John Gray
LIVING WITH NEGATIVE CAPABILITY
Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition
By Richard Holloway (Canongate 200pp £14.99)

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Most people who get involved in debates about religion assume that having strong beliefs is a Good Thing. For secular humanists, religion is a tissue of errors no reasonable person should entertain for a moment. For at least some believers, religion is a body of received truths one must accept or reject. Both sides take for granted that it is an area of life where firm convictions are required.

In Britain the enemies of religion are commonly more dogmatic than its friends. Drawing on a tradition of questioning that goes all the way back to the Book of Job, most religious people in this country do not need reminding that their beliefs are highly problematical. In contrast, secular humanists think theirs are literally true - a common trait of fundamentalists. Today's unbelievers are a noisy bunch, and it is mostly due to their influence that the notion that strong beliefs are in some way virtuous continues to prevail. Richard Holloway is a voice of sane humanity in this generally unenlightening conversation. Formerly Scottish Episcopal Bishop of Edinburgh, he has written a number of books in which all the certainties of his earlier Christian faith are questioned and eventually abandoned. In Godless Morality: Keeping Religion Out of Ethics (1999), he presented an outline of a post-religious morality shaped by the ethical teachings of Jesus. Having relinquished any sort of conventional Christianity he seems now to have settled into a kind of Christian atheism.

In itself this is not an unusual position. Secular humanists take more from Western monotheism than they care to admit, and the type of atheism that has sprung up over the past few years is not much more than a dilute version of evangelical Christianity (minus God). What distinguishes Holloway's atheism from this vulgar variety is the depth of his insight into what it owes to Christian and Jewish traditions, and the subtlety of his understanding of religion itself. Between the Monster and the Saint is a wide-ranging enquiry into the contradictions of human nature. Why are humans so fond of cruelty? How is it that they are so easily inured to injustice? These are very old questions, and one might well think it impossible to say anything new and useful in response to them. Yet, drawing on writers as diverse as Simone Weil, Freud and Tennessee Williams, and infusing their thoughts with his distinctive Christian inheritance, Holloway is able to offer a perspective on the intractably conflicted human animal that is consistently fresh and illuminating. He is well worth reading on the way that 'our addiction to purpose, our passion for meaning', which distinguishes humans from other animals, also helps make humans such an extremely destructive species.

Holloway's reflections on the problem of evil are arresting and profound, but the most original part of the book is his typology of contemporary religious experience. He identifies four varieties of religion in the world at present. The first is what he calls strong religion. Strong religionists - who need not be fundamentalists - claim to be in possession of 'a body of revealed knowledge about how the universe came to be', together with 'a final and unalterable lifestyle manual'. In contrast, weak religionists do not yearn after finality. While they may affirm a divine power they believe humans are flawed receivers of its signals, any interpretation of which should be highly tentative. A further approach, which Holloway calls after-religion, sees religion as 'an entirely human construct, a work of the human imagination'. Just because religion is a human projection, however, does not mean it should be discarded. Religion may be humanity's supreme creation, and after-religionists cherish it as an enduring source of meaning. The last of the four varieties is hardly a type of religious experience at all: it denotes the complete absence of religious awareness. This fourth approach mirrors strong religion in that its most extreme practitioners are anti-religious missionaries who aim to convert all of humankind to their own shrivelled sensibility.

Holloway himself is somewhere between weak religion and after-religion. He views religion as a human creation, with all the flaws that flow from its human origins; but at the same time he does not want to close off the possibility that it might enable access to some kind of spiritual reality, though not the Christian God (which is why he can be described as a Christian atheist). Here he is close to Montaigne, a sceptic who probably had no religious beliefs himself but who used his scepticism to leave open a window to faith.

Holloway's ambivalent stance reflects the fact that the varieties of religious experience he describes are not always sealed off from one another. For after-religionists, he tells us, the value of religion may be mainly aesthetic; but the line between beauty and the numinous is blurred and shifting. From Plato onwards there have been those who understand beauty as an intimation of the divine, and there is a tradition of mysticism in which the natural world is experienced as having a kind of value that transcends human concerns. The boundary between an everyday epiphany and an experience that points beyond anything created by humans is one an after-religionist might easily cross, moving back to weak religion along the way.

Holloway seems to have decided to leave the issue open. For some his ambiguity on such a key point might seem a weakness. Certainly fundamentalist atheists will see it that way, as will many traditional believers. To my mind Holloway's refusal to surrender to strong belief is a mark of intellectual vitality. In some areas of life a definite view of things may be a useful ideal. Science and the law could hardly go on without some such aspiration. But why should religion be like this? The most enduring strands of the world's religions have not been their creeds.

In religion the demand for strong beliefs expresses an all-too-human frailty - the need for psychological security. Strong believers - a category that includes our excitable apostles of unbelief - say they are pursuing truth, but it is obvious that they are merely trying to rid themselves of troublesome questions. Living with what Keats called 'negative capability' - 'in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason' - requires more nerve. That is why Holloway's approach to questions of faith is so admirable. It is also, I fear, why it will not catch on. Weak religion can never be popular, for it requires strong human beings. And there are never very many of them.

John Gray is the author of 'Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia' (Allen Lane).