Update: A later version of this essay can be read at Butterflies and Wheels.

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I admire Richard Holloway for his courage. Here is a man of religion who, from 1986-2000, was Bishop of Edinburgh. Here is a man of virtue concerned with his neighbor, with social justice, and with the common good. And here is also a man who lost his faith but not his desire for transcendence. I don’t know when his doubts became so substantial that they compelled him to leave the Anglican Church, but I imagine that the decision came only after the crisis was too great to ignore.

What brought on that crisis, one that bubbled up no doubt over the course of many years only to reach critical mass, was, I suspect, the feeling that traditional religion had lost its hold on the modern world together with the sense that the general account offered by evolution could no longer be denied.

The loss of traditional religion is still acutely registered in Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going,” a poem with which Holloway is all too familiar. Here, the speaker describes his experience of walking into a church and finding that a hallowed space, a space that had once been suffused with life and meaning, has since been abandoned. And what does he do? He goes through the motions, taking off his hat, signing the guest book, intoning “Here endeth” too loudly. And what does he wonder? Only how we’ll get on after the rituals that had hitherto bound us together have fallen away. He sees that the rituals are no more; that the people have gone elsewhere (but where have they gone?); that the church, once a symbol of communion and love, is now only a relic of another world, one dimly remembered yet still vaguely felt.

And that is the thing, really: the poem speaks to us because it inhabits the post-WWII transition marking the death of traditional religion and the absence of some serviceable replacement. There is honesty too in the poem (if one can describe  a poem as “honest”) since it has not moved on to the point of “bland nihilism,” a matter-of-fact ethos of a later generation where the question of loss no longer arises. I admire Holloway first, therefore, because he is attuned to the melancholy of our time but also to the hope for something more, something else. Throughout his writings, he acknowledges that something deep is missing and that we can’t go home again.

This is especially true once we grant the general truths of evolution. Darwin’s revolution amounted to the toppling of the Great Chain of Being and to the notion of a providential order. Human beings do not fit into a hierarchy of being; they are natural organisms in many respects* like any others. It follows that we have no pre-given purpose or meaning, no all-encompassing framework with which to make sense of our lives, no shared structure that gives shape and weight to our life projects. What ensues is a perilous antinomy between existentialism (crudely put, meaning is constructed) and traditional faith (God imbues the world with meaning). But while the idea of providence has collapsed, the pat existential mantra that we “make life meaningful” seems more like a catch-all marketing slogan than like a robust philosophy of life.

What then? Unlike the New Atheists who would have us swear off the divine, Holloway seeks to preserve some spiritual dimension within human life–“immanent transcendence,” we might say. Yet because he has parted ways with traditional religion, he needs to invent a new vocabulary with which to express the weightiness of human experience. All this makes life into a gamble, and thus it requires honesty, courage, persistence, and humility: it requires a life of virtue.

* “in many respects”: my qualifier flags those respects in which human beings may be unique on account of consciousness, language, and humor.

Further Reading

Richard Holloway, Looking in the Distance

Richard Holloway, Godless Morality

Richard Holloway, On Forgiveness