In his 2012 book, Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton argued that elements of certain religious systems were still useful in a secular society. His interest seems to be that the unbeliever has lost the crucial community-building infrastructure that had, for millennia, been the exclusive domain of the church.
He put it this way:
It's clear to me that religions are in the end too complex, interesting and on occasion wise to be abandoned simply to those who believe in them.1
My impression is that de Botton is too charitable in his representation of the value of the Christian institution. However, he does manage to expose a few moral paradoxes of the religion, in describing what has come to be known as the Feast of Fools. A popular festival during the Middle Ages, in which the ecclesiastical ritual was parodied to the point of blasphemy, heresy, and sexual debauchery.
Of course, Christians did not come up with the Feast of Fools in a vacuum. It is debated whether it is a Christian adaptation of the pagan festivities related to Saturnalia. If this is the case, the festival would demonstrate that pagan practices were baked into the very religion that prides itself on being different and distinct from pagan practice. The mind reels.
De Botton writes:
In essence, religions understand that to belong to a community is both very desirable and not very easy. In this respect, they are greatly more sophisticated than those secular political theorists who write lyrically about the loss of a sense of community, while refusing to acknowledge the inherently dark aspects of social life. Religions teach us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober, but they also know that if they do not allow us to be or do otherwise every once in a while, they will break our spirit. In their most sophisticated moments, religions accept the debt that goodness, faith and sweetness owe to their opposites. [italics mine]
De Botton seems to give credence to religious systems that acknowledge we need a release from restraint. That we need space to indulge in our baser natures. In principle, that is fine. But in practice, that lends itself to hypocrisy.
I grant that many Christians have had moments of honor, politeness, and concern for the poor. Countless examples can be drummed up. But those virtues are often overshadowed by a deluge of sexual perversion, manipulation, coercion, torture, and endless threats of eternal damnation. This hypocrisy does not get a pass simply because Christians acknowledge that we need a reprieve from restraint.
De Botton goes on:
Medieval Christianity certainly understood this dichotomy. For most of the year, it preached solemnity, order, restraint, fellowship, earnestness, a love of God and sexual decorum, and then on New Year’s Eve it opened the locks on the collective psyche and unleashed the festum fatuorum, the Feast of Fools. For four days, the world was turned on its head: members of the clergy would play dice on top of the altar, bray like donkeys instead of saying ‘Amen’, engage in drinking competitions in the nave, fart in accompaniment to the Ave Maria and deliver spoof sermons based on parodies of the gospels (the Gospel according to the Chicken’s Arse, the Gospel according to Luke’s Toenail). After drinking tankards of ale, they would hold their holy books upside down, address prayers to vegetables and urinate out of bell towers. They ‘married’ donkeys, tied giant woollen penises to their tunics and endeavoured to have sex with anyone of either gender who would have them.
Nietzsche’s representation of the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies inherent in all of us comes to mind. Christians, for most of the year, remained in an Apollonian state. One of order and restraint. Until they were cast, headlong, into a Dionysian revelry. This turbulent party lasted four days. During this short window, believers were allowed to untether themselves from the rules, laws, and social norms that otherwise welded the community together.
The Feast of Fools could be compared to The Purge, a 2013 flick about a 12-hour period where any and all crime is permitted.
Christians gave themselves up to heresy and sodomy during this strange festival. The very same behaviors that might get an outsider threatened, maligned, tortured, or even killed. A classic iteration of all this for me, but not for thee.
But none of this was considered just a joke. It was sacred, a parodia sacra, designed to ensure that all the rest of the year things would remain the right way up. In 1445, the Paris Faculty of Theology explained to the bishops of France that the Feast of Fools was a necessary event in the Christian calendar, ‘in order that foolishness, which is our second nature and is inherent in man, can freely spend itself at least once a year. Wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air. All of us men are barrels poorly put together, and this is why we permit folly on certain days: so that we may in the end return with greater zeal to the service of God.’
The Paris Faculty of Theology conceded that humans were “poorly put together.” That our nature went against the grain of holiness, prudence, and restraint. And that this Dionysian period was a release valve where our lusts could be put on brief display. All this was defended as a method to “return with greater zeal to the service of God.”
This riddle of moral paradox and hypocrisy goes a long way toward explaining how the Catholic Church, for example, whose leadership upholds celibacy as some kind of virtue, has engaged in child sexual abuse for centuries. Could it be that the guilty parties have rationalized their degenerate behavior as a result of being “poorly put together”? This slope turns out to be very slippery.
In Footnote 14 of Sam Harris’ book, The Moral Landscape, he writes:
Consider the ludicrous ideology that made [sexual abuse in the church] possible: the Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behaviors taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception: preferring, instead, that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy—or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS. Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution—one of the wealthiest on earth—that preferentially attracts pederasts, pedophiles, and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority, and grants them privileged access to children.
Of course, none of this should strike anyone as new or surprising. But it is imperative to shine a light on the moral confusion inherent in a religion that has spawned 2.3 billion believers.
Perhaps de Botton is correct, here, that Christianity has something to offer the secular world, in terms of its ideas about community, structure, and reverence. But it is absurd to suggest that an institution can be extracted from the practices it affords. Because the practices themselves are what give shape to the institution.
The Philosophers Magazine ISSUE # 57 Page 26