Religion

Once mainly associated with shrill killjoys and desiccated reductionists, atheism has recently received a jolt of adrenaline from Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. Yet while these writers delight in exposing religion’s philosophical deficiencies, their tone is predominantly negative. Fortunately, The Australian Book of Atheism goes beyond simply rehashing the New Atheists’ explanations of Why God Doesn’t Exist. Divided into ‘Overview’, ‘Personal’, ‘Education’, ‘Social and Cultural’, ‘Politics’, ‘Philosophy’, and ‘Religion and the Brain’, this collection offers a more nuanced picture of atheism than does the recent crop of celebrity-authored blockbusters.

In A Fundamental Fear (1997), Bobby Sayyid wrote about the spectre of Islam haunting the West. Important to this ‘hauntology’ is Muhammad: the last prophet of Islam. From the English chronicler Venerable Bede, Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther to the Pentagon’s defence intelligence secretary, William Boykin, many have depicted Muhammad as the obverse of everything the West and Christianity regards as good. In Summa contra Gentiles, Aquinas wrote that Muhammad ‘gave free rein to carnal desire’ and ‘those who believed in him from the outset were … beastlike men’. Striking is the parallel drawn by Luther: ‘The coarse and filthy Muhammad takes all women and therefore has no wife. The chaste pope does not take any wife and yet has all women.’ In TheChurch and the Political Problem of our Day (1939), Karl Barth, regarded as ‘the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas’ by Pope Pius XII, made a peculiar observation: ‘It is impossible to understand National Socialism unless we see it in fact as a new Islam, its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s prophet.’ To the American evangelicals, he is a ‘demon-possessed paedophile’ (all unreferenced quotes from Frederick Quinn’s The Sum of All Heresies, 2008). The latest example is The Truth about Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion (2007) by Robert Spencer.

In October 2010 Hugh Brady, president of University College Dublin, sent colleagues around the world a copy of The Idea of a University(1854)by Cardinal John Henry Newman. As Newman approached beatification, President Brady recalled that UCD is the successor institution to the Catholic University of Ireland, which welcomed Newman as its first rector in 1851. Not many university leaders can aspire to sainthood, but establishing a new university and writing a classic text about the purpose of higher learning were only brief episodes in the long life of the most famous church intellectual of the nineteenth century.

Mark Johnston’s Saving God: Religion after Idolatry is an astonishing book. Its surprise consists in its topic, style, passion, range of religious and philosophical scholarship, and its daring blend of human depth and philosophical originality. Johnston describes it as an essay that ‘gradually evolves into a sort of jeremiad’. There are plenty of complaints, and it is at times a tirade, especially in the final chapter, but the term ‘jeremiad’ does too little justice to the book’s subtlety and persuasive intelligence.

Popes have long been wary of Church Councils, seeing them as possible rivals to their claim to absolute authority. When the Council of Constance met in 1414, there were three contending popes, each elected by a set of cardinals, and each with political support across Europe. At its end, two had been deposed, and the third, Gregory XII, having been recognised as pope, agreed to resign. A commission of Cardinals and others appointed by the Council then elected a new pope, Martin V, in 1417. Constance also decreed that the pope was to convene councils on a regular basis. Martin conformed for a time, but the practice soon fell away. Popes have preferred to govern alone, with the help of the Roman Curia.

Providence, understood as God’s governance and care of the world, has an important place in religion. Church leaders speak of it with a view to giving comfort in adversity, especially when there has been large-scale loss of life, as in terrorist attacks or earthquakes. There is often some defensiveness in this appeal to providence because of the tension between belief in a loving and all-powerful God and the occurrence of what could be seen as preventable evil. Genevieve Lloyd – the first female professor of philosophy appointed in Australia, now retired – discusses providence in Christian belief, especially in considering Augustine’s thoughts, in late antiquity, on divine justice and the ‘ordering’ of evil, and Leibniz’s bold attempt, in early modernity, to reconcile divine providence with evil, and freedom with necessity, in ‘the best of all possible worlds’. There is attention, too, to Voltaire’s sharp critique of facile optimism, and to Hume’s sceptical probing of what can be known with certainty in these matters. More generally, Providence Lost explores the long tradition of philosophical inquiry, from the Greek tragedians to modern times, that gave rise to a range of different conceptions of providence in the context of human freedom, necessity, fate and fortune.

The Bible is not a book. Its title comes from the Greek biblia, books; it is a collection, or library. That the Bible has become a single book, or even the book for some, is a remarkable and sometimes problematic accident, and the premise for this engaging tour through one part of its history.

A book with a title such as this one necessarily invites a question: is it going to be a theological work using examples from the stated body of fiction, or an exercise in literary criticism confined mainly to religious themes, just as other critics might focus their discussion on political or psychological issues? Most authors would of course protest against this crude ‘either/or’ proposition and assert that the strictly literary aspects of a novel, as distinct perhaps from non-fiction, are inseparable from any intellectual issues it might raise. Neither approach should play Christ to the other’s St Christopher.