The Problem

 Reading Walter Pater's 1885 novel of ideas, Marius the Epicurean, this weekend, I found a number of passages that could have been written of a friend of mine—someone who went to divinity school with me, years ago, and who found there perhaps something closer to his true vocation than I did. 

Pater writes of his second century Roman protagonist that he has a natural proclivity toward the hieratic and the sacerdotal. Though never fully convinced himself of the various divine doctrines competing for his devotion in the age of religious tumult the novel concerns, he nonetheless is drawn irresistibly to the beauty of sacred places. He would be content to spend his days sweeping out ancient temples, or sitting through Catholic liturgies, even if he remained always an unbeliever. 

My friend is just the same way. Like Emerson, he "like[s] a church" and "like[s] a cowl"— even though he could not believe enough in the doctrines they teach to become such a priest himself. 

In writing of this character, of course, Pater was undoubtedly speaking partly of himself and his own era. Though the novel is set millennia ago, in the days of early Christianity, its protagonist makes only a very doubtful 19th century sort of conversion to the new faith. In the novel's final section, he finds in the Christian ceremony of the Eucharist a beauty he was unable to discern in any of the rival doctrines and philosophical schools to which he is exposed. But he does not unambiguously become convinced on this basis of the truth of its promises. 

Pater insists that, for the church of the second century, this would have been no insurmountable barrier. He writes of the Christian communion during the brief window of time between two waves of persecution, and he contends that the church during this small interval—at least in its urban centers—had purged itself of its intolerant Montanist factions, had all but abandoned in practice its harsh insistence on the dogmas of exclusive salvation, eternal punishment, and the imminent doom of the world, and had instead attained to an ideal of placid goodwill, aesthetic contemplation, and friendly compassion. 

That Pater is not really talking here about the ancient church should already be apparent. What he is really talking about is the Catholic Church—specifically the Catholic Church as it might appear in an idealized form from the standpoint of an Oxford scholar of a liberal and Aesthetic bent in the closing decades of the 19th century. The Church—as it could be made to seem in that era, if regarded from a great distance—was the sort of institution that did not insist too crudely on mere belief as the test of admission. Rather, it could be entered and appreciated as a thing of beauty.  

The sense in which Ronald Firbank or Baron Corvo were Catholics, then, is perhaps the sense in which Pater's protagonist becomes a second century Christian. It's the sort of religion that Robert Lowell once wittily summarized under the following tagline: "There is no God/ And Mary is His Mother." 

I appreciate the spirit of tolerance behind such an ideal. I understand why people like my divinity school friend and Walter Pater are drawn to the candles and incense of a great cathedral, and why they feel that there is something ancient and beautiful and meaningful happening inside these buildings that transcends the rigid and often cruel dogmas of the official theology that they exist to proclaim. 

I find myself, however, that I am unable to go along with even the most genially metaphorical version of Christianity, or to regard it from afar merely as a thing of beauty. I readily acknowledge that many of the preachers and practitioners of the mainstream Christian churches of today have long since ceased to believe themselves in a literal sense (I learned that much at least from my time in divinity school). I am willing even to entertain that this was an ideological possibility even in the Roman Catholicism of Pater's day (though I suspect it was far less of a feature of actual practice of the then-still-arch-conservative Church in Rome than its Aesthetic admirers at Oxford liked to imagine). 

But even if that's true—even if one can find meaning in the ritual and spirit of the thing without believing too rigidly in the letter of the dogma—I will never be able to overlook the fact that the churches—even the most liberal mainline Protestant ones—still profess the dogma, at least in name. And by doing so, they provide no shield to the unwary who may pass their doors—the young or simple at heart who may take too literally the words and texts they hear there—and find in that credence not cause for comfort, but for terror (which has always seemed to me the much more logical emotional reaction if it turned out Christian theology were true). 

And a teaching of terror, in turn, cannot seem to me a thing of beauty, no matter how metaphorically or insincerely it is professed. Scape at and polish it as one will, I have never yet found a brand of liberal Christianity that has been able to so thoroughly prettify the vessel that it can eliminate the inward kernel of exclusiveness and vindictiveness that one always finds at the heart of Christian theology—the trace of the impulse to turn the other cheek in this life only because one has the divine book's assurance that the Lord will "pour live coals" on the heads of one's enemies in the life to come. 

The narrowness, exclusiveness, and vindictiveness of the Christian notion of salvation therefore is not something I am able to abstract from the presence of beautiful cathedrals and other monuments to the faith. I cannot say, with the Paters of the world—"false it may be, but how finely-wrought!" For what would be ugly and terrifying if taken as true still retains something of those same qualities even if it is taken to be mere mythology. And it is all the more so if it refuses to tell you it is mere mythology, but still insists (albeit with tongue in cheek or fingers crossed somewhere behind its back) that it still means all of this stuff just the way it sounds. 

And so, comparing myself to Pater or Marius or my Pater-like friend, I would not say that I completely fail to understand the aesthetic appeal of the sacred places that drew them—but I would have to depart from them by placing greater emphasis on the second side of Emerson's famous dilemma: "Yet not for all his faith can see/ Would I that cowled churchman be." 

And perhaps it's worth noting, in this regard, that both Emerson and I found even a career in Unitarian ministry—that most abstracted and liberalized and demythologized lineal descendent of the Christian teaching of them all—to be asking too much of our ability to suspend disbelief.