Incarnation

I have spent a load of time at New Oxonian kvetching about new atheists. Now everyone's doing it, but I was one of the the first kvetchioners. And I paid a high price, having the distinction of being abused and scolded and insulted by critics as far removed as a is from b in ideological variety: Jerry Coyne, P Z Myers, Eric MacDonald, sundry literary lieutenants and former friends, and their "base." Especially their base.

I have always called myself a soft unbeliever. I am not committed to unbelief. I am not a none. I am not agnostic--a word that always evokes in my imagination an incurable sinus condition.

Given the contours of today's young, restless, and largely illiterate atheism, I am not an atheist.

I am just not sure about the God thing. Doctrines and dogmas are really only interesting as historical information, or because they tell us something about the journey of the human mind from one kind of truth to another: truth as a higher good to be sought purely in the mind, and truth as an answer to questions and solutions to problems of existence. One gets us philosophy, music, pure mathematics and poetry; the second gets us science and technology. Don't believe them when they try to harness "reason" to the second.

I am genetically incapable of taking up or down votes on truth; so I find embedded in some religious doctrines --the Trinity for example--some important insights into how the imagination launches itself almost unwillingly towards questions of transcendence and immanence.

Translated into my own feeble language, that means that while I am not sure about God, people have never been willing to leave God alone--as a purely distant thing. A God who is believed to exist can't just exist as a cardinal principle. The "divine Mechanic" of Newton and Alexander Pope and the God of the Philosophers looks a lot like the beautifully made scientific instruments of the eighteenth century: he is wonderful insofar as we are supremely competent to solve the mysteries of nature through the gift of reason.

But the majority of people never latched on to that God, and no wonder. Because he was nothing like the majority of people. They were happy enough with a God who variously demands obedience, faith, trust--in cruel and tormenting ways; but who in a different spin loves, cajoles, inspires, teaches, and takes our place by becoming just like us. Greater love than this hath no man. Who doesn't tremble at words like that?

It is almost Christmas. I may be wrong, but Christmas is frighteningly magical and mysterious. No wonder people feel lonely in the midst of their families, and unloved in the act of receiving gifts. Christmas is that place where the expectation of happiness confronts the reality of human sadness, where joy to the world means the judgment of mankind.

It is a time of unforced reflection, fraught with memories of family feuds, the first social awareness of missing family members, presents you wanted but never got. You see in the faces of expectant children the anxiety of age.

Somewhere in the background is the central myth of the birth of Jesus, the "nativity of the Lord," or in official language--seldom used even by priests these days--the incarnation.

Atheists often despise Christmas. Their anti-religion billboard campaigns you'll notice don't target Muslims but the Christian holiday season. Partly this may just be common sense on their part: Muslims are not famous for responding to slaps in the face by turning the other cheek. But the birth of the baby who became the man who taught people to do just that seems especially venomous to the atheist. Why?

Because you can live without a pie in the sky God by a simple act of negation, by scorn, ridicule, 'blasphemy' or denial. But how can you ignore a baby in a manger lined with hay?

But atheists have never bothered to understand the incarnation. It is not the simple Hellenistic belief that sometimes, if rarely, gods are born on earth. Unbelief becomes more problematical when it's suggested that "God became man," when belief takes on a Trinitarian aspect that includes other components of human personality. Freud may not have known that he was borrowing shamelessly from this tradition when he developed his model of the human psyche; but his rival Karl Jung reminded him of it. (To which Freud responded, Unsinn)

Freud wasn't into the Christ child, but once a year many people are--into celebrating the long liturgical action that begins here and ends on Good Friday. The celebration of an existence within which (to quote the church father Irenaeus) "all human nature is summarized."

"God became man so that we might become God," the Egyptian writer Athanasius declared in the fourth century. In that statement the centuries long war between pagan religion and the new faith was resolved; the gods are no longer at war with mankind. Men have been elevated to divinity by a God who confers his own nature on them. This is the language of myth, of course; but the phenomenon it describes would have profound effects on the later history of western civilization.

It begins with the belief that the child Jesus is the prototype of all human nature, born to be godlike in all respects, and born to be human "in all things but sin." No wonder, with that teaching, emperor after emperor and critic after critic called the Christians "atheists." They had destroyed the barrier between heaven and earth.


That kind of atheism makes us nervous, too, because it is grounded in affirmation, not denial: it leaves us alone in a world in which we are as vulnerable as a new born baby as he takes his first puffs of air, or as isolated as a man struggling for breath on a cross.

You can billboard these images, if you want. You can deny Jesus existed--there a slim rise in the number of eccentrics who do--but the symbolic weight of this story is greater than anything human history has produced.

Merry Christmas from Khartoum, on the Nile where Moses once floated in a basket made of reeds.