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First we lost our faith, then we lost faith in ourselves
'Tis the season to be merry. Advent is not supposed to be a time of lamentation.
If you are not one of the few who are watching and praying for the arrival of the saviour of the world, you can at least be one of the many who are looking forward to partying, feasting, holidays and even some genuine seasonal goodwill here and there. Yet to me this Advent has seemed unusually melancholy.
Gloom set in, for me, at an extraordinarily beautiful carol service in the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, on the first Sunday in Advent. Outside in Trinity Great Court the night was cold and clear. Inside, the chapel was at first almost silent, filled with hushed people and with soft gold light from the candles we were holding.
Suddenly into the silence came an unearthly pure solo voice from the east end somewhere near the altar. Then it was answered by other astonishingly lovely voices out of sight at the other end of the chapel. If any moment on earth, or any earthly beauty, can be said to be heavenly, that was one of them.
However, like most people in this country, I am not a believer in the teachings of Christianity. And there is a curious kind of pain in trying to make sense of one of the most awe-inspiring parts of my -of our -inheritance, which I both know and love, but which seems ever more meaningless, if there can be degrees of meaninglessness. I suppose, at least, there can be degrees of a sense of loss of meaning.
It is impossible to know quite what to make of choral music like the unearthly singing in Trinity College Chapel, or the subtle, overwhelming thunder of a great organ toccata and fugue, or the undeniable power of the great requiem masses, or the best 17th century religious sonnets.
Some sort of automatic translation has to go on, filtering out what is not acceptable intellectually, or transmogrifying it into something other than what it claims to be. Something is always lost in translation, and perhaps too much for any meaning to endure. Perhaps before long these things, stripped of their religious inspiration, will be as inaccessible as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
In any case, there in that chapel I was struck by an acute attack of the contemporary Dover Beach effect.
The original Dover Beach effect was described by Matthew Arnold in 1867, in his poem of that name, about the loss of faith -that huge intellectual and spiritual upheaval of the 19th century. He was writing specifically about the loss of Christian belief, and the sense of meaning that goes with it, and indeed did go with it, rather literally. He famously lamented the sea of faith, which once encircled the earth. Now, he wrote, thinking of a moonlit night under the cliffs of Dover, he could only hear "its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar".
Much later, now, after more than 150 years of adjusting to that profound feeling of change, I think we are suffering from a different and perhaps even more disturbing loss of faith -a contemporary form of the Dover Beach effect, a sense of the silence of the beach long after the tide has gone out.
It is not just that my young companion in the chapel was as mystified by the service as a young anthropologist might be when first introduced to the rituals of a far-flung and alien tribe, English and well-educated though she is. It was not just that she commented on how increasingly irrelevant such rituals seem to her generation, however beautiful.
But with the loss of specifically religious conviction we have also lost so much of the wider conviction that matters in a society, including a proper respect for our own culture as a whole, for our own traditions in general.
At the same time, by some strange perversity, we respect people who do respect their own traditions, or we imagine we do. In practice this means some of us all too often decry our own rituals, weakened as they are, and show preference for the rituals of others.
Every year now there are examples of this strange self-denigration, when otherwise conventional British functionaries decide that the word Christmas is offensive, that we must abandon nativity plays or that we must all talk of Winterval.
The perfect example this year was the case of the public library in Buckinghamshire that favoured Islam over Christianity. That is not putting the case too crudely.
What happened was that High Wycombe public library refused to allow a local church to put up a notice advertising Advent carol services, yet held a party, which (unlike the choral services) was advertised at the library, to celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid.
The mind can only reel at this kind of idiocy. The reason given for suppressing the little poster about the Christian festival was that it might cause offence.
Passions might be inflamed. Yet though Christian celebration is offensive and inflammatory, Islamic celebration is not. Religious diversity must be respected, but not in the case of Christianity, it seems.
Prominent Muslims across the country have been horrified, and have said so publicly. This repression does not come from them. It comes from within the host community; in other contexts such denials have rightly been called self hatred.
What's striking is not the silliness or the injustice. It is the cultural cowardice and loss of self-respect that has allowed it. This was an outward and visible sign of our -by which I mean the host community's -loss of faith in ourselves. It is not trivial, and it may not be reversible.
The trouble with throwing out the unwanted bathwater is that you may lose not just the baby Jesus but the entire value and belief system that has grown up around him for 2,000 years, and which has shaped everything we held until recently dear, and everything which perhaps still makes this country desirable. Once inside a belief system, to change metaphors, the loss of faith corrupts everything, like a computer virus.
That, I think, is the explanation for the failure of nerve around us and in among us, and for the moral muddle which seems to oppress so many of us. It must be, I think, the explanation for the constant complaint, which I have heard from countless readers, that there are now so many things one cannot say.
That must be at least partly due to their loss of conviction, and their belief in their right to say them. It must be why so many self-interested politicians, and so many self-appointed leaders, go unchallenged, when in various ways they undermine the values of what we used to be able to call the host culture.
Matthew Arnold seems to ignore the obvious point that though the tide certainly goes out, bearing faith away perhaps, it also comes back in, bringing upon it all kinds of other faiths from the other side of the waters to replace the beliefs that have been swept away. That may be quite inevitable, for better or for worse.
And in any case, it may not matter much in the long run, because, as JM Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead. But it is sad and not a very cheery seasonal thought.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, December 21, 2003
Comments:
I read this article many years ago and have found again. To the point, well wriiten.-God Bless
Posted by: Peter McAleese | 9 Jun 2008 05:54:04
