How To Be An Agnostic
spiritual life, which I do, then I do well to be serious about this
one. I guess that many of the thinking and ecumenically minded
believers I know think something similar: they place their trust
in the tradition they know the best – trusting that it’s truth is
rich enough – while also acknowledging that they can learn
much from the truths of other traditions.
R – is for Reading and Writing
Plato was wary of writing. He suspected that, in the way it
objectifi ed philosophy, it could become an excuse not to live
it. He thought that, in the way it tidied philosophy up, it could
become a means of concealing meaning that can only be expe-
rienced. So convinced was he of this risk that in the Republic,
he bans poets from his model city-state. It seems an extreme
position to adopt. But poets were authority fi gures. The body
of work from Hesiod to Homer people remembered and recited,
and in Plato’s time had started to write down, was the dogmatic
canon of the day. The danger is that poets would appeal to the
dogmatic instincts of citizens in providing a ready-made source
of knock-out proof-texts for the positions they opposed.
These days the best novels are often quasi-religious texts.
Jeanette Winterson, an author who has been accused of delib-
erately confusing literature and religion, wrote in an article for
the London Times (available on her website): ‘If you believe, as
I do, that life has an inside as well as an outside, you will accept
that the inner life needs nourishment too. If the inner life is
not supported and sustained, then there is nothing between us
and the daily repetition of what Wordsworth called “getting
and spending.” ’ She is conscious of the differences between reli-
gion and art, ‘having spent most of my early life in a gospel tent
with a pair of evangelical parents’, as she puts it. However, art
is religious in a deeper sense: ‘It asks us to see differently, think
differently, challenging ourselves, and the way we live.’ In other
words, writers and artists should aim not to tie things up, but to
open things out. It is an agnostic imperative that is pursued.