How To Be An Agnostic
It’s a pattern that is found in the Christian tradition. Take
Augustine, and his diagnosis that the human condition is a rest-
lessness of the heart that seeks God. His spiritual journey, which
he writes about in his Confessions, is characterised by doubt:
everything that presented itself to him in life as a satisfaction
for this restlessness, as a solution to this suffering – the love of
another, the Manicheism of his youth – fails him. They frustrated
and disappointed, intellectually and emotionally. Augustine’s
journey only ends when his heart fi nds its rest in God, and what’s
striking about this moment is that it comes about with the reali-
sation that his search for himself requires an outward dynamic. It
is not just an inward turn but is also, simultaneously, a discovery
of God. He fi nds what it is to be human when he fi nds God. It’s
a discovery that, far from alienating him, makes him. In Jungian
terms, the ego of his youth exhausts itself – we’d call it a mid-
life crisis. And in letting go of itself, fi nds the Self. ‘But you were
more inward than my own inwardness,’ Augustine writes. ‘You
were within me, and I was outside myself.’
So here’s the nub of the issue for the spirituality-inclined
agnostic as I see it. We have a desire for more than biology and
psychology can describe. But we also fi nd it diffi cult to put our
trust in the religious discourses that might address our restless-
ness. We know that being spiritual but not religious is limiting,
because it makes spirituality too much like shopping – signing
up for this meditation class because it’s good for our happiness,
or pic’n’mixing over this truth and that. And yet we are also
rightly unsure about believing – meaning trusting – in a reli-
gious tradition if only it were true, that might carry us to wider
horizons and satisfy the restless heart. However, I think that
Plato’s Socrates offers us help again with this apparent impasse.
There’s this link between his awareness of his ignorance and
his way of love – philosophy, the desire for what he lacked: he
said both that he knew nothing for sure and that he knew about
love, and that’s no contradiction. Plato’s Socrates embraced ordi-
nary human searching and doubt and fashioned it into a fl our-
ishing way of life. It was a disciplined desire to reach out for