How To Be An Agnostic
In Search of Lost Time, never quite gets to the bottom of it all.
But we learn an enormous amount about paying attention to
life in the process.
S – is for Silence
Now, there’s silence and silence, of course. There’s the silencing
of the oppressed. There’s the silence of pure ignorance. There’s
the silence that causes people to speak. The Romantics, when
silenced by the sublime, had that experience. It precipitated an
avalanche of words, poems and stories.
But there’s also the silence of fi nitude before infi nity. Sara
Maitland, in A Book of Silence, likens this to the silence of the
desert, the place the hermits went to pursue learned ignorance.
Desert silence precipitates a kenotic response, an emptying of
the self; a sense of transparency and dissolving before the infi n-
ity of sand, sun and air. It brings a kind of purity of heart and
mind that is open to the divine.
Thomas Carlyle put it well: ‘Silence is deep as Eternity; speech
is shallow as time.’ Maybe that’s why God seems silent, why the
agnostic can’t be sure God exists. In that absence, God’s trying
to tell us something.
T – is about Therapy
Foucault noticed that it was early Christianity which fi rst insti-
gated a practice of self-examination that required the individ-
ual to examine their inner life and reveal it to another – that
practice being the confession of the penitent to a wiser confes-
sor. What is doubly interesting about confession is that it pre-
supposes that the penitent might easily deceive themselves.
They might confess one sin that was actually symptomatic of
another; so penitents must not just confess but actively search
their souls. It was in this capacity that the wise confessor was so
important. Their role was to exercise discernment, thereby steer-
ing the penitent in the direction that would reveal the greatest