Religion
An eclectic list of books that have shaped my thinking about religious matters.
The varieties of religious experience by William James
Surely a fixture of any half-decent reading list on religious matters, James’s elegant and sympathetic account of mystical experiences is a celebration of the potentials of human consciousness. An experience’s divine origins matter less to James than the consequences of such opening on one’s life and purpose.
DIALOGUES CONCERNING NATURAL RELIGION by David Hume
This is another classic text from the philosophy of religion that is especially good for A-Level and undergraduate philosophy students because it contains so many of the arguments that you’ll find on your course. Hume pits three fictional philosophers against one another: the natural theologian Cleanthes, the rationalist-mystic Demea, and the sceptical Philo. His discussions of the design argument anticipate the thinking of William Paley and Charles Darwin. Hume also talks about the problem of evil, whether it makes sense to say that God exists necessarily, and the claim that religion is merely there to comfort us. An indispensable text.
You Must Change Your Life by Peter Sloterdijk
Religion, says Sloterdijk, doesn’t really exist. It’s not an easily separable arena of human life, but is rather contiguous with other fields in which human beings seek to train themselves. Taking cues from Nietzsche, Foucault, and Rilke, Sloterdijk sees human beings as animals that need ‘vertical tension’ in their lives: the call of something better, the beyond, excellence, spiritual athleticism, heroic askesis. An endlessly fascinating book.
Religions, Values and Peak Experiences by Abraham Maslow
Maslow’s short essay is a wonderful complement to James’s more encyclopaedic account of mystical experiences. Maslow’s book makes the case for not dismissing unusual states of ecstasy, joy, or connection out of hand, but for investigating them from outside the frameworks of inherited religious ideas. He tells encourages us to keep hold of religious questions, even if we reject the answers.
Surviving Death by Mark Johnston
Philosopher Johnston attempts the seemingly impossible in this book: to try to show, without any recourse to the supernatural, that there might be, in Socrates’s words, ‘something in death that is better for the good than for the bad’. Through an investigation of Buddhist denials of the inherent existence of the ‘self’ and the Christian ideal of universal love, Johnston suggests that altruistic concern enables a person to identify not with their finite physical existence, but with the ‘onward rush’ of humankind and thereby live forever. A dazzling book no matter what you think of his conclusion.
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mikhail Bakhtin famously said that Dostoevsky was a polyphonic writer. André Gide celebrated his ability to embrace inconsistencies. Between the three brothers - Ivan the cynical atheist, Alyosha the hopelessly hopeful and pious Christian, and Dmitri the lawless hooligan - Dostoevsky dramatises his own struggles with religion and morality. Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor parable and the sermons of Father Zosima, Alyosha’s spiritual director, are magisterial.
STRAIT IS THE GATE by André Gide
Jerome is in love with Alissa. Alissa is devoted to God. ‘We are not,’ she says, ‘made for happiness’. A devastating depiction of the perversity of the ascetic ideal.
SEIOBO THERE BELOW by László Krasznahorkai
Seventeen interconnected stories about art, divinity, beauty, the sublime, and the impossible pull of aesthetic and spiritual vocation. Krasznahorkai tells us tales of the restoration of a statue of Amida Buddha, a Louvre security guard’s love of the Venus de Milo, an artist who hews horses out of mountain earth, a homeless man who stumbles into an exhibition of Russian icons, a lost tourist transfixed by a painting of Christ in a Venetian church, and a Shinto shrine being rebuilt. A luminous book.
The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals by Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton is and will always be one of my heroes. A great soul who spent the bulk of his life in a Trappist monastery and yet managed to touch the lives of thousands through his writing, his activism and his example. His diaries are some of his most companionable work: never less than honest, they chart his struggles with Catholic institutions, his love of solitude, his clandestine romance with a student nurse, and his pioneering dialogue with contemplatives in other religions, particularly Buddhism.
The Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche is a great religious thinker, despite (or perhaps because of) his loathing of Christianity. It’s hard to pick just one of his texts: the story of the madman running into the marketplace to declare, famously, that God is dead, adding, somewhat less famously, that it is ‘we who have killed him’ would make The Joyful Science another candidate for inclusion. But the Genealogy contains some of Nietzsche’s most sustained analysis of religiosity and some of his major ideas, including the phenomenon of ressentiment, the ascetic ideal, and the notion of slave morality.