by MARY WARNOCK
“Richard Holloway, who resigned as Bishop of Edinburgh in 2000, has written a candid and deeply moving account of his growing disillusionment with religion.” PHOTO/Murdo Macleod
David Hume, an Edinburgh man, discovered, when he was just over 20 years old, that he could not believe the Gospel stories of those miracles upon which Christianity was founded, their improbability far outweighing the credibility of their authors. He was cautious enough, however, to suppress his arguments for more than a decade and when he did publish them, as part of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he did so in a spirit of irony: “Upon the whole we may conclude that the Christian religion was not only at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.”
Richard Holloway, in contrast, did resign as Bishop of Edinburgh in 2000 when he was 66. He did so with sorrow and his memoir is the account of his growing breach with the Episcopal church, until he sadly walked away from it and, perhaps less certainly, from Christianity.
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Richard Holloway’s developing thoughts about the nature and purpose of religion, and especially about the status of the Christian narrative, slot seamlessly into the story of his own life; in fact, they form its principal drama. There were two things wrong with the work of the Christian fathers who shaped the Bible and established the church. The first was their ignorance of the origins of the universe. We cannot blame them for this, but we should not pretend to share it when we know better.
The second was culpable, even then. They did not understand the nature of myth. This failure has had a profound effect on religion, producing the finally intolerable tension between pretending to believe a narrative to be factually true and understanding the meaning of that narrative, the truth that it contains, without denying that it is the product of imagination. It is Holloway’s insistence that Christianity is a great work of the human imagination that makes his memoir so compelling and so intense. What he loves about the narrative is its central figure, who possesses endless pity for human beings and is endlessly subversive, in preferring compassion to rules. What he came to hate about the church is its insistence on rules, which turns it to cruelty, not pity. The attitude of the church towards women and homosexuals, which Holloway in the end could stand no more, illustrates the way the supposed rules drive out love.
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