Free Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton

teaching culture in secular institutions. Enquiries as to why, exactly, people should bother to study history or literature usually strike them as impertinent and argumentative and are often left unanswered. Academics in the humanities appreciate that their opposite numbers in the technical and scientific departments can without trouble justify their work in utilitarian terms to impatient government officials and donors (in the unlikely event that anyone should idly wonder what the purpose of rocket science or public health might be). But fearing that they cannot compete effectively against these rivals, the denizens of the humanities prefer to take refuge in ambiguity and silence, having carefully calculated that they retain just enough prestige to get away with leaving the reasons for their existence somewhat murky.
    When confronted by those who demand of culture that it should be relevant and useful, that it should offer up advice on how to choose a career or survive the end of a marriage, how to contain sexual impulses or cope with the news of a medical death sentence, the guardians of culture become disdainful. Their ideal audiences are students who are uninclined to drama and self-involvement, who are mature, independent, temperamentally able to live with questions rather than answers and ready to put aside their own needs for the sake of years of disinterested study of agricultural yields in eighteenth-century Normandy or the presence of the infinite in Kant’s noumenal realm.
    6.
Christianity meanwhile looks at the purpose of education from another angle, because it has an entirely different concept of human nature. It has no patience with theories that dwell on our independence or our maturity. It instead believes us to be at heart desperate, fragile, vulnerable, sinful creatures, a good deal less wise than we are knowledgeable, always on the verge of anxiety, tortured by our relationships, terrified of death – and most of all in need of God.
    What sort of education might benefit such forlorn wretches? While the capacity for abstract thought is considered by Christianity to be in no way dishonourable, and indeed even a potential sign of divine grace, it is held to be of secondary importance to a more practical ability to bring consoling and nurturing ideas to bear on our disturbed and irresolute selves.
    We are familiar enough with the major categories of the humanities as they are taught in secular universities – history and anthropology, literature and philosophy – as well as with the sorts of examination questions they produce: Who were the Carolingians? Where did phenomenology originate? What did Emerson want? We know too that this scheme leaves the emotional aspects of our characters to develop spontaneously, or at the very least in private, perhaps when we are with our families or out on solitary walks in the countryside.
    In contrast, Christianity concerns itself from the outset with the inner confused side of us, declaring that we are none of us born knowing how to live; we are by nature fragile and capricious, unempathetic and beset by fantasies of omnipotence, worlds away from being able to command even a modicum of the good sense and calm that secular education takes as the starting point for its own pedagogy.
    Christianity is focused on helping a part of us that secular language struggles even to name, which is not precisely intelligence or emotion, not character or personality, but another, even more abstract entity loosely connected with all of those and yet differentiated from them by an additional ethical and transcendent dimension – and to which we may as well refer, following Christian terminology, as the
soul
. It has been the essential task of the Christian pedagogic machine to nurture, reassure, comfort and guide our souls.
    Throughout its history, Christianity indulged in lengthy debates as to the nature of the soul, speculating on what it might look like, where it might