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

be located and how it might best be educated. In its origins, the soul was thought by theologians to resemble a miniature baby inserted by God into an infant’s mouth at the moment of his or her birth.
    The baby inside us that we must educate. Receiving one’ssoul: illumination from an early fifteenth-century Bible. ( illustration credit 4.5 )
    At the other end of the individual’s life, at the moment ofdeath, the soul-baby would then be expelled again through his or her mouth. The trajectory it was to follow would be more ambiguous this time: it would be either taken up by God or snatched away by the Devil, depending on how well or badly its owner had tended to it over the years. A good soul was one that had managed to find appropriate answers to the great questions and tensions of existence, a soul marked by such godly virtues as faith, hope, charity and love.
    Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one – that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
    By its own standards, Christianity therefore has no choice but to tilt its educational emphasis towards explicit questions: How can we manage to live together? How do we tolerate others’ faults? How can we accept our own limitations and assuage our anger? A degree of urgent didacticism is a requirement rather than an insult. The difference between Christian and secular education reveals itself with particular clarity in their respective characteristic modes of instruction: secular education delivers
lectures
, Christianity
sermons
. Expressed in terms of intent, we might say that one is concerned with imparting information, the other with changing our lives. Sermons by their very nature assume that their audiences are in important ways lost. The titles alone of the sermons by one of the most famous preachers of eighteenth-century England, John Wesley, show Christianity seeking to dispense practical advice about a range of the soul’s ordinary challenges: ‘On Being Kind’, ‘On Staying Obedient to Parents’, ‘On Visiting the Sick’, ‘On Caution Against Bigotry’. Unlikely though it seems that Wesley’s sermons could ever seduce atheists through their content, they nevertheless succeed, like any number of Christian texts, in categorizing knowledge under useful headings.
    An illumination from an early-fifteenth-centuryBook of Hours, showing asoul which has recently emerged from a deceased man and is being fought over by the Devil and St Michael. ( illustration credit 4.6 )
    While it was at first hoped by Arnold, Mill and others thatuniversities could deliver secular sermons that would tell us how to avoid bigotry and find helpful things to say when visiting ill people, these centres of learning have never offered the kind of guidance that churches have focused on, from a belief that academia should refrain from making any associations between cultural works and individual sorrows. It would be a shocking affront to university etiquette to ask what
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
might usefully teach us about love, or to suggest that the novels ofHenry James might be read with an eye to discovering parables about staying honest in a slippery mercantile world.
    Yet a search for parables is precisely what lies at the heart of the Christian approach to texts. Wesley himself was a profoundly scholarly man in ways that the modern university would honour. He had an intimate textual knowledge of Leviticus and Matthew, Corinthians and Luke, but he quoted verses from these only when they could be integrated into a parabolic structure and used to leaven the hardships of his listeners. Like all Christian sermonizers, he looked to culture principally as a tool,