The Atheist and the Archbishop

Marghanita Laski and Archbishop Anthony Bloom

Transcript of BBC televised interviews, transmitted 5th and 12th July, 1970.

I

Laski: You believe in God, and you think this is good and right. I don’t believe in God, and I think it’s good and right. Now we’re neither of us frivolous people, we’re serious, we’ve reached our decision as carefully as we can. There’s a lot of people like me, there’s a lot of people, probably a lot more people, like you. How do you explain this basic, one could say this fundamental difference?

Bloom: I really don’t know how to explain it but it seems to me that the word ‘belief’ is misleading. It gives an impression of something optional, which is within our powers to choose or not. What I feel very strongly about it, is that I believe because I know that God exists, and I’m puzzled how you manage not to know.

Laski: This brings me to the next thing I wanted to ask you, which is about faith. I know that faith is a major Christian virtue but to me it’s nearer a vice and I cannot see why you need it. When you say ‘ I know that God exists’ and many people do say this for one reason or another because they’ve experienced God or because they see God in the shape of the universe. But if you know, you don’t need faith. And if you don’t know, to me as an unbeliever, it’s almost throwing away the most important thing about a human being, to substitute faith for not knowing. To me, the right thing when you don’t know is to wait on knowledge or to say ‘ I don’t know’. If you know that God exists, why should faith be considered a virtue ?

Bloom: I think it’s a question of the definition of faith. I remember having read in a rather facetious theological book a definition of faith as the ability which grown-ups possess to assert that things are true when they know that they are not true.

Laski: That’s rather nice__

Bloom: If that is faith, I’m afraid I don’t possess it. I think faith is best defined in the words of the Epistle to the Hebrews, when the writer says ‘Faith is certainty about things invisible.’ It is certainty, that is the operative word, and things which are invisible are not simply things imagined. Speaking for instance of myself and a number of other people, I’m sure we began with an experience that was totally convincing. Now at a certain moment this experience faded away, as does every experience of beauty, of love, of joy, of pain. There is a moment when it is no longer actual, but the certainty of it has remained. And this is the moment when faith comes into it. But faith doesn’t mean credulity ; it means that the certainty remains about something which is not our actual present experience of things.

Laski: If you use the word faith, surely it must imply that you have faith in the face of possible doubt ? But if you have certainty, then there’s no room for doubt, and so I’m sorry, I can’t see any need for faith— isn’t certainty enough ?

Bloom: You are in the same position as I in a way. You have a certainty, concerning the non-existence of God, which in a way is an act of faith, because you have as little evidence you can produce outwardly as I have to produce outwardly.

Laski: Wouldn’t you say there was a fundamental difference in way of thinking about, or way of approaching problems of the invisible, that there could be a temperamental preference for having certainty about the invisible, and for reserving judgment about the invisible? ‘

Bloom: I’m not sure, I think my attitude to things is very much determined by the kind of education I have had. I was trained to be a scientist and I treat things as experimental science— perhaps wrongly, perhaps rightly. But as far as faith is concerned, for instance, I started with something which was an experience which seemed to be convincing, that God does exist. Doubt comes into it not as questioning this fundamental experience but as questioning my intellectual workings out of it. And in that respect the doubt of the believer should be as creative, as daring, as joyful, almost as systematic as the doubt of a scientist who, having discovered facts that have convinced him up to a point of something, will begin to find the flaw in his reasoning, the error in his system, or new facts that will invalidate his model of the universe.

Laski: But his moment of discovering, as it seems to him, a new pattern in the universe, is equally convincing whether his examination of the pattern shows it to be true or false. The scientist will no doubt value the feeling that comes with the new discovery, but he wouldn’t regard that feeling as validating, as you say ; he would afterwards make tests and so on. But you don’t, do you, admit an experience of feeling as if God exists which doesn’t necessarily say whether God exists or not?

Bloom: I don’t think it’s wholly a question of feeling. I don’t think for instance that feeling can be simply unreasonable or completely absurd, and yet kept against every other evidence. But I would say for instance if you transfer, for a moment, from faith in God to other fields-—music, say— from the point of view of a scientist, music can be put in drawing, in line, in mathematical formula. When you’ve got them all it does not give you a clue as to whether this is a beautiful piece of music or whether it is just discordant noise. There is a moment when you listen and you say this is music and not simply noise.

Laski: Certainly, although one of the things I most want to know about is why good music, good poetry, good art, has the effect on us it does, and I always assume that experiences of God include such a patterning. I as an atheist would never want to doubt the profound knowledge that the Churches, synagogues, mosques, have acquired over the centuries, into human nature, into human thought, into human physical responses. Now you’ve written greatly about interior prayer and even before I read your book I was very much interested in this because it seemed to me clearly that it worked. That is to say, people who attempted contemplative prayer received benefit from it. And this I have tried, I have tried it a great deal recently, because I’ve just had a very bad slipped disc, and I don’t like painkillers. And it seemed to me that to try contemplative prayer, as St Gregory describes it, meditating on the Lord’s Prayer for instance, might help my pain. And indeed it did. So I assume that here the Church has discovered a mental technique which is therapeutic, which is beneficial. But it seems to me that in the case of this experience of prayer, as in other experiences called religious, the Church has, so to speak, pre-empted them, said ‘These are our experiences, these lead to God.’ I’m not pretending my attempts compare with anything that a trained religious could do, but are you not holding to yourselves and giving explanations which are unacceptable to atheists of various techniques and modes of living that could help all humanity, perhaps even in this time of recourse to drugs —could help humanity with greater need than ever before ?

Bloom: As far as techniques and methods are concerned, I quite agree that you are right, and I could give you an example in your favour as it were, about a group of drug addicts who by chance read ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ and addressed themselves to a priest, not to me, to say: ‘We have discovered that this is exactly what we are looking for and it would be a much cheaper thing for us to get it that way than through the drugs we are using— ’

Laski: — And much healthier.

Bloom: Much healthier. And we have experience now of a number of drug addicts for instance who discover through meditation what they were looking for through drugs, and move away from drugs into another world. As far as technique is concerned I think it is completely true, because techniques are founded on our common humanity. Whatever the object you pursue, your thinking is your human thinking, your emotions and feelings are your human emotions and so forth. What the believer would say is that for some reason, the same kind of reason that makes you recognise beauty in music, in nature, in art and so on, he would say: ‘This experience which I had is neither my emotions nor my wishful thinking, nor my physical condition at that moment; it was a meeting with something different, profoundly other than myself, and which I cannot trace back even with decent knowledge of sociology, or psychology, or biology, to anything which is me, and within me.’

Laski: This is the fundamental difference between us, isn’t it? Whether this feeling that we have encountered is something other than oneself, is a self-induced feeling or is an other-induced feeling, an other-derived feeling. Is this not what separates us most?

Bloom: Yes. A believer would say: ‘ I objectively know that he exists, which means I have knowledge acquired and not manufactured.’ But doesn’t it apply in the same way to things like irrational experiences in common life? Like love, like the sense of beauty, in art, music and so on ?

Laski: I would guess that the sense of beauty is irrational only for the present until explained. I always think of the philosopher Hume, who two hundred years ago said we know that bread does us good but we shall never know why and of course now we do know why. And I think we shall, perhaps in the not very distant future, come to learn what kind of patterning it is that affects us and that we call beautiful.

Bloom: That may well be, but why don’t you think that we may by the same process come to a point when by the study, say, of brainwaves and that kind of thing, we will be able to discover that at such a moment something has intruded or come into our experience which is not intrinsic to our physical body. Logically, it’s as credible as the other one.

Laski: This is what I would most like to know and of course if the experiment worked your way, there would be no alternative to being a believer. I simply suspect it would work my way. But Archbishop, supposing I had, as any of us unbelievers might have, a sudden experience of the kind you describe as certainty that God existed. Supposing that it didn’t take place in any religious context. Let’s say like St Ignatius Loyola, I was sitting by a river. Now I know I was brought up a Jew, but I’ve lived in England, which is as they say the country of a hundred religions and one sauce, why should anything follow from this? I can understand that it would be sensible to join a religion for fear of the kind of arrogant madness that falls upon people who think that they have a direct personal line to God, but from this experience of God, what should lead me to suppose I’ve encountered a Christian, a Jewish, a Moslem God? That he would want me to be a Methodist or a Russian Orthodox or a Church of England? What should make one take a step further than having this experience and saying: ‘ Fine, I now have the certainty that God exists?’

Bloom: It would proceed in different steps—if you had, and I’m certain one can have an experience of God outside any context, of previous religiosity or religious background, then you will probably discover that if God does exist it has immediate implications as to your situation with regard to men in general.. . .

Laski: Please explain because this is what I want to understand.

Bloom: Readily. My experience in childhood was that life was violent, brutal, heartless, that men were to one another adversaries and causes of suffering, that there were on the whole just a few, the closest around you, who belonged together, and who were no danger to you. And my situation when I was a young teenager, was that all these people were dangers. One had to fight, to overcome in order to survive, and eventually to hit back as hard as one could in order to win the day.

Laski: This was truly your situation, I believe, wasn’t it?

Bloom: That was the experience I had, in a slum school, and in the early years of revolution and so on— not in Russia but abroad. Now, when I discovered God and I discovered Him in connection with the Gospel, the first thing that struck me is that here was a God for whom everyone was meaningful, who was not segregating people, who was not the God of the good versus the bad, the God of the believer versus the unbeliever, the God of one type versus another. That everyone existed for him as a completely meaningful and valuable person. And if I had discovered that God, then that was the attitude I had to discover with regard to all my surroundings. And you know, I felt with amazement that the fact that I had discovered that God was such, and that that was his relatedness to everyone else, upturned me completely. I looked around and I no longer saw the detestable hateful creatures, but people who were in relationship with Him, and with whom I could come into a new relationship, if I believed about them what God believes about them.

Laski: But it is a fact that non-believers can have this experience of respectful love, charitable love, to all creatures, without the need for God. Pm not a good Socialist, but I think that people who are really good Socialists, in the basic sense, not the political sense of the word, have this feeling. It’s not necessary to have God to have the sense of the worth of each human being.

Bloom: No, I don’t mean to say that it is necessary. I would say it is not necessary to know that God exists to be a human being, and not below the mark as I was quite definitely. Neither is it necessary I would say, to know that God exists for Him to exist in feet. To me the problem of God is this. He is not something I need to have a world outlook. I don’t need God to fill gaps in my world outlook. I have discovered that he exists and I can’t help it, exactly in the same way as I have discovered facts in science. He is a fact for me, and that’s why He has significance and plays a role in a way exactly in the same sense in which having discovered that a person exists, life becomes different from the moment before you had become aware of the person.

Laski: Could I ask you to be a bit concrete about this? For instance this is rather a debating point I’m going to make, but I thing it’s a valid one. For the past five hundred years, since science escaped from the bounds of the Church, it’s leapt ahead, so that it’s a commonplace now to say that our technological, our scientific knowledge is beyond our moral capacity. The Church, on the other hand, has had two thousand years to develop our moral capacity, if this is one of its functions. But you have said that one can come to this awareness of the real individual— what’s the Christian word I want?— for the existence, the respectful existence of every human being. And this entails, I think, a kind of behaviour to human beings which makes a link between belief in God and morals. Is there a necessary link between belief in God and morals? What is it? And since the Church doesn’t seem in two thousand years to have made us good— in fact I would claim that it’s secular thought that has done most to improve us over the past two hundred years— can the Church be said to have fulfilled this function? In other words, how do morals follow from belief in God ? Why has the Church failed to make us moral beings?

Bloom: I think quite certainly morals should follow our belief in God because if we see the world structured around a certain number of great principles, it should make a difference to our behaviour.

Laski: What are the great principles ?

Bloom: Love, let us say… love, justice.

Laski: Because you feel love when you encounter God? Because God seems to be a creature of love and justice ?— I mean where do these virtues come into the encounter with God ?

Bloom: Let me limit myself to the Gospel which will be easier than to try to embrace a wider field. The whole teaching of the Gospel is really a teaching about loving. Now the fact that we fall short of it condemns us, but doesn’t make its declaration less true. I’m quite prepared to say that individually and collectively we have fallen very short of that ideal. Now what I’m more doubtful about, is what you said about secular thought because my impression is that west European secular thought at least, or the secular thought developed from west European culture is impregnated with the Gospel, for instance the notion of the value of the person is something which the Gospel has introduced into ancient society which amply didn’t possess it. And there are so many things which now have become common ground, universally accepted, which were novelties in their time and which now work in society as leaven works in dough.

Laski: I would agree with you completely about this. I’m only saying that over the past two hundred years, at least since the middle of the eighteenth century, these principles which do seem to me to be the glory of western civilisation, have passed effectively into the hands of the seculars and from the hands of the religious, that insofar as there has been a moral leap forward over this period, and I think there has been one, it’s not I think, the Churches, the synagogues, that we have to thank for it.

Bloom: There are two things that strike me— the one is that the believers have had and still have a most unfortunate tendency to escape the difficulties and the problems of life into ‘worship’ in inverted commas.

Laski: Yes, I’m glad you brought that up.

Bloom: That quite certainly. It’s much easier to retire to one’s room and say: ‘Oh God, give bread to the hungry,’ than to do something about it. I have just been in America and someone was making discourse about his readiness to give his life for the hungry and the needy, and I asked him why he was a chain smoker and didn’t give simply a packet of cigarettes for it.

Laski: And I can throw another example at you. All of us who have children and meet a lot of young people. . . . meet the people who ask for more love in the world but find it impossible to give it to the older generation.

Bloom: Yes, that’s true too. So that is quite definite. We have been escaping into a world of irresponsible prayer, instead of realising that if I say to God, ‘ Here is a need. Help,’ I must .be prepared to hear God answer within me, without waiting for a revelation. ‘You have seen that— well go and do it.’ So that is a way in which we have failed, and which is one of the reasons why we have gone wrong.

Laski: Could I suggest that another reason why I think you and the secular do-gooders also have failed is because of a rejection of the world not just as you say, going into one’s room and failing to do the good that lies to hand, but a feeling that the world and particularly the urban world of today, is a hell—a Satanic mill, a place to be avoided. There’s no gaiety in religion, for instance, there’s no enjoyment of a jolly life. The pleasures that we normally take in society, even if you like the pleasures of amassing possessions, of sitting in our little castles with our refrigerators round us and our children playing at our feet— these to me are healthful pleasures. But I think that serious people, serious religious people, serious non-religious people, have always regarded these things that we genuinely enjoy as human animals, as clogs in the way of the good life.

Bloom: I think they are right up to a point. I think it takes a great deal of mastery of self not to forget what is deepest in oneself to the profit of what is more superficial. It’s easier to be superficial than deep, it’s easier to be on that level rather than face things that may be tragic. You see the difficulty is that we have made it into a false moral attitude, into an attitude that if you are a Christian you must be stem, almost sinister, never laugh—

Laski: —-Or very, very simple, so simple and innocent that the realities of life seem irrelevant to you.

Bloom: Yes. But if you are really aware of things, of how tragic life is, then there is restraint in your enjoyment. Joy is another thing. One can possess a great sense of inner joy and elation, but enjoying the outer aspects of life with the awareness of so many people suffering and so on, is something which I find difficult. When I was a professional man, we made a decision with my mother never to live beyond the minimum which we need for shelter and food because we thought and I still think, that whatever you spend above that, it is stolen from someone else who needs it while you don’t need it. That doesn’t make you sinister, it gives you a sense of joy in sharing, and in giving and receiving. But I do feel that as long as there is one person who is hungry, excess of happiness—excess of amenities— is a theft…

Laski: And yet each one person is so vulnerable, so prone to tragedy, so likely to fall into danger that when I see people, for instance on a beach, with excessive possessions and enjoying themselves excessively, here I think, is gaiety, a little happiness stored, a moment of gaiety that is not wrong.

Bloom: I wouldn’t say it is wrong. I think it could be deeper and it could be more permanent. One of the problems of the modem person is that we have so much that we no longer enjoy little things. Say, in the years when life was extremely hard, in my experience, the slightest joy was a miracle. Now, my level of miracle has come up; it takes more for me to find that things are so miraculous.

Laski: Yes, and yet sometimes people rediscover simplicity through excess. I’m not morally disagreeing with what you are saying but I am wondering whether this— to put forward such a moral point as you do— isn’t to impose guilt on most of us who are not so austere. This would be a general charge, not against you only.

Bloom: Guilt is always wrong and guilt is a sickly attitude to life. It’s useless. It’s destructive and it does away with the very sense that all things are possible, that one can put things right. No, I believe that guilt is wrong but I think that it is a challenge of greater joy. If I say, for instance, I won’t do this because I can have the joy of sharing, instead of parasitically, in a predatory way, devouring it for myself, I’m not diminishing my joy and I’m not developing a sense of guilt.

Laski: The only thing I’d say is that if you are wrong— guilty—have done wrong, it’s better to bear it yourself than to put it on to other people. It may be necessary to bear your own guilt and work through it.

Bloom: I think it’s better to leave the word guilt alone and do something.

Laski: Certainly, do something, but don’t push it on to somebody else.

Bloom: I don’t see any advantage in pushing it on somebody else except if somebody is prepared, in terms of affection, friendship, love or whatever you call it, I mean relatedness to you, to share with you your problem, your predicament, not your sense of guilt, not your drowning, but your getting out of it.

Laski: I’ve been pushing my questions at you and you’ve been very generous, but have I left out— I’m sure I have— some important area that you would like to put forward? Have I given you insufficient scope to say what’s really important to you?

Bloom: No, I think it was very exciting as it was. We never can cover all the ground, anyhow. What I feel, to put it in two very short statements about God and religion, is that to me God is not someone I need to fill gaps. It’s someone I have got to accept because from the experience of life I have He does exist; I can’t avoid the fact. And the second thing is that all the morals that develop from His existence are part not of a duty to Him or a duty to people— I don’t like the word duty— but an act of happiness and gratitude for God and for people, and that links with worship— a worshipful attitude to God, a worshipful attitude to people, a worshipful attitude to life; I think the sense of worship and joy and of a challenge which will make me grow into a full stature is really what matters in practical life.

II

Bloom: What strikes me in the discussion we had before is that we are both on a level of conviction and belief. That is, I said that I had some sort of evidence that God exists. What is your evidence that he does not exist ? On what do you base your belief?

Laski: I think I’ve got to put it in a more negative way. I see no evidence that God exists. No reason to believe that God exists. What you t^ke as evidence seems to me not to count as evidence, not to be sufficient evidence.

Bloom: You call that over-belief— ?

Laski: Over-belief? I would say that undoubtedly you andpeople like you know a feeling that seems as if something that might be called God could exist, but this seems to me to be a feeling that something it might be useful to call God exists, not evidence that God exists. It seems to me more probably to be a feeling of it than true evidence.

Bloom: Where do you draw the line between evidence that is something that does exist and the superstructure which we’ll call over-belief? How do you distinguish the one and the other?

Laski: That is a difficult question, but I suppose that evidence would be something that if accepted as valid made a difference to one’s entire mental patterning, something that had to be taken into account and which, if not taken into account, falsified every previous picture you’d held of how the world was, how it was constructed. I would rather find, I think, that to believe that God exists in supererogatory. Isn’t it William of Occam who said you shouldn’t multiply entities unnecessarily? I don’t see a need to believe that God exists, or that if I did my picture of the world would be improved. In fact, I think my picture of the world would be falsified in that I would tend to make overtidy patterns about how things are if I believe that God exists, instead of confronting the much greater difficulties that seem to me to be there when I can’t accept this.

Bloom: Yes, I see. But is an experience valid when it says to you God does exist ? Can you invalidate that kind of statement ?

Laski: It doesn’t seem to me to be a valid statement at all because there are all kinds of statements I can make from my experience. I can say at a moment of loving infatuation: ‘This person is the person I shall be happy with all my life. He is the most beautiful, wonderful creature in the world.’ But my eyes are blinded. Or I may have a fever and be hallucinated. Or the sun may shine and I may have an improper optimism about a situation. Or the sun may not shine and I may have an improper pessimism. Surely experience must be tempered by authority, just as authority must be tempered by experience, but on experience alone, I may be mad.

Bloom: That’s the kind of thing which the atheists and the believers say about one another quite freely, so we can both accept that kind of qualification. But what is the basic difference between saying ‘ I know that God exists’ and saying ‘ I know that love exists’ ?

Laski: I don’t think I would say ‘ I know that love exists’ because I wouldn’t use abstract words like this. I would say I know several different kinds of feelings that are called love, and it would be better, I think, if we restricted the word a bit more and used it for rather fewer feelings than rather many, but I can certainly say I know various feelings that people call love and I probably don’t know all the feelings that people call love. For instance, I don’t know your feeling of love of God in any adult sense.

Bloom: What if I simply denied the fact that love does exist, that there is such feeling— whatever the nuance you give it— I suppose you would say there is something lacking in me ?

Laski: But haven’t you changed the words a bit? I say I know a feeling that it’s reasonable to call love, just like I know a feeling of being right and a feeling of being wrong, but I wouldn’t myself— I may be only quibbling with words— find it useful to say love exists, right exists, wrong exists. I know what it is to feel loving, let me put it that way, I know what it is when people are feeling loving towards me.

Bloom: Yes I see. But it’s an irrational feeling, something which is pure feeling which you accept as an experience without assuming that at the back of it there is such a thing as love, as it were.

Laski: No. You seem to be using irrational there as a rude word.

Bloom: On the contrary.

Laski: But it’s a feeling that has all kinds of validations hasn’t it? I mean, for instance, you can observe my behaviour when I say I feel loving and say: ‘ Is my behaviour consonant with what counts as feeling loving?’ And if I say I am feeling loving when in fact my eyes are glazed, my hands are cold, I have no energy, you would then be justified in saying: ‘Well she may call this love but I think she’s mad.’ There are references for feeling loving, aren’t there ?

Bloom: Yes. You moved from some sort of child’s belief into unbelief . . . . . or is it too personal a question, how did you make the move into discarding God? Simply by the fact that there was no evidence that satisfied your more adult mind ?

Laski: Would you agree that a child’s belief in God need have very little to do with an adult’s belief in God, except when the adult comes to God he’ll make a recognition ? This is what was presented to me as God when I was a child and now I can see more clearly. I see that it was right to present this to me. The God I knew and loved as a child was a God presented to me by my parents and He was an imaginary friend, as many children have, and I think I had the same kind of belief in Him that I had, say, in the fairies or that I had, say, in that somewhere there was a country called China. These were all things that came by authority and had to stand the test of time.

Bloom: So it wasn’t a God whom you would have said you had met in a sort of intimate relationship. It was a God whom someone else had met and about whom you had been told?

Laski: A litde more than that because I think every child’s imaginary friend is somebody you meet in a personal relationship and I was certainly very convinced that this God whom I loved was on my side, so to speak. That when my parents said this was right and I thought, no, that was right, God was with me not with them.

Bloom: You find, say in the Bible, in the Gospels in particular, a sort of poetic evidence but no sort of objective evidence?

Laski: No objective evidence of the existence of God but an objective evidence of the kind of reasons that led people to believe in God and, of course, a great many statements of permanent validity without which I couldn’t live nearly so well as I try to.

Bloom: But do you think one can have a convincing poetic evidence which is founded on nothing but hallucination or nothing but fantasy or wishful thinking ?

Laski: Now you are using rude words and unnecessarily because it seems to me that religion would not have existed in every community we know of unless it corresponded to people’s deepest needs which couldn’t in other ways be satisfied and when you say poetic, we in our post-Renaissance world, take poetry as being something fairly slight compared with religion. But I would have thought that religion was the expression of something we had so far no other means of expressing, something that is to do with our whole best development as human beings, and so when I say I accept this as a poetic myth it’s not to denigrate it; in fact it’s rather greedily and jealously to say what can I learn from it and in what ways human beings can without the mythical basis of the myth still continue to develop in a life that’s a continuance from this and not a break from it.

Bloom: When I think of poetry as far as the human scene is concerned, I always feel that it carries weight, it makes sense because it is an expression in its own terms of something so profoundly real that poetry is the only medium which can be used to transmit the experience or to share it, but what makes it so convincing, so powerful is that there is a reality, human reality, at the root of it.

Laski: But here we agree. I mean I think we were almost reaching the point of difference before, . . . . . . if you would say that poetry is an expression of a very deep human reality I am not away from you at all. It’s when you suggest, if you are going to suggest, that there is something outside, something other, that we would disagree. It seems to me in fact that the subject of poetry, to take poetry literally now, that the subject that is most often used in poetry is the subject of this very deep emotional pattern-making, in some way closely related to a religious experience, that this is the thing poetry is most about.

Bloom: So that the human experience is genuine and the way it is interpreted you would feel is beyond the evidence as it were, the loss of words, imagination or fantasy.

Laski: Beyond the evidence but not destructively beyond the evidence if one is able to accept it as mythical. We met before on television, I think a year ago, and I remember saying to you I understand you. I still believe that I understand you and I think perhaps this is what I am trying to say, that nothing that you put forward seems to me to be alien or strange but rather to be poetry in its deepest sense.

Bloom: And you would accept, for instance, that passages of the Gospel, to take the Gospel as an example, as being humanly true, without implying that it goes beyond the human truth of it.

Laski: I would not only take them, I would seek them and use them.

Bloom: Because you mentioned the Lord’s Prayer, for instance . . . What does the Lord’s Prayer mean, apart from the God whom you call ‘Our Father’ in the beginning, or about Whose kingdom, will and so on you speak ? Is it an incantation ? You said that you used it.

Laski: Yes, it’s hard to say because its meaning changes from one pondering to another. You must find this too. And, except for using it as I think I do in a somewhat incantatory way, it wouldn’t be perhaps the words that would most come to my lips, except for this purpose. I mean some of it I would accept, some I would reject. For instance: ‘Lead us not into temptation’ or, as it says in the New English Bible ‘Do not bring us to the test’. This I would reject. This seems to me to be cowardly, but, on the other hand, the pious wish: ‘Thy Kingdom Come’ this seems an expression of Glory, this is splendid, this is life-giving.

Bloom: My difficulty is not so much such-and-such a sentence but the fact that the Lord’s Prayer, for instance, is addressed to someone. If the someone doesn’t exist at all, how does it affect you?

Laski: I don’t know the answer to that. I mean there is maybe still a childish recourse to a someone. I don’t think there often is. Maybe I’m using your image. Could I produce another text, perhaps which I might find easier? One I often think of: ‘ I Will Lift up Mine Eyes to the Hills from Whence Cometh My Help’. Now this is more meaningful to me because the help that comes from looking at hills, to those of us who are helped by looking at hills, is a very real thing. We don’t know, it may be, as people have said, something to do with the shape of the hills, whatever it may be, but I don’t need then to assume a someone, a something that moves on the mountains. I just know, as a human being, that looking at hills is good for many human beings. It helps.

Bloom: I can’t see that. My difficulty was that a prayer is addressed to someone or to a void and then I would feel that if there is a void towards which it is addressed then I couldn’t use it.

Laski: In mome nts of deep distress and disaster where it would be natural to pray, in that sense I can’t pray and this is one of the things we atheists must do without. I can see that it could be the greatest of strength and comfort to feel you could address a prayer and this perhaps is why I think people address prayers, but we can’t do it.

Bloom: My feeling about it is not so much that there is someone to whom you can address a prayer but that the God who I believe exists, makes sense, and is a key of harmony even when the whole piece of music is totally discordant. Where is your key of harmony? Or is the world completely nonsensical ?

Laski: Perhaps there isn’t a harmony but certainly I think that the attempt to impose a harmony goes far beyond anything we have a right, on what evidence we have, to do. But we can seek for harmony in ourselves, harmony in our surroundings. We can seek the things that give us harmony, This I think is our duty. This is an important thing to do, but to say there is a great, . . a universal, an overall harmony, no, I think this is something we impose and God is one of the means by which we impose it.

Bloom: I won’t say that there is one, but I would say that we are in a dynamic process of disharmony and tragedy that is aiming at and moving towards a final resolution, a meaning. How can you build meaning on the sort of patchwork which is life day by day?

Laski: First, I wouldn’t seek for anything in the nature of a final resolution because that would seem to me to be atrophy and death. The play, as you put it, of a movement towards tragedy and disorder, a movement towards harmony, is the very ebb and flow out of which creativity comes; but meaning, in any large sense, isn’t something I would look for, no, I don’t understand what this means,

Bloom: What do you feel of life then? You just exist, you act according to— I wouldn’t say principles—but to promptings .

Laski: Experience and authority— my experience, as purely as I can get it, the best authority I can find to try to be a good animal, a good human being, to the best of my capacity in my society, making as many choices as I feel it’s in me to make, reconciling myself where I can’t choose.

Bloom: And what about this scale of values ? Is there such a thing as a scale of values between things bad and good, better or worse, ugliness and beauty? Is there any sort of base on which one can build a scale of values ?

Laski: I’ve got to be very simple here because what I go by is as easy as comes. What makes me feel better is good. What makes me feel worse is bad. But authority must come in. You see, again, I could be mad. I could be a sadist. If I feel better at beating a child then I must defer to authority. There’s something wrong with me, I should go to a doctor. But what makes me feel better, in society, as a social animal, I think, if tested by authority— and part of the authority I could certainly use would be the authority of religion— what tends towards health, the health of me in my society, is good. What tends to unhealth is bad.

Bloom: Yes, but health and unhealth are very relative notions.

Laski: Need they be ? Just as you, as a doctor, as you have been, can recognize a state of greater or lesser physical health, surely we are moving towards a point where we are able to recognise a larger kind of health than that, a health. . . a social health for instance as a community, a psychosomatic health of the individual as a whole and one of the things we should be able to do in ourselves, and always with this check of authority, is to know what’s good for us and the word good is quite important there, to know what’s bad for us.

Bloom: What troubles me is that for instance that in the case where the physical well-being of people has improved they feel happier and yet often I feel so sorry for them because they are missing something more important and I would rather be back to more misery but be alive in the way I was than be more stable, more happy, more satisfied and less dynamically alive.

Laski: I don’t think this is wiped out by what I’ve said. Are you saying better Socrates dissatisfied than the pig satisfied? I think the polarity between unhappiness and happiness, between illhealth and good health, between stagnation and movement, all this is what makes for movement and creativity. And so the last thing I would be saying is that I want to be in a state of perfect endless bliss because this would be similar to your final harmony. You know the atheist poet, William Cory, who said: ‘Your chilly heavens I can forego, this warm, kind world is all I know’, and the chilly heavens do indeed seem to me to be the area of cold movementlessness like an icy sea.

Bloom: I don’t think that harmony is bound to be a stagnation or immobility. When, for instance, you spin a top, there is a moment when the movement is so perfect and intense that it coincides with complete poise.

Laski: But your harmony— I mean if we are talking about music — the harmony of music is made by playing on your nerves, by the exacerbation of discords, by the expectation that isn’t fulfilled. There’s no peace but the grave.

Bloom: True, there is no peace but in the grave, but I don’t see harmony as a grave. What do you think of the people who are sure that there is an otherness which they call God, how do you take into account their experience or what they assert? Do you think that all of them were completely mistaken in their judgment or hallucinated ?

Laski: You lead me to the besetting sin of the atheist which is arrogance, so I think I have to say I don’t know. I guess there to be a temperamental difference. I guess there to be a difference between people who prefer a minuscule putting together of pieces that may never reach a whole and people like Plato, perhaps, who saw a perfection in ideals. There do seem to me to be people who yearn for an otherness and people who yearn for a here and now, and this is not to make judgment between them but to say that perhaps it’s something to do with the way your brain works.

Bloom: Yes, but you spoke of authority as one of the bases for decision and thought. If you take the total authority of mankind in the sense that it occupies a place which seems to be discordant with another line, with the line you have taken, do you feel you need integrate them somehow or would you say, as an atheist once said to me: ‘Your belief comes either from hopeless ignorance, or, from the fact that you are a crack-pot and as you are not hopelessly ignorant’— or rather he thought I was hopeless but he didn’t think I was sufficiently ignorant— ‘ then you must be a hopeless crack-pot.’

Laski: When I said authority I wasn’t thinking again of authority for a great big thing, but for little things. ‘The hedgehog knows one big thing and the fox knows many things.’ I’m a fox. You’re a hedgehog. So when I refer to authority, I want to know what authority has said about charity, what authority has said about adultery, what authority has said about lies and anger. But not what it’s said about God. It simply seems to me that where these human problems are concerned, what should I do ? How should I behave? How can I find consolation? The Fathers of the Church and the Fathers of the Synagogue have been into all this and they’ve found answers that suit human beings, so there is likely to be an answer that suits me. I don’t have to take their source of their answer, but their answer is very likely to suit my condition.

Bloom: I find it surprising because in our time particularly people are so interested in knowing all that exists— travelling and having seen, having read, having heard, being aware of the total reality. My question about this reality is that I feel God is perhaps part of this reality or is not and it’s not immaterial to know whether He exists any more than it is immaterial to know whether something else of the material world exists. It’s as important in a way, not for a world outlook, but for the sake of my passionate interest in what there is.

Laski: But I have said I don’t think God exists. How would my life be changed if I thought otherwise ? How would my very imperfect world picture be made more perfect, how would my life be different ?

Bloom: What is the difference for your life to have discovered that music exists? In a way, you could very well live without ever having had any experience of music. It may not have made you any better, any worse, but it’s an enrichment. It is part of a real and wider experience of life and that’s how I would put the problem about God.

Laski: I see this. But surely God doesn’t exist for my enrichment. You’re suggesting almost that there’s another art form I haven’t come across. I’m tone deaf to God and I would have a richer life, just as I might if I could understand another art that I don’t understand. But God must be something more than this.

Bloom: And yet, as far as my human experience is concerned, when in times past I’ve said: ‘ I’ve no use for music, I am not interested and I dislike it’, people have said: ‘Oh poor one. You miss so much and you are short of part of life.’

Laski: But at least you knew that music existed. You could watch us listening to it. You could see these people scraping away.

Bloom: With great thought and meditation. . . But what about us scraping away? What about, say, the great people like St Theresa ?

Laski: I don’t go greatly for St Theresa, because it seems to me that whenever she didn’t find people who would agree with her exact interpretation of God, she sought for another adviser, so she is not my favourite saint. But I think she’s a good example because she, more than most people, actually believed she perceived God beyond the point which Christianity allows in fact and yet she did not really submit her visions to authority. As I say, she changed her authority whenever it didn’t suit her vision.

Bloom: Yet here is a woman and here are many people who possess something they say is real. And you would go a long way to discover a new writer, a new artist, in terms of painting or sculpture, a new world of discovery and yet you would say this is not worth investigating and discovering. That’s what puzzles me.

Laski: I don’t think I’m saying that. I would certainly probably not have investigated it so far as you would think proper. It’s certain that I don’t see any substitute for this world of yours because since the Renaissance for instance, it’s been all too sadly apparent that in all the arts there has been no inspiration comparable with the inspiration that religion gave. There have been no words for secular music that compare with the music of a Mass. I certainly think that belief in God and the religions that arose from belief in God did give a shaping and a pattern to life for which I can see no conceivable substitute and to that extent I would certainly grant to you that my life is poorer than that of a believer. My justification for it, and I say it as humbly as I can, is that it’s founded on the truth as I see it and the truth has to make me free of perfection. I’m not entitled to it.

Bloom: I feel terribly happy about what you said because I think what really matters first of all is integrity and truth and I’m certain that if God exists, which I believe He does, He’s happier about truth of unbelief than falsified belief. Now I think I must give you the chance you gave me to say what you would like to say in addition to our discussion.

Laski: I probably haven’t made atheism seem at all rich and I don’t think it is. I think it’s a very Protestant, a very puritanical faith that, as I say, does tend towards arrogance because we lack authority. But there is one thing I would say for atheism, as against religion, and that is this: if you try to practice it, it trains you in a virtue that I value highly which is endurance without whimpering and without seeking help you can’t properly expect to have. But we must— I say ‘we’, I don’t know who ‘we’ are, I don’t know who atheists are and this is, again, where arrogance comes in— but we must depend very deeply on religions which have a great many things that we can’t have— rite, ritual, festival, words beyond any words we’ve managed to maintain. I think sometimes that we could have more help.

From God and Man by Anthony Bloom