Abstract
Richard Harries is a public figure, who has been influential both in the Church of England, and in the House of Lords and beyond. It is impossible to do justice to the richness of his latest book within the compass of a short review. He has written an intensely personal confession of faith, displaying both theological learning and a wide knowledge of English and American literature, especially of the twentieth century. In the first chapter, he is anxious to remind us that there is no proof of the existence of God and that human language is not adequate to describe him within its limits. He brilliantly evokes the mysterious ‘evasiveness’ of our Wordsworthian encounters with beauty; in his depiction of the horrors of the world, he seems to me to make too little of the distinction between human evil, of which there are the seeds within us all, and the ‘cruelties’ and disasters of the natural world. At the beginning, he is apparently tolerant of those who find purpose for their lives in, for example, music and seek no common purpose for all human life. This hesitancy slips, as more is revealed of his own faith.
Harries is right to say that religion, except in its dottier forms, has learned to live comfortably with post-Darwinian science, but what science, and common sense, cannot easily live with is miracles. Once Harries has, early on, declared his belief in the historical truth of the Gospel accounts of the empty tomb and the resurrection of Jesus, it is no surprise that he does not tangle with the attempts to ‘demythologize’ the Gospels. For once Christians are let off having to claim to believe in turning water into wine, or the virgin birth, where is the line to be drawn? The kind of argument against belief in miracles on which David Hume relied, the argument being that there could be no witness whose credibility could outweigh the unlikelihood of the alleged miracle, is still persuasive to many people. Faith is, of course, precisely the leap across such an abyss of scepticism.
Harries is also right to say that life after death has dropped out of the creed of most Christians. This is because post-Darwinians, following neurologists and philosophers alike, have come to dismiss Cartesian dualism, so that after the death of our bodies there is nothing of us that remains. We are also more inclined to accept our death as final along with that of all other forms of life. Besides, those who are old are most of us too much preoccupied with how to avoid dragging out a half-life which we cannot escape or afford, to have much time left to contemplate another life, however heavenly. Yet for anyone who is fascinated by the phenomenon of religion, this is a deeply interesting book; and for those who are believers, it will be a source of great comfort.