It's always interesting to watch idealism encounter pragmatism - especially when one considers "pragmatism" has an older meaning than that purveyed by politicians, one encompassing practical, purposeful love for one's fellow humans.
Dorothy Rowe is a punchy advocate of a stripped-down psychoanalysis, focusing on how we can deal more effectively with the world around us, not dissimilar in approach to the dialogues of Ancient Greece. Her attitude to organised religion is as sceptical as many an Ancient Greek, and in her new book What Should I Believe? (Routledge, £9.99) Rowe tackles the contradictions of belief head on.
Karen Armstrong is a former Roman Catholic nun who now describes herself as a "freelance monotheist", author of numerous books on religious history and the world's faiths, and a proponent of the Charter For Compassion which seeks to bring people of all faiths together in demand for a more compassionate society.
Armstrong's most recent book The Case for God (Bodley Head, £20.00) urges practice over precept, the embodied action over the intellectualised self-justification. There was, then, some common ground between the believing Armstrong and the sceptical Rowe. The Edinburgh Book Festival's guest director Richard Holloway held the ring as much as a "recovering Christian" might be expected to do, but if there were points of agreement, there were also points of difference.
Rowe traced our religious yearnings to childhood understanding that no matter how much our parents loved us, we remain with a sense of aloneness which never leaves, confirmed by our unique response to everything around us. No-one sees exactly the same thing in the same way, as confirmed by neuroscience. Our largest organ is also the one least like anyone else's, so the messages it receives and sends are equally different from any other brain.
Thus, as Epictetus reminds us, it is not things that trouble us, but what we imagine those things to mean. The meanings we attach to things are, of course, determined by past good or bad experiences. Those meanings, unique to us and impossible to completely communicate to anyone else, are what isolate us from others. To live without the support of a faith or its community challenges much of what we would like to believe about the world we live in, but our understanding is always contingent on what we do not know, and can only be increased by exposing ourselves to the uncertainties a necessarily provisional body of evidence offers us.
Armstrong's approach is enthusiastic. She genuinely seems to relish the massive contradictions inherent in championing religion as a good, and in seeking to accentuate the positive in an age which sees religion as either an encumbrance or an embarrassment. She used historical example, as with her citing of the Holy Trinity as initially a form of meditative discipline rather than the doctrine it later became.
Religion, for Armstrong is clearly a way of conducting a conversation within a framework, rather as psychoanalysis is now seen by some of its more radical practitioners. Yet although there are deep divisions between psychoanalytic "schools", as there were between philosophical schools in the ancient world, far less blood has been spilt by either than is spilt even today in the name of religion.
Questions were, as might be expected, lively and in some instances profound. That this was so was an encouraging assurance that whatever the future of religion (or psychoanalysis) our desire to ask questions and probe each others minds and beliefs remains a strong and healthy element of the western tradition, as it always has been.
Copyright Bill Dunlop 2009
First published on EdinburghGuide.com 2009