THEOLOGY: The Evolution of GodBy Robert Wright Little Brown, 567pp. £22.50
THIS IS A thought-loaded book. There are 567 pages of it, and if you get distracted for even one line, you have probably missed half a dozen ideas – with implications to the end of the book. Wright has almost ferocious continuity in his thought processes. Fortunately, the likelihood of your getting distracted is quite remote. He is a riveting writer, compelling and – I suspect – compulsive. Once he gets a truly big idea going, he grabs you by the coat lapels and doesn’t let you go. He is a master of lucid and persuasive prose.
“Gods are products of cultural evolution,” Wright informs us. It is only on page 300 – unless I have succeeded in getting distracted momentarily on some previous page – that he gets around to telling us where he stands in respect of God’s, or god’s, existence. “Of course,” he writes, “God belongs in quotation marks, because what’s growing is people’s image of God, not God himself – who, for all we know, may not exist.” So Wright is an agnostic. Fair enough.
Voltaire said something similar a few centuries ago when he remarked that if God made man in his own image, man has surely paid him back with interest. And Wright tells us that Xenophanes, who lived five centuries before Christ, had observed that if horses and cattle did theology, horses would draw the form of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle.
Where Wright breaks new ground is in expressing the view, and indeed the hope, that man’s image of God is, or may be, or should be, not merely individualistic or local or static but culturally evolutionary, social, directional, and that it can become a unifying and civilising force, “for believers, agnostics, and atheists alike”. He is concerned to see if the Abrahamic religions, the Judeo-Christian West, on the one hand, and the Muslim world, on the other, can get along with one another as globalisation forces them into ever closer contact. He is also preoccupied with the perceived clash between science and religion. He says in his introduction that religions “will have to highlight some ‘higher purpose’ – some kind of larger point or pattern that we can use to help us orient our daily lives, recognise good and bad, and make sense of joy and suffering alike”. I would not like to be on the committee organising that.
The first half of this book, concerning the birth and growth of the gods, and the emergence of Abrahamic monotheism, is hugely enjoyable and genuinely instructive. There follow two excellent chapters on Philo and the Logos.
Then things seem to go less well. Of course, I am speaking from the perspective of a monotheist and a Christian, so I would say that, wouldn’t I? But Robert Wright is not about to abandon his big synthesis. I was sad to see him, in effect, trotting out that hoary old chestnut about St Paul as the inventor of Christianity. Admittedly, he puts a new spin on it. Paul was “the Bill Gates of his day, a religious entrepreneur, who developed the doctrine of inter-ethnic love, as a cement in his far-flung enterprise”. I wonder what kind of far-flung enter-prise would be worth the sufferings that Paul endured for the truth of his gospel about Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 11:23-29).
The essential thesis of this book is that gods are the products of cultural evolution, helped on by "non-zero-sum" relationships (cf Wright's previous big synthesis, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny). It may be that a "higher purpose" is being expressed through that evolution, but there is probably no room for a Christ figure who comes blundering in, interrupting the relentless progress of Wright's Hegelian-style cultural evolution, and who claims – or at least whose followers claim – that he is the revelation of a God who "for all we know, may not exist". Between revelation and cultural evolution, we will probably have to choose. As Oscar Wilde said to the wallpaper: "One of us has got to go."
Wright depends heavily on the argument that, as Mark’s was the earliest gospel to be written down, it must be the most reliable historically – and assuredly so in relation to any inflated claims or embellishments recorded in other writings of the New Testament. Thus he gives assent to the findings of Bart Ehrman that “The Ebionites’ conception of Jesus was probably closer to Jesus’s own view of himself than was the picture that eventually prevailed within Christianity. Jesus was no God, said the Ebionites, just a messiah.”
It would be beyond my competence – and impossible anyhow in the space available – to rehabilitate the other three gospels (not to speak of the authentic letters of St Paul), written even before Mark wrote his gospel. But the entire mainstream Christian tradition has always regarded these texts as historically reliable – though not always literally factual in a dull-dog 21st-century way. There is a lot of theologising in there too. But, above all, Christians have always treasured these sacred texts as faithful testimonies to the life, teaching and person of Jesus Christ. In that important respect, though greatly admiring the sheer brilliance of his work, I think that Wright is simply wrong.
Andrew Nugent is a monk of Glenstal Abbey and a novelist. His latest book, Soul Murder, is published by Headline and Hachette Ireland