Atheism and a Life Worth Imitating

reflecting on the sadness in beauty and a conversation with a Mennonite Pastor

Life imitates art. Or is it that art imitates life? If religion is viewed as a form of artistic expression, is it merely describing a life which preceded it? Or are we molding our lives to match the beauty which is unveiled in our aspirational art?
In Alain de Botton’s “The Architecture of Happiness” he relays an observation made by the 12th century Christian theologian Hugh St Victor who remarked on a strange psychological phenomenon that many of us feel when struck by a beautiful physical expression, “When we admire the beauty of visible objects, we experience joy certainly, but at the same time, we experience a feeling of tremendous void.”
When an auction house needed to advertise an upcoming sale of the last privately owned Da Vinci they chose to capture this response directly by focusing the lens only on it, not devoting a single frame to the painting itself. It was almost as if what was being auction was the deep joy and tremendous void rather than a canvas stained with pigment.

“The Last da Vinci” ad by Drogba95 for Christie’s Auction House

Salvator Mundi (circa 1500) — *Salvator Mundi* (circa 1500)

Hugh St Victor proposed this sadness was a recognition and memory of the symbols of the unblemished life we once enjoyed in the Garden of Eden. In the case of this particular ad, that analogy may be literal. Salvator Mundi was the painting which evoked those poses. The joy and void sold for $450.3 million.
Taken as myth, I think the Garden of Eden narrative can overlay and illuminate a purely secular description of biology. We can substitute a literal creation story where the Garden is a stand-in for something like the childhood innocence in our own lives or, more pessimistically, a nostalgia for a simpler time when we knew less, before, as it were, we tasted from the tree of knowledge.
The Christian position suggests that the single bite from the apple doomed all of us descendants to the true human condition of anguish, torment, frustration, and embarrassment. There is some wisdom in this notion. The innocence of childhood still whispers to us from every muddy puddle we choose not to splash around in so as not to soil our shoes for the next business meeting. Perhaps a playground of muddy puddles and no meetings is a decent notion of heaven. But where the religious stance falters is its insistence that we ought to strive to return to that garden when ignorance was truly a form of bliss and if we can just take righteous steps, keep our heads down, and trust the path, it will leads us back to a, perhaps fluffier, version of Eden when the anguish ends.
The art reflecting life, or vice versa, conceptions of the sadness are missing something obvious which collapses all separation. Life itself is art.
If we feel a pang of sadness when looking at something beautiful, it can be conceived of as evidence of pieces of knowledge not yet won or earned. Whether those pieces are aesthetic achievements or transcendent relations to our environments or fellow travelers, it doesn’t matter. If we dare to raise our eyes from the path that leads back to blissful ignorance, we will see that there are more trees and apples to bite from outside of the garden. Longing for a time before we knew the sweetness of the apple reeks of fear, fear that we mere mortals can’t ever hope to construct any form of higher beauty worthy of imitation.

Describing and enacting lives worth imitating with heroes who dared to find more apples and planted new trees for future outcasts to nourish their journeys is the path of optimism, atheism, and science. This path wanders and drifts towards unreachable infinities. It does not loop back around to humbly knock on the door to apologize and request re-entry to the Garden.
Not long ago, I had a long conversation with a Mennonite pastor who had come to ground zero on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 to pray. We found this precise fork in the path while I tried to entice him with the scientific mysteries of consciousness and David Chalmers’s “Hard Problem”. He stopped me mid-sentence to exclaim, “God is the answer!” I furrowed my brow and replied “I think God is the question.”
We each viewed each other in that moment in something of a nightmare, I’m sure. Me, picturing him digging his heels in the path and averting his gaze from all of the incredible human-planted knowledge-trees bearing the fruit of exciting puzzles, some partially solved, some still boxed. But he looked at me and pictured a curiosity which drifts far off into dark woods laden with painful traps designed to deceive us into thinking that just beyond the thorny thicket, a fabulous vista awaits. We both felt sorry for each other. Our encounter on the streets of lower Manhattan ended on friendly terms shortly after this mutual sympathy. He assured me that the answers to my questions had been found while I mentioned that I was going to continue looking, just to be sure. I couldn’t help but think he was a bit jealous as I wandered off. If I did find his God out there, he’d surely want to take a quick peek.
There is a much richer kind of sadness than St Victor cast in Christian terms when looking at a painting like Gerritt Dou’s “Astronomer by Candlelight” or a physical object like Francis Galton’s pegboard which he used to investigate the statistical truths of general distributions and regressions to the mean. It is a sadness which laments that these seekers one day ran out of energy to wander the world far beyond the cradle of ignorance in a garden tended by a tyrannical parent who was so unimaginative that his only conception of how to love us was to protect us from wondering where we were.
If there is sadness in beautiful things let us not fool ourselves into thinking otherwise. It is only the heavy burden of our time running out on just how beautiful our life far outside the garden could be if we are brave enough to build it.