The death and extraordinary worldwide outpouring of grief and ecstatic praise at the burial of Pope John Paul II in Rome brings the issue I raised on agnosticism recently to an unexpected focus.
Let me recap. I had recounted an escapade into the Gauteng hinterland that ended in the discovery of an “African Orthodox” monastery on the highveld. People came up to me in the street with born-again smiles on their faces, congratulating me for having finally been liberated from my semi-communist agnosticism and finding God. If I could be saved, their smiles said, so could almost anybody.
I was obliged to burst the bubble of their granfaloonism (check out your Kurt Vonnegut bible if you don’t know what I mean) by advising them that dipping into an Orthodox religious experience, or any other, for that matter, did not imply a wholesale and permanent conversion to the straight and narrow path of belief and redemption. I was still prepared to take my chances in the sceptical world and remain an agnostic.
So what is this agnosticism? Being less than confident in my own understanding of the condition that I had staked a claim to, I took the precaution of looking it up in the dictionary. This is what the dictionary said:
“Agnostic: one who holds that we know nothing of things beyond material phenomena — that a First Cause and an unseen world are things unknown and … apparently unknowable.”
This has always left us agnostics in a marginally superior (or inferior) position to those who call themselves “atheists”. An atheist is someone who totally, proudly and unequivocally believes that there is no such thing as God, or even a god, or gods.
An agnostic is a sceptic as far as common religious orthodoxy, the bread and butter of swamis, popes, nuns and monks, fakirs, sangomas and voodoo punters and houngan men alike, is concerned. An atheist, on the other hand, is probably a communist. So much for that.
People frequently confuse agnostics with atheists. While us agnos feel that this is unjust and unfair, bordering on random criminalisation, we feel, at the same time, that we ourselves cannot precisely put the finger on what the difference is. It’s probably a very fine line.
But anyway, back to the issue of the agnostic who is prepared to walk into someone else’s religion and not only respect it (where respect is appropriate), but possibly even gain something from it.
The problem the disorganised agnostic has with organised religion lies in the question of blind faith. If the unseen world is unknowable, how can you believe in it? It’s all very well to deliver homilies such as “God moves in mysterious ways” and “The mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small” (so watch out next time you spit in the street), but the agnostic already has difficulty with accepting that unexplained phenomena (a plague of boils, a bolt of lightning out of the sky or a tsunami) can be assigned to causes that are very much part of the real world we live in.
People can (and often do) move in mysterious ways, literally and metaphorically. But is it reasonable to expect that God should therefore do the same and be as petulant and unpredictable as the average human being? You’d expect more from the fellow if he, she or it really was all-seeing and all-knowing. And so on and so forth.
The attraction for the agnostic, on the other hand, is in some of the ritual that is attached to religious proceedings — the storytelling (reverting to the world of childhood fantasy) balanced, in skilful hands, with some penetrating philosophy and a couple of home truths; the intoxication of incense waved in your vicinity, the soaring music (where it is allowed), the mesmerising repetition of the words and the communal experience. At its best, it can be a form of personal or public meditation.
Then there are the icons and the symbols — real or imagined. At Ouidah in Benin, I walked through the voodoo garden, astonished at the postmodernist sculptures that represented the various deities of the voodoo world. I stood at the foot of the tall tree that is said to be what the revolutionary King Behanzin transformed into to evade capture at the hands of European slavers and colonists.
I also stood in the Temple of the Serpents, in the midst of dozens of live, writhing pythons, and took the guide’s word for it that during the night they roam freely into the streets of Ouidah to hunt for their supper. They don’t harm people, and are back in their thatch-roofed temple with blissfully full stomachs by sunrise, all of their own accord.
I’ve sweated it out in a Native American sweat lodge, sitting on a muddy hillside in total darkness with a couple of dozen strangers while a laid-back medicine man hummed to the spirits of the earth and the air and all the great and powerful forces of nature that we know so little about.
I’ve walked into a mosque in Regent’s Park, London, and been greeted with warm smiles, like a long-lost brother. I’ve stood in the cathedral in Uganda dedicated to the early martyrs of that country who were canonised during the reign of the recently deceased pope.
And I’ve been to St Peter’s Square in Rome, and stood on its cobble-stones and wondered at the mystery of its conception and symbolism.
I suppose I had been expecting dour representations of the saints and angels. Instead, many of the buildings that huddle against the Vatican are adorned with pagan images — the gods and goddesses of ancient pre-Christian times, a metaphysical link to the past, when the hidden world was even more mysterious than it is today.
Yes, as an agnostic I can stand in wonder at the feet of all these things. And still remain a convert to none.