At the heart of the Christian faith lies astupefying paradox. An eternal and uncreated deity, so Christians believe, was born of a human mother, and entered the flow of time. Why, though, had this miraculous rupturing of history happened precisely when and where it did? Some 300 years after the lifetime of Christ, a Palestinian bishop by the name of Eusebius provided what would long serve Christians as the definitive answer. It was no accident, he argued, that the universal empire of Rome had been established just in time for Jesus to be born into it. "For no one could deny that this synchronicity was arranged by God."
In time, though, historians raised within the Christian tradition would indeed come to deny it. When Edward Gibbon analysed the emergence of Christianity, he paid lip-service to the notion of divine providence, only to sneer at it behind its back. The historian pledged to trace the progress of religion, he explained in his habitual tone of irony, was charged with a melancholy duty. "He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption … contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings." There could be no place, in the pages of an enlightened historian, for the hand of God.
Today, it is taken for granted by those writing in the post-Enlightenment tradition of historiography that religion, like any other expression of culture, should be analysed in exclusively human terms. The beginnings of Christianity are not to be explained with reference to a literal resurrection; the origins of the Qur'an are not to be traced back to the authorship of a god. Ignore such prescriptions, and a historian risks straying into the field of theology or apologetics. In that sense, all history today in the west is a-theistic. Eusebius has few, if any, modern heirs.
In what way, then, can a survey titled An Atheist's History of Belief be held distinctive? The answer, based on the evidence of Matthew Kneale's new book, seems to be if its author has a wholly reductive understanding of the function and appeal of beliefs in the supernatural. All of them, he argues, are essentially the same. "From the earliest times, every religion has given people comfort by offering ways – so their followers believe – of keeping their nightmares at bay." Between aCro-Magnon shaman and L Ron Hubbard, the differences are less ofkind than of degree.
Indeed, there is a sense in which Scientology seems to be hovering behind Kneale's conception of how religions have always functioned. Again and again, he casts them as franchises flogging the gullible bogus insurance. The Old Testament prophets offered the Jews "a kind of national supernatural protection policy". The Book of Daniel, with its lurid visions offuture history, was "energetically promoted by a kind of ancient Jewish publicity team". Martyrdom was seen byChristians eager for the key to the top floor "as a kind of express lift to salvation". A fondness for business metaphors combines with an addiction to italics to give to Kneale's arguments an ahistorical quality that is twitchily neurotic. Religions, in his account of them, are little more than conspiracies practised by confidence tricksters. What he gives us is history à la Dan Brown.
How can a novelist, whose art requires him to see the world through other people's eyes, be so blind to the sheer richness and variety of religious belief? Writing about the enigmatic Neolithic site of Göbleki Tepi, on amountain ridge in what is now south‑east Turkey, Kneale reaches for his favourite metaphor: the sanctuary was the expression of a business arrangement with the gods, to which itsbuilders "commuted". Of the sense of wonder at the open skies that may equally have inspired its construction, the yearning for transcendence, the mingled sense of identification with the natural world and dread of its terrors, and above all humanity's abiding ambition to part the veil of death, he breathes not a word. Kneale might just as well be writing about the 7.36 to Waterloo.
It is hardly a surrender to superstition to recognise in the gods worshipped by past ages evidence of something more than simple knavery and backwardness. Rare is the civilisation that has not expressed through its beliefs and rituals the essence of what makes it distinctive: its hierarchies and gender tensions, its most profound hopes and fears. When Kneale, in his introduction, cheerfully acknowledges that he has not the slightest interest in "the history of religious institutions", it reflects his presumption that "religions" can somehow be abstracted from the social fabric that sustains them. Yet they donot, and cannot possibly exist as hermetic conspiracies divorced from the culture that bred them, and which they influence in turn. To believe otherwise is to indulge in an essentialism more proper to a believer than an atheist.
Even the airiest of theological abstractions, which Kneale dismisses in cavalier fashion as "jargon", offer something more instructive to the historian of belief than the mere spectacle of angels dancing on the headof a pin. When Kneale gives us anabsolute car-crash of a survey of late antique christology, the fact that he can get Arianism and Nestorianism so spectacularly wrong is doubly telling. That the author of a history of belief cannot be bothered to research the most basic theological details suggests that he regards it as beneath him to make the effort; which suggests in turnthat he has failed to reflect on theinfluence that Christian doctrines might conceivably have had on himself. What, for instance, does he make of Ernst Bloch's thesis that the terminus of Christianity is inevitably the death of God? Could western-style atheism have arisen in any other context save a Christian one? What, in short, is the history of Kneale's own beliefs?
It bewilders me that he should have written a book so unreflective, so under-researched and so gratingly complacent. It reads, not like the work of the Booker prize-shortlisted novelist he is, but like an extended essay by a sixth-former who has just discovered Richard Dawkins. God willing and inshallah, Matthew Kneale will not be giving up the day job.
