One of the books that influenced me most in my journey towards becoming a Catholic was a large book called Reformations by the Catholic Yale historian Carlos Eire.
Reading large, state-of-the-art histories of the Reformation may not be to everyone's taste, but in this case I found the book helpful for a number of reasons. It has helped me to sort the world out more than history is normally thought to do. It is an enormously rich work with many facets. One I found especially interesting was the effect of the Reformation. Eire argues that the distinction between Protestant and Catholic reform can be found in two principal binaries: whereas the Catholic Counter-Reformation was clerical and otherworldly in character, the Protestant Reformation was instead lay and materialistic.
That made sense to me in terms of the way that the two Western traditions have developed: the Catholic has remained rooted in the supernatural, whereas Protestantism has evolved towards humanism and humanitarianism. And for someone such as I, who am truly convinced of the reality of the supernatural element of religion and of life, it made increasing sense to gravitate towards the Catholic Church.
Another important book for my spiritual and intellectual development is The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by the Oxford scientist and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. In it — and, more recently, in The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World — he has given masterly expression to one of the crises of our culture.
Many people will be familiar with his suggestion that we suffer from a form of schizophrenic split between left-brain and right-brain activities. His analysis is that the left brain specialises in measurement, rationality, practicality — in other words, the material, the manipulable, the manageable: it is the great how taskmaster. And the right side of the brain is the why side. So, our divided brain gives us "two whole, coherent, but incompatible ways of experiencing the world".
This division between the left brain and the right brain is well known and is not problematic in itself; indeed it is necessary to explain the origins of music and language. McGilchrist looks at the relation between our two brain hemispheres as a crucial shaping factor in our culture. But since the Enlightenment, the balance of power between those hemispheres has shifted.
Given this, it is no great surprise that the difficulty that our culture has had with the Bible and religion in general is because the Bible sets itself the task of answering the why questions and our culture has been predominantly preoccupied with how questions for the last 400 years. Instead of asking itself whether or not there is more to life than how, developing an oddly monochrome preoccupation with process, the children of the Enlightenment became more and more fixated on how.
When the Bible seemed to fail their needs because it consistently answered how questions with why answers, the West decided it could do without the Bible and return to physics and the dogma of evolution instead. McGilchrist thinks that this damaging split between the two sides of the brain — and in effect, the two sides of our nature — is a peculiarly modern phenomenon that is causing incalculable harm.
"Our dominant value — sometimes I fear our only value — has, very clearly, become that of power;" he wrote recently. "This aligns us with a brain system, that of the left hemisphere, the raison d'être of which is to control and manipulate the world. But not to understand it: that, for evolutionary reasons that I explain, has come to be more the raison d'être of our — more intelligent, in every sense — right hemisphere. Unfortunately the left hemisphere, knowing less, thinks it knows more. It is a good servant, but a ruinous master. And the predictable outcome of assuming the role of master is the devastation of all that is important to us."
He is right. Rather too late, a society that has focused on management and measurement has discovered that it is producing populations that are suffering from degrees of mental illness and psychic distress, and the diseases in this area are unprecedented. Iain McGilchrist is not formally a Christian. He has said, "The mythos of Christianity is to me the richest one that I know in the world. It is endless in its profundity and what it gives rise to. Not always good, of course. Heaven knows, anything that involves such frail creatures as human beings will be interpreted and used by some for ends that are contrary to the spirit of Christianity." Yet it is often those outside our Church who give us profound insights into the nature of faith. Both Carlos Eire, Catholic, and Iain McGilchrist, religiously non-aligned, have helped me in my journey to Catholicism. I am immeasurably grateful for that.
