Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton Page A

spoken or written, believing that the fluent pedagogue could unfairly disguise unacceptable or barren notions with honeyed words. The way an idea is imparted has been deemed to be of little importance next to the quality of the idea itself. The modern university has thus placed no premium on a talent for oratory, priding itself on its interest in the truth rather than in techniques to ensure its successful and enduring conveyance.
    It seems beyond imagining that any contemporary university lecturer would, upon his death, have his body strapped to a table, his neck cut open and his larynx, tongue and lower jaw removed, to be mounted in a golden case encrusted with jewels and displayed in a niche at the centre of a shrine dedicated to the memory of his oratorical gifts. Yet this was precisely the fate of Anthony of Padua, the thirteenth-century Franciscan friar who acceded to sainthood by virtue of his exceptional talent and stamina for public speaking, and whose vocal apparatus, on view in the basilica of his hometown, still draws admiring pilgrims from all corners of Christendom. According to holy legend, Anthony delivered 10,000sermons over his lifetime and was able to melt the hearts of the most determined sinners. It was even said that one day in Rimini, standing on the seashore, he began to declaim to no one in particular and soon found himself surrounded by an audience of curious and evidently appreciative fish.
    This rarely happens to our university lecturers: the enshrined lower jaw ofSt Anthony of Padua: reliquary, basilica of St Anthony, Padua,
c
. 1350. ( illustration credit 4.9 )
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St Anthony was but one exemplar in a long and self-conscious tradition of Christian oratory. The preaching ofJohn Donne, the Jacobean poet and dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, was comparably persuasive, treating complex ideas with an impression of effortless lucidity. Forestalling the possibility of boredom during his sermons, Donne would pause every few paragraphs to sum up his thoughts in phrases designed to engrave themselves on his listeners’ skittish minds (‘Age is a sicknesse, and youth is an ambush’). Like all compelling aphorists, he had a keen command of binary oppositions (‘If you take away due fear, you take away true love’), in his case married to a lyrical sensibility which enabled him to soar along contrails of rare adjectives before bringing his congregation up short with a maxim of homespun simplicity (‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee’). He situated himself vis-à-vis his audience without any hint of schoolmasterly pedantry. They could feel the truth of his ideas all the more intensely for it being delivered by someone who appeared to be appealingly human and flawed (‘I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door’).
    St Anthony preaching to carp: sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript. ( illustration credit 4.10 )
    More recently, the Christian oratorical tradition has been further developed by African-American preachers, particularly those of the Pentecostal and Baptist denominations. In churches across theUnited States, a Sunday sermon is not an occasion to sit with one eye trained on the clock while, from a lectern in the apse, a cleric impassively dissects the story of the Good Samaritan. Instead, believers are expected to open their hearts, clasp the hands of their neighbours, erupt into shouts of ‘All right now’ and ‘Amen, preacher’, let the Holy Spirit enter their souls and finally collapse in paroxysms of ecstatic wailing. Up on the stage, the preacher stokes the fires of his congregation’s enthusiasm through call-and-response, asking repeatedly, in a mesmerizing blend of vernacular expression and the vocabulary of the King James Bible,