RITE AND REASON:Our response to religious faith is profoundly influenced by our relationships with the people who profess that faith
THE IMPORTANCE of the personal witness in communicating religious faith is widely acknowledged. But just as positive examples can aid religious belief, negative examples can prompt unbelief.
The connection between rejection of faith and experience is memorably traced in Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. De Beauvoir not only came to reject all religious faith but she also developed a deep hostility to the Catholicism of her childhood.
It would be unfair to discount the actual intellectual element in her rejection of religious belief, but the personal element played a powerful role. As a child and young teenager, de Beauvoir was very pious and aspired to become a nun. Her father advised against making too hasty a decision.
The event that was to trigger her renunciation of the faith occurred at confession with the school chaplain. The priest abandoned his role of confessor to reprove her for mischievous behaviour in the school.
She found a new confessor in the church of Saint Sulpice, who encouraged her to read some mystical texts. Any inspiration she found there was subverted by a moment in the garden when she came to the conclusion that there is no God. It was with some reluctance that de Beauvoir decided that the “facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced”.
Her concern in school was to keep quiet about her genuine beliefs and avoid being “pointed at with the finger of scorn” or be expelled. She resolved to take her lead from an older pupil who was “rumoured” to be an unbeliever, but who took care never to express “subversive notions”.
Later she felt obliged to return the books to the priest in Saint Sulpice to whom she confessed her state of unbelief. Here again the personal element intervened, as the priest was shocked at her apostasy and asked what mortal sin she had committed. In dismay she definitively left the church and the faith behind her.
Her journey from faith to development of hostility to Catholicism was reinforced by her perception of the attitudes of committed believers in her own middle class milieu, especially those of her mother and of the family of her best friend, Zaza.
She found them to be controlling, sanctimonious, judgmental, smug, snobbish and self-righteous. Parents wanted their offspring to marry those who shared their faith and who were also of the same social class.
What really angered de Beauvoir was the element of hypocrisy in attitudes to the sexual behaviour of males and females. Before they married a chaste young woman, it was expected that young men would engage in sexual activity with women beyond respectability.
De Beauvoir’s account raises key questions about transmission of religious faith. How would her attitude to religion have been shaped if its influence on families she knew had prompted honesty and openness rather than deviousness and exclusiveness?
Would the outcome have been different if the school chaplain had not behaved as he did? What would have happened if the priest in Saint Sulpice had been sympathetic? How would she have developed if the school had been less punitive of pupils with religious doubts?
It may well be that, whatever her experiences, Simone de Beauvoir would have abandoned the faith. Yet, if she had encountered any of the three priests interviewed in this newspaper by Rosita Boland on January 5th last, at least her attitudes to the priesthood would probably have been positive. Their faith is expressed in a generous spirit of openness.
What de Beauvoir’s narrative shows is that the kindness and tolerance that people of faith exhibit towards others are more decisive than the orthodoxy of their theologies.
Dr Kevin Williams lectures at the Mater Dei Institute, Dublin City University
