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Chesterton, always shrewd, notes that the most reasonable aspect of the positivist religion is what, at first glance, might seem the most baroque: the creation of a calendar. With a starting point and its markers, annual, weekly, daily. Everything is good that sets man in an ordered, meaningful time frame; one distinct from the physical time of his old age and decline.

In spite of all this, Comte, as I said, failed; failed totally and miserably.

A religion with no God may be possible (or a philosophy, if you prefer; something that carries in its wake, like so many delightful corollaries, a code of ethics, a sense of “human dignity,” maybe even a political theory, if compatible). But none of this seems to me to be conceivable without a belief in eternal life, the belief that in all monotheistic religions acts as the great introductory offer, because once you’ve conceded that, and with this as your goal, everything seems possible; no sacrifice too great—viz., Islamic suicide bombers.

Comte wasn’t offering anything like that; all he proposed was one’s theoretically living on in the memory of mankind. He gave the concept a slightly more high-flown twist, something like “incorporation into the Great Being,” but it didn’t change the fact that what he was offering was a theoretical perpetuation in the memory of mankind. Well, that just didn’t cut it.

Nobody gives a shit about living on in the memory of mankind (not even me, and I write books). So why do I spend so much time correcting my proofs? I don’t know, Proust was surprised that he did. I suppose it must have something to do with the idea of a job well done, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with a Protestant work ethic; the Protestant work ethic simply opportunistically seized on an age-old propensity in man, who is essentially an animal that makes—tools or machines—which, to my mind, includes books, and perhaps this is at the root of our inability to understand each other. I don’t confer on books a sufficiently lofty, sufficiently sacred status; for me books are something to be remade generation after generation, none of them gifted with eternal status, and take my word for it, this is something that does not suit me because I’ve been lying through my teeth since the start of this paragraph; as an author, of course I want to live on, but on the other hand I haven’t lied at all, since it’s true that I would rather really live on, to live on physically, as physically as possible.

One of my favorite parts of The Genius of Christianity is probably the bit where Chateaubriand launches into a stylistic comparison of Homer and the Bible, his goal being to show that if Homer’s writing is extraordinarily beautiful, the Bible is even far superior. He deploys all the insight and the analytical acuity one has every right to expect from a writer who is himself a phenomenal stylist, and he carries it off; I have to admit, it is an astonishing victory, he is completely convincing. Carried away by his enthusiastic apologia he seems unaware of the danger that gradually mounts with every page: by heaping praise on the literary qualities of the Bible, one comes to think of it as a literary work—one of the finest in the history of mankind, it’s true, but nothing more. Exalted, at times extraordinarily moving, but at heart a fiction, and nothing more than fiction.

There you are; this, at the end of the day, is what my reading of the Bible led me to conclude. Oh, it happened gradually, over a period of years. But by dint of comparing translations, choosing the “best one” (my criterion was not accuracy, but purely aesthetics), by continually rereading my “favorite passages.”

And it’s true that I persist in separating the discussion of literature—however intensely emotional, however symbolically profound—from the discussion of truth. In saying that, I feel rather narrow-minded, an old Calvinist stick-in-the-mud.

(But that is possibly exactly what I am.)

(There are worse things, it has to be said; all you have to do is consider the famous Proposition 7 that