The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (André Comte-Sponville)

OVERVIEW

Hunting for literature about atheist spirituality is not always as easy as I’d like, but when the book is titled The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality there’s reason to be hopeful. André Comte-Sponville offers up his thoughts in three parts. Part 1 asks: Can we do without religion? (Answer: Yes, although we can’t do without communion and fidelity). Part II asks: Does God exist? (Answer: No). This brings us to Part III and the question I am most interested in: Can there be an atheist spirituality? To this, Comte-Sponville asserts: Yes.

Unfortunately, what follows in Part III is not (to me) an entirely satisfying exhibit of what an atheist’s spirituality could look like (and so this book does not live up to its title, in my opinion). But here is what Comte-Sponville does offer: Spirituality is the life of the human spirit, and our “spirit” is our power to think – to contemplate, remember, imagine, and access truth. It’s the psyche. “The spirit is not a substance. Rather, it is a function, a capacity, an act. . .” The existence of our spirit, our mental capacity, is not supernatural, it is a product of nature. Atheism need not deny the existence of the spirit, only its ontological independence from the material world. Spirituality, to Comte-Sponville, is using our mental effort to afford transcendence… using our consciousness to contemplate the cosmos, to experience immensity, to break out “of the tiny prison of the self.” It’s transcendental experience in the classic sense… an altered state of consciousness where the boundaries of the ego dissolve, what Freud called the “oceanic feeling.” To Comte-Sponville, these experiences are crucial to well-being and human flourishing, and so he strongly implores us to divorce spirituality from religion, to reclaim transcendence as natural and necessary.

“There is nothing innately religious about the oceanic feeling. Indeed, my own experience of it is quite the opposite. When you feel “at one with the All,” you need nothing more. Why would you need a God? The universe suffices. Why would you need a church? The world suffices. Why would you need faith? Experience suffices.”

What religion offers its followers is something critical: the feeling that they belong to something more. What atheism can offer is the same (if we can wrest spirituality from supernaturality); what it can offer is the same transcendence… our brain’s ability to give us those feelings of immensity and immanence, a sensation of eternity. And if we can access this, this feeling of belonging to the universe, what need have we for unfounded faith? – our consciousness can give us all the fidelity we need.

IN SUM:

Is this book entirely secular? Yes.

If I had to describe the book in one sentence? An attempt to argue why we don’t need religion or God, but why we do need spirituality.