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of religion hold within a society, that society is the better for it. We take a good nibble of our brother’s cake before throwing it away.
    Right behaviour, to me, is the behaviour taught me by my Christian family: one should do unto one’s neighbour as one wouldlike him to do unto one, should turn the other cheek, should not pass on the other side of those in trouble, should be gentle to children, should avoid obsession with material possessions. I have accepted a great deal of Christ’s teaching partly because it was given me in childhood by people I loved, and partly because it continues to make sense and the nearer people come to observing it the better I like them (not that they come, or ever have come, very near it, and nor have I). So my piece of my brother’s cake is a substantial chunk, and it is covered, what’s more, with a layer of icing, because much of the painting and sculpture I love best (and such things matter a lot to me) was made by artists who lived long enough ago to believe that heaven and hell were real. In the Correr Museum in Venice, coming suddenly on Dieric Bouts’s little Madonna nursing the Child , I was struck through with delight as I never was by a mother and child by, for example, Picasso or Mary Casson, and I cannot remember being more intensely moved by any painting than by Piero della Francesca’s Nativity .
    It is not the artist’s skill that works the spell, charming though it is in Bouts’s case and awe-inspiring in della Francesca’s. It is the selflessness of such art that is magnetic, as it is in a Chinese bronze of the Buddha, a medieval wood-carving of an angel, or an African mask. The person making the object wasn’t trying to express his own personality or his own interpretation of appearances; he was trying to represent something outside himself for which he felt the utmost respect, love or dread – to show us this wonderful thing as well as he possibly could. How the purity of this intention makes itself felt in the artefact I don’t understand, but it does. You needonly compare any halfway respectable Madonna and child from the fourteenth or fifteenth century with even the best modern one to see that it does, and that it is something to do with the artist’s taking for granted the truth of what he is representing. From the seventeenth century on there is always a taint of sentimentality or hysteria in religious art, however splendid the technique, and by the twentieth century it soaks the object right through: think of the junkety smugness of Eric Gill! Of course great artists painting nonreligious works often attend to what they are making with a respect and love which takes them beyond self and approaches the same purity, but there is no longer a subject strong enough to save the bacon of an artist less than great (Bouts was good, not great).
    Early religious music, lovely though much of it is, has a less powerful effect on me: I prefer Bach’s instrumental music to his cantatas. The words, I suppose, make the cantatas too dogmatic for me: even the greatest religious poetry and prose leaves me unmoved. The painter of a triptych for an altar did it with dogmatic intent, but his medium is less suited to teaching than words are. Dogmatically, painting is a blunt instrument, so the lily, the goldfinch, the pomegranate, the dove, the mother, the child can all be taken to exist for their own sakes, regardless of their message. Although – baffling paradox – it is precisely their creator’s belief in the truth of the message that gives them their force.
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    My indifference to religious writing is overcome by one majestic exception: the Bible. I was brought up to know both the Old Testament and the New fairly well, and am still glad of it. Thebeauty of the language has much to do with this, but my maternal grandmother’s gift for reading aloud to children has much more. She left us in no doubt