By Roy Hattersley (THE GUARDIAN, 02/10/06):
Tomorrow I speak at the launch of the Canterbury Cathedral Restoration Appeal. A more superstitious man would fear that, before the performance was finished, he would be struck down by a thunderbolt - punishment for the presumption that emboldens an atheist to answer the call to rescue a place of worship. But it is the rejection of superstition that stands between me and belief. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to join my father one day, on a big white cloud. But I cannot accept the idea of the resurrection, or any of the other mysteries and miracles of faith. So I have to make do with earthly pleasures. One of them is visiting Canterbury Cathedral.
Last December, I was there one evening. An organist was rehearsing for a concert the next day and, although most of the cathedral was dark, the lights still shone in the nave. The half-lit cathedral must have looked much as it did in the days of candles. Was Thomas Becket murdered in the dusk? Did Chaucer's pilgrims hurry over the last few miles in the hope of arriving at the martyr's shrine before sunset? Were Henry VIII's iconoclasts comforted, as they smashed the holy relics, by the anonymity of shadows? In what I hope was an uncharacteristically florid moment, I described Canterbury Cathedral as "not just a building, not even just a cathedral, but England in stone". Ashamed though I am of the style, I have no doubt that the substance of my message was true.
A thousand years of history is commendation enough. But it is only the beginning of what makes Canterbury Cathedral the object of my unspiritual veneration. It is far too beautiful to be allowed to wear away at the edges. Whenever I see it, I am filled with awe and wonder - exactly the reaction that the men who built it wanted to create. My feelings are stimulated by different emotions from those they hoped to arouse. My breath is taken away by the building, rather than by the thought of the deity to which it was dedicated. But I realise that nothing of such spectacular elegance could have been built by a generation of rationalists. Canterbury Cathedral is the product of faith. The sacrifices made for its creation were a gift to the God it celebrates.
That does not make what the builders believed true. But it does require us to treat their devotions with respect. When I go to Paris, I always call in at the Madeleine so that I can feel a warm glow of satisfaction at the thought that, in the glory days of the French revolution, it was converted into a Temple of Reason. To be reasonable is to be right. But it is also reasonable to be sceptical about lavishing time and money on elaborate buildings. The Madeleine would never have been built in its classical style if it had been designed to be the home of sermons preached by Rousseau and Voltaire. Canterbury Cathedral is the aesthetic victory of Christianity. Atheists would have been far too sensible to decorate the leaping arches with the best examples of stonemasonry that money could buy.
During my rationalist upbringing, I was constantly indoctrinated with stories of the way in which the church in general - and the Roman Catholic church, which built our cathedrals, in particular - placed the worship of God ahead of the welfare of men. One example was said to be the sandstone Lichfield Cathedral - red, the argument ran, with the blood of the men who built it. I do not begin to argue that their sacrifice was a price worth paying. But I do believe that, in their time and in their way, faith was a comfort and a consolation as well as a stimulus to create buildings of supreme beauty.
Anyone who drives from central London to the M1 passes a shop that proclaims it is the home of Jews for Jesus. I ought to set up next door an establishment called Atheists for Christianity. It would proclaim the achievements of the churches, which, by any calculation, far outweigh the damage they have done. The creation of the great cathedrals, in France, Germany and England, is only part of the record. But they are well worth celebrating, and the work must not be allowed to decay. Tomorrow, the dean of Canterbury and I share a platform. I shall thank him for at least one miracle. It is called Canterbury Cathedral.