Episode Thirty: Uber, For Religion
It is a truism of finance that some businesses scale much better than others. The 2010s were the decade of tech: huge software businesses with vast addressable markets and enormous economies of scale. The marginal costs of adding new customers are often near-zero. This simple fact, coupled with a very low cost of capital thanks to near-zero interest rates, underpinned the huge outperformance of the Nasdaq ever since the dotcom bubble burst (a bubble that in retrospect looks like rather less of a bubble than it once did).
Other businesses scale rather less well. A boutique consultancy will only ever so many clients who want their services, while the specialized nature of their offering makes it hard to add new staff quickly without degrading product quality. Such a firm can only grow relatively slowly and patiently – and of course, there’s nothing wrong with that: you just need to make sure your prices are appropriately high. But this limitation cannot be wished away.
Imagine, for a second, you are God, and are confronted with the problem of reunifying your own fallen, imperfect creation with your own boundlessly perfect self (why this Fall happened we explored in Episode Three). Intuitively, it seems rather easier for God to forgive than for Man to become sufficiently holy. This seems obvious enough, but in our own day religions often forget it. Instead we get a lot of incoherent ecclesiastical gibberish about the universal call to holiness. It will never work.
Holiness is a business even less apt to scale than our boutique consultancy above. In this sordid world who has the time for holiness when there are kids to feed and jobs to do? Your average commuter has probably committed at least a couple moderately serious offences even before getting on the train to Waterloo, and the state of the train will no doubt incite him to commit at least five more. The only people with time for real holiness are the monk and the NEET, and no doubt it was ever thus.
The modern ecclesiastical response to this problem is to lower standards and redefine away as somehow not sinful all kinds of things that every prior generation of the Faithful would have obviously considered to be wrong. Traditionally, however, the response was rather different. The plan was to scale up mercy. Medieval confessors’ manuals are fun things, grimly aware of the difficulties of getting your peasant faithful educated enough so they can manage their one confession a year, in preparation for their one communion a year. But at least this way no standards were dropped, and the faithful were indeed absolved of their failings.
This intuition, perhaps, underpinned the very ancient Christian practice of prayer for the dead. The church of yore, it seems, was not prepared to let such a minor inconvenience as death stop it from continuously trying to scale up mercy. That terrifying old text, the Dies Irae, the sequence once sung at every Requiem Mass – whether of King or beggar – ends with a desperate plea for mercy.
“Ah, that day of tears and mourning!
From of the dust of earth returning,
Man for judgement must prepare him
Spare, O God, in mercy spare him!
Lord all-pitying, Jesu blest
Grant them thine eternal rest.”
These days, black vestments and Requiem Masses are out of favour at funerals, and the Dies Irae is virtually confined to oblivion. People want cheerful celebrations of life instead, which rather makes me wonder what you do at the funerals for people in whose lives there wasn’t much to celebrate. It is, perhaps, a jarring thing to have a text like Dies Irae sung at the funeral of someone you loved and admired – as I have done – but the practice betrayed an awareness that even the best of men have no doubt committed some rather bad sins that need forgiving.
Mercy can scale well - perhaps not to all the people, maybe not even to most of the people, but certainly to an awful lot of more of the people than holiness can. Men such as Paul Verlaine will never be holy, as Aaron Taylor wryly noted in a wonderful piece at First Things some years ago. But they can be forgiven, and no one has to lie about the great magnitude of their sins in the process. Mercy can scale, of course, because the forgiveness extended is not ours but Christ’s, the God-Man who “takes our nature upon him”, and makes the reparation to God that we never could.
Merry Christmas.