A sincere book by a good man is always a welcome thing, and Richard Holloway's essay on the human condition, and how we might endeavour to be our best despite its contradictions and tensions, is one such book. It is interesting for reasons that fall largely outside its just-described main topic, for it is also an account of Holloway's own view of religion - this former Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church is known to have lost anything recognisable as a traditional religious faith - and it also has flashes of personal memoir, revealed in relation to the main themes.

Holloway sets himself the task of seeing how there can be redemption “minus the expectation of supernatural rescue” from the monstrousness innate in our human make-up, and moreover a redemption that will push us in the direction of being at least a bit more like saints than monsters. His conclusion is that we achieve it if we can feel pity for our fellows - or better, sympathy - and with it gratitude for all that is best in the world. This is easier said than done, and for that reason, perhaps, it has the soft-focus air of the condolence postcard about it.

But Holloway means it and offers a resource for achieving it: religious myths. “Myths” is the word he uses. Throughout the book he makes clear that he regards religion as a man-made thing, the outcome of imagination, which points to nothing transcendent, but says a great deal about the needs and nature of mankind itself.

Because Holloway thinks that some sort of subscription to religious myths can subdue the monster and encourage the saint within, he is impatient with the robust atheist attacks on religion that the religion-inspired violence of recent years has provoked. He falls into the trap of attempting to assert an equivalence between atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (he does not name them) and those he describes as espousers of “strong religion”, those who believe they have a direct line to God and thus know what God wants. He criticises both for the assurance with which they assert their positions. But whereas some of the latter issue and carry out death threats, neither Dawkins nor Hitchins does. They shoot down ideas, the warriors of God shoot down living human beings.

This is where I part company with Holloway. He says that religion - literally false and the product of human imagination - “helps us cope with life”. Let us leave aside the question of achieving solace on the basis of untruths, and say that religion does not invariably help “us” to cope with life; religion as a force in the world is often divisive, a source of conflict, a barrier to progress, and socially oppressive. Little of this enters Holloway's calculation; if it did, and if he attended more closely to what secularists are arguing - namely, that religious belief should be a private matter like one's sex life - would make him appreciate better the ethical outlook that has no truck with myths or religion proper, but addresses human realities in a complicated world without their often obfuscating aid.

In presenting itself as a response to the monstrousness of which human beings are capable, Holloway premises the bleak and tragic aspect of life as if this were its main fact. But it is only one side of the story, and the other is not the saintly, but the ordinary kindness and steadiness of most people most of the time.

A day's shopping offers dozens of little kindnesses and courtesies from people, most of whom, like oneself, wear the scars of life, but still have a smile or a preparedness to give you the glove you dropped.

A rounded picture of the moral life must take not only the banality of evil, and the propensity we all have to do wrong, but the essential social- ity of the human condition, and all that this means. This big part of the picture is not present enough in Holloway's account, perhaps because as a churchman most of his life he was confronted mainly with the grief and hope that parishioners bring in their need. Faced with a preponderance of this, one could be misled into thinking that all humankind is daily groaning under those same burdens. People indeed carry them; but more often than not with the grace, dignity and humour that makes ordinary life go on as it does.

Holloway writes with clarity and compassion, and when whatever differences of means are set aside between him and other friends of humanity, all can agree that the end he has in view - that we should look on one another with eyes of sympathy - surely commands agreement.

Between the Monster and the Saint: Reflections on the Human Condition by Richard Holloway
Canongate 200pp; £14.99 Buy the book here

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