The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage.

FOR conservatives, the importance of Paul Johnson's new book is demonstrated not by comparing it to similar books -- of which, by current writers, there are few -- but by considering something apparently unrelated: the barely detectable conservative effort to fend off legalized gay marriage.

As most of us sense, the real reason to oppose gay marriage is simply that God opposes it. In Leviticus, He warned the Israelites to shun the "practices" of the Egyptians and the Canaanites, if they wanted to avoid getting ejected from the Holy Land, and the Talmud records that one of those practices was to allow men to marry men and women to marry women. If not a Holy Land, America is, or at least once was, a holy land. Just as God watched the Israelites, He is watching us.

Given that the first principle of conservatism is the belief that "a divine intent rules society," as Russell Kirk put it, it is strange that on this issue we have heard little from the Right. On the New York Times op-ed page, Lisa Schiffren had the temerity to invoke "the Judaeo-Christian moral order" against gay marriage, though without mentioning God. To the extent that other conservatives have raised their voices, they have offered lame pragmatic arguments about the effects on straight marriage and on children raised by gay parents.

This is merely a symptom of a more pervasive shyness. Conservative politicians and intellectuals speak impressively about the need for a moral, even a religious revival in this country, and about their schemes to ignite such a revival, designated by such jargon terms as "communitarianism," "Victorian virtues," or "Civil Society." In fact they will expound on every possible catalyst but God Himself. Which is why, so far, our words have been in vain. As Rabbi Daniel Lapin points out, the most effective way to get other people to take God, and thus morality, seriously, is to talk about Him in a serious way yourself, in public. That we will not do.

To this rule, Mr. Johnson emerges as a welcome exception. His main point is that, although the history of the past century or so has been in large part the history of men trying to find substitutes for God, there is no satisfactory substitute: not because, as hedge-betting conservatives seem to think, inherently violent, chaotic man needs to believe in a fictitious Lord who will rein in his evil impulse; but because God lives. Johnson recalls a chilling conversation he overheard between a journalist and an Oxford philosopher. The journalist had invoked the "sanctity of life" and the philosopher had asked her to "Prove it to me. Why should human life be sacred?" A "number of beliefs to do with behavior and morality and civilization" which we consider self-evident today, writes Johnson, may not seem self-evident as the next millennium progresses. That self-evidence needs to be re-established, and the useful-fiction God favored by media-friendly moralists can provide no help in re-establishing it.

Once the decision has been made to talk about God as a living entity, what does one say about Him? Johnson has several good ideas. He tries to clear away some of the rubble that has been thrown down in the street on the way to God.

Take the problem of theodicy, of justifying God's goodness despite the worldly triumph of evil. This is a tough challenge, to which Johnson offers an appealingly modest answer: "Our understanding, compared to God's infinite knowledge and wisdom, is so puny that it seems to me hazardous to set ourselves up in judgment over God's righteousness. . . . I am content to believe that no one who innocently suffers here on Earth will be without full and ample recompense in Heaven."

Johnson himself came to God because he was properly educated on the subject: above all by his father, a sturdy English Catholic who taught art and who taught his young son that we can know God through His works. Johnson became an amateur artist himself and when, with great effort, he had mastered the challenge of drawing trees, the accomplishment had a spiritual reward: "at long last I began to understand how God designed them, and how it was their functional efficiency which made them works of natural art."

But those who cannot draw need not despair. As a route to the experience of transcendence, Johnson recommends prayer, and includes an inspiring summons to pray daily, especially the Psalms. Imagine that: a conservative intellectual advocating prayer for adults.

Throughout, Johnson writes with his usual stout, unapologetic relish, with a clarity and a concreteness that never fail to please or to inform. Anyone who has a hard time understanding why a man would love God, or love an institution devoted to God, should read this book. In a beautiful image, Johnson pictures God as a Being so devoted to His creation that the fate even of a blade of grass concerns him.

As for the church in which Johnson learned to worship this Deity, his affection toward it could not be more warmly expressed. He comes from a part of England, north Lancashire, that never went Protestant, so Catholicism for him is an exceedingly old family possession, like "a much-loved old teddy bear or a favorite armchair or a smelly old favorite dog." He is not one of those Catholics who think their church evacuated its history and calling at Vatican II. What matters most to him remains firmly in place:

The sheer mechanical activity of the liturgy, its endless whirring and clattering, its muttering and singing and chanting, its tinkling and incensing, provides a wonderful and, if we stop to ponder a second, meaningful support and daily nourishment for our spiritual life. It baptizes us into the church, it punctuates our days throughout our life, it confirms us and marries us, and, eventually, it buries us. I could not do without it, and I rejoice that I am part of an immense multitude of a billion believers who cannot do without it either.

Sometimes Johnson's relish gets out of hand, especially on the subject of Hell, which he speculates about with a pleasure and confidence in his hunches and instincts that are justified neither by what we know from any revealed text nor by what we know about God, who is the definition of justice but also of benevolence. Johnson will, for example, state authoritatively that if anyone is in Hell, it is Promethean artists like Beethoven, Picasso, and Matisse.

The problem with The Quest for God has to do with this enthusiasm for imagining things beyond the scope of revelation. There is a flaw in fundamentalism, which asserts that individuals can read the Bible and determine on their own the meaning of that highly mysterious work. The Bible does not present itself as a straightforward instruction manual. Like the Constitution, whose concepts and vocabulary emerged from English law, it requires a tradition to help us understand what it means. That is why Roman Catholics, like Jews, depend on an ancient oral tradition which they believe explains Scripture and bears the authority of revelation. Johnson notes this concept, which Roman Catholics call the magisterium, and accepts it.

But for someone who prides himself on his orthodoxy, he is a little too eager to think matters out on his own. He calls for female priests, and for vegetarianism. Of the latter he predicts that we will all one day regard eating meat as "no more acceptable than cannibalism." Less silly, but more dangerous, are his thoughts on Biblical authorship: "the Scriptures were written by men (and sometimes by women). Yes: I know we are taught they are divinely inspired: 'So have I heard and do in part believe,' as Horatio says in Hamlet. It may be that God indicated what was to be put down, and the writer placed his own construction on it." Johnson speaks of the "authors of Genesis."

Our pride in modern scholarship urges us otherwise, but on this point the fundamentalists must have it right. If we cannot trust that what ancient holy texts say God said, He really did say, then we lack a crucial basis for belief in Him. How credible is a God who plants a vague "inspiration" in the mind of some pious man but then leaves it to chance to ensure a) that the man will correctly transcribe the content of that inspiration, and b) that, if the man gets it right, future generations will not fool around with the words so that divine instructions become hopelessly lost among human imaginings?

It was, after all, the first "higher critic" of the Bible, Baruch Spinoza -- excommunicated by the Amsterdam rabbis in 1656 -- who started the West down the road at the end of which we find ourselves today, the road to secularism and disbelief that makes Paul Johnson's book an important event. It is a sign-post on the road back to God.