The Rector of St. Brides seemed to put some special force into his recital of the 128th Psalm, which promises, “Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thine house; thy children like the olive-branches round about thy table. Lo, thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord.” I noticed (as I always do) the mention of fear and nodded to myself.
The swearing of great oaths concentrates the mind. So did the baptisms first of my daughter and then of my wife—who, raised as a Marxist atheist, trod another rather different path to the same place. Her christening followed a particularly lovely and robust form, devised in seventeenth-century England for the many who had been denied infant baptism under the rule of Oliver Cromwell and now wanted to enter the church of their fathers. I remember the rather reasonable answer the candidate is asked to give in reply to the enormous question, “Wilt thou then obediently keep God’s holy will and commandments, and walk in the same all the days of thy life?”
The required response is, “I will endeavour so to do, God being my helper”—which seems to me to be a realistic promise. And the next thing in the back of the Prayer Book is the old Catechism, which I had dreaded so much as a refractory child but now read with limitless regret and deepening interest. My own confirmation, by contrast, was a miserable modern-language affair with all the poetic force of a driving test, and endured by me in much the same spirit.
The Prodigal Son Returns Too Late
I quickly found that I was going to have to pay immediately (as well as in other, slower ways) for my long rebellion. The church that I remembered had been a dignified body of sonorous prayers, cool and ancient music, and poetic services and ceremonies that would have been recognizable to the first Queen Elizabeth and to William Shakespeare. During the years I had been away—and not only away but actively hostile—the Bishops had felt the waves of hatred—from people like me—beating against their ancient walls. And they had responded by trying to make their activities more accessible to the worldly.
The services of the Book of Common Prayer along with the King James Bible, on which I had been raised and which still pervade the language and literature of the English-speaking world, were written to be spoken aloud, by countrymen to whom poetry was constantly present and normal in every action, from sowing and reaping to the cutting of hedges and the planing of wood. Because of this, they stand more or less outside ordinary time, as I think they were designed to do.
Thomas Cranmer’s Prayer Book has many virtues, one being that it is largely the work of a man who did not have a very high opinion of himself and who filled its pages with pleas for help in the impossible task of being good. He was also a dramatist of some skill. The service of Holy Communion, for instance, is a perpetual reenactment of the night of the Last Supper. This is why—on those rare occasions when it is celebrated on Maundy Thursday—it chills the church building with fear and trembling and, in parts, seems to be written in letters of fire. Outside, not far away, are the Garden of Gethsemane, the chilly night of loss and betrayal, the rooster preparing to crow three times, and the mob already stirring in its sleep for the show trial, the grotesque procession to the gibbet, and the judicial murder.
The services of Morning and Evening Prayer are the last traces of the unceasing monastic cycle of prayer, which once absorbed thousands of monks, day and night, throughout the Christian world. Evensong in particular has a dreamlike quality, at the edge of both sleep and death. As soon as the opening words are spoken, the mind is drawn away from the daily and the ordinary and toward the eternal.
The Prayer Book has another striking feature. It demands penitence as the price of entry to all its ceremonies. The hard passage from the First Epistle of John—“If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us”—is often the first thing spoken. Soon afterward, the general confession requires a public declaration that “We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” There is “no health in us.” We are “miserable offenders.” These are not easy words to say, if you mean them. This is not because they are archaic or difficult. Most of them are plain English words of one or two syllables, in beautifully crafted sentences with a memorable rhythm. The fact is, many people prefer not to say them, because they do not like to admit that this is so. The church’s solution to this unpopularity was to abandon the requirement, replacing it with vague, half-hearted mumblings or—more often—with nothing at all.
Claiming that their proposed new services were an “alternative,” waves of newly ordained liberal clergy fanned out from the theological colleges (where liberal teachers had been working away for years) and in a swift and ruthless revolution drove the old Prayer Book from church after church. Anglicans are very accommodating, deferential, generous, and kindly people. Although most of them probably preferred the old to the new, many thought it would be bad manners, or uncharitable, to resist the urgent demands for novelty issued by their vicars. It was quickly clear that there was in truth no alternative. First, there would be an “experiment” with new forms, which was always deemed a success. Then there would perhaps be a period when old and new alternated. Then the old would be relegated to early morning (a concession to the aged) and perhaps the evening. In a few years, 400 years of almost unbroken tradition had been wiped out. What resistance there was had been patronized or ignored, even if it came in the shape of great figures of literature and poetry such as W. H. Auden, who memorably asked “Why spit on your luck?” This was how it was when I returned.
I had asked for this myself, and I accept it as the consequence of my own rebellion. But it does not make the loss any less painful.
A few years ago I was in Dallas, Texas, in some turmoil after having witnessed the execution of a murderer by lethal injection at the prison in Huntsville. With time to spend before catching my plane back to Washington, D.C., I visited the city’s Museum of Art and there found myself standing speechless in front of a painting about as different from Rogier van der Weyden’s Last Judgment as it is possible to imagine. It was a startlingly pessimistic version of The Prodigal Son by Thomas Hart Benton. Now, of all the parables, this one had been the most disturbing for me from the moment I encountered it, which I did—as few do now—in the ringing, unforgettable poetry of the King James Version, which fills the mind with vivid pictures. I could not have known, when I first heard that parable, how much it would eventually apply to me with direct personal force, and in how many ways. But it went home, deep and hard, all the same. I almost know it by heart, and cannot pass a beech tree in autumn, with a litter of nuts about it, without the words, “He would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat,” coming to mind. It is a bitter story, and we are left at the end wondering how the two brothers dealt with each other in the years to come, even though this is not the point of it.
But Benton had made the tale even more sour. His prodigal son is a figure a little like Tom Joad back from prison in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and from the same era. He has come home too late. Nobody has seen him from afar off and run joyfully to meet him. There will be no forgiveness, no best robe, no ring, no “music and dancing.” He stands in his shabby clothes with his poor, roped suitcase. A beaten-up car—the last trace of his squandered wealth—is parked in the background. He is gaping, with his hand to his mouth, at the ruin of the family homestead, ruin caused by his own greed and wastefulness. He looks as if it is just dawning on him that he is stupid and cruel and without hope. The light is failing in a chilly sky beneath wind-ripped, twisted clouds. Instead of a fatted calf, there is a stark, white animal skeleton, the skull horned, lying in the untended grass. We can guess at the grief, resignation, and failure that have overtaken the family and its home during his heedless absence. Who can he blame for it but himself? The desolation is infinite. And as I surveyed the melancholy remnants of my own church, out of which I had petulantly stomped, I felt the same. It was terrible and wrong, but what was I to say? Where had I been when I was ne
eded?
I threw myself, even so, into an effort to halt or reverse the destruction. I think I knew that this was futile, many years too late. But it allowed me to be both in the church and out of it, which at the time was where I needed to be. I bicycled from place to place in search of citadels of the old worship. In one particularly lovely Oxfordshire church, I enquired of a priest—a cozy-looking, well-padded old gentleman—if they ever used the Prayer Book. He stared at me, his eyes hot with dislike. “Never!” he pronounced, and then almost spat out the words “I hate Cranmer’s theology of penitence.”
This was one of those moments of abrupt realization—rather like the day when a British railway employee responded to a complaint about an especially late train by saying sarcastically, “You think the railways are run for your benefit, don’t you?”—when the truth suddenly became clear to me. It was not the language they disliked (though they probably did dislike it too). It was what the words meant. The new, denatured, committee-designed prayers and services were not just ugly, but contained a different message, which was not strong enough or hard enough to satisfy my need to atone.
Word spread around my trade that I was somehow mixed up in church matters. It was embarrassing. I remember one acquaintance, a distinguished foreign correspondent, turning to me in the press room of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Washington, D.C., and remarking that he had heard I was going to church. With a look of mingled pity and horror on his face, he asked, “How can you do that?” He plainly felt much as Virginia Woolf had felt toward T. S. Eliot.2
I talked to very few people about this and was diffident about mentioning it in anything I wrote. I think it true to say that for many years I was more or less ashamed of confessing to any religious faith at all, except when I felt safe to do so. It is a strange and welcome side-effect of the growing attack on Christianity in British society that I have now completely overcome this. Being Christian is one thing. Fighting for a cause is another, much easier to acknowledge.
And so I find myself, skulking behind the pillar at the back, attending a small village church some distance from my home, so small that the authorities have not—yet—put pressure on it to abandon Cranmer’s prayers and the King James Bible. We all know we are refugees, awaiting the moment when some ecclesiastical bureaucrat discovers that we are not in step with the times and takes measures to make us conform.
I have seen elsewhere how they proceed: sometimes by salami-slicing the ancient traditions—one vanishing one year, another the next, until all are gone; sometimes by brutal, abrupt decree; sometimes by dividing and ruling congregations. I have more or less accepted that only God knows whether I will die before the old books are finally stamped out, or the other way around. It will be a near-run thing. But I know that, finally released from any regular use, they will continue to live, perhaps more widely than they ever did before, in the minds of men and women. Nobody can stop me from reciting these texts in private, and I believe that they are so enduring and so filled with truth that they will survive as long as any human work.
This small, private battle for poetry and beauty—to which I am still committed—is as nothing compared to the greater conflict that we now face. No doubt it would be easier to fight if we were better armed. But in recent times it has grown clear that in my own country the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat, by secular forces that have never been so confident. In the United States, where Christianity appears stronger, it is by no means as powerful and secure as it imagines. Why is there such a fury against religion now? Why is it more advanced in Britain than in the USA? I have had good reason to seek the answer to this question, and I have found it where I might have expected to have done if only I had grasped from the start how large are the issues at stake. Only one reliable force stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. Only one reliable force forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. Only one reliable force restrains the hand of the man of power. And, in an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.
* * *
1“The Trees,” by Larkin (1922 – 85).
2See pages 23-24.
CHAPTER 8
The Decline of Christianity
“I myself have seen the ungodly in great power: and flourishing like a green bay-tree.”
(THE 37TH PSALM)
Western Christianity has undergone several separate reverses and defeats in the modern era. It was permanently divided by the Reformation; it was weakened by the Enlightenment and the bold claims of modern science; it did itself huge damage during modern wars by allowing itself to be recruited to opposing sides. This problem was most harshly stated by Abraham Lincoln in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, in which he pointed to the absurdity of both sides in a war seeking the aid of the same God:
Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offences; for it must needs be that offences come, but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.”
Lincoln, who seems not to have been a Christian but who knew his Bible better than most believers, was undeniably right—though his target was not the church but the Christian slaveholders. The same absurdity was on display in the First World War, in which soldiers of both sides initiated and enthusiastically joined an unbearably poignant Christmas Truce in 1914, which—had it spread and taken hold—might have ended the whole undertaking. The decline of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, in Europe, dates from this war, in which the leaders of the national churches gave their support to the warmaking of democratic politicians and so helped to destroy themselves for many years to come.
Recent European wars had been over more quickly and had not brought about such terrible numbers of deaths and maimings. Many priests and pastors performed great acts of personal bravery and sacrifice, bringing comfort to the dying and not shirking terrible danger and privation. But the gospels could not really be made to endorse or excuse the gross mass murder, the rapid loss of all delicacy of language and feeling, everything that had been considered good and fair before; the acres of unburied dead rotting in plain sight until consumed by rats, the resulting growth of mercilessness and brutality at home, thanks to the corruption of men’s morals by what they had seen; the devastation of family life and social order.
As the old regimes, one by one, crumbled and sagged, the churches crumbled and sagged with them. Protestant England was particularly troubled after the war was over, because most of its very Protestant churches were unable to permit the prayers for the dead that so many bereaved families would have liked to offer. Spiritualism, with its promise of renewed contact with the departed, briefly flourished because of this, prompting Rudyard Kipling to write his poem “En-Dor,” warning the bereaved that they were being cruelly manipulated for gain. But in general the Church of England suffered the decay in authority and the loss of trust and deference that affected every established pillar of English society. People had gone to war for things they completely believed in, and they had been completely betrayed. Promised glory and honor, they had found hideous death, mud, sin, mutilation, rats, and filth. They had, astonishingly, passed through it without any serious mutiny (in the case of the British armies) or collapse in morale. But they knew—and everyone knew—that they had been fooled and that whatever they had fought for had been lost during the squalor of war. Among those who had deceived them were their Christian pastors. Never such innocence again, as Philip Larkin wrote in his poem “MCMXIV” about the last hours of the old England in August 1914:
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
>
As changed itself to past
Without a word—the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
Even so, Christianity still survived into the 1930s and into the early 1950s as a considerable if weakened force. Church attendance fell, but was still healthy by the standards of today. The supremacy of the Christian faith was assumed in schools, state and private, and in public life in general. It was affirmed in great national ceremonies, such as the two Coronations of the era—George VI in 1937, and Elizabeth II in 1953. The national broadcaster, the British Broadcasting Corporation, was still unquestionably Christian. Well into the 1950s it broadcast on its main morning news program an uncompromisingly Christian segment entitled “Lift Up Your Hearts,” as well as broadcasting a number of church services at other times of the day. The important thing is that nobody at the time thought this was odd. But fifty years later it is more or less unimaginable.
Not Such a Glorious Victory
The disillusion of the First World War has by now been reinforced by the double disillusion of the Second. In Britain a supposedly glorious victory was followed by two astonishing experiences. The first was a severe economic crisis, made worse by an exceptionally cold winter and appalling pollution—a time of lethal smogs, of frozen pipes and frozen railways, of profound shortages and rationing far more restrictive than it had been during wartime, when supply convoys were being torpedoed by German submarines. Bread had never been rationed in the war. Now it was.
The Rage Against God Page 9