Absolute Truths

ABSOLUTE

TRUTHS

ONE

‘No doubt it would be more suitable for a theologian to be absolutely pickled in devout reflection and immune from all external influences; but wrap ourselves round as we may in the cocoon of ecclesiastical cobwebs, we cannot altogether seal ourselves off from the surrounding atmosphere.’

AUSTIN FARRER

Warden of Keble College, Oxford, 1960–1968

Said or Sung

I

What can be more devastating than a catastrophe which arrives out of the blue?

During the course of my life I have suffered three catastrophes, but the first two can be classified as predictable: my crisis in 1937 was preceded by a period of increasingly erratic behaviour, and my capture by the Germans in 1942 could have been prophesied by any pessimist who knew I had volunteered on the outbreak of war to be an army chaplain. But the disaster of 1965 walloped me without warning.

Ten years have now passed since 1965, but the other day as I embarked on my daily journey through the Deaths Column of The Times, I saw that my old adversary had died and at once I was recalling with great clarity that desperate year in that anarchic decade when he and I had fought our final battle in the shadow of Starbridge Cathedral.

‘AYSGARTH, Norman Neville (“Stephen”),’ I read. ‘Beloved husband of Dido and devoted father of …’ But I failed to read the list of offspring. I felt too bereaved. How strange it is that the further one journeys through life the more likely one becomes to mourn the loss of old enemies almost as much as the loss of old friends! The divisions of the past seem unimportant; we become unified by the shrinking of the future.

‘Oh God!’ said my wife, glancing across the breakfast table and seeing my expression. ‘Who’s died now?’

Having answered her question I turned from the small entry in the Deaths Column to the many inches of unremitting praise on the obituary page. Did I approve of this fulsome enactment of the cliché Nil nisi bonum de mortuis est? Summoning all my Christian charity I told myself I did. I was, after all, a retired bishop of the Church of England and supposed to radiate Christian charity as lavishly as the fountains of Trafalgar Square spout water. However, I did think that the allocation of three half-columns to this former Dean of Starbridge was a trifle generous. Two would have been quite sufficient.

‘What a whitewash!’ commented my wife after she had skimmed through this paean. ‘When I think back to 1965 …’

I thought of 1965, the year of my third catastrophe, the year Aysgarth and I had fought to the finish. Bishops and deans, of course, are not supposed to fight at all. Indeed as senior churchmen they are required to be either holy or perfect English gentlemen or, preferably, both.

How we all hanker after ideals, after certainties – and after absolute truths – which will provide us with security as we struggle to survive in the ambiguous, cloudy, chaotic world which surrounds us! Moreover, although in a rapidly changing society ideals may appear to be swept away by a rising tide of cynicism, the experience of the past demonstrates that people will continue to hunger for those ideals, even when absolute truths are no longer in fashion.

Society was certainly changing with great speed in the 1960s, and when I was a bishop I became famous for defending tradition at a time when all traditions were under attack. I had two heroes: St Augustine, who had proclaimed the absolute truths till the end, even as the barbarians advanced on his city, and St Athanasius, the bishop famous for being so resolutely contra mundum, against the world, as he fought heresy to the last ditch. By 1965 I had decided that I, like my two heroes, was being obliged to endure a dissolute, demoralised, disordered society, and that my duty was to fight tooth and nail against decadence. A fighting bishop unfortunately has little chance to lead a quiet life, but I decided that was the price I had to pay in order to preserve my ideals.

In the 1960s there were three years which now stand out in my memory. The first was 1963, when I clashed with Aysgarth over that pornographic sculpture which he commissioned for the Cathedral churchyard; it was the year Bishop John Robinson wrote his bestseller Honest to God, a book which rocked the Church to its foundations, and the year I wrote in rebuttal A Modern Heresy for Modern Man. That was when I ceased to be merely a conservative bishop, underlining the importance of preserving the accumulated wisdom from the past, and became a fighting bishop contra mundum. The second year which I remember vividly is 1968. That was the year young Nicholas Darrow, my spiritual director’s son, was finally ordained after what I suspected was a very shady interval in his private life. It was also the year my son Charley became engaged and my son Michael was married, yet despite these family milestones 1965 remains the year which is most clearly etched in my memory. Not 1963. Not 1968. But 1965.

Let me now describe the man I was before my third catastrophe felled me, the catastrophe which arrived out of the blue. I had been the Bishop of Starbridge for eight years and despite a tentative start I had become highly successful. My sons were both doing well in their chosen careers, and although in their different ways they still worried me, I had come to the conclusion that as a parent I must have been doing something right; at the very least I felt I deserved a medal for paternal endurance. I was on happier ground when I considered my marriage, now almost twenty-eight years old and a perfect partnership.

In short, I was not ill-pleased with my life, and stimulated by this benign opinion of myself I travelled constantly around my ecclesiastical fiefdom, spoke forcefully on education in the House of Lords, held forth with confidence on television discussion programmes, ruled various committees with an iron hand and terrorised the lily-livered liberals of the Church Assembly. I also had sufficient zest to maintain my prowess on the golf course and enjoy my wife’s company on the days off which she so zealously preserved for me amidst the roaring cataract of my engagements. Occasionally I felt no older than forty-five. On my bad days I felt about fifty-nine. On average I felt somewhere in my early fifties. In fact I was as old as the century, but who cared? I was fit, busy, respected, pampered and privileged. Frequently and conscientiously I thanked God for the outstanding good fortune which enabled me to serve him as he required – and what he required, I had no doubt, was that I should fight slipshod thinking by defending the faith in a manner which was tough-minded and intellectually rigorous. St Augustine and St Athanasius, I often told myself, would have been proud of me.

I was proud of me, although of course I had far too much spiritual savoir-faire to do other than shove this secret opinion of myself to the very back of my mind. By 1965 I was too preoccupied by my current battles to waste much time visualising my future obituary in The Times, but on those rare moments when I paused to picture my posthumous eminence, I saw long, long columns of very dense newsprint.

God stood by and watched me for some time. Then in 1965 he saw the chance to act, and seizing me by the scruff of the neck he began to shake me loose from the suffocating folds of my self-satisfaction, my arrogance and my pride.

II

In order to convey the impact of the catastrophe, I must now describe what was going on in my life as I steamed smoothly forward to the abyss.

1965 was little over a month old, and we were all recovering from the state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill, an event which had temporarily united in grief the members of our increasingly frivolous and fragmented society. For people of my generation it seemed that one of the strongest ropes tethering us to the past had been severed, and ’the old order changeth, yielding place to new’ was a comment constantly in my thoughts at the time. Watching that winter funeral on television I shuddered at the thought of the inevitably apocalyptic future.

However, I had little time to contemplate apocalypses. As one of the Church’s experts on education, I was required to worry about the government’s plans to scrap the 11-plus examination and establish comprehensive schools; I was planning to make a speech on the subject in the Church Assembly later that month, and I was also framing a speech for the House of Lords about curbing hooliganism by restricting the hours of coffee-bars. My involvement in current events of this nature required in addition that I brooded on racism – or, as it was called in those days, racialism – and marvelled at the state of a society which would permit a play entitled You’ll Come To Love Your Sperm-Count to be not only performed in public but actually reviewed by an esteemed magazine.

I remember I had begun to think about my Lent sermons but Easter was late that year, Good Friday falling on the sixteenth of April, so the sermons had not yet been written. In my spare time I was working on a book about Hippolytus, that early Christian writer whose battles against the sexually lax Bishop Callistus had resounded throughout the Roman Empire; at the beginning of my academic career I had made a name for myself by specialising in the conflicts of the Early Church, and before my accession to the bishopric I had been Lyttelton Professor of Divinity at Cambridge.

At this point may I just rebut two of the snide criticisms which my enemies used to hurl at me? (Unfortunately by 1965 my fighting style had earned me many enemies.) The first was that academics are unsuited to any position of importance in what is fondly called ‘the real world’. According to this belief, which is so typical of the British vice of despising intellectuals, academic theologians are incapable of preaching the faith in words of one syllable to the proletariat, but this is just crypto-Marxist hogwash. I knew exactly what the proletariat wanted to hear. They wanted to hear certainties, and whether those certainties were expressed in monosyllables or polysyllables was immaterial. Naturally I would not have dreamed of burdening the uneducated with fascinating theological speculation; that sort of discourse has to be left to those who have the aptitude and training to comprehend it. Would one expect a beginner at the piano to play Mozart? Of course not! A beginner must learn by absorbing simple exercises. This fact does not mean that the beginner is incapable of intuitively grasping the wonder and mystery of music. It merely means he has to take much of the theory on trust from those who have devoted their lives to studying it.

Having demolished the idea that I am incapable of communicating with uneducated people, let me go on to rebut the second snide criticism hurled at me during my bishopric. It was alleged that as I had spent most of my career in an ivory tower I was ill-equipped for pastoral work. What nonsense! The problems of undergraduates sharpen any clergyman’s pastoral skills, and besides, my years as an army chaplain had given me a breadth of experience which I would never have acquired in ordinary parish work.

I have to confess that I have never actually done any ordinary parish work. The training of priests was more haphazard in my youth, and if one had the right connections one could sidestep hurdles which today are de rigueur. In my case Archbishop Lang had taken an interest in me, and I had spent the opening years of my career as one of his chaplains before accepting the head-mastership of a minor public school at the ridiculously young age of twenty-seven. Not surprisingly this latter move had proved to be a mistake, but even before I returned to Cambridge to resume my career as a theologian, I felt that an appointment to a parish was merely something which happened to other people.

I admit I did worry from time to time in the 1930s about this significant omission from my curriculum vitae, but always I came to the conclusion that since my path had crossed so providentially with Archbishop Lang’s it would have been wrong to spurn the opportunities which in consequence came my way. I was still reasoning along these lines in the 1950s when I told myself it would have been wrong to spurn a bishopric merely because I had sufficient brains to flourish among the ivory towers of Cambridge. (Indeed if more bishops had more brains, the pronouncements from the episcopal bench in the House of Lords in the 1960s might have been far more worthy of attention.)

I did not turn my back on my academic work when I accepted the bishopric. Indeed as I toiled away in Starbridge I soon felt I needed regular divertissements to cheer me up, and this was why I was nearly always writing some book or other during my spare time. I dictated these books to a succession of most attractive part-time secretaries, all under thirty. In 1965 my part-time secretary was Sally, the daughter of my henchman the Archdeacon of Starbridge, and I much enjoyed dictating the fruits of my researches to such a glamorous young woman. It made a welcome change from dictating letters on diocesan affairs to my full-time secretary Miss Peabody who, although matchlessly efficient, was hardly the last word in glamour. My wife quite understood that I needed a break from Miss Peabody occasionally, and always went to great trouble to recruit exactly the right part-time secretary to brighten my off-duty hours.

My wife and Miss Peabody kept me organised. I had two chaplains, one a priest who handled all the ecclesiastical business and one a layman who acted as a liaison officer with the secular world, but Miss Peabody guarded my appointments diary and this privilege gave her a certain amount of power over the two young men. I classed this arrangement as prudent. Chaplains can become power-mad with very little encouragement, but Miss Peabody ensured that all such delusions of grandeur were stillborn. Miss Peabody also supervised the typist, recently hired to help her with the increased volume of secretarial work, and organised the bookkeeping.

In addition I employed a cook-housekeeper, who lived out, and a daily cleaner. A gardener appeared occasionally to mow the lawns and prune any vegetation which acquired an undisciplined appearance. From this list of personnel it can be correctly deduced that Starbridge was one of the premier bishoprics, but if I had not had a private income to supplement my episcopal salary I might have found my financial circumstances tiresome, and we were certainly a long way from those halcyon days before the war when my predecessors had lived in considerable splendour. Alex Jardine, for instance, had kept twelve indoor servants, two gardeners and a chauffeur when he had been bishop in the 1930s. He had also lived in the old episcopal palace, now occupied by the Choir School, but despite the loss of the palace I could hardly claim I was uncomfortably housed. My home was a handsome Georgian building called the South Canonry which also stood within Starbridge’s huge walled Close, and from the upstairs windows we could look across the Choir School’s playing-field to the tower and spire of the Cathedral.

‘I’m glad the trees hide the palace from us,’ Lyle had said on our arrival at the South Canonry in 1957. She had lived at the palace before the war as the paid companion of Bishop Jardine’s wife, and the experience had not always been a happy one.

Lyle was my wife, and I must now describe just how important she was to me by 1965. Before the war people had joked that she ran the diocese for Jardine as well as his palace, and I sometimes thought she could have run the diocese for me. She was the perfect wife for a bishop. She solved all household problems. She appeared in church regularly. She excelled in charity work. She controlled numerous committees. She controlled the chaplains. She even controlled Miss Peabody. She monitored the wives of the diocesan clergy so skilfully that I knew about any marriage trouble among my priests almost before they were aware of it themselves. She also read the Church newspapers to keep me informed of any serpentine twist of Church politics which I might have been too busy to notice.

In addition she ensured that I had everything I needed: clean shirts, socks, shoes, every item of my uniform – all appeared as if by magic whenever they were required. Bottles of my favourite whisky and sherry never failed to be present on the sideboard. Cigarettes were always in my cigarette-case. I was like an expensive car tended by a devoted mechanic. I purred along as effortlessly as a well-tuned Rolls-Royce.

The one matter which Lyle never organised for me was my Creator. ‘You deal with God,’ she said. ‘I’ll deal with everything else.’ I did talk to her about God, particularly when I needed to let off steam about the intellectually sloppy antics of various liberal-radical churchmen, but although she listened with sympathy she seldom said more than: ‘Yes, darling,’ or: ‘What a bore for you!’ Once I could not resist saying to her: ‘I sometimes feel troubled that you never want to discuss your faith with me,’ but she merely answered: ‘What’s there to discuss? I’m not an intellectual.’

The truth was that Lyle was no fool, but a skimpy education had given her an inferiority complex about intellectual matters with the result that she always played down the knowledge of Christianity which she had acquired through her copious reading. I knew her faith was deep, but I knew too that she would never be one of those clerical wives who gave talks on such subjects as ‘Faith in Family Life’. Her most successful talk to the Mothers’ Union was entitled: ‘How to Survive Small Children’, and faith was barely mentioned at all.

But by 1965 Lyle had become profoundly interested in prayer. She had even formed a prayer-group composed entirely of women, a move which I found remarkable because in the past she had seldom had much time for her own sex. My spiritual director was most intrigued and said the formation of the group was a great step forward for Lyle. I was equally intrigued and wanted to ask questions, but since my advice was never sought I realised my task was merely to provide tacit support. I did enquire in the beginning what had triggered this new interest but Lyle only said in an offhand voice: ‘It was my involvement with Venetia. When I had that lunch with her in London I realised there was nothing more I could do except pray for her,’ and I saw at once it would be tactful not to prolong the conversation. Venetia, a former part-time secretary of mine, had been Lyle’s protégée. I had seen that Lyle was becoming too involved, regarding the girl as the daughter we had never had, and I had several times been tempted to utter a word of warning, but in the end I had kept quiet, preferring to rely on the probability that Lyle’s hard-headed common sense would eventually triumph. Such pseudo-parental relationships often dissolve unhappily when one party fails to fulfil the psychological needs of the other, and it had been obvious to me that Venetia, a muddled, unhappy young woman, had been looking not for a second mother but for a second father, a quest which had had disastrous consequences. By 1965 she had moved out of our lives, but the prayer-group, her unexpected legacy to Lyle, was flourishing.