Absolute Truths. Susan Howatch

       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

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