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

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.

‘
A
Y S G A RT H,
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 abso
lute 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 unfor
tunately 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 conserva
tive bishop, underlining the importance of preserving the accumu
lated 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 condusion 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 pro
grammes, ruled various committees with an iron hand and terror
ised 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.

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. Watch
ing 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 aca
demics 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 certain
ties, 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 communicati
ng 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 sparetime. I dictated these books to a succession of most attractive
part-time secretaries, all under thirty. In 1965 my part-time secre
tary 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 chap
lains, 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 privi
lege 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 book
keeping.

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 appear
ance. 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 con
trolled 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 dis
solve 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.