Haunted by Christ: Modern Writers and the Struggle for Faith

199 Pages·2018·1.193 MB·English

by  Richard Harries

Richard Harries is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the
Academy of Medical Sciences. After 19 years as Bishop of Oxford, he was made a life peer
(Lord Harries of Pentregarth) and he remains active in the House of Lords on human rights
issues. He is the author of 28 books and his voice is well known to many through his regular
contributions to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

For Piers and Poh Sim Plowright,
with deep gratitude for their friendship
and in memory of Stewart Sutherland,
friend and former colleague who would,
I believe, have enjoyed this book
Contents
Introduction
1 Fyodor Dostoevsky: Through a furnace of doubt
2 Emily Dickinson: A smouldering volcano
3 Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘Away grief’s gasping’
4 Edward Thomas: The elusive call
5 T. S. Eliot: Out of hell
6 Stevie Smith: A jaunty desperation
7 Samuel Beckett: Secular mystic
8 W. H. Auden: ‘Bless what there is for being’
9 William Golding: Universal pessimist, cosmic optimist
10 R. S. Thomas: Presence in absence
11 Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown: Light from the Orkneys
12 Elizabeth Jennings: Poet of pain and praise
13 Grace in failure: Four Catholic novelists – Graham Greene, Flannery
O’Connor, Shusaku Endo and Evelyn Waugh
14 C. S. Lewis and Philip Pullman: Competing myths
15 Marilynne Robinson: Christian contrarian
Notes
Acknowledgements
Search terms
Introduction
Like many people, especially of my generation, books have always meant a great deal to me,
and from a young age I could quickly get absorbed in what I was reading. The great magic
about stories, novels and plays is that they take us into worlds different from the one with
which we are familiar, but in such a way that our day-by-day world is illuminated. We enter
into the lives of imaginary characters and find that the way we see and experience our usual
life is subtly altered. Books affect us deeply and can change us in significant ways.
All books are written from a particular point of view. If the author tries to press that point
of view too hard in a plot or characters the work will almost certainly fail as literature. The
characters will seem one-dimensional and the plot artificial. The result will be propaganda.
Some writing written from a Christian point of view makes this mistake. In any good writing,
imaginative sympathy is at work and this enables the writer to enter into the minds of people
with fundamentally opposed views or characters. This is indeed one of the marks that
distinguishes literature from propaganda. It is one of the reasons why we find it so difficult to
place someone like Shakespeare as being a believer or non-believer, a Catholic or a
Protestant.
David Mamet’s play Oleanna is about a university teacher who is accused by one of his
female students of sexual harassment. I saw the play with my daughter. When we came out we
realized my daughter had experienced the play through the student who believed she had been
harassed; I had done so through the lecturer who believed the girl had manipulated him. When
the play was shown in the USA, it sharply divided audiences in a similar way. That was a
mark of its status as a genuine work of art.
One aspect of this capacity to be multifaceted means that reading a good novel, or seeing a
great play, we are conscious again of the complexity of human life, the ambiguity of so much
behaviour, the mixture of qualities and motives in all of us. All this is a very healthy and
important antidote to moralism. There is a human tendency to divide the world up into goodies
and baddies. This can be so if religion is brought into it, though moralism certainly isn’t the
preserve of religion. One of the great themes of Jesus in the Gospels is the way he tries to
shake us out of all easy moralizing. We are directed to look at ourselves, at the great plank in
our own eye before we call attention to the speck of dust in our neighbour’s eye. So literature,
in bringing home to us the complexity, ambiguity and thoroughly mixed nature of human
behaviour spells out and reinforces one of the central elements in the New Testament.
However, and this point cannot be emphasized too strongly, we should not assume from this
that good writing is without a point of view. It cannot be, because nothing in this life is value
free or neutral. It comes out of the life experience of a particular writer who will have a
distinctive feel for life whether or not he or she is able to articulate it. According to Philip
Pullman, this is not only inevitable but necessary and good. Literature should, in his words,
‘pack a moral punch’.1 It is entirely natural and inevitable that some works should be written
from an atheist point of view, and others from a Christian one. If the perspective is Christian
this does not make it more or less worthy of consideration as literature. This needs stressing in
our society today. At the same time, because good literature depends on empathetic imaginative
power, a novel written from a Christian standpoint will at the same time feel the full force of
atheism, and one from an atheist perspective will know something of the enchantment of the
Christian faith.
It is possible to view literature as just one form of enjoyment or form of escape like football
or chess. But in our own time its importance is far more crucial than that. In our own time
especially, we look to novels, plays and poetry to understand better what it is to be alive, what
it means to be human, living with other human beings. No less we look there to see what it
means in practice, as a ‘form of life’ to use a phrase of Wittgenstein, to believe or not believe
life has a meaning beyond any which we may choose to attribute to it.
These words apply to all forms of literature, but they also highlight the importance of
literature that is written by Christian writers or on Christian themes. At a time when so much
religious language has become either unbelievable or alien to many people it is in works of
literature that we can begin to discover what the Christian faith is about and what is at stake. If,
for example we want to explore the challenge to Christian belief posed by human suffering and
the attempt to understand suffering theologically in the texture of life, we will read Albert
Camus or Fyodor Dostoevsky. If we want to explore what faithfulness and martyrdom might
involve in a brutal world, we might read Shusaku Endo’s Silence.
Poetry, like novels, can express what it is to have faith but with two additional features that
are particularly relevant today. So much of the language we use is recycled cliché, the
linguistic sludge of a lazy culture. This is especially true of religious language, which has for
many become tired, stale and lifeless. Poetry, in the words of T. S. Eliot can ‘purify the dialect
of the tribe’.2 It can bring freshness and sharpness because poetry is as much a matter of sound
as it is of image; it can hint, like music, of what is beyond words, the ultimately elusive
mystery of the divine. As the Australian poet Les Murray put it, God is ‘in the world as poetry
is in the poem’.3
He goes on to say this is ‘A law against closure’4 To believe is to be open to a horizon
beyond our present horizon, to refuse to clamp down in a settled outlook with stereotyped
phrases, whether of a religious or anti-religious kind. Poetry keeps that horizon open.
This book considers 20 novelists or poets, in 15 chapters, who have meant a great deal to
me over the years. They are not the only ones, but they are the ones for whom the pull of
religion has been fundamental and in whose work we can best see what it is to believe or to
protest against belief.
Historians write about the early modern period, meaning the late fifteenth century to the end
of the eighteenth century. Modernism in music, literature and the visual arts is usually dated
from around 1913. For the purposes of this book ‘modern’ means beginning with Fyodor
Dostoevsky (1821–81). This is in part because he wrote the first psychological novels,
exploring the complexity of human motives and the way unconscious forces so often drive our
behaviour. But more significantly because the radical religious questions over which he
agonized and which are reflected in his novels set the agenda for the possibility of religious
faith in our time. Dostoevsky entered deeply into the atheism of his era, calling himself ‘A
child of his age’ and, as has been written:
This was an age in which a radical intelligentsia which had finally rejected religion was energetically propounding various
forms of scientific atheism; an age like our own, in which Christianity, at least among the educated classes, was liable to
go by default . . . in reading Dostoevskii we are in the presence of a genius wrestling with the problems of rethinking
Christianity in the modern age.5
Many of the great Victorian agnostics who turned away from the Christian faith did not do so
because of the rise of biblical criticism or the theory of evolution, but because what Christians
called on them to believe struck them as morally inferior to their own ethical beliefs and
standards.6 The same is true today. Too often it is not the alleged unreasonableness of faith that
turns people away but something about it that has put them off, which strikes them as morally or
aesthetically unattractive.7 In the person of Ivan Karamazov, Dostoevsky gives voice more
strongly than any other figure in literature to the moral objections to God. This is so powerfully
stated that some modern figures, such as Camus, thought that this was indeed Dostoevsky’s own
view.
Emily Dickinson (1830–86) is another figure who powerfully represents our present
conflicted attitude to religion. Again, there are two reasons why she belongs to our world
almost more than her own. First, because of the innovative style of her poetry. She eschews
conventional punctuation and uses a great number of dashes. She has her own system of
capitalization, and a minimalist approach to language in which a single word comes to focus a
whole sentence or verse. She broke with what was regarded as proper for poetry at the time
and anticipated the radical developments of modernism. Second, and more pertinently,
although deeply versed in the Calvinist milieu of the society in which she lived, she distanced
herself from it and developed an intense inner life of her own. She might be described in terms
of the modern cliché as being spiritual, not religious, except that this does not capture the
passion and intensity of that spiritual life.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) in one way did belong very much to his own time, in the
sense that he was part of the talented group of people influenced by the Oxford Movement who
first became Anglo-Catholics and then followed John Henry Newman in becoming Roman
Catholics. Yet Hopkins became a major influence in the twentieth century and this continues
into our own time. His poetry was not published until 1918, when it came as a shock to most.
As the poet Elizabeth Jennings wrote, ‘Hopkins has had a strong influence on every twentieth
century poet from Auden downwards.’8 For many today he is their favourite religious poet.
This poetry, with its extraordinary intensity, reflects both Hopkins’s love of the beauty of the
world, and the agony of his personal suffering, especially his later verses, ‘the sonnets of
desolation’, which are the subject of the chapter on him in this book.
Edward Thomas (1878–1917) was not an obviously religious person, and, in contrast to
war poets like Wilfred Owen, he did not reflect Christian themes or images in his work. But
there is in his poetry a haunting quality which has been recognized by every reader, and which
I term ‘the elusive call’. In the chapter on Thomas, this quality is identified in the poetry and
questions raised about it. Did it represent a haunting disappearance of faith, a faith which had
been lost by so many of the fin de siècle generation? And if so was this loss permanent? It is
because the poetry of Thomas raises this crucial question that I have included him in this book.
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) wrote The Waste Land in 1922, arguably the most famous poem of
the twentieth century, in which he seemed to speak for a disillusioned generation, shattered by
the First World War and at sea without any traditional religious or moral landmarks in sight.
Then in 1927 he was baptized as a Christian and shortly after announced to a startled world
that he now identified as an Anglo-Catholic. In the chapter on Eliot, the reasons for that
conversion are discussed together with a consideration of the difference it made to his life.
Eliot’s conversion was received with disbelief and scorn by most of the intelligentsia of the
day. But Eliot’s faith did not mean that he stopped being highly aware of all the arguments
against his position. On the contrary, he said that a mature faith was inseparable from doubt.
Stevie Smith (1902–71) shared T. S. Eliot’s love of Anglo-Catholicism and churchgoing
was for her, at least in her younger days, a very happy experience. However, even then she
began to have doubts, not about the veracity of the faith but about the morality of some of its
teaching. In particular, she reacted against the idea of hell, and so strong did this aversion
become over the years that she rejected Christianity while at the same time being strongly
attracted to it. For her it was a mixture of sweetness and cruelty, and although she continued to
be enchanted by it, she felt it had to be rejected on moral grounds.
Samuel Beckett (1906–89) will be thought of as an unusual person to include in this book.
The reason for his inclusion is contained in a remark of the distinguished scholar, poet and
dramatist Francis Warner. As a young man Dr Warner produced Beckett plays and as a result
got to know Samuel Beckett. He once told me that Beckett was ‘A Christ haunted man’ and
‘secular mystic’. It is that remark about Beckett which is contained in my title. Beckett’s plays
and novels seem to purvey a very bleak view of the world, though often one with much humour
in it. But that sombre view, which might be thought of as a world without God, is one which
has to be taken into account by believer and non-believer alike. Serious believers will feel the
force of it as an alternative to their faith and similarly serious non-believers will feel the pull
of a religious perspective on their lack of faith. Beckett was able to depict such a moving view
of the human predicament without God just because he knew so deeply what it was that was
absent.
W. H. Auden (1907–73) wrote that he left the Christian faith in which he had been brought
up as a teenager in order to pursue the pleasures of the flesh. He rediscovered this faith again
and made it his own in about 1940, after which it was a quiet, subterranean influence in all his
writing. He believed we had a choice between shouting in anger and despair at life or blessing
what there is for being. He chose the latter course and made praise and gratitude for the
ordinary things of life one of the main themes of his poetry. At the same time he thought that a
serious faith necessarily involved a certain reticence.
William Golding (1911–93) in his novels reflects what is for many a classically Christian
understanding of existence. First there is a strong sense of human sin, which can wreak havoc
in any social group, and second there is the possibility of some kind of redemption, even if it is
only in an increased self-awareness. Golding’s own views are much more conflicted and more
difficult to identify. In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he described
himself as a universal pessimist and a cosmic optimist but it is not clear on what that cosmic
optimism rested.
R. S. Thomas (1913–2000), more than any other poet in the second half of the twentieth
century, reflected the feelings of those who experience God only as an absence. As well as
writing vivid, moving poetry about the hard life of the hill farmers to whom he ministered as a
priest in the Church in Wales, he explored all the inner contradictions he felt about the faith he
preached.
Edwin Muir (1887–1959) and George Mackay Brown (1921–96) both came from the
Orkneys and both knew much personal anguish in their lives. Edwin Muir, brought up in a
Scottish Calvinist environment, was devastated by an experience in which he saw human
beings simply as animals destined for the slaughter house. Gradually over the years he gained a
sense of the human soul and in the end he was much drawn to the religion of the Incarnation.
George Mackay Brown converted from indifference to Roman Catholicism.
Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001) was a devout Roman Catholic who knew much personal
travail in her life because of periods of mental instability. Her poetry reflects a personal
journey in which she faces her inner fears and works through them, like Auden, to a sense of
gratitude for existence and an ability to see grace in the people around her.
Graham Greene (1904–91), Flannery O’Connor (1925–64), Shusaku Endo (1923–96) and
Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) were all novelists for whom Roman Catholicism was fundamental to
some of their best-known novels. Another theme which unites them is a sense of grace in
human failure. They deal with different kinds of failure but in all of them some element of
grace can be seen glimmering, however dimly.
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) and Philip Pullman (1946–) are both brilliant storytellers for
young people. C. S. Lewis was converted from atheism to become the twentieth century’s best-
known Christian apologist. Some might cavil at Pullman’s appearance in a book with the title
Haunted by Christ. However, he is deeply antagonistic to the Christian view of the world as
put forward by Lewis, and he is haunted in the sense that this has got far enough under his skin
to cause him to write a major trilogy in fierce opposition to it. He has also written a book more
directly attacking the Christian faith The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.
In the His Dark Materials trilogy, Pullman sets out an alternative vision to that of Lewis, in
which people have to learn to stand on their own feet, take responsibility for lives and learn to
love the earth in all its finitude. The strengths and weaknesses of both fictional worlds are
identified.
Marilynne Robinson (1943–) has written a trilogy, Gilead, Home and Lila in which a
Christian view of life is explored through three generations of Protestant pastors in Iowa.
Theirs is a hard life and there is for them no easy resolution of the dilemmas of faith. What
comes through is a sense of astonishment and wonder at existence with hope for the future.
Each chapter is headed by a short introductory paragraph setting out a few basic facts about