The Soul of the West

The modern dilemma is essentially a spiritual one, and every one of its main aspects, moral, political and scientific, brings us back to the need of a religious solution. The one remaining problem that we have got to consider is where that religious solution is to be found.

Must we look for some new religion to meet the new circumstances of the changing world, or does the Christian faith still supply the answer that we need?

In the first place, it is obvious that it is no light matter to throw over the Christian tradition. It means a good deal more to us than we are apt to realise.

As I have pointed out, it is the Christian tradition that is the most fundamental element in Western culture. It lies at the base not only of Western religion, but also of Western morals and Western social idealism. To a far greater extent than science or philosophy, it has determined our attitude to life and the final aims of our civilisation. Yet on the other hand we cannot fail to recognise that it is just this religious element in Western culture that is most challenged at the present day. The majority of men, whatever their political beliefs may be, are prepared to accept science and democracy and humanitarianism as essential elements in modern civilisation, but they are far less disposed to admit the importance of religion in general and of Christianity in particular. They regard Christianity as out of touch with modern life and inconsistent with modern knowledge. Modern life, they say, deals with facts, while Christianity deals with unproved and incomprehensible dogmas. A man can indulge in religious beliefs, so long as he treats them as a private luxury; but they have no bearing on social life, and society can get on very well without them.

Moreover, behind this vague tendency to treat religion as a side issue in modern life, there exists a strong body of opinion that is actively hostile to Christianity and that regards the destruction of positive religion as absolutely necessary to the advance of modern culture. This attitude is most in evidence in Soviet Russia, where, for the first time in the history of the world, we see a great state, or rather a world empire, that officially rejects any species of religion and has adopted a social and educational policy inspired by militant atheism. But this tendency is not confined to Russia or to the followers of communism. Both in Europe and America there is a strong anti- religious movement that includes many of our ablest modern writers and a few men of science. It seeks not only to destroy religion, but also to revolutionise morals and to discredit the ethical ideals which have hitherto inspired Western society.

This, I think, is one of the most significant features of the present situation. Critics of religion in the past have, as a rule, been anxious to dissociate the religious from the moral issue. They were often strict moralists, like the late John Morley, who managed to clothe atheism in the frock coat and top hat of Victorian respectability. But today the solidarity of religion and morals is admitted on both sides. If Europe abandons Christianity, it must also abandon its moral code. And conversely the modern tendency to break away from traditional morality strengthens the intellectual revolt against religious belief.

At first sight it seems as though the forces of change in the modern world were definitely hostile to religion, and that we are rapidly approaching a purely secular state of civilisation. But it is not so easy to get rid of religion as we might imagine. It is easy enough for the individual to adopt a negative attitude of critical scepticism. But if society as a whole abandons all positive beliefs, it is powerless to resist the disintegrating effects of selfishness and private interest. Every society rests in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and common ideals, and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to the loyalty of its members, it must inevitably fall to pieces.

In the past, society found this unifying principle in its religious beliefs; in fact religion was the vital centre of the whole social organism. And if a state did not already possess a common religious basis, it attempted to create one artificially, like the official Caesar-worship that became the state religion of the Roman Empire. And so, today, if the state can no longer appeal to the old moral principles that belong to the Christian tradition, it will be forced to create a new official faith and new moral principles which will be binding on its citizens.

Here again Russia supplies the obvious illustration. The Communist rejection of religion and Christian morality has not led to the abandonment of social control and the unrestricted freedom of opinion in matters of belief. On the contrary, it has involved an intensification of social control over the beliefs and the spiritual life of the individual citizen. In fact, what the Communists have done is not to get rid of religion, but merely to substitute a new and stricter Communist religion for the old official orthodoxy. The Communist Party is a religious sect which exists to spread the true faith. It has its Inquisition for the detection and punishment of heresy. It employs the weapon of excommunication against disloyal or unorthodox members. It possesses in the writings of Marx its infallible scriptures, and it reveres in Lenin, if not a God, at least a saviour and a prophet.

It may be said that this is an abnormal development due to the excesses of the Russian temperament. But it is abnormal only in its exaggerations. The moment that a society claims the complete allegiance of its members, it assumes a quasi-religious authority. For since man is essentially spiritual, any power that claims to control the whole man is forced to transcend relative and particular aims and to enter the sphere of absolute values, which is the realm of religion. On the other hand, if the state consents to the limitation of its aims to the political sphere, it has to admit that its ideal is only a relative one and that it must accept the ultimate supremacy of spiritual ideals which lie outside its province.

This is the solution that Western society has hitherto chosen, but it implies the existence of an independent spiritual power, whether it be a religious faith or a common moral ideal. If these are absent, the state is forced to claim an absolute and almost religious authority, though not necessarily in the same way that the Communist state has done. We can easily conceive a different type of secularism that conforms to the needs of capitalist society: indeed, we are witnessing the emergence of something of the kind in the United States, though it is still somewhat coloured by survivals from the older Protestant tradition.

And so too in Western Europe the tendency seems all towards the development of a purely secular type of culture which subordinates the whole of life to practical and economic ends and leaves no room for any independent spiritual activity. Nevertheless a civilisation that fails to satisfy the needs of man's spiritual nature cannot be permanently successful. It produces a state of spiritual conflict and moral maladjustment which weakens the vitality of the whole social organism. This is why our modern machine-made civilisation, in spite of the material benefits that it has conferred, is marked by a feeling of moral unrest and social discontent which was absent from the old religious cultures, although the lot of the ordinary man in them was infinitely harder from the material point of view.

You can give men food and leisure and amusements and good conditions of work, and still they will remain unsatisfied. You can deny them all these things, and they will not complain so long as they feel that they have something to die for.

Even if we regard man as an animal, we must admit that he is a peculiar sort of animal that will sacrifice his interests to his ideals—an animal that is capable of martyrdom. The statesman sees this when he appeals to the ordinary man to leave his home and his family and to go and die painfully in a ditch for the sake of his country; and the ordinary man does not refuse to go. The Communist recognises this, when he calls on the proletarian to work harder and to eat less for the sake of the Five-Year Plan and the cause of world revolution. But when the soldier comes back from the war, and the Communist has realised his Utopia, they are apt to feel a certain disproportion between their sacrifices and the fruits of their achievements.

Now it is the fundamental contradiction of materialism that it exalts the results of human achievement and at the same time denies the reality of the spiritual forces that have made this achievement possible. All the highest achievements of the human spirit, whether in the order of thought or action or moral being, rest on a spiritual absolute and become impossible in a world of purely economic or even purely human values. It is only in the light of religious experience and of absolute spiritual principles that human nature can recognise its own greatness and realise its higher potentialities.

There is a world of eternal spiritual realities in which and for which the world of man exists. That is the primary intuition that lies at the root of all religion, even of the most primitive kind. The other day I came upon a very good illustration of this, rather unexpectedly, in a passage in one of Edgar Wallace's novels in which he is describing a religious discussion between a white officer and a West African medicine-man. The former says "Where in the world are these gods of whom you are always talking?" and the savage answers, "O man, know that the Gods are not in the world; it is the world that is in the Gods."

In our modern civilised world this truth is no longer obvious; it has become dim and obscured. Nevertheless it cannot be disregarded with impunity. The civilisation that denies God denies its own foundation. For the glory of man is a dim reflection of the glory of God, and when the latter is denied the former fades.

Consequently the loss of the religious sense which is shown by the indifference or the hostility of the modern world to Christianity is one of the most serious weaknesses of our civilisation and involves a real danger to its spiritual vitality and its social stability. Man's spiritual needs are none the less strong for being unrecognised, and if they are denied their satisfaction through religion, they will find their compensation elsewhere, often in destructive and anti-social activities. The man who is a spiritual misfit becomes morally alienated from society, and whether that alienation takes the form of active hostility, as in the anarchist or the criminal, or merely of passive non-co-operation, as in the selfish individualist, it is bound to be a source of danger. The civilisation that finds no place for religion is a maimed culture that has lost its spiritual roots and is condemned to sterility and decadence. There can, I think, be little doubt that the present phase of intense secularisation is a temporary one, and that it will be followed by a far-reaching reaction. I would even go so far as to suggest that the return to religion promises to be one of the dominant characteristics of the coming age. We all know how history follows a course of alternate action and reaction, and how each century and each generation tends to contradict its predecessor. The Victorians reacted against the Georgians, and we in turn have reacted against the Victorians. We reject their standards and their beliefs, just as they rejected the standards and beliefs of their predecessors.

But behind these lesser waves of change there is a deeper movement that marks the succession of the ages. There are times when the whole spirit of civilisation becomes transformed and the stream of history seems to change its course and flow in a new direction. One such movement occurred sixteen hundred years ago, when the ancient world became Christian. Another occurred in the sixteenth century with the coming of the Renaissance and the Reformation, which brought the mediaeval world to an end and inaugurated a new age. And the forces of transformation that are at work in the world today seem to betoken the coming of another such change in the character of civilisation, which is perhaps even more fundamental than that of the sixteenth century.

All the characteristic movements that marked the culture of the last four centuries are passing away and giving place to new tendencies. We see this not only in politics and the material organisation of life, but also in art and literature and science; for example, in the tendency of modern art to abandon the naturalistic principles that governed its development from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century in favour of new canons of style that have more in common with the art of Byzantium and of the ancient East.

We are not, indeed, going back to the Middle Ages, but we are going forward to a new age which is no less different from the last age than that was from the mediaeval period.

But if this is so, may it not be that religion is one of the outworn modes of thought that are being abandoned and that the new age will be an age of rationalism and secularism and materialism? This is, as we have seen, the current belief, but then the current beliefs are always out of date. It is difficult to realise how much of current thinking belongs to the past, because it is natural for men's minds to be soaked in the mental atmosphere of the last generation, and it needs a considerable effort to see things as they are and not as other people have seen them. The artist and the philosopher and the scientist, each in his own way, sees life direct, but the majority of men see it at second-hand through the accepted ideas of their society and culture. And consequently, the tendencies that we regard as characteristic of the age are often those that are characteristic of the age that is just passing away rather than of that which is beginning.

Thus in fact the tendencies that arc hostile to religion and make for secularism and materialism are not new tendencies. They have been at work in Europe for centuries. The whole modern period from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century was a long process of revolt in which the traditional order of life and its religious foundations were being undermined by criticism and doubt. It was an age of spiritual disintegration in which Christendom was divided into a mass of warring sects, and the Churches that resisted this tendency did so only by a rigid discipline which led to religious persecution and the denial of individual freedom. And this again brought religion into conflict with the spirit of the age; for it was an age of individualism, dominated by the Renaissance ideal of liberty of thought, the Reformation ideal of liberty of conscience, the individualist ideal of economic liberty and the romantic ideal of liberty of feeling and conduct. It was an age of secularism in which the state substituted itself for the Church as the ultimate authority in men's lives and the supreme end of social activity. And finally it was an age which witnessed the triumphant development of scientific materialism, based on a mechanistic theory of the world that seemed to leave no room for human freedom or spiritual reality.

Today this process of revolution has worked itself out, so that there is hardly anything left to revolt against. After destroying the old order, we are beginning to turn round and look for some firm foundation on which we can build anew. Already in social life we are witnessing the passing of individualism and the recovery of a sense of community. In economics for example, the nineteenth-century ideal of unrestricted freedom and individual initiative has given place to an intense demand for social organisation and social control.

Looked at from this point of view, socialism and communism are not purely revolutionary and negative movements. They mark the turn of the tide. Karl Marx was among the first to feel the insufficiency of the liberal revolutionary tradition and the need for a new effort of social construction. And so he built on what seemed to his age to be an ultimate foundation—the bed-rock of scientific materialism. But today we realise that the materialistic theory of the nineteenth century was no more final than the scientific theories that it superseded. Science, which has explained so much, has ended by explaining away matter itself, and has left us with a skeleton universe of mathematical formulae. Consequently the naive materialism that regarded Matter with a capital M as the one reality is no longer acceptable, for we have come to see that the fundamental thing in the world is not Matter but Form. The universe is not just a mass of solid particles of matter governed by blind determinism and chance. It possesses an organic structure, and the further we penetrate into the nature of reality the more important does this principle of form become.

And so we can no longer dismiss mind and spiritual reality as unreal or less real than the material world, for it is just in mind and in the spiritual world that the element of form is most supreme. It is the mind that is the key of the universe, not matter. In the Beginning was the Word, and it is the creative and informing power of the Word that is the foundation of reality.

And if this is true of the world of nature, it is still more true of the world of society and culture. We must abandon the vain attempt to disregard spiritual unity and to look for a basis of social construction in material and external things. The acceptance of spiritual reality must be the basic element in the culture of the future, for it is spirit that is the principle of unity and matter that is the principle of division. And as soon as this truth is admitted, religion will no longer appear as an unessential and extraneous element in culture, but as its most vital element. For religion is the bond that unites man to spiritual reality, and it is only in religion that society can find the principle of spiritual union of which it stands in need. No secular ideal of social progress or economic efficiency can take the place of this. It is only the ideal of a spiritual order which transcends the relative value of the economic and political world that is capable of overcoming the forces of disintegration and destruction that exist in modern civilisation. The faith of the future cannot be economic or scientific or even moral; it must be religious.

This is just where the new artificial manmade religions, like Positivism, fail. They lack the one thing that is necessary, namely, religious faith. It is a complete mistake to think that we can bring religion up-to-date by making it conform to our wishes and to the dominant prejudices of the moment. If we feel that modern society is out of touch with science, we do not call on the scientists to change their views and to give us something more popular. We realise that we have got to give more thought and more work to science. In the same way the great cause of the decline of religion is that we have lost touch with it, either by abandoning religion altogether, or by contenting ourselves with a nominal outward profession that does not affect our daily life and our real interests. And the only way to bring religion into touch with the modern world is to give it the first place in our own thought and in our own lives. If we wish to be scientific, we must submit to the authority of science and sacrifice our easy acceptance of things as they seem to the severe discipline of scientific method. And in the same way, if we wish to be religious we must submit to religious authority and accept the principles of the spiritual order. In the material world, man must conform himself to realities, otherwise he will perish. And the same is true in the spiritual world. God comes first, not man. He is more real than the whole external universe. Man passes away, empires and civilisations rise and fall, the stars grow old; God remains.

This is the fundamental truth which runs through the whole of the Bible. There is, of course, a great deal more than this in Christianity. In fact, it is a truth that Christianity shares with practically all the religions of the world. Nevertheless it is just this truth that the modern world, like the ancient world before it, finds most difficult to accept. You even find people who reject it and still wish to call themselves Christians. They water down religion to a series of moral platitudes and then dignify this mixture of vague religiosity and well-meaning moral optimism with the respectable name of Christianity.

A Concrete Reality

In reality Christianity is not merely a moral ideal or set of ideas. It is a concrete reality. It is the spiritual order incarnated in a historical person and in a historical society. The spiritual order is just as real as the material order. The reason we do not see it is because we do not look at it. Our interests and our thoughts are elsewhere. A few exceptional men, mystics or philosophers, may find it possible to live habitually on a spiritual plane, but for the ordinary man it is a difficult atmosphere to breathe in. But it is the function of Christianity to bring the spiritual order into contact and relation with the world of man. It is, as it were, a bridge between the two worlds; it brings religion down into human life and it opens the door of the spiritual world to man. Its ideal is not a static and unchanging order like that of the other world religions. It is a spiritual society or organism that has incorporated itself with humanity and that takes into itself as it proceeds all that is vital and permanent in human life and civilisation. It aims at nothing less than the spiritual integration of humanity, its deliverance from the tyranny of material force and the dominion of selfish aims, and its reconstitution in spiritual unity.

And thus there are two principles in Christianity which though they sometimes appear contradictory are equally essential as the two poles of the spiritual order. There is the principle of transcendence, represented by the apocalyptic, ascetic, world-denying element in religion, and there is the principle of catholicity, which finds expression in the historic, social, world-embracing activity of the Church. A one-sided emphasis on the former of these leads to sectarianism, as we see in the history of the early Christian sects that refused all compromise with secular civilisation and stood aside in an attitude of negative and sterile isolation. But the Catholic Church rejected this solution as a betrayal of its universal mission.

It converted the ancient world; it became the Church of the Empire; and it took up into itself the traditional heritage of culture that the Puritanism of the sectaries despised. In this way the Church overcame the conflict between religion and secular culture that had weakened the forces of Roman society, and laid the foundations of a new civilisation. For more than a thousand years society found its centre of unity and its principle of order in Christianity. But the mediaeval synthesis, both in its Byzantine and mediaeval form, while it gave a more complete expression to the social function of Christianity than any other age has done, ran the risk of compromising the other Christian principle of transcendence by the immersion of the spiritual in the temporal order—the identification of the Church and the World. The history of mediaeval Christendom shows a continuous series of efforts on the part of orthodox reformers and Catharist and "spiritual" heretics against the secularisation and worldliness of the Church. And, as the wealth and intellectual culture of Western Europe increased, the tension grew more acute.

It was the coming of the Renaissance and the whole-hearted acceptance by the Papacy of the new humanist culture that stretched the mediaeval synthesis to breaking-point and produced a new outburst of reforming sectarianism. It is true that Catholicism met the challenge of the Reformation by its own movement of spiritual reform. But it failed to recover the lost unity of Christendom and was forced to lose touch with the dominant movements in secular culture. Thus Christianity withdrew more and more into the sphere of the individual religious life and the world went its own way. European civilisation was rationalised and secularised until it ceased even nominally to be Christian. Nevertheless it continued to subsist unconsciously on the accumulated capital of its Christian past, from which it drew the moral and social idealism that inspired the humanitarian and liberal and democratic movements of the last two centuries. Today this spiritual capital is exhausted, and civilisation is faced with the choice between a return to the spiritual traditions of Christianity or the renunciation of them in favour of complete social materialism.

But if Christianity is to regain its influence, it must recover its unity and its social activity. The religious individualism of the last age, with its self-centred absorption in the question of personal salvation and private religious emotion, will not help us. The Christianity of the future must be a social Christianity that is embodied in a real society, not an imaginary or invisible one. And this society must not be merely a part of the existing social and political order, like the established churches of the past; it must be an independent and universal society, not a national or local one. The only society that fulfills these conditions is the Catholic Church, the most ancient yet, at the same time, the most adaptable of all existing institutions. It is true that Catholicism has suffered grievously from the sectarian division and strife of the last four hundred years, but it has succeeded in surmounting the long drawn-out crisis that followed the dissolution of the mediaeval synthesis, and it stands out today as the one remaining centre of unity and spiritual order in Europe. If Christianity is necessary to Europe, the Catholic Church is no less necessary to Christianity, for without it the latter would become no more than a mass of divergent opinions dissolving under the pressure of rationalist criticism and secularist culture. It was by virtue of the Catholic ideal of spiritual unity that the social unity of European culture emerged from the welter of barbarism, and the modern world stands no less in need of such an ideal if it is to realise in the future the wider unity of a world civilisation.

But though Christianity is necessary to civilisation, we must not forget the profound difference that there is between them. It is the great paradox of Christianity, as Newman so often insisted, that though Christianity is a principle of life to civilisation even in secular matters, it is continually at issue with the world and always seems on the verge of being destroyed by it. Thus the Church is necessary to Europe, and yet any acceptance of the Church because it is necessary to society is destructive of its real essence. Nothing could be more fatal to the spirit of Christianity than a return to Christianity for political reasons.

But, on the other hand, any attempt to create a purely political or social religion is equally destined to fail. Nothing is more remarkable than the collapse of all the efforts to create an artificial religion to meet "the needs of the age." Deism, Saint-Simonianism, Positivism and the rest have all ended in failure. It is only a religion that transcends political and economic categories and is indifferent to material results that has the power of satisfying the need of the world. As Newman wrote eighty years ago: "the Catholic Church has accompanied human society through one revolution of its great year; and it is now beginning a second. She has passed through the full cycle of changes in order to show that she is independent of them all. She has had trial of East and West, of monarchy and democracy, of peace and war, of times of darkness and times of philosophy, of old countries and young."

And today she still stands as she did under the Roman Empire, as the representative in a changing world of an unchanging spiritual order. That is why I believe the Church that made Europe may yet save Europe, and that, in the great words of the Easter liturgy: "the whole world may experience and see what was fallen raised up, what had grown old made new, and all things returning to unity through Him from whom they took their beginning."



Christopher Dawson, 'Christianity as the Soul of the West', from the Dawson Newsletter, 1995.

Snow, Glass, Apples

I do not know what manner of thing she is. None of us do. She killed her mother in the birthing, but that's never enough to account for it.

They call me wise, but I am far from wise, for all that I foresaw fragments of it, frozen moments caught in pools of water or in the cold glass of my mirror. If I were wise I would not have tried to change what I saw. If I were wise I would have killed myself before ever I encountered her, before ever I caught him.

Wise, and a witch, or so they said, and I'd seen his face in my dreams and in reflections for all my life: sixteen years of dreaming of him before he reined his horse by the bridge that morning, and asked my name. He helped me onto his high horse and we rode together to my little cottage, my face buried in the gold of his hair. He asked for the best of what I had; a king's right, it was.

His beard was red-bronze in the morning light, and I knew him, not as a king, for I knew nothing of kings then, but as my love. He took all he wanted from me, the right of kings, but he returned to me on the following day, and on the night after that: his beard so red, his hair so gold, his eyes the blue of a summer sky, his skin tanned the gentle brown of ripe wheat.

His daughter was only a child: no more than five years of age when I came to the palace. A portrait of her dead mother hung in the princess's tower room; a tall woman, hair the colour of dark wood, eyes nut-brown. She was of a different blood to her pale daughter.

The girl would not eat with us.

I do not know where in the palace she ate.

I had my own chambers. My husband the king, he had his own rooms also. When he wanted me he would send for me, and I would go to him, and pleasure him, and take my pleasure with him.

One night, several months after I was brought to the palace, she came to my rooms. She was six. I was embroidering by lamplight, squinting my eyes against the lamp's smoke and fitful illumination. When I looked up, she was there.

"Princess?"

She said nothing. Her eyes were black as coal, black as her hair; her lips were redder than blood. She looked up at me and smiled. Her teeth seemed sharp, even then, in the lamplight.

"What are you doing away from your room?"

"I'm hungry," she said, like any child.

It was winter, when fresh food is a dream of warmth and sunlight; but I had strings of whole apples, cored and dried, hanging from the beams of my chamber, and I pulled an apple down for her.

"Here."

Autumn is the time of drying, of preserving, a time of picking apples, of rendering the goose fat. Winter is the time of hunger, of snow, and of death; and it is the time of the midwinter feast, when we rub the goose-fat into the skin of a whole pig, stuffed with that autumn's apples, then we roast it or spit it, and we prepare to feast upon the crackling.

She took the dried apple from me and began to chew it with her sharp yellow teeth.

"Is it good?"

She nodded. I had always been scared of the little princess, but at that moment I warmed to her and, with my fingers, gently, I stroked her cheek. She looked at me and smiled -- she smiled but rarely -- then she sank her teeth into the base of my thumb, the Mound of Venus, and she drew blood.

I began to shriek, from pain and from surprise; but she looked at me and I fell silent.

The little Princess fastened her mouth to my hand and licked and sucked and drank. When she was finished, she left my chamber. Beneath my gaze the cut that she had made began to close, to scab, and to heal. The next day it was an old scar: I might have cut my hand with a pocket-knife in my childhood.

I had been frozen by her, owned and dominated. That scared me, more than the blood she had fed on. After that night I locked my chamber door at dusk, barring it with an oaken pole, and I had the smith forge iron bars, which he placed across my windows.

My husband, my love, my king, sent for me less and less, and when I came to him he was dizzy, listless, confused. He could no longer make love as a man makes love; and he would not permit me to pleasure him with my mouth: the one time I tried, he started, violently, and began to weep. I pulled my mouth away and held him tightly, until the sobbing had stopped, and he slept, like a child.

I ran my fingers across his skin as he slept. It was covered in a multitude of ancient scars. But I could recall no scars from the days of our courtship, save one, on his side, where a boar had gored him when he was a youth.

Soon he was a shadow of the man I had met and loved by the bridge. His bones showed, blue and white, beneath his skin. I was with him at the last: his hands were cold as stone, his eyes milky-blue, his hair and beard faded and lustreless and limp. He died unshriven, his skin nipped and pocked from head to toe with tiny, old scars.

He weighed near to nothing. The ground was frozen hard, and we could dig no grave for him, so we made a cairn of rocks and stones above his body, as a memorial only, for there was little enough of him left to protect from the hunger of the beasts and the birds.

So I was queen.

And I was foolish, and young -- eighteen summers had come and gone since first I saw daylight -- and I did not do what I would do, now.

If it were today, I would have her heart cut out, true. But then I would have her head and arms and legs cut off. I would have them disembowel her. And then I would watch, in the town square, as the hangman heated the fire to white-heat with bellows, watch unblinking as he consigned each part of her to the fire. I would have archers around the square, who would shoot any bird or animal who came close to the flames, any raven or dog or hawk or rat. And I would not close my eyes until the princess was ash, and a gentle wind could scatter her like snow.

I did not do this thing, and we pay for our mistakes.

They say I was fooled; that it was not her heart. That it was the heart of an animal -- a stag, perhaps, or a boar. They say that, and they are wrong.

And some say (but it is her lie, not mine) that I was given the heart, and that I ate it. Lies and half-truths fall like snow, covering the things that I remember, the things I saw. A landscape, unrecognisable after a snowfall; that is what she has made of my life.

There were scars on my love, her father's thighs, and on his ballock-pouch, and on his male member, when he died.

I did not go with them. They took her in the day, while she slept, and was at her weakest. They took her to the heart of the forest, and there they opened her blouse, and they cut out her heart, and they left her dead, in a gully, for the forest to swallow.

The forest is a dark place, the border to many kingdoms; no-one would be foolish enough to claim jurisdiction over it. Outlaws live in the forest. Robbers live in the forest, and so do wolves. You can ride through the forest for a dozen days and never see a soul; but there are eyes upon you the entire time.

They brought me her heart. I know it was hers -- no sow's heart or doe's would have continued to beat and pulse after it had been cut out, as that one did.

I took it to my chamber.

I did not eat it: I hung it from the beams above my bed, placed it on a length of twine that I strung with rowan-berries, orange-red as a robin's breast; and with bulbs of garlic.

Outside, the snow fell, covering the footprints of my huntsmen, covering her tiny body in the forest where it lay.

I had the smith remove the iron bars from my windows, and I would spend some time in my room each afternoon through the short winter days, gazing out over the forest, until darkness fell.

There were, as I have already stated, people in the forest. They would come out, some of them, for the Spring Fair: a greedy, feral, dangerous people; some were stunted -- dwarfs and midgets and hunchbacks; others had the huge teeth and vacant gazes of idiots; some had fingers like flippers or crab-claws. They would creep out of the forest each year for the Spring Fair, held when the snows had melted.

As a young lass I had worked at the Fair, and they had scared me then, the forest folk. I told fortunes for the Fairgoers, scrying in a pool of still water; and, later, when I was older, in a disc of polished glass, its back all silvered -- a gift from a merchant whose straying horse I had seen in a pool of ink.

The stallholders at the fair were afraid of the forest folk; they would nail their wares to the bare boards of their stalls -- slabs of gingerbread or leather belts were nailed with great iron nails to the wood. If their wares were not nailed, they said, the forest folk would take them, and run away, chewing on the stolen gingerbread, flailing about them with the belts.

The forest folk had money, though: a coin here, another there, sometimes stained green by time or the earth, the face on the coin unknown to even the oldest of us. Also they had things to trade, and thus the fair continued, serving the outcasts and the dwarfs, serving the robbers (if they were circumspect) who preyed on the rare travellers from lands beyond the forest, or on gypsies, or on the deer. (This was robbery in the eyes of the law. The deer were the queen's.)

The years passed by slowly, and my people claimed that I ruled them with wisdom. The heart still hung above by bed, pulsing gently in the night. If there were any who mourned the child, I saw no evidence: she was a thing of terror, back then, and they believed themselves well rid of her.

Spring Fair followed Spring Fair: five of them, each sadder, poorer, shoddier than the one before. Fewer of the forest folk came out of the forest to buy. Those who did seemed subdued and listless. The stallholders stopped nailing their wares to the boards of their stalls. And by the fifth year but a handful of folk came from the forest -- a fearful huddle of little hairy men, and no-one else.

The Lord of the Fair, and his page, came to me when the fair was done. I had known him slightly, before I was queen.

"I do not come to you as my queen," he said.

I said nothing. I listened.

"I come to you because you are wise," he continued. "When you were a child you found a strayed foal by staring into a pool of ink; when you were a maiden you found a lost infant who had wandered far from her mother, by staring into that mirror of yours. You know secrets and you can seek out things hidden. My queen," he asked, "what is taking the forest folk? Next year there will be no Spring Fair. The travellers from other kingdoms have grown scarce and few, the folk of the forest are almost gone. Another year like the last, and we shall all starve."

I commanded my maidservant to bring me my looking-glass. It was a simple thing, a silver-backed glass disk, which I kept wrapped in a doe-skin, in a chest, in my chamber.

They brought it to me, then, and I gazed into it:

She was twelve and she was no longer a little child. Her skin was still pale, her eyes and hair coal-black, her lips as red as blood. She wore the clothes she had worn when she left the castle for the last time -- the blouse, the skirt, -- although they were much let-out, much mended. Over them she wore a leather cloak, and instead of boots she had leather bags, tied with thongs, over her tiny feet.

She was standing in the forest, beside a tree.

As I watched, in the eye of my mind, I saw her edge and step and flitter and pad from tree to tree, like an animal: a bat or a wolf. She was following someone.

He was a monk. He wore sackcloth, and his feet were bare, and scabbed and hard. His beard and tonsure were of a length, overgrown, unshaven.

She watched him from behind the trees. Eventually he paused for the night, and began to make a fire, laying twigs down, breaking up a robin's nest as kindling. He had a tinder-box in his robe, and he knocked the flint against the steel until the sparks caught the tinder and the fire flamed. There had been two eggs in the nest he had found, and these he ate, raw. They cannot have been much of a meal for so big a man.

He sat there in the firelight, and she came out from her hiding place. She crouched down on the other side of the fire, and stared at him. He grinned, as if it were a long time since he had seen another human, and beckoned her over to him.

She stood up and walked around the fire, and waited, an arms-length away. He pulled in his robe until he found a coin -- a tiny, copper penny, -- and tossed it to her. She caught it, and nodded, and went to him. He pulled at the rope around his waist, and his robe swung open. His body was as hairy as a bear's. She pushed him back onto the moss. One hand crept, spider-like, through the tangle of hair, until it closed on his manhood; the other hand traced a circle on his left nipple. He closed his eyes, and fumbled one huge hand under her skirt. She lowered her mouth to the nipple she had been teasing, her smooth skin white on the furry brown body of him.

She sank her teeth deep into his breast. His eyes opened, then they closed again, and she drank.

She straddled him, and she fed. As she did so a thin blackish liquid began to dribble from between her legs...

"Do you know what is keeping the travellers from our town? What is happening to the forest people?" asked the Head of the Fair.

I covered the mirror in doe-skin, and told him that I would personally take it upon myself to make the forest safe once more.

I had to, although she terrified me. I was the queen.

A foolish woman would have gone then into the forest and tried to capture the creature; but I had been foolish once and had no wish to be so a second time.

I spent time with old books, for I could read a little. I spent time with the gypsy women (who passed through our country across the mountains to the south, rather than cross the forest to the north and the west).

I prepared myself, and obtained those things I would need, and when the first snows began to fall, then I was ready.

Naked, I was, and alone in the highest tower of the palace, a place open to the sky. The winds chilled my body; goose-pimples crept across my arms and thighs and breasts. I carried a silver basin, and a basket in which I had placed a silver knife, a silver pin, some tongs, a grey robe and three green apples.

I put them down and stood there, unclothed, on the tower, humble before the night sky and the wind. Had any man seen me standing there, I would have had his eyes; but there was no-one to spy. Clouds scudded across the sky, hiding and uncovering the waning moon.

I took the silver knife, and slashed my left arm -- once, twice, three times. The blood dripped into the basin, scarlet seeming black in the moonlight.

I added the powder from the vial that hung around my neck. It was a brown dust, made of dried herbs and the skin of a particular toad, and from certain other things. It thickened the blood, while preventing it from clotting.

I took the three apples, one by one, and pricked their skins gently with my silver pin. Then I placed the apples in the silver bowl, and let them sit there while the first tiny flakes of snow of the year fell slowly onto my skin, and onto the apples, and onto the blood.

When dawn began to brighten the sky I covered myself with the grey cloak, and took the red apples from the silver bowl, one by one, lifting each into my basket with silver tongs, taking care not to touch it. There was nothing left of my blood or of the brown powder in the silver bowl, save nothing save a black residue, like a verdigris, on the inside.

I buried the bowl in the earth. Then I cast a glamour on the apples (as once, years before, by a bridge, I had cast a glamour on myself), that they were, beyond any doubt, the most wonderful apples in the world; and the crimson blush of their skins was the warm colour of fresh blood.

I pulled the hood of my cloak low over my face, and I took ribbons and pretty hair ornaments with me, placed them above the apples in the reed basket, and I walked alone into the forest, until I came to her dwelling: a high, sandstone cliff, laced with deep caves going back a way into the rock wall.

There were trees and boulders around the cliff-face, and I walked quietly and gently from tree to tree, without disturbing a twig or a fallen leaf. Eventually I found my place to hide, and I waited, and I watched.

After some hours a clutch of dwarfs crawled out of the cave-front -- ugly, misshapen, hairy little men, the old inhabitants of this country. You saw them seldom now.

They vanished into the wood, and none of them spied me, though one of them stopped to piss against the rock I hid behind.

I waited. No more came out.

I went to the cave entrance and hallooed into it, in a cracked old voice.

The scar on my Mound of Venus throbbed and pulsed as she came towards me, out of the darkness, naked and alone.

She was thirteen years of age, my stepdaughter, and nothing marred the perfect whiteness of her skin save for the livid scar on her left breast, where her heart had been cut from her long since.

The insides of her thighs were stained with wet black filth.

She peered at me, hidden, as I was, in my cloak. She looked at me hungrily. "Ribbons, goodwife," I croaked. "Pretty ribbons for your hair..."

She smiled and beckoned to me. A tug; the scar on my hand was pulling me towards her. I did what I had planned to do, but I did it more readily than I had planned: I dropped my basket, and screeched like the bloodless old pedlar woman I was pretending to be, and I ran.

My grey cloak was the colour of the forest, and I was fast; she did not catch me.

I made my way back to the palace.

I did not see it. Let us imagine though, the girl returning, frustrated and hungry, to her cave, and finding my fallen basket on the ground.

What did she do?

I like to think she played first with the ribbons, twined them into her raven hair, looped them around her pale neck or her tiny waist.

And then, curious, she moved the cloth to see what else was in the basket; and she saw the red, red apples.

They smelled like fresh apples, of course; and they also smelled of blood. And she was hungry. I imagine her picking up an apple, pressing it against her cheek, feeling the cold smoothness of it against her skin.

And she opened her mouth and bit deep into it...

By the time I reached my chambers, the heart that hung from the roof-beam, with the apples and hams and the dried sausages, had ceased to beat. It hung there, quietly, without motion or life, and I felt safe once more.

That winter the snows were high and deep, and were late melting. We were all hungry come the spring.

The Spring Fair was slightly improved that year. The forest folk were few, but they were there, and there were travellers from the lands beyond the forest.

I saw the little hairy men of the forest-cave buying and bargaining for pieces of glass, and lumps of crystal and of quartz-rock. They paid for the glass with silver coins -- the spoils of my stepdaughter's depredations, I had no doubt. When it got about what they were buying, townsfolk rushed back to their homes, came back with their lucky crystals, and, in a few cases, with whole sheets of glass.

I thought, briefly, about having them killed, but I did not. As long as the heart hung, silent and immobile and cold, from the beam of my chamber, I was safe, and so were the folk of the forest, and, thus, eventually, the folk of the town.

My twenty-fifth year came, and my stepdaughter had eaten the poisoned fruit two winters' back, when the Prince came to my Palace. He was tall, very tall, with cold green eyes and the swarthy skin of those from beyond the mountains.

He rode with a small retinue: large enough to defend him, small enough that another monarch -- myself, for instance -- would not view him as a potential threat.

I was practical: I thought of the alliance of our lands, thought of the Kingdom running from the forests all the way south to the sea; I thought of my golden-haired bearded love, dead these eight years; and, in the night, I went to the Prince's room.

I am no innocent, although my late husband, who was once my king, was truly my first lover, no matter what they say.

At first the prince seemed excited. He bade me remove my shift, and made me stand in front of the opened window, far from the fire, until my skin was chilled stone-cold. Then he asked me to lie upon my back, with my hands folded across my breasts, my eyes wide open - but staring only at the beams above. He told me not to move, and to breathe as little as possible. He implored me to say nothing. He spread my legs apart.

It was then that he entered me.

As he began to thrust inside me, I felt my hips raise, felt myself begin to match him, grind for grind, push for push. I moaned. I could not help myself.

His manhood slid out of me. I reached out and touched it, a tiny, slippery thing.

"Please," he said, softly. "You must neither move, nor speak. Just lie there on the stones, so cold and so fair."

I tried, but he had lost whatever force it was that had made him virile; and, some short while later, I left the Prince's room, his curses and tears still resounding in my ears.

He left early the next morning, with all his men, and they rode off into the forest.

I imagine his loins, now, as he rode, a knot of frustration at the base of his manhood. I imagine his pale lips pressed so tightly together. Then I imagine his little troupe riding through the forest, finally coming upon the glass-and-crystal cairn of my stepdaughter. So pale. So cold. Naked, beneath the glass, and little more than a girl, and dead.

In my fancy, I can almost feel the sudden hardness of his manhood inside his britches, envision the lust that took him then, the prayers he muttered beneath his breath in thanks for his good fortune. I imagine him negotiating with the little hairy men - offering them gold and spices for the lovely corpse under the crystal mound.

Did they take his gold willingly? Or did they look up to see his men on their horses, with their sharp swords and their spears, and realize they had no alternative?

I do not know. I was not there; I was not scrying. I can only imagine...

Hands, pulling off the lumps of glass and quartz from her cold body. Hands, gently caressing her cold cheek, moving her cold arm, rejoicing to find the corpse still fresh and pliable.

Did he take her there, in front of them all? Or did he have her carried to a secluded nook before he mounted her?

I cannot say.

Did he shake the apple from her throat? Or did her eyes slowly open as he pounded into her cold body; did her mouth open, those red lips part, those sharp yellow teeth close on his swarthy neck, as the blood, which is the life, trickled down her throat, washing down and away the lump of apple, my own, my poison?

I imagine; I do not know.

This I do know: I was woken in the night by her heart pulsing and beating once more. Salt blood dripped onto my face from above. I sat up. My hand burned and pounded as if I had hit the base of my thumb with a rock.

There was a hammering on the door. I felt afraid, but I am a queen, and I would not show fear. I opened the door.

First his men walked in to my chamber, and stood around me, with their sharp swords, and their long spears.

Then he came in; and he spat in my face.

Finally, she walked into my chamber, as she had when I was first a queen, and she was a child of six. She had not changed. Not really.

She pulled down the twine on which her heart was hanging. She pulled off the dried rowan berries, one by one; pulled off the garlic bulb - now a dried thing, after all these years; then she took up her own, her pumping heart -- a small thing, no larger than that of a nanny-goat or a she-bear -- as it brimmed and pumped its blood into her hand.

Her fingernails must have been as sharp as glass: she opened her breast with them, running them over the purple scar. Her chest gaped, suddenly, open and bloodless. She licked her heart, once, as the blood ran over her hands, and she pushed the heart deep into her breast.

I saw her do it. I saw her close the flesh of her breast once more. I saw the purple scar begin to fade.

Her prince looked briefly concerned, but he put his arm around her nonetheless, and they stood, side by side, and they waited.

And she stayed cold, and the bloom of death remained on her lips, and his lust was not diminished in any way.

They told me they would marry, and the kingdoms would indeed be joined. They told me that I would be with them on their wedding day.

It is starting to get hot in here.

They have told the people bad things about me; a little truth to add savour to the dish, but mixed with many lies.

I was bound and kept in a tiny stone cell beneath the palace, and I remained there through the autumn. Today they fetched me out of the cell; they stripped the rags from me, and washed the filth from me, and then they shaved my head and my loins, and they rubbed my skin with goose grease.

The snow was falling as they carried me -- two men at each hand, two men at each leg -- utterly exposed, and spread-eagled and cold, through the midwinter crowds; and brought me to this kiln.

My stepdaughter stood there with her prince. She watched me, in my indignity, but she said nothing.

As they thrust me inside, jeering and chaffing as they did so, I saw one snowflake land upon her white cheek, and remain there without melting.

They closed the kiln-door behind me. It is getting hotter in here, and outside they are singing and cheering and banging on the sides of the kiln.

She was not laughing, or jeering, or talking. She did not sneer at me or turn away. She looked at me, though; and for a moment I saw myself reflected in her eyes.

I will not scream. I will not give them that satisfaction. They will have my body, but my soul and my story are my own, and will die with me.

The goose-grease begins to melt and glisten upon my skin. I shall make no sound at all. I shall think no more on this.

I shall think instead of the snowflake on her cheek.

I think of her hair as black as coal, her lips as red as blood, her skin, snow-white.


Neil Gaiman, 'Snow, Glass, Apples', 1994

'A piano duet with the Pope - now that would be something'

Speaking just before his first extended audience with Benedict XVI, the Archbishop of Canterbury talks to Freddy Gray about Richard Dawkins, women priests – and how close he is to Catholicism

Archbishop, throughout history people have struggled to understand that Jesus is both fully God and fully man. Some eras have underlined the divinity of Christ, presenting him as a terrifying judge of mankind. Others have focused so much on his humanity that he seemed little more than a good man who taught us to be kind to others. I wonder where you think we are today: what are the characteristic insights and blind spots of our own age in relation to Jesus?

It’s a wonderful question to start with because it is the most central that there could be. When I look at the history of the Christian Church, especially in the early centuries, what strikes me as extraordinary is that the temptation to go overboard for one or the other – the humanity or the divinity – is always there. The Church always resists it and says: “No, you’ve got to have both.” But the balance has never been easy, I think.

Interesting that in the question the divinity of Jesus is associated with being a terrifying judge of mankind. I would say that the divinity of Jesus is about the Mystical Body; it’s about Jesus as that end of life into which Christians are incorporated and which they express in the Eucharist. I think that is what we are missing today. We talk about devotion to Jesus. We talk about the quest for the historical Jesus. What often slips out of focus is that sense of the sacramental Christ. The life of the risen Christ is the life out of which flows the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit incorporates us, binds us into that Life, gives us the right to pray “Abba, Father” and gives us the right, in the Eucharist, to join in the prayer of Jesus as we receive the life of Jesus. That is the foundation of private and public prayer – the whole thing. One of the greatest influences for me was the theology of the liturgical movement of the 20th century – Gregory Dix or Lambert Beauduin, the Belgian.

When you write about the Incarnation you often use words such as “disruption”, “interruption”, “upheaval” and “bewilderment”. Are you concerned that many Christians have become too familiar with the idea of God become man and need to let themselves be shaken to their core by it again?

Perhaps not so much “familiar” as almost a “don’t call us” mentality. When Dorothy Sayers was writing her radio plays about the life of Jesus she wrote lots of letters about them to various people and published those letters. She said: “What have we done? This is the most extraordinary thing you could imagine: the Maker of the universe sitting down to scrub his toenails on a roadside in Galilee. How on earth have we managed to make that boring?”

You know, it may be true. It may be false. It may be nonsense. But it is not boring. That is what I am trying to get at using words like “disruption” and so forth. What I see happening in the New Testament – to use the phrase that has been used by a couple of other writers – is that there’s been some sort of explosion and here are all these people picking round the edge of a crater to see what has happened. A sort of Dr Who scenario. Because the words that you’ve got and the ideas that you’ve got are not going to be adequate to what’s happened. So in the New Testament, you see John or Paul feeling their way into a new vocabulary. What have we got to say about this event? What must we say in order to capture the fullness of it?

When you were chosen to be Archbishop of Canterbury you famously said: “If there's one thing I long for above all else, it's that the years to come may see Christianity in this country able again to capture the imagination of our culture, to draw the strongest energies of our thinking and feeling.” Why did Christianity lose its grip on the imagination of the British people?

I don’t really know. I think it is a little bit to do with this routinising of our talk and our worship which all the churches – yours and mine – are involved in. It’s a little bit to do also with that curious post-Second World War loss of nerve in Britain. There was a very interesting study recently by a young scholar called Matthew Grimley, who said that the problem after the Second World War wasn’t that people stopped believing in Christianity; they stopped believing in moral communities. That sagged and a rather materialistic, pragmatic spirit dug itself in a little further. I think we are still dealing with the consequences of that.

But do you think that modern Christianity might focus too much on the faith as a binder of communities, rather than something much more substantial?

There is a danger there. There are elements in government and public life which would love to have religious communities doing their work for them: binding communities. But it can’t just be social cement. It has got to be a real inspiration, in the sense of seeing people and the world differently. When I was a research student I met someone who had been a close friend of a very, very remarkable old émigré woman Sonya Zernova. She, like many Russian émigrés, was, although firmly anti-Bolshevist, a great believer in justice. She used to go and nag factory owners in France. One of them apparently said: “Why do you bother with these people? They are just animals.” And she said: “No, they are images of God. That is why I bother about them.” Now, that’s capturing the imagination.

Do you think there are signs of growth, a recapturing of the imagination?

Well, there is a lot of interest isn’t there? A couple of nights ago we had the launch of Theos, a new Christian think-tank. We had a very interesting discussion with Shirley Williams, Madeleine Bunting and Frank Field, who I think disagreed quite a bit about how near we were to a rediscovery of Christianity. Madeleine was pretty pessimistic. Shirley was a bit more optimistic. The interest is there and one sort of advantage is that a lot of people are now so ignorant of the Christian narrative and Christian imagery that it comes to them freshly.

So the further society gets from faith, the more we want it?

In one way. We may be better equipped to hear it as if it really were new – that is not impossible. When Philip Pullman’s plays were on at the National, I did a conversation with him. The response to that was very interesting: a lot of young people in the wake of that clearly wanted to know what I was talking about.
The difficulty is that a lot of religious journalists, or people who think they know a bit about religious journalism, tend to have stereotypes about Christian belief: you know, either you are a liberal or you are a fundamentalist. In the middle of all that there is something much more interesting, I think, which is the great tradition that the Church proclaims and which I think, again, ought not to be boring.

Many people seem to instinctively reject Richard Dawkins, though he is the bestseller at the moment.

That’s interesting, isn’t it? I think it works in two ways. First of all, people are always a bit suspicious of people who are overdoing the argument and Dawkins is inclined to go over the top in what he says about the intellectual and moral corruption of religion.

Second, there is perhaps just a touch of scepticism about science. People have gone a bit beyond the idea that scientists are automatically to be listened to and believed when they talk outside their field. We are much more suspicious about science than we might have been 20 or 30 years ago. People think there is something a little bit fishy about science now. It’s leading us in directions that we can’t cope with. The fact that Dawkins is a very, very good scientist doesn’t automatically mean that he is a very good philosopher … which he isn’t.

There is a burgeoning publishing industry devoted to announcing the imminent death of Anglicanism. A recent example is entitled Last Rites and is cheerfully subtitled The End of the Church of England. Does the Church of England still have the power to shape culture, or is it only able to be shaped by it?

“The Church of England as it now is no human power can save.” Those words were spoken in 1831, at the time of the Reform Bill, so a little bit of historical perspective comes in handy. At the same time, it is clear that the Anglican Church worldwide, as it has evolved, has got to find some new ways of relating and organising its life because we have depended a little bit too much on what you might call “gentlemen’s agreements”. As the Church has become so much more diverse, then the old notion of a kind of spiritual version of the British Commonwealth becomes less plausible. We have got to do more and better theology and more and better thinking about structures. We are trying to do it, with the Windsor Report and so on…

As for the Church of England, you do get wildly differing accounts don’t you? I have looked at Michael Hampson’s book, and it doesn’t do me any favours. But my feeling is that, on the ground, parish life is pretty much what it was.

There are real points of strain, especially finding enough volunteers to keep certain bits of the administration going – parish treasurers and so forth. At the same time, there are largely uncontrolled and unplanned bits of growth. My sense is of lots and lots of parishes that are very effectively plugged into their local communities, working, often heroically, with very limited resources with young people and young families. And while they have all sorts of anxieties about finance and maintenance, there is a basic confidence which I find very striking. It’s not as if everywhere is in decline and low morale.

That’s not to ignore the points of strain and the challenges – like all churches we face huge challenges. I don’t sense, though, that in the majority of parishes there is a massive crisis of confidence. The decline in Sunday worshippers, which again affects all the churches, seems to have slowed a bit and we are beginning to realise that we have got to count in those who don’t worship on Sundays for whatever reason – those who, if you like, slip through the net of counting and what we get is not a straight downward graph but a diffused pattern of loyalty to the Church much more varied than it was a generation ago. And at the same time also we have a rising number of candidates for ordination, quite startlingly in a way. Having said last year that I thought we needed a really substantial percentage increase in candidates under 30, I look at the statistics this year and rather to my surprise they seemed to have got it. But shaping and being shaped was the question wasn’t it? I think it does still shape culture to a remarkable extent and the first of the two areas where this is most obvious is education, where it is still quite clear that people at large have an investment in a religious dimension to education, however much columnists in certain newspapers don’t like it. The other area is this question of partnership, regeneration, and the fact that in so many areas of our country the Church is the only organisation that has a non-negotiable long-term presence in the community. The building, the priest, the very fact of a regular activity, a resource for the community, a professional who lives in the middle of the community and doesn’t commute in – these are shaping things. It is partly because of that there remains this sense that the Church is there for people and exercising a kind of pull.
Shaping on the wider stage, the country as a whole, harder to say. It is interesting that, in talking about the reform of the Lords for example, there is a surprising reluctance on the part of those discussing it to say: “Well, we can just dispense with the bishops and / or the guaranteed religious element.”

Does this not tie in with the twinning of Anglican identity with Britishness? Do you think that can both hold the Anglican Communion back and hold it together? I think what we are seeing is the swings and roundabouts of that. There is something about the involvement of the Church of England in the British political identity that is a very useful springboard for the work of the Gospel, but it something also that can be a bit of straightjacket in the global Church as it emerges. Part of my job, having a role in England and a role in the Communion, is trying to ride those two horses.

Your book on St Teresa of Avila suggested that you have a quite remarkable affinity for the Catholic world, for its saints, theologians and artists. Could you tell me about your relationship with the Catholic Church and how it has influenced your life?

The Welsh environment in which I grew up was, on the whole, deeply suspicious of Catholics. Catholics were foreigners: Irish, Italian or Spanish. You might be surprised to know there was a substantial Spanish community in the upper Swansea valley in the mid-20th century. The Spanish were right out of consideration; the Irish were just a local nuisance; the Italians were tolerable just because they had very nice ice-cream shops. When we started attending a rather more Anglo-Catholic parish church in Swansea that was a sort of gentle introduction to an awareness of other kinds of priority and shape for worship. We’d moved house; we’d moved from a context in which we had been regular members of a Presbyterian chapel to a village where the parish church was the most important religious presence, which we loved, and the whole family had flung itself into enthusiastically. It was a curate in the parish who, when I was about 14, lent me some of his books to read, including St Teresa’s autobiography. So I was beginning to find my way in this, to understand a bit about the monastic tradition, about traditions of prayer. The teaching we had in the parish was solidly sacramental, very much focused on the Eucharist. It was old-fashioned High Churchery, but with very serious emphasis on the centrality of the Sunday morning parish Eucharist and the daily Mass in the parish. That’s what I grew up with and it still forms who I am and what I am as a Christian. And an interest in both history and literature in school intensified that. All of that helped me find my way a bit into the Catholic world.

How close did you get to becoming a Roman Catholic?

I thought about it a lot for several years, during most of my student years. That was a time when the biggest influences on me were coming from one or another kind of Catholic environment. I was reading St John of the Cross and a lot of that tradition. I was making retreats regularly at Benedictine monasteries. Also, writers like Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar were the people who got me excited. And I was thinking about whether my calling was in monastic life and, if so, was it in that sort of context? The thing I couldn’t quite manage was, as it were, signing up to the theology of the papacy as it evolved. I couldn’t cope with Vatican I. And I didn’t think that it was particularly honest to pretend otherwise or cut a corner. So I sat there chewing my nails for quite a while, not quite sure what would emerge. I think it was the experience of teaching theology to Anglican candidates for ordination that made me feel: “Well, they’re coping with it. Perhaps I need to cope with it and offer myself in good faith for ordination in the Anglican Church and see what happens.”

So it would be the decree from Vatican I on papal infallibility that proved the real obstacle?

That’s what I found the hardest, but there were other things that I wasn’t comfortable with: some aspects of the doctrine of grace as it evolved, but I think it was that that was the really tough thing.

What aspects of the doctrine of grace?

Oh, I could never quite get my mind round indulgences and the slightly, without being unkind, mechanical, factory approach.

What attracted you then?

The life of prayer, the life of sacraments. I found that technical side harder. I think that is where my studies of the Eastern Orthodox tradition came in at that point, because I was researching Russian Christianity at that period. That had the kind of scepticism about the papacy and about certain aspects of the doctrine of grace that I thought: “Yeah, OK, I understand those questions.” So that is why I am not…

A Catholic?

Yes.

Last year the book Father Joe by Tony Hendra appeared. This brought the extraordinary personality of Dom Joseph Warrilow vividly to life. You have described yourself as one of Fr Joe’s “spiritual children”. What did he mean to you?

For several years, everything in terms of nurture and encouragement. His photograph is still on my desk. I think it was, as Tony Hendra describes, the sense of being taken completely seriously and having somebody’s love and prayerful attention just wrapping you around, with no reproach and no agenda – just that sense of, yes, an unconditional love. I have seldom met it in anyone, but there was this remarkable man who was just there in that way. Tony Hendra says at end of the book how surprising it was for him and for many people to find that, where they had thought that they were the really special person for Joe, there were about 500 others. For somebody to give that sense of absolute specialness to quite so many people is amazing. Theirs is a sort of freemasonry of people you bump into and say: “Ah yes, one of Joe’s boys.”

Did you discuss joining the monastic life with him?

I discussed that and all sorts of aspects with him. And the great thing was he never put me under any pressure. He helped me see what was true and what was false. He’d very gently say: “Look, aren’t you being a bit romantic about all of this? Don’t try and be more holy than you need be. Take it gently and say your prayers.”

How would he have answered your concerns about the papal infallibility?

I still remember the conversation we had about it, because it very nearly tipped me over. He said: “Well, I have always thought of it as being a bit like the promise you make of being obedient to the abbot. You’re in the community. You acknowledge where the leadership is. You just say: ‘OK, I am committed to that.’ Well, if only it were that… but a great man for whom I give thanks constantly.

In 2002 you published a book about praying with icons of the Virgin. Are you that most remarkable of things: a Marian Archbishop of Canterbury?

Well, I’d like to think I was a Christian Archbishop of Canterbury and therefore a Marian Archbishop of Canterbury. The kind of Anglicanism in which I grew up with wasn’t panicked by the idea that a proper devotion to Mary was part of proper Christian practice. It was when I was bishop in Wales that this came home more because I used to take groups from the diocese every year to Walsingham for a week.
We would take quite a big group from the diocese, 90-odd people sometimes. And I remember the first time I took such a group thinking that there is something about this environment and people discovering Mary as a mother and as a sister in the Church, something so life-giving and liberating for people, that I really need to rediscover.

Would you feel uncomfortable with the Marian Catholicism that John Paul II showed?

It is more overt and more emotional than something I feel entirely at ease with. But it is not something I feel repelled by – quite the contrary. It’s a cliché, but I think it’s important that if you take the humanity of Jesus seriously, then you’ve got to understand that that humanity is shaped by Mary.

The American Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor was once invited to a New York literary salon. Over dinner the hostess, who had the power to make or break writers’ careers, said that she believed the Eucharist was merely a “symbol”. Flannery O’Connor replied: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” Later, O’Connor wrote that there was no other answer she could have given, because the Eucharist “is the centre of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable”.

I think that is a wonderful quote and I want to stand and applaud it.

Is that also true of you?

I think so, but I might want to refine the language a bit. Of course, the Eucharist is a symbol, but I think what Flannery O’Connor was saying is that if it is just a symbol in the sense that it is something detached from what it is about, and it is just working in your mind -- well, no, that’s not it. The Eucharist is not a visual aid and it’s not a jog to memory. It’s an event, an encounter. And if it is not an event in which some utterly earth-shaking change occurs, if it is not an encounter with the risen Christ, well, indeed, to hell with it. It just becomes something that we do as opposed to something God offers or does. That’s at the centre of my own feeling about the Eucharist.

But how close can Anglicanism get to transubstantiation?

I think partly because of the Thirty-Nine Articles giving transubstantiation a very bad press, Anglicans don’t especially want to go down that route. In spite of a lot of very interesting work – P J Fitzpatrick’s book – on the Eucharist, I still think there is a problem being bound to that particular theory of what happens. What I want to say: the bread and the wine, the sacrament, become fully and perfectly the carriers of the agency of Jesus, as fully as his literal flesh and blood are the carriers of his agency and identity. And what that means and how that happens, I am not sure we can carve up quite as neatly as St Thomas.

You are going to have your first extended audience with Pope Benedict XVI later this month. Cynics say there is little point in a meeting between the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury, given that, despite frantic ecumenical efforts, the two communions are drifting ever further apart. Barring some extraordinary intervention by the Holy Spirit, full, visible unity is out of the question. What is there left to talk about?

I don’t of course entirely bar extraordinary interventions of the Holy Spirit. But what is there left to talk about? Any number of things, really. I think we simply have to try and understand each other for one thing. Why is it that the ordination of women has become such a touchstone of “yes” or “no” between our churches? At the very least, we need to understand what is happening there. Can we talk about where we see the unity of the Church lying? What do Anglicans mean by the unity of the Church? We need to be pressed on that. Equally, we want to press just how much the papacy has changed and how much it might change – plenty of conversation to go on. But also, and this is a very important strategic point for us at the moment, we are now not two churches competing for a limited market: we are two churches standing in the middle of a secular and unfriendly environment and also in the middle of a world whose practical needs are enormous, needs which the Church is in a unique position to help with.

So what we are trying to do at the moment is to diversify a bit, not just talking about institutional unity but talking about what are the practical means of collaboration, which is why when I go to Rome I am meeting the Secretariat of State and the congregation for evangelisation, not just Christian unity. Yesterday morning Cardinal Martino was sitting where you are sitting and we were talking about how we might better work together on the development agenda in Africa. In Sudan the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches have an extraordinary record of collaboration and we’re trying to work out whether we take that further, especially with education and reconstruction in southern Sudan. So there is quite a lot to talk about, and all of that happens because we feel there is enough in the bag in the way of doctrinal agreement for us to feel we can recognise each other and even though we may have hit the buffers a bit in terms of institutional reconciliation there is actually still quite a lot to do. So I don’t feel gloomy about that.

So the focus is not on Christian unity but on overcoming secularism?

Yes, and to Christian mission and to our common task in resisting the assumptions that are hostile to Christianity. That’s not to say we stop thinking about unity question. Certainly not. And of course we pray every day for the unity of the Church. It’s just a bit harder to see how we get to it.

In his address to the Church of England bishops in June Cardinal Walter Kasper identified women’s ordination as the key problem in relations between Rome and Canterbury. Has the introduction of women priests into the Church of England brought all the benefits that you hoped for and are you therefore satisfied that it was worth the deterioration in relations with Rome that it caused?

Two points. One, I think some Anglicans are quite surprised at just how high up the scale of theological priorities the women’s issue turned out to be. I have often referred to the fact that in the ARCIC document on ministry the whole foundation for theological agreement about what we mean by ordained ministry is sorted, and then there is a footnote saying: “Of course, there is an issue about the gender of people being ordained, but leave that for now.” Now, I think on the basis of that it is a bit surprising that it turned out to be quite so important. But of course in the late Pope’s pontificate a whole lot of new considerations about the theology of the role of women came in and were given quite strong priority in a way which made this much more complicated. So I could express the point crudely by saying it is not just the Anglican Church that has moved: there have been developments in the Roman Catholic Church as well.

The interesting question is: has it been worth it? When the Church of England decided to ordain women as priests I think all sorts of things were going on. But it wasn’t just because we thought it would be useful, but because we thought it was right, that there was actually something about the ordained priesthood carrying and representing the whole body of the baptised that we felt would be lost or obscured if things remained solely male. My own theological view rests very strongly on that conviction: that a baptised woman and a baptised man relate to Jesus Christ in the same way. And if that is the case, I believe that either may be called. So we did it because we thought it was right, knowing something of the price it would exact but not, I think, knowing just how difficult it would be.

Had we known how difficult it would be, would it have stopped us? I suspect not. And that sounds a bit blunt, but I think there was sufficient depth of theological conviction in the Church of England to feel that it would somehow be wrong and no real compliment to the Roman Catholic Church if we held back and said: “Well, you know, we won’t hurt your feelings.”

Perhaps it is ridiculous to say that it happened too quickly…

Two thousand years! No, I understand what you mean – the way it happened and the fact that it began with irregular ordinations in the United States. I just wish that the Communion as a whole could have settled this together, even if that had taken a bit longer. But what we had was one province here, one province there, one saying “no”, the other saying “yes”. That wasn’t the best way of doing it, but given the diffuse way in which the Communion works I don’t quite see how it could have been otherwise.
I don’t think it was too hasty. After all, the discussion had been going for a good 20 years – more than that really – several votes, several synod discussions, innumerable papers. I don’t think it could have been put off much longer.

As for the issue of women bishops, would that thicken the wedge between you and Rome?

It’s certainly not going to make it any easier, and those of us who care about our relations with the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches are going to find it very hard that this is undoubtedly going to be another cause of concern. But we are in the process at moment of discerning how and when, and I don’t think I want to foreclose on that. I can’t see a theological objection, but we know that the practical cost is high. We all know that and Cardinal Kasper reminded us of that very forcefully.

Do you anticipate the same sort of rebellion as occurred with women priests?

We are undoubtedly going to have internal division. The most time-consuming and energy-consuming thing at the moment in all this is working out how that is dealt with justly and creatively, not just reactively, in a way that honours the convictions of those who can’t go along with this.

But the level of division has not shaken your conviction that it was the right thing to do initially?

No, it hasn’t. It has tested it, it really has, and there have been moments when I have felt that. But I think perhaps what one doesn’t always realise is how very, very normal this has come to feel for the huge majority of Anglicans and it hasn’t undermined what people feel about the ministry of the sacraments. So that now that putting it back in the bottle is not an option.

I don’t think it has transformed or renewed the Church of England in spectacular ways. Equally, I don’t think it has corrupted or ruined the Church of England in spectacular ways. It has somehow got into the bloodstream and I don’t give it a second thought these days, in terms of regular worship.

There can be no going back then?

I don’t see how there can be. I could just about envisage a situation in which over a very long period the Anglican Church thought again about it, but I would need to see what the theological reason for that would be and I don’t see it at the moment.
I don’t think, practically, there’s going back. It is a matter of containing and managing the diversity.

How disappointed are you that there will be no ceremony in the Sistine Chapel marking the 40th anniversary of the historic meeting between Paul VI and Archbishop Ramsey?

I am just delighted that we have been given a chance to pray together and we have been given such generous time in the meeting.

It would have been nice iconically to have a meeting in the Sistine Chapel but I think we also have the sense from 40 years ago that it was unique and now it is routine.

Pope Benedict XVI’s address at Regensburg provoked an outcry in the Muslim world. But the address was not so much a critique of Islam as an attack on Western secularists who seek to exclude the sacred from public life. Did you find the Pope’s argument persuasive? And do you think it can be applied to the present, somewhat hysterical, debate about secularism in Britain?

I don’t think there is any division between us on that matter and some of the interventions I have tried to make recently have been shoving that forward. One of the lectures I will be giving in Rome will be partly about this subject.

I thought the Pope made an extremely interesting point about what we now understand about reason.

And whatever the Emperor Paleologus may have said, the point that reason and faith are not automatic opposites is one we really need to ponder.

We have bought into a view of reason sometimes that is so trivial and functionalist that we need to recover something of the patristic, early medieval sense of the reasoning capacity as part of the image of God.

Is it equally worrying that reason has detached itself from faith, as it is that faith appears to be distancing itself from reason?

Yes, so there are really important markers there. We will want to talk about that.

Do you agree with his term “the dictatorship of relativism”?

I have read what he has said about that not only in his pontificate but also before. Yes, I think the challenge of subjectivism, individualism, the idea that all society can do is gently regulate a set of individual agendas, is a really dangerous view.

Do you think that the British Government has presented multiculturalism in a relativistic manner?

Not necessarily. If what the Government is doing is to allow different communities to have responsible debate in public, then OK. The worry is where Government, or popular opinion, tries to say: “OK, everybody get out of the room. Put the Muslims away in that cupboard and the Christians away in that cupboard and we will have nice reasonable discussion.” But there is nobody there.

You and the Holy Father will have much ecumenical business to discuss. But if you have time for a more general conversation what would you most like to talk to him about?

I think the one obvious answer is Mozart. I know that the Pope is a musician and if we have a chance to talk about something other than theology that would be one of my first choices.

Maybe you could play the piano together?

That would be something: the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Pope playing duets.




The Catholic Herald

To His Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

'To His Coy Mistress', Andrew Marvell

Tea

One or two Americans have asked me why the English like tea so much, which never seems to them a very good drink. To understand, you have to make it properly.

There is a very simple principle to the making of tea, and it’s this – to get the proper flavour of tea, the water has to be boiling (not boiled) when it hits the tea leaves. If it’s simply hot, then the tea will be insipid. That’s why we English have these odd rituals, such as warming the teapot first (so as not to cause the boiling water to cool down too fast as it hits the pot). And that’s why the American habit of brining a teacup, a tea bag, and a pot of hot water is merely the perfect way of making a thin watery cup of tea that nobody in their right mind would want to drink. The Americans are all mystified about why the English make such a big thing out of tea because most Americans HAVE NEVER HAD A GOOD CUP OF TEA. That’s why they don’t understand. In fact, the truth of the matter is that most English people don’t know how to make tea anymore either, and most people drink cheap instant coffee instead, which is a pity, and gives Americans the impression that the English are just generally clueless about stimulants.

So, the best advice I can give to an American arriving in England is this: Go to Marks and Spencer and buy a packet of Earl Grey tea. Go back to where you’re staying and boil a kettle of water. While it is coming to the boil, open the sealed packet and sniff. Careful – you may feel a bit dizzy, but this is in fact perfectly legal. When the kettle has boiled, pour a little of it into a teapot, swirl it around, and tip it out again. Put a couple (or three, depending on the size of the pot) of tea bags into the pot. (If I was really trying to lead you into the paths of righteousness, I would tell you to use free leaves rather than bags, but let’s just take this in easy stages.) Bring the kettle back up to the boil, and then pour the boiling water as quickly as you can into the pot. Let it stand for two or three minutes, and then pour it into a cup. Some people will tell you that you shouldn’t have milk with Earl Grey, just a slice of lemon. Screw them. I like it with milk. If you think you will like it with milk, then it’s probably best to pour some milk into the bottom of the cup before you pour in the tea.* If you pour milk into a cup of hot tea, you will scald the milk. If you think you will prefer it with a slice of lemon, then, well, add a slice of lemon.

Drink it. After a few moments you will begin to think that the place you’ve come to isn’t maybe quite so strange and crazy after all.


*This is socially incorrect. The socially correct way of pouring tea is to put the milk in after the tea. Social correctness has traditionally had nothing whatsoever to do with reason, logic, or physics. In fact, in England it is generally considered socially incorrect to know stuff or to think about things. It’s worth bearing this in mind when visiting.



Douglas Adams, 'Tea,' The Salmon of Doubt, 67-69

Plutarch on the Battle of Champions

When Argives and Spartans were contending for the Thyreatis, the Amphictyonic Assembly decreed that three hundred of each should fight, and the country should belong to the victors. The Spartans accordingly made Othryades their general, and the Argives made Thersander theirs. In the battle two of the Argives survived, Agenor and Chromius, who brought to their city the report of their victory. But when the battlefield was deserted Othryades revived, and, supporting himself on spear-shafts broken in two, despoiled and stripped the corpses of their shields and when he had erected a trophy, he wrote with his own blood upon it: 'To Zeus, Guardian of Trophies.' And when the two peoples still disputed over the victory, the Amphictyonic Assembly, after a personal inspection of the battlefield, decided in favour of the Spartans. Thus Chrysermus in the third book of his Peloponnesian History.



Plutarch, Moralia, 330 A-B

The Fiddler of Dooney

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Moharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time,
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle
And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’
And dance like a wave of the sea.



W.B. Yeats, 'The Fiddler of Dooney'

The Fire of Pure Being

He was a marvellous talker, a magical talker, and I wish I were able to give a better idea of what he said, but it is impossible for a mediocre intellect to render the speech of a superior one - especially after so many years - without losing a good deal in the translation. The discussion that day was about loss of self, about Plato's four divine madnesses, about madness of all sorts; he began by talking about what he called the burden of the self, and why people want to lose the self in the first place.

'Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?' he said, looking round the table. 'Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls - which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think? Remember the Erinyes?

'The Furies,' said Bunny, his eyes dazzled and lost beneath the bang of hair.

'Exactly. And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn't stand it.

'And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely? Love? Yes, but as old Cephalus once heard Sophocles say, the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods. war? One can lose oneself in the joy of battle, in fighting for a glorious cause, but there are not a great many glorious causes for which to fight these days.' He laughed. 'Though after your Xenophon and Thucydides I dare say there are not many young people better versed in military tactics. I'm sure, if you wanted to, you'd be quite capable of marching on Hampden town and taking it over by yourselves.'

Henry laughed. 'We coul do it this afternoon, with six men,' he said.

'How?' said everyone at once.

'One person to cut the phone and power lines, one at the bridge over the Battenkill, one at the main road out, to the north. The rest of us could advance from the south and west. There aren't many of us, but if we scattered we'd be able to close off all the other points of entry' - here he held out his hand, fingers spread wide - 'and advance to the center from all points.' The fingers closed into a fist. 'Of course, we'd have the advantage of surprise,' he said, and I felt an unexpected thrill at the coldness of his voice.

Julian laughed. 'And how many years has it been since the gods have intervened in human wars? i expect Apollo and Athene Nike would come down to fight at your side, "invited or univited," as the oracle at Delphi said to the Spartans. imagine what heroes you'd be.'

'Demigods,' said Francis, laughing. 'We could sit on thrones in the town square.'

'While the local merchants paid you tribute.'

'Gold. Peacocks and ivory.'

'Cheddar cheese and common crackers more like it,' Bunny said.

'Bloodshed is a terrible thing,' said Julian hastily - the remark about the common crackers had displeased him - 'but the bloodiest parts of Homer and Aeschylus are often the most manificent - for example, that glorious speech of Klytemnestra's in the Agamemnon that I love so much - Camilla, you were our Klytemnestra when we did the Oresteia; do you remember any of it?'

The light from the window was streaming directly into her face; in such strong light most people look somewhat washed out, but her clear fine features were only illuminated until it was a shock to look at her, at her pale and radiant eyes with their sooty lashes, at the gold glimmer at her temple that blended gradually into her glossy hair, warm as honey. 'I remember a little,' she said.

Looking at a spot on the wall above my head, she began to recite the lines. I stared at her. Did she have a boyfriend, Francis maybe? He and she were fairly chummy, but Francis didn't look like the sort who would be too interested in girls. Not that I stood much of a chance, surrounded as she was by all these clever rich boys in dark suits; me, with my clumsy hands and suburban ways.

Her voice in Greek was harsh and low and lovely.

Thus he died, and the life struggled out of him;
and as he died he spattered me with the dark red
and violent-driven rain of bitter-savored blood
to make me glad, as gardens stand among the showers
of god in glory at the birthtime of the buds.

There was a brief silence after she had finished; rather to my surprise, Henry winked solemnly at her from across the table.

Julian smiled. 'What a beautiful passage,' he said. 'I never tire of it. But how is it that such a ghastly thing, a queen stabbing her husband in his bath, is so lovely to us?'

'It's the meter,' said Francis. 'Iambic trimeter. Those really hideous parts of Inferno, for instance, Pier de Medicina with his nose hacked off and talking through a bloody slit in his windpipe-'

'I can think of worse than that,' Charles said.

'So can I. But that passage is lovely and it's because of the terza rima. The music of it. The trimeter tolls through that speech of Klytemnestra's like a bell.'

'But iambic trimeter is fairly common in Greek lyric, isn't it?' said Julian. 'Why is that particular section so breathtaking? Why do we not find ourselves attracted to some calmer or more pleasing one?'

'Aristotle says in the poetics,' said Henry, 'that objects such as corpses, painful to view in themselves, can become delightful to contemplate in a work of art.'

'And I believe Aristotle is correct. After all, what are the scenes in poetry graven on our memories, the wones that we love the most? precisely these. The murder of Agamemnon and the wrath of Achilles. Dido on the funeral pyre. The daggers of the traitors and Caesar's blood - remember how Suetonius describes his body being borne away on the litter with one arm hanging down?'

'Death is the mother of beauty,' said Henry.

'And what is beauty?'

'Terror.'

'Well said,' said Julian. 'Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.'

I looked at camilla, her face bright in the sun, and thought of that line from the Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining.

'And if beauty is terror,' said Julian, 'then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?'

'To live,' said Camilla.

'To live forever,' said Bunny, chin cupped in palm.

The teakettle began to whistle.




Once the cups were set out, and Henry had poured the tea, somber as a mandarin, we began to talk about the madnesses induced by the gods: poetic, prophetic, and finally, Dionysian.

'Which is by far the most mysterious,' said Julian. 'We have been accustomed to thinking of religious ecstasy as a thing found only in primitive societies, though it frequently occurs in the most cultivated peoples. The Greeks, you know, really weren't very different from us. They were a very normal people, extraordinarily civilized, rather repressed. And yet they were frequently swept away en masse by the wildest enthusiasms - dancing, frenzies, slaughter, visions - which for us, I suppose, would seem clinical madness, irreversible. Yet the Greeks - some of them anyway - could go in and out of it as they pleased. We cannot dismiss these accounts entirely as myth. They are quite well documented, though ancient commentators were as mystified by them as we are. Some say they were the results of prayer and fasting, others that they were brought about by drink. Certainly the group nature of the hysteria had something to do with it as well. Even so, it is hard to account for the extremism of the phenomenon. The revelrs were apparently hurled back into a non-rational, pre-intellectual state, where the personality was replaced by something completely different - and by "different" I mean something to all appearances not mortal. Inhuman.'

I thought of the Baccahe, a play whose violence and savagery made me uneasy, as did the sadism of its bloodthirsty god. Compared to the other tragedies, which were dominated by recognizable principles of justice no matter how harsh, it was a triumph of barbarism over reason: dark, chaotic, inexplicable.

'We don't like to admit it,' said Julian, 'but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people - the ancients no less than us - have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old animal self. Are we, in this room, really very different from the Greeks or the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are to modern tastes so chilling?'

I looked around the table at the six faces. To modern tastes they were somewhat chilling. I imagine any other teacher wou;d've been on the phone to Psychological Counseling in about five minutes had he heard what Henry said about arming the Greek class and marching into Hampdeb town.

'And it's a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake.'

'Why?' said Francis, leaning slightly forward.

Julian arched an eyebrow; his long wise nose gave his profile a forward tilt, like an Etruscan in a bas-relief. 'Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses e's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely. For a warning of what happens in the absence of such a pressure valve, we have the example of the Romans. The emperors. Think, for example, of Tiberius, the ugly stepson, trying to live up to the command of his stepfather Augustus. Think of the tremendous, impossible strain he must have undergone, following in the footsteps of a savior, a god. The people hated him. No matter how hard he tried he was never good enough, could never be rid of the hateful self, and finally the floodgates broke. He was swept away on his perversions and he died, old and mad, lost in the pleasure gardens of Capri: not even happy there, as one might hope, but misreable. Before he died he wrote a letter home to the Senate, "May all the Gods and Goddesses visit me with more utter destruction than I feel I am daily suffering." Think of those who came after him. Caligula. Nero.'

He paused. 'The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw,' he said, 'was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws - this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos.' He laughed. 'Easy to see why the Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly - how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it. Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious. For all their logic, who lived in more abject terror of the supernatural than the Romans?

'The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism.' He looked at the ceiling for a moment, his face almost troubled. 'Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?' he said. 'It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. the bellowing of bulls. Springs of honet bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit is out reborn.'

We were all leaning forward, motionless. My mouth had fallen open; I was aware of every breath I took.

'And that, to me, is the terrible seduction of Dionysiac ritual. Hard for us to imagine. That fire of pure being.'




Donna Tartt, The Secret History, 40-47