Every once in a while, I recommend this novel, but hardly anyone listens to me. In the context of current ecclesial troubles, here I go again.
I think especially if you are younger (which most of you are), if the only Church you’ve known has been from JPII on and especially if your understanding of modern Church history and experience is based on what apologists and your own veil-sporting bubble tells you – this might be a helpful read.
I mean – this is the experience (in a very general way, from the perspective of lay English Catholics, of course) of the Pope Francis generation of clergy and laity, an experience so rudely interrupted by JPII and B16.
How Far Can You Go? was the original title of David Lodge’s short survey of English Catholic life from the 1950’s to the 70’s. It was sold in the US as Souls and Bodies, but the original title is much, much better. It brilliantly plays on the sexual anxiety of the young men and women we meet in the opening chapter – how far can you go before it’s a sin? and then, more importantly, on the question of change and Church reform:
Our friends started life with too many beliefs — the penalty of a Catholic upbringing. They were weighted down with beliefs, useless answers to non-questions. to work their way back to the fundamental ones — what can we know? why is there anything at all? why not nothing? what may we hope? why are we here? what is it all about? — they had to dismantle all that apparatus of superfluous belief and discard it piece by piece. But in matters of belief…it is nice question how far you can go in this process without throwing out something vital…
I re-read most of the book last night because as I have been mulling over fiction ideas in my head, it occurred to me you know, you’re just re-writing Souls and Bodies , but about a generation and a half later…
This isn’t a “great” novel, but it’s a vital historical document. Lodge – who, at 84, is still around, but I assume in declining health (one of his last published books reflected his growing hearing loss) – offers an honest and painful look at Catholic life during this period. We first meet his characters as college students who in subsequent years marry, have children, lose children, are tempted to infidelity, succumb, confront mortality – all within the context of the massive changes in Church practice and life during the period.
Contraception, of course, looms large as it does even more so in the scathingly funny The British Museum is Falling Down. The characters wish that they could contracept, are mostly faithful for a time, but then, one by one, go with the zeitgeist.
What I like about Lodge – here and in the other book – is that while his sympathies are clearly against traditional Catholic teaching, he remains quite clear-eyed and realistic about the whole business. His characters all, to a fault, blame the ban on contraception for the problems, and all believe that not only sex, but life in general, will be so much better if they could only pop a pill and be done with it – but it never works out.
At all. The last chapter of The British Museum is Falling Down features an interior monologue by the wife in the story (a play on Molly Bloom’s similar passage in Ulysses) in which she drowsily confronts all of this, acknowledging that no matter what, it’s all fraught with mystery and frustration, and no, no pill is going to fix it – and might even make it worse.
In this book, Lodge’s characters each confront middle age and these issues at the same time in varied ways, but all seem to run up against the same question, whether they admit it or not (most don’t) – all right, they can contracept and have “worry free” sex now whenever they like, but, well:
It seemed to Michael that he was no nearer grasping the fundamental mystery of sex, of knowing for certain that he had experienced its ultimate ecstasy, than he had been twenty years before, staring at the nudes in the Charing Cross Road bookshops. Then he began to s*** blood and quickly lost interest in sex altogether.
But of course there is more to it than that. The whole book is an account of a dismantling.
The priest who’d been chaplain to the university students, at some point in the late 60’s, experiences frustration on the pastoral front, and as is normal, is recommended to head off “for a course” for a time – to go study something. What? Perhaps Biblical studies? That’s the ticket:
“How would you like to go on a course?”
“What kind of course?”
“Whatever you like. Ecumenical studies, pastoral studies, biblical studies, you name it. You know about this new theological college we’ve just opened? One of the ideas is that it will provide refresher courses for the secular clergy.”
It was on the tip of Austin Brierley’s tongue to suggest that it was Father McGahern who stood in most urgent need of a refresher course, but he was not foolish enough to waste such an opportunity. “I used to run a New Testament study group, once,” he said reminiscently, “for university students. I shouldn’t at all mind picking up that sort of thing again.”
The Monsignor looked slightly disappointed at his choice. “You don’t think something like Pastoral Studies would be more relevant to your work, Father? Or catechetics?”
“No, Biblical Studies would be just the ticket. I’m terribly rusty. I don’t suppose I’ve read a book on the subject since I left the seminary.” He suddenly had a vision, flooding his mind like a sun-burst, of himself sitting in a quiet room, slowly turning the pages of a thick, heavy book with nothing to do except finish it. “When can I start?” he said eagerly.
Austin Brierley found that things had changed a lot since his seminary days, especially in the field of biblical commentary. When he was a student, the methods of modern demythologizing historical scholarship had been regarded as permissible only in application to the Old Testament. The New Testament was taught as a historically reliable text, directly inspired by God and endorsed as such by the infallible authority of the Church. It came as something of a shock to discover that views mentioned formerly only to be dismissed as the irresponsible speculations of German Protestants and Anglican divines who could hardly be considered seriously as Christians at all, were now accepted as commonplace by many Catholic scholars in the field. The infancy stories about Jesus, for instance, were almost certainly legendary, it seemed, late literary accretions to the earliest and most reliable account of Jesus’s life in Mark. The baby in the stable at Bethlehem, the angels and the shepherds, the star in the sky and the three kings, the massacre of the Innocents by Herod, the flight into Egypt — all fiction. Not meaningless, the books and articles and lectures hastened to add, for these fictions symbolized profound truths about the Christian faith; but certainly not factual, like the events one read about in the newspaper, or for that matter in Livy and Tacitus. And the Virgin Birth itself, then — was that a fiction? Well, opinion differed, but there were certainly many authorities who did not see that the literal, physical virginity of Mary (which was nowhere mentioned in Mark, Paul and John) was an essential part of the Gospel message. If this was accepted, then the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption also ceased to signify, they became dead letters, not worth arguing about. What was important was the figure of Jesus, the adult Jesus, himself. But here, too, a startling amount of sceptical sifting appeared to have taken place. The story of his baptism by John the Baptist was probably historical, but hardly the temptation in the desert, a narrative with obvious folktale characteristics deriving from the Jewish Babylonian exile, like the more spectacular miracle stories, the walking on the water and the draught of fishes. And the Resurrection… ? Well, here even the most adventurous demythologizers hesitated (it was another kind of How Far Could You Go?) but a few were certainly prepared to say that the Resurrection story was a symbolization of the faith found by the disciples through Jesus’s death, that death itself was not to be feared, that death was not the end. That was the essential meaning of the Resurrection, not the literal reanimation of Jesus’s corpse, an idea that could not possibly be as meaningful to an intelligent Christian of the twentieth century as it was to the inhabitants of a pre-scientific world.
Austin Brierley almost rubbed his eyes in disbelief sometimes. He read the professional theological journals with much the same mixed feelings of shock and liberation as Michael read Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the sexually explicit fiction that was published in its wake. Of course the theologians and exegetes were generally more discreet than the novelists. They expressed themselves with elaborate caution in learned journals of tiny circulation, or exchanged ideas with like-minded scholars in private. It was understood that one did not flaunt the new ideas before the laity, or for that matter before the ordinary clergy, most of whom were deplorably ill-educated and still virtually fundamentalists when it came to the interpretation of the New Testament. The main thing was to get on quietly with the work of updating Catholic biblical scholarship while Rome was too pre-occupied with pastoral and liturgical experiment to bother checking up on them. Austin Brierley, however was unable to take this view of the matter. It seemed to him that a dangerous gap was opening up between the sophisticated, progressive theologians and exegetes on the one hand, and ordinary parochial Catholics on the other. The latter still went on believing in the nativity story and the miracles of Our Lord and all the rest of it as literally, historically true. If they woke up one day to discover that their own “experts” hadn’t believed these things for years, they would feel cheated, and might under-standably give up the practice of their religion in disgust. It was therefore, he concluded, the clear duty of priests like himself to try and educate the laity in the new, modern way of reading Scripture.
When his course was over, Father Brierley returned to his parish at the end of the Northern Line fired with this sense of mission. His first sermon was given on Ascension Day. He expounded the Gospel read-ing as a dramatic way of expressing the idea that Jesus was united with the Father in eternal life after his death on the cross, and thus promised all men of faith the same union and the same eternal life. To the disciples, to the first Christians, to the authors of the New Testament (especially the authors of Luke and the Acts, in which the Ascension was most elaborately described) it was natural to express this idea as a physical movement upwards in space, for they inhabited a flat world in which “Heaven” was identified with the sky above. Today, of course, we knew that the world was round, that space was curved, that there was neither up nor down in the cosmos, that Heaven was not a place that would ever be discovered by a space probe. To understand the Gospel story, we had to interpret it metaphorically. After a few more sermons like this, the parishioners complained to Father McGahern, and Father McGahern to Archbishop’s House, and Austin Brierley was seconded to another diocese in the Midlands that was allegedly short of priests. Before he left, the Monsignor gave him a sympathetic interview, shook his hand and advised him to go easy on the new biblical scholarship in his new job.
As I said, I’m younger than this group by a generation and a half or so, but um..growing up in the late 70’s and early 80’s? I’ve been to an agape meal or two. They were the rage for a time. And this is…exactly right.
As well as the Sunday masses in the College chapel, Michael and Miriam and their friends held occasional gatherings in their homes on weekday evenings which they called “agapes”, after the common meal or love-feast which accompanied the celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the primitive Church. These occasions did indeed make Michael and Miriam and their circle feel a little bit like the early Christians, gathered together in fellowship behind the curtained windows of suburban houses, while all around them people went about their secular pursuits, sat slumped in front of televisions, or drank beer in pubs, or walked their dogs under the streetlamps, quite indifferent to and ignorant of the little cell of religious spirit pulsing in their midst. About a dozen people would be invited and, when everyone had arrived, sat round a table spread with homely and slightly archaic fare — home-baked bread, butter, cheese, dates, nuts and raisins, and wine. The host and hostess would choose some readings, usually from the new Jerusalem Bible, which had “Yahweh” instead of “God” in the Old Testament, and then, with some made-up prayer referring to the Last Supper, they would break the bread and pour the wine into a large goblet. These would be passed round the table from person to person, each taking a piece of bread and a swig from the goblet. Then everyone’s glass would be filled and the meal would continue with ordinary conversation, serious at first, but getting more lighthearted as the wine flowed.
When Father Brierley came to the city, they naturally invited him to join them at these occasions, and then they would have a Eucharist, but without any vestments or candles, just all sitting round the table as before, with home-made bread and yin ordinaire, broken and blessed and handed round, just like at the Last Supper. A certain theological ambiguity hung over these occasions. Was it a real Eucharist, or wasn’t it? Outwardly, only the presiding presence of an ordained priest significantly distinguished the event from their improvised agapes. To some, this was a crucial difference, to others it was a relic of the old “magical” view of the sacraments which they had renounced. In the earliest days of the Church, the commemoration of the Lord’s Supper was not restricted to a priesthood, and Austin (as they now called Father Brierley) himself declared that the idea of a special caste exclusively empowered to administer the sacraments was rapidly becoming obsolete. He prophesied a time when the whole elaborate structure of bishops and priests and dioceses and parishes would melt away, house-eucharists would replace the huge anonymous crush of the parochial Sunday mass, and mutual counselling and consciousness-raising groups would replace Confession and Confirmation.
So they stood upon the shores of Faith and felt the old dogmas and certainties ebbing away rapidly under their feet and between their toes, sapping the foundations upon which they stood, a sensation both agreeably stimulating and slightly unnerving. For we all like to believe, do we not, if only in stories? People who find religious belief absurd are often upset if a novelist breaks the illusion of reality he has created. Our friends had started life with too many beliefs — the penalty of a Catholic upbringing. They were weighed down with beliefs, useless answers to non-questions. To work their way back to the fundamental ones — what can we know? why is there anything at all? why not nothing? what may we hope? why are we here? what is it all about? — they had to dismantle all that apparatus of superfluous belief and discard it piece by piece. But in matters of belief (as of literary convention) it is a nice question how far you can go in this process without throwing out something vital.
The book ends perfectly. One of the spouses of the original student group is a BBC presenter, and he comes up with the idea of doing a documentary on their “Catholics for an Open Church” Easter festival. It gets everything about 1975 exactly right, from the nun who’s gotten into the charismatic movement, to the liberation theologian shipped in from Latin America to speak, to most liturgically and theologically conservative of the group – the gay academic, who believes the liberation theologian should be deported and Latin should be reinstated and who (we learn in the epilogue) returns to his Anglican faith because at least they can do liturgy right.
Lodge ends:
While I was writing this last chapter, Pope Paul VI died and Pope John Paul I was elected. Before I could type it up, Pope John Paul I had died and been succeeded by John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope for four hundred and fifty ears: a Pole, a poet, a philosopher, a linguist, an athlete, a man of the people, a man of destiny, dramatically chosen, instantly popular – but theologically conservative. A changing Church acclaims a Pope who evidently thinks that change has gone far enough. What will happen now? All bets are void, the future is uncertain, but it will be interesting to watch. Reader, farewell!
The general impression one leaves this novel with, taking into account the present moment as well is – or is for me, once again – it’s sort of a miracle it’s held together this long, at all.