Glamorous Powers (70 page)

As I had discovered in my younger days, a mystic who dispenses with a religious framework lays himself open to corruption. But on the other hand a religious who tries to discard mysticism lays a dead hand on his spiritual life. Mysticism is the raw material of religion, as I had once said to Janet; without raw materials building is impossible, and without a structure designed by architects raw materials remain raw materials. However although the raw materials of mysticism can be found world-wide as they permeate all the great religions, the architecture which springs from them is as varied as the human race itself. The mystics may all speak the same language but the language has many dialects, and for me, if not for Plotinus, there was one voice which spoke that language more finely than any other, the voice of Christ as re-created by the Fourth Evangelist in one of the greatest mystical tracts ever written, the voice of St John proclaiming the eternal values of ultimate reality as he unveiled the great mystery of the Incarnation.

I was still meditating on the Fourth Gospel and thinking what a model of clarity it was when compared with Plotinus’ obscure, tortuous prose when Anne returned home with good news from Romaine.

‘The baby’s coming for Christmas!’ she said kissing me. ‘Alan said he hoped it wouldn’t disrupt Matins!’ And without giving me time to respond she asked me what had happened in Starbridge.

Sensing her fear that I might still be lukewarm about fatherhood I took care to reassure her by postponing a full account of my own news and returning at once to the subject of the baby. ‘Now that I’ve got over my arrogant, self-centred desire for a replica by conquering my past unhappiness,’ I declared, ‘I shall look forward to this infant’s arrival in the hope that we’ll have a daughter who’ll take after you. Then I’m sure I shall find parenthood very pleasant.’

Anne was sufficiently relieved to exclaim generously: ‘I think a replica of you would be rather fun!’

‘Oh no, it wouldn’t!’ I said with a shudder. ‘In fact I can see now what hell it would be to have a son who was as proud, arrogant, wilful and obstinate as I am – what would happen to my dreams of a peaceful old age? Life would be one long battle!’

‘Nonsense!’ said Anne firmly. ‘Anyway we can’t have a girl because I’ve just had the most brilliant idea for a boy’s name. Darling, as the baby will always be able to claim he was brought by the reindeer instead of by the boring old stork, why don’t we call him after Father Christmas?’

‘
Father Christmas?
’

‘St Nicholas!’ said Anne happily, enrapt by her cleverness. ‘Don’t you think that’s the perfect solution?’

Utterly speechless I pulled her into my arms and wondered when I had last felt so ambivalent.

The character of Jon Darrow is fictitious.

Darrow’s religious thought is derived from the writings of
WILLIAM RALPH INGE
(1860–1954), one of the leading intellectuals in the Church of England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Educated at Eton and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he obtained a first in classics, he then taught at Eton before being ordained in 1888. Following his ordination he became a fellow of Hertford College, Oxford, where Idealist philosophy was in the ascendant, and it was there that he turned from pure scholarship towards metaphysics.

In 1895 he began to read the work of Plotinus, first of the philosophers now called Neoplatonists, and his encounter with Neoplatonism led him to make a special study of Christian Mysticism, the subject of his famous Bampton Lectures in 1899. Inge played a leading role in the twentieth-century revival of interest in mysticism. He believed that this human experience of the presence of God provided an indestructible religious truth which the current attacks on the institutional churches and the authority of the Bible could not touch; in his view the mystical experience of God, vouched for in a similar manner amidst different religions at different times and in different places, represented a timeless witness to a reality which was not subject to passing fashions in theological or philosophical thought. Inge saw reality as the spiritual world, a kingdom of values which he equated with the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. When accused of being more of a Platonist than a Christian his response was that in his opinion the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation perfected and completed the philosophical system of his much-admired Plotinus.

Inge was a successful, though strikingly individual churchman; using modern terminology one could say that although
he operated ‘within the system’ he was not ‘an organization man’. In 1904 his great friend
HERBERT HENSLEY HENSON,
then Rector of St Margaret’s Westminster and later to be Bishop of Durham, offered him the living of All Saints, Ennismore Gardens, and in accepting the offer Inge at last moved from Oxford to the capital (and from bachelorhood to matrimony). However in 1907 he returned to academic life; he became Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge where he remained until 1911. At that point he received his famous preferment: he was appointed Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, a post he held for twenty-three years. After his retirement he continued his writing, both scholarly and journalistic, and the fruits of a lifetime’s study of mysticism were displayed in his last book,
Mysticism in Religion,
published when he was eighty-eight.

Inge was brought up in the High-Church tradition but gradually he detached himself not only from the Anglo-Catholics but from the Evangelicals, the two powerful opposing wings of the Church. He claimed to represent a third party within the Church; he saw his ‘religion of the spirit’ as not only embodying the highest wisdom of the past but offering a profound spiritual relevance to the world of today and tomorrow. In
The Platonic Tradition In English Religious Thought
he wrote: ‘My contention is that besides the combative Catholic and Protestant elements in the Churches, there has always been a third element, with very honourable traditions, which came to life again at the Renaissance, but really reaches back to the Greek fathers, to St Paul and St John, and further back still. The characteristics of this type of Christianity are – a spiritual religion based on a firm belief in absolute and eternal values as the most real things in the universe – a confidence that these values are knowable by man – a belief that they can nevertheless be known only by whole-hearted consecration of the intellect, will and affections to the great quest – an entirely open mind towards the discoveries of science – a reverent and receptive attitude to the beauty, sublimity and wisdom of the creation, as a revelation of the mind and character of the Creator – a
complete indifference to the current valuations of the worldling.’ It is this religion of the spirit which I have tried to reflect in the character of Jon Darrow.

Glamorous Powers
is the second of a series of novels about the Church of England in the twentieth century. The first novel,
Glittering Images
, was narrated by Charles Ashworth and set in 1937. The third novel,
Ultimate Prizes
, will focus on Neville Aysgarth after the war.

Extracts from
Christian Mysticism
by W. R. Inge reproduced by kind permission of Hodder & Stoughton Ltd; Extracts from
Mysticism In Religion
by W. R. Inge reproduced by kind permission of Century Hutchinson Publishing Group Ltd; Extracts from A
Pacifist in Trouble
and
Lay Thoughts of a Dean
by W. R. Inge reproduced by kind permission of The Bodley Head; Extracts from
Outspoken Essays
by W. R. Inge reproduced by kind permission of Longman; Extracts from
Christian Ethics and Modern Problems
by W. R. Inge reproduced by kind permission of Methuen.

GLAMOROUS POWERS

S
USAN
H
OWATCH
was born in Surrey in 1940. After taking a degree in law she emigrated to America where she married, had a daughter and embarked on her career as a writer. In 1976 she left America and lived in the Republic of Ireland for four years before returning to England. The idea for the
Starbridge
novels was conceived in Salisbury, where her flat overlooked the Cathedral.

From the reviews:

‘This novel marks a remarkable departure for Susan Howatch’

Today

‘Howatch writes thrillers of the heart and mind … everything in a Howatch novel cuts close to the bone and is of vital concern’

New Woman

‘A mesmerising storyteller’

Daily Telegraph

‘One of the most original novelists writing today’

Cosmopolitan

‘She is a deft storyteller, and her writing has depth, grace and pace’

Sunday Times