Absolute Truths - Susan Howatch

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my timetable was for the day ahead, I devoted at least the first hour to being myself, alone with my Maker; I was recharging my spiritual batteries. While I drank my tea I focused my mind on the coming day and recalled, item by item, all I had to do. Then I prayed that I would do everything in a manner acceptable to God and I prayed for God’s grace and God’s help. Afterwards, if I had no plans to attend a service of matins, I said the office before moving on to my reading.

      I read the leading books as recommended by the most important theological and ecclesiastical journals, but this was no chore because I was being myself, indulging in one of my favourite pursuits. I enjoyed a book if I agreed with its propositions, and if I disagreed with them I enjoyed the book even more because I had the opportunity mentally to tear it to pieces. I loved demolishing a slipshod theological construct, just as a counsel for the prosecution loves demolishing the case for the defence in a court of law. I was often asked to write reviews, and my cool, lucid little paragraphs had earned me bitter enemies. Periodically my opponents tried to soothe their wounded egos by demolishing my own books, but this was an uphill struggle for them because I applied to my theology a logic and scholarship which my enemies, if they had any professional integrity, were reluctantly obliged to acknowledge. Revelling in these academic battles I found each clash greatly stimulating.

      My spiritual director was keen that I should read exactly what I liked during this period of early morning solitude. I often thought another spiritual director would have queried this self-indulgence, but Jon realised that the more eminent I became in public life the more I needed to have this time to exercise my intellect, my special gift from my Creator. So on that particular morning I read just as I always did, my brain skipping from concept to concept in an ecstasy of intellectual satisfaction, and when I had finished this treat I washed, shaved and dressed before setting off to the Cathedral for matins.

      In accordance with tradition, the Cathedral offered the full range of services every day. During the week and on Saturdays these consisted – at the very least – of matins, Holy Communion and evensong, the latter being usually a service sung by the Choir, and on Sundays this weekday programme was elongated into a sung matins and a sung Communion in addition to the sung evensong. (In 1965 the Dean was still refusing to convert the sung Communion into the main Sunday service and refer to it as the Eucharist.) I never cease to be amazed by the idea, prevalent among the unchurched masses, that nothing now happens in cathedrals except the occasional royal wedding, but perhaps this misunderstanding arises from the fact that apart from the chaplain, the guides and the flower-arrangers, no devoted local supporter of the Cathedral would dream of visiting it between ten and four when the tourists rule the roost. The twentieth-century revival of our cathedrals as places of pilgrimage must certainly be welcomed as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, but the swarming hordes can be disconcerting to anyone in search of peace and quiet.

      Leaving the South Canonry on that cold, dank winter morning, I took the short cut across the Choir School’s playing field and began the short walk up Palace Lane towards the wall of the cloisters. The Cathedral, invisible at first in the darkness, began to take shape as I approached so that I was reminded of a sculpture emerging mysteriously from a block of stone. A masterpiece of English perpendicular architecture, built within the short space of forty years with no later additions, its eerie perfection so dominated its surroundings that it seemed to wear the darkness with the nonchalant elegance of a beautiful woman modelling a long black velvet gown. As I drew closer I fancied that the dawn, which was about to break, was making the Cathedral vibrate in anticipation. Beyond the wall nearby birds had begun to sing in the branches of the ancient cedar tree in the cloister garth.

      A bishop need have little to do with his cathedral; the running of the building is not his business, even though he remains ultimately responsible for the spiritual welfare of all who work there. However, although tradition required that I should keep a certain distance from those who did run the Cathedral – the Dean and the three residentiary Canons who formed the Chapter – I had felt driven in the early days of my episcopate to set the pace in the matter of daily worship. That was because of the shortcomings of my enemy, the Dean.

      Let me say at once that Aysgarth did have virtues: he had a good brain, a talent for administration, a genius for fund-raising, a not inconsiderable gift for forceful preaching and a certain range of social skills which made him popular in Starbridge. A self-made man, he had a chip on his shoulder about his origins in Yorkshire where his father had been in trade. This inferiority complex manifested itself in frequent references to the fact that he had read Greats at Oxford. (He was a scholarship boy, of course.) Not having a degree in theology he was hostile to those who had, but I must in all fairness concede that he was a sincere Christian. Unfortunately, after an upbringing among the crudest kind of Non-Conformists and an intellectual reaction in which he had embraced the wildest forms of Liberal Modernism, his theological outlook was, to put it kindly, confused.

      When he became Dean – at the same time as I became Bishop; a testing stroke of providence – he made no secret of the fact that he disapproved of the habit of receiving the sacrament more than once a week, and that he thought auricular confession was Papist poppycock. One simply cannot go around making those sort of statements if one is the dean of a great cathedral in the middle of the twentieth century. I concede that one may be allowed to think them; after all, in our broad Church Protestants and Catholics are equally welcome, but such thoughts should be kept private and balanced by a determination not only to be tolerant of the other side but to learn from it. The older cathedrals in England are shrines to the pre-Reformation Catholic tradition and are now witnesses to our famous Anglican ‘Middle Way’ where the Catholic theology of the sacraments embraces the Protestant theology of the Word; in consequence a dean has no business making inflammatory statements in the manner of some Non-Conformist fanatic who bawls out: ‘No Popery!’ whenever he sees a statue of the Virgin Mary.

      Fortunately Aysgarth was no fool and he soon realised he had to modify his stance in order to avoid giving offence to a great many people. He backtracked on auricular confession, although he refused to hear penitents himself, and he swore devotion to the cause of ecumenism, the reconciliation of the different branches of the Church, although his statements were strangely silent on the subject of Rome; I suspect he confined his ecumenical yearnings to union with the Methodists. But despite this improved behaviour he still failed to show up regularly at the early morning weekday services, and during the months when he was officially ‘in residence’ he constantly delegated the saying of matins and the celebration of Communion to one of the minor canons. (Lyle said Aysgarth needed the extra time in bed in order to recover from his hangovers, but this charge was not evidence of Aysgarth’s drinking habits but of Lyle’s dislike.)

      The upshot of all these abstentions from public worship was that I soon felt obliged to give the residentiary Canons the spiritual lead which he was apparently unwilling to provide, so I started turning up more regularly at the Cathedral’s early services. I was careful not to exaggerate my response. I did not turn up every day. But I appeared at least twice during the week and often three times.

      That made Aysgarth reform with lightning speed. His competitive nature ensured that he could not bear to be outshone by me, particularly on his own territory, and the embarrassing absences ceased.

      This tense game of spiritual one-upmanship, with all its revolting worldly implications of rivalry, dislike and distrust, was played between us for six years in an atmosphere which, despite repeated clashes of opinion, we managed to keep tolerably civilised. By that I mean we never actually had a row, although we often came close to one. Then in 1963, as Jon put it in his old-fashioned way, ‘the Devil wriggled into the Cathedral and caused havoc.’ It is not my purpose now to describe the events of 1963, but this was the year when Aysgarth commissioned a pornographic sculpture for the Cathedral churchyard.

      I regret to say that mere was even more going on than this row over the sculpture (the commission was eventually cancelled), but I still cannot bring myself to write about what Aysgarth was getting up to on his days off. Some forms of clerical misbehaviour really do have to be buried six feet deep for the good of the Church. I think I may divulge, however, without going into lurid detail, that his two most dangerous habits at that time were a tendency to drink too much and an inclination to be undignified with women many years his junior.

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