WHEN the theme of this year’s festival — “A Truth Universally Acknowledged” — was thought up a few months ago, it was primarily a literary reference. This is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. The festival venue, Winchester Cathedral, is where she was buried.
At the end of a week in which the Ukrainian President was treated as the aggressor by his counterpart in the United States, the concept of universal truth took on a political dimension, however.
This was acknowledged by Edward Stourton, the journalist and BBC presenter. He gave the Sir Tony Baldry Lecture on Friday night in honour of the festival’s founder and president. He had rewritten his address several times in recent weeks, he admitted, as yet more assaults were made on the truth. “We have quietly accepted the idea that multiple truths exist,” he said.
Fact-checking at the BBC was now far more rigorous than in his earlier days, since “technology keeps coming up with news ways of lying.” It was not simply a matter of mining truths and presenting them to the public like lumps of gold: “We gather information and do things to it before we offer it to you.” He used Harry Beck’s 1933 London Tube map as an example: topographically inaccurate, it none the less provided a true and accurate representation for the traveller.
The BBC was still trusted — 68 per cent of adults in the UK still got their news mainly from the BBC — but, in a world in which people preferred a version of the truth that best fitted their prejudices, that trust had to be earned.
THOSE attending Michael Wheeler’s talk on Gladstone were left wondering how long the Victorian polymath would have lasted as Prime Minister had the secret truths about his life and desires been exposed. In Wheeler’s view, Gladstone’s fiercest battles were spiritual, and his longest crusade was against the enemy within.
Gladstone’s diaries, now held in Lambeth Palace Library, reveal a lifelong commitment to the Christian faith, and the C of E in particular; but also a lifelong struggle against “adultery of the heart”. His conversations with “fallen women” were part of his campaign for emancipation and education, but he recognised that they were “not within the rules of the world’s prudence”. This combination of complexity and earnestness was quintessentially Victorian, Wheeler suggested.
THE power of revelation was one of the points made by Natalie Collins, who appeared in conversation with Mark Pryce and Alison Webster (with images by Eddy Aigbe). She could run through the statistics of abuse, she said, such as the fact that one in four women would be subjected to it in their lives. But when she told her own story of being manipulated as a teenager into a sexual relationship, an abusive marriage, and early pregnancy, “something changes in your understanding.”
Harvey MillsMark Oakley
Experience and story were now given more weight in discussions about abuse, she agreed. But she warned that people’s desire to distance themselves from uncomfortable truths remained strong. There were signs that experience (she hates the label “lived experience”) and personal stories were being subjected to the process of othering.
Collins urged another language correction: people should not talk about “abusive relationships”; the problem was “an abusive person who is in a relationship”.
A DIFFERENT aspect of truth-telling was described by Helen King, whose book Immaculate Forms: Uncovering the history of women’s bodies focused on breasts, clitoris, hymen, and womb (Books, 20 September 2024; Feature, 4 October 2024). She had been extremely shy as a child, she said, but her academic studies had taken her to a place where she could address 150 C of E bishops on the history of the clitoris. At least there were now some clitorises among them, she said.
The Church’s record was darker than imagined. In the 1860s, a clinic in London performed clitoridectomies as a means of “curing” disturbed or excitable women. The clinic’s patrons were the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, King said, and similar surgery was advertised in the Church Times.
Harvey MillsEve PooleEVE POOLE, in conversation with Nick Spencer and Chine McDonald, related another presentation to the Bishops, this time about artificial intelligence. Would the Bishops baptise an alien, she had asked. (Depended how cute they were, it seemed.) An intelligent creature such as an octopus? (No, though the Archbishop of York had said that he would anoint it with oil, fry it, and eat it for lunch.) Her clone? (“They were up for that. I was shocked, since it would have been made in a lab.”) AI? (No.)
On the other hand, they baptised infants and many people who could not give verbal consent. What emerged, she said, was that we were “really shaky” in our definition of a human, a worrying lack when people were developing tools that were designed to replace us. As apex predators, humans had never had an intelligent competitor of this order.
Asked whether there was a theological dimension to the debate about AI, Spencer recited a definition of AI as “the first creation that no longer obeys its creator”. Anyone familiar with the book of Genesis might have a contribution to make, he suggested.
BODIES were not the just the preserve of Helen King. Chine McDonald spoke of the close link — throughout history and prevailing in many parts of the world — between childbirth and death. A former Bishop of Exeter, Joseph Hall, had said: “Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave.” Maternal death had become a literary trope by Jane Austen’s time, prompting her to mock it in the opening of her parody of the Gothic novel Northanger Abbey: the heroine’s mother “had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on”.
Harvey MillsChine McDonald
McDonald also spoke of child death. “To be a mother is to anticipate danger,” making instant risk-assessments on entering a room. A child’s death was literally unspeakable: there was no word equivalent to “widow” or “widower”. (German had Waisenmutter and Waisenvater, which translate as “orphan mother” and “orphan father”.)
She was ambivalent about the Prayer Book service for the churching of women. It had more than a hint of the rites of purification, and yet it acknowledged the great pain and peril of childbirth.
AMBIVALENCE could be said to typify the Church’s attitude to sex throughout its history, something overlooked by those who argue that there is one clear Christian ethic (invariably theirs). Diarmaid MacCulloch, speaking in the cathedral on Saturday night, pulled examples of contrary belief and practice from his new history of sex and the Church, Lower than the Angels.
Although there are plenty of villains in his account (e.g. St Jerome), he dwelt on his heroes: St Paul (to his surprise), who dictated, against the culture of his time, that there should be equality between husband and wife; Thomas Cranmer, who introduced into the liturgy the idea that marriage could be for pleasure (i.e. for the “mutual society, help, and comfort, that the one ought to have of the other”); and the Lambeth Conference of 1930, which accepted that contraception could enrich marriage, and thus furthered the separation of sex and procreation.
Festival of Faith and LiteratureIan Collins, Ronald Blythe’s biographer, with Paul Handley
Many Christian traditions were acquired from other cultures: monasticism from India via Syrian traders; celibacy from the Greeks. Part of the popularity of celibacy in the past, he argued, was that it liberated women from a patriarchal culture that treated them as their husbands’ chattels.
CELIBACY and the enclosed life were not the problem for Catherine Coldstream, author of Cloistered: My years as a nun (Books, 8 March 2024; Features, 28 March 2024). It was the misuse of power, and the use of the vows of silence and obedience to suppress discussion of it, which prevented any mature work towards a healthy convent.
In the end, Coldstream broke enclosure, only to return two weeks later, when she discovered that the other nuns had been told that she was in the infirmary. She likened leaving the convent to leaving the Army or prison. “It’s your whole reality. You can’t just step out and think: ‘This is great.’”
Ten years on, she is able to see the value of a contemplative mode of being, which gave her an inner strength. Perhaps everybody could be a nun for a couple of years, she suggested.
THE current status of belief was discussed by Rupert Shortt and Nick Spencer. The decline in respect for the institutional Church was being matched by a new openness to spiritual matters, they suggested.
The “lunar landscape” of unbelief posited by Richard Dawkins and others did not satisfy the present hunger for meaning, Shortt said. “HashtagBeKind is quite thin gruel.”
Francis Spufford digressed from a conversation about his latest novel, Cahokia Jazz, to reflect on his earlier Christian polemic, Unapologetic (Books, Features, 24 November 2023). He would write it differently now, he said, since we were seeing the passing of the generation who saw Christianity as “the boring thing your headmaster made you do in 1971”.
SPEAKING on the last afternoon, Archbishop Stephen Cottrell described the radical challenge of the Lord’s Prayer. He is embarking on a Lord’s Prayer tour, and has just published Praying by Heart (Features, 8 November 2024; Books, 3 January).
The opening two words of the prayer heralded a revolution. “Father”, while acknowledging its problematic nature for many people, as well as the fact that God does not have a gender, none the less signals that our relationship with God is “most like a relationship of a child to a parent”.
Harvey MillsRupert Shortt
The “our” prompted an anecdote about meeting Pope Francis in Rome, and praying the Lord’s Prayer with him. “Whether we like it or not, we are sisters and brothers, and therefore our interests are bound up with one another.”
The scandal of disunity was, in his view, two scandals: “Scandal number one: we are disunited. Scandal number two: we don’t seem to mind about it.”
As for “Give us today our daily bread”, this was another way of saying “Stop me from wanting more than my share.” It was the most important lesson for the human race to learn: what does enough look like?
The irony was not lost on him, living in Bishopthorpe Palace. “The evidence is that I’m quite happy for others to go without so I can have more.” Should he, then, stop saying the prayer? Or should he use every opportunity to live more simply?
It was what he wanted for the Church. “We have been shamed and humbled by safeguarding failings.” He longed for a more penitent, simpler Church.
THE weekend was enriched by other speakers and conversations, as well as three opportunities to experience choral evensong in the cathedral, and a sumptuous concert on the closing evening by Papagena, a five-piece a cappella choir who selected a repertoire that focused on women’s experiences, sacred and secular.
Mark Oakley discoursed on W. H. Auden, “not a very religious religious poet”. Auden said that poetry “is the very clear expression of mixed feelings”, but, according to Oakley, it took a lot of work to tease out the details of the “vision of agape” that Auden experienced while sitting on a lawn with teaching colleagues one evening in 1933.
Harvey MillsMalcolm Guite
Malcolm Guite gave some tasters of his epic work-in-progress, a retelling of the Arthurian legend. It was a dare he had to accept, he said, a tale he had to take up, and one that persisted in the land’s memory.
Cathy Rentzenbrink also spoke about the creative process, which to her involved having the faith to walk through a door. What she described, though, was more like walking into a door: “The more inspired I feel, the less I’m able to walk down the street without falling over.”
Andrew Ziminski’s work is creative in a different way: he is a stonemason, and an illustrated talk conveyed some of an insider’s knowledge of church buildings. Along with shots of him at the top of a tower with his whippet (the dog could manage a scaffolding ladder), we saw the results of a latex coating used to clean interior walls. A YouTube video of him peeling it off has attracted two million views.
THE last words, though, should go to Jane Austen, who was the subject of literary tours during the festival and of a discussion between two of her admirers, Paula Hollingsworth and Rachel Mann. Why was she not more overtly Christian, they were asked. It was her milieu, they said: it was simply the case that one was a Christian and a member of the Church of England. This meant that her spirituality was often ignored by academics.
Harvey MillsRachel Mann
Austen topped off an hour’s reflection on the work and life of Ronald Blythe and his “Word from Wormingford” column for the Church Times. Ian Collins, his biographer and executor, spoke knowledgeably and warmly about Blythe’s late flowering: half his published work was produced after his 80th year. Several questions from the audience came from neighbours who had travelled from Essex, such was their affection for the writer.
The session closed with a passage from one of the “Words”, in which Ronnie mused on Mr Bennet and the library, his “male sanctuary” in Pride and Prejudice. His “book-fed calm” drives his wife up the wall . . .
“But, like a sensible parent, he sees that what might be called book sanity takes root in one child — Elizabeth. So maybe she and her lovely husband will read together, laughing, pages turning in unison — which, to my mind, is part of a desirable marriage.”
