Episcopal Press and News
New Howatch Book Faces Tension Between Truth and Reality
Episcopal News Service. February 24, 1995 [95039]
Karen Brown
Absolute Truths, Susan Howatch, Knopf (528 pages, $25)
(ENS) "What is truth?" Pilate is said to have asked Jesus of Nazareth. Some 2,000 years later, in the century of Einstein, Freud and Jung, he might have asked instead, "What is reality?"
Advances in quantum physics make material reality seem like a great hall of mirrors. We often feel no closer to understanding another great mystery -- ourselves. And it is, after all, through the variable lens of human personality that we encounter not only each other, but God. In acknowledging this condition, we see that we are capable of great self-deception as our passions, prejudices and attachments lead us now this way and now that. How then are we to recognize our true selves? How are we to know the voice of God? Are there really no absolute truths left to guide us?
This is the formidable theme undertaken with wit and grace by novelist Susan Howatch in her series of six novels about the Church of England in the 20th century. Absolute Truths is the closing volume in this engaging and highly entertaining exploration of the forces that lead us to construct the false selves that we present to the world, to each other, and ultimately to God. In this final installment, Charles Ashworth, retired bishop of the fictional Anglican diocese of Starbridge, ponders the obituary of a longtime ecclesiastical rival and reflects upon the journey of transformation (begun in Glittering Images, the first book of the series) that has characterized his own long life in the church.
Absolute Truths chronicles the personal and professional catastrophes that overwhelm Ashworth in the mid-1960s, plunging him into a shattering and finally deeper rediscovery of the absolute truth underlying all absolute truths. In 1965, as a powerful and influential defender of the great Anglican via media, Bishop Ashworth was certain of God's requirements. With the very best of intentions, he believed it was his duty to shore up the boundaries dividing correct from erroneous doctrine and moral from immoral behavior, especially during the chaotic and turbulent sixties. But until the crises of 1965, Ashworth never imagined that he had also been thoughtlessly erecting the very boundaries which would serve to fence out his own true self and the true selves of those he loved as surely as he had already fenced out those whom he believed were his moral inferiors.
As Ashworth struggles to put his life and faith back together, he finds that his journey is once again inextricably and mysteriously intertwined with the two men he would never consciously have chosen as teachers and companions on the way. Jonathan Darrow (whose story is told in Glamorous Powers and again in Mystical Paths) is an Anglo-Catholic mystic, ex-Fordite monk and Ashworth's spiritual director. Neville Aysgarth (whose story is followed in Ultimate Prizes and Scandalous Risks) is a modernist liberal Protestant, dean of Starbridge Cathedral, and notorious taker of scandalous risks with his personal and professional reputation.
As the life journeys of these very different men of the church unfold before us, one recognizes that Howatch has wielded her impressive and spellbinding powers as a storyteller to depict that great challenge of finding unity within diversity that has so preoccupied Anglicans throughout the 20th century. But while reflecting larger societal and spiritual themes in this way, Howatch's characters are also magnificently individual, full of life, and compellingly real in their unique profiles of triumph and failure, fate and fortune, sin and redemption.
While each book in the series may be read independently of the others, there is great satisfaction in following the stories in sequence precisely in order to savor the development and intermingling of these colorful and turbulent lives. As Howatch weaves them all together again in this imaginative and moving conclusion, she could well have been thinking of those haunting lines from T. S. Eliot's East Coker:
Home is where one starts from.
As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living.
Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.