Caryll Houselander on loving the spirit of the age
Unlike her co-religionists
Notoriously eccentric — among other things she covered her face in white power —the English Catholic writer Caryll Houselander . She wrote this note on the back of her journal. It appears in Maisie Ward’s Caryll Houselander: That Divine Eccentric.
Houselander writes “We live in a time that is tortured” and then quotes two lines from Matthew Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse,” which he wrote after visiting a Carthusian monastery: “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born.”
Some people cling to what is past; some, the fewer and braver, face the future; but to live harmoniously in the present is an almost superhuman task.
The modernist writers are not the contemptible egoists which they are too often supposed to be. They refuse to write anything which is not an integral part of their own experience, and most of them have no experience of Faith as we understand it. The problems tormenting those of the modernist sort outside the Church are a thousand times more terrible to those within it.
My position is that I am obsessed by the spirit of this age, with all its faults I love it and believe in it.
I believe that it is the most serious duty I have, to see, to recognize Christ in it and to go on, never to go back; that all our modern inventions and conditions are to be used, cleared of abuses and lifted up but not swept away, that compromise with the present and a looking back to the past is a sin.
I find no sympathy with this view in the thought of my fellow Catholics, who seem to me to be always striving to return to the past and to set fierce limitations on the uses of the present.
I find in this attitude a deadlock, a deadening and choking of effort.
I do not trust myself to stand alone, I will not range myself among those who, though they clearly share my desires, do not share my faith in Christ.
Consequently I am tortured.
I desire supremely and above all to be in perfect harmony with the whole world.
“How exactly did she propose to be in harmony with a whole world patently inharmonious — indeed at fierce war with itself?” Ward asked.
In Caryll’s eyes the greatest of all obstacles to harmony was the gulf dug by society between the respectable and the outcast — whether cast out by society for wrongdoing or merely dropped for the sin of failure and poverty.
“She wanted,” a very intimate friend told me, “to make herself one with prostitutes and drunkards — to go to pubs and get drunk with them. Father Steuart thought this too extreme.”
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