Mortal Follies. William Murchison
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Название: Mortal Follies
Автор: William Murchison
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Словари
isbn: 9781594033551
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Peter Taylor limned the perplexity in a short story, set in the middle of the twentieth century: “What a different breed [Episcopalians] had been from their Methodist and Presbyterian contemporaries. They danced and they played cards, of course, and they drank whiskey, and they did just about whatever they wanted on Sunday. . . . There were no graven images in the old church, but the Episcopalians had talked about the church as though it were the temple in Jerusalem itself. That was what their neighbors resented. Yes, they always spoke of it as ‘the Church,’ as though there were no other church in town.”
Whether by accident, intention, or an odd conjunction of both factors, the Episcopal Church oozed specialness. Here was not just any church. Here was one that presented, as Episcopalians saw it, a beguiling blend of all that was best in Christianity—orthodox doctrine; sacramental devotion balanced by devotion to Scripture; intellectual attainment; scholarship; architectural richness; liturgical know-how; good manners; good taste—and, with it all, intellectual spaciousness; willingness if not necessarily to believe a new story, or a new account, at least to hear, as a judge from his bench might hear an arresting new theory of contract law.
Where was the harm in hearing, after all? Some new insight might emerge, some new way of understanding old problems and challenges. In the Episcopal Church no book could be presumed closed. Narrowness of outlook was frowned upon. Narrowness implied both sterility and finality, neither one acceptable to Christians. The globe on which we lived was ever spinning, ever dying, ever renewing itself. A good way to become irrelevant—except possibly for tourist purposes, such as the Old Order Amish served, with their beards and buggies—was to pretend that whatever needed to be known was known. But who was likely to listen long as you argued to this effect?
A distinguished, certainly orthodox, twentieth-century archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, spoke for many when he noted: “Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit we are given fresh understandings and fresh articulation of what has been revealed originally in all kinds of hidden seeds.” Anglicans—Episcopalians—waited expectantly for those seeds to germinate. Meanwhile, tall brass processional crosses led the way to the Altar, where all such questions could be laid with pious expectancy. All would in due course be revealed. The church abided that moment.
It was never, of course, as good as all that. Of no institution, no human grouping or coalition whatever, anywhere, may it be said that ideals and practice are as one. That is not the way of the world. I leave the reader to point out, if he likes, any notable exceptions to that assertion. Unless we are to tarry, I need to mention those special ways in which the Episcopal Church fell short of that specialness to which Episcopal theorists sometimes pretended.
There was first the whole elite aura of the church, its social as well as ecclesiastical propriety. If the Episcopal Church was never really the Church of the Rich, still it welcomed a very large number of the rich, people who endowed it with their own way of looking at life. Clarence Day, Sr., of Life with Father fame, had in the Gilded Age embraced the Episcopal Church as “a church [so Day Jr. wrote] managed like a department of a gentleman’s Government. He liked such a church’s strong Tory flavor, and its recognition of castes. He liked its “deference to sound, able persons who knew how to run things, and its confidence in their integrity and right point of view.”
The Vanderbilts, Astors, and Whitneys were among those sound, able persons, as was Franklin Delano Roosevelt—as was John Pierpont Morgan, who, according to Kit and Frederica Konolige, saw the Episcopal Church as “another agency for the improvement of America and the American aristocracy.” By the 1950s, reported Vance Packard, corporation executives were ten times as likely as other Americans to identify themselves as Episcopalians; furthermore, three-quarters of social weddings reported in the New York Times took place in Episcopal churches.
What of it, aside from the potential for class snobbery and reactionary defense of privilege? The question is plausible: little more than that. Superficial acquaintance with nineteenth-century novels could give the impression of a moat between rich and poor, dug and maintained by the rich for their exclusive benefit, impassable except in tales where the factory owner’s son weds the daughter of the head housekeeper or some such. It would be more to the point to note how impermanent is “class” identity in America, given the constant migration upwards and downwards between various classes—the general direction nonetheless being upward—with so-called social lines marked as often by automobiles as by attitudes.
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