All's right
Christopher Booker
An Humbler Heaven William Rees-Mogg (Hamish Hamilton £3.50)
In the past ten years, Mr William ReesMogg has established for himself a unique place in the strange menagerie of English public life. Both in his weightier public pronouncements and in his private manner, he is our last representative of Victorian gravitas. Whether he be calling in a slim . volume for the return to the Gold Standard, or perusing the pages of some eighteenthcentury philosopher in the library of his Palladian mansion near Bath — even when he is declaring in the leader columns of The Times that 'George Brown drunk is a better man than Harold Wilson sober' — his life seems somehow all of a high-minded piece.
Yet, as if it is somehow in the rules oi these frivolous times that no one can play such a dignified role without lapsing into
self-caricature, there is always peering out from behind Rees-Mogg's gravitas a hint of absurditas. One recalls, for instance, the 'Open Letter' to his son Thomas in 1966, in which he gravely advised the new-born baby that 'life is like a great cathedral on a Northern hill'. And can anyone forget that historic occasion in 1967 when he sat solemnly in a garden with Father Corbishley, an Anglican bishop and a former Home Secretary, the television cameras turning, as they waited for Mick Jagger to descend from the clouds by helicopter to discuss with them his views on such grave issues of the day as 'the taking of substances'?
Now, in the more sober Seventies, Rees-Mogg has produced another, extremely slim volume (98 pages) containing his views on the Christian religion, and inevitably the more light-hearted reviewers have pounced on the instances of absurditas — the reference, for instance, to the resurrected Christ's 'love of picnics and ironic sense of humour'. Even the title itself, taken from Pope's Essay on Man, has caused puzzlement — the 'Humbler Heaven' in question is that which Pope reserved for 'the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind, sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind'. Is that Augustan figure, the Editor of The Times, seriously equating himself with a poor Indian?
Well, in a curious way, and as one of the two surprising things about this book, yes. In the early pages, Rees-Mogg describes honestly and simply the various stages by which he came to a belief in God which is obviously very real and important to him. There was the sight of Jung on Face to Face (presumably the celebrated moment when John Freeman asked Jung, 'Do you believe in God?', and the old sage replied, 'I do not believe . I know'). There was his surprisingly eclectic reading list — not just Pascal and Evelyn Underhill, but the Hasidic mystics, the neo-Platonists and even the sixteenth-century Moslem-Hindu Sadu. And most surprising of all, perhaps, there were the moments of ecstatic illumuniation, the premonitory dreams (and one vivid 'recollection' of walking behind a coffin in a rush-strewn church in the eighteenthcentury), which struck Mogg as like 'chinks in the order of the world', opening out for him a strong sense of the spiritual, nonmaterial plane of reality.
Alas, from these bright, early gleams of an inner vision, the book quickly fades on to rather more mundane ground. It is almost as if, having exposed too much of the inmost, personal Mogg, the author feels that he has to climb into a succession of dun clothes more acceptable to the outside world. We get Mogg the ex-President of the Oxford Union, rehearsing some pretty familiar arguments for the existence of God (e.g. would so many men have described the same thing, and had their lives thereby transformed for the better, if it were all a lie?). We get Mogg the believer in Religion as a Social Force for Good (more social stability, less divorces). We get Mogg the
the Patriotic Englishman (a highly dubious passage in which he appears to argue that the commercial vigour of Victorian England derived from a profound religious faith). We get Mogg the Somerset Gentleman and member of the Garrick Club: 'It matters very much whether we are polite and friendly to the people we meet, to the bus-conductor or the postman' (one cannot help suspecting that in an earlier draft it might have read `to one's servants or one's gardener'). Above all, we get Mogg the orthodox Roman Catholic, not just accepting but welcoming the reforms set in train by John XXIII, whom he obviously sees as the greatest man of our century (when he compares the Vatican Council to Noah letting the dove out of the ark, one cannot help recalling that the first bird Noah let out of the ark was the raven, which flew off and was never seen again).
Certainly this entirely conventional Catholic English gentleman, who thinks that the world is going to the dogs without religion, is a far cry from the catholic, eclectic, almost mystically inclined figure, clutching his Jewish and Hindu texts, whom we glimpsed in the early pages. The arguments and authors he adduces seem, in the late twentieth century, almost quaintly dated (most of his sources, from the Puritan Baxter to Berkeley's Alciphron, are from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). He emphasises the 'natural philosophical' arguments for God — but there is no follow-up, for instance, of his mention of Jung, or the 'archetypal', psychological and anthropological arguments of more recent times. Equally, however much one may agree with his equation of the anti-religious materialism of the Communist world with the irreligious materialism of the West, one never really feels that, as a prosperous, bourgeois Westerner himself, he has thought out how much Western life would change if our civilisation recovered a truly spiritual attitude to life. One suspects that if it did (the results of course would be shattering!), the Editor of The Times would more than most people find himself a fish out of water.
Nevertheless, there is another surprising thread running through the book, which redeems it from being just another of those soon-remaindered apologias to which public figures become prone at a certain age, trying to find an agreeable halfway house between God and Mammon — and that is Mogg's constant insistence that what religion is about is Love. 'The love of God is the only thing that matters ultimately in life, that and the love of human beings which flows from it and flows back into it'. He even has a sense of love as the energy which ultimately moves the physical universe.
So obviously does Rees-Mogg mean this, that it shows up more clearly than anything the contrast between the stiff and awkward carapace of Mogg the Pillar of the Community, and the little immortal spark within. Which is what makes this in the end, for all its quaintness, a moving little book.
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