Is the burden now tolerable?
Peter Mullen
The Archbishop of Canterbury stands in the House of Lords and speaks emo- tionally and with understandable regret of the fact that society no longer understands the difference between right and wrong. And nobody laughs. But we ought to be laughing, every one of us, even if only hysterically; even if only through tears of remorse. For it is partly the fault of the Church, whose leader the Archbishop is, that the moral distinction has gone by default.
Over the past 20 years the Church of England seems to have stopped concerning itself with sin. It is hardly mentioned in the revised services. And when it is mentioned, the reference is so euphemistic and soft that we can hardly believe that it is any longer of much account.
In the old services of the Book of Com- mon Prayer we confessed our sins in the words, 'The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is in- tolerable'. But the new Alternative Service Book dare not use words like that for fear of sounding impolite, nasty. We used to 'acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness'. And there were some of us who thereby felt some pardon and release. But the word has been passed from the Church's public relations men that har- ping on wickedness is no way to win friends and influence people. At the cheery singalong with the Revd which has replaced the awe-inspiring ritual in which we weekly met our Maker, sin and wickedness is gloss- ed over and got out of the way as quickly as possible so that all we nice people can enjoy another bout of togetherness.
But is the age of Hiroshima and Belsen, of urban rot and video nasties, less wicked than the age of the old Prayer Book? And if not, don't we need those explicit words of penitence? The leading secular prophet of this century, Sigmund Freud (banned by the Roman Catholic Church and never much loved of Anglicans) explained precisely why the neurotic mind, the mind at odds with itself, is under an intolerable burden. How strange that Freud's work should have been so disapproved when he was only defining the dilemma which St Paul called 'sin' in the words 'the good I would that I do not; the evil I would not, that I do'. But then St Paul has not exactly been top of the pops recently in the C of E (Revised). Freud also taught that the only way to the recovery of mental health was by facing up to the darkness within: in other words by acknowledging and bewailing.
The new services raise self-evasion to the level of a principle and still the Archbishop wonders why that much vaunted thing 'modern man' has lost his way. Is it any wonder that the Church's teaching on mar- riage (never mind remarriage) is in a mess
when the new wedding service refuses to mention 'fornication' and `men's carnal lusts'? Or when that old challenge to the couple, 'I require and charge you both' is reduced to, 'I am required to ask' — as if matrimony were solemnised by a spokesman from the Tax Office?
If those stern but realistic words are no longer included, we are driven to the judg- ment that they are no longer the doctrine of the Church. In fact, the explanation is more subtle: the Church still does believe that adultery is sinful and that men can be lustful — in those attenuated versions of sin and lust to which it still clings; but it does not like to make mention of the fact. The Church hopes that in the absence of pro- hibitions and other clear statements (which might harm its popularity) people will re- main decent enough to do the proper thing. This is wishful thinking.
Mere niceness and the pious hope that people will behave themselves, that men will learn to control (by better education?) their `carnal lusts' and that the technological Benthamite Babel of contemporary society will issue in the second paradise are no substitutes for a realistic diagnosis of human nature. But then perhaps lust and the temptation to fornication are not urges felt so strongly among ecclesiastical bureaucrats as they are in the rest of the body politic?
That well-intentioned speech of our poor, saddened Archbishop made me think back to that prophecy of T. S. Eliot in the 1930s and now so horribly fulfilled — of the dangerous fatuity which lies in 'dreaming of systems so perfect that nobody will need to be good'.
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