Here Endeth

On visiting churches, and the religious imagination

It is of course an entirely secular poem. I was a bit irritated by an American who insisted to me it was a religious poem. It isn’t religious at all. […] Ah no, it’s a great religious poem; he knows better than me — trust the tale and not the teller, and all that stuff. Of course the poem is about going to church, not religion — I tried to suggest this by the title — and the union of the important stages of human life — birth, marriage and death — that going to church represents; and my own feeling that when they are dispersed into the registry office and the crematorium chapel life will become thinner in consequence.

~ Philip Larkin, Nov 1964, on the subject of his poem Church Going¹

“Methinks the lady doth protest too much.” Queen Gertrude’s famous line, thus misquoted, is inevitably also misapplied. In Hamlet the speaker is the guilty party; Gertrude sees in the Player Queen an oppressed and self-defensive conscience because her own conscience is so deeply troubled; she sees in the stage figure her own guilt — as Hamlet indeed has planned it — because she no longer really believes in the possibility of innocence. When this line is quoted, the speaker, in pointing the finger of accusation, should understand that the finger points back at himself; that he is revealing himself as culpable. Instead it is used to say that those who protest their innocence too loudly must be guilty — a moral catch-22 to which no person of virtue could agree without a more than merely virtuous measure of humility. The line has been subsumed into the general illiteracy of the times, and its meaning inverted.

And yet, reading Larkin’s protestations above, I can’t help but think to myself: the lady doth protest too much.

Larkin wrote Church Going in 1954, when he was aged 32. This, in the development of Larkin’s art, is already too late for one to be able to tell that it is a young man’s poem; already we can imagine him at fifty, disgruntled and disappointed, but animated by a gentle and elegiac genius which sooths at-hand anger and pain but, at the same time, stings somewhere deeper. Church Going is like The Whitsun Weddings, An Arundel Tomb, or High Windows a giving up which is not quite a letting go; not a torrent of sobs but a single unspilt tear shivering brightly on the cusp of an eyelid, no sooner noticed than wiped away. It’s all very sad.

The poem — fairly long for Larkin, at 63 lines — tells of a young, unbelieving cyclist who calls into a country church while passing: something which he does often, and out of habit.

Hatless, I take off

My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

He imagines what, with the seemingly inevitable decline of Christianity, will become of the place; who will be the last to see it; who the last to understand its original purpose. He ends:

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much can never be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

Larkin sent a copy of the poem to Monica Jones in August 1954, along with a letter explaining his intentions:

I could write plenty of “background” stuff about it, but you had better read it unsupported first: do remember, however, that I write it partly to exhibit an attitude as well as to try to arouse an emotion — the attitude of the “young heathen” of whom there are plenty about these days […]

I suppose nearly seventy years later there are even more about, though on the whole no doubt displaying a different attitude. Still, young² heathen myself, given as I am, like Larkin and Larkin's cyclist, to touristing in churches, I can't help but have some sympathy for the poor American who so annoyed the poet in insisting that there was something religious about the poem. Is it really true that when we — atheists, unbelievers, heathens — are drawn to churches, wander in, inspect the stonework, the windows, the tombs, bask in atmosphere of it, the middle-of-the-day dimness, the musty smell of medieval tiles and rafters, that somehow-ever-present petrichor, and that silence thicker than air, that whisper-denying silence which raises within one simultaneously pulse-stilling calm and muscle-tightening anxiety — is it true, could it possibly be true that this has nothing to do with the building's purpose, which is not in the first case weddings or christenings or funerals but the glorification of God? Or, to put it another way: are our reasons for being there so totally unlike the reasons of those others; those who are driven there honestly by their beliefs to commune with the divine? Is it a kind of coincidence? I don't find it plausible.

[S]ome brass and stuff

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;

And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,

Brewed God knows how long.

Larkin’s contention is that we are drawn to churches not for religion, but because it is there that human life is taken seriously, where “all our compulsions meet,/ Are recognised, and robed as destinies”. But this is not really true — death, to which we are compelled whether or not the compulsion is our own, is in the Christian view disrobed, rather, as an illusion — revealed naked and pitiful, denied and defeated.³ But in any case, we have seen in recent years the attempt to remake these ceremonies of life along secular lines. "Humanist" marriage ceremonies; funerals which are not (the horror) to mourn the dead, but to "celebrate the life". Even secular “naming ceremonies” which parody christenings. Such things, clearly, have nothing like churches to appeal to us. Who would wish to step inside some community hub or leisure centre on the grounds that secular humanists used it for their (self-conscious, vaguely embarrassing) ceremonies? And surely such ceremonies lack the power to “robe as destinies” any compulsion — their purpose rather is to raise up the compulsion itself for celebration; to honour and dignify desire as desire. Nor can our “dead lie round”. Rather, their corpses alone rot — and indeed it is the fashionable boast of the proud atheist that he cares not a wit for what becomes of his body when he is dead (“Why would I care? I’ll be gone.”)

So what, then, is it that draws us in? In Little Gidding Eliot also imagines a visitor to a church — seems, indeed, to address Larkin’s cyclist directly, despite being written over a decade earlier.

[W]hen you leave the rough road

And turn behind the pigsty to the dull façade

And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for

Is only a shell, a husk of meaning

For which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled

If at all. Either you had no purpose

Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured […]

Larkin also uses the word “shell” to describe the church after its long decay — after it has been emptied out of the meaning that belief gives it. Eliot then goes on, famously:

You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid.

A serious house on serious earth, indeed. Eliot leaves us, finally, with the promise of Julian of Norwich that

All shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

And this, I think, rather than any wish “to be more serious”, is what bring us in: the religious vision, which remakes a world of contingency and callous disregard for human life into one which is, if we could but see it, predicated on love; in which humanity and the humane have a central place, and in which not only our compulsions but our desperate hopes are “robed as destinies”. It shows us the world as we wish it to be. The tourist follows the natural yearning of the heart to know that “all shall be well” and this brings him to the place where the religious imagination has done its best to make that promise manifest in the world. We see Christ in agony — in the very perfection of our own agony — and though we might perhaps intellectually understand it as the cruel and unnecessary and unheeded torture of some poor animal like ourselves, we are compelled to see it the other way: as infinite triumph over death and suffering — not only the rending of the veil, but the revelation that there is something behind that veil. It is a vision of homecoming; the end of a long exile; of humanity finally overcoming its perpetual metaphysical homelessness, its alienation in an alien world.

Here, however, before the mock-crucifix, is where the tourist’s path runs out. He, unlike the believer, knows that he cannot go forward into the heavenly city which is his home, but must turn and leave by the way he came in; or rather, more and more often now in larger churches and cathedrals, by the gift shop, which was placed there not in anticipation of his arrival but of his leaving, and where he can buy snap bracelets, keyrings, cathedral-themed Top Trumps, pencil-sharpeners, The Little Book of Hope.

Those gift-shops bother me, and not only because I can at times feel mocked by them. They seem part and parcel of the museumisation of churches. Larkin again:

When churches fall completely out of use

What shall we turn them into, if we shall keep

A few cathedrals chronically on show,

Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,

And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.

As Christianity declines (and it does remain in decline, a few trendy pockets of converts notwithstanding), churches lose their meaning. No longer dedicated to prayer, worship, the glorification of the divine, man’s nature-beyond-nature, they may in the future no longer point the way out of this world to that other place — vital, though imaginary — where we are made whole, but back towards our own society and its past. Even now there are times when I, somewhat guilty and furtive, seek out a church or chapel to peruse for half-an-hour and am met by: exhibits, plaques, and, yes, gift-shops.⁴ And of course I have no right to complain; it's like that because of me. Coming to a larger church or cathedral, one can often find oneself part of a crowd of tourists trudging the perimeter, whispering to one another, taking photographs, while maybe one or two people sit in the pews in quiet contemplation. One's natural romantic impulse is to say, well, one of them outnumbers a hundred of us — but the evidence as so often refuses to side with such impulses. Chapels "where prayer has been valid" have become darkened rooms in which brief historical documentaries are projected in a loop on the wall; eyes are drawn away from the stonework and windows towards exhibits bearing masses of text explaining the history of the place (vindicating the archdeacon's words in Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris⁵); the church explains itself as an artefact in need of explanation, like the statues and frescoes of long-gone civilisations, and ages disgracefully into museumhood as the living tradition within it petrifies into dead history. But this defeats not only the believer's purpose, but the tourist's. He is not looking for a museum; he wants a vision of his home.⁶

Well, so what? It’s a lot of stone to maintain for just a crumb of comfort. Perhaps they will survive as museums and an unbelieving man at least should be able to do without the rest. I believe, however, that there is a great deal more at stake than that. It is through the religious imagination that man comes to have an idea of the good. What we call Western morality is really Christian morality; when we judge a civilisation to be righteous or unrighteous, we judge by a standard which was given to us by the Christian imagination and, as Tom Holland argues convincingly in Dominion, our idea of the universal dignity of man is a fundamentally Christian idea. It is no surprise, therefore, that we find it is nations with Christian heritage who most fervently uphold and live by notions like “human rights”, however self-critical they may be, and nations which are furthest from that heritage who are most likely to view their citizens as disposable chattel (I’ll name no names — but only because I don’t need to); no more is it a surprise that as Christianity retreats we see the inviolability of human life become negotiable at both ends, with the increasing acceptance first of abortion and now of “euthanasia”. And indeed one need only look at the Aztecs to see how much the worth of an individual human life can change when the religious imagination takes a different course. The righteous city on Earth is an imperfect reflection of the Heavenly City which the Christian imagination provides; the righteous man is an imperfect reflection of Christ.

It is religion that causes the alienation for which it is a balm. It is religion which tells us we are not made for this world. But this is all to the good — to be at home in the world would be to remain a worthless animal. It is in the pursuit of heaven that man becomes man. It is only when he is orientated towards that impossible horizon that he rises out of his beastly nature. Science tells us truly that man is an animal. Religion tells us that he is divine. And like Don Quixote making manifest the unreality of chivalric literature, and thus rising in glory beyond the narrow confine of Alonso Quijano, man imperfectly apes the divine, and so overcomes his apehood. In this way it can be said, the nonexistence of the original notwithstanding, man truly is made in the image of God. For now, that is; he is busy making for himself new images.

---

I have form when it comes to Larkin. For years I assumed that the titular High Windows were the bright, unadorned glass of a Protestant church — until I read that they were probably inspired by the windows of some garret Larkin had once occupied. What I took as ironic mockery of religion (“No God anymore, or sweating in the dark/ About hell and that…”) was probably meant sincerely. I regret and fear the decline of Christianity and may be guilty of reading my own feelings into his poems. Maybe Church Going is what Larkin said it is: entirely secular, unconcerned with religion-qua-religion. Trust the tale and not the teller, and all that. The lady doth protest too much, I think. And then I remember that Queen Gertrude’s the guilty party.

Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few

Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce

'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.

~ Philip Larkin, Church Going

1. The Complete Poems gives the reference: Philip Larkin: Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews, 22-3.

2. I beg your indulgence.

3. Or rather, it is dolled up in robes and makeup and re-presented as “eternal life”.

4. The worst I’ve seen is Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, in which a third of the space is given over to a gift shop selling shamrock keyrings and the rest is pure museum, displaying, among other curiosities, Swift’s death mask.

5. "This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice."

6. “Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.” ~ W. H. Auden