A case for P.D. James as a Christian novelist

Theology Today, Jan 2003 by Wood, Ralph C

It is a mark of James's integrity that she permits such sharp critique of her own spiky kind of Anglo-Catholicism. Such attacks can be found in her other novels as well. In Innocent Blood (1980), an Anglican bishop confronts the sociologist Maurice Palfrey on a television talk show. Palfrey believes that we need only to improve economic and environmental conditions in order to prevent crime and solve social problems. Christianity, with its absurd doctrines, is a deceitful distraction from this primary task. Instead of congratulating the sociologist for having been appropriately scandalized by the gospel-the good news that God transforms the world precisely through the tawdry bride of Christ called the church-the bishop blinks. He is too timid and vacillating about his own faith to offer an untrammeled affirmation of it. James thus allows a confessed murderess to denounce not only the weakling prelate but also the great preponderance of Christians who share his Laodicean faith: "Poor bishop! He could only win by saying things he'd be too embarrassed to utter and which neither the BBC nor the viewers-especially the Christians--would in the least wish to hear."22

James does not leave her bell-book-and-candle kind of Christianity undefended. Father Sebastian Morell, the warden of St. Anselm's, responds to Crampton's attack with his own sprightly queries:

What is it that you want? A Church without mystery. stripped of that learning, tolerance and dignity that were the virtues of Anglicanism? A Church without humility in the face of the ineffable mystery and love of Almighty God? Services with banal hymns, a debased liturgy and the Eucharist conducted as if it were a parish bean-feast? A Church for Cool Britannia?23

Yet we are not left with a rhetorical standoff between low and high churchmanship. The novel offers a strong case, albeit quietly unstated, against the notion that there is any pure, unadorned gospel that needs only to be applied like a poultice to the world's problems.

There is no Christianity, James suggests, without strange language and difficult doctrines and unworldly practices. Absent such signs of its transcendent uniqueness, Christian faith becomes little more than moral uplift. The very existence of St. Anselm's, though small and precarious and doomed soon to die, makes its own powerful witness. Its resident priests and ordinands are surely not exemplars of unalloyed virtue; indeed, they all have reason for committing the murders. James makes it ever so clear that sin can infect the faithful even more fatally than the unbelieving. Yet this handful of churchmen is habituated to a life of devotion, worship, and communal living that gives them a depth of character that is lacking in their secular counterparts, most of whom live in a solitary sufficiency.

It is P. D. James's great gift to recreate the interworkings of professional enclaves where people are put in close connection and joined by a common enterprise. Whether in a law office or a bank, a hospital or a theological college, she reveals the jealousies and affairs, the alliances and enmities that inevitably occur. James is agreed with Dostoevsky that intimate relations are the ultimate test of character and indeed of faith itself. "I love mankind," a character confesses in The Brothers Karamazov, but "the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons.... As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men."24 Chesterton scored the same dark point far more lightly: "The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies," said the great English wit, "probably because they are generally the same people."25