It is pure coincidence, but there is something apt in the fact that Richard
Holloway has arranged to meet on the day before the beginning of the Lambeth
Conference. The newspapers are full of headlines predicting ructions to
come, mostly along the lines of “Archbishop Williams needs miracle to hold
church together”. Gene Robinson, the openly gay bishop of New Hampshire and
bête noire of the evangelicals, is haunting London’s television and radio
studios like Banquo’s ghost. It is not just a depressing spectacle but also
a depressingly familiar one, and few know it like Holloway.
It was in 1998, as Bishop of Edinburgh, that he went to his last Lambeth
Conference. After a poisonously acrimonious debate about homosexuals in the
church, he got up the next morning, packed his car and began the long
journey back to Scotland. This incident may not have been the sole trigger
that saw Holloway exit the church, but it was certainly a notable staging
post. By the following year — still a bishop — he had published probably his
best-known book, Godless Morality.
“It upset a lot of people,” he says, neither proudly nor regretfully, sitting
in the drawing room of his house in Merchiston. “It was a book that the then
Archbishop of Canterbury denounced me over at a conference because I was
beginning to challenge the notion, which I believe to be false, that you
have to be religious to have a true ethic.”
It may have been a crude summary of a subtle man, but the legend of the
atheist bishop was born. By the following year, he had resigned his post (or
“packed it in” as he puts it, sounding as though he were drawing a line
under a career in the Post Office or Co-op). It seems unlikely that any of
the church hierarchy gave him a carriage clock.
So here we are, almost exactly a decade later, confronted with the same
debates but not the same Holloway. For a man in his seventies, he is hardly
lacking in energy.
In 2006, he became chairman of the joint board of the Scottish Arts Council
and Scottish Screen and should one day, presuming the politicians get their
act together, fulfil the same role at the new national arts quango, Creative
Scotland. He finds time to present a Sunday morning show on BBC Radio
Scotland, and this month he even makes his debut at the Edinburgh Fringe,
playing the archetypal turbulent priest in a staged reading of T S Eliot’s
Murder in the Cathedral. (“I’m not sure you can draw too many connections
between us,” he says.)
But it is writing that has most clearly defined the past decade for Holloway.
This month, his fifth book since Godless Morality is published.
Collectively, these volumes have proved hugely popular for works of moral
philosophy and, in this respect at least, it is hard to separate the man
from the work.
Much of the fascination of Holloway’s writing comes from watching the author
struggle with his faith — or lack of it — in public. As he conducts a
conversation with himself, he is by turns hopeful, hesitant and strident.
And, though he clearly draws on a huge library of theological and other
reading, he manages to convey his ideas in a manner that is intimate to the
point of folksiness at times. Decades of giving sermons have their uses.
Nor is he afraid to go for the big questions. The new book, Between the
Monster and the Saint, comes with the subtitle Reflections on the Human
Condition, which pretty much covers it all. Didn’t he feel he ought to take
on a subject that was just a little more self-contained?
“But it is the big questions that are interesting,” he says. “I quote the
painter Gauguin, who wrote three questions on the corner of one of his
canvases: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? The book
is mainly about evil. From a theological and religious point of view, I have
always been interested in the side of the human that’s capable, on the one
hand, of the most love and pity and heroism and, on the other, of the
ugliest cruelty.”
The idea that Holloway returns to again and again in Between the Monster and
the Saint is what he calls the “X force”. Transcribing the tape of the
interview afterwards, I realised that I had repeatedly called it the X
Factor, the show presided over by Simon Cowell. This is slightly
embarrassing when you’ve just been talking to someone of Holloway’s moral
seriousness.
In fact, the idea is borrowed from the French philosopher Simone Weil. Writing
about Homer’s Iliad, she says: “To define force — it is that X that turns
anybody into a thing. Exercised to its limit, it turns man into a thing in
the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.”
Weil’s observation is the central quote of the book: “Men objectify women. War
objectifies humans,” Holloway says. “She seemed to put her finger on the
essential human problem. We are all victims of, if you like, effects,
whether that be the beginning of the universe, down to our parents, to the
person we met. But we need to be more than that.”
The book starts with a graphic example of the process of such objectification,
from Holloway’s own experience. When he was nine, growing up in the town of
Alexandria, Dumbartonshire, he had a holiday job as a messenger for the
local Co-op. One morning, observing the male members of staff drifting
towards the store-room at the back, he followed them.
“One of the women workers came into the room, presumably to pick something up
for a customer. As soon as she entered, the door was closed, then locked,
and the men surrounded her . . . Mr Self-Importance gave the signal and the
men grabbed the woman and lifted her on to the table on her back. Though she
struggled a bit, it seemed to me to be more of a lark than a lynching, and
she didn’t cry out for help. I didn’t exactly know what was going on, but I
played a significant part in what happened . . . entering the fun, I took
hold of her ankles and lifted her legs on to the table, provoking the
congratulations of Mr Self-Importance for my assistance. He then shoved his
hand under her skirt and groped her. It was all over.”
Yet in Holloway’s mind, it clearly wasn’t all over. The memory has stayed with
him over six decades, although he has only now chosen to write about it.
“I’ve been wrestling with this one for a number of years,” he says. “That
wasn’t a bunch of completely bad men. There was one man and the others went
along with it. I come back to it because I think most of what goes in human
affairs is like that, the way we can be sucked into scenarios that in our
heart we don’t actually approve of.”
Between the Monster and the Saint dots around its subject with a magpie
energy, as its author scampers up the highways and byways of art, philosophy
and literature, synapses sparking, to find just the right quote or example.
You suspect that Holloway would be perfect on the radio panel game Just a
Minute: he ranges widely without ever quite deviating from his subject.
Many of the writers he draws on are feminists, among them Andrea Dworkin, who
he quotes with glee. He makes an unlikely feminist writer himself, I
suggest: a septuagenarian west coaster who, by his own admission, is a “very
male kind of figure”.
“But why do you say that?” he asks. “That doesn’t mean I can’t have empathy. I
had a very strong mother and two sisters. I’m the father of two daughters.
Once I was of a thinking age, it’s not as if I came late to the idea of
women’s rights as a simple social justice issue. And I supported female
ordination.
“That said, I do remember taking part in one symposium on the role of women in
religion where I was taking a fairly radical stand. Someone came up to me
afterwards and said, ‘Richard, the real paradox is that that was a very
masculine performance.’ But I can’t not be who I am.”
If the treatment of women informs part of the book, our attitude to other
species is also a concern. “I’m an animal lover. I’ve always had dogs,” says
Holloway. (While he talks, his beloved border terrier, Daisy, snoozes on an
armchair by the window). “Probably the most gross example of how humans
objectify the other is the way we objectify animals. One of the great modern
horrors is factory farming, because we literally deny animals their
animalhood. We simply reduce them to pure product.”
But what of his own spiritual progress in the past decade? After he stepped
down as Bishop of Edinburgh, he says, he spent “a fair bit of time, if not
exactly in the wilderness, at least on the edge of it. I would go to church
sometimes. But most of the time I was just walking, thinking”. Often, he
would go back to Old St Paul’s, where he had many happy years as rector, and
sit in the empty church. “I suppose that building trapped something of the
search for the other in me. It was quite a painful time.” Lately, however,
he admits having grown “a bit mellower about religion”.
Have the people he upset when he stepped down as a bishop forgiven him yet?
“There are ones that still think I’m a bampot and a heretic. That’s their
problem. I never alienated friends in the sense that they stopped seeing me
— and I’m never too bothered about losing enemies.”
He certainly does not consider himself an atheist and prefers the term
“after-religionist” to agnostic. “You can be agnostic and not have any
relationship with religion. With after-religion, religion is still there,
but as a human construct. You value it still but you no longer operate with
the assumption that it belongs to some kind of celestial domain.”
Since Godless Morality, Holloway’s books have never been just about the ideas
contained within. It is almost as if he has become the protagonist in an
ongoing story, with each slight shift of position another plot twist. “The
one thing I don’t think I’m capable of,” he says, as he prepares to take
Daisy for a walk, “is being static.” Expect the next instalment in a couple
of years.
Between the Monster and the Saint is published by Canongate
(£14.99).Richard Holloway is speaking at theEdinburgh Book Festival on
August 10; www.edbookfest.co.uk
