Austin Marsden Farrer (1904–1968) grew to maturity in a Europe in upheaval. He was an adolescent during World War I and shared the experience of privation in Britain. He was a young adult throughout the period of the General Strike in the United Kingdom and the economic slump that followed it, observing at a distance the rise of National Socialism and Fascism in a Europe that had also witnessed the Russian Revolution and the advent of Communist governments. World War II was associated not just with the aerial and saturation bombing of cities of civilians, but also with the unimaginable horrors of systematic mass murder, and not only in Europe. Although we associate Farrer with the Oxford in which he spent most of his working life, we need to keep this larger framework in mind if we are to appreciate him, the context that nourished him and his world of friends of various degrees of intimacy that we are going to bring into focus in this chapter. We begin with Farrer himself, broaden out to look at his circle of friends and acquaintances, and return to him in the last part. I want to pay particular attention to three key women thinkers of this period, because their influence is often underestimated.

Education

Austin was born the middle of three children into a lively, learned Nonconformist family, to whom he paid a profound tribute: ‘From first infancy our elders loved us, played us, served us, talked us into knowing them; and so the believer claims that he has been brought by mediated divine initiatives into the knowledge of God’. At St Paul's School in London, he received a predominantly literary and classical education, which included the invaluable practice of learning by heart both poetry and prose. He had no pretensions himself to be a poet of much significance, though write it he certainly could. He was also able to translate texts from the Western Church's inheritance of Latin liturgy and devotion.

Farrer's literary gift was to be displayed in an inimitable prose style, especially that intended for oral delivery, as in his sermons, and his sensitivity to metaphor and imagery was to flower especially when he dealt with the biblical text. It takes someone thoroughly familiar with poetry in many styles and several languages to engage with the wealth of genres to be found in scripture.

My narrative is concerned with some elements in Anglican theology over the last halfcentury or so, and with their wholly unforeseen legacy for the credibility of those who represent and wish to commend Christian tradition. I have chosen to provide a thread of connection through my narrative by referring to the work of Stephen Sykes, a near contemporary, whose concern throughout his career was to commend the integration of specifically Church of England liturgy and theology. A distinctive characteristic of his perspective was his confidence in the theological competence of the laity given the episcopate as ‘authorised interpreters’ of the resources they had inherited and faithfully transmitted. My overall proposal is that whatever the theological and liturgical competence of at least some members of the episcopate, their failure to address themselves to much-needed change in the very structure of relationships in the church has put in jeopardy the trust in its representatives on which its members should be able to rely and indeed enjoy.

Introducing the Thread of Connection

I begin with an initial introduction to the life and work of Stephen Whitefield Sykes, for a decade a colleague in the University of Durham's Department of Theology, and a lifelong contact in friendship thereafter. Stephen Sykes was born in 1939 into a clerical family then based at a Bristol college for the training of Church of England candidates for ordination. His secondary education began at Bristol Grammar School, but he was sent from there to what was then an all-boys school in Bath, graduated from St John's College, Cambridge in Theology, and trained for ordination at Ripon Hall, Oxford. Ordained deacon in 1964, he returned to Cambridge as dean of his Cambridge College, and was made priest in the following year. A stint as an assistant and then a full lecturer led to his becoming Van Mildert Canon of Durham Cathedral and professor in the university's Department of Theology (1974–1985). It was during that decade that he identified some of the central preoccupations of his theology. He left Durham to become Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge for just five years, becoming bishop of Ely 1990–1999, thence back to Durham as principal of St John's College until retirement in 2006 – the year of the publication of his concluding and controversial ref lections on ‘power’.

For the purposes of what is necessarily merely an introductory essay in reading Lewis on ‘gender’, the term is to be taken to refer to the relationship of the ‘feminine’ to the ‘masculine’ and vice versa. We assume that one cannot be understood without the other. Lewis himself lived through a period of immense change in what we would now call ‘gender relationships’, and we can draw attention to but a few examples of his views. We need to note also that, given his resistance to the merits and growth of some of the ‘social sciences’, one cannot imagine that he personally would have been sympathetic to the development of ‘gender studies’ which took place after his death. In such studies, attention to ‘masculinity’ is as yet still coming into focus, not least in the study of the Christian tradition in all its complexities.

We can recall, for example, that it was axiomatic in the church of Lewis's baptism, the Church of Ireland, part of the Anglican Communion, that very few were able to take seriously those women who believed themselves to have a vocation to ordination. So whilst women could be baptised, confirmed, forgiven, exchange vows with a male in marriage, receive communion, chrism or a blessing, and like any other baptised person, could baptise someone in extreme circumstances, they would never be able to confirm anyone, pronounce divine forgiveness, celebrate communion, chrismate or bless someone. Whether they could read scripture in public, let alone give an address or preach to a ‘mixed’ audience, was contentious across different churches, as indeed remains the case in our own time. Only in 1944 was Florence Li Tim-Oi ordained by the Anglican bishop of Hong Kong to serve Christians in China, otherwise bereft of priestly ministry. She ceased to act as a priest in 1948 when her bishop's actions were condemned by his fellow-bishops at the Lambeth Conference, though her ordination was eventually recognised within the Hong Kong diocese in 1970. In due course some provinces of the Anglican Communion accepted the ordination of women to the priesthood, including the Church of England itself in 1992.

The vigour of the debate about the ordination of women in the twentieth century was virtually inevitable given the changes of attitude to gender in other areas of life, such as access to university education.

Given more than a century since the birth of Simone Weil (1909–1943), we are in a sense better placed than ever before to appreciate her work, having progressed beyond the days when carefully edited selections of her writing were being released into press in a somewhat piecemeal manner. On the other hand, given the availability of the whole range of the work of such an extraordinarily gifted woman, we are presented with further difficulties. She wrote intensively throughout her relatively short adult life, but not necessarily for publication. Some of her work is best understood to be in the nature of exploratory drafts, whilst her confidence in the value of parts of it, and the care with which she left manuscripts with friends and correspondents, at least encourages us to seek among those drafts for comparably valuable insights. Her long-suffering parents clearly believed in her importance, with her mother especially putting in hours of time typing up her work, not least after Simone's death, making it possible for its publication in due course. All in all, we are left with questions about how best to ‘read’ her without over-systematising her thoughts. Albeit reading selectively, there is certainly coherence to be found, but we can also relish the provocative stimulus of some of her notebook entries as well as the clarity and conviction of such writing with which she seems to have been satisfied, much of it produced in the pressure of extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

We may begin by noting the pressures intrinsic to her education, being brought up alongside a brilliant and affectionate older brother, who became one of France's greatest mathematicians (eventually associated with the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies), as well as managing her own particular talents and achievements. In certain parts of Europe, women gained access to prestigious educational institutions only after World War I – Oxford, for instance, admitting women to degrees only in 1920. In France, it was not until 1928 that women were admitted to the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS). It is a mark of her exceptional abilities that Simone Weil was among the tiny minority of women first under the French philosopher Alain (pseudonym of Emile-Auguste Chartier) at the Lycee Henri IV and then at the ENS.

Dorothy L. Sayers came to maturity during World War I and lived through the eventful responses to it of the 1920s and 1930s, responses that led almost inevitably to the turmoil and disasters of World War II. More directly and intentionally than C. S. Lewis and the other friends who shared these times and stared with her at the possible collapse of European society, she came to see her most pressing call to be helping her nation move beyond the wars and their consequences. She believed that recovery required society to become more just and that it could become so only by reappropriating basic Christian beliefs: creation, incarnation, Trinity, sin, atonement. These dogmas teach us the truth about ourselves and God; consequently, they show us how we can live in the ‘city’ more justly than had been done in the years leading up to and including the two world wars.

The dogmas are not abstract principles; they find their meaning in life. When rightly held, they are at work directing the drama of the soul's choice. The doctrines must be shown, presented, made visible, so that persons can grab hold of them and give them root. Thus, she has the choir in her 1946 play, The Just Vengeance, pray for God to ‘throw open the gates’, to ‘show, show’ the ‘image of truth in place of the images’.

Dorothy L. Sayers takes us to ‘the place of the images’ and shows us the truth of faith as it can be lived in our fallen world. To do this, she works in an amazing range of genres – from advertising to detective fiction, literary criticism, poetry, plays for theatre and for performance in cathedrals, theology, personal and social ethics, reviews, broadcasting, autobiography, letter-writing, lecturing, translation and commentary on texts. In all these forms, her conviction that we relate to God through fictional, poetic, dramatic, biblical and creedal images stands out in bold relief. Thus we find her exploring the ‘liveability’ of Christian doctrine even in her detective novels.

Sayers became more intentional about showing the images when in the late 1930s she began to write plays in which she could literally get doctrine on stage. Her most important theological essay, The Mind of the Maker, also stresses the point that we can know God because we are created in the image of God.

Evelyn Underhill's remarkable book Mysticism (1911) went through many editions and revisions during her own lifetime, and has rarely been out of print since. This book was the work of a pioneer in the field and is still acknowledged as such. It is also worth noting that terminology has shifted over the years: use of the term ‘spirituality’ has now largely superseded such terms as ascetical/mystical/spiritual theology. Thus most of Underhill's writing as a whole is still much valued as ‘spirituality’ (relation to the transcendent). She is not simply to be written off as if she were of importance only in her own era, before World War II in effect (she died in 1941), though some of the conclusions she drew from her studies would not necessarily be palatable to her present-day readers, as we shall see. Moreover, given that ‘spirituality’ has in the last quarter century or so been developing into a major academic discipline and that it is, so to speak, being reconnected to academic theology, we may hope that there will be renewed attention to the whole range of her work. However, it will no doubt be some time before academic theology fully embraces what is now called ‘liturgical’ or ‘pastoral’ theology of the kind that she herself attempted – also within the broad compass of ‘spirituality’. She was nothing if not ambitious both in the range of topics she tackled and in some of her theological proposals. The reason for choosing my particular focus is precisely the audacity of her convictions. A more comprehensive study of her writing as a whole would require a major book.

Evelyn Underhill and Her Context

Born in December 1875, Evelyn Underhill was a Victorian, but one fortunate enough to benefit from some of the most significant changes in the Victorian and then the Edwardian era, which affected the lives of women and, inevitably, their relationship with men. Put briefly, in England, the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, and its development in legislation of 1867 and 1870, had at last done something to rectify the situation of married women, deemed hitherto to have no legal existence and no legal rights of property ownership. In 1885, the Married Women's Property Act secured to married women the property and earnings they had acquired after marriage.

This chapter is about Austin Farrer as a preacher of the gospel of divine saving judgement; for this purpose the Farrer of the sermons, the Lent books, the paragraphs for use at the Eucharist; even the Farrer who taught the use of the rosary. The thread of the chapter is provided by some of Farrer's remarks in Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited (1962; hereafter LA). The title reminds us of P. T. Forsyth's exposition of divine love as that which ‘has absolute power to give itself eternal and righteous effect’. Behind Forsyth lies a long tradition of discussion of theodicy, notably the challenge to Christian theology thrown down by Bayle at the end of the seventeenth century, and Leibniz's attempt to console those who like Bayle expressed inconsolable grief at the way in which ‘evil’ is woven into the entire cosmic texture. Farrer seemed to summarise this tradition when he wrote: ‘The very intensity of the indignation or grief which we feel over the affliction or destruction of God's creatures is a testimony to the esteem in which we hold the happiness and the mere life of the creatures affected’. Farrer's masterly appreciation and criticism of Leibniz sprung both from his own brilliance as a philosopher, and from his thorough grasp of the Christian gospel.

How may we as it were provoke Farrer to speak to us, so that he is not merely the elegant philosopher and theologian of an earlier generation, but a living voice? Perhaps we can deepen our sympathies and refresh our sensitivities to those features of Christ's passion reflected in Farrer's presentation of the gospel by paying attention to two profoundly moving modern ‘passion stories’. One is Rosemary and Victor Zorza's account of the death of Jane, their 25-year-old daughter, a situation of extreme physical evil, in which moral evil is not allowed to proliferate, despite Jane's death. Another is Rolf Hochhuth's account of a German love story, which ends in utter tragedy. Neither of these stories were written to further the interests of any religious apologetic, so it is by accident that they give us a sense of what might be meant by the claim that the passion of Christ is of universal significance.

A walk through the graveyard of the Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead will discover a gravestone for Hubert and Evelyn Stuart Moore, the tablet further identifying her as the daughter of Sir Arthur Underhill. This memorial in effect relegates Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941) to the roles of daughter and wife, containing no indication that she had received public recognition in her own right for her remarkable career. A major feature of this was becoming a ‘retreat director’, a vocation which, in the Church of England, was one she pioneered for women. As early as 1913 Underhill was made an Honorary Fellow of King's College for Women (King's having been founded as a Church of England College), and became King's first woman Fellow in 1927. On that occasion, the dean of King's commended her as one might expect, rehearsing her career and qualifications, but rather to her surprise the principal received her not just as an ‘exponent of mysticism’ but as a poet. She had indeed published three volumes of poetry, but she had also published three novels which are the focus of this present chapter: The Grey World (1904), The Lost Word (1907), and The Column of Dust (1909). The principal may have been perfectly well aware that Underhill had long since deliberately abandoned her attempts to establish herself as a novelist in favour of concentrating on her many publications to commend the living of a distinctively Christian life. For these the University of Aberdeen offered her an Honorary DD in 1938, and she is commemorated in the calendar of the Church of England on 15 June, the date of her death in 1941. At the present time, there continues to be much interest in the work which established her as a distinctively Anglican voice, with many of her readers focussing on her extraordinary achievement in researching and writing Mysticism (1911). For those familiar with this major work and her subsequent publications in theology, the novels may well startle readers into a revaluation of Underhill and the development of her own spiritual life.

At the age of 17, Underhill noted down her ideal of a woman: ‘clever, vivacious, accurately but not priggishly informed, gentle, truthful, tactful and tolerant, and should have a due sense of proportion’.

My interest in Simone Weil (1909–1943) in this chapter is not primarily in her very many merits, but in what helped to bring her to her death. I would not deny that she was one of the great minds of this century, and that whatever she wrote, whether for publication or for her own needs, is marked by her own inimitable authority. We can rely on argument for her merits from writers as different as Professor D. Allen, with his critique of that egocentrism which infects our culture, and is at odds with Christianity's doctrines of co-inherence in their many forms; and Professor D. Z. Phillips, not least with regard to her hunger for the transcendent.

We may recall that terrible prayer she wrote towards the end of her life1 though she did insist to herself that one could not voluntarily demand what the petitions were for, that such prayer was despite oneself, though with consent, entire and without reservation, a movement of the whole being. The prayer included a petition to the Father to grant her in the name of Christ, ‘That I may be unable to will any bodily movement, or even any attempt at movement, like a total paralytic. That I may be incapable of receiving any sensation, like someone who is completely blind, deaf, and deprived of all the senses. That I may be unable to make the slightest connection between two thoughts […]’ She asked for will, sensibility, intelligence, love to be stripped away, ‘devoured by God, transformed into Christ's substance, and given for food to afflicted men whose body and soul lack every kind of nourishment. And let me be a paralytic – blind, deaf, witless, and utterly decrepit’.

At the very least, she is one of those who skip certain levels of contemplative religious development and start with ‘Passionist’ manifestations. Someone operating at this level presents themselves as a total physical sacrifice to the destructive elements of the world, rather than ‘hitting back’: and it is worth noticing that the next level is what Margaret Masterman identified as the ‘Hostic’ level, ‘only sacramentals portrayed’ at which the saint desires not only to be killed but eaten. And indeed we find Simone Weil noting: ‘To live the death of a being is to eat him.

There are three personal names in my title, to begin with the obvious, and I shall say least directly about Dante himself (1265–1321). I want to say something about Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) and two of her essays before turning to her focus on Dante's Beatrice, and why she found that focus so immensely rewarding. Let me begin by explaining that I discovered this more ‘academic’ Sayers more or less by accident. The year 1993 was the centenary of Sayers's birth (she died in 1957), and I seized the opportunity offered to me to put together an integrated anthology of her work, that is to say, of her spiritual and theological writings set into a narrative of her life. Many of her poems and essays on spiritual and theological themes are now little read or remembered, though important in their day, despite the continuing popularity of her detective novels. I would hope that reading her theology would not be as much an exercise in nostalgia as some of the reading of her novels may be. For some of her work, most notably The Mind of the Maker (1941), deserves a place in an authorised list of writings about the Trinity, and of the Trinitarian self-understanding of a writer such as she was, a writer of excellent detective fiction at that! And some of that fiction may be important to prepare a reader for what Sayers has to say about Dante's Beatrice – Gaudy Night (1935) is the most obvious example. Among other things, Gaudy Night is an unabashed defence of academic or intellectual work, irrespective of its market value; of such work as undertaken by women in particular, and of the problems which arise when intellect and emotion are out of harmony with one another, a harmony crucial for the experience of ‘freedom’. That enjoyment of women's intellectual qualities, and of the integration of intellect and emotion, are alike characteristics of Dante and Dante's Beatrice, and not surprisingly are central to Sayers's own aspiration for herself. Not always aware of the ways in which her theology was an act of self-interpretation, she was sensitive to the way in which this was true in the case of Dante's portrayal of Beatrice, and the phrase ‘passionate intellect’ she used of herself as she used it of him.

Readers of C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed may be provoked yet again to evaluate Christian faith in divine sovereign goodness, notwithstanding evidence of the manifest and unambiguous evils of our lives. Joy Lewis's bone cancer is but one example. Joy's death in 1960 may have provoked not only her husband's text, but also Austin Farrer's Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited, published in 1962, one year after Lewis’s. In his last chapter on ‘Griefs and Consolations’ Farrer may well have had Lewis's text in mind. For Katharine and Austin Farrer were friends enough with the Lewises to have attended their extraordinary registry office wedding in April 1956 and Lewis's Reflections on the Psalms of 1958 is dedicated to them. And it was in October 1956 that Katharine had a premonition that something was wrong with Joy. She telephoned, but just before the phone rang, Joy tripped over the wire, felt her leg snap, and found herself helpless on the floor with the telephone receiver beside her, hearing Katharine's anxious voice at the other end. Austin himself, priest as well as friend, gave Joy final absolution on her deathbed, and read her burial service in stark Cranmerian form under the obvious stress of his own deep sorrow for her. In writing Love Almighty, however, Farrer could not refer to A Grief Observed as Lewis's own work. For Lewis had both revealed and hidden his grief and the logical impasse to which it had brought him by publishing his text, yet concealing the identity of those about whom he wrote. He referred to his wife as ‘H’ – the initial of Helen, her first name, and to himself, the author, as N. W. Clerk, a pseudonym he had used before for short pieces. The N. W. derived from an Anglo-Saxon phrase meaning ‘I know not whom’, and ‘Clerk’ meant simply one able to read and write. Farrer himself delivered the commemoration address in Oxford in honour of Lewis1 after the latter's death in 1963, speaking of him as put almost beside himself by Joy's death, of which only those who were aware of the identity of the author of A Grief Observed had unambiguous evidence. Then Farrer contributed a notable critique of Lewis as a Christian apologist in a collection published in 1965.