I was, for better or worse, raised in the Methodist Church.
To try and explain precisely just what that means is difficult, as in many ways that iteration of the Methodist Church is no longer existent, or is found mostly in memories, kept alive by dwindling, gray haired congregations. The Methodism of the North of England has never been particularly theologically or religiously zealous: they tend towards sobriety and moderation in religious expression, a focus on hymnody and a practical theology outworked as social organization — Sunday schools, charitable committees, foundations to improve the public good. It isn’t a surprise that Methodism of this flavor flourished in industrial centers — Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester. The first Methodists were miners, weavers, factory laborers and so their religion was a way to be a good worker – for the Lord as well as for their employer. If Methodism emerged at roughly the same time as British Romanticism, it was in some ways a very unromantic kind of religion. It was sober, serious and ultimately — Methodical. Read the sermon titles of John Wesley: “On Charity” “On Visiting The Sick”, “On the Education of Children.” Methodism emphasized literacy in Scripture (the Bible has always been the Church’s bad conscience as Bloch puts it) and a life lived in quiet service for the betterment of the world. This, of course, was not done to earn salvation, but works for others were done as an act of faithful thanks to God for a salvation that came through faith alone. The Methodist did not wait to see heaven but was supposed to, by and with the help of God, bring heaven just a little nearer to Earth. Conversion and faith comes by grace, and inevitably leads one to live differently. To be a Methodist was to live out of time, and to see the world as something that with effort — with work — could be made into something new..
When I was there, the church was over a century old but its school buildings and halls were empty, aside from seemingly never-ending Church luncheons and coffee mornings, hard working women trying to make the world a little better through strong tea, lemon cake and fruit salad, moving seamlessly through childbirths, sickness visits, all the way to bereavement. Eventually, the beautiful, sonorous pipe organ was removed, as the only member of the congregation who could play passed away. The chapel closed in 2018. They’ve torn the place down now, though on the drive up the hill back to my childhood home you’ll see the ruin of it, the echo of a place that saw the world as something to be made anew. For better or worse you can’t tear down memory quite so easily and faith, even if it’s ruined and gone, lingers deep in the earth of one’s being.
Faith is a good problem for a novelist. After all, to live differently — or, to put this in more religious language — to be set apart, inevitably creates dramatic conflict. Take Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Is it better that humanity be remade or that human freedom be preserved even at terrible cost? For Burgess, a slightly unorthodox and rather politically reactionary Catholic, the answer he gives in the novel is clear. Or, take Brighton Rock, a noir gangster story that is maybe the first and greatest of Graham Greene’s religious novels concerned with questions of not just right and wrong, but good and evil. The Catholic novel is well established, though Methodists tend not to get quite so much attention in this realm. After all, historically, Methodism, with its links to working and lower middle classes was seen as being self-improvement at best and rather embarrassing in its sincerity at worst. Maybe the closest thing to a Methodist novelist is George Eliot — her 1859 novel Adam Bede is surprisingly sympathetic, presenting the preacher of Dinah Morris as sensible, self sacrificing and deeply concerned with the poor. She does not see visions or preach radicalism but seeks in a small way the dear nearness of the Kingdom of Heaven. And now, perhaps, there is something close to a Baptist novel, in Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment.
I’ve enjoyed all of Perry’s previous novels and she’s always written about the intersections of faith and reason. The Essex Serpent stages such a divide in the context of nineteenth century rural Essex, wherein faith and folklore collided with the emergence of the natural sciences like geology and evolution. In a postmodern Gothic retelling of Maturin’s old novel Melmoth the Wanderer there is a keen awareness of the terrible responsibility of being in the world, a confrontation with the charnel house of human history and the injunction put upon all: look. See what dwells in the hearts of humanity, and do not soothe yourself with the glib lie, “I did not know.” Her Melmoth is a very Calvinist novel in some ways (hardly a surprise) as the victims of Melmoth seem to be predetermined from birth to be so observed. If Melmoth is a novel of darkness, shadows, pain and blood, then Enlightenment is a metaphysical novel of light and wonder.
Set in the fictional Essex town of Aldleigh, it follows the relationship between Thomas, a middle aged man out of time who works as a columnist for the local paper, and the seventeen year old Grace Macaulay who worships with him and a small congregation at Bethesda Baptist Chapel. Without giving too much away, it features a beetle-browed ghost, local museums, a fire and the bleak history of Eastern Europe but the principle concern of the novel is not anything as prosaic as human affairs, but rather a cosmos shot through with the indelible touch of enchantment. The religious view is that the material world is never just things but enchanted with something that eludes us always. Gerard Manley Hopkins writes that, “for all this, nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” It is this view that the novel shares, finding that freshness — that enchantment — not in the natural world, but in the perihelion and aphelion of heavenly bodies and, at the same time, the antinomies and contradictions of human consciousness. As the novel puts it, “to become a citizen of the Empire of the Moon” is like a religious experience, a moment of conversion, in which the way one sees the world (and so lives in the world) becomes necessarily and permanently altered.
There are ghosts, fear, pain and loss in the novel, but unlike in Melmoth these are not to be feared. At its best, the novel sees these things as necessary and sacred elements of the interconnected sublimity of all things. The journey of the characters is something akin to E.M Forster’s injunction to “live in fragments no longer.” Does faith resolve? No, but one can live with the contradictions: the pull towards a different world and the push towards this world which could be made new. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. As do we all.
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