Alice Thomas Ellis

A reader asked me the other day if I had read Mrs Ellis's "The Inn at the Edge of the World". I hadn't. I still haven't. But it reminded me that having put aside her excellent "Serpent on the Rock: A Personal View of Christianity" for something more pressing, I really ought to pick it up again. And so I did.

It is a book of conversations with all sorts of modern Christians, the orthodox, the confused and somewhat less-than-orthodox, the completely barmy and all manner of gradations in between. Mrs Ellis leaves the citations from the learned journals to someone else and holds up her end of the conversation with style, wit, and common sense.

In this sample, a very modern Catholic full of angst worries about the Catholic teaching on contraception, celibacy, and sex in general:

But I do think that the sexual doctrine of the Church is causing great problems and is partly responsible for the haemorrhage of young people. The doctrine needs, at the very least, strong updating with the help of social sciences. Wherever you look – divorce, homosexuality, contraception or whatever – the Church’s position appears to be outdated and harmful if it creates guilt where perhaps there shouldn’t be any.’

‘I sometimes get the feeling that a constant awareness of guilt should be the condition proper to mankind,’ I observed. ‘It isn’t pleasant but it often seems entirely appropriate.’ Nor do I have the remotest faith in the ‘social sciences’. Human nature hasn’t changed since Adam and Eve and Cain and Able first all fell out with each other’ since David lusted after Bathsheba, Lot repulsed the Sodomites or Onan spilled his seed. I also know that my own ‘young people’ refuse to go to church because it’s lost its elastic. They prefer rules to being patronized and are aware only of the liberal movement, not of the hard core which does remain, if often seemingly silent. The sophisticated young are even less tolerant of the Church’s attempts to offer them what they imagine they will find inviting than I am. The sneer on the face of the street-wise young person who witnesses a Rave in the Nave is enough to freeze the blood.’


One more:

This unthinking insistence on happiness most probably springs from the absurdity enshrined in the American Constitution that man has a right to ‘the pursuit of happiness’: an empty promise which has conspired with later doctrines to mislead people into selfishness and greed. . . .Freud, despite being the originator of the ‘talking cure’ which has degenerated into the ubiquitous ‘counselling’, cannot be held to blame here, since he acknowledged that the normal state of man was one of mild depression. . . It is futile to make happiness a goal: it is always and only a by-product.

This is a hugely enjoyable read. I can't imagine what it was that seemed important enough to let it be laid aside for so long.