Ray Anglesea shares the next installment of his sabbatical experiences
Le Mans Cathedral (Cathédrale
St-Julien du Mans) is a Catholic cathedral situated in Le Mans, France. It
is dedicated to St Julian of Le Mans the city's first bishop who established Christianity
in the area around the beginning of the 4th century. The cathedral, which
combines a Romanesque nave and a High Gothic choir, is notable for its rich
collection of mediaeval stained glass and the spectacular bifurcating flying
buttresses at its eastern end.
Amongst
the great beauty of the cathedral one wall plaque caught my eye in the south
transept, a war memorial dedicated to the “memory of one million war dead of
the British Empire who fell in the Great War 1914 -1918, and of whom the greater
part rest in France.”The Great War memorials in every town and village both at home and in Europe bring it starkly home to us. The First World War was a huge collective bereavement. The Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red - an art installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies - one poppy for each British and Colonial death during the conflict and planted in the dry moat at the Tower of London is a visual reminder of the enormity of that loss. The generation that lived through the War was a generation both literally depleted by mass slaughter and depleted or diminished in another way by the loss of so much confidence and aspiration. All around were the signs of absent contemporaries; and for many the continuing trauma of having seen friends butchered hideously in large numbers in front of their eyes. There were absent sons and daughters, parents, brother and sisters, husbands and wives, lovers, colleagues, neighbours: a routine intensity of loss.
But beyond that, many believed that the greatest
loss in the war was the conviction of human purpose and human meaning. The
brilliant golden glow of an innocent Edwardian autumn about which so much has
been written and imagined gave way to four cruel, calamitous and merciless years.
An automatic belief in national righteousness; the extreme pronouncements of a
belligerent deity espoused by Anglican Bishops and German Lutherans; governmental
wisdom; the trustworthiness of official communication and popular media alike –
all these were shaken beyond repair. The generation that discovered this had to
find their way into the twentieth century with maps and landmarks damaged
almost unrecognisably.
For many who actually lived through the nightmares
of the First War the war shattered so many illusions of those who suffered in
the trenches and further afield, as well as on the Home Front. Many could make
no sense of God in the cataclysmic events that unfurled before them. For others
who tried to make sense of where God had been in all this realised that losing
the safe, problem-solving God who protected nations and empires might itself be
a gift, a moment of truth that brought the reality of God closer, recognised or
not.
Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy, the charismatic military
chaplain universally known as “Woodbine Willie,” was one of those who tried to
make sense of it all. In his sermons, his meditations, his astonishing poems,
so many of them cast in the voice of the ordinary soldier in the trenches, full
of protest and apparent blasphemy, Studdart-Kennedy argues against the bland
problem solving God. His commitment is to the God who is discovered in the
heart of endurance and pain – not a solution, not a Father Christmas or a Fairy
Godmother, but simply the one who holds our deepest self and makes it possible
for us to look out on the world without loathing and despair.
Shocking and stark as it was, the way
Studdart-Kennedy talked and wrote was pretty well the only religious response
that was at all credible to those who were living through the daily nightmare.
And this may explain just a little how some of the brave who did come through
were able to find some deep foundation for surviving the rest of the century
with courage and a kind of new-found faith.
That
being said, and taken as a whole, the experience of war effected how people
thought about God, about society, and about life. The war changed everything. Survivors
were no longer the same people they were before the war. They could not think,
see, feel in the same way; and they were not content with the old answers to
their questions. Karl Barth (1886-1968), pastor of a rural Reformed parish in
Switzerland, declared to a meeting of Religious Socialists in 1919, "The
fact that today our eyes are opened wider to life's realities is the very
reason why we long for something else." A young Lutheran theologian Friedrich Gogarten
(1887-1967), expressed the bitterness of his generation to his theological
elders in a 1920 article, "Between
the Times." He wrote:
“In our need we were often angry with you, because
you left us alone--and because your words were so weak and so empty that they
sank to the ground before they reached us. But mostly we cried out our question
to you through all your answers to your own questions. . . .
The clearest theological response to the religious crisis created by the war
in Europe was that of Karl Barth. He was soon joined by others thinking along
similar lines, his work
had a profound impact on twentieth century theology and figures such as Dietrich
Bonhoeffer — who like Barth became a
leader in the Confessing Church — Thomas Torrance, Paul Tillich, Reinhold
Niebuhr, Stanley Hauerwas, Jurgen Moltmann and of course, Albert Schweitzer.
The
War had a profound effect on how we and our European neighbours thought about
matters of faith for the rest of the century. Christians struggled with
questions of the impotence of the Church, the power and mystery of sin, and the
ethics of institutional Christianity. In reaction to the Protestantism that
endorsed the war, a distancing between Christianity and culture also took
place. Questions of the ethics of war relate directly to us today, not simply
to human life, but to the survival of all life on our planet. The trauma of the
War in Europe initiated a deep searching for spiritual truth, which has shaped
the religious history of this passing century.
Ray Anglesea
Sabbatical Blog 9: Le
Mans, France
4th
August 2014
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