27. Preface to Austin Farrer, A Faith of Our Own
To say that this book set me wondering why there are so few like it may seem a left-handed compliment, but it is far from being one. Nearly everything that is very well done looks easy to do, especially if you have never tried it yourself. And if it is also very well worth doing, we naturally ask why more people do not at any rate attempt it. Actually, books like this are rare. We have plenty of religious literature: books of devotion, controversies, apologetics, Christian reflections on ‘the present situation’, Drives, Recalls, Appeals, and New Approaches. But except on a far lower level, both literary and theological, than Dr. Farrer's, the unabashedly homiletic – undisguised instruction and exhortation – is not common. Dr. Farrer offers it. He comes before us in this book not as a missioner, nor a journalist, nor a philosopher, but simply as a priest.
This priestly quality is almost the opposite of the parsonical. No author is so free from labored bonhomie, emotional rhetoric, or conventional pietisms of phrase. He writes everywhere as one who both has authority and is under authority. This is what constitutes his priestliness, and this dictates everything else in the book.
It dictates, first of all, the style. This, in its impeccable sobriety, will seem to every critical reader a model of good taste; but no one who was consciously bothering about taste would ever have achieved it. Its source is elsewhere. Because he writes with authority, he has no need to shout. The truth and importance of what he says are already vouched for. It is assumed that we acknowledge both. He is there to expound, to explain, to remind; to draw again any lines in the bright diagram that have been smudged. But equally, because he speaks under authority, he must practise many abstinences: no exaggerations, however effective, no half-truths, however stimulating. He must not go beyond his commission. And all this, far from producing any flatness, turns out to be what, unconsciously, we were longing for. We have been bullied, flattered, wheedled, and generally ‘got at’ enough. It is a blessed relief to be simply told, to sit quietly listening to this firm, level, unaffected voice.
Again, Dr. Farrer is far too wise and workmanlike in his pastoral office to waste any time on being topical. You will find nothing here about the Bombs or Sputniks. What is usually called ‘the contemporary’ is in fact a composite picture of the recent past, based on secondary sources (chiefly newspapers) and touched up with guesses about the future. Dr. Farrer, at any rate in working hours, has no leisure to spare for such a phantom. He deals with what is really and knowably contemporary – with the august and terrible coincidence of the present moment and the eternal, in which each one of us lives. He is never speaking to the abstraction ‘modern man’; always to you and me, whom he seems to know sufficiently well. That is how – unobtrusively, and with all respect for the individual mysteries we are – he gets under our skin. We close the book aware of tasks we never thought of attempting, and of those others which we repeatedly resolved to attempt and instantly forgot.
His severe self-discipline is nowhere more apparent than in the simplicity with which he writes. Sometimes – in ‘The Fish out of Water’ or ‘Chastity’ – he is reminding us of truths that are not in themselves difficult to grasp. But there are other essays of a very different character: ‘Christ's Atoning Death’, ‘Christ is God’, and ‘This is My Body’. In each of them there is matter out of which some theologians would have made a whole book. Even as they stand, they lead us through a structure of thoughts so delicately balanced that a false word, even a false tone, might land us in disaster. Opposite errors threaten from both sides, so that the author has to tread a path as narrow as a hair. Yet I believe the simple reader will be perfectly capable of following them and will remain quite unaware of all the shoals and rocks that have been avoided. When the author was really dancing among eggs, he will seem to have been strolling across a lawn. It would indeed be possible – if you didn't know – to read the whole book without ever suspecting that it is written, not only by one of the most learned theologians alive but by the theologian whose critics most often accuse him of excessive subtlety. This does not mean that the simplicity of these essays is spurious. It means that it is a final product. None of them began in simplicity. It is a costly distillation. The work is all done and out of sight by the time they reach us.
Perhaps, after all, it is not so difficult to explain why books like this are rare. For one thing, the work involved is very severe; not the work on this or that essay but the lifelong work without which they could not even have been begun. For another, they demand something like a total conquest of those egoisms which – however we try to mince the matter – play so large a part in most impulses to authorship. To talk to us thus Dr. Farrer makes himself almost nothing, almost nobody. To be sure, in the event, his personality stands out from the pages so clearly as that of any author; but this is one of heaven's jokes – nothing makes a man so noticeable as vanishing.