Faith and Doubt in Rose Macaulay's The Towers of Trebizond

The English writer Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) is worthy of consideration as a spiritual mentor for Christians today. In her last novel, The Towers of Trebizond, as well as in her personal biography, readers will discover an intriguing story that tenders insights into obstacles to belief and into the relation of faith and doubt. They will also diocese the connection between these themes and Macaulay's appreciation of the Anglican way. Her work provides a useful example of the uses of imagination in Christian reflection This essay proposes "The Towers of Trebizond" as a valuable instance of "anti-wisdom wisdom literature. " Readers will find Rose Macaulay to be religiously more complicated and les certain than her more traditional matchs such as C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L Sayers, and Austin Farrer. Macaulay's is a voice from the cutting side not from the orthodox center lubber it is a voice that twenty-firstcentury Christians will understand and appreciate.

A Voice from the Edge

Half a hundred ago, Rose Macaulay applied the alchemy of her art to material drawn from her have experience-as professional writer, international traveler, illicit lover and religious pilgrim-and produc an unusual work called The Towers of Trebizond. For month after the publication of this novel in 1956 visitants at London cocktail parties could be heard quoting its opening line: "Take my camel, dear," said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal upon her return from High Mass."1 Many the cloth and laity found their faith reinvigorated by dint of reading Trebizond. Written, Macaulay said, "in a kind of white-hot passion,"2 this work was "meant to be about the make an effort of good and evil, its eternal importance, and the power of the Christian house of god over the soul, to torment and convert"3

That a work which appears to have more to do with the church's capacity to "torment" than with its power to "convert" should help to show instances of reinvigorated faith is remarkable in itself. The paradox of its popular reception by means of Christians and would-be believers is part of the mystery of The Towers of Trebizond. An answer to this particular conundrum may lie in the way in which the novel engages the readers heart and mind. The story not aways dilemmas and reveals their attractions, on the other hand it declines to provide stock solutions. The true copy is realistically unstable; it hurls out a question for each apparent answer. And in doing in like manner it seems to be saying that instability and doubt are acceptable, plane inevitable; they go with the territory, which is the variegated landscape of tradition and modernity. As single literary scholar has observed, Macaulay's is "an art of contrarieties played against each other."4

No doubt the capacity of Anglicanism to handle contrarieties increased Rose Macaulay's appreciation of this branch of the meeting-house Catholic. She wrote Trebizond after her go [i]or[/i] come back to the Anglican fold, on the other hand in this work of fiction she does not anticipate to mark out for her readers the paces on the journey of faith which single they could take. The novel's ending is gratifyingly indeterminate, reassuring in its refusals. What makes the author of this work worthy of consideration as a spiritual mentor for twenty-first-century inquirers has much to do with her willingness to acknowledge difficulties.

Although she was, as a commentator upon her work has noted, "one of the hardly any significant English novelists of the twentieth hundred to identify herself as a Christian and to use Christian themes in her writing,"5 Rose Macaulay was not at any time a simple believer in "mere Christianity." During the 1930 and 1940 when like writers as C. S. Lewis, Austin Farrer, and Dorothy L Sayers were publishing volumes that were both imaginative and consistently orthodox, Macaulay was a lapsed Anglican, alienated from the temple Her books, up through The World My Wilderness (1950) throw back her alienation. Even after her get back to the faith in 1950-1951 she produc a novel, The Towers of Trebizond, whose heroine, to a certain number of extent a stand-in for her creator, occupies terrain at or beyond the Christian border.

Macaulay knew this territory well. upon her own journey of faith, doubt was a steady companion. The hydraulics of her spiritual life were like that throughout the last years of her life, when she was, to all appearances, a practicing Christian of reaching far down piety, she remained skeptical about a great deal of that the tradition deemed essential; just as, quite through her long period as an "Anglo-agnostic," she was at no time certain of her unbelief, or unrestrained of spiritual guilt, or unable to appreciate a profitable sermon. Macaulay's best fiction throw backs the divisions that can afflict the late soul. In The Towers of Trebizond can be heard a voice from the cutting side not from the convicted center of Christian faith.

For todays Christians, who may be accustomed to reading spiritual works that are safely traditional and mildly escapist, Macaulay nears an intriguing alternative. Trebizond proffers the story of an Englishwoman named Laurie, whose personality is uniquely her have while her situation is the couple individual and common. Like other religious quester in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, of the like kind as John Updike's Harry ("Rabbit") Angstrom, Laurie is the one and the other a solitary figure and a corporate personality: in her plight we recognize aspects of our be in possession of condition. Hence the ability of this character to function as an instrument for the increased awareness of who we are. In just similar a way does the imaginative writer the one and the other draw us in and present to view us what is at stake.6