'When I was a student,' she says, turning back to the Godwins, 'which would have been around 1950, we read a lot of D. H. Lawrence. Of course we read the classics too, but that was not where our real energy went. D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot – those were the writers we pored over. Perhaps Blake in the eighteenth century. Perhaps Shakespeare, because as we all know Shakespeare transcends his time. Lawrence gripped us because he promised a form of salvation. If we worshipped the dark gods, he told us, and carried out their observances, we would be saved. We believed him. We went out and worshipped the dark gods as best we were able, from the hints that Mr Lawrence let drop. Well, our worship did not save us. A false prophet, I would call him now, in retrospect.
'What I mean to say is that in our truest reading, as students, we searched the page for guidance, guidance in perplexity. We found it in Lawrence, or we found it in Eliot, the early Eliot: a different kind of guidance, perhaps, but guidance nevertheless in how to live our lives. The rest of our reading, by comparison, was just a matter of mugging things up so that we could pass exams.
'If the humanities want to survive, surely it is those energies and that craving for guidance that they must respond to: a craving that is, in the end, a quest for salvation.'
She has spoken a great deal, more than she meant to. In fact, in the silence that now falls, she sees that others have been listening in. Even her sister is turned towards her.
We did not realize,' says the Dean loudly from the head of the table, 'when Sister Bridget asked us to invite you to this happy event, that it was
'Thank you,' she says.
'I could not help catching some of what you were saying,' the Dean continues. 'Do you then agree with your sister that the outlook for the humanities is dark?'
She must be careful how she treads. 'I was merely saying,' she says, 'that our readers – our young readers in particular – come to us with a certain hunger, and if we cannot or will not satisfy their hunger then we must not be surprised if they turn away from us. But my sister and I are in different lines of business. She has told you what she thinks. For my own part, I would say that it is enough for books to teach us about ourselves. Any reader ought to be content with that. Or almost any reader.'
They are watching her sister to see how she reacts. Teaching us about ourselves: what else is that but
'Is this just a conversation over luncheon,' says Sister Bridget, 'or are we being serious?'
'We are being serious,' says the Dean. 'We are serious.'
Perhaps she should revise her opinion of him. Perhaps not just another academic bureaucrat going through his hostly motions, but a soul with the hungers of a soul. Grant that possibility. In fact, perhaps that is what all of them are around this table, in their deepest being: hungering souls. She should not rush to judgement. If nothing else, these people are not stupid. And they must by now have realized that in Sister Bridget, whether they like her or not, they have someone out of the ordinary.
'I do not need to consult novels,' says her sister, 'to know what pettiness, what baseness, what cruelty human beings are capable of. That is where we start, all of us. We are fallen creatures. If the study of mankind amounts to no more than picturing to us our darker potential, I have better things to spend my time on. If on the other hand the study of mankind is to be a study in what reborn man can be, that is a different story. However, you have had enough lecturing for one day.'
'But,' says the young man seated next to Mrs Godwin, 'surely that is precisely what humanism stood for, and the Renaissance too: for humankind as humankind is capable of being. For the ascent of man. The humanists were not crypto-atheists. They were not even Lutherans in disguise. They were Catholic Christians like yourself, Sister. Think of Lorenzo Valla. Valla had nothing against the Church, he just happened to know Greek better than Jerome did, and pointed out some of the mistakes Jerome made in translating the New Testament. If the Church had accepted the principle that Jerome's Vulgate was a human production, and therefore capable of being improved, rather than being the word of God itself, perhaps the whole history of the West would have been different.'
Blanche is silent. The speaker presses on.
