God Has Not Changed. By Alice Thomas Ellis, Continuum, 2004.
Alice Thomas Ellis, who also published under her birth name of Anna Haycraft, was raised by atheistic parents who were members of the Church of Humanity, a godless organization originated by Auguste Comte. In her late teens, she rebelled and converted to Catholicism. She initially intended to enter a convent, but her poor health prevented her from pursuing this vocation. She eventually married and had seven children, though the deaths of two of them would deeply affect her and her work. Starting in 1977 and continuing for over two decades, she would produce a series of wonderful novels of manners that frequently addressed themes of faith, love, and family. Due to her acerbic wit, Ellis might very justifiably be thought of as, “Jane Austen after a few fast shots of whiskey.”
Besides her novels, Ellis also wrote a popular column on the joys and trials of domestic life, as well as numerous essays on religious themes. It is this latter group of writings that has been anthologized into “God Has Not Changed.” All of these essays were originally published in a newspaper, and therefore most of them are quite short, being only about two pages long. Despite their brevity, each essay contains Ellis’s piercing insights into the state of the Faith in England.
Ellis was a staunch Catholic for her entire adult life, but she was an outspoken critic of the secularization of society, particularly what she viewed as the watering down of theology and traditional religious practices in the wake of Vatican II, which she frequently alleged led to the breakdown of a sense of wonder and beauty in favor of modern fads and political correctness. Her outspoken disgust at contemporary trends in worship was very controversial, sparking a wide variety of reactions from all people of all backgrounds. In one of her essays, Ellis wrote that:
“I get lots of letters. In one of them a Reverend writes: ‘You may be a fine novelist but I really do wonder why your theological opinions should be of the slightest interest to anybody, let alone worthy of inclusion in The Guardian. Since you are not a professional theologian they are your private opinions…’ I had written a few words on the liberal approach to God, or as the Reverend would put it ‘God,’ for on the reverse side of the letter is an ad for a work by the Reverend himself entitled On Doing Without ‘God.’… Part of the ad reads: ‘In a global village, the God of religion should not be modeled in the metaphysical terms of a more parochial age. New ways of doing this must be developed.’ New ways of doing what? However, the gratifying part of it is that I had written, in the article to which the Reverend takes such exception, about the intolerance of the liberal stance, the baffled outrage of the liberal whose views are questioned, the refusal to consider any other point of view. It is sweetly ironic that the modernists, the reformers, the liberals, say things like ‘we are church,’ meaning presumably, the people the laity. They wish to democratize the faith and give everyone a say except, of course, for the orthodox. The only voices the bien pensant can tolerate are those that sing in agreement with the current vogue, and the most noted ‘professional theologians’ of our time seem to be either feminists or atheists or both. The simple believer cannot get a word in.” (11).
Ellis was not in the habit of mincing words, and her acerbic style turned off a lot of people. Ellis was singularly disinclined to be charitable towards people who disagreed with her, though it would be unfair to regard her as mean-spirited. A more just evaluation of her character would be to describe her as saying that she was always “snapping to keep from crying.” At the heart of all of Ellis’s work is a deep sadness, often revolving around something that no longer exists, but that was once very deeply loved. In God Has Not Changed, the loss in question often revolves around what Ellis saw as a much wiser and purer past. Anger is commonly regarded as a stage of grief, and behind the disgusted complaining lies some very real mourning. In another essay, Ellis mourns the generational gap in religious knowledge, writing:
“I have given up trying to explain to the younger generation that we are not mere passive spectators at the Tridentine Mass but deeply involved in the mystery, the holiness, the sense of awe, the awareness of a Presence which you sure as hell don’t feel in the kindergarten atmosphere that too often prevails now. With all the endless talk of ‘empowering the laity,’ of giving us a ‘role in church affairs,’ we have ended up being treated like witless kiddies, too stupid, too immature to grasp anything smacking of theological complexity: everything must be sweetened, diluted, simplified and made as bland as infants’ pap. No guilt and certainly no humility and nothing that might appear to tax our intelligence. The attitude of the ‘reformers’ is profoundly insulting, patronizing in the worst possible way, and if we complain they take offence, protesting crossly that it’s all for our own good and how can we be so ungrateful? The changes in the Church increasingly look less like alteration than total destruction, an act of iconoclasm, vandalism previously unsurpassed.” (20).
Many people might disagree with Ellis’s assessment of the post-Vatican II Church, but any serious study of religious changes have to understand the diversity of opinions that changes provoke. Ellis’s writings raise the point that somehow complaining has the power to lead to sanctity, if only because venting over everything that bothers you can assist in purging you of anger. One particularly salient point that she makes is that the attempts to turn religion into a commodity for mass consumption wind up producing something that few people wish to consume at all. Ellis comments:
“Much of the appeal of the religious life used to lie in the challenge it presented. It took courage and determination, as well as faith, to abandon what the world perceived as desirable, and the distinctive habit was an outward sign of commitment. Besides, if one may be permitted to strike a fashion note, the habit suited all women regardless of size, shape or form of countenance, and was a pleasure to gaze upon. A group of nuns clad in the old style, compared with the new ones in short skirts, anoraks, lisle stockings, sandals and the unbecoming approximation of a veil, are reminiscent of swans adjacent to a bunch of tatty pigeons. Some new nuns, of course, dress as they please, with make-up, hair-dos and earrings, and God alone knows what message they hope to put across. I think they might claim that the inner light of the spirit shines through their outer appearance, but it doesn’t. Many of them are concerned only with feminism, goddesses, and ‘women’s rites’– which is even more tiresome than the eldritch squawking about ‘rights,’ and flesh-creepingly silly. Not just spirituality, but all common sense disappears in a welter of secular trendiness, hung about with the tawdry baubles of paganism which are intended, I suppose, to add a flavour of other-worldliness, but are in direct contradiction to Christianity. One of the troubles with the devil is that he has lousy taste he is not the suave gentleman that some would like to think of him as, but a poseur avid to keep up to date with the latest fad. I sometimes think that perhaps he lives in Islington and reads The Tablet, but I may be doing him an injustice… (As I wrote those rude words about Satan, the adversary, my pen dried up. Typical petty spite.)” (27-28).
