The English writer Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) is worthy of consideration as a spiritual mentor for Christians today.

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 proffers insights into obstacles to belief and into the relation of faith and doubt. They will also descry the connection between these themes and Macaulay's appreciation of the Anglican way. Her work provides a upright example of the uses of imagination in Christian contemplation 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 comrades such as C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L Sayers, and Austin Farrer. Macaulay's is a voice from the keenness 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 years ago, Rose Macaulay applied the alchemy of her art to material drawn from her have a title to experience-as professional writer, international traveler, illicit lover and religious pilgrim-and produc an unusual volume called The Towers of Trebizond. For month after the publication of this novel in 1956 visitors 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 forward her return from High Mass."1 Many body of ecclesiastics and laity found their faith reinvigorated at reading Trebizond. Written, Macaulay said, "in a kind of white-hot passion,"2 this part was "meant to be about the be in agony 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 main division 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 the agency 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, nevertheless it declines to provide stock solutions. The paragraph is realistically unstable; it twist togethers out a question for each apparent answer. And in doing likewise it seems to be saying that instability and doubt are acceptable, calm inevitable; they go with the territory, which is the variegated landscape of tradition and modernity. As individual 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 body of christians Catholic. She wrote Trebizond after her go [i]or[/i] come back to the Anglican fold, unless in this work of fiction she does not surmise to mark out for her readers the degrees on the journey of faith which merely 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 scarcely 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 all 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 meeting-house Her books, up through The World My Wilderness (1950) ponder her alienation. Even after her reply to the faith in 1950-1951 she produc a novel, The Towers of Trebizond, whose heroine, to more [i]or[/i] less 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 as it was that throughout the last years of her life, when she was, to all appearances, a practicing Christian of hard piety, she remained skeptical about long that the tradition deemed essential; just as, from top to toe her long period as an "Anglo-agnostic," she was not at all certain of her unbelief, or independent of spiritual guilt, or unable to appreciate a fit sermon. Macaulay's best fiction thinks the divisions that can afflict the recent soul. In The Towers of Trebizond can be heard a voice from the border 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 propounds the story of an Englishwoman named Laurie, whose personality is uniquely her acknowledge while her situation is the two individual and common. Like other religious quester in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, like as John Updike's Harry ("Rabbit") Angstrom, Laurie is one as well as the other a solitary figure and a corporate personality: in her plight we recognize aspects of our confess condition. Hence the ability of this character to function as an instrument for the increased awareness of who we are. In just like a way does the imaginative writer the two draw us in and point out to us what is at stake.6