Last Words, Richard Holloway, Swift, 2025, £10.99.
The number of prelates who later in life lose their faith, but who, through inertia or fear of losing a comfortable billet, continue in their office, must in the nature of things remain unknown; but Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, is most definitely not one of them. He has been very public about his apostasy and turn to agnosticism, and is perhaps fortunate that he was, in the days of his belief, a Christian rather than a Moslem.
Four considerations operated on him to lose this faith. The first was the sheer immensity of the universe, which made it implausible to him that the whole had been created with Man in mind. The second was the impossibility of reconciling the infinite goodness of any Supreme Being with the manifest suffering of which any reflective person must be cognizant. The third was that the notion of an uncaused cause, a cause whose essence was that it could not but exist, was incoherent and explained nothing. And fourth was the awareness of the sheer variety of religious opinions and dogmas, often held with a degree of certainty, or at least of dogmatic obstinacy, not proportional to the evidence in their favour – and which have caused, and continue to cause, much conflict in the world.
These are hardly new arguments and might just as well have prevented him from ever having had any faith, but they did not. He acknowledges, however, that such faith is deeply consolatory for many (though for fewer and fewer), for it provided both an explanation of why there was something rather than nothing, and an assurance that the existence of suffering had a transcendent meaning and significance, and was not merely arbitrarily horrible.
This book is a kind of short summing-up of his life’s experience, and as he is now in his tenth decade, it is likely to be, as indicated by the title, his final book. It is part reflexion, part autobiographical, and reads amiably. It is written without bitterness or acidity, and he is the kind of man with whom one might disagree without coming to dislike or despise him. As the temperature of our mutual disagreements rises, this amiability is an increasingly uncommon quality.
Richard Holloway’s path through life has been a remarkable one. He experienced great poverty at home, in the small Dunbartonshire town of Alexandria, of a kind and degree that has all but disappeared, at least without an almost obstinate search after it, severe mental illness, or by the exercise of some grossly dysfunctional habit. He was saved, if that is quite the word I seek, from permanently joining the ranks of the Scottish industrial proletariat and unemployed by going off at the age of fourteen to study for the priesthood at Kelham Theological College in Nottinghamshire, closed since 1973. This was surely a most unusual step for a boy of his background.
However, as his memoir makes clear, the physical deprivations of his childhood did not mean that it was miserable. On the contrary, he remembers it as having been happy, happier than many a childhood today. Living in cramped and unheated conditions, sharing a bed, with only cold water and an outside communal lavatory, one wonders how this could have been: for children living in such conditions would nowadays be deemed in urgent need of removal.
There were two things that made his childhood not only tolerable but happy, the first being the proximity of nature, and the second, more importantly, the love of his parents. While I am the last person to underestimate the importance of comfort, the fact remains that within quite wide, though not infinite, limits, parental love is what a child most needs, and Richard Holloway was fortunate always to have received it.
His parents were good people. His mother once ran off with a lover, but his father had the great good sense to accept her back and they lived as an affectionate couple until his mother’s death. This suggests that his father, a very small man who, sometimes unemployed, was obliged to take physically-exhausting jobs to which he was unsuited, such as coal-hauling, was a good man imbued with wisdom and an uncomplaining sense of duty; and there is a very moving photograph in the book of the author and his father on the day of the former’s ordination as Bishop of Edinburgh. The son towers over the father by at least two heads, but the latter, very respectably dressed, evinces no embarrassment at the situation, rather a generous pleasure. One cannot but feel the deepest respect for him.
The street in which the author grew up has been demolished. One should not sentimentalise it, of course, but those authorities at whose orders it was demolished acted from an abstract concern for the poor who lived in it, doing things to and for them, but never consulting them as to what they wanted. Because the communal spirit of the street was not measurable, for them it did not exist, though in fact the people in such streets often helped one another in times of emergency. There was a social warmth that no number of bathrooms and no amount of central heating, though desirable things in themselves, could replace. For the bureaucratic mind, what is not measurable does not, cannot, exist.
The text is interspersed by some of the author’s poetry, and it pains me to have to say that it is very bad. One is disinclined to mockery of it only by the age of the author and his evident goodwill.
Naturally, the question arises whether the recollections of his childhood are not sprinkled over with the icing sugar of nostalgia. But just as it is said that an animal in the throes of a violent death experiences a kid of anaesthetising calm, so nostalgia is a necessary emotion for us to feel towards the end of our lives, if we are not to die in utter psychic pain. Besides, I think the author is too clear-headed a man to allow nostalgia to have clouded his reminiscences so greatly that there is no truth to them. One interesting, and important, point: when he suffered from rheumatic fever for the first time before the arrival of the National Health Service, he nonetheless received decent medical care.
