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PAST AND PRESENT

Canon Edward Probert, Chancellor (Thursday 1st June 2006)

I’ve spent a good deal of my life studying history, and learning about it remains one of my great loves. A recent passing conversation about the spelling of ‘Mediaeval Fayre’ has reminded me how much we English are in thrall to a fantasy version of the past. It isn’t hard to think of examples: ‘ye olde’ this or thats; inns with four-poster beds but without the draughts to go with them; great country houses one can visit where the dozens of servants have been replaced by shops selling pot-pourri. Along with this goes a conviction that things are going to the dogs, and that modern society is much more brutal and ugly than what went before. ‘Twas ever thus – the Victorians were firmly convinced not only that their age was Britain’s greatest, but that mediaeval times were the true era of beauty and romance. Hence the Pre Raphaelite movement, and all those radical ‘restorations’ by which ancient churches were made to look properly mediaeval. And how ironic it is that the Victorians, whose age saw the most comprehensive changes to Britain, bequeathed to many in the following century the conviction that, for example, a proper church was Gothic and had pews, an organ, and a robed choir who sang hymns. We recognise that times change, all the while fighting that fact by clinging to a vision of the past. The past of course is never as we remember it, as I’ve discovered several times on meeting people after many years. Still less is the distant past as we imagine it: it is, as LP Hartley puts it in ‘The Go Between’, another country – one we can’t inhabit again. That mysterious country stays with us though, and affects us in lots of ways. Nowhere is this more true than at a cathedral with its inheritances of buildings and worship and administrative structures. These things are all valuable and fascinating, but we do well to remember that God doesn’t inhabit the past, but lives now and in eternity.

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