Rubbing salt into the arts

Me and my God
"I FOUND that I simply couldn't take it," said Kathleen Raine.
Zeus and Hera; The Golden Dawn; The Secret Doctrine: I retreived my glance from the stacked shelves of books piled high in her Chelsea home whence it had inadvertedly strayed and returned it to my subject: the distinguished poet, academic, and present editor of Tenemos ("a bi-annual review devoted to the arts of the imagination") who was looking back through time to her conversion to and reversion from Catholicism.
"I went up to Cambridge in the 1920s," Kathleen Raine told me, "and it was the time of communism, and I was a contemporary of all the people who joined the communist party full of idealism, and 1 threw religion to the winds...1 had a great desire to get away from the constraints of my upbringing." (It appears, by the way, to have been a starchily devout one: her father was a Wesleyan, her mother a Presbyterian.) "The usual rebellion.
"But I couldn't take communism because it was atheist. I never joined the CP: my husband, Charles Madge, did. They were all selling The Daily Worker in the back-streets of Cambridge, and they all had a certain sense of idealism, of a fairer world. All these young aristocrats, you know, when they saw the hunger marches come down to London you don't remember, of course they saw another world: the poor."
"We were all," (she confessed) "very wild." "I separated from my husband, and went to live in a cottage in Cumberland with my two children, and I suppose that at that time I felt that I needed the discipline of religion." Soon afterwards, she was received into the Catholic church. But almost immediately I felt that I'd put myself in a cage: I found that I simply couldn't take it."
Which takes us back to the beginning and, by way of explanation, to those book titles. It was studying Blake, Kathleen Raine feels, that opened the door of the cage. "I felt; I can breathe this air. I couldn't breathe the air of Catholicism. And Blake did say, very early that religions are one, and this seemed to me absolutely true. Every culture has its own specific perspective on reality, and ours is Christianity it is, as it were, our local tradition."
From Blake to Yeats was perhaps a natural progression: it was the latter's mysticism, perhaps, that helped instigate her own as those kabbalistic and hermetic titles indicate. But whether so or no, I found myself thinking, Kathleen Raine is clearly attracted temperamentally to the romantic and the platonic.
She believes that "Christianity has put itself out on a limb by its untenable claim to exclusive truth. That seems to me something one cannot believe in a world in which we are now familiar with other spiritual
traditions. I can't accept the exclusion from the universal family that is implicit in accepting the Christian case.
"I also think that there's too much blood on the record of the Christian church: the inquisition, the crusades, the persecution of Jews, witches, heretics the whole thing: it's a very bloodstained record, and has very little to do with the Gospel. Blake made this distinction, which seems to me quite justified, between the religion of Jesus and the church."
Unsurprisingly, she finds the doctrinal eclecticism of Hinduism deeply attractive, and feels that the profession of Christianity would cut her off from friends of other faiths. "I didn't have much time for Protestantism when I was younger, but I've developed a more sympathetic attitude towards it that the highest authority is the God within."
Kathleen Raine nonetheless describes herself as "still a fellowtraveller in many respects...people need symbols and beauty: Christmas and Easter; the figure of the Virgin Mary; angels and archangels and all that, but I do feel that Christianity in the west has become too historicised and institutional we've lost the art of being able to live with mystery."
This vision is central to her view of the arts. "The gift of the artist, I believe, should be to have perhaps a clearer insight into the world of the imagination, because what you bring into that world is not for yourself alone; you have a responsibility to those you are offering your work too." This sacral view of the arts inspires Tenemos (the word, she tells me, means the sacred space round the temple where ritual drama and dance were performed), and she takes a very poor view of much of what passes for modern art. "The salt of the arts has lost its savour."
She told me that she knows "less and less the older I grow: that's one of the things about growing old; you don't know more, you know a great deal less. And in any way that God can use me, I hope he will," My glance strayed yet again, wavered, and settled on a card fixed to a mirror set above the fireplace: on it was inscribed a prayer of Cardinal Newman. "In all thy works thou art holy, 0 my God, and I adore thee in them all."
Paul Goodman