Psychic Spirituality and Theological Romance in Susan Howatch's Mystical Paths and The Wonder Worker

Abstract

Susan Howatch is the author of a series of novels involving members of the clergy of the Church of England. (1) The setting is the imaginary diocese of Starbridge, based on the actual cathedral city of Salisbury, in the period from the late 1930s to the early 1970s. Subsequently she has published two novels set more recently at a center for spiritual and physical healing, St. Benet's, in London. (2) These stories are connected by two generations of characters. One of them, Nicholas Darrow, exemplifies Howatch's distinctive blending of mysticism, Jungian psychology, and the occult, which she uses to create fictions that make a theologically sophisticated form of Christian spirituality accessible to a broad audience of contemporary readers, believers and unbelievers alike. We shall focus on two of these novels, Mystical Paths and The Wonder Worker, because they are closely related to each other. Both feature Nicholas Darrow and his colleague Lewis Hall as major characters, and the stories connect the worlds of Starbridge Cathedral and of St. Benet's. (3) Together they show that, when psychic powers are used rightly, they can lead to healing but when misused result in sin and disintegration. In Mystical Paths Nicholas looks back from a perspective of twenty years to describe events in 1968, when he was still an ordinand or seminarian studying to be a priest in the Church of England. In his mid-twenties at the time, he is the son of Jonathan Darrow, who before marrying Nicholas's mother late in life had been a Fordite monk (Howatch's joke on the name of an order of Anglican monks, the Cowley Fathers in Oxfordshire, and the location of a former Morris car plant on the Cowley Road in Oxford). (4) Jonathan is an austere mystic, recluse, and spiritual director in his eighties. Having inherited psychic powers from his father, Nicholas is a seer and a hypnotist. Though psychic phenomena are a common feature in Howatch's novels, we are not to assume because a character is psychic that he is invulnerable, holy, or spiritually superior. Although psychic gifts can be used for spiritual and good ends, they can and often are turned to selfish (thus evil) purposes. Nicholas also has strong hypnotic powers, which he is trained to use for healing but which in each book he abuses for sexual gratification without consent. As he remarks in Mystical Paths, Emotional, romantic, very feminine women are never a problem to hypnotise (74). In 1968 he is badly adrift from his spiritual moorings and does not seem at all religious or called to ministry. In addition to several squalid sexual encounters with upper-class women from his own set, he had been carrying on a series of affairs with working-class girls whom he had dropped as soon as he was bored with them. As he later confesses to Lewis Hall, his spiritual director: always tried to be very kind when I traded them in. Traded them in? You're saying you thought of them in the same way as a second-hand car? No, of course not! ... The point I was trying to make is that whenever I broke off an affair I did it as decently as possible, gave the girl a nice present, told her I still thought she was great-- This is decency? Well, what would you call it? Expensive insincerity. (288) Not only does Nicholas frequently yield to temptations of the flesh, appropriate to the swinging London of the late 1960s, but his spiritual life has also degenerated into a dry routine. He prays in formulaic ways and not from his heart. He repeats the Jesus prayer or simply opens himself to as he terms it, knowledge he has gained though his psychic abilities, believing that he is in direct touch with God. He is certain that his gnosis is always true, and it takes some shattering events to disabuse him of this illusion, including a ghostly vision in a monastery garden and an encounter with a demonically possessed murderer in a mysterious chapel. …