Life’s Value: a review of The Children of Men by p. d. james (Alan Jacobs, August 1, 1993, First Things)
It would be unwarranted to call this novel an apology for Christianity, and yet the title encourages us to think along such lines. Its origin is the ninetieth Psalm—in this case, the version that appears in the burial rite of the old (1662) Anglican Book of Common Prayer, a rite that is not just quoted but that actually figures in the novel: “Lord, thou hast been our refuge: from one generation to another. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made: thou art God from everlasting, and world without end. Thou turnest man to destruction: again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday: seeing that is past as a watch in the night.”
This might sound positively evangelistic; after all, in the context of the burial rite, it is a call to sinners to repent while they still may. But in the novel the character who pronounces these words believes neither in them nor in God. He is the narrator of much of the book and the protagonist of the whole, Theo Faron, an Oxford don (Merton College, Victorian history) and a skeptic—or rather, a man too tired and hopeless and beaten down by life to believe in anything. (In this he resembles almost everyone else in his world.) It is one of James’ deftest touches to make her main character an unbeliever; indeed, only two characters in the book are Christians, and only one of them, a woman named Julian, a major figure. (Yes, we are invited to think of Julian of Norwich.) Thus Julian’s faith and Theo’s lack of it have equal claims upon our attention, and James leaves us free to assess the validity and persuasiveness of each. Nevertheless, the words of the Psalm have a force all their own, independent of the character who utters them, a fact of which Theo himself is well aware.
Why, one might ask, is the old Anglican prayer book in use in England in 2021, when it has been largely abandoned in the Church of England in 1993? This question leads us to one of James’ most intriguing and subtly developed themes: the uselessness of liberal theology in a time of profound crisis. Christian theological liberalism has typically discarded orthodox eschatology in favor of a mild and essentially secular meliorism. But when people are faced with the apparent extinction of the human species, the belief in moral and material progress that undergirds such meliorism becomes, to say the least, untenable. James’ story convincingly demonstrates that in such a world people will hold to a fully supernatural faith—in which hope is quite specifically a theological virtue—or they will abandon hope altogether. Extreme situations call forth extreme responses; comfortable middle-of-the-road liberalism has no claim on anyone’s attention in such a world. What remains in that case is either to hear the call of God when “again thou sayest, Come again, ye children of men,” or to seek whatever passing pleasures a broken and truncated world offers.
In James’ imagined future, the truly hopeless turn to the government for the provision of those pleasures. England is ruled by a man named Xan Lyppiat (Theo Faron’s cousin), who styles himself the Warden; his job, as he understands it, is chiefly to protect his doomed subjects from boredom, discomfort, and disorder. The people of England, it seems, are ready to give the Warden absolute power in return for such benefits. Though the machinery of democracy remains more or less in place, virtually no one cares to exercise his or her voting rights. Democracy too dies in the absence of hope for the future.