Anthony Ernest Harvey (1930–2018) was a significant English churchman of his generation. Mostly an academic, but of a socially engaged kind as his career evolved, he was Eton-schooled and studied classics at Oxford before his ordination. He divided his professional career between significant stints as a don at Oxford, as the last Warden of St Augustine’s College in Canterbury, and as a Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey. He will be remembered, in this light, for his best-selling Companion to the New Testament (1970; revised for the nrsv translation in 2004), his vigorous and somewhat quixotic leadership of St Augustine’s before its closure, and his pastorally and morally sensitive work at Westminster, which included directing the statuary project of the ten twentieth-century martyrs that has since become so famous. He took a prominent role in several Church of England commissions, and was on hand at the 1961 World Council of Churches in New Delhi, as well as at the 1976 Anglican Consultative Council in Trinidad. Harvey’s writings on New Testament subjects tended to be scholarly overviews, lucid and elegant, and thus helpfully accessible to a wider readership. But it was his social commentary on matters of war and peace, political asylum, and sexual morals, published during his retirement, that kept his name in the public view during his last years.
Harvey’s autobiography, Drawn Three Ways (2016), was published only shortly before his death. In its overall shape, the volume fits a certain genre of memoire. Harvey outlines his career, and the reader is treated to a parade of duties, places, encounters, and professional vignettes. He traces, with genuine delight, the array of famous people he meets and hosts at Westminster Abbey – the Queen, the Dalai Lama, Mandela, Helder Camara, the retinue at Princess Diana’s funeral. We are allowed to look in on these special moments, and stand with Harvey beside the era’s celebrities. For all this, however, Harvey comes across as a type of the English academic priest: he enjoys sketching (and sometimes skewering) the characters of his erudite and mostly sophisticated circle; he is not shy in making (mostly) gentle judgments of colleagues; and running along beneath everything is a subterranean moralism about ecclesial culture, society, even theology, that continually sets him at a distance from the church he serves. Harvey repeatedly draws attention to his own regretfully perceived sense of superiority that masks a deeper feeling of professional insecurity. Even more evident in his self-account is a deep unease at his own privilege: ever sensitive to class and economic distinctions from which he could never escape, his anxiety seamlessly passes into a reverse arrogance aimed at peers and the institutions he works for.
For all its predictable contents and tone, Drawn Three Ways stands apart from most clerical memoirs in the way that Harvey consciously allows these typical elements of studied irony and moralism to settle into the shadows as he draws out from them more deeply personal realities, of anguish and struggle, often peremptorily noted and left behind in similar books. The ‘three ways’ of the title stand for Harvey’s life seen under the headings of ministry, scholarly profession, and marriage. It is an innocuous schema that provides ready categories for his memories. Later in the book, though, Harvey revises the three-fold strands into those of ministry, marriage, and a troubled faith. Finally, it is mostly the last two – marriage and assaulted conviction – that form the pillars of the book’s energies and interest. And here Harvey’s writing transcends the genre with a troubling and moving power.
At the centre of Harvey’s self-accounting is his wife Julian. She arrives in the first chapter – his childhood only cursorily noted – and inhabits, sometimes obscurely but still with a steady grip, every chapter thereafter. The daughter of the British Consul in Florence, whom Harvey meets as a young man, she was, in his eyes, graced with creative passions, exuberances, and personal entrancements that enveloped him for the rest of his life. Harvey admits that the autobiography is as much about her and in memory of her than it is related to his own self. He uses extensive portions from her journals, as well as from her poetry, throughout the text, trusting her voice and observations, as well as her heart, almost more than his own in laying out the past. He and Julian had four daughters, and we get glimpses of their common life here and there throughout the book – traveling in a minibus to Jerusalem for a period of research; taking vacations together, rustling about the house. It is only in the last chapter that this hovering presence breaks out into the articulate and profound reality that, we realize, has been haunting the book from its start.
For 25 years, we learn at last, Julian struggled with an overwhelming mental illness, which Harvey identifies as a bi-polar affliction. Descending into depressions that lasted weeks, sometimes months at a time, and that saw her hospitalized on several occasions, Julian’s expansive personality shifted into a more protective space, walled by denials but also by fragile hopes. We hear, in this last chapter, how Harvey juggled his schedules and duties during the years of his official engagements so fluidly recounted earlier, in order to care for her and the family, masking the demands, and habituating himself to long-suffering. We hear also how their relationship changed, not so much in affection as in its form and communication, now riven with anguish and enforced remove. When Julian, in her last years, began to suffer from a progressive dementia, another wrenching shift in their relationship took place, less tortured perhaps, but with a peace that was now guarded by an immense emotional distance.
Harvey ends his book with a long and often painful summary of this journey, in which he counts up the cost to his parenting, as well as to his inner resources. When he describes how his third daughter, Christian, dies of cancer at age 46, leaving behind a loving husband and young daughter, Harvey finally lays bare the now raw elements of his loves, crudely left behind by a faith that had long been ‘eroding’ over the years. Able in the end to experience, by his daughter’s bedside, a fatherly intimacy unavailable to him before, even as Julian could only note in passing her daughter’s illness and death in an uncomprehending way, Harvey presents affection, loss, joy, and thanksgiving in their elemental and unadorned integrity. The simple prose here, which for much of the book seems to express a stylized donnish reticence, now burrows into the depths of tears and epiphany.
Harvey embodied a particular kind of Anglican intellectual cleric, as Rowan Williams notes in his Forward to the memoirs. Harvey will be remembered in history for his role at Westminster Abbey; ecclesially, perhaps, for his work as the last Warden of St Augustine’s and his ‘experiments’ in education there (having student discussions with French Catholics, bringing in mentors in Hindu prayer); and personally for leadership in social debate within the Church of England. His theological and cultural insights, for example, about Vatican II, seem in retrospect somewhat naïve in a ‘70s’ kind of way, his critical scepticism dated, an afflictive symptom of his contemporary Church of England, rather than an enlivening charism. His scholarship and formation, as personal connections die off, will, if they have not already, fade along with the mass of other competent, but hardly innovative, products of our overcharged academic and church production line. Harvey himself knew all this, and one of his constant themes is his status as an ‘amateur’, superficially passing through intellectual contexts where only a few are destined to reside over the generations.
Harvey’s admission here, however, is not one of false modesty. He is genuinely perplexed before a world he has gone through, but that has refused to bend to his busied ecclesial life, now unveiled in its hollowness. Here is the brilliance of the book’s own revelation: the theological ‘cards’ he had been ‘playing with’ all his life could not make sense of his daughter’s suffering and death, the burden of ‘wretchedness’ that he and Julian had lived through during her many years of depression, the engulfing feeling of ‘bereavement’ at her dementia, and finally the facing of his own aging and mortality. Professional faith turns out to be a weak reed and Harvey faces its inadequacy squarely and unpretentiously.
The transfiguring last chapter of the book is thus regretful and courageous at once. Harvey stares in the mirror, and sees looking back the image of a ‘Stoic’, rather than of a Christian. He takes stock of his years simply ‘carrying on’, being ‘resilient’; he describes the tragic realization of having missed something essential with his children as, over his career, he grit his teeth and pushed through; he traces, deftly, the weakening of his formal faith. Christ, the Son of God, slowly fades from his experienced consciousness, replaced by a real but limited framework of Christian ethics, immovably compelling, but also a second-best refuge and guide for someone whose vocation turned out to be survival with whatever moral integrity could be had. Harvey laments the distance between his fallen convictions, tumbled by the stark challenges of his family, and the passionate witness of suffering Christians and of energetic evangelists on whom he has only gazed from afar over the years. But the confrontation of this distance, and its causes – a life of assaulted love for his wife and children – ends with a simple, almost Job-like proclamation of a deeper faith: ‘the reality of God’, ‘immense and mysterious’.
Harvey’s disturbing and moving autobiography challenges the reader, and the Christian reader especially, to hold together this God, that is so real and even crushing, with the ‘grammatical’ faith Harvey himself worries has simply slipped through his fingers. In a comment, made only in passing earlier in the book, Harvey quotes a Catholic Franciscan’s epitome of his founder’s theology: ‘The world and everything in it is good. His message is, Move over, and let others enjoy it.’ Harvey approvingly notes, ‘I have never heard a better summary of Franciscanism.’ Much of his story is about an effort to embody this kind of respect for others. Yet Harvey’s judgment here is telling and one he tacitly will admit is inadequate. This is not, after all, the Franciscanism of Francis and his early followers, for whom the Cross of Jesus stood at the centre of all reality. Nor could Harvey find his ‘immense and mysterious’ God in the unfettered love, constricted suffering, deadened loss, and resurrection that is the Son of God, for whom the martyrs died. He wishes, it seems, that he had.
One hopes that this strong yet ultimately humble servant has somehow discovered otherwise, even as the dilemma with which he leaves his readers proves a tonic to the shallow certainties that often plague the church.
