Inspiring Christian Lives

Francis Thompson, 1859-1907

Winter 1886, Berlin: A manuscript is received by a major German publishing house. It is from one of the most brilliant and celebrated philosopher's of the day, Friedrich Nietzsche. The central message of the manuscript is that 'God is dead'. It is time, Nietzsche argues, that we rid ourselves of this 'God delusion', grow up and come of age. God is for weak fools who are unable to face up to the brutal and bitter reality of existence. Not like the bravado of Nietzsche, of course . . . It is only fear of the consequences that prevents us from doing this. Man, he says, is totally free - there is nothing to bind him, no one to oblige him to do or not to do whatsoever he may choose, only possibly, what they might do to him in return - everything is allowable. Nietzsche's understanding of 'freedom' was very different to a Christian understanding - for him, it meant 'anything goes' freedom, licentiousness and lawlessness. (For Christians it means freedom for growth towards God). As a result, man must dare to achieve, must create his own morality, and 'make his own reality'. But most men are too grovelling, too weak and fearful for this, so the few, the strong, must unite together and smash what's left of Christian morality, and in its stead, enthrone all of the vices it has sought to drive out. Jesus of Nazareth, he goes on, was a con-man; he only exalted poverty and humility because he was so poor and weak himself and wanted to find some clever way of getting at the rich and capable. Christianity must be condemned. Nietzsche died some 12 years later in a mental institution, banging a piano and railing against Christ. He was one of the prophets that undermined the Christian vision of the twentieth century.

Winter 1886, London: A manuscript is received by a minor English religious magazine. The manuscript contains a poem, which catches the eye of the editor, Meynell. Meynell is intrigued and has to do some detective work to track down the author of this piece. Sometime later, a pale, bedraggled drug addict in broken shoes shuffles into the editorial office and claims to be the author of the poem. His name is Francis Thompson. Thompson has been sleeping rough in Covent Garden for years. He had sunk from training to be a priest to training to be a doctor to aspiring to be a writer. To find inspiration, he had begun to frequent the opium dens and brothels of London, only to find himself soon imprisoned within his own drug addiction and trapped in poverty, empty with despair. He had even attempted suicide until what he believed to be a vision of another suicide-poet being pulled him back from the brink. Perhaps this was just another drug induced hallucination. The editor of the magazine Thompson had sent the manuscript to and his wife, themselves devout Christians, took Thompson in and began the process of rehabilitating him. It was during this rehabilitation that Francis Thompson composed the story of his conversion from seeing the world as meaningless, nothing but sound, fury, emptiness and absurdity to seeing the world shot through and charged with meaning and love. And the central figure in this story was not Thompson; no, it was God who hounded him down, even though he was a wayward soul, knocking and pushing until the door of his soul was opened to him:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days
I fled Him, down the arches of the years
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under raining laughter.

The remarkable thing about faith for Thompson, was that God comes to get us - we receive Him as He receives us.