Against All Reason

by Geoffrey Moorhouse

436p first edition hardback with illustrated brown dustjacket, one smallish closed tear to top of jacket and a little edgewear, name in ink, otherwise very good

Paperback

Published October 1, 1986

About the author

Geoffrey Moorhouse, FRGS, FRSL, D.Litt, was an English journalist and author. He was born Geoffrey Heald in Bolton and took his stepfather's surname. He attended Bury Grammar School. He began writing as a journalist on the Bolton Evening News. At the age of 27, he joined the Manchester Guardian where he eventually became chief feature writer and combined writing book with journalism.

Many of his books were largely based on his travels. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society in 1972, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1982, and received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Warwick. His book To The Frontier won the Thomas Cook Award for the best travel book of its year in 1984. He had recently concentrated on Tudor history, with The Pilgrimage of Grace and Great Harry's Navy. He lived in a hill village in North Yorkshire. In an interview given at the University of Tuebingen in 1999, he described his approach to his writing.

All three of Moorhouse's marriages ended in divorce. He had two sons and two daughters, one of whom died of cancer in 1981. He died aged 77 of a stroke on 26 November 2009 and is survived by both sons and one daughter.

Reviews

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was written a little over 50 years ago and before Moorhouse moved on completely from journalism. It doesn't have the intensity of observation, or individual engagement that I enjoyed so much in "To the Frontier," which was written 15 years later than this book. But it's still a fascinating look at a way of life that was diminishing even as he wrote the book. I don't know why, but I've always had an interest in monastic life, ever since I was a little girl (I think Moorhouse also had that interest), in particular those that are cloistered and apart from the world. I think, probably because when I was a little girl nuns still wore medieval habits, and we lived in a state (New Jersey) where we saw them often, and they were so clearly different from everyone else around, and I've always loved that difference in the status quo.

The Christian religion is not the only one to provide the means to leave the world behind and spend time in contemplation and communal prayer. I myself like solitude but I could never put myself in the situation these people do, or if so, only for brief periods. I'm not religious at all anymore, and I grew up in a Protestant tradition with no such cloistered life, but I do like the idea of the routine, the surroundings, and in many cases the beautiful architecture.

The first section of the book covers the founding of various movements. So many of them started around the time I'm very fond of in European (especially English) architecture--12th century, and I learned some new things about how the great establishments of abbeys (some of which were converted to Cathedrals when the monasteries were dissolved under Henry VIII) would have been used in daily life. The rest of the book talks about the three vows that the religious make: poverty, chastity and obedience and gets into the difficulties of keeping them in a meaningful way, once one has determined if there is a "vocation," a call to the life. The final section of the book speculates on the future, and is followed by an appendix with contemporary numbers of order members (monks and nuns) over the 1960s, when the men's orders had somewhere in the number of 300,000 total worldwide and the women's a bit over 1 million. (Quite a difference). These numbers were updated to the mid-1980s as this copy is a later edition of the book, when men (priests and brothers) were at about 220,000 and women were just under a million. Between the time he published the book and updated the numbers in the '80s, the Vatican had stopped publishing the number of religious in orders. And at least a few of the monasteries he wrote about have closed down. But...some persist. Their members believe they are sustaining the world through their prayers. I want them to pray harder.