I failed so spectacularly as a godfather that my first and only godson, aged twenty, publicly sacked me by denouncing me for various failings in the pages of a British national newspaper. It was, I admit it, the first and last communication between us since his baptism. This was not totally my fault, but I also can’t wholly escape the blame. I could explain everything, but I won’t. There was justice of a sort in the rebuke, and I’ll leave it at that. I’m afraid I may have been influenced, in my slackness, by my own godparents, of whom I can, alas, remember nothing at all. 

I always envied my brother’s godfather, who was generally good for a handsome present at least once a year. Christopher was far more grandly launched into the faith than I was, having— according to family lore—been sealed with the Sign of the Cross aboard one of His Britannic Majesty’s submarines in the great naval station of Malta. The ship’s bell, by maritime tradition, was upturned, blessed, and used as a font for the ceremony. Many years later, on another formerly British Mediterranean island, Cyprus, he was received into the Greek Orthodox Church in order to be married, thus leaving the Anglican Communion. This is otherwise rather hard to do. You cannot just resign, or grow slack in the faith. The Archbishop of Canterbury will take no notice. You must actually join a rival church to quit the Church of England.

That was about as deep as my understanding of the office of baptism went, until I grew older. I was astounded by the ferocious two-way obligations of godfather and godson revealed in the opening scenes of the great Francis Ford Coppola movie. When it came to christening my own children, most of the people I knew were secular or actually atheist, but I was by then fumbling my way back to faith and found the service very deep and satisfyingly dark. I was most impressed when my wife, brought up by Communist atheists, underwent an adult christening, the “Ministration of Baptism to such as are of Riper Years and Able to Answer For Themselves” in the Book of Common Prayer. This delightful and intelligent ceremony was devised specifically for the many who had been denied traditional infant Baptism under the ultra-Protestant rule of Oliver Cromwell. It still survives to meet very different needs in our times. There are no godparents in it, but it contains this very lovely and powerful exchange between the person to be baptized and the minister: “Wilt thou then obediently keep God’s holy will and commandments, and walk in the same all the days of thy life,” to which the answer is “I will endeavour so to do, God being my helper,” a pledge so reasonable that I suspect it binds the baptized person more firmly than a loftier promise would. 

But it was only when my grandchildren began to appear that their parents drew my attention to the rather alarming fierceness and radicalism of baptism as a ceremony. In one case, the ritual was actually an exorcism, requiring salt as well as water. No wonder there is an ancient view that the child should roar and shout during the actual christening, a sign that the devil and all his works have truly been renounced and are departing angrily and reluctantly. Fonts are usually near the entrances of churches and cathedrals for a very good reason. The font is the point of entry into both faith and church. In Saxon England, those not Christened were, I’m told, not allowed into the church at all, and baptism was—to begin with—only performed at Easter or Whitsuntide, the great Spring festivals.

In the first Prayer Book of Edward VI in 1549, the ritual was still connected to the doom-haunted Catholic past. One of the main prayers begins (I here use the rather riotous and charming spelling of the time):

Almyghtie and euerlastyng God, whiche of thy iustice dydest destroy by fluddes of water the whole worlde, for synne, except viii persones. whome of thy mercy (the same tyme), thou dydest saue in the Arke, and when thou dydest drowne in the read sea wycked King Pharao with all his armie.

The whole atmosphere is wilder and more dangerous than the later versions of the ceremony. These, though very lovely and poetic, rejoice less in the destruction of the wicked and more in the salvation of the faithful. For example, they leave out wicked King Pharaoh and his drowned army. They also omit the annihilation of the whole world in the flood, for its sins. Instead, they praise God for “of his great mercy” saving Noah and his family in the Ark from perishing by water.

This is not the only difference. In the 1549 version there is a clear exorcism, in which the Evil One is directly addressed and ordered to depart. “I command thee, unclean spirit, in the name of the father, of the son and of the holy ghost, that thou come out and depart from these infants.” (The service assumes that several children are to be baptized at once). It goes on to tell the Devil uncompromisingly, to begone: “Therefore thou cursed spirit, remember thy sentence, remember thy judgement, remember the day to be at hand, wherein thou shalt burn in fire everlasting, prepared for thee and thy Angels. And presume not hereafter to exercise any tyranny towards these infants whom Christ hath bought with his precious blood.” The newly baptized (and anointed) children are also dressed in the chrisom, the white robe of purity, a tradition which still just survives in some places.

In studying this, I had a strong sense of having missed something important for much of my own life. I am not quite sure why the Reformers did not want to speak directly to Satan, as their forebears had. And, as a wanderer in ancient churches and a lover of old stained glass I am ceaselessly unsettled by the ancient depictions there of judgement and hell, and the way in which so many of them have been painted over or moved out of sight. Even Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel, which illustrates some rather grim events, has been neutralized into Great Art, and so somehow deprived of its power. What if all this stuff is true? There is a brilliant evocation of evil active in the modern world in Kingsley Amis’s novel The Green Man, published in 1969, a ghost story set in the comfortable, temporal civilization of the motor car and the restaurant guide. The Ancient of Days actually features in it as a minor character, in a very unexpected guise, but there is no doubt here that God is real, or that evil exists. It ends with an exorcism, once again featuring salt as well as water. Where Amis found the ritual he quotes, I do not know. Anglican parsons of my acquaintance are reserved about exorcism, though they still sometimes do it. But I doubt that he himself made up the words “by the token of the life poured out in the broken body and blood of Jesus Christ . . . and under the sign and symbol of His holy, bloodstained and triumphant cross, I exorcize thee.” Though spoken by an unworthy minister who does not believe in what he is doing, they have a devastating effect in the quiet fields of the English Home Counties. This is serious. I should take it more seriously.