Angelus News | April 8, 2022 | Vol. 7 No. 7

DESIRE LINES
HEATHER KING
Diagnosing a ‘disease of the soul’
Caryll Houselander. | IMAGE VIA CNS
Caryll Houselander (1901-1954) was a British mystic
and writer who wore a pair of big round tortoiseshell
glasses, lived in London during the Blitz, and
until she died at 53 from breast cancer, apparently barely
slept or ate. A friend observed: “She used to cover her face
with some abominable chalky-white substance which gave
it quite often the tragic look one associates with clowns and
great comedians.”
“Caryll Houselander: That Divine Eccentric,” Maisie
Ward’s fine biography, charts Houselander’s difficult
childhood, her reversion to the Church in 1925, and her
unrequited love for a British spy who would be the model
for Ian Fleming’s “James Bond.” She had an eclectic circle
of friends and was utterly devoted to Christ. She never
married.
Houselander suffered greatly during her own life: from
poverty, from frail health, from neuroses. She had a lifelong
and especially deep and tender bond with traumatized
children, and loved teaching them how to draw, paint, and
carve small animals out of wood.
She became a prolific and popular spiritual writer. Her
most well-known works include “The Reed of God”
(1944), “A Rocking-Horse Catholic” (1955), and “The
Risen Christ” (1959).
She wrote another book, lesser-known and especially
apropos for Lent: “Guilt” (1951).
“The most striking characteristic of the age in which we
are living is psychological suffering,” she begins. “I have
named this ego-neurosis. Ego-neurosis is a disease of the
soul, a spiritual rather than a psychological ailment.”
Usually such people, Houselander continues, “suffer consciously
merely from a vague and persistent unhappiness,
an inexplicable sense of guilt about everything they do or
don’t do, a shrinking from effort, especially mental effort, a
certain sense of frustration and a hidden stirring of shame
because they feel inadequate before life — they suffer continually
from embarrassment … and always from anxiety in
some form or other.”
“That’s ego-neurosis?” was my reaction. I thought everyone
felt that way!
All kidding aside, Houselander goes on to discuss the
existential guilt arising from our fallen nature, our shared
responsibility for the suffering of the world, and the strange
phenomenon of people who feel neurotically guilty for
trifles while totally overlooking huge sins of commission
or omission for which they really should feel guilty: lack
of charity, for example, or a tendency toward pathological
lying, or murder.
The book contains passages on the mental suffering,
among others, of serial killer Peter Kürten (“The Monster
of Düsseldorf”), Hans Christian Andersen, the French poet
Arthur Rimbaud, and St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
Speaking of guilt, The Times Literary Supplement recently
ran a piece by Regina Reni, Canada research chair in
philosophy of moral and social cognition at York University
in Toronto, called “Libelling the dead?: Anne Frank’s
informer and ethics.”
Turns out that researchers purport to have found the
30 • ANGELUS • April 8, 2022