Resumo de Absolute Truths

?Absolute Truths? by Susan Howatch

The book starts with an extract by Reginald Somerset Ward, Anglican Priest and Spiritual Director to Jerusalem, suggesting that we are more likely to run away from Absolute Truths than stick to them.
Susan Howatch analyses the solutions proposed by the church by telling us the story of a churchman who is himself faced with difficult personal decisions of right and wrong. Will he follow the church's teaching that he propounds at the pulpit and in his writings?
This racy novel brings alive an institution over two-thousand years old and those who serve it, for better or for worse.
It shows clergy face-to-face with their own particular quandaries, mostly of a sexual nature. How can a man of the church represent certain ideals and go against them? To paraphrase the author, people are hungry for ideals, even when ideals are no longer in fashion.
The central character of the book, Charles Ashworth, is called 'Anti-Sex Ashworth' due to his writings on Hippolytus, an early Christian writer, who battled against a sexually lax Bishop Callistus. However, Ashworth says that he and the Church are all for sexual intercourse. It is the abuse of sex that they are against and all the problems that it causes. He speaks up to prevent people being exploited and their lives wrecked.
Each chapter is preceded by an extract from a church teaching which provides a framework for Ashworth?s personal struggle. Will Ashworth?s fight against decadence succeed or is he also being pulled into its quagmire? Will he be able to follow the paths laid out for him by his heroes? They were first and foremost St. Augustine, who was all for absolute truths, and then St. Athanasius, the bishop who put his tireless energy into fighting against heresy. Meanwhile, his wife?s former affair with a churchman and having to bring up her son, the result of that relationship, give him plenty of opportunities to struggle with himself.
As a comment on his work as a Bishop, Susan Howatch presents Charles Ashworth as a man who likes to write in his spare time in order to prevent boredom. When the author started writing this book she was living next to Salisbury Cathedral and later moved to London within the vicinity of Westminster Abbey - perhaps for the very same reason.

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