Disintegrating England

The English Soul:
Faith of a Nation
by peter ackroyd
reaktion books, 416 pages, $30

Peter Ackroyd is a major figure in contemporary English letters, a fluent and pleasing writer with dozens of fascinating books to his name in numerous genres—history, biography, chorography, criticism, and fiction. So the prospect of his reflections on the long history of Christian England is an appealing one. Yet, by his usual standards, The English Soul is a little disappointing. The book is cast as a catena of brief lives, with “England” an almost abstract backdrop, lacking that spirit of place which is so often the soul of Ackroyd’s writing. The eponymous “English Soul” is ritually invoked from time to time, often in phrases of atypical banality (such as the comment about Little Gidding, “It became a corner of the English soul”) or almost randomly (“This was a phase of the English soul”). The effect is of a halfhearted attempt to make something out of an eye-catching title that never really manages to marshal enough of an idea to justify itself.

The starting point is promising. To begin your history of English Christianity with Bede—a hundred years in, so to speak—is spot on, given that it is English Christianity that Ackroyd is concerned with, not the Christianity of “Britain” (whether Roman, Welsh, or Scottish). For Bede, with his Ecclesiastical History of the English People (ca. 731), virtually invented not only English Christianity but also the English people, and not as two things or two ideas but as one. That his book is an “ecclesiastical history” is not accidental. In telling their ecclesiastical history Bede was recounting the creation story of the English as such, the forging of a nation out of a melee of warring Germanic tribes. His very choice of the name of just one of those tribes, “Angli,” for this new people was decisive. The indigenous Celtic peoples called the invaders and their descendants “Saxons.” In crediting Gregory the Great with the initiative for preaching Jesus to the “Angles” (“non Angli, sed Angeli”), Bede set his story, their story, in an almost covenantal framework. If not for Bede, we English might today be living in “Great Saxony.” Yet while Ackroyd offers some characteristically acute insights into Bede’s literary and historical work, the monumental significance of Bede’s achievement is not fully set before readers.

Having been called into existence by the papacy, English Christianity remained for nine hundred years intimately connected with Rome, but this truth is simply bypassed. Ackroyd leaps nimbly from early-eighth-century Jarrow to later-fourteenth-century Norwich, where he takes a brief look at the fourteenth-century English “mystics”—Julian of Norwich, Richard Rolle, and Walter Hilton—before considering the curious career of medieval England’s homegrown heresiarch, John Wycliffe. The selection may partly reflect the book’s methodology. For this is history through great men—mostly men, mostly writers, and mostly those who stood out through idiosyncrasy. The great men of medieval English Christianity were not usually writers and were not always English (which may explain the absence of Anselm). But Dunstan, Aelred of Rievaulx, Thomas Becket, Stephen Langton, and Robert Grosseteste, to name but a handful, surely measure up at least to such figures as Abiezer Coppe and Lodowicke Muggleton—not characters, as you might surmise, from the Harry Potter canon, but mid-seventeenth-century sectarians whose foibles enliven chapter 11. Bizarrely, Thomas Becket (as Henry VIII commanded us to call him) is depicted on the front cover (excommunicating his enemies, apparently), yet is mentioned in only one sentence in the entire book, in a quotation from G. K. Chesterton. Ackroyd himself says nothing whatsoever about him. It’s a telling comment on the reality of the “English Soul” that the cover designer chose two medieval images (St. Thomas the Martyr, and the Virgin and Child in a rose) to embody the subject—thus showing a surer instinct than the author, who barely mentions either of them.

So the long continuum of English Catholicism, from 600 to 1500, is covered in fifty pages, a quarter of them on the idiosyncratic figure of John Wycliffe, who repudiated so much of that Catholic tradition. All those great features of medieval England—the parish churches, cathedrals, monasteries, shrines, relics, pilgrimages, and miracles—all these, one might infer from this account, left the “English Soul” untouched. Yet we cannot allow such an inference to stand. To miss those things is to miss what made Christian England and made England Christian. In a very real sense, Ken Follett, though maybe not a writer on a par with Ackroyd, brings us closer to the English Soul in his novel The Pillars of the Earth by getting inside the means and motives that spurred people to devote the best of the little they had to the worship of God in Jesus Christ and his saints.

The story of the rise and fall of Protestant England, from 1500 to the present day, fills Ackroyd’s remaining three hundred pages with a bewildering succession of prophets, priests, and plain ordinary cranks. By citing the view that William Tyndale was the “true father of English Christianity” because of his role in the translation of the Bible, Ackroyd acknowledges the special place of Protestant Christianity in his narrative. His eclectic selection from the multifarious figures who jostle together in the kaleidoscopic history of English Protestantism is entertaining and instructive. He not only conveys the essential information but enriches it with telling details and well-chosen anecdotes. Nobody could fail to learn something from him. Yet the big picture is missing, though it is sometimes glimpsed in passing comments such as that on the final extinction of the Muggletonians: “In the calendar, at least, the sect endured almost as long as Anglicanism.” For the story of Protestant England is the story of the disintegration of English Christianity through the working out of the inner logic of Protestant theology. Martin Luther’s attempt to anchor Christian truth in the absolute certainty of the divinely inspired words of the Bible alone (sola scriptura), and thus to insulate it from the unreliability of human tradition and interpretation, was perhaps especially believable in the new, crisp world of the printed page, where things could be seen “in black and white,” in stark objective clarity, through countless identical copies. But human language, even when inspired, remains indelibly human, and inescapably in need of interpretation. Although the seductive simplicity of Luther’s vision continues even today to persuade many Christians that their interpretation of the faith is the literal truth of scripture, the plain text, the pure Word of God, half a millennium has more than amply vindicated the prediction of Luther’s opponents, that his specious insight simply appointed every man his own infallible interpreter, opening the way to interminable and irresolvable hermeneutical contestation.

English Catholicism was an integral part of Protestant England, primarily because the fear, or at times hatred, of “popery” was the lowest common denominator of English Protestantism. Precisely because English Catholics were necessarily dissidents, English Catholicism itself became in a paradoxical way culturally Protestant, especially in its converts, such as Cardinal Newman and G. K. Chesterton (each given a chapter here), who exercised their “private judgement” by voluntarily submitting to “Holy Mother Church.” The decision for Rome in such an instinctively anti-Catholic culture was almost the ultimate expression of the fearless individualism that was such a feature of Protestant Englishness. Newman and Chesterton certainly speak for the “English Soul,” but even in the context of Protestant England one wonders whether Catholics are somewhat under-represented in Ackroyd’s survey. Was neither A. W. N. Pugin nor Cardinal Manning at least as worthy of note as the atheist Charles Bradlaugh?

Ackroyd, no mean historian, undoubtedly appreciates just how deeply Christianity has shaped England, the English, and English. But in the last generation this truism has become faintly embarrassing. A glance at the cursory references to Christianity in Life in the United Kingdom, the travesty which British law requires aspirants to citizenship to learn by rote before they can be granted it, shows this. The English Soul lacks the conceptual introduction that might perhaps have helped give the book some shape. But it does have a preliminary “Author’s Note,” which it is tempting to speculate was added at the behest of a “sensitivity reader.” (Question for debate: Are sensitivity readers the dementors of the modern publishing industry?) In about 250 words, the author notes the presence and significance of other faiths in contemporary England, and hops anxiously around his subject, trying not to give offense and making some curious comments along the way (for example, “Islam is not of native origin or of native inspiration”—as though Christianity was).

The lack of sustained analytical reflection means that Ackroyd never gets to the bottom of his own primary insight. Christianity was, simply, constitutive of English identity. It was not itself merely an adjunct to Englishness, as, arguably, it ended up being by the mid-twentieth century, when English values and virtues seemed somehow bigger than the Christianity that had engendered them, and Christian faith was an extra that one could dispense with (as Churchill did) without seeming to jeopardize the cultural legacy it had left. (As we know, the legacy started to dissolve remarkably quickly.) Ackroyd at times glimpses the historical reality, but he never properly grasps and grapples with it. Too often he treats the Christianity as dependent on the Englishness, putting the cart before the horse: “Christianity has been the reflection, perhaps the embodiment, of the English soul.” Au contraire.

If Ackroyd starts in the right place, he also ends in the right place, with three theological heroes of Anglican Modernism—John “Honest to God” Robinson, John Hick, and Don Cupitt—who, through their conscientious response to the increasing difficulty of belief in God and Jesus Christ in the modern world, between them evacuated the content of English Christianity. Robinson’s personalism and relationalism pointed towards atheism, but his personal faith triumphed over his philosophy, enabling him to have his cake and eat it in that happy disregard for mere logical consistency that one expects of Anglican bishops. Hick’s genial wishful thinking about the essential sameness of all religions gradually evolved or dissolved into an undogmatic religion of universal niceness, as he abandoned belief first in the Incarnation and then in God as such. Cupitt’s radically deconstructive and reductive approach took Robinson’s arguments to their logical conclusion (Is that why he was never made a bishop?), emptying out any remaining doctrinal or theological content in favor of yet another new religion—though his has been even more unsuccessful than most. The trio, though, are more symptoms than cause. Their pretentious but ultimately diaphanous writings could have gained even the hearing they did only in a culture in which Christianity was still a living memory if no longer a defining social reality. Already they are mostly forgotten in a wider culture more likely to give ear to such childish follies as The Da Vinci Code.

The deepest continuities in the long history of Christian England were in its moral order. The moral order of Christianity that was imposed, doubtless with considerable difficulty, on the diverse peoples of pre-Conquest England, held together the society it created for a millennium with a commitment in principle to Christian marriage, founded in monogamy and fidelity, that is only now being abandoned by various nominally Christian churches in favor of the hedonistic order that has recently prevailed in society at large. The taboo against taking interest on loans was under pressure even before the Reformation and crumbled rapidly after it, despite the personal opposition to usury of so many leading early Reformers. And medieval Christianity set immense value on vowed virginity for the sake of the Lord, a position eagerly jettisoned by the early Reformers (many of whom were former monks or friars). But the core Christian doctrine of marriage, even though divorce did become possible within limits, survived in Protestant England right up to the breaking of the dam in the mid-twentieth century.

Perhaps the clearest index of profound change in the moral order was the sudden collapse of Sunday observance, which under the influence of the Reformation had become a badge of English Protestant identity, often under the bizarre label of “Sabbath” observance. (It was only in English that Sunday came to be known without adjectival qualification as “the Sabbath,” and not simply, by analogy, as “the Christian Sabbath.”) This was perhaps thanks largely to the influence of the Puritan theologian William Perkins, an immensely influential writer who should surely have had a few pages in Ackroyd’s roster, having left a footprint on the “English Soul” at least as deep as that of his contemporary, Richard Hooker. The erasure of Sunday observance under commercial pressures in the second half of the twentieth century was the most visible ritual marker of the general abandonment of Christianity by the English people. Like so much of England’s patrimony, the English Soul was sold off.

One of the striking results of the sale of the English Soul is the void it has left behind. There is no clear alternative English identity to replace it. Waving the banner of St. George in support of various national sports teams is not quite the same. For the rest, the long historical blurring between “British” and “English” has left England without any distinctive identity akin to the palpably vigorous national ideas in Ireland and Scotland. Attempts to establish or reaffirm a specifically English identity are embraced by elements of the political right but are consequently deplored by elements of the political left, a rift that dooms them to failure. So the long history of Christian England draws to a close, as the long history of Catholic England drew to a close in the sixteenth century. English Christianity will of course survive, just as English Catholicism survived the Reformation—but no longer as the mainspring of the cultural mechanism. What will replace it is anybody’s guess. Many of the virtues or features of English culture or character in which the English have taken pride—tolerance, humor, self-deprecation, eccentricity, pragmatism, courtesy—things that often catch Ackroyd’s eye in these pages, derive in some way from the long Christian tradition of this land. But they are already under threat as the baptismal waters recede. The accidents may briefly survive the departure of the substance, but they are unlikely to endure much longer than the smile of the Cheshire Cat.

Richard Rex is professor of Reformation history at the University of Cambridge.

Image by Rosser1954, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.