Several books on some aspect of the history of Christianity have recently come my way. “The Most Dangerous Man in England”: Newman and the Laity, by Paul Shrimpton, provides a record of Newman in action. We learn about Newman’s work in setting up and directing an English oratory in Birmingham; his founding and leadership of the Catholic University of Ireland; his editorship of the Catholic journal The Rambler; and his response to Vatican I and acceptance of the red hat (after an initial refusal). Throughout the story, Newman stands as a firm defender of the laity. In Shrimpton’s words, he was a “guide of souls” who “put himself among his flock, walked with them.”
In chapter 8, Shrimpton describes how Newman battled to keep the oratory school firmly Catholic, which may inspire today’s Catholic parents and educators, who have watched in dismay as Catholic parishes have allowed their schools to bend ever further in a secular direction. Shrimpton gives Newman the last word: “I shall offend many men when I say, we must look to the people.”
In Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy, Brandon Bloch focuses on a narrow time and small group of people: Protestant intellectuals in Germany who were key figures in political reconstruction after the war. “Protestant political activism rarely deployed the language of democracy,” Bloch writes. It needed strong intellectual voices to reconcile the new civics and the old religion. What follows is a scrupulous narrative account of developments on the ground, backed by seventy-eight pages of endnotes.
When John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Daniel Webster was asked to give a commemorative address in Boston soon after, where he cast the passing of the two as providential, “proofs that our country and its benefactors are objects of [God’s] care.” John D. Wilsey cites this episode in Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer as evidence of how deeply Christian the nation was in its early years. It was founded on ideas of liberty, though, and Wilsey admits that individual freedom and the obedience that comes with faith were and are ever in tension.
The figures best equipped to reconcile the spirits of liberty and piety are, he argues, Burkean conservatives. Such men and women cherish religious freedom but abhor violent means of preserving it (Wilsey cites the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). They understand the impulse behind Christian Nationalism but warn against making an idol of the nation. They extol liberty but only in “ordered” form, never allowing it as “simply doing what one pleases.” Responsibility and duty are needed to curb license. Burkean conservatives apply a moral vision to the past but hold back from judging the past by the standards of the present, and they are leery of the toppling of statues. The superiority that marks the progressive attitude is dangerous, they believe. Throughout the book Wilsey returns to the current chaotic condition of American society, which cannot go on for long, though it will try. “What Augustine called the City of Man has and will continue to exalt itself and oppose any and all that stand in its way,” he writes on the last page. It is the triumph of progressive ambitions to cast off the past; it is the burden of conservatives to oppose them, though ever in a way consistent with principle.
In the early years of the seventh century, a catastrophe for Christianity took place. Seeing the Byzantine Empire sliding into political confusion and military weakness, the Sasanian Empire launched an invasion that met with quick success. By 610, Sasanians had occupied every Roman city east of the Euphrates, and in 615 Jerusalem fell, thousands of Christians were slaughtered, and the True Cross was taken to the capital Ctesiphon in triumph. The episode is one of many recounted in 30 Key Moments in the History of Christianity: Inspiring True Stories from the Early Church Around the World, by Mark W. Graham. We learn about heresy suddenly breaking out in fourth-century Britain, when Pelagianism spread across the island; the arrival of Christianity in China in 635, for which the emperor decreed his support three years later; the martyrdom of Vibia Perpetua in Carthage in 203 (a sword stroke to the neck killed her after she’d been thrown by a heifer); end-times speculation and anxiety as year 1000 approached; and two dozen more remarkable occasions for the Church. It’s an entertaining and informative summary of lesser-known happenings in the history of the faith in the first one thousand years, an up-and-down story that Graham sets against the backdrop of “the glorious messianic promises of Psalm 72”: “May all kings bow down to him and all nations serve him.”
Creed & Culture is a new press. I advise readers to get on its mailing list. A new and impressive offering is The Mighty Continent: A Candid History of Modern Europe, by Walter A. McDougall. I include it in this list of Christian history because McDougall has chapters on “The Biblical Origins of European Civilization,” faith and reason in the medieval millennium, the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Reformation (he dislikes the term counter-reformation). To McDougall, “historians cannot understand past cultures without delving into what they considered holy.” The culture and politics of the whole medieval era were shaped by the Roman Catholic Church, he says, and the early modern era, including the Enlightenment, was shaped by the Protestant Reformation. In the medieval world, the Church stood out as the most dynamic institution or “estate.” “The church was so diverse and mobile,” McDougall writes, “because it was the only estate a person was not born into but called into.” McDougall quotes Sts. Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, describes the paintings of El Greco and Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Rome, and details the rise of the Jesuits, whom “Protestants hated and feared.” The election of Pope Paul III in 1534 started a reform within the Vatican that was long overdue, which the Council of Trent formalized. Throughout the turmoil, “Europe’s culture not only survived but thrived.” When he gets to the present, the author is not so sure; he quotes Elie Wiesel, Solzhenitsyn, and others who speak of the decline of the West. Western civilization is a gift to humanity, he believes, but it may not last.
