Another View of Christianity in England: Peter Ackroyd on "The English Soul"

Catching up on my reading of periodicals, I looked at the book reviews in the December 2024 issue of First Things and saw a review of a new book by Peter Ackroyd written by Richard Rex, professor of Reformation history at the University of Cambridge. The book is titled The English Soul: Faith of a Nation and is published here in the USA by the University of Chicago Press with a paperback available in September this year (in the UK it's available now from Reaktion Books). The publisher's blurb:

This book portrays the spirit and nature of English Christianity, as it has developed over the last fourteen hundred years. During this time, Christianity has been the predominant faith of the people and the reflection of the English soul. This fascinating new history is an account of the Christian English soul, which recognizes the fact that Christianity has been the anchoring and defining doctrine of England while accepting respectfully that other powerful and significant faiths have influenced the religious sensibility of this nation. Peter Ackroyd surveys the lives and faith of the most important figures of English Christianity from the Venerable Bede to C. S. Lewis, exploring the mysticism of Julian of Norwich and William Blake; the tumultuous years of the Reformation; the emergence of the English bible; the evangelical tradition, including John Wesley; and the contemporary contest between tradition, revival, and atheism. This is an essential, comprehensive, and accessible survey of English Christianity.

Richard Rex comments on the unfulfilled promise of the title (his review is titled "Disintegrating England):

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. (p. 53)

And as the title of the review suggests, Rex comments on how Ackroyd does not address the moral decline and lack of Sunday observance in England today, as highlighted in the Crisis Magazine and National Catholic Register articles I posed on last week. What is "The Faith of [the English] Nation" today?

In the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) Lucy Beckett is a little unsure about it too:

The title and subtitle of Peter Ackroyd’s new book are both misleading: the book could more accurately be called From Bede to Don Cupitt: Essays in the history of English Christianity. Twenty-three chapters, each under the heading “Religion as …”, take the reader from the eighth to the twenty-first century, but six of these thirteen centuries are absent from the story. After Bede (“Religion as History”), the next subjects are the fourteenth-century English mystics (“Religion as Revelation”), who seem to be included principally to justify Ackroyd’s often-repeated idea that the (Christian) English soul begins in mystical experience and ends in pragmatism. For him, though they were orthodox Catholics, the mystics initiated the tradition of the individual’s connection with God, outside any structure of doctrine or sacraments, that was taken up first by enthusiasts in the sects that developed on the wilder fringes of Protestantism, then by William Blake. Contemporary with Julian of Norwich and the other mystics, who were very different from each other, was John Wyclif, a scratchy, clever, discontented academic, and indeed a proto-Protestant.

Beckett's review is titled: "A Practical faith: Peter Ackroyd’s Protestant reading of English Christianity". Ackroyd does indeed skip many Catholic writers after Julian Norwich and others in the fourteenth century, according to the Table of Contents until the nineteenth and twentieth. After her and Rolle and Hilton it's Wyclif, Tyndale, Cranmer, and Foxe. He does later devote chapters to John Henry Newman ("Religion as Thought"--YIKES!) and G.K.Chesterton (shared with C.S. Lewis in chapter titled "Religion as Argument"--Chesterton probably wouldn't mind that much because he did love a good argument!), two Anglican converts to Catholicism. I wonder if William Caxton, Saint Aelred of Rievaulx, Saint John of Beverley and Saint John of Bridlington (two of the English saints Henry V asked to intercede at the Battle of Agincourt),and otherss even merit a mention.

As Rex comments, "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 [by Ackroyd]. . . . 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 (sic) . . ." (p. 54 in the print edition) Rex also points out the irony that the cover of the book depicts Saint Thomas of Canterbury excommunicating Henry II when the martyred Archbishop of Canterbury is hardly mentioned in the book and by the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus, yet none of the medieval Catholic material culture of art and architecture is mentioned.

Lucy Beckett brings up some of the same issues with this trenchant comment, "Ackroyd writes as if Eamon Duffy had never bothered to revive respect for the warmth and depth of medieval English Christianity, and treats Catholic piety only with the contempt of a scornful Protestant."

Speaking of Eamon Duffy, here's his view of Ackroyd's success or failure. He concludes: "Ackroyd is an accomplished writer who has often written compellingly about the English past. But he is not at his best in this book, a sometimes dutiful catalog of major and some very minor religious figures, lacking a convincing unifying theme. Anyone looking for a key to the English soul must look elsewhere."

I think I'll wait for the paperback . . . or to see it on the shelf at a bookstore and scan the chapter on Newman.

"Thomas More changed the course of the narrative"

In a presentation on June 25, 2019, Richard Rex spoke in Dublin -- in the Church Blessed John Henry Newman built for the Catholic University of Ireland, which is under the stewardship of the University of Notre Dame as the Notre Dame-Newman Centre for Faith and Reason -- on what Hilary Mantel has done to the reputation of St. Thomas More for the sake of elevating the reputation of Thomas Cromwell. The Iona Institute website offers this introduction:

Professor Richard Rex of Queen’s College, Cambridge, addressed a packed University Church in Dublin last week on the topic: The Two Thomases, namely Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell. In particular, he examined the portrayal of both in Hilary Mantel’s best-selling and widely-praised novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. Professor Rex, who lectures in Reformation and Tudor history, offers a wry, learned and ultimately devastating analysis of how Mantel essentially reversed the personalities and characters of both men.

As Professor Rex . . . says: “They are two of the emblematic figures of English history: More, the defender of the Catholic Church in England against the tyrannical pretensions of Henry VIII to be the Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England; and Cromwell, the pliant instrument of tyranny. Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons cast More as a liberal hero of freedom of conscience and Cromwell as the ruthless agent of State pragmatism. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has reversed those polarities for a new age, with Cromwell now the apostle of humanist tolerance and More the hate-filled prophet of religious fanaticism. My aims this evening are to investigate and document this reversal, to show how it was achieved, and to speculate on why it has enjoyed so much success. The key to this final aim is the idea that Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell have, in one little cultural niche, served to embody or represent the changing position of the Catholic Church in modern – or postmodern – western culture. But before we come to that we must unpack and unpick the role reversal and comment on its rationality and plausibility.”

Or as Professor Rex says elsewhere in his address: “To destroy More, the symbol of Catholicism, More must be diminished to the scale of an ant, that Cromwell may trample upon him. Mantel’s fiction shows us a nasty man getting his Tudor come-uppance. History shows us something rather different.”

You may watch video of the presentation here. The Iona Institute website also provides a link to the text of the presentation (which contains some additional material). One of the more interesting insights to me was Professor Rex's analysis of how "Thomas More changed the course of the narrative" that is, changed what Hilary Mantel planned to write:

According to the author, Wolf Hall was originally conceived as a single novel, retelling the rise and fall of its hero. However, as she got to grips with the events of 1534-35, in which Thomas More was targeted and ultimately destroyed by the regime for his refusal to go along with Henry’s assumption of the title of Supreme Head, under Christ, of the Church of England, she found the duel between More and Cromwell irresistibly dramatic. One sees her point. This duel became the dominant theme of the narrative, with a natural end in More’s execution. Thus the original novel was therefore recast as a trilogy, each closed by a beheading: Thomas More in 1535, Anne Boleyn in 1536, and, presumably, in the final volume, which has now been promised for next year, Cromwell himself in 1540. What you should note is that Thomas More changed the course of the narrative. In a sense, I would argue, he took over the story, despite his allotted role as a merely secondary presence within it. More’s impact on the story itself serves to undermine the author’s intentions and assumptions and assertions. Crucially, it was the portrayal of More, not that of Cromwell, which accounts for Wolf Hall’s early vogue.

The bold emphasis is in the text as downloaded. He later comments:

As one review of Wolf Hall put it, ‘you cannot back Cromwell without spitting on More’. If you can’t back Cromwell without spitting on More, can you back More without spitting on Cromwell? You certainly can’t back both horses. But you can esteem and praise More, even making room for appropriate criticism, without really having to take Cromwell into account at all. Bolt and Mantel once again offer a useful contrast. In A Man for All Seasons, Cromwell is definitely down among the ‘minor characters’ in the credits. But in Wolf Hall, Thomas More is central to the action. This imbalance reflects reality, despite the author. Thomas More has never been forgotten. People fell over themselves to write his biography, even in the Tudor era. The biographies by William Roper, Nicholas Harpsfield, and Thomas Stapleton all survive. The one written by William Rastell is preserved only in a few stray fragments. There have been more editions just of Roper’s Life of More than there have been biographies of Cromwell. Not a century has gone by without its share of biographies of More. No one rushed to write the life of Cromwell. . . .

And Rex concludes with Mantel's own comments about Holbein's portrait of Cromwell at the Frick:

And in the case of Cromwell and More, the pictures are there for us to see. They can be seen in the Frick Collection in New York, where More and Cromwell gaze at each other across a fireplace, captured by the hand of the sixteenth century’s greatest portraitist, Holbein. The author of Wolf Hall herself describes his Cromwell as an ‘incredibly dead picture’. The art critic Waldemar Januszczak more memorably labels Cromwell ‘the least attractive sitter in the whole of Holbein’s art’. The picture is the evidence. A great painter, they say, paints not just the face but the soul. And Holbein’s More is famously and sublimely living. This is the evidence: Cromwell – dead, dull; More – alive, alert. Holbein got it. Seeing is believing. But there’s none so blind as them that will not see.

A full quote of Waldemar Januszczak on the contrast between the portraits: 

That is why I recommend a visit to the Living Hall at the Frick Collection, and a good gawp at Holbein’s portraits of More and Cromwell. Holbein was there. He knew them both. So what does he make of them?

Of More, he makes one of the most noble presences in the whole of British portraiture. Determined. Handsome. Resolute. With his velvet sleeves and his gold chain, More is a man of rank, but there’s something kindly about his face, too. And in the exact capturing of his five-o’clock shadow, Holbein has produced one of his finest records of the true textures of humanity.

On the other side of the fireplace, the new hero of Wolf Hall, Cromwell, has none of those qualities. Indeed, with his piggy eyes and his veal-like complexion, he is one of Holbein’s least appealing sitters. He’s shown at a desk, writing. A death warrant, perhaps. Or further instructions for the destruction of a monastery. As soon as I saw him, that famous observation by Hannah Arendt about the “banality of evil” flashed into my thoughts.

So, who to trust? Holbein, who was there? Or Hilary Mantel, who is a great writer, and a worthy winner of the Booker prize? Over to you.

"Over to you" is a weak conclusion!

Rex, in contrast, presents a devastating critique of Mantel's vaunted historical accuracy and how people have fallen for her anachronistically "nice" Thomas Cromwell.

St. Thomas More and Conscience (Again)

In a letter to History Today, Hilary Mantel states that Thomas More's "conscience [was] captive to tradition and authority"--as though that were a bad thing. Thomas More's understanding of conscience, its formation, and its decision-making process was that the individual conscience must be responding to God's authority and the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church. I'm presuming now, but Mantel might think of conscience as being captive only to the individual's interpretation of events and actions and being consistent with oneself--what Blessed John Henry Newman in the nineteenth century would call conscience's counterfeit.

More offered Cromwell an explanation of the true meaning of conscience in his June 3, 1535 letter to his daughter Meg about his recent interrogation in the Tower of London. Cromwell was accusing him of a double standard, claiming his conscience was better than a heretic's conscience. More explained that the heretic was not appealing to conscience, which should have led him to follow the Church Jesus founded, but to his own ego, which had led him to reject the truth and develop individual ideas about the Church and salvation:

Whereunto I answered I would not dispute the King's authority, what his Highness might do in such case, but I said that verily under correction it seemed to me somewhat hard. For if it so were that my conscience gave me against the statutes (wherein how my mind giveth me I make no dec­laration), then I nothing doing nor nothing saying against the statute, it were a very hard thing to compel me to say either precisely with it against my conscience to the loss of my soul, or precisely against it to the destruc­tion of my body.

To this Master Secretary said that I had before this when I was Chan­cellor examined heretics and thieves and other malefactors and gave me a great praise above my deserving in that behalf. And he said that I then, as he thought and at the leastwise Bishops did use to examine heretics, whether they believed the Pope to be the head of the Church and used to compel them to make a precise answer thereto. And why should not then the King, since it is a law made here that his Grace is Head of the Church, here compel men to answer precisely to the law here as they did then concerning the Pope.

I answered and said that I protested that I intended not to defend any part or stand in contention; but I said there was a difference between those two cases because at that time, as well here as elsewhere through the corps of Christendom, the Pope's power was recognized for an undoubted thing which seems not like a thing agreed in this realm and the contrary taken for truth in other realms. Whereunto Master Secretary answered that they were as well burned for the denying of that as they be beheaded for deny­ing of this, and therefore as good reason to compel them to make precise answer to the one as to the other.

Whereto I answered that since in this case a man is not by a law of one realm so bound in his conscience, where there is a law of the whole corps of Christendom to the contrary in matter touching belief, as he is by a law of the whole corps though there hap to be made in some place a local law to the contrary, the reasonableness or the unreasonableness in binding a man to precise answer, standeth not in the respect or difference between beheading and burning, but because of the difference in charge of con­science, the difference standeth between beheading and hell.

In his chapter on St. Thomas More in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More ("More and the Heretics"), Richard Rex notes that More--and in this he certainly was a man of his time--was certain that he knew the truth. Catholic Christianity was the truth and no one had the right to deny or ignore the truth. Rex notes that we post-modernists can hardly imagine this certainty (our only certainty would be perhaps that we cannot be certain!). In his role as Henry VIII's Chancellor, he was sworn to assist the Church in finding heresy and he fulfilled that role. More regarded the obdurate heretic as a danger to society, an egoist deciding his own interpretation of God's revelation, and a person in certain danger of damnation. Thus, when More made his appeal to his right to follow his conscience, he asserted that his conscience was responding not to his own interpretation but to the teaching of the universal Church, an authority high above Henry VIII, even if the monarch did take over the Church in England.

On the Acton Institute website, writer Marc D. Guerra sums up More's understanding of conscience well; he was indeed guided by tradition and authority:

Whereas modern doctrines of conscience characteristically emphasize the self-sufficiency of the individual’s judgment, More stresses its communal nature. More, to be sure, recognized the uniqueness of the individual conscience. More was, after all, imprisoned precisely because he could not, in good conscience, swear allegiance to Henry VIII’s oath. But in contrast to the modern claim that the individual can create his own moral values, More saw the “formation of conscience” as “the fruit” of an education “in the truth.” Far from being the arbitrator and creator of its own moral order, the human conscience is in need of conforming to the truth. For More, the formation of conscience is the result of a long process in which one discovers a preexisting created moral order. This was, in some sense, the issue in More’s dispute with Henry. Henry sought to substitute his own law for the “higher law of God and Christ’s Church.” Nothing underscores the profound differences between More’s and the modernist’s understanding of conscience more than this fact: Whereas modern thought views the individual’s conscience as being above all other authorities, More’s conscience testifies to the superiority of the church’s authority to his king’s. More’s refusal to take Henry’s oath was not an act of civil disobedience but, rather, of obedience to truth and thus, in his view, an act of “genuine liberty.”