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.