In the Western world today, Peter Ackroyd is one in all the best writers of biography, history, and fiction. His most up-to-date project turns attention to the sphere of faith, getting down to describe what he calls the “spirit and nature of English Christianity” because it has developed over the past 1,400 years.
The English Soul: Faith of a Nation offers an episodic and biographical account of books, individuals, and communities which have done most to shape this tradition. Consistent with Ackroyd’s gifts, the book crafts superb turns of phrase while approaching its subject with curiosity, generosity, and breadth.
But this book also makes some unexpected moves. The English soul, Ackroyd insists, requires a Christian explanation—for while Jews, Muslims, and adherents of other religions have “contributed” to the country’s religious tradition, their faith and practice haven’t “characterised” it. “Christianity,” he asserts, “has been the anchoring and defining doctrine of England.”
These are daring words, and contestable ones, not least when measured against England’s secularization over the past 50 years. In most parts of the country, Christian affiliation, even at its most nominal, is dropping fast.
The Church of England might still be established, and the brand new king might still be its supreme governor, but his episcopal appointments are approved by a Hindu prime minister in a capital city boasting a Muslim mayor and in a culture that treats these religious differences with little greater than indifference.
These social changes reframe Ackroyd’s title into an issue: Does England still have a Christian soul?
At minimum, Ackroyd’s book capably shows that England has a Christian past. Its chapters range across this terrain, starting with the Venerable Bede, a seventh- and eighth-century monk often known as the “father of English history.”
But it will not be at all times clear what principle has governed the alternative of topics and figures. There’s a spot of 700 years between chapter 1, on Bede, and chapter 2, on Julian of Norwich (and only a 3rd of that chapter focuses on the famous mystic). Nearly half the book covers events within the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leaving just a number of chapters apiece for the pre-Reformation church and the centuries leading up to the current day.
Neither are the chapter titles especially illuminating: Bede is discussed under “Religion as History,” the King James Version of the Bible under “Religion as Scripture,” and so forth. The focus here will not be on religion as practice. In fact, it’s not at all times clear whether the term religion is pointing to any fixed category in any respect.
Of course, the flexible meaning of religion presents a problem in a book meant to distill an English “soul.” And these references to an English soul are sometimes quite peculiar.
Ackroyd, as an illustration, describes Julian’s visions as “specific, almost humble” intimately, concluding that “the English soul is mediated through homely images.” This is a curious statement, because it seems to imply that Julian’s vision is ultimately turned in upon herself.
Ackroyd’s conception of “Englishness” is usually just as hazy as his conception of faith. The Reformation, we’re told, demonstrated that “ambiguity and compromise were a part of the English temper; doctrinal purity was not.” Queen Elizabeth’s proposals to finish Protestant-Catholic conflict were “very English … practical relatively than speculative,” involving “compromise, and toleration, in addition to a good amount of ambiguity.” The agendas of “compromise and conciliation” that animated the King James Version “might even act as a mirror of Englishness itself, and by extension of the English soul.” The Quaker movement had “an essentially English character,” in that “toleration … has at all times been the English path.” John and Charles Wesley preferred experience to doctrine and so offered an “outline of the English soul.” And so on.
These generalizations usually are not at all times accurate—John Wesley’s hostility toward his Calvinist rivals was actually theologically informed. And they actually cannot explain why the book devotes space each to evangelicals and to atheist stalwarts like Richard Dawkins.
This is where proper categorization is important, because a minimum of because the Reformation, as Ackroyd acknowledges, the English soul has been contested. With the rise of Protestant reform, the “fight for the English soul had develop into earnest.” One century later, Puritanism offered “another English tradition,” which continues to compete for the English soul.
Ackroyd has particular trouble determining evangelicals. With their sometimes fierce commitment to biblical inerrancy and high view of God’s righteousness, it’s hard to assume them fitting comfortably throughout the tolerant pragmatism of the book’s “English soul.”
Can evangelicals be English in any respect? They is perhaps the one growing tradition throughout the established church today. Does that mean the English soul is dying?
It seems fitting, then, that The English Soul is a book and not using a conclusion. Its final chapter sketches the careers of revisionist thinkers like John A. T. Robinson, John Hick, and Don Cupitt, hinting that their movements away from “dogma or abstract principle” made them more faithful attendants upon the English soul.
But the shortage of a conclusion seems revealing. It’s not merely that Ackroyd’s story of this tradition has yet to succeed in its finale. Perhaps, in his way of telling, it cannot.
Ackroyd’s book incorporates some unexpected blunders. It will not be true, as he claims, that the 39 Articles of the Church of England rejected the doctrine of hell or that Puritans “doubted whether Christ … intended to create a Church in any respect.” Moravians didn’t regard sexual activity as a sacramental act. Charles Spurgeon was not the pastor of a “Reformed Baptist church” (a descriptor not used until the mid-Twentieth century).
Blunders and bigger hesitations notwithstanding, this survey of English Christian history stays a book by Peter Ackroyd, which implies that it’s provocative and sometimes baffling but additionally shrewd, rigorously observed, and at its best, good.
Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. His books include The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland.
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