Reading this book was like
working through a cut and paste job. Peter Ackroyd acknowledges the help of two research assistants (Thomas
Wright and Murrough O’Brien) and I guess they provided the cuts pasted
into the potted Wikipedia-style biographies of divines and theologians which comprise
the bulk of the book. Those biographies record births, marriages and death-bed
scenes – in that order - though in contrast to Wikipedia nothing is footnoted.
As far as I can tell, not a single new fact is reported; everything derives from secondary sources of which some are
listed as Further Reading. It’s rather dull and there’s no humour at all – perhaps to reflect the fact that Jesus never laughed (the
internet has long since gone viral on the subject). Occasionally, the book is
coy: was John Wesley a philanderer or not? The book suggests it but doesn’t
provide a clear answer.
I
found myself contrasting Ackroyd’s book with two recent works which are thoroughly
researched and lively and which light up English religious cultures: Anna
Keay’s study of Cromwellian England, The Restless Republic (2022) and
Daisy Hays’ Dinner with Jospeh Johnson which treats of late eighteenth
century radical and sceptical cultures in which William Blake figures (he gets
a chapter in Ackroyd’s book).
Some
discursive and slightly better essays appear later in the book but the last
chapter reverts to mini-biography, presenting CVs for three twentieth century
academic theologians with no attempt to discriminate. John Hick’s important Evil
and the God of Love is not elevated above lesser works and there is no
recognition of its core concern with solving the intractable theodicy problem:
Since there is unmerited suffering in the world then either God is not all good
or not all powerful. Solve that one if
you can. I am surprised that no editor was to hand to veto the inclusion of
this worse-than-weak last chapter.
From
time to time the biographies are interrupted or concluded by strange one-liners
about “the English soul”. I quote a selection:
On
Julian of Norwich: “The English soul was mediated through homely images.” (page
31)
On
Thomas More: “The fight for the English soul had become earnest.” (70)
And
again, “The burnings [of heretics] continued, shedding fitful light on the
English soul.” (73)
On
Henry Barrow: “But his witness survived, and became a significant aspect of the
English soul.” (107)
On
the Authorized Version: “It might even act as a mirror of Englishness itself,
and by extension the English soul” (140)
On
George Herbert: “Little Gidding became, for Herbert, a vision of spirituality
in the world. It became a corner of the English soul.” (147)
On
William Blake: “Yet in truth his vision has never been lost. It is integral to
the English soul.” (240)
As
a response to Samuel Butler: “it is certainly true that the established
religion rested on what was comfortable and what was familiar. That has always
been the default position of the English soul.” (261)
And so it continues. Wrap up all your expositions with the same phrase and it reveals itself as either trite or vacuous. Ackroyd nowhere tries to place the notion of soul in relation to, say, heart or spirit. There are those who are kind-hearted and those who are mean-spirited; we use such terms to describe characters and make moral assessments. Is a soul in contrast something which can only be evaluated from a theological standpoint as saved or damned? But then it would be rather odd to have a theology which had a category of English soul as if there might be French ones or Russian ones or Japanese ones requiring separate theologies. And would those theologies acknowledge that there is more than one path to salvation? It hasn't really been part of the spirit of theologies to allow that.
Regardless of who is
responsible for what, this miscellany is in no sense an enlightening history of
Christianity in England or a successful evocation of the varied ways it has infused
the experience of some generic English soul. To have achieved anything
approaching such lofty ambitions would have required some informing sense of
history and structure. Should one be thinking of a Great Tradition
(Leavis-style) of lives and works or of a Simultaneous Order (T S Eliot-style)
of cultural monuments?
Or should one be looking
for the reflection of social changes in the way Christianity has been expressed
and lived (in the style of R H Tawney, Christopher Hill and the Hammonds)? The
English soul would then take different forms in different contexts: changing configurations and strategies of state
power; the distribution of literacy and access to knowledge; and, most
obviously, the changing ways in which the worlds of the rich and the poor have
been conjoined (“The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate; God made
them high and lowly and ordered their estate” – second verse, All Things
Bright and Beautiful).
*
Peter Ackroyd was a scholarship boy who studied at Clare College, Cambridge re-endowed (as Clare Hall) in the fourteenth century by Lady Elizabeth de Clare. Part of her endowment comprised land and the church benefice in the nearby village of Litlington. Fellows of Clare regularly took the church living and then employed a curate to do the actual work, making the usual profit on the deal. But the Rev Dr William Webb, Master of Clare from 1815 to 1856 and vicar of Litlington from 1816 to 1856 actually lived much of the time in its rectory and indeed died there. This apparent devotion to clerical duty allowed him to pursue a lifelong passion for agricultural improvement; he brought Enclosure to Litlington in 1830. The consequences followed as they did everywhere. My Pateman ancestors, for centuries Litlington agricultural labourers, were scattered – some as far away as Australia by transportation or assisted passage. Some remained but suffered again from the mid-Victorian agricultural depression. Despite that depression, promptly after his death Dr Webb’s executors auctioned his crops growing at Litlington for £405.
Webb's successor the Reverend Joseph Power (vicar from 1856 to
1866) may or may not have known much about his parish. His interests lay
elsewhere; he was University Librarian and also looked after the wine cellar at Clare
( the records are archived); as a mathematician he had
successfully explained the mechanical cause of one of the first fatal train
accidents in England. But in August 1864 he was able to sell the barley growing on his four Litlington acres for £23. The year is significant for my history.
In December 1863 my great
great grandfather James Pateman stole a bushel of beans from his master, a
local landowner, because his pregnant wife Susan was ill and their family
hungry; he paid the price with 14 days hard labour in January 1864. A daughter,
a little Emily, was born at the beginning of February but died before the month
was out after a private baptism at home – anyone could perform such an act but
it was probably done by a local dissenter; the Patemans had married in an
independent Meeting House in nearby Royston, a centre of lively dissent from
the time of the Civil War. In the 1870s after the early death of Susan who
had no more children, her teenage son John - my great grandfather –
became another of those who left the stricken village; he made his way to Brick
Lane in London’s East End and found work in the giant Truman Hanbury and Buxton
brewery which offered effective competition to the other opium of the people. By
this time it’s probable that the Patemans were no longer dissenters but simply
godless, which is how I experienced my Pateman grandparents. But none of them
transmitted orally or left anything in writing to reveal how they experienced
their lives; they can only appear to me as if bereav'd of light. As
the Hammonds put it in The Village Labourer, “this lost world has no
Member of Parliament, no press, it does not make literature or write history;
no diary or memoirs have kept alive for us the thoughts and cares of the
passing day” Their take on the English soul has to be guessed at.
*
After a prefatory warning that you will find nothing here about Judaism or Islam or … but don’t be
offended etc…. Ackroyd’s book starts with Bede when I would have expected
Augustine, sent to re-christianise an island abandoned by the Romans and Rome. Arriving
at the head of a large expedition funded by Pope Gregory and heading straight
to the Canterbury capital of the local secular power, Augustine’s first task
was to get Aethelberht on side and that he achieved. He got the protection and resources
in cash and kind without which no religious mission can put down roots, outspend
and defeat competitors Aethelberht had his reward in this world: renewed
church power and old state power were going to march arm in arm and have done
so ever since. But I guess Augustine doesn’t make the cut because he wasn’t
English and, to boot, the agent of a foreign power. (And, yes I agree, that’s
an old English trope).
As for lived experience
which touches the soul there is in Ackroyd’s book precious little about country
churchyards, church bells tolling for thee or me, organs belting out the tunes
which all the faithful come to sing. There is surprisingly little about parsons,
benefices, tithes, the Victorian clerical novel, Sunday and National schools, Nativity
plays (were you Mary or a donkey?), the cost of keeping up bishops’ palaces, cloister
intrigues, schoolboys beaten, choristers interfered with. Nor is it pressed
upon us that the lives of our ancestors since Augustine arrived have, for the
very most part, been nasty, brutish and very short, Christ or no risen Christ. We
too easily forget both infant mortality and how that experience affected
husband, wife and siblings. It is not surprising that we encounter so much
evidence of melancholia in those who did record their lives. The money spent on understanding the perils of childbirth and on laying-in wards was a minute fraction of that spent on steeples and spires.
Ackroyd sketches the
outer lives and inner struggles of his cast of mostly male characters. Some of
the choices are obvious ones, some less so. A chapter on three Atheists (Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, Richard Dawkins) included, as it were, to represent
the Other Side, simply ignores such details as the distinctness of not
believing in the existence of a God or any gods and not believing in any kind
of personal immortality (which I suppose knocks out one version of the Soul,
English or not). It does not treat secularism as a distinct belief cluster
which could be adhered to by theists and quite often is outside of a Church of
England which still clings fiercely to the secular privileges without which it
would now die. Ackroyd is silent on
agnosticism as distinct from indifference. He does not allow for those who
rather awkwardly feel that some form of unbelief is a moral obligation imposed by
the record of terrible crimes committed – and across millenia - in the names of
organised monotheisms. It’s for much the same reason that many have felt
obliged to renounce the more recent ideals of Communism.
*
I do share the hope that
everyone who lives long enough will come to feel that there is some Quest or other
that they must undertake before it is too late. Some discover very young, some
never. The English soul? This is Rudyard Kipling in Kim:
“…we must find that River; it is so verree valuable
to us”
“But this is gross blasphemy!” cried the Church of England.
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