Peter Ackroyd’s Protestant reading of English Christianity
THE ENGLISH SOUL
The faith of a nation
PETER ACKROYD
384pp. Reaktion. £20.
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.
The chapter on Wyclif is excellent, but where in the book are the glory days of medieval England, of King Alfred and the Anglo-Saxon monastic revival, the Norman kings and bishops, the foundation of hundreds of monastic houses in the twelfth century, the building of the great cathedrals and of village churches, from Saxon barns to the gothic splendours of East Anglian and Cotswold wool churches? 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.
He gets into his stride with William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer and, even more, the PR triumph of John Foxe and his gloating Book of Martyrs (1563), so successfully regaling every parish with the horrors of the Marian persecution that the Catholics executed, either as heretics or as traitors, over more than a century have been largely forgotten. Cranmer deserves the admiration of everyone familiar with The Book of Common Prayer, but Ackroyd gives him no credit for the taste and skill with which he wove the great Luke canticles from the Roman Office, the “Benedictus”, the “Magnificat” and the “Nunc Dimittis”, into Matins and Evensong. Ackroyd thinks the Reformation is somehow confirmed by the fact that all the early Reformers were once Catholics: but how (apart from a few harmless Lollards) could they have been anything else? For him Thomas More was only
