Unchanged since Bede
Peter Ackroyd, The English Soul: Faith of a Nation
Reaktion Books, 384pp, £20.00, ISBN 9781789148459
reviewed by Archie Cornish
The Anglo-Saxon kings encountered Christianity at the turn of the seventh century. Over the following hundred years their kingdoms gradually ‘christianised’, and that process was linked to the coalescence of separate realms into a single nation. In the celebrated spoof history textbook 1066 And All That (1930), W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman condense these huge parallel shifts into a single, crisp sentence: ‘the country was now almost entirely inhabited by Saxons and was therefore renamed England, and thus (naturally) soon became C. of. E’. Just as ‘therefore’ smooths diverse groups of Saxons and Angles into the non-sequitur of ‘England’, so the church of this new nation is presumed — ‘naturally’ — to be the same ‘C. of E.’ of the interwar years, abbreviated in an exquisite parody of English officialdom, at once stiff and complacent.
Peter Ackroyd, in this structurally flawed but abundantly enjoyable history of English Christianity, begins at the very beginning, with the Northumbrian historian known today as the Venerable — ‘Venomous’, in 1066 — Bede. Unlike the histories Sellar and Yeatman are sending up, Ackroyd doesn’t tell a triumphalist story of how English Christianity was always destined to turn into the body founded haphazardly in the 16th century and now known as the Church of England. He does, however, attempt to trace the presence of an adapting but essentially unchanging ‘English soul’, between denominational boundaries, and across a historical arc stretching from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History to the contemporary Church.
That English soul is characterised, for Ackroyd, by a particular combination of intense spiritual mysticism and pragmatic flexibility in the realm of doctrine. He finds it stirring in the thoughts and deeds of the various figures structuring his history, whose chapters narrate the biographies of individuals (Julian of Norwich, John Wesley, Cardinal Newman) or groupings (Tudor reformers, Commonwealth radicals, Catherine and William Booth). Ackroyd is an accomplished novelist, as well as an acclaimed popular historian; his novelistic eye brings his sweeping array of historical people and places effortlessly to life. George Fox, the first Quaker, is a tall man, long-haired in ‘defiance of Puritan custom’, wearing a ‘broad-rimmed white hat’. In The Pickwick Papers Dickens gives a long-forgotten 17th-century sect an unexpected afterlife as a cricket team called ‘The Old Muggletonians’. The Booths founded their evangelical Army in the 1870s and advertised its appearances with posters featuring the ‘Hallelujah Giant’ and ‘Salvation Midget’.
Like all good novelists Ackroyd also balances shrewd judgment of his characters’ behaviour with an instinctively generous, or at least curious, sense of their motivations. C.S. Lewis’s character and faith come across as excessively muscular (‘beer and boisterous fun’); Ackroyd suggests perceptively, however, that the curmudgeonly bluntness was necessary for the maintenance of a ‘persona of a plain man’ to cover an inner life of deep, occasionally prophetic spiritual feeling.
Medieval England is less replete with delicious detail than the stuffed treasure-house of Victorian England, but Ackroyd — who acknowledges his gratitude to two research assistants, Thomas Wright and Murrough O’Brien — brings it to equally vivid life. Generalising from a close reading of Richard Rolle’s The Fire of Love, for example, he observes that ‘flame is central to the 14th-century imagination’. The second half of the 14th century, as Europe reeled from the devastation of the Black Death, was a time of spiritual recovery on one hand (hundreds of churches were built) and on the other an age of tense agitation (social radicals known as Lollards, and followers of the reformist John Wyclif, protested the corruption of the church under a centralising Papacy). One of the most enlightening aspects of The English Soul is Ackroyd’s suggestion that the meditative writing of this era, including Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, had a central influence on subsequent English mysticism. With its focus on the embodied person of Christ, and its privileging of subjective experience, the English mystical tradition shows how the two aspects of the ‘English soul’ — inner spirituality and pragmatic distaste for doctrinal rigidity — might relate. In its medieval guise, English pragmatism looks like a characteristically pre-modern ease with non-standardisation and local variation; closer to the present, pragmatism seems more akin to the political tradition of ‘muddling through’, and thus a key resource for the development of a modern nation.
Ackroyd has published a general history of Englishness, Albion (2000), which tries similarly to follow a thread of ‘English imagination’ through history. Peter Conrad wrote a review in The Guardian so smugly snobbish — ‘soccer yobs’, in the first line — that it could serve as The Guardian’s parody, 1066-style, of its own liberal myopia. But The English Soul has more in common, structurally, with Ackroyd’s most celebrated non-fiction work, his 2002 ‘biography’ of London. Allowing the capital to focus his gaze, Ackroyd can exercise his relentless curiosity and eye for detail. English Christianity, however, is a baggier and more expansive subject, both in time and place, than London. Ackroyd’s attempt to hang the history of English Christianity on selected historical figures, therefore, is always going to risk imbalance. John Milton and Paradise Lost are strangely absent, especially given Ackroyd’s evident affection for 17th-century religious prose, such as the sermons of William Laud and Lancelot Andrewes. Given its later resonance, the rise of Christian socialism in the late 19th century also seems an omission.
Similarly, Ackroyd’s structure risks flattening the various parts of England — ‘countries’, as they were known in early modern English — into a single homogenous place. It’s not that Ackroyd is insensitive to regional variation. A life of immersion in English culture makes him adept at observing the quirks and historical particularities of specific places: the towns of the midlands whose commercial economies lent them to the autonomy of Nonconformism; the flourishing of extreme sects in the anonymity and obscurity of London; the suitability of high Anglicanism to Oxford. But the book requires the characters embedded in these regions to exemplify the English soul, and so these snippets of geographical specificity have to remain suggestive.
The plurality of spiritual atmospheres across England, and within the island of Britain itself, is explored more fully in Oliver Smith’s recently published On This Holy Island, though Smith is less concerned with history than (psycho)-geography, and casts his net wider than Christianity. Ackroyd’s unfashionable insistence that England’s spiritual history is a fundamentally Christian one is useful here. But his refusal to venture beyond England, except in brief digressions, proves as unbalancing as his reluctance to dwell on variation within England. In particular, the book occludes Wales, and this seems a weakness not only given the central role Welsh culture plays in the history of British Protestantism — the Bible was translated into Welsh as well as English in the 16th century; the ‘Independent’ polity of Cromwellian Protestantism flourished in Wales after the Civil War, Welsh Methodism is vital in the Victorian spiritual revival — but also because, until 1920, the ‘Church of England’ also officially covered Wales. Nation and Church fit together, but not perfectly so.
These structural limitations are minor flaws because, like most of Ackroyd’s work, The English Soul subordinates its overall design to the vividness of its local detail. Readers of Peter Conrad’s persuasion, however, might find a more fundamental flaw. If you’re hostile towards the idea of national character, this is not the book for you. Reading William Blake and John Henry Newman as manifestations of the multi-faceted but essentially coherent English soul, Ackroyd invokes an idea of national identity that crosses not just historical periods but also class divisions, and thus blasphemes against the received wisdom of both Marxist and otherwise sceptical historiographies in which national identity is always a top-down construct. Ackroyd’s book makes a persuasive case for the narrowness of this view. Nations might have murky and contingent origins, but the tendency of events to echo in a national community's memory, and of patterns to repeat across its territory, means that it makes sense to look for lines of continuity. Religious culture, rooted so deeply in its collective myths and texts, can only serve to amplify the echoes.
The principal flaw in this book is not the notion of national identity itself, but Ackroyd’s notion of how it is transmitted. The English Soul frequently glances with great skill at historical resonances across its set-piece chapters. Catherine Booth preached early sermons in Whitechapel, ‘in a tent within the Quaker burial ground’; the spirit of the white-hatted Fox is effortlessly revived. But on occasion Ackroyd’s trans-historical gestures seem more rhetorical than real, as when he assesses the claim that G.K. Chesterton’s prose, with its paradoxical style, is rather un-English — ‘this is to forget’, Ackroyd retorts, ‘that paradoxes and riddles were at the heart of Anglo-Saxon literature’. It’s a neat observation, but an oddly facile one, given the paradoxical style of the religious prose — Browne, Laud, Andrewes — from whose tradition Chesterton much more obviously draws. Ackroyd’s English soul seems to be an inherent genius of certain individuals, rather than a collective tendency nurtured by the flow of national currents and the amplifications of religious culture through history. The English soul has existed for Ackroyd, fundamentally unchanged, since Bede: history is simply a process of stripping away the impediments to its expression, and of self-correction when, as in ‘times of division’ like the upheaval after Civil War, it wanders off in multiple and erroneous directions.
This veers close to the view of history that 1066 And All That seeks to parody: the Whiggish interpretation, in which the Saxons are Victorian Englishmen-in-waiting, impatient to shrug off their Norman yoke. Yet Ackroyd’s book, far less triumphalist than a Whiggish narrative of inexorable progress towards the glories of the ‘C. of E’, shows that disposing of this teleological model of history doesn’t require a more wholesale disposal with the idea of national identity itself.
There is such a thing as an English soul, but its formation is a highly historical and thus highly contingent process. In our own time, the Church of England is in crisis after a period of long flux. Attendance has dropped by an astonishing fifth since the pandemic. Archbishop Welby’s resignation follows a protracted period of resistance in the name of ‘saving the parish’ against his centralising measures. Meanwhile, the overlooked but historically seismic divorce, a few decades old, of the Tories from the Church of England means that the established ‘C. of E’ has become associated, for the first time in English history, with progressive socio-economics. This autumn, in the context of the debate on Assisted Dying, the church found itself most closely aligned with — of all people — the Liberal Democrats. The point is that no one knows what is going to happen.
Peter Ackroyd, in this structurally flawed but abundantly enjoyable history of English Christianity, begins at the very beginning, with the Northumbrian historian known today as the Venerable — ‘Venomous’, in 1066 — Bede. Unlike the histories Sellar and Yeatman are sending up, Ackroyd doesn’t tell a triumphalist story of how English Christianity was always destined to turn into the body founded haphazardly in the 16th century and now known as the Church of England. He does, however, attempt to trace the presence of an adapting but essentially unchanging ‘English soul’, between denominational boundaries, and across a historical arc stretching from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History to the contemporary Church.
That English soul is characterised, for Ackroyd, by a particular combination of intense spiritual mysticism and pragmatic flexibility in the realm of doctrine. He finds it stirring in the thoughts and deeds of the various figures structuring his history, whose chapters narrate the biographies of individuals (Julian of Norwich, John Wesley, Cardinal Newman) or groupings (Tudor reformers, Commonwealth radicals, Catherine and William Booth). Ackroyd is an accomplished novelist, as well as an acclaimed popular historian; his novelistic eye brings his sweeping array of historical people and places effortlessly to life. George Fox, the first Quaker, is a tall man, long-haired in ‘defiance of Puritan custom’, wearing a ‘broad-rimmed white hat’. In The Pickwick Papers Dickens gives a long-forgotten 17th-century sect an unexpected afterlife as a cricket team called ‘The Old Muggletonians’. The Booths founded their evangelical Army in the 1870s and advertised its appearances with posters featuring the ‘Hallelujah Giant’ and ‘Salvation Midget’.
Like all good novelists Ackroyd also balances shrewd judgment of his characters’ behaviour with an instinctively generous, or at least curious, sense of their motivations. C.S. Lewis’s character and faith come across as excessively muscular (‘beer and boisterous fun’); Ackroyd suggests perceptively, however, that the curmudgeonly bluntness was necessary for the maintenance of a ‘persona of a plain man’ to cover an inner life of deep, occasionally prophetic spiritual feeling.
Medieval England is less replete with delicious detail than the stuffed treasure-house of Victorian England, but Ackroyd — who acknowledges his gratitude to two research assistants, Thomas Wright and Murrough O’Brien — brings it to equally vivid life. Generalising from a close reading of Richard Rolle’s The Fire of Love, for example, he observes that ‘flame is central to the 14th-century imagination’. The second half of the 14th century, as Europe reeled from the devastation of the Black Death, was a time of spiritual recovery on one hand (hundreds of churches were built) and on the other an age of tense agitation (social radicals known as Lollards, and followers of the reformist John Wyclif, protested the corruption of the church under a centralising Papacy). One of the most enlightening aspects of The English Soul is Ackroyd’s suggestion that the meditative writing of this era, including Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, had a central influence on subsequent English mysticism. With its focus on the embodied person of Christ, and its privileging of subjective experience, the English mystical tradition shows how the two aspects of the ‘English soul’ — inner spirituality and pragmatic distaste for doctrinal rigidity — might relate. In its medieval guise, English pragmatism looks like a characteristically pre-modern ease with non-standardisation and local variation; closer to the present, pragmatism seems more akin to the political tradition of ‘muddling through’, and thus a key resource for the development of a modern nation.
Ackroyd has published a general history of Englishness, Albion (2000), which tries similarly to follow a thread of ‘English imagination’ through history. Peter Conrad wrote a review in The Guardian so smugly snobbish — ‘soccer yobs’, in the first line — that it could serve as The Guardian’s parody, 1066-style, of its own liberal myopia. But The English Soul has more in common, structurally, with Ackroyd’s most celebrated non-fiction work, his 2002 ‘biography’ of London. Allowing the capital to focus his gaze, Ackroyd can exercise his relentless curiosity and eye for detail. English Christianity, however, is a baggier and more expansive subject, both in time and place, than London. Ackroyd’s attempt to hang the history of English Christianity on selected historical figures, therefore, is always going to risk imbalance. John Milton and Paradise Lost are strangely absent, especially given Ackroyd’s evident affection for 17th-century religious prose, such as the sermons of William Laud and Lancelot Andrewes. Given its later resonance, the rise of Christian socialism in the late 19th century also seems an omission.
Similarly, Ackroyd’s structure risks flattening the various parts of England — ‘countries’, as they were known in early modern English — into a single homogenous place. It’s not that Ackroyd is insensitive to regional variation. A life of immersion in English culture makes him adept at observing the quirks and historical particularities of specific places: the towns of the midlands whose commercial economies lent them to the autonomy of Nonconformism; the flourishing of extreme sects in the anonymity and obscurity of London; the suitability of high Anglicanism to Oxford. But the book requires the characters embedded in these regions to exemplify the English soul, and so these snippets of geographical specificity have to remain suggestive.
The plurality of spiritual atmospheres across England, and within the island of Britain itself, is explored more fully in Oliver Smith’s recently published On This Holy Island, though Smith is less concerned with history than (psycho)-geography, and casts his net wider than Christianity. Ackroyd’s unfashionable insistence that England’s spiritual history is a fundamentally Christian one is useful here. But his refusal to venture beyond England, except in brief digressions, proves as unbalancing as his reluctance to dwell on variation within England. In particular, the book occludes Wales, and this seems a weakness not only given the central role Welsh culture plays in the history of British Protestantism — the Bible was translated into Welsh as well as English in the 16th century; the ‘Independent’ polity of Cromwellian Protestantism flourished in Wales after the Civil War, Welsh Methodism is vital in the Victorian spiritual revival — but also because, until 1920, the ‘Church of England’ also officially covered Wales. Nation and Church fit together, but not perfectly so.
These structural limitations are minor flaws because, like most of Ackroyd’s work, The English Soul subordinates its overall design to the vividness of its local detail. Readers of Peter Conrad’s persuasion, however, might find a more fundamental flaw. If you’re hostile towards the idea of national character, this is not the book for you. Reading William Blake and John Henry Newman as manifestations of the multi-faceted but essentially coherent English soul, Ackroyd invokes an idea of national identity that crosses not just historical periods but also class divisions, and thus blasphemes against the received wisdom of both Marxist and otherwise sceptical historiographies in which national identity is always a top-down construct. Ackroyd’s book makes a persuasive case for the narrowness of this view. Nations might have murky and contingent origins, but the tendency of events to echo in a national community's memory, and of patterns to repeat across its territory, means that it makes sense to look for lines of continuity. Religious culture, rooted so deeply in its collective myths and texts, can only serve to amplify the echoes.
The principal flaw in this book is not the notion of national identity itself, but Ackroyd’s notion of how it is transmitted. The English Soul frequently glances with great skill at historical resonances across its set-piece chapters. Catherine Booth preached early sermons in Whitechapel, ‘in a tent within the Quaker burial ground’; the spirit of the white-hatted Fox is effortlessly revived. But on occasion Ackroyd’s trans-historical gestures seem more rhetorical than real, as when he assesses the claim that G.K. Chesterton’s prose, with its paradoxical style, is rather un-English — ‘this is to forget’, Ackroyd retorts, ‘that paradoxes and riddles were at the heart of Anglo-Saxon literature’. It’s a neat observation, but an oddly facile one, given the paradoxical style of the religious prose — Browne, Laud, Andrewes — from whose tradition Chesterton much more obviously draws. Ackroyd’s English soul seems to be an inherent genius of certain individuals, rather than a collective tendency nurtured by the flow of national currents and the amplifications of religious culture through history. The English soul has existed for Ackroyd, fundamentally unchanged, since Bede: history is simply a process of stripping away the impediments to its expression, and of self-correction when, as in ‘times of division’ like the upheaval after Civil War, it wanders off in multiple and erroneous directions.
This veers close to the view of history that 1066 And All That seeks to parody: the Whiggish interpretation, in which the Saxons are Victorian Englishmen-in-waiting, impatient to shrug off their Norman yoke. Yet Ackroyd’s book, far less triumphalist than a Whiggish narrative of inexorable progress towards the glories of the ‘C. of E’, shows that disposing of this teleological model of history doesn’t require a more wholesale disposal with the idea of national identity itself.
There is such a thing as an English soul, but its formation is a highly historical and thus highly contingent process. In our own time, the Church of England is in crisis after a period of long flux. Attendance has dropped by an astonishing fifth since the pandemic. Archbishop Welby’s resignation follows a protracted period of resistance in the name of ‘saving the parish’ against his centralising measures. Meanwhile, the overlooked but historically seismic divorce, a few decades old, of the Tories from the Church of England means that the established ‘C. of E’ has become associated, for the first time in English history, with progressive socio-economics. This autumn, in the context of the debate on Assisted Dying, the church found itself most closely aligned with — of all people — the Liberal Democrats. The point is that no one knows what is going to happen.