MacCulloch’s History of Christianity

I’ve just finished reading Diarmaid MacCulloch’s massive History of Christianity . The TV series based on this begins this Thursday on BBC4. I’m not going to try to review it, since I would guess there is only a small band of people competent enough to do so, but I do want to commend it. If you want reviews, then there are a couple I’ve seen, by Rowan Williams and Nicholas Orme, both of whom belong to that small band knowledgeable enough to review such a massive undertaking.

I do want to know that a book which takes me down so many roads pointing out the sights is one I can trust. Where this book does touch on areas I know something about, it reveals a mastery of the main lines of scholarly thinking, and some awareness of disputed areas. I also spotted the odd insignificant mistake (e.g. he mistakes which gospel(s) have a (probable) one year and (probable) three year timescale for Jesus’ ministry (p 83)). Then again New Testament / Early Church history is not MacCulloch’s area, and probably has at least as many sub-disciplines and topic areas as all the rest of church history combined, to say nothing of an impossible range of secondary literature. The fact that MacCulloch writes as good a critical summary as he does gives me a great deal of confidence in his other judgements.

One or two observations. MacCulloch begins with the millennium before the birth of Jesus, and sees Christianity shaping up in a rather unstable inheritance of both Jewish and Greek pasts. Variety, creativity, and a constant reinvention of itself mark the story of several different but nonetheless clearly related Christianities. So, for example, he gives a great deal of attention to the missionary expansion of what he calls the Church of the East, by which he means the Christianities which were sundered from and anathematised by Catholics and Orthodox alike after Chalcedon. His history of Christianity is never a simple European one, but much more aware of global developments.

He often stresses the sheer happenstance of history, and that the spread and development, and sometimes the retreat and retrenchment, of the Church(es) could not always be predicted from one age to the next. He never sides with one form of Christianity over another. Rather he stresses the ways in which any version can be creative, and any version can be compromised, as it usually is, whether by human imperfection, or political machination. Yet at the same time he often develops a particular theme to try to encourage people to see how it was from the inside. He offers a particularly sympathetic account, for example, of the mediaeval economics of salvation, and the growth of the idea of Purgatory (p555 ff).

The complexity is handled by chapters that regularly overlap, but from different perspectives, and covering different geographical areas. Fortunately the reader is aided by some helpful cross-referencing taking one back and forth through the text to where relevant discussions happen. The book is accompanied by a lengthy index also, although the indexer’s judgements are occasionally erratic: the Scottish Episcopal Church, briefly mentioned, gets an entry; Cajetan, who deservedly gets a page to himself in the text, fails to gain an index entry.

MacCulloch has a nice line in dry observations which bring a slightly biting humour to a book that despite its 1000 page plus length is never hard going or tedious. A few samples may give you a flavour of why I think you should read it:

• On St Jerome: “One feels that he was a man with a six-point plan for becoming a saint, taking in the papacy on the way.” (p294)
• On Erasmus’ disappointment at the end of his life: “What had happened to the humanist project for changing the world through the power of a perfectly balanced Ciceronian sentence?” (p603)
• On the rise of a new women’s spirituality in the 19th century: “The most assertive woman of all was the Mother of God. The nineteenth century proved one of the most prolific periods for Mary’s activity in the history of the Western Church since the twelfth century. She seems to have made more appearances al over Europe and Latin America than in any century before or since: generally to women without money, education or power …” (p819)

Nice judgements are nicely phrased. Perceptive comments and pleasing prose mark the entirety of the book, together with broad sympathies. If there are villains, then Slavic Orthodoxy in its current nationalisms (which have a long pedigree) seems to be MacCulloch’s least sympathetically portrayed form of Christianity. But perhaps above all the deeply ambiguous figure (as MacCulloch portrays him) of Augustine haunts the Western Church as much for woe as for weal. If at the Reformation Augustine’s doctrine of grace was pitted against Augustine’s doctrine of the Church, MacCulloch finds neither to be without problems. Augustine’s doctrine of grace comes with a deeply pessimistic view of human nature, and his doctrine of the church comes entangled with that profoundly compromising interpretation of “Compel them to come in”: Augustine at a stroke legitimises the use of state violence to enforce Christian orthodoxy. Both haunt the Church to this day.

The future remains uncertain: for MacCulloch the only certain thing is that Christianity retains the power to reinvent itself creatively. He looks at angry conservatism (“the most easily heard tone in religion … is of a generally angry conservatism” p990) and for Christian and Muslim alike he attributes to a dissonance caused between religious constructions of gender roles and the actual experience of women in the modern world. He is unsure how the struggle between this and a liberal “European” post-enlightenment liberalism will come out. (“Europe, which is not so much a continent as a state of mind to be found equally in Canada, Australasia and a significant part of the United States.” p1016) He ponders whether, in the light of both internal inconsistency and past parallels, Pentecostalism will remain linked to Evangelicalism, or separate in new ways. And he speculates that if a new Constantinian settlement will happen anywhere, China is as good a candidate as anywhere.

The book, as you will see, is provocative and stimulating to the end. I urge you to get it. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to the series which MacCulloch is presenting himself.

Tagged as: books, History, reviews