Dr Edward Norman, Fellow and former Dean of Peterhouse, is an ecclesiastic historian. He lectured at Cambridge for many years, following this with the chancellorship of York Minster. Currently he is a licensed curate in a London city parish.

In less than 200 pages he has provided a scholarly, sympathetic and concise account of the Church in the last 2000 years. This alone is a formidable achievement. The fact that it is “An illustrated history”, replete with lavish illustrations of the kind that the publishers, free to rummage in the Church’s rich artistic patrimony, have known well how to deploy for an intellectual coffee-table readership (is this an oxymoron?), does not in any way detract from its intrinsic merits.

Dr Norman’s chapters are structured along the usual lines: the foundation of the Church, the Great Schism, the medieval period, the Reformation and so on. With skill and dry humour he presents an extraordinary phenomenon: an institution run by the usual mixture of saints and sinners – more of the latter, inevitably - which has survived, flourished, occasionally staggered, reinvented itself and carried on for twenty centuries – so far. The continuing Japanese monarchy may be a technically older institution, but in reading these pages it seems rigid, narrow and static compared with the life of the Church.

What interests Norman is the Church in human society: how it has reflected that society as well as standing in some sense apart from it. Thus, in the early period he describes the influence of Jewish, Greek and Roman culture on the nascent community of believers. “The minds of the first Christians”, he tells us, “were formed within what remained an essentially Greek understanding of the world”. Similarly, a feudalization of the Church developed during the medieval period; “Because of its lands, the Church was unavoidably incorporated into feudal landed relationships.” In art Christ was depicted as a “great feudal ruler, receiving the homage of his earthly vassals.”

Norman has much praise for the monastic orders, remarking that periodic reform, a permanent feature in the history of the Church is often associated with monastic development. The genius of the Benedictine Rule was adopted and adapted widely by other Orders; periods of relaxation were followed by movements of reform and renewal. Indeed, the author infers that this continual purgation and re-purification after periods of laxity, even corruption of early ideals, is characteristic of the Church as a whole. Despite the current fury of her critics worldwide, we can see it at work in the Church today, painfully renewing itself after the institutional secrecy and cover-up of sexual scandals in certain countries of the West.

The author, indeed, stands in polite but trenchant opposition to contemporary stock-in-trade attacks on the Church. On the Crusades he suggests that the question is “evaluated in a context and with a passion, which has departed from academic detachment” and that Muslims should apologise for their initial invasion of the Holy Land. Moorish Spain, so often quoted as the pinnacle of Islamic civilisation (compared to their crude Christian aggressors), is summed up succinctly as a slave society with a slave economy. “The placid courtyards and sparkling fountains, poetry and art, rested upon the existence of one of the largest slave populations the world has ever seen.” In Cordova in the tenth century, for instance, the Emir had a harem of 6,000 women and 13, 000 young boys. Naturally Spanish Christians found “Moorish moral standards defective.”

The word “Inquisition” in particular, evokes the worst excesses of seeming Catholic cruelty and malpractice. Dr Norman reminds readers that in the 16th century, the Inquisition was regarded as far more enlightened than the secular courts: “If you denied the Trinity and repented, you were given a penance; if you stole a sheep and repented, you were hung.”

The scandal and sorrow of the Reformation was followed by phenomenal missionary expansion in the New World. Norman is quick to point out to moderns who like to focus on the artistic merits and social organisation of the local civilisation, and who routinely criticise the Catholic missions for their Puritanism and philistinism, that they forget the human sacrifices practised on a huge scale by the Aztecs, which was stamped out by the Spaniards. Accepting that the conquistadores sought wealth and material gain, he emphasises that this was accompanied by a genuine wish to bring “a providential religious destiny” to the pagan tribes.

The author, still in uneasy communion with the Anglican Church, cannot resist a few ironic asides at his alma mater, informing readers that women priests were rejected among the early Christians “because they were associated with the obscene rituals in official classical religion”. Similarly, the Donatist heresy, which St Augustine struggled against in North Africa, “had endured for about the same length of time that Anglicanism has managed to do since the Reformation.” The scholarship displayed is meticulous, the prose carefully modulated.

What of today? It is an age “in which a massive privatisation of religious choice is taking place” and where modern education “even in institutions conducted by the Church, is not conducive to recruitment of children to the Faith.” So Dr Norman is not afraid to offer his own measured criticisms of the Church he knows and loves so well. I say “loves” - yet although the author has made public his own intellectual and doctrinal dissent from Anglicanism, he is not in formal communion with Rome. He still aspires to become a Catholic but is currently “in limbo”, a position he regards as unsatisfactory. Whatever difficulties may yet lie in his path, I would remind Dr Norman of John Henry Newman’s reassuring words: “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.” If this is not enough to resolve the issue, I will add the words of a modern convert, recently quoted in this newspaper: “A bad day in the Church is better than a thousand good days in the world.”

© 2010 Francis Phillips

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