The title of this work might sound a little antiquated – a word such as one might find in Shakespeare – but there is nothing antiquated about Father Aidan Nichols’ new book. At only 160 pages, it fizzes with stimulating thoughts and ideas. This should not surprise; Nichols is a Dominican friar from Cambridge, now John Paul II Memorial Visiting Lecturer at Oxford, and the Dominicans were founded to preach the word of God against heretics.

The subtitle states it plainly: “An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England”. This is a courageous theme, for it is definitely very unfashionable to speak of the conversion of England in times like these, when Catholics are constantly enjoined to be ecumenical (rather than missionary) towards their fellow Christians and when the powerful and ubiquitous thought-police view all religion as irrational or irrelevant and contrary to decency and democracy.

Nichols is trenchantly unrepentant about this lapse in good manners. He puts it disarmingly in his Preface: “As a Catholic Christian and a patriotic Englishman (and, within that context, Briton), I wish my countrymen/women to share the blessings I have received. What could be more (super) natural?” And what could be more of a lost cause, a craven Catholic reader might respond. Nichols has no illusions about the task in hand. He quotes the Catholic writer and journalist, Daniel Johnson, on the current state of the Church in England: “...afflicted by dissension, apathy, too few vocations and an ageing congregation.”

Apathy rather than dissent is, in Nichols’ view, is the dominant mood; a settled conviction that nothing can be done to change this situation, with its corollary that faith is a private consolation that can no more be brought to bear on the public sphere (except in very limited ways) than any other private pursuit.

The book builds on Nichols’ earlier one: Christendom Awake: on Re-energising the Church in Culture, published in 1999. It is here that he sets out his comprehensive blueprint: reviving beauty of liturgy; reclaiming the Bible; rethinking ecumenism and re-launching Christian philosophy and doctrinal orthodoxy. Along with chapters on the pro-life movement, family life, the priesthood and religious life, it provided a spirited challenge to the Church in this country to transform itself. Now he turns his formidable intellect to the task of bringing a renewed faith to the nation – the ‘realm’. The nation, he points out, is not the State (a necessary reminder, surrounded as we are by this ‘Nanny-State’ in all its bossiness and inefficiency); “The State is, simply, a relatively higher power within the network of authorities that constitute the body politic.”

What concerns Nichols is nationhood and, specifically, how the English nation was formed during the thousand years of Catholic Christianity that preceded the Reformation; a slow process of the development of law, the crown and parliament, all deeply permeated and fertilised by the influence of the Church. Where do we get the virtues that we hold in respect, Nichols asks, such as the English sense of “fair play”? They flow from our Catholic heritage, he believes. “In the crucial formative phase of its development, England is in fact inseparable from Catholicism.” Small, poignant reminders of this remain in customs and place-names. It is Nichols’ contention that this heritage can provide the only coherent leaven for the future

Drawing on the scholarship of historians such as Eamon Duffy, Christopher Haigh and J J Scarisbrick, Nichols argues that the Church on the eve of the Reformation was not the corrupt and superstitious body that later propagandist historians have made it out to be; though requiring reform it actively nourished the culture and spiritual life of its people. Reflecting on twentieth century writers such as TS Eliot, David Jones, G K Chesterton, Tolkien and Belloc, he draws out the idea of a Christian intelligentsia that actively influences the surrounding culture – the “clerisy” first articulated by Coleridge.

Some of this ground has been covered by Roger Scruton in his A Political Philosophy (2006). But Scruton’s weakness in that book was to think that a vibrant culture of conserved and transmitted values could be possible without regard for the Catholic centuries which formed those values. Indeed, he almost gives the impression that TS Eliot’s poetical evocation of Anglicanism is his faith. Nichols is no romantic, nostalgic for an imagined past; evangelisation includes squaring up to the “modern, intolerant, lobby-driven, issue-obsessed cultural liberalism” and confronting the State “with the abiding objectivity of the natural moral law, itself an expression of the divine Wisdom, and the measure of all positive law on earth.” No aesthetic ivory tower here. To be fit for this formidable task, the Church as an institution must possess at all levels “a corporate spiritual atmosphere that is detectable”.

The learned arguments of this book and its author’s wide reading are not an academic exercise; by returning to the sources of the Christian civilization that has shaped the “realm” of England and drawing attention to the writers who have kept its memory alive, Nichols aims to show the great tradition that underpins the work of conversion. What is necessary now is an “integral evangelisation”, for “only a co-ordinated advance on a whole host of issues...really meets the needs of the hour.” Too often the Church expends its energies on fighting one issue – a new Parliamentary law that assaults Christian teaching, say; what is not evident is a wider vision that draws on the dynamic nature of faith and how this could be brought to bear on every dimension of society.

It is natural to the faith “to shape a civilisation and not just be something for our private lives”, he asserts; the aim must be “to communicate our faith to others as what made England once and can remake it again.” The Catholic faith is not another ideology, competing in the market-place of modern Britain, where traditional authority has been dissolved within a “neo-pagan, confessional-secular State with as its quasi-religion the ‘politically correct’ moralism of the day.” It is “the most wonderful epiphany of goodness, truth and beauty humanity can ever know.” This, he asserts, is what we need to proclaim with confidence to our fellow citizens. It is not a tall order; it is a towering order.

Perhaps the small weakness of Nichols’ book is, as he admits, “too many ideas for its own good.” Yet he is a man of palpable vision. His name has been put forward as a possible future Archbishop of Westminster and thus leader of the Church in England, following the anticipated retirement later this year of the present incumbent, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. Critics of Nichols, who is the author of more than 30 books, think he is too scholarly for such a public position, a man of the pen rather than of the people, and thus out of touch with the common man. He is also lacking in administrative experience – but as his supporters point out, there are always a surfeit of administrators; too many Indians when what is needed is a chief. Men have also been known to grow in the office entrusted to them. What is certain is that without a daring and imaginative choice, one that transcends the conventional bureaucratic channels, the Church in this country is likely to move from a languishing condition to a terminal one.

© 2008 Francis Phillips

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