Curate’s egg?
First reviewed some years ago, for Amazon UK.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is clearly very erudite, and capable of being quite disarmingly charming and witty. But does this make him the best reporter of Christian history? I have to say that I think perhaps not. A superbly well informed voice within the discussion yes, but not necessarily the best, nor even, despite the enormity of his much lauded History of Christianity, necessarily the most authoritative.
For me the central issue is his own apparent attachment to the religion, quite literally, of his fathers. He comes from a long line of ‘men of the cloth’. One might have hoped his homosexuality and his historical awareness might’ve meant that by now he’d have had his own Damascene conversion experience, and finally have fallen off the supposedly high horse of theology.
In his TV series he called himself a ‘candid friend of Christianity’, so perhaps he has? But he’s frequently surprised and disappointed – despite playing the role of whistle-blowing ‘little boy’, telling the emperor he’s butt naked – that his theological heroes have feet of clay.
As, for example, when he ruefully recounts how a fellow theologian showed Paul Tillich, and another couple of German theologians of Tillich’s era, to be the type of ‘saint’ (I’m deliberately conflating his discussions of saints and theologians here) who transpires simply to be ‘someone who has not been researched well enough’.
The revelations about Tillich and co., along with a brief reflection on how the facts of their lives might compromise their authority, are then followed by a frankly comically maudlin note of disappointment, as DM opines that ‘the stock in trade of theologians is honesty’.
I’ve always held, since ditching Christianity – as soon as my mind matured enough to begin apprehending reality more clearly – that theologians’ stock in trade is, at best, conjuring some kind of meaning from a disparate set of strangely aggregated ideas – conjuring the semblance of the Divine spirit from the ‘facts’ of a haphazard evolution – and at worst deliberate obscurantism with intent to exploit.
The suggestion is, re DM’s disappointment in Tillich, I suppose, that theologians should know and behave better. But funnily enough DM’s book itself offers endless examples of how this isn’t the reality.
This doesn’t stop this from being in many ways a very well-written book, full of interesting information (tax-dodging Egyptians fundamental to the founding of monasticism; the casuistry that allows clerical approval for burning at the stake because it doesn’t obviously contravene the injunction on the spilling of blood), which approaches many types of silence, and spans, rather like his massive tome on Christianity, a period beginning with Jewish culture (and others) in the millennium before the time of Jesus and his followers’ religion, right through to present times.
His attempts to cover certain topics, such as Christianity’s many forms of collusion with worldly power, including the subjugation of women, acceptance of slavery, and more recently the failure to effectively oppose fascism, whilst part of a laudable effort at ending the silence of forgetfulness or denial within and around Christianity, felt rather token to me.
By contrast, in the section dealing with the Anglo-Catholic church and the place of homosexuals within it, I felt I could really sense DM’s personal passion, his quote of the phrase ‘gin, lace, and backbiting’ hanging in the air with a certain frisson.
I have to say that despite DM’s trumpeting his own outsider status as a gay man in a Christian world – what’s unusual is not the sexuality, but rather the honesty in admitting to it – and the observation elsewhere (made in reference to Quakers’ anti-slavery stance) that ‘It took original minds to kick against the authority of sacred scripture’, he seems on the whole to take a largely conservative stance.
This is particularly clear in his view that the Catholic mainstream tradition represents some kind of order and continuity, the disruption of which, by what he terms ‘the inveterate Word-centred noisiness of Evangelical Protestantism’, he clearly sees as a tragedy for the church (and so it follows that an attempted historical reconciliation/fudge such as Chalcedon ‘should be seen as one of the great disasters of Christian history, not one of its triumphs.’).
I don’t for one minute buy into this polarity of contemplative Catholicism verses noisy Protestantism, with its undercurrents of political and social snobbery. These are traits so often combined in English academics, as can be detected here, with an obvious distaste for the French Revolution as symbol of un-Godly disruption of the prevailing social order. I sense a brotherly love here for the Stripping of the Altars line taken by Eamon Duffy.
I’m struggling to complete, or rather I should say continue, MacCulloch’s enormous History of Christianity, and his equally detailed if somewhat shorter work on the Reformation. For all that his writing has been lionised, I find it nowhere near as compelling as the copiously effusive praise it receives on the book jacket blurbs suggest it ought to be.
I started those two books ages ago, got bogged down in them, and feel no great urge to resume. And I was deeply disappointed at the meagreness of the TV version of his History of Christianity, far preferring Bamber Gascoigne’s proper 13 episode ‘sledgehammer’ The Christians.
For all his criticisms, and the occasional flashes of clarity, MacCulloch equivocates and fudges too much. And he is so smitten with as to become mired in the nomenclature and jargon of theology, such that sometimes his seductive language glosses over strangely silent lacunae of his own. He ultimately appears, as Buddhists might put it, overly ‘attached’ to Christianity.
It seems he wants to have his cake and eat it, to be historical and critical, even sceptical, but not to offend the faithful. Well, more accurately, he doesn’t seem overly bothered about offending Protestants, but very definitely seems placatory and more than just sympathetic to Catholics. In some ways his soothing tone towards the faithful, or some of them, might be construed as a commendable show of tact. But considered from another angle it’s pandering to a group who, for vast stretches of time, have been domineering bullies.
Fairly early on in this book DM suggests that much post-Enlightenment historical awareness more or less amounts to ‘sneering’ at the beIiefs of our antecedents, and admonishes us against this,just as Melvyn Bragg did in his book on the King James Bible.
Well, one can feel sympathy/empathy, as regards the lamentable ignorance of our forbears, struggling to understand and explain life to themselves and each other – just as we do – whilst remaining acutely aware of our own shortcomings. These are not two mutually exclusive positions, as Bragg and MacCulloch occasionally seem to suggest. Nor should such awareness stop us from seeing where they got it wrong, or even expressing such insights with vigour.
Very early in the book he gets in a bit of a muddle regarding all this over the issue of textual reliability, veering between commending the recent trend towards more rigorous scholarly historical analysis – the tradition to which he belongs – and sniping at it, as when he says ‘corruption of the text is always a rather desparate last throw for biblical or literary commentators’.
What, and making a muddled text (The Bible) say whatever one wants it to say isn’t ‘a rather desperate last throw’? It all depends on the text, and the one under discussion is, as DM himself concedes, ‘manifestly in a state of some corruption’. Is this ‘desperate last throw’ not very much part of the same recent phenomenon DM elsewhere describes as ‘this triumph of Western scholarly patience’?
Although I have yet to properly read either of them, I sense from my slight familiarity with some of their content that I will much prefer Isaac Asimov’s works on Jewish and Christian religious history. He has MacCulloch’s breadth, depth, and fascination with detail, but is both more impartial and yet forthrightly judgemental.
This is the first of MacCulloch’s books I’ve succeeded in finishing, thus far; whilst informative and interesting, I found it overall disappointing and even somewhat frustrating. I can’t honestly say I’d recommend reading this.