Peter Ackroyd’s The English Soul: Faith of a Nation, is a rich and odd book. Rich because of the author’s storytelling skill and odd because it doesn’t tell the story that its title seems to promise.
Ackroyd has been a major figure on the British literary scene for the past half century. In addition to four books of poetry, he has published at least 18 novels, most strongly rooted in history and historical settings. Moreover, he is known for his nearly four dozen nonfiction books, many dealing with London and its history and many of them biographies of such figures as William Blake, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Charlie Chaplin, Sir Thomas More, Ezra Pound, J.M.W. Turner, Edgar Allan Poe, Isaac Newton, Alfred Hitchcock, and Geoffrey Chaucer.
The English Soul: Faith of a Nation is the latest in a string of Ackroyd’s books about the nature of England and its people, including a six-volume History of England (2011–2021), The English Actor: From Medieval to Modern (2023), The English Ghost: Spectres Through Time (2010) and Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002).
Yet, that’s where things start to get odd, although not necessarily in a bad way.
Consider the cover. It features an 800-year-old image of Thomas Becket, known to history as Thomas a Becket—even though Becket isn’t one of the nearly 40 religious figures whom Ackroyd highlights in his book.
Which is curious since Becket is one of the most famous of the last thousand years. As Archbishop of Canterbury, he clashed with King Henry II until the king’s knights murdered him in the cathedral in 1170, the subject of many literary works including T.S. Eliot’s 1935 play Murder in the Cathedral. For over 300 years, the site of the assassination drew crowds of pilgrims such as those depicted by Geoffrey Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales.
Becket is honored as a saint and martyr by the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, but it appears that Ackroyd leaves Becket out of his story, except for a small peripheral mention, because of his Catholicism.
Although Ackroyd’s subtitle indicates that he’s writing about the Faith of a Nation, his approach is much more limited. In an author’s note, he writes that his book is about “the spirit and nature of English Christianity...over the last 1,400 years,” and, so, he doesn’t address how the faith of English Jews, Muslims, and Hindus have had an impact on the English soul.
And, truth be told, he doesn’t give much attention to Catholics even though, for 900 of his 1,400-year time period, England was a thoroughly Catholic nation. Indeed, Ackroyd highlights only a few early Catholics, such as the Venerable Bede, a historian who lived from 673 to 735, and Julian of Norwich, a mystic (1343–1416), and two later ones who converted to Catholicism, Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890) and popular writer G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936). He provides no in-depth look at other major figures, such Thomas More who, like Becket, died for refusing to go along with another king, Henry VIII.
Reforming the Reformers
It was Henry VIII, in a dispute over divorcing his wife Catherine, who broke with Rome in 1534, and established an independent Church of England with the monarch as the Supreme Governor in civil and ecclesiastical matters.
The United States was founded on a clear separation of church and state, but, for nearly five hundred years, the Church of England has been the official faith of the nation, and that seems to be the focus of Ackroyd’s book, based on the title at least. Yet, very oddly, it isn’t.
Although Ackroyd is at pains to exclude the non-Christian faiths and most of the non-Protestant Catholics, he hasn’t written a book that is a history of the Church of England. Much, much more, it is a history of the many people who have dissented from or clashed with or turned their back on the national church over the centuries.
The Church of England was born out of the Reformation, and, ever since, its own need for reformation has been a constant theme running through the nation’s religious history.
It is as if Ackroyd is saying that the Faith of a Nation is a faith rooted in discord and unorthodoxy. The Church of England was born out of the Reformation, and, ever since, its own need for reformation has been a constant theme running through the nation’s religious history.
To be sure, Ackroyd gives those religious thinkers and activists who established the church their due, such as the translators who created the Authorized Version of the Bible (1611), more commonly called the King James Version. Ackroyd writes:
“The vernacular Bible had always been the long-wished-for and long-promised sanctuary for the English soul…Historians of later periods have confirmed that the Bible is central to any understanding of the English sensibility.”
Even so, it’s curious that he doesn’t highlight other important figures in the establishment of the church, such as Henry himself and his daughter Queen Elizabeth I, who oversaw the Elizabethan Religious Settlement from 1559 to 1563 which gave permanent shape to the religion’s doctrine and liturgy.
Highlighting Dissenters
Ackroyd focuses on dozens of dissenters or one sort or another, such as George Fox (1624-1691) who founded the Quakers and John Wesley (1703–1791), the leader of the eighteenth-century revival movement. These two, he writes, provide something of “an outline of the English soul” in their efforts to proclaim “the truths of individual experience over doctrine or abstract principle” despite attacks from violent mobs.
What Ackroyd calls “a phase of the English soul” is the late eighteenth-century fashion for mysticism and a belief in a coming age of peace and righteousness. He writes:
“Many of the tracts and pamphlets sold in the bookshops and on the bookstalls were concerned with occult and cabbalistic beliefs. There were Quakers and Socinians, Freemasons and ‘The Ancient Deists’ of Hoxton; some of them were astrologers or alchemists, mystics or magnetizers, but all of them believe in the primacy of the spiritual world.”
Like many other English reformers, Catherine Booth (1829–1890) who co-founded the Salvation Army with her husband William (1829–1912), underwent a conversion experience when she was in her late teens.
“he experienced the force of the sudden grace that came with the assurance of salvation; it had come upon her while reading one of Charles Wesley’s hymns, which included the phrase ‘my Jesus is mine!’ It was an epiphany, and it reveals the extent to which the words of John Wesley and his brother had entered the English soul.”
In The English Soul: Faith of a Nation, Peter Ackroyd tells the story of a national soul, an English faith, that is far from a monolithic religion.
Two examples of a bedrock aspect of the English faith — combativeness — were the highly popular Christian apologists G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. Chesterton, the author of the Father Brown mystery novels and a late-in-life convert to Catholicism, wrote so persuasively that he was a major influence in Lewis’s embrace of the Church of England. Lewis wrote about faith for a popular audience in essays, books and novels, such as those that were the basis for the recent fantasy films, The Chronicles of Narnia.
“oth affirmed the life of the spirit, but kept their spirituality concealed behind a sometimes pugnacious or argumentative manner; both evinced an intense interest in the supernatural but expressed it in the practical terms of common sense; they shared a trust in the ‘ordinary,’ but put their faith in the mysterious and miraculous elements of Christianity.”
In these ways, Ackroyd writes, Chesterton and Lewis reflected the English soul.
In The English Soul: Faith of a Nation, Peter Ackroyd tells the story of a national soul, an English faith, that is far from a monolithic religion.
Instead, it is a kind of catch-all of a vast and fascinating array of approaches to the spiritual meaning of life and to living. Rather than walk in lockstep, the English, as Ackroyd portrays them, have been deeply quirky in their relationships with formal religion and, more important, with their God.
The English Soul: Faith of a Nation is available at bookstores and through the University of Chicago Press website.
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