Book Review - St. Augustine by Garry Wills

 St. Augustine by Garry Wills

London: Phoenix, 2000 (first published 1999)          ISBN 0753810727

A great little book. Written by Garry Wills (Pulitzer Prize winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg), this short book is a brief and pithy description of the life of St. Augustine, and an explication of his theology and philosophy.

Wills explains the progression of Augustine's intellectual and religious life, from Neoplatonism, through Manicheanism to being truly Augustinian. He explains how much of the writing about Augustine and his works focusses too much on the "earthly" in what he wrote, without understanding the religious points that Augustine was trying to make. 

Augustine was a humanist in the sense that he felt keenly the deficiencies that each person has when confronted with God: that we should emphasise forgiveness and mercy rather than exclusion of those who fall from the narrow way. That we should emphasise the love God has for humanity, rather than instilling fear into the hearts of mankind. "Act as you desire, so long as you act with love. If you are silent, be silent from love. If you accuse, accuse from love. If you correct, correct from love. If you spare, spare from love. Let love be rooted deep in you, and only good can grow from it."

Augustine, great thinker and rhetorician that he was, was deeply involved in battling heresy in the early church, particularly Pelagianism and Donatism. Regarding the latter, he was a key member of the council that helped quash the heresy, but acted with compassion to the Donatists in his Diocese, allowing the Donatist bishop to continue worshipping, and not exercising the death penalty against Donatists who killed a priest (Wills explains that as Bishop of Hippo, Augustine was responsible for civil order as well as religious - something he was always uncomfortable with).

Wills has given a good flavour of the type of person Augustine was - as prepared to admit his own flaws as to forgive those in others, a firm friend and an inspired leader. This book is a great introduction to one of the great thinkers of early Christendom.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Jerusalem: the Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

 Jerusalem: the Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

London: Phoenix, 2012 (first published 2011)      ISBN 9781780220253

One of the blurbs on my edition of this book calls it "a tour de force", and there is no doubt that Jerusalem lives up to that particular piece of praise as well as all the others that it has gained since publication. It is the story of Jerusalem for sure, but along the way the reader learns much of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, of the Arabs, Romans, Ottomans, Russians and British, of Crusader Kingdoms and Sultanates, and of modern geopolitics.

Like all great works of non-fiction, Montefiore has woven much more into his story than the bare bones. The reader comes away from this work with a much broader knowledge of Western and Middle Eastern history than they would have a right to, given the books ostensible subject matter. The reader does of course gain an intimate knowledge of the development and trials of Jerusalem itself, as well as wonderful little titbits of other information such as the origin of the phrase "Bob's your uncle", the fact that Rudolf Hoess, Franz von Papen and Rudolf Hess were all in Jerusalem at the same time, and that the future King George V got tattooed when there, in the same place as his father.

These little nuggets of information are the cherries on top of the wonderfully rich dessert of history that Sebag Montefiore serves up. Thankfully his style, and the easily digestible short chapters make it both easy to read, and easy to absorb the information.

Sebag Montefiore writes in the last pages of the book that "for 1,000 years, Jerusalem was exclusively Jewish; for about 400 years Christian; for 1,300 years, Islamic, and not one of the three faiths ever gained Jerusalem without the sword, the mangonel or the howitzer."

The history of this city is a history of rapine, destruction, and war. It is also a history of worship, ecstasy and wonder. It is a story of immigration, emigration, and cosmopolitanism. It is the story of a city that on many occasions threatened to die, but is in many ways the most important city on Earth. The origins of Jerusalem are obscure and biblical, although recent archaeology has proven that King David did in fact exist.

Until the arrival of the Romans, and sometimes even after, Jerusalem was a backwater. Holy to the Jews, it was of small interest to others apart from being an attractive place to loot, owing to the gold that was held in the Temple.

Rome and Herod brought some stability to Jerusalem, although religious fever often led to riots, and there was also a continuous underground of Jewish rebellion against Roman rule. This was mainly driven by Jewish fundamentalism; a belief that gentiles could not rule God's chosen people. Jesus was part of this milieu.

The disaster of AD70 when the Romans sacked the city and destroyed the Temple after yet another Jewish rebellion, signalled the end of any Jewish control of the city for nearly 1,900 years. Jews were expelled, and Jerusalem once again became a backwater.

After an interval of Byzantine rule, the Arabs took the city in AD630. Soon after came the building of the Dome of the Rock, which raised Jerusalem to a holy site for its third religion (and which has led to many of the trials and tribulations the city has suffered down the years). Montefiore explains that this move was partially political, as the ruler of Jerusalem, Abd Al-Malik did not control Mecca and so needed a counterweight to the shrine there.

While the Muslims tolerated both Christians and Jews, life was not easy for them under Islamic rule. The Crusaders however were worse. The Crusader Kings, who were essentially freebooters looking for land, were often dangerous to each other, but not as much as they were to both Jews and Muslims.

Saladin's relatively enlightened rule was but a short interlude between the Christian crusaders and the Mamluks and Ottomans, who ruled Jerusalem for 400 years. For most of that time the city was again a backwater - Jews were forbidden the Temple Mount, and Christian worship was heavily circumscribed (although the Christians seemed to rank ahead of the Jews in the eyes of the Pashas and Sultan).

As the Ottoman Empire sank into sloth and corruption, Western countries began to influence what happened at the centre of Christendom. Kings, Czars and Emperors vied with each other to endow churches, fund pilgrimages and gain the upper hand in the machinations to do with the operation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The rise of millenarian ideas in the USA and Britain led to a push to allow Jews back to Jerusalem so that biblical prophecies of the Armageddon could be fulfilled. Montefiore clearly explains how these ideas led to massive changes on the ground in Jerusalem (one of Montefiore's ancestors funded Jewish settlement there) and on policy. The Balfour Declaration was a ground-breaking change in geopolitical thinking, even though one of the major reasons it was made was to mobilise Jewish support for Britain's fight in World War One.

Montefiore brings the history up to the present with descriptions of the internecine terrorism performed by both Jews and Arabs during the British Mandate and beyond, and explains how so many chances to find a workable peace have been missed: when one side felt politically strong enough to offer terms, the other side was too weak to accept them.

The uneasy state of peace that currently entails in Jerusalem has come at the cost of almost total segregation of Jews, Muslims and Christians from each other, and the destruction of what was a unique culture. It seems that we humans have not learnt a thing from the history of this holy and benighted place.

There is so much more in this book than I have noted here - it is an accessible wonder, and well worth reading. You will learn a lot.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Reformation by Owen Chadwick

 The Reformation by Own Chadwick (Pelican History of the Church v. 2)

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986 (first published 1964, rev. ed. 1972) ISBN 0140205047

This book has travelled around with me for about 30 years - well, not this book, but the various editions I've owned and then lost or given away through my various moves. This copy I bought for $2 at a charity shop. In all that time, I've never read it cover to cover until now.

And I'm glad I did. Owen Chadwick has written a lively and comprehensive history of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, covering not only Luther's revolt, but all that followed - Presbyterianism, Anglicanism, Calvinism and all the other groups that grew from the great initial revolt at the torpor and corruption of the Catholic Church. He also covers the Catholic reaction to these changes, with the growth of the Jesuits, and the attempts to clean the Augean stables that was the Medieval Catholic Church.

We all know the outlines of the Reformation - disgusted at the corruption and sinfulness of much of the church, Luther famously set out to clean up church doctrine, liturgy and ritual. He never intended to set up a rival religion, but, partly through mismanagement by the Pope, and the political situation in Northern Germany, that is what happened. Once the Pandora's box was open, many went further than Luther in ridding religion of ritual, music, pictures, bishops, and in fact most of what made the Catholic Church the Catholic Church.

Chadwick covers both the political and religious sides of the history, and explains how the Catholic Church "fought back", with Jesuits and Dominicans in particular bringing the Catholic Church back to the people. Chadwick also writes about the Church's move into the Americas, and how the way the Conquistadors treated the natives made many churchmen consider what the church should be to all people, and how Christ's message should be delivered.

Chadwick weaves his way through the chronology of the Reformation quite skillfully, and towards the end has an interesting chapter on how the average peasant coped with the changes that occurred not only in areas that turned Protestant, but also in the Catholic world, where services changed and many excesses were done away with.

Overall, if you want to read a comprehensive, well-written account of the religious upheavals of the Sixteenth Century, this is well worthwhile.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Short History of the Cathars by Sean Martin

Short History of the Cathars by Sean Martin

Harpenden: Oldcastle Books, 2018                 ISBN 9780857303097

This book is a great introduction to one of the most fascinating periods in Church history, one that is shrouded in mystery and myth: who were the Cathars? What did they believe? Why did the Church see them as such a threat? Short History of the Cathars tries and mostly succeeds in answering these questions in a series of short informative chapters.

The origin of the Cathars is murky: it seems that the heresy known as Catharism in Southern France and Northern Italy was imported from the Balkans. Catharism was one of many dualist heresies in the early Church, believing that the Earth was the domain of Satan, and that God ruled only in heaven. The Cathars had their own structure of "Believers" and "Perfect". "Believers" being those that followed the beliefs of Catharism, while the "Perfect" were like the priesthood, and abstained from most human indulgences.

In fact, to Cathars everything of the world was corrupted with evil, including the Church, which they particularly regarded as the work of Satan. The reason Catharism became a problem for the Church, especially in the Languedoc region of France, was that the Church there was notoriously corrupt and venal, and had lost the respect of not only the lower classes, but of the nobility as well. The Cathars, with their life of physical denial and holiness, seemed more holy than the official members of the Church, and soon gathered much support.

Initially the Church tried to use persuasion rather than force to convert the heretics, but when that didn't work they moved to harsher measures, including military action and executions. That it took over 100 years to finally suppress Catharism, with much bloodshed, shows how much hold it had over the population in Languedoc. It could be argued that much of the lingering anti-clericalism in France can be traced back to this time.

I was drawn to this book remembering Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou, which I read whilst at University, and found completely fascinating. Short History of the Cathars is no less fascinating, although far less detailed. A great introduction into this era of Church history.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - New Short History of the Catholic Church by Norman Tanner

New Short History of the Catholic Church by Norman Tanner

London: Bloomsbury, 2014 (first published 2011)       ISBN 9781472909886

This book is a serviceable short history of the Roman Catholic Church, with the caveat that it is written by a Jesuit priest, who perhaps glosses over the bad more than perhaps he should. Packing nearly 2000 years of history into a little over 200 pages leads to much compression - Tanner has dealt with this by taking a broad-brush approach to his work, but still manages to cover a lot of ground. By dividing the book two ways - chapters historically, and within each chapter sections looking at Church government, popular religion, missionary work and so on, the reader gets a flavour of what changed and what remained constant across the history of the Church.

At times Tanner runs the risk of seeming to be an apologist for the Church, downplaying the sins of the Borgia Popes for example, and portraying the Reformation as a minor disagreement that got out of hand. Likewise the split between Catholic and Orthodox is portrayed as an issue of bad timing. Tanner mentions in passing some of the geo-political machinations that were precursors to these splits - perhaps he could have made more of them. He devotes more time to recording the workings of the Church Councils and to theological, liturgical and doctrinal movements, an area that often gets overlooked in other Church histories, so perhaps he does have the balance right after all.

While we think of Roman Catholicism as a World religion now, Tanner shows us that this growth really exploded only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in fact many centuries of the Church's existence consisted of decline rather than expansion. The last two centuries have been difficult for the Church in other ways, walking a tightrope straddling tradition and modernity, scripture and human appeal.

This book is a useful guide for the major events in the history of the Church, but a book not be read in isolation.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Silence a Christian history by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Silence : a Christian history by Diarmaid MacCulloch

New York : Viking, 2013                     ISBN 9780670025565

This book was not what I expected it to be... it was much more. Picked up on a bargains table at my favourite bookstore, in its handsome dustjacket with an Angel (or is it Mary?) gazing beatifically out from under a golden halo, I was expecting this book to focus on the Christian ascetics and monks of the Middle Ages, and their continuation on into today. Of course that subject is discussed, but this book paints a much larger canvas, exploring the concept of silence itself in all its facets through Church history.

MacCulloch starts before the birth of Christ, investigating silence as it was seen in the Jewish books of the Bible, and finds that initially silence was seen as a bad thing, invoking the devastation of post-war, and of death. Under the influence of Greek thought and philosophy, silence as a sacred state began to enter Jewish thought, via Job and others, and the Temple in Jerusalem would have used silence as part of its ritual.

It was hundreds of years after the death of Christ before the idea of the pursuit of God through silent prayer took hold. The Desert Fathers were, by their very nature, not part of the mainstream Church, and it took some time for their views to break into the mainstream. The institutional Church - especially in the West - was fearful of individuals praying for themselves by themselves as the priests wanted control over people, and so monasticism grew as a way that the hierarchy could control silent prayer. In the East the iconoclastic battles occurred for similar reasons, the difference being that the institution lost and the individuals won, which is why the individual ascetic experience is much more common in the Orthodox world.

As it was the Protestants that opened the Bible up to more people via vernacular translations, it is ironic that MacCulloch shows us that for Protestants silence was usually seen as wrong, or at least suspicious. And yet silence became very important for some for mere survival. Nicodemism in many of its forms is well represented in this book, as the silences involved often were a matter of life and death, when the Inquisition or Elizabeth's Secret Service were asking questions. Gay clergy falls into this section of MacCulloch's book and in some ways is a slightly separate issue, as there was not only often silence on the side of gay clergy, but silence from the Church as well - a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy, with those that did tell made to be silent.

The last section of the book deals with more disturbing uses of silence within the Church, if not within Christianity in general. MacCulloch delves into Church silences that surround the Holocaust, sexual abuse, and slavery. For those, like me, who thought that the Church was one of the institutions that helped rid the (Western) World of slavery, MacCulloch provides a corrective, when he describes how various Churches provided those who engaged in the practice religious cover for their activities. While the abolitionist story is well known, this murkier relationship of Church and slavery has been subsumed into silence.

This brief description does not do justice to this book: extensively researched (excellent apparatus and bibliography), lucidly argued and packed with information, it is truly a mind-expanding work. This is surely the masterpiece on this subject and will be the foundation of any future work in this area.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Popes : a history by John Julius Norwich

The Popes : a history by John Julius Norwich

London : Chatto & Windus, 2011      ISBN 978070182908


Having recently returned from a trip to the Eternal City, and realising what I knew about the history of the Roman Catholic Church merely scratched the surface, I found this book filled some of the gaps, as well as being a rollicking read. Norwich has taken on a massive task - trying to compress nearly two thousand years of history into a readable five hundred pages - and within the limits he's set himself, he has been successful.

Those limits do, however, limit the book. I quote from the Introduction - "This book is essentially political, cultural and, up to a point, social. There are moments, from time to time, when basic matters of doctrine cannot be avoided.....but as far as possible I have tried to steer well clear of theology, on which I am in any case unqualified to pronounce." He goes on to write that, being a book for that mythical creature, the "average intelligent reader", this book breaks no new ground in scholarship.

While to my mind a book about the head of the Roman Catholic Church that does not delve into doctrine is a bit like cauliflower without the cheese sauce, this is still an interesting and worthwhile tome. Norwich starts with Saint Peter, and works chronologically up to Benedict XVI, sometimes skipping forward some years to the next interesting phase in the development of the institution of the Papacy.

The first years of the Papacy are sometimes more myth than history, and Norwich is at pains to point out when he can't be certain of what he's writing, but that doesn't stop him relating an aprocryphal story if it's a good one - he devotes a chapter to Pope Joan, even though he's conclusive about the fact that she never existed.

Most of the small amount of doctrinal discussion occurs in the early part of the book, when the Papacy battled various heresies, and the Schism between Eastern and Western Churches began - something that Norwich shows the Popes have tried to remedy without success for the last thousand years.

With the decline of the Western Empire, and with the Eastern Church breaking away, the Papacy was the remaining major institution left in Italy, and so their spiritual power moved into the temporal sphere, with the Pope being the spiritual ruler of all Christians, and the temporal ruler of a growing number of states, both in Italy and other countries.

The Middle Ages saw the Papacy become at times the plaything of powerful families and become involved in diplomacy between Kings and Emperors. The men that sat on the throne of St. Peter reflected those times. Many were given almost fully over to temporal works, and some not choosing to fulfil any but the most basic of their religious duties.

A lot of what Norwich writes anyone with any interest in the Papacy of those times will already know - the scheming, the power-plays, the corruption and nepotism - the list goes on. What Norwich's narrative does lay out is how this was not the norm for the whole Medieval / Renaissance period: from time to time highly devout people, monks and even occasionally hermits, ascended to the throne. Sometimes these Divines made the office more Holy, sometimes they were the creatures of those more worldly people around them, and sometimes they were a leopard that changed their spots on election and became everything they weren't beforehand.

Norwich describes how having the wrong Popes at the wrong time helped both the English and Continental Reformation gather steam, and how the Age of Reason led to a gradual diminishment of the Pope's power in both spheres. With a very limited ability to raise funds, a lot of which was spent on nepotism and grandiose building projects, the ability of the Pope to militarily defend his lands became more and more limited as time rolled on. With the other states of Italy constantly being horse-traded by the nobility of Europe, the Papal States were under pressure for many hundreds of years, their survival being due solely to the diplomatic abilities of the Pope and the Curia.

Gradually the Papal States were lost, and the Papacy itself became beholden to whichever despot held or threatened Rome. When the Risorgimento united Italy, the Papacy was left with no earthly possessions at all. In fact anti-clericalism became the norm in Italy, with the Papacy under pressure from all sides. It seems bizarre to write, but it was the Fascists that gave the Papacy a lifeline, with the Lateran Treaty, signed by Mussolini creating Vatican City, making Roman Catholicism the state church, and offering the Holy See a regular income. Norwich gives a very good brief account of what was not the Papacy's finest moment. (Incidentally Norwich has made a blunder here, placing Mussolini's death two years earlier than it actually occurred).

In bringing his story to the present Norwich deals briefly with Vatican II, and the death of John Paul I (not murder, according to him).

This book is a great read - as well as the history of the Popes, we get a potted history of European nobility, Italy, and the building and re-building of Rome. While Norwich probably made the right decision to avoid the religious side, given his avowed lack of expertise in the area, it is a lack in this book which means I can't recommend it as the only book to read on the Papacy - it is, however, a great place to start.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell