To offer a critique of a literary tradition that spans a millennium and a half would seem to require the length and breadth of insight one might expect from the likes of Jacques Barzun. His seminal work, From Dawn to Decadence, took nearly a thousand pages to cover a third the amount of time, albeit in wider range than the subject of this review. And yet, according to the book’s summary, this is more or less what poet Andrew Thornton-Norris attempts to do with The Spiritual History of English, and only in the space of about a hundred and fifty pages.

The book concerns itself primarily with decline, as can be guessed by its synopsis on the back cover, but it takes a creative approach in its expression: the nature of English as a written literary tradition and how the decline in English culture, as well as its literature, came about. To say this is a fascinating idea would be an understatement, but it’s also invites a sprawling array of examples and exegesis that Norris’ short volume obviously must preclude. And unfortunately, this only works to its detriment, as despite the promising idea behind the book, and despite the book’s diagnoses coming across as mostly agreeable, its shortness disallows any expression of nuance in some of the more sensitive matters it must deal with, such as metaphysics and the affects of ideology on mass society.

Summary

As “the Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us,” so a metaphysic or belief is incarnate in the literary form. This is an approach to literature, religion, and culture which understands them as intertwined, as different aspects of the same thing. It sees the beliefs, actions, and modes of behavior that go to make up a way of life as united in a way that is clearest in traditional cultures or the ancient world, where religion and culture were regarded as one and the same thing and were denoted by the same word.¹

Norris begins by defining the nature of literature and English literature in particular. Religion and spiritual belief are elements of man’s being that come prior, but are certainly related, to art, storytelling and literature. Additionally, understanding both religion and literature as intertwined invites the reader to recognize literature as something of a fusion of aesthetics and reason, and to a lesser degree, morality, where all three faculties attuned to the transcendentals work in coordination to either produce, take part in, or otherwise interpret created things.

Following this acknowledgment, Norris ties the uniqueness of English literature specifically in order to begin his analysis. To do this, he charts the course of the English language from its pre-millennial beginnings and the Norman conquest, through the Reformation and what he refers to as the Puritan Revolution, and then follows this with the Neoclassicalist, Romantic, Modern and Postmodern periods, granting a chapter of treatment to each. As history progresses, one notices the familiar expressions of literature take shape; where the written word began as transcriptions of poetry, it turns quickly to ecclesiastical history, to parable, and eventually to the familiar media recognizable today.

The second of these two is of specific note for the English, who, as Norris notes, “understood [themselves] from the very beginning as a nation with a providential relationship with God, and therefore with a special relationship with the original People of the Book.”² The reason for this is because, for Norris, the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of Britain forms the starting point of English literature as-such, being that England customarily “regarded [history] as primarily a form of literature.”³

Norris explains how Bede’s volume expresses a foundational component of English identity:

the sense was born that the English were a Chosen People, with a special mission to civilize their neighbors wherever in the world they might be. It was fathered by Pop Gregory, articulated by the Venerable Bede, and embodied in the English Church implemented by St. Augustine, predating the Reformation by about a millennium. This sense of a special mission to civilize has followed the language and its speakers wherever they have gone, although the idea of that civilization has come to be understood in different and more materialistic ways that would be unrecognizable to Bede, Alfred, and many other English historians.⁴

Norris correlates this national identity, self-considered as in some sense “providential or prophetic,” with the place artists and storytellers hold in society: particularly as a sort of alternative secular class of mystic who gives tangible form to the society’s conception of itself. It is his argument then, that as the English lost their religious and spiritual character, its literature naturally suffered—“it died with our faith.”⁵ From this beginning, Norris then attempts to chart this gradual decline, illness and death through into the current era, where fiction seems to have become subsumed by nonfiction and literature has apparently passed on.

One might be tempted to presume the novel as a bastion of the English tradition, being so representative of the last three centuries of English literature. But Norris comments on the novel as “mostly commercial writing,” with “its theological background of Protestantism and rejection of continental cultural influences” having “disengaged from the Latin Classical tradition, as much as the Puritan and Protestant theology that lies behind it is disengaged from ecclesiastical Christianity.”⁶ This dichotomy between the Puritan, Protestant, post-Reformation English approach to literature versus that of a Latin Classical tradition, for which he uses examples from Spain and the Caribbean, is one he uses quite a bit. Unfortunately, however, it is unclear exactly what he’s talking about with regard to a ‘theological background’ of the novel.

Still, one sees a descending digression away from a holistic, ecclesiastical sense of literature as an artform, and as Norris continues into the Modernist and Postmodernist movements, this digression is made clearer and clearer. He comments in the last chapter of the book how “It might be said that now, in place of a religion of the book, we now have a religion of the mass media, in which the cult of personality, of the individual, is consummated.”⁷ The divorce from the Church, in other words, led to directly, if at some great length of time, to the fracturing of all narratives and the sublimation of man’s soul to the mediocre, the mass-marketed, and the automated.

The Fire of Conversion

As Norris explains in his epilogue, this book was originally written and published in 2009, a period in which he converted from the Anglo-Catholicism of his early adulthood into the fullness of the universal Faith. Writing this book was part of this process, granting creative expression to the evolution in his thinking that led from the respect for English tradition to an understanding of authority at the heart of said tradition. His underlying thesis regarding authority’s relationship to tradition and order within the context of social and artistic—literary—expression is quite sensible with this in mind.

Indeed, the fire of a new convert is on plain display within these pages; speaking from experience, when one not only finds but acquiesces to the Faith, it seems as though all troublesome irregularities with thought and history are resolved by the abundant grace afforded by the Faith’s total non-contradiction. This leads not infrequently, however, to the new convert’s willingness to paint with brushes of exceptional breadth, as Norris does rather frequently throughout the work. One might expect this, given the shortness of the volume compared to the scope of its thesis, but it nonetheless deserves note.

This tendency is nowhere more apparent than his treatment of medieval scholasticism and its relationship, or perhaps, devolution into, modernity. A highly simplified understanding of this devolution is characterized by a sentiment popular among self-professed e-trads at the end of the 2010s: that modernity and, therefore, all modern ills, are a result of the Protestant Reformation, the reduction of religious belief to private interest, and that this was a direct result of the Nominalist thought of William of Ockham. Some even went so far as to somehow blame Blessed John Duns Scotus for this.

This piece is not the place to criticize this line of thought per se, given the magnitude of its oversimplification and the transparency with which it pushes a particular (albeit somewhat sympathetic) agenda. Suffice it to say, however, that the ideas which led to the Reformation were in deeper theological error than anything sensibly attributed to Ockham, and that Ockham’s system of philosophy stood in deliberate contra-distinction to Scotus’ own. The theological, philosophical, social and political revolutions that took place with the disintegration of ‘Catholic Europe’ requires more explanation than the ideas of the doctors at the academies of the time.

Nonetheless, in adhering to the loose outline of this idea, Norris directly states that a stricter adherence to Thomistic orthodoxy might have prevented this turn in history. More specifically, he implies it is only by Thomistic orthodoxy which English literature can be saved and, therefore, by his own thesis, Thomistic orthodoxy expresses the only true manifestation of the Faith.⁸ While this is a wild leap in presumption, it doesn’t undermine the thesis of his book to any significant degree as he barely touched on Thomism as a metaphysical system—and spent no time whatsoever discussing the others. These came across more as sudden and irrelevant sideswipes that provided no additional context for his point.

Additional problems mount when dealing with theories regarding the modern day and the present audience’s ability, or lack thereof, to interface with art, literature, narrative and the written word. Norris again comes across as painting with too broad a stroke. Postmodernism in literature was indeed the result, to some extent, of the oft-proclaimed collapse of meta-narratives and the embrace of a sort of metaphysical nihilism. It’s also meaningless, however, to discuss postmodernism in literature without at least touching on postmodernity at-large, and the transformation of Western society over the 20^th century into an automated, service-oriented and market driven civilization. As it applies to literature, the establishment of a publishing industry first allowed media like novels and short stories to flourish, only for that very same industry to grow large enough to undermine itself. And it deserves note too that this occurred as technology advanced such that the novel itself had to cede its relevancy over to film, television, and to a lesser degree, video games.

It is true that the collapse of ideas has led to the academy inventing fields of critical theory to study, and it’s also true that this has negatively impacted the quality of literature that gets written, published and discussed at anything resembling a serious level. But this again seems brought about because an industry of mass production formed that was capable of gate-keeping works of merit according either to their marketability or their prestige, and this industry eventually found itself, like many in the last fifty years, commandeered and occupied by radical ideologues.

As such, any presumption that good works can naturally find publishers is a presumption that has been in error, by some estimations, for longer than two decades. The error has arguably been baked into the industry since its conception, given that it has always been a matter of who owns the presses and what taste they have which decides what manuscripts get accepted. In the past, however, it is recognized by all save the literati elite of the present generation that such publishers at least still had some semblance of taste. For the last twenty years, they’ve been ridiculed as racists, misogynists, colonialists, or some other meaningless progressive buzzword.

Again, one might blame the change in ideas for this, but this is a sprawling problem that engulfs more than literature and the arts, and the suddenness with which this turn has occurred implies a very obvious relation to the technology that coincided with the change.

Right Conclusions By Alternate Paths

The examples above are indicative of the difficulties faced by such a short work with a large topic. The Spiritual History of English is not specifically a book of philosophy or metaphysics, which is why his reductionist approach to the ideological origins of the Reformation doesn’t undermine his overall point. Should one suppose he is in error with specific causes, his diagnosis remains correct and likewise does the overall shape of what he’s painting: that the English language, particularly in literature and poetry, was inextricably linked and developed by its deeply religious roots. The Reformation in England did indeed permanently impact English writing as evidenced by the sudden differences between the writers before, during and after the period.

Likewise, in the second example, Postmodernism as a literary movement was informed, albeit arguably to only a very limited degree, by the philosophical ideas that bear the same name. These ideas, however, did not invent the ‘postmodern condition,’ even if they gave it some definition and terminology. The study of postmodernism from a philosophical angle is the study of the peoples and societies afflicted by the postmodern condition. In the case of the literary movement, one might argue—and in all likelihood, rightly—that it was pursued by writers with, at best, a dim understanding of postmodernity broadly speaking, and that much of what was categorized as such was permitted to be published because of the disintegrating standards of the literate public. But this is effectively the problem with trying to consider these movements purely from the standpoint of a history of ideas.

Norris acknowledges that “it is possible” that “such declines in literature and Christianity … [are] the consequence of related or unrelated external causes, perhaps technological, social, or political change, and that each decline is therefore unrelated or only incidentally related to each other.” His argument, however, remains that “whatever a writer writes, and whatever a reader reads, is intimately related to what they believe,” going on to quote Ted Hughes: “How things are between man and his idea of the Divinity determines everything in his life.”⁹

This implies a distinction between a man’s beliefs and ‘external causes,’ such as markets, trends, social fads, media, ideology, and other such presumed factors that exist as either intentional or unintentional influences upon a person’s and society’s belief system. Marxists and atheists still attempt to pigeonhole religion into the realm of pure ideology because both religion and ideology operate in the same sphere of belief, where the understanding of reality meets the individual action of the soul. While the Marxists and atheists fail to grasp that sincere belief in religion, even in those religions in error, encompass a framework of unconscious traditions that ideology can never fulfill, they still recognize that man’s beliefs are formed first from the outside before being accepted and adopted interiorly.

Certainly, there is a sense in which conversion to the True Faith arises from within, as conversion involves the in-pouring of Divine Grace from Heaven directly into the soul. However, for conversion to come about, this in-pouring of Grace must coincide with the intellect’s disposition to accept conversion as not just a possibility, but as the only correct path forward by comparison to any other alternative. Grace moves the needle, but the soul must be willing to let the needle move. Such factors exterior to the man are highly relevant to this aspect of conversion, and indeed, to all matters of personal belief.

This unfortunately undermines a great deal of the book’s intended purpose, as the study of how the Faith affected the development of literature and poetry includes the study of how ideas interact with culture, and this is not so easily tracked by a course in aesthetics or philosophy. Norris might counter that this view myopically attaches too great an importance on the cogito, modernity’s chief error: “that the starting point of thought and therefore belief is the self,” which had “revolutionary consequences … for religion and culture.”¹⁰ In this, contained in the chapter regarding the Puritan revolution in England, Norris refers to the apparent abandonment of the “ontologism” of the Medieval mind with the “psychologism” of the Modern¹¹, or more broadly speaking, the focus on man’s self obstructing and replacing his focus on the Divine. While the broadness of such language obscures the nuance of how exactly this applies to specific cases of literature and interpretive methods, the general idea at least seems right based on cursory readings of art and narrative across history.

Conclusion

While the strokes with which Norris paints in A Spiritual History of English are broad enough to obscure the details of his point, he nonetheless succeeds in identifying and explicating the errors of modernity, as well as the relationship that literature and the written English word has had in bringing them about. Likewise, he certainly seems correct in asserting that the Church, and specifically the stability and orthodoxy offered by the Magisterium, that English culture and written tradition can be brought back to life. How exactly this would work remains ambiguous, however, but charting out a method wasn’t within the scope of a book focused more on diagnosis than on remedy.

In brief, Norris offers a wide sampling of various critics, poets and writers in the effort to make his point. This alone marks the book as of some value, even when its point seems confused or too quickly argued. Overall, being a slim volume written during what was clearly a pivotal period in his life, it reads as chaotically and passionately as Norris probably felt at the time, thereby perhaps nearly straying into the realm Norris outlined for the modern novel: a cohesion of fiction and reality, where nonfiction is presented in a fictive mode. This probably isn’t something that Norris intended, however.

121.

231.

3Ibid.

432-33.

5141.

696.

7135.

8“However, as Hans Urs von Balthasar argues, [Gerard Manley] Hopkins was a Scotist, and this does detract from Thomistic orthodoxy and hence contributes to the difficulty of his work.” 157.

921.

1065.

11111.

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