A History of Christianity, by Paul Johnson
Dean, Eric
"A History of Christianity, by Paul Johnson" live with it and learned to condemn violence. What, then, determines which way a knee jerks? In explaining their resistance to co-optation, Ulam does not settle merely for an analysis—though his is...
...Certain conspirators actually seemed to nurse electoral ambitions for a future constitutional system, but in the prevailing atmosphere they hid them, for their fellows detested such Western ideas...
...In this way Ulam attaches an amendment to the dislike of political ideologies so evident in Solzhenitsyn...
...From this observation, and with a sense that all ideologies may really obscure human experience, Solzhenitsyn derives his disdain of Western politics—which is almost always based on one ideology or another...
...If they fail to preserve the power to make people believe, they will have to rely on the power to make them obey...
...In the Name of the People portrays antagonists who truly deserved each other, for the conspirators had an equally empty view of Russia's problems, and of how they would govern...
...He should be, Eric Dean is professor of religion and philosophy, and chairman of the Division of Humanities at Wabash College in Indiana...
...Certainly the titanic debate between the African bishop and his British opponent, Pelagius, ranged over issues which should be debated throughout all the years of the Church...
...and thus he writes of Christianity in a series of vignettes illuminated more by the fires of Augustinianism than by the cool light of Pelagianism...
...Lacking Chesterton's wit, Johnson has written an anti-Orthodoxy, which —thinking of wags—bears out Belloc's aphorism: "The Church must be divine, no merely human institution run with such knavish imbecility could have lasted a fortnight...
...in fact, freer than the non-Christian, who is pre-committed by his own rejection...
...Not content to let outbursts pass, the Tsar's men chose to make "examples," and usually made martyrs...
...As it was, for Johnson, by being declared a heresy Pelagianism was largely silenced...
...The harshness that is then required further whittles belief, and gives an opening to those more skilled in both forms of power and—worse yet—ready to use them...
...We are not told what might have happened had Pelagius won outright...
...One might ask, however, whether Pelagius' denial of original sin should convince us entirely on points for style...
...For this endless cycle of frustration, Ulam spares the government least of all: Had it better understood the need to make itself legitimate in the eyes of the new classes, the cycle might have been broken...
...Yet this approach lets the government off the hook...
...indeed, he is positively bound to follow it...
...At the very least, his treatment must be said to slight the significant structural and theological changes of the postwar period...
...At all events, I have sought to present the facts of Christian history as truthfully and nakedly as I am able, and to leave the rest to the reader...
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...Instead, the regime was "unable to inspire fear [or] to enlist support...
...And it was Karl Barth's discovering that the Bible and Dostoevsky had more to say to the generation between the World Wars than the failing liberal theology that led to the rise of neo-orthodox theology...
...Even such a figure as Thomas More, whom Johnson admires, would acknowledge this...
...Ulam shows that the orientation of the liberals resulted instead from a genuine political failure of the regime, ascribable to its "suicidal" and "sclerotic" inability to gain for itself even the shreds of legitimacy...
...Not surprisingly, perhaps, Johnson's epilogue brings in the verdict that, because the history of the Christian era "has reflected the effort to rise above our human frailties...the chronicle of Christianity is an edifying one...
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...By contrast, what little we have of Pelagius and his immediate heirs Johnson finds straightforward and classical...
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...Likewise, the government veered occasionally toward reform (most dramatically, justbefore Alexander's murder), but always allowed itself to be panicked by the next act of revolutionary violence...
...To be sure, much that was held against Tsarism was not its fault, or could not be quickly remedied...
...military is a very real possibility...
...The key to Johnson's impressive and informed reading of the record is found in his frequent allusions to Augustine...
...What puzzles, of course, is that Latin Christianity continued to be very much influenced by Pelagian...
...Lest the reader find need to speculate as to his point of view, Johnson writes a prologue which concludes: So the Christian, according to my understanding, should not be inhibited in the smallest degree from following the line of truth...
...For him, Augustine represents orthodoxy in its arrogance, and Pelagius every sane antidote to such an attitude...
...One mightargue that orthodoxy recurs because of its constantly demonstrated cogency...
...A fairly persuasive case could be made for viewing the problem in sociological terms...
...Both sides failed to make violence comprehensible...
...Perhaps his impressive bibliography represents them, but one can only guess for there is virtually no documentation...
...Yet between prologue and epilogue, the reader is provided with a litany of events so generally deplorable in Johnson's view that he can only wonder what it would have taken to oblige Johnson to conclude that the chronicle is in no degree edifying...
...That A History of Christianity raises hackles suggests, of course, that it should be read...
...Calvin, for example, while being given high marks for intelligence and industry, is found presiding over the standard theocratic reign of terror despite recent works which show the traditional views of Calvin's character and his role in Geneva to be inaccurate...
...We have much of Augustine's writing, and doubtless one could wish that he had sometimes avoided forms of expression which seem unfortunately obsessed with sexuality...
...The essays in this book examine the complex arguments pro and con and describe the likely impact of military unions on the functional effectiveness and political responsiveness of our armed forces...
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...As the pace of economic progress elsewhere in Europe quickened, Russia's material backwardness produced increasing irritation and impatience...
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...Thus, Augustine and Pelagius are more metaphors than historical figures...
...There are those who would want to suggest that there is more at stake in this debate than good form...
...It is fascinating to speculate on Johnson's sources...
...It was in its handling of violence that the regime undermined itself most...
...Not surprisingly, the bibliographical entries on the Reformers are outnumbered by those concerning Pelagius...
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...In explaining their resistance to co-optation, Ulam does not settle merely for an analysis—though his is very shrewd —of the educated Russians' frame of mind...
...Clearly, sweet reason would have done better with the issues with which the Church was from time to time presented, but in a bull-in-china-shop fashion some halfway decent things got done until the debacle of 1870-1975...
...Ulam points out the exceptions in his picture of Russia's mindless turmoil...
...A generation which has read both Freud and the existentialists will wonder whether the categories of rationality are sufficient to explicate human experience...
...The failure is interesting because it was avoidable...
...For too many ordinary people an ideology, which was in some ways appealing, legitimized horrors for which there can be no excuse...
...Ulam seems to sympathize with the restive confidence ofthe liberals that only freedom could exploit Russia's energies: " [I]n the late 19th century freedom and power went hand in hand....Russia for all her enormous resources remained backward and relatively weak because her people were unfree...
...Not concerned for theological issues, Johnson does allow us to see Christianity as the object of the journalist's concern, particularly as the object of a kind of Fabian concern...
...And save for the cloacal insights of Erikson, which the historian might question, Johnson gives a similar standard interpretation of Luther...
...A national debate on the issue is almost certain...
...Unlike Bismarck, or Brezhnev, for that matter, the Russian autocracy was denied the revivifying effects of nationalism...
...Military unions would have a dramatic effect on our military institutions and on the character of civil-military relations in America...
...In Russia, in contrast to Germany, the revolutionary danger was not seen by liberals as stemming from a different social class...
...The vigorous and earthy monk, despite his Augustinian rudeness to Erasmus, helps move affairs in the German states in the right direction...
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...Yet the vitality of various movements in the Roman Catholic Church in this century, no less than in others, suggests that the Church is not simply to be identified with the success or failure of papal policies, and there is clearly more to Protestantism in this century than Johnson's muckraking among the sects would suggest...
...His implication is that many different kinds of regimes, even traditional ones, can acquire legitimacy, but they must work at it...
...In Solzhenitsyn's view, Soviet doctrine must answer for the suffering his nation has endured...
...Indeed, Johnson seems not to be aware of the fact that Luther is quoted as having said that all of his parishioners were Pelagians...
...However, what others might judge to be both an inevitable and a perennial debate within Christianity seems to Johnson to stem principally from the character of Augustine, and his argument is more than a little tinged by—if not British sympathies—a concern for the underdog...
...Only political programs and principles can do this, can make violence work, whether to protect or destroy an existing order...
...And national comparisons wounded not only Russia's pride but also its international position...
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...In fact, both sides fmally failed for the same reason: Struggling with each other was too absorbing, and its easy accomplishments (locking this fellow up, knocking that fellow off) were not the same as political success...
...This, however, is Ulam's point: No modern regime is so secure or so embattled that it can afford to ignore the importance of legitimizing itself...
...The government," says Ulam, "tended to use repression as if it were an end in itself rather than an auxiliary and subordinate means for preserving a viable social and political order...
...What the bibliography omits may be decisive, for when he is not pressing his own point of view, his account is often dauntingly old hat...
...Though—as is true for Johnson—one may 34 The American Spectator December 1977 dislike the passionate rhetoric of Augustine, is it possible that he is correct in the substance of his teachings on original sin and predestination...
...BOOK REVIEW A History of Christianity Paul Johnson / Atheneum / $13.95 Eric Dean Those who have difficulty remembering anything but the scantest and most sardonic references to religion in the pages of the New Statesman can only find themselves bemused over the phenomenon of Malcolm Muggeridge as the lion of recent religious broadcasting and publishing...
...But Johnson is not, in the end, much interested in the theological points at stake...
...No one need argue that papalist attempts to stem the tides of the modern world were prideful and doomed to failure...
...For this reason they could more plausibly feel they had nothing to fear from violence...
...Now, furthering one's confusion, comes erstwhile New Statesman editor Paul Johnson with A History of Christianity...
Vol. 11 • December 1977 • No. 2
