When Mr Southern produced The Making of the Middle Ages in 1953, he illustrated it with photographs and was praised for the way he scooped up such a revealing collection of personalities and instances. Now in his new general work on Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, the photographs have been displaced by graphs and tables, and the selection of ‘moments’ in the life of the medieval Church is disclaimed in favour of a study of the interplay and tension between medieval society and its Church, and of a study of the continuous adaptation of the institutional modes by which the medieval Church attempted to satisfy the changing requirements of society. All too often ecclesiastical history lapses into the history of the organization and life of the Church as seen from the inside, and no doubt this is the image which the phrase ‘Church history’ evokes in many minds, but what is here studied is the history of the Church looked at from the viewpoint of society at large. Already by the ninth century western Church and society were so closely identified that those outside the Church were usually outside society also, but there is no risk of confusion here if one grasps the fact that throughout the medieval period elements in the Church continually tried to tune its responses to changing social demands.

This book is structured according to a pattern of threes. Each of the five essays which form its core is planned in relation to the differences which separate a primitive age (c. 700-c. 1050) from an age of growth (c. 1050-c. 1300) and an age of unrest (c. 1300- c. 1550). Each essay is unquestionably a masterpiece. That on Byzantium and the West pursues the double theme of Rome as the source of western unity and the source of division in Christendom as a whole. The essay on the papacy shows theory evolving in relation to social change.

After doing much to discredit in Absolutely Null and Utterly Void the historical build-up to Apostolicae Curae, Fr Hughes has now tackled the theological questions involved in Anglican Orders. In doing so he pursues his attack on Dr Francis Clark’s two books. This does not make entirely happy theological reading. One is left with the impression that both authors were first quite convinced a priori of the truth of their thesis, and then set out to prove it.

The basic argument of Clark’s Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation was surely not, as Hughes writes (p. 41), ‘that it was not abuses or errors that caused the Reformers to reject eucharistic sacrifice, but their own new conception of grace, justification . . .’; rather was the basic argument that the Reformers did not merely reject current late medieval superstitions about the Mass, but the Catholic doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice itself. In so far as Clark has maintained that a perfectly clear and orthodox doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice was currently taught (and as clearly rejected by the Reformers), and that the prevailing superstitions have been greatly exaggerated, Hughes makes many inroads on his position: Biel’s theology was extremely unsound, even if orthodox by the skin of its teeth; how threadbare Catholic thought was on the point came out in post Reformation apologetic, when it was clear from their twisting and turning that Catholic theologians, though insistent that the Eucharist is a sacrifice, were quite unable to give either a coherent or an acceptable account of why or how it is (and remained so till yesterday or even today); what theological thought there was, lay buried under a mass of devotional and allegorical comment on rubrics; the elevation was wrongly thought of as the moment of offering, Cajetan’s lone voice, that the whole of the Mass was a sacrifice in a sacramental sort of way, going unheeded; above all, theological thought does not exist in isolation, and in this period was embedded in a shocking system of buying the effects of Calvary piecemeal for personal use.

‘If you have faith’, St Cyril of Jerusalem tells his catechumens, ‘you won’t only receive remission of your sins, you’ll also do things beyond the power of man. Please God, you’ll receive the gift of prophecy.’

In the previous two articles, we have been dissecting the Pente-costal doctrine of ‘baptism in the Spirit’, and concluded that the strict New Testament teaching is that the experience and the manifestation of the Spirit belong to sacramental baptism. However, even in the New Testament there is the puzzling case of the Samaritan converts who were baptized but didn’t receive the Spirit (which means, for Luke, simply that they did not show any visible sign of the Spirit; we should not interpolate Pauline considerations into the story). So spiritual writers of east and west have always had to allow that, all too often, baptized Christians live and feel as though they were still living under the Law, before the coming of faith.