The purpose of this collection is, as the Archbishop of Westminster says in his Foreword, to show how Catholicism ‘has been a constant formative influence on every aspect of English life’. The second half of the second millennium opened with the Church at the height of its confidence and popularity; it witnessed a catastrophic attack on Christian civilisation during the wars of religion, brief gleams of light under Queen Mary and James II, and the long tedious years before the brilliance of the Catholic Revival, and the triumphant return of confidence in faith reborn. The collapse of that confidence and the rapid decline that followed is barely touched on: there are few entries after 1960.
The dates are explained by the decision to include only printed matter, and only writers who died before the end of the millennium. Caxton opens in 1484, with an anonymous Prayer for Forgiveness, the first work of spirituality printed in English. We close with reflections by Cardinal Hume, who died in 1999. In between we have poems, meditations, spiritual extracts, letters, translations, history and even polemic. There are well-known authors from More and Fisher to Chesterbelloc, but also the forgotten and obscure.
The earliest extracts are of course in late Middle English, and require more modernisation than has been provided. Margaret Roper in particular needs punctuation: what can we make of ‘naught you sufferest among temptation to fall either to prove and make steadfast the sufferance and patience of thy children’ (p. 52)? But her contemporary Dean Colet is clear and to the point in warning the clergy not to engage in secular business, for ‘our warring is to pray devoutly, to read and study scriptures diligently, to preach the word of God sincerely, to administer the Holy Sacraments rightly, and offer sacrifice for the people’ (p. 26).
After the badly timed Bull Regnans in Excelsis in its contemporary English translation (pp. 104–6), we enter the age of martyrs, an extract from Campion's famous Brag, accompanied by little-known prose and verse accounts of his martyrdom by Blessed Thomas Alfield (pp. 112–27). At the same time Lady Hungerford could write calmly about the Rosary (pp. 138–9) and we have the lovely poetry of St Robert Southwell (pp. 152–7). In the seventeenth century the major spiritual writers, Dame Gertrude More and Dom Augustine Baker, link the resurgent English Benedictines with mediaeval English mysticism.
The editors are at pains to show that the eighteenth century was not, after all, such an age of obfuscation as Newman suggested, for English Catholics did write publicly and boldly. Familiar names like Dryden and Pope are matched with other worthwhile poets, the acerbic Thomas Ward, and the gentle Jane Barker. Her lament on her brother's death ranks with Augustine, Bernard, and Auden (p. 288). The end of the eighteenth century saw fierce controversy, as Cisalpine and Ultramontane battled for England's soul: we hear from Berington and Butler and their great opponent Bishop Milner, who would certainly object to including the former as Catholics in good standing! (The Modernists a century later were rigorously excluded, even von Hügel.)
The ‘Second Spring’ brought a vigorous affirmation of the Catholic Church's rightful place in English life: the mediaeval romanticism of Pugin, the Baroque exuberance of Wiseman, the Yorkshire common sense of Ullathorne. Meanwhile the careful historians Dodd and Lingard had prepared for our modern re-appraisal of England's Catholic past. Newman has to be represented, and the hymns of Faber and Caswall – but there is now such a wealth of Catholic writers that it is hard to select. The eccentric wanderers Francis Thompson and John Bradburne are rightly represented – though I miss the spine-tingling last stanza of the Hound of Heaven – and Chesterton's unexpected turns of phrase range from prosaic to fantastical. But that triumphal time came to an abrupt end with the ‘cultural revolution’, mentioned only in a letter of David Jones; ‘I feel bloody sorry for the hierarchy actually, for whatever they decide they will be blamed by both parties’ (p. 658).
Letters are incongruous anyway, in a selection of printed works. Few were intended for publication, and those of David Jones and J.R.R. Tolkien (pp. 645–8) would never have seen print had it not been for the reputation of their other writings, but inconsistencies are inevitable in any selection
It is not quite clear for whom the book is intended. Little is suitable for the prie-dieu. The volume is far too heavy and the print too small for a bed-side anthology. (Incidentally O.U.P. could have done better in the production: the pages seem grey, and the illustrations muddy. And the ugly sans fount used for the editorial material is a blemish.) Perhaps it is most valuable to reassure us that we were not, after all, merely a gens lucifuga, a foreign mission to immigrants, a rabble of workers and peasants, but that we belonged then, and belong now, to the mainstream of English society, a society which we brought to the Faith in the seventh century, again in the tenth, again in the nineteenth, and shall do again as we prepare for what, counting carefully, will be our Fourth Spring.
