Christianity in Culture: A Historical Quest (review)

The noted and prolific medievalist John Sommerfeldt attempts in this book to show the influence of Christianity on culture and vice versa, beginning with the early Christian Church and continuing on to the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI. In some places, it resembles Christopher Dawson's admirable blending of literature, art, and theology. The discussion of the medieval priesthood is made more cogent by the introduction of Chaucer's description of the Clerk in the Canterbury Tales:

Wide was his parish, with houses far asunderYet he neglected not in rain and thunderIn sickness or in grief, to pay a callOn the remotest, whether great or small.

Also, Sommerfeldt's brief treatment of Dante is inspired, pointing out that Dante "used the form of a love lyric to express profound philosophical and theological ideas" and the author shows how (p. 87). To a teacher of the humanities for the last thirty years, this is wonderful stuff. There is a fine moment, at the very end of the book, where the author reflects movingly on the relationship between modern science and faith, concluding that faith will (and should) have its influence.

Unfortunately, this tone is not sustained throughout the book. The author wants his reflections to be read by a wide audience, those who are curious and intelligent but with no specialized training in historical scholarship. This, he admits, is a new audience for him. It is the kind of thing Dawson would try to do, but even Dawson limited his attention to specific periods of time, focusing on the "Dark Ages" or on a specific work of literature such as "Piers Plowman." Recent attempts to do something similar, such as Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, 2007) and Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence (New York, 2000) were massive undertakings of more than 800 pages, and they both only began their narratives in the late Middle Ages.

Sommerfeldt casts his net very wide, taking in all of Christian Church history. The book may have been better titled My Reflections on Christianity in Culture, since this is really not more than a professor's musings on the interactions of Christianity and culture rather than a serious attempt to explain them. Even the treatment of the Middle Ages is lacking. Whereas the sudden emergence of the medieval Church in new religious orders and new approaches to spirituality and theology receive good coverage, the development of Gothic architecture and Gregorian chant (and Giotto) are hardly mentioned. The farther the author journeys from the Middle Ages, the worse things get.

Opinions are quirky. Leonardo Da Vinci, by a narrow definition of humanism, is excluded as being a truly Renaissance artist. Martin Luther's (and Protestantism's) main quarrel with the Catholic Church is over free will. I thought that Melancthon had patched that up. Otto von Bismarck is remembered as a social reformer, but his Kulturkampf—with its imprisonment of Catholic bishops, closure of Catholic schools, and dismissal of religious orders—is not mentioned. The Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century and the enormous literary and theological revivals of the twentieth century, taking place in several countries at the same time, are not to be found in this book. In a book on Christianity in culture, the names John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Charles Peguy, François Mauriac, Sigrid Undset, and Thomas Mann should at least be noted, if not treated in some detail. The missionary work of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is not mentioned, along with its revolution in the cultural direction of the Church; the insistence of the popes on inculturation; the introduction of the vernacular at the Second Vatican Council; the composition of the College of Cardinals; and the impact of the Church on world politics, including the fall of communism. Nothing.

Even more regrettable is the treatment of the last two centuries in...