The Spiritual History of English

Book excerpt: extremely perceptive - Edward Norman; absolutely fascinating - Michael Burleigh; absorbing and thought-provoking -Michael Gove an enjoyable, erudite and cohesive journey through the history and philosophy of English literature in 150 pithily written pages. Brilliantly thought out, and painstakingly researched -The Times Modernity might be defined as the age when mankind tried to do without God for the first time. The effect on culture has been extraordinarily stimulating. From the Renaissance and Reformation, through the Baroque reaction, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and the Modernist reaction, Western culture has flourished. However, now that God has been so effectively removed from our society and culture, the impetus seems to have gone. And the art and culture that is being produced is singularly tired and uninteresting. Postmodernism is the end of the line. What Britain needs now is the religion it tried to bury with King Charles I and II, says Andrew Thornton-Norris in this new book. He says that today's social and cultural decay comes from the death of Protestantism in the 1960s. It was replaced by the social individualism characteristic of that decade, which became the economic individualism of the 1980s. Now, the idea of upholding objective standards in society or culture is derided and, he contends, this is shown in the demise of English literature. Thornton-Norris believes that only the Roman Catholic Church is able to resist what the Pope describes as the 'dictatorship of relativism': to provide once protestant countries such as Britain and America with the underlying sense of values that they have lost. This is the challenge facing the future King Charles III, with his deep concern for spiritual, social and cultural matters.