This is the work of the maturity of a humane and reflective scholarly mind. It is a model of its kind in its balance and judiciousness. Yet it is not easy to sum up an age in a way which defines it, and it could be argued that Donald Logan has not succeeded. But then he has not attempted anything so ambitious. His emphasis, as he admits, is largely chronological and what he presents us with is a narrative. The narrative moves from the early Church, given as a background to the medieval Church; through the process of conversion of the various parts of Europe which were Christian by the end of the Middle Ages. A chapter is given to Justinian and Mohammed. The story then moves to the conversion of the English, and so we are moved on through a series of topics clustered about a period or a theme.
The obvious weakness of this approach is that it makes it difficult to bring out, at the level of the intellectual debate, the ebb and flow of the tides of indignation and the power-struggles and the rest of the forces which shaped the world in which the Reformation took place. This is not a story which can satisfactorily be told from the outside, and principally in terms of events. Heretics and dissidents were involved in a ‘process’ of thought and argument in which an individual was likely to pick up notions from others, and few stood alone. From the stage at the beginning of the book (p. 9) when the Church is discussed in terms of its ‘organization’ and ‘units’, to its last section, where John Wyclif is portrayed as holding ‘views on the Eucharist out of step with the received orthodoxy of the times’ and as denying the existence of purgatory (p. 326), we are given scant indication of the struggles of conscience and scholarship. There is no sense of the achievement of the Middle Ages in ecclesiology and sacramentology.
This is a ‘history of the Church in the Western Middle Ages’. The Greek Christians appear briefly in the story, before the Crusades at the time of the schism of 1054 and again at the Council of Florence in the 15th century.
It is startling to find the book ending short of the Reformation. The tradition of anti-establishment dissent now building to a climax and waiting their Luther; the discontent lingering after the inconclusive conciliarist challenge to papal monarchy, all lack their denouement. This is a deliberate choice on the part of the author. He begins his chapter on the 15th century by saying so. His idea is to place the emphasis ‘on what happened then rather than on what was to happen’ (p. 332). The difficulty is that this has its distorting consequences, for it gives us a narrative without its natural ending.
It would be unjust to end on a negative note. It is an immensely rich and close-textured tale, with many insights, though occasional banalities of expression. It is an excellent example of ecclesiastical history, but not a history of the Church. The Church has a mind.
