The Story of Christian Spirituality:  

Two Thousand Years, 

from East to West

Edited by Gordon Mursell

Fortress Press:  2001.  384 pages. 

Reviewed Siroj Sorajjakool 

Additional comments by others are invited.

If we had to live every day from fields to meals, the narratives of our collective lives from century to century might only produce crops and cooking. Life would be plain, lacking in color. But the reality of our history is filled with traces of color, collections of art from artists who paint souls. Two thousand years have passed and yet our souls never cease to flourish. Variation proliferates.

 I have often wondered about the meaning of spirituality. Reading the history that captures the creative depths of souls confirms my intuition that spirituality is an existential quest for meaning, an archetype deeply rooted in our psyches, which expresses itself as it interacts within our sociocultural, historical, and environmental contexts.

I found affirmation of this from reading The Story of Christianity: Two Thousand Years, From East to West. This illuminating 384 page, beautifully illustrated volume, published by Fortress Press with Gordon Mursell as general editor, is an ambitious project that fulfills its intention to offer historical accounts of the varied forms of Christian spirituality as it moved from East to West over the last two millennia.

The book is divided into ten chapters, with a distinguished scholar writing each. Richard Burridge, Dean of King’s College and Honorary Lecturer in New Testament, introduces the volume with "Jesus and the Origins of Christian Spirituality." Chapter one, "The Early Church Fathers," covers the first through the sixth centuries. It is written by John McGuckin, Professor of Early Church History at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In chapter two, Douglas Dales, Chaplain and Head of Religious Studies at Marlborough College covers "Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Spirituality," particularly from the fourth through the ninth centuries. In chapter three, "Saints and Mystics of the Medieval West," David Farmer, Former Reader in History at Reading University, looks at Christian spirituality from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. In chapter four, McGuckin discusses "The Eastern Christian Tradition" from the fourth through the eighteenth centuries. Sergei Hackel, Former Reader in Russian Studies at the University of Sussex, recounts "The Russian Spirit" from the tenth through the nineteenth centuries in chapter five.

In chapter six, Herman J. Selderhuis, Professor of Church History at the Theological University in the Netherlands, looks at "The Protestant Tradition in Europe" from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Chapter seven by Liz Carmichael, Chaplain and Tutor in Theology at St. John’s College, Oxford, recounts stories of "Catholic Saints and Reformers" in the same period of time. In chapter eight, general editor Gordon Mursell, Dean of Birmingham Cathedral and Former Senior Lecturer in Pastoral Studies at Salisbury and at Wells Theological College, writes on "The Anglican Spirit" in the same four centuries. Stephan Graham, Dean of Faculty and Professor of American Church History at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago, reviews "The Protestant Tradition in America" during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in chapter nine. Chapter ten, written by Bradley Holt, Professor of Religion at Augsburg College, covers "Spiritualities of the Twentieth Century."

Although the outline of this volume offers a wide range of topics on spirituality, when going through each chapter readers will be even more impressed by the diverse perspectives and practices discussed by the authors. The changing faces of spirituality are clearly evident in this historical account.

We are taken from the poetic expression of ninth century monasticism—

A hedge of trees surrounds me,

A blackbird’s voice sings to me;

Above my lined book

The call of birds chants to me.

In a grey mantel from the topmost bush

The cuckoo sings:

Truly may the good Lord protect me;

At peace I shall write under the green canopy.

To Alan Paton, a South African novelist and activist—

Give us courage, O Lord, to stand up and be counted, to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves, to stand up for ourselves when it is needful to do so…Let us have no other god before thee, whether nation or party or church. Let us seek no other peace but the peace which is thine, and make us its instruments, opening our eyes and our ears and our hearts, so that we should know always what work of peace we may do for thee.

And from fourteenth century mysticism as expressed in "The Cloud of Unknowing"—

As the cloud of unknowing lies above you, between you and your God, you must fashion a cloud of forgetting beneath you, between you and every creature.

To the optimism of science and the place of evolution in Christian theology in the writings of Pierre de Chardin—

I bless you, matter, and you I acclaim: not as the pontiffs of science or the moralizing of preachers depict you, debased, disfigured—a mass of brute forces and base appetites—but as you reveal yourself to me today, in your totality and your true nature.