Pavane by Keith Roberts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Christendom Chronicles

I don’t think it’s right to comment on Keith Roberts’s Pavane without comparing it to its near contemporary, Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration. Pavane is probably a better written book all round but both books present a remarkably consistent counter-factual view of a 20th century Christendom which might have existed if the Protestant Reformation had never taken place (The Alteration) or was suppressed (Pavane).

Both books are also profoundly pessimistic about European political and economic life under a regime of a united Church and State. In my comments on The Alteration, I suggested that Amis is rather prescient in his presentation of this modern Christendom as the subliminal goal of the European Community (See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Roberts, it appears, may have been equally canny about the political tectonics of the time. Constraints on freedom of expression, trade, technological innovation, and science are themes which he uses as well as Amis.

But it is the general medievalist sentiment and tone in Amis and Roberts that alerted me to something else about these books. They make literary reference not just to European politics of the day, but to an English movement which has its aesthetic as well as its political roots in the early nineteenth century. This movement has operated under a variety of names - The Oxford Movement, Christian Socialism, Distributism, and most recently, Radical Orthodoxy.

While never reaching the cohesive strength of a political party, these cultural strands have had a persistent influence on English intellectual, artistic, and cultural life. The Oxford Movement, for example, set about ‘re-capturing’ the liturgical and ornamental richness of the medieval Catholic Church that had been lost during the Reformation. Nineteenth century Christian Socialism sought to redress the effects of the Industrial Revolution through the re-establishment of medieval forms of social obligation. Distributism, a form of Christian Socialism invented by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, suggested an incredibly radical redistribution of wealth and the establishment of guilds that would have effectively returned the country to a pre-capitalist economic condition.

Caricature of GK Chesterton with a contemporary motto of Distributism


At about the time Roberts and Amis were being published, a new form of this movement was emerging. Its current name is Radical Orthodoxy. This version of the movement is unusual because it is explicitly theological and very post-modernist. The essential historical proposition of Radical Orthodoxy is that certain nefarious medieval philosophers (most notably the Oxford Franciscan, Duns Scotus) threw a conceptual spanner into the works of European thought.

Scotus, so it is claimed, fraudulently undermined the Christian Platonism which had formed the foundation of the Christian Church/State polity for a thousand years. Simultaneously he allowed the distinction between philosophy and theology to infect both patterns of thought and academic organisation. Scotus, therefore, is the arch-demon of cultural relativism as well as the cause of secular governmental institutions which are hollowed out versions of their medieval forebears.

Radical Orthodoxy, like previous manifestations of this very English cultural phenomenon, is academically prominent but prefers to keep its political head below the parapet. It might not be apparent to the mass of the electorate, therefore, that the so-called Red Tories are significantly influenced by Radical Orthodoxy. David Cameron’s Big Society, for example, were a set of policies developed and advanced by the movement’s more political activists.

I suppose the point I want to make with this exposition is that the ‘Christendom Chronicles’ of Roberts and Amis are not only interesting as historical comments on mid-twentieth century European politics. They are also relevant today as a satirical critique of a live and persistent political tendency in Britain. This tendency is conservative but only in the sense that it looks to the (rather ancient) past for inspiration. It is in fact, as the name of its most recent manifestation suggests, rather extreme. Roberts and Amis indicate just how extreme.

View all my reviews