100 good godly reads

Saint Augustine in His Study by Sandro Botticelli, c1490-1494

By RUPERT SHORTT

It felt like a theological Desert Island Discs writ large. Or a literary version of the Solomon’s-baby challenge. Eight of us – theologians, clerics, a librarian and a journalist (me) – were given a portentous remit by the Church Times: to select the “100 best Christian books”. . . .

The template is hardly untarnished. It almost goes without saying that on TV, especially, menus for the 100 best sitcom moments, or rock albums, or lowest common denominators, tend to be safe and stale. Was the answer to go unapologetically highbrow? Probably not. Focusing too much on the view sub specie aeternitatis at the expense of what is popular today seemed equally misplaced – not to say presumptuous. Our list (it has been unveiled in stages over the past fortnight, with the top ten appearing today) contains the spiritual equivalent of tea and squash, side by side with Barolo or Single Malt.

The wine and whisky analogy tells us more besides. We grant that ours is a mainly European list with a heavy Anglophone bias. All the judges apart from me were Anglicans; we’re all too aware of how random our choices will seem to many. The arbitrariness was softened somewhat along the way, though. First, the Church Times’s Editor, Paul Handley, sought pitches from more than a hundred of the paper’s reviewers. Their nominations led to a long-list of 700 titles, and then a shortlist of 120 based on the number of times a given work was proposed. Before meeting in June, the judges (chaired by Martyn Percy, the new Dean of Christ Church, Oxford) ranked the shortlisted works in sextiles – which should be in the top twenty, which in the top forty, and so forth. From this stage a preliminary ranking emerged.

The impact of a given work was judged important, though not sacrosanct. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is a case in point. Though hugely influential in its time and thereafter, it is little read today by non-students and was eventually demoted to eighty-eighth place on our list. The Bible and liturgical works – the Book of Common Prayer and Hymns Ancient and Modern, for instance – were excluded entirely on the grounds of forming such a deep part of church life already.

Large-scale systematizations of Christian belief seemed relatively easy to place. St Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae is third, Sarah Coakley’s God, Sexuality and the Self sixty-fifth, and John Macquarrie’s Principles of Christian Theology eighty-third. Devotional verse and fiction were also popular. I was pleased to see included the Complete Poetry of George Herbert (tenth), T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (eleventh), St John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul (fourteenth), Paradise Lost (sixteenth), the Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (seventeenth), The Brothers Karamazov (twenty-third), Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (seventieth) and Dorothy Sayers’s The Man Born to Be King (seventy-fourth).

The preponderance of male writers in a tradition dominated by patriarchy, despite some striking exceptions, was obvious and, sadly, unavoidable. But classic texts written by women were not overlooked. Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love is ranked fourth, St Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle is twenty-fifth, Simone Weil’s Waiting for God thirtieth, Elisabeth Schussler-Fiorenza’s feminist classic In Memory of Her thirty-fourth, and the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson seventy-seventh.

At the very top stands a unanimous choice: Augustine’s Confessions. Through its stylistic force and sharpness of perception, both psychological and intellectual, this work is still arguably the greatest of all literary self-portraits. For over a millennium, almost all educated people in the Latin West were steeped in this and other works by the fourth- and fifth-century pagan convert who transposed Platonism into a Christian key and ended his days as Bishop of Hippo in north Africa. Augustine is also the only person to feature twice in the top ten: his magnum opus, The City of God, is eighth.

The other top ten works are St Benedict’s Rule (two) – a colossally influential shaper of Christian culture, not only of those called to the religious life – Dante’s Divine Comedy (five), Pascal’s Pensées (six), John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (seven) and Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ.

Asked to nominate one that got away, I opted for Shusaku Endo’s Silence (1966), a searing historical novel documenting the Christian experience in seventeenth-century Japan. Its focus on costly discipleship, including martyrdom, gives the work a melancholy resonance in our own time.