High King Of Heaven

by Benedicta Ward

It was not until after the conversion of the English to Christianity that any sustained information was written down about Christian life in these islands. This was done in the eigth century by the monk Bede, and it is mostly through his writings that it is possible to be in touch with the first Christians in England and to know about what they thought and did. Ward looks at this "golden age" of English Christianity, how it ended with the attacks of the Vikings and the "golden age" of faith and culture which followed in the tenth century.

132 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Benedicta Ward, SLG was a British Anglican nun, theologian, and historian who specialized in early Christian spirituality and medieval theology. She was a lifelong member of the Community of the Sisters of the Love of God at Fairacres in Oxford.

Ward is best known for popularizing the Apophthegmata Patrum through her translation, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, alongside major contributions to the study of St. Anselm of Canterbury, the Venerable Bede, and medieval miracles, including The Prayers and Meditations of St. Anselm and Miracles and the Medieval Mind.

Reviews

[Gille Liath · Rating 3 out of 5]

A reasonably interesting little book, mainly based on literary evidence, about Christian practice in Anglo-Saxon England. Only, the author avoids the term Anglo-Saxon 'as it might be thought intended as a contrast with Celtic', preferring 'early English'; and although you'd swear that someone called Benedicta Ward would be Irish-Catholic, in fact she was that rare bird, an Anglican nun. In writing this she looks for the supposedly characteristically English compromise, and for the seeds of an English national church in what was not thought by anyone at the time to be anything other than simply a region of the Catholic church.

Arguably this is claiming as a national trait, and a cause of history, what is actually its result: the founders of the C of E had little choice but to attempt a compromise between Protestant and Catholic if they were to please their Tudor masters. Afterwards the church made a virtue of necessity and claimed that compromise was the best possible approach to the faith; but I'm not sure that it is, actually. And even the title of this book naturally brings to mind the medieval Irish hymn, Rop Tu Mo Baile or Be Thou My Vision.

It would certainly have livened the book up to have included more about the lives of the early English saints, many of whom were actually Irish; in fact English spirituality of this era, in the north anyway, was simply Irish spirituality. And a few more pictures would also have been nice. Still, this includes some things that I haven't seen elsewhere and was interested to learn; and to stress the Englishness of the early church is at least a change from the fetish of a separate (and largely imaginary) 'Celtic Christianity'.

[Perry Pennington · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was a history of devotional practice and beliefs of Anglo-Saxon Christians in England, under the guidance of those who brought them Christianity- Celtic and Roman missionaries. The significance and meaning of the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s creed are discussed in detail, with a generous mixture of explanatory quotes from the writings of Bede and others.