Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity.

Mr. Aeschliman is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Virginia.

ALTHOUGH he could not finish his studies there because of poverty, Dr. Johnson later remarked that Oxford University was "a monument to the excellence of the Christian tradition." The beautifully produced Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity is also such a monument. To be sure, the evidence regarding the present and future health of the excellent tradition is mixed and ambiguous, as a glance at Bryan Wilson's essay on secularization readily shows. "The essence of modernity," Daniel Bell has remarked, "is that nothing is sacred," and this pervasive desacralization is immensely powerful in all Western countries, and indeed throughout the world.

Yet the historical view of reality fostered by this volume gives reason for hope, if not for optimism; hope that Judaeo-Christian "logocentrism" can still, in the words of T. S. Eliot, "renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide." Now that Marxism is everywhere in decline (everywhere but in the humanities and social-science departments of our universities), the other great antagonist has emerged more prominently: the libertarian nihilism pioneered most notably by Nietzsche, and championed by Ayn Rand and more recently by the chic literary deconstructionists. This may well be the cultural contradiction of capitalism" about which such sensitive observers as Daniel Bell, Hilton Kramer, and the late Malcolm Muggeridge have written: that, in the name of self-expression" and liberation," it generates an intellectual despair and a culture of glitzy, contemptible, and absurd rubbish.

This beautifully illustrated volume has separate chapters on the history of Christianity by eminent scholars such as the Chadwick brothers and Basil Mitchell, whose fine essay on "The Christian Culture" reminds one in its judicious orthodoxy of his great short work Morality: Religious and Secular (1981). The coverage of Christianity as a world religion is outstanding, especially the essay on Latin America by Frederick Pike of Notre Dame. Martin Marty's beautifully organized discussion of Christianity in North America should impress even those who may disagree with parts of it.

There is throughout the book a genial tolerance and nuanced comprehension of the varieties of Christian belief and practice throughout the ages and across the map. Nonetheless, the importance of orthodoxy is also stressed, notably in Basil Mitchell's essay, with its outstandingly chosen illustrations from twentieth-century art, documenting contemporary rootlessness, confusion, and absurdism, and contrasting with the humanizing art of the classical-Christian centuries. Like his mentor, C. S. Lewis, Mitchell lucidly defends logocentrism-the continuing insistence upon morality as flowing from the nature of things rather than as a construction of the human mind." As the recent career and thinking of that other moralist, Alasdair MacIntyre, may indicate, our choice is ultimately between the baptized Aristotle of the Judaeo-Christian Natural Law tradition and the various Nietzschean demoralizers, whether radical" or "libertarian."

This long Judaeo-Christian tradition, with all the conflict and conversation within it, is beautifully described and explained in this volume. Christianity's capacity to sustain and transmit the vision of "decent Godly order," in which most human sanity down the ages has been rooted, is surely problematic, but another lesson of this volume is that it has always been problematic. In Gertrude Himmelfarb's magnificent essay "From Clapham to Bloomsbury: A Genealogy of Morals," Miss Himmelfarb describes the tragic nineteenth-century transition from the earnest, moral, Protestant world of the English Victorians to the kinky aesthetic nihilism of Bloomsbury-essentially the transition from an ethical to an aesthetic view of reality. The Bloomsbury "liberation"--from "the importance of being earnest"-gives us a world in which there is nothing obligatory or of ultimate value that is anterior, exterior, or superior to the unique self. Three-quarters of a century after their heyday, the anarchic immoralism of Oscar Wilde, J. M. Keynes, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Lytton Strachey has ceased to be only a minority pursuit of leisured and depraved bohemian sophisticates, and has become a mass-consumer phenomenon.

To it the residual momentum of Judaeo-Christian "logocentrism," so contemptuously assaulted in the academy, ignored in the media, undermined in the marketplace, is the West's only means of restoring sanity. That this tradition is spurned or crucified over and over again by transgressive nihilism may only be proof that it is being loyal to its Lord. This magnificent Oxford history is testimony to the durability and beauty of this Godly tradition, as well as to its rightness. Not only a beautiful art object, this book is a spiritual vademecum as well.