Eamon Duffy on Norwich's Papacy

Following on Marc's post below about John Julius Norwich's new book about the history of the papacy, I recently came across a review of Norwich's book by Eamon Duffy in the Times Literary Supplement. One might have already been suspicious upon learning that Norwich devotes an entire chapter to the anti-papal satirical legend of Pope Joan, which Bill Keller highlighted in his NY Times review--it's as if a history of the American presidency included an earnest and lengthy examination of the fable of George Washington's refusal to tell a lie when he cut down his father's cherry tree. Duffy--who actually knows something about the history of the papacy and upon whose book Saints and Sinners (Yale UP, 1997) Norwich extensively relies--is not impressed (and calls to mind the scene in "A Fish Called Wanda" when Wanda has to tell Otto that "Aristotle was not Belgian" and "the principle of Buddhism is not 'every man for himself'"):

[Norwich] is not, by his own account, greatly interested in religion, and defines his book as “essentially political, cultural and, up to a point, social”. Occasionally, he warns us, “basic matters of doctrine cannot be avoided”, but as far as possible “I have tried to steer well clear of theology”. This is probably just as well, to judge by the declaration in his opening paragraph that “Roman Catholicism began with Christianity itself; all other Christian religions – and there are more than 22,000 of them – are offshoots or deviations from it”, a claim liable to trigger apoplexy in Constantinople and Cairo, Geneva and Canterbury, and which might elicit a raised eyebrow even in the Vatican. And on theological matters at any rate, errors abound: St Luke was not the author of the earliest gospel, St Peter did not write the epistles which go under his name, Athanasius was never an archbishop, Greek was not the dominant language of the Roman liturgy in the fourth century, St Peter’s Basilica was a cemetery church and never a cathedral, St Jerome was not an Italian, Constantine was not baptized by Eusebius of Caesarea, we do not know the purpose of Gregory VII’s Dictatus papae, and they were certainly never “published”.

....

The Popes is an entertaining book which tells some good stories and embraces a large historical sweep. But its overall effect is curiously trivializing. The papacy depicted here is in the end unintelligible, its power to inspire and its centrality over two millennia of Christian development reduced to a handful of vivid personalities and the to and fro of power politics. Anyone seeking to understand more of the inwardness of the world’s most enduring religious institution will have to look elsewhere.