No institution has exercised a more profound influence on Western civilisation than the Roman Catholic church.The phenomenal success of The Da Vinci Code attests to the power it continues to wield over minds and imaginations even when it no longer does so over bodies and souls.
Edward Norman's concise, lucid and thought-provoking illustrated history of the Church is therefore welcome and timely.
Norman, a former Dean of Peterhouse, is said, along with his Cambridge colleagues, Maurice Cowling and Roger Scruton, to have provided a philosophical basis for Mrs Thatcher's policies - a charge he vehemently denies.
Despite his reputation as a controversialist, his position here is impeccably orthodox. He is clearly one of those who "believe that the Church as Christ's body on earth participates in its indefectibility".
Since leaving Cambridge, Norman has been Chanc- ellor of York Minister and is currently curate of St James's, Garlickhythe in the City of London. While he remains an Anglican priest, his sympathies are plainly Roman.
He cannot resist wicked digs at his own denomination, as when he describes Montezuma's suggestion to Cortez that Aztec idols should stand on one side of a temple with the cross on the other as an "Anglican-style compromise".
He regards the Roman Catholic church as directly ordained by Christ: "To be a Christian is to be part of the original apostolic tradition conveyed to the world by those appointed by Christ himself."
He has no problem with the doctrine of papal infallibility, which, while accredited since earliest times, was only codified in 1870 during the pontificate of Pius IX.
Norman has boundless sympathy for his subject. This is not the place to look for an account of the decadence of the Borgia popes, still less the controversy over Pius XII's conduct during the Second World War.
He even manages to shift the blame for the Inquisition by depicting it as a legacy of the 12th century Islamic heresy courts and insisting that it was far more enlightened than the secular courts of its time.
The book offers a clear chronological history, from the early councils through the growth of monasticism and the schism between East and West (officially in 1054, over an arcane dispute about the Holy Ghost, but it had effectively occurred centuries earlier), to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
It shows how the Church's contraction in Europe was matched by an expansion in Asia and the Americas, which revitalised it and made it truly universal.
Norman has no truck with contemporary political correctness. He rightly asks why the Church is asked to apologise for the Crusades while no such demands are made of Islamic bodies regarding their invasion of the Byzantine provinces and Holy Land three centuries earlier.
It was Muslim barbarity and its threat to Christian sites (notoriously, Caliph al-Hakim's destruction of Christ's tomb in 1009) that largely inspired the Crusading ideal.
He is on shakier ground in his account of the Conquistadors. He dismisses the myth of a pre-conquest Golden Age and points out how the missionaries ended mass human sacrifice (just as they later secured the abolition of suttee rites in India).
But, while noting the admirable attempts by religious orders to protect the indigenous people, he makes no mention of the deaths of an estimated 150 million Indians during the 16th and 17th centuries: the greatest genocide in human history and one that took place in the name and, at times, with the connivance, of the Roman Catholic church.
That Church could not wish for a more accomplished apologist than Norman. He offers a sharp, well-argued and witty account (feudalism as "a species of protection racket"; indulgences as "hire-purchase redemption").
He dismisses ecclesiastical and monastic failings as inevitable in institutions run by human beings not by angels (leading to the inevitable question of why those institutions show such little compassion for human frailty).
While admiring Norman's scholarship, it is possible to disagree with his conclusions. I closed the book more convinced than ever that revelation is not to be found in any institution, let alone one that derives its authority from a gospel passage designed to settle a power-struggle in the early church, before turning in relief to Christ's own words that "the Kingdom of God is within you".
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