For the first twenty-one years of my life, I was under the illusion that I had no history. Like most Americans, I was more concerned with what I would make of myself than what the past had made in me. But when I first entered the medieval cathedral of Salisbury, I was confronted with something new that staked its claim on me: a dead thing destined for resurrection.
On one side of the nave was a dark stone sarcophagus. Its intricate carving, so brilliantly worked, was now worn by the passing of centuries. A sign read, “Walter, first Lord Hungerford.” It mentioned his ties to kings Henry V and Henry VI, his service at the Battle of Agincourt, and his installment as a Knight of the Garter. Yet, none of this mattered half as much as the fact that Walter was my ancestor—a man whose existence was tied to my own.
I stood there powerfully aware that the bones within that tomb shared DNA with my own living flesh. It was the first time I thought of myself as anything but American, for I realized my ties to England were not merely emotional. Here too was bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.
I learned something that day. The past is not a series of isolated events consigned to memory. It is a reality awaiting resurrection—a beacon pointing us to eternity—and the greatest thing that will be resurrected is the church of Jesus Christ.
“A people without history / Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern / Of timeless moments.” Thus wrote T.S. Eliot in his poem “Little Gidding,” the last of his Four Quartets, in what I have always suspected was a reference to his country of birth. Eliot found something different in England: a land steeped in history, which bore traces of past enchantment.
East Anglia is one such place. Here generations of pilgrims journeyed to visit the shrine of St. Edmund the martyr king and pray before the image of Our Lady of Walsingham. Here Julian of Norwich recorded her mystical encounters with the divine. In this land shaped by the will of water, the Saxon princess Etheldreda founded a monastery on a sacred isle in The Fens. They called it Ely after the eels that multiplied in the marsh. Some mornings, when the fog would settle over those waters, you could see the church rise from the mist as if by magic, brilliant in the first rays of dawn.
“We call them a ‘fen damp’,” explains Francis Young, lay canon of St. Edmundsbury Cathedral and historian of religion. “A fen damp is a particular kind of fog that is absolutely horrible and gets into your bones.” Such conditions are less than ideal for farmers and holiday makers but were grist to the mill of medieval monastics.
This was a place at the end of existence—a refuge from the world, the flesh, and the devil. “Remote islands offered not only solitude but, more importantly, the conditions for spiritual testing,” Ed Newell writes, noting the preference of early monastic houses in the British Isles to position themselves on the water’s edge. These were sacred sites where time met eternity. As Eliot puts it in “Little Gidding,”
“There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.”
King Canute paid Ely a visit in the tenth century. Approaching by boat, he could hear the chanting of the consecrated brothers. “Row, lads, nearer the land, and let us hear the monks’ song,” he implored. Such are the tales that have shaped this most enchanted isle.
Enchantment is defined by the philosopher Charles Taylor in his work A Secular Age as, “the world of spirits, demons, moral forces which our predecessors acknowledged. The process of disenchantment is the disappearance of this world, and the substitution of what we live today: a world in which the only locus of thoughts, feelings, spiritual élan is what we call minds…” Some long for the return of that enchanted world. To every Nick Carraway who claims, “You can’t repeat the past,” they respond incredulously, “Why, of course you can!”
But why should I mourn as dead that which lives in me? Why should I lament as distant that to which I am joined in love and longing? And what of resurrection, that final miracle of God? As Eliot so wisely noted in his poem “Burnt Norton,”
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.”
The history of Ely’s cathedral is a microcosm of the history of the English church. In its breaking and remaking, we see the promise of resurrection unfolding here and now.
The church at Ely was made a cathedral in 1109 and became one of England’s finest examples of Norman and early Gothic architecture. In 1321, further construction began on a Lady Chapel featuring a series of carved scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary. The craftsmen were still laboring when the cathedral’s central tower collapsed, destroying the work of generations. The chief builder, Alan of Walsingham, was “devastated, grieving vehemently and overcome with sorrow,” for “he knew not which way to turn himself or what to do for the reparation of such a ruin.”
Yet, when his eyes were cleared of tears, Alan of Walsingham glimpsed an opportunity amid disaster. He would not reconstruct the tower in its original form but create a wonder of engineering and beauty without equal in the kingdom. Instead of a standard square, the tower was shaped as an octagon, with eight points likely signifying eternity. An additional lantern tower was set upon its crown, with a central image of Christ in majesty. Here was a symbol of the beatific vision drawing the mind to things eternal. Young notes that the vast open space is more typical of Baroque churches than their Gothic predecessors, creating a sense of majesty that “has to be seen to be believed.” As with the wheels in Dante’s Paradiso, the eyes of the viewer are drawn upward and inward to Christ himself.
The disaster of the sixteenth century provided no such consolation. The commissioners of King Henry VIII compelled the monks to abandon their habits and surrender the church. Unlike many abbey churches in England, the cathedral of Ely was too significant to be disbanded and stripped for parts. It was reborn as a cathedral in the independent Church of England, but on one thing the authorities insisted: Etheldreda must be forgotten. Her shrine was destroyed—the line of pilgrims ended. Previously the Cathedral of St. Etheldreda and St. Peter, it was rededicated to the Holy and Undivided Trinity. The images in the Lady Chapel were smashed, the face of Mary scratched out with a vengeance. Statues were removed from their elaborately carved niches.
Tim Guile, Chair of the English Catholic History Association, notes that reactions to this disaster were decidedly mixed, with some active resistance but substantially more passive resistance, and still others who accepted it as a fait accompli. “I think that people kind of went along with it because they had no choice, but then a lot of people rejected it as well.” This led to a culture of hidden relics, priests, and allegiances amid a climate of political uncertainty as successive monarchs veered from Reformed to Romanist Christianity and back again.
Much of what had made Ely was destroyed in those days, left as refuse for the fires of time to consume. The Fens themselves were drained to create rich, arable land, an action Young describes as “probably the greatest ecological catastrophe that Britain has ever faced.” Once, fishers and fowlers dominated that region, studying every dip and sway of the land, moving across it with a skill hard won through trial and error. Now, farmers plowed the fields and Ely itself was accessed not by boat or bridge, but carriages moving on paved roads.
Yet, the morning fog still lingered over those low-lying plains of peat, and the cathedral stood as a reminder of all that came before, stripped as it was of much of its former glory. Though the color was drained from its walls and the Lady Chapel bore scars of violence, it offered the body and blood of Christ to generation after generation, for the world never ceases in enchantment. The unseen realm is an established fact. It is only our acknowledgment of this fact that waxes and wanes in season.
For those who believed, Ely remained a lantern drawing them to their hearts’ home. Like a plant gone dormant in winter’s chill, it needed the warmth of new fire to enliven it: the Spirit of God himself. For in that heat, its rose would bloom again.
It is no sacrilege to speak of the death of Ely or that of the English church. As G. K. Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man, “Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died.” The history of Ely is tied to that of East Anglia, and it has felt every shock that has pummeled that land: the coming of the Normans, the Black Death, the Peasant’s Revolt. Yet, the Reformation stands as the greatest cataclysm to strike the cathedral, for it brought the death of the monastery and the end of the vision laid out by Etheldreda.
Christianity in England would face further shocks in the coming years. Not only were the faithful of the Church of England separated from Nonconformists, but they were increasingly forced to reckon with the death of religion itself. By the Victorian period, the claims of Christianity were openly dismissed by many of the kingdom’s leading intellectuals. The process of secularization continued apace, and churches began emptying in the twentieth century. By 2021, less than half the population of England and Wales described themselves as “Christian” for the first time in the history of record keeping.
But though the Victorians questioned religion, they were also fans of revivalist art and architecture. The nave ceiling of Ely Cathedral was painted with a series of figures from the Old and New Testaments. The Virgin Mary, once banished from the chapel that bore her name, was featured in the penultimate panel. Just above her, the figure of Christ was seated upon his throne, his fingers making the sign of blessing over all who passed below.
This was the era in which Chesterton was born, and he saw in the machinations of history an important spiritual truth: that which has lived must die, but that which dies must live again. For the upheavals of our present day are not fundamentally different from those of the past, and the same Redeemer stands above them all. As he stated in The Everlasting Man, “It is already clear, and grows clearer every day, that [Christianity] is not going to end in the disappearance of the diminished creed; but rather in the return of those parts of it that had really disappeared.”
The Christian heritage of England is not monolithic, but multitudinous. “I think that there is always that sense of a slightly contested legacy between the Church of England and the Catholic Church in England,” Young acknowledges. “Who is the inheritor of this medieval inheritance? But at the same time, relations between the Catholic Church in Ely and the cathedral in Ely are very cordial.”
Guile likewise has no desire to make cathedrals like Ely a flashpoint in a new confessional struggle. “They’re just part of our shared culture and history and heritage, which is shared between Catholics and Anglicans. Things happened in the 16th century: unfortunate things, bad things happened on all sides, really. But that’s the past. That’s gone.”
As a Catholic convert, Chesterton was highly aware of the fissures which cut through the English church, their fault lines still visible in the walls of Ely Cathedral. But he understood the church’s eternal destiny is to be joined to her perfect husband, in whom she is united and by whose blood she is purified. Those who die with Christ will also be raised with him. “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.”
In 1973, while on a tour of the United Kingdom, the famed conductor Leonard Bernstein sought a venue to film a performance of Gustav Mahler’s Second “Resurrection” Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra. Given the religious themes of this work, with its epic choral finale proclaiming, “Rise again, yes, you will rise again, my heart, in an instant!”, Bernstein chose Ely Cathedral as the setting, with the orchestra and choir positioned directly beneath the octagon.
The video of this performance has had tremendous staying power in the world of classical music. Its creators made an interesting decision that could easily escape notice. In the final bars of the symphony, as the choir has proclaimed the promise of resurrection, the camera scans the painted ceiling of the nave, taking in each scene until, as the music reaches its crescendo, it settles on the figure of Christ enthroned with his fingers raised in benediction.
Not judgment at the end, but a blessing upon those called by his name, to whom he bids, “Come!” For that which we cannot heal, he will resurrect.
God does his work in millennia. History is not an inevitability brought about by human will, but a tapestry of contingencies both colorful and bold, woven by the one who holds our days in his hands. The convulsions of the moment may not be what they seem. What if these disasters are not tragedies at all, but the purging fire of the Holy Spirit come to kindle Christ’s church anew? Then let us cry with the Psalmist, “Purge me with hyssop!” For as Eliot told us in “Little Gidding,” the only choice is between two fires that burn eternally.
“The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire."
There is no earthly remedy for this division of Protestants and Catholics, conservatives and liberals, high church and low church. We feel the absence of enchantment, the silence of the divine. But we forget the promise made to us: the descent of Pentecostal fire, the granting of life to things long dead. All that is good, beautiful, and true finds its being in Christ, and Christ is risen. The good that was then and the good that is today stand united with the good that will be when we behold our Savior face to face, for all that is good will rise again.
It is tempting to believe that in visiting a place like Ely, we can judge between the righteous and the damned, the keepers of truth and the heretics. The history of the English church tells of conflict between sects, with each believing events moved toward its own justification. But while the truth of God is essential and unchanging, it is not up to us to save the church. The beginning of virtue is a cry for mercy: an admission that only Christ himself can resurrect us.
God did not bring you here to conquer or to justify yourself, but to stand amazed before the mystery that encompasses your existence. For this is something greater than the machinations of man in history, which fills us with a holy fear that is also the rapture of divine love. As the unicorn proclaims at the end of C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, “The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, and further in!”
We long for historic enchantment—a return to the good religion of the past—but they longed to see our day. In truth, there has never been an end of enchantment or a lessening of transcendence. The same choice is always laid before humanity. For we are bound to them as bone of our bones and to our Savior as flesh of his flesh. In him, time past and time present are one. The remedy for our disenchanted age is not to go backward, but further up and further in to the mystery of Christ. For it is he who resurrects his bride, uniting the disparate parts of the church militant into a single church triumphant. The history of Ely speaks to the failures of the church and the mercies of God.
Resurrection is not the declaration of a winner—a final result of our historical contest. It is a gathering together of all that is true, good, and beautiful: the transformation of the ages into a new and glorious form, united forever, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb who sits triumphant on his throne, making the sign of blessing over us, declaring, “Peace be with you.” Not condemnation in the end, but reconciliation, the union of all things in Christ, both in heaven and on earth. In this holy fire, a rose will bloom, as T.S. Eliot wrote so beautifully in the closing lines of “Little Gidding,” drawing on the mystic Julian of Norwich.
“And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”
As Ely has been resurrected, we too shall be. We make for our home eternal. The church of Jesus Christ will rise again.