Ross McCullough’s The Body of This Death: Letters from the Last Archbishop of Lancaster is a remarkable, demanding, haunting book.
It is also a book of the sort that I rarely find in Christian writing: one that refuses to make itself accessible or “easy,” one that has the makings of an instant classic yet demands much of its readership, and one that lingers and rewards re-reading.
Two immediate notes, paramount for this review:
- This text requires much of its readers. It is not an academic text per se; it is not attempting to be a scholarly work. It is, rather, what is called an epistolary novel: a fictional work composed entirely of the titular Archbishop’s letters. But it is a deeply academic novel, one saturated with Scripture, Dostoevsky, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, among others. There is a brief glossary—but much of the intellectual and Scriptural references from our Archbishop go unexplained, as they would in any normal written letter from one individual to another. If you don’t know your Scripture well, if you think Kierkegaard is a Danish snack brand, if you don’t know who Ivan is, or if the words “Pascal’s wager” don’t mean anything to you, then you are going to find this book quite a lot of work before you can glean any reward from it. Know this going in.
- The book showcases a distinctly Catholic theology. This means references to Catholic theologians and thinkers, of course, and references to the Eucharist and saints and purgatory and to the Virgin Mary and the desert fathers—but it also means an emphasis on the Incarnation, on embodiment, on suffering and obedience. That does not mean the book isn’t for all Christians. In Christianity Today, Brad East writes a compelling argument for why Protestant evangelicals ought to read this book (spoiler: for the same reasons we read Lewis), but I would also posit that the Catholicism of the book is precisely what makes it so rich. In fact, given the setting and world outlined in the book, one can’t imagine anything other than a distinctly Catholic response. The emphasis on embodiment, the deep understanding of and focus on sacrifice and death and suffering offer a rich Christian color in a fictional world largely drained of anything…well, real.
The plot of the book is fairly simple: the novel itself is a collection of letters gathered together by a fictional scholar in a not-so-distant future, the only evidence remaining of the Archbishop’s communications. The characters addressed or discussed in these letters by the Archbishop are few: fellow priests and a sister, an agnostic, the Muslim Ms. Bushra, the Archbishop’s goddaughter Felicity, a self-proclaimed Ludite (the missing d is intentional), and, eventually, the Archbishop’s “Inquisitors.”
But it is the world sketched out in the Archbishop’s letters that unnerves and haunts, for it is not very different from our own in some ways (or from where our own seems to be headed). Immersive Reality (IR) and a proliferation of media have saturated society, resulting in a simulacra-driven world to which the most dangerous threat are “cloudhackers” with the capability of bringing that system down, even briefly. Death, with the capability of transferring one’s consciousness, has simply become “dematerialization.” A progressive, global Islamic religion (divorced, seemingly, even from itself) and the separation of sign from signifier mean that everything and yet nothing is true all at once. The greatest of sins, it seems, is to choose for tradition rather than against it.
Into this world, and from it, writes the Archbishop: on the nature of love and of faith and of obedience, on Christian sacrifice, on abjuring the world, on what it means to die and to prepare for death, and on what it means to suffer. The narrator is brilliant and well-read, but humble enough to confess his foibles (he admits sheepishly to the periodic use of IR himself); he challenges others in argument; he is at times mystified and frustrated by his growing goddaughter; he is a clarion call to truth in a world where that no longer seems in any meaningful form to exist.
This makes for exquisite writing on faith. On suffering, the Archbishop notes that:
“Pain is not the wound; pain is the reaction to the wound. Suffering is not alienation from God but a reaction against alienation, a protest that begins from some inarticulate depth inside of us—the depth from which articulations come. That is why it is holy…”
To his “Inquisitors”, he writes:
“Why has Christianity lasted so long? It is a religion of suffering well. And here you are, prophets of the easy commandment, priests of the empty altar. But even with your bastardized technologies and your bastardized religions, you must feel at some level the insufficiency of it all. Perhaps especially you. …it is no use to kill the Minotaur if you lose the golden thread.”
And:
“It is not the savior that flees the world but the world that flees its salvation. You think you are here to discipline me, but perhaps the nails run the other way.”
I was impressed not just by the spiritual depth of the work but by what it chooses against. Yes, a progressive global Islam is the prevailing faith system of the era (we hear as an incidental that the Auschwitz memorial is dilapidated) but McCullough takes care to avoid rousing anti-Islamic sentiment. What has emerged in the world inhabited by the Archbishop is a complex system, and one has the impression that this global Islam might as well be any religion, or no religion at all; the letters between the Archbishop and Ms. Bushra, in which they converse about their beliefs, illustrate the common ground they both share in this bewildering world and prove respectful even in difference.
And though McCullough takes a few pokes at very “of the moment” issues (the Archbishop casually mentions a “second Pill” that allows people to uncouple sexual intercourse from inconvenient sentiment or feelings), he seems much more interested as a general rule in examining a broad world in which a new Dark Age is anchored by endless simulacra, the desire to engineer deathless life, and technology that renders the body and even meaning irrelevant. This isn’t a book necessarily trying to make an argument about a specific political issue (although it certainly can); it wants to illustrate for us, from the long arcs of our politics and our economic priorities and our desires, the society we intend to become.
This book haunts and sometimes hurts. In that, for me, it differs (in a good way) from Lewis’ Screwtape. Although there are moments of humor or at least wry sidelong glances (the Archbishop at one point refers to “Post-Protestants,” pointing out that Protestants can’t very well call themselves that when they stop reading the Scripture they claimed to give primacy), the book’s primary themes are sacrifice, suffering, and loss—and all in the name and service of Christ. Death is addressed in the very first letter, and that our titular character will be martyred is made plain by the novel’s very title. Though the novel does not linger overmuch on the Archbishop’s personality or his interests or desires, I found myself weeping at what becomes of him in the same way we all weep for the loss of truth and goodness and beauty.
In closing, I’ll say that reading this book made me understand in a new way the evils of our modern age, the darkness in it, the deep and foul harm in what we have allowed ourselves to be and become and continue to be and become—what we’re really doing with our media and our AI and our pharmaceutical responses and our belief that life is ours to control. The Archbishop serves as a reminder of what Christ genuinely asks of us: not an Instagram-bright journey of prosperity promises, but to walk in truth and light and love and faith while knowing what it costs. To understand that suffering is a form of practice for what we are asked, as believers, to endure.
He comes, writes the Archbishop in one of his letters. And it is that truth around which our main character revolves, the answer at the heart of everything, the Meaning that cannot be lost and the truth for which all sacrifice is worthy.
I will not recommend this book unequivocally. It’s a toughie. It is most certainly not for everyone. But The Body of This Death, if it is for you and you are willing to work through it and with it, will grant you much, and leave its traces behind. You won’t leave unchanged.
Samaritan's Song 