TO GOD'S GLORY & THE HONOR OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 1782

The above inscription, on boards suspended from the roof of a parish church in Somerton, Somerset, ‘served … as an inspiration towards’ Betjeman's writing of English Parish Churches (BB 172). His introduction to the book begins: ‘To atheists, inadequately developed building sites …’ (BB 172) – a sentiment developed in his own way by Philip Larkin in parts of ‘Church Going’. Yet arguments on behalf of atheism, agnosticism, or, indeed, monotheism miss Betjeman's key religious perception: that Anglican Christianity is less about either philosophy or theology than about a sacred caritas revealed in hallowed places and buildings, consecrated customs and rituals, dedicated music making, flower arranging, days of special observance or celebration, and reverence for time-honoured ‘petits récits’ – most particularly from the Bible and Prayer Book. Betjeman's religious genius is to convey this yet, in extremis, to question its adequacy:

Here the poet expresses the essence of any honest religious feeling – the gulf between socialized forms of belief and faith-initself, and the unworthiness of the believer. There is surely no reason to endorse Betjeman's sense of personal inadequacy – it is those who lack such who are preposterous (and often dangerous). The poet's profound sense of limitations precisely inspires his genuine virtues – tolerance, humour, and generosity of spirit.

In this, Betjeman's represented Christianity is less an idiosyncratic throwback than a prophetic intimation of a Double Millennium devotio postmoderna. His religious poetry, I suggest, has less in common with ecclesiastical ‘radical orthodoxy’ than with Erasmus's ecumenically forward-looking In Praise of Folly. A recent commentary on Erasmus's text, in Patrick Grant's Literature and Personal Values, has considerable relevance to the poet's work: