The Book of Books

by Melvyn Bragg

  Joseph Priestley, another Fellow of the Royal Society in the late eighteenth century and the man credited with the discovery of oxygen, saw a direct link between the right religion (in his case Dissenting Protestantism) and the right kind of natural knowledge. He used his chemical and electrical experiments to promote his Dissenting views about the character of divinity. In the nineteenth century, Michael Faraday saw no gap between his world-changing experiments and his severe nonconformist Sandemanian religious faith. In the twentieth century, Arthur Eddington, another Fellow, was clear about the basic unity of his own spirituality as a Quaker and the principles of modern physics. He argued that mystical religious experience and modern physical science were entirely consistent. Newton saw God as the direct cause of gravity and as for God’s place, he argued that space itself was ‘as it were, God’s sensorium’.

  There were others, and among the most distinguished and radically innovative of the Fellows was the botanist John Ray, who wrote The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation. James Clerk Maxwell (1831 – 79), such a seminal influence on Einstein, underwent an evangelical conversion as a student in Cambridge. His biographer wrote that ‘he referred to it long afterwards as having given him a new perception of the Love of God – one of his strongest convictions thenceforward was that “Love abideth, though knowledge vanish away”.’ Even Darwin was sure that his account of speciation with natural selection as one of its engines was not logically connected with atheism.

  Lord Kelvin (1824 – 1907), an important contributor to thermodynamics, gave a famous affirmative address to the Christian Evidence Society. Sir Robert Boyd (1922 – 2004), pioneer in British space science, founded the Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship. Of those still living, Charles Hard Townes won the Nobel Prize in Physics and wrote The Convergence of Science and Religion. John Polkinghorne, a prize-winning British particle physicist, is an Anglican priest and author of Science and the Trinity. Simon Schaffer, the Cambridge Professor of the Philosophy of Science, believes that there is an aspect of natural theology that characterised the emergent function of the Royal Society. He talks of early modern providentialism.

  In 1649, a king had been executed, but only after a trial and that trial had been seamed with references to what was accepted as the ultimate authority, the Bible. If you could execute a king who claimed to rule by Divine Right, what could you not do? But the Bible had been the key to that and it was believed that it would also unlock the new knowledge. There seemed so much in common. The need for science to discover a First Cause, for example, seems to have been transferred directly from religion into science. Newton’s search for an order, a single unifying force in the universe, came from his faith in Genesis. Gravity was God’s other face.

  In his book The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science Peter Harrison has written convincingly on this theme. He writes of the collapse of previous interpretations of the Bible at about this time. ‘The Protestant reformers . . . in their search for an unambiguous religious authority insisted that the book of scripture be interpreted only in its literal, historical sense.’ He argues that ‘the new way in which the bible was read by Protestants played a central role in the emergence of natural science in the 17th century.’ And he points out that the majority of those who formed the Royal Society were hard-reading Bible men; Protestantism had a direct influence on the emergence of modern science.

  This is a new way of reading the Bible – for its history, and for verification of the science of the day. Moses, for instance, Harrison writes, became ‘the father of history’, an author and natural philosopher, a historical figure who had written ‘a factual account of the first ages of the earth’. He goes on to say, ‘the contents of the Book of Genesis attracted new descriptions: “the history of creation” ; “scripture history”; “surpasses all the accounts of Philosophers as much in Wisdom as it doth in authority”.’ Moses was seen as an author and his intentions were taken to be at the very least on a par with those of the Fellows of the Royal Society.

  Within this ‘history’ was to be found all sorts of knowledge including knowledge of the sciences which would reinforce what the seventeenth-century scientists were doing and put them in the tradition of true faith as well as providing a tradition out of which their new science could validly grow.

  The Garden of Eden, which in medieval interpretations had been full of allegorical and psychological meanings, was now seen as a particular place on the planet, though there were complaints that not enough information had been provided as to where exactly it was. Seventeenth-century authors tried to remedy that with numerous suggestions as to the precise location. The Bible was being tested in a similar way to that in which the scientists were testing the weight of air or the content of various seeds.

  Similarly with Noah’s Flood. Out went the charming elaborations of the Middle Ages. The new literalism and the confidence which Bible readers now had led directly to scientific probing. Where was the Flood? Other questions followed. ‘Where did the waters come from?’ writes Peter Harrison. ‘And where did they eventually go? What mutations of the earth took place as a result of the Deluge? How, wondered the moderns, could the great catalogue of creatures whose lives were to be preserved for the impending inundation be physically housed in a vessel of the specified dimensions? . . . How was the craft constructed, how navigated, by what means did Noah assemble his cargo, where were the provisions stored, how were fox and fowl kept apart?’ And if they could not quarry the evidence out of the Bible, the assumption would be that the original author had not wanted to confuse his largely ignorant readership with too much detail. The new, modern readers were very ready to supply this out of their own scholarship. Or it was argued that the gaps were due to faulty transmission, patchy texts, omissions which again could be repaired by the moderns.

  Some of the scientists, especially among the Presbyterians, were already well practised in finding their own present in the Bible’s past. The villainous kings of the Old Testament, Ahab, Saul, Nimrod, Nebuchadnezzar, had been vigorously likened to Charles I and, in the case of some of the Puritan extremists, with every other king who had ever sat on a throne.

  Yet the balance was kept. The demands on the Bible were not so fierce as to kill the scientific or natural philosophical goose that laid the golden egg. Its primary purpose was to teach the most important matter in this earthly life – the way to attain salvation and enjoy eternal life. It reinforced and intellectually spurred on scientific enquiry, but the divergences were already apparent to those who wanted to winkle them out.

  Harrison writes: ‘Isaac Newton also believed that the new discoveries in the sciences were in fact re-discoveries of ancient truths, traces of which could be found in a variety of texts, including Scripture. The priest-scientists of antiquity, he believed, had known of atomic theory, the existence of the vacuum, universal gravitation and the inverse square law.’ One task the new scientists had was, through their experiments on the Book of Nature, to reinforce the respectability of that other book, the Scriptures, passages of which had been lost or adulterated. Newton’s belief that the fate of the solar system, following his theory, would bring it to destruction and then restoration was exactly what had been predicted in the Bible. Q.E.D.

  The new studies in chemistry which ran alongside a deep interest in alchemy (Newton spent as much time on alchemy as on mathematics) gave some scientists the notion that they would find the way in which God had created the world out of chaos by pursuing their experiments which included efforts to renew life from ashes. Transmutations were everywhere, wrote Lady Ann Conway in 1692: ‘Barley and wheat are convertible one into the other; worms change into flies, and the earth brings formed creatures without sex.’ Resurrection would be just another transmutation.

  The theories of these scientists were criticised and often mocked, especially by scientists in Europe who did not understand or sympathise with this religious strain in Anglo-Saxon science. And since then m
any of the claims about Moses and Noah and others have been discredited or laughed off the page. Yet there was what Harrison calls ‘a phase during which the literal truth of scripture and the theoretical truths of the new science were believed to coincide exactly’. Initially the intellectual energy, social acceptability and moral authority that science gained through such a close association with the King James Bible were undoubtedly of benefit to the scientists.

  Robert Hooke, Newton’s contemporary, a genius at microscopy, wrote that the more objects were magnified ‘the more we discover the imperfections of our senses, and the Omnipotency and Infinite perfections of the great Creator’. John Edwards declared that ‘an Insect is an Argument of the Divine Wisdom as well as an animal of the first magnitude.’ God was to be found first in nature or nature’s Bible. The written Scriptures were then to be examined to provide corroboration.

  Christianity assumed that the world was intelligible. So and perhaps, therefore, did modern science. There had to be a first cause because Newton knew it was there: It was God. In the formative years of the seventeenth century it could be said that the King James Bible joined religion and science together in a marriage which has just about held despite massive bombardment.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LANGUAGE

  While Shakespeare contributed more to the word-hoard, the Bible contributed more to the idioms, the catchphrases, expressions now native to English speaking, phrases that have been used and reworked ever since.

  In terms of the long-term effect, I think that the Bible has it. Shakespeare has been read and heard by millions: the Bible by hundreds of millions. Shakespeare – who was Bible-bottomed – has infiltrated the imagination of generations, but only relatively recently that of the masses of the people. The King James Bible worked its many effects for centuries, was read in churches and assemblies and in schools and on solemn and formal occasions all over Britain, America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and scores of other countries. Moreover, for much of that time and for many people now, it was not only and not principally a book of fine words but the book of the great faith. Indeed, for millions along the way, it was the Word of God through His prophets and of Christ through His Apostles: language was seen as the subordinate clause of its impact.

  By the time of Tyndale the English language was reaping a golden harvest. There was the rock of Anglo-Saxon – still the fundament – the subject-verb-object organisation often of monosyllables that again and again carry rich meaning in brief expression. ‘Let there be light’, or from Shakespeare, ‘To be or not to be’ – arguably the two best known quotations from the Bible and Shakespeare. There are thousands of others. Then there was the input of the Norse which freckled the language with tough words and hammered off the encrustations of Germanic grammar. Norman-French brought a bounty of new words and also words which ran alongside the old – ‘archer and bowman’ for instance, which give the language synonyms, slyness and subtlety, qualities embellished when the more fashionable French of Paris was adopted by the court in London.

  Under that was the inheritance of the Latin of the Roman Catholic Church, shards of Greek and, from British seamen, the plunder from foreign languages, fifty of which appear in Shakespeare.

  Having survived for about 300 years the stultifying and oppressive domination of the Normans, English re-emerged, enriched and enlarged. It reappeared, regrouped, ready for action, bursting, it seemed, to make its name in the world.

  In the early fifteenth century, the hero warrior king Henry V broke with the past and sent home his letters from the battlefields of France not as was customary in the language of the court (French) but in English. Chaucer had emerged, an instant success, as the new voice and father of English literature. Grammar schools began to teach English and halfway through the fourteenth century, the first of the York Mystery Plays was produced – in English – and had a heartening reception.

  And the English dialects, the riot and confusion of English spellings were set on the road to coherence by two engines. The first was the Signet Office located in the still existing Great Hall of Parliament. Henry V decreed it should use English. But what English? The variety was profligate: there were dozens of words for church – kyrk, kric, cherche, chorche, schyrche, ssherch. Though it is hard to credit, there were 500 ways of spelling the word ‘through’ and over sixty ways to spell ‘she’, but so it was. ‘People’ went into dozens – ‘peple, pepul, pepulle, poepul, puple, pople . . .’. ‘Receive’ could be ‘rasaive, rassaif, rassave, resaf, resaive, resseyve . . .’.

  The scribes of the Signet Office took it to the Chancery which was responsible for the paperwork which legislated for the kingdom. The twelve senior clerks, the Master of Chancery, and their twenty-four assistants or cursitors, and their clerks and sub-clerks got to work. The work was to regularise the language in such a way that the law of the land would be clear from coast to coast as it had been in Latin. Evidence in court had to have words widely understood and agreed on. Chancery decided that it would be ‘such’ and not ‘sich, sych, seche, swiche . . .’.

  The second engine was the printing press: William Caxton, born about 1420, learned the craft in Bruges and came back to London where eventually he set up his press in 1476 and changed the way the world worked and was perceived. One of his first printings was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which has never been out of print since. By the end of the fifteenth century, English was the language of the state, and increasingly of the law and of literature. Ripe for any purpose. The last fortress it had to conquer was that of the self-appointed, or, as they believed, divinely ordained, keepers of the eternal Kingdom of God, the Roman Catholic Church.

  And that Church, with the help of the crown, made it as difficult as it possibly could. The language of the Greatest Authority and His Representative on Earth was Latin and it belonged to them. The Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, with its radical call for equality based on biblical slogans, had captured the Tower of London, executed the Archbishop of Canterbury and very nearly toppled the court. This had frightened the establishment badly. The reaction was draconian. The English peasants were not to be armed with the Bible in their own tongue. This was presented as an aesthetic argument – the English language was too coarse and rude to be permitted to carry the Words of God which were already cast in lines of antique beauty.

  As the Bible historian Alister McGrath points out: ‘In 1407 Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, banned the Bible in English. “We therefore legislate and ordain that nobody shall from this day forth translate any text of Holy Scripture on his own authority into English.” ’ Translating the Bible into English became a heresy punishable by death: usually death by being burned at the stake. Even as late as 1513, the Dean of St Paul’s was suspended just for translating the Lord’s Prayer into English.

  Yet English would no longer be excluded. When it could legally be read or read aloud, as in the case of Chaucer, it was; when the Bible was banned in English, the Wycliffe translation found its voice in secret locations. The force was with it. One of Henry VIII’s advisers noted in 1527: ‘the universal people of this realm had great pleasure and gave themselves greatly to the reading of the vulgar English tongue.’ Yet in Oxford and Cambridge, even a hundred years later, 99 per cent of their libraries were in Latin.

  So when the translation of Tyndale was printed abroad and smuggled in (often unbound in bales of cloth) there was hunger for it. William Malden recollected reading Tyndale’s New Testament in the late 1520s: ‘Divers poor men in the town of Chelmsford . . . where my father dwelt and I born and with him grew up, the said poor men bought the New Testament of Jesus Christ and on Sundays did sit reading in the lower end of the church and many would flock to hear their reading.’

  What the King James Bible was to do was to provide a standard and a stability for what was considered to be the best possible English literary language. The 1611 translation, after a few uneasy years, became the book of English speakers. Its retention of c
ertain already rather archaic forms – ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ – gave it an air of important antiquity, the stamp of ancestry, a sense of an emanation from a sacred past. ‘You’ had replaced ‘thou’ in educated speech in about 1575. And just as much of the greatest art in the world came about as an unexpected consequence of the religious purpose of those works, so the beauty of the King James Bible came as a by-product of the dedication to accuracy and the determination to do fullest justice to the words of the faith.

  Yet Tyndale and others were not afraid to use the full resources of the newly emerged mongrel English tongue to show off the paces of their native language.

  When Tyndale learned Hebrew, he said that he found a natural affinity between Hebrew and Anglo-Saxon and certainly the King James Bible is studded with English idioms taken from Hebrew idioms and given the genius touch of memorability. Here are a few. ‘To lick the dust’, ‘to fall flat on his face’, ‘a man after his own heart’, ‘to pour out one’s heart’, ‘the land of the living’, ‘under the sun’, ‘from time to time’, ‘pride goes before a fall’, ‘to rise and shine’, ‘a fly in the ointment’. And there are so many others, not only from Hebrew sources: ‘the mark of Cain’, ‘a mess of pottage’, ‘the fat of the land’, ‘flesh pots’, ‘to everything there is a season’, ‘the apple of his eye’, ‘how are the mighty fallen’, ‘the wisdom of Solomon’, ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’, ‘vanity of vanities’, ‘grind the faces of the poor’, ‘a voice crying in the wilderness’, ‘no peace for the wicked’, ‘the parting of the ways’, ‘man cannot live by bread alone’, ‘go the extra mile’, ‘cast your pearls before swine’, ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’, ‘sign of the times’, ‘wars and rumours of wars’, ‘a law unto himself’, ‘through a glass darkly’, ‘lost sheep’, ‘I wash my hands of it’, ‘of making books there is no end’.