by Melvyn Bragg
From Walt Whitman, who saw the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as ‘the great Construction of the New Bible’, to John Updike, who takes on Protestant rigour, ambition and guilt in many of his novels, to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road almost 150 years later, the King James Bible has not ceased to play a major part in American and much of English-speaking literature. It would be possible to rummage around and find so many other examples: C.S. Lewis, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, G.K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Bishop, Rudyard Kipling, Margaret Atwood, Wallace Stevens, Mark Twain. These writers take what the Bible said as sufficient, if not gospel, as words and possibilities if not prophecies and certainties, but are still beguiled, even a little bewitched by it. Or they use it – to challenge as well as to affirm, full of ready-made subjects with the convenience of being widely known. Even if, as in Thomas Hardy’s The Oxen it is at a meditative, wistful distance, a trace memory.
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock
‘Now they are all on their knees,’
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
‘Come: see the oxen kneel,
In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know’,
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
And for the poet regarded as seminal to the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot, and the novelist who has brought the world of the deep spiritual adventure of the Afro-Americans into fiction, Toni Morrison, both Nobel Prize winners, there is still a felt truth. Despite generations of sound and fury against the King James Version and despite the disproofs and pinpoint dismissals, the Bible to them is still the Word of God.
T.S. Eliot, American poet-philosopher, is an extraordinary tribute to the lasting influence of the King James Bible and his private embrace of Anglicanism. He stationed himself in London for the greater length of his life, where he worked as a banker and then as a publisher. His heroes included the committee, especially Launcelot Andrewes, who had finally steered the Bible into the harbour of the King James Version.
T.S. Eliot is regarded as an icon of modernism. Somehow, the poetry of such a man ought to be post-religious, not as utterly steeped in the King James Version and in Anglicanism as is much of the work of T.S. Eliot. And his great rival, W.H. Auden, was no less devoted to the Anglican Church and its book.
Eliot was a true believer and an explorer of the spiritual meanings to be gleaned from Christianity. He came from New England nonconformist stock. He converted to Anglicanism and became a regular churchgoer in his adopted city, London. In 1934 he became Warden of the Church of St Stephen, a post he held until 1959. He supervised the collection during Mass. He went on retreats, confessed his sins and received absolution. How strange this must have seemed to many of his contemporaries – increasingly secular, indifferent or atheistic – and to his increasingly secular successors that Christianity and the Anglican religion and its sacred language and Catholic practices played such a crucial part in his life and in his imagination.
Surely this great twentieth-century Modernist poet could not be bound up in it in the same way as John Donne, a poet in whose lifetime the King James Bible was published? To continue in that vein in the sceptical, war-worn, scientifically triumphant twentieth century seems such an anachronism. Yet far from being an anachronism, T.S. Eliot was and remains the sounding poet of the century, his ‘message’ as relevant to the age as his techniques and essays which have helped substantially to shape its literary style and tone.
He reached back to the King James Version in many ways: for words and sentences, for images, but above all, I think, for the meditative melancholy he found there, for the room to brood over mysteries without being mangled in the new philosophy. It might be more simple. It might be that he sincerely believed in Christ, in the Trinity, in the Resurrection, in a life eternal, in an Almighty God – and used his great gift to celebrate, explore and attempt to describe it. The fact and the results of his faith need to be reckoned with.
At times, in Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets and in Little Gidding, it seems that everything he writes – however powdered with past cultures – glides on a current of Anglicanism. As if all of it was composed in an English country churchyard, the graves, the few tilting tombstones and the ancient and sturdy little church were the perfect, in truth the only, context.
A seemingly simple example, ‘Journey of the Magi’, is in a rather different category but it serves to illustrate two points: Eliot’s unstrained commitment to the story of the Three Wise Men, and the ease with which he played it into the musings so characteristic of him.
He begins in such a practical way that you could think – you are to think – that this was a well-reported, historically accurate journey and what is being said is a matter-of-fact, trustworthy account.
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow . . .
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
‘Realistically’ grumbling, tentative, there is neither vanity nor vainglory – Eliot leads us expertly into this story from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and makes it new without yielding a centimetre of its flat factual truth.
A few lines later, the voice of the poet changes. . . were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
It is impossible to think that Eliot was simply ‘looking for a subject from the Bible’ as so many others, legitimately, had done down the centuries. The King James Version inspired his prose: the faith it denoted inspired his thinking: the story of Christ and what He promised inspired some of the finest poetry of the century.
He even, like Milton, rewrote the very opening of Genesis in his chorus The Rock.
In the beginning God created the world. Waste and Void.
Waste and Void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep. And when there were men, in their various ways, they struggled in torment towards God.
Blindly and vainly, for man is a vain thing, and man without
God is a seed upon the wind . . .
Like T.S. Eliot, Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature. Her prose comes, in part, from the Gospel tradition begun in slave-America and turned into song both in the singing and in the speech. Song of Solomon seems an inevitable title for a novel by Toni Morrison, as does Beloved: ‘this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.’ In Morrison’s Beloved the son becomes a daughter, resurrected into the life that had been ripped away from her, reincarnated and ‘seen’ and accepted back in her home after the long absence.
There is actual Bible preaching in the book, the unmistakable Bible preaching/talking honed by the slave experience and the liberation from that experience. Souls join up and inhabit the bodies of those who are in a mutual circle of holy love. There is an omnipotent aura of the mystery of things and a belief that the key to that is to be discovered in biblical language. It all but beggars belief that after all the p
ounding it has taken, the King James Version is still a source for such great imaginative writers today.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENLIGHTENMENT
The ‘Enlightenment’ traditionally describes a time when thought is considered to have come out of medieval religious darkness. This new thought is generally taken to be driven by reason, motivated by scientific enquiry and in its early stages dedicated to throwing off what were seen as the shackles of religious bondage. This Enlightenment, among a small number of scholars, was in place in the British Isles by the end of the seventeenth century: soon afterwards it was present in intellectual circles in America and throughout what we now know as Europe.
Despite being apparently vanquished in the Enlightenment century of tournaments of competing systems of thought, the Bible survived. In many ways it was even more influential in the nineteenth century than ever before and still today it is not without intellectual and artistic significance. Moreover, it was against the Scriptures, as revealed to the English-speaking world from the King James Bible, that these competing systems had to fight in order to flourish.
In that sense, the Bible served a vital purpose. It was the whetstone and the essential opposition. Where would the Enlightenment have been without it? It enabled arguments to be developed and provoked them because its domain was so vast and self-contradictory. A new orthodoxy of thought, reason, gained a purchase on thoughts and systems which its apostles considered to be not only superior to the Bible, but to supersede it and render it obsolete. At the very least the Bible provided an essential negative dynamic for the birth and progress of the Enlightenment.
Moreover, though the Enlightenment is now considered to have swept away any intelligent claims for the Bible that has not proved to be the case with everyone. Great congregations still attend churches and chapels and meeting houses and prayer meetings unfazed by the news from the intellectuals on high that the day of the Bible is doomed. Theologians, artists, teachers, philanthropists, politicians, men and women in many professions, including the sciences, and ordinary people in their millions continued to keep faith and draw intelligent comfort as well as spiritual satisfaction from the ancient Scriptures.
Yet the Enlightenment did change the landscape in which, for centuries, the Bible had been supreme and unchallenged. It had been the sum of the human knowledge of the human condition, its history, its eternal promise and its purpose. By the sixteenth century, Christianity had long ago gathered monopolistic strength through the Roman Catholic Church. It had absorbed paganism, tamed, though not eradicated, superstition, and in holy crusades savagely and bloodily defined itself against what it saw as heretics or non-believers or followers of other threatening, competitive creeds.
The Roman Catholic Church covered its territory under a canopy which was as pervasive as the atmosphere. Some see this as a time of darkness, bigotry, ignorance, injustice, prejudice, cruelty, authoritarian excess and enforced intellectual stagnation. Others find great beauty there, deep comfort and occasional ecstasy, an order of things and people which makes perfect sense in what they see as a spiritually purposed world. They see the Roman Catholic supremacy, despite its failings, as an era of truth, the one Church as a keeper of the keys to salvation, unflinching at the harshness of the narrow path to that glorious destination.
There had been disputes within the Roman Catholic Church, and later with and inside the Protestant Church. There had been divisions and revisions. But little to compare with the force of change and threat brought in by the Enlightenment with its insistence on a totally new world: a world based not on faith, not on good works, not on ancient Scriptures but on the unchallengeable power of reason.
In his book ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment, Peter Harrison claims that it was in England, in the seventeenth century, that ‘the groundwork was laid’ for the Enlightenment. ‘The Religious upheavals of the 16th and 17th century,’ he writes, ‘meant that Englishmen enjoyed a freedom of religious experience which was matched nowhere in Europe with the possible exception of the Netherlands.’ And, as the philosopher Locke wrote, the kings and queens of post-Reformation England had been ‘of such different minds in point of religion that no sincere and upright worshipper of God could, with a safe conscience, obey their several decrees’ .
In the sixteenth century, under Henry VIII you were expected to be a faithful Roman Catholic and after his divorce an Anglican Protestant; under King Edward VI, a Protestant; under Queen Mary, a Roman Catholic; under Elizabeth I, a Protestant; under James I, a Presbyterian in Scotland and an Anglican in England; under Charles I, an Anglo-Catholic; under Cromwell, a Presbyterian; under Charles II, an indifferent Anglican; under James II, Roman Catholic. So where was guidance from the monarch?
One starting point is once again with the lawyer, politician, essayist and natural philosopher, Francis Bacon. The fruitful and scandalous last phase of his life was contemporaneous with the publication of the King James Bible. He spoke of the two books of life – the one to be read in nature, the other in the Scriptures. ‘The one, that which springeth from reason, sense, induction, argument, according to the laws of heaven and earth; the other, that which is imprinted upon the spirit of man by inward instinct, according to the law of conscience.’
As Pope was to write in the eighteenth century: ‘The State of Nature was the State of God’.
Both nature and the Scriptures were to be tested. As the centuries rolled on, nature proved increasingly boundless, enlarged and empowered by being tested: the Scriptures were found increasingly vulnerable and frail, needing more and more faith. But the space for faith was still defended.
It was a time of major shifts in society in the English-speaking and other worlds. The Reformation introduced the astonishing and liberating idea that the Bible could be read by an individual who could have their own ‘discussion’ with it. The Bible in the vernacular – German, Italian, French, but, as it proved, most influentially, English – meant that control had passed out of the power of the priesthood.
The Renaissance retrieved classical learning from Greece and Rome which had achieved glories without Christianity. The navigational compass and an urge to trade brought other religions firmly on to the scene. How were they to be dealt with? Was Christianity the major, the supreme religion or just one of many? Were the others Saved? Could they be Saved?
The blunter young bloods of the new experimental sciences whetted their mental appetites on crunching the Bible. It was a tempest: looking back, the Middle Ages seemed an inland lake of calm compared with the storms out on the high seas of the new knowledge. For some English speakers the King James Bible was the Ark, for others it was the wreckage.
The questions intensified. What did religion itself come from? The Greeks believed it had begun in man’s fear. Fear was certainly core to the Catholic project. Sin and be damned. What is sin? We will decide. Dare it be suggested that it was man-made? Voltaire, the epitome of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment, asserted that ‘if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.’ The two arguments brought in to support religion were reason and nature: reason which grew in authority in this period was increasingly thought to be on the side of nature. Yet, in its fight to hold its ground, the Church scholars in England in the seventeenth century and subsequently held to the words of the theologian Benjamin Whichcote that ‘Reason discovers what is Natural; and Reason receives what is Supernatural’ (my italics). The supernatural still had its place.
Whichcote hailed back to Plato who wrote that reason was man’s highest faculty because it corresponded to divine reason. For Defenders of Faith in the King James Bible this was a classic knockout to petty post-Platonist opponents. Plato was the great fountain of philosophy and to be able to call on him was to have a majestic ally in the battle to save what the guardians of the faith saw as the survival of their God-given Scriptures.
Then there was the mire of whether those of faiths other than
Christianity should be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Culverwell, a contemporary of Whichcote, wrote: ‘I am farre from the minds of those Patrons of Universal Grace, that make all men equal in propinquity to salvation, whether Jews or pagans or Christians.’
He points out the privilege of the Christian that ‘God planted thee in a place of light, when he shut up and imprisoned the world in palpable darkenesse.’ Once again the King James Bible was used as a shield to protect the Protestant believer from the spears of the gathering hordes.
And as the Protestants were driven back, they still found what they believed to be sure footholds. Their innate faith and the God-given conscience were argued to be superior to deduction. The traditions and authority which were being so battered by the growing attacks on the accuracy of the Bible and its relevance to the natural world were still claimed to have greater authority than all that reason could offer.
Protestants who saw themselves as the saviours of the faith were well capable of rational argument but in facing this onslaught from the Enlightenment, they found their redoubt in the idea of inner strength. This was the strength of a belief which was beyond examination but available to the senses: an experience rather than a thought, felt and not, finally, wholly available to reason.
The Bible, long regarded as the sole and perfect history of humankind, was beginning to buckle. The greatest of all the Fathers of the Church, St Augustine, in ‘The City of God’, in the fifth century, states that the ‘fable . . . of the Antipodes’ as ‘on no ground credible’. That ‘it is too absurd to suppose that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean’, and that Scripture is never wrong. But by the mid-seventeenth century, it was embarrassingly apparent that Augustine was wrong on both these claims. The sacred text was not infallible. And what did the discovery of America and its Indians say about the story of Adam and Eve, the enclosed Garden of Eden, when over a vast ocean men had discovered another sort of paradise – inhabited?
