Canst thou read the Bible?

Next to Chesterton, C.S. Lewis is my favourite Christian apologist of the 20^th century.

From where I’m sitting, which is the seat of a reasonably well-informed layman, Lewis was sound on doctrine, even though he failed to appreciate the fundamental difference between Roman Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism.

His friend and frequent correspondent, Evelyn Waugh, set him straight on that matter in an instructive letter. That issue apart, the two men had much in common. In addition to being clear thinkers, they were both superb writers, if in different genres.

Lewis’s style was cogent and lucid, and he demanded these qualities not only of himself but also of anyone putting pen to paper. I couldn’t agree more: a writer is duty-bound to make the reader’s task as easy as the subject-matter allows.

This raises the question of biblical translations, and that’s where I’m not sure I entirely agree with Lewis. He thought that each generation was justified in translating the Bible into up-to-date vernacular. After all, what really matters about Scripture is the message, not the style. And the more quickly and unerringly is the message understood, the better.

Thus, Lewis had problems with the beautiful prose of the King James Version – precisely because it’s beautiful. Readers, he felt, would be so riveted to the glorious cadences that they’d be liable to miss the nuances of content, especially when conveyed in an archaic language.

True enough, some cultured atheists read the KJV just for its prose, which Lewis finds outrageous. An argument can be made, though, that many of those who begin by reading Scripture strictly for aesthetic reasons may end up seeing its truth. Not just Christian texts but also Christian art, especially music, can use beauty to claim converts.

In fact, the link between beauty, truth and morality has attracted the attention of some of history’s greatest minds: pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides, then Plato and Aristotle, followed by mediaeval scholastics like Albertus Magnus and Aquinas, then subsequent Catholic theologians, and of course classical German thinkers, most notably Kant.

Both Plato and Aristotle devoted much attention to what they called ‘transcendentals’, the ontological properties of being they defined as Truth, Beauty and Goodness. They existed as Three in One –what’s true and moral is also beautiful, what’s beautiful is also moral and true – and hence what’s ugly can be neither true nor moral.

Aquinas saw the obvious link between those transcendentals and Christian doctrine. God is One, and He is Truth, Goodness and Beauty. The unity of the three thus made a natural journey from philosophy to theology.

What follows from this is that all beauty comes from God and hence may lead to God. Bach’s cantatas, Fra Angelico’s paintings or Dante’s verse – and yes, the poetic music of the KJV – can lead one close to God more surely than the same message delivered by basic melodies, crude images and primitive doggerel.

Before Jesus Christ became a superstar, our mediaeval ancestors understood that perfectly, which is why they strained every physical and fiscal sinew to erect magnificent cathedrals, houses worthy of acting as God’s dwellings. In due course, they drew in the best painters to create iconic images and the best composers to write liturgical music.

The men of the Holy Roman Empire knew that beauty could act as a teaching aid, educating communicants on the truth, and hence beauty and goodness, of their faith. Then, centuries later, both the art and the music began to leave their original habitat to settle in private collections, museums and concert halls.

That broadened their appeal, and also diluted it. But not to the point of disappearance.

The Erbarme dich, mein Gott duet from St Matthew Passion, perhaps the most beautiful piece ever written, retains its celestial, God-like splendour in any secular context – and reminds listeners that secular isn’t the only context there is. All it takes is a modicum of sensitivity to grasp the divine inspiration behind such music. It’s not for nothing that Bach wrote Soli deo, gloria on his scores – “To God alone, the glory”.

It’s easy for a believing Christian to take exception to devotional art demeaning itself in this fashion. And it’s true that today’s youngsters may not know the Biblical stories behind many Renaissance paintings. Most of them don’t see God moving the artist’s hand. All they see is a combination of colours and shapes, just like modern art.

But ‘most’ is the operable word. Some of them may respond not only to the beauty of a painting, poem or musical piece, but also to the truth they convey. The sublime Russian pianist, Maria Yudina, made that point when writing that “Many paths can lead to God, but music is the one available to me.”    

As for Biblical translations, Lewis makes a good point that until the Reformation the Church had frowned on any of them, good, bad or indifferent (other than St Jerome’s 4^th century translation into Latin Vulgate). That restricted Scriptural access to those who could read Hebrew and Greek or at a pinch Latin, which is to say to the educated elite.

In fact, even in the century immediately before Lancelot Andrewes and his team produced the KJV, such translators risked their lives. William Tyndale, whose own translation formed the basis of the KJV, was in 1536 burned at the stake for his trouble.

One could argue in favour of such exclusivity, if not necessarily in favour of the method of its enforcement. Regardless of the language it’s in, the Bible is more easily misunderstood than understood by those not trained in theology, philosophy and textual analysis. Priestly mediation is thus essential for most believers, provided, of course that the priests themselves possess the necessary qualifications.

In the past, that was taken for granted; now, less so. In any case, it’s possible to argue against the very idea of vernacular rendering – even though, ignorant as I am of the original scriptural languages, I myself would be at a disadvantage. (The only thing I have in common with Shakespeare is that I too have “small Latin and less Greeke”.)

But even conceding the validity of vernacular translations, I still disagree with Lewis when he insists, in a characteristically Protestant way, that Biblical texts should be instantly comprehensible to even uneducated readers. To that end, they shouldn’t be written in a language other than the one people speak.

Now, polling my Orthodox friends, I hardly ever find any who are fluent in Church Slavonic. Yet every Sunday they are exposed, with no visible ill effects, to the Mass largely celebrated in that language. They don’t seem to suffer from the gap separating the language of the street from that of the liturgy.

Until the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), millions of world Catholics happily celebrated Mass in Latin, even though, unlike Lancelot Andrewes and his friends, they didn’t typically converse in that language. This goes to show that for almost 2,000 years people accepted the existence of liturgical languages different from those they spoke.

The Catholic Church decided to go populist then, and at about the same time Anglicans began to rebel, at first meekly, then aggressively, against the greatest religious texts in the English language, the KJV and the Prayer Book. Both denominations suddenly felt an acute need for more up-to-date replacements.

(In some Protestant denominations, such populism produced texts along the lines of “Don’t dis your Mum and your Dad, it ain’t cool”, which presumably would make Mr Lewis happy had he lived long enough to enjoy such prose.)

Since the KJV was Protestant, the Catholic Church dropped it altogether, although it would have been an easy enough matter to make the doctrinally required amendments in the same style. Instead, it produced inoffensive but anodyne texts, lexically and phonetically devoid of any sense of grandeur and rhythm.

For example, anyone who thinks that “have mercy on us” is an improvement on “have mercy upon us” should be taught a remedial lesson in English and have his hearing examined, and I’d even be in favour of public flogging. But at least the Catholic Church has a ready excuse: it had to produce its own vernacular translation after doing to Latin Mass what the Anglicans did to the KJV and the Prayer Book.

The latter, on the other hand, are out of excuses – unless they think that “This ring is a symbol of our marriage” is better than the traditional “With this ring I thee wed”. Empty pews all over Britain testify to the failure of this liturgical populism.

It’s true that people in close, personal communion with Christ don’t need aesthetically perfect accoutrements to maintain that dialogue. But the Church has known from time immemorial that some, perhaps most, believers need help – and some unbelievers need grandiose architecture, a tingling voice and a moving painting to cross the threshold.

Lewis also objected that the language of the KJV is more beautiful than the Greek of the Evangelists and Apostles, who were no poets and scholars (although Luke and Paul were educated men). True, but the people who produced the translation were just that, and they decided that beautiful prose might add something to the appeal of eternal truth without taking anything away from it.

People who insist that church art belongs only in the church display the sort of dogmatic rigorism I find both admirable and alien. Let’s just say I won’t feel guilty next time I put on the recording of Christa Ludwig singing Erbarme dich.