Religious English
Deus non potest apprehendi nisi per verbum.
SWEENEY :
DORIS :
Birth, and copulation and death.
That's all, that's all, that's all, that's all,
Birth, and copulation, and death.
I'd be bored.
WHY IS "BIRTH, AND COPULATION, AND DEATH" such an inadequate
summary of human life? In birth, copulation and death there is
nothing specifically human: cows, too, are born, copulate and die,
and elephants, and mice. But animals do not marry, they mate; and
when animals are buried there is not usually a funeral.
There is nothing necessarily solemn about burying a human body,
and there is nothing necessarily significant about human copulation.
If these events, and the others that make up our lives, are to have
any seriousness, we must make it, whether by ignoring, co-operating
with or fighting whatever gods there may be. Making something of
life that the animals cannot make of their life is the great human
endeavour. And all the various activities by which we make something human of life are heavily dependent on language; all our
personal efforts take place in a context given to us by human
history, typically in the language we use. The move from birth,
copulation and death to initiation, marriage and burial is from an
animal to a recognizably human world, though not one that all
humans inhabit. We may reduce the world of initiation, marriage
and burial to nonsense, or we may fail in it; but without the
possibilities such serious words express there is no human life.
It is an almost universal characteristic of human societies to try
to make something solemn of a funeral1. We feel the need to make
something more serious of the event than waste-disposal, than just
'I wish to acknowledge an immediate debt for some ideas in this
paragraph, to my colleague Mr. David Sims. My other debts to Mr.
Sims are more general.
303
304
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
putting a corpse into the earth or burning it. But if a funeral is to
be solemn, one of the instruments essential for making it so is a
language in which solemnity is possible. If the styles of English
were restricted to the conversational ones appropriate to a barber's
shop, we could have no funerals. Similarly if a marriage, at the
moment it is contracted, is to be recognised as something more
significant than a social and economic regularization of procreation,
that recognition must be formulated in an adequate language.
Whatever seriousness we can make of these events will depend on,
amongst other things, the way language is used about them. The
way that the 166s Book of Common Prayer speaks of marriage, for
all its unfashionable insistence on carnal desire as something
rather disreputable which has to be kept in a safe place—wedlock—
and despite its unacceptable subordination of woman to man, does
make available, wonderfully, possibilities of making sense of
marriage. In this passage the second question exemplifies the first:
Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live together
after God's ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony? Wilt
thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her, in sickness
and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto
her, so long as ye both shall live?
We need such language for the serious occasions of life if they are
to be serious. Especially, any explicit community, any common
recognition of what matters in life, can only be expressed in a
language of due seriousness. Otherwise, so far as general recognition
goes, we shall all die the death of dogs.
Traditionally, the "language of due seriousness" in which the
English have celebrated the important moments of life has been the
more public end of the religious "register" of English.1 It is a mere
historical fact that this has been provided above all by Christianity;
and much of the present essay must deal with Christian uses past
and present. But a concern for a language of public seriousness
cannot, especially in our time, be restricted to Christian uses, and
"religion" could always be replaced by "high seriousness" or any
'"Register" is a term sometimes used by linguisticians (presumably taking it over from organists, who use it for combinations of
stops) and means any style or set of styles appropriate to a given
context.
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
3O5
similar phrase without affecting my argument. But the difficulty
of finding and using such phrases is one of the data.
The religious register of English is a set of styles easily distinguishable from others. But, equally, it must be connected with other
styles, public and private. During the last four hundred years the
English Bible and Prayer Book have always had the dual function
of providing forms for public worship and private devotions. The
religious register has to be tested and filled with meaning
both in its public uses and its connections with private life. Language can function only if words have different meanings in
different contexts; but a language like a life is a unity only if the
sense of a word in one context can carry over and affect its sense
elsewhere. All the great words in the marriage service are used on
more ordinary occasions. Or, if one says "I love God" with habitual
insincerity isn't there an obvious danger that the devaluation of
love will affect its use elsewhere? And vice versa.
It is equally true that the religious register is, in another direction,
interdependent with the language of tragedy, whether drama or
novel. Shakespeare was a contemporary of the Authorized Version
of the Bible and he has a style of sober exposition or rebuke plainly
related to the Bible by way of the Protestant sermon tradition, and
found, for instance, in the lay sermon Henry V preaches to Bates,
Court and Williams before Agincourt:
Besides, there is no King, be his Cause never so spotlesse, if it
come to the arbitrement of Swords, can trye it out with all
unspotted Souldiers: some (peradventure) have on them the
guilt of premeditated and contrived Murther; some, of beguiling Virgins with the broken Seales of Perjurie; some, making
the Warres their Bulwarke, that have before gored the gentle
Bosome of Peace with Pillage and Robberie.1
Johnson's Life of Swift, perhaps the nearest the English eighteenth
century came to tragedy, achieves its sharp solemnity by drawing on
rhythmic resources very similar to those of the Bible:
He now lost distinction. His madness was compounded of
rage and fatuity. The last face he knew was that of Mrs.
Whiteway; and her he ceased to know in a little time. His
'I owe this example to a paper read by Mr. Morris Shapira to the
University College of Swansea English Society.
go6
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
meat was brought to him cut into mouthfuls; but he would
never touch it while the servant staid, and at last, after it had
stood perhaps an hour, would eat it walking; for he continued
his old habit, and was on his feet ten hours a day.
The passage has Johnson's individual style very plainly in the
brevity of "lost distinction" and the deliberate rightness of the
phrase "rage and fatuity"; but the confidence of his rhythmic
sense he owes to the Bible at places like "her he ceased to know".
In our own century the career of T. F. Powys may be seen as the
heroic effort, necessarily eccentric and partly unsuccessful, to keep
and use the style of the Bible and Prayerbook. And Mr. Henry
Gifford, in the best published work on the New English Bible I have
come across,1 shows how natural and right it was for D. H. Lawrence
at bis most solemn to employ the religious register:
Anna's soul was put at peace between them. She looked from
one to the other, and she saw them established to her safety, and
she was free. She played betwen the pillar of fire and the pillar
of cloud in confidence, having the assurance on her right hand
and the assurance on her left. She was no longer called upon
to uphold with her childish might the broken end of the arch.
Her father and her mother now met to the span of the heavens,
and she, the child, was free to play in the space beneath,
between.
It is generally recognized that Lawrence brought English prose
closer to the spoken language (which is not the same as 'ordinary
speech'): it would be equally true to say that he brought English
prose closer to the language's religious tradition.
So without seriousness there is no serious language; but the
converse, which is equally true, is harder to accept: without a
serious language there is no seriousness, whether of literature,
religion, or life generally. (To think of a language as caused by the
life it expresses is to oversimplify: it would be equally true to think
of the life as caused by the language.) That is not to say anything
generally deterministic People in the end get the language they
really want: if we really wanted a religion, that would involve
generating the language for it. But it is also true that most people
use unquestioningly the language they find, and that no mere
i
Essays in Criticism, 1961, pp. 466-70.
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
307
individual can alter language very much without becoming eccentric
All the signs I have seen in the last half dozen years suggest that
the religious register of English is dead or dying. If it is true that
we can no longer call on a religious style as could the makers of
the Revised Version of the Bible in 1881, or as Lawrence could
fifty years ago, we are in a more desperately unserious world than
would be suggested, for instance, by the numerical decline of the
Christian denominations. If a serious language is to survive the
decline of organized Christianity, religious language cannot be
the property of the sects, as the translators of the New English
Bible recognize. If we have lost our religious language we have
lost one of the most obviously important strands in the cord of
forms of behaviour, thought, language, life, which has traditionally
bound English civilization into a unity within which English people
have had the chance to make something of life. A people that loses
its religious language, its power to share a serious sense of life, has
gone very far towards losing its identity or, if one dare say it, its
soul.
I have set off so boldly, equipped only with what Johnson called
"general grammar", across the dark and uncharted sea variously
claimed by philosophy, theology and linguistics, hoping to steer
clear of at least some of the minefields laid down by those great
powers, because however likely it is that I shall be blown up—quite
possibly in happy unconsciousness of my fate—I do claim one
decisive advantage over those scholars who, in the New English
Bible, the Jerusalem Bible, and the Prayer Book revisions1 have
been recently engaged in producing a modern religious English. I
can see the importance of a set of problems whose mere existence
they are wholly unaware of. The translators and revisers are at
sea as well: I want to show at least that I have noticed our dangerous plight while they, sheltering below deck, imagine themselves
safe in harbour. To deal with these new books even a very good
'The New English Bible: New Testament, Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, 1961. My references are to the Penguin
edition.
The Jerusalem Bible, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966.
The Church of England Liturgical Commission, Alternative Services, Second Series, S.P.C.K., 1965.
go8
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
review, such as the ones of the New English Bible by Mr. Gifford
or by "Alan Ramsey" in Delta no. 33, 1964, would be insufficient.
For their failure occurs at a level so much at the foundation of
things that there is no alternative to an attempt to clarify the
general issues involved, however perilous for a mere literary man
the inspection of such cracks below the waterline must be.
II
The religious register of English is found above all in the 1611
Bible and the 166s Prayer Book: those are the channels through
which during the last three hundred years it has flowed to English
people. But the set of styles in those books was certainly not invented
by the translators of 1611. Their version offers itself as "translated
out of the original tongues, with the former translations diligently
compared and revised"—which is, of course, self-contradictory:
are we to take the version as firstly a new translation or firstly a
revision? In fact it is most often the latter. Much goes back,
whether directly or through the sixteenth-century intermediaries,
to Tyndale and Coverdale, especially in rhythm. But there is no
reason to suppose the 1611 version would have been stylistically
very different if it had been the first in English or if Tyndale had
never lived. The style of the 1611 version was a part of the language
at that time, available for anyone who dared use it. The Psalms
in the Prayer Book differ, often sharply, from the versions in the
1611 Bible, but they belong to the same register of the language—
as do all the successive versions of the Prayer Book produced as the
winds of doctrinal change veered. And though the 1611 Bible was
the work of several separate panels (two for the New Testament,
for instance) which worked quickly and with little liaison, one could
hardly have discovered the fact merely by reading. Conversely, outside the Bible itself, the translators of 1611 tend to have the rather
irritating sententious-witty-latinate prose style of their period, and
none of them survives as an individual writer. (The more obvious
continuity between Tyndale's translation and his expository style is
one of the reasons that he is often better than the 1611 version, as
well as why his name survives.) R. W. Chambers showed1 very
1
On the Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and
his School, Early English Text Society, first published as the Introduction to Harpsfield's Life of More, E.E.T.S., 1938.
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
309
tellingly that the style of the English Bible was available equally to
Tyndale and More, a development, in response to the wants of
the early sixteenth century, of a capacity of the language going
much further back into history.
This is not to say that all the translators down to the 161,1
version were as good as one another. Tyndale seems to me by far
the best of all, though patchy: he takes risks which sometimes
brilliantly succeed, and he is less concerned with achieving fine
effects in church than, especially, the Bishops' Bible, the immediate
predecessor of the 1611 version, which tends rather to propriety
and the Church Voice. The Douai Version seems usually inferior.
But with all the variety of these versions they show a common
stylistic power, a generally accepted way of speaking of serious
matters.
Why translate the Bible, anyway? This rather primary question
is, as I shall show, one that the modern translators cannot answer.
The Protestant translators of the sixteenth century had that question
answered for them merely by their position in history, and had no
need to consider the question as long as they believed their answer.
The 1611 version was the culmination of a century of work done—
and done on language—because the translators believed that they
were stewards of the Word of God and that the task entrusted to
them, at the risk of their souls, was to speak the Word of God in
English, so that he who seeks may find.
For the register of English used this meant a formality and constant solemnity which is one of the limitations of the Protestant
tradition, a style that can permit the Church Voice, or, worse, the
Chapel Voice:
Without realizing it, I must, from earliest childhood, have
detested the pie-pie mouthing, solemn, portentous, loud way
in which everybody read the Bible, whether it was parsons or
teachers or ordinary persons. I dislike the "parson" voice
through and through my bones.1
It is true that some parts of the 1611 version lend themselves rather
well to the Parson Voice—those for instance where the chattiness of
St. Paul's postscripts and personal messages is heavily overlaid by a
'D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, section I.
J1O
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
solemn style, or those other parts of the epistles where the translators seem to be disguising the vacuity or pettiness of the thought.
It is even true that the Parson Voice can prettify and deprive of
significance some of the greal things of the 1611 version. One of its
supreme achievements is to make something sublime and meaningful of the crucifixion without disguising the squalor or bloodiness
of the event: but in the Parson Voice the sublimity can become
conventional, achieved by not realizing the events described. (And
to the credit of the new versions, it must be as hard to apply the
Parson Voice to them as to the Daily Mirror.) But my own early
memories of the Chapel Voice are not so much of dislike as of
pure boredom; and I also remember those who could read the
Bible better. I suspect that Lawrence's memory was unfairly selective. One of the bits of H. G. Wells that make it unjust to classify
him with C. P. Snow is the description of Mr. Polly's wedding;
and Wells's picture of religious language misused is at least as true
as Lawrence's:
The officiating clergy sighed deeply, began, and married them
wearily and without any hitch.
"D'bloved we gath'd gether sighto' Gard 'n face this
con'gation join gather Man Worn Ho Mat'mony whichis on'ble
state stooted by Gard in times mans in'cency . . . "
. . . So it went on, blurred and hurried, like the momentary
vision of a very beautiful thing seen through the smoke of a
passing train.
Wells is describing one of the Church Voices, Lawrence a Chapel
Voice, but the worst either can say is that there is no guarantee in
the religious register of English against these misuses. But there is
no guarantee in English poetry against the Poetry Voice—which is
at least as bad as the verbal equivalent of "the canonical smirk,
and the filthy clammy palm of a chaplain." And if Lawrence hadn't
been drilled—pie-pie mouthing and all—in the language of the
Bible he could not have written The Rainbow. Opportunities for
religiosity must always be a small price to pay for the possibility
of a shared seriousness. And with whatever limitatons, the style of
the Bible and Prayerbook is a very great one.
The greatness of the language of the English Bible is in its
weight, definiteness, irresistible rightness of rhythm, and power to
draw on Shakespearian ranges of meaning—which last is why its
plainness is so far from French clarti and why the style can be
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
3U
seen as essentially English, making the language, at one necessary
place, fully itself. It is also, of course, a language of great beauty.
I omit beauty from my first list of attributes not because I despise
it but because of the tendency of modern Christians to see only
beauty, and only rolling cadences in its rhythms. But the beauty
proceeds from the other qualities; at its best it is as functional as the
beauty of the Forth Bridge. The style of the Bible is first and foremost a style for getting something said in the right way—because
without the right way there could not be the "thing".
And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in
the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the
glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore
afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for behold, I bring
you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour,
which is Christ the Lord.
And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe
wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.
And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the
heavenly host praising God, and saying,
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will
toward men.
And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them
into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go
even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to
pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.
(Luke s, 8-15)
There are a few archaic words whose dictionary meaning the
modern reader may not know, but the passage is the opposite of
difficult to read. It is a model of English rhythmic construction,
which is a very real compliment to pay, for rhythm, so far from being
a kind of optional extra as some moderns suppose, is the expression
of syntax in speech, and a passage as rhythmically successful as
this succeeds as a piece of meaning. It tells the reader how to shape
and stress, and makes the point of its meaning in the shaping and
stressing. The rhythmic climaxes of the sentences come at the
climaxes of sense—"a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord" is the
culmination of the phrases that lead up to it. (There is, perhaps,
Jig
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
a useful dissertation to be written on the rhythms of Bible English:
the obvious indebtedness of the movement of the verses at the
beginning of the quotation to the tradition of alliterative
verse would be one of the things to be investigated.) One may note,
too, the human Tightness of the second quoted verse: how right
that the first reaction of the shepherds should be great fear, and
how strongly that is brought out I The genuineness of their fear
is not at all diminished by the way they speak, a dialect never heard
out of shepherd's mouth in any English county. Like everyone
else they speak Bible style—does that matter at all? As for the
poetic range of the imagery, try to define "glory." Is it a thing?
It shines, and surely only things can shine? But to take it in the
Middle English sense of "a halo" (very solid the haloes look, too,
in mediaeval pictures) would be to misconceive the way the language is working. Similarly, like any good story, the passage can be
ruined if you ask the wrong questions, e.g., What did the angel
look like? But the language controls the reader and he would be
perverse not to follow it as it demands—which is not the case with
the New English Bible version discussed below. The 1611 style and
language are so right here that one feels, as with the greatest
moments in the 166s Prayer Book, that this is the only way of saying what is being said, that "style" and "content" have ceased to be
distinguishable.
That degree of Tightness of style is never an accident1 and—to
put the other side of my insistence that style affects meaning—it is
never only a question of style. Such a Tightness of language can
only be the result of a great creative effort, in this case the collaborative effort of the Reformation divines. It was a co-operation,
too, between the translators and the language they found—itself
the record of earlier co-operative creativity. And the result is the
kind of language in which God can be spoken of—and without
which God cannot be spoken of.
This collective creation would serve very well as a paradigm of
the human attempts to make something of life which I began by
mentioning.
'c/. Prof. M. Hodgart reviewing the Jerusalem Bible in The New
York Review of Books, 9 February 1967: "[the 1611 version's] style
is then a peculiar historical accident."
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
313
III
My predominant impression on reading the New Testament in
the New English Bible translation was surprise that any scholar
should think the book worth respectful attention. If the version
gives an accurate idea of the original, the New Testament was the
work of a group of credulous and ignorant fanatics and can be, at
best, of some historical interest to specialists. The book appears to
have come from the worst moment of Christianity, when the
second generation was codifying the wild new impulses of the
first. The moment of writing down is a dangerous one for any
cult, and the Church seems to have made nothing better of it
than the angel who wrote the Book of Mormon. If there was any
originality in Christ it is effectively hidden by the gospel writers,
who present a cheap miracle-worker and dispenser of pretentious
half-truths. Matthew's miracles are two a penny, grotesque lies that
insult the reader with their demands on his credulity:
p. 26 When it grew late the disciples came up to him and said,
"This is a lonely place, and the day has gone; send the
people off to the villages to buy themselves food." He
answered, "There is no need for them to go; give them
something to eat yourselves." "All we have here," they said,
"is five loaves and two fishes." "Let me have them", he replied. So he told the people to sit down on the grass; then,
taking the five loaves and the two fishes, he looked up to
heaven, said the blessing, broke the loaves, and gave them
to the disciples; and the disciples gave them to the people.
They all ate to their hearts' content; and the scraps left
over, which they picked up, were enough to fill twelve great
baskets. Some five thousand men shared in this meal, to say
nothing of women and children.
It is the casualness of the miracles that destroys them. One gets
no sense of the miraculous:
p. 14 "Why are you such cowards?" he said, "how little faith
you have!" Then he stood up and rebuked the wind and
the sea, and there was a dead calm. The men were astonished
at what had happened .. .
—only astonished! The Jerusalem Bible is no better:
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
p. s6 "Why are you so frightened, you men of little faith?" And
with that he stood up and rebuked the winds and the sea;
and all was calm again. The men were astounded and said,
"Whatever kind of man is this? Even the winds and the sea
obey him."
The calming is like turning off a tap. Contrast the Revised Version
of 1881, the last version to use the traditional religious style:
And he saith unto them. Why are ye fearful, O ye of little
faith? Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea;
and there was a great calm. And the men marvelled, saying,
What manner of man is this, that even the winds and sea
obey him?
(Matthew 8, «6-s7)
To take the miraculous so much as a matter of course is a sign of
extraordinary stupidity, and the disciples in the new versions do
seem very inept, unable to understand the simplest figures of
speech, which have to be explained to them as if to a Sunday-school
class (e.g. the Parable of the Sower, N.E.B. p. S3). Whatever the
original text is like, this stupidity is a product of the translators.
This is what they bring out of the text. In their confused pursuit of
accuracy (on which see below) they have failed to show in English
what truth there may be in the miracles or the parables. This was
not a problem for Tyndale and his successors. If miracles are
possible, as they were generally supposed to be, they may be able
to speak for themselves, and one gets from the 1611 version a sense
even of restraint. Jesus, far from scattering miracles broadcast, was
unwilling to perform one unless it should powerfully express
something he had to say. Belief in the factual occurrence of the
miracles could be, for Tyndale, a way of seeing the truth in what
was said. But the forms of truth are different for us. We know,
perfectly well, that five breadloaves and two small fish cannot under
any circumstances feed 5,000 men, and that water cannot turn into
wine. Those things cannot happen—not, at any rate, in a world
to which the laws of physics apply. And the laws of physics are
true. So one of the problems a modern translator faces, knowingly
or not, is how to show that the miracles are not mere lies. And
however the translator tackles this problem it is certain to be
centrally a stylistic one. The difference between frivolously lying
tales and stories with a real significance—a truth—becomes here
almost wholly a question of style: as they convince, or fail to
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
315
convince, so they are true or false. And the new versions fail at
the central miracle, the story of the resurrection.
N.E.B. The angel then addressed the women: "You", he said,
p. 53 "have nothing to fear. I know you are looking for Jesus who
was crucified. He is not here; he has been raised again, as he
said he would be. Come and see the place where he was laid,
and then go quickly and tell his disciples: 'He has been
raised from the dead and is going before you into Galilee;
there you will see him.' That is what I had to tell you." . . .
54
The women had started on their way when some of the
guard went into the city and reported to the chief priests
everything that had happened. After meeting with the elders
and conferring together, the chief priests offered the soldiers
a substantial bribe and told them to say, "His disciples came
by night and stole the body while we were asleep." They
added, "If this should reach the Governor's ears, we will
put matters right with him and see that you do not suffer."
So they took the money and did as they were told. This
story became widely known, and is current in Jewish circles
to this day.
With all the deliberate improbability of this account of the official
version—Roman soldiers asleep on duty who still know what had
happened—it makes what Matthew wants us to believe look a very
tall story indeed. An angel who speaks like that is obviously an
impostor: he sounds much more like a spokesman with an awkward brief. The Jerusalem Bible's angel is similarly unangelic and
even chatty (p. 63). But contrast the 1881 version:
And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not
ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which hath been crucified.
He is not here; for he is risen, even as he said. Come, see the
place where the Lord lay. And go quickly and tell his
disciples, He is risen from the dead; and lo, he goeth before
you into Galilee . . .
(Matthew s8, 5-7.)
That is the only version of the three I could in any sense believe
in.
I chose the miracles as an obvious place to illustrate the
strength or weakness of any translation, but the whole of the New
Testament in the New English Bible version records a mean, in-
gi6
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
significant religious movement. The Beatitudes are here an incitement to one of the most unholy religious types—the soul enclosed
in its own world of self-applauding and self-exhibiting sanctity:
p. 8
How blest are those who have suffered persecution
for the cause of right;
the kingdom of Heaven is theirs.
How blest you are, when you suffer insults and persecutions
and every kind of calumny for my sake. Accept it with gladness and exultation, for you have a rich reward in heaven;
in the same way they persecuted the prophets before you.
John passes off his modish Greek ideas with the self-advertisement
that he was the favourite of Jesus. Paul is a particularly recognizable and unattractive figure, of a kind to be found rising rapidly
in most organizations; he compensates himself for his loss of status
in the old religion by an unscrupulous ascendancy in the new,
which he maintains by a mixture of soft soap and stage thunder.
Revelation is here the woolly rhapsody of a thwarted peasant.
p. 430 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first
heaven and the first earth had vanished . . . [my italics]
There one word makes all the difference betwen a vision and a
conjuring-trick. If this earth can vanish like that how safe is the
next? The Jerusalem Bible varies the mistake:
p. 449
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; the first heaven
and the first earth had disappeared now . . . [my italics]
The Revised Version again gets it right:
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first
heaven and the first earth are passed away . . .
(Revelation, si, 1)
N.E.B. Then he who sat on the throne said, "Behold I I am
p. 430 making all things new I" And he said to me, "Write this
down; for these words are trustworthy and true. Indeed," he
said, "they are already fulfilled . . ."
The prophetic pretension of Behold I collapses with the instruction
to the scribe, which seems to place us at a press-conference. Then
comes the private slipping of information to the favourite correspondent. The feeling of a Guardian interview is persistent in the
version:
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
p.438
J17
Then the angel said to me, "Write this: 'Happy are those
who are invited to the wedding-supper of the Lamb!'" And
he added, "These are the very words of God."
Added, indeed! (The Jerusalem Bible makes the same blunder
and goes on "Then I knelt at his feet to worship him, but he said
to me.'Don't do that . . .' ". Revised Version: "See thou do it not."
If those are the very words of God so much for God. But if God or
angels spoke I can well believe it would be as the Revised Version
makes them:
And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are
bidden to the marriage-supper of the Lamb. And he saith
to me, These are true words of God.
(Revelation 19, 9)
The best passages in the New English Bible are those that keep
closest to the English Bible, and are archaic. But very occasionally
we catch glimpses of what a modern religious register might be
like. This follows the 1611 version closely, but make one alteration
that effectively pulls up the modern reader:
p. 11 No servant can be slave1 to two masters; for either he will
hate the first and love the second, or he will be devoted to
the first and think nothing of the second. You cannot serve
God and Money.
The last short sentence gives in modern English the old plainness
and definiteness and shows the way the religious style ought to speak
—and the way the Bible has to speak if we are to listen. This is
also a place where there is an obvious connection between a
religious style and other styles.
But the New English Bible has no set of styles, no register. The
infelicities of expression are often so obvious that one wonders
how anyone of average literacy could have let them pass. Satan
tries to establish a feudal system with Jesus as a vassal, but Jesus
says, after the manner of the Victorian damsel rebuking the impor'This phrase is infelicitous: for us servants are not the same as
slaves. It should be "No slave can be a slave . . . "—but I suppose
that would have offended the translators' intermittent sense of oldfashioned Style: they like elegant variation. The Jerusalem.Bible
gets this phrase
right.
•'•-'-' - J V .t
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
tunate Villain, "Begone Satan, Scripture says . . ." (p. 6.) A similar
girlish gush ends the first chapter of the Sermon on the Mount:
"You must therefore be all goodness, just as your heavenly Father
is all good-" (p. 10.) There is also something very governessy here:
"Then I will tell them to their face, 'I never knew you: out of my
sight, you and your wicked ways!' " (p. ig.) The version is even,
quite often, more obscure than the 1611 version. The passage about
sex in Matthew 19 is made so vague as to defy interpretation. And
as part of the Lord's Prayer we are made to say (in the Jerusalem
Bible, too), "Do not bring us to the test." What does that mean?
One can find out by consulting commentaries; but that can hardly
be an excuse for the translation.
Before leaving the version let us consider its Shepherds, in contrast to the 1611 version discussed earlier; for I think the failure to
maintain any consistent standard of modern prose is worth a little
examination:
p. 9*
Now in this same district there were shepherds out in the
fields, keeping watch through the night over their flock, when
suddenly there stood before them an angel of the Lord, and
the splendour of the Lord shone round them. They were
terror-struck, but the angel said, "Do not be afraid; I have
good news for you: there is great joy coming to the whole
people. Today in the city of David a deliverer has been born
to you—the Messiah, the Lord. And this is your sign: you
will find a baby lying all wrapped up, in a manger." All
at once there was with the angel a great company of the
heavenly host, singing the praises of God:
"Glory to God in highest heaven,
And on earth his peace for men on whom his
favour rests."
This goes wrong with its first word, Now. Is it now introducing a
temporal clause or now a conjunction? It turns out to be the latter:
but any native English speaker knows that if now equals and it is
confusing to have a when clause later in the same sentence. Here at
the when we have to go back and wonder whether, after all, the
now wasn't temporal. "Keeping watch through the night over their
flock" abandons standard English word order for no apparent
reason, with the result of suggesting that the shepherds are peering
through the darkness over the top of the sheep and failing to see
them. (And it is as impossible to imagine their words spoken by real
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
shepherds as those of the 1611 version: he would be a very
parsonical shepherd who began "Come, let us go . . .") The next
quoted sentence is a model of how not to construct an English
sentence. The words don't make sense of the form—this is not
distinguishable from rhythmic failure—and the suggestion is that
if the sentence were clarified it would read, "Though they were
terror-struck the angel said . . ." Unless sentence-shape and prose
rhythm express the meaning they will attack it. Again in the next
sentence the clauses are in no meaningful order or relation to each
other, and the most important part comes in the most unimportant
place (so near and so far from the 1611 version) tacked on by a dash,
a kind of afterthought when the sentence proper is over. It is
difficult to imagine a more inept use of syntax. Sign is obscure:
if I say, "This is your sign," there is no reason why you should know
what I mean. "Singing the praises" is unfortunate cliche (in which
these translators feel more at home than elsewhere) and "all
wrapped up" is a ridiculous descent into the very colloquial. But
the worst thing is the supposed song:
Glory to God in highest heaven
—so far so good, an ordinary four-foot line; rather a cliche, but
one has seen worse. It is the next line that is impossible:
And on earth his peace for men on whom his favour rests
It has a fairly regular six-foot metre and so is in a way verse1. But
try to imagine it sungl It is incurably prosaic: it could never
inspire another Handel. And the connection between stylistic and
religious failure is particularly clear in the line because the angels
sing so ambiguously as to appear to be trying to mislead the
shepherds. Do they mean that peace is for everyone because God's
favour rests on men, or that peace is for those God's favour happens
to rest on? There is no knowing. And the passage is typical of the
linguistic chaos of the version, which, so far from being a contemporary piece of prose, seems to carry us back to the ages before
English prose or verse were invented. There is something prehistoric, pre-human, in its amorphousness. But perhaps pre-historv
and post-history are to be the same.
'The two new versions share an uneasiness about metre.
Naturally, since their prose rhythms are so incompetent they cannot
reproduce the poetic prose of 1611 and instead, when something
poetic is needed, lurch in and out of metre in a manner very uncomfortable to the reader.
320
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
The new Roman Catholic version, the Jerusalem Bible, suffers
less from blind over-confidence than the New English Bible. It is
a more ordinary, workmanlike job. Just as the Douai Version
rarely rose to the heights of the more daring Protestants, so the
Jerusalem Bible rarely sinks quite to their present depths. It makes
an attempt at a poetic style for some parts of the Old Testament,
sensibly using line-division to indicate phrasing, and sometimes trying to make something of the isosyntactic Hebrew metre. But not
very far down, the Jerusalem Bible suffers from faults similar to
those of the New English Bible; it belongs decisively to the same
moment of history.
To take the version at its best: parts of the Song of Solomon,
that wonderful poem, do become more readily available than in the
old versions, and so may really reach more people.
THE BRIDE
I hear my Beloved.
See how he comes
leaping on the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
My beloved is like a gazelle,
like a young stag.
See where he stands
behind our wall.
He looks in at the window,
he peers through the lattice, (p. 994)
The 1611 version is here comparatively obscure. But the new
version's attractiveness is comparatively shallow and smooth. Here
it is, comparatively, watery:
THE BRIDE
I sleep, but my heart is awake.
I hear my Beloved knocking.
"Open to me, my sister, my love,
my dove, my perfect one,
for my head is covered with dew,
my locks with the drops of night."
—"I have taken off my tunic [J«C]
am I to put it on again?
I have washed my feet,
am I to dirty them again?"
My Beloved thrust his hand
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
321
through the hole in the door;
I trembled to the core of my being.
Then I rose
to open to my Beloved,
myrrh ran off my hand,
pure myrrh ran off my fingers,
on to the handle of the bolt.
I opened to my Beloved,
but he had turned his back and gone!
My soul failed at his flight.
I sought him but I could not find him,
I called to him but he did not answer.
The watchmen came upon me
as they made their rounds in the City, [sic]
They beat me, they wounded me,
they took away my cloak,
they who guard the ramparts.
I charge you,
daughters of Jerusalem,
if you should find my Beloved,
what must you tell him . . . ?
That I am sick with love. (p. 998)
This is certainly a respectable piece of work and even has momenu
of real beauty. But it took those old Protestants, who might perhaps have been expected to take any available cover afforded by
the idea that the work is an allegory, to allow into their translation a most authentic note of passionate abandon:
I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved
that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove,
my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks
with the drops of the night.
I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed
my feet; how shall I defile them?
My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and
my bowels were moved for him.
I rose to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with
myrrh, and my fingers with sweet-smelling myrrh, upon the
handles of the lock.
3««
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
I opened to my beloved; but my beloved had withdrawn
himself and was gone: my soul failed when he spake: I
sought him, but I could not find him; I called him, but he gave
me no answer.
The watchmen that went about the city found me, they
smote me, they wounded me; the keepers of the walls took
away my veil from me.
I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if ye find my
beloved, that ye tell him, that I am sick of love.
(Song of Solomon, 5, 2-8)
The Jerusalem Bible is not free from the stylistic lapses that disfigure the New English Bible. Genesis keeps dose to the old versions,
so the lapses stand out prominently:
The man had intercourse with his wife Eve, and she conceived
and gave birth to Cain. "I have acquired a man with the help
of Yahweh", she said. (p. 18)
(1611: And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare
Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord. [Genesis,
4. 1])
It has also, in the Old Testament histories, a peculiar prosaic flatness:
The Philistines made war on Israel and the men of Israel fled
from the Philistines and were slaughtered on Mount Gilboa.
The Philistines pressed Saul and his sons hard and killed
Jonathan, Abinadab and Malchisua, the sons of Saul. The fighting grew heavy about Saul; the bowmen took him off his guard,
so that he fell wounded by the bowmen. Then Saul said to his
armour-bearer, "Draw your sword and run me through with it;
I do not want these unrircumcised men to come and gloat over
me.'" But the armour-bearer was afraid and would not do it.
(P- 38*)
It is possible to begin this with solemnity and a feeling of significant
events: the prose is so simply neutral that any reading is possible.
But in bulk the same simplicity wears down the reader's efforts and
neutralizes any tone except a totally flat and non-committal one.
Saul and his sons die. So what? The 1611 version makes something
tragic of the same passage:
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
3*3
Now the Philistines fought against Israel: and the men of
Israel fled from before the Philistines, and fell down slain in
Mount Gilboa.
And the Philistines followed hard upon Saul and upon his
sons; and the Philistines slew Jonathan, and Abinadab, and
Melchi-shua, Saul's sons.
And the battle went sore against Saul, and the archers hit
him; and he was sore wounded of the archers.
Then said Saul unto his armour-bearer, Draw thy sword, and
thrust me through therewith; lest these uncircumcised come
and thrust me through, and abuse me. But his armour-bearer
would not; for he was sore afraid. Therefore Saul took, a sword,
and fell upon it.
(I Samuel 31, 1-4)
And, as might have been expected, the Jerusalem Bible founders on
the Psalms. Everything becomes rather goody-goody:
The two ways
Happy the man
who never follows the advice of the wicked,
or loiters on the way that sinners take,
or sits about with scoffers,
but finds his pleasure in the Law of Yahweh,
and murmurs his law day and night, (p. 786, Psalm I)
If these are the alternatives, let us sit with the scoffers.
These versions fail to speak the Word of God in English; and
translators who cannot show the Bible to be the Word of God
have no business to meddle with it. I do not impute any heterodoxy
to these scholars; but they have produced between them the
Atheists' Bible.
IV
The disastrous unawareness of the importance of language and
style, on which I have been concentrating as a way of showing the
general failure of the new versions, comes out dearly enough in
their prefatorial statements. What can they have thought they were
doing?
N.E.B. In doing our work, we have constantly striven to follow our
p. x instructions and render the Greek, as we understood it, into
the English of the present day, that is, into the natural
vocabulary, constructions and rhythms of contemporary
3*4
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
speech . . . Since sound scholarship does not always carry
with it a delicate sense of style, the Committee appointed a
panel of literary advisers, to whom all the work of the
translating panel has been submitted.
I have tried to show that one of the version's failings is a lack of
any very secure sense of contemporary English, natural or otherwise.
But the confusion of the English of the present day with contemporary speech shows, in any case, a blank unawareness that
different modes of discourse need different styles—an unawareness
not finally enlightened by the later explanation that the Literary
Panel "took pains to secure the tone and level of language appropriate to the different kinds of writing." The "panel of literary
advisers" is itself a further instance of misunderstanding of language—even if, in view of the results, one can believe that the
panel ever met. For "sound scholarship" here is the ability to say
in English, with all possible delicacy and precision, what the Bible
writers meant in Greek. The "delicate sense of style" is simply part
of the "sound scholarship". They are very naive, too, about the
process of translation:
p. vii The next step was the effort to understand the original as
accurately as possible, as a preliminary to turning it into
English.
But in what language did the understanding take place? Was it all
in New Testament Greek? For a responsible translator the understanding i5 the translation: the relation he has needed to make
between the text and the life of the language he is translating
into.1
The New English Bible translators appear to have had two
ambitions: on the one hand to produce a scholarly version that
takes into account all the recent advances in textual, historical and
archaeological knowledge, so that the New Testament may be seen
'See Mr. H. A. Mason's very fine essay "Arnold and the Classical
Tradition," Delta, no. 31, 1963, pp. 8-18. For example:
. . . the right relation to the classics is more active than Arnold's
in that it is an attempt to bring them into our intimate concerns. It may not then seem a wild leap to proclaim that we
can only do this by translation: the classics exist only in
translation.
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
3«5
in its first-century context, and on the other to do so in language
that presents no difficulties to the man in the street. The contradictions between these two ambitions are not my present concern.
Neither ambition, even if successfully achieved, could justify the
title of the version, its claim to the inheritance of the English
Bible. It is not surprising that the result is a slangy crib, for the
translators have quite deliberately abandoned the centre, the
tradition that made the Bible of central importance in English
life, and provided the language that allowed it to be so. And
though the sense a translator makes of the Bible must be found in
it, not imposed on it, it is not true that one of the translator's
duties is to be accurate in the way that the translation of a
scientific paper out of Russian into American has to be accurate.
Tyndale believed that if the Bible is the Word of God there can
be no mistakes in it and that the translation must be accurate in
the scientific sense, but in Tyndale's case the belief, and the
superstition, were quite inseparable from the urgent need to speak
the Word of God in English. But the modern translators seem not
to be finally interested in what the Bible means, in what it has to
say to us. And without that interest, the only one that makes any
book worth translating, questions of scientific accuracy are a kind
of scholarly frivolity.
The Jerusalem Bible is even worse in its misunderstanding of why
English needed to evolve a religious style:
p. vi Still less must it be supposed that there should be throughout a kind of hieratic language, a uniform 'biblical' English,
dictated by a tradition however venerable. There is no
doubt that in forfeiting this we lose something very precious,
but one hopes that the gain outweighs the loss.
But the "something very precious" turns out to be the "rhetorical
quality" mentioned a little lower down:
The Psalms present a special problem for translators since,
unlike other parts of the Bible, the psalter is not only a
book to be read but a collection of verse which is sung or
chanted. Moreover, many of them are so familiar in their
sixteenth-century form that any change may seem to be an
impertinence. Nevertheless, here too the first duty of a
translator is to convey as clearly as he can what the original
3*6
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
author wrote. He should not try to inject a rhetorical
quality and an orotundity of cadence which belong more
truly to the first Elizabethan age in England than to the
Hebrew originals. He must avoid the pure bathos of prosy
flatness, but he will be aware that there is no longer an
accepted 'poetic language' which can be used to give artificial dignity to plain statements. It would certainly be
dangerous to give the form of the translation precedence
over the meaning.
The muddle here is so complicated as to be worth unravelling.
Firstly, why is the old style something very precious if it is only
an orotundity of cadence which injects a rhetorical quality on to
plain statements? If so it is just a nuisance and should be got rid of.
Secondly, the only way to convey as clearly as possible what the
original author wrote is to copy it: there the formulation
abandons the idea of translation altogether. The remarks on the
rhetoric of the first Elizabethan age are a way of avoiding the
question of what a modern equivalent of Elizabethan rhetoric might
be. And so it isn't clear from the passage why prosy flatness should
be avoided, especially if the Psalms are "plain statements." But
if it has to be avoided the alternative is some kind of poetic style;
and if there is no longer an accepted poetic language the translator
must either develop one or abandon his task. The misunderstanding
running through the passage is the unawareness that the way
"things" are said affects the things: the writer is here misled by our
customary grammar of words and things (parallel to the phrase
saying a thing we really need another: thinging a say). But where in
the case of the Psalms is the thing? So although the last quoted
sentence could in some places be true here it is misleading. What
would the alternative mean, to let meaning have precedence over
form, if the form is what expresses the meaning?
The result of these attitudes is that the Bible becomes a very
foreign book, needing copious notes and introductions about such
matters as the Spiritual Value of the Psalms, and the allegory in the
Song of Songs (which has always been the church's rearguard
action to prevent that book being read). If the twenty-third psalm
is to begin, "Yahweh is my shepherd, I lack nothing", the Psalter is
a foreign book, not part of the English Bible.
Another fallacy common to both sets of translators is expressed in
the Preface of the New English Bible:
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
3«7
p. viii Today that language [of the old versions] is even more
definitely archaic, and less generally understood, than it was
eighty years ago, for the rate of change in English usage has
accelerated.
Compare :
What are the reasons for this change [in the Prayer
Book]? The most obvious is language. Sixteenth-century
English is each year less and less usable.1
But it is simply untrue that standard English usage is changing
rapidly, or that the rate of change is accelerating. New styles develop, and old ones die; but these statements almost suggest
that to read George Eliot one needs a glossary. It is probably true
that fewer people are familiar with the language of the Bible and
Prayerbook than eighty years ago. That is not, however, the result
of some mysteriously inevitable process of linguistic change, but
simply because fewer people use that language. But Bible language
is not like Anglo-Saxon; it is no more unusable than Shakespeare.
(And one of the corollaries of the position of these scholars is that
there ought to be modern translations of Shakespeare.)
The translators of 1611, and the Revisers of 1881—before the
dayspring of linguistic science—both showed a more intelligent
awareness of the issues involved. The 1611 translators showed a
remarkable linguistic insight in deliberately deciding not to use
the same English word for the same word in the original even when
this could easily have been done: their reason was that, since they
expected their version to have a large influence on the language, it
behoved them to give the status of Bible language to many English
words that could have been left out. And the 1881 revisers have a
much better idea of style than the moderns: they can speak
approvingly, for instance, of "the frequent inversions of the strict
order of the words, which add much to the strength and variety
[not, one notes, beauty or orotundity'] of the Authorized Version."
Of course the 1611 scholars were in a position of strength and
knew it: they were readier to bring the world to God than to take
the Church into the world; and their confidence in their relation
to succeeding generations was proved by the event. But their
awareness helped to establish the situation. No Bible, obviously,
•Rev. Prof. G. D. Kilpatrick in The Times, st Jan. 1967.
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
can be to our age what any Bible was to the seventeenth century,
even if that were desirable. But does this not take us back to the
first question, Why translate the Bible?
V
The Prayer Book revisions set out in the Second Series of Alternative Services, and in a very similar form in experimental use,
are at a surface level much more consistently competent than the
new versions of the Bible. There has been no attempt to re-write
the Book of Common Prayer in journalese, and the re-written parts
do show a grasp of formal English not common at the present day.
But compared with the 1662 book the revisions are flat, churchy and
undramatic In the end the Commission can be justly accused of a
frivolity similar to that of the New English Bible translators,
though their offence is not so glaring.
When their version of the Burial Service appeared, the Times
report remarked that it struck "a less sombre note" than the 166a
version. The new service 15 less sombre—but it seems to me also
less joyful. It insists even more than the old service on Christian
hopes of personal immortality; but it is both less adequate to the
occasion, not confronting us so simply with the fact that a corpse
is being put into the ground, and less hopeful in that it fails to
build anything so profoundly serious on the event. The aims of the
Liturgical Commission are on the whole well stated:
p. 105 What ought we to be doing at a burial service? . . .
. . . the Commission puts forward the following fivefold
answer:
(a) To secure the reverent disposal of the corpse.
[This is slightly confused; disposing of the corpse is not
what we ought to be but what we are doing; and "reverent"
is rather irrelevant: insofar as the problem is one of disposal reverence is needed only as much as it always is in
human affairs. Dustbins ought to be emptied decently.]
(b) To commend the deceased to the care of our heavenly
Father.
(c) To proclaim the glory of our risen life in Christ here
and hereafter.
(d) To remind us of the awful certainty of our own coming
death and judgement.
(e) To make plain the eternal unity of Christian people,
living and departed, in the risen and ascended Christ.
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
3*9
This is a specifically Christian statement of what, generally, a
funeral can do. But the revisers suppose that because the old
service emphasizes the misery of human life it cannot perform
these functions. They imply that the old service expresses a
"denigration of a life that God has created" (p. no) and say:
p. 117 the Commission believes that, although protests against
worldliness are necessary in every generation, it is unfortunate that the only reference in the Burial Service to the
earthly life of the deceased should be in terms of the miseries
of this sinful world.
The 1662 Burial Service begins with one of the most challengingly hopeful assertions in the world. I am surely not the only
person to have been struck dumb with wonder as the minister,
advancing into church followed by the very coffin, cries, "I am the
resurrection and the life, saith the Lord . . ."1 The tension between
this statement and the presence of the corpse (unequivocally so
called in the rubric of the 1662 book) is at the heart of the old
service. A funeral is the occasion for asserting in the act of burying
a corpse the possibility of making something even of a life whose
natural end is the grave. The Lord hath given and the Lord hath
taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord. Whatever one's
belief about personal immortality death does not render life pointless: on the contrary, the duty of a funeral is to wrest sense even
from the fact of death. The Commission understand this, in their
different language, and say wittily that "the message of the New
Testament is rather 'In the midst of death we are in life' than the
reverse" (p. 118). What they seem not to have realised is the effort
it needs to say so, especially for people in the act of burying the
'This remains optionally in the new service in a weaker form,
"Jesus said, I am the resurrection and the life . . ." but the introductory sentences in the new service, all optional, are now all
from the New Testament, which means the exclusion of the best
version of all of the wonderful passages from Job:
I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand
at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin
worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God:
whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and
not another.
33O
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
mortal remains of someone they love. And if a funeral cannot be
an occasion for reminding us of the transience and misery of human
life—which is also, of course, very long and joyful—what can be?
The old service, in its very insistence on transience, connects death
significantly with life in the way the revisers wish to do. It doesn't
follow at all that if misery and mortality are emphasized life is
denigrated.
One of the pieces the new service alters and partly cuts is the
passage that provides the text for the anthems in Purcell's Music
for the Funeral of Queen Mary:
Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and
is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower;
he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one
stay . . .
Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy
merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, O
God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most
worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any
pains of death, to fall from thee.
I mention Purcell because it is perhaps most of all in his music
that it becomes very dear that this is not simply a miserable passage.
We have but a short time—a short time, though, to live. And if we
come up and are cut down like a flower, a flower is hardly an
emblem of misery. (Just so love poems tend to give the hint of a
reference to death:
O my love's like a red, red rose
That's newly sprung in June . . .
How long does the rose last?) Would life be saved from denigration
if it were asserted that we are creatures who do "continue in one
stay"? Purcell shows the poignancy and greatness of what is mortal,
the necessary connection between greatness and transience which
is the subject of a funeral service of whatever religion. As for the
prayer I, who am not a Christian, feel that it expresses exactly the
truth I would like to find at that moment.
Similarly the "sure and certain hope of the resurrection" (which
now becomes "having our whole trust and confidence in the mercy
of our heavenly Father"—oddly unconfident, surely?) is made tense
by its position immediately after that dramatic moment when the
beat of dust to dust, ashes to ashes is marked by the first earth
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
331
dropping on to the coffin, or, in the old days, straight on to the
shrouded corpse.
With all the dogmatism of the Book of Common Prayer, I can
make more of its burial service than of the new one. Part of the
Collect expresses exactly the hope one might get out of a funeral:
We meekly beseech thee. O Father, to raise us from the
death of sin unto the life of righteousness; that, when we
shall depart this life, we may rest in him, as our hope is
this our brother doth . . .
The deliberate range of meaning given to death allows the old
service to be less restrictive, more generally acceptable, than the
new. On the Collect the comment of the revisers is:
p. 116
The Collect of the Prayer Book Service has been found
difficult to attend to by those who have not become familiar
with it through frequent assistance at funerals . . .
so they shorten it. But the shortened version finds room for three
lines of pure churchiness not in the original:
p. 127
. . . for the sake of thy son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who
liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy
Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.
The new burial service is comfortable in the modern sense; the
old one was comfortable in its sense. The new belongs to a world
where the action will usually be a mechanized cremation, where the
waste-disposal is well organized and the significance minimal as, to
a faint hum and, as often as not, canned music, the coffin slides
genteelly through a trapdoor to be consumed offstage in the fires of
an electric Gehenna.
The old burial service is, of course, superbly dramatic, bringing
out of the act of burial all the significance only an action can
enforce. (Tragedy arises from ritual: but ritual is that from which
tragedy arises.) And with "dramatic" I come to my last objection
to the moderns, namely that they seem eenerallv to have much
less sense of pace, of the way a narrative or enacted fable progresses,
than the makers of the 1611 Bible or the 166s Book of Common
Prayer. Often in the New English Bible one is rushed along through
a work that must go as if it were a dramatic poem at the speed one
reads a newspaper. The new service of Holy Communion—as far
as I can follow it through the maze of alternatives, virtually every-
33*
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
thing from Mass to Hot Gospel—gives far less than the old form a
sense of trying very hard to conduct the congregation through
a series of necessary steps, at the right speed. And generally the
churchiness and woolliness of some of the new parts of the new
services will be felt by congregations as an uncertainty of pace.
The Commission seem to have thought that parts of the 1662 book
can easily be shortened. But the old book was not in the habit of
throwing words about, and for instance the General Confession,
now optional in Morning and Evening Prayer, manages to seem
vague and expansive, though very much shorter:
p. s6 Almighty God, our heavenly Father,
We have sinned against thee,
Through our own fault.
In thought, and word, and deed,
And in what we have left undone.
This is simply an expansion of "God, we have sinned against thee."
"Through our own fault" is quite redundant. And the expansion
has none of the effect of progress found in the old text. There,
by the time we get to the phrase that draws the rest together, we
have been taken through a thorough exploration of our condition:
Almighty and most merciful Father, We have erred and
strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed
too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have
offended against thy holy laws, We have left undone those
things which we ought to have done, And we have done
those things which we ought not to have done, And there is
no health in us . . .
Instead of such sharp examination, taken at the speed for maximum
impact, the new services tend to give the authentic vague churchy
flavour.
The revisers of the Prayer Book, like the new translators of the
Bible, have not identified their main problems, and that is a
form of unbelief. Obviously a Church of England Liturgical
Commission rewriting the Burial Service has to decide what to do
about prayer for the souls of the departed, a question of importance
to some Christians and one which goes far back in denominational
history. But there is something wrong with the sense of priorities
which makes prayer for the dead the main question, as the Commission has done. The uncontemporaneity of that concern at a
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
333
time when belief in personal immortality is dying both inside and
outside the churches makes their limiting themselves to traditional
Christian disputes a sort of uninterestedness in what faith could
at present mean. Their unconcern about how to keep alive in the
present words like soul, resurrection, life, belief—to ask what they
can and must mean now—is a failure of intelligence altogether indistinguishable from an impoverishment of faith. They have not
believed hard enough and they have not worked hard enough on
language.
VI
In navigating the minefield I have tried to avoid committing
myself to any particular view of the relationship between words
and things—which seems in any case to be a formulation that confuses a range of relationships by supposing there is only one. But
even if one took the extreme view that words only refer to things,
that the business of religious language is to refer to religious
experience or to God, the idea of the experience or of God will
vary with the way the reference is made. The other extreme is the
belief that language creates what it describes. I do not wish to
endorse either view—especially the latter, for no religion can
remain respectable if it obviously manipulates its gods, and any
language which cannot in some way connect us with the unknown is
not worth preserving. But in any event the influence of language
on the thing expressed is important and indisputable. And if
there is a range of relations between words and things, religion
belongs to that end of the range where the power of language to
shape or unshape the "thing" is at its greatest. Ways of thinking
about seriousness, and ways of experiencing God, vary coherently
with the language used to describe them. Our language is bound to
affect our view of God and what we make of religion is our place
in human history. Learning a language, because it is a child's
initiation into the human world, is also the way a child inherits
the past. We can only begin where we are born.
And even if one follows one of the extremer evangelical views of
seriousness, that our business in the world is the salvation of the
individual soul in a direct relationship with a personality-possessing
God, one still needs the common possession of a religious language.
John Wesley (whose view of religion I was not referring to in the
last sentence) says that at a meeting in Aldersgate Street
334
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
I felt my heart strangely warmed; I felt I did trust in Christ,
Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that
He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the
law of sin and death
—an event which was certainly beyond his control in the sense
that he did not produce it at will. But the event in Wesley's life
became of immense significance to him, and others, only because
he was able to employ in reference to it words like faith, trust, salvation, assurance, law, sin. He needed this language to look on his
life as a whole and see a coherence, the change resulting from the
event. One may accept that the "assurance" was "given", but for
it to be effective it had at least to be recognized and named. Similarly I doubt whether Christian's burden could have rolled away
unless he could have said so. Without a religious language, Wesley's
strange warming of the heart would have remained a sensation: a
conversion is not a conversion until it is described, and the description, or even the recognition, demands an effective language.
That is the difference between Wesley's conversion, or St. Paul's,
and the heartwarmings felt by some at the meetings of Dr. Billy
Graham.
The claim of a mystic to direct intuitive knowledge of God can
be allowed only insofar as the mystical experience has been
expressed, through whatever medium.
So the failure of those works under discussion, which I have been
defining as a linguistic failure, is a basic disaster for modern
Christianity. Unless the holes are stopped the ship must go down:
and if they aren't noticed it can only be because the ship has
already foundered.
When the Christ of the New English Bible commands the
disciples to follow him, one can only wonder that they choose to
obey. And when it is said that he taught "with a note of authority",
one gapes. But the call and the authority in the 1611 version are
harder to resist. It is rather obviously the book of one of the great
religions. Perhaps the New English Bible is more accurate, truer
to the spirit of the original; if so the 1611 version is simply an
improvement on the original. In any case the truth of Christianity
is not like some buried fragmentary antique pot waiting to be
unearthed and put together: any sense Christianity makes is the
collective creation of the Christian centuries. 1611 makes sublime
what 1961 makes trivial. The Bible is so good in the 1611 version
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
335
because in the way it tells its story it embodies the endeavour of
many people who loved the Lord their God with heart and mind
and soul and who therefore did, amongst other things, the necessary
work on language. But those who have not done the work on
language, by living with it and using it in a real religion, will be
betrayed by language.
The 1611 translators summed up in English the sense their
fifteenth-century predecessors had managed to make of the Bible;
and the collective sense they made was confirmed or modified by
the co-operation of later generations in reading them. I am willing
to believe that some of the most important work on the English
Bible went on in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—after,
that is, it had attained its final form. This is only a rather striking
instance of the work that must be done for any book to survive:
the re-creation in every generation, the new interaction between the
book and life. So the familiarity of Bible language, especially
the familiarity of its rhythms, is an inestimably valuable national
possession though, like all collective achievements, open to abuse.
The rhythms of the Bible could not have been so right without the
successful labours of the translators: but equally they could not for
us have been so right if they had not permeated hundreds of years
of the English language by their use in English life. In these ways
the establishment of the Bible and Prayer Book as great forces in
English history was as much the work of the ordinary people who
used them as of the scholars who wrote them. And that is a good
example of the way anyone can help or thwart civilisation. But
an inferior Bible or Prayer Book could not have mattered, and the
new texts cannot matter even in the limited sphere left to them.
The Bible and Prayer Book only attained their importance because they were used, voluntarily or not, by everybody. It is when
one thinks of them as more popular than the News of the World,
more universal than independent television, that the magnitude of
.their achievement appears.
Mrs. Leavis writes of Shakespeare's audience:
They had to take the same amusements as their betters, and if
Hamlet was only a glorious melodrama to the groundlings, they
were none the less living for the time being in terms of
Shakespeare's blank verse . ..'
'Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, p. 85.
336
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
The Bible is an even more glorious example of a universal invitation to rise: there is no levelling down whatever. With the Prayer
Book everybody could be married and buried in terms of a language of real seriousness. Everybody had the opportunity that gave.
"Inevitably no one will find here exactly what he wants to say",
the Prayer Book revisers courageously admit1. And perhaps that is
always true of any public rite. The Prayer Book never did please
everybody, and caused several wars. Even with a good convention
the poet and the novelist and the scientist will be dissatisfied and
want to go further. But still, there are parts of the 166s book which
perform the poetic function of showing more, making more of
life. And the religious register of English must be one of the
finest general possessions in the world, as good a start as any poet
could wish for. There will be no more English tragic poets if we
lose it.
What then must we do? We need a style for seriousness, a
religious register, and we possess a superb though archaic one in
our own language. The present is not a very serious age, and is
unlikely to develop a new generally available religious style. So
"what to do" must here be a question of how to preserve. Or if
we need to develop a newer style, it must develop from the old,
must learn its rhythms and dare to use its great words.
Language has to be conservative. Even the most adventurous poet
or philosopher or prophet conserves more than he alters. So there
is nothing harmfully restrictive in wanting to preserve the best
of a language. It is the same as wishing to conserve the possibilities
for fineness of life civilisation gives; and it is also, here, the wish
to preserve English civilisation.
It needs to be recognised that the Authorized Version and the
Book of Common Prayer are the great exemplars of the English of
communal seriousness. "Keep the truth thou hast found"—truth
here being what is made possible by a style of the language. The
best way to keep it is simply to use it, and the question of how to.
keep it could not have arisen had there not been a trahuon des
clercs, had the "clergy", the educated class, not been so unaware of
the worth of their inheritance, which they appear to be giving
away without even ensuring a mess of pottage in return. The most
'They say this of their Communion Service, Alternative Services,
p. 147.
RELIGIOUS ENGLISH
337
blatant recent treasons have been the documents under discussion,
especially the New English Bible, where, with enlightened selfrighteousness, the translators have betrayed the God of their fathers
in full confidence that they were increasing his chances of survival.
If the Christians would use a religious English, instead of prettifying
it or bemoaning its demise, they might notice how alive it can still
be. They might even revive a little themselves. In churches the
Bible ought to be read in the 1611 or 1881 versions by people who
are willing to take the trouble to read it. If Shakespeare can be
kept alive in reading and performance, as he can, so can the other
great achievement which connects us with his age, the language of
the Bible.
But the religious register is altogether too important a matter to
be left to the Christian denominations, especially as they show so
little sign of recognising their obligation to cherish it. For everyone the 1611 Bible ought to be a central part of education. As such
it would show the artificiality of subject-divisions, for what English
literature, language, or history could be taught without it? Not
to mention Religious Knowledge, whatever that may be. Above all
the Bible must be used often enough, intelligently enough, and
lovingly enough, for its language to sink in. But failing that it
would be better for it to be hammered in as it was to Lawrence
than for it to be forgotten. Those who have left school and forgotten
what the inside of a church is like can play their part by using the
religious style when they feel the need for it. Fear of formality
and solemnity is a modern disease; but there are times in any life
when the failure to command the formal and the solemn will be a
frustration of the human possibilities.
We are rather fond at present of recognising and bowing gracefully to the inevitable; which is certainly more comfortable than
fighting it. Britain's decline into a second-rate power is usually
accepted as inevitable, and we gratefully accept from across the
Channel the pity of a less populous power with a disastrous recent
history. This morning's Daily Mirror remarks calmly that the
reorganization of the B.B.C. along the same lines as the I.T.A. is
sooner or later inevitable. What could be more inevitable than the
historic movement of a language, obviously linked to the historic
decline of a religion?
Yet I cannot see, try as I will, why we need surrender so
important a part of our life and identity as our religious style; unless
we want to. If there is the right determined minority concerned to
338
CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY
preserve and improve the language there is no reason why they
should not succeed, though they will need to make certain recognitions. But if things like the new versions are allowed to pass
themselves off as somehow both contemporary and inevitable, the
war is certainly over and we are living or partly living in a world
that is post-serious and post-English. The alternative could only
be, in whatever ways,
that, for the sake of our humanity—our humanness, for the
sake of the human future, we must do, with intelligent
resolution and with faith, all we can to maintain the full life
in the present—and life is growth—of our transmitted culture.1
That is itself an example of the survival and growth of the
language's style of public seriousness in the work of almost the
only contemporary writer who can use it.
IAN
•F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures? p. s8.
R O B I N S O N