The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them
how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them. . .
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
WE’D STOPPED OFF in Washington DC with H., as most English writers of my age did if they were visiting the American East Coast in the 1990s. He was a little older than me, and infinitely grander in social milieu – but we had ‘clicked’ from the moment we met – some ten years earlier – and he was someone of great warmth of heart, wit and generosity. Whenever he heard that one of his friends was coming to the East Coast, he’d urge them to come and stay in the capital. Thoroughly assimilated as he became as an American – I was going to write, as an American Institution, rather than Citizen – H. was always obsessively interested in the literary gossip of London. When we met, he would always quiz me in detail about the staff of The Spectator – the magazine for which I once worked, and at whose lunch table H. and I had first met. As well as following the doings and affairs, in all senses, of our friends there, he also had a voracious appetite for reading their work. He had always read the new novel by Peter Ackroyd or Shiva Naipaul before anyone else, and if they came to Washington, as they generally did on a book-signing tour, they would receive the same generous hospitality as R. and I were doing that evening, in a palatial apartment block once occupied by General Eisenhower, where H. and his wife and child lived like very hospitable grandees.
But on this occasion, his questions about our friends in common, and our (largely unmalicious) malice about their goings-on and their writings, were put on hold as the cigarette smoke billowed and the gin martinis were dispensed from an enormous shaker.
—So, you have taken leave of your Creator?
This was his excited question – an allusion to something I’d written back home, following on from the Jesus book, expressing total disillusionment with religion and the belief that when we looked about the world – at Northern Ireland, at the Middle East, at Sri Lanka and Burma and many of the countries in Africa – was it not religion itself, not just religious intolerance, which was causing all the trouble? This conversation took place nearly twenty years before H. himself launched into the public arena with enormously well-publicized rhetorical attacks on religion – in the form of broadcasts, lectures, brilliantly conducted public debates and books. He was to become one of the field marshals in the modern campaign against God.
I am in fact one of life’s wishy-washies and, although I meant every word of my anti-religious outburst when I had written it, by the time it had appeared in print, I was beginning to have my doubts! The catechism by H. over those sublimely potent gin martinis made me feel very foolish.
—So, no reality outside ourselves – nothing Out There – no ‘spiritual truth’. . .
Bushy-chested, deep-voiced – I often felt there was something Homeric about him – he began to recite the materialist creed with some fervour. I felt like some teenager who’d accidentally joined the Moonies and got in up to his neck before he’d really had time to think through the implications. H. told me gleefully that William B., a famous right-wing journalist in the US, had also recently lost his faith. He then told me an hilariously scabrous, and ludicrously camp, anecdote about the late Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York.
I do not think I have ever subscribed to the hard doctrines of materialism, for the simple reason that they are based upon an almost absurdly obvious self-contradiction. In order to have reasonable discourse at all, we must be agreed that human reasoning is valid, that it can draw reasonable conclusions. ‘If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.’ If there is no order in nature, if materialism is ‘all there is’, if the human brain has simply evolved by a series of accidental processes, by what criterion does it come to recognize the validity or otherwise of scientific statements, or of any statements at all? In order to know that the material world is ‘all there is’, H. would have to possess a mind – which quite plainly he did. And this mind, with its capacity for ratiocination, for discourse, for turning over evidence. . . We are back to the old philosophical conundrums of consciousness being self-consciousness, of our awareness of our own minds; and back to the insoluble difference between what philosophers term Idealism versus Realism. ‘By trusting to argument at all, you have assumed the point at issue’, as C. S. Lewis put it, quoting J. B. S. Haldane.
But I longed to steer H. off the matter of God and his friends, and, mercifully, we left the subject eventually. Having smoked enough cigarettes to turn our lungs into kippers, and numbed the world with gin, we reeled into the dining room to eat some superb beefsteak, accompanied by flower-vase-sized goblets into which superb Château Talbot had been wastefully splashed. As the meat melted in the mouth, we at last left religion and reverted to gossip.
—We had the Duchess through last week signing her latest.
—Debo?
—Madama Ackroyd.
R. and I left DC the next morning for Charleston. My wife was even more anxious than I was to see the antebellum architectural treasures, and my publisher, S., had a house adjoining a country club a few miles from the city. Over dinner we told him about our time in DC, met some of his family, of whom I was growing fond, and talked about our sightseeing plans.
—That all sounds great, he said. —But tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day, and I’d like to drive over to this place called the Penn Center. It’s on one of the Sea Islands. Dr King often went there for retreats, and to preach, and. . . well, if you’d care to come along. . .
It was a longer drive than I’d expected, and it was dark before we got to the Penn Center. The hall – if my memory serves me right, it wasn’t a chapel, exactly – was completely packed, and we were welcomed effusively. We were not quite the only whites in the place, but it felt like that. I felt stiff with shyness. Although – almost, because – the people at the door were so friendly, did they think we had just come as spectators, not participants, in what was to follow?
There was a large gospel choir assembled, and before long the music began. This was the first time in my life that I had heard this music. It was an intoxicant, and as with the effects of alcohol, muscles relaxed and the mind moved more freely. A good gospel song starts with a slow recitative – sometimes the personal testimony of a soloist, sometimes a few lines sung in chorus. Then the rhythm starts to establish itself. Then the song moves into top gear, a lively hymn of praise. It was during the singing of ‘The Blood Done Signed My Name’ that I really gave myself up to the music. . . Lead me, dear Master, to ma home above. . . The Blood will never lose its Power. . .
Surely no one, except the totally cloth-eared, can hear that music without hearing two centuries and more of dignified human suffering, two centuries and more in which African people had been treated like chattels, kidnapped, exiled, forced into punitively hard labour and enslaved. Almost the most painful part of the story is what happened after they were supposedly ‘liberated’ and slavery was abolished, but still, especially in the Southern States, the vast majority of African Americans lived in abject poverty and were exposed to the most degrading discrimination.
Perhaps those of a generation younger than I am – I was born in 1950 – find it hard to envisage a world in which one category of human beings, in the free, democratic United States, were allowed into certain schools, toilets, buses, from which other categories of person were excluded. And perhaps no one who has lived in latter times can quite recapture how exciting it was to live in a world which contained Dr Martin Luther King, nor how the Civil Rights Movement, and the anti-Vietnam war movement, came to a tragic crescendo in 1968 with the assassination of King, and of Bobby Kennedy.
As the voices swelled – I Rose up this Mornin’ with the Holy Ghost – I began to envisage Dr King himself standing in that quite small hall and addressing his followers. I have only ever heard him deliver his famous speeches on film. Whether preaching from the pulpit or delivering a political message from the podium, his rhetoric follows a pattern which is in fact very similar to that of the gospel song. He would start, in his modulated and very educated tone, to expound his theme. If he was preaching from the Bible, he would usually make it clear that he had read the relevant modern commentaries on the Scriptural passage and took a non-fundamentalist view of the text. He would then draw out its poetry. To this extent, he was most perfectly true to the tradition of Christian Scripture reading which we find in Paul’s Epistles, in Hebrews, and in the early Fathers of the Church – expounding the ‘literal’ reading of a text, and then moving towards an exposition of its ‘true’ meaning.
As he did so, his voice and manner would change. He would move, as it were, from the ‘recitative’ to the rhythmic chorus, often repeating a phrase over and over again – as in the most famous of all his speeches – ‘I Have a Dream’. And the larynx would then become vibrato, and he would move to his peroration.
It is difficult to think of anyone in my lifetime (I was born after the death of Gandhi) who more deserves the name of prophet than Dr King. Nor is it easy to think of any figure who was more Biblical. One thinks of his sermon delivered, I think, at Atlanta, Georgia, on the three young men, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, in the Book of Daniel, who refused to bow down and worship the image set up by King Nebuchadnezzar. The title and text of the sermon was ‘But if Not!’
As the sober Harvard Ph.D. expositor of the original text in Daniel moved into choric mode, the simple Bible story began to be applied to the current situation in the American South. Even if the demonstrations and the boycotts and the protests got apparently nowhere, they were still going to continue – because it was right to protest and because, eventually, he had confidence that they would succeed.
His extraordinary speech in Memphis on the eve of his assassination foresaw that, like Moses, who died on Mount Nebo before he was able to get to Canaan, he would never enter the Land of Promise. King saw political and social events in the light of the Bible, and deliberately used the language and lore of the Bible to speak of his campaign for Civil Rights. Reared in the African-American Baptist tradition, he absorbed the ‘modern’ approaches to the Bible text, studying the German critics and theologians. Early in his ministry, however, he abandoned the arid textual methods of the twentieth-century Germans and reverted to a much older way of reading the Bible – using allegory and typology as methods of interpreting the old stories, just as Augustine and the early Fathers of the Church had done. He did not need to teach this way of reading the Bible to his congregations – they already read it that way themselves, seeing their own struggles and dilemmas reflected in the story of Moses delivering the enslaved people of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land. While academics all over the Western world were letting the Bible turn into a dead letter beneath their imperceptive scrutiny, King and his followers found it to be a living Word which inspired them to live and to act and to become free:
My soul is sick, my heart is sore
Now I’m coming home
My strength renew, my hope restore
Lord, I’m coming home.
His rhetoric was consciously Biblical, and the more practically political he became, the more he invoked the Bible, uttering speeches which had Hebrew parallelism in their poetry.
If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.
The metaphor of the ‘Dream’ speech is as old as the prophet Joel’s visions – ‘your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions.’ [Joel 2:28]
King’s sermons all have the vividness of poetry:
You can’t hem him [mankind] in.
He has a mind.
Hold John Bunyan
In Bedford jail
He set there
But because he had a mind
His mind leaped out of the bars.
Using Christ’s parable of Dives and Lazarus, King compared Africa to a beggar lying at Europe’s doorstep. Before a march in Albany, he declared:
We will march around
Those jail house walls
That symbolize segregation
We will walk around them
Like unto Joshua
Until the walls
Come tumblin’ down.
The academic world was taken over, during the 1970s, by what was called Theory, sometimes Critical Theory. One of its cardinal doctrines was that expressed by, among others, the Canadian theorist Jean-François Lyotard who spoke of ‘the end of grand narratives’ (in The Postmodern Condition). The grand narrative is one which encompasses all others. Lyotard – deriving from Derrida and other theorists – wanted to make his devotees believe that ‘grand narrative’ was either sinister – as it had been in the time of the National Socialists – or simply fallacious. Yet the template of all templates, the Grand Narrative of all Grand Narratives in the West, has been the Bible; and only a few years before Critical Theory swept the campuses, King had demonstrated the power of the Grand Narrative.
I suppose a secularist like my friend H. in Washington would have said that the important thing about King was that he began a tide of demonstration against an unquestionable evil, that as well as possessing the gift of oratory he had prodigious organizational skills. The bus boycott in Atlanta was only the beginning. In the final Memphis speech, he had calculated that, though the American blacks were poor, their collective income exceeded the GDP of Canada. When he began to tell them not to buy Coca-Cola or not to invest in white-run insurance companies, he was wielding some mighty economic clout.
It was this, the secularist H. would have argued, and not the guff about the Book of Daniel, which gave King his power and his place in the history books. But if this is what he thought (and I am putting words in his mouth), this is so facile, and so wrong!
H. had wanted me to agree that not only was ‘religion’ all rubbish; but it was also a form of mental poison, responsible for so many of the pointless conflicts in the world. I’d nodded in agreement as the martinis made a Cloud of Unknowing in my skull, but here was a glaring example of a phenomenon which was the opposite of mental poison.
African Americans, through their spirituals, through their Baptist and other chapels, through their traditions of song, carried around with them, from their first arrival as slaves until the present day, a collective way of reading the Bible.
They knew that a ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘literalist’ view of Scripture justifies slavery, rather than the reverse. Both the Old and the New Testaments were written during periods when slaves were a fact of life, and you could even justify, as the right-wing whites in South Africa could do for many years, the oppression of black people by whites from the story of Ham (father of Cain) gazing on his father Noah’s nakedness and being punished. ‘Lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.’ [Genesis 9:25] But the American slaves and their descendants were not Biblical literalists. They were People of the Book.
Rather than using the Bible as a weapon with which to strike their enemies, they saw it as filled with symbolic and collective significance. Their instantaneous identification with the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt, for example, was not a fanciful reading of the Torah. It was the authentic way of reading it. The ones who have got that story wrong include the academics who insist that the whole story of Moses is ‘myth’ and therefore of no value to the historian; and the fundamentalists who think that these rich stories somehow or other justify the drawing-up of certain territorial borderlines in the twenty-first-century Gaza or West Bank. Those are the strangely linked fundamentalists who get the Bible wrong. But the slaves who sang ‘Go Down Moses’ and the oppressed African Americans who joined the Civil Rights Movement, and Dr King, they are the ones who knew How to Read the Bible. They remake it the Book of the People.
After Samuel had anointed Saul, and proclaimed him the King of Israel, the old priest told him that, as he came down the road to Gibeath-Elohim, ‘at the place where the Philistine garrison is; there, as you come into the town, you will meet a band of prophet coming down from the shrine with harp, tambourine, flute, and lyre playing in front of them; they will be in a prophetic frenzy. Then the spirit of the Lord will possess you and you will be in a prophetic frenzy along with them and be turned into a different person. Now when these signs meet you, do whatever you see fit to do, for God is with you.’ [1 Samuel 10:5–7]
The root meaning of ‘to prophesy’ is probably a verb meaning ‘to slaver’, ‘to foam at the mouth’. As Martin Luther King’s biographer Richard Lischer wrote, ‘Hebrew scholars contend that prophets are “maladjusted” figures whose “pathological” visions are given utterances in tones “one octave too high for our ears”.’
Some Bible scholars believe that the prophetic tradition stretches right back, a thousand years BC. The first prophets whose words and actions are recorded in books of the Bible emerged in the eighth century BC. Amos is the earliest – he was active during the peaceful reign of Jeroboam II, 788–747 BC. Amos was a sheep-farmer in the southern Kingdom of Judah. Moved by the Spirit of the Lord, he began to denounce the religious hypocrisy, and the social injustices, of the northern kingdom, Israel. The key sentence in the entire book – one beloved of Dr King himself – was ‘The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy?’ [Amos 3:8]
Although Amos uttered his prophecies at a period when monotheism was very far from being established, he was a monotheist of sorts. Two things distinguish his powerful utterances. The first is his sense of the Lord being the Lord of all – who made the earth and the stars and the world of men and women: ‘The one who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea, and pours them out on the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name’ [Amos 5:8].
Second, Amos, who spoke in the name of the Lord God, is convinced that God communicates via the human conscience. We know the difference between right and wrong, and in making these discernments, we come to know God. ‘For lo, the one who forms the mountain, creates the wind, reveals his thoughts to mortals, makes the morning darkness, and treads on the heights of the earth – the Lord, the God of hosts, is his name!’ [Amos 4:13] In the later prophecies of Ezekiel, a Temple priest who was taken into exile in Babylon in 597 BC with the first tranche of Hebrew exiles, there is a vivid metaphor: ‘A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.’ [Ezekiel 36:26–27]
But the Hebrew prophets did not preach a merely private religion. True, they called every man, woman and child to pray for that new heart of flesh, in place of the heart of stone. True, they preached personal repentance. But they were also passionately engaged with a quest for social justice. They were not monks or contemplatives. Their possessed, or frenzied, utterances were commentaries on actual world events, and they called for the all-out reform of the system. That is why a figure such as Amos, the small sheep-farmer who took on the kings and rulers, denouncing their greed and selfishness and neglect of the poor, was so inspiring to Martin Luther King.
There are many prophets in the Hebrew Bible, but the archetypical prophet was Elijah, whose story is told in the First Book of Kings. His clashes with the evil King Ahab and with the pagan, self-indulgent Queen Jezebel in the Kingdom of Israel make up some of the most memorable narratives in the whole of Scripture.
When the prophet encountered the king, Ahab, in his greeting, gave the definition of a prophet in the Biblical tradition: ‘“Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” He answered, “I have not troubled Israel; but you have, and your father’s house, because you have forsaken the commandments of the Lord and followed the Baals.”’ [1 Kings 18:17–18] There followed a vast assembly on Mount Carmel, where Elijah challenged the four hundred and fifty pagan prophets (prophets of Baal) to a competition. He told the crowds who assembled that they must choose between following the popular pagan religion promulgated by Queen Jezebel and her false prophets, or following Yahweh, the true God. ‘“I, even I only, am left a prophet of the Lord; but Baal’s prophets number four hundred fifty.”’ [1 Kings 18:22]
Two bulls were brought. Elijah took one of the animals, and the priests of Baal another. The competition was to see which God – the Lord or Baal – would set light to a burnt offering merely by prayer, without the fire being lit by human hand. From morning to noon, the prophets of Baal limped around their altar offering their imprecations to Baal, and as they did so, Elijah mocked them: ‘“Cry aloud! Surely he is a god; either he is meditating, or he has wandered away, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened.”’ [1 Kings 18:27]
Here is a classic exposition of how the Torah, the Prophets and the Wisdom Literature of the Bible all spell out the same ‘atheist’ message. Our contemporary denouncers of theism and religion are nearly always operating, though they would not recognize this, in the tradition of Elijah’s speech on Mount Carmel. The true God cannot be destroyed by human satire or human attempts at logic. He is God! But the lazy substitutes for science or substitutes for logic which masquerade as theology or religion – these are rightly destroyed by the arguments of H. and his friends.
After the prophets of Baal had been reduced to despair, cutting themselves with swords and lances as they cried out to their nonexistent god Baal, it was the turn of Elijah. He cut up his bull and laid it on the altar. Then he asked the helpers to dig a trench around the altar and filled it with water. Again. And again. Having doused his meat and stones with water, Elijah called upon the name of the Lord, ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel’ [1 Kings 18:36].
Fire came from heaven. Elijah was vindicated. He took all four hundred and fifty false prophets to the Wadi Kishon and slaughtered them.
It is not a gentle tale! But nor does it end there. Having proved his case, and slaughtered the false prophets, Elijah’s life was in grave danger from Jezebel. He went into hiding, in a cave on Mount Horeb, and there he sank into a profound depression.
Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’ He answered, ‘I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.’
He said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. [1 Kings 19:9–12]
It is in the ‘still small voice of calm’ that the prophet hears the voice of the true God.
After the Babylonian exile, the Biblical writers conveyed a sense that the voice of prophecy ceased. In Psalm 74, for instance, the writer asks God, ‘why do you cast us off forever?’ As the poet imagines their enemy destroying the sanctuary and hacking at the adorned Temple with hatchets and hammers – it was a Psalm which Dietrich Bonhoeffer marked in his prayer book with the date of Kristallnacht – he states, ‘We do not see our emblems; there is no longer any prophet’ [Psalm 74:9].
The rabbinic literature believed that, just as the kings of Israel and Judah died out, so did the prophets. ‘After the first temple was destroyed, kingship ceased from the house of David, the Urim and the Thummim ceased. . . After Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi – the latter prophets died – the Holy Spirit departed from Israel.’
It was at this moment that the Jews felt the need for Scripture, and began either to write the books we now call the Bible, or to compile older writings into the shape they came to possess as Biblical texts. Whether you take the view that the Bible texts were written in the fourth to second centuries BC, or whether you follow another strand of modern scholarship and believe that the Bible is actually much older – largely written between the reigns of King Hezekiah (r.715–687 BC) and King Josiah (r.640–609 BC) – does not really alter the argument here.
Plato recorded the sayings and conversations of his hero Socrates, and there was something deeply paradoxical about this exercise. For Socrates made it clear that we arrive at the truth by the oral examination of concepts and ideas, by talk, by conversational to and fro. To freeze such concepts into written dialogues, highly elaborate written constructs, is of course to change their nature entirely. And Socrates, incidentally, rather like the oral prophets of old Israel, was believed to be possessed by a particular Spirit.
Likewise, the spoken words of inspired prophets differ markedly from written words. This is not just because the scribe who wrote them might have distorted the words, like the idiotic evangelist in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, who keeps misquoting the Master. It is because the spoken word is living, and the written word cannot live in the same way. Not all the Biblical authors would have agreed with Paul, writing to his Christian converts in Corinth that ‘the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life’ [2 Corinthians3:6], but the prophets, and Socrates, would have seen the point when he told his followers, ‘You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all’ [2 Corinthians 3:2].
Judaism is so intensely literate a religion, based not just on written Biblical texts, but on the written commentaries made by the rabbis on those texts, and then further commentaries on the commentaries, that we can be forgiven for not distinguishing the world where the Bible originated from its later life in the rabbinic schools and the synagogues.
The legendary happenings of the Bible (the Fall of Man, Noah, the Hebrew Enslavement in Egypt, the Journey through the Wilderness, and so on) happened not merely in times which, if not prehistoric in the palaeolithic sense, are pre-realist history. But they are also pre-writing. The alphabet came into general use in the world at about the time of the first world empire, the Assyrian, in the eighth century BC, which was also the time of the first written prophecies in Hebrew. In this world, literacy was not just rare, it was all but non-existent for most people.
In the pre-history times – pre-history, that is, as far as the Bible is concerned, in the second millennium BC – writing, pre-alphabetic writing, was always sacred. It was a sacred or magical act. Among the earliest forms of writing to be found are inscriptions on or near Egyptian coffins from the third millennium BC. Their magical rituals reflect the idea that writing could actually spring to life, possess a magical life of its own. It is to this ‘pre-historic’ mode of writing that the Ten Commandments belong when God’s Finger actually traced the Torah on stone for Moses [Exodus 24:12].
Once we enter the era where the Bible becomes history, the written word, and our attitude to it, begins to change. After this, there can exist the illusion that the inspired or spoken word is really more lively than the inscribed or written word. Two things seem to happen at once here. On the one hand, the written – still more the engraved – word has authority. It conveys, and reflects, power. Write something down and we are beginning to move towards a time when it is unchangeable. On the other hand, while all these texts were preserved by writing and reading, there remain, in a number of literate traditions, the illusions of orality. Plato, one of the greatest writers of the ancient world, managed to make a hero out of a man who never wrote a word, Socrates. What are in fact carefully crafted literary texts, written by Plato, come to us as the oral effusions of Socrates. In a comparable way, ‘orality was. . . an ideology of Rabbinic Judaism’. The Rabbis believed that the spoken Torah had more authority than the written Torah. But this is going to lead us round and round in circles; because, of course, the writing down of spontaneous utterance is the only way they possessed of immortalizing it.
This duality, this tension between the ‘inspired’ Word of God and the sacred quality of the Written, is something which the Bible brings down through history, packed into each of its books. It explains many of the spats, in Judaism and Christianity, between the ‘prophetic’ or ‘ecstatic’ interpreters of the Word and those who believe in a sacred and unalterable Text.
The Biblical tradition of the prophets brings this out very clearly. The Bible is calling us to tear out our hearts of stone and replace them with hearts of flesh. That is why so many of the prophets of the twentieth century were inspired, as was Dr King, by the Biblical spirit of prophecy, which in Christianity is developed into the notion of God’s Word, not merely spoken, but incarnated, made flesh. Although the Word was only made flesh once in the formal doctrinal sense, there is another sense in which the Word is made flesh, in Biblical terms, every time the prophetic spirit is invoked, every time the hunger for justice is fulfilled.
It was late when we returned to the country club from the Penn Center.
—I forgot, said S. —Someone wrote to you and posted it to my office in New York. Here—
He held out an envelope, inscribed with the familiar italic of L.
Seeing the postmark, he asked,
—Who d’you know in Kentucky?
—No one.
What was she doing there? Buying a horse?
Trying to get to grips with the chapter on the Prophets for How to Read the Bible.
I did not recognize the name of the place at the time. L. was staying in the guest house at the Abbey of Gethsemani, the Trappist monastery where Thomas Merton had pursued his pilgrimage. She did not directly allude to my tirade ‘against religion’, but presumably she meant some reference to it when she wrote:
So much of the anti-religious feeling in the West seems to be a form of laziness: not bothering to listen to what our ancestors were saying: not having any use for the old furniture and pictures inherited by our grandparents, so chucking them all out. Previous generations have been enlivened by the Bible, not held back by it, because they have always been able to read it as a template of how their own lives – as individual and as groups – are to be led: the Abolitionists, for example, who campaigned for the scrapping of slavery, were all guided by the Bible in one way or another, just as the slaves were all sustained by their ability to transpose their own situation on to the stories of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, and their journey through the desert to the freedom of the Promised Land. I think I want to write about this in my chapter on the Prophets. . .
When Jesus was Transfigured – when he appeared to be shining with light on the mountain and his three friends saw him conversing with Moses and Elijah – how did they know it was Moses and Elijah?!! No one had ever taken photographs of these individuals.
Yet it is one of the most popular scenes for Icons in the Eastern Church. We are to take it that in this moment he was shown to be the fulfilment of two strands of Jewish tradition – the Torah, in Moses, and the Prophetic tradition. It was his life as a prophet, denouncing the wrongdoing of his day, that led him to the Cross.
On the plane coming over, I read a life of Trevor Huddleston, the Anglican bishop who did so much to campaign against apartheid twenty years ago in South Africa and got expelled for his pains. He said in one of his sermons, ‘The Christian, if he is true to his calling, is always an agitator. . . At the heart of our religion there lies a principle in absolute contradiction to the principles by which the world speaks and thinks and acts.’
While King and his followers campaigned for justice in the United States, in South Africa a parallel struggle was advancing against apartheid, spearheaded by some Anglican monks, the two most prominent of whom were Raymond Raynes and Trevor Huddleston. When I wrote to L. about the experience of hearing the gospel singers at the Penn Center, she sent back another quotation from one of Huddleston’s Christmas sermons in South Africa: ‘It is this mystery of identification which finds its expression in the Stable of Bethlehem – God Almighty and Eternal, identifying Himself with man at his most helpless, with man in his utter littleness and poverty. Surely if the Incarnation means anything at all, it must mean the breaking down of barriers not by words, but by deeds, by acts, by identification.’
She added:
The Word, in other words, is always two things, which is what is meant by its taking Flesh. The Word is active (King, Huddleston, any prophetic engagement with the world, whether in the Civil Rights Movement, Oxfam, the anti-apartheid movement, etc., etc.) and it is also written. Words are not just spoken. Socrates to this extent is a fictional character. And the Jesus of the Gospels??? Fascinating that Solzhenitsyn was beginning his painstaking dedication to the Word – writing out the experiences of his fellow-prisoners in the Gulag Archipelago, as these other heroes (roughly) were fighting for truth and justice in the American South and in South Africa. . .
It is indeed a strange fact that at the very same period in history that Dr King was leading his followers to Mount Nebo and showing them the Promised Land of an end to segregation, an end to discrimination, an end to the iniquity of racism in the United States, an obscure physics teacher from Rostov in the Soviet Union was writing his own commentary on the Scriptures in the form of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and had already begun his furious exposé of the Gulag Archipelago.
When I was in my twenties, in the 1970s, if you had asked anyone in Western Europe or the United States to name a celebrated author, they would almost certainly have said Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Yet now his memory has vanished almost without trace.
Extraordinary.
In One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alyosha, the Baptist in a neighbouring bunk, had copied out half the New Testament into a notebook which he kept concealed in a crack in the wall, invisible to the warders. He read from it aloud so that Ivan D. can hear:
The Baptist was reading his Bible, not altogether silently, but sort of sighing out the words. This was meant perhaps for Shukhov. (A bit like political agitators, these Baptists. Loved spreading the word.)
‘But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or a thief, or a wrongdoer, or a mischief-maker; yet if one suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but under that name let him glorify God.’
These are all ways of reading the Bible.
The folkloric books of Samuel and Kings were included in the synagogue libraries in the section reserved for Prophecies. Although they contain some of the most famous stories in the world – the boy David fighting the giant Goliath, the prophet Elijah feeding the ravens, King Solomon, the wisest man in the world, being visited by the Queen of Sheba – they are fundamentally imbued with a single prophetic message. That message is that Israel, and later Judah, made a fundamental mistake in asking God to give them a human king. God was, and is, their King.
In 1 Samuel 8, the people approach their old prophetic patriarch, Samuel, with the request: ‘“You are old and your sons do not follow in your ways; appoint for us, then, a king to govern us, like other nations.”’ [1 Samuel 8:5] Samuel consulted God, who said, ‘“Listen to the voice of the people. . . for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.”’ [1 Samuel 8:7]
Samuel warned the people against monarchy.
These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots; and he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his courtiers. [1 Samuel 8:10–15]
Embedded in the prophetic tradition is the everlastingly revolutionary idea that God never wanted his people to have a king, and nor did he want them to have a temple. That is why, in history, those who hate throne and altar, whether Milton or Voltaire, have something recognizably of the Divine Spark.
Jesus stood before Pilate, having been mockingly crowned with thorns. He recognized the authority of Caesar, but reverted to the true prophetic ideal of Israel when he said, ‘Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ [Mark 12:17]
Solzhenitsyn’s prophetic witness could not take the oral, and dramatic, form of the Civil Rights Movement in America. Imprisoned for years in the Gulag Archipelago, in common with millions of others, he knew that vocalized dissent would have led to instant death. It must often have been an extinction for which each and every prisoner of the Stalinist regime yearned. But Alexander Solzhenitsyn wanted the world to know what was happening behind the impassive cruel façade of Soviet communism. Now, forty years later, we all know what was happening and we can read such magisterial surveys as those of the Pulitzer prize-winning Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History. But when Solzhenitsyn’s work began to appear in the West, it was a revelation. We knew that Stalin had been cruel, we knew he employed secret police, we knew that many millions had died in the civil war, in the purges, in the Second World War. The extent of the enslavement, the sheer numbers of dissidents killed or imprisoned, however, we did not know. The sheer magnitude of the Stalinist propaganda lie we did not know. And the first major work of demolition was that of Solzhenitsyn.
After his exile in Vermont, and his subsequent return to a post-Soviet Russia, Solzhenitsyn excited much controversy, not least for his defence, in the second volume of The Gulag Archipelago, of those thousands of Russian troops, at the end of the Second World War, who had been prepared to side with the Germans in an attempt to destroy the Stalinist tyranny.
These are matters of controversy which will never go away, but they should not be allowed to diminish his stature. Here was one who held the emperor to account, and who in so doing, during the long years in prison, came to share the Christian faith which he had first seen among the Baptists and later rediscovered in his own Orthodox Church.
What he has in common with Civil Rights campaigners, and with the anti-apartheid campaigners, is a Biblical sense of prophecy. Those who regard religion as mental poison blind themselves to the forcefulness of religion as a power for good against monstrous injustices. All over Eastern Europe, partly inspired by Solzhenitsyn, partly inspired by the leadership of the Archbishop of Cracow, later Pope John Paul II, men and women rejected Marxist Materialism and the brutal system which it had inflicted upon them. The religion of the Scriptures, the Christian religion, was not just a cultural adjunct to their struggle: it was the fundamental inspiration. Christ stood before Pilate, and the world saw that the spirit of prophecy was not dead.