We may take the Book of Job, perhaps, as the epitome of the narrative
of the Bible, as the Book of Revelation is the epitome of its imagery.
Northrop Frye, The Great Code
I CAME ACROSS L. during my first year at university. She was quite a bit older than I was – a graduate student, working, as I came to understand, on ‘The Bible’. She happened to be sitting next to me in a crowded lecture theatre in the newly built English Faculty Building in Manor Road. The lecturer was the celebrated Canadian Northrop Frye, who was spending a summer term in Oxford (where he had himself studied as a graduate, at Merton College). He was lecturing on William Blake. I had not then read Frye’s ground-breaking book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry, nor his Anatomy of Criticism. I was therefore unprepared for his style: the huge magisterial sweep, taking in the whole of world history; the vast Vico-esque, not to say Spenglerian, generalizations, and divisions of the ages of man, the preoccupations with myth and language. I came in time to see what an enormous influence Frye had had on L., and in turn – both via L. and in my own reading of him – what a great influence he would have on the way I myself read the world. At the time of these Blake lectures, Frye had not yet published his superb book on the Bible, The Great Code, which took its title from Blake’s ‘The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art’.
Frye seemed to have absorbed much of Blake’s prophetic mantle, not a little of his sheer battiness. His lectures on Blake were a stylish pyrotechnic display. He began each of them with a resumé of what he had said in the previous week, but instead of saying, ‘Last time, we were discussing. . .’, he would declaim: ‘Last Day. . .’ and there would then be a longish pause. During the ten seconds before more words came forth, there was time to wonder whether he was himself a recording angel, dispatched to Oxford to announce the End of Time itself, and the ushering in of the Rule of the Saints.
Quite by chance, L. was sitting beside me at the first lecture, much of which had passed over my head, as Frye discoursed of Blake’s Prophetic Books (which I found impenetrable), illustrated with diagrams which he chalked rapidly on the board, talking all the time and letting forth a truly prodigious range of reference. Everything from Milton to Hegel, from Luther to Kant, from Giambattista Vico to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, was apparently of relevance.
In those days, L. had dark hair. She looked like a sad gypsy. At – what, seven? – years older than I was, her intense, innocent, bony face was much as it remained for the next thirty-plus years of our friendship. The same aquiline nose, the same high cheekbones, the same intense dark eyes which glinted behind very thick specs.
Typically of L., she turned to me after the lecture, without introducing herself, and started in with that conversation which we continued until she died, sometimes in person, sometimes by letter or postcard, and sometimes by a weird telepathy, which would mean that she would simply materialize in my life – often after an absence, and a silence, of several years – and meet my mind at the point which it had reached in my own puzzled searching of the Scriptures.
—It’s bold, his – Frye’s – view that the Bible was to be read as a whole. Biblical ‘scholarship’ as such is of very limited use in appreciating the Bible. Frye always says that the very worst way to read the Bible is as an anthology of Near Eastern texts, some written before, some after Christ.
—But isn’t that precisely what the Bible is? I don’t know how you can read a book ‘as a whole’ which has so many different authors, was composed at so many different times. . . Take Genesis alone. No scholar knows whether the Yahwist author is the oldest strand – as used to be thought. Then there is the Priestly author, and the Eloist author. . . and all their different narratives coalesce and have been shoved together by a redactor to form the book we know as Genesis.
—That’s all very well, said L. —But that sort of work is really archaeology, not reading. Isn’t the fascination of the Bible the story of how it has been read, how it has been interpreted? The way it has shaped human lives, human imaginations? The Bible is a great work of the imagination.
—But whose imagination, the reader’s or the writers’?
—That is the question! Some coffee?
When she stood, I saw how very tall she was, a good six feet two.
I did not know at the time, though I discovered in the course of that term – when Frye gave those eight unforgettable lectures on Blake – that L. had actually begun her graduate work at Toronto, as a pupil of Frye’s, and this was the origin of her elusive ‘Bible book’. She spoke of it to me during that summer in Oxford as if it was a work all but completed.
—Take Job, she said to me a few weeks later as we were walking around Christ Church Meadows. —Tell me what you know about it.
—Well, I said, it’s one of the great literary masterpieces of the Bible. Probably written at the time of the Exile – 600 or so, maybe 500 BC.
—That’s the archaeology out of the way, said L. —But, you must see, in effect Job is the whole of the Bible in miniature. Job foreshadows it all. Remember, Job was ‘the greatest of all the men of the east’. He’s a type of virtuous, perfect man – almost a king. In the first chapter the wholly virtuous Job loses his ten children – seven sons and three daughters – his extensive flocks of sheep, his camels and all his wealth. In the second chapter, he finds himself covered in sores. We, the readers, or hearers of the tale, are aware that these calamities have befallen a blameless, religious man as the result of an almost frivolous debate between God, Yahweh and Satan, who in the Hebrew is described as one of the sons of God. Yahweh believes that, whatever is thrown at him, Job will not lose his faith. Satan is of the opinion that if Job is made to suffer enough, he will abandon his faith. ‘Does Job fear God for nothing?’ [Job 1:9]
Satan’s question is one of the big questions of the book. And it is, of course, a great book, one of the Biblical books which is also a stupendous work of literature, a book in which the Hebrew poetry is never more hauntingly musical or sad, nor in which the theological questions, now simple to the point of simple-mindedness, now subversive and deep, are more disturbing.
Christians who believe that the Bible contains all the answers to all the questions are as likely to be disturbed by the Book of Job as those anti-Godders who want to think that the Bible is a sort of Koran, designed to hammer you over the head with instructions about how to live. By contrast, the really disturbing thing about the Book of Job, as about the Bible as a whole, is its refusal to answer the questions which it so honestly and devastatingly puts.
You will remember that in the Book of Genesis, Abraham and the Lord have a conversation about the sinful city of Sodom. God is in favour of total destruction, but he has to warn Abraham to get out first, since it is in Abraham’s seed that all the future generations of the blessed will be found. But, asks Abraham, supposing there were fifty righteous people left in Sodom? How about that? Would you destroy a whole city and risk killing fifty righteous? And so on, until he has whittled down the number from forty-five to twenty to ten. In this conversation, who is the righteous one? Abraham, with his sense of justice, or the impetuous God who seemingly rains down destruction upon the just and the unjust?
We think of this exchange throughout the Book of Job, especially at the end, when having seen off his irritating and unhelpful friends Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, and the pious young Elihu, Job is confronted by God himself. Throughout the book, the friends have been trying to persuade Job that the reason for his misfortunes is that he must, somehow or other, have committed some wrongdoing, for which God is justly punishing him. And Job is equally insistent that he has not deserved his punishment, not done anything wrong, and indeed lived righteously. Then comes God’s great poem at the end, from Chapter 38 onwards, ‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?’
Job does not know, as we the hearers or readers know, that the reason for his sufferings are in a sense frivolous – not quite to settle a bet, but to settle a dispute between God and one of his sons. He hears God out. God represents himself as the Lord of the natural universe, of the seas, of the sinewy horse and the locust, of the soaring hawk and the mighty whale, the great Leviathan. Job submits to God. ‘Therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.’ [Job 42:3] He abases himself in dust and ashes. God then rewards him by allowing him to have ten more children, the firstborn of whom is named Jemimah, as well as a great number of sheep, camels, oxen and donkeys and one hundred and forty more years of life. . .
I have made this into a discourse. Probably L. said such things to me on several walks, and during several conversations over cups of coffee after Frye had given his Blake lectures.
I remember one other thing she ‘hammered home’ during that phase of our friendship.
—The three irritating friends, and the wife of Job all think that he is on trial. But it is a much more revolutionary book than that. Job makes it quite clear – he has done nothing wrong. All he asks is to be released from his torments by a merciful death. But even as he indulges in his (in a way) pointless debates with the pious friends, it is clear that Job is not on trial. Someone else is, though. God thinks that he has settled the matter by his great poem at the end – ‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?’ [Job 38:4] But he has not settled anything. Job, in many a lyrical passage, has acknowledged that God is responsible for the world order as we know it. The great poem in Job 28, about the elusiveness of Wisdom, seems when you first read it as if he is asking how can a human being become wise? ‘Whence then cometh wisdom? And where is the place of understanding? Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of the air?’ [Job 28:20–21]
But does the personification, the mythologization of Wisdom make him or her personal? Isn’t Job saying, we know about the big, powerful Creator-God who made whales and earthquakes, who rains down abundance and calamity on the earth in equal and indifferent supply. But we can’t learn anything from such a God – he’s really just a name for the forces of Nature, and his punishment of completely virtuous people makes him a figure who is unknowable – and if he were knowable, would we be as virtuous as Job and worship him? ‘Behold, God is great, and we know him not.’ [Job 36:26]
Job has laid some other time-bombs for us too. About death, he has been uncompromising. It is the end. There is nothing beyond it. Death is ‘a land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness’ [Job 10:22].
But then, in Chapter 19, he starts off on another tack. ‘Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever! For 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’ [Job 19:23–26]. Maestro! Cue for Handel’s Messiah. What a good example of how the Bible is the only book which does not merely gain from translation, it is in some ways the creation of translators. Not only have the 1611 translators created the wonderful anachronism of Job, two thousand years before Gutenberg’s invention, wishing that his words could be printed in a book. With equal disregard for the contemporary meaning of the word, they make Job into a Christian who knows that his redeemer liveth. The Hebrew go’el was translated by the Authorized Version translators as ‘redeemer’. When the word is used in Numbers 35:19 and Deuteronomy 19:6 it means an avenger of blood, the nearest male family member who would vindicate his relative’s wrongs. The go’el also redeemed lost or misappropriated family property. The phrase is charged with near-blasphemous irony, since etymologically go’el seems to mean something like ‘a bit like God’. Job, however, is calling for an Avenger to call God to account for his misdeeds. He also seems (though this is more dubious) to be implying that the only way in which he could find any consolation for his appalling sufferings was if he could be given a chance after death to see Justice. But the things he has said previously suggest that he does not believe in life after death. So the ‘Avenger’ who lives, to call God to account. . . who is he? Is he a product of Job’s fantasy? A creature of wish-fulfilment? Or has the human race moved on while this great genius of a poet has been at work and started to believe in Life after Death?
Shortly after that conversation with L. about Job, the term came to an end. L. left Oxford, and I did not see her for several years. I did not have an address to write to. She wrote a postcard to my college. It contained no expression of pleasure that we had begun a friendship, if that was what we had done, nor of regret that we were now to be separated, as she went on to whatever the next stage was for her. (In fact, a spell as a supply teacher in a rough school in Reading, followed by what seems to have been some sort of mental collapse or nervous breakdown.) Her card, closely written, simply read:
Israel. The etymology. The Hebrew sarah means to fight or to wrestle. The story of Jacob wrestling with the angel in Genesis 32:24–30. Jacob and his two wives, his menservants and his eleven sons were journeying. Jacob found himself alone with a stranger with whom he wrestled. As dawn broke, the man asked to be released. Jacob said he would not release him until he blessed him.
‘So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed.”’ [Genesis 32:27–28]
Israel means ‘The man who strives against God’ – or perhaps ‘God fights’. Wonderfully uncosy. This the subject not only of Job but of entire Bible.
It was probably twenty years after receiving that card that I found myself in Edinburgh at festival time, and drawn to the exhibition of Blake’s drawings from the Book of Job at the National Gallery of Scotland. L. was clutching a little green book – one of the two volumes of the plays of Sophocles in the Loeb edition, translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones. There was no ‘Hello’, or ‘What a surprise seeing you, after two or three years’.
—Lloyd-Jones reminds us, L. said, that there are two approaches to the tragedies. There are those who see them as stories by which heroes must learn wisdom through suffering, since the divine government of the universe is necessarily just; and those who see Ajax and Philoctetes and Oedipus as great figures, virtuous figures who defy the cruel whims of unjust Gods.
Now the strange thing about the Book of Job is that it demands, I think – because of the prose preface – to be read as the second sort of book – that is, it demands to be seen as the exemplary and dignified behaviour of a man who has heroic patience in the face of appalling injustice unleashed upon him by Satan and by God. And yet, it attributes to God, not only in the foolish utterances of the Comforters, but in the great closing passages, virtues which are lacking in the Olympian immortals, a moral seriousness which we do not invariably find even in the elevated Sophoclean deities.
God by the end of this book seems to belong largely to the world of Nature. He has become almost Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, the process by which storms, locusts, whales etc. come to pass. He cannot ask Job’s awestruck obedience before the force which creates whales and oceans, without seeing that this makes him the God of tsunamis, earthquakes and famines.
The Book of Job, L. concluded, says that our awe in the face of Nature does not alter the question of how we should be living decent lives. For most of our contemporaries, that decent or good life is lived today without religion. Not for them either the unanswerable question of how God could allow a tsunami or a child’s death by leukaemia.
Earlier in a letter, L. had written to me:
Job is the central book of the Bible. It is not a book to finish and lay by, it is a book to wrestle with, to be troubled by. There will be days when the figures within it seem like spectres in a nightmare.
The narrator, the poet of the book, represents God not only as the source of wisdom and strength, but also as a capricious and in a way heartless figure. God almost needs Job, the virtuous, patient Job, to show what the Good Life is, or could be.
The Book of Job does not only stand at the centre of the Bible. It is in a way the whole of the Bible in miniature. For, having tried to wrestle, throughout the Old Testament, with the problem of Omnipotence and Love – the problem of how you could posit a loving Creator in the utter misery of the world, the Bible comes up with a radical solution. In Job we have God, the thunderingly clumsy upholder of natural order and justice; we have Job, the virtuous human being who simply suffers calamity after calamity; and we have the infusion of elusive Wisdom – where is Wisdom to be found? – which tries to make sense of the tragedy. In the second half of the Bible, the New Testament, these things coalesce in one figure, Jesus. Job is a type of Jesus and the Book of Job is a type of Gospel. Bonhoeffer said he could only worship a suffering God. Job anticipates, indeed helps to create, a religion which holds together the apparent incompatibilities – God the Author of things as they are – the Father; God the source of Wisdom, the Spirit. And in the tormented human archetype – this surely is the Bible’s genius – in humanity at its most abject, most vulnerable, most unjustly tormented – especially here, it finds the divine. Thereby it seeks, even in the most terrible calamities of war, earthquake, disease and waste, to find divinity in each abandoned Japanese corpse, each fly-blown African child, each anonymous, childish owner of the shoes which piled up in the Nazi death camps, each skull heaped up by Pol Pot.
But now we were in Edinburgh, at an exhibition of Blake’s engravings of the Book of Job.
I must have ‘looked at’ these pictures before somewhere, perhaps reproduced in books about Blake. But I had never really ‘seen’ them. I was in the position of Blake’s Job himself, who, only towards the end of the sequence, begins to understand: ‘I have heard thee with the hearing of the Ear but now my Eye seeth thee’ (Illustration XVII), a print in which Job and his wife kneel to be blessed by God. They are not looking at him, however, they are staring into the middle distance. The friends, presumably his Comforters, are terrified, and sit with their back to God, cowering in darkness, with their faces covered. Only after he has learnt to ‘see’ can Job pray. The last four pictures show, in turn: Job with outstretched arms praying to the Light; Job and his wife having the humility to accept charity from others – dispossessed, he has learnt the meaning of Love; Job telling the story of his Life to his daughters, a scene not in the Biblical text – this is a key picture, because it illustrates Blake’s belief that, as he wrote in The Laocoön, ‘Art is the Tree of Life’ and ‘Christianity is Art’; and finally, Job, his wife and his new family restored to prosperity. They are not praying in the pious mode of conventional churchgoers, as they were in the very first illustration. They are making music beneath the cosmic tree. They have entered the realm of the imagination.
In his preface to Jerusalem, Blake had written, ‘I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination. . . O ye Religious, discountenance every one among you who shall pretend to despise Art and Science! I call upon you in the Name of Jesus! What is the life of Man but Art and Science?’
Blake’s reading of Job is truly revolutionary. His Job, unlike L.’s or that of conventional Christianity, is that, in a sense, the Comforters are right. Job, in the first illustration, when he is piously conventional and conventionally pious, is not alive. He cannot see. The musical instruments hang unplayed in the tree above his head. In the frame beneath, Blake has drawn an altar on which are written the words from 2 Corinthians 3:6, ‘The Letter Killeth. The Spirit giveth Life.’ Job has not received the Spirit. To this extent, he could not be more wrong in his belief that he is without fault. He has a single vision. He cannot see into the life of things. ‘May God us keep’, Blake prayed with his friend Thomas Butts, ‘From Single Vision & Newton’s Sleep.’
The subsequent illustrations are among the most disturbing artworks I have ever seen. As in other Blake paintings and engravings, the figure of Satan, deriving from his own reading of Milton’s heroic depiction, is a classically beautiful figure, large, vibrant, muscular, a Farnese Hercules come to life. This is a winged demi-god who destroys the sons of Job and brings the pillars of their palace tumbling about them.
The depiction of Job’s Evil Dreams is especially imaginative and troubling. Job lies flat, his eyes wide open, his face contorted with fear. God, whose hair has been shaped in a curious star-like crown, leans over him to illustrate the text ‘With Dreams upon my bed thou scarest me & affrightest me with Visions’. But God himself is cloven-footed and entwined with a serpent. He is a Satanic God. What Blake appears to be saying is that Blake can still not see that he has invented his God. His God is a sort of devil. He began as the defender of the proprieties and the conventions, but now he is a sort of cosmic monster who can only affright him. This God is not just the conventional God of ‘Religion’, the God for whom men and women put on their smartest clothes to worship on a Sunday morning as a way of feeling good about themselves, their sexual normality, their wealth, their comfort. He is also the bogus God of the Philosophers, the God of the Creationists and the Theorists, the God whose existence can be proved. And if he exists, then indeed he would be a devil, for he would be the God who created Evil. The true God, who speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, ‘who maketh the Clouds his Chariot & walketh on the Wings of the Wind’, is a strange, bearded, swirling figure (Illustration XIII) whose long beard, sad, attentive face, and long expressive hands are in fact all but identical to those of Job himself.
I do not remember when L. spoke to me the words I have attributed to her in an earlier part of this chapter. I know that she came round the exhibition with me, and I know that we went for coffee somewhere afterwards. I noticed her hands were shaking as she lifted the cup to her lips, mid-sentence, and – unable to get to the end of her thought – she replaced it in the saucer. This she did over and over again, as a light skin formed on the surface of the cup.
I was speechless, because the Blake exhibition was one of the few aesthetic experiences of my life which was palpably life-changing (another was the first time my wife R. and I attended The Ring of the Nibelungs). I could feel myself changing as I looked at those pictures, and I could not immediately take in what L. was saying, because I was so aware of what Blake was saying.
Northrop Frye’s comment on the first and last of the illustrations sums up what was happening to me. ‘In the last plate, things are much as they were before, but Job’s family have taken the instruments down from the tree and are playing them. In Blake, we recover our original state, not by returning to it, but by re-creating it. The act of creation, in its turn, is not producing something out of nothing, but the act of setting free what we already possess.’
Blake, who read deeply in Kabbalistic literature, Swedenborg, the Gnostics and so on, was almost self-consciously a ‘heretic’. Maybe he had to do that, rather than try to fit his ideas into any of the conventional churches or chapels of his day. What these pictures made so clear to me that day – it is so obvious that I feel sheepish at admitting to being so bowled over, so surprised! – is the absolute centrality of the imagination as a key to perception. The Job illustrations are a shout of protest against the ‘scientific outlook’ as well as a demolition of conventional religion. The former believed it had abolished the Bible, by treating the Bible as a series of improbable histories, lazy substitutes for scientific theories and outmoded religious, dietary and sexual ‘laws’. The latter responded, disastrously, by entirely accepting the premises of the Enlightenment. Ignoring the text at the bottom of Blake’s first picture of Job – ‘The Letter Killeth . . .’ – they began to treat the Bible as if it were all the things which it is not. They refused to see the living power of Myth.
This is not just a ‘lit. crit.’ perception. It is the way the Bible has actually ‘worked’ in human life. The example in Chapter Three, of Dr King and the Civil Rights Movement, is only one, extremely vivid case in point. Since the eighteenth century, among the slaves on the Southern plantations, there had developed the imaginative identification of their plight with that of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Building upon such tropes, and upon the whole Old Testament mythology of deliverance – of the Hebrews from Egypt, of the exiled Jews from Babylon – King had at his disposal a shared rhetoric, one to which millions of people, steeped in the Book, could respond. The words, when he quoted them, resonated because he was applying them in the way they had always been applied in times when the Spirit gave life. In earlier ages, and later, Christians had used the mythology of Deliverance as a picture of what happened to the individual soul, as when Dante, about to explore Purgatory, hears the delivered souls, as they come over the water piloted by the Angel, singing Psalm 114: ‘When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a people of strange language’.
Those imprisoned in the ‘Letter’, in the literal reading of the Bible, would waste their time wondering whether the Children of Israel, as a matter of historical fact, ever set foot in Egypt, or whether they had ever crossed the desert, and if so, when, and in what numbers. And literalists on one side would think they had defended the ‘truth’ of the Bible by saying that this stuff was ‘history’, while the other side mocked, or politely smiled. Meanwhile, on fire with the prophetic spirit, Martin Luther King had changed the world. The Spirit giveth Life.
Once again, we turn back to the very beginning of the Bible and wonder if the literalists have even begun to ask themselves what is meant by the verses ‘Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness”’ [Genesis 1:26], and again, ‘the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being’ [Genesis 2:7], and again, after Adam and Eve have eaten the apple and learnt the knowledge of good and evil, ‘the lord God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil”’ [Genesis 3:22].
Rather than allowing these words to infuse their imaginations, some human beings would prefer to read the Bible ‘literally’, deriving from it not just false impressions, but shutting themselves off, not merely from an understanding of the Bible, but an understanding of anything at all. Humanity, divinely made and divinely inspired, lives in the realm of the imagination. Language itself is metaphor. Materialism or Reductionism, or whatever you call it, the most boring, as well as the least accurate way of experiencing the world and recording experience, is the dominant mindset of the Western intelligentsia in our day. They think they have disposed of the ‘evidence’ of the Bible when they have ‘proved’ that there was no such person as Noah, or that Jonah, having spent three days in the belly of a fish, would probably have died of asphyxiation. Perhaps satisfyingly to themselves, they have created a century-long nervous breakdown among religious believers who think that in order to ‘defend’ their religion, they ought to keep silent about one of the most obvious facts about the Bible, namely that it is mythology. (Nor is this phenomenon restricted to the Bible belt, or the unsophisticated by-ways of American Protestantism. Which academic examiner was it who did not allow Thomas L. Thompson his doctorate because he dared to question the historicity of Abraham? Step forward Joseph Ratzinger!)
Before we parted in Edinburgh that day, L. said,
—Go steady on Blake. I can see he has ‘got’ to you. He was basically a Gnostic.
—Thanks for the warning.
The skin was still floating on her cold coffee as we paid the waitress. I watched her tall back wandering up Princes Street and disappear into the crowds. Her bob of hair was grey now. Strange that I had not noticed this as we talked – I suppose I had been so mesmerized by her dark eyes that I had not had time to notice her hair. It was, as it happened, the last time I ever saw her, though we exchanged cards and letters for a year or two more.
I have not taken L.’s advice about going steady on Blake. The more I read him, and the more I look at his paintings and engravings, the more it seems he anticipated, with quite prodigious accuracy and intuition, all the more bizarre delusions of our times. The deeper his messages sank into my soul, the more I wished to read the Bible with the eyes of the imagination, the more glorious it seemed; and also, the more dangerous it seemed, to read it in a materialistic or literal way. The revulsion I felt ‘against religion’ twenty years ago grew in intensity, the more I felt the enemies of religion, like poor old H. – now dead from throat cancer – to be barking up the wrong tree.
Indeed, the last time I heard H.’s voice was on the radio, indulging in one of those impassioned rants of his. He was saying that you did not have to go further down the alphabet than the letter B, in itemizing the world’s trouble-spots, in order to see the harm done by religion. I forget the Bs now – they included Belfast, where Catholics and Protestants were (at the time I heard the broadcast) still knocking hell out of one another; Baghdad, where Sunnis and Shiites were fighting it out; and Bethlehem in the land of Judah, then divided by a Berlin-style concrete wall.
There would once have been a time when the emotional revulsion of H. against all the disgusting human behaviour on display in those towns would certainly have made me draw the false inference – what do they all have in common? Religion. How do we make the world a better place? Get rid of religion. Now, it seems pretty obvious that what they all have in common is that they are inhabited by human beings. That human beings have an ineluctable tendency to think materially, and literally, and that this is a sort of death. Were things any better before the Enlightenment, when men and women went to war, literally, over the question of how, or whether, Christ was present in the Eucharist? Of course not. But are we going to throw away all our religious inheritance, and two and a half thousand years of shared reading of the Bible, because we can’t be bothered to read it imaginatively?