Go search this thing,
Tumble thy breast, and turn thy book.
George Herbert, ‘The Method’
STUCK IN MY Bible at the beginning of Psalms, I find a letter L. had written to me once:
Just seen a man outside the subway near Washington Square, wearing a sandwich board which reads: PRAYER IS TALKING TO YOURSELF!
‘I call upon you, for you will answer me, O God’ [Psalm 17:6] – though I prefer the Gelineau translation – ‘I am here and I call, you will hear me, O God’ [Psalm 16 in Gelineau]. . . This human capacity to talk to God. The belief that he listens – even, that he will reply! In the early stories, especially those written by J, this can be explained by simple anthropomorphism. Yahweh walks about, gets angry, changes his mind, and so forth. As the books of the Bible are at present arranged, God (or whichever of the Gods you are thinking of, Yahweh, Elohim, El Shaddai, and so on) talks quite freely to people in the patriarchal times. Less often in the times of the kings – hence the value of the prophets who, so to say, speak for Yahweh. Their mouths speak his words. The last time God actually ‘appeared’ to a human being, in the Bible stories, is when he had his conversation with Solomon [1 Kings 9:2].
When he appeared to the King, the Lord said:
‘I have heard your prayer and your plea, which you made before me; I have consecrated this house that you have built, and put my name there forever; my eyes and my heart will be there for all time. . . If you turn aside from following me, you or your children. . . but go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will cut Israel off from the land that I have given them. . . and Israel will become a proverb and a taunt among all peoples.’ [1 Kings 9:3,6,7]
Which of course is what happens – Solomon has no sooner built the Temple than he starts to worship other gods and the whole catastrophe begins. Thereafter Yahweh deserts the scene. Interesting book called The Disappearance of God by Richard Elliott Friedman, relating these Bible stories to later ‘death of God’ ideas – Nietzsche and so on. . . and all the American crazies like Altizer (Alzheimer??!) in the ’60s.
When were the tales of Solomon written down? Probably about 600, 620 BC? By the Deuteronomic author? Or do we go for the much later date favoured by Thompson in The Bible in History? Either way, it’s a sophisticated idea that a whole people can lose touch with their God, he can just withdraw. Rather like the death of a relationship, end of a marriage when one partner starts seeing another person?
But while all this is going on in Bible literature, we also have the growth of personal religion in the Psalms? It’s a bit like what we talked of in Philadelphia, when you were discovering Wallace Stevens/ the death of images, the washing of language. Atheism a clearer path to the true God than conventional religion, because it is clearing the mind of cant, as Dr Johnson said. Our old friend Simone again – Entre deux hommes qui n’ont pas l’expérience de Dieu, celui qui le nie en est peut-être le plus près. . .
It more than once struck me over the years that L. was modelling herself on Simone Weil – the intensity, the bookishness, the uncompromisingness, the self-conscious poverty. Whereas Simone Weil’s life was perforce adrift – because of the Second World War – L.’s wanderings were, so far as I could tell, self-imposed. She could have accepted a full-time teaching post somewhere, rather than always doing supply work, and moving on after a few months. The extent of the mental illness? The periodic ‘breakdowns’ were perhaps her real reason for never holding down a job. And she had once shocked me when unable to recall a name, blaming her memory loss on ‘that damned ECT they made me have once upon a time’.
About ten years ago, I received a letter from the Reverend Mother of a small Roman Catholic religious community near Salisbury in Wiltshire.
We have been unable to find any trace of a family, but some letters from yourself were found tucked into her Bible. She appears to have had very few possessions – her luggage in the Guest House here contained only a change of clothes, the Bible, and a copy of George Herbert’s poems. She was found dead at the back of the chapel after Compline on Tuesday evening last week. The cause of death appears to have been a heart attack. The doctor who looks after this community managed to trace her medical records through the wonders of the computer. She was fifty-five – as I am sure you knew. Naturally, it has been a great shock to us all. Though none of us ever got to know her well, we had grown fond of her and looked forward to her visits. We understand that she was an Anglican, so the funeral was conducted by the Rector of Bemerton – George Herbert’s parish, as you may know. We thought this would be appropriate. Two of the sisters and myself were glad to be able to attend the funeral. No one else was there. I am sorry we were unable to locate an address for you in time to tell you of the ceremony. It was a very simple service. I went with the Rector to the Crematorium afterwards. . .
I read through that letter from L. again, with its somewhat gnomic quotation from the notebooks of Simone Weil. ‘Of the two men with no experience of God, it is perhaps the man who denies him who is the closer to him.’
The trouble with this ‘shocking’ idea of Weil’s is that it begs the question of what an experience of God might be. How would you know that you had had an experience of God, rather than simply imagining that you had done so?
Weil’s own conversion, after all, took place not in a literary vacuum, but while she was reciting a poem – George Herbert’s ‘Love’. In her excellent biography, Weil’s friend Simone Pétrement recalled, ‘Here we are astonished ourselves and are brought, as it were, to a standstill by the account of an event that remains impenetrable to us. It surprises us as much as the event surprised her. It is hard to understand why, given her ideas until that moment, she did not regard this feeling of Christ’s presence as a purely subjective impression; why she thought Christ had really been present.’
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lack’d any thing.
‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here:’ Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah, my deare, I cannot look on thee.’
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, ‘Who made the eyes but I?’
‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘who bore the blame?’ ‘My deare, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meate.’ So I did sit and eat.
Weil’s conversion, her sense that Christ was palpably present to her when she read this poem, is itself a real literary parcel or palimpsest. For she felt herself confronted by the true God when reading a poem. The poetry of Herbert itself, at one and the same time highly original and completely artful, is a reading of that book of the Bible which more than any other dramatizes the inner life, gives expression to our own direct experiences of God: Psalms. Herbert is one of the noblest and cleverest examples of a great imagination, and a developed poetic master, reading the Bible.
Were it ever to fall to me to write L.’s book for her, Herbert would certainly be one of my ‘People’ of whom the Bible is the Book. Not only did his poetry grow from the mulch of the Bible, but his life was shaped by daily recitations of the Bible.
Born in 1593, of distinguished Welsh gentry, Herbert was part of a large family. His father died when he was three years old. His mother, born Magdalen Newport, had no fewer than ten children – seven sons and three daughters, ‘Iobs number and Iobs distributions as she her selfe would often remember’. The words are those of John Donne who lodged in her house after she had remarried – to Sir John Danvers. Intelligent, witty, intensely pious, Magdalen was an exemplary mother, who was largely responsible for the education of her children until they were eligible for school. George Herbert attended Westminster School, where he came under the influence of the Dean of Westminster, Lancelot Andrewes, and Trinity College, Cambridge. At the university, his intelligence was matched by his ambition. He became the Public Orator and had ambitions to succeed not only in the academic but in the political world. He aspired to a high position at court.
Following the death of James I, however, and a series of illnesses, Herbert changed direction. He took Holy Orders when in his early thirties and, having married Jane Danvers, a relation of his stepfather’s, he settled in the village of Bemerton, near Salisbury, and near Wilton, the seat of his cousin, the Earl of Pembroke. The aloof, haughty Public Orator of Cambridge became a model pastor. Accessible to all his humble parishioners, he became their friend. He patched up quarrels between them. He urged them to read. He administered simple physic to them. Twice a day, he read the Office in his little church, nearly always attended by a congregation. The Book of Common Prayer lays down that the priest should read through more or less the whole Bible in the course of a year, and the Psalms every month. These portions of Scriptures are divided up, and supplemented with prayers, to form what Anglicans call Matins and Evensong – a truncated version of the old Monastic Hours of Prayer from the Roman Breviary. ‘Holy Mr Herbert’, as he came to be known locally, became a type of the English parish priest whose example has inspired thousands since.
He died in March 1633 when he was not yet forty. He will always be remembered for his sanctity of life. He also left behind the volume of verse contained in the book known as The Temple. Rhetorically sharp, dramatic and personal, the poems lay naked and raw an intense life of prayer. It is easy to see how Weil could have felt the presence of Christ as she read Herbert’s ‘Love’ since this is what the poem itself does: it conveys so very powerfully what it felt like to be praying to Christ and receiving his consoling presence.
Herbert’s poems are palimpsests, in which it is difficult – impossible, in fact, for they are so carefully wrought – to distinguish between their rhetoric and the realities they describe. The prophets spoke with the Divine Afflatus, and it was under this inspiration that Christian prophets since have spoken – such figures as Dr Martin Luther King not so much quoting the Old Testament prophets (though he did so) as embodying the Old Testament, enfleshing it, making it happen in our midst.
This way of reading the Bible as typology was second nature to Herbert, never more overt than in his poem ‘The Bunch of Grapes’. The title refers to the moment in the Book of Numbers (Chapters 13–14) when scouts, who have been sent to spy out the land of Canaan, return to the Israelites in the wilderness, bearing a bunch of grapes on a single pole carried between them. The poem begins with the speaker’s own mood swings, his own mental state, which is immediately read in terms of the journeying of the Israelites in the wilderness.
Joy, I did lock thee up: but some bad man Hath let thee out again:
And now, me thinks, I am where I began Sev’n years ago: one vogue and vein, One aire of thoughts usurps my brain.
I did towards Canaan draw; but now I am
Brought back to the Red sea, the sea of shame.
For as the Jews of old by Gods command Travell’d, and saw no town:
So now each Christian hath his journeys spann’d: Their storie pennes and sets us down. A single deed is small renown.
God’s works are wide, and let in future times;
His ancient justice overflowes our crimes.
Then have we too our guardian fires and clouds; Our Scripture-dew drops fast:
We have our sands and serpents, tents and shrowds; Alas! our murmurings come not last. But where’s the cluster? Where’s the taste
Of mine inheritance?
The experience of reading the Bible becomes a way of reading off our own experiences and backslidings and emotional life against the template of the Myth. And you can see it working. Not merely ‘working’ rhetorically in the terms of Herbert’s poetics, but in terms of human lives. ‘The poet invents the metaphor, and the Christian lives it’, as R. S. Thomas brilliantly put it in the preface to his own selection of Herbert’s poems.
In no other book of Scripture is this more the case than in Psalms. This hymnbook of the synagogue, this anthology of some of the most sublime religious poetry in the literature of the world, is both public and personal prayer. Some of the poems recite the old mythology of conquering the land. Some tell of the desolations felt by those taken into Babylonian captivity. But nearly all of them are poems of the interior religious experience. None more so than Psalm 139. ‘O Lord you have searched me and known me. . .’
How many religious men and women, since its composition, must have recited this Psalm, with its sense that Yahweh has been with us since our very conception. . .
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your right hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast. [Psalm 139:7–10]
The psalm appears first to have been written by a religious leader who has been accused of idol-worship. It is an appeal to Yahweh to examine the worshipper, through and through. The preterite in the first verse in most English translations – ‘O Lord you have searched me and known me’ – is wrong. It is a request to be examined now: ‘Yahweh, examine me, and know me yourself!’
Mitchell Dahood SJ renders the final verse as ‘Test me and know my cares. Then see if an idol has held sway over me, and lead me into the eternal dominion!’
Does the ‘experience’ of reading this Psalm constitute an ‘experience’ of God?
The poem embodies, exemplifies, the transformation of human religious awareness which we associate with the Axial Age. This is the term generally given to that broad, longish period of history when Siddhartha Gautama shaved his head and beard and put on the saffron robe of the Renouncer in the foothills of the Himalayas, when Socrates was professing that the unexamined life was not worth living, and when the Hebrew prophets began to see that true religion is not the mere following of rituals, but the transformation of the heart. The classic mythological expression of this transformation, or enlightenment, is Plato’s myth, in The Republic, of the Cave, when the initiate, who has been looking at the flickering of shadows at the back of a cave cast by the fire, and mistaking this for reality, turns and looks at the light outside the cave – the true light of the sun.
Whatever the precise date or origin of Psalm 139, it is cognate with these moments of human enlightenment. What grabs us, in reading it, is the urgency: the intimacy. A recent translation by Robert Alter renders the central verses as follows:
If I take wing with the dawn, if I dwell at the ends of the sea,
there, too, Your hand leads me, and Your right hand seizes me.
Should I say, ‘Yes, darkness will swathe me, and the night will be light for me,
Darkness itself will not darken for You, and the night will light up like the day, the dark and the light will be one.
For You created my innermost parts, wove me in my mother’s womb.
Alter reminds us that in fact the Hebrew word here for ‘innermost parts’ is actually ‘kidneys’. (Shades of Leopold Bloom at the beginning of Ulysses!) The relationship between the human being who prays and the Living God has been going on since the first mysterious beginnings of the foetus in the womb. Deeper intimacy is not possible. When we pray, it is this profound kinship, this relationship with God which has been there from the beginning of our conception, which we reawaken.
The liturgical, and private, repetition of Psalms since the compilation of the Book in the fourth or fifth century BC has been a – perhaps the – feature of the inner religious life of Judaism, later of Christianity. Every single day, Jews and Christians repeat these poems. In Christian religious houses, the Hours of Prayer are devoted to a recitation of Psalms – not so much in the order printed, but in an order which reflects the patterns of Christian prayer and meditation.
The personal nature of the Psalms, the raw truthfulness of their emotions, is what makes them the enduring prayer book which they have been ever since their composition.
Thomas Merton wrote:
Of whom can it more truly be said that; ‘the word is nigh them, even in their mouth and in their heart’ than those who daily recite or chant the Divine Office? If that word is to become for them living and effectual, if it is to penetrate the depths of their interior life and make them contemplatives, they must discover in it the Christ who is the light of the world. He who is the centre of the Old Testament and the New is, above all, the life of the Psalter.
Anyone who has read the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s last hours must have been struck by how many phrases from the Scriptures are used in the narrative; and in particular by how many quotations there are from the Old Testament, and in particular from the Psalms.
Let us consider the oldest Gospel, that of Mark. And remember, the Psalms, in Jewish tradition, were the composition of their folk hero, King David, who is supposed to have lived about 1000 BC. In 2 Samuel, we read how King David suffered a rebellion by his son Absalom. He decided to flee his citadel in Jerusalem. Deserted by all but a few followers, he crossed over the Wadi Kidron [2 Samuel 15:23] and went up to pray on the Mount of Olives, weeping as he went. David has lost power. He has become a new type of king, one who must throw himself wholly on the mercy of God. His only power is prayer. It is David the Psalmist who is seen here in the old story, the Psalmist to whom God promised ‘Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession’ [Psalm 2:8] or ‘O you who answer prayer! To you all flesh shall come.’ [Psalm 65:2].
David’s story tells a spiritual message. The legendary founder of Zion, the founder of Jerusalem as the centre of Jewish cultic worship (as opposed to Shechem in the northern kingdom – where this book began), he is in a sense one of the founders of Judaism itself; of that Judaism of which Psalms was the central liturgical text, the main prayer book. In the stories David often behaved badly. The most notable piece of bad behaviour, perhaps, was his stealing the wife of one of his best soldiers, Uriah the Hittite, and sending Uriah into the front line of battle where he would be sure to get himself killed. He was denounced for his behaviour by the prophet Nathan. Furthermore, God punished David and Bathsheba (Uriah’s wife) by making their baby die; but their next baby was none other than Solomon himself.
To whatever depths David sank in these stories, however, he always retained his capacity for repentance. He was the type of the Penitent, and in so far as tradition makes him the author of the Psalms, the redactor of the book linked particular Psalms with moments in his life. The penitential Psalm 51, best known to concertgoers in the setting by Monteverdi, is introduced in the Hebrew Bible as ‘A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba’.
David in the Hebrew Bible is therefore both legendary folk hero and type of the Man of Prayer.
Jesus, in Mark’s Gospel, had been identified by the blind beggar Bartimaeus as the ‘Son of David’ [Mark 10:47]. In his disputes with the scribes, Jesus reminded them that they had called the Messiah ‘Son of David’, even though, in the Psalm, David had written, ‘“The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand. . .’” David himself calls him Lord; so how can he be his son?’, a riposte which Mark tells us delighted a large crowd [Mark 12:36–37]. Mark, in other words, is far along the way to proclaiming, as Matthew and Luke were to do, that Jesus was actually descended from King David. In any event, in the Marcan story of the last two days of Jesus’s life, he takes on the Davidic role of the king without followers, weeping on the Mount of Olives. The next day, when he is crucified, Jesus calls out the words of Psalm 22 from the Cross – Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani, which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ [Psalm 22:1] ‘And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink.’ [Mark 15:36] Here is another quotation from the Psalms, this time from Psalm 69, traditionally associated by Christians with the Crucifixion of Jesus. ‘They gave me poison for food, and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink’ [Psalm 69:21].
From that single Psalm, 22, we have, for example, ‘All who see me mock at me’ [v.7) and ‘They divide out my clothes among themselves, and for my clothing they cast lots’ [v.18].
There can be no doubt that, as in so many other parts of the Bible, we find here one passage of Scripture being used to provide the narrative structure for another.
Two very different reasons could be attested for the presence of these details in the narrative of the Crucifixion. One is that the soldiers did indeed steal Jesus’s clothes and cast lots for them; that Jesus did indeed cry out ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ from the Cross, while those who passed by jeered.
Another explanation could be that the Evangelist has used the Psalm, not as a recollection of anything which actually took place, but as a meditation on the inner meaning of Christ’s death. Jesus would have prayed in the words of Psalms on a regular basis. Any Jew (or now, any Christian) brought up in a liturgical tradition would have much of Psalms by heart; and even those Psalms which are not literally memorized would have sunk deep into the psyche of any practising Jew or Christian. So it is perfectly possible that Jesus himself, for example, cried out words from Psalms as he was dying on the Cross.
Is it not equally possible, however, that the narrative of the Crucifixion is a literary construct?
Emem, as I was invited to call her, was there to greet me when I arrived at the convent. She was a woman in her early seventies, with short grey hair, a remarkably unlined face, and gardener’s hands – the skin at her fingertips was thick and calloused, and although her hands were clean, they had clearly been very recently scrubbed.
—It’s good of you to come. —Kind of you to ask me.
—We did not know who else to contact. And, you see, she did leave this packet for you.
Emem wore a white blouse, a dark blue cardigan and blue slacks. Sandals on bare feet were the only clue as to her calling.
In the ‘higher’ branches of the Church of England, with which I was more familiar than with the Catholic Church, the remaining nuns still tend to dress like nuns. Emem, I was told later, was an abbreviation for the name she had taken when joining the Order forty-five years before – Sister Margaret Mary of the Sacred Heart.
—We have Mass at midday. You’d be most welcome to join us. It’s not going to be a Requiem, but she will be mentioned in the prayers.
—I’d love to be there.
—And do feel free to come to Communion.
—You realize I’m not . . .
—We’d like it – if you feel able to do so. We’ve all discussed it, and I’ve squared it with Father Dermot.
—Your chaplain.
She gave a short, rather gruff laugh.
—It’s a long time since we had the luxury of a chaplain. There are only four of us now, you see. But Father Dermot comes over as often as he can – he’s chaplain at the hospital in Salisbury. And we have another priest we can call on sometimes. But we won’t get Mass every day. . . until one of us is ordained.
We both laughed – though I was not sure why.
By the standards of formal Anglican liturgy, the Mass was remarkably spare. Father Dermot, a pleasant-faced man in his mid-forties, wore simply a white throw-over garment a little like a nightshirt reaching to his ankles, and a coloured stole. He spoke slowly and distinctly. One of the sisters read the first lesson, and Emem read the Epistle and led us in the recitation of the Responsorial Psalm. A third sister, a very small old lady with a melodious voice, read the bidding prayers, which included a commendation of L. to God.
Though it was a simple Eucharist, the priest used the oldest form of Canon available in the new Missal. The Canon of the Mass is the great central prayer of the rite – what in other denominations would be called the Prayer of Consecration. It begins by establishing that the prayer is made in conjunction with all Catholic and Orthodox Christians throughout the world: that is quite a number – well over a fifth of the planet’s entire population.
But these millions of people are not the only ones with whom the prayer joins the participants. For there then follows the first of two long catalogues of names of those with whom the worshippers are in communication – the Virgin Mary, the Twelve Apostles, and a list of the early martyrs who died for the faith in the first centuries of Christendom.
The prayer then continues with the central historic claim of Christendom: that, on the night before he suffered, Jesus took bread into his hands, broke the bread, and gave it to his disciples with the words ‘This is My Body’; and likewise, when they had eaten, that he gave them the Cup, saying ‘This is My Blood’.
The prayer is not over yet, however, for, having commemorated the death, resurrection and ascension of Christ into heaven, the priest prays that the offering will be accepted as the first offerings of Abel in the earliest part of Genesis was accepted; and as the bread and wine offered by the mysterious figure of the High Priest Melchizedek in the story of Abraham. In other words, the Eucharist celebrated here, today, in the twenty-first century, becomes part of an unbroken voice of prayer rising up from the human race since the dawning of humanity itself.
The prayer asks for the dead a place of refreshment, light and peace. And then comes another catalogue of names before gathering all the prayers together: ‘Through Him, With Him and In Him. . .’
I did not – do not – understand the thinking behind a ‘requiem’ mass. I must be too much of a Prot to get my mind around it. How could the celebration of the Communion make God more or less likely to give peace to a departed soul? Surely the Eucharist is the spiritual food of wayfarers on earth, not a bargaining counter? And is there not something presumptuous about thinking that anything we said or thought could affect the destiny of our departed sister? Yet, praying for the dead is another way of loving the dead, and during the recitation of the Mass, I realized how very much I did love L., how much I would miss these strange conversations and disquisitions of hers; I also thought how much of her life had been a secret from me. Were I to research a biography of L., name the small town in New England where she grew up, describe her parents, list her grades, chronicle the graduate work with Frye in Toronto, try to analyse the mental illnesses, ask myself, during all our encounters and non-encounters, whether she wanted a deeper relationship with me – all that is ‘archaeology’. She liked reading poetry, but she seldom spoke of fiction. Her sense of the Bible was poetic, not fictive. It did not worry her, as it worried David Friedrich Strauss and George Eliot, that we do not know anything ‘about’ Elijah, or Jesus or St Paul, in the way that we ‘know’ the characters in Middlemarch. For this reason, I have felt free, in these pages, to mythologize L., to put into her mind, or her letters, words which were in fact spoken by others, and to make her a ‘composite’ figure, rather as we may suppose that certain New Testament writings were attributed to Paul when in fact they were composed by someone else, or as parables and apothegms in general circulation at the time a particular Gospel was composed were attributed to Jesus.
After the Mass, the nuns gave me a simple meal. It appeared to be a sort of vegetable bake, very dry in texture. Father Dermot did not join us – he drove back into Salisbury. There was no conversation at the meal. One of the sisters read from a biography of Dorothy Day, the American social activist and Catholic convert.
In the small sitting-room afterwards, there was half an hour of recreation in which talking was permitted. There I met Emem’s sisters – none of whom was under sixty-five – and they presented me with a brown paper envelope.
—She asked us to give this to you if. . .
On the train back to London, I opened the packet. It was the loose leaves of her ‘Bible book’, a collection of notebooks and odd pieces of paper which represented a lifetime of thought and work. It is from these notes that the present book is constructed. This is L.’s book as much as mine.
The celebration of the Eucharist, and the use of one of the most ancient prayers of Christendom, spoken quietly, gently, slowly, brought into focus the direction in which my Bible thoughts had been moving. There is no more contemporary, no more popular, way of reading the Bible than in the daily recitation of the liturgy which happens all over the world, in a multitude of languages and a whole variety of situations.
Clearly, as a living witness to the tradition of Bible-steeped Christianity, there is no more obvious or available example. As it happened, I had brought along for train reading the The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. While he was engaged upon the long task of writing The Lord of the Rings, in wartime Oxford, a son was in South Africa serving with the RAF. To this son, Tolkien wrote:
If you don’t do so already, make a habit of the ‘praises’. I use them much (in Latin): the Gloria Patri, the Gloria in Excelsis, the Laudate Dominum; the Laudate Pueri Dominum (of which I am specially fond), one of the Sunday psalms; and the Magnificat. . . If you have these by heart you never need for words of joy. It is also a good and admirable thing to know by heart the Canon of the Mass, for you can say this in your heart if ever hard circumstance keeps you from hearing Mass.
It would seem that it was a remark by Tolkien to his friend C. S. Lewis which played a decisive role in the conversion of Lewis from theism to specific Christian belief. Nothing could illustrate more purely the dilemma I had reached in my journey around the Bible. Clearly, from all I had learned, reading about the Bible, it is mythology. As Frye had written, ‘Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns’.
To demythologize the Bible is to destroy it, as Frye says elsewhere.
But does it make any difference to our appreciation of the Bible whether we are happy to live in the protection of its mythological wings without asking the question of whether any of it is, objectively speaking, verifiable, let alone ‘true’?
At the centre of the Mass which I had heard in the convent was an historical assertion. ‘The night before he was betrayed, he took bread.’
The central Christian act of worship supposedly goes back in an unbroken line to the person of Jesus himself. Clearly, the lives of the nuns I had just visited were fed and nourished by the Mass. For millions upon millions of human beings since AD 50 or so, when Paul described the Eucharist in Corinth, this rite has been enacted, and people have felt in it that they knew the presence of Christ. It is the centre of Christian life, and of its tradition. This action – taking bread, breaking it, repeating the words of Jesus, ‘This is My Body’ – is something which Christians have been doing as long as there have been Christians.
That is a matter of fact.
Is there any need to go beyond this fact to establish facts which are not known – such as whether Jesus really did institute the Meal? And if so, do we need to know when he did so?
Clearly, the Meal, the Eucharist, is part of the very earliest tradition. For a practising Christian, therefore, who takes the tradition seriously, it is part of the faith, not merely that Christians have been doing this since, say, AD 50, but that it is a rite instituted by the Lord.
For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’ For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. [1 Corinthians 11:23–26]
It might be supposed that this is an historical statement, and it is therefore either ‘true’ or ‘untrue’. Unfortunately, things are not as simple as that. Only by continuing to think in an ‘imaginative’ or ‘mythological’ way will we make any progress in understanding the historical origins of the Eucharist.
Two things might not be obvious when we first approach the matter, and it might be worth stating them baldly. One is a piece of theology. The other is a piece of history, or rather, of non-history.
The theology first. The first Eucharist was not the Last Supper. The first Eucharist, for Christians, was the Crucifixion. The Last Supper – whenever it took place – and if you believe it took place – was an exposition of the theology of the Cross. Jesus took bread, broke it, as his body would be broken; he said, ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. The Eucharist was left to his first followers as the everlasting remembrance of, and re-enactment of, his act of self-giving on the Cross. The Eucharist is not just a ‘let’s pretend’ version of the Last Supper. It is what was called in the old pagan religions, and what is still called by Christians, a Mystery, a solemn symbol which leads us into the heart of what faith believes happened on the Cross. It therefore takes us, absolutely immediately, beyond any question where ‘Did it or did it not happen?’ could ever be answered by any known criterion.
Secondly, the history, or rather the non-history. The Gospels cannot be used as historical evidence, one way or the other, for the question of Eucharistic origin. They were written down by and for Christian communities for whom the Eucharist was already the centre of their life and worship. As well as recording the Lord’s words ‘on the night when he was betrayed’, Paul also saw the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross as a Passover. Reading the Exodus story typologically, as so many Jews did – I was tempted to write, as all Jews of this time did – he applies the story of the first Passover to the story of Jesus’s death. In common with all Jews, Paul kept Pesach, or Passover, ate the Lamb, which had been ritually sacrificed in the Temple in remembrance of the Jewish deliverance from Egypt, as an emblem or token of human redemption from sin. Paul saw the death of Jesus as the new Passover. ‘For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the festival, not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.’ [1 Corinthians 5:7–8]
Paul did not say that Jesus took the loaf, and spoke the words of the Eucharist at Passover. He said Jesus was the true Passover Lamb, and then, in another place, a little later he said that Jesus was betrayed the day after the Supper. Pass a whole generation and the two metaphors have become embedded into Christian tradition. Jesus the Paschal Lamb is offered in the Holy Sacrifice of the Eucharist. The Eucharist was instituted at Passover-time. But although that is what came to be written down in the period AD 70–100, by the Gospel writers, it is not the earliest tradition.
The Gospel writers wrote down their accounts of the Supper, thereby landing later historians with a real conundrum. Matthew, Mark and Luke all want to make the Supper into a Passover meal. There are many people who firmly believe that the Supper had to have been a Passover meal, or it would somehow lose its authenticity. The trouble with this is twofold. It asks us to believe – if we believe the earliest testimony that Jesus established the Supper the night when he was betrayed – that Jesus was arrested at Passover, and that the Jewish High Priests, their entourage of acolytes and their Sanhedrin, their court, were all in full session during the most sacred period of the Jewish year, to decide the question of whether to hand over to the Romans for crucifixion either Jesus or a man called Barabbas who ‘was in prison with the rebels who had committed murder during the insurrection’ [Mark 15:7]. Even if you believed that the High Priest was prepared to suspend the Feast of Pesach for the sake of Jesus – his high profile as a troublemaker, or his supposed blasphemies against Judaism making it necessary to deal with him as soon as possible – why would they have cancelled Pesach just for Barabbas? It does not make any sense at all.
If you persist in thinking that Jesus died around Passover time, then the Fourth Gospel makes much better historical sense, and much deeper theological sense too. This describes the Supper happening during the period of preparation for Pesach. Jesus dies on the Cross, in this version, while the Passover lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple. On the other hand, note well that the Fourth Gospel does not have the institution of the Eucharist occurring at the Supper. On the contrary. It has its long disquisition on the Eucharist in its sixth chapter, while Jesus was still in Galilee. It follows the great Sign of the Feeding which is obviously seen as symbolic of the Eucharist by this author.
Either way, you are not going to be able to get any historical facts out of the Gospels on this matter. This is not because the Gospels are being sneaky, or trying to trick us. It is because they are so convinced by the two imaginative truths about Jesus promulgated by Paul – that Jesus is our Passover Lamb, and that Jesus left us the Supper as a token of his presence – that they do not trouble themselves to write history in the post-Enlightenment sense at all.
The conundrum of whether the Eucharist was instituted by Jesus, and if so when, throws into the sharpest relief the bigger question, of whether the New Testament gives us anything like historical ‘evidence’ for the faith.
Two recent books illustrate quite different answers to the matter. They are The Mystery of the Last Supper by Colin J. Humphreys and Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Memoir of a Discovery by Thomas L. Brodie. Both are densely worked books, so that I mention them partly in order to apologize to their authors, since there is not room, in a book of this kind, to summarize all the intricacies of their arguments.
Sir Colin Humphreys is Professor and Director of Research at the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge; as a second string to his distinguished bow, he has entered the (mine)field of Biblical history. He believes himself to have reconstructed the exact date of the Crucifixion. He gets over the difficulty of it having occurred during the Jewish Passover by claiming that Jesus followed a slightly different calendar, namely that which was discovered among the Caves of Qumran in 1948 (the Dead Sea Scrolls). In this, Sir Colin is following the lead of Pope Benedict XVI who also thought that Jesus followed the Qumran calendar. This would place the events of that last week a few days earlier, assuming that the first century Jewish calendar can be calculated with this degree of accuracy. Sir Colin carries a table detailing ‘the effect of a cloudy sky delaying the date of Nisan 14 in Jerusalem, AD 26–36’.
Sir Colin’s theory is interesting as a theory. It is hard to see why or how it could affect the state of mind of any Christian preparing to attend a celebration of the Eucharist. For any such person, the reality would be the living presence of Christ in the broken bread, in the shared chalice. This incomprehensible Mystery could not depend upon whether Jesus followed the Qumran or the mainstream Jewish calendar for the keeping of 14th Nisan.
The tradition is of Christ present in the Church, present in the Eucharist, present in the hearts of the faithful. Part of that tradition is that the Meal owes its origin to Jesus himself, but we are not bound to think of the Mass as taking its origin in a particular Passover meal. On the contrary, the symbolism of the Passover meal, to which the Eucharist owes much, draws not on the dating of the Last Supper, but on Paul’s idea of Christ as our Paschal Lamb.
So, Colin Humphreys’ approach seems to me like historical hobbyism, what L. called archaeology. At the beginning of his book, he quotes Richard Dawkins as saying, ‘The only difference between The Da Vinci Code and the gospels is that the gospels are ancient fiction while The Da Vinci Code is modern fiction’. Humphreys thinks to refute this sentence by establishing the ‘historical’ evidence for the exact week in which the Last Supper took place. It is done with the best intentions, of course, but is it not playing into the hands of materialism to make everything depend upon the plausibility of a theory put forward by one retired scientist about weather conditions and calendars in ancient Palestine?
Is not a more powerful answer to Dawkins’s claim, that he has made a ‘category mistake’? ‘Fiction’ can mean many things, evidently. Dan Brown’s book is a fast-paced piece of thriller writing based upon crackpot theories concerning the Knights Templar, secret codes in Leonardo da Vinci and the unhistorical story that Jesus was secretly married to Mary Magdalen. The Gospels are not ‘fiction’ in this sense. They are not written as stories which the authors knew to be untrue. They use typological devices – fictive devices, if you will – to convey deep theological and spiritual truths. The truths which these mythologies convey have inspired some of the most heroic lives, some of the most stupendous buildings, some of the most glorious works of music and art in the world’s history. When Dan Brown’s book has come close to doing the same, then Dawkins’s comparison will stand, but until there is an oratorio of The Da Vinci Code to match Bach’s St Matthew Passion, or a Dan Brown Memorial Building to match Canterbury Cathedral, we can continue to go to church without too much fear that we are merely believing ‘fiction’.
Or can we? Although Dawkins and Humphreys both display a certain woodenness of approach – indeed, a complete lack of imagination, if one is being candid – how would it be if the characters and events of the New Testament were in fact entirely invented – fiction in the sense Dawkins and Humphreys meant? This is the view put forward by the Roman Catholic friar Thomas Brodie OP in Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus.
Brodie has spent a lifetime researching the typology of the Bible. Towards the end of his book, he writes:
Insofar as the figure of Christ engages sin, death, and resurrection, it is a reminder, first of all, that reality challenges every human being to face squarely into suffering and death. There is no easy road. Life has more suffering not only than we want but often even than we imagine. Yet the figure of Christ is also a reminder, amid all the world’s pains, that the heart of reality is a compassion that knows us through and through, and that there is more life in heaven and on earth than many of us ever dream of. . .
Brodie’s writings are an attractive blend of scholarship, intellectual inquiry, and an imaginative, even poetic, ‘take’ upon the world. Like many Biblical scholars, he has travelled a long way, in his own journey of faith, from the days when he joined the Order of Preachers as a young novice. In fact, he has decided that Jesus did not exist. ‘The tragedy with the quest for the historical Jesus is not just that it is seeking something impossible – but that – somewhat as Dawkins reduces the mind – the historical reconstructions present forms of Jesus that are desperately reduced. . . The quest for the historical Jesus installs the flicker of a matchstick in place of the aurora borealis. . .’
I can imagine L. responding positively to that sentence: I can imagine, likewise, Brodie’s great Dominican predecessor, Thomas Aquinas, agreeing. What is Aquinas’s great Eucharistic hymn except an acknowledgement that Christ remains eternally hidden, and eternally to be worshipped, behind Symbol?
Plagas, sicut Thomas, non intueor;
Deum tamen meum te Confiteor.
I do not see the wounds, as Thomas did, yet I confess you to be my God.
But Brodie, in the tradition of what was once called Catholic Modernism, goes much further than Aquinas. He actually believes that Jesus is a literary construct. He believes the same, too, of Paul. The imaginative advantage of Brodie’s theory is that it is non-reductionist. It does not wish to demolish the whole rich tradition of Christendom and replace it with arid ‘archaeology’. On the contrary, he rejoices in all the imaginative possibilities of faith in Christ. The theology of Cardinal Newman, the poetry of George Herbert, the great traditions of inner prayer in religious houses, the music and the buildings inspired by Christianity remain intact. It is simply that, as we go back, and back and back in the tradition, all we find, in Brodie’s version, is an elaborate series of literary types. He rejects any notion of an oral tradition antedating the literary constructs of the New Testament texts. Where is the evidence for such a tradition? No, all we have is the written text. And ‘in testing the Gospels, essentially every strand concerning the life of Jesus consistently yielded clear signs of being dependent on older writings’.
I am sure this is broadly true. Brodie has spent most of a longish professional life establishing its truth. When Mary sings her hymn of praise to God, known as the Magnificat [Luke 1:46 ff], the words are largely drawn from Hannah’s Prayer in the First Book of Samuel [1 Samuel 2:1–10]. When the disciples receive the prophetic call to follow Christ and are told that the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head [Luke 9:57–62], it is a close parallel to the call of the Prophet Elijah in the wilderness [1 Kings 19:4–21] and so on, over and over again.
There is a great attractiveness about Brodie’s book – to me at any rate. Did not Paul, or – if you follow Brodie – ‘Paul’, or whoever wrote the Letter to the Colossians – write, ‘So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God’? [Colossians 3:1–3] Would it not be something of a relief to abandon all the pointless ‘archaeology’ of worry about whether the Bible is historically true, and concentrate upon living a spiritual life, drawing upon all the riches of prayer to be found in its pages, especially in Psalms and the Gospels?
‘To say Jesus did not exist as a historical individual does not mean he has been eliminated. Copernicus did not eliminate the earth. He simply saw it in a new way,’ writes Brodie.
What is remarkable about Brodie’s thesis is that, in many respects, it does not alter the way in which most Christians could still go on leading rich inner lives, fed by sacrament and Scripture, whether the historical Jesus had existed or not. This has been realized at least since the Abbé Loisy wrote L’Evangile et l’Eglise in 1902.
Earlier critics of the New Testament, including those intent on proving it to be historically true, have tended to take it to bits, akin to those ‘restorers’ of antique sculpture who remove later accretions and would prefer a few heaps of disconnected limbs which authentically dated from the second century BC, rather than a finished statue, whose arms, nose and ears had been added by a restorer in Roman times or in the sixteenth century. The beauty of the Modernist approach to the Bible is that it leaves the artefact intact. Brodie quotes with approval an exchange at a Biblical conference when the Marriage Feast of Cana was being discussed. ‘Did it really happen?’ ‘What a European question! In Asia, they would ask, “What does it mean?”’
Brodie and scholars like him have done so much to enable us to read the Bible with new eyes: by making us see the kind of books which compose the Bible. In so doing, Brodie has worked himself into a position where the books are all that he can see. In those books, he can see infinite riches of symbolism and spiritual strength. But is there in the end something unsatisfactory about his theory? He has analysed the way in which the Biblical writings are put together, with repeated cross-reference and typological reading of earlier texts. But although the New Testament writers write about Jesus in a mythological way, does this entitle us to think this is all they were doing – rather than writing a myth which happened to be true? If the neatness of Brodie’s thesis is what ultimately leaves our curiosity unsatisfied, can we derive any answer to the inevitable question – Did It Really Happen?