QUEEN VICTORIA DISLIKED being addressed as if she were a public meeting. I hope, if you have read to the end of this book, that you feel that you have been having a gentle conversation, and not that you have been harangued.
It would not be quite honest, however, if I pretended that the book had no agenda. I hope that at least one fundamentalist – either a Christian or an atheist one – will have paused and wondered whether they have been reading the Bible in the wrong way. I have hinted many times in this book that much which is most rich in the Western cultural inheritance was inspired by the Bible – campaigns of political freedom, poetry old and new, painting, music. It is an obvious point in a way, but is the reason for it obvious?
Biblical fundamentalism, espoused so clumsily by believers and unbelievers, sees ‘the Bible’ as a shopping list of bossy assertions: take your choice, we all know what this way of reading Scripture enjoins. The anti-Godders read the Bible and see only poison, because they obediently read it in the way that the religious fundamentalists tell them it is to be read. Here is a book, both sides of this ludicrous argument believe, which asserts as a scientific fact that the world came into being in the space of six days. Or here is a book which condemns homosexuality (and most other forms of sexual activity). While I was preparing this book for press, I heard on the news that an Islamic court in Iran had condemned someone for not believing that Daniel was an historical figure who really spent a night in an actual lion’s den.
It is easy to feel superior to the bigots in the Middle East who insist upon Biblical fundamentalism. But many of the secularists who reject our religious heritage make the same crass mental errors.
There was a reason, once the Christian Bible had been printed and become a book in Europe in the sixteenth century, why it inspired even more works of art than it had done in its previous fifteen hundred years of history. There is a reason why the Reformation morphed into the Romantic Movement, and why figures such as William Blake and William Wordsworth derived so much of their inspiration from the Bible.
And that is a very simple reason. The Bible – multifarious in its authors and origins – is itself a work of the imagination. It is not all written in poetry, but it is much more like poetry than it is like any other form of literature. The act of creation was not finished when the first scribe wrote the words of Scripture on a piece of papyrus. Biblical creativity only began with this process, and unfolded with each reading, each repetition, each understanding by a human being, many of them hearing the words in translation from the original Hebrew or Latin or Greek; some of them hearing because they could not read, but still absorbing into their imaginative life the living Word which the Bible was and is.
Stand outside a great church – for example, Bath Abbey, where you can see, carved in stone, a medieval depiction of the angels of God ascending and descending to earth by ladders. In the reign of Henry VII, in 1499, Bishop King had a dream in which he saw angels ascending and descending; and he heard a voice saying, ‘Let a King restore the church’ – which he did. King’s dream was itself a reference to the dream which Israel/Jacob had in the Book of Genesis. It is one of the most sublime images ever conceived by the human imagination of the possibility either (as in this story) through dreams and the subconscious, or through other channels – love, music, silence, walking, nature, or in the case of a bishop in 1499, sleeping and thinking of architecture – of mortal men and women feeling themselves in touch with something beyond material experience.
The secular fundamentalist might feel that the angels on the west front of Bath Abbey should by rights be chipped off, or covered with a layer of concrete, lest they confuse the unwary into supposing that an early Tudor bishop had actually seen visitors from outer space, or that the ancestor of the Jews in the mists of time had seen spacemen coming out of the sky on extra-terrestrial ladders. (This is, as a matter of fact, what some modern proponents of Scientology do believe!)
This fundamentalist way of reading the west front of Bath Abbey is, surely, however, not merely stupid, but perverse. Most normal surveyors of those medieval stone angels would see them as potent symbols, and would recall the passage of Genesis to which they refer. Like so much in what is perhaps the richest of all Biblical texts, it seeks not to assert, but to question, to nudge the imagination in the direction of uncertainty, to recognize that life cannot always be judged by appearances. ‘Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!”’ [Genesis 28:16]