400 years of gratitude (in Authorized English)

The cover “story” in the newest Harper’s Magazine is a feature that includes four essays and three poems about the King James Bible (the Authorized Version in England) in honor of its 400-year anniversary. The essay respondents, which include John Banville, he of the ponderous prose, Howard Jacobsen, he of the most recent Booker Prize, and Benjamin Hale, he that I don’t know anything about but seems young, and Marilynne Robinson, she of the force. I don’t really need to treat the poems, which are all good, except to say that Charles Baxter’s poem, “The Arrow by Day,” is the strongest just because it approximates Psalmic language the best. I thought I’d throw some excerpts from each essay and then comment on them a bit.

Each novelist (that is what they all are, I guess) starts with a significant passage of KJV and then responds. Howard Jacobsen responds to Genesis 1:31 “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. . . .” Jacobsen, a self-identified "Jewish artist," opts to think about the inclination toward artistic creation--God the artist--and writes this:

The question of the artist's autonomy has plagued literary criticism; can the artist be said to owe responsibility to anything outside his work, does he hold a mirror up to nature, or is the nature that the artist manufactures the only one safe to refer to when it comes to art? If God is the model of the artist, then the question is settled: there was no world prior to God the artist's creating it, not even a blue pirnt for one. He holds the mirror up to nothing. Seeing the light, he doesn't worry that it fails to measure up to some idea of light existent already in his mind in the still formless void. He conjures up the concept at the same time that he creates the thing, and sees that it is good.

The "God as artist" idea has always appealed to me, primarily because it pits art ahead of science--creation as a work of imagination rather than an experiment--and all that goes with art goes with the world: richness of interpretation, meaning beyond comprehension, allusiveness, humor, love, metaphysics, ineffability. But what I like most about Jacobsen's series of questions--and his whole response is wonderful, which has convinced me I need to read his book The Finkler Question (I guess he is good at questions)--is the way it sheds light, so to speak, on the idea that art moves beyond a known quantity, or that creation's end has no precedent because its standard is only unto itself on the moment of execution. The end result is so different than the original idea, expectation, or prescription, as in man, and that is what is so "good" about it. I can't think of a better description of the Bible itself.

John Banville's piece is based on 2 Samuel 18:9-10, where "a man" sees Absalom, son of David, "hanged in an oak." Banville decided to write a first-person fictional account from the voice of the "man" who originally discovers Absalom hanging there. I am not sure it is very successful, primarily because Banville doesn't really deal with the language of the KJV, which seemed to be the original assignment, but it does yield some nice passages. Absalom is, of course, a traitor to the Israelite cause, and the man that Banville imagines is an Israelite soldier. The passage I want to quote is another series of questions, like Jacobsen's, only in the voice of this supposed biblical character. He is describing King David:

The thing about our King, as the Lord liveth, and I say this with all due respect, is that he's odd. I don't say more than that: odd, that's all. There was that business of him dancing for the Lord in front of the Ark of the Covenant--what was that about? I mean why keep a high priest of the Temple if you're going to do the dancing yourself? And what of the day when he heard the news that Saul his great enemy had fallen on his sword, and that Jonathan the son of Saul had perished also? Did he rejoice, did he clap his hands and caper? Rather, he wept, and rent his clothes, and fasted, and cried out that the beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen!

"Odd" you say? Yes, well, "beyond our prescriptive expectation" too. What would you expect from David, perhaps the finest poet the Western world has known? In David's response to the death of Saul, as in his subsequent response to the death of his traitor son Absalom, we see what makes the Bible, and the prophets, so astounding: it reflects a world fraught by emotional upheaval, irrational attachments, actions outside of the fable (and if there ever was an inaccurate way to describe the Bible, it would be "fable.") and into the realm of a humanism still worth studying, and to some extent, cultivating.

Benjamin Hale's take on Psalm 8:4-8, "What is man, that thou aren't mindful of him? . . ." is unsurprising, if well-articulated. He refuses to grant the Bible its anthropomorphic view of the world, preferring to see humans as another creation among many--art only in context of happenstance.

Desmond Morris, paraphrasing Huxley, said he saw his "fellow man not as a fallen angel but as a risen ape." That's better than calling us the "crown of creation," but "fallen" and "risen" are still the wrong words; the Great Chain of Being still haunts the rhetoric. Though it's a nice sentence, I'd prefer to rephrase it as, "not a fallen angel but just an ape." Granted, a great one.

A great ape, indeed. One that made a Bible, celebrates its 400th anniversary, and wonders about itself endlessly. I find Hale's argument strange, especially in response to the Bible, and I am guessing Harper's knew he would take this kind of approach so they offered him the chance (his new novel, of course, is called The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore) to give an oppositional view of the Bible's central premise: that humans are important enough to think a lot about. But arguing with the Bible is like arguing with nature--pointing out its deficiencies is the same as pointing out its strengths, and the ire against it has the effect of making it that much greater. "What is a man, that thou art mindful of him? . . . For thou has made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him to have dominion over the works of thy hand; thou hast put all things under his feet" This passage is not about the Great Chain of Being anyway, it is about someone coming to terms with the unknowable nature of his own being through prayer. When the Psalmist asks this question, he asks it in a state of simultaneous wonder and humility. Sure, "lower than the angels" and greater than the other "works of thy hands," but the explanation is still conditioned as part of the question. In other words: "We hear that we are greater than these other things, but why doesn't it feel that way? Why do you love me? What is it about me that you, Lord, love?" That is a pretty interesting question, especially phrased in the collective, and it is a question accessed best through a relationship with a creator, the Great Artist that loves his creation precisely because it has become something a bit unknowable, and "it is good."

Acting almost as a direct response to Hale, Marilynne Robinson writes about 1 Corinthians 15:51-52, "Behold I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, In the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump . . ." Her response close reads "twinkling," and if I could, I'd quote her whole piece here, as wonderful as it is, including sentences like "The Wycliffites took a word [twinkling] from the unaccountably rich vocabulary the ancestors of the English language created to mark subtle differences in the appearance of light, enabling all their generations of descendants to distinguish a glitter, a glimmer, a shimmer." And, more succinctly, "The Bible is much thumped and little pondered." Robinson sees the Bible as the Reformers saw it, as a democratizing document of liberation and love, or a gift to the downtrodden, a "mystery" that contains power to save. She imagines the dissemination of the first English translations, done by Wycliffe and Tyndale, to the world beyond large hallways and echoing chambers:

Its [the Bible's] greatness is owed in large part to the fact that it has preserved much that is best in the work of its martyrs, including a sense of the urgent generosity that lay behind their words. Imagine a tonsured youth taking a page or two of Scripture from his sleeve and keeling to read, by some small, furtive light that, since it played on English faces, flickered or gleamed. "We shall all be chaunged, and that in a moment, and the twincklynge of an eye." He'd have been reading to old Adam the delver, the man of earth, the bearer of the primordial curse whose toil was grossly embittered by the impositions of his fellow men. And in the quiet of the peril they shared he'd have brought him the vision of himself as the new Adam, not burdened and coerced by the needs of his hungry body and by the entrapments of his degraded condition, but wholly conformed to himself as a living soul.

Beyond the fact that Robinson's image is close to how the popular imagination understands Joseph Smith reading James 1:5, it makes a political point that I find reassuring. The Bible does not shore up political, social, and economic authority but rather resists it, or flies in the face of it. And through exegesis, or the critical act of reading and interpretation, more can be done for the understanding of the self, or the potentiality of human selves, than almost any other activity. Why does sacred writ matter? Because it allows us to glimpse other worlds and trust that our act of reading moves towards that other world, in turn making this one much more tolerable, or even beautiful. We, of course, need our native tongue to help us out with that, principally because its language, both poetic and literal, matters as much as the content, and the translators of the Authorized Version realized, I think, that salvation is harder to glimpse without a joyful noise, a language of poetic imaginings.