Literary Style in Religious Writing: Second of Two Parts

Let us move forward some hundreds of years, and note another ingredient in religious writing of the distant past.

Maurice de Sully, who died in 1196, is the first known French preacher to give his sermons in the vernacular instead of in Latin. Some of his sermons were translated into Middle English, and some have been preserved in the Laud Manuscript (No. 471) in the Bodleian Library. They are written in the Kentish dialect of about 1250. Their formal elements are of the simplest kind, chiefly the form of organization: text, narrative, exposition, and application. Hear a very short sermon. (The translation from the Middle English is my own, so you must overlook any infelicities of expression.)

We read in the Holy Gospel of today that our Lord Jesus Christ went one time into a ship, and his disciples with him, into the sea. And so they were in the ship when there arose a great tempest of winds; and our Lord had laid himself down to sleep in the ship before ever the tempest arose. Then his disciples had great fear of this tempest, so that they awakened him and said to him, “Lord, save us; for we perish.” Now he well knew that they had no good faith in him, so said he unto them, “What fear you, folk of little belief?” So arose up our Lord, and took [seized; controlled] the wind and the sea, and it was quickly still. And the men that were in the ship saw the miracle, and so wondered greatly.

“This is a true miracle that the Gospel for today tells us; therefore shall your belief be the better strengthened because that our Lord may do such a miracle, and do it when he will. But it was needful, for them to be succored in their peril and for us to be saved in our need, that we call to him that he help us. And he will do it blithely, as the Holy Writ says. “I am,” he saith, “the healer of the people; when they call to me in their sorrow and in their needs; I will succor them, and take away from them all evil, without limit”.… Cry out to him heartily for mercy, if the devil encumbers you through sin, through pride, or through envy, or through wrath, or through any other manner of deadly sin; cry out to him for mercy, and say we all to him, “Lord, save us, that we do not perish, and he will deliver us from all evil, giving us right works to do in this world, and will save our souls in Doomsday, and give us the bliss of heaven.

The simplicity and the objectivity—the “thingness”—of the style reminds us that we are in the age when Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur helped to do for English prose what Chaucer did for poetry; that is, to provide a literary standard and a link between Anglo-Saxon and modern English. This task was chiefly done for prose, however, by Wyclif’s translation of the Bible in the 1380s.)

If there were time, we could amply support the thesis that religious writing in the vernacular in the Middle Ages showed the highest consciousness of the need to invest ideas with beauty, abstraction with imagery, content with form. And we could show also that one of the major reasons for this awareness and this achievement was the influence of the Bible itself, in the original tongues and in English translation.

We must move forward, however, and note certain enrichments of religious writing style resulting from humanism. To oversimplify, we may say that the major enrichment was the consequence of Latinate constructions (syntax) and vocabulary, and of the models provided (at least at first) by the oratorical style known as Ciceronian.

The texture of the prose becomes more tightly woven, the colors more varied, the harmonies more complex, the metaphors more sophisticated. But our conclusion remains the same—is, indeed, underscored: the writer of religious prose was acutely aware of his responsibilities as a literary artist, not just an idea journeyman. His purpose was constantly to move, not just to inform. Indeed, the time was not far future when adornment would, in the practice of some religious writers, take precedence over content, as an illuminated manuscript became more of a work of art than an instrument of verbal communication. By and large, however, we find that religious writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries never lost touch with the homely, vigorous, simple, and sensuous modes of the past.

Hear, for example, a passage from a sermon by Hugh Latimer, later martyred by Bloody Mary, preached before the King Edward VI in 1549. With a consciousness of clear organization that our modern writers would do well to emulate, Latimer states his “argument”:

In this first sermon is declared and taught the godly election of a king, and a rule of godly living as touching his own person.… The form of his godly rule, also, is divided here in this sermon in three parts. First, that he should not trust too much upon his own strength and policy, but only to walk ordinately with God and to make Him his lodesman and chief guide. Secondarily, that he live not lasciviously and wantonly, following venereal affections, but to live chastely.… Thirdly, is admonished the King’s Grace that he should not desire gold and silver too much.… In these things consisteth the whole sum of this sermon.

Note that in one short sentence he incorporates three images. First, to walk “ordinately with God.” The metaphor is derived from geometry, and declares with beautiful precision a measured walk parallel to God’s leading. Second, to make God one’s “lodesman,” the root of which is the Old English lad, meaning a “way,” a “course,” and later a “procession.” And thirdly, an easy metaphor: to make God one’s chief guide.

We sometimes think it marvelous that a company of scholars in the early seventeenth century could have produced the magnificence of the King James Version, and so it is. But from many sources we know with what pains every literate person of that age had drilled into him not only the mechanics of language but also the comely adorning of it. Hear Roger Ascham, tutor of Queen Elizabeth, on teaching a child syntax:

After the child hath learned perfectly the eight parts of speech, let him then learn the right joining together of substantives with adjectives, the noun with the verb, the relative with the antecedent. And in learning further his snytaxis, by mine advice he shall not use the common order in common schools for making of Latins; whereby the child commonly learneth, first, an evil choice of words (and right choice of words, saith Caesar, is the foundation of eloquence); then, a wrong placing of words; and lastly, an ill framing of the sentence.… These faults, taking once root on youth, be never or hardly, plucked away in age.… There is a way, touched in the first book of Cicero de Oratore, which, wisely brought into schools, truly taught and constantly used, would … in short time, as I know by good experience, work a true choice and placing of words, a right ordering of sentences, an easy understanding of the tongue, a readiness to speak, a facility to write, a true judgment both of his own and other men’s doings, what tongue soever he doth use.…

A wit in youth that is not overdull, heavy, knotty, and lumpish, but hard, rough …, such a wit, I say, if it be at the first well handled by the mother, and rightly Smoothed and wrought as it should, not over-thwartly and against the wood, by the schoolmaster, both for learning and whole course of living, proveth always the best [from The Scholemaster, 1570].

From such humanists as Ascham did generations of theologians learn, with much labor and practice, the rudiments of style and organizations, for facility in writing never came but by great anguish. “You write with ease to show your breeding, but easy writing makes demmed hard reading,” said Richard Sheridan in the eighteenth century. How much of the sloppiness of much contemporary religious writing may we attribute to two simple causes, ignorance and laziness? Surely a great deal. “He who casts to write a living line must sweat,” wrote Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson. As Bishop Joseph Butler once put it: “Confusion and perplexity in writing is indeed without excuse because any one may, if he pleases, know whether he understands and sees through what he is about; and it is unpardonable for a man to lay his thoughts before others when he is conscious that he himself does not know whereabouts he is, or how the matter before him stands. It is coming abroad [i.e., taking a public promenade] in a disorder which he ought to be dissatisfied to find himself in at home” (Sermons, preface). This advice, however, is relatively late—eighteenth century.

By all odds, the greatest age in English religious writing was the seventeenth century. It was the Golden Age of the Anglican communion, and it is astonishing how many of the great names we remember simply as literary giants were clergyman or the products of a primarily theological education at one of the universities—Donne, Herbert, Fuller, Taylor, Bunyan. Browne, Marvell, Milton, to name just a few of the best known. If we had the time we could see how the various stylistic traits of English prose, going back to Anglo-Saxon days, from homely simplicity to the rich organ notes of the humanists, run through such writers as these, jointly and severally. It must suffice us, however, to be reminded of some of the more visible manifestations of literary beauty, and it would be hard to find a better example than that of the son of a Cambridgeshire barber, Jeremy Taylor. His name is not much on the lips of seminary students today, but it should be.

To the Romantic poets of England who rediscovered the loveliness of seventeenth-century writing—to Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb, particularly—Taylor is to be listed side by side with Shakespeare as preeminent in richness of mind and style. It is not hard to see why. In Taylor we find supremely the elements we have stressed—rhythm, imagery, verbal melody. The sentence structure looks complex, but the flow of idea and feeling is aimed straight at the mind and heart. The effect is cumulative; one should read large chunks of, say, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, just as one must listen to the entirety of a Beethoven quartet. One cannot take a few notes and say, See, here is beauty. But listen to a few sentences:

Since we stay not here, being people but of a day’s abode, and our age is like that of a fly and contemporary with a gourd, we must look somewhere else for an abiding city, a place in another country to fix our house in, whose walls and foundation is God, where we must find rest, or else be restless forever.

And again:

Men’s [very] joys are troublesome, and besides that the fear of losing them takes away the present pleasure, and a man hath need of another felicity to preserve this, they are also wavering and full of trepidation, not only from their inconstant nature, but from their weak foundation: they arise from vanity, and they dwell upon ice, and they converse with the wind, and they have the wings of a bird, and are serious but as the resolutions of a child, commenced by chance, and managed by folly, and proceed by inadvertency, and end in vanity and forgetfulness. So that as Livius Drusus said [Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae, i, 6] of himself, he never had any play-days or days of quiet when he was a boy, for he was troublesome and busy, a restless and unquiet man; the same may every man observe to be true of himself; he is always restless and uneasy, he dwells upon the waters, and leans upon thorns, and lays his head upon a sharp stone.

Every line, almost every phrase, you will note, is visible, sensuous—besides the grace lent by parallelism, culminating rhythms, and precision of vocabulary. The style is very sophisticated compared to that of Bunyan, but who can read the opening pages of The Pilgrim’s Progress and not be caught up almost physically: The Man, “looking upon Evangelist very carefully, said, Whither must I fly? Then said Evangelist, pointing with his finger over a very wide field, Do you see yonder wicket gate? The Man said, No. Then said the other, Do you see yonder shining Light? He said, I think I do.…”

I tell you that in the mass of much contemporary writing a man could stumble over that wicket gate, and put his hand on that light, and not know it, so dark and obscure are the clouds of verbiage covering the wide field.

How heartening it would be among today’s writers if there were a truly anguished sense of responsibility to practice to write well—to echo the words of the great Richard Baxter in the seventeenth century, who in one of the most powerful calls to conversion ever written, A Call to the Unconverted (usually referred to as “Baxter’s Call”), describes his own labors:

For long we have preached to many … in vain. We study plainness, to make them understand, but they … will not understand us; we study serious piercing words, to make them feel, but they will not feel. If the greatest matters would work with them, we should awake them; if the sweetest things would work, we should entice them and win their hearts; if the most dreadful things would work, we should at least affright them from their wickedness; if truth and sincerity would take with them, we should soon convince them; … if Scripture might be heard we should soon prevail; if reason … might be heard we should not doubt but we should speedily convince them; if experience might be heard, even their own experience …, the matter might be mended; yea, if the conscience within them might be heard the case would be better with them than it is. But if nothing can be heard, what then shall we do for them? [from an undated edition of about 1850].

The temptation is to wander indefinitely among the literary monuments of the seventeenth century, but let me huddle together a few generalizations about the eighteenth century, o’erleap the nineteenth entirely, and end with some observations on the contemporary scene.

Although the established definitions of past periods are often demonstrably inaccurate—to call the early Middle Ages “Dark,” for example, is more indicative of an early ignorance of that amazing era than of perceptive interpretation—yet occasionally the standard term is useful. The glory of eighteenth-century religious writing is, as is asserted of the period in general, its rational clarity. The form within which the rational content was communicated was supremely orderly, tactful, harmonious. Hear Dr. Johnson deplore the unwisdom of believing nothing because one cannot know everything: “He who will determine against that which he knows because there may be something which he knows not; he that can set hypothetical possibility against acknowledged certainty, is not to be admitted among reasonable beings” (the words of Imlac, Chapter XLVIII, Rasselas). The sentence swings, hovers, balances, and concludes. It is hard to beat the ancient recommendation that all art should have a beginning, middle, and end, each part organically adapted to its role. Many modern sentences, like pop music, do not conclude; they simply die away. An eighteenth-century sentence is like a Haydn symphony: you know when it is done.

Anyone who wishes to write with any degree of felicity should steep himself in eighteenth-century prose—as Abraham Lincoln did, copying out the sentences to get the feel of the syntax in his fingers. I am afraid, however, that this practice is far from common among those who write today; and so far as I can judge even the seminarians are largely ignorant of such eighteenth-century masterworks as William Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), or View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794), or Natural Theology (1802), not to speak of Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), on which earlier generations of seminary students were raised. One may agree or disagree with such classics, but he cannot absorb them without having his mind stretched and his literary style affected for the better.

And now I wish to report an experiment. On reaching this point, with some assessment of the past in terms of the literary style of religious communication, I wished, naturally, to use something for contrast. But I realized that it would be unfair to read in contemporary religious writing until I came upon something sufficiently awful to support my thesis. So I honestly did this: I approached a shelf of books on religious topics, took down a volume at random, opened it at random, and read the first sentence I saw. It was this: “The definition of empirical concepts, and of the corresponding classes of individuals, in terms of other empirical concepts depends ultimately on explaining the meaning of some concept by means of standard members of the class of its instances and of standard non-members of it” (“Theology and Philosophy,” by Anthony Kenny, in Theology and the University, edited by John Coulson).

Now, that is not bad writing, in modern terms. The sentence has a subject, and a verb (if one searches a bit), and all the space between the initial capital letter and the terminating period is filled up with words—about all one can expect in an imperfect world. But, fortunately for my experiment, this sentence vividly illustrates how poor modern religious writing is in those stylistic traits we have seen permeating older writing, notably simplicity and sensuousness. Every term in the sentence is abstract; nothing is to see or feel; no rhythm; no illuminating image; no form. It has content, and, if one concentrates, it informs; but it does not move, in either the transitive or the intransitive sense.

Except for a few brilliant exceptions (C. S. Lewis is one), modern religious writing exhibits most of the characteristics of writing in the social sciences—and that is a very serious charge. No decent social scientist would be caught dead saying, “We decided to do it again,” if he has learned to say, “The determination was made to replicate the experiment.” The appeal of an esoteric, specialized vocabulary, of involuted syntax, of prolixity, is too great to be resisted, particularly if experience shows that these traits are what editors want. Furthermore, a spare, agile, vivid style requires that we have something very explicit to say, and who wants to live with a burden like that?

During some twenty years of serving as a consultant to a score or more government agencies in an effort to raise the level of official prose, I have come to believe that perhaps no more than half a dozen diseases underlie most morbid symptoms. Granted that most of the cures do little more than turn non-sentences and non-paragraphs into reasonably clear, head-on statements and fairly unified idea clusters, yet such merely functional improvement shows itself, overall, in a better style. It is not only clearer to say that “doctrinal differences were resolved” than to say that “resolution of doctrinal differences was achieved” but it is also more pleasing, even though all one has done is to give to the better sentence a real subject and a real verb in place of the fakes infesting the other. Fortunately, the old principles still work—economy, parallelism, unity, linkage and coherence, vigorous verbs. And though these qualities cannot in one sense be taught, they can be learned.

Unfortunately, however, stylistic felicity not only cannot be taught—it cannot be learned. At least not in time to do any good. One cannot get there from here. The learning would have had to start at age ten, with good and incessant reading, continuing over the years. It is amazing how many times I have been asked to teach a group of government employees how to write stylistically pleasing sentences—and to do it in three easy lessons. The candidates usually are people who have never read anything more aesthetically pleasing than the latest instructions for filling out income-tax forms, and who at home feel they have made their gesture to literature by listening to a TV editorial. They try, but it is simply not in them to distinguish between a sentence so awkward that it sets the teeth on edge and one that moves with some degree of grace. We are back to form again: such people do not possess an educated anticipation with regard to literary pleasure, and so cannot be either gratified or disappointed by the rise and fall of a sentence.

If the teacher can do little more than clean up the grosser errors in grammar and syntax, what can the editor do? Surely not rewrite every stylistically deficient article he gets, for even if he had the time, the piece would then become his own. How we say something is often more important than what we say. Form is more important than content, and that is why Rachmaninoff can put his. name at the bottom of the score of “Variations on a Theme by Paganini.” Perhaps, however, it would help if editors joined in a national effort to publicize their concern over badly written prose, and let it be known that the kind of flaccid, awkward, disjointed writing that now is accepted will not be viewed with favor in the future.

I cannot, I think, conclude this discussion better than by reverting to my favorite century, the seventeenth, and quoting a few words from Ben Jonson. They occur in that rather odd posthumously published collection of scattered thoughts called Timber: Or Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter. “In style,” Jonson, says, “to consider what ought to be written, and after what manner, he must first think and excogitate his matter, then choose his words, and examine the weight of either. Then take care, in placing and ranking both matter and words, that the composition be comely; and to do this with diligence and often.” And again: “For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries—to read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise of his own style.”

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