Literary Style in Religious Writing: First of Two Parts

Despite what Marshall McLuhan has said—and it is uncommonly difficult to determine precisely what he has said—the major traffic between minds still travels the roadway of the written and the spoken word, and is likely to do so indefinitely. Even without appealing to the basic text, “In the beginning was the Word,” one can confidently say that man was created with a verbal faculty and that this faculty not only provides the best tool for communication but constitutes in some subtle way a definition, in part, of man’s rational nature. To express it quite simply, man and God are word-using beings, and there is nothing in Scripture or in human semantic or linguistic study to suggest that any better basis of communion is inherently possible, at least so long as man is a terrestrial creature. Pictures are useful, as are gestures, diagrams, and examples; but one clear sentence is better than a thousand pictures in transferring an idea from one mind to another.

It may even be true, as some have maintained, that words are not merely the counters by which we reckon ideational quantities but are themselves the things we know. Nonsense, some would say. It makes no difference whether we use a word of Scandinavian derivation and say “sky” or one of French origin and say “ciel.” It is the same object. Precisely: the same object. But is it possible for us to possess an idea—an abstraction—in any container save that of words? The limit of our intellectual activity, the very horizon of our mental habitation, is our vocabulary. We may feel an emotion, point to an object, or smell a smell without words; but we cannot think a thought unless we have the words to think it with.

We do not communicate with words alone, of course. Words without syntax, that is, without organization, convey meanings, but they do not ordinarily make statements. The difference is the ancient one between content and form. Every one of us has just about what Shakespeare had, so far as content (that is, vocabulary) is concerned. Every pianist has the same content Rachmaninoff had—eighty-eight keys. Marble from the quarry Michelangelo used is still available to those who have the urge to carve a statue. Tubes of the same colors Rembrandt used may be bought at any artist’s supply store. But as Browning has Andrea del Sarto say, as he despairingly and enviously looks at a painting by Raphael: “All the play, the insight and the stretch—out of me, out of me!”

The breath of life is breathed into language when the form is created. Literally, this is inspiration.

But what is form? We know that our sense of form lies within, or at least is inseparable from, that mysterious capacity we call the aesthetic sense. We know—I think we know—that an inherent element of that sense is an awareness of the difference between order and disorder, and a built-in preference for the former. No matter how widely separated by space or time, concepts of form (or beauty) possess certain common characteristics, common at least to the degree that order is an element in all. This must be so, for disorder is a non-thing in itself, and exists only as the absence of something that we know. The seeming appeal of disorder in language or thought or art depends entirely upon the shock of violating a remembered kind of order.

Furthermore, at least so far as the form of language is concerned, we know that while our aesthetic sense seems inherently to desire the beauty of order, the precise nature of the order appropriate to language must be learned. Perhaps certain basic features of the form of language, notably rhythm, are not so much learned as possessed innately, and then refined by art: but the pleasure we derive from fine writing is directly related to the quality and quantity of our reading.

So perhaps we may say of literary form—as of all other kinds—that form is that which gratifies an anticipated fulfillment, and that the variety and richness of the anticipation is dependent, in its degree, on the right kind of preparation. We all know how this works in actual experience. We hear a certain piece of music for the first time, and perhaps are pleased by it. If we listen to it again, and if it has sufficient depth of form to merit the term art, we enjoy it more, not because we do not know “how it comes out,” but because we do. We do not avoid the symphony concert that lists our favorite music, on the grounds that we have heard it before. Rather we seek it out, our anticipation keen, explicit, complex, and ready for the satisfaction that form will produce. The same principle applies to great writing. We constantly reread the things we like best because our educated anticipation is bound to be gratified. Hence, the unlearned, the unsophisticated, can gain little gratification from great music, art, or literature, for he anticipates nothing; he is not sufficiently “educated” to be able to anticipate intelligently.

In passing, note that while the gratification of form is the only lasting attraction of writing, it is not the only one. We enjoy it also because it gives us information through content. But information is simply that which gratifies curiosity, as does a detective story. Granted, many “whodunits” are well enough written to provide aesthetic pleasure as well, that is, the enjoyment of form. Normally, however, it would never occur to us to reread a mystery story unless we have forgotten how it comes out.

Also in passing, note that the pleasure of many jokes is that they rely precisely upon not satisfying the anticipated gratification. Hence it is that jokes of one culture are not funny in another, for the frame of reference within which one person comes to anticipate a certain kind of gratification is not familiar to the uninitiated.

That bewildering and much misused word culture cannot be neatly pinned down, but surely we can measure a sizable segment of it by asking: “In how many areas, dimensions, art types, literary traditions, historical periods, bodies of knowledge, emotional experiences, aesthetic patterns is this people immersed, and, as a consequence, in how many ways is this people capable of holding highly educated anticipations to be gratified by the forms of its culture—by its architecture, music, art, literature?”

Once two great traditions, providing the richest possible heritage within which to build educated anticipation, were common to the culture of Western man: the classics and the Bible. Each now has practically disappeared as standard equipment, and there is, so to speak, no orchestra within the sensibility of the modern generation with which to play the great melodies of our traditional culture. Nor is it yet clear whether any adequate substitute has been, or can be, found. Even the delight one can take in the sheer precision of language, the ability of a great writer to provide a form (chiefly a syntactical form) by which it may be said that an idea has oft been thought but ne’er so well expressed, has been eroded by anti-intellectualism and by a deficiency of practice in the art of thinking clearly. Even the least sensuous of the lines of Alexander Pope can give intense pleasure, simply by saying things with supreme economy and precision—but I find that very few of my students are able to experience it.

It is, therefore, small wonder that in these days we are buried beneath tons of words put together in such a way as to provide no slightest aesthetic enjoyment, and with no other purpose than to communicate, by the millions, those bits of information necessary to get through our complex but unbeautiful lives. Small wonder that the power of words is almost a forgotten heritage, and that the instant appeal of pictures—an appeal largely to our curiosity, not to our aesthetic sense—has captured our exclusive attention. Our journalistic age reduces pictures almost entirely to content without form, and most modern novels are popular entirely because of the events they describe, not the way they describe them. Even pop music is enjoyed as much for its pelvic gyrations as its melodic form.

It may seem we have strayed a long way from the topic—the urgent need to enhance the excellence of religious writing in our day. What I have tried to do, however, is to stress, first, the centrality of words as part of our nature, not just as a tool society has in the past found fairly useful; second, to suggest that only the truly literate person can write effectively, for his effectiveness is dependent more on form than on content; and third, to note some of the reasons why writing, not only in religious areas but as a whole, is so enfeebled in our generation.

Let me turn now to a more focused view of the nature and history of the style of religious writing.

As to its nature, I have only to say that religious writing has need, if any kind of writing does, to make use of every possible grace, every aesthetic device, every sinew of rationality, every principle of structure—in short, of every dimension of literary art. This is owing to the nature of the subject. Man needs not only to be informed about religious matters—he needs to be moved; and to be well moved, the mind, the heart, and the spirit must be touched. Surely those of us who believe that the Bible is more than a human book can see how God’s servants who wrote that Book made use of every grace of form in order to force their words not only into the ears but also into the hearts and minds of their readers and hearers. Furthermore, it is in those areas of aesthetic anticipation least esoteric and susceptible to particular and varying cultures that the formal elements are most apparent, notably two: rhythm and image. The vaunted beauty of the King James Version is no mere coloration added by the master verbal painters of the early seventeenth century. The literary qualities of the ancient Hebrew are the kind that may be literally translated without losing the grace and power to move. To say, not that “The divine power maintains benign supervision over my life,” but that “The Lord is my shepherd,” is not to add a grace note to the original but simply to translate literally what David wrote.

In sum, then, my point is that religious literature by its nature must do more than inform. It is not simply exposition. It must, by every means available to the devoted writer, make its entry into the heart through form.

As to the history of religious writing in English, my point is equally simple, though somewhat more extensive. My purpose is obviously not to trace even cursorily the lone and rich heritage of religious writing in our tongue, for many books have not exhausted the topic, but only to suggest a few features of the past as they may be relevant to the present condition of religious writing.

First off, let us remember that despite the wisely held notion of great gaps in understanding between the generations, there has been and is a clear continuity in religious writing, largely, I suppose, because our religious needs do not change. Man was a sinner, and he still is; man fled from God, and he still does; man needed to hear God’s word, and he still does. From Bede to Barth, the problem is the same; the inherent aesthetic and moral potential of man is the same; the spiritual need is the same; the role of language is (with superficial differences) the same. There has been no revolution of sensibility to separate us from Maurice de Sully in the 1190s, or from Latimer, or Hooker, or Donne, or Fuller, or Baxter or Bunyan, or Wesley, or Lewis. What separates us from them is our ignorance of them, and ignorance is a disabling but curable ailment.

Listen first to Bede, in Book II, Chapter xiii of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. This is a famous passage, describing how the English kingdom of Northumbria was presented for the first time with the Gospel by a missionary named Paulinus. King Edwin called a council of his advisers to decide whether to hear the strange new doctrine, and a pagan priest named Corfi speaks:

O King … I verily declare to you … that the religion we have hitherto held has no virtue or utility in it. For none of your people has applied himself more diligently to the worship of our gods than I; and yet there are many who … obtain greater dignities than I, and are more prosperous in all their undertakings. Now if our gods were good for anything, they would rather assist me, who have been more careful to serve them.

Rarely has the utilitarian view of religion been more sharply expressed. Another adviser then spoke,

The present life of man, O King, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and retainers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.

The two speeches were remarkably successful, for (Bede tells us) Edwin immediately gave his decision in favor of the new religion, and Corfi, the priest, with his followers, went straightway to their temple and demolished it.

Note the two characteristics of the style: rhythm (which is strikingly apparent in the original Old English; faintly perceptible even in translation) and imagery. There is another feature, too, and that is simplicity—reminding us of Milton’s dictum that the essential elements of style are simplicity and sensuousness. Note, too, that the appeal of form through imagery is based, as form must always be, on anticipated gratification. In this case the anticipation is grounded in the hearers, familiarity with the natural world about them—the sense of the comfort of the mead hall in winter; the forlornness of the sparrow outside, momentarily flying in at one open end of the hall; the dark mystery of the world outside the door, and even the greater mystery of the dark universe beyond the dimly lighted door of this earth.

It is precisely these ingredients that pervade and quicken the style of the Old Testament as supremely revealed in the King James Version, a translation, remember, notable for its literal rendering of the images of the Hebrew original. How penetrating are the physical images that permeate the ancient Hebrew—“the sweat of the brow,” “a broken reed,” “weighed and found wanting,” to smite “hip and thigh,” “the skin of the teeth.” And, transcendently, images drawn from the life and work of the shepherd.

Note that this endless array of images is not needed in order to communicate, rationally, the content of the message. The thought that God protects does not rationally need the parallelism, “the sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night,” but the power of form does. Consider the poignance of the message of Ecclesiastes: “And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low …,” and “… the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened.”

But this, you may say, is poetry, and we expect a heavy load of formal paraphernalia there. Consider, then, a mere narrative—the killing of Sisera by Jael: “At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead.” The expository content is simple: he died. But the writer skilled in giving life to words (so that they bleed when cut, in Luther’s phrase) is as concerned with how he writes as with what he says. It is not enough to condemn idleness abstractly, much more powerful to say, “yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep,” and destruction comes upon us. “We walk in darkness, we grope for the wall like the blind.” “Thou makest us a byword among the heathen, a shaking of the head among the people.”

When religious writers ceased from being steeped in the King James Version, their writing grew pale and thin.

Calvin D. Linton is professor of English literature and dean of Columbian College, The George Washington University, Washington, D.C. He holds the A.B. from George Washington and the A.M. and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins.

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