Who runs may read
BOOKS
PATRICK COLLINSON
'Then was the Sacred Bible sought out of the dusty corners where prophane False- hood and Neglect had thrown it.' Thus Milton, consolidating the national myth of the Protestant invention of the Bible in an age when someone as unlike himself as George Herbert's country parson could be said to make of Holy Scripture 'the store- house and magazine of life and comfort. There he sucks and lives.' Myth aside, some of Herbert's cloth in the previous century were such inexpert suckers of the word that they could neither place the Lord's Prayer in the Bible nor name its author, while a cleric of Tudor Yorkshire thought that it was King Saul who had led the Israelites out of Egypt. Only our own times can hope to match such magnificent ignor- ance of holy writ, which invests with unin- tended irony a remark by Dom Jean Leclercq that 'mediaeval laymen knew the Bible as well as clerics'. This is one of the less sensible statements in a work of meticulous scholarship, volume two of The Cambridge History of the Bible: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation, edited by G. W. H. Lampe (ct.n. 70s).
The operative word of course is 'knew'. What kind of biblical knowledge did the people of the Middle Ages possess? They did not find their way through the wilder- ness of this world book in hand, like Bunyan's Christian (whom the late Dean Norman Sykes took as the typical figure of Protestantism in the previously published volume three of this History). Yet the Bible was a part of mediaeval experience at many levels. It was the principal source of the questions posed by the mediaeval intellect, the launching-pad, so to speak, for adven- turous voyages into the inner space of metaphysics. It resounded in every part of the Liturgy: in instruction, corporate prayer and lyrical expression. It provided the material for popular edification in homilies, verse paraphrases and drama. It supplied the visual artist with his vocabu- lary. The glaziers who populated the windows of Chartres and Bourges with Old Testament characters and situations in- tended these images as types of Christ. For their work to be understood they depended upon a sense, at once simple and sophisti- cated, of the spiritual unity of Scripture. Dom Leclercq is entitled to say of the society to which they belonged that it possessed an 'essentially biblical culture'.
A history of the Bible in the Middle Ages which aspired to completeness would consequently resemble a history of mediaeval civilisation. Professor Lampe has sensibly chosen to interpret the phrase in a narrower sense as referring primarily to the history of the Bible itself, in all its texts and versions. The international team of scholars which has been assembled is accordingly composed for the most part Of philologists and authorities on mediaeval manuscripts rather than of theologians or historians.
The volume opens with compressed accounts of the texts and canons of the Old and New Testaments: topics which will be more fully treated in the first volume of the History of the Bible which is to be pub-
lished later this year. Dr T. C. Skeat writes on early Christian book-production, a sub- ject of consuming and general interest since the codex (the form of a book familiar to us, with its separate leaves bound at one side) owed its nearly universal adoption to Christian preference if not to Christian in- vention. According to the theory favoured by Dr Skeat, the book as we know it is a kind of sacred relic in itself, piously pre- serving the form of the rough notebooks of the ancient world in which the Gospel of Mark may first have been written.
There follows an account by Professor E. F. Sutcliffe, SI, of Jerome's preparation of that venerable text which much later came to be known as the Vulgate. It is amusing to learn that this new version had to endure in its time the fate of all new versions, and that Jerome was punished in particular for his arrant rationalism in rendering the plant which sheltered the prophet Jonah (a type of Christ!) as hedera (ivy) rather than the traditional cucurbita (gourd). But Jerome's eventual authority was such that his mistranslation of a Hebrew word in Exodus was the basis of the settled convention by which mediaeval artists depicted Moses on his descent from Sinai with horns sprouting out of his head.
It would be misleading to leave the impression that in tracing the descent of the Latin Bible this History is more notable for such pleasing morsels as these than for solid and unadorned learning. The mediaeval pedigree of the Vulgate is established by Dr Raphael Loewe in fifty pages of severe but presumably unavoidable technicality which it would not be appropriate to discuss outside the pages of a learned journal. Other parts of the volume seem to have been designed as exercises in haute popularisa- tion. But these chapters, which are the foundation of the whole enterprise, are not amenable to popularisation of any kind, least of all that of the weekly reviewer.
Mercifully, the history of the Bible must by any reckoning amount to more than the classification of texts. The heart of the matter lies in the interaction of an unalter- able body of sacred writings with a living religious tradition, and this volume finds its rightful centre of gravity in a series of studies of the exegesis of the Bible.
From the beginning the Church was forced to exercise more ingenuity in exegesis than the Synagogue by the necess- ity of regarding the Old Testament as a book about Christ. But while some inter- preters remained content with readings which retained some logical connection with the original sense, others, more especially of the Alexandrian school and Origen above all, allegorised the Bible to the point
at which it became a mystery, requiring a kind of prophetic inspiration to disentangle the hidden, spiritual meaning from the husk of literal sense. The wives of the patriarchs became the Christian virtues; every detail of Noah's Ark a figure to illustrate baptism or to serve some other purpose. The gospels themselves were extensively spiritualised.
It was through the assistance of Origen and the more balanced Gregory the Great that the mediaeval Church read and glossed the Bible. Even Erasmus read the New Testament through Origen's spectacles, a fact observed by Pere Louis Bouyer in the essay with which this volume ends. On the other hand the rabbinical tradition survived to correct the vision of those Christian scholars who were not too proud to learn from the Hebraica veritas, notably Nicholas of Lyra who anticipated the sixteenth century in his rejection of mediaeval exegetical conventions. Professor Lampe, Dom Leclercq and Dr Erwin Rosenthal are guides along this way until we reach the point where Miss Beryl Smalley exercises the historian's imagination in recreating the atmosphere and the activity of the schools in the golden age of mediaeval biblical study, the mid-thirteenth century. At this point the application of elaborate typologies to the pictorial treatment of biblical sub- jects is explored by Dr Milburn, the dean of Worcester, in a free-ranging essay which takes its title from the Bible picture books called Biblia Pauperum; and by the doyen of English palaeographers, Professor Frances Wormald, in a more particular account of Bible illustration. These and other chapters are supported by a substan- tial appendix of plates.
Beyond the thirteenth century the Bible suffered in the universities from that enveloping of theological argument in philosophy against which Luther was the most effective but not the first protester. Outside the schools, the increasing availabil- ity of the Bible in everyday language was a pointer to the coming age when English (for example) would become a creative medium for religious expression and when the Bible would acquire a new immediacy for anyone able to construe for himself.
Unfortunately it is here that the unity and thrust of the argument fails, always a risk with the composite and lightly edited Cam- bridge histories. Ample space has been found for a succession of chapters on biblical versions in six groups of vernacu- lars: Gothic, English, French, Germanic, Italian and Spanish. These have been com- missioned from philologists whose first interest is the textual origins of these Bibles and their significance for the emergence of language and literature. They include analysis of the Wycliffite Bibles by Mr Henry Hargreaves which clarifies our know- ledge and even adds to it. Wider historical implications are not totally neglected, least of all by Professor Geoffrey Shepherd, whose account of pre-Wycliffite versions in English contains searching insights into the interdependence of theology and language. But these matters are reserved for obiter dicta, sometimes repeating, sometimes unconsciously opposing what other contri- butors have said, and usually avoiding a serious engagement with the significance of these documents for the social and cultural development of Western Europe. It is a pity that at this point the team could not have included an historian of later mediaeval religion of comparable eminence—say Dr Gordon Leff—to redress the balance.
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