Jazzing up the Psalms
Digby Anderson
REVELATIONS introduced by Richard Holloway Canongate, £10, pp. 404, ISBN 1841955086 New editions and commentaries on the Bible are generally to be welcomed as they rekindle interest in that book. The venture of which this publication is a part was also welcome, publishing, as it did, the different books of the Bible separately. If the Bible is neglected it is also true that some books are more neglected than others and separate publication directed interest to some of the overlooked ones. These books were published each with an essay and this new publication collects these essays in one volume without the biblical texts but with some additional essays. So we have 33 essays, 16 on the Old and 17 on the New Testament.
Who are the essayists? This is the peculiar thing. For the most part, the publisher has not chosen theologians or biblical scholars. Some have skills of literary analysis, but the majority have been chosen for who they are, not what they know. Indeed, in the publisher’s words, they have been selected because they ‘don’t have a religious drum to beat’. Moreover they have what he clearly regards as the necessary quality of being ‘diverse’. Their essays are ‘heartfelt’ and ‘personal’. There’s a very slight treatment of Genesis by the veteran leftist Steven Rose — an odd choice. Even odder ones are the pop musicians Nick Cave and Bono. There are the ex-nun Karen Armstrong, the painter Alasdair Gray, Will Self, Joanna Trollope, A. N. Wilson and others all presented by the former Bishop of Edinburgh, the thoroughly post-modern Richard Holloway.
Why should anyone want to read Bono on the Psalms when they could read St Augustine, or Louis de Bernières on Job when they could read Pope Gregory? The consequence of choosing authors by celebrity status and as part of an ‘unholy’ alliance to ‘jazz things up’ (in the publisher’s words) has obvious consequences. Since many know little about the Bible, they write about themselves and their interests. In the case of the literary ones such as A. S. Byatt this can be interesting, but even there the attempt to treat the Bible as just literature is always strained. Some third of the 33 essays are competent but unremarkable, others are dull, supercilious — and occasionally hilarious.
Thor Heyerdahl solemly explains that the height of Noah’s flood ‘was greatly exaggerated in Genesis’ and treats us to a riveting exploration of the depth of the mud in Lower Mesopotomania in the Sumerian period. The lefties manage to squeeze in a good political rant or two. Alasdair Gray supposedly on Micah and Jonah gets in one on the mass bombing of Iraq and Kuwait, the British sale of arms, company profits and the mass killing of foreigners by the UK and US. The publisher has the obligatory jibe at the American Christian Right, ‘dangerous ... abuse’. Darcey Steinke in a bid for Dave Spart’s job explains (on St John’s Gospel):
Jesus commits an act of social anarchy worthy of any Sixties revolutionary, [driving] the money-changers out of the temple. But unlike Che Guevara, whose demeanour and public agenda seem close to Jesus’, [He] has a trump card to play: supernatural power.
This blending of holy persons and events with slang and trendy expressions crops up elsewhere. Richard Holloway explains how King James with regard to his Bible ‘wanted the text to do its own thing’. St Paul is the Church’s ‘opportunistic pal from Tarsus’. Mordechai Richler tells us that ‘one day Satan, who was still one of the Lord’s ground crew, took a break from “going to and fro in the earth”.’ Faced with possibly the most important and intriguing text in the Bible, St John’s Gospel, Will Self finds it a ‘sick text’. He announces for those eager to learn that he himself ‘has no truck with immortality’. He writes mostly about a drug-addict friend of his who quoted St John and was ‘fucking complex’. The most striking sign that most of the essayists aren’t up to the texts they are addressing is their inflated sense of their own importance and opinions, and those of other modern intellectuals, compared to the importance of the Bible, and opinions traditionally attributed to God. De Bernières ends his analysis of Job by saying:
We miss God, we would dearly like to see Him going to and fro in the earth ... but we admire tyranny no longer, and we desire justice more than we are awed by vainglorious asseverations of magnificence.
Karen Armstrong treats Hebrews as a licence for dumping those of the Church’s rites and doctrines which have died for us. She declares that ‘we’ of ‘today’ (presumably she and others she knows) are competent to do better and create symbols that ‘will speak to us more eloquently and directly of the sacred’.
Not all the essayists are like this. Peter Ackroyd (Isaiah) puts his finger on the problem: ‘We must approach this sacred text with great respect, doubting the ability of our mind to comprehend it and our tongue to describe it.’ Many of the essayists do not give the text great respect. There is little sign that they entertain doubts about their own abilities or ideas. It’s dangerous to write about the Bible. The danger is that someone will compare its profundity, durability and beauty with the qualities of the essays written about it. Against the stature of the Bible, the essayists look so small you can hardly see them.
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