III: The Bible
Men can read the life of Our Lord (because it is a human life) as nothing but a human life. . . . Just in the same way Scripture can be read as merely human literature. . . . For what is required, on all these levels alike, is not merely knowledge but a certain insight; getting the focus right. . . . One who contended that a poem was nothing but black marks on white paper would be unanswerable if he addressed an audience who couldn’t read. Look at it through microscopes, analyse the printer’s ink and the paper, study it (in that way) as long as you like; you will never find something over and above all the products of analysis whereof you can say ‘This is the poem’. Those who can read, however, will continue to say the poem exists. . . .
Taken by a literalist, He will always prove the most elusive of teachers. Systems cannot keep up with that darting illumination. No net less wide than a man’s whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish.
Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 11
The Day of Judgement is an idea very familiar, and very dreadful, to Christians. . . . If there is any concept which cannot by any conjuring be removed from the teaching of Our Lord, it is that of the great separation; the sheep and the goats, the broad way and the narrow, the wheat and the tares, the winnowing fan, the wise and the foolish virgins, the good fish and the refuse, the door closed on the marriage feast, with some inside and some outside in the dark. . . . It is from His own words that the picture of ‘Doomsday’ has come into Christianity.
‘The Psalms’, Christian Reflections
When you accepted the exodus of Israel from Egypt as a type of the soul’s escape from sin, you did not on that account abolish the exodus as a historical event.
The Allegory of Love, ch. 5, sec. 2
Some people when they say that a thing is meant ‘metaphorically’ conclude from this that it is hardly meant at all. They rightly think that Christ spoke metaphorically when he told us to carry the cross: they wrongly conclude that carrying the cross means nothing more than leading a respectable life and subscribing moderately to charities. They reasonably think that hell ‘fire’ is a metaphor—and unwisely conclude that it means nothing more serious than remorse. They say that the story of the Fall in Genesis is not literal; and then go on to say that it was really a fall upwards—which is like saying that because ‘My heart is broken’ contains a metaphor, it therefore means ‘I feel very cheerful’. This mode of interpretation I regard, frankly, as nonsense. For me the Christian doctrines which are ‘metaphorical’—or which have become metaphorical with the increase of abstract thought—mean something which is just as ‘supernatural’ or shocking after we have removed the ancient imagery as it was before.
Miracles, ch. 10
Books on psychology or economics or politics are as continuously metaphorical as books of poetry or devotion.
Miracles, ch. 10
Our age has, indeed, coined the expression ‘the Bible as literature’. It is very generally implied that those who have rejected its theological pretentions nevertheless continue to enjoy it as a treasure house of English prose. It may be so. There may be people who, not having been forced upon familiarity with it by believing parents, have yet been drawn to it by its literary charms and remained as constant readers. But I never happen to meet them. Perhaps it is because I live in the provinces. But I cannot help suspecting, if I may make an Irish bull, that those who read the Bible as literature do not read the Bible. . . .
Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only ‘mouth honour’ and that decreasingly.
‘The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version’, Selected Literary Essays
The same divine humility which decreed that God should become a baby at a peasant-woman’s breast, and later an arrested field-preacher in the hands of the Roman police, decreed also that He should be preached in a vulgar, prosaic and unliterary language. If you can stomach the one, you can stomach the other. The Incarnation is in that sense an irreverent doctrine: Christianity, in that sense, an incurably irreverent religion. When we expect that it should have come before the World in all the beauty that we now feel in the Authorised Version we are as wide of the mark as the Jews were in expecting that the Messiah would come as a great earthly King. The real sanctity, the real beauty and sublimity of the New Testament (as of Christ’s life) are of a different sort: miles deeper or further in.
Introduction to J. B. Phillips’s Letters to Young Churches
And finally, though it may seem a sour paradox—we must sometimes get away from the Authorised Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity the transporting or horrifying realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame or struck dumb with terror or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and adorations.
Introduction to J. B. Phillips’s Letters to Young Churches
Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated.
Letters (25 May 1962)
It seems to me appropriate, almost inevitable, that when that great Imagination which in the beginning, for Its own delight and for the delight of men and angels and (in their proper mode) of beasts, had invented and formed the whole world of Nature, submitted to express Itself in human speech, that speech should sometimes be poetry. For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.
Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 1
A visitor from another world who judged humanity simply by its poetry would get the impression from profane poetry that we were creatures who lived habitually on a high, level plateau of consistent passion; from our sacred poetry, and from it almost alone, would he get any notion of human experience as it really is, with all its lee-shores and doldrums and rudderless hithering and thithering. . . . It is the profane poetry which assumes attitudes of greater clarity and consistency than inner experience will really support; it is the sacred poetry which gives us life in the raw. For whatever else the religious life may be, it is the fountain of self-knowledge and disillusion, the safest form of psychoanalysis.
Book review, Review of English Studies (January 1941)
The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance. . . .
[The Psalmists] express a longing for Him, for His mere presence, which comes only to the best Christians or to Christians in their best moments.
Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 5
The dominant impression I get from reading the Psalms is one of antiquity. I seem to be looking into a deep pit of time, but looking through a lens which brings the figures who inhabit that depth up close to my eye. In that momentary proximity they are almost shockingly alien; creatures of unrestrained emotion, wallowing in self-pity, sobbing, cursing, screaming in exultation, clashing uncouth weapons or dancing to the din of strange musical instruments. Yet, side by side with this, there is also a different image in my mind: Anglican choirs, well laundered surplices, soapy boys’ faces, hassocks, an organ, prayer-books, and perhaps the smell of new-mown graveyard grass coming in with the sunlight through an open door. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other, impression grows faint, but neither, perhaps, ever quite disappears.
‘The Psalms’, Christian Reflections
[Psalm 119] is a pattern, a thing done like embroidery, stitch by stitch, through long, quiet hours, for love of the subject and for the delight in leisurely, disciplined craftsmanship. . . .
This is not priggery nor even scrupulosity; it is the language of a man ravished by a moral beauty.
Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 6
The Psalmists . . . give us little landscape. What they do give us, far more sensuously and delightedly than anything I have seen in Greek, is the very feel of weather—weather seen with a real countryman’s eyes, enjoyed almost as a vegetable might be supposed to enjoy it.
Reflections on the Psalms, ch. 8
What an admirable thing it is in the Divine economy that the sacred literature of the world should have been entrusted to a people whose poetry, depending largely on parallelism, should remain poetry in any language you translate it into.
Letters (16 July 1940)
The question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say.
Miracles, ch. 1
The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern. . . .
A miracle is emphatically not an event without cause or without results. Its cause is the activity of God: its results follow according to Natural law. . . . Its peculiarity is that it is not in that way interlocked backwards, interlocked with the previous history of Nature. . . . To find how it is interlocked with the previous history of Nature you must replace both Nature and the miracle in a larger context. Everything is connected with everything else: but not all things are connected by the short and straight roads we expected.
Miracles, ch. 8
By definition, miracles must of course interrupt the usual course of Nature, but if they are real they must, in the very act of so doing, assert all the more the unity and self-consistency of total reality at some deeper level. They will not be like unmetrical lumps of prose breaking the unity of a poem; they will be like that crowning metrical audacity which, though it may be paralleled nowhere else in the poem, yet, coming just where it does, and effecting just what it effects, is (to those who understand) the supreme revelation of the unity in the poet’s conception. . . . If Nature brings forth miracles then doubtless it is as ‘natural’ for her to do so when impregnated by the masculine force beyond her as it is for a woman to bear children to a man.
Miracles, ch. 8
Theology says to you in effect, ‘Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.’ The philosophy which forbids you to make uniformity absolute is also the philosophy which offers you solid grounds for believing it to be general, to be almost absolute. The Being who threatens Nature’s claim to omnipotence confirms her in her lawful occasions. Give us this ha’porth of tar and we will save the ship. The alternative is really much worse. Try to make Nature absolute and you find that her uniformity is not even probable. By claiming too much, you get nothing. You get the deadlock, as in Hume. Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers.
Miracles, ch. 13
What cannot be trusted to recur is not material for science: that is why history is not one of the sciences. You cannot find out what Napoleon did at the battle of Austerlitz by asking him to come and fight it again in a laboratory with the same combatants, the same terrain, the same weather, and in the same age. You have to go to the records. We have not, in fact, proved that science excludes miracles: we have only proved that the question of miracles, like innumerable other questions, excludes laboratory treatment.
‘Religion Without Dogma?’, God in the Dock
All the essentials of Hinduism would, I think, remain unimpaired if you subtracted the miraculous, and the same is almost true of Mohammedanism. But you cannot do that with Christianity. It is precisely the story of a great Miracle. A naturalistic Christianity leaves out all that is specifically Christian.
Miracles, ch. 10