I think I may as well begin by breaking a promise. In another life I used to teach English, at the Cathedral School here in Wells, and when I left, to train for ordination, I made a promise. I promised my colleagues in the English department that whatever else I did I would not quote T. S. Eliot in sermons, because they had already suffered too much of that from other people. Some of whom may be listening.
But that was a long time ago. So this is from ‘Little Gidding’, the fourth of Eliot’s Four Quartets.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
It just glides past you, plausible and somehow unchallengeable. And then you think about it. What does Eliot actually mean? Who changes a language at the end of the year, like an old diary? Language changes very gradually, slowly enough for us all to complain about the changes we don’t like. What does he mean?
I am here to talk about what happened, in the 16th century, when something like that did happen. When you could go to church one day in Latin and the next day in English. When people found that words had changed and ideas had changed with them. When your religion was suddenly talking to you in the same language that you spoke to buy cabbages and shout at the dog and complain about your neighbours. The language had changed. The times had changed. A new year, new words, another voice: perhaps even God had changed. What language does God speak? What language is the Word?
This is a huge subject, and this is going to be a kind of keyhole sermon. Like keyhole surgery: it’s a very small opening, but it does the work. So here are four keyholes to look through at this turmoil of words and language and God. They are the page, the printing press, the pulpit, and the ploughboy.
The page, the printing press, the pulpit, and the ploughboy. The first three all belong together but the ploughboy doesn’t seem to fit. The ploughboy is from a story about William Tyndale. Tyndale was arguing with another priest about whether people needed the Bible in the vernacular. At the time, it was illegal to own a copy in English. The other priest said, people have the church, they have the laws of the Pope, they don’t need the Bible. And Tyndale said, says the story, ‘I defy the Pope and all his laws, if God spare my life, I will make a boy that driveth the plough know more of the Scripture than thou dost.’ So if the ploughboy doesn’t seem to fit with the page and the pulpit and the press, that’s Tyndale’s point.
The page. Think of a page in a medieval Bible. It’s handwritten. It’s a beautiful clear rounded script. The page is parchment and it has cost, we would say, an arm and a leg, though more literally it has cost the four legs of the sheep or calf whose skin it was. It might be illuminated. The text will be Latin. There might be an interlinear gloss, where someone has written between the lines, and that might be Old English, Anglo-Saxon. It’s not exactly a translation, the scribes are just writing the English word above the Latin to help themselves find their way through the text. The scribes are probably monastic. The book they make is produced and shared by a community of skill, and it becomes part of the life of that community. It will be read at services, studied, copied, borrowed and returned, borrowed and scandalously not returned, given as a great gift. Other parts of the life of the community will be recorded in it. Charters of land may be copied in on half-blank pages here and there. If you know The English Patient, the novel by Michael Ondaatje, you may remember that the English patient has one book, a copy of the Histories of Herodotus, and he’s treated it a bit like this. He’s written in it, and kept things between the pages, and later Hana, the nurse who’s looking after him, who’s become part of the odd community around him, inherits the book and also writes in it. It’s a book that’s an individual, with its own identity, its own history, and it holds their histories: and that’s what a medieval manuscript Bible is like.
But it is a Bible, and if we know Latin we might be able to read bits here and there. In principium creavit Deus coelum et terram. Terra autem erat inanis et vacua. But there may well be other texts written around that, not the Bible but commentary. We’ve moved on in time now from the Anglo-Saxons, writing a crib translation between the lines. These are the scholars of the later middle ages, compiling a vast commentary on the Bible and writing it round the text, a whole body of understanding and reflection and interpretation that encloses the Biblical text on the page. That is the sacra pagina, the holy page.
Now, if I want to look up Genesis 1.1, I pull out my phone and open the app, and the text just scrolls past me, free-floating. In the beginning God created heaven and earth, and the earth was without form and void. The words might have come from anywhere, they might go anywhere. Nothing anchors them. Nothing explains them, nothing tells me what other people in my community have thought they meant, not unless I bother to look that up. One of the things that happened in the Reformation was that the text of the Bible leapt off the page, escaped from the communities that held it and ran like wildfire through Europe. And everywhere, of course, people tried to enclose it again.
The moral of the page is that we do enclose it again. Our understanding of what the Bible says is still wrapped round in assumptions and interpretations and commentary. But we don’t make that visible to ourselves any more.
What happened to the Bible wouldn’t have happened without the printing press. That was a historical accident, or an accident that caused history. The printing press with moveable type came along and changed all the rules. Manuscript is slow and unique, print is quick and repeatable. Manuscript is institutional and expensive, print is commercial and at first still quite expensive, at least if what you wanted to buy was the Gutenberg Bible, but that changed as the technology spread. Print is accessible, liberating, dangerous. Print meant that anyone could own a book. It’s the printing press that takes the Bible and sends it out into the world.
No one has ever succeeded in finding out what the moral of the press is.
Long before there was a press to print Bibles, there was already a movement to translate the text. Even in English, there had been been translations before. You remember the Anglo-Saxons writing their between-the-lines versions. There were proper Anglo-Saxon translations of the Bible; there was a translation of the Gospel of John by Bede, which is lost, one of the great lost books; and there are others, among them the Wessex Gospels from the tenth century, about a hundred years before Doomsday Book. We don’t know if they prayed the Lord’s Prayer in English or if they said their paternoster in Latin, but they certainly knew how to write it in English.
Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum,
si þin nama gehalgod.
To becume þin rice,
gewurþe ðin willa,
on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.
Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg,
and forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum.
And ne gelæd þu us on costnunge,
ac alys us of yfele.
Soþlice.
But after that it goes underground. John Wyclif and his followers translated the whole of the Bible into English in the fourteenth century. About 150 manuscripts of that survive, which suggests it was very widely circulated. And it was political dynamite. Wyclif spent most of his life and his quite distinguished career embroiled in fights with John of Gaunt and the Pope, with the powers of his time: and against these he wanted to set another authority, Scripture, which he said was more powerful than either. So he translated it, and the authorities suppressed it.
It’s not that, as the 14th-century person in the street, you’re not allowed to know what’s in the Bible. Of course you know. You know the stories, you carve them on your churches and cathedrals, they dance all over your stained glass, you act them out in the marketplace in guild plays. But what you’re not allowed to do is own the Bible, possess it, read the arguments about the means of grace and the hope of glory, so that its power is in your hands. And you would know what it doesn’t say. Hilary Mantel captures this, a couple of hundred years on, in her novel about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall. Mantel’s Cromwell reads the English translations of William Tyndale, smuggled in to the country from Germany. Here he is thinking about what’s happening:
‘what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, ‘Purgatory’. Show me where it says relics, monks, nuns. Show me where it says ‘Pope’.’
We’ve reached the 16th century. The printing press has arrived, the English translations have surfaced and the political upheavals have surfaced with them. The text has leapt off the manuscript page and into everyone’s pocket. People need to read it, so they must have schools. People need to hear it - the word must be preached, said Martin Luther. The word on the page, even the printed page, is inert, captive. The word must embody the life of God’s living Word. So it must be preached. So there must be pulpits. You will have strolled round an English market town, and seen the old grammar school building on the village green near the church. A 16th century foundation. And then you wander into the church to have a look, and there is, of course, a pulpit. Added, probably, in the 16th century. The pulpit and the school, when they were new, were part of the revolution: next year’s architecture for next year’s words.
The other pulpit in this cathedral illustrates one of the problems people were having now with words: they change. The Bible keeps changing. The nave pulpit was added in the 16th century by Bishop William Knight, who understood that the word must be preached. So the pulpit has an inscription around the top from the second Letter to Timothy, Luther’s source.
Preach thou the worde be fervent in season and out of season
improve rebuke exhort in all long suffering & doctryne 2timo
But if you look very closely, you will see that the inscription has been corrected. It came from the Great Bible. That was mostly Tyndale’s translation tidied up by Myles Coverdale. It came out in 1539 and Thomas Cromwell ordered a copy to be put in every church for people to read - if they could read, and if not they could listen - ten years before Cranmer’s first Book of Common Prayer let everyone say their prayers officially in English. But the times were changing in Biblical scholarship. It’s not just a question of which language you translate into, it’s also which language you translate from. People started to go back beyond the Latin Bible - itself a translation - to the original texts. Not just the reformers, not just Luther’s Greek New Testament: the Polyglot Bible was sponsored by a Cardinal and produced, in Greek and Hebrew, by the impeccably Catholic and scholarly University of Madrid. Everyone needs to know what exactly they’re arguing about. So translations change. In the Great Bible, 2 Timothy 4.2 said ‘improve, rebuke, exhort’, but by 1611 it said ‘reprove, rebuke, exhort’, someone from the masons’ yard here gets sent to come along here with a chisel and correct the pulpit.
The moral of the pulpit, and everything that goes along with it, is that this is an enterprise of learning, and there is always more to learn. We never arrive. Words change. Meanings slip. Someone translates presbuteros as priest and someone else translates it as elder. Someone translates ekklesia as church and someone else translates it as assembly. And the vernacular language is changing hugely itself all the time, as people use it to argue and write and experiment and explore. Next year’s words are everywhere. Anything you say may change the church and the world. Words are power, words are making reality. But if you look at that the other way up, maybe there is no reality but words.
So the printing press is hard at work. The pulpit is grinding out sermons. People have the Bible in their hands, they have its words ringing in their ears, they are beginning to map their lives on to its pages. They are finding out what happens when you can talk to God in the language you use to buy cabbages. God is everywhere: there’s no hiding place, there’s no sacred language, but there’s nothing that isn’t about God. The sixteenth century is drunk with words and drunk with God. The seventeenth century gets the hangover.
And that leaves the ploughboy. To sober us up. To bring us back down to earth. Remember the ploughboy: ‘if God spare my life, I will make a boy that driveth the plough know more of the Scripture than thou dost.’
That’s a radical promise. But it’s not a new radicalism. Tyndale has not thought of the ploughboy by accident. The ploughboy has a long pedigree. I think it can be traced right back to Caedmon in Northumbria in the 7th century, the first poet in English whose name we know. Caedmon is the cowherd in the monastery who can’t sing, but when his mouth is opened by God he sings – in English – about the creation of the world. The ploughboy’s immediate ancestor is Piers Plowman, in William Langland’s poem a couple of centuries back. Piers puts his head up in the middle of a search for Truth that has convulsed the whole of society, lords and ladies and merchants and priests and friars and all. Nobody can find Truth. And then Piers the ploughman says Truth? I know Truth.
`I know him as well · as a clerk doth his books.
Conscience and Mother-Wit · made known his place
And made me swear surely · to serve him for ever.
Piers is a kind of natural Christian: later in the poem, Piers is seen as Christ himself. Caedmon and Piers and Tyndale’s ploughboy are there to say that God was always there in the marketplace, in Piers’s half-acre, in the cowshed. That only the language has changed. That, in the end, the language doesn’t matter. And for the moral of the ploughboy, I am going to go back to Eliot, a great maker of words, scolding himself, telling himself what matters.
You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
We are here to kneel. In the end, the Word itself falls into silence on the cross. It is out of the silence of God, after Good Friday, that resurrection comes.