The Givenness of Things

REFORMATION

The Reformation, a movement that touched or transformed thought and culture across the breadth of Europe, must inevitably have different histories in various cities and countries and classes and language groups. It would be impossible to begin to do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon as a whole. Since the Reformation in Britain has had exceptional importance for us in North America, I will devote most of my time to this branch of it — not to the Tudor break with the Papacy but to the Puritans and Separatists who were early immigrants to these shores. Granting that the example of Luther and his writing as well had great influence in Britain, an even greater influence for our purposes was Jean Calvin, known by us as John Calvin, the sixteenth-century French Reformer whose career unfolded in Geneva.

Calvin was in the second generation of the European Reform movement, his Institutes of the Christian Religion first appearing in 1536, almost twenty years after Luther published his Theses. Important works of Calvin were printed in English soon after they appeared and were widely circulated during his lifetime. The Reformation itself came a little late to England, but when it came, it came with a vengeance, leading finally, in the seventeenth century, to civil war and then a mass migration of Puritans to New England. It had had important precursors in Britain, in the work of the Oxford professor John Wycliffe, for example, a central figure in the making of the earliest complete translation of the Bible into English, which first appeared in 1386.

The history of the Reformation is very largely a history of books and publication, a response to the huge stimulus given to intellectual life by the printing press. It was in considerable degree the work of professors, men of exceptional learning who were intent on making the central literature of the civilization accessible to the understanding of the unlearned, those who could not read or understand Latin. Luther made his profoundly influential translation of Scripture, which became the basis of the development of German as a literary language. Calvin did not make a translation of the Bible into French — that was done by a cousin, Pierre Robert. For the purposes of his commentaries, Calvin made translations from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. But he also wrote and preached in French. His work was read so widely that he is credited with creating French as a literary and discursive language, and an international language as well. His influence and Luther’s are both very comparable to the impact on English of the Bible in English, generally attributed to the Authorized or King James Version. So one immediate and remarkable consequence of the Reform movement was the emergence of the great modern languages out of the shadow of Latin, with their power and beauty and dignity fully demonstrated in the ambitious uses being made of them.

The cultural dominance of Latin persisted even though there was a great period of vernacular English poetry in the fourteenth century, when Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, and Julian of Norwich flourished. It is hard now to imagine a world in which virtually everything of importance — law, humane learning, science, and religion — was carried on in a language known only by an educated minority. The dominance of Latin did have the advantage of making the learned classes mutually intelligible across the boundaries of nationality. But this advantage came at the cost of the exclusion of the great majority of people from participation in the most central concerns of their own civilization. And it was enforced by contempt for ordinary spoken languages and for the ordinary people whose languages they were. Thomas More was scathing on this subject. Despite the examples of John Gower and Julian of Norwich, More scoffed at William Tyndale’s rendering agape by the word “love” in place of the conventional “charity.” Love, he said, was a word that might be used by “any Jack.” This is the same William Tyndale who made the translations of the New Testament and portions of the Old Testament that became the basis of all subsequent English versions of the Bible.

It would not occur to us now to find the word “love,” commonplace as it is, unsuitable in the context of the sacred. This is one measure of the transformation that has resulted in the rise of the vernacular brought about by the Reformation, and an aspect of the embrace of the secular with which the Reformation is always identified. Thomas More was a man of great influence with the king, Henry VIII. His objections to Tyndale’s work led him to call for Tyndale to be burned at the stake, as he was, though his martyrdom is less well-known than that of Thomas More himself, who was beheaded a few years later for refusing to acknowledge King Henry as the head of the English church.

All the conflict and denunciation, all the bitter polemic and violence, tends to distract attention from a remarkable and very beautiful fact: the learned men in Bohemia, Germany, France, and Britain who articulated the faith of the Reform and who created its central documents were devoted to the work of removing the barrier between learned and unlearned by making Christianity fully intelligible in the common languages. They were devoted to the work of ending an advantage they themselves enjoyed, by making learning broadly available through translation and publication.

The modern languages surely benefited from their being brought into literature by these extraordinary scholars and humanists. But a more remarkable fact is that these writers heard the beauty in common speech, the very different speech of their various regions, and produced that beauty faithfully in their own use of these languages. To be sensitive to the aesthetic qualities of anything a culture has stigmatized as a mark of ignorance, or as vulgar in both senses of the word, would have required respect and affection that saw past such prejudices. The ability to hear the power and elegance of these languages would have been simultaneous with the impulse to honor the generality of people by giving them, first of all, the Bible.

The fourteenth-century Middle English translation of the Latin Vulgate associated with the Oxford professor John Wycliffe was widely circulated, and important in its own right. I have read that it did not have the literary value of later translations because it adhered closely to the Latin of the original. I cannot confirm this from my own reading of it. In any case, its greatest influence on literature was perhaps indirect, since it set off or encouraged a movement called Lollardy. The Lollards, also called “poor priests,” wandered through the countryside, preaching and teaching from the Wycliffe Bible, which was clearly adequate to conveying the simple, radical force of the Gospels: “Blessid be ye, that now hungren, for ye schulen be fulfillid. Blessid be ye, that now wepen, for ye schulen leiye.”

The fourteenth century was a time of great hardship and profound civil and religious unrest among the poor in England. In the years 1348 to 1350 the Black Plague ravaged and reduced the population. In 1381 Wat Tyler led the Peasants’ Revolt, a major though ultimately failed insurrection whose demands included an end to serfdom. Lollardy took its character from this period. It was a radically popular movement, critical or dismissive of many teachings of the church of that time, and claiming an exclusive authority for Scripture over priesthood and Papacy as Wycliffe himself seems to have done. Parliament responded with an act titled De Haeretico Comburendo, which declared that those who continued to exercise “their wicked preachings and doctrines … from day to day … to the utter destruction of all order and rule of right and reason,” if they did not repent of their error, were to be burned “before the people, in a high place … that such punishment may strike fear into the minds of others.” Though it was harshly suppressed, Lollardy persisted until the time of the Reformation. Wycliffe himself, who had died a natural death in communion with the Catholic Church and had lain in his grave for years, was declared a heretic, dug up, and burned.

The poet and priest William Langland, contemporary with these events, wrote in Middle English the long visionary poem Piers the Ploughman, composed between 1362 and 1394. One voice of the poem, describing theologians at dinner, says, “Meanwhile some poor wretch may cry at their gate, tormented by hunger and thirst and shivering with cold; yet no one asks him in or eases his suffering, except to shoo him off like a dog. Little can they love the Lord who gives them so much comfort, if this is how they share it with the poor! Why, if the poor had no more mercy than the rich, all the beggars would go to bed with empty bellies. For the gorges of these great theologians are often crammed with God’s Name, but His mercy and His works are found among humble folk.”

Ne were mercy in mene men more þan in riche,

Mendinantȝ meteles miȝte go to bedde.

God is moche in þe gorge of þise grete maystres,

Ac amonges mene men his mercy and his werkis …

Complex as the history is, the Bible may be fairly said to have entered English as a subversive document. It continued to be a forbidden document in England for more than a hundred years, in law if not in fact. Meanwhile, off in Germany, the priest William Tyndale worked away at his translation, from the original Greek and Hebrew into the spoken language of his time. Tyndale could only have been aware of the probable consequences for himself of his labors. Yet, according to John Foxe’s sixteenth-century Acts and Monuments of the Martyrs, disputing with a learned man at dinner Tyndale said something any Lollard would approve: “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.” The Acts and Monuments is a compendium of anecdotes about the heroes of the English pre-Reformation and Reformation. If the words attributed to Tyndale are hearsay, or even supplied by Foxe himself, this would only underscore the degree to which the Ploughman held place as a standard in the Protestant imagination.

The Ploughman was, of course, the archetypal poor man in the countryside, to whom the Lollards had preached. Toward the end of Langland’s poem, Piers the Ploughman appears as the suffering Christ. More than a century later John Calvin will take this physical identity of Christ with the poor to a startling extreme, saying that “being born in a stable, all His life He was like a poor working man” and that he “was nourished in such poverty as to hardly appear human.” This language reminds us how extraordinarily bitter poverty was in premodern Europe, how reduced and disfigured by hardship were those laboring people in whom Tyndale and the others acknowledged the image of Christ. The movement that preceded the Reformation and continued through it was one of respect for the poor and oppressed — respect much more than compassion, since the impulse behind it was the desire to share the best treasure of their faith and learning with the masses of unregarded poor whom they knew to be ready, and very worthy, to receive it.

The bookishness of the Reformation might be said to have generalized itself to become an expectation of legibility in the whole of Creation. If Tyndale felt he was effectively giving Scripture to the unlearned in the fact of translating it with art and skill, he was necessarily dismissing the interpretive strategies — allegorical, tropological, and anagogical — that were traditionally applied to the reading of it, and which gave it meanings only available to those who were especially trained in these methods. This sense that revelation, scriptural and natural, was essentially available to everyone, pervades Reformation thought.

Calvin described the heavens as intelligible in their deepest meaning to the unlearned as well as the learned. He said,

In disquisitions concerning the motions of the stars, in fixing their situations, measuring their distances, and distinguishing their peculiar properties, there is need of skill, exactness, and industry, and the providence of God being more clearly revealed by these discoveries, the mind ought to rise to a sublimer elevation for the contemplation of his glory. But since the meanest and most illiterate of mankind, who are furnished with no other assistance than their own eyes, cannot be ignorant of the excellence of the Divine skill, exhibiting itself in that endless, yet regular variety of the innumerable celestial host — it is evident, that the Lord abundantly manifests his wisdom to every individual on earth.

The eighteenth-century English Puritan Isaac Watts, known to us for the hymns he wrote, was also the author of books on logic and pedagogy used in British and American colleges for generations. He said,

Fetch down some knowledge from the clouds, the stars, the sun, the moon, and the revolutions of all the planets. Dig and draw up some valuable meditations from the depths of the earth, and search them through the vast oceans of water. Extract some intellectual improvements from the minerals and metals; from the wonders of nature among the vegetables and herbs, trees and flowers. Learn some lessons from the birds and the beasts, and the meanest insect. Read the wisdom of God, and his admirable contrivance in them all; read his almighty power, his rich and various goodness, in all the works of his hands.

Both Romanticism and early modern science are strongly associated with the Reformation. Passages like these show how they could have sprung from the same root. An intelligible Creation addressed itself in every moment to every perceiver, more profoundly as the capacities of perception were enlisted in the work of understanding. The most persistent and fruitful tradition of American literature from Emily Dickinson to Wallace Stevens is the meditation on the given, the inexhaustible ordinary. Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James wrote about the subtle and splendid processes of consciousness in this continuous encounter.

Clearly there was no condescension whatsoever in Tyndale’s feelings about the people for whom his Bible was intended. The best proof of this is the fact that by far the greater part of the King James Version New Testament, universally considered to be among the glories of English literature and to be the source of much that is best in it, is in fact Tyndale’s work. In writing for the common people, in writing for the Ploughman, who would not only have been ignorant of Latin but illiterate altogether, he created a masterpiece. This great generosity of spirit, this great respect, is perfectly consonant with his accepting the likelihood that he would suffer a terrible death for taking on this very great labor. Putting aside all other difficulties, the fact that he made himself proficient enough in Greek and Hebrew to carry out the work is remarkable in itself. These two ancient languages had been almost unknown in Europe for centuries and were just beginning to be studied again when Tyndale wrote.

Perhaps because I am sometimes a writer and sometimes a scholar I think I have a little sense of the labor and concentration represented in all these books. I know I can’t imagine the care that went into the Bibles the Lollards carried, made small to be easily concealed, each one handwritten since there was still no printing press, and each one ornamented with delicate strokes in its margins. I have a collection of Calvin’s writings, nowhere near complete but daunting all the same, dozens of volumes of disciplined and elegant explication from the hand of a man whose health was never good, who shouldered for decades the practical and diplomatic problems of Geneva, a city under siege, and whose writings inspired and also endangered the individuals and populations across Europe who read them, whether or not they were persuaded by them. To say these things are humbling would be to understate the matter wildly.

I do happen to know what goes into the writing of a book — granted, not a book that requires a mastery of ancient languages, or that addresses the endless difficulties of translation — nor one that sets out to make literary use of a disparaged language or that attempts to render or to interpret a sacred text. I have no idea what it would be like to write in prison or in hiding or in a city full of refugees. I have no idea what it would be like to live with the threat of death while trying to write something good enough to justify the mortal peril others accepted in simply reading it. I have just enough relevant experience to inform my awe. I find the achievements of these writers unimaginable. When I see Calvin in his commentaries pausing once again over the nuances and ambiguities of a Hebrew word as if his time and his patience and his strength were all inexhaustible, I am touched by how respectful he is, phrase by phrase and verse by verse, of the text of Scripture, and therefore how respectful he is of any pastor and of all those to whom that pastor will preach.

And this is why it seems important to me to remember the special popular origins of the movement that became the English Reformation, and the Reformation in general. Indeed, the intellectual genealogy of the movement is straightforward — Professor John Wycliffe of Oxford was read by Professor Jan Hus of Prague, who in turn was read by Professor Martin Luther of Wittenberg, whose work exerted enormous influence on William Tyndale. And it deeply influenced the brilliant young humanist scholar John Calvin, who would echo the psalmist and anticipate Hamlet in his praise of “the manifold agility of the soul, which enables it to take a survey of heaven and earth; to join the past and the present; to retain the memory of things heard long ago; to conceive of whatever it chooses by the help of imagination; its ingenuity also in the invention of such admirable arts.” He is describing the universal and defining mysteries of human consciousness, which he says are “certain proofs of the divinity in man.”

The argument could be made that we are now living among the relics or even the ruins of the Reformation. One relic is a continuing attachment to the Bible that is culturally particular to America, even in the absence of any great impulse to honor the Promethean work of the Reformers by reading it. A ruin may be the respect for one another as minds and consciences that is encoded in the First Amendment to the Constitution and institutionalized in the traditionally widespread teaching of the liberal arts, the disciplines that celebrate human thought and creativity as values in their own right and as ends in themselves. The fine colleges founded in the Middle West when it was still very much a frontier — Oberlin, Grinnell, Knox, and so many others — offered demanding curricula from the beginning, assuming that the young men and women who found themselves on the prairie would want to be educated to the highest standards. Rather than tuition, the colleges required all their students to do the chores necessary to the functioning of these little academic outposts, to make logic and classical history available to the figurative — or literal — Ploughman on equal terms with anyone.

It seems these days as if the right to bear arms is considered by some a suitable remedy for the tendency of others to act on their freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, and especially of religion, in ways and degrees these arms-bearing folk find irksome. Reverence for the sacred integrity of every pilgrim’s progress through earthly life seems to be eroding. The generosity to the generality of people that gave us most of our best institutions would be considered by many pious people now to be socialistic, though the motives behind the creation of many of them, for example, these fine colleges, was utterly and explicitly Christian. If I seem to have strayed from my subject, it is only to make the point that forgetting the character of the Reformation, that is, the passion for disseminating as broadly as possible the best of civilization as the humanist tradition understood it, and at the same time honoring and embracing the beauty of the shared culture of everyday life, has allowed us to come near to forgetting why we developed excellent public libraries, schools, and museums.

We tend to break things down into categories that are too narrow. It is hard to call the motives behind the development of these institutions self-seeking, though there can be no doubt that they have contributed mightily to our prosperity and have in some cases redounded to the credit of philanthropists. We cannot call the motives altruistic, though many people have given selfless and devoted support to them. The motives were and are of another order. We are moved to respond to the fact of human brilliance, human depth, in all its variety, because it is the most wonderful thing in the world, very probably the most wonderful thing in the universe. The impulse to enjoy and enhance it is by no means originally or exclusively — or consistently — Protestant or Christian. It has its roots in Renaissance humanism, in classical tradition, and before either of them in the ancient Hebrews’ assertion that a human being is an image of God.

In the forms we have known it, however, it is especially related to the Reformation because the rise of the vernacular languages with all they embodied in unacknowledged beauty and in the capacity for profound meaning made the broad dissemination of learning possible and urgent, and a labor of aesthetic pleasure and very great love. Isaac Watts wrote of one who teaches that “he should have so much of a natural candour and sweetness mixed with all the improvements of learning, as might convey knowledge into the minds of his disciples with a sort of gentle insinuation and sovereign delight, and may tempt them into the highest improvements of their reason by a resistless and insensible force.” He recommended the reading of poetry so that one may “learn to know, and taste, and feel a fine stanza, as well as to hear it.”

Now we are more inclined to speak of information than of learning, and to think of the means by which information is transmitted rather than of how learning might transform, and be transformed by, the atmospheres of a given mind. We may talk about the elegance of an equation, but we forget to find value in the beauty of a thought. At the same time we live, if we choose, in what amounts to a second universe. With the rise of mass literacy, printing, and publishing came an outpouring of books of many kinds, at first religious, classical, philosophical, polemical, and quasi- or protoscientific. Then there came as well any number of newly created works of the literary imagination. To this day the phenomenon accelerates. The universe of print we live in now, on page and screen, is an infinitely capacious memory and an inexhaustible reservoir of new thought. That its best potentialities are not often realized, that its best moments often pass unobserved or unvalued, only certifies its profound humanity.

Cultural pessimism is always fashionable, and, since we are human, there are always grounds for it. It has the negative consequence of depressing the level of aspiration, the sense of the possible. And from time to time it has the extremely negative consequence of encouraging a kind of somber panic, a collective dream-state in which recourse to terrible remedies is inspired by delusions of mortal threat. If there is anything in the life of any culture or period that gives good grounds for alarm, it is the rise of cultural pessimism, whose major passion is bitter hostility toward many or most of the people within the very culture the pessimists always feel they are intent on rescuing. When panic on one side is creating alarm on the other, it is easy to forget that there are always as good grounds for optimism as for pessimism — exactly the same grounds, in fact — that is, because we are human. We still have every potential for good we have ever had, and the same presumptive claim to respect, our own respect and one another’s. We are still creatures of singular interest and value, agile of soul as we have always been and as we will continue to be even despite our errors and depredations, for as long as we abide on this earth. To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.

Sigmund Freud called Americans Lollards, intending no compliment. Still, I hope he was right. I hope that, whoever we are and by whatever spiritual or cultural path we arrive at Lollardy, we do and will share a generous and even a costly readiness to show our respect for all minds and spirits, especially for those whose place in life might cheat them of respect. It may be that the variety of cultures exists to show us that the histories that form them differently all yield value. The spiritual and intellectual wealth of nations has flowed into this country, enriching it in the degree that those who brought their histories and traditions have been good stewards of their special wealth and good interpreters of it to the larger society. The Reformation is another beautiful and very worthy heritage, another stream of cultural and spiritual wealth, also well deserving of advocates and interpreters.