In The Varieties of Religious Experience William James declares, “Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow” (88). The instinctual side of religion is responsible in part for its destructive power (Ellens). “Kill the infidels wherever you find them” comes from the Qur’an, but the sentiment is by no means limited to Islam. 09/11/01 had a forerunner on 08/24/1572—the massacre of the Huguenots. The Greek word from which “heresy” is derived means “ choice,” but it has come to mean a wrong choice, which will be punished, if not in this world, then in the hereafter.
“Sex and violence” are part of human nature, as the American motion picture industry convincingly demonstrates, but in today’s world, more perhaps than ever before, religion has become the catalyst for violence towards “the other,” so much so, in fact, that Sam Harris, in The End of Faith, has confronted us with the stark alternative: if civilization is to survive, religion has got to go.
Of course, religion is not going to disappear, precisely because, like sex, it is an instinctual part of human nature; we find it reflected in the earliest cave drawings of our race. Furthermore, instinct in religion is not only a well-spring of violence; it can also be a transformative power in the life of the individual. Every living religion mediates a relationship between the believer and “the true light that enlightens every man” (John 1:9).
C.G. Jung believed that everything in nature, whether a yucca moth or a human being, has an innate drive towards completion, that is, to become what it is, and what is true in the external world is also true in the psyche, where all religions originate. When institutional religion ignores or seeks to suppress religion’s instinctual side, perhaps because of a fear of instinct’s potential for violence, it signs its own death warrant as a transformative force.
Human rationality, in the form of historical criticism, has been called “the death of scripture” (Morgan, 44-61). “Unscrewing the inscrutable” entails reductionism; explaining sacred texts comes to mean explaining them away. In an academic environment where historical criticism is “the only game in town,” scripture is stripped of its transformative power, and those preparing for Christian ministry are left wondering, “What has this got to do with the reasons that moved me to embark on this path? How am I being helped to grow as an individual or as a minister of the gospel?”
But in the area of worship the castrating effect of rationality on religion is even more devastating. Historical criticism of the Bible, after all, can only do what it sets out to do, namely, recover the meaning of ancient texts. How these texts might be religiously significant for a contemporary reader is simply not its concern. But liturgy and the texts used in worship have everything to do with the worshipper.
When a “voice from the pew” complains, “The old Mass was more like prayer. Now I find myself looking at my watch. The Mass doesn’t seem so holy anymore” (Collins, 7)--then we know we have a serious problem. A former advisor to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Terry Waite, who was a captive of Islamic Jihad for 1,763 days, got so fed up with attempts to modernize Anglican worship that he started attending Quaker services (TIME, Nov. 26, 2006, p. 13).
Just as the Bible only becomes sacred scripture when it affects the reader, so liturgy only becomes worship when it affects the worshiper. It is in the illumination and transformation of the believer that scripture and worship achieve their purpose as means of divine grace. In the words of Ignatius Loyola, “it is not abundance of knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul but rather an interior understanding and savouring of things” (37). Interior understanding and savouring do not depend on whether or not the text being used conforms to the Apostolic Tradition attributed to Hippolytus. There is no healing power in liturgical “correctness.”
For The Book of Common Prayer, liturgy is accountable to those who use it, not those who produce it, and its healing power is to be found in its language. Its chief architect was Thomas Cranmer, the 71st Archbishop of Canterbury, who suffered martyrdom under Mary Tudor on March 21, 1556.
“Bliss can erupt, across the centuries, out of texts written to the glory of the dreariest, most sinister philosophy” (Barthes, 1975, 39). Bliss erupts from the Prayer Book from a language created by someone with a natural ear for formal prose, for sound and sentence structure. Since the first Prayer Book appeared in 1549, Cranmer’s language has been a spiritual resource for all English-speaking people, regardless of their confessional allegiance, because, like Shakespeare, it is a language not of an age, but of all time.
The Collect for Peace originated in the Sacramentary of Gelasius and was incorporated in the Sarum Breviary, from which Cranmer translated it in 1549:
O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom: Defend us thy humble servants in all assaults of our enemies, that we, surely trusting in thy defence, may not fear the power of any adversaries; through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord.
Cranmer’s gift for formal prose was shared by John Henry Newman, whose Collect at Eventide was recited each night at the orphanage in John Irving’s Cider House Rules:
O Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, the busy world is hushed and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then, Lord, in thy mercy, grant us safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Language is an endowment which distinguishes human beings from other living creatures. Its most common use is as a means of communication, but it also has an expressive function, which we see in poetry, where what is said is less important than the way in which it is said. In Western Christianity this expressive function has been increasingly undervalued. In the onward push towards rationalism, represented by the dominance of technology and the reign of the computer, the power of the imagination is being stifled through fear of the ambiguity of the older stress on the role of the image, whether visual or acoustic.
By the time of the 16th century English Reformation, rationalism was well on its way towards 20th century man’s loss of soul, whose values have been traded for the rational intellect’s instrumental powers. But although Protestantism destroyed the statues and stained glass of Catholic England, it put in their place the English Bible with its incomparable language.
The liturgical reformation which was carried out under Edward VI should be seen in relation to two important events which took place during the previous reign of Henry VIII. In 1538, by official injunction, a copy of the English Bible was to be set up in every parish church in England. Five years later, the order was given that on every Sunday and major feast day two chapters of scripture—one from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament—were to be read publicly in English.
Well over 80% of The Book of Common Prayer is taken directly from the Bible. Passages from the New Testament fill a third of the Prayer Book, while the Psaltery fills one quarter. The Book of Common Prayer (1549) preceded the King James Bible (1611), but after the restoration of the Prayer Book in 1662, following its suppression during the Commonwealth, the two texts have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. The Prayer Book Psalter, which uses the earlier translation of Coverdale, is the exception.
During the 16th century the English people enjoyed a love affair with the Bible, and the purpose of Cranmer’s Prayer Book was to nourish and sustain this love within the traditional context of ordered worship. His accomplishment was not so much to create a new liturgy as to transpose scripture into worship. The central place of scripture in the Prayer Book brings it into line with the other two monotheistic faiths, where the word of God enjoys a position of primacy.
Unlike modern liturgists, Cranmer was committed to the principle of sola scriptura, and the worship attested in the New Testament provided no models for his reform. The diversity in worship reflects the diversity of the early church itself and ranges from the worship of the synagogue to the Lord’s Supper to the charismatic prayer meetings attested in Paul’s Corinthian correspondence.
Therefore, Prayer Book liturgy is really not about liturgy; it is about scripture. Moreover, unlike other Protestant traditions, the sermon is not central to Prayer Book worship, although it has a place both in the offices and in the communion service. Queen Elizabeth once interrupted a sermon by calling down from the royal box, “You have preached long enough!”
In the Western church, prior to Cranmer, the recitation of the Divine Office, as it was called, was the special obligation of priests, monks, and nuns. Cranmer simplified the office by reducing the eight services to two, and he translated it into the vernacular. But beyond this, Cranmer made Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer forms of congregational worship, in which the psalms, the canticles, and the scriptural lessons have the central place. Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer are Anglicanism’s most distinctive contribution to Christian liturgy. From the reign of Queen Elizabeth I until the reign of Queen Elizabeth II the principal worship on Sundays and feast days was Morning Prayer. Finally, the Order for the Burial of the Dead offers a collection of scriptural passages which Handel used in Part III of Messiah.
Cranmer believed that the Bible is the living word of God to every man and woman, and that it comes with the greatest power when unaccompanied by any human gloss, comment, or exposition. Consequently, in the Anglican tradition the minister of the word is primarily the person who is authorized to read the word of God in the congregation (Neill, 54-55).
Religious language enchants and informs, addressing its rhythmic and symbolic speech to regions of the mind which are inaccessible to argument, and evoking moments of awe and love which no exhortation can obtain. It has meaning at many levels and welds together all those who use it, overriding their personal moods, and subduing them to its grave loveliness.
Such language warms and moves our hearts, as it did with John Wesley (107) and the Emmaus disciples (Luke 24:32). When sacred language is suppressed, we are rendered speechless; we lose our way of talking of God and to God, and the way God speaks to us. We are like the children in the residential schools in Canada who were forbidden to use their native tongue.
The language of the Prayer Book and the King James Bible is “understanded of the people,” as the English Reformers required. But it is not the language of every day, the language by which we communicate with each other. The widest aftermath of Cranmer’s life and work is to be found in the realm of language and cultural identity.
Sacred sound taps into our instinctual hard-wiring. In Jung’s association experiment he discovered that the more the subject’s attention was reduced, the more the associations were phonetic (sound-based), rather than semantic (meaning-based). With increasing unconsciousness the associations are “more and more influenced by sound, till finally only a sound is associated” (1981, 171).
The linguistic system appears to order meaning through acoustic images of similar sound. The correlation between diminished consciousness and susceptibility to phonetic factors suggests that the emotional impact of Biblical language has to do not only with visual imagery but also with acoustic images. If, as Jacques Lacan has suggested, “the unconscious is structured like a language” (32), then we can understand why the sound of the English Bible has played such an important role in our religious history.
The phonetic links which bind together the linguistic system of the unconscious enable language to “speak” directly to the soul. The unconscious web of linguistic associations interact with emotionally charged patterns of meaning called complexes. Language, as an archetypal reality, stands at the intersection of the psychic and physical worlds (Kugler), and this is the root of its healing power.
As long as the ego could be viewed, with Descartes, as a unified thinking subject, the text could be considered as a form of communication, a message transmitted by one thinking subject to another, or, in the case of the Bible, by God to the believer. But once psychoanalysis revealed the ego to be part of the multiplicity of fragmentary personalities called complexes, this communications model became inadequate for the reception of the texts, including religious texts.
Heidegger has said that “language speaks” (190); Barthes declares, “the text works” (1973, 1015-16). The interplay of words is freed from the limitations of authorial intention; the meaning of words is the meaning they can have in the interpersonal linguistic system from which they emerge. The acoustic images of the Prayer Book and the King James Bible are effective because they express the processes of the psyche more clearly than the clearest concept and enable the hearer to re-experience them. Before the word becomes the bearer of a concept it is first of all a sound. The banishment of sacred sound from liturgy and scripture breaks the link between the two worlds, between “things visible and invisible.”
Adam Nicolson speaks for many when he confesses that he is no atheist, but no churchgoer either, now that the conservative text has been suppressed by the modern requirement for clarity (241). The King James Version, like The Book of Common Prayer, “has the air of irreproachable authority, which is the essence of sacred ritual. The translators made a ceremony of the word, turning words into a tangible experience and adopting them as markers of and symbols for the divine” (232). In the King James Version we find “immediacy, dignity, and a sense of deep musical rhythm” (191). “The spoken word is the heard word, and what governs acceptability is not only accuracy but euphony” (209).
No wonder T.S. Eliot was so entranced by a form of English which was both sensuous and exact. The King James Bible appeals to what he called “the auditory imagination, that feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and invigorating every word” (Nicolson, 223).
Father Frederick Faber, author of the beloved hymn “Faith of our Fathers,” says of the King James Bible,“It lives on the ear like a music that can never be forgotten; its felicities often seem to be almost things, rather than mere words” (Neill, 135n).
The Book of Common Prayer was compiled at a time in the history of the English language when the beauty of rhythm and the splendour of diction were at their zenith. Anglicanism’s emphasis on texts rather than doctrine forms a link between the twelfth century concept of lectio divina and modern literary theory.
The healing power of Prayer Book worship contrasts with the latest episode in “the wars of religion:” the sorry spectacle of the Anglican Communion tearing itself apart over the issue of homosexuality. The Catholic-Protestant fault-line which has run through Anglicanism ever since the16th century Reformation has meant that doctrinal agreement among Anglicans is extremely difficult. But as long as Anglican worship, however variously executed, used texts that derived from Cranmer’s Prayer Book, Anglicans shared a tradition of common prayer, and it is only prayer that can reconcile the irreconcilable.
Change in worship is never universally welcome. The 1549 Prayer Book led to a riot in Cornwall; liturgical reform in Russia led to the excommunication of the Old Believers (1667). But today, ironically, the Latin Mass has more in common, on the experiential level, with the Prayer Book which supplanted it in England than either one has with the modern rites which gladden the hearts of liturgists but leave some of us looking at our watches.
The connection between religion and violence is to be found in the conceptuality of doctrine, which is inherently intolerant. If I know with certitude what must be done and believed in order to be saved, then anyone who disagrees with me is on a slippery slope and will face a severe comeuppance, if not now, then in the world to come, and although Paul cautions, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19), there are plenty of religious zealots who do not wish to wait for divine retribution, and are only too happy to act as God’s executioners here and now.
The origins of doctrinal orthodoxy can be seen in Irenaeus, for whom “true knowledge consists in the doctrine of the apostles” (AH IV,33.8). (All the New Testament books were thought to have been authored by apostles.) But in the early church there was a group called Gnostics who found religious truth not in dogmatic propositions, about which, under the law of contradiction, if I am right, you must be wrong, but in religious imagery. “Truth did not come into the world naked, but it came in types and images” (Gospel of Philip). The Gnostics had the same scripture as the orthodox, but they read it differently. A Gnostic reading of scripture does not reveal self-consistent and unchanging realities beyond the empirical world; rather, it uses religious images to interpret existence.
The text serves as a catalyst for the release of natural symbols arising out of the unconscious. There is no possibility of reconstructing some reality behind the text: what the reader reads is what the reader gets, as in the Protestant principle of private interpretation. Canonical texts are freed from the constraints of doctrinal or historical exegesis, so that they can generate that experience of expanded consciousness which, in the Christian tradition goes by the name of “revelation.”
The Gnostics had no normative theology, and they mocked the emerging orthodoxy of the Christian church as “dry canals” (Apocalypse of Peter). Irenaeus compares Gnostic inconsistency to the many-headed hydra of Greek legend (AH I, 30.15), since in the Gnostic reading of scripture the principle of contradiction has no application. Their lack of concern for rational consistency recalls the myths of Greek culture. They go below rational language, which, though brought into the world by truth, is nevertheless the cause of error. The Gnostics anticipate Jacques Derrida’s discovery of the differential nature of language: “Light and darkness, life and death, right and left, are brothers of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this neither are the good good, nor the evil evil, nore is life life, nor death death” (Gospel of Philip). The literalistic interpretation of religious language leads to deception, which only the inner knowledge of the Gnostic can escape.
Gnostic reading is instinctual, paralleling the archetypes which, like biological instincts, direct all fantasy activity into its appointed paths. Rational discourse, the expression of ego consciousness, and fantasy language come from different parts of the brain. For the Gnostics meaning is derived not from public conventions of discourse but from correspondences hidden in the deep structure of language, to which ego consciousness has no direct access. The correspondences between “things visible and invisible” are expressed through the power of fantasy language, which wells up from the deep structure which is eternally there.
The life of the scriptural text is found not in its ideas but in its images, with which we seek to stay as long as their power continues to move us. Instead of converting images into concepts, this way of reading reimagines them, dreaming the myth ever onward. Doctrinal orthodoxy, produced by the rationality of ego consciousness, is a counterfeit reality which the Gnostics sought to unmask.
A Gnostic reading of scripture transcends the duality of text and reader by a process of “inlibration” best illustrated in Qur’anic interpretation. The reader is in the text and the text is in the reader. Gnosis provided a lyrical approach to Christian symbols at a time when Christianity was becoming increasingly a prose religion, and this is why it was stigmatized as the synthesis of all heresy.
If we are to avoid Sam Harris’ stark choice between religion and civilization, then we should consider the power of a religious faith based not on doctrine but on images, since such a faith is non-violent. I may not be moved by the ceremonies or symbols of another faith; I may even be repelled by them. But I feel no need to attack them.
Music has been called spirituality without dogma. Read conceptually, the Bible is a pretty horrible book, most notably in those passages which, as loca omittenda, are not fit for public reading. But as Jung observed, “the spirit does not dwell in concepts” (1977, 167), whereas the sacred sound of the King James version and The Book of Common Prayer have nourished the souls of countless Christians, and continues to do so, demytholigization and the Jesus Seminar notwithstanding.
Islam, which is the fastest growing religion in the world today, is inspired by a sacred scripture written in a language which most of those chanting it or hearing it chanted do not understand. When the present pope removed the restrictions on the celebration of the Latin Mass, one progressive young woman remarked, “I want to hear Mass sung in a language I don’t understand because too often I don’t like what I hear in English” (TIME, July 30-August 6, 2007, 92). Clearly the musical power of sacred sound has little to with rationalism’s demand for clear and distinct ideas.
Pilate’s skeptical question (John 18:38) goes unanswered, but to those with ears to hear, beauty speaks for herself. The Book of Common Prayer enshrines the beauty of sacred scripture in the context of divine worship, and therein lies its healing power.
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