Toward a Sacramental Poetics

Regina M. Schwartz, Patrick J. McGrath, Regina M. Schwartz, Patrick J. McGrath, Regina Schwartz, Patrick McGrath

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780268201494
• eBook ISBN: 9780268201517
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature

Distinguished theologians and literary scholars explore the workings of the sacred and the sacramental in language and literature.

What does a sacramental poetics offer that secular cultural theory, for all of its advances, may have missed? How does a sacred understanding of the world differ from a strictly secular one? This volume develops the theory of "sacramental poetics" advanced by Regina Schwartz in her 2008 book on English Reformation writers, taking the theory in new directions while demonstrating how enduring and widespread this poetics is.

Toward a Sacramental Poetics addresses two urgent questions we have inherited from a half century of secular critical thought. First, how do we understand the relationship between word and thing, sign and signified, other than as some naive direct representation or as a completely arbitrary language game? And, second, how can the subject experience the world beyond instrumentalizing it? The contributors conclude that a sacramental poetics responds to both questions, offering an understanding of the sign that, by pointing beyond itself, suggests wonder. The contributors explore a variety of topics in relation to sacramental poetics, including political theology, miracles, modernity, translation and transformation, and the metaphysics of love. They draw from diverse resources, from Dante to Hopkins, from Richard Hooker to Stoker's Dracula, from the King James Bible to Wallace Stevens. Toward a Sacramental Poetics is an important contribution to studies of religion and literature, the sacred and the secular, literary theory, and theologies of aesthetics.

Contributors: Regina M. Schwartz, Patrick J. McGrath, Rowan Williams, Subha Mukherji, Stephen Little, Kevin Hart, John Milbank, Hent de Vries, Jean-Luc Marion, Ingolf U. Dalferth, Lori Branch, and Paul Mariani.

PART 1

Sacramental Translation

CHAPTER 1

Cloven Tongues

Theology and the Translation of the Scriptures

ROWAN WILLIAMS

Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtaine, that we may looke into the most Holy Place; that remooueth the couer of the well, that wee may come by the water, euen as Iacob rolled away the stone from the mouth of the well. . . . Indeede, without translation into the vulgar tongue, the vnlearned are but like children at Iacobs well (which was deepe) without a bucket or some thing to draw with.

—“The Translators to the Reader,” in the Bible of 1611¹

Miles Smith’s typically elegant phrasing in the prefatory essay to the 1611 Bible hints strongly at a focal theological theme: the two most vivid metaphors are Christological. The “putting aside” of the curtain in front of the holy of holies is bound to evoke the tearing of the veil of the temple at the death of Christ, as narrated in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke; and the reference to Jacob’s well and its depth takes us directly to the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman in the fourth chapter of John’s gospel. Smith is positioning the translator at the heart of the event of salvation; the translator is aligned with the work of Christ in his ministry and his passion, breaking open the path to saving knowledge and the vision of God. It is perhaps no accident that the language of passing within the veil of the temple is associated with the effect of the sacrament of Holy Communion in the preaching of Bishop John Jewel²—a salutary reminder that in the climate of the Reformed theology of the Church of England in this era, “Word” and “Sacrament” are not separate, let alone rival, categories. Both are moments in the “decipher-ment” of the holy, a holy reality that has been necessarily encrypted in the stuff of this world. Sacramental action and symbol are the opposite of mystification—which is why in Reformed theology their status as illuminating “mystery” has to be stringently purged from elements in their performance that obscure the transparency to divine agency that they are meant to embody.

In such a context, scriptural translation is no mere tool for study; its effect is the effect of the incarnation and the cross. It becomes a kind of sacramental act—remembering that, for the Reformed theological tradition in England, the sacraments were both a “text” in which the godly might read the full meaning of the recorded acts of God and a demonstration of the effects of the passion of Christ. Jewel, in the sermons comprising his Treatise of the Sacraments (delivered in Salisbury Cathedral and published posthumously in 1583), anticipates Smith when he speaks of the frustration of the unbeliever who is faced by a book that he cannot read (“He may turn over all the leaves, and look upon all, and see nothing”) compared to the believer who, through the sacramental action, is able to “behold the secret and unknown mercies of God.”³ And he later describes the Eucharist as the place where we may “see the shame of the cross, the darkness over the world, the earth to quake, the stones to cleave asunder, the graves to open and the dead to rise”—alluding to the passage in the gospel of Matthew (27:51–53) which begins with the tearing of the temple veil at the moment of Jesus’s death.⁴

To translate is to be taken up into the divine act of uncovering, deciphering the world, God’s “publishing” of a readable text in which we can see both the meaning of what he has done and the present effects of it. Smith’s prefatory essay moves on to relate how Scripture in one language alone was sufficient at the time when God’s work was confined to the Hebrews; but Providence, on the eve of the coming of Christ, looking forward to the spread of the gospel beyond the Hebrew world, stirred up the king of Egypt (a useful royal precedent for 1611) to commission the Septuagint and so inaugurate a history of translation into Greek. But at this point a complication arises in the argument, one that Smith will have to deal with at greater length before the end of the essay. The Septuagint is an imperfect rendering; why did not the apostles themselves undertake a new translation? It is clear from the Christian Scriptures and the early history of the Church that the first generations of Christians used the Septuagint freely, despite its faults—though New Testament citations from the Hebrew Scriptures do not invariably follow the Septuagint, as Smith notes. His answer is that the apostles felt free to correct the existing version on an ad hoc basis, but refrained from making a complete new translation because they did not wish to invite the reproach of producing a partisan rendering. There is enough accuracy in the Septuagint for most practical purposes. But this, of course, undermines any claim (such as was sometimes made in the patristic period) that the Septuagintal translators were “prophets” who somehow brought to light a more authentic “core” to the actual Hebrew text than the original showed; a translator need not be inspired to be an adequate translator. And consequently it is fully understandable that there should have been efforts to make a more satisfactory rendering of the Hebrew Scriptures, as in the work of Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus.⁵

Smith is thus conceding the crucial point that translation is always in some measure provisional; there is no final version, even if there is now for England and Scotland an authoritative version guaranteed by political power (we should not forget that the 1611 version was, among other things, a profoundly political project—though also one, as we shall see, that made possible a good many ideas and ideals beyond those King James might have had in mind). And this acceptance that there is no final version, as Smith will argue later on in the text, is part of the rationale for a new translation in English. Does the fact of a new version mean that earlier believers were in some way deluded or denied the full truth? No: an imperfect version may still rightly be called the Word of God, just as we may call a man handsome even if he has warts on his hand. Quoting Augustine’s De doctrina 9, Smith is confident that in all matters touching faith, hope, and charity, Scripture is clear and consistent, whatever variations in wording may be possible. As to other things, there may be texts where a final resolution of the meaning is simply not possible—where there is a unique use of a Hebrew word or where the names of exotic plants, animals, and minerals are in question.⁶ There is therefore an inescapable element of indeterminacy in certain elements of the interpretation of the biblical text: thus the 1611 translation includes marginalia noting departures from the literal meaning of the original languages or possible alternative renderings of a word or phrase. “As S. Augustine saith, that varietie of Translations is profitable for the finding out the sense of the Scriptures: so diversitie of signification and sense in the margine, where the text is not so cleare, must needes doe good, yea, is necessary, as we are perswaded.”⁷ Further, the translator has the liberty to vary the way in which a single word in the original should be rendered in different contexts. The notion that a translation is unfaithful if it allows such variation suggests an unchristian bondage to the letter; “Is the kingdome of God become words or syllables?”⁸

The overall picture of the theology of translation here is a nuanced one. On the one hand, the translator in some sense participates in the ongoing effect of the self-revealing of God through the incarnate life and redeeming death of Jesus; on the other, the translator draws attention to what is still hidden by recognizing the unfinished business of translation, the unavoidable marginal alternatives, a shadow text that makes parts of the main column of print questionable and provisional. The very fact of revising a translation shows that there is always more work to be done: not, indeed, in reconstructing the main doctrinal themes of Scripture, which can be spelled out in their consistency even when clothed in slightly diverse vocabularies, but in the appropriation of the language and narrative of Scripture into our own native tongue. The bare fact is that an English translator may quite fairly represent a single word in Hebrew by two or more in English: lexical fields are best mapped by locals. But all this amounts to saying both that the translator clarifies and that the translator makes difficult. The initial images of letting in the light, breaking the shell, or removing the veil might in themselves be taken to presuppose that the text contains a simple “message” to be digested by the reader when the obstacles of unintelligibility have been removed. But it is plain that the actual process of translation rather destabilizes such a picture. We come to see that God’s meaning requires us to listen over and over again, to work, to acknowledge our need of the Spirit and “to seek ayd of our brethren by conference, and neuer scorne those that be not in all respects so complete as they should bee.”⁹ Translation generates humility and the recognition that we cannot apprehend “God’s secret and unknown mercies”—to borrow Jewel’s phrase once more—in isolation from the believing community and its collective skill and discernment.

Some of these themes are already present in the dispute, nearly a century earlier, between Tyndale and More over the legitimacy of Englishing the Scriptures, as is clear from a reading of Brian Cummings’s seminal study of The Literary Culture of the Reformation. ¹⁰ More is insistent that a vernacular Bible opens a Pandora’s box of diverse and warring interpretations, since there is no “canonical” tradition of reading an English text: the effect is “equyuocacion,” words being used to mean whatever an individual reader wants. But, as Cummings shows, Tyndale’s response is in effect to convict More of exactly the same thing. More can only show that a Tyndalean rendering is false or arbitrary by a philological argument; he cannot—any more than his opponent—take for granted a canonical sense for an English text, and must seek to persuade the reader of the authority of one translation over another. And Tyndale argues further that this is what More never really does; he never undertakes the painstaking job of showing how the use of a word or phrase in context establishes its meaning, and simply appeals to a received convention of translating in a way that ignores the subtle shifts and variations of a word’s signification which appear in usage over a prolonged argument or exposition. In his treatise The Obedience of a Christian Man, Tyndale had already raised and answered the challenge that a translation would necessarily lead to uncontrollable diversity of interpretation: What do we have clergy for if not to offer an authoritative and unified account of what is in Scripture? And when Scripture is available in the native tongue of the congregation, the laity are enabled to judge for themselves whether the priest is really making sense of the text or not (“they should see by the order of the text, whether thou jugglest or not”).¹¹ Translation may not in itself guarantee an immediate consensus about meanings; what it does is to enable mutual instruction and correction in reading, a corporate discernment—one of the leading themes of several of the early Reformers, traceable in Calvin’s early works as much as in Tyndale. It is, as Cummings points out,¹² clear evidence that Tyndale is no less a “humanist” than More in his sensitivity to literary rather than simply dogmatic criteria in the search for meaning.

The polymathic Canadian poet and translator Robert Bringhurst says of one of his own complex and many-voiced poems (involving three layers of text to be read/spoken simultaneously) that “The ideal reader for this poem . . . is not a person with three heads but a person with two friends.”¹³ Smith’s acknowledgment of the indeterminate element in the sacred text and his defense of printing marginal alternatives goes some way toward suggesting that the ideal reader of Scripture is a person with two (or more) friends. Bringhurst argues—at the end of an essay entitled “What’s Found in Translation?”—that “translation ...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Contents
• Introduction Regina M. Schwartz and Patrick J. McGrath
• Part 1. Sacramental Translation
• Part 2. Sacramental Aesthetics
• Part 3. Sacramental Politics
• Part 4. The Metaphysics of Sacramental Poetics
• Part 5. Sacramental Poetics and Modernity
• List of Contributors
• Index