tim's experiment

Last Christmas I was very kindly invited to a carol service. I have always had a soft spot for carol services but in Hong Kong there is apparently a great shortage of traditional ones so it seemed unfair for me to intrude on a rare commodity.

I am not, you correctly infer, a very religious person. At least as far as organised religion is concerned I was inoculated by my boarding school, which required us all to troop down to the local church every Sunday.

I suspect this had more to do with giving the staff a morning free from us than with the attractions of religion, but the ritual had to be observed. We had two sets of clothes, the latest ones for Sunday and the others for weekdays. As the weekday ones expired the Sunday ones were demoted and replaced.

The service was always the same, except for the hymns and the sermon. We followed the Book of Common Prayer, which despite centuries of adjustment was still recognisable as the masterpiece penned in the 16^th century by the political weasel and literary genius Thomas Cranmer.

When I started work at the then Baptist College I was surprised by the prayers which preceded all Faculty and Senate meetings. The surprise was not that there were prayers – I had been warned about that – but that the prayers were delivered extempore in more or less modern English. Where was Mr Cranmer?

Well he had not of course forseen this particular requirement. The Book of Common Prayer does not actually have a suggestion under the title A Prayer for Wisdom at the Meetings of Academic Bodies. So the Chaplain had to make up his own. And indeed this seems to be the way it is done these days.

The other literary delight on offer in the Midhurst Parish Church on Sundays was the Bible in the Authorised Version. This is also a masterpiece. Although it was produced by a committee they had the good sense to follow much of the solo translation which William Tyndale had produced a century or so earlier.

Owing to the inspiration provided by one of my primary school teachers I had developed some facility in public reading and as a result was often called on to read the lesson. In early outings at Midhurst this was an unalloyed pleasure. The church owned an enormous Bible which sat on an eagle lectern. The acoustics were, by church standards, quite good. A bit of stage fright added spice to what was otherwise a rather repetitive occasion.

Later the church sprouted a trendy new vicar, who introduced a trendy new translation of the New Testament, which did not impress me at all. The other regular reader and I both tried to get the Old Testament assignment but for some reason my style was considered more suitable for the modern stuff.

Anyway the purpose of this digression is to make it clear that though I am rarely seen in a church these days I am quite familiar with the ritual, at least as it was done in rural English churches in the late 1950s.

Returning to the latest carol service I was dismayed to find that not only had the Bible been fixed, but someone had been at that other mainstay, Hymns Ancient and Modern. This used to be so universal in Anglican churches that they had a sort of notice board into which you could only insert numbers. These indicated the numbers of the hymns to be attempted, always from the same book.

It seems that some of the traditional carols no longer pass doctrinal tests and have been modified accordingly. I am told by a connoisseur of these matters that this work is ongoing and new versions are promised with more “inclusive” language. I tremble at the thought of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentle Persons”, or “We Three Monarchs”.

The Bible had also undergone numerous changes. Some of the readings were not familiar to me but I can almost recite from memory the second chapter of the Gospel according to Luke, the one which starts with the announcement that “all the world was to be taxed”, and finishes with “there was no room at the inn.”

Both these phrases have now disappeared. I realise that the “tax” was actually a census so changing that improves comprehension. I am less happy with inserting “the Roman world” instead of the world, because while that may be helpful it is not what Luke wrote. The room at the inn has also been changed. I hope this was not just from puritan horror at the thought that Our Lord narrowly missed being born in a boozer.

Anyway this raises a serious question, which I am probably not qualified to ask, but here we go anyway: is it really a good idea for a religion to express itself in the most everyday language it can find?

This is, after all, by no means the usual practice.

Here is a passage from Nassim Taleb (usually considered a business writer, but versatile)

“Keep a [religious] language away from the rationalisation of daily life and avoid the corruption of the vernacular… the Catholic Church translated the services and liturgies from Latin to the local vernaculars; one may wonder if this caused a drop in religious beliefs. Suddenly religion subjected itself to being judged by intellectual and scientific, without the aesthetic, standards. The Greek Orthodox Church made the lucky mistake, upon translating some of its prayers from Church Greek … of choosing classical Arabic, an entirely dead language. My folks are thus lucky to pray in a mixture of dead Koine (Church Greek) and no less dead Koranic Arabic.”

Fooled by Randomness pp 76-7

The whole point of religious texts is that they are unchanging. Consequently serious believers have plenty of time to establish what they mean, even if the language is archaic or foreign. And there is something about exotic language. It suggests learning, authority, mysticism.

Other professions shamelessly take advantage of this. When my tonsils were untimely ripped from my throat because the medical profession had not discovered that they do actually have a useful function, the operation was performed by an ear, nose and throat specialist.

You will not find such a person today. He or she will now be an otorhinolaryngologist. Which means exactly the same thing. Lawyers are worse, with their voire dire, eiusdem generis, mens rea and such like. As for officials, don’t get me started.

Anyway the thing which makes me sad about all this is that the standard of writing in a society is affected by the standard of reading and hearing. In the days when most English people were regularly subjected to the Bible as translated in the early 1600s and the Book of Common Prayer more or less as written even earlier, they were nudged in a useful direction.

One was not encouraged to revive archaisms like the use of “thou” and “art”, but to write in a simple, graphic, and often monosyllabic way, which as much rhythm and music as the meaning could bear. The loss of this helpful influence must I suppose be born in the interests of doctrinal clarity. It still seems a shame.