Throughout my life, I have mainly worshipped in utterly ordinary Catholic churches, with English-language prayers and readings, faltering amateur choirs, toned-down liturgical practices. Like most worshippers, I am generally happiest with that which is most familiar to me. I feel slightly at sea at a Latin mass, despite my general devotion to Latin. I avoid Church of England services, much as I am in favour of cross-denominational fraternizing among Christians.
So, when attending a Church of England service yesterday evening, I felt my usual mix of uneasiness and irritation. However, I was also reminded of how much more beautiful and noble are the texts of the King James Version and the Book of Common Prayer than the English of the Scripture translations and liturgy with which Anglophone Catholics are familiar.
Part of that beauty is the fruit of the mastery of the authors and translators, writing in the English language’s first golden age. But another part of the beauty now resides in the language’s antiquity—much of this English is now archaic (“Our Father, which art in heaven”), although of course it was at the time of its creation the contemporary idiom.
This last observation may point to the conclusion that we honour the King James Version and the Book of Common Prayer by doing what their authors and translators did: creating a Christian language in our own contemporary idiom. But this is to neglect the special power of archaic language, the weight of memory and history that it carries with it as it ages.
Homer, as the written final stage of an oral tradition stretching back centuries, preserved layers of dialect, vocabulary and grammar that were archaic by the time of writing. The Greeks then continued to write epic poetry in the Homeric idiom till the end of antiquity. In Western Europe, not only did the Roman Church stick with Latin for well over a millennium after Latin ceased being, in the ordinary sense, a living language, but Western Europeans wrote vast quantities of new Latin prose and poetry. The churches of the East have preserved Scriptures and liturgies in archaic forms of Greek, Russian, Coptic, etc, just as Jews, Muslims and Hindus have preserved biblical Hebrew, classical Arabic, Sanskrit, for their own sacred texts.
At its first stage, the King James Bible, like Luther’s German Bible, was a break with this veneration of the power of archaic language, an affirmation of the newness, the immediacy of Scripture. Of course, Scripture is dead to those who see it only as a legacy, a tradition. But it is also that, and who would be so bold as to claim that all those Western Christians hewing to Latin, all those further East hewing to the old languages, through thick and thin, have, over so many centuries, been revering nothing but dry bones?
There is a strange inversion in the work of the early Anglicans and of Luther now itself taking on the majesty of ancient language. But I think that we would be wiser to say that the Reformers wrought better than they knew, and so to preserve in the living stream, through reading, study and worship, their now-old language, than to claim to be honouring the Reformers’ spirit by discarding their work in favour of prayers and Scripture in our own idiom, for which we otherwise show so little reverence.
