Clive James. I tend to think that only a religion which stands apart from society can meaningfully refer to the proposed eternal world which is its proper concern; excessive preoccupation with the minutiae of contemporaneity degrades any faith.
Like most of Cultural Amnesia, the essay offers aphorism after aphorism, the elegance of its insights demanding multiple quotations. I apologize for the length of the following, but given James’ status as an agnostic (if not atheist) cultural critic and historian par excellence, I feel his view is fascinating. Speaking of how translations of the Bible erode credulity, James notes that:
“The King James Bible is a prose masterpiece… The modern versions, done in the name of comprehension, add up to an assault on readability. Eliot said that the Revised Standard Version was the work of men who did not realize that they were atheists. The New English Bible was worse than that… For those of us unable to accept that the Bible is God’s living word, but who believe that the living word is God, the successful reduction of once-vital language to a compendium of banalities was bound to look like blasphemy… For me, the scriptures had provided a standard of authenticity against the pervasive falsehoods of advertising, social engineering, moral uplift, demagogic politics -all the verbal corruptions of democracy, the language of illusion… I don’t want the teachings of Jesus taken from me… If I no longer know that my redeemer liveth, I know that he speaketh not like Tony Blair. It is true that Jesus never spoke the language of the King James Version… But the language of the King James Version is of a poetic intensity congruent with the impact Jesus must once have had on simple souls, of whom I am still one: simple enough, anyway, to need my sins forgiven. Now that there is nobody to do that for me, I must try to do it myself. Like most men with a conscience, I find that very hard, and spend much time feeling absurd. But without the scriptures we poor wretches would be lost indeed, because without them, conscience itself would become just another disturbance of the personality, to be cured by counseling.”
While I think substantial exceptions can be taken to some of his points, James routinely delights me by his serious and apolitical engagement with the sources of culture; he is never facile because his subject -the world of meaning- never is either.
