Clarity, Speed, Humility, Courage.

The New Testament, Translated by William Tyndale: The text of the Worms edition of 1526 in original spelling. Ed. W. R. Cooper. London: The British Library, 2000, 555pp. $25.00 (cloth).

Ian Robinson, The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 208pp. $69.95 (cloth).

Sister Molly Monahan, Seeds of Grace: A Nun's Reflections on the Spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous. New York: Riverhead, 2001. 180pp. $23.95 (cloth).

The Writer and Religion. Ed. William H. Gass and Lorin Cuoco. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. 157pp. $19.95 (paper).

Andrew Shanks, "What Is Truth?": Towards a Theological Poetics. London: Routledge, 2001. 167pp. $31.95. (paper).

The original populist Bible has appeared in the ultimate elitist form: William Tyndale's 1526 New Testament has been issued with the original spelling. The first English New Testament to be (illegally) translated directly from the Greek, to put scripture in the hands of the common people, it was printed in Europe and smuggled across the Channel in bolts of wool. Now you can buy it in a handsome little pocket-sized hardback, roughly the size of the original, published quite openly by one of England's national institutions. The edition includes no scholarly apparatus, but is probably not expected to sell as widely as it did in the sixteenth century. These days, it's a commonplace of publishing and education that ordinary bookbuyers are nervous about old spellings. A particularly adventurous teacher might trust an honors high school literature class with this book; students in the regular track would never be told about it.

Surprise: Tyndale is still on the people's side. Uneducated England learned to read in order to read this Bible, and some still-current nonstandard spellings date back at least to the orthography of the 1520s. (So do some pronunciations: axe for ask, hit for it, hanger, and others persist in regional American speech.) The spellings of and off are interchangeable ("won off you shall betraye me"); then is used indifferently for both then and than. There is no their there: there is used for both the possessive pronoun and the adverb. One only regrets that sixteenth-century usage didn't include airight and alot. Anyone who has done copy editing or corrected student papers may feel a wild anarchic rush of gratitude for this edition. "Misspellings" of this kind are a survival of an older and less tractable sensibility in the language--bred in the bone, as Tyndale's "the salt of the earth" and "pearls before swine" and "the powers that be" are set in our speech.

David Daniell's 1989 Yale edition, with modernized spelling, has already made clear the headlong rush of Tyndale's prose. Someone has now proven on a computer that 83 percent of the King James New Testament was subsumed whole from Tyndale; the rest was subjected to the braking process that Elias Canetti described in Crowds and Power when he designated religion the "slow crowd." Canetti observed that "the central problem of universal religions is how to dominate believers spread over wide stretches of the earth. The only way to do it is by a conscious slowing down of crowd events. Distant goals must gain in importance, near ones losing more and more of their weight." No state church could have tolerated the speed of Tyndale's translation, which makes the Kingdom of Heaven seem a very near goal indeed. (One is astonished, for example, to find how early in the Gospel of Matthew the Sermon on the Mount appears). Modern translations like the New English Bible and the NRSV, with their mix of business English and s heer syntactic arrhythmia, are speedy in another way--one can speed-read them like a newspaper, and find them about as disposable--but in their anxiety not to confuse, they have utterly sacrificed the power to command. Tyndale still presents the most urgent New Testament in the language -- quick, intimate, homely, and terrifying.

Ian Robinson's The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment suggests how the business English got into the modern translations. Robinson studied the evolution of the modern sentence from the lengthy and meandering medieval "period" to its present organization. The "period" was punctuated in what is now called a rhetorical style, as a guide to the voice and the ear, rather than in our present syntactical style which clarifies the sentence structure and is intended mainly for the eye. In a culture of less than universal literacy, in which spoken language was expected to pull its intellectual weight, it made sense to punctuate for audibility. But the increase of literacy coincided (if it was coincidence) with the point-by-point logic of Puritan sermons, the rise of scientific rationalism, and the creakingly systematic "Ramist" method of intellectual self-improvement. Highly structured argument--in which the outcome was known by the author from the beginning, digressiveness was a fault to be kept in check, and the mind was organized within an inch of its life--not only took less care for the needs of the ear, but led to a studied emotional disengagement, and eventually undercut the force of religious prose.

The homogeneity of the eighteenth-century sentence -- much remarked by scholars of the period -- and its urbane disregard of messy emotional truths, made certain things impossible to say. Robinson declares flatly that the Restoration of 1660 ushered in "a culture in which plain statements of fact are the central object of worship and fiction itself is subversive" -- a culture in which "passion, tragedy, ecstasy, great beauty, became inexpressible in the styles of language approved by the arbiters of taste." It was high time, of course, for something to undercut the force of religious politics -- but now no one could write Lear or The Tempest either; wonder and moral gravity had been domesticated and diminished. (The novel, which began as a domestic form, seems to be by nature ironic; Robinson suspects it is impossible to write a genuinely tragic novel.) The result has been a public discourse, still current, in which the movement of money and goods is considered hard evidence, subjective emotions like grief a nd dread are inadmissible as evidence, and it takes an extraordinary crisis to remind people that we feel grief and dread anyway and must speak what we feel.

When such a crisis occurs, the inadequacy of the present religious vernacular becomes all too clear. The preachers of sermons, the choreographers of services, and the writers of presidential eulogies are thrown back on the past (which is brought forth blinking, like Lazarus, from the grave) and on their own resources (which may not reliably rise to an occasion). To be sure, this may be largely a white problem; in the black churches, where Reformation language was never rejected and where words like "relieve," "desire," "burden," "glory," still carry their full moral weight, a religious discourse persists which can hold its listeners to a standard, exhort and console, and cast a cold eye on the compromises of privilege. But the white churches learned -- possibly in the eighteenth century -- the art of casting potentially subversive messages in a sort of pious lilting drone, so that even a president adjured to prudence before the eyes of the nation (as in the September 14 service at the National Cathedral) wil l not have to notice that he is being publicly mistrusted and given unsolicited advice. (It would be possible to see a parallel between this pious camouflage and the apparently resigned tone of the spirituals during slavery -- the spirituals being full of the most specific concealed messages; the difference is that the slaves had a thoroughly serious intention of escaping, whereas the white clergy seem mainly to intend to remain in their jobs without risk.) With this for the status quo, one may have to search far afield to find a religious language one can trust.

One could do worse than begin with the phrase "a searching and fearless moral inventory." The twelve-step movement, by not trying to be a religion, has managed to serve powerfully some central religious functions. Seeds of Grace: A Nun's Reflections on the Spirituality of Alcoholics Anonymous, an unassuming and thoughtful reflection on A.A. and its methods by the pseudonymous Sister Molly Monahan, finds a number of parallels between the Twelve Steps and Catholic spiritual formation. It also suggests a number of things about the construction of moral language. A.A., says Monahan, "has found ways of supplying the missing link between experience and faith" through its unique blend of obsession and self-limitation. It is a wholly voluntary association from which one cannot be excommunicated; "the only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking." The essence of membership is bearing one another's burdens: the system of sponsoring and being sponsored by other A.A. members -- people as fragile and fall ible in sobriety as oneself -- gives everyone a share in the mortally urgent work of containment, and sidesteps the highly corruptible moral hierarchy that is the curse of better organized religions. A.A.'s democracy of wretchedness at least raises no false hopes about the purity of its leaders. The groups accomplish their work on very ramshackle language, but it is moral language, it is common language, and it comes straight out of the lived experience of self-destruction and desperate resolve, an experience that no one in the movement has had at second hand.

In a sense A.A. may not need subtly articulate language to accomplish its task. That it employs language at all, rather than evading speech in the slurred rage or sullen taciturnity of Drunkenness, is a miracle of self-respect, and for many of its members a triumph of articulation. Monahan, who has worked with words at the academic level, very naturally suspends judgment toward A.A.'s "corny slogans" out of sheer gratitude. The essence of the matter is that "sober members of Alcoholics Anonymous no longer add to the deficit column of the common good" through missed work, fatal car accidents, acts of violence and mayhem. Who cares what words they use on the way to such an accomplishment? Yet in another sense, there are experiences we don't know how to have until we can talk about them. The long climb out of addiction is the painstaking construction of a sort of ladder of self-knowledge, of which words are the rungs; in Nelle Morton's striking phrase about feminist consciousness-raising, A.A. members meet and talk in order to be heard to their own speech. What is the difference in affect between Tyndale's "let not your hearts be troubled" and A.A.'s "get off the pity pot"? Why is one still graceful and fresh after nearly five hundred years and the other "corny" at birth? How might more words build higher rungs?

Part of it is the difference that Walter J. Ong elaborates (Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Methuen, 1982) between oral and literate language, and need not be criticized: oral language depends heavily on a common stock of repeated phrases to establish and reinforce shared experience, whether the art is conversation or epic verse. Literate language, which can be returned to with ease and increased with less effort of memory (but whose imperatives are perhaps less binding for most people than the force of pithy communal opinion), prizes subtlety, distinctiveness of experience, and original phrasing. The extraordinary luck of Tyndale's -- and Shakespeare's -- English was to achieve a written language that drew on the proverb-generating function of oral language while adding substantially both to its stock and to its capacity for reflection. Where is the contemporary language that can bridge the gap between A.A.'s profound communal experience of reciprocity in shame and the public realm in which we hold presidents accountable for military deployments, social miseries, and failures of public trust? You can't tell writers to make new religious language out of A.A. slogans for the sake of the common good; writers will tell you where to stick your common good. Dylan Thomas might have thought sobriety well lost for a line like "the golden ghost who ringed with his streams her mercury bone." Yet the experience of an urgent and consensual moral effort, fully articulated in words that bear repetition, cannot be left to the hack-producers of grave truths, who murder the mankind of our going with calls for uncritical patriotism (or, just as effortlessly on the Left, for some habitual and unexamined resistance). G. K. Chesterton once remarked that "My country, right or wrong" was not a proud saying; it was the equivalent of "My mother, drunk or sober" -- shameful, resigned, patient, ridiculous, and tragic. A.A. members--and their families--would understand.

Certainly writers are slow to make any deliberate connection between their own moral language and religion. The participants in the Washington University's 1994 International Writers Center's conference on The Writer and Religion (the proceedings were issued as The Writer and Religion, ed. William H. Gass and Lorin Cuoco) are representative in their reluctance. This eminent group -- the speakers were Eavan Boland, J. M. Coetzee, William Gaddis, Amitav Ghosh, A. G. Mojtabai, and Hanan al-Shaykh -- addressed the rising and hydra-headed fundamentalist threat with intelligence, conscience, clarity, and occasional wicked wit (Gaddis: "When I see a bumper sticker that says 'Keep God in America,' my reaction is, is he trying to get out?"). But finally they declared the no-man's-land between religion's public repressiveness and the writer's private dissent too full of land mines to venture into. The possibility of a religious language written so as to undercut fundamentalist certainties, or a literary language of mor al declaration impossible to turn into slogans, did not arise. At most, one of the speakers would occasionally show a wistful sympathy with salt-of-the-earth inarticulate seekers of miracles or a nostalgia for a common vision of the common good, or give two cheers for the prophetic sensibility in either scripture or literature. Writers have every reason to fear and despise religion -- which perennially fears and despises them -- but there was a peculiar passivity, indeed a paralysis of imagination, in this group's willingness to leave the defining process entirely to the hard-liners (and, by implication, to the earnest and incurably sloganeering efforts of the liberal soft-liners).

Eavan Boland spoke with real horror of Matthew Arnold's idea that poetry would substitute for religion in an age of unbelief, as if poetry were bound to behave like the Catholic Church given half a chance. (Others hastened to point out the unlikelihood of that prospect, in an age when poets are read mainly by each other.) She feared what might happen to poetry if it were privileged and simplified to the level of "faith arid unreason" that religion, in her experience of Ireland, demands; she also feared what might happen to the societies that accepted such poetry as a substitute for religion. Yet surely what has happened to poetry since Arnold's day has toughened it beyond his anticipation, and produced some work that genuinely does a better job than religion. One sees the process at work in Yeats's move from romantic Irish nationalism to the later poems, still oracular but now also ironic and disillusioned. One sees it better in Adorno's pronouncement that one can no longer write poetry after Auschwitz, and in the kind of poetry that was written after Auschwitz: Glatstein's scorching and inconsolable indictments of God, Amichai's wry and intimate use of biblical quotation. The poetry whose death Adorno announced was the kind of poetry Boland feared, the lyric of heightened emotion that can be used to manipulate group emotion; there are humbler and more rigorous forms that do not bolster faith or unreason.

Andrew Shanks, in "What Is Truth?": Towards a Theological Poetics, suggests why this might be so. Starting from Julien Benda's contempt for "pathos" in politics -- by which Benda meant the insatiable popular thirst for thrilling propaganda, "a morality consistently packaged to be as exciting as possible" -- Shanks suggests that there may be a trustworthy as well as an untrustworthy form of pathos. He opposes to the form that Benda despised, which he terms the "pathos of glory," a "pathos of shakenness" which is answerable only to the demands of integrity and which dissents from all ideologies. He presents Blake, Holderlin, and the Holocaust poet Nelly Sachs as exemplars of the pathos of shakenness. (To those names one could add Dickinson, Hopkins, and the Shakespeare of the tragedies and the late plays. Kipling ricochets interestingly between the two kinds of pathos; Eliot begins with shakenness and congeals into an austere and difficult mode of the pathos of glory; Auden aims at shakenness from the beginnin g and generally attains it.) Shanks compares the pathos of glory to Milan Kundera's "kitsch" -- easily reduced to a slogan and interchangeable in its effect on the faithful of all religions and ideologies, even those that oppose each other. He suggests that the pathos of shakenness will be, by definition, an antidote to kitsch, resisting all moves toward propaganda. There is evidence that this can happen midstream in a poet's career: as the relation between aesthetics and politics has become more troubling and more suspect, poets have begun to accuse and revise themselves on detecting the "pathos of glory" in their own work. (Yeats: "Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?" Auden: "We must love one another and die" -- a makeshift revision which did not salvage the remarkable "September 1939" for his collected poems.) Shanks has a particular interest in liturgy; he proposes a Christian Day of Atonement for the historical sins of the church, and certain days on the model of saints' days t o be dedicated to artists of "shakenness." Imagine Emily Dickinson juxtaposed with St. Paul: it may turn out that Matthew Arnold was right.

There have been very few voices -- maybe none in English since the Reformation -- that could combine immediacy and integrity in a specifically religious language, still less in religious language that could enter popular speech. Tyndale was one, and since he died for his efforts - a distinction he shares with many twentieth-century writers-we may let him have the last word:

For the worde of god is quycke, and myghty in operacion, and sharper than eny two edged swearde: and entreth through, even unto the dividynge a sonder of the soule and the sprete and of the ioyntes, and the mary [marrow]: and iudgeth the thoughtes and the intentes off the herte. Nether is there eny creature Invisible in the sight off hit: but all thynges are naked and bare unto the eyes off hym, off whom we speake. (Heb. 13)

Now that we make a distinction between religious and secular that Tyndale (and Paul) did not make, the word of God is so two-edged that it can turn up anywhere, in or out of canonized scripture; it starts dividing asunder the soul and the spirit and the joints wherever a writer lays bare the intents of the heart. Perhaps the writer's job is not to declare an allegiance--to decide for secularity or religion--but simply to keep the two edges honed: to dedicate herself to making the moral inventory searching and fearless enough.

Catherine Madsen is contributing editor and book review editor for CrossCurrents.