From Essays After Montaigne
I propose certaine formelesse and irresolute fantasies, as do those schollers who in schooles publish doubtfull and sophisticall questions to be disputed and canvased: not to establish the truth, but to find it out...
It is not without great reason, in my poor judgement, that the Church forbiddeth the confused, rash and indiscreet use of the sacred and divine songs which the holy spirit hath indited unto David. God ought not to be commixed in our actions, but with awful reverence, and an attention full of honour and respect. The word or voice is too divine, having no other use but to exercise our lungs and to please our eares. It is from the conscience and not from the tongue that it must proceed. It is not consonant unto reason that a prentise or shop-keeping boy, amiddest his idle, vaine, and frivolous conceits, should be suffered to entertaine himselfe, and play therewith. Nor is it seemely or tolerable to see the sacred booke of our beliefes Mysteries tossed up and downe and plaid withall, in a shop, or a hall, or a kitchen. They have heretofore beene accompted mysteries, but through the abuse of times they are now held as sports and recreations. So serious and venerable a study should not, by way of pastime and tumultuarie, be handled.
Are they not pleasantly conceited, who, because they have reduced the same into the vulgar tongues, and that all men may understand it, perswade themselves, that the people shall the better conceive and digest the same? Consisteth it but in the words, that they understand not all they find written? Shall I say more? By approaching thus little unto it, they goe back from it. Meere ignorance, and wholly relying on others, was verily more profitable and wiser than is this verball and vaine knowledge, the nurse of presumption and source of temeritie. Moreover, I am of opinion that the uncontrouled libertie, that all men have to wrest, dissipate, and wyredraw a word so religious and important, to so many severall idiomes, hath much more danger than profit following it. The Jewes, the Mahometans, and well-nigh all other nations, are wedded unto and reverence the language wherein their mysteries and religion had originally beene conceived; and any change or translation hath not without apparance of reason beene directly forbidden. Know we whether there be Judges enow in Basque and in Brittanie to establish this translation made in their tongue? The universall Church hath no more difficult and solemne judgement to make. Both in speaking and preaching the interpretation is wandring, free, and mutable, and of one parcell; so it is not alike.
One of the many squabbles of the Reformation involved language. I imagine it sounds quaint to observers today, but nearly five hundred years ago, people were actually martyred over the question of whether Christian services must be conducted in Latin. That sounds simply barbaric to our ears. Even Augustine noted that the Bible was translated into Latin by men who made mistakes in that translation (though he did try to claim that those mistakes were divinely inspired, that the word of God is a living word).
Part of the absurdity of Mel Gibson's folly of The Passion (in addition to his reliance on discredited anti-Semitic cranks, his attacking Jewish critics months before any criticism actually appeared, and his graphic physical threats to the seemingly benign Frank Rich and his nonexistent dog) is his puzzling insistence on filming the movie not in the Greek dialect in which the Gospels (which he claims to be following so assiduously) were written nor in an English translation that his audience would understand, but in the Aramaic that would have actually been spoken at the time and the Latin into which the Gospels (already written decades after the fact) were later translated. That was the first thing I heard about the movie, and I remember scratching my head upon hearing it. That seems so naive, even arbitrary. We know better than that now.
In his book The American Religion, Harold Bloom describes America's "post-Christian" religion:
As a religious critic, I find two characteristics invariably present in every authentic version of the American Religion, whether it be Pentecostal or Southern Baptist or Mormon or whatever... The American finds God in herself or himself, but only after finding the freedom to know God by experiencing a total inward solitude.
The majority of Americans, regardless of their religious affiliation, feel that they are free to define, find, and interpret God for themselves. They find God in themselves and their surroundings--He is an ongoing participant in their lives. To be separated from God by something as mundane as translation would seem offensive or even blasphemous. It would be tantamount to admitting that people who understand a particular language are somehow closer to God. Even American Catholics no longer seem willing to subscribe to that belief, at least in practice. If asked, I imagine that most Americans would follow Augustine's lead and claim that the word of God is a living word, that their translation and understanding of that word is guided by the God within them.
And yet... I can believe myself to be made by God, but not made of God. I'm too broken, too divided against myself, too weak, and too corruptible to have any of the divine in me. To me, the divine is out there, not in here. The best we can hope for is a striving after the divine. (Our ability to recognize the divine has proven imperfect at best.) God's creation, of which we're part and in which we find ourselves, is not God. It's all of the things (finite, temporal, mutable, etc.) that God is not. And if God is not in us but beyond us, then Montaigne might be right that He should be shrouded in mystery and that He should be approached reverently in the language in which He revealed Himself. Certainly, no degree of humility before God could ever be excessive.
This essay has been revised. The sentence discussing the languages in which The Passion was filmed was changed to reflect the corrective comments offered by Mambrino's Helmet. The original sentence can be seen in her first comment.
7:26:43 AM 
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