Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

The fourteenth century was a time of great hardship and profound civil and religious unrest among the poor in England. In the years 1348 to 1350 the Black Plague ravaged and reduced the population. In 1381 Wat Tyler led the Peasants’ Revolt, a major though ultimately failed insurrection whose demands included an end to serfdom. Lollardy took its character from this period. It was a radically popular movement, critical or dismissive of many teachings of the church of that time, and claiming an exclusive authority for Scripture over priesthood and Papacy as Wycliffe himself seems to have done. Parliament responded with an act titled De Haeretico Comburendo, which declared that those who continued to exercise “their wicked preachings and doctrines … from day to day … to the utter destruction of all order and rule of right and reason,” if they did not repent of their error, were to be burned “before the people, in a high place … that such punishment may strike fear into the minds of others.” Though it was harshly suppressed, Lollardy persisted until the time of the Reformation. Wycliffe himself, who had died a natural death in communion with the Catholic Church and had lain in his grave for years, was declared a heretic, dug up, and burned.

The poet and priest William Langland, contemporary with these events, wrote in Middle English the long visionary poem Piers the Ploughman , composed between 1362 and 1394. One voice of the poem, describing theologians at dinner, says, “Meanwhile some poor wretch may cry at their gate, tormented by hunger and thirst and shivering with cold; yet no one asks him in or eases his suffering, except to shoo him off like a dog. Little can they love the Lord who gives them so much comfort, if this is how they share it with the poor! Why, if the poor had no more mercy than the rich, all the beggars would go to bed with empty bellies. For the gorges of these great theologians are often crammed with God’s Name, but His mercy and His works are found among humble folk.”

Ne were mercy in mene men more þan in riche,

Mendinantȝ meteles miȝte go to bedde.

God is moche in þe gorge of þise grete maystres,

Ac amonges mene men his mercy and his werkis …

Complex as the history is, the Bible may be fairly said to have entered English as a subversive document. It continued to be a forbidden document in England for more than a hundred years, in law if not in fact. Meanwhile, off in Germany, the priest William Tyndale worked away at his translation, from the original Greek and Hebrew into the spoken language of his time. Tyndale could only have been aware of the probable consequences for himself of his labors. Yet, according to John Foxe’s sixteenth-century Acts and Monuments of the Martyrs , disputing with a learned man at dinner Tyndale said something any Lollard would approve: “If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.” The Acts and Monuments is a compendium of anecdotes about the heroes of the English pre-Reformation and Reformation. If the words attributed to Tyndale are hearsay, or even supplied by Foxe himself, this would only underscore the degree to which the Ploughman held place as a standard in the Protestant imagination.

The Ploughman was, of course, the archetypal poor man in the countryside, to whom the Lollards had preached. Toward the end of Langland’s poem, Piers the Ploughman appears as the suffering Christ. More than a century later John Calvin will take this physical identity of Christ with the poor to a startling extreme, saying that “being born in a stable, all His life He was like a poor working man” and that he “was nourished in such poverty as to hardly appear human.” This language reminds us how extraordinarily bitter poverty was in premodern Europe, how reduced and disfigured by hardship were those laboring people in whom Tyndale and the others acknowledged the image of Christ. The movement that preceded the Reformation and continued through it was one of respect for the poor and oppressed — respect much more than compassion, since the impulse behind it was the desire to share the best treasure of their faith and learning with the masses of unregarded poor whom they knew to be ready, and very worthy, to receive it.

The bookishness of the Reformation might be said to have generalized itself to become an expectation of legibility in the whole of Creation. If Tyndale felt he was effectively giving Scripture to the unlearned in the fact of translating it with art and skill, he was necessarily dismissing the interpretive strategies — allegorical, tropological, and anagogical — that were traditionally applied to the reading of it, and which gave it meanings only available to those who were especially trained in these methods. This sense that revelation, scriptural and natural, was essentially available to everyone, pervades Reformation thought.

Calvin described the heavens as intelligible in their deepest meaning to the unlearned as well as the learned. He said,

In disquisitions concerning the motions of the stars, in fixing their situations, measuring their distances, and distinguishing their peculiar properties, there is need of skill, exactness, and industry, and the providence of God being more clearly revealed by these discoveries, the mind ought to rise to a sublimer elevation for the contemplation of his glory. But since the meanest and most illiterate of mankind, who are furnished with no other assistance than their own eyes, cannot be ignorant of the excellence of the Divine skill, exhibiting itself in that endless, yet regular variety of the innumerable celestial host — it is evident, that the Lord abundantly manifests his wisdom to every individual on earth.

The eighteenth-century English Puritan Isaac Watts, known to us for the hymns he wrote, was also the author of books on logic and pedagogy used in British and American colleges for generations. He said,

Fetch down some knowledge from the clouds, the stars, the sun, the moon, and the revolutions of all the planets. Dig and draw up some valuable meditations from the depths of the earth, and search them through the vast oceans of water. Extract some intellectual improvements from the minerals and metals; from the wonders of nature among the vegetables and herbs, trees and flowers. Learn some lessons from the birds and the beasts, and the meanest insect. Read the wisdom of God, and his admirable contrivance in them all; read his almighty power, his rich and various goodness, in all the works of his hands.

Both Romanticism and early modern science are strongly associated with the Reformation. Passages like these show how they could have sprung from the same root. An intelligible Creation addressed itself in every moment to every perceiver, more profoundly as the capacities of perception were enlisted in the work of understanding. The most persistent and fruitful tradition of American literature from Emily Dickinson to Wallace Stevens is the meditation on the given, the inexhaustible ordinary. Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James wrote about the subtle and splendid processes of consciousness in this continuous encounter.

Clearly there was no condescension whatsoever in Tyndale’s feelings about the people for whom his Bible was intended. The best proof of this is the fact that by far the greater part of the King James Version New Testament, universally considered to be among the glories of English literature and to be the source of much that is best in it, is in fact Tyndale’s work. In writing for the common people, in writing for the Ploughman, who would not only have been ignorant of Latin but illiterate altogether, he created a masterpiece. This great generosity of spirit, this great respect, is perfectly consonant with his accepting the likelihood that he would suffer a terrible death for taking on this very great labor. Putting aside all other difficulties, the fact that he made himself proficient enough in Greek and Hebrew to carry out the work is remarkable in itself. These two ancient languages had been almost unknown in Europe for centuries and were just beginning to be studied again when Tyndale wrote.