John Gardner - Freddy's Book

“Yes, interesting,” said Lars-Goren.

Bishop Brask nodded, his face slightly glowing, as if even he were for a moment interested. “And ideas,” he said. “What of ideas?” His face took on an apologetic look, as if not by his will but by its own accord. “I’ve been working, as you know—” He gave a little shrug, then forced himself to continue, “I’ve been working on Gustav’s translation of the Bible into Swedish. One encounters some rather peculiar problems. It’s nothing new, you understand — nothing I’m the first man in the world to discern. Alcuin, Grosseteste, Bacon — they were all on to it, though their conclusions were perhaps not exactly the same as mine. The Hebrew’s not all of a piece, that’s the heart of it. The language and ideas change not by decades but by centuries. In a single sentence the language may jump hundreds of years. You follow my drift?”

Lars-Goren considered, then shook his head.

“What I’m saying is, Holy Scripture grew. Like a plant. Like a horse. It changed, sometimes drastically. There seem to be startling cuts, shifts of opinion, as if God’s spirit, dictating, kept changing its mind.”

“Possibly you’ve made some mistake,” said Lars-Goren.

Bishop Brask looked at him. “No,” he said. “It’s no mistake.”

“And what do you make of it?” Lars-Goren asked.

Bishop Brask stared hard at his horse’s ears. “I think the whole book is a record of trials and errors,” he said.

“You sound like a Lutheran,” said Lars-Goren.

For a time Bishop Brask said nothing. Then: “No, worse.”

Darkness was falling. They were still a good twenty miles from Uppsala. Lars-Goren urged his horse to a brisker pace. As if without noticing, the bishop did the same.

2.

THEY SLEPT THAT NIGHT in one of the elegant stone houses in the garden of the cathedral, a walled-in park with trees and headstones, some of them old arrow-shaped Viking stones. The night air was heavy with the scent of horses. It crossed Lars-Goren’s mind — an idle thought, but one not a little distressing to him — that here in the walled cathedral garden they were “in sanctuary.” Theoretically at least, no sheriff or general from Gustav’s government could touch them. It wouldn’t be a bad place to live out one’s life, all things considered — heavy-beamed old trees, a creek with clean-swept bridges, statues here and there, lit by flickering torchlight, some of them finer than anything at the palace in Stockholm, if Lars-Goren was any judge.

An old serving man opened the door for them and bid them come in. Behind him in the darkness, people were moving about, lighting candles, stoking the fire, softly calling to one another. It was queer, all this fuss for two more or less unimportant travellers, Lars-Goren thought. He soon discovered they were not as unimportant as he’d imagined.

Four priests came forward and greeted Bishop Brask with great respect, almost fear, as if to the clerics of Uppsala he was of a rank with the Pope himself. Some knew him, it seemed, for the force and cunning of his political activities, some for his scholarship. The young priest who was placed in attendance on them, rousted out of bed, puffy-eyed with sleep, was, it turned out, one of those involved with the bishop on the Uppsala translation project. He could not seem to do enough for his master, and though he was solicitous, too, about the welfare of the king’s advisor Lars-Goren, one could see at a glance that in the priest’s eyes — in all the priests’ eyes — Lars-Goren was a humble commoner in comparison with the bishop.

Bishop Brask was gray with weariness and walked slightly tilted, as if his back were hurting him. He seemed to want nothing more than sleep; yet at the priests’ urging he seated himself compliantly and drank a glass of brandy, then another and another, and talked at length, mainly with the young man involved with translation, sometimes heatedly — whether from an old man’s weary exasperation or from frustration at the complexity of the problems involved — about the book of First Corinthians. Lars-Goren sat forgotten in a corner of the candlelit room, listening, with his hands on his knees. The text they were discussing was one he had never heard before and would have considered at any other time, not worth haggling over, since it was a text never used in sermons. But today’s context charged it with meaning in Lars-Goren’s mind, though the meaning was nothing he had words for. The text read, roughly, “There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord; and there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which works in all.” Like the priests, Lars-Goren sat forward, hanging on the specialists’ words, his brandy glass on the table beside him, forgotten.

His hope that their arguments would resolve his unwordable question proved vain. They spent the whole time debating the meaning of the Greek word for which Brask supplied the translation “operations.” The younger priest was urging such translations as “movements” or “events,” possibly “changes and inner principles in things.”

The bishop looked older and wearier by the minute. His left cheek trembled, and his mouth made a tight, thin line. “My young friend,” he said, “it’s not our business to write the Bible, just to translate.”

“But it means the same thing,” the young man insisted, smiling falsely, eagerly, as if in hopes of deflecting the bishops wrath. “Operations — changes in things —surely there’s no real difference!”

“If that were true, you wouldn’t be fighting me so heatedly,” said the bishop.

The young man held out his hands, palms up. “It’s a question of making ourselves clear to the people who read,” he said. “Changes in things they’ll understand — spring, summer …”

“You fool yourself,” snapped the bishop, and let his eyes fall shut. “You want to make God say not what in fact he says but what the people will understand. What the people believe — what you believe — you want him to believe. The Greek is more vague than you like it — less, so to speak, sophisticated. You want him to compare the behavior of water in a river to the behavior of mayflies, or husbands and wives — make God some kind of universal alchemy. Perhaps up in heaven, listening to what you say, God is pulling at his beard nodding heartily in agreement. But at the time he, so to speak, spoke with Paul, he was talking about talents and governments, and somehow or another he forgot to say what, listening to you, he may be wishing now that he’d thought to bring to Paul’s attention.”

The young priest was checked in his opinion for only an instant. He drew his plump hand back to his mouth and said tentatively, not meeting the bishop’s eyes, his whole body expressing his refusal to be beaten by the bishops rhetoric, “It all depends what he meant, exactly, by ‘administrations.’ Perhaps he wasn’t thinking exclusively of churches or political systems. Systems of philosophy, as Aquinas tells us, have their necessary logical ‘government.’ Trees, the arrangement of veins in mammals, the habits of badgers, as opposed to those of bees …”

“You know you’re talking nonsense,” the bishop said crossly. “Human pride! Beware of it! What a pleasure it would be”—he smiled slightly, his eyes narrow slits—“to impose one’s opinions on the world through the mouth of God himself!”

“If I’ve correctly followed the arguments of your books, they’re as much your opinions as mine, my lord,” said the priest, but feebly, looking at his knees, as if he knew the ploy would never work.

“True enough, they are my opinions,” said the bishop. “Who knows, if the Lutherans win, they may someday be all men’s opinions and taken for gospel. Give every man a Bible and let him read it as he likes, sooner or later what the Bible says will be what the news-crier says in the street. Truth will be whatever survives generation on generation.” He closed his eyes again, and for a moment it seemed to Lars-Goren that he’d fallen asleep. Then, without opening his eyes, he said, “It may all come to pass. No need to rush it.”