Christian Symbolism: The Book
We are pleased to kick off this new year with an addition to our on-going series on Christian symbols. Fr Sam Gibson writes about the book as a sign, not only of literacy and learning, but also of Christian community.
If it takes an imaginative leap to see the book, understood as an artefact or object, as a sign or symbol in Christian life, then this is perhaps down to sheer familiarity. Books are ubiquitous in Western culture. I sit writing this in one of my favourite places: an enormous bookshop in rural Warwickshire, consisting of multiple barns full of volumes on every imaginable topic. Even in the café I am surrounded by stacks of the things, I am resting my laptop on a few of my most treasured discoveries (books are working objects, after all). C.S. Lewis apparently wrote that he “could never find a book long enough or a cup of tea deep enough” to satisfy him.
I used to protest that I was only a moderate bibliophile (book-lover) until my wife pointed out to me that I literally spent five years of my life preparing a book about books. The fact that this was seen as a legitimate thing to do by some of mentors and peers is pretty remarkable. My own research was on the Lectionary of the Orthodox church, which in itself is less a book than an elaborate and sophisticated system for organising, interpreting and singing texts. So, I hold my hands up: I am not just a regular bibliophile. Yet I was still unclear about the symbolic power of the book for Christian faith until two particular experiences focussed my mind.
In the first, I was speaking to a woman who had just entered attended a Sunday Mass for the first time in many decades. In a challenging conversation, she asked me why everything in our church was so book-oriented. At first I was taken aback. Ours is a multi-sensory, audio-visual tradition – choral music, vestments, gestures. How could anyone think we were bookish? Then, as so often happens, a seeker schooled me in the art of worship. She pointed out to some of the various symbolic uses of books she had just observed.
The East window at St Alphege, Solihull
If you enter St Alphege as a stranger on a Sunday morning, you will find a priest standing in a prominent position at the front, reading or singing from a large book (in this case our missa plastica folder used at the Chair). Then another person, usually a deacon, takes a large red book to the centre of church and reads from it. Following this, he or she gets up into a pulpit and speaks from a folder. Someone may then read further prayers from a book, and later on the whole group goes to a table where they read again from a book (a Missal) while everyone listens keenly to the words contained therein. In Solihull, the high altar sits directly beneath a stained-glass window depicting the four evangelists who are in turn holding their own weighty tomes. Sadly, in a typical parish you may also sometimes find that the worshippers are fixed intently on their pile of hymnals, pamphlets or pewslips as the holy mysteries unfold.
So we are certainly a bookish people, and it seems that books as objects hold immense power for us in ways that we rarely examine in the ordinary course of events. Whatever happened to the newcomer in our church, she demonstrated insight into the significance of the book (its quality as a sign) and its ability to tantalise, fascinate and irritate, especially when used ritually. It is an object which comes to life during worship, and can possess a transcendent quality.
The second experience which prompted my meditation on the book’s strange power was an encounter with a Muslim taxi driver. He reminded me that Christians (and others) are viewed by Islam as ′Ahl al-Kitāb: “people of the book.” For many Muslims, this designation is a positive one, suggesting a family resemblance and shared common beliefs. The book(s) in question are the Torah and the Gospels, albeit in forms which are believed to be unredacted or uninfluenced by Christian and Jewish beliefs.
The description “people of the book” is an ambiguous one from a Christian point of view. Often, theologians react badly to the notion that we are book-oriented, and instead point towards the revelation of Jesus Christ as the Word made flesh (John 1:14). If we are honest, mainline Christians do not tend to explicitly think of themselves primarily as people who draw an account of the world from a book or books. Our emphasis tends to be on worship, experience, tradition, reason; yet these are all strategies for reading books and yielding meaning from them. For some other Christians, the contents of the Bible, even down to the very words themselves, are sacred and inerrant. There is at least an honesty in this way of thinking about the totemic power of the book, even if its results can be distorting or disturbing. Perhaps our response should be to more fulsomely own the description of ourselves as book-people.
The Gospel of John in Algerina Peckover Greek 7 (Cadbury Research Library, Birmingham). It is typical of the ornately directed and revered codices of the late antique and medieval world.
Historically, Christians were not just bibliophiles but technological innovators. According to manuscript scholars our forebears were, if not inventors, then certainly very enthusiastic users of the codex [1]. The codex is what we now know as a book, a series of leaves folded into bindings, set inside a cover. Before the second century, books were largely not codices but scrolls. Our Christian habit of collecting texts into collections (like four Gospels, or a set of Paul’s letters) almost certainly encouraged the explosion of codex use, since it presented ancient users with a convenient and mobile way of consulting multiple texts in one sitting. The birth of Christian thought among the intellectuals of late antiquity – people like Origen, Jerome, and Augustine – was at least partially down to this book culture. So too was the system of readings, hymns and daily prayers that arose in the great imperial cities of East and West. All of our modern liturgies – Roman, Eastern, Anglican, Reformed – are descendants of this codicological synthesis, right down to the first experiences of seekers in the modern day. We are truly then “codicophiles” (codex-lovers); our worship, and so our practised and embodied response to God, has been shaped by the book.
Nor is this merely a question of literacy. While pre-modern people varied hugely in literacy level – and while there were hugely important musical, artistic, and mystical dimensions to medieval piety – the basic pattern of worship and learning was still shaped by the book. The book, often decorated or illuminated with pictures of the saints, operated as symbol even for those to whom its contents were oblique. Think only of the Fall as narrated in popular Christmas carol Adam lay Ybounden: “As clerkes finden written in their book”, or of the ways in which, in the Christian centres of Rome, Constantinople and Armenia books were decorated with jewels, paraded in the entrance of the Liturgy, or revered as talismans or protectors in times of need. People trusted books and trusted their educated users (often clergy or monastics) to correctly utilise their power, which could be a medium for the divine.
In the Byzantine rite, the Gospel book is ceremonially elevated at a time in the Eucharistic liturgy long before it is read from, as a kind of dramatic anticipation of the words which will be proclaimed. Nicholas Cabasilas (d.1392) describes it this way:
The priest, standing in front of the altar, raises the Gospel-book and shows it to the people, thus symbolising the manifestation of the Lord, when he began to appear to the multitudes [2].
In our modern Western services, the whole community gathers around the Gospel book, accompanied by singing, procession, censing and other ritual actions (the sign of the cross, for example), reinforcing the creative power of that particular book for each of the participants. Among Reformed Christians, the Bible may be brought in at the start of worship, raised above the clerk or minister’s head as a sign of its vital role in the preaching of God’s word.
Christianity has bequeathed to our culture a love of the codex, and a reverence for it, so that its symbolic power spills out well beyond our liturgical customs. The Renaissance and the Reformations in Western Europe democratised access to books, modifying their symbolic resonance so that – eventually – every individual Christian could aspire to own, treasure, read and interpret texts. The printing press made them mass commodities, but often still precious and ornate. From one angle, an observer could view that whole historical period as an exchange of books. Out went the dense commentaries, catenae and summae of the medieval world, in came Foxe and Bunyan, the Book of Common Prayer and Luther’s Table Talk. The content changed, the medium, the book and all its sign-bearing weight remained, if in newly imagined forms. Vernacular Bibles transmitted the symbolic power formerly held by monasteries and the clergy of grand basilicas to domestic worship and family meals, to ordinary people as they worked in fields and factories, to revival meetings, colonists and abolitionists, courts, parliaments and trade unions.
This symbolic power persists and continues to develop in places where Scripture, thought of correctly or otherwise as “a book”, is held in high regard, as in the Bible Belt or in the rapidly growing churches of the majority world. The fact that the power of the book can be liberative or restorative, where it is used to set people free to worship God without fear, or oppressive, where the book is weaponised so as to be used against minority groups, acts as both encouragement and warning to us. We must not be dismissive, or naïve about such a potent object; we certainly cannot take it for granted.
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However, professional manuscript scholars have wondered recently whether the popularity of the codex as we know it is coming to an end [3]. Digital tools allow researchers, and then general readers, to combine different texts, images and information in a way that suits them, and modern editions of texts (especially of prominent Biblical manuscripts) are online, and multi-layered [4]. Nevertheless, Christian readers keep purchasing traditional bound Bibles, and sales of printed books are surprisingly buoyant. Maybe the traditional book’s enduring power to shape society, as well as its visual allure, is partially why it persists long after its predicted demise at the hands of electronic media. It is just too deeply-ingrained a habit to quit. Books can also simply be beautiful or fascinating, as the popularity of Christopher de Hamel’s 2016 volume Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts suggests.
If this is a feature of our once-evangelised culture which endures beyond Christendom – a longing for books and a sense of their importance – then here is at least one way back in. Are we able to harness the power of the book to make known the good news of Jesus Christ which was embodied by the literary and codicological traditions of the Christian ages? Books feature prominently in the famous conversion stories of ages past. Augustine of Hippo famously heard the words “tolle lege” (take, read) (Confessions VIII.xii) at the start of his journey to renewed Christian belief, Francis of Assisi used the book of the Gospels to discover his call to evangelical poverty (Bonaventure, Legenda Maior III.iii), and John Wesley’s heart was “strangely warmed” when he heard Luther’s exposition of Romans read aloud (Journal II.xvi). Where might this converting power be found today?
For some in our own times “bookishness” is seen as little less than failure, but perhaps a love of books can be rehabilitated as a virtue. Many contemporary Christians, especially in our evangelism-driven times, are looking for non-textual, visual, practical ways to communicate truth, and of course that is part of our story. We have all heard (and perhaps even given) sermons that were narrowly bookish in an affected way, or which assumed familiarity with literary references that none of the hearers were likely to find helpful. I am not suggesting we follow this course.
Yet the endurance of the book in its traditional format is a cultural curiosity, and an opportunity which it is hard to pass up. The book is a ready-made sign, ready to be taken up into worship, catechism, or conversation. We would be wrong to assume that books, understood as symbolic bearers of meaning and culture, are only valued by a middle-class minority. The most unexpected people are avid readers, and even those who are not readers may well value particular books for other reasons. I recently accompanied a church group, mixed in age and background, to the Cadbury Research Library in Birmingham, where each member became enchanted by the medieval books in Greek, Latin, Coptic and Syriac which were set before them, as well as inspired to learn more about the faith they represent. Books – though maybe not what some would consider “high” books – turn up everywhere. Our education system encourages the use of codices, and children are growing up formed by the same deep affection for the codex as their ancestors, alongside the iPad and apps. The combination of good coffee and books is practically iconic for “millennial” culture.
In some places the bookshop or book exchange is undergoing a revival, but there is a striking absence of good and accessible Christian literature – of which there seems to be more than ever – from our bookshops, cafés and community centres. In these hubs of social interaction we are conspicuous by our absence. And our churches seem, all too often, to place little value on the exchange of books, or on their use, doing little to teach about the meaning of Missals, Bibles, Prayer Books or Commentaries. Little is done to celebrate their beauty (where it exists), or to provide beneficial interpretations of their use in worship. We seem to have a collective amnesia about their history, and power to inspire. Tempted to see reading as yet another private, individual activity, we may even doubt the ability of God to enter into and transform our collective world of signs. How ironic that we find ourselves alienated from the very places where our own object, the codex, continues to grow and evolve, absent from a mission field Christian practices helped to create. Perhaps the way forward is to retrace our steps.
1. This history is related in the seminal Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church (Yale University Press, 1997).
2. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy (London: SPCK, 1977), 59.
3. See for example “The New Testament of the Future” in David C. Parker’s 2011 Lyell Lectures, printed as Textual Scholarship and the Making of the New Testament (Oxford: OUP, 2012).
4. See e.g., Codex Bezae (fourth/fifth century) in the Cambridge Digital Library
