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The Beauty of the Bible
By Howard J. Happ

THIS IS a ground-breaking study of broad scope. Principally a work in art history, it is also a history of the Bible.

The cost of this beautiful volume, with 211 photographic plates in its text, 45 in full-page color, will restrict its distribution chiefly to libraries and to coffee tables-, where its subject and the formidable scholarship brought to bear upon it will allow it to shine as a symbol of erudition as well as of affluence.

But the book is much more than a decoy. It invites reading by people fortunate enough to get it into their hands for more than a few minutes' enraptured gazing. Chair of Yale University's Art History Department, an expert on the Romanesque, Professor Cahn surveys Bibles from the eighth to the eleventh centuries. His additional catalogue of 150 select manuscripts is, for scholars, a treasure in itself. Earlier studies have focused on particular manuscripts or schools of illumination or (as is the case with the Cambridge Bible History) have treated this area with necessary brevity.

I

The introduction of the codex (our bound book) toward the end of the first century allowed more written material to be bound together, more durably and more handsomely. Although the rotulus (roll or scroll) was sometimes provided with a figure or illustration, the codex was far more amenable to illumination, to full-page illustration. Unlike the uniform scroll, the book could have color, rhythm, architecture. However open contemporary Judaism may have been to iconography, tradition confined the books of its canon to their respective scrolls. Ancient Christianity saw no reason why a codex might not house the Bible as well as Virgil's Georgics.

Three developments of the Fourth Century made this possible. The Constantinian establishment provided the wealth and safety needed for such investment. Pressures toward doctrinal and political unity helped establish the New Testament canon. St. Jerome's scholarship and stylistic polish provided the Vulgate text. Jerome was to be intimately associated with his translation. From the ninth to the twelfth century,

Howard J. Happ is Professor of Religious Studies, California State University at Northridge. A graduate of Cornell College, Iowa, he received his theological degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and his doctorate in religion from Princeton University. An Episcopal priest, Dr. Happ has also served parishes in California. He is here reviewing Walter Cahn's Romanesque Bible Illumination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982, 304 pp., $95)

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the Bible text was normally preceded by Jerome's letter to Paulinus of Nola; the Old Treatment by that to Desiderius; the New, by that to Pope Damasus. Further, Jerome's study of proper names in Scripture was the principal exegetical aid to the medieval reader. "Filtered through this erudition, the Word was at once history and symbol, moral exhortation and encyclopedic science." With its various topics (and varying opinions) the canon of Scripture, called Bibliotheca or Bibliotheca sacra was, when bound and illuminated, at once a library and art gallery.

Cahn provides illustrations from the few extant manuscripts of the late sixth and the seventh centuries. Illustrated in classical style, they are not unaffecting. The Flood as pictured in a manuscript of the Bibliotheque Nationale seems contemporary, its drowning white horse recalling Picasso's Guernica.

Three chronologically organized chapters follow, dealing respectively with the Carolingian renaissance of the ninth century, the highly scattered production of the disorganized tenth, and the recovered production of the eleventh, closely connected with the Gregorian Reform. Since the eleventh century alone provides a high number of examples of Romanesque illumination, Cahn appends two further chapters, treating of particular artistic developments and various biblical themes. He concludes with a chapter on the patrons and artists responsible for these works.

Although he presents intriguing cameos of minor figures, like Theodulph of Orleans and miniatures of various monastic or regal figures responsible for a particular manuscript, Cahn does not go out of his way to explain the general history of the period. At least a nodding acquaintance with the Iconoclastic controversy, Carolingian and Ottonian emperors, Cluniac and Gregorian reforms, Cistercian and Premonstratensian orders is presupposed. As well as of the geography of the period: one is left to infer that "Musan" refers to the area along the Meuse.

II

The Carolingian era involved a great rise in learning, and necessarily a concentration on the production of the Bible, with respect to which Alcuin of York has been given too much credit. In the last third of the century, on the brink of Viking invasion, monasteries at Orleans and

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Tours brought illumination to what Cahn terms its "height." Classical style was considerably modified by "barbarian vigor," seen most clearly in the "swags and linear flourishes" of the intricately decorated initials which served as title pages for canonical books and which began to turn into pictograms. This high artistry and idiosyncratic treatment of letters produced a heightened individualism in the artist.

From the sixth century forward, artists began to make their identity known. They would become more prominent until at the end of the period Manerius of Canterbury, a free-lance artist, would furnish readers of his three-volume Bible his family history, including the etymology of all its names, after the manner of Jerome. The work of reproducing Scripture, regarded in Judaism as a mitzvah, came to be seen as wounding Satan with each word or participating in the action of the Lord. Cahn concludes the book with the story of a scribe saved from Hell because the words he had written outnumbered his sins by one. The high dignity of Holy Writ bestowed a little upon scribes and painters.

Tenth century invasions left few illuminated manuscripts in France. They were produced in Spain in the face of iconoclastic Islam. In England illumination was bestowed not upon the text of the Vulgate but upon the vernacular paraphrases of Caedmon and Aelric. This insular celebration of vernacular idiom was revealed in illumination as well as text: Adam, Joseph, and even God appear wonderfully Anglo-Saxon, as bland as they are blond.

III

Monastic reform in the eleventh century heightened the demand for Bibles, read according to the Rule of St. Benedict at the Vigil office, following a lectionary beginning Genesis yearly on Septuagesima Sunday. Production of complete Bibles for such cyclical use resulted in more standardized cycles of illustration, themes which appeared at the same period in the tympana of Romanesque churches. The life of David would illustrate psalters as well. Much of the content of these illustrations was determined by non-biblical sources: Gregory's commentary (on Job), Josephus' history, Plato's philosophy.

Churchly theology influenced illumination, which became in itself gloss or exegesis. Elaboration of initials reached its peak in the treatment of the IN of the "In Principio" of Genesis and St. John's

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Gospel. The juxtaposed initials came to bear medallions depicting the seven days of creation or seven ancestors of Christ in the Tree of Jesse. The depiction of the creation reflected contemporary cosmology: the four elements, the signs of the Zodiac, the numerology of the Timaeus.

But it was not so much the Creation as the Fall that illumination emphasized. Highly schematized portrayals of the patriarchs or of Job focused on their typological significance, prefiguring the Passion and/or Sacraments. Tobit, Judith, Maccabees were suggestive for illustration as well as the canon proper (though not to the same extent as Genesis, I Samuel, the Gospels). Christ and the church are straightforwardly depicted as the subject of the Song of Songs (or Solomon). The Virgin becomes central to the Tree of Jesse and the Book of Isaiah. Above the Canon Table (Gospel concordance the function of which was largely forgotten) of the Bible of St. Germain-des-Pres one finds depicted the Dormition and Assumption of the Virgin.

The final chapter illustrates the stages of illumination (drawing, gilding, painting) and discusses the rise of ateliers and free-lance artists.

Some of the institutions and individuals who commissioned or donated Bibles are discussed. St. Bernard's strictures against decorated Bibles are contrasted with the brilliant pages of one he owned. Learning that in 1162 the repair of a fortress cost the city of Pisa only one-third more than the Calci Bible, the cost of which was roughly equal to 850 bushels of grain or over 210 barrels of wine, helps one imagine in more concrete terms the value of the Bible in the Romanesque era.

When we reflect upon the rarity, the uniqueness of each Romanesque Bible, and consider that the production or bestowal of such a volume made a monastery or cathedral at once a center of learning, wealth, and prestige as well as a treasure-house of art, we begin to imagine the degree of power, both temporal and spiritual, associated with such a volume. In the Carolingian age, whence arose much of the Western ceremonial of coronation, enthronement and investiture, for a king or an archbishop to bestow such a volume conferred a degree of legitimacy and authority not even echoed by modern bishops or presbyteries giving even deluxe mass-produced editions--additions, rather, to the ordinands' collections of rival translations.

IV

Handling so beautiful and costly a volume as Cahn's, realizing that it will require several sittings before we are entirely at home with its plates' color and intricacy of design, can we, with eyes inured to illustrations

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and galleries, television, videogames, and psychedelic lightshows, approach conceiving the effect an entire illuminated Bible must have had upon a contemporary of Charlemagne or of William the Conqueror?

How did the Apostolic antithesis of the letter that kills and the spirit that gives life, strike the imaginations of those for whom the sacred page was filled with letters alive with beauty, initials that metamorphosed into beasts or into trees in whose branches seven doves, the Spirit's gifts, appeared to coo? Even the abstract, aniconic initials acquired the character of mystic runes, separated from the semantic framework of the text. From their energetic coils of line more concrete images emerged: patriarchs and prophets gained distinctive faces and dress and marched from illumined page to sculpted tympanum and (later) into stained glass.

The letters of Scripture not only had life; words became incarnate. Compare the Aga Khan's illuminated manuscripts of the Qu'ran recently displayed in this country. Although from periods when secular Islamic art was fully representational, they are entirely abstract. But they are beautifully illuminated. Framed by an entire page of gold leaf, written in elegantly diagonal nastaliq script, brilliantly multicolored, stands a single word of Holy Writ: an image, but an image that is a word, its meaning, its sound, vibrating with the color--mystical. Romanesque Scripture, written to be read aloud, amplifies its meaning by metamorphosing into icon--concrete, cyclical, historical, vibrating with carefully harmonized chords of meaning: the bride, the church; manna, the Mass.

The churchly context is all important. Where, after all, is the Bible to be read, but aloud, in the community, at the liturgy, at Vigil? The figures of donors, the testimonies of artists, the patron saints of recipient monasteries which adorn the frontispieces and append the texts proclaim the ecclesiastical context of the Bible's production. The illuminations speak as well of the interpretive role of tradition. Under their guidance we cannot read Genesis naively, but with the eyes of Augustine; we read Job with Gregory. Marian piety is interposed along with the riches which the church, wisely or unwisely, stole "from Egyptians": numerology and astrology, the Timaeus, and the Bestiary.

It is these aesthetic, psychological, material, and sociological aspects

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of the history of the Bible that fascinate Cahn as well as the Bible's place in art history. He points to ways in which "the composition of the text and its material presentation were complementary aspects of a single purpose. He adds, provocatively, "The portable format, the austere typography, the use of special 'Bible paper' which characterize the printed editions of our time, seem to us an appropriate garb for the archaizing sonorities of the King James version."

V

If the format and text, style, and cost of the Bible produce a single effect, what conclusions might be reached about our present situation in comparison with the Romanesque age and its Bible? Its Bible, in its beauty, rarity, and expense was regal and majestic, authoritarian, and hierarchical. Its colors evoked awe; its illustrations imposed a corporate consensus upon individual interpretation; its symbolism bespoke a polyvalent system of interpretation. Its decoration and divisions revealed it was an inter-related, organic structure. Its use was communal, liturgical, cyclical. Seasons acquired concrete associations: David could suggest midsummer; Jonah, falling leaves.

The reader of a Romanesque text found it framed by Jerome's letters. To one opening a first Bible at a time when childhood's wonder was captured by the Arthurian legend and the Coronation, the heraldic blazon of "the High and Mighty Prince, JAMES," might confer upon that text additional majesty and authority. To another it might confirm impressions of its irrelevance. One might speculate whether the format of the KJV did not provide much of the impetus that drove English-speaking Protestantism from the Reformation to Pietism. Zealous as they were to tear the text of Scripture out of the context of church tradition, allegory, legend, and gloss, the Reformers were anxious that Scripture be interpreted in historical context and through scholarly consensus. They abhorred "private interpretation." And yet the King James Version, in its classic double-columned format, with Stephanus' verse numbers, appears as nothing so much as a copia, a massive supply of divine adages or proof-texts, uniform, detachable atoms or bits of revealed data.

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One thinks easily of churches or chapels built around this Bible and what appears its connate theory of inspiration: real and carved Bibles their only decoration, their pews and aisles, viewed from above, the pattern of columned page and margins. The Bibles were indeed portable, able to be read silently and privately, smuggled or concealed. Gutenberg's press had distributed regal power to the people. Private interpretation arrived with a vengeance. Hence that invincible institution of American lay Protestantism, the "Bible Study." People not well educated about the Bible could pool subjective impressions of a text, blissfully oblivious of relevant scholarship. Are both the Fundamentalist doctrine of inspiration and the Pietist institution of lay Bible study implicitly and inseparably connected with the format of the Renaissance Bible, the Authorized Version? Is this why its verses are projected iconically on television screens and shielded from the fallout of post-Bultmannian criticism and secular culture by tooled leather tabernacles?

What hearing or vision of the Word is to be drawn from the Bible in our succeeding age of paperback editions and rival translations of less than classic prose, as the King James editions, with their august and unforgettable cadences, are gathered to their illumined fathers in museum cases and historians' studies?