Favs

A Facebook friend posted an article about books one owns but has not read. The thesis of the article was that just having books around you alters your character and outlook in a good way.

This got me to thinking about the many books I own that I, too, have not read. Some, however, I have read more than once. I wonder if that counts somehow?  And who is counting? This then lead to thinking I would do a multiple book post of my favourite books. I thought idly for a few minutes, then decided I had to think more deeply and…. then decided that idly thinking was probably a better marker of my fav books as they would like cream, rise to the top.

Here are my idle choices:  The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien; The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris; The Geometry of Love by Margaret Visser.  All three, as i will now explain fit into my mini-thread of books on religion.

I went into my library to grab the three and take cover pictures of each (I think I have already done a Bookstory post on Margaret Visser’s book, but I took a new shot anyway). While there I saw other books that I enjoyed, learned from, found useful – particularly Leonard Cohen’s Selected Poems 1956-1968.  But these three are the top three. They burrowed into my heart and my mind where they live happily and where they stir me in many ways. Not necessarily happiness as that is over-rated, but they move my spirit.

They have an essentially religious nature, or if you are one of those who are spiritual but not religious, an essentially spiritual nature. The Cloister Walk is about the experiences of a Presbyterian poet (yes, they do exist) who spent holiday time at Saint John’s Benedictine Abbey in Collegeville Minnesota, despite being a practicing member of her own church congregation.  The front cover has a blurb from the Boston Globe. The first sentence encapsulates this book completely:  ‘This is a strange and beautiful book’. I would add it is a prose work that could only be written by a poet. The Geometry of Love has a prolix title that you need to meditate on to see its appropriateness. Margaret Visser delves (and that is an apt word too) into one of the most ancient, yet less well known churches in Rome. The church is Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura and is so old that you must descend stairs to reach the level that was the ground level when the church was built. She applies a lover’s gaze at every aspect of the building’s architecture and its connection to Agnes, a young girl martyred as a Christian around about the year 304.  The Lord of the Rings may seem surprising to readers of this blog. Most these days likely know only the movies, which like Hollywood since the beginnings of that place, changed the inner soul of the book. J.R.R. Tolkien was a devout Catholic and this spirit of the inner nature of Catholic Christianity infuses The Lord of the Rings. Not in specifics – there is no obvious and crude connection with the Christian story. What the book does have at its centre is a profound belief in the relationship between the immanent and the transcendent.

This trinity of books is religious essentially. Or spiritual, if you will.

2020

For this year, Anno Domini 2020 I chose a screenshot of the way the Bible appears in this cyber era. This is an evangelical Protestant site where one can find many Bible translations and also a search box. I noticed that the default translation is the King James version. In the post on the 60s I noted that this translation was the translation for the English-speaking world, even to influencing Catholic Bibles from the 18th century into the present day.

If you click on the translation tab you will find 219 translations. The greatest number are in English, some 60 versions,  but Chinese translations are very common too. These perhaps reflect the long history of missionary work in China.  I don’t know how these statistics compare to other religions, but the numbers printed, distributed and translated into many languages and often several translations into one language is surely remarkable.

I think the early division of Christianity into east and west and also into fragments especially in the east in early days and later the fissiparous Protestant churches has meant there has never been a single official Bible from which all translations flow.  The Bible is actually a compilation of books written at different times and places and wedded together into one volume. I suppose one could see Christianity as a living coloured mosaic that has been added to and altered at different times. Or as something like white light which is in actuality all the colours of the visible spectrum merged. It may look like one but is many, joined.

Post Scriptum:  I was determined to work the word fissiparous into one of these blog posts!

And I made it before midnight eastern time and thus before the end of the 12th day of Christmas.

the 60s

In this blog post I decided to combine two 1960s style Bibles here:  one is a peculiar sort of Bible and very Protestant; the other is a standard text Bible, but deliberately Catholic.

First the 1960 Gideon New Testament, with Psalms and Proverbs. The Gideons are a group I did not know much about until I began this blog post. The Bible shown above was given to me in Grade 5 in 1960. As I recall (dimly), two men wearing brown suits came into the class, were welcomed by our teacher and spent a few minutes preaching casually, then handed out free copies as above. The Gideons (taking their name from an Old Testament figure) were formed in 1899 by two travelling salesmen in Wisconsin. According to that reliable source, Wikipedia, this group today gives away on average two Bibles per second and has distributed roughly 2 billion since they began this practice in 1908. To be a Gideon you must be male, over 21 and in a sales or professional occupation – and, most importantly a member in good standing of an evangelical Protestant church.

This idea of religion in a public school system comes up in my teaching when students here in Ontario, Canada begin to note that only Catholics have publicly funded religious schools. I can then tell them that the ‘public’ schools in Ontario were at one time ‘Protestant’  schools and publicly funded. I have personal memories of daily Bible readings, saying the Lord’s Prayer (the ‘Our Father’ to Catholics) as part of opening excercises, a general assent to Christianity from teachers, and occasional visits in class time from a local Protestant minister. And of course, the receipt of free Bibles from the Gideons.

George Grant has a good essay on the degree to which these public/Protestant schools actually assented to Christianity in the early 60s. The essay can be found in a collection of his essays, Technology and Empire (1969). The particular essay, Religion and the State, was first published in Queen’s Quarterly in 1963. The 1969 reprint has a new introduction by Grant where he critically analyzes his own earlier thinking. In general he states that the true religion of public schools was consumerism and that only lip service was paid to Protestant Christianity.  Judging by my own 1960 experience, I am not sure his assessment was entirely accurate, unless of course I was personally more attuned to faith and the message received from curriculum and teachers and Gideons than most. This inclusion of a basic, Protestant Christianity in schools was a product of the attitudes and mind of Egerton Ryerson in the 19th century. Ryerson, like Sir John A. MacDonald, has been cast from the firmament of national worship because of their ideas on indigenous education, as has the place of religion in these formerly Protestant schools.

I have also alway been curious why these gift Bibles only include the Psalms and Proverbs from the Old Testament. I have no answer, just the question.

The second Bible pictured above was published in 1966 using a 1946 updated translation originally from 1611. This is a Catholic Bible and the interesting point here is that it is not based on the first Catholic Bible English translation, but the King James Anglican version that became ‘the’ Bible for English-speaking Protestants and is still so for many today. The original Douay-Rheims Bible has a complex publication history which I won’t go into here as that would require a long article on its own. But, in the 18th century another entirely different Catholic English translation was produced in England that was based on the King James Anglican translation. It was translated so as to ensure it matched the last Latin Bible and did not conflict with Catholic theology. This 1966 Bible is in that tradition which also has a complex publication history. Like the family Bibles I described earlier in this series of blog posts, it contains explanatory notes, especially for the Old Testament indicating it is meant to be used as a study Bible. This too is new for Catholicism. The existence of English translations was part of the Catholic Reformation that followed the Protestant – sometimes called the Counter Reformation as it was seen at one time as a reaction to the Protestant reform. To some degree it was, but reform had been bubbling under the surface before Martin Luther. But what is new here for Catholics is Bible study and a Study Bible.

Both these Bibles show a Christian world in the 1960s that saw Bibles as sources of intellectual study – a type of science of the Bible, or Godly science. Given the state of Christianity in the contemporary world I think it obvious that this attempt to study the Bible as one would study Biology or Physics did not achieve positive results. I am currently struggling with Charles Taylor’s philosophical works on ‘secularism’ and his ideas such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘individuation’ as factors in the change if not the decline in Christian belief in the western world. More on this in the final installment of this series.

1954

At this point, I leap into the mid 20th century. This Bible is the same size as the 1899 Bible and the original owner, my elder brother the same age, nine, as my grandfather when he received his Bible in 1899. There are differences, however. This Bible, as was common in the United Church of Canada, was given to students free at a certain age in Sunday School. It is cloth bound, not leather and has no special identifier on the cover. It has maps at the back, but in black and white and only three: ‘The Ancient World’ (actually the eastern Mediterranean sometime prior to the arrival of the Roman Empire in the east); ‘Palestine’, with three inset maps of Palestine at the time of the Tribes of Israel; at the time of the Kingdoms of Judah & Israel and ancient Jerusalem; thirdly, ‘The Mediterranean World in the First Century’ – listing some of the Roman provinces and showing as far west as Italy. The book is published by the American Bible Society and is less obviously directed towards historical study than the 1899 Bible.

Sunday School classes in the United Church of Canada were heavily weighted towards teaching basic Christianity utilizing the Bible, reinforced by hymns for children such as Jesus Bids Us Shine.

My memory of my elder brother (who died of cancer 16 years ago) was of a natural cynic about Christianity. He claimed to me when a teenager that he had read through the Bible and was unimpressed. When my family lived in Toronto and he was a teenager, my parents made him attend their United Church congregation there, rather than senior Sunday School. I recall one time when I attended too,  instead of going to Sunday School, he gave me lessons on how to avoid boredom. He brought along paper and a pencil and sat drawing pictures or doodling through the service. He told me I should do the same if I were ever required to undergo this experience in the future.

In later life he became an aficionado of various exotic spiritualities. After his death, when my sister and I travelled to the family home where his life ended, I found a book shelf filled with volumes on Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto and New Age material, but no Bibles. I think he was a bit ahead of his time in terms of the decline of active (or even passive) Christian belief in Canada. A harbinger, if you will.

It is interesting though, that he kept this Bible, even if not on his main bookshelf.

Insurance?

1899

This is the first of this series that is not a ‘family Bible’, but a 6 X 4 inch personal Bible. As such it has no section between the Old and New Testaments for family rites of passage. As you can see it has an inscription:  a gift from my mother’s grandparents to her father when he was a boy at Christmas in 1899. His grandfather came initially from Liverpool, first to Jamaica, then to Canada. His father moved from Kingston, Ontario to Oswego NY, then to Rochester NY.

The Bible bears the imprint of Oxford University Press, American branch and was printed in the U.S. His parents had his name printed in gold lettering on the front cover. Considering it is roughly 121 years old, the book is in remarkably good condition. The cover is leather with some fraying as can be seen above, but the pages are pristine as are the colour maps at the back. Maps are important in these 19th century Bibles as they were used for study: of scripture and its meaning and with maps to place the events mentioned in the text. The first map shows Egypt and the Sinai tracing the journeys of the Israelites on their way to ‘the promised land’. Next is a map of ‘Canaan’ with tribal names added. Then comes a map of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel. Following are maps of Palestine in the Roman era and time of Jesus; Jerusalem and environs; and the eastern Mediterranean showing the travels of St. Paul.  History figured large in the thought world of the 19th century. This centrality of history, based to a degree on Christianity, lasted into the 1960s at least, in schools. At some point after that History, except national history, was no longer a required subject. This makes one wonder if we, in the West, are now a people without history, without a foundation, drifting about  where the winds of social change and fad drive us. I wonder too if the decline in Christianity in the West is one cause of the removal of required History courses from High School curricula. If the goal of worship is the nation state and not the divine, then History declines in importance.

I found most interesting the fact that a Bible was considered to be a good Christmas gift in 1899 for a nine year old boy (my grandfather was born in 1890). This was not a notably religious family. They were members of the Church of England in England and Canada and the American equivalent, the Episcopal church in Rochester, NY.  Apparently later in life my grandfather became a Baptist, which according to the research of the sociologist Reginald Bibby is unuusal. For Canada anyway, he tracked denominational change and found concentric circles: Anglicans might become Catholic; Catholics Anglican; Methodists might become Anglican or Baptist; Anglicans might become Methodists, but almost never go as far afield as the Baptist church.  People, when they changed denomination stayed within the loosely familiar, that is – unless this occurred through marriage. Even here though, as religion is intrinsic to culture (anthropologically defined), marriage was within degrees of cultural familiarity.

I don’t know enough about my grandfather to know how deeply he felt his faith, except that he did begin attending a Baptist church as an adult. But I do know he liked his booze – usually cheap rotgut – and this is not an aspect of Baptist behaviour, though it is acceptable for Episcopalians. Again, religion is more than about theology; it is a way of life.

1873

This is another Harding published Bible, belonging to my father’s mother. It has some interesting aspects as compared to the first two of my trio of 19th century Bibles. Firstly, for the economic historian, the price and place of purchase are given:  $15.00 in Oswego, NY.  I found a handy inflation calculator that tells me that $15 US is in 2020 equivalent to $338.43.  This is $439.40 in Canadian dollars today, January 2, 2020. The most expensive modern Bible I could find in roughly the same size and bound in genuine calfskin leather,  retails for $119.99 US. Here are the particulars of this modern version from the publisher’s site (Thomas Nelson Bibles – a division of HarperCollins (see the 1864 Bible post):

• 9780785220718
• Release DateDec 18, 2018
• Weight 4.210
• Height 11.11 in
• Width 6.11 in
• Pages 2240
• Price $119.99  (155.79 Canadian)
• Bible Translation New King James Version
• Features Ribbon Marker, Thumb Index
• Language English

The 1873 Aseltine Bible weighs 9.4 pounds and measures 11 inches by 9 inches.

So, the 1873 Bible (purchased in 1874) is more expensive than the most expensive printed Bible today. This is one case where inflation worked in reverse.

The 1873 Bible has improved on the 1860 by the same publisher. It has ‘glossing’ (marginal notes – the kind teachers used to punish you for scribbling in the margins of books, but which has a long and honorable history). It has an extensive note index, but no colour, unlike the 1864 Collins Bible.

What interests me here more, however, is the cross border factor. The Aseltine or sometimes written Asselstine family were (and perhaps still are) a large family scattered around the Kingston, Ontario region. If you ever visit Upper Canada Village along the St. Lawrence river east of Kingston, one of the displays is the Asselstine Woolen Mill.  The link here doesn’t say where the building was moved from, but I know it was moved from Odessa, Ontario, a village just north of Kingston.

This family were of Dutch origin, living in the Hudson Valley region of New York.  The Canadian branch were Loyalists who fled to Upper Canada after the American Revolution. They set up one of their businesses in Odessa, Ontario. The purchaser of this Bible, William Henry Aseltine moved back and forth across the border. This was common in those days. Even in my day, so to speak, all you needed was a birth certificate to prove you were Canadian to cross into the U.S. Oswego NY was the closest town on the US side for Canadians in eastern Ontario.

Anti-semitism is a side note of the history shown in this Aseltine family Bible – William Henry Aseltine had a son named Charles who became a bank manager in New York City for the Chase National Bank.  Here is a bit of banking history for you. The Chase National Bank was formed in 1877 and through a number of characteristic capitalistic mergers and purchases is today JPMorgan Chase and Company, but operates publicly as the Chase Bank. Why did I zip off in this direction?  Well!  When my ancestor Charles Asselstine began to climb the corporate ladder in NYC, he was told his name sounded too Jewish. So, he changed the family name to Aseltine from Asselstine. Further research by me a few years back revealed that in the 16th century, the Asselstines in the Netherlands were in fact Jewish and converted to Reformed Christianity and later moved to the Dutch New Amsterdam colony. The Brits took New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed the colony New York.  This unearthed bit of family history made real the dry facts of what I label in my courses ‘the other’ and its very real consequences for real people.

What else can I draw out of this material object for the understanding of religion and life in the 19th century?  The Bible is leather bound and has a metal clasp to hold it closed. It is published and printed in Philadelphia. A middle class man (and what is interesting here is that the book was purchased by a man, not a woman) thought it important enough to spend a large amount of money on it.

Inside on the ‘Marriages’ page between the Old and New Testaments, William Henry takes the first entries and reveals another fact of 19th century life. He was married twice. Today that would normally mean a divorce and remarriage. But in the 19th century, that meant a first wife who died as the result of child birth. The Charles who changed his name was my grandmother’s half brother from the first marriage. Men had to be married for a number of reasons in the 19th century, as did women for other reasons. Modern understandings of marriage and family see the traditional role of women as one of oppression, but in an era where family was central and science and technology weak,  a wife was a necessity to run all the many tasks of a household allowing the husband to concentrate on work. A husband was necessary as pregnancy made work difficult if not impossible.   Why did men work outside the household and women in? There is a whole literature on this, but here is the condensed version:  work mostly meant physical labour for most people and men biologically have greater muscle mass and aggression, and to repeat the evidence from this Bible, women often died in child birth. This set a gender role for men and women whether they worked at labour or in offices. These roles had an economic basis therefore, that was reinforced by religion.

The feminist movement did not change this in any real sense until the invention of the birth control pill in the 1960s. It is no accident that Christian churches began to accommodate divorce, as did the law, also in the 1960s. The earlier beginnings of home technology – vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and the slow decline of death caused by child birth due to the growth of medical science preceded the ‘pill’, but women gaining control over reproduction was the essential agent of social change. The existence of the centre pages with places for family milestones (marriages, births, deaths) indicates the also central role of religion in family life.  I could not find any reference to these pages being included in modern ‘family’ Bibles. I’m not immediately sure what to make of this lack.

It is on the basis of material evidence combined with documentary evidence that we can, as R.G. Collingwood noted, rethink the thoughts of the past and in this case begin to understand the integration of religion and society.

1864

This Bible has its covers – detached but still in existence. The interior of the front matter gives a date of 1864, but for some reason, the title page for the New Testament says 1865. I wanted to put the cover front and centre to give an idea of the intricacy and heft of book covers for family Bibles in the mid 19th century. I have added other images: the title page showing this, the Bates family Bible, was published and printed in Glasgow Scotland. An interior note says the company had permission from the Crown to produce 3,000 copies of this edition. William Collins & Co. is an interesting example of publishing. The firm began as a publisher of Bibles and religious books in 1819, indicating that this was a profitable niche. A hundred years later it began to publish fiction, murder mysteries in particular. Now it is part of the conglomerate HarperCollins as publishing companies attempt to deal with the rise of eBooks and the online world in general by uniting into larger firms.

It is indeed, deluxe. Not only does it have the usual black & white artwork illustrating scenes from the Bible, this edition contains coloured maps and has, running in a column down the centre of each page, explanatory notes and references to the text on either side.

Family Bibles were not some dusty book on a shelf sitting ignored, but were used for study by the family. In the 1860 post I focussed on the integration of religion with business. Here you see the integration of faith with daily, family life.  The entries in the same handwriting and pen were probably done in the 1880s by my grandmother’s mother (a Wright from the 1860 Wright family Bible). I don’t mean to get into genealogy here, but am thinking through the time period that family Bibles were used, at least in my mother’s family. The last entries in this Bates family Bible were made by my mother between the 1940s and the early 1970s. This is important also to note something useful to the historian:  handwriting. Handwriting (now called cursive for some cursed reason) is highly individualistic. Thus you can get a sense of who wrote what, when. An historian will not necessarily or even usually know the individual doing the writing (I recognize my mother’s handwriting as she used to send me letters), but can discern different personal styles and assign rough dates to them. Future historians who are taught only printing and not handwriting will have to take special classes in reading handwriting in the future or lose a large swathe of historical information.

Bibles

It is Christmas 2019. I don’t mean Christmas Day, but the season of Christmas. The specific date I am writing this first post for the season is December 28, 2019. For most today, Christmas begins sometime in December and ends on Christmas Day or perhaps what Canadians call Boxing Day, December 26 (though advertizers shout about Boxing Week now for their sales). But for Christians of the sort who observe the Church year, Christmas begins on December 25 and ends on January 6. This is the fourth day of the Christmas season. I decided a week ago to do something with the several old Bibles I have, but did not have time until now.

I spent the past hour sorting photographs I took with my old iPhone 7 of parts of each Bible. I will devote a post to each over the next few days. I have seven Bibles and ten days, sensibly allowing myself time for the duties that consume about 10-12 hours of each day before I can get to writing.

The seven:

1. 1860 Wright Family Bible (part of my maternal grandmother’s family)
2. 1864 Bates Family Bible (my maternal grandmother’s family)
3. 1873 Aseltine Family Bible (my paternal grandmother’s family)
4. 1899 Harrison Kemp Bible (my maternal grandfather’s boyhood Bible)
5. 1954 Dennis Brian Kemp Smith Bible (my elder brother’s childhood Bible)
6. 1960 My Gideon New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs (given to me in 1960)
7. 1966 Ignatius Catholic Bible (purchased by me sometime in the 1990s)
8. 2019 Bible Gateway Online Bible (many versions – downloaded to my iPhone)

Today’s Scripture reading which seems appropriate:  Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest  (NIV Matthew 11:28)

I prefer the King James Version for prayer and the NIV for study.

Church

I decided to write this in red and bold because it is an unsual topic. Margaret Visser, a former professor of Classics at York University in Toronto, is in reality a civilized lover of the idea of humanity and all our works. 

This book is one of the strangest I have looked at on this strange blog of mine. The title does not tell you anything about the contents, you must read the book. Usually a title gives you a hint that either impells you to open the book and see what it is about, or to reject it. In this case, you must read the book in order to understand the title. This book looks at one ancient church in Rome, Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura (St. Agnes outside the walls).  She (Margaret, not Agnes) examines every part of the church with a loving gaze, penetrating to the hearts of the people who built it, populated it, worshipped in it and to the little girl saint the building and its lovers honour.

It is the best study of architecture and the place of architecture in the human imagination I have read.

Margaret Vissser says in her introduction that this is not a church description based on “dates and measurements”, rather it is a plot, a narrative that she follows from the point of entering the church and on to the end of its story, encased in the building. It is a “trajectory of the soul” she says.

What is it to me, then? I read this book years ago. If you notice the funny, white abstraction in the lower left corner of the cover picture, you might wonder what that could be. It is where one of my dogs at some point chewed the book, nearly destroying it whole before I grabbed it away. I think my first Labrador, Zoë, yellow in colour and with a wild heart of joy was the culprit. I tasted this book too as I read it; she tasted it literally. It is like a many course meal, or a feast of several days, where new savouries and sweets greeted me around each corner and on each new page.

Margaret Visser, The Geometry of Love:  Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church. Toronto: Harper Perennial, 2008

 

Does night follow the Dawn…or dawn the night?

Historians rarely write ‘big books’ anymore. We, as a breed, are esconced mostly in the study of the minutiae of history. Pubs in Upper Canada, parish folk in medieval England, Jesuit missionaries in New France, etc. Today I wrote a very different blog post – in my last purely blogging blog – commenting on Niall Ferguson’s now several years old ideas on the decline of western civilization. This got me to remembering this book. They both reach similar conclusions: that once a civilization loses self-confidence it is done, to put it brutally. Or as Jacques Barzun opines, it is now decadent. This book spoke to me in my own decline. I am now 67 years old and well past my ‘best by’ and ‘best buy’ dates, like western civilization. I think Prof. Barzun made the better case as he came at the debate from the point of view of culture. Or, maybe Niall Ferguson is better in print than on TV, though he is an impressively good TV presenter. I should try reading one of Dr. Ferguson’s books, rather than merely watching him on YouTube. But two things stand out for me in Jacques Barzun’s book:  his understanding that cultural history – and indeed history at all, is a web of many strands and not a simple linear tale. What stood out most for me is his statement: I have not consulted current prejudices. Too many commentators and, alas, historians alike do consult current prejudices. Which is another sign of decline.