I have not been a very good blogger of late. Late posts, missed posts and sort posts, not to mention several that have only scarcely been in theme. Today is Medieval Monday and I not only have one thing for you, I have two.

Anyone who spends thirteen seconds or more around me knows that I am an atheist and have a great respect and love for SCIENCE! especially biological science. The natural world is spectacular and the people who are able to spend their lives mapping and discovering and understanding it are pretty neat. Anyone who has been able to ensure those seconds will also realise that I reserve a great deal of hatred for creationists and ID-advocates, those who seek to undermine all the work that these scientists do.

Greta Christina, atheism-and-sex blogger extraordinare, wrote today about these vile people. I am not particularly interested in most of her post -it does not say anything the few remaining Christians reading this would disagree with- but she notes something I find interesting:

Let's say you're a theist. Let's say you believe in God, a creator god who made the world and the universe in all its beautiful and astonishing complexity.

Wouldn't you want to understand that universe, as well and as thoroughly as you could?

The answer for the modern Creationist/IDiot is "No," of course. However, Christina unknowingly touches on something medieval with that comment: once upon a time, they did. I have touched upon this topic before, albeit briefly, when I was doing research on Newton as the end of the medieval world-view. Gould also touched on it, once, in "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds."

Medieval scholars sought to uncover the mind of God via the three pathways available: revelation, scripture and the natural world. Scripture is obvious, as is revelation, and the natural world was described by Pliny and other ancient texts. However, the scholars (very) gradually became discontent with mere authority, especially where it seemed to contradict actual natural events. They sought greater and greater understanding of the world around them: the world created for them, by God.

These were Christian scholars not only using the rational inquiry God had granted them, but using to investigate His world in order to appreciate His grandeur and His gift. This is the magnificent unfurling of rational thought which would eventually lead to the rift between science and religion so famously exemplified by Galileo. Nonetheless, these thinkers and philosophers and clerics doing the absolute best they could.

I firmly believe -sans evidence, of course- that they would have regarded Creationists with absolute contempt. They sought to understand the universe in all its beautiful and astonishing complexity and, through that understanding, uncover the mind of God. God is magnificent and complex to these folk; He works in mysterious ways. They firmly believed that the universe was for us, and would remain conservative with regard the Great Demotions that Sagan wrote about.¹ However, God would not lie to you. Or to them. The world was a reflection of God; His word was instilled in every piece of it. The world speaks to us of Him and to deny the evidence is to deny God.

Creationists deny the evidence. They deny God. They belittle Him and strip Him of dignity and power and grandeur; they corrupt and mislead; they lie. Few scholars in the medieval period would want to be associated with these people.

Along a similar line of thought, I want to talk a little about the Bible. I, like Dawkins,² completely support the idea that the Bible is a great, classical work of literature. It is on par with the Illiad or the Nordic sagas or a multitude of other texts; it is magnificent. It contains grand and sweeping dramas of human mytho-history, history and mythology.

It is also a bitch to translate.

Saint Jerome struggled with the Vulgate and generations of scholars of language, theology and literature have struggled with correct form since his time. The several languages of the original texts, the complex religious, historical and philosophical context, the need to disseminate the information to as many people as possible, and importantly the ever-pressing need for the translation to be as close as possible to the original and yet be a creative and idiomatic work in the new tongue.

Damn hard work. One has sympathy for the Muslim dislike of Qu'ranic translations. Which is why, for all the flaws, the King James English translation is such a classic; it is a magnificent work in its own right. There are other Modern English translations which are decent enough, and they are often heavily annotated to minimize lost information.

So, I wonder, who would honestly prefer The Message? It is such a banal, childish translation that I wonder how anyone could see a God within. Let alone a God who created this amazing, transcendent universe. A simple comparative glance of the Lord's Prayer reveals this pathetic display. "You're in charge!" it proclaims, in stark contrast to the more usual "For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever."

Disgusting.

The Reformation ended medieval religion (more or less), but the translations of the Bible into the vernacular did not minimize the magnificence. I can't speak for Luther or Agricola, but the edition popularised by James is still a magnificent piece of work. The Reformers still regarded their God of the highest importance, a being transcendent above all other things. Religion should inspire and translation should capture the original beauty of the text. The Message fails on every count.

One reason I study the medieval period is because of the magnificent religion spawned during the period, with stunning heights and diabolical lows. The spread of what was once a small middle-eastern cult to stunningly transform barbaric tribes into glittering empires is one of these heights (and a low, truthfully). These people, these creationists and these Messagers, they seek to take a religion which was once magnificent and inspiring and reduce it to mud and ashes.



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1: Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, Chapter 3: The Great Demotions.
2: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, 340-344.