Liber Scriptus: The Sensible Book.

I have to confess that I’m bi-graphical:  I have two handwritings. There’s the neat, show-offy birthday card writing, with rounded ‘o’s and graceful ‘t’s and ‘l’s, and then there’s the scruffy grocery list writing, with wonky slopes and squashed ‘g’s and ‘y’s.  Depending on mood and distraction, the same words might be written in different ways.

            This leads me to wonder if the presentation of writing reflects how we receive it. Whether the beautifully bound, gold-edged Bible (a confirmation present) is any more of a pleasure to read than the battered paperback volume in the backpack. Whether the gold-edged Bible is even read at all: perhaps it’s too precious to touch. Touch, that vital link with the inhabited world, can add pleasure to reading or it can repel.  I own a copy of a book on meditation so sensually produced —with its thick, creamy paper, its lavish but not overwhelming size, its lightness and substantiality combined — that just holding it is meditation for the hands.

            Then there’s the question of what is written in the book. Here I just mention another of the senses, hearing: hearing about writing, this time through music.  For Mozart, the words ‘Liber Scriptus’ in the Requiem Mass are a calm, fluent tenor solo in the midst of a classic trio, leading to the great choral heralding of “Rex Tremendae Majestatis” — the King of Fearful Majesty —coming to judge the world with justice: the final moment for God’s justice to prevail.  For Verdi, by the nineteenth century, it’s an operatic oration, setting the stage for a grand if terrifying drama. For Britten, who had seen Belsen concentration camp soon after its liberation, it’s a spine-chilling soprano declamation: an ambassador’s announcement of dreadful events.  ‘Liber Scriptus’ is the book in which are contained the deeds of humankind by which the world shall be judged.  It is the written book: these deeds cannot be altered; they have already taken place.

            Surely the Bible, a collection of books which is in one sense a history of the world (for there are many senses), contains these matters which must be judged: wars, genocides, invasions, deportations, imperial aggressions, repressions, persecutions; slavery, incest, rape, murder; betrayals, rejection of strangers entitled to protection; lies, greed, grinding down of the poor.  Hatred of neighbours; worship of money.  Vengeance, ruthlessness, self-interest as a way of life. Read the Bible, and you’ll be astonished at how little has changed in the last few thousand years.

           But there is another sensibility in the Bible, and especially in the Gospels. The figure of Jesus of Nazareth offers a way of compassion, a view of the kindness of God and the forgiveness of sins for those who repent.  To repent, forswear violence, and follow a way of goodness/beauty can’t change the words in the written book: events in which I (and sometimes a whole generation) have been implicated have already come to pass, and their consequences will play out in the mortal world.  But perhaps new words can be written, for there is a fountain of divine mercy — ‘fons pietatis’ in the liturgy —and it’s never too late to appeal for ever-flowing salvation.