A group of monks enjoys a table conversation during the Christmas season. Left to right: Fr. Daniel, Bro. Alban (facing away), Fr. Valerian, Fr. Julian and Bro. Michael.
The cover of one of the reproduction volumes of the St. John's Bible. |
The Saint John’s Bible: Gospels and Acts, produced by Donald Jackson and a team of scribes and artists. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical 2004. $64.95. ISBN 0-8146-9051.3,) Illuminating the Word: Making the Saint John’s Bible, by Christopher Calderhead. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2004. $39.95. 216 pp. ISBN 0-8146-9050-5.)
Every now and then an idea comes along that is simply breathtaking. Either it is brilliant or it is utterly silly. The Saint John’s Bible is one of those ideas. Although the rest of this review will show that I am of the first persuasion, I can well imagine that many people would be less impressed. After all, this is the first complete handwritten Bible produced in the West since the invention of printing by J. Gutenberg in c. 1450.
Why has nobody bothered to do something like this for five hundred years? Well, for one thing, it is extremely hard to do and therefore very expensive. It is well-known that manuscript Bibles took years to write and therefore were so costly that they had to be chained to the lecterns. No doubt The Saint John’s Bible will also have to be guarded if the monks use it in the liturgy, as they plan to do. But the production of a manuscript Bible also requires skills and talents that are almost obsolete in the early 21st Century.
The most obvious skill is beautiful writing, that is, calligraphy. Nowadays, when schools no longer teach penmanship and most people can only manage a childish scrawl, truly expert and exquisite writing is a rare commodity. Nevertheless, there still are professional calligraphers left in the world and Donald Jackson is one of them. He is the Queen’s Calligrapher, which means he executes some of the documents produced by the British Parliament. But apparently he also has enough spare time to embark on a huge project like The Saint John’s Bible.
As Christopher Calderhead makes clear in his account of the project (Illuminating the Word), the project was Jackson’s idea. Over the years he had taught national seminars on calligraphy at St. John’s, so he knew the monks well. Their progressive artistic and theological vision emboldened him to propose to them a manuscript version of the Gospels and Acts. When he was asked what this would cost, he tossed off a glib figure: “About a million dollars.”
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If that sounds preposterous, and it certainly did to many of the St. John’s monks, be advised that the whole project will eventually cost about seven times that much. We know that, because the finished Bible will consist of seven quires, each costing about a million dollars. Where St. John’s can come up with that kind of money is bewildering to the ordinary mind, but the monks are honest enough to admit that the project will in fact be a fund-raising tool for the entire institution. Nothing wrong with that. Besides, it is wonderful to see the Church engaging the artistic community to this extent.
But as Calderhead explains it, St. John’s is not just the funder for this project. In fact, the theological and artistic faculty of the University provided a hard working commission that guided and controlled the theological dimensions of the project. This group, headed by Michael Patella, O.S.B., picked out the biblical passages to be illustrated and also provided detailed exegesis of these texts to guide the artists. So this really is a St. John’s Bible in the active sense. These exegetical briefs will eventually be published so we can all see what theology lies behind the magnificent illuminations in these books.
Once the groundwork had been laid, Donald Jackson had to organize a whole team to produce his great Bible. Centered on his studio in rural Wales, he gathered scribes, illuminators and various technicians needed to bring off the project. Although he is a master calligrapher and actually designed the script used for the text, Jackson himself did not do much of the writing. Instead, he labored mightily at the dozens and dozens of illuminations, each of which is a work of art in itself. But laying behind it all was the computer.
What place has the computer got in a project which deliberately employs materials and methods from the Middle Ages? Well, the whole Bible had to be precisely laid out in advance so that several persons could work on different parts simultaneously. It was not just a matter of someone starting to write Genesis and dropping in illustrations here and there ad libitum. Actually, the medieval Bibles were also laid out in advance; we know this because many of the illuminations were never filled in. At any rate, every single line of The Saint John’s Bible was laid out in advance (and gently tweaked) by a computer expert. The scribes were writing off these printouts. As for Donald Jackson, he expresses no reservations about making heavy use of the computer in the production of his Bible. He is not an ideologue but a practical man who is willing to use whatever makes the project go.
Even though Jackson himself did not do much of the actual writing, he designed the “typeface” to be written. That means that the other scribes all had to learn this common hand and try to stick to it. Since they worked at home all over England, they had to meet periodically and review how much they were deviating from the norm. Of course, the average eye could detect little or no variation, but an expert calligrapher certainly can. Still, it must be admitted that variety is precisely what makes a handwritten manuscript so charming.
Why did Jackson invent a new calligraphic style? According to Christopher Calderhead, who is himself a graphics expert and who spent long hours in Jackson’s shop, modern English requires a slightly different type style from the great historical alphabets such as Uncial, Carolingian, Gothic and Italic. The reason is that English has more “ascenders and descenders” (letters that extend above and below the line) than Greek or Latin. Therefore, something must be done to lighten these elements. I was wondering why my own calligraphy often looks so ugly and here is the reason.
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At this point, I have given myself away. I confess it: I am a calligrapher. That does not mean that Donald Jackson would hire me. It just means that I have been writing in the Italic style for almost fifty years, sometimes using a chisel point fountain pen and sometimes a good old BIC. In fact, I converted my handwriting entirely to Italic at age 21. For a while, my test papers in seminary were illegible. This in itself does not qualify me to review these books, but I will say that good calligraphy does exhilarate me in a way that it would not most people.
When I was studying in Europe, I had a wonderful chance to travel the whole continent looking at the great churches and the great masterpieces in the famous museums. If I had to pinpoint the most beautiful thing I saw that whole summer (1976), it was Codex Amiatinus in the Laurentian Library in Florence. As I gazed at the astonishing perfection of this Uncial manuscript, I remember almost passing out from admiration and joy. How could anyone write so perfectly and gorgeously line after line, page after page? Ancient calligraphy was fantastically skillful and delicate.
My own experience also tells me that it was really hard work writing this book. One of the scribes told Calderhead that it usually took her three and a half hours to write a page, whereas it took another scribe about seven. Unlike medieval scribes, these people no doubt worked in rooms with good light and adequate heating. But the sheer concentration needed to write beautifully hour after hour is staggering. Furthermore, all of these experienced scribes had to submit their personal styles to the Jackson alphabet and the common parameters of the project. Like the medieval cathedrals and Bibles, there are no signatures on this project. It is all anonymous. Not surprisingly, some scribes resigned from the project after giving it a try for a few days.
As for the illumination, it differs more widely from the ancient forms than does the text. There are a few Byzantine icons, but mostly we find a rather dynamic “diagonal” style that emphasizes energetic brush-strokes of the paintbrush. When one first opens the pages of The Gospels and Acts the great swashes of color leap off the page. The style is generally much looser than with ancient illumination. Having seen a few of the Jackson originals at the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library at Collegeville, I can say that the printed colors are not quite as brilliant, but that is understandable.
Even though the written text is beautiful, and on a par with the best medieval calligraphy, I think the illuminations will become world famous. They are already appearing in periodicals like America, and the Liturgical Press is savvy enough to make them available in the form of full-size prints. Donald Jackson is not just a calligrapher, he is a serious painter. This just may be some of the finest sacred art produced in our time. Not only is the color outstanding, but the biblical themes are treated in very subtle fashion. There is a lot to meditate here.
To speak of The Saint John’s Bible: Gospels and Acts as a printed book, we might ask how it can be used. Since it is quite large (10 x 15 inches), it is quite suitable for public display. But for purposes of public reading, I would find the text a bit too small. This is because this facsimile is only two-thirds of the original. It is fine for personal lectio divina even for old eyes like mine, but I would not advise anyone to try to decipher the tiny, tiny footnotes without a magnifying glass. These notes were included only because the biblical translation that was used, the Revised Standard Version, requires them for all printed versions.
Someone who has not studied the whole project in Calderhead’s Illuminating the Word may be puzzled at what appear to be faint smudges on the text. In fact, these are not smudges at all but the writing on the obverse side of the page. This is because the original is not written on paper, but fine leather (vellum) pages, which are slightly translucent. Another startling detail in this volume appears in the text of Mark 3: 21: a little bird flying with a line of text in its mouth, a line which the scribe left out.
That is a charming little joke, but it is also a reminder of what an unforgiving process it is to write on vellum. You can erase as you go along, but when you have spent seven hours writing a page, and you see you have left out a line, you can either throw out the whole skin, jump off a bridge or devise a clever little scheme like this one. To me, the important thing about this mistake is that it tells us that this book was written by human beings. Of course, all books are written thus, but there is something quintessentially human about writing a book by hand. In that sense, The Saint John’s Bible does us the great favor of repeating one of the great human achievements.
Not only do we have a facsimile of the finished product of this process in The Gospels and Acts, but with Christopher Calderhead’s book, we also have an excellent record of the process itself. Anybody who wants to know what it is like to actually produce a handwritten Bible will surely want to read this book. I was vaguely aware of some of the skills and techniques required, but Calderhead takes you into the details in a way that you almost feel you are there. Sometimes we almost feel we are getting under Jackson’s feet, but it is worth his wrath to see what is going on.
Take the matter of the vellum. To put it in quantitative terms, it took 1050 calfskins to make this book. These are not just ordinary calfskins, of which there are plenty at any stockyard, but first quality skins. Apparently, there is only one firm left in existence that could provide Jackson with enough good vellum, namely, the same one that provides the British Parliament. But Jackson had to inspect every skin because only one out of three was large enough and sufficiently unblemished to suit his standards. Yet even with the best skins, this is still organic material and full of irregularities. After all, the scribes of the Book of Kells had to work around a few wormholes.
It is also the best handwriting material in the world. I myself have never written on vellum but it must be a quasi-mystical experience to work with a surface that provides just the right bite for your pen, absorbs the ink uniformly and permits you to make clean thicks and thins. In order to come up with such a material, the Jackson team has to spend endless hours soaking, scraping and generally coddling the vellum. And they have to be especially careful when they are laying all kind of paint and gold leaf on it for the illustrations. One can imagine how easily things can go wrong.
A lot can go wrong with the pens, too. These people write with quills, not out of antiquarian stubbornness but because apparently quills are simply the best pens there are and have ever been. Obviously, a quill takes a lot of maintenance. The scribe has to cut the nib angles just so and keep them trimmed. Most of all, one has to start with the right kind of quill, namely, the lead feather of a turkey or goose. In this case, Jackson was able to acquire as many good wild goose feathers as he wanted in Minnesota, which is full of the Canadian variety.
Speaking of Minnesota flora and fauna, The Saint John’s Bible also features insects from the Land of 10,000 Lakes. Every now and then we find them adorning the margins of the text, and sometimes they figure in the illuminations as well. They are beautifully painted by Chris Tomlin, a specialist in this kind of art. One might ask, though, what beetles and grasshoppers are doing in a Bible? The answer is that this is nothing new, for medieval Bibles were full of fanciful and playful creatures. Apparently, the purpose was to keep the pages sufficiently lively to the eye. The handwritten Saint John’s Bible is thus hymn to God’s creation.
Does Illuminating the Word: Making the Saint John’s Bible have any shortcomings? It was not made in heaven, so there are some problems. Since it contains a lot of very good photographs of the artists and their work, the book is printed on glossy paper. But that does make the text a bit hard to read. I also feel that the text is too small for comfort. The captions are ridiculously small. One can understand that in the facsimile volume, but there is no parallel reason here. In comparative terms, these volumes are very reasonably priced. Perhaps they are subsidized by St. John’s Abbey.
We have noted that The Gospels and Acts is only the first book of the set to be published. What about the rest of the project? Is it on schedule? Is it likely to be completed? God knows, many historical Bibles were never completed, which is not surprising given the fact that they often took decades to produce. But The Saint John’s Bible is right on schedule and there is little chance it will not be completed. The deadline for the Jackson team is summer of 2007. May God be with them!
(To be Continued)
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