“It may be asked whether now, when only a minority of Englishmen regard the Bible as a sacred book, we may anticipate an increase of its literary influence. I think we might if it continued to be widely read. But this is not very likely. Our age has, indeed, coined the expression ‘the Bible as literature.’ It is very generally implied that those who have rejected its theological pretensions nevertheless continue to enjoy it as a treasure house of English prose. It may be so. There may be people who, not having been forced upon familiarity with it by believing parents, have yet been drawn to it by its literary charms and remained as constant readers. But I never happen to meet them. Perhaps it is because I live in the provinces. But I cannot help suspecting, if I may make an Irish bull, that those who read the Bible as literature do not read the Bible.
It would be strange if they did. If I am right in thinking that the Bible, apart from its sacred character, appeals most easily to a Romantic taste, we must expect to find it neglected and even disliked in our own age…
I think it very unlikely that the Bible will return as a book unless it returns as a sacred book…Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only ‘mouth honor’ and that decreasingly. For it is, through and through, a sacred book. Most of its component parts were written, and all of them were brought together, for a purely religious purpose. It contains good literature and bad literature. But even the good literature is so written that we can seldom disregard its sacred character. It is easy enough to read Homer while suspending our disbelief in the Greek pantheon; but then the Illiad was not composed chiefly, if at all, to enforce obedience to Zeus and Athena and Poseidon. The Greek tragedians are more religious than Homer, but even there we have only religious speculation or at least the poet’s personal religious ideas, not dogma. That is why we can join in. Neither Aeschylus nor even Virgil tacitly prefaces his poetry with the formula, ‘Thus say the gods.’ But in most parts of the Bible everything is implicitly or explicitly introduced with ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ It is, if you like to put it that way, not merely a sacred book but a book so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does not invite, it excludes or repels, the merely aesthetic approach. You can read it as literature only by a tour de force. You are cutting the wood against the grain, using the tool for a purpose it was not intended to serve. It demands incessantly to be taken on its own terms: it will not continue to give literary delight very long except to those who go to it for something quite different. I predict that it will in the future be read, as it always has been read, almost exclusively by Christians…
For the Bible, whether in the Authorized or in any other version, I foresee only two possibilities; either to return as a sacred book or to follow the classics, if not quite into oblivion yet into the ghost-life of the museum and the specialist’s study. Except, of course, among the believing minority who read it to be instructed and get literary enjoyment as a by-product.” (C. S. Lewis, The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version, pp. 29-34)
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