Let in the Light

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We discuss pneuma and its translation as “Spirit”. In John 3 (“no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit”), she observes, “there’s this whole play on the word pneuma and it becomes a life breath, this essence of life, an essence of God’s life, of God giving life, and then the wind and its mysteries, the mysteries of its movement. It’s really kind of mind-blowing, the poetics of the whole thing, and the medieval scribe or Renaissance translator up to the modern era — people did not have an idea of how the rhetoric of this vocabulary could work, or how this vocabulary could work to elaborate the very important concepts here. Just rubber-stamp one word ‘spirit’ in English. The Patois translation allows the Bible’s humour to come through, such as in Jesus’s words about the log in one’s eye, she says: “the way he says it would be like how my Dad would have said it.” Patois is a “very animated” language, she explains, with its origins in West Africa and some words taken directly from Twi. Sometimes, she notes, laughing, Jesus will ask “ee? ee?” when asking a question. “I just love it.” James sees himself as an animateur , activating creativity and encouraging the young people to see themselves as artists. Both the environment of the CAMHS unit and the subject-matter the young people were asked to focus on was very difficult – exploring these experiences in an arts context was a challenge. James wanted the young people to understand the rigour of creating art without falling for stereotypical expectations of what an artist is or how they make art.

Sometimes I just give up,” she tells me. “I crumble and I translate the word with two or three English words.” She compares the “very powerful, small vocabulary” of the original language to a “linchpin, the ball-bearing there, and the whole passage with its meaning moves around this word, with the very flexible meanings”. We are accustomed to thinking of English as an “incredibly rich language”, she says. “But in certain ways, English is limited . . . a pragmatic language.” A philologist who has translated classical texts, including The Aeneid (described by Ursula Le Guin as “the best translation yet”) and St Augustine’s Confessions, Dr Ruden is unafraid of ruffling feathers with her approach. In her introduction to The Gospels (Vintage, 2021), she argues that, when it comes to the New Testament, “the self-expressing text has fallen under the muffling, alien weight of later Christian institutions and had the life nearly smothered out of it.”Translation is both “essential” and “never quite satisfactory”, he concludes. He gives the example of the “notorious” phrase “Son of Man”. In Greek, it’s “the son of the human”, and in Daniel it’s “a son of a human”. Yet, “we say ‘Son of Man’ and may well always say ‘Son of Man’, even though that’s plainly not what the Greek or Aramaic says. It’s what we’re used to; it’s punchy; it makes a metric rhyme with ‘Son of God’.” James was working on a video artwork titled Exposure, in which he interviewed health workers from across the borough of Newham to talk about their experience of initial years of the Covid 19 pandemic. Although we know what happened in other departments of the NHS, such as in the intensive care unit, gynaecology and other units, there was an untold story with respect to mental health units during COVID, particularly the crisis facing children’s and young people’s mental health. Among the many health professionals interviewed was an occupational therapist that had worked in CAMHS during that first wave. These accounts were profoundly alarming. For an ordinand, the motivation for learning Greek is very different from that of the average undergraduate. “It really matters that they understand the text well,” she writes. “Their very identity is bound up with doing so.” Biblical exegesis “carries a culturally transformative value in a way thinking about Homer is far less likely to — it isn’t preached from the pulpit on a weekly basis.” It is difficult to achieve reading proficiency in either language in the amount of time available, he says, and one of the pitfalls that he seeks to avoid is confirming the “ingrained inclination to think of other languages as more or less successful simulations of English in a sort of secret coded way. They aren’t simulations of English: they are living cultural and expressive phenomena on their own. . . The development of this body of work has greatly altered the scale and ambition of James’s work, resulting in it becoming one of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs). Hearing this gives me hope that the arts are changing, and that those holding the purse strings are listening and accepting that the accumulation of funding for the disability arts sector is literally life-changing.

Like Dr Ruden, he provides extensive notes on several of his key choices, in which he explains that he has allowed his thinking to be shaped by both the studies of modern biblical scholars and those of “ancient authorities”: Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Theodore of Mopsuestia. Anyone who has read his apologia for universal salvation, That All Shall Be Saved ( Books, 13 December 2019) will be unsurprised to see extended discussions concerning translations of what is typically rendered as “eternal” and “hell”.I was able to catch up with James soon after the event and he surprised me by describing himself as “an activist that uses art”. This was interesting for a number of reasons however, particularly as art and activism are seen as kind of separate, despite their evident crossover. I was delighted to have been invited to this sharing of For They Let In The Light , art made by young people from a CAMHS (Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services) ward, which was shown at Chisenhale Gallery, London. I couldn’t make it in person and was invited to join remotely. What was evident from the art I witnessed was that these were not young people who had been taught how to be artists based on someone else’s definition. Instead, it was the art of these young people from a CAMHS ward, in their own words and actions, which they had been helped to feel confident to share with the wider world. Let The Light In” is the twelfth song on Lana Del Rey’s ninth studio album Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. It features Father John Misty, with whom Lana has previously collaborated on the “Freak” on 2015’s albums Honeymoon with music video.

In a review for Commonweal, Dr Luke Timothy Johnson, Professor of New Testament and Christian origins at Candler School of Theology, complained that “striving for original or striking expressions leads at times to simple clunkiness” and that in other places “her over-literalness serves to confuse”. I've spent fifty years translating Sanskrit texts, but only now has this book taught me how to read a text in a foreign language and how to read (and write) a translation. It is also a brilliant book about Latin, Augustine, God, and the meaning of life. Wendy Doniger, author of The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in MythOne of the most striking features of the record is just how pure and modest Wright is in her presentation. There is virtually no flash and glitter to her music, enabling the success of the material to be based solely on the strength of her voice and writing. Vocally, Wright is mysterious, sultry, defiant and proud all at once, exhibiting both confidence and vulnerability. Active yet moody piano accompaniment. cleanly played electric guitars, and steady yet unobtrusive percussion guide many of the album’s arrangements, contributing to — and causing, in many instances — the unrefined, natural feel of the music. the vacuum cleaner & Collaborators in rehearsals for For They let In The Light (2022). Produced and commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London. Photo: Oscar Abdulla.

In Let in the Light, White invites readers to join him in a close and engaged encounter with the Confessions in which they will come to share his experience of the book’s power and profundity by reading at least some of it in Augustine’s own language. He offers an accessible guide to reading the text in Latin, line by line—even for those who have never studied the language. If that were pertinent then we would never be able to run the UN or international diplomacy in general, because we would never be able to attain anything like cooperative agreement with other language groups,” he tells me. “Translation does its job.” She doesn’t produce these objections from an “anti-religious” position, she emphasises. “In fact, I don’t think there is anything more dangerous to our morals, our politics, our spiritual health than the prevailing malleability of sacred literature and translation. If you read these documents in the original languages, nothing will come across more strongly than their vivid realities. To the authors, and to those who inspired the authors, what we call the unseen world was not only real: it was seen. There was no division between the natural and supernature. There is just one universe to enjoy or to try to destroy.”

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Equally attuned to the resonances of individual words and the deeper currents of Augustine’s culture, Let in the Light considers how the form and nuances of the Latin text allow greater insight into the work and its author. White shows how to read Augustine’s prose with care and imagination, rewarding sustained attention and broader reflection. While she isn’t chary of criticising the language of the Greek, which can tend towards “dutifulness and dullness”, she is also utterly convinced of the importance of her task. The Bible is a book that matters, she writes. “We all to some degree define ourselves in relation to it, whether we mean to or not.” Donald Trump could not have the poisonous influence he continues to have without the support of conservative and even mainstream Christians. And part of their intellectual operations is an idolatry of the text . . . I was really interested in taking a more critical look at the Gospels and starting to deconstruct them as an idol.”