I’ve continued to think about the Pendle Witches, and about what that episode might tell us about different ways of understanding life and, more especially, language. It is impossible these days to accuse anybody of committing murder by language. Nobody believes any longer that I could kill you by means of a spell. By the same token, it would no longer be possible in Britain to bring a successful prosecution for blasphemy. My dictionary defines blasphemy as “to speak impiously or contemptuously of God or sacred things”. Of course, it is still possible to blaspheme: but nothing much follows from having done so. We have, in this and in other ways, lost any sense of the power of speech.
In fact, generally speaking, we have a pretty banal view of the nature of language. I blame (among others) John Locke (1632-1707) who, writing only a generation later than the Pendle Witches gave priority to “plain and simple language”, dismissing all figurative uses of language as “perfect cheats”. Language was at its best when confined to making truthful, factual claims about the world; its expressive and emotional properties were definitely suspect; and its figurative uses to be avoided as “abuses of language” (according to Thomas Hobbes, a contemporary of the Pendle Witches). This kind of empiricism wouldn’t appear to have much time for poetry …. and it certainly left little space for religion.
Neither poetry nor religion, as modes of using language, would be at all possible or permissible if we were confined to making straightforward factual statements about the world, to which the only criterion of their appropriateness is whether or not they are true. Unfortunately, because of the way in which this approach to language has become linked to a scientific approach to the world, there is a tendency to accept it unreflectively. So much is this the case that even religious thinkers, including apologists for Christianity, have long ago ceased to challenge it. Think for a moment of John Betjeman’s well-known poem Christmas, for whom the point of the poem is to pose the question “And is it true?”
Religion (certainly within the Protestant tradition, and above all in its Evangelical wing) has been reduced to belief, construed as assent to those statements we hold as being factually true about the world. Sadly, we have lost the distinction (essential to any religious world view) between belief and belief in. The latter refers to those things in which we are prepared to put trust during the process of living, rather than simply to propositions we are willing to tick as correct. The sad result of this is that religious believers these days tend to assume that the real test of their faith is the extent of their credulity.
This shift of emphasis has been all a part of what Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world”. To live in an “enchanted world” might not seem ideal when we look back on the Pendle Witches. Nevertheless, it is a “world we have lost”, and whereas I for one would not wish us to be back in their world, our abandonment of any sense of the power of expressive and figurative language has indeed been a loss. I am convinced that we need to engage in a massive reorientation of our understanding of religious language, in which process religion should be understood primarily as an ally of art, and not as a rival of science. These are complex and difficult ideas, and I am by no means sure that I have conveyed them as clearly as I might. In that case it is likely that I might need to return to them again.