Last weekend I went to the National Theatre with my beautiful and sweet wife to see William Shakeapeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. It always gives me an immense pleasure to go see a play with her, not only because of the moments that we share, but also because she knows a lot more about theatre than I do. She looks at it, not simply as entertainment, but as art — something that matters, something with a communal value; the same way I look at film. During the performance she told me that Shakespeare was a feminist.
Some scholars argue that Shakespeare was Catholic. When he was born, the Elizabethan Religious Settlement had already separated the Church of England from the Catholic Church. Catholic faith became illegal. A lot of people became recusants, refusing to attend the services of the now official church. It is said that Shakespeare, who came from a Catholic family, was one of those who quietly refused to submit to the new denomination. That means that if he was Catholic he could not have been outspoken about it. Nevertheless, he was surely a Christian. We see it in his commitment to equality and social justice — Christian values that the theologian Desiderius Erasmus universalized as humanist values.
While I was attending the play, it struck me that the illumination we get from Shakespeare’s work (and from the best art) is similar to the one we get from the Bible. Scriptures should be read poetically, even if some of its books are historically accurate. Reading the Bible scientifically (like dishonest atheists and bible literalists do) is reading it simplistically. This collection of books has to be appreciated for its poetry and for the meaning it reveals, not directly conveys. Anselmo Borges, a Portuguese priest who teaches philosophy at the University of Coimbra, puts it like this:
After all, the Bible writes about the history of men, at their best and at their worst, in the search of the absolute. It is necessary to understand that it is a religious and not a scientific book and that only in its whole it claims the truth. [...] Only in this light are they [the Scriptures] true. In all that can be found of less human or even inhuman, it is revealed what God is not and what Man should not be.
Lídia Jorge said in an insightful way: “The Bible is the longest collective poem created by Humanity until now. In it are mirrored the various battles that men have engendered in their quest for absolute love.”[1]
Shakespeare is not a substitute for the Bible. (The comparison is senseless.) But his works can get us closer to God — the idea that the natural world and the produced world (art works in particular) yield information about God is important in Christianity. Pay attention to the way Timothy Radcliffe uses King Lear to explain that exposing who and what we are leads to serene delight instead of agitated approval:
Delight is not the same as approval. The Father does not approve of the Son, nor the Son of the Father. The Trinity is not a mutual admiration society. Approval implies patronage, and to obtain it we may be tempted to put on masks and pretend to be the sort of person of whom your patron would approve. In King Lear Goneril and Regan seek their father’s approval so that they may obtain power. Cordelia obstinately refuses to say what her father wants, only what she thinks. Ultimately, he comes to delight in her.[2]
Scriptures puts us in touch with God, with the truth about our hearts and about what surrounds us — but not directly. It is not true, it is truthful — truthful to human experience. Slowly and tentatively grasping this truth is part of our long journey as Christians. Jesus’s words on the value of his words in John 8:32 can therefore be applied to the whole Bible: “and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free”.
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[1] Anselmo Borges, “A ‘Bíblia’: 73 Livros”, Diário de Notícias, 18 Oct. 2008 (my translation), http://
www.dn.pt/inicio/interior.aspx?content_id=1133089, pars. 14-15.
[2] Timothy Radcliffe, OP, What Is the Point of Being a Christian? (London: Burns & Oates, 2005), 61.
