wordsout by godfrey rust
The
sailing of the ark < 22
of 45 >
22
Imagine
one more myth. Suppose there was
an image, once, of perfect truth,
in
which
Adam looked, until like everything
it was shattered in the Fall, its pieces strewn
across
the centuries. Most came to rest
in a small, untidy, squabbled-over country,
where
men, by diligence or what seemed luck,
discovered fragments, stained or brightly polished, edges
sharp
enough to wound; they swept-up sixty-six,
each one a book, and when with careful restoration
by Nicaea they had done the best they could
they held it up at last—the Bible, Paul's dark glass,
a
broken mirror that somehow returns
the cracked reflection of the face of God.
The second turning point of the sequence: a mythic view of the nature of scriptural authority.
Paul’s dark glass cf 1 Corinthians 13:12 (the Authorised Version: “glass” means “mirror”).