Jonathan writes about a mythic book with marginalia that might reveal more than any book today.
Take the quiz and find out.
It is well known—at least among those who subscribe to obscure theological journals—that Anselmo of Bruges held that the margins of holy books were more inspired than the text itself. “The Lord,” he wrote in a letter never delivered, “prefers the space left over.”
He spent forty years annotating every Bible he could find—not the words, but the silences. Where the text declared Fiat lux, Anselmo scribbled: “But was it too bright?” Beside In principio erat Verbum, he noted: “There must have been a pause before the Word, some divine hesitation.”
Over time, his marginalia expanded: digressions, diagrams, recipes for invisible ink, even an attempted refutation of the Trinity using only fish metaphors. Eventually, the words of Scripture disappeared entirely beneath his own script.
When he died, his brethren gathered the volumes and had them burned. Yet legend insists that one survived—a single book whose margins are completely filled and whose original text is wholly effaced. It is said to contain everything God meant to say, had He been less concise.
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Contributed by
Jonathan Bennett
