The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts 9781474471794

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The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts

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The Edinburgh Companion to the Bible and the Arts e d i t e d b y s t e ph en prickett

EDINBURGH University Press

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© editorial matter and organisation Stephen Prickett, 2014 © the chapters their several authors, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12 Goudy by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 3933 5 (hardback) The right of the contributors to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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contents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Figures Plates Contributors 1.

Introduction Stephen Prickett

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I: Inspiration and Theory 2. ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ The Biblical Chain-Gang 11 Stephen Prickett 3. Hebrew Aesthetics and Jewish Biblical Exegesis 24 Mordechai Z. Cohen 4. Migne’s Achievement and the Modern Transmission of Ancient Manuscripts 42 D. H. Williams 5. Augustine on Beauty: A Biblical Aesthetics 56 David Lyle Jeffrey 6. Sublimity as Resistance to Form in the Early Modern Bible 69 Anthony Ossa-Richardson 7. ‘A Babel of Bibles’: Aesthetics, Translation and Interpretation since 1885 88 Nicholas Bielby 8. Lest the Story be Lost: Biblical Fiction 104 David Dickinson 9. The Bible and Phenomenology 114 Kevin Hart II: Art and Architecture 10. The Gospel of John in Early Christian Art Robin M. Jensen 11. Images of Conflict: The Art of Anti-Judaism in Fifth-Century Rome Geri Parlby 12. A Shared Tradition: The Decorated Pages of Medieval Bibles and Qur’ans Vivian B. Mann

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vi 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

contents Speaking Pictures: Medieval Religious Art and its Viewers Charles Moseley The Iconography of the Cross as the Green Tree Christopher Irvine Art and the Resurrection Narratives Christopher Herbert Covenants and Connections: The Sassetti Chapel, Santa Trinita: Scenes from the Life of St Francis, Ghirlandaio, 1479–85 Chloë Reddaway Who Framed Bathsheba? Vivienne Westbrook The Fresco Decoration in the Sistine Chapel: Biblical Authority and the Church of Rome Shirley Smith The Materiality and Iconography of the Coverdale Bible (1535) Title Page in Context Mark Rankin and Guido Latré Moses and Eighteenth-Century Religious Art Nigel Aston Blake: Text and Image Christopher Rowland ‘For Thine is the Kingdom’: Portraying the Bible in Nineteenth-Century Stained Glass Christopher Rogers Van Gogh: Framing a Biblical Vision Daphne Lawson Coventry Cathedral: Conception and Reality Sarah Hosking

III: Literature 25. Sacred Poetry: Watts and Wesley J. R. Watson 26. The Bible Interpreted by Hymns Robin Gill 27. The Art of Unveiling: Biblical Apocalypse Christopher Burdon 28. The Divine Comedy as the Word of God Patricia Erskine-Hill 29. The Medieval Bible as Literature Alastair Minnis and A. B. Kraebel 30. Homer Writes Back: Rhetorical Art and Biblical Epic Justice in Paradise Lost Phillip J. Donnelly 31. Biblical and Seventeenth-Century Poetry: The Case of the Psalms and George Herbert Christopher Hodgkins

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contents 32. 33.

34.

35. 36.

From Virtue to Goodness: Biblical Values in Victorian Literature Jan-Melissa Schramm The Mirror of the Law of Liberty: Reflecting the Hidden Christ in George Macdonald’s Lilith Bethany Bear Figurative Literalism: The Image of the Creator in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Norbert Lennartz From Satire to Sanctity: The Prophetic Books in T. S. Eliot’s Poetry Jan Gorak Imitatio Pilati et Christi in Modern Historical Drama James Alexander

Index

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editor wishes to thank first and foremost the thirty-five long-suffering contributors themselves who have laboured long and hard, and treated their editor’s pettifogging comments with unfailing patience and good humour. He has learned an incalculable amount from them. Here he should also record his thanks to Jackie Jones, of Edinburgh University Press, whose concept this book is, and who has consistently supported it – though with occasional stern budgetary admonitions – through five long years. We also wish to thank the many institutions and people who have given advice and support to particular aspects of this project. These include the churches that have allowed our contributors to photograph their windows, carvings, and other architectural features without charge – most notably, perhaps, the Dean and clergy of Coventry Cathedral. In this connection, we also record our gratitude to Oliver Hutton, grandson of John Hutton, the creator of the angels in the great west window of Coventry, for permission to use his father’s designs. Our thanks also go to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, for permission to use the nativity picture on our cover, as well as to Sarah Hosking who suggested it. Among individuals, we record our gratitude to Mordechai Cohen, who, in addition to contributing an important essay on Jewish aesthetics, has given invaluable advice on other aspects of Jewish material in general; to Christopher Rowland, who stepped in at the very last minute with invaluable Blake material; to Mary Frank, and to Sarah Haynes. Vivian Mann would like to thank Carol Bier, formerly of the Textile Museum, Jonathan Bloom of Boston College, and Menahem ben Sasson, President of the Hebrew University, for their careful readings and comments on her paper (Chapter 12). Haggai Ben Shammai of the Hebrew University and the National Library in Jerusalem, Eva Hoffman of Tufts University, and Jay Rovner of the Jewish Theological Seminary were kind enough to discuss various aspects of the subject with her. She also thanks Ilana Tahan and Dr Colin Baker of the British Library, Dr Ben Outhwaite of the Cambridge University Library, Dr Khader Salameh of al-Haram al-Sharif Islamic Museum, and Dr Raquel Ukeles and Yael Okun of the National Library of Israel for allowing her to study manuscripts in their collections. Thanks also to Rina Krautwirth and Joanna Newman of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary for their unfailingly good-natured assistance with technical matters. The research and publication of this chapter was supported by the Memorial Foundation of Jewish Culture. All the images in the Blake chapter (21) are from the collection in The Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. The author, Christopher Rowland, is grateful to

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The Yale Center for British Art and its Open Access policy and also for its hospitality in arranging an exhibition of some of the Blake images discussed in Chapter 21 to coincide with a lecture in the Yale Center, 13 November 2011. Mark Rankin and Guido Latré (Chapter 19) wish to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities, whose funding of the 2009 summer seminar for college and university teachers, ‘The Reformation of the Book: 1450–1650’, resulted in the rare book exhibition and workshop at the Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp, out of which this chapter emerges. We also thank librarians and archivists at the British Library, Cambridge University Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Plantin-Moretus Museum, and St John’s College, Cambridge for assisting with research. We preserve old-style spelling and expand brevigraphs using italics. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are our own. Christopher Rogers wishes to thank the clergy and PCCs of the following churches for kind permission to photograph and for the provision of information about the stained glass of which they are justly proud: St Martin’s, Bampton; All Saints, Bloxham; All Saints, Middleton Cheney; Bolton Abbey church; Malvern Priory church; St Michael and St Mary Magdalene, Easthampstead; St Mary the Virgin, Oxford; All Saints, Selsley; St Michael’s, Tilehurst. The Dean and Chapter of Christ Church, Oxford; Birmingham and Salisbury Cathedrals and the Administrator of St Chad’s Cathedral in Birmingham. The governing bodies of Bradfield College, Berkshire; Merton College and Harris Manchester College, Oxford. Castle Howard estate, Yorkshire. Vivienne Westbrook wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Pin-han Li and Hsin Hsieh in acquiring the illustrations used in her chapter (17). Lastly, I would like to thank Patricia Erskine-Hill, who not merely contributed an essay to this collection, but helped me in many aspects of the editorial work, even to phoning the Vatican Library to negotiate in Italian. Stephen Prickett, Charing, 2013

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FIGURES

10.1 Mid fourth-century Christian sarcophagus, Vatican Museo Pio Cristiano. Photo: Robin M. Jensen. 10.2 Jesus changing water to wine: early fifth-century wooden door panel, Basilica of Santa Sabina in Rome. Photo: Robin M. Jensen. 10.3 Detail from an early Christian sarcophagus; Jesus speaking with the Samaritan woman at the well: fourth century Christian sarcophagus, Louvre Museum. Photo: Robin M. Jensen. 10.4 Invalid at the Pool of Betheseda: detail from a fourth-century Christian sarcophagus, Vatican Museo Pio Cristiano. Photo: Robin M. Jensen. 10.5 The raising of Lazarus, Catacomb of Callixtus, chamber 21, mid to late third century. G. Wilpert, Roma sotterranea: Le pitture delle catacombe romane (1903), taf. 46. Photo: Robin M. Jensen. 10.6 Detail; Jesus raising Lazarus: sarcophagus in the Vatican Museo Pio Cristiano. Photo: Robin M. Jensen. 11.1 a & b Mystery women from the St Maria Maggiore triumphal arch. J. Wilpert (1916), Die römischen Mosaiken und Malereien der kirchlichen Bauten vom IV. bis XIII. Jahrhundert. 11.2 Above: Jacob demanding the hand of Rachel. Below: Rachel and Jacob marry. Nave mosaic, St Maria Maggiore, Rome. J. Wilpert (1916), Die römischen Mosaiken und Malereien der kirchlichen Bauten vom IV. bis XIII. Jahrhundert. 11.3 Wedding of Moses and Zipporah. Nave mosaic, St Maria Maggiore, Rome. J. Wilpert (1916), Die römischen Mosaiken und Malereien der kirchlichen Bauten vom IV. bis XIII. Jahrhundert. 11.4 Marco Tullio Montagna: Drawing of the triumphal arch 1640. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. Barb.lat.4405, fol. 1r. 12.1 First Leningrad Bible, Scribe: Solomon Levi ben Bouya’a, probably Fustat, 929. St Petersburg, State Public Library, MS. II, B.17. 13.1 Lion ‘drawn from life’ from the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt, MS in the Bibliothèque nationale Paris (MS fr.19093 fol. 24v). 13.2 The Expulsion from Paradise: Font, mid twelfth century, All Saints, East Meon. Photo by William George Charles Moseley.

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13.3 The Midwife’s Withered Hand, the Nativity, in the Holkham Picture Bible, British Library Addit. MS 47682, fo. 12 vo. The British Library, 2007. 13.4 Deposition from the Cross, fresco, early sixteenth century, Church of St Lawrence, Lohja, Finland. Photo by C. W. R. D. Moseley. 13.5 The Triptych closed, showing the Annunciation (see also Plate 21). Photo by Charles Moseley. 16.1 Renunciation of Worldly Goods (left wall lunette, Sassetti Chapel) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, by permission of Antonio Quattrone, Quattrone snc, Via dell’ Arcolaio 48, 50137 Firenze. 16.2 Funeral of St Francis and Verification of the Stigmata (right wall, lower tier, Sassetti Chapel) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, by permission of Antonio Quattrone, Quattrone snc, Via dell’ Arcolaio 48, 50137 Firenze. 16.3 Confirmation of the Rule (altar wall lunette Sassetti Chapel) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, by permission of Antonio Quattrone, Quattrone snc, Via dell’ Arcolaio 48, 50137 Firenze. 16.4 Resuscitation of the Roman Notary’s Son. Donor portraits of Francesco Sassetti and Nera (Corsi) Sassetti; Altarpiece, Nativity (altar wall, middle and lower tiers) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, by permission of Antonio Quattrone, Quattrone snc, Via dell’ Arcolaio 48, 50137 Firenze. 18.1 Reconstruction of the Exterior of the Sistine Chapel. Ernst Steinmann, Die Sixtinische Kapelle (Tefeln, Erster Teil, Munich, 1901). 18.2 Reconstruction of the Original Interior Decorations of the Sistine Chapel. Ernst Steinmann, Die Sixtinische Kapelle (Tefeln, Erster Teil, Munich, 1901). 18.3 Plan of Ceiling Frescoes, Sistine Chapel, by kind permission of Reginald Piggott. 19.1 Hans Holbein the Younger: Title Page, Biblia The Bible / that is, the holy Scripture of the Olde and New Testament, faithfully and truly translated out of Douche and Latyn in to Englishe. Edited by Miles Coverdale. Antwerp: Merten de Keyser, 1535. STC 2063. © The British Library Board (shelfmark C.132.h.46). 19.2 Title Page: Dat oude ende dat nieuwe testament. Antwerp: Jacob van Liesvelt, 1526. Artist unknown. Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, OTM: Ned. Inc. 119. 19.3 Title Page: The Bible in Englyshe of The Largest and greatest volume. Rouen: Cardin Hamillon, for Richard Carmarden, 1566. STC 2098. Artist unknown. St John’s College, Cambridge, shelfmark T.3.21. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge. 19.4 Queen Elizabeth I enthroned as Emperor Constantine, initial capital ‘C’, dedicatory preface to Elizabeth, in John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes. London: John Day, 1563, sig. B1r. STC 11222. Artist unknown. From The Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries, shelfmark BR1600. F6 1563. 21.1 William Blake: The First Book of Urizen, Copy A, 8, 1794. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 21.2 William Blake: Europe A Prophecy, 12, Copy A, 1794, 12. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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figures 21.3 William Blake: America A Prophecy, Bentley Copy M, Plate 6, 1793. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 21.4 William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 1, 1825. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 21.5 William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 21, 1825. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 21.6 William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 11, 1825. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 21.7 William Blake: ‘The Garden of Love’ from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1789–94, Copy L. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 21.8 William Blake: Illustrations to the Book of Job, Plate 17, 1825. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 21.9 William Blake: Abraham and Isaac, 1799–1800. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 22.1 A. W. N. Pugin: The Annunciation, Bolton Abbey (1853). Photo: Christopher Rogers. 22.2 Thirteenth-century glass panel in Merton College chapel, Oxford (1298– 1311). Photo: Christopher Rogers. 22.3 Burne-Jones: The Death of Saint Frideswide, Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford (1859). Photo: Christopher Rogers. 22.4 William Morris: The Annunciation, All Saints, Selsley Glos. (1861). Photo: Christopher Rogers. 22.5 Burne-Jones: The Vyner Memorial window, Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford (1872) Photo: Christopher Rogers. 22.6 Morris and Co., 1869: Angeli Laudantes, Lady Chapel window Saint Michael’s, Tilehurst. Photo: Christopher Rogers. 22.7 One of six Days of Creation windows, Manchester College, Oxford (1896). Photo: Christopher Rogers. 22.8 Burne-Jones: Generosity (Saint Martin of Tours), Manchester College, Oxford (1896). Photo: Christopher Rogers. 22.9 Edward Burne-Jones: The Nativity, Saint Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham (1887). Photo: Christopher Rogers. 23.1 François Millet: The Sower, 1850. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Gift of Quincy Adams Shaw through Quincy Adams Shaw Jr and Mrs Marian Shaw Haughton. Inv.17.1485 © 2012. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved/© Scala, Florence. 23.2 Vincent Van Gogh: Olive trees with Alpilles in the Background, 1889. New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Oil on canvas 28 5/8 x 36cm. Mrs John Hay Whitney Bequest.581. 1998 © 2012. Digital Image,The Museum of Modern Art, New York/© Scala, Florence. 23.3 Vincent Van Gogh: Starry Night over the Rhone, Arles, 1888. Paris, Musée D’Orsay. Oil on Canvas 72.5 x 92cm. © 2012. Photo © Scala, Florence. 23.4 Vincent Van Gogh: The Pietà (after Delacroix) 1889. Saint-Rémyde-Provence. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation). Oil on Canvas, 73.2 x 92.7cm 168V/1962. F687.

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24.1 Clergy leaving the ruined cathedral after the enthronement of Bishop Neville Gorton, 1940. Image © Martin R. Williams. 24.2 Graham Sutherland: Two Studies in Charcoal on Paper for the Tapestry ‘Christ in Majesty’, c. 1952. © Sutherland Estate. 24.3 Coventry Cathedral, the Nave, photographed April 1962, before many of the commissioned furnishings were installed. Image © Coventry Cathedral. 24.4 Lady Epstein unveiling the Epstein sculpture of St Michael and the Devil, June 1960. Image: Martin R. Williams © Coventry Cathedral. 24.5 Design of lettering for Tablets of the Word, Ralph Beyer 1962. Image: Martin R. Williams © Coventry Cathedral. 24.6 The Angel of the Lord: relief sculpture by Stephen Sykes in the Chapel of Gethsemane 1962. Image © Coventry Cathedral. 27.1 Albrecht Dürer, Four Horsemen, © Trustees of the British Museum. 27.2 Albrecht Dürer, Woman and Dragon, © Trustees of the British Museum. 27.3 Jean Duvet, Apocalypse Chapter 9. © Trustees of the British Museum. 27.4 The ‘Synchronisms’ of Joseph Mede’s Clavis Apocalyptica (1627). 29.1 An Italian copy of Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus; part of a preacher’s miscellany or commonplace book from the first decade of the sixteenth century. This is the opening of Bersuire’s text, beginning with the quotation of 2 Timothy 4: 31–2. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. MS 1081, fol. 99r. 29.2 A late twelfth-century French copy of Priscian’s Institutiones, once owned by Jacques de Vitry. In this basic textbook of Latin grammar, a reader has added annotations indicating where Priscian draws his examples from classical poets; this page includes citations of Virgil (‘V’), Lucan (‘L’), and Juvenal (‘I’). The marginal annotations on the top half of the page are thirteenthcentury additions. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. MS Marston 67, fol. 14r. 29.3 A mid-twelfth-century French copy of Gilbert of Poiters’s gloss on the Pauline Epistles, here showing the beginning of Gilbert’s commentary on 1 Corinthians. The biblical text appears in the narrow inner column, and the commentary in the wider outer column. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. MS Marston 152, fol. 34v. 29.4 A fragment from Nicholas of Lyre’s widely influential commentary on the entirety of the Bible, here beginning the gloss on Psalm 4. The biblical lemmata are underlined in red to distinguish them from Lyre’s commentary. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. MS 22, fol. 1r. 29.5 From Nicholas Trevet’s commentary on the Tragedies of the Younger Seneca, here showing the beginning of his general prologue. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. MS Marston 150, fol. 1r.

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PLATES

Plates 1– 18 to be found between pages 160 and 161 Plate 1

Jesus speaking with the woman at the well: changing water into wine at Cana, Detail from dome mosaic of an early fifth-century baptistery, Naples. Photo: Robin M. Jensen. Plate 2 Wall painting, Catacomb of Domitilla, Rome, from arcosolium 77. Taken from G. Wilpert, Roma sotterranea: Le pitture delle catacombe romane (1903) taf. 239. Photo: Robin M. Jensen. Plate 3 a) Ecclesia Ex Circumcisione and b) Ecclesia Ex Gentibus: part of the dedicatory mosaic from Santa Sabina Church, Rome. Photo © Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P. Plate 4 St Maria Maggiore nave and triumphal arch. Photo © Holly Hayes Art History Images. More detailed images can be viewed at http://www.flickr.com/ photos/geri-parlby. Plate 5 Bible, Perpignan, 1299 (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Ms. hébreu 7, fols. 12b and 13a). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris. Plate 6 Frontispiece, Qur’an, San’a, first half of the eighth century? After Ettinghausen, et al., Islamic Art and Architecture, fig. 116. Plate 7 Micrographic Carpet Page (New York, Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, ENA 2630.1). Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Plate 8 Karaite Book of Exodus, tenth century (London, British Library, Ms. Or. 2540, fol. 2v), © British Library Board. Plate 9 Qur’an, Damascus, ninth century (Al-Haram Al-Sharif Islamic Museum, Raba’ah no. 5). Courtesy of the Al-Haram Al-Sharif Islamic Museum. Plate 10 Z·emah· ben Abraham, Colophon, Hebrew Bible, tenth century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS. A 42.2). © Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Plate 11 Fragment of a Marriage Contract, twelfth century? (Cambridge University Library, T-S. K8.90; photo: author). © Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Plate 12 Qur’an, Andalusia, 1304 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, Ms. arabe 385, fol. 130r). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris.

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Plate 13 Hebrew Bible, Spain, late fifteenth century (Cambridge, Trinity College Library, F 12.06, fol. 4r). Courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge. Plate 14 Qur’an, ninth century (Jerusalem, National Library Israel, Yehuda Ms. Ar. 969, fol. 41r). Courtesy of the National Library of Israel. Plate 15 Fragment of a Marriage Contract, tenth century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, T-S. K10.7; photo: author). © Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Plate 16 Qur’an, ninth century (Jerusalem, National Library Israel, Yehuda Ms. Ar. 969, fol. 41v). Courtesy of the National Library of Israel. Plate 17 Samuel ben Jacob (scribe), Second Leningrad Bible, Fostat, 1008/9 (St Petersburg State Public Library, II. B. 19a). Plate 18 Qur’an, Spain or North Africa, 1344 (Jerusalem, Al-Haram Al-Sharif Islamic Museum, Maghribi Rab‘ah no. 3; photo: author). Courtesy of the Al-Haram Al-Sharif Islamic Museum.

Plates 19–33 to be found between pages 192 and 193 Plate 19 The Hylle or Wykham Jewel, in the form of a crowned Lombardic initial ‘M’ with annunciation figures, late fourteenth century (silver-gilt set with rubies, diamond, emerald and pearls), French school (fourteenth century) (attr. to) / © Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford / The Bridgeman Art Library. Plate 20 The Holy Thorn Reliquary (early fifteenth century) made for John, Duc de Berry to house a relic of the Crown of Thorns. From the Waddesdon bequest, © The Trustees of The British Museum. Plate 21 Nicole Froment (c. 1425–83/6), Madonna and Child in the Burning Bush, central panel from the Triptych of Moses and the Burning Bush c. 1476 (oil on panel). St Sauveur Cathedral, Aix-en-Provence, France. Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library. Plate 22 The ‘Lily Crucifix’, fifteenth century. Clopton Chapel, Holy Trinity, Long Melford, Suffolk. This uncommon device, which brings together the moments of Conception, symbolised by the Lilies of the Annunciation, and of Death, is also to be seen carved on a misericorde in the ‘Decani’ stall in Tong Church, Shropshire. Photo: Charles Moseley. Plate 23 Canon Table, Carolingian Gospel Book. A canon table with detail of a blossoming and fruitful cross (Harley MS 2788, f.7), © British Library. Plate 24 A twelfth-century wall painting of the Crucifixion with green cross, St Alban’s Abbey, Hertfordshire. With thanks to Kevin Walton and by permission of the Chapter of St Alban’s Cathedral. Photo: Ben Smith. Plate 25 Jesse tree window, Figure of Mary, Corona Chapel Jesse Tree, the Corona Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral, by permission of the Dean and Chapter, Canterbury Cathedral. Plate 26 Roger Wagner, Dartmoor Crucifixion (2007), by permission of the artist, Roger Wagner. Plate 27 Titian, Noli me tangere, Bridgeman Art Library.

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Plate 28 Bishop Bernward’s Bronze Doors, Hildesheim. Plate 29 Hans Memling, Scenes from the Passion of Christ (The Turin Altarpiece), Bridgeman Art Library. Plate 30 Fresco: Dura Europos House-Church: The Three Women Visiting the Tomb. Plate 31 The St Albans Psalter: The Three Marys, Dombibliothek Hildesheim. Plate 32 Stigmatization of St Francis (left wall, lower tier) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, by permission of Antonio Quattrone, Quattrone snc, Via dell’ Arcolaio 48, 50137 Firenze. Plate 33 Trial before Sultan (right wall lunette, Sassetti Chapel) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, by permission of Antonio Quattrone, Quattrone snc, Via dell’ Arcolaio 48, 50137 Firenze.

Plates 34–50 to be found between pages 256 and 257 Plate 34 Sacra Parallela, by John of Damascus, Grec 923 (Vue 568 / 796) © The National Library of France. Plate 35 Bathsheba Bathing, by Jean Bourdichon. Tours, 1498–9. French, Leaf from the Hours of Louis XII, Tempera colors and gold on parchment. 9 9/16 x 6 11/16 in. MS. 79, Recto. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Plate 36 Het toilet van Bathseba, by Cornelis Cornelisz. 1594. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-3892. Plate 37 Rembrandt van Rijn: Bathsheba in her bath, 1654. Oil on canvas. Le Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski. Plate 38 Edgar Degas: The Tub, Hill-Stead Museum, 35 Mountain Road, Farmington, CT 06032. Plate 39 Pietro Perugino: Giving of the Keys, 1481–2, Sistine Chapel. Photo © Vatican Museums. Plate 40 Sandro Botticelli: Punishment of Korah, 1481–2. Sistine Chapel. Photo © Vatican Museums. Plate 41 Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel Ceiling 1508–12, Sistine Chapel. Photo © Vatican Museums. Plate 42 Michelangelo, Detail of Ignudi, Separation of Light from Darkness, 1508–12. Sistine Chapel Ceiling. Photo © Vatican Museums. Plate 43 Arch of Constantine, fourth century. © 2013 Photo Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali. Plate 44 Michelangelo, Last Judgement, 1537–41, Sistine Chapel. Photo © Vatican Museums. Plate 45 Michelangelo, St Bartholomew, Last Judgement (detail), 1537–41. Photo © Vatican Museums. Plate 46 Jan Swart van Groningen, Title Page, Den Bibel. Antwerp: Willem Vorsterman, 1528. Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, OTM: Ned. Inc. 100. Plate 47 Reredos with commandments, creed and paternoster, Chiselhampton Parish Church, Oxon. Photo: Nigel Aston. Plate 48 Aaron the high priest: Edmondthorpe Parish Church, Leics. Photo: Nigel Aston.

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Plate 49 Moses the lawgiver: Edmondthorpe Parish Church, Leics. Photo: Nigel Aston. Plate 50 Moses and Aaron with commandments, Allerton Mauleverer, W. R. Yorks. Photo: Nigel Aston.

Plates 51–72 to be found between pages 352 and 353 Plate 51 ‘London’ from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Copy F, 1794. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Plate 52 Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion, Copy E, 75, 1804 to 1820. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Plate 53 Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion, Copy E, 76, 1804 to 1820. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Plate 54 ‘The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins’, c. 1825. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Plate 55 William Blake: Title Page from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Copy L. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Plate 56 Ford Maddox Brown: The Nativity, All Saints, Selsley, Glos. (1861). Photo: Christopher Rogers. Plate 57 Burne-Jones: The Holy Children, All Saints, Middleton Cheney, Oxon. Photo: Christopher Rogers. Plate 58 Edward Burne-Jones: The Last Judgement, Saint Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham (1897). Photo: Christopher Rogers. Plate 59 Vincent Van Gogh: Sower in the Setting Sun, 1888, Otterlo, Kroeller-Mueller Museum. Oil on Canvas © 2012. DeAgostini Picture Library / © Scala Florence. Plate 60 Vincent Van Gogh: The Sower, 1888, Arles. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation). Oil on canvas, 32.5 x 40.3cm 29V/1962. F451. Plate 61 Vincent Van Gogh: Starry Night, 1889. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.1cm. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Acc.no.: 472.1941 © 2012. Digital Image, the Museum of Modern Art, New York / © Scala Florence. Plate 62 Vincent Van Gogh: Wheatfield with a Reaper, 1889, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent Van Gogh Foundation). Oil on canvas. 73.2 x 92.7cm 49V/1962. F618. Plate 63 Interior of St Michael’s Cathedral, Coventry, 15 November 1940. John Piper, oil on canvas laid on board. Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry. © Coventry Cathedral. Plate 64 Sanctuary candlesticks made by Hans Coper against the tapestry designed by Graham Sutherland, 1962. Image © Martin R. Williams. Plate 65 Nativity and Epiphany Crib, figures made by Alma Ramsey-Hosking and structure designed by Anthony Blee, 1962 (restored 2007) against the Baptistery Window. Image © Hosking Houses Trust. Plate 66 The Consecration of Coventry Cathedral 25th May 1962, Terence Cuneo, oil on canvas. Image, Martin R. Williams © Coventry Cathedral.

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Plate 67 The Dragon and the Woman of Revelation 12 from the ‘Trinity Apocalypse’, by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. Plate 68 Hans Memling, right-hand panel of triptych of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist. © Musea Brugge and Lukas-Art in Flanders. Plate 69 William Blake, Death on a Pale Horse. © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Plate 70 J. M. W. Turner, The Angel Standing in the Sun. © Tate, London 2013. Plate 71 John Martin, The Plains of Heaven. © Tate, London 2013. Plate 72 Domenico di Michelino, La Commedia Illumina Firenze (‘The Comedy Illuminates Florence’), 1465, Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence Cathedral.

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CONTRIBUTORS

James Alexander, son of a Scottish father and an English mother, was born in Middlesbrough in 1972. He read History at Trinity College, Cambridge, and, after completing a PhD thesis, studied for a time at King’s College, Cambridge. He taught for the Department of Politics in Cambridge, before moving to Turkey in 2004, where he currently teaches in the Department of Political Science in Bilkent University, Ankara. He is the author of Shaw’s Controversial Socialism (2009), Frederick Bulmer: A Life, 1865–1941 (2009), ‘Subjectivity, Civility, Ecclesiasticality’ in Philosophy, Politics and Religion in British Democracy: Maurice Cowling and Conservatism (2010), ‘Oakeshott on Hegel’s “Injudicious” Use of the Word “State”’ in History of Political Thought (2011), ‘Three Rival Views of Tradition (Arendt, Oakeshott, MacIntyre)’ in Journal of the Philosophy of History (2012), ‘Oakeshott as Philosopher’ in The Cambridge Companion to Oakeshott (2012), ‘The Four Points of the Compass’, which is an attempt to see all of philosophy in its entirety, in Philosophy (2012), and ‘The Contradictions of Conservatism’ in Government and Opposition (2013). Nigel Aston is Reader in Early Modern History at the University of Leicester. His books include The French Revolution: Liberty, Authority and the Search for Stability, 1789–1802 (2004) and Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2009). Among other projects, he is completing a book on Oxford and the Enlightenment for Oxford University Press, editing the second volume of the correspondence between James Boswell and the Rev. W. J. Temple for Edinburgh and Yale University Presses, and working on aspects of the career of the cosmopolitan British Premier, William, 2nd Earl of Shelburne (1737–1805). Bethany Bear is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mobile in south Alabama, where she teaches English composition and British literature. Her research interests include Victorian fantasy, children’s literature, and religion and literature in Victorian England. She has presented papers on writers such as Christina Rossetti and Lewis Carroll, while in her most recent research she has explored the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s philosophical prose on Victorian writers, particularly George MacDonald. She has also studied the religious writers of the seventeenth century, many of whom enjoyed renewed attention during the nineteenth century. In the autumn of 2012, Studies in Philology published her study of the sanctification of ‘fancy’ in the writings of John Bunyan.

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Nicholas Bielby is a retired lecturer in Education at Leeds University who currently runs and edits the poetry magazine Pennine Platform and the poetry publisher, Graft Poetry. From grammar school he won an Exhibition to read English under F. R. Leavis at Downing College, Cambridge – but changed after Pt I to Moral Sciences (i.e., Philosophy). Later, he took an MA in English at Leeds, doing a dissertation on prosody. After university he taught at St John’s College, University of Agra, in India before taking up Primary teaching in England and then Teacher Education. He has written several books on reading, contributed to others for UKRA (now UKLA), written regularly for the TES, and has acted as a consultant to the government and several major publishers. In addition, he has published a book on early Tudor poetry and three books of poetry. He has won numerous prizes in competitions including the Arvon International and New Poetry. He is a fully qualified City and Guilds welder in MMA, MIG and TIG and Inert Gas – but he has never completed the steel yacht he began because his wife, believing (correctly) he would never finish it, bought one ready-made: a confiscated drug smuggler. Christopher Burdon has degrees in Modern Languages, Theology and English Literature from the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Glasgow respectively. He has worked as a parish priest in the Church of England and has long been involved in theological education and ministerial formation, teaching biblical studies and hermeneutics, most recently as Principal of the Northern Ordination Course. He is especially interested in the reception and influence of biblical and apocalyptic literature in art, politics and the life of the churches, and his doctoral work on the reception history of the Book of Revelation was published by Macmillan as The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling 1700–1834. He is the author of Stumbling on God: Faith and Vision in Mark’s Gospel (SPCK) and of many articles on the reception of the Gospel of Mark and the Book of Genesis. Less apocalyptic activities include music, reading novels, travelling and learning to be a grandfather. Christopher was until his retirement in 2012 Canon Theologian of St Edmundsbury Cathedral, Suffolk. Mordechai Z. Cohen (PhD, Yeshiva University, 1994) is Professor of Bible and Associate Dean of the Revel Graduate School of Yeshiva University in New York City. Author of seminal studies on Jewish Bible interpretation in its cultural settings, and its interface with Arabic poetics, Muslim jurisprudence and modern literary approaches to the Bible, his published volumes include: Three Approaches to Biblical Metaphor: From Abraham Ibn Ezra and Maimonides to David Kimhi (Leiden: Brill Academic Press, 2003; 2nd edn 2008) and Opening the Gates of Interpretation: Maimonides’ Biblical Hermeneutics in Light of His Geonic-Andalusian Heritage and Muslim Milieu (Leiden: Brill Academic Press, 2011). From 2008–11, he was Division Editor of The Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, a multivolume reference work published by Walter de Gruyter (Berlin, 2009–). In 2010/11 he directed the international research group at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ‘Encountering Scripture in Overlapping Cultures: Early Jewish, Christian and Muslim Strategies of Reading and Their Contemporary Implications’, which included fourteen leading scholars in these fields from the US, Europe and Israel (including contributors to the current volume). The findings of this six-month research project will be published in a volume he is co-editing with Adele Berlin.

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The Rev. Dr David Dickinson was until 2013 Director of the St Albans Centre for Christian Studies, an ecumenical centre based at the Abbey and Cathedral Church of St Albans, UK. He is now minister of Sutton Trinity Church in Surrey. Having worked in the field of religion and literature for most of his ministry since ordination in 1990, he has specialised in the form and function of literary sermons, and his book, The Novel as Church: Preaching to Readers in Contemporary Fiction, contributes to Baylor University Press’s Making the Christian Imagination series. His current interests include the portrayal of Methodism in English fiction and the theology that develops when literature subverts and challenges faith. Phillip J. Donnelly (PhD, University of Ottawa, Canada) is Associate Professor of Literature in the Honors College at Baylor University, where he teaches in the Great Texts Program and the English Department. He also serves as the Director for the Great Texts Program. His research interests focus on the historical intersections between philosophy, theology and imaginative literature, with particular attention to Renaissance literature and the reception of Classical educational traditions. The topics of his published work range from St Augustine and post-modern critical theory to the Renaissance poetry of George Herbert and John Milton. His most recent book is Milton’s Scriptural Reasoning: Narrative and Protestant Toleration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is a contributor to the new Milton Encyclopedia, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Yale University Press) and to the Oxford Guide to the Historical Reception of Augustine, ed. Karla Pollmann and Willemien Otten (Oxford University Press). Patricia Erskine-Hill was born in upstate New York, and attended seven schools in seven countries, finishing with a degree in Modern Languages from Trinity College, Dublin. She speaks fluent French, Italian and Spanish and has a smattering of Russian and German. She has worked in Britain, Italy and the US variously as a courtroom interpreter, English teacher, marketing executive, caterer, owner of an event-organising company and, finally, as a university lecturer. Her second degree, from the University of Edinburgh, is an MSc in Economic and Social History, specialising in Imperial Russia, but she has also worked on medieval and early modern Italy, especially Dante, and the English eighteenth century. She is now a freelance history lecturer and has recently been become a registered NADFAS and cruise-ship lecturer. Robin Gill is Professor Emeritus of Applied Theology at the University of Kent (having earlier held the Michael Ramsey Chair of Modern Theology there for twenty years) and an Honorary Provincial Canon of Canterbury Cathedral. Previously he held the William Leech Research Chair of Applied Theology at the University of Newcastle. He recently published his trilogy on sociological theology with Ashgate: Theology in a Social Context; Theology Shaped by Society; and Society Shaped by Theology. Currently he is editor of the journal Theology and is working on the fourth edition of his A Textbook of Christian Ethics for T & T Clark. He is an enthusiastic but only semi-competent trumpeter who also serves actively as Canon Theologian in Gibraltar (from where his father’s family came). Jan Gorak was educated at Blackburn College of Technology, and at the Universities of Warwick, Leeds and Southern California. Since 1988, he has taught modern literature, the Enlightenment and critical theory at the University of Denver. He is the author of the

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following books: God the Artist: American Novelists in a Post-Realist Age; Critic of Crisis: A Study of Frank Kermode; The Alien Mind of Raymond Williams; and The Making of the Modern Canon. He wrote an essay on eighteenth-century canon formation for volume four of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. He has also edited Canon versus Culture: Reflections on the Current Debate and Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, as well as contributing to many collections and journals. Kevin Hart is Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia, where he also holds Courtesy Professorships in the Departments of English and French. He is also Eric D’Arcy Professor of Philosophy at the Australian Catholic University. His most recent scholarly book is Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings (Fordham University Press, 2013), and his most recent collection of poetry is Morning Knowledge (Notre Dame University Press, 2011). He has recently completed two new academic books: Poetry and Revelation and Kingdoms of God, and is completing a new collection of poetry: Barefoot. Christopher Herbert was ordained in Hereford Cathedral in 1967 as curate and schoolmaster. In 1971 he became the Diocesan RE Adviser and in 1976 Diocesan Director of Education. In 1981 he became Vicar of The Bourne, Farnham (Diocese of Guildford) and was, in addition, Director of Post Ordination Training. In 1990 he was appointed Archdeacon of Dorking and in 1995 was consecrated as Bishop of St Albans. He served the diocese from 1995 until his retirement in 2009 and was a member of the House of Lords for almost ten years. During his episcopate he undertook research at the University of Leicester on ‘The Image of the Resurrection in 15th Century Northern European Art’ and was awarded an MPhil in 2002. He developed his research further and in 2008 was awarded a PhD by the university for his work on English Easter Sepulchres. He has had a lifelong interest in art and in retirement is in great demand as a lecturer across the UK and in Europe. He was a Fellow Commoner of St John’s College, Cambridge in 2000, and has two honorary doctorates from the Universities of Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. He is an honorary citizen of Fano, Italy. Christopher Hodgkins is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Atlantic World Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His books include Authority, Church, and Society in George Herbert (Missouri, 1993); Reforming Empire (Missouri, 2002); and as co-editor with Robert Whalen of the first born-digital edition of Herbert’s masterpiece, The Digital Temple (Virginia/Rotunda, 2012). He also directs UNCG’s Atlantic World Research Network and co-directs the George Herbert Society, and he has edited George Herbert’s Pastoral (Delaware, 2010) and George Herbert’s Travels (Delaware, 2011). Currently he is writing a textbook for Wiley-Blackwell Publishers on the literary study of the Bible, and has started co-editing the complete digital works of Herbert. His research has been supported by year-long grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A native of California, he grew up in the Napa Valley and attended the University of the Pacific (BA 1980) and the University of Chicago (MA 1982, PhD 1988). Hodgkins has been married since 1987 to Dr Hope Howell Hodgkins and has three (mainly) grown children: Mary, Alice and George. He teaches Shakespeare, Milton, the Metaphysicals and Bible. He prays, gardens, hikes, travels and splits wood.

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Sarah Hosking trained at St Albans and Leicester Colleges of Art in the 1960s before studying arts administration with the Arts Council in 1970 (and a later Master’s in Renaissance History). She worked with the regional arts associations covering exhibitions and support schemes for contemporary visual arts and applied arts, before becoming freelance in 1980. She worked for the NHS on art commissions and design development, also interior upgrading and management of land and gardens. She finally specialised in the non-clinical, environmental aspects of patient care in secure special hospitals, and co-authored Healing the Healthcare Environment: design, management and maintenance of healthcare premises (Routledge, 1999). Since her retirement, she has founded and runs the Hosking Houses Trust for the benefit of contemporary writers. Christopher Irvine is currently the Canon Librarian and Director of Education at Canterbury Cathedral, and is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of History in the University of Kent. He was formerly Principal of the College of the Resurrection, Mirfield, a Church of England theological college, and during this time taught an undergraduate course on imagination, art and theology in the Theology and Religious Studies Department of the University of Leeds. Canon Irvine serves as a member of the Church of England’s Liturgical Commission, the Cathedrals Fabric Commission for England, and is a trustee of Art and Christian Enquiry, a major art education charity promoting art in religious contexts. He has written extensively on a range of liturgical topics, and on art and liturgical theology. His recent studies include The Art of God: the meaning of worship and the making of Christians (SPCK, 2005), The Use of Symbols in Worship (SPCK, 2007), and his major study, The Cross and Creation in Christian Liturgy and Art was published by SPCK in 2013. David Lyle Jeffrey (PhD Princeton; Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada) is Distinguished Professor of Literature and Humanities at Baylor University. He is also Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Ottawa, and has been Guest Professor at Peking University (Beijing) since 1996 and Honorary Professor at the University of International Business and Economics (Beijing) since 2005. Jeffrey is best known as a medievalist and as a scholar of biblical tradition in western literature and art. His books include A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992); The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (1975); Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition (1984); English Spirituality in the Age of Wesley (1987; 1994; 2000); The Law of Love: English Spirituality in the Age of Wyclif (1988; 2001); People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (1996), a co-authored book on The Bible and the University (2007) and, with Greg Maillet, Christianity and Literature: a Philosophical Approach to Literary Criticism ( 2011). In 2011 also appeared The King James Bible and the World it Made (ed.), and his theological commentary on Luke for the Brazos Press in 2012. His current project, Arts of the Holy, is a book on art and the development of doctrine in the Christian West. Robin M. Jensen is the Luce Chancellor’s Professor of the History of Christian Art and  Worship at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches in both the Department of the  History of Art and the Divinity School. Her teaching, research and publication focus  on the interpretation of late Roman and early Christian art and architecture in light  of its religious significance, ritual performance, doctrinal expression and cultural context.

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Jensen’s most recent books are Living Water: Images, Symbols, and Settings of Early Christian Baptism (Brill, 2011), and Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity (Baker Academic, 2012). Other monographs include Understanding Early Christian Art (Routledge, 2000); Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity (Fortress, 2005); and The Substance of Things Seen: Art, Faith and the Christian Community (Eerdmans, 2004). She contributed to Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art (Yale, 2008) and co-edited Visual Theology (Liturgical Press, 2010). Co-written and edited with Patout Burns, The Practice of Christianity in Roman Africa, appeared in 2013 (Eerdmans). Currently, she is finishing a monograph on early Christian iconography titled The Epiphanic Character of Early Christian Art and undertaking a new project: The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy (Harvard University Press, planned for 2014). A. B. Kraebel is a PhD candidate in English Language and Literature and a Whiting Fellow at Yale University. His publications include a critical edition of twelfth-century Latin exegesis, The Sermons of William of Newburgh (Toronto, 2010), and essays appearing in Mediaeval Studies, Medium Ævum, Sacris erudiri and Revue bénédictine, amongst others. He is currently preparing a monograph concerning biblical commentaries and translations produced in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Oxford. Guido Latré read English and Dutch Literature and Linguistics at Leuven University (PhD English Literature, 1982). From 1983 to 2001, he taught English Literature at K. U. Leuven (Flanders, Belgium). In 2001 he became a Senior Lecturer at Louvain University (French-speaking Belgium), where he is currently a professor of English Literature and Culture. From 1990–6, he was a member of the Board of Governors at Westminster College in Oxford. His main focus for research is on the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, especially in connection with early English Bibles printed in Antwerp. From 1999 to 2004 he coordinated a large-scale project on this subject, which included an exhibition at the Plantin Moretus printing museum in the autumn of 2002. He is a Member of the Advisory Board of Reformation, and of the Board of Trustees of the Tyndale Society. In 2002 he was awarded the Churchill Medal for his research and teaching of English language, literature and culture in a European context. He co-organises the Antwerp part of the biannual NEH seminar on Tudor books and readers. He has been involved in the production of several documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4. These include Devil’s Words: The Battle for an English Bible (script by Peter Ackroyd) and another on the life of Tyndale (presented by Melvyn Bragg). Daphne Lawson is a full-time Art History lecturer for the European campus of Queen’s University Ontario, Canada at Herstmonceux Castle, East Sussex. She has taught Art History there since it opened in 1994 and specialises in nineteenth-century French and English art. She has been instrumental in developing the concept of teaching art history courses in the galleries of London and Paris in front of the primary sources. Daphne did her undergraduate degree in Art History at Birkbeck College, London University and her postgraduate degree at the University of Kent. Her thesis was centred on her special area of interest in late nineteenth-century French painting, on Degas and his images of private and public spectacle. This interface between visual imagery and performance was of particular interest to Daphne because her first career was as an actress. She was trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama, graduating in 1971 and spent the next ten

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years in television, theatre and film before changing careers to become an art historian after she had a family. Norbert Lennartz is Professor of English Literature at the University of Vechta (Germany). He did his doctorate (on concepts of the absurd before the theatre of the absurd) and his post-doctoral qualification (on deconstructions of eroticism and the body in seventeenth-century poetry) at the University of Bonn. His teaching and research range from Shakespeare and the Metaphysicals to Romanticism, from the Victorian Age to the early twentieth century and he has published widely on Romanticism, Dickens and Thomas Hardy in international peer-reviewed journals such as Philological Quarterly, Études Anglaises, Dickens Quarterly and Joyce Quarterly. As a scholar of comparative literature, he is not only interested in the relationship between literature and art, but also in the interconnection between German, French and British Romanticism. He has just completed a longer essay on the reception of Dickens in Germany from 1900 to 1945 for the Continuum series; he is currently preparing two collections of articles on intertextuality in and new approaches to Dickens and writing a monograph on the cultural history of tears and porous bodies in literature and the arts. Vivian B. Mann is Director of the Master’s Program in Jewish Art and Visual Culture at The Jewish Theological Seminary, and was Morris and Eva Feld Chair of Judaica at The Jewish Museum, where she curated ‘Convivencia: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Medieval Spain’; and most recently, ‘Morocco: Jews and Art in a Muslim Land’. In 2000 her Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts was published by Cambridge University Press, and in 2005 Art and Ceremony in Jewish Life: Essays in the History of Jewish Art was published by Pindar. Uneasy Communion. Jews and Altarpieces in Medieval Spain appeared in 2010 in conjunction with an exhibition at MOBIA. Dr Mann has received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, NEA Fellowship for Museum Professionals, NEH Fellowship for Research, and the NEH Collaborative Projects Grant for Interpretative Research. She has been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University and a visiting professor at Wesleyan University and Stern College. In 1999 she was awarded the Jewish Cultural Achievement Award in Jewish Thought by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture for her efforts in establishing a Master’s program in Jewish Art and for her scholarship. In 2007 Mann co-founded Images: A Journal in Jewish Art and Visual Culture. In 2010 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Alastair Minnis is the Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English at Yale University. Previously he taught at the Queen’s University of Belfast, the Universities of Bristol and York, and Ohio State University. He is a Fellow of the (British) English Association, a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, and the author or editor of twenty-one books, including Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Scolar Press, 1984; 2nd edn 1988, repr. with a new introductory essay by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2009); The Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Chaucer’s Shorter Poems (Oxford University Press, 1995, repr. 2000); Magister Amoris: The ‘Roman de la Rose’ and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford University Press, 2001); Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), and Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Currently he is completing a monograph entitled From Eden to

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Eternity: Creations of Paradise in the later Middle Ages. Characteristically, Professor Minnis’s research methodology brings together reading strategies from literary criticism and the history of ideas, and an interest in medieval philosophy and theology has informed much of his work. Charles Moseley is Life Fellow and former Senior Tutor of Hughes Hall, Cambridge. He lectures in Medieval and Renaissance literature in the English Faculty of the University of Cambridge, and has published extensively in those areas. An area of particular interest to him is medieval and early modern travel writing, especially The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and its readers. He has been elected to Fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries of London and of the English Association. He is also a member of the Society for Nautical Research, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and member of the Arctic Club. Anthony Ossa-Richardson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the English Department of Queen Mary, University of London. His primary research interest is in early modern intellectual history, with a particular focus on problems of interpretation and mis-interpretation across disciplines – literature, philosophy, theology, history, scholarship and so on. His first book, The Devil’s Tabernacle, dealing with the reception and understanding of the ancient Greek oracles (1500–1800), appeared in May 2013. Other published work has examined the history of classical allegory, the problems of antiquarian learning in seventeenth-century France, the use of imagery in confessional polemics, the hostile reception of Descartes among contemporary theologians, relic-worship, Biblical translation, and the controversy over the nature of insanity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His current Leverhulme project is on the history of literary ambiguity between Aristotle and Empson. He is also contributing to the forthcoming edition of the complete works of Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82) for Oxford University Press, having spent a year transcribing and annotating Browne’s manuscript notebooks. Geri Parlby is a former Fleet Street journalist and film PR, who came to academia rather late in life. She has a first-class honours degree in History and Theology from the University of Surrey, and a Master’s in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute. Her doctoral thesis is on the re-evaluation of the evidence for Marian images in Late Antiquity. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at The Digby Stuart Research Centre for Religion, Society and Human Flourishing at the University of Roehampton and a member of the Centre for Marian Studies. Her most recent publications are ‘The Origins of Marian Art: The Evolution of Marian Imagery in the Western Church until ad 431’ in Mary The Complete Resource, ed. Sarah Jane Boss in 2007 and ‘The Origins of Marian Art in the Catacombs and the Problems of Identification’ in The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary, ed. Chris Maunder in 2008. She currently heads up the Visual Arts section of the Distance Learning courses at Exeter University and is a regular lecturer for NADFAS. Stephen Prickett is Regius Professor Emeritus of English, University of Glasgow, and an Honorary Professor at the University of Kent, Canterbury. After teaching at the University of Sussex, the Australian National University in Canberra (where he had the chair of English), and Duke University, North Carolina, he went to Baylor University, Texas, where he was Margaret Root Brown Professor of English and Director of the Armstrong Browning Library. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the

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(British) English Association, former Chairman of the UK Higher Education Foundation, former President of the European Society for the Study of Literature and Theology, President of the George MacDonald Society, and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Artois, in France. He has published one novel, nine monographs, seven edited volumes, and over a hundred articles on Romanticism, Victorian Studies, and literature and theology. His fourteen-language, Reader in European Romanticism, (2010) won the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for the best book published in Romantic Studies that year. Mark Rankin is Associate Professor of English at James Madison University, where he teaches courses in English Renaissance literature, Shakespeare, and the History of the Book. He is the co-editor of Henry VIII and His Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art (Cambridge, 2009) and is completing a monograph titled Henry VIII and the Language of Polemic in Early Modern England. He is also editing Tyndale’s Practice of Prelates for the Catholic University of America Press. His research has received funding from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Chloë Reddaway works in the field of Christian art and visual theology. She is a Research Associate at the Cambridge Divinity Faculty, a member of Peterhouse, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Arts and the Sacred at King’s College London (KCL). After reading Philosophy and Theology at Trinity College, Oxford, she was employed in the arts sector for several years before returning to Theology. She received AHRC funding for her doctoral thesis, ‘Visual Theology in 14th and 15th Century Florentine Frescoes: a Theological Approach to Historical Images, Sacred Spaces, and the Modern Viewer’, at KCL. Having been Research Assistant to Professor Ben Quash at KCL, she continues to teach for the KCL/National Gallery MA in Christianity and the Arts, at Westcott House, and for ‘The Creative Arts in Christian Ministry and Mission’, for the Southern Theological Education and Training Scheme, where she is an external examiner. She writes for the journal, Art and Christianity Enquiry, and forthcoming publications include ‘Spiritual Transformation in Person and Paint: the Brancacci Chapel Florence’ in James Romaine and Linda Stratford (eds), Methodological Studies of Christianity in the History of Art (Cascade: Oregon). A monograph based on her doctoral research has been accepted for publication by Brepols. Christopher Rogers read Geography at Merton College, Oxford and spent his career teaching in secondary schools. He was a housemaster at Marlborough College and Head of Geography at Downe House School, Newbury. He has been a lecturer for NADFAS for some years where his main interest is architectural history. A special area of study has been the art and architecture of the Gothic Revival, of which stained glass is an important element. Christopher Rowland has been Dean Ireland’s Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture, and Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford since 1991. Before that he was University Lecturer and Dean of Jesus College, Cambridge, 1979–91. He began his teaching career as University Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1974–8. He comes from South Yorkshire, is a member of the Church of England and is Canon Theologian of Liverpool Cathedral. He has written on apocalypticism in the Bible and in Christian history. His first book, The Open Heaven,

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challenged prevailing understandings of Jewish and Christian apocalypticism in ancient Judaism and Christianity in the light of the study of Jewish mysticism. His other publications include Christian Origins (1985, rev. edn 2002), three commentaries on the Book of Revelation, including one on the history of its interpretation (with Judith Kovacs, 2004). Most recently he has written on one of the pre-eminent interpreters of apocalyptic and prophetic texts, William Blake (Blake and the Bible, 2010). He has a long-standing interest in liberation theology, its pedagogy, and its use of the Bible (Liberating Exegesis, 1989, and The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology, rev. edn 2007). He was Chair of the Latin American and Caribbean Committee of Christian Aid, 1984–96. Jan-Melissa Schramm is a Fellow at Trinity Hall, and a University Lecturer in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, where she teaches Victorian literature. She is the author of Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in NineteenthCentury Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 2012) as well as a number of articles and book chapters on representations of the law in the works of Dickens and Eliot, Victorian satire, and first-person narration. She is also co-editor of Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt (Macmillan, 2011). She currently holds a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to complete a monograph provisionally entitled ‘Democracy, Censorship, and Victorian Sacred Drama’. Shirley Smith graduated from the University of East Anglia with a first-class honours degree in the History of Art, specialising in the Italian and Northern Renaissance. A part-time lecturer at the University of East Anglia, she is a tutor with the Institute of Continuing Education of the University of Cambridge, for whom she runs Certificate and Residential Weekend courses. A great advocate of interdisciplinary learning, she has coordinated with lecturers in Music, Literature and Science in her Renaissance courses. A member of the Royal Society of Arts, she also lectures to NADFAS, the Art Fund and various Arts Societies. Previous essays have included: ‘Picturing the Nativity: 15th Century Artists reinterpret the Scriptures’; ‘The Great Impresario Giorgio Vasari: Artist, Architect and Art Historian’; and ‘Pearls, Pomegranates, Peacocks and Pipes: the Hidden Language of Renaissance Art’. J. R. Watson is Emeritus Professor of English, University of Durham. He was educated at the Universities of Oxford and Glasgow. He taught at the Universities of Glasgow and Leicester before going to Durham as Professor in 1978. He was Public Orator of the University, 1989–99. He is the author of books and articles on the Romantic and Victorian periods, and of The English Hymn (1997, paperback 1999) and An Annotated Anthology of Hymns (2002, paperback 2003). Awake My Soul, sub-titled ‘Reflections on Thirty Hymns’, appeared in 2005 (SPCK). He was President of the International Association of University Professors of English, 1995–8, Chairman of the Modern Humanities Research Association, 1989–99, and Vice-President of the Charles Wesley Society, 1994–2003. He was President of the Charles Lamb Society, 2003–12. He is the Farmington Fellow, St Chad’s College, Durham, and an Honorary Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford. He was the Free Churches’ representative on the Archbishops’ Commission on Church Music, 1988–92, and served on the committee of Common Praise (2000). He gave the Michael Ramsey Lecture, Durham, 2003, and the Peake Memorial Lecture, the Methodist

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Conference, 2005. He is currently editor of a project to replace John Julian’s A Dictionary of Hymnology (1892, 1907), published online in 2013. Vivienne Westbrook is Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature at National Taiwan University, and Associate and Book Editor of Reformation. She has authored many works on the cultural reception of major texts, figures and issues from the sixteenth through to the twenty-first century. She is currently preparing a book-length study of the afterlives of Sir Walter Raleigh while editing Catholic Renewal and Protestant Resistance in the reign of Mary Tudor  with Elizabeth Evenden;  Reinventing the Reformation in the Nineteenth Century with Peter Knockles; and Humour in Literature and Culture through the Ages with Shun-liang Chao. D. H. Williams (PhD, MA University of Toronto, 1991) is currently Professor of Religion in Patristics and Historical Theology in the Department of Religion, Baylor University. Prior to 2002 he was Associate Professor of Theology at Loyola University, Chicago. Publications include scholarly work on early Christian thought and literature, as well as studies integrating ancient Christianity with contemporary evangelical theology. His books include Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts (Oxford University Press, 1995), Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants (Eerdmans, 1999), Evangelicals and Tradition: The Formative Influence of the Early Church (Baker Academic, 2005), and a translation of Hilary of Poitiers’ Commentary on Matthew for Fathers of the Church series (Catholic University of America Press). Williams has also published scholarly essays in the Harvard Theological Review, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Journal of Early Christian Studies, Journal of Theological Studies, Church History, Studia Patristica, Scottish Journal of Theology, Interpretation, and Pro Ecclesia. He is a member of various academic societies, and is active in teaching Christian studies in China. Since 2007 he has lectured at major universities in mainland China, had several articles published in Chinese, and served as academic consultant for a publishing press in Beijing. In 2009 and 2012 Williams was Visiting Research Professor at the International Promotion of Chinese Language and Culture, People’s Republic University in Beijing.

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INTRODUCTION Stephen Prickett

O

ver-familiarity with such words as ‘Bible’, or ‘the Arts’, can easily lead to over-simplistic thinking about both. When linked, those chances are increased. One of the many aims of this book, therefore, is to de-familiarise, or at least broaden, our understanding of both terms. It is sometimes assumed, for instance, that whereas the arts have clearly changed in medium, style and form over time, the Bible, in contrast, has always been the ‘rock of ages’, the stable and eternal manifestation of God’s Word. Thus conventional wisdom, even for the non-religious, might suggest that of the two terms in our title, the former, ‘the Bible’, is the known and fixed, while the latter, ‘the Arts’, has been historically more fluid – subject even to wild and unpredictable fluctuations of polemic, convention and, of course, fashion; arbitrary, or perhaps subtly developmental according to taste. In fact, not merely has the Bible, and its many derivative artistic expressions, also varied enormously across the last two thousand years, but, as we shall see, much of that variation has actually been the direct result of close interaction of the Bible and the art forms of the day. Theology and aesthetics have always exerted both a gravitational pull, and a no less profound centripetal repulsion on one another – and, for that reason, even today this statement will probably prove a controversial one. For some, aesthetics must a priori always be subject to theology; for others, beauty has led inexorably to the divine; for many there is only a faint, dimly sensed, historical connection, at best merely accidental, and having no intrinsic or necessary relationship at all. Yet controversy is always a sign that something is going on. Like gravity itself, that something can be seemingly invisible until we stop to think about it. Indeed, even that image is only meaningful if we also remember that planetary or stellar systems are not independent even in their origins. They were originally formed from the same matrix, and constitute parts of one and the same system. Similarly, not merely are the Bible and the arts much less stable terms than is often assumed, they have, from their very origins, always been parts of a single interactive system. From the earliest cave paintings religion and art have always drawn on the same human facility for symbolism. We believe our volume to be unique in making this dual historical connection and instability central. Indeed, even the ideas of what constitutes the Bible and what constitutes art have evolved, historically, in close relationship. Considering either without the other impoverishes our understanding of both. Nevertheless, setting out to cover any such relationship within the confines of a single volume presents almost insuperable problems. Among my most treasured – if not

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most valuable – books is a Philips World Atlas printed sometime in late 1942. With rare courage its editors have set out to portray the world not as it should have been, but as it actually was on 1 August 1942. Thus Greater Germany extends from the Brest peninsular on the coast of Brittany to the Urals, and from the North Cape of Norway to Crete in the south – giving an uncannily prophetic snapshot of the historic zenith of the Nazi conquests, but, with the siege of Stalingrad moving towards its terrible climax, already out-ofdate by the time of publication. Though less dramatic and compressed in time-scale, any editor of a book entitled ‘The Bible and the Arts’ faces similar choices to those Philips editors, in that even something recognised as a snapshot of chronic instability runs the risk of distortion simply by its selection. Had we been producing this volume a hundred years ago, even discounting works of later writers and artists in the twentieth century, our selection itself would certainly have been different. Two hundred years ago, very different. In other words, not merely are both the Bible and the arts variables in themselves, but so are our current standpoints and principles of selection. We can make no apology for being culturally and historically determined. Vision is impossible without a viewpoint, a particular perspective. What we now refer to as ‘the Bible’ has been subject to fierce debate over many centuries. For Jews, of course, the word refers strictly to the Hebrew Bible. Not merely does this not – for obvious reasons – contain the New Testament, but the books themselves are arranged in a quite different order. This is not so much that Christians, originally themselves members of a Jewish sect, re-arranged the contents of the Hebrew Bible to suit their own purposes, as that the arrangements of both the Christian and Hebrew Bibles date from roughly the same period: that of the invention of the ‘codex’ or bound, paginated book sometime in the first century. Before that time the books of the Hebrew Scriptures were written on separate scrolls that would have been kept in an open case much like modern pigeon-holes, to be selected as required. The question of ‘arrangement’ simply did not arise. However, the book-form was undoubtedly spread by the rise of Christianity, since it facilitated the cross-referencing between Books and Testaments essential to the re-interpretation of the scriptures and their relationship essential to the new religion.1 Moreover, even the contents of the Christian Bible have been fiercely disputed. The  so-called ‘deuterocanonical’ books, for instance, including such works as Bel and the Dragon, Ecclesiasticus, Judith, the two books of Maccabees, Tobit, were included in  the  Greek ‘Septuagint’ – the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made probably between the third and second century bce, and so labelled because it was supposed to have been translated by a team of seventy for the Jews of the Diaspora, scattered around the eastern Mediterranean. Many of these Jews had little Hebrew, and Greek would have been their common language. The deuterocanonical books were then imposed on the Christian Bible for largely political reasons at the Council of Nicea, already in 325, almost 300 years after the events described in the New Testament. Subsequently treated with grave suspicion by Jerome, and other Church Fathers, they were nevertheless retained by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century, removed by the Protestant Reformers (who relegated them to a separate section called the ‘Apocrypha’) but are still part of the Vulgate. The 1

See Peter Stallybrass, ‘Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible’, in Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer (eds), Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 42–79.

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‘Jerusalem Bible’ of 1966, a modern approved Catholic translation, edited by Alexander Jones, dutifully retained them in their original arrangement, but marked them in the index with a * and a footnote, explaining that *Some editions of the Bible have not admitted these deuterocanonical books (or parts of books [Esther to Daniel] which are here printed in italic type . . .) or have included them only as Apocrypha. It does not, however, go as far as to say which Bibles omit the disputed books, or give the reasons for so doing. Maccabees, for instance, is simply introduced with the information that these books were not in the Jewish canon of Scripture, but that the (Catholic) Church had nevertheless given ‘recognition to them after a period of doubt’ (a coyly oblique reference to the contested decision of the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent 1545–63). The second edition, of 1984, edited by Henry Wansbrough, reflects the increasing liberalisation of Catholic scholarship both by openly making the translation ‘directly from the Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic’ rather than giving a tacit nod to the Latin Vulgate as prime source, and also in giving much more detailed reasons for the different treatment of the deuterocanonical books. As even this brief summary suggests, unlike, say, the Qur’an, whose true form and meaning is held to reside only in the original seventh-century Arabic,2 the Christian Bible is an essentially translated book, which has come down to us in a multitude of textual forms.3 Even the Hebrew Bible adapts genres and sometimes words from Babylonian, Egyptian and Ugaritic, and parts of it (in Daniel, for instance) are in Aramaic, the language of the Persian Empire, and by extension first-century Palestine. As we have mentioned, the Greek of the New Testament is koine¯ Greek, not the language of the Classics, but the Alexandrian dialect also used for the Septuagint. This was the common and (for a classicist) low-status Greek of the eastern Mediterranean trading community. Both were made, presumably, for the benefit of expatriate Jews, and other Greek-speakers, ignorant of both Hebrew and the Aramaic actually spoken in first century Palestine. 4 But even the koine¯ incorporates translations and paraphrases of classical Greek, Hebrew and Latin. By the time we reach the English Bible, we must add on the old Latin translation, Jerome’s Vulgate, and a succession of partial and whole translations from Wycliffe to the Calvinistic Geneva Bible, even before the 1611 King James version. Each version had its own purpose – its own axe to grind. Unlike other sacred texts, there is no available ur-text to the Bible, no neutral version from where to start. The huge variety of twentieth-century translations is, in fact, only a continuation of the polemical pluralism that has always been integral to the history of the Bible from its earliest origins. 2

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There are in fact no less than seven basic texts of the Qur’an in use in different parts of the Muslim world – though the Abu Bakr one is the most widely used. For a more detailed account of this see Chapter 1, below, and the Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics Bible, ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). The original languages of the events described in the New Testament have to be a matter of some conjecture and debate, since Jesus was very possibly quadri-lingual: using Aramaic for ordinary discourse, Hebrew in the Synagogue, Greek for reading the Septuagint – and for the occasions when he is actually recorded as speaking Greek – and very possibly Latin as well (as in the conversation with Pilate).

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As I try to show in the first essay, there is ample evidence that among the many factors – cultural, political and theological – that have influenced translation and reading of the Bible, the arts, collectively, have played a substantial part. Other essays do not so much re-argue this case as take it for granted. Those that follow, therefore, are not intended to be merely descriptive of existing scholarship. The writers – who are all experts in their chosen disciplines – have been asked to make original contributions to their respective fields, and, where possible, to show the relationship between the Bible and the arts in a new light. As even a cursory glance at the biographies of our contributors will indicate, they include a deliberately widespread range of people, from some of the most senior figures in some of the best universities in Britain, continental Europe and the USA, to retired people, and young scholars just starting on academic careers; artists and art historians; clergy; journalists; poets; and even a lone political scientist. Our purpose is not so much to argue partisan positions as to illustrate the sheer range of possibilities currently in play, and to point out that how fundamentally different this makes the current relationship between the Bible and the arts from that of any previous period. Of course there are self-evident gaps. We cannot satisfy all expectations. We have, alas, nothing on Shakespeare, nothing on Handel’s Messiah, nothing on Russian icons – each reader can add their own list of missed opportunities . . . What we do have are essays on topics we think many readers may never even have heard of – fifth-century, anti-Jewish visual propaganda, Fatimid Bible decoration, the frontispiece to the Coverdale Bible and phenomenological criticism. To point to our self-evident lack of any kind of ‘coverage’ is only to emphasise the diversity of possible material. In an overview of the current state of religions in Europe and North America, Charles Taylor writes that: the present scene, shorn of its earlier forms, is different and unrecognizable to any earlier epoch. It is marked by an unheard of pluralism of outlooks, religious and nonand anti-religious, in which the number of possible positions seems to be increasing without end. It is marked in consequence by a great deal of mutual fragilization (sic), and hence movement between different outlooks . . . But the interesting story is not simply one of decline, but also of a new placement of the sacred or spiritual in relation to individual and social life.5 While Taylor, writing as a sociologist and historian, does not directly link increasing religious pluralism with textual instability of the Bible itself, as we have seen, there is a sense in which the two are related in not-always obvious ways. This is a book not just about changing relationships, but also about re-defining those relationships themselves. It is my hope that so far from proving destructive of traditional patterns of thought, this new synthesis will, in turn, offer new and constructive insights in both religion and the arts. Though we do not concentrate on the blatant bad taste or cringe-making aesthetics that have sometimes disfigured much religious art and literature, in an enterprise of this nature some criticism of biblical arts is inevitable, and several of our contributors – Anthony Ossa-Richardson, Nicholas Bielby, Sarah Hosking, Robin Gill, to name but some – are rightly critical of failures in theology or aesthetics that have been responsible for the kind of vulgarity and tawdriness that have frequently given ‘religious art’ a bad

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Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Belknap Press, 2007), p. 437.

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name.6 What is interesting, from our point of view, is that even here bad aesthetics is so often the product of bad theology, and vice versa. As we shall see, the two remain inextricably locked together even in bathos. When Jackie Jones, of Edinburgh University Press, first discussed this project with me, we considered looking at the interpretation of the Bible in relation to a wide range of artistic practices and activities, past and present. Could the ‘arts’, she wondered, take in literature, textual analysis, painting, sculpture, iconography, film, music/opera, theatre and performance, publishing, translation, digital and mass media? Well, yes, in theory, perhaps: in practice some proved bridges too far. Digital and mass media seemed too contemporary to provide the kind of historical analysis we were interested in. More immediately, the speed of change in these areas has been so great that a project conceived in 2009 would have been already out of date by 2013. Even so, the sheer range of the historical project was always daunting. All we could ever do, within the prescribed limits of size and cost, would be to provide a series of snapshots, maps of Europe in 1942 – tiny glimpses of what, if looked at more closely, would all turn out to be vast narratives in their own right. Our cover design, from a mid fifteenth-century French Book of Hours, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (Fitzwilliam 69), captures what I hope will be seen as  the spirit of this Companion to the Bible and the arts – at once highly traditional, but  also pleasantly quirky. Mary, a central and iconic figure in Christian art, is herself reading – we presume from the Hebrew Bible – and though the lettering in her book may be no more than conventional squiggles, a close examination certainly suggests something at least more like Hebrew than Roman script. Meanwhile Joseph minds the baby. Pamela Tudor-Craig suggests that the ox and ass provide a ducted air heating system, whereby the ox bestows its warming breath on Mary, while the donkey warms the infant Jesus – and if he takes an affectionate nibble of Joseph’s halo (she says) ‘we are not criticising’.7 The back cover, Blake’s Red Dragon and the woman clothed with the sun (from Revelation 12), is no less counter-conventional – as only Blake can be – but takes us from the familiar domesticity of the front cover to the darker, weirdly visionary, world of apocalypse and judgement that has, historically, provided a constant polarity to the good news of the Nativity.

Arrangement Our volume is arranged thematically, and within each section, so far as is practicable, on historical lines. Our first section, ‘Inspiration and Theory’, attempts to survey some of the theoretical discussions of the long and complex relationship between scripture and art – especially in terms of rhetoric and aesthetics. My own introductory essay tries to look more closely at those troubled yet paradoxically enduring bonds linking the scriptures with the arts, and in particular how this inextricable combination of literature and theology underlay the whole phenomenon of Romanticism – and thus to play its part in the 6

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Though the word ‘tawdry’ supposedly has its origin in the lace and shoddy religious tat on sale at St Audrey’s fair, held annually in medieval and Catholic Ely, the modern use of the word first occurs in Protestant times, after the Reformation. It appears to have been made for the local liturgical use of Besançon in the Franche-Comté, between Burgundy and Switzerland. See Pamela Tudor-Craig and Nicholas Rogers, ‘Illuminating Christmas with the Friars’, Church Times, 21 December 2012.

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development of both English and German Romantic critical thought which still underlies many of the assumptions of our own age. Returning towards the roots of the common era, Mordechai Cohen traces some of the ways in which Arabic eulogies of the beauties of the Qur’an made Jewish scholars in al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) look again at their own scriptures in increasingly aesthetic terms – an Arabic/Jewish crossover to be taken up again in the following section by Vivian Mann, who looks at how the decorative practices of Egyptian craftsmen and bookbinders from the Fatimid era spilled over into Jewish decorative bookbinding in medieval Spain. Dan Williams looks in detail at some of the modern assumptions behind transmission practices of the biblical manuscripts themselves, while David Jeffrey discusses Augustine’s nascent biblical aesthetics. Anthony Ossa-Richardson, however, raises a quite different set of questions concerning the disjunction between biblical genres and our own – and the curious resistance of biblical narratives to the literary and rhetorical forms into which we try to force them. Nicholas Bielby, continuing our theme of biblical shape-changing, looks critically at the plethora of biblical translations in the century following the Revised Version of 1885, and the differing theories of history, theology and aesthetics – good and bad – that helped to shape them. More up to date, David Dickinson looks at modern attempts to create fiction from the biblical narratives, while Kevin Hart looks at the phenomenological interpretations of the Bible from such slightly unexpected figures in the history of biblical aesthetics as Husserl and Heidegger, and the thinking of the French critics Michel Henry (‘all thought is essentially religious’) and Jean-Luc Marion. Our second section is concerned with the Bible and the visual arts. Here Robin Jensen shows how much of the earliest Christian funerary art takes its inspiration from St John’s Gospel, while on a more sinister note, Geri Parlby looks at the nascent anti-semitism already springing up in the Christian art of fifth-century Rome. As we have mentioned, Vivian Mann looks from a quite different angle at Jewish history by noting the shared tradition of Hebrew and Qur’anic decoration and bookbinding radiating out from tenthcentury Cairo. Charles Moseley investigates ways in which medieval art, in both books and churches, provided a visual scripture for the illiterate, while Christopher Irvine and Christopher Herbert follow through particular themes – the cross and the tree of life, and the resurrection narrative respectively – as visual traditions in European painting. Chloë Reddaway focuses more specifically on the way in which the story of St Francis provides yet another way of interpreting biblical themes in the Sassetti Chapel in Florence. Continuing the way in which certain biblical figures have been interpreted, Vivienne Westbrook looks at what she calls the ‘afterlives’ of Bathsheba: the ways the story of her affair with David was changed over time to suit a variety of different hermeneutic expectations – especially in attitudes towards women. Nor were such shifting biblical interpretations free of other politics, as Shirley Smith shows in her exploration of the harnessing of biblical and ecclesiastical authority in Michelangelo’s decoration of the Sistine Chapel. Turning to Protestant art, Guido Latré and Mark Rankin give a detailed exposition of the remarkable iconography of the Coverdale Bible – arguing for a much closer co-operation of printers and engravers in England and the Low Countries than has previously been recognised. Staying with the Anglican tradition, Nigel Aston looks at the uses of the figure of Moses in eighteenth-century English art, while Christopher Rowland looks at the extraordinary way William Blake uses the Bible as the take-off point for his own unique blending of text and image. Daphne Lawson continues this theme visually in the no less idiosyncratic biblical interpretations behind the work of Van Gogh. Later

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in the nineteenth century Christopher Rogers shows us something of the impact of PreRaphaelite stained glass – especially on churches in the Birmingham area. This architectural motif is completed by Sarah Hosking’s exploration of the re-building of Coventry Cathedral by Basil Spence after the Second World War, where stained glass, the engraved glass of John Hutton (itself, on this scale, a new art form), sculpture, tapestry and liturgical fittings were all designed as a unity by a coordinated team of artists and craftsmen to produce a ‘box of jewels’ – one of the most inspiring pieces of religious art in the whole twentieth century. It is a matter of some regret that a volume like this could not contain within its covers any of the glories of church music, but music is not best conveyed by words on the printed page. The idea of a CD/DVD was discussed, but reluctantly discarded – not least because most copies of a book of this size and price were probably destined for libraries, and experience has shown that such appendages are often among the first things to be stolen. We have, therefore, confined ourselves to what has turned out to be the most distinctively Protestant art form: hymns. Richard Watson introduces us to the work of two of the finest – and certainly the most prolific – hymn writers, John and Charles Wesley – the latter, in particular, arguably one of the greatest poets of the eighteenth century. Following this, Robin Gill, looks more generally at the many ways (not all successful!) in which the words of the Bible have been turned into hymns over the years since the Reformation. We begin our final section, on literature, with Christopher Burdon’s dramatic account of what he calls the ‘vigorous afterlife’ of the Apocalypse as a source for an extraordinary range of literature, music and painting. (So far we have failed to identify a style of ‘apocalyptic architecture’, but it would be interesting to find if readers know better than we do . . .) This is followed by Patricia Erskine-Hill’s account of the way in which Dante’s no less apocalyptic Divine Comedy – already steeped, of course, in biblical references – was read by his own time, and continues to be read as being in some sense a biblical text in itself. Here, not for the first time, art has gone from imitating scripture to actually becoming scripture – just as the New Testament weaves quotations and prophecies from the Old into its narrative. Much the same treatment was often also given to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, which, like Dante for Italians, acquired what amounted to canonical status for subsequent generations, not merely of English-speakers, but through its many translations, for Europeans as well. Phillip Donnelly shows not merely how Milton used his biblical source-material for his great poem, but also through it conducts a kind of dialogue with Plato’s Republic – in effect, drawing together the Hebrew and Greek roots of Christianity into a quite new amalgam. Alastair Minnis and A. B. Kraebel turn to the medieval Bible as a literary text, showing how worried many churchmen were about the corrosive influence of pagan – especially classical – texts on impressionable young clergy, and the subsequent continuation of the age-old debate about the relationship between sacred and secular literature. Returning to themes already raised by both Richard Watson and Robin Gill in connection with hymns, Christopher Hodgkins looks at the poems of George Herbert (several of which, of course, have subsequently been turned into hymns) to see how the words and themes of scripture were revitalised in the language of his own generation – if not for his own generation, since they were not published until after his death. Jan-Melissa Schramm looks at the many-faceted influence of the Bible on the realism of Victorian prose literature, while Bethany Bear draws out from nineteenth-century literature the no less biblical counter-culture of fantasy, which, through writers like George MacDonald, was to reverberate right through the massive extensions of the genre in the

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twentieth. Norbert Lennartz returns to the earlier themes of Creation and Apocalypse, this time in the nineteenth-century dystopian myths of creation from Frankenstein to H. G. Wells and the making of modern monsters. In the twentieth century, Jan Gorak and James Alexander look at the ways in which the Biblical myths continue to inspire major art forms, both in the work of T. S. Eliot, arguably the century’s most important and influential Christian poet, and in the works of other dramatists. As will be clear from even this bare-bones summary, we have scarcely begun to survey the full extent of this vast subject. To fulfil Ezekiel’s vision of putting flesh upon even these fragments must be – as is right and proper – for the reader’s own researches. To shift our metaphor yet again, each is no more than a keyhole, giving only enough view to suggest the vast hinterlands behind and beyond. What is little short of astonishing, at least for this editor, is that the key to all these doors is to be found in those endlessly fascinating, elusive and sometimes infuriating works, the diverse books of the Bible itself.

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‘WHAT HAS ATHENS TO DO WITH JERUSALEM?’ THE BIBLICAL CHAIN-GANG Stephen Prickett Whilst fully recognizing the important functions which may be discharged by chaste and healthy works of fiction, we wish emphatically to state that our ‘Notes’ are NOT intended to advocate novel-reading. Our purpose is NOT an invitation to read any novels. But, it being assumed that many people do read them, and that many novels are unworthy of the time they demand, others unfit for the perusal of youth, and not a few unsuited, perhaps dangerous, to any Catholic reader – we propose to offer a judgment on the quality of certain novels that are in more general demand, raising the note of warning wherever we discover need for doing so.1

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erbert Vaughan’s introduction to his new literary section of The Dublin Review on becoming editor in 1885, sums up with a certain succinct poignancy a tension between religion and art long predating even Christianity itself. What is – what should be – the relation between human creativity and the experience of the divine, the arts and the Word of God? That question already haunts the first and second Commandments, and persists like the interruptions of a troublesome and annoying child throughout the Hebrew Bible, to be resolved neither by the new perspectives offered by re-styling it as the ‘Old Testament’, nor by the radical re-directions of the New. Not surprisingly, therefore, in 1885, some eighteen hundred years after the coming of Christianity, the problem was still unsolved. The obvious embarrassment of the editors of the Dublin Review tells its own story. Under what circumstances could novels – by far the most popular art form of the nineteenth century – be read by good Catholics? The general problem of the editors was compounded by two further factors specific to the Catholic position. The first was that the medieval Church’s reliance on paintings, stained glass, images, music and other art forms in a still largely illiterate world had infuriated the Protestant, and, in particular, the Puritan reformers of the sixteenth century. For them ‘popery’ and ‘idolatry’ were practically synonymous. This evident delight in the visual and auditory arts had been strengthened by the Counter Reformation in the seventeenth, where the now ‘Roman’ Catholic Church had not merely continued the patronage of the arts that it had flaunted so extravagantly through the days of its most blatant decadence, but actually employed those arts as a centrepiece in its struggle with the Reformers. Devotional painting, magnificent architecture, elaborate church 1

Dublin Review, April 1885 (vol. 13 no. 2), p. 420. I am indebted to Mary Frank for this reference.

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music all flourished as never before in the many forms of the new Baroque sensibility of Austria, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain, and increasingly also in South and Central America. The second was more specific to late nineteenth-century Ireland. With the rapid increase in literacy and no less dramatic fall in printing costs at the beginning of the nineteenth century, literature had entered the front line in Catholic propaganda right across Europe. In France, Chateaubriand’s philosophical and historical Genius of Christianity (1802) openly advocated a return to traditional Catholicism for historical, intellectual and above all, emotional reasons; the Romanticism of Mme de Staël’s novels offered soft-focus fictional vistas in the same direction. In England it was arguable that the wildly exotic Catholic villains created by writers like Anne Radcliffe, in the Mysteries of Udolpho, or The Italian (no doubt quite baffling to the ordinary Catholic in the pews), had paradoxically given Rome an unwholesome glamour; while novels of the Brontës and even Disraeli had presented a softer more generous view of Catholicism in contemporary Belgium or pre-Reformation England. In England, the rise of the Oxford Movement in the 1830s coincided with the growing popularity of a much more serious kind of ‘religious novel’, which by mid-century had become a recognised genre. There were Evangelical novelists,2 High Church novelists and – a relatively new group – Catholic novelists, all writing with the aim of defending their authors’ particular religious turf. A great novel reader, Newman’s very obviously autobiographical Loss and Gain (1848), was a thinly-disguised version of his conversion to Catholicism three years before. Charles Kingsley’s anti-Catholic historical novel Hypatia (1853) provoked both Archbishop Nicholas Wiseman and Newman himself into further historical novels about the early Church, with the former’s Fabiola (1854), and the latter’s Callista (1855). By the 1880s, when the Dublin Review decided to venture, however hesitantly, into the dangerous battlefield of literary criticism it was against a background not merely of the great Victorian novelists – Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, and so on – but of a flourishing sub-genre of novels whose plots usually hinged on conversions of one form or another.3 The Dublin Review, despite its name, was edited from London, and though there was considerable Irish input, one senses a tension between English metropolitan Catholics and their less sophisticated Irish brethren. Vaughan had obviously supposed that, given the traditional Catholic belief that the arts could enhance faith, and the flourishing of the new novelistic genre where Catholics could manifestly hold their own, there could rarely have been a better moment to enter the critical field. Yet in 1892, with the coming of a new editor, Canon James Moyes, a Scot educated in Ireland, France and Rome, the section completely vanishes as suddenly as it had arrived without a word of explanation. Part of such an explanation might, no doubt, be traced to the particular local context of nineteenth-century Dublin, where neither Newman, whose lectures on The Idea of a University had found a distinctly cool reception, nor Thomas Arnold, son of Matthew Arnold, a (multiple) convert who taught intermittently at the new Catholic University, 2

3

See Elisabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth Century Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). See, for instance, Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompei, John Gibson Lockhart’s Valerius, or even Zenobia, by the American Unitarian minister, William Ware.

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found any broad sympathetic cultural ethos of the kind they had experienced in Oxford.4 As the Dublin Review editorial itself suggests, there was correspondingly little sympathy for modern fiction. But whatever its local manifestation, the problem, in essence, was both very ancient and very familiar. If Tertullian’s question from the third century, ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?’ 5 was more to do with philosophy and theology than the arts, it was already well enough known, in the following century, for Jerome, translator of the Vulgate, to ask even more pointedly, ‘What has Horace to do with the Psalms? Virgil with the gospels? Cicero with the apostle [i.e. Paul]?’6 The answer, as we have already suggested, is quite a lot. Historically there have been three main positions on the vexed question of the relationship of art to religion: that of the Counter Reformation, to embrace the symbolic power of art to arouse emotions of devotion and piety; that of extreme Puritans, from Byzantine Iconoclasts to the Taliban, to deny any connection whatsoever; and, for many others, including the nervous editors of The Dublin Review, a doubtful and worried stance somewhere in the middle. Naturally enough, it is that area, that contested field of literalism, prejudice, sensibility and what Matthew Arnold called ‘Aberglaube’, or ‘extra-belief’, which will be one of the main concerns of this book. Indeed, as we shall see, the self-consciousness of literature had turned that disputed relationship into a literary theme in itself. In Charlotte M. Younge’s The Heir of Redcliffe (1853) a central axis of the plot is the moral and religious possibilities of literature – the man who becomes the hero, we find, is a passionate admirer of Shakespeare, while the man who subsequently turns out to be the villain is loud in his denunciations of Shakespeare, the theatre and secular literature in general. As the translator of the Vulgate, Jerome of all people knew perfectly well that the question was further complicated by the fact that neither the Old nor the New Testaments were themselves rhetoric-free zones. Simply to use words – not to mention poetry – was inevitably to venture into literary construction. And therein lay problems. For any educated member of the late Roman world the Greek of the Septuagint and the New Testament could only appear crude by contemporary critical standards. For Jerome their style was nothing short of ‘harsh and barbarous’. Making a virtue out of necessity, he warned his readers not to expect from his translation any Ciceronian eloquence, for a translation made for the Church, although it may indeed have some literary merit, ought to conceal and avoid it, so as to address itself, not to the private schools of the philosophers with their handful of disciples, but rather to the whole human race.7 Yet this vehemence only too evidently masks private fears about the cultural divide between his two worlds, which were to surface near the end of his life in a dream in which 4

5

6 7

This must remain speculative, since the Review was officially edited and printed in London, and the extent of the specifically Irish content, though clearly present, is unclear. For a more detailed discussion of the contemporary Dublin ethos, see Bernard Bergonzi, A Victorian Wanderer: The Life of Thomas Arnold the Younger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). On Prescription of Heretics, 7. See George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, 2nd edn (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 167–8. Ibid. Epistles 22; 29. Ep. 22: 30. Cited by H. D. F. Sparks, Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 1, ed. P. R. Ackroyd and C. F. Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 254.

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he appeared before the Judgement Seat of Christ at the Last Day, only to be told that he was not a true Christian, but in reality a mere ‘Ciceronian’.8 Even when he clearly envisages some kind of accommodation between secular beauty and learning on the one hand, and religious faith on the other, his image of the former as the captive woman in Deuteronomy, who has her head shaved, her eyebrows trimmed, and nails paired before she is taken to wife by the true Israel (Letter 70) is disturbing, to say the least. Yet, even this well documented clash reveals something else not usually mentioned. What is inevitably presented in terms of the failure of the crude New Testament Greek to live up the standards of classical Greek (or Latin) rhetoric also shows the degree to which what would later be called the ‘aesthetic’ expectations of the scholarly community of the ancient world had decisively influenced the reading of the Bible itself. Jerome’s dream was perhaps more revealing than even he recognised. His reading of the Bible had itself been influenced and modified by the current literary norms of the day, and one of Jerome’s deliberate aims in his great translation, the Vulgate, was to obliterate that koine¯ crudity (not to mention that of the Old Latin Bible, the Vetus Latina) and create a new literary style – almost a new literary language – which we now know as ‘Church Latin’, and which rapidly came to replace its classical predecessor. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, aesthetics had changed the Bible. This process was, of course, made more difficult by the fact that there was no single original text of the Bible to which scholars could refer. As mentioned in the Introduction, the texts of the Hebrew Bible – arranged differently from Rabbinic Judaism by Christians to form the ‘Old Testament’ – contained a wide variety of works in different genres covering nearly a thousand years. Though recent evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls and other early sources show that those books found there have been copied with remarkable accuracy, nevertheless at this period the Hebrew Scriptures relied completely on much later transcriptions. But by the fourth century Hebrew was already a dead language.9 Parts of Daniel are only known in Aramaic. Nor is the Greek New Testament, which caused such offence to Jerome and his fellow classicists, written in the language spoken by Jesus and his followers, who would have used Aramaic, the language of the Persian Empire. The koine¯ Greek of the Septuagint and the New Testament was, as we have seen, the common patois of traders at the eastern end of the Mediterranean rather than a Jewish dialect. The Vulgate, which replaced the old Latin version of the Bible, was already at several removes from its original sources. If the Bible has always challenged attentive readers, it is no less true that even the most faithful of the great European translations in turn revised and changed the text according to the needs and norms of their age. Luther’s sixteenth-century German translation was to re-shape both the German language and, once again, the Bible itself. For the Englishspeaking world, the King James Version of 1611, drawing on a series of earlier translations, 8 9

‘Ciceronianus es non Christianus’ Letter 22. Rather than being the spoken language of Jewish communities anywhere by that date, it was the  religious language to be used in synagogues, in much the same way that Latin was used until the second half of the twentieth century for the Catholic Mass, or sixth-century Arabic in Muslim countries like Indonesia today – or indeed, to a slightly lesser degree, King James English in the English-speaking world. Hebrew is slightly more complicated in that it has been ‘revived’ as the modern-day language of Israel. But it, too, has been a worship-only language for fifteen hundred years.

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but above all on Tyndale, performed a similar role in the shaping of English.10 What has sometimes been called ‘the King James Steamroller’, gave the language of the English Bible a lasting power and dignity that has influenced generations of English speakers and writers around the world ever since.11 What it has not done, however, is give any sense of the wide variety of forms and styles in the original writings. It is very much the creation of its time: serving the language, politics and cultural assumptions of early seventeenthcentury England. Moreover, we should remember that the forms and genres of the original Hebrew, which include history, prophecy, poetry, wisdom literature – even what we would now call ‘magical realism’12 – would, in turn, have reflected the literary, cultural and artistic assumptions of their own times. There was never a moment when the Word of God was not culturally, and therefore ‘artistically’, conditioned and mediated. But, of course, we are not just dealing with narratives. Jesus’s reduction of the Ten Commandments to just two (Mark 12: 13) is notable nearly as much for what it leaves out  as for what it includes. Totally omitted, even by implication, is the second Commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. (Exodus 20: 4) Not merely does this bypass certain specific earlier problems with golden calves (Exodus 32) – previously settled, we are told, by slaughtering some three thousand naked and unarmed Israelites, while conveniently excluding Aaron, the instigator of the whole project (32: 27–8) – but the new injunction, to love your neighbour as yourself, while perhaps offering an unspoken comment on the Exodus narrative, leaves questions of art and aesthetics entirely open. Here, incidentally, is another profound difference between Christianity and those other ‘people of the book’, Jews and Muslims, both of whom are expressly forbidden representational art in their scriptures. This does not mean, of course, that either religion has always avoided such art: rather that the same tension we have seen in Christianity persists, albeit more submerged, in both. When, for instance, Moses commissioned the mercy seat from Bezaleel and Aholiab, we are told he gave specific instructions for it to be embellished with two golden cherubs (Exodus 37: 7–9) apparently in complete contradiction of the second Commandment he had just promulgated; similarly Persian miniatures, or even the representational ‘fusion’ art of the Islamic Mogul Emperors in India would not be acceptable to strict Islamists. If, on closer inspection, the Bible has shown a much greater textual instability than the conventional wisdom of the past has often assumed, the arts have shown no less dramatic changes in both theory and practice. Once seen as ‘the handmaid of religion’, creating visual, architectural and even tactile illustrations to biblical stories for those who could not read the sacred Word (and in some cases were actively discouraged from doing so), 10

11

12

See Stephen Prickett, Introduction to the World’s Classics Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). See Stephen Prickett, ‘Language within Language: The King James Steamroller’, The King James Bible after 400 Years, ed. Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For example, Job or Jonah.

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in the last few hundred years the whole meaning and theory of art has undergone such transformations that even definitions of what we mean by ‘art’ have been the cause of heated debate. Northrop Frye once compared art to a psychopomp – a guide to the paths of the dead. Art, he suggested, was like Virgil at the end of Dante’s Purgatorio, pointing to a place where art could not by its very material nature follow. But the remarkable thing is that this debate over aesthetics was engendered primarily by developments in biblical criticism itself. From the beginning there was one very significant difference between the world of the Old Testament and the New. It is to be found at the first verse of John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ This is, of course, a literal translation of Jerome’s ‘verbum’ in the Vulgate, but the original Greek word is logos, which has a much wider resonance than the English – though, arguably, not of the Latin. Logos implies both reason and explanation. Much has been written about what John may, or may not, have meant by identifying Christ as the divine ‘Word’ of God in this sense of charged meaning in the universe from its very foundation. Given the enormity of its philosophical implications, it is perhaps not surprising that much less has been devoted to its aesthetic claims. Yet to identify Christ with language and verbal meaning is to give words – all words – a special resonance. For all the Rabbinical stress on Hebrew as the language of a people set apart by God, nowhere in the Old Testament is it ever explicitly stated that language is of itself a divinely-charged medium. Nor is the Hebrew Bible even written entirely in Hebrew: as has been pointed out, parts of the books of Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah, for instance, are in Aramaic. Jewish discussion as to the aesthetics of the Hebrew Scriptures only really begins under the influence of Arabic poetics and Qur’anic hermeneutics among Hebrew poets and scholars in twelfth century el-Andalus, though parallel, more rudimentary observations emerged independently among Jewish scholars in northern France, perhaps influenced by Christian notions of the Bible’s poetic qualities13 – which (as we shall see in David Jeffrey’s account in Chapter 5) go back at least to Augustine. But uniquely, the crude koine¯ Greek of the New Testament that had so offended the classical scholars of  the late Roman Empire, contained in embryo the revolutionary idea that language, rhetoric, even ‘logic’ (itself a derivative of the word logos), was somehow integral to the divine purpose. The universe had meaning that could be expressed, if not always in direct terms, then sacramentally, figuratively, symbolically. In other words, language14 was somehow integral to religion. If that was so, then it followed that even rhetoric could be seen as part of the Incarnation. If, as Alastair Minnis and A. B. Kraebel argue, the medieval Church was already disturbed by literary debates about the Bible,15 these were greatly exacerbated by the emergence of the concept of ‘literature’ in its modern sense at the end of the eighteenth century. Anthony Ossa-Richardson in a later chapter traces some of the fierce controversies that were to erupt over the assumed ‘sublimity’ of the Bible in France and the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.16 Partly because of the political turmoil in seventeenth-century England, such debates were slower to begin in the Englishspeaking Protestant world, where for a long time there was also little interest in the visual 13 14 15

16

See Chapter 3: Mordechai Cohen, ‘Hebrew Aesthetics and Jewish Biblical Exegesis’, pp. 24–41. By extension, therefore, logic and even science. See Chapter 29, Alastair Minnis and A. B. Kraebel, ‘The Medieval Bible as Literature’, pp. 440–58. See Chapter 6, pp. 69–87.

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arts to illustrate the Bible or to decorate churches. The post-1688 settlement by and large deemed the use of representational art in Protestant churches to be unnecessary, and possibly idolatrous. Thus both Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715) Bishop of Salisbury, and his contemporary, Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury (1636–1715), set the tone by frowning upon anything more elaborate in the way of church decoration than painted panels of texts – most commonly the Ten Commandments, the Creed, or the Lord’s Prayer. (Given Moses’ expressed enthusiasm for golden cherubs, these were also sometimes permitted at the corners.17) More rare, sometimes in conjunction with the Commandments, are panel depictions of Moses and Aaron. 18 For cultural reasons, textual criticism of the Bible in the English-speaking world was more likely to be literary than either historical or theological. This, in turn, was to shape the history of Biblical aesthetics quite differently in Protestant England from Protestant Germany. Hans Frei has argued that: In England, where a serious body of realistic narrative literature and a certain amount of criticism of that literature was building up, there arose no corresponding cumulative tradition of criticism of the biblical writings, and that included no narrative interpretation of them. In Germany, on the other hand, where a body of critical analysis as well as general hermeneutics of the biblical writings built up rapidly in the latter half of the eighteenth century, there was no simultaneous development of realistic prose narratives and its critical apparatus.19 This is surely correct in identifying the strength of eighteenth-century literary criticism in England, but, as we shall see with Robert Lowth, there was also ground-breaking biblical criticism in England during this period that most certainly did involve narrative interpretation. Indeed, Lowth’s work was to change the whole state of both English and German biblical scholarship, to play a significant part in triggering the German Higher Criticism of the later eighteenth century. Frei, however, is at least right in that the English were already writing, reading and criticising novels in a way that their contemporaries in Germany were not. As a result, they tended to read their Bibles differently. Though the idea of the ‘aesthetic’ first comes to prominence in German Romanticism with Kant’s third critique, the word itself is, of course, the coinage of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in the middle of the eighteenth century. First recorded in English in 1798, with the rather limited meaning of ‘received by the senses’, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) comments acerbically that the word was ‘misapplied in German by Baumgarten, and so used in England since 1830’. In fact, even the revolutionary use of the word to mean ‘pertaining to the beautiful’ by Baumgarten, was itself far too narrow to catch the way in which by the end of the century it had come to stand for something much closer 17

18

19

See Sarah Haynes, ‘A Legal History of Art in the Church of England’, paper given at Symposium on History, Religion and Art, Westminster College, Oxford, 25 October 2012, p. 292. Needless to say, such instructions were sometimes honoured more in the breach than the observance. Not merely are glories, tetragrammatons, and so on, to be found in this period; see also the dome ceiling of St Mary Abchurch (painted by William Snow, 1708) showing the heavenly choir and the classical virtues. But see Chapter 20, Nigel Aston, ‘Moses and Eighteenth-Century Religious Art’, pp. 292–306. Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 142.

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to ‘pertaining to the theory – or theories – of art’.20 In the Critique of Judgement (1790), Kant had attempted to bridge the gap between his two earlier Critiques, of what he called ‘pure’ and ‘practical Reason’, by means of reflective or aesthetic judgement – the power by which (for instance) we distinguish between the sublime and the beautiful.21 For Kant, these qualities were reflected alike in nature and art, but subsequent philosophers, following Schiller, in The Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), tended to see art rather than nature as central to the construction of the human world. For Hegel the Kantian priorities were explicitly reversed: beauty in art actually has higher status than natural beauty.22 Where Kant’s influence remained undiminished, however, was in the belief that poetry (rather than prose) was somehow the most representative form of this new and very powerful idea of the aesthetic.23 For Friedrich Schlegel there was a further attribute of the aesthetic that was of prime importance: it must be not merely ‘poetic’ but mythological. Before we make the Ideas aesthetic i.e. mythological, they are of no interest to the people and on the other hand before mythology is reasonable the philosopher must be ashamed of it. Thus enlightened and unenlightened must finally shake hands, mythology must become philosophical and the people reasonable, and philosophy must become mythological in order to make the philosophers sensuous. Then eternal unity will reign among us. Never the despairing gaze, never the blind trembling of the people before its wise men and priests. Only then can we expect the same development of all powers, of the individual as well as all individuals. No power will then be suppressed any more, then general freedom and equality of spirits will reign! – A higher spirit sent from heaven must found this new religion among us, it will be the last, greatest work of mankind.24 How much of this huge (and in some ways overbearing) superstructure of ideas actually influenced German Romantic writing is irrelevant here. What is very clear is that central to the new Romantic aesthetics of Herder, Kant, Schiller and the Schlegel brothers – critics and philosophers whom Schleiermacher was memorably to label ‘the cultured despisers’ of religion – was a new way of reading the Bible. Beginning with the criticism of Richard Simon in France and Robert Lowth in England, the new historical criticism was rapidly taken up by such critics as Eichhorn, Lessing and Reimarus in Germany who were to become the forerunners of what was known as the Higher Criticism.25 It was to change radically the whole subsequent theory of literature and the arts. Hegel’s assertion 20

21

22 23

24

25

See Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). See, for instance, Hazard Adams, Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1983), Ch. 2: ‘The Kantian Symbolic’. Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, p. 133. Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard, New York, Hafner Publishing Co., 1951, pp. 170–1. ‘Oldest System Programme of German Idealism’, in Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity (Bowie’s translation), pp. 266–7. The authorship is uncertain and it has been variously attributed to Hegel, Hegel, Hölderlin, Schelling, Schlegel – or any combination of the aforementioned. See Stephen Prickett, Origins of Narrative: the Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 182. See Stephen Prickett, Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Chs 6 & 7.

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that ‘in our time’ the theory of art is ‘much more important than any actual examples of its practice’ was only a reiteration of one of the fundamental tenets of the Jena group.26 Two twentieth-century French historical critics, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, attribute to Herder, Kant, Hegel and their successors the whole modern idea of ‘literature’ as writing charged with an aesthetic value over and above its ostensible subject. 27 Indeed, one of the features that was to become common to Romanticism right across Europe at this period was this new concept of ‘Literature’. The OED lists this value-added variant as the third and most modern meaning of the word, (‘of very recent emergence in both France and England’), defining it as ‘writing which has a claim to consideration on the ground of beauty of form or emotional effect’. But not merely was the idea of what constituted ‘literature’ – and its purest form, poetry – fiercely debated, but also the relationship of literature to the other arts: music, painting, sculpture, dance and other socalled representations of reality. Robert Lowth’s Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753), in which he redefined Hebrew poetry, proclaiming the sublimity of its rhetoric and diction, together with his subsequent translation of Isaiah (1778), were to strike a sympathetic chord all over Europe, and were widely translated and re-published. From Herder and the Jena Romantics in Germany to Chateaubriand in France, and Blake or Coleridge in England, the Bible was to replace the classics as the most potent literary model, and become, in Blake’s words ‘The Great Code of Art’. Moreover, Blake’s own multi-media prophetic works demonstrate how far this new biblical aesthetic could reach beyond words and rhetoric, potentially, at least, to incorporate all the arts.28 A late piece, ‘Laocoön’ (1820), shows the famous classical statue of the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being strangled by sea serpents – a sculpture now in the Vatican but which Blake (for his own peculiar reasons) believed to be a poor copy of a now lost Hebrew statue representing ‘Jehovah & his two Sons Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubim Of Solomons Temple by three Rhodians & applied to Natural Fact or History of Ilium.’ Around this Blake has scribbled a series of gnomic slogans: A Poet, a Painter, a musician, an Architect: the Man or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian. You must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses & Lands if they stand in the way of Art. Prayer is the study of Art. Praise is the Practise of Art. Fasting &c., all relate to Art . . . . . . The Old & New Testaments are the Great Code of Art . . . . . . Christianity is Art . . . If this sounds extreme, there are enough parallels in other writings of the period for Blake’s position to be understood more clearly in context. In the Prefaces to the Lyrical 26 27

28

Ästhetik, ed. Bassenge, Frankfurt-on-Main, 1965, vol. 1, p. 20. Cited by Bowie, pp. 134–5. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: the Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. xiv. For the ‘multi-media’ quality of Blake’s work, see Susanne Sklar, Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ as Visionary Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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Ballads (1800; 1802), and later in Biographia Literaria (1817) Wordsworth and Coleridge had stressed the role of the imagination, both as the ‘prime instrument of all human perception’,29 and as the power by which we respond to poetry (and, by implication, other works of art). We are not passive receivers of stimuli, but from the simplest of sense-data through to the most complex of responses to art, we are contributors, ‘part-creators’ as Wordsworth has it, of all that we experience. We do not observe art; we both create it and are possessed by it. We enter into it. What is true of art is also true of religion. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere,30 to discuss biblical hermeneutics in the light of poetic theory is not to apply an alien concept, but to restore a wholeness of approach that has been disastrously severed over the past two hundred years. For Coleridge’s German contemporary, Friedrich Schleiermacher, art is unfulfilled if it is separated from its natural concomitant, religion.31 Indeed, in an almost Blakean parallel he writes that A human being should be like a work of art, which, though openly exhibited and freely accessible, can nevertheless be enjoyed and understood only by those who bring feeling and study to it.32 In this view, only the artist, the one who enters into the soul of things by actually creating (or, as Schleiermacher sometimes has it, ‘self-creating’) is worthy of the title of Christian. Religious belief is a highly personal activity; it cannot be acquired second-hand. As Schleiermacher put it in his Speeches on Religion (1799): What one commonly calls belief, accepting what another person has done, wanting to ponder and empathize with what someone else has thought and felt, is a hard and  unworthy service, and instead of being the highest in religion, as one supposes, it is exactly what must be renounced by those who would penetrate into its sanctuary. To want to have and retain belief in this sense proves that one is incapable of religion; to require this kind of faith from others shows that one does not understand it.33 So much for the idea of tradition, or the inherited spiritual wisdom of the past! Nor was this view unique to Schleiermacher. His friend and collaborator Friedrich Schlegel was similarly unimpressed by the value of tradition: ‘You should never appeal to the spirit of the ancients as if to authority. It’s a peculiar thing with spirits: they don’t let themselves be grabbed by the hand and shown to others. Spirits reveal themselves only to spirits.’34 It is interesting to find that Schlegel and his Jewish wife, Dorothea Mendelssohn, two of the ‘cultured unbelievers’ addressed by Schleiermacher in his Speeches on Religion, were to find 29

30

31

32

33 34

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, Collected Works (Bollingen Series 75), vol. 7. 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), Ch. 13. Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 197 ff. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 158. Athenaeum Fragment 336, in Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Ibid. p. 134. ‘Critical Fragments’, Ibid. p. 44.

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a spiritual home in Catholicism less than ten years later. ‘If only because it is so ancient’, wrote Dorothea to a friend, ‘I prefer Catholicism. Nothing new is any use.’35 But in 1799–1800 both Schlegels, like Schleiermacher and the other ‘Jena’ Romantics, Novalis or Schelling, not to mention Blake, Wordsworth or Coleridge, considered art not just vital to religion, but actually indispensable to our sense of reality itself. Here is Schleiermacher again: No poetry, no reality. Just as there is, despite all the senses, no external world without imagination, so too there is no spiritual world without feeling, no matter how much sense there is. Whoever only has sense can perceive no human being, but only what is human: all things disclose themselves to the magic wand of feeling alone. It fixes people and seizes them; like the eye, it looks on without being conscious of its own mathematical operation.36 I have discussed this passage at length elsewhere;37 suffice it to say here that this Romantic idea of art is not merely the expression of religious experience, but is indispensible to it. Yet, as we have seen, even with the German Romantics, the relationship between language and whatever religious experience it struggles to express has rarely been without some degree of tension, or even outright hostility. What one might designate the incarnational possibilities of language (and they are never more than possibilities), not to mention the other arts listed by Blake, have hovered, flickeringly, throughout Christian history. Indeed one is tempted to use the symbolism of Stanley Kramer’s 1958 film, The Defiant Ones, where the two criminals, one black, one white, (Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis respectively) who loathe one another, escape from a chain-gang, but since they cannot break the chains that bind them inextricably together are finally forced to reach a grudging accommodation and even mutual respect. The difference, however, is that while the two escapees are bound by mere contingency, as we have seen, incarnational religion and art are bound by something much closer to necessity. As Roger Scruton has argued: God is not straightforwardly distinct from the way of representing him, even though identical with no physical thing. The earthly phenomenon through which he can be most accurately viewed is language . . .38 No religion can exist without some kind of concrete imagery, some kind of expression, which, however much certain devotees may try to exclude it, seems almost inevitably to assume an aesthetic form. Anyone who has actually attended a Quaker meeting – formally perhaps the most austere religious gathering ever devised – is likely to have noticed that, like the plain buildings in which they are housed, there is still a restrained, even minimalist, aesthetic undertone, the more impressive, perhaps, for understatement. Similarly, and not surprisingly, art – as far back perhaps as the earliest cave paintings – seems to have emerged historically as inseparable from religion. However much some post-Renaissance artists and writers may have proclaimed a defiant secularity, they often seem strangely drawn towards a transcendence, which, though frequently at odds with the conventional 35 36 37 38

Hans Eichner, Friedrich Schlegel (New York: Twayne, 1970), p. 106. Athenaeum Fragment 350 in Philosophical Fragments, trans. Firchow. See Stephen Prickett, Origins of Narrative, pp. 184–203. Roger Scruton, Our Church: A personal history of the Church of England (London: Atlantic Books, 2012), p. 39.

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religion of the time, begins to look suspiciously religious in flavour. In a later essay in this volume Kevin Hart quotes Michel Henry’s aphorism: ‘All thought is essentially religious.’39 Moreover, the greater the artist, it seems, the more likely this is to happen – hence, perhaps, also the phenomenon of the atheistic or agnostic religious artist, who is drawn aesthetically to religion even while rejecting its doctrines. One thinks most notoriously of Caravaggio or Cellini in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. More recently in music one thinks of the atheist Ralph Vaughan Williams, prolific composer and arranger of hymn tunes, church music and even an oratorio based on the Pilgrim’s Progress; or his contemporary, Edward Elgar, a lapsed Catholic, who said, at the apparent failure of his musical setting of a version of Newman’s Dream of Gerontius, ‘I always knew God was against art . . . I have allowed my heart to open once – it is now shut against every religious feeling . . .’40 Benjamin Britten, best known to the wider public for such ‘religious’ pieces as his War Requiem, took no part in the Church in his private life. Similar examples of visual artists working in a mythology they valued without believing can be found in the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. They include Jacob Epstein, John Hutton and Graham Sutherland.41 Yet the long process of destabilising both the Bible and the arts was only the beginning, not the end of this ever-more complicated dance in the twentieth century. If any in the English-speaking world in 1936 wondered whether the publication of Ernest Sutherland Bates’s Bible Designed to be Read as Literature was the final conclusion of this growing gap between the Bible and the arts, or its reverse – the absorption of the religious by the aesthetic – that was probably because they were still unaware of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s attempt to approach God by way of Kant’s third critique – which was to culminate in his massive, fifteen-volume work, the first seven volumes of which, The Glory of the Lord, was translated into English in 1982. Balthasar’s thought, which has been a major influence on many twentieth-century theologians, including both Rowan Williams and Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), when it first appeared in mid century was startlingly at odds with the conventional Thomism of Catholic theology – not to mention the worried editors of the Dublin Review half a century earlier – but it was to prove prophetic. For Balthasar, ‘great works of art’, occur with the same uncontrollable and numinous quality as Old Testament theophanies, appearing like inexplicable eruptions on the stage of history. Sociologists are as unable to calculate the precise day of their origin as they are to explain in retrospect why they appeared when they did . . . [Art’s] unique utterance becomes a universal language; and the greater a work of art, the more extensive the cultural sphere it dominates will be.42 We recall, similarly, George Steiner’s claim that ‘the experience of aesthetic meaning in particular, that of literature, of the arts, of musical form, infers the necessary possibility of a theological “real presence”’.43 39 40

41 42

43

See Chapter 9, p. 119. Jerrold Northrop Moore, Edward Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, paperback 1999), p. 334. See Sarah Hosking in her essay on Coventry Cathedral (Chapter 24). Hans Urs von Balthasar, Two Say Why, trans. John Griffiths (London: Search Press, 1973), pp. 20–1. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 3.

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To put it another way, and using a slightly different metaphor, it is not so much that the Bible and the arts are inseparably chained together, but that (like Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis), however unwillingly, they actually share the same, all too human, DNA. Not merely have they an astonishingly common history, but their origins are, if not murkily indistinguishable, probably identical. And like our two chained convicts, and, indeed, the rest of us, ancestry is not a matter of choice. We start where we find ourselves, not where we would necessarily like to be. That is not to say, of course, that the Puritan charges of idolatry were necessarily unfounded, or that religion is just another form of art. We oversimplify at our peril. But some understanding of where we have started should at least enable us know a little better where we are now. If, as Eliot claims in Little Gidding, ‘the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time’ this is never an easy journey, and though some explorers (like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner) live to tell their tale, it is clearly easier to quote than to do. We should remember the warnings of Blake and Schleiermacher, that religious experience, like artistic creation, cannot be second-hand. Their metaphors are of journeys without clear-cut goals, struggles without victories – especially if we suspect that, as in all processes of evolution, our starting-point itself is in constant motion. Thus in literature as in the other arts, in what Rowan Williams has memorably called the ‘theology of writing’, fiction and faith are deeply intertwined. Both fiction and faith are constantly in flux for ‘every new statement of faith has to issue into a linguistic world where it may be contradicted, ignored, parodied or . . . trivialized as a cliché’.44 In this, of course, it strangely parallels Jesus’s own career, where narrative and theology are inseparable concomitants.45 They are part of the ‘given’ of human existence.

44

45

Rowan Williams, Dostoyevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008), p. 45. See Stephen Prickett, Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism versus Irony, 1700–1999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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HEBREW AESTHETICS AND JEWISH BIBLICAL EXEGESIS Mordechai Z. Cohen

S

ometime in the 1130s in the northern, Christian sector of Spain, the accomplished and by then aged Hebrew poet and literary critic Moses Ibn Ezra (c. 1055–1138) recorded the following anecdote, recalling his early years in the great Muslim metropolis of Granada: In my youth, in my hometown, a Muslim scholar . . . asked me to recite the Ten Commandments in Arabic. I understood his intention, to demonstrate the paucity of its rhetoric. I therefore asked him to recite the opening (al-fatih∙a) of his Qur’an in Latin . . . but when he set out to translate it into that language its words became ugly and its beauty tarnished. He understood my intention and released me from his request.1 This passage is from Ibn Ezra’s Book of Discussion and Conversation, a handbook for composing Hebrew verse according to the rules of Arabic poetics, as was the practice of the great authors of the Golden Age of Hebrew poetry in Spain, who fused biblical language and themes into their Arabic-style poetry. Samuel the Prince (ha-Nagid) of Granada (993–1055) penned ‘Son of Psalms’, ‘Son of Proverbs’, and ‘Son of Ecclesiastes’ in this spirit. A similar model was followed by Solomon Ibn Gabirol of Zaragosa (1021–58), who had also written the Neoplatonic work Fons Vitae (of which the Arabic original has been lost and is now extant in Latin translation only; fragments of the original are cited by Ibn Ezra in another work of his).2 Judah ha-Levi of Toledo (1075–1141), a protégé of Moses Ibn Ezra and author of the influential polemical-theological Book of the Kuzari, likewise followed the Arabic model in his Hebrew poetry. Having participated in that poetic tradition himself, Moses Ibn Ezra saw fit to also write a poetics, The Book of Discussion, which, in addition to serving as a how-to guide for aspiring Hebrew poets, reflects a broad range of intellectual values and spiritual passions of Judeo-Arabic culture at its height in twelfthcentury al-Andalus (Muslim Spain). Among these values was the desire to demonstrate the aesthetic qualities of the Hebrew Bible, which Ibn Ezra did by harnessing the welldeveloped art of Arabic poetics and using it as a yardstick by which to evaluate the literary achievements of the ancient biblical prophets. 1

2

Moses Ibn Ezra, Book of Discussion 24a. For full information regarding this and other references, see the bibliography below. See Fenton, Philosophie et exégèse, pp. 393–403.

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Is the Bible Poetic? The great Hebrew poets of the Golden Age in al-Andalus exhibited a complex cultural identity. Though they were suffused with Arabic culture and learning, pride in their own heritage led them to pen their verse in Hebrew exclusively, even while adopting the norms of Arabic poetics. Moses Ibn Ezra was forced into exile in northern Spain in the 1090s, and from that point onward was deprived of the cultural richness he had enjoyed in alAndalus. Longing for that intellectual milieu, it was in Christian Spain that he composed his Book of Discussion.3 Like his educated Judeo-Arabic contemporaries in al-Andalus, Ibn Ezra prized literary elegance, termed fas∙a¯ h∙a (‘purity of speech’) and bala¯ gha (‘eloquence’) in Arabic. In addition to aspiring to achieving these qualities in their own metrical compositions, Andalusian Jewish scholars found it necessary to ascribe them to the Hebrew Bible as well. The trouble was that the Sacred Text did not seem to be guided by Arabic poetic norms. Ibn Ezra acknowledges this problem. Adopting the Arabic judgment that poetry (shi‘r), i.e., rhymed, metrical verse (naz∙m; lit. ‘string of pearls’), is superior to prose (nathr; lit. ‘scattering’), he ponders whether ‘metrical verse was known to our Israelite nation in [ancient times]’.4 Citing the biblical evidence, he concludes: ‘We have found nothing in [scripture] departing from prose save these three books: Psalms, Job and Proverbs. And these . . . employ neither meter nor rhyme in the manner of the Arabs.’5 Echoes of alternatives to this harsh verdict can be heard in the Book of Discussion. Ibn Ezra cites an unnamed scholar, probably his teacher Isaac Ibn Ghiyyath (1038–89), who believed that 1 Kings 5: 12, ‘[Solomon]’s poetry (shir) was one thousand and five’, refers to lost poetry comparable to the highest Arabic poetic forms, but he himself is sceptical that these differed from existing biblical ‘poetry’.6 Other authors brought evidence from the biblical passages explicitly labelled shir(ah) (pl. shirot), the medieval Hebrew term for ‘poetry’ (phonetically similar to Arabic shi‘r).7 But Ibn Ezra is more cautious, and argues that Biblical Hebrew shir(ah) does not connote poetry in the Arabic sense.8 His outlook informed by Greek and Arabic thought, Ibn Ezra appreciated the powerful effects of art, in all of its manifestations, on the human mind and emotions. In another work of his, The Treatise of the Garden on Figurative and Literal Language, he discusses the capacity of music to elevate man’s soul, which explains its central role in the ancient Holy Temple (see 1 Chronicles 25: 1–5). He notes that the prophets at times required musical inspiration to receive word from God, as evident from Elisha’s request for a minstrel (2 Kings 3: 15).9 Citing ‘ancient philosophers’, Ibn Ezra describes how music 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

His choice to write this work in Judeo-Arabic made it virtually inaccessible to Jews in Christian lands, to which the great centres of Jewish learning were ultimately transplanted. The work was translated into Hebrew and Spanish in the last quarter of the twentieth century; see the bibliography for details. Book of Discussion 5a, 10a, 14a–15a. Book of Discussion 24a. Book of Discussion 25a–b. Compare with the introduction to Ibn Ghiyyat’s commentary on Ecclesiastes, published in The Five Scrolls: Song of Songs, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Lamentation with Ancient Commentaries (Hebrew), ed. and trans. [into Hebrew] Joseph Qafih (Jerusalem 1962), p. 168. See Adele Berlin, Biblical Poetry, pp. 33–4. Book of Discussion 25a. See A. Shiloah (ed. and trans.), ‘The Musical Passage in Ibn Ezra’s Book of the Garden’, Yuval: Studies of the Jewish Music Research Center 4 (1982): pp. 211–24.

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‘stir[s] up the noble forces of the soul’ by awakening man’s unique aesthetic sensibilities, which were implanted in his nature ‘when God attached the individual souls to animals’ bodies’. Music, he explains, ‘corresponds to [man’]s four temperaments and harmonize[s] their differences’; he thus analyses how each musical tone produces a distinct spiritual effect on the listener.10 Ibn Ezra describes the effects of poetry on man’s spirit in similar terms. Stimulating his aesthetic sense, poetry captivates man’s soul and becomes indelibly absorbed into his heart like ‘engraving in a stone’. Its melodic rhythm, uniform metre, clever sound-plays, noble diction, beautiful imagery, and other ornaments all cause poetry to be ‘most strongly fastened to the ears and most closely attached to man’s nature’.11 Ibn Ezra thus believed that the Bible’s poetic language stirs man’s aesthetic sense and fastens God’s word to his soul, much like the Temple music inspired worshippers and enhanced their divine service. While his protégé Judah ha-Levi would see no need to support his assertion that the biblical authors were capable of the highest literary excellence, Moses Ibn Ezra insisted on establishing an empirical basis for this assessment. And whereas ha-Levi implies that the ‘pure’ and ‘authentic’ biblical literary style (which he did not, in fact, define) is superior to all foreign models,12 Ibn Ezra acknowledged his debt to Greco-Arabic aesthetics. As he remarks: The art of rhetoric (Ar. khita¯ ba) is called rhetorica in Greek . . . According to the philosopher Aristotle it is speech that persuades . . . And rhetoric[al addresses] are found in our sacred prophetic books . . . The art of poetry (Ar. shi‘r) is called poetica in Greek . . . The term for poet (Ar. sha¯ ‘ir) in our [Hebrew] language is navi (=prophet) . . . [For example:] ‘a group of nevi’im’ (1 Sam 10: 5) – a gathering of poets; ‘you shall engage in nuvu’ah with them’ (1 Sam 10: 6) – you shall extemporize poetry.13 In addition to presenting these ancient Greek concepts with their Arabic equivalents, Ibn Ezra finds it necessary to establish that these forms are represented in the Hebrew Bible. Most strikingly, he emphasises the central role that poetics played in the Hebrew Bible by equating the Arabic term for poet (Ar. sha¯ ‘ir) with the Hebrew term for prophet (navi). Interestingly, this very connection would be made some six hundred years later by Robert Lowth (1710–87), a seminal Bible scholar, who was also Oxford Professor of Poetry and a Bishop of the Church of England.14 Whereas Lowth inherited his conceptions of poetry and poetics from Latin learning, Moses Ibn Ezra relies upon Greco-Arabic sources for this purpose. As he writes: 10

11

12 13 14

See Shiloah, ‘Musical Passage’, pp. 218–19 (Arabic), pp. 221–2 (English). Judah ha-Levi also speaks of music as a ‘revered art’ that ‘transfer[s] the soul from one mood to its opposite’ (Kuzari II: 64–5). Biblical evidence for this assessment can be brought, of course, from the therapeutic effects of David’s harp playing to cure Saul’s melancholy, as described in 1 Samuel 16: 23. Book of Discussion 14b–15a. The connection between music and poetry is further developed by later medieval authors. See Berlin, Biblical Poetry, pp. 88–9. See Kuzari II: 70, 74, 78. See also Cohen, ‘Best of Poetry’, pp. 23–4. Book of Discussion 9b–15a. Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, trans. G. Gregory (Boston: T. J. Buckingham, 1815), II: 14–18. See also Prickett, Words, p. 41.

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In the eighth of his books on logic (the Poetics),15 the Philosopher (Aristotle) enumerated the matters in which poetry excels and is beautified [including] . . . strength of the words, pleasantness of the matters, incorporating many matters in few words, beauty of the comparisons, quality of the metaphors, strength of the correspondence, repetition of the ends and the openings . . . Now the Arabs divided them into many more than this number and scrutinized this matter deeply, as you shall see in this composition when you reach the appropriate place.16 And it is in fact the Arabic ‘embellishments’ of poetry that he uses to define this art form in his Book of Discussion. Moreover, to establish the literary excellence of the Hebrew Bible he illustrates his list of twenty key ‘embellishments’ defined by Arab experts on poetry with biblical examples.17 Moses Ibn Ezra’s willingness to adopt Arabic poetic standards might be contrasted with Lowth’s response to the incompatibility of the Hebrew Bible with the neoclassical poetic yardstick prevalent in eighteenth-century England. As noted by Stephen Prickett, for Lowth, ‘an understanding of scripture . . . involves . . . a radical re-think of what was to be called “aesthetics”’.18 According to Lowth: To relish completely all the excellencies of the Hebrew literature, the fountains themselves must be approached, the peculiar flavour of which cannot be conveyed by . . . any exertion of modern art . . . [B]y considering the circumstances, customs, opinions, and sentiments of the Hebrews [we] facilitate our approach to the interior beauties of their poetry . . . to restore their native perspicuity to such passages as appear obscure, their native agreeableness to such as now inspire us with sentiments of disgust, their proper allurement and elegance to those which seem harsh and vulgar.19 As Prickett explains: For the neo-classical tradition in which Lowth was raised, poetic diction was meant to be elevated, refined, and abstract . . . Whatever qualities Hebrew poetry had, however, it could not be seen as anything other than specific, concrete, and downto-earth – and therefore, for a neo-classicist, impossibly coarse and vulgar. The psalmist who wrote ‘Moab is my washpot; over Edom will I cast out my shoe . . .’ (Psalm 60: 8) breaks every canon of neo-classical correctness . . . Lowth . . . turns this aesthetic against itself, attacking ‘those theories of rhetoricians which they have so pompously detailed, attributing that to art, which above all things is due to nature alone’. This very contrast with the norms of neo-classical prosody gives it, he argues, its own sublimity.20 15

16 17 18

19 20

In its Arabic version, Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics were classified under the rubric of logic. See Black, Logic. Book of Discussion 76a. Book of Discussion 116b. Stephen Prickett, ‘Robert Lowth’s Biblical Poetics and Romantic Theory’, in Interpreting Scriptures in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Overlapping Inquiries, ed. Adele Berlin and Mordechai Z. Cohen (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Lowth, Lectures, pp. 114, 116. Prickett, ‘Lowth’s Biblical Poetics’.

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Lowth constructs a new aesthetic based on the ‘interior beauties’ of biblical Hebrew poetry, shattering the norms of neoclassical poetics (and anticipating Romantic poetics). In embracing Arabic poetics so explicitly, Moses Ibn Ezra may have limited the influence of his Book of Discussion, which was tied to the fate of a particular Andalusian Judeo-Arabic outlook that would fade away as the Reconquista progressed in Spain, forcing Jewish learning to be transplanted to Christian lands. While much of Judeo-Arabic scholarship was lost during this often tumultuous transition, the activities of assiduous translators salvaged some of the most important Judeo-Arabic linguistic, theological, philosophical and legal works, preserving them in Hebrew for the benefit of later generations of Jewish readers. But the Book of Discussion remained untranslated in the medieval period, although Ibn Ezra’s Treatise of the Garden, being of a more philosophical nature, was translated by the great Judeo-Arabic poet Judah Alharizi (1165–1225; Toledo [?], Aleppo). As it turns out, though, the aesthetic perspective that Moses Ibn Ezra applied to the Bible lived on in the exegetical tradition, which his Book of Discussion actually illuminates uniquely. I am referring to what came to be known as the school of ‘peshat’, that is, ‘plain sense’ philological-contextual exegesis of the Hebrew Bible that emerged in the medieval period and displaced the older midrashic interpretive mode, which was associative and unscientific. Perhaps the best-known pashtan (practitioner of peshat) is Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac; 1040–1105, Troyes), who distinguishes his own ‘plain sense’ (peshat) exegesis from the Rabbis’ midrashic interpretations – a project perfected by his grandson Rashbam (Rabbi Samuel ben Meir; c. 1080–1160, Rouen). Rashi and Rashbam represent one branch of the peshat school, which emerged in northern France. But the one to which Moses Ibn Ezra belonged was pioneered by Saadia Gaon (882–942, Fayyum, Egypt; Baghdad) in the Muslim East and developed to spectacular heights in al-Andalus. Within that school, Arabic learning was avidly harnessed to fathom the depths of the Hebrew language, yielding a long line of Bible exegetes culminating in the commentaries of the celebrated pashtan Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1164, Spain, Italy, France, England; no relation to Moses Ibn Ezra). In his early life in Muslim Spain, Abraham Ibn Ezra was more interested in composing poetry, and is cited together with Judah ha-Levi in the Book of Discussion (42b) as an up-and-coming young poet. But in 1140 Abraham Ibn Ezra was forced to flee Spain, and made his way to Rome. There he began a twenty-four-year career in which he wrote Bible commentaries that would become extremely influential, as they made Andalusian learning (previously available only in Judeo-Arabic) newly accessible to Jews in Christian lands. A generation later, Moses Maimonides (1138–1204, Muslim Spain, Egypt) penned his Guide of the Perplexed to harmonise the Hebrew Bible with science and philosophy. (Although written originally in Judeo-Arabic, the Guide was soon translated into Hebrew.) Fusing the exegetical methods of Abraham Ibn Ezra and the philosophical outlook of Maimonides, the Provençal exegete Radak (=David Kimhi; 1165–1230, Provence) would represent a high-water mark of the Andalusian peshat school transplanted to Christian lands. Christian interpreters who sought to elucidate the ‘literal sense’ of the Old Testament – a movement that began to take form during the ‘twelfth-century renaissance’ but which reached a high point in the Reformation – regularly turned to Jewish peshat interpreters. The twelfth-century Hebraists Hugh of St Victor and Herbert of Bosham used the

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commentaries of Rashi and his students.21 Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, translated into Latin in the 1220s, was an important source for St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, and for Nicholas of Lyre (who also used Rashi extensively) in the fourteenth.22 The advent of printing made Jewish commentaries readily available, especially in the ‘Rabbinic Bible’ (published from the early sixteenth century) that featured Rashi, Abraham Ibn Ezra and Radak surrounding the biblical text – all cited in the notes of the 1611 King James Bible. As James Kugel has demonstrated, midrashic interpretation – not unlike the ‘spiritual sense’ celebrated by the Church Fathers – is founded on the assumption that the Bible is a cryptic text, whose ultimate sense lies beneath the surface.23 The peshat endeavour, as developed in the schools associated with the above-mentioned Jewish Bible interpreters, departs sharply from this assumption. Within Christian tradition, the Wycliffite notion that ‘the Bible speaks plainly’ is part of a trajectory that Lowth follows, when he writes that The first and principal business of a Translator is to give us the plain literal and grammatical sense of his author . . . For whatever senses are supposed to be included in the Prophet’s words, Spiritual, Mystical, Allegorical, Anagogical, or the like, they must all entirely depend on the Literal Sense.24 As an accomplished Hebraist, Lowth was quite familiar with the great pashtanim and drew upon their work. Yet the facile association of peshat with the ‘literal sense’ of scripture is overly simplistic. In truth, a key characteristic of peshat exegesis is an awareness of aesthetic dimension of scripture and the role played by rhetorical and poetic considerations in its original composition in ancient times. In this respect, peshat interpretation departs from another midrashic assumption articulated by Kugel: Scripture is perfect and perfectly harmonious . . . [a] view [that] ultimately led to the doctrine of ‘omnisignificance,’ whereby nothing in scripture is said in vain or for rhetorical flourish: every detail is important, everything is intended to impart some teaching . . . [A]ll sorts of . . . apparently insignificant details in the Bible – an unusual word or grammatical form, any repetition . . . – all were read as potentially significant.25 Moses Ibn Ezra’s aesthetic outlook helps illuminate the departure of the peshat school from this assumption – especially in the tradition of Abraham Ibn Ezra, Maimonides and Kimhi. 21

22

23 24

25

See Berly Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (3rd edn, Notre Dame: 1983), pp. 102–5, 364–6; see also Goodwin, Herbert. See Smalley, Study of the Bible, pp. 298–302. See Deeana Copeland Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of the Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia 2007). For the characterisation of Lyre, see Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 86, 91–3. Kugel, Bible, p. 18. Robert Lowth, Isaiah: A New Translation [1778], repr. (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1822), p. lxix. Kugel, Bible, pp. 20–1.

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Rhetoric in the Bible David Kimhi’s Andalusian heritage emerges clearly in his striking assessment of the prophetic vision of Micaiah ben Imlah described in Kings 22. In an endeavour to dissuade King Ahab from doing battle at Ramoth Gilead – a course of action encouraged by 400 prophets and the charismatic Zedekiah ben Chenaanah – Micaiah proclaims that he ‘saw the Lord seated upon His throne, with all the host of heaven standing in attendance to the right and to the left of Him’. Describing an elaborate vision of the Lord seeking a volunteer to ‘entice’ Ahab to march to his death, Micaiah tells of a ‘lying spirit’ that proposes to enter ‘the mouth of all his prophets’ (1 Kings 22: 19–23)26 and mislead Ahab – a mission that the Lord sanctions. Radak’s commentary here highlights the question that this biblical passage posed to the rationalist Andalusian outlook: This matter poses a great perplexity to one who takes it literally (ke-mashma‘o). Now the truth (emet) is that God induced the false prophets to mislead Ahab . . . but not that any of them attained prophecy . . . But what about the elaborate vision that Micaiah describes? In Radak’s view, all of these are [merely] words of eloquence (divrei melis∙ah), which Micaiah said rhetorically (derekh has∙a‘at devarim; lit. by way of presenting [his] words), not that Micaiah saw any of these things, nor heard them, since prophecy from God must be true.27 Radak argues that the Micaiah’s purported vision is a fabrication, a rhetorical dramatisation of the message he received from God. Ironically, our medieval commentator describes this tactic echoing the Mishnaic definition of a false prophet: ‘one who prophecies what he did not see or did not hear’ (m. Sanhedrin 11: 5). Radak would say, of course, that there is a kernel of truth in Micaiah’s words: that the prophets are lying, as expressed in his final verse. Indeed, this point is referred to as ‘the truth’ (ha-emet) of Micaiah’s vision in the first line of this gloss. As he often does ‘for the lovers of derash’,28 Radak notes the traditional alternative to his peshat interpretation, according to which the ‘spirit’ was actually that of Naboth the Jezrelite, who was murdered by Ahab and finds an opportunity here to settle the score. Radak’s citation of this approach highlights the revolutionary nature of his peshat reading: Radak posits, by way of peshat, that a prophetic depiction is not intended literally, 26 27

28

The Bible is cited in this essay according to the NJPS translation (Philadelphia 1985). Radak’s gloss on 1 Kings 22: 19. Unless otherwise indicated, citations from the medieval Jewish commentators are from the Miqraot Gedolot (Rabbinic Bible), Keter, ed. (Ramat Gan 1990–), where available. Interestingly, a similar notion is expressed by William Blake in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–3), plates 12–13, where he writes in the name of the prophet Isaiah: ‘I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded, & remain confirm’d; that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God.’  Introduction to his commentary on The Former Prophets. See Cohen, ‘Qimhi Family’, pp. 396–8.

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by contrast with the midrashic approach which assumes a factual literal reading.29 In this respect he is representative of the Andalusian school,30 in which peshat was not simply a literal or even purely philological-contextual reading, but rather an attempt to understand the Hebrew Bible in light of the key role played by rhetoric in ancient prophecy. The lineage of Radak’s specific treatment of Micaiah’s vision can be traced to Judah ha-Levi’s Kuzari: [Regarding what] Micaiah said to Ahab, ‘I saw the Lord seated upon his throne . . .’, there was no truth (or: literally true language; Ar. h∙aqı¯qa; Heb. emet) in this vision beyond what he said: ‘So the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these prophets of yours.’ And all the rest is simply an introduction and rhetorical preparation (Ar. muqaddima wa-tawt∙i’a khit∙a¯ biyya; Heb. haqdamah we-has∙a‘ah halas∙iyyit) to confirm and emphasize that this utterance is true. (Kuzari 3: 73) Ha-Levi composed the Kuzari in Judeo-Arabic, but it was soon translated into Hebrew by Judah Ibn Tibbon (c. 1120–90), an Andalusian émigré in Provence. Radak probably used the latter version, though he might have been able to make his way in the original as well.31 In any case, Radak employs ha-Levi’s terminology: both oppose the ‘the truth’ (emet) of Micaiah’s prophecy to his rhetorical strategy (melis∙ah, halas∙ah). This further connects Kimhi to the Andalusian tradition, since ha-Levi’s comment is rooted in the interpretive thought of his mentor, Moses Ibn Ezra, as evident in the citation above (at n.  13). Indeed, a further exploration of the great Andalusian literary critic’s work will further illuminate Radak’s peshat orientation.

Moses Ibn Ezra on Artistic Falsehood Moses Ibn Ezra’s aesthetic outlook is especially evident in his treatment of the ‘embellishments’ defined by Arab experts on poetry – which he applies to the Bible. For example: The first category of the embellishments of poetry is metaphor (isti‘a¯ ra) . . . Even though precise [i.e., non-metaphorical] language is most reliable, in that it is fundamental, and metaphor is merely [derived] from it, nonetheless [metaphor] has grace. When a composition is enrobed in the cloak of metaphor, its silken garment becomes beautiful and its glaze refined . . . And those among the intelligent people of our time who disavow metaphor resist the plainly manifest truth and turn aside from the straight path, for metaphor is manifold in our Scriptures.32 To support this claim he goes on to list forty biblical examples of metaphor.33 Ibn Ezra acknowledges that metaphor is less accurate than literal language, and that it is a derivative rather than essential form of speech.34 Yet metaphorical expression is more elegant 29 30 31 32 33 34

This occurs elsewhere; see for example, Radak on Jeremiah 31: 14, Hosea 1: 2. See for example, Abraham Ibn Ezra on Hosea 1: 2; Maimonides, Guide, II: 46. On Radak’s knowledge of Arabic, see Cohen, Three Approaches, 137n. Book of Discussion 118a–119a. For an analysis of these examples, see Cohen, ‘Argument’. The implications of these ‘defects’ are discussed in Cohen, ‘Imagination’, pp. 439–40.

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and thus necessary, as Ibn Ezra demonstrates himself when speaking of metaphorical language ‘enrobing’ a naked idea to beautify it, rendering it ‘poetic’. The problem with metaphor is a reflection of a more fundamental issue raised about poetry itself in Ibn Ezra’s Muslim milieu: It was said that ‘the best of speech is its most true,’ and this is a valid statement, but it does not apply to the poet, for it as been said ‘the best of poetry is its most false’ . . . And in the Qur’an of the Arabs it says: As for the poets, they are followed only by the strayers. Do you not see that they wander aimlessly in every valley? And that they say what they do not [actually] do? (Sura 26: 224–6)35 Ibn Ezra records that the philosophical tradition, likewise, associated poetry with falsehood. Among other sources, he cites Alfarabi’s critique of poetry: The poet is like one who makes a design that is visually splendid, but has no truth (h∙aqı¯qa) to it.36 While Alfarabi represents the Aristotelian branch of Arabic philosophy, the critique of the poets as liars is a reflection of the general philosophical objection to poetry that goes back to Plato. One solution Ibn Ezra offers is that only the external form of the poem – its elaborate metaphorical language – is false, but that the deeper ‘intention’ (mura¯ d) may be true.37 Underlying this argument is a distinction made in Arabic poetics between form and content, as Ibn Ezra himself articulates: The wording (lafz∙) is a vessel for the idea (or: content, meaning; ma‘na) . . . The idea is the spirit (ruh∙) and the word is the body (badan) . . . And . . . the prophet cannot fulfill his mission except through wording with which he can be understood, even if it differs from the wording that he heard. But what does not change is the idea. Now speech (or: language; kala¯ m) is made up of a husk (qishr) and a kernel (lubb). The husk is . . . perceived by the ear . . . but . . . understanding . . . occurs only in the heart . . . [when] the idea is received by the intellect . . .38 Beginning with the classical dichotomy between ‘wording’ and ‘idea’ – said to be related like ‘body’ and ‘spirit’ – Ibn Ezra produces a starker image: the wording is merely an incidental husk (qishr), whereas the idea is the kernel (lubb). Accordingly, the falsehood of poetry is merely a feature of an incidental element, but does not affect the truth of its essence. A critical transition is made by Moses Ibn Ezra here that depends on the equation of poetry and prophecy established early in the Book of Discussion: the form-content dichotomy applies not only to poetry, but to prophecy as well. Just like the poet, who devises a poetic – and thus ‘false’ – garb for his true ideas, the prophet’s task is to find the most rhetorically effective wording to express the bare content communicated to him by 35 36 37 38

Book of Discussion 62a–b. Book of Discussion 64a. Book of Discussion 64a. Book of Discussion 77b.

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God. Indeed, it is this thinking that underlies the way in which ha-Levi and Radak interpret Micaiah’s vision: an imaginative and thus ‘false’ dramatisation of the essential truth (h∙aqı¯qa) communicated to the prophet by God. The Song of Songs, a text interpreted allegorically in Jewish (as in Christian) tradition, but that otherwise seems to be comprised of charming love lyrics, shines a spotlight on the potential disparity between what might be regarded as the imaginative, false poetic ‘husk’ of Scripture and its true and sublime inner essence. Ibn Ezra’s approach to this disparity can be gleaned from a comment of his intended to address a criticism levelled against the erotic Hebrew poetry of his own day. In defence, the great poet writes: The love and passion . . . [depicted by] the poets of our people are not repugnant since this is found in the Holy Writings, even though the meaning of [that which is] hidden in that speech (ma‘na ba¯∙t in dhalik al-kala¯ m) is not the apparent sense (z∙a¯ hir) of the language.39 Referring to the erotic love poetry in the Song of Songs, Ibn Ezra invokes a standard dichotomy used in the interpretation of the Qur’an between the ∙za¯ hir, the external or apparent sense, and the ba¯∙t in, the hidden, inner meaning. In the case of the Song of Songs, the human love poetry is merely an external veneer of a biblical book that relates to more lofty matters – such as the relationship between God and Israel.40 Notwithstanding this assessment of the Song’s inner meaning, Ibn Ezra maintains that its literary form is worthy of emulation for its poetic beauty. The most radical implication of Ibn Ezra’s rhetorical-poetic outlook emerges in his Treatise of the Garden. In speaking of the anthropomorphic depictions of God that abound in the Hebrew Bible, he remarks: The true idea (Ar. al-ma‘na al-h∙aqı¯qi; Heb. ha-‘inyan h∙a-amiti) that is intended is too wondrous and exalted to be understood precisely. The wise man must [therefore] divest the [true] ideas of their garb of gross figurative expressions (Heb. ha‘avarot; Ar. maja¯ za¯ t) and [re]clothe them in pleasant garb, so that he will reach through them the intended idea, to the extent of human capacity to comprehend.41 In his poetics, when discussing the process of literary composition, Ibn Ezra described how metaphor enrobes plain ideas in beautiful language. Here we find the corollary that the reverse process of interpretation uncovers the ‘true idea’ underlying scripture’s figurative language by ‘stripping away’ the husks that adorn it. True, Ibn Ezra here is speaking about a special case – language about God, which entails particular theological challenges. But this perspective pervades his exegetical work, and it would be fair to say that it broadly characterises the Andalusian peshat method, which identifies elements of scripture used 39 40

41

Book of Discussion 143a. Moses Ibn Ezra does not specify that he takes this to be the substance of the inner meaning of the Song. But this was a rather standard view in eleventh-century al-Andalus, as reflected, for example, in the commentary of Abraham Ibn Ezra, and the commentary attributed to Saadia Gaon. Another interpretation, however, did emerge within the Andalusian tradition, namely that the Song, taken allegorically, depicts the love of the individual soul for God. See below, n. 53. Arabic, MS, p. 46; Hebrew trans., p. 137. On the complexities of this passage, see Cohen, Three Approaches, p. 63.

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for poetic and rhetorical purposes, to preclude their further interpretation.42 This strategy was devised as an antidote to midrashic over-interpretation motivated by the doctrine of ‘omnisignificance’.43 Indeed, it is this Andalusian peshat outlook that is reflected in Radak’s approach to  Micaiah’s vision – identifying the point of ‘truth’ in the prophet’s words, and relegating the remainder of the dramatic account in heaven to the need to convey that point in the most rhetorically effective way. In this respect, he follows in the footsteps not only of ha-Levi and Moses Ibn Ezra (as noted above), but also of Abraham Ibn Ezra, who remarks: The words of any author, whether a prophet or a sage, [have but] one meaning (t∙a‘am), although those with great wisdom (i.e., the Rabbis) augment [this] and infer one thing from another thing . . . by way of derash . . . About this the early Sages, of blessed memory, said: ‘A biblical verse does not leave the realm of its peshat.’44 The goal of his peshat analysis is to zero in on the single meaning (t,a‘am, ma‘na) of scripture, rather than its incidental literary embellishments of the sort that invited the midrashic inferences of the Rabbis. Indeed, throughout his commentaries, Abraham Ibn Ezra points to elements in the biblical text that are deployed merely for the sake of elegance (which he terms ∙sah∙ot in Hebrew, a cognate of Ar. fas∙a¯ h∙a) and that therefore must not be interpreted – as the Rabbis typically do, motivated by their doctrine of omnisignificance.45 The endeavour to separate the ‘kernel’ of the Divine word from its incidental, ornamental ‘husk’ thus characterises ‘the way of peshat’ that guided Abraham Ibn Ezra and Radak.

Exegetical Implications: Maimonides on Job and the Song of Songs Some of the more dramatic exegetical applications of the Andalusian aesthetic outlook are manifested in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. This is perhaps ironic since Maimonides – unlike Moses and Abraham Ibn Ezra – seemed to have little patience for poetry or aesthetics himself, subscribing wholeheartedly to the Farabian philosophical outlook that prized ‘truth’ over beauty (above, at n. 36). Yet Maimonides recognised that the ancient prophets, who sought to bring the word of God to the people, were forced to employ the appropriate rhetorical and poetic strategies to capture their audience’s attention. The Greco-Arabic philosophical school itself, chiefly the writings of Alfarabi and Avicenna, provided Maimonides with the notion that the ancient prophets conveyed philosophical truths in poetic form in order to communicate most effectively with the uneducated masses.46 Recognising the key role of the literary imagination in the formation of the Hebrew Bible, Maimonides dedicates considerable thought in his Guide of the Perplexed to the ‘parables’ composed by the ancient prophets. In identifying ‘perplexing’ biblical passages 42 43 44 45 46

See Cohen, Three Approaches, pp. 238–45. See above, at n. 25. See also Kugel, Idea, pp. 103–9. Yesod Diqduq, Allony (ed.), p. 86. See Cohen, Gates, pp. 199–201, and references cited there. See Sara Klein-Braslavy, King Solomon and Philosophical Esotericism in the Thought of Maimonides (Hebrew; Jerusalem 1996).

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as parables (Ar. amtha¯ l; Heb. meshalim) that are not to be taken literally, Maimonides resolves numerous theological difficulties.47 But Maimonides also argues that one must recognise that biblical parables also employ some elaborate language purely for the sake of literary embellishment.48 Accordingly, he formulates the following interpretive principle: once the general idea (ma‘na; Ar. equivalent of Heb. ∙t a‘am) of a biblical parable is identified, one must not ascribe further meaning to its details, since their function is merely literary rather than substantive.49 Well-versed in rabbinic literature, Maimonides clarifies – rather polemically – that this principle undercuts the sort of over-interpretation characteristic of midrash. Here he puts his finger on the fundamental assumption of the Andalusian peshat school that counters the midrashic doctrine of ‘omnisignificance’: that an understanding of the workings of biblical poetics enables the discerning reader to separate out (‘strip away’) the incidental stylistic garb of biblical literature to get at its essential content – the intention of the biblical authors, what Abraham Ibn Ezra took as the singular goal of his ‘way of peshat’. Maimonides’ treatment of the book of Job, to which he devotes two full chapters in the Guide, is a fine illustration of his application of his reductive interpretive principle. A fundamental step he takes is to identify this tale as a parable (Heb. mashal; Ar. mathal) for which he cites a precedent from the Talmud: You know the explicit statement of [the Sages] ‘Job never existed and was never created, but was only a parable (mashal)’ (b. Bava Bathra 15a).50 But this view is actually rejected in the Talmud, and the book of Job was typically assumed to be historical within the subsequent Jewish interpretive tradition. Maimonides, on the other hand, found it necessary to posit that Job is a literary fiction, and this permits him to separate out the book’s essence, its philosophical content from its fictional, stylistic format.51 And, indeed, in the following chapter of the Guide Maimonides abstracts five philosophies from the speeches of Job and his companions, while disregarding what he refers to here as ‘dicta necessary for the order of the discourse’. Following the principle articulated in his introduction to the Guide, Maimonides claims that these dicta were employed by the author of the book of Job in order to hide the book’s true – and potentially dangerous – philosophical content from the masses.52 Against this backdrop we can understand Maimonides’ interpretive approach to the Song of Songs, presented in passing in his legal work, Mishneh Torah: What is the love of God that is befitting? To love the Eternal with a great and exceeding love . . . like a lovesick individual, whose mind is at no time free from his passion for a particular woman, the thought of her filling his heart at all times . . . Solomon expressed this allegorically (derekh mashal) [saying,] ‘For I am sick with love’ (Song 2: 5). And the Song of Songs in its entirety is a mashal for this notion. (Hilkhot Teshuvah 10: 3) 47

48 49 50 51 52

Guide, introduction; Pines (trans.), p. 6. It is this directive that Radak applied to Micaiah’s vision, above, at n. 27. Ibid. p. 12. Ibid. p. 15. Guide III: 22, Pines (trans.), p. 486. Guide III: 22, Pines (trans.), p. 490. See Cohen, ‘Maimonides vs. Rashi’, pp. 325–32.

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Despite the brevity of this remark, the preceding discussion enables us to unpack its hermeneutical implications. Maimonides boldly draws the logical conclusion from the Andalusian literary interpretive outlook and applies it to the Song of Songs. He does so in the context of describing how a person must love God in an all-consuming way, just as one is overpowered by feelings of romantic love. As he explains, this analogy is the very essence of the Song of Songs – which he takes allegorically to connote the longing of the individual for God.53 The language Maimonides uses here – ‘the Song of Songs in its entirety is a mashal for this notion’ – parallels the language he uses in the Guide to describe the literary workings of this genre, in which most of the details are merely poetic embellishment. This implication was drawn out by the post-Maimonidean Provençal commentator Joseph Ibn Kaspi (fourteenth century), who writes in his commentary on the Song of Songs: Having explained the general idea, we have no need to explain the specific expressions. Only a few of them attest to the [allegorical] meaning. Most are nothing but decorative refinements in the style of poetic art and rhetorical science . . . I have no doubt that this book belongs to the second type of meshalim that ‘the Guide’ [i.e., Maimonides], of blessed memory, mentioned at the beginning of his book, in which not every word in the mashal applies to the nimshal [i.e., the allegorical level].54 For Maimonides – as Ibn Kaspi explains – the expanse of the Song of Songs poetically heightens the feelings of human love, which in turn represents the way one must love God. Yet, from an interpretive perspective, these details are an incidental ‘husk’ to be ‘stripped away’ as Moses Ibn Ezra would say. They serve to beautify scripture (and, as such, are worthy of emulation; see above, at n. 39); but from a substantive perspective they add little.

Another Perspective: the Northern French Peshat School Medieval Jewish scholars in northern France did not know the Greek or Arabic terms for rhetoric or poetics, nor were they able to read the works of their Andalusian coreligionists, which were written in Judeo-Arabic. Yet some analogous literary notions were developed intuitively within the northern French quest to explicate ‘the peshat of Scripture’. Rashi’s advance of peshat, revolutionary in his time and place, was never intended to supplant the older method reading the Hebrew Bible. Rather, he sought to supplement the existing midrashic interpretations with his own peshat commentary. Even Rashbam, whose adherence to peshat was more pronounced, still emphasised the authority of midrash as the ‘essence’ or veritable meaning of scripture.55 The ideology of the northern French dual hermeneutic – peshat and midrash co-existing – is most clearly articulated by Rashi in his introduction to the Song of Songs. Rashi does not question the allegorical midrashic reading of this text as a historical dialogue between 53

54

55

See Cohen, Gates, pp. 208–12. The traditional midrashic allegorical interpretation took the Song as a national allegory of the love of God for Israel. Maimonides reads it on a philosophical level as the individual’s quest for God. See above, n. 40. Ibn Kaspi, comm. on the Song of Songs, Constantinople 1504 ed. See Berlin, Biblical Poetry, pp. 105–7. See Kamin, Jews and Christians, pp. xxv–xxxv.

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God and Israel. But he invokes the talmudic maxim that ‘a biblical verse does not leave the realm (lit. hands) of its peshat’ (b. Shabbat 63a) to say that the philological-contextual (‘plain’) sense (peshat) is worthy of study as a first point of reference toward the midrashic allegorical sense.56 Rashi then co-ordinates these two levels of meaning of the Song of Songs: Solomon saw with the Holy Spirit that Israel will be exiled . . . and will recall the original love [of God toward them] . . . saying ‘I will go and return to my first husband; for then [was it] better with me than now’ (Hos. 2: 7) . . . And he [Solomon] composed this book with the Holy Spirit in the language of a woman stuck in living widowhood, longing for her husband, pining over her lover, recalling to Him the love of their youth . . . Likewise, her lover suffers over her pain, and recalls the goodness of her youth and her beauty.57 Rashi reconstructs how the Song of Songs was composed: Solomon envisioned through the Holy Spirit that Israel – centuries after his time – would be exiled and distanced from God, and seek to rekindle their relationship with Him. Rashi casts the Song midrashically as an expression of the people of Israel in his time communicating with God, recalling the days when the Divine Presence dwelt among them, and being promised that God will restore them to that former glory. According to Rashi, this alternative to the Christian view that God has abandoned Israel is undoubtedly the essential prophetic message of this biblical book.58 Yet Rashi also accounts for the literal sense of the Song of Songs and its literary format – which he defines as the peshat. He does so by constructing a persona and setting for the love lyrics in this biblical book within an imaginative literary framework. On his account, we hear in the Song of Songs the voice of an older woman separated from her husband, in what Rashi terms ‘living widowhood’, recalling their youthful love and striving to restore it. As Rashi explains, the love poems in the Song of Songs are retrospective – this older woman reliving the romance of their youth. Rashi’s commentary sparked others within the French peshat school. Rashbam, for example, begins his commentary by presenting peshat as its objective: The discerning man must incline his heart to understand the language of eloquence (melis∙ah) of this book. To teach and convey its peshat, according to its style and word[ing], in accordance with its structure and language . . . [Solomon] wrote (katav) his . . . ‘Song’ . . . [in the voice of] a maiden longing and lamenting the loss of her lover, who left her and went to a faraway land. She recalls him and his eternal love for her, and she sings and says: such strong love my darling manifested toward me when he was still with me. And she . . . recounts to her friends and her maidens: such and such my darling said to me and this is how I responded.59 Although the spirit of Rashi is evident here, Rashbam identifies the beloved as a young maiden, not an older woman. Presumably he felt that this better captures the spirit of playful, youthful love in the Song of Songs – and did not wish to read these retrospectively. In his introduction, Rashbam does not mention the allegorical sense of the Song of 56 57 58 59

See Cohen, Gates, p. 363. Rashi, Introduction to the Song of Songs, Kamin and Saltman (eds), p. 81. On this polemical dimension of Rashi’s commentary, see Kamin, Jews and Christians, pp. 22–57. Japhet (ed.), p. 233.

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Songs. But that is an essential part of his commentary, as evident in his first gloss of the book: ‘[The Song . . .] of Solomon’ – King Solomon composed it through the Holy Spirit, for he saw that Israel would grieve in their exile over God, who has become distant from them, as a groom separated from his beloved.60 He adopts Rashi’s distinctive national reading of the Song of Songs, by identifying the beloved as a symbol for Israel in exile separated from God and longing to reunite with Him. Rashbam does not cite theoretical works on poetics, as Moses Ibn Ezra did, but he is aware of secular love poetry and identifies this as the literary garb of the Song of Songs, as we see in a gloss later in his commentary: This is the manner of this ‘Song’ – that she sings and grieves in all of them about her love for her darling . . . And even nowadays the way of the singers (jongleurs?) is to sing a song that recounts the narrative of the love of a couple, with love songs as is the custom of the world.61 Is this secular style of the jongleurs the work of the ‘Holy Spirit’? Whereas Rashi specifically attributed the style of the Song to the ‘Holy Spirit’ (‘he composed this book with the Holy Spirit in the language of a woman stuck in living widowhood’), Rashbam simply writes: ‘[Solomon] wrote (katav) his . . . Song . . . [in the voice of] a maiden longing and lamenting the loss of her lover’ (n. 58 above). It would thus seem that the younger pashtan considers this poetic garb to be a product of the human ingenuity of King Solomon, as opposed to the prophetic content he received from God. What is only hinted at in Rashbam becomes crystal clear in a subsequent commentary of an interpreter clearly influenced by him, as we read in an anonymous northern French peshat commentary on the opening verse of the Song of Songs: The Song of Songs – the most special of Solomon’s poetry (lit. songs), for he wrote many poems, as it is written ‘his poems numbered a thousand and one’ (1 Kings 5: 12), and this is one of them. But one could say that from among his poetry the Wise Men selected these poems and compiled them, in order to teach about God and the Community of Israel. And this is what [the opening verse] says: ‘A poem that was prepared from Solomon’s poetry’ – that they anthologized his poems and shaped it with respect to God and the Community of Israel, and the remainder they did not use. For this [poem; or: biblical book] was compiled with the Holy Spirit and was included in the Sacred Writings, because it is holy of holies, for the Wise Men compiled the words of Solomon, as it is written: ‘These are the sayings of Solomon that the men of Hezekiah transmitted’ (Prov. 25: 1).62 This commentator, who is using the vocabulary of Rashi and Rashbam, boldly posits two aspects of the authorship of the Song of Songs. In his view the book is a selection of love poems by King Solomon – what Rashi defined as the peshat layer of the book. However, a later group of editors, Hezekiah’s ‘Wise Men’, is responsible for the anthology of poems 60 61 62

Ibid. p. 234. Gloss on Song 3: 5; Ibid. p. 250. Eppenstein, Fragment, pp. 243–4.

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that makes up the biblical work we now have as the Song of Songs – and they endowed it with its allegorical sense, inspired by the Holy Spirit. Going a step beyond Rashbam, he argues that Solomon himself is responsible solely for the literary format of the Song of Songs, and that the Holy Spirit inspired only a later generation of biblical authors, who endowed the text with its allegorical sense regarding the relationship between God and Israel. These developments in the northern French peshat school can be appreciated by comparison with a tendency in the medieval Latin commentary tradition to focus on the literary and aesthetic contributions of the Bible’s human authors, as distinct from the role of the Holy Spirit. As Alastair Minnis writes: . . . in much twelfth-century exegesis . . . the commentators were preoccupied with allegorical interpretation. According to Geoffrey of Auxerre (late twelfth century), it is not important to know who wrote the Song of Songs. Perhaps the human auctor knew what he was prophesying, but if he did not, the inspirer (inspirator) most certainly knew. What matters is the prophecy itself, of the mystical marriage of Christ and holy Church. But in the early thirteenth century, when emphasis came to be placed on the literal sense of the Scripture, the exegetes’ interest in their texts became more literary . . . the emphasis shifted from the divine auctor to the human auctor of Scripture.63 Although this trend emerged in force only in the thirteenth century, Minnis points to exceptional Christian interpreters in Rashbam’s time who paved a new path: In twelfth-century commentaries on the Bible, God was believed to have controlled human authors in a way which defied literary description. Literary criteria and classifications . . . were afforded a relatively unimportant place in Scriptural exegesis. Of course, there are exceptions to this general rule, the most exceptional of all being the exegesis of Peter Abelard (1079–1142), the great opponent of . . . Anslem of Laon . . . [Abelard] anticipates literary attitudes which were widely held in the thirteenth century. [He] was . . . interested in the individual literary activity of the human auctor of Scripture, especially in the author’s intention and the rhetorical force of his writing.64 While further research is needed to explore this parallel further, it is certainly noteworthy that Jewish and Christian interpreters in medieval northern France manifest similar interests in the literal sense / peshat and the aesthetic designs of the human authors of scripture, as distinct from the Holy Spirit that guided them.

Conclusion Having surveyed the two key medieval streams of Jewish peshat interpretation – the originally Judeo-Arabic Andalusian school and the northern French school pioneered by Rashi – it is important to note a critical difference between them, despite their shared view of the importance of the aesthetic dimension of the Hebrew Bible. For Abraham Ibn Ezra, peshat is the essential idea conveyed by the text of scripture, stripped of its literary 63 64

Minnis, Authorship, pp. 38–9. Ibid. pp. 58–60.

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form and ‘embellishments’. This outlook is taken to its logical (but radical) conclusion by Maimonides, who identifies the theological purpose or ‘message’ of the Song of Songs and treats its poetic form merely as an incidental husk, employed for aesthetic purposes only. By contrast, in Rashi’s school, the literary form of the Song of Songs itself is celebrated as ‘the peshat of Scripture’, and, as such, worthy of exegetical attention, even though it is quite distinct from the true allegorical essence of the book, which is expressed in the midrash. This exegetical interest would not wane (if anything, it grew) even when the literary form was increasingly attributed to King Solomon’s own poetic sense and not the Holy Spirit. For Rashi and his followers, even the ‘husk’ of the Holy Bible, the human literary output of divinely inspired authors, is worthy of exegetical analysis.

Bibliography Primary Sources Ibn Ezra, Abraham. Yesod Diqduq, ed. Nehemia Allony (Jerusalem 1985). Ibn Ezra, Moses. Book of Discussion and Conversation = Kita¯ b al-Mud· a¯·d ara wa-l-Mudha¯ kara (Sefer ha-‘Iyyunim weha-Diyyunim), ed. and trans. [Hebrew] A. S. Halkin (Jerusalem 1975); ed. and trans. [Spanish] M. Abumalham Mas (Madrid 1985). The Treatise of the Garden on the Matter of Maja¯ z and H · aqiqa (Maqa¯ lat al-H · adı¯qa fi Ma‘na l-Maja¯ z wa-l-H · aqiqa), MS JNUL 8°570 (formerly Sassoon 412). Partial medieval Hebrew, trans. Judah Alharizi, published as ‘Arugat ha-Bosem in: Zion 2 (1849) 117–23, 134–7, 157–60, 175. Ibn Kaspi, Joseph. Commentary on the Song of Songs, in Sheloshah perushim [le-shir ha-shirim] (Constantinople 1504). ha-Levi, Judah. Kuzari (Kita¯ b al-Radd wa-d-Dalı¯l fı¯ d-Dı¯n adh-Dhalı¯l), ed. D. Z. Baneth and H. BenShammai (Jerusalem 1977). Maimonides, Moses. Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago 1963). Mishneh Torah (Code of Jewish Law). Standard printed version with traditional commentaries (Vilna 1900, repr. frequently). Rashbam (= R. Samuel ben Meir). The Commentary of Rabbi Samuel Ben Meir (Rashbam) on the Song of Songs, ed. S. Japhet (Jerusalem 2008). Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac). Commentary on the Song of Songs, according to JTS MS Lutzky 778 = ‘Rashi’s Commentary on the Song of Songs’, ed. J. Rosenthal, in Samuel K. Mirsky Jubilee Volume, ed. S. Bernstein and G. Hurgin (New York 1958), 130–88; also published by S. Kamin and A. Saltman, Secundum Salomonem: A Thirteenth Century Latin Commentary on the Song of Songs (Ramat-Gan 1989), 81–99 (Hebrew section).

Secondary Sources Berlin, Adele, Biblical Poetry Through Medieval Jewish Eyes (Bloomington 1991). Berlin, Adele and Mordechai Z. Cohen (eds), Interpreting Scriptures in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Overlapping Inquiries (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Black, Deborah L., Logic and Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’ and ‘Poetics’ in Medieval Arabic Philosophy (Leiden 1990). Cohen, Mordechai Z., ‘The Aesthetic Exegesis of Moses Ibn Ezra’, HBOT I/2: 282–301. Cohen, Mordechai Z., ‘Moses Ibn Ezra vs. Maimonides: Argument for a Poetic Definition of Metaphor (Isti‘a¯ ra)’, Edebiyât: Journal of Middle Eastern and Comparative Literature 11 (2000): 1–28.

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Cohen, Mordechai Z., Opening the Gates of Interpretation: Maimonides’ Biblical Hermeneutics in Light of His Geonic-Andalusian Heritage and Muslim Milieu (Leiden 2011). Cohen, Mordechai Z., ‘Imagination, Logic, Truth and Falsehood: Moses Ibn Ezra and Moses Maimonides on Biblical Metaphor in Light of Arabic Poetics and Philosophy’ [Hebrew], Tarbiz 73 (2005): 417–58. Cohen, Mordechai Z., ‘Maimonides vs. Rashi: Philosophical, Philological and Psychological Approaches to Job’, Between Rashi and Maimonides: Themes in Medieval Jewish Thought, Literature and Exegesis, ed. E. Kanarfogel and M. Sokolow (New York 2010), 319–42. Cohen, Mordechai Z., ‘The Qimhi Family’, HBOT I/2: 388–415. Cohen, Mordechai Z., Three Approaches to Biblical Metaphor (Leiden 2003). Eppenstein, S., ‘Fragment d’un commentaire anonyme du Cantique des Cantiques’, REJ 53 (1907): 242–54. Fenton, Paul B., Philosophie et exégèse dans le Jardin de la métaphore de Moïse Ibn ‘Ezra (Leiden 1997). Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: The History of its Interpretation, ed. Magne Sæbø, Menahem Haran and Chris Brekelmans, vol. I/2, The Middle Ages (Göttingen 2000). Kamin, Sarah, Jews and Christians Interpret the Bible, ed. Sara Japhet (Hebrew; 2nd edn, Jerusalem 2008). Kugel, James L., The Idea of Biblical Poetry (New Haven 1981). Minnis, Alastair, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes (Philadelphia 1988). Prickett, Stephen, Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge 1986).

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MIGNE’S ACHIEVEMENT AND THE MODERN TRANSMISSION OF ANCIENT MANUSCRIPTS D. H. Williams

I

t is truly impossible to overstate the influence which the dual Patrologia series of Jacques-Paul Migne has had on patristic scholarship for the last century and a half. This enormous compilation of thousands of texts was edited into two connected collections: the Latin series of 227 volumes, completed in 1885, and the Greek series of 166 volumes, together provide unto the present the greatest wealth of ancient texts in the world (close to one million words). Since the end of the nineteenth century to the present, Migne’s collection has continued to function as the ‘default mechanism’ for the investigation and translation of texts as witnessed in the Ante-Nicene Fathers or the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, the Ancient Christian Writers, the Fathers of the Church series and so on. Now in its fifth edition, the Clavis Patrum Latinorum still relies on the PL (and PG) in its margins for the majority of patristic works it references. Despite the steady growth of the more recent and much improved critical editions of Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latina, or Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, Graeca or Sources Chrétiennes, the Patrologia series1 to this day remains the literary summa of ancient and early medieval text collections. When the publisher Chadwick-Healy wished to create the first electronic version of Latin patristic writings in 1995, it was determined that Migne’s edition, given its scale, was the best candidate. It is now freely accessible on the web, making availability a priority which was certainly in keeping with the spirit of Migne himself. Because of Migne and the other series, our own era has better access to the breadth of patristic texts than any age before us. But our indebtedness to modern editions is perhaps more invasive than we know. Such accessibility comes with a price that is paid by today’s students and scholars who want to appropriate patristic writings for purposes of their research. The problem, simply stated, is that the vast enterprise of collating patristic writings into a seemingly smooth and reconstructed order (part of the overall purpose of Migne’s collection) suggests a textual continuity between original writer and the later evidence of his writing that rarely existed before the sixteenth century. Some ancient authors are survived by a single manuscript, or just a few, whereas others have a dozen or many more. M. R. James frames the problem succinctly: ‘For some writings we have too little manuscript evidence, for some so much as to be embarrassing.’2 As I will show 1

2

Because Patrologia Syriaca and Orientalis were published twenty years after Migne’s death, they will not be included here. The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts (London: SPCK, 1919), p. 9.

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in a moment, this is frustratingly true, but my concern here is simpler, namely, the great series of printed editions tend to anesthetise us to the lack or abundance of evidence for each patristic writer. With all good intentions, the serious reader of ancient Christian texts will want to read them in extenso, whether in Latin, Greek, Syriac or English translations with the intention of making certain literary, theological or historical connections between texts, especially in their chronological order. The question to be faced, however, is determining the extant evidence for each writer such that it may tell us how to measure its significance in the light of later writers. Even the way in which the collected editions are structured in the categories of Latin writers as separated from Greek3 has an impact on our use of the patristic legacy. Just as significantly, Migne’s printing of only Latin and Greek texts creates a Christian framework that completely ignores the equally enduring legacy of Christianity to the east. It is too easy to accept these limitations as the sum of patristic reality. Since Migne’s Patrologia best exemplify my point about the result of printed editions, it seems proper to focus briefly on this colossal undertaking since the sixteenth-century reformations. Ordained in 1824, Jacques-Paul Migne served a parish in Puiseaux for three years, and during this time he explored first-hand the power of the printing press and formulated plans for harnessing it to the service of the Catholic cause, especially to combat the unbelief and anti-clericalism of the day. Arriving at Paris, he set to work at once to put these plans into execution. At first he succeeded a predecessor to become editor of a journal called Univers religieux. In keeping with Migne’s universal aims, the paper was soon called simply, Univers, which endeavoured to be solidly Catholic and faithful to papal teaching Nonetheless the journal was not the fulfilment of Abbé Migne’s mission. His inspiration was for a broader project, the creation of a complete library that contained all the catholic literary tradition. In 1836 Migne opened a small printing press in a suburb of Paris (Petit-Montrouge). In a letter Migne writes to a colleague, ‘I believe that I will render to the Church the greatest service that has ever been rendered . . . by reviving in toto its tradition.’4 Migne is justly famed for his two Patrologies. But these formed only a part, and not the greater part, of his aspiration which was to provide a Bibliothèque universelle du clergé, ou Cours complet sur chaque branche de la science ecclésiastique (Universal Library for Clergy or a Complete Series on Every Branch of Ecclesiastical Knowledge). Having borrowed the necessary capital from well-wishers, lay and clerical, Migne began by erecting a small printing press called the Ateliers Catholiques. Modest at first, the establishment grew and eventually comprised printing-presses, bookshops, composing rooms, storerooms, a type-foundry, a bindery, with all their appurtenances – everything necessary for quickly 3

4

Criticism of the Patrologia series was first voiced by a friend of Migne’s, Augustin Bonnetty, who argued in 1846 that this division produced the impression of two churches, or worse, two catholic traditions. Bonnetty preferred a method in keeping with the locations from which patristic writers originated. But this suggestion was subsequently ignored by later series of ancient series of texts such as Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna), the Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte (Leipzig and Berlin) and the Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina; Series Graeca (Turnholt). See Anthony Cotter, ‘Abbé Migne and Catholic Tradition’, Theological Studies 7 (1946), p. 60. R. H. Bloch, God’s Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbé Migne (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 9.

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turning out books by the thousands. One of Migne’s later catalogues concludes with the following notice: If you desire to see in operation all the arts and processes of typography, you are invited to visit the Ateliers catholiques at Petit-Montrouge. Type-founding, stereotyping, printing, binding are all going on at once within the walls of the establishment, and on a scale which is not rivalled by the Imperial Printing Office . . . Our capacity is so enormous that we can turn out two thousand quarto volumes every twenty-four hours. A monk of the middle ages could not copy in three years the number of pages printed in this establishment in one minute. This was no idle boast. The floodgates of Migne’s publishing efforts opened in 1838, and volume upon volume poured from its presses for thirty uninterrupted years. The first series was the Scripturae Sacrae Cursus Completus, appearing between 1838 and 1840 in twentyeight volumes. Soon after Theologiae Cursus Computus was produced also in twenty-eight volumes and there was much more to come. In keeping with his age, there was something of a supersessionist mentality at work here. As Migne refers to the Cursus Completus, all previous projects would become outmoded. In one of his prospectus, he claims, ‘Whoever possesses them, may say to himself: I care not what [previous] commentaries or treatises of theology are published, for I have the very best on my shelves.’ There was more to it than this, however. With a similar aim as Baronius in his Annales Ecclesiastici two centuries earlier, Migne set out explicitly to rival the Protestants in England and Germany who were publishing editions on the early Fathers. The Bibliothèque universelle was to show, if by its sheer size alone, that the records of the ancient and medieval catholic tradition belonged to Rome. In this era, the ecumenical idea that the Fathers could function like a bridge between Protestantism and Catholicism, was entirely foreign. Migne’s efforts were meant to provide the tools for a Roman ressourcement that not only demonstrated Rome’s pre-eminence, but would, more strikingly, reverse the effects of the Protestant reformations as well.5 To this end, it was claimed that the texts of the Cursus would contain the finest commentaries on the Bible, that they were selected by bishops and theologians with a European reputation, and that numerous notes would be added for priests’ instruction. The way to make all of this a reality was, as Migne often repeated, to provide resources that were both accessible and intelligible to all. In this, he was eminently successful at making hundreds of ancient and medieval writers convenient for the common cleric or educated layman. However, to make good on these claims Migne needed money-saving measures, which, most of all, meant reprinting sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions instead of combing throughout Europe’s monasteries, cathedrals, universities and for manuscript evidence. *

*

*

Commonly referred to as the Patrologia Latina or Patrologia Graeca, the full title of the patristic series is much more telling about its general editor’s original intentions. In English it reads, ‘The Complete Series of Patrology, or, a Universal, Entire, Organized, Convenient, Economical Library of All the Holy Fathers, Doctors and Ecclesiastical Writers, both in Latin and Greek, from the Apostolic Age to the Times of Innocent III 5

Bloch, 5.

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(the year 1216) for the Latin writers, and down to the time of the Council of Florence (year 1439) for Greek writers.’ The Latin series begins with the entire works of Tertullian6 and the Greek series with I Clement. Frequent use of superlatives (‘Most accurately compared’; ‘Most diligently corrected’) in the title page cannot be missed. At the bottom of the title page, in larger lettering: 7 The Latin Series, in which the fathers, doctors and ecclesiastical writers in Latin are produced, from Tertullian to Innocent III; The Complete Series for each branch of ecclesiastical knowledge. Carefully Examined (accurante) by the editor, J-P. Migne. It is evident that the title pages of the Patrologia functioned as a prospectus for the contents.8 All in all, the Latin series comprised 2,614 writers, and the Greek some 800 writers. There was some evolution of the Greek series that is worth noting: between 1857 and 1866, the Greek text appeared with the Latin translation on opposite pages; but from volume 64 onward, Greek and Latin were placed in parallel columns on the same page. This may give the impression that there existed ancient Latin versions for the Greek and vice versa, but the informed student should know better.9 The huge volume of texts and amount of detail was quite extraordinary and Migne was the consummate marketer: This work, he says, is preferable to any other on account of its paper and printing, the convenience of its format, the accuracy of the texts, the cheapness of the volumes, and the inestimable advantage of having in one collection, completely indexed and arranged chronologically, the works of all the ecclesiastical writers, including the smallest fragments, hitherto scattered through multitudinous books and manuscripts, very difficult, and in some cases impossible, to obtain. Elsewhere, an advertisement states: Is there any complete edition of the Fathers but ours? Is there any, giving all the authors, complete as to substance, uniform in size and form, correct as to text, cheap as to price? Can any priest now say honestly that the Fathers are hard to get or dear to buy? Is it not clear then that the priest who does not possess them is lacking, either in Christian intelligence or in practical faith?10 The two Cursus, numbering almost 400 volumes and over half a million pages, were completed in twenty-two years, a feat that has yet to be matched by any comparable series.11 6

7

8

9 10 11

The Latin Fathers were published between 1844 and 1855, altogether 221 volumes, the last four of which were meticulously prepared indices. The first (of two) edition of the Patrologia Latina (= PL) I is called ‘the first series’ and reads ‘from Tertullian to Gregory the Great’. To a much lesser degree this advertisement is reminiscent of Johann Dominicus Mansi’s title page  for his collection, ‘A New and Most Complete Collection of the Holy Councils . . . Everything is Displayed and Most Suitably Arranged according to its proper place’ . . . (Florence, 1759). The Latin translation also appeared separately in eighty-one volumes (1856–67). In McClintock, ‘Migne’s Roman Catholic Publishing House’, Methodist Review 49 (1867), p. 419. The Patrologia series in no way represented the conclusion of Migne’s labours. Almost simultaneously with the Latin Patrologia, Migne began his Encyclopédie théologique or Série de dictionnaires sur toutes les parties de la science religieuse. J. McClintock, a Methodist minister from New Jersey,

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To this series, one must add the publication of 400 volumes on other theological, scriptural and ecclesiastical topics12 mentioned earlier, and Migne was not yet finished. In an age of the great French encyclopediasts, Migne quite consciously sought to take his place among the amalgamators of knowledge; in this case, divine knowledge, which could refute the secularist claims that had held sway since the French revolution. Again, his goal for the Patrologia, indeed, for the whole edifice of his literary productions, was to place the Roman Catholic tradition of the first twelve centuries in the hands of the Church’s practitioners. But of importance for this essay is the way in which Migne accomplished the impossible. In a fascinating little book by R. H. Bloch, Migne is taken to task as a pious plagiarist on a massive scale. All but a few of his Patrologia volumes were expedited by drawing quite freely on earlier editions, often incorporating the very same mistakes and lacunae. In the case of Augustine (PL 32–47), the Maurist edition was used with minor changes, even though Migne’s work soon became the standard for reference to Augustine’s works: Opera Omnia, 16 volumes ‘The Newest Edition, Corrected and Enlarged J-P. Migne.’13 The whole production becomes less impressive when we learn that Migne’s so-called ‘newest edition’ was copied from one already printed in 1730 (Verona), with only a few additions. Besides the Maurists, a great deal of material was used from the editions of Fabricius, Sirmond, Mabillon and Mai. The same pattern and a good example may be found in the printing of the Glossa Ordinaria (the Glossed Bible), one of the most edited and influential exegetical productions of the later middle ages. Volumes 133 and 114 of the PL reproduce a version of the Gloss that, when compared to the editio princeps of 1480/81 (Strassburg), presents us with a very truncated text.14 Migne’s interest in saving time and money was translated into the creation of an expedited edition to the point that many glosses of earlier editions are not taken into account; only the references to the patristic authors are given. More disconcerting is that no glosses whatsoever are presented for Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, the Minor Prophets and I–II Maccabees.15 Instead, the reader is told to consult Jerome’s or Radbertus’ works. What this means is only a very small proportion of the Latin and Greek editions offer

12

13

14

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who visited the Migne plant in 1867, calls this ‘a literary enterprise so vast that an ordinary publishing house would find its hands full in accomplishing it if it attempted nothing else’. Besides the Scripturae Sacrae Cursus Completus and Theologiae Cursus Completus, Migne’s Bibliothèque consisted of Démonstrations évangéliques (20 vols), Collection intégrale et universelle des orateurs sacrés (99 vols, though the plan was for 200), and Summa Aurea de laudibus B. Virginis Mariae (13 vols). All these are described in greater detail by A. Hamman, ‘Jacques-Paul Migne et la renaissance patristique Leçon d’un centenaire’, Studia Patristica 15 (1984), pp. 85–7; Cotter, ‘Abbé Migne and Catholic Tradition’, pp. 50–2. ‘Editio novissima, emendata et auctior accurante J-P. Migne’ (Paris: Venit apud Editorem in Vico Dicto Montrouge, 1841–9). Biblia Latina cum Glossa Ordinaria: Facsimile Reprint of the Editio Princeps Adolph Rusch of Strassburg 1480/1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992). I am grateful for James L. Gorman (PhD cand. at Baylor University) calling to my attention the discrepancy on Genesis between PL 113 and the Strassburg edition. Ibid. pp. xxv–xxvi. In the introduction, Karlfried Froelich comments on the erroneous association Migne perpetuated (first made by Johannes Trithemius in the early sixteenth century) by identifying the origin of the Glossa Ordinaria with the ninth-century theologian, Walafrid Strabo. Thus Migne dismissed valuable twelfth- and thirteenth-century copies of the Gloss as late and unworthy versions.

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new editions in the usual sense, that is, the reconstruction of a text by collating and comparing surviving manuscripts. Even in the case of the lengthy introductions accompanying each author, the texts were taken directly or culled from earlier editions. One of these introductions, Pierre Daniel Huet’s essay on the life and teaching of Origen (1668), was simply reproduced and recast as the introduction for PG 11 which filled 651 columns. *

*

*

We need to consider to which collections Migne had access. To do this with brevity, I find helpful Petitmengin’s identification of three stages of patristic textual history:16 1. between Cassiodorus and Erasmus 2. the controversial period after Trent late sixteenth/early seventeenth centuries 3. the century of Maurist erudition, whose methods and achievements were the precursors to Migne’s own Since the focus of this essay is on stage 3, I want to make short work of the first two. 1. Let us observe that this first stage was an era of transmission quite unlike stages 2 and 3, which had the advantage of set type. The great age of the Latin Fathers had scarcely reached its full flowering when the invasions from the north began fragmenting the very civilisation which nurtured it. The result is that we have few patristic authors whose writings are extant before the Carolingian period. In support of his plan to create a Christian curriculum of study, Cassiodorus reveals a familiarity in his Institutiones (written ad 551–62) with particular works of no less than two dozen Greek and (mainly) Latin authors from the late third to early fifth centuries. While he may well have had further texts at his disposal because of his own collection of manuscripts – a collection that was becoming rare for the age – those he mentions17 constitute a small number in comparison to the texts available nowadays. There is evidence that scriptoria in the environs of Aquileia, Verona, Fleury and Orléans in the fifth century continued to disseminate manuscripts of particular works of Augustine, Ambrose and Rufinus’ translations of Origen.18 Of special interest is a fifth-century Latin manuscript now in the Bibliothèque nationale (Par. BN Lat. 8907), a key source for the history of Latin Arianism. Besides Hilary of Poitiers’ De trinitate, De synodis and Contra Auxentium, there appears the first two volumes of Ambrose’s refutation of ‘Arianism’, De fide, and the acta of the Council of Aquileia (381). This manuscript is our oldest witness to these texts, but its real interest lies in the margins. These contain two blocks of scholia: one begins with De fide, and continues for a third of its length (ff. 298r–311v); another block then fills the margins of the council’s acts, continuing almost

16

17

18

Pierre Petitmengin, ‘Les Patrologies avant Migne’, in Migne et le renouveau des études patristiques, ed. A. Mandouze and J. Fouilheron (Paris: Beauchesne, 1985), p. 16 ff. Cassiodorus’ interest is that of Biblical exegesis as are the patristic commentaries that he cites. Karla Pollman, ‘Reappropriation and Disavowal: Pagan and Christian Authorities in Cassiodorus and Venantius Fortunatus’, Religious Identity and the Problem of Historical Foundation (2004), pp. 290–4. Caroline Bammel, ‘Products of Fifth Century Scriptoria Preserving Conventions used by Rufinus of Aquileia’, Journal of Theological Studies 35 (1984), pp. 348–9.

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to the end (ff. 336r–349r).19 These scholia contain an ‘Arian’ response to the main text: both sections discuss the council of Aquileia, reviling Ambrose himself as a ‘servant of Antichrist’ and the Aquileian council as a den of treachery. Whatever momentum was building in manuscript collections and reproduction, it was severely stunted by the social and political chaos that followed. Not until the Carolingian renaissance will a similarly fruitful era manifest itself in the Latin world. There are several ways in which patristic texts are found in manuscripts (many examples of each are readily found): A. The whole manuscript of a complete, individual work. Illustrative of these are Augustine’s De trinitate, Ambrose’s Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam, or Gregory’s Moralia. There are plenty examples of these, just as it is also common to find individual manuscripts that contain a list of sermons or epistles from a single author. B. With several works of the same author. An example that comes immediately to mind is the Codex Agobardinus (in the Bibliothèque nationale as Ms. Latin 1622) that contains twenty-three works attributed to Tertullian. Only fifteen of these are confirmed as authentic works of this North African writer. There is also extant an early eleventh-century manuscript of Tertullian20 among those found in the library of Medicine, Bibliothèque de Montpellier, known as Codex Montepessulanus H. 54, which includes De carne Christi, De resurrectione mortuorum, Adversus Praxean, Adversus Valentinianos, Adversus Marcionem (in five books). The Apologeticum often appears in independent manuscripts. C. With works of other authors. For example, consider Paris, B.N. Lat. 13047 (eighth century) from Tours which has a distinctive and excellent uncial: Pseudo-Cyprian, De Genesi; Tertullianus, Adversus Judaeos; Chrysostomus, De compunctione cordis; Hieronymus, Epistolae 105, 56, 67, 104, 112, 73, 129; Sedulius, Carmen Paschale I; Augustinus, De civitate Dei, XVIII 23; Idem, De mortalitate; Hieronymus Ad Paulum, ep. XXX, ff. 18–25. An extensive twelfth-century catalogue of manuscripts from a French Cluny library (now in the Bibliothèque Nationale) offers hundreds of examples of the way patristic works appeared in multi-authored volumes, or individually, or sometimes in both formats in separate manuscripts.21 D. Attributed to the wrong or another author (common with heretical texts). These are the result of great scholarly exertions because they have been transmitted by one or more names, with several titles, and the original provenance is usually problematic. Well known is Anonymous in Iob (an anonymous commentary on Job), likely a Homoian Latin ‘Arian’ creation, but attributed to Origen in six manuscripts from the Middle Ages. It was chiefly ignored in the twentieth century until Steinhauser’s new edition.22 2. The post-Tridentine era (late sixteenth and seventeenth century): this was a time 19

20

21

22

See R. Gryson and L. Gilissen, Les Scolies Ariennes du Parisinus Latinus 8907 (1980) for the description of this manuscript. Another manuscript of only Tertullian’s works is Sélestat, Bibliothèque humaniste, Ms. 88 (first half of eleventh century): De patientia, De uera carne domini = De carne Christi, De carnis resurrection, Aduersus Praxeam, Aduersus Valentinianos, Aduersus Iudaeos, Aduersus omnes haereses, De praescriptione haereticorum, Aduersus Hermogenem. Published in Léopold Deslisle, Inventaire des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale: Fonds de Cluni (Paris, H. Champion, 1884). Anonymi in Iob Commentatius (Wien: Österreichischen Akademei Wissenschaften, 2006) (= CSEL 96).

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of producing editions of the early Fathers as a demonstration of who was the true Church, but soon Protestants responded in kind. It cannot be denied that the primary motive for patristic scholarship during this period was polemical. In what was the earliest constructed Lutheran history of the Reformation, the Ecclesiastica Historia (1574), supervised by Matthias Flacius Illyricus (later called the Magdeburg Centuries from its third edition in 1757 because of its treatment of each century of Church history as a discrete unit),23 the author maintained that by the beginning of the second century the Church had begun to fall away from the apostolic truth in her constitution and in specific doctrinal elements. It was called the mysterium iniquitatis, the first phase of what would become Catholicism (II. 109). This intent was to refute Roman Catholic claims to authenticity and show that Lutheranism is a return to the apostolic faith.24 It was just a matter of time before the appearance of the Magdeburg Centuries would incite a response. This came in the form of the Annales Ecclesiastici written by Caesar Baronius whose interest was not creating new editions of texts, but utilising them in a chronological historical narrative, as opposed to the usual topical classification of patristic writings. This method provided a means of showing the theological continuity of Catholic tradition through the ages versus the Protestants’ arguments to claim the Fathers’ teaching in support of their reforms. In effect, Baronius became the precursor to a battery of ensuing studies whose patristic scholarship was dedicated to transferring the centre of Catholic piety from the historical age of the Fathers to an ahistorical, never-changing institution, the See of Peter.25 And thus the initial purpose of compiling patrological texts had to do with developing an ecclesiastical arsenal whose effect was to concretise the divisions between Protestant and Catholic Reformations. 3. But now we move on to Petitmengin’s third stage. In the seventeenth century there was a reform of the French Benedictines that became the Congregation of St Maur, a monastic body that established itself in major monastic centres across France where many works of orthodox writers of the patristic period were collected and edited. Within a century the Maurists produced hundreds of volumes in which they chronicle French history, record saints’ lives and create new editions of the Fathers.26 They were, and are still known as, a scholar-monastic order that made a special effort to locate and edit extant manuscripts to obtain a more reliable text. The eleven-volume edition of St Augustine, published in Paris from 1679 to 1700, was the commencement of their patristic efforts and it may 23

24

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26

For an insightful commentary on the historical reconstruction of the Historia, see Auguste Jundt, Les Centuries de Magdebourg, ou la Renaissance de l’Historiographie Ecclesiastique au Seizième Siècle (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1883). In The Power and the Primacy of the Pope (Smalcald, 1537): ‘[A]s to the declaration: Upon this rock I will build My Church, certainly the Church has not been built upon the authority of man, but upon the ministry of the confession which Peter made . . . not as referring to the person of Peter, most of the holy Fathers, as Origen, Cyprian, Augustine, Hilary, and Bede, interpret this passage: Upon this rock. Chrysostom says thus: “Upon this rock”, not upon Peter. For He built His Church not upon man, but upon the faith of Peter. But what was his faith? “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” And Hilary says: To Peter the Father revealed that he should say, “Thou art the Son of the living God.”’ E. Cochrane, ‘Caesar Baronius and the Counter-Reformation’, The Catholic Historical Review, 66, no. 1 (January 1980), p. 57. Charles de Lama, Bibliothèque des écrivains de la Congrégation de Saint-Maur, ordre de Saint-Benoit en France (Paris, 1882) enumerates 710 volumes published by Maurists from 1616 until 1814.

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be fairly said that their collection represented a marked improvement over all previous editions. The Maurist edition was thereafter frequently reprinted, including by Migne.27 Most poignantly, one sees in the Maurists’ work the initial stages of paleography as witnessed by the many journeys made around Europe to find manuscripts and subsequent collation of the different readings in the texts.28 Their goals were the most ambitious of the age. ‘One of the principal aims of all Benedictine reforms since the early fifteenth century had been the replacement of the outmoded copying of manuscripts and compilation of chronicles and encyclopedias by learned work based on the humanist education and the critical methods of the Renaissance.’29 For example, Pierre Coustant’s (d. 1721) chief contribution to this project consisted in the separating of the spurious from the genuine writings, which was in keeping with the humanist textual tradition that was intent on attributing texts to their authentic sources. Thus we have a new library of patristic authors which, while eventually overshadowed by Migne’s efforts, was the most impressive achievement of co-operative, or at least co-ordinated, scholarship in the modern world.30 However one regards St Maur’s contributions, their enormous productivity in what was a golden age of French scholarship proved a godsend to the Abbé Migne and his advisors who made full use of the Maurists. By my count, the Benedictines produced twenty-two opera (many of these designated as Opera Omnia) of Latin and Greek authors, from Justin to Gregory the Great. Undoubtedly, the Patrologia would have been far less valuable had their texts been unavailable; Migne also took the notes and prefaces from Maurist publications, reprinting them unchanged. In other words, one of the characteristics of Migne’s collection is that it flagrantly plagiarised the Maurist editions. Of course there were numerous other collections before Migne which served as fodder for the Patrologia. To take only a few examples: Caillau and Guillon published 133 volumes in 1842, Collectio selecta SS. Ecclesiae Patrum which offered (as the title says) select works from Greek and Latin literature. We cannot omit the scholarship of Giovanni-Domenico Mansi, also a source of primary texts like Migne, namely, the Sacrorum Conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio edited by Johann Dominicus Mansi in fifty-seven volumes. Mansi’s method for organising ancient and medieval texts is made apparent on title page, which also functioned as a prospectus: ‘A New and Most Complete Collection of the Holy Councils . . . Everything is Displayed and Most Suitably Arranged according to its proper place . . .’ (Florence, 1759). Another relevant series is Angelo Mai’s Scriptorum Veterum nova collectio, ten volumes (published 1825–38) on select patristic literature, creedal documents and inscriptions which were all constructed out of the extant manuscripts of the Vatican library. In each case, with the exception of Mansi, patristic texts are presented using different rationales and share no governing pattern. 27

28 29

30

Although modern critical editions for individual works have appeared since, the Maurist edition remained as the last critical edition of the complete works of Augustine until the mid twentieth century. Petitmengin, p. 27. M. D. Knowles, ‘Great Historical Enterprises II: The Maurists’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 9 (1959), p. 171. Ibid. p. 187. ‘The literary remains of the monks scattered throughout the municipal and departmental archives of France survive principally in the Bibliothèque Nationale, where they have provided, and still provide, almost inexhaustible mineral wealth for historians and antiquaries, all the more so since transcripts and plans made by the Maurists are often the only witness that remains of charters and vanished abbeys’ (Ibid. pp. 184–5).

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But none of these nearly approached the scope of the Bibliothéque Universale. Ironically, the Maurists never finished an edition on Tertullian, and it seems Tertullian was one of the few volumes which Migne, with Dom Pitra, tracked down and consulted various manuscripts in order to compile an editio princeps. PL 1–2 can truly be described as critical editions. And yet this was not the common practice that produced the Patrologiae given Migne’s foremost goals for expediency. *

*

*

Despite the great riches of the post-Erasmian period and the age of printing, there are many patristic texts, especially those written before the fourth century, which have surprisingly weak evidence for our present reading. In fact it is uncommon to find attestations for most patristic writers in the pre-Carolingian era. The editor of the Clavis Patrum Latina, Elgius Dekkers, has posed several questions about the state of our manuscript evidence that he himself finds ‘rather curious’; namely, why do we have preserved only a small number of ancient manuscripts from the patristic era that were obviously important for subsequent writers in the Middle Ages?31 This is not always the case. I will pass over with no comment the 350 MSS of Augustine’s De trinitate alone, of Confessions, 400 MSS, and many of these before the eighth century; Jerome’s De viris illustribus – one of the early Church’s earliest catalogues of ‘who’s who’, is extant in over 200 MSS in addition to ‘innumerable’ citations in later works. As in the case of Augustine, there are several pre-Carolingian MSS that demonstrate its immediate popularity.32 While not on the same quantitative scale, the De trinitate and De synodis of Hilary of Poitiers were copied in the first half of the fifth century, less than a century after the bishop’s death.33 Another late fifth-/early sixth-century manuscript also carries De trinitate.34 In an essay devoted to determining Hilary’s heritage vis-à-vis manuscript evidence, Charles Kannengiesser shows the early and wide diffusion which Hilarian texts had in the Middle Ages. There is a late fifth- or sixth-century Hilarian manuscript in uncial script that was found at Lyons (Bibl. Lyons, 452). The riches continue into the Carolingian era and on into the fifteenth century. All told, there are seventy-five complete or nearly so manuscripts of De trinitate which often included De synodis as book XIII of De trinitate.35 If Hilary is an exception, there are many more who were modestly influential, like Chromatius of Aquileia, but who are under-represented in the MSS tradition. This younger contemporary of Ambrose penned a number of insightful exegetical treatises in the early fifth century, although we have no manuscript earlier than the twelfth century. Let me briefly mention a few others that may be surprising. 1. The Didache is perhaps most often quoted from by Protestants looking to retrieve 31

32

33 34 35

E. Dekkers, ‘De la pénurie des manuscrits anciens des ouvrages le plus souvent copies’, Sapientiae doctrina: Mélanges de théologie et de literature médiévales offerts á Dom Hildebrand Bascour O.S.B. (Leuven: Imprimerie Orientaliste, 1980), p. 24. E. Dekkers, ‘Pour une histoire de la bibliographique chrétienne dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen Âge’, Aevum inter utrumque: Mélanges offerts à Gabriel Sanders (Steenbrugis: In Abbatia S. Petri, 1991), pp. 53–4. See p. 20 of the introduction of the latest critical edition, ed. Pieter Smulders, CCSL 62. Paris Bibliotéque nationale lat. 2630. ‘L’Héritage d’Hilaire de Poitiers’, Recherches Science Religieuse 56 (1968), p. 455.

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the patristic tradition, and is thereby used as if it represented a normative position within the early Church. Placed among the ‘Apostolic Fathers’ corpus, the Didache factors as a puzzling but attractive text because of its liturgical data. The facts are: the Greek text as we now have it, apart from two miniscule fragments, is derived from one eleventh-century manuscript, though it was not discovered and published until the late nineteenth century. As an individual text, it is very rarely quoted by later writers, and when it is, the focus is only on the ‘Two Ways’ tradition that can be found in several other writers (like the Epistle of Barnabas). It is instructive that the first collection of the so-called ‘Apostolic Fathers’ by Jacque Cotelier (1672) and that of Andrea Gallandi’s Biblioteca Veterum Patrum (1765), do not mention even the fragmentary portions of the Didache in their editions. Not till the 1880s does the Didache appear numbered with the ‘Apostolic Fathers’ and thereafter becomes a fixture in this artificial collection. 2. To read Justin in any English series, one would never guess that all of Justin’s works are attested by a single and late MS: Parisinus Graecus 450 (this single copy is dated 11 September 1364, written on the last folio). The Dialogue with Trypho, the I Apology and II Apology (referred to as Apologia Maior and Apologia Minor),36 along with eleven other works are attributed to him (and one of these is really written by Athenagoras). However, it is the three of his writings which are acknowledged in subsequent centuries as Justin’s, though Jerome attributes a number of others to him.37 It must also be observed, as did von Harnack in 1883, that Parisinus Graecus 450 is plagued with textual gaps, corruptions, scribal errors and intrusive marginal glosses; some 200–300 scribal errors in the text of the Apologies alone.38 There is another MS from the mid sixteenth century, now at the British Museum, but it is merely an apograph of the earlier manuscript. 3. Most (in)famous is Origen, De principiis for which five sixths of the Greek is lost. For this most important work of his, all we have extant is a Latin translation made by Rufinus, 150 years after Origen’s death. To this day, scholars debate over how accurate Rufinus’ translation really is. These problems are also shared by Origen’s huge twenty-five-book commentary on Matthew: only books 10–17 of the Greek are extant and these come from two thirteenth- and fourteenth-century manuscripts. A Latin version starts with 12.9, so a partial comparison of the overlap can be made. Erich Klostermann made such a comparison in his critical edition of the commentary39 and concluded the Greek versions have a closely related origin and share many gaps and corruptions.40 The problem with Origen’s text is like that of another important text from the previous century, Irenaeus’ Adversus Haereses. More than a few students who wanted to study Irenaeus’ anti-heretical work have used the Greek columns in PG 7a and 7b as the primary text, not realising that they were dealing only with a modern Greek translation of the Latin. Irenaeus’ Greek does not survive, though the many later citations of his Greek give us some barometer 36

37 38

39 40

It remains uncertain whether the II Apology (much smaller than the first) is a separate work or a detached extension of the first one. De viris illust. 23. M. Marcovich (ed.), Iustini Martyris Apologiae pro Christianis (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1994), pp. 7–8. Migne utilised an amended edition from 1742 that was based on editio princeps by Robert Estienne (Paris, 1551). Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte 10 (Leipzig and Berlin, 1935). C. Hammond Bammel, ‘Some Textual Points in Origen’s Commentary of Matthew’, Journal of Theological Studies 24 (1973), p. 380.

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for evaluating the Latin translation, which provides a stronger basis of comparison than Origen’s. Novatian of Rome’s so-called De trinitate, which has been translated into English several times, is rightly regarded as an important window into the Latin theological tradition of the third century. While dissertations and articles have been written about its theological content, less attention is paid to the fact that no manuscript of De trinitate survives before printed editions appeared and there are only three of these, none of these earlier than the sixteenth century.41 It is clear that texts of Novatian survived earlier but were reckoned under the name of Tertullian. Such is the case in an eleventh-century catalogue of manuscripts from Corbie, now lost. There exists a fragment of De trinitate found in a manuscript from Monte Cassino (cod. 384, ninth–tenth centuries) containing a patristic florilègium. Also, it is likely that Novatian’s De trinitate was transmitted under the name De fide.42 This remarkable lack of MS evidence might be explained by Novatian’s later condemnations. There is nothing inherently heretical about the text, but in this case, the author’s name itself is problematic. In the same way, other texts regarded as heretical slipped beneath the ecclesiastical radar and survive in medieval MSS. A prime example of this phenomenon is the Opus imperfectum in Mattheum,43 as it is now known, which has been preserved only because it was regarded as the work of Chrysostom before Erasmus, although it has unmistakable ‘Arian’ and ‘Pelgian’ leanings. Nonetheless it was widely copied and distributed. A huge commentary, it has a complex stemma in which 200 manuscripts have to be sorted out. Despite the fact that some twelfth-century manuscripts show weeding out of the more obvious ‘Arian’ passages, a recognisable ‘Arian’ content still persists and caused occasional consternation among scribes, as seen by several warning notes inserted into the margins.44 While the title Opus imperfectum in Mattheaum would likely pertain to the missing sections of the commentary, it was also a way to distinguish it from the Opus perfectum, namely the ninety less controverted homilies by Chrysostom. Why then was the former text suspect of heresy and transmitted in so many more MSS than most orthodox works? Remarkably, Migne places the commentary among Chrysostom’s works, despite the fact that the prologue states its author is unknown (PG 56. 611–12). There is a plausible suggestion that the great popularity of the Opus during the Middle Ages (from ad 800–1450) was because it provided a kind of theological antidote to the strong anti-Pelagianism of the day.45 *

41

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43 44

45

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E. Hunt, ‘The Need for a Guide to the Editors of Patristic Texts in the 16th Century’, Studia Patristica XVII, Part 1 (1982), pp. 365–71. Dekkers, ‘En 1545 Martin Mesnart réédita à Paris les oeuvres de Tertullien. Partant de la troisième édition de Rhenanus, il y ajouta un morceau resté inédit du de Patientia et onze opuscules, neuf de Tertullien et deux de Novatien, le de Trinitate et le de Cibis Iudaicis, que, sur la foi de son manuscrit, il attribua également au polémiste carthaginois.’ ‘Note sur les fragments récemment découverts de Tertullien’, Sacris Erudiri, vol. 4 (1952), pp. 372–83. PG LVI. 611–948. J. van Banning, ‘The Edition of the Arian Opus Imperfectum in Mattheaum. Review and Prospects’, Studia Patristica 20 (1989), 73. Van Banning published a critical edition for this work, CCSL 87b (1988). PG LVI. 611–948.

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Let me finish by returning to Migne. Over the years there have been scores of assessments about the value of his patristic accomplishments. Surely Hamman is justified in reminding us that before Migne there were only partial collections; ‘il n’a jamais existé dans l’histoire une seule collection complete et générale des ouvrages patristique’.46 It is arguable that had Migne and his collaborators decided on producing really critical editions of the Fathers, we should still be without a complete Patrology. But the reality is that nearly every volume produced by Migne was transplanted, with minor corrections, from earlier series to his own. But just as important is the effect which Migne’s collection had on subsequent readers. Whereas Migne and other recent editions, including English translations of these editions, create the idea of a seamless unity of patristic witnesses, the manuscript attestations paint a different picture. There are texts with sufficient manuscript evidence that may we cite with confidence, and then there are others whose literary efforts remain unproven and uncertain – at least they do for the serious student of manuscript transmission and reliability. To speak with confidence about what ‘the Fathers said’ in a unitive sense is difficult to do in the best of text circumstances, and we must be cautious about following any edited or translated series which by their very nature create a continuity between ancient texts. Moreover, Migne’s use of the term ‘Fathers’ raises questions given the lack of distinction made in the Patrologia for degrees of authority attributed to a large body of texts, i.e. conciliar documents, papal statements, theological treatises, and so on. Undoubtedly, the Abbé was operating from a theological perspective that regarded the whole of his Patrologia as representative of the Catholic tradition. Given the general goals of his day to show Roman ecclesial superiority, it is not surprising to find in the PL and PG the placement of ancient texts subsisting in succession to one another. That a great many of the texts contained in the Patrologiae comprise a part of the catholic identity cannot be disputed. But these same texts represent degrees of ecclesial significance, just like the Nicene creed or works of Athanasius hold greater authority than the creed of Serdica or the writings of Gregory of Elvira. Not all tradition, written or not, is on equal footing – a point espoused by Protestant historical theologians, and in practice, by Roman Catholic writers as well. A related issue about Migne’s scheme for the Patrologiae is the lack of any division between the patristic era and what follows. Most historians use the term ‘Fathers’ in reference to Christian antiquity. We may observe how writers in the fifth and sixth centuries, such as Vincent of Lérins or Cassiodorus, addressed contemporary issues by looking back to the age of the ‘Fathers’. While also embracing the principle of orthodoxy, their reference attributed certain parameters to the meaning of the ‘Fathers’, namely, that it connoted the formative architects of the earliest centuries. Admittedly, there is no one paradigm that neatly circumscribes the patristic age in the same way that there are no definitive markers that indicate the beginning (or end) of the medieval period. This approach is the one followed by the standard patrologies of the last two centuries, by both Catholic and Protestant scholars.47 Over all, there are important caveats to be highlighted in any modern appropriation of the patristic literature. As the interpretation and application of early Christianity 46 47

A. Hamman, ‘Jacques-Paul Migne et la renaissance patristique Leçon d’un centenaire’, p. 87. For example, in Berthold, Bardenhewer and Quasten, Patrology I–III. Volumes IV and V follow a similar pattern but also include texts deemed heretical.

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continues to grow, especially among various Protestant groups where there is renewed enthusiasm, we would do well to acknowledge that our confidence in the texts used today for theological reconstruction is heavily based on organisational and editing processes that occurred long after the patristic writers, which may or may not be well-founded. Migne’s grand enterprise puts this last observation in stark relief, and sometimes it is all we have.

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5

AUGUSTINE ON BEAUTY: A BIBLICAL AESTHETICS David Lyle Jeffrey

W

hile St Augustine has been variously regarded both as the most formative theological mind of antiquity after St Paul and the foundational figure for hermeneutics and biblical exegesis in the West, his name is not so often associated with aesthetics. This is perhaps understandable, given his famous self-deprecatory remark in his Confessions that while he had once written a book entitled Of Beauty and Proportion, ‘in two or three volumes, I think’, he says rather laconically, they were somehow lost. There is not the slightest hint of lament in this remark, and given that it forms part of Augustine’s acknowledgment of his pre-conversion preoccupation with inferior subjects out of dubious motives,1 the lost work on aesthetics might seem to be something that in his own mind he lumped together with his adolescent pranks and other misdirected pursuits of the old life. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. To the contrary, the questions which he had attempted to pursue in the lost books, first among them the nature of the beautiful and its compelling ‘allure’ (allicit, from allicere, to entice) are here in the Confessions and throughout the whole body of his works reframed in a larger intellectual context in which, far from being dismissed as spiritually or philosophically unworthy, they are re-valorised and made central to the meaning of his new life. In brief, the basic questions of the lost De pulchro et apto remain at the centre of Augustine’s work as a Christian theologian and philosopher. Any reflection on his aesthetics must accordingly take into account the theological and metaphysical matrix in which his aesthetic ideas, as we have them, are formulated. Two extrinsic contexts, one ancient, the other modern, can intervene to obscure the continuing pertinence for Augustine of his early questions about the nature of corporeal beauty and its seductive allure. The oldest of these draws heavily upon the language of 1

Confessions 4, especially 4.13.20 through 16.31. I have used here the translation of J. G. Pilkington, corrected on occasion by the translation of F. J. Sheed, recently re-edited by Michael P. Foley, Augustine’s Confessions (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 2006). Augustine tells us that he had dedicated his De pulchro et apto to Hierius, a notable rhetorician in the Greek manner (4.14.21); Philip Burton observes reasonably that in confessing to this dedication, as to his early devotion to the sermons of Ambrose for their rhetorical style rather than their content (Conf. 5.23.13), Augustine is effectively expressing contrition for his early obsession with rhetoric for its own sake (‘The Vocabulary of the Liberal Arts in Augustine’s Confessions’, in Karla Pollmann and Mark Vessey (eds), Augustine and the Disciplines from Cassiciacum to Confessions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)), p. 151.

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neo-Platonism to which Augustine was indebted, but by which he has been sometimes characterised too narrowly as a metaphysical realist or even a dualist.2 More recently, the paradigmatic post-Kantian disposition in aesthetics as a modern discipline, namely to reject metaphysics altogether, has found much of Augustine’s biblical and theological language, as well as his argument, to be fanciful and irrelevant piety, a kind of mysticism. I want in this essay to suggest that each of these approaches prevents a just appreciation – to show (a) that Augustine is not a strict neo-Platonist, and (b) that his metaphysical teleology is not abstracted from physical reality and bodily experience. Considered canonically, Augustine’s aesthetic ideas reveal themselves to be fundamentally more Hebraic than Hellenic – which is to say, much more historically grounded and tangibly mediated than some of his apparently neo-Platonic language might on the surface seem to indicate. Thus, while metaphysical realities are obviously crucial to Augustine’s overall theory of beauty, his ideas about the beautiful, and indeed of the nature of its allure, depend absolutely upon sensible appreciation and corporeal experience.

The Beautiful as an Object of Love As he reflects further on the questions that prompted his lost work, we encounter everywhere a word that would be tangential in a neo-Platonic context and seems entirely misplaced in a post-Kantian aesthetic: that word is love (amor): I loved these lower beauties . . . and I said to my friends, ‘Do we love anything but the beautiful? What, then, is the beautiful? And what is beauty? What is it then that allures and unites us to the things we love, for unless there were a grace and a beauty in them, they could by no means attract us to themselves.’ And I marked and perceived that in bodies themselves there was a beauty, from their forming a kind of whole, and another from mutual fittingness, one part of the body with its whole, or a shoe with a foot, and so on. (Confessions 4.13.20, trans. Pilkington) We shall see that Augustine’s strong early connection of beauty with desire in the lost books is not at all lost in his subsequent Christian reflections on beauty; rather, the connection is strikingly developed. A neo-Platonic ambience in his subsequent discussions of beauty is nonetheless strong. As Carol Harrison has observed in her landmark study, Augustine’s familiarity with Plotinus in particular provided him with both a useful paradigm and a vocabulary.3 Yet Plotinus’s Peri tou Kalou (Ennead 1.6) is as important for its character as a foil to Augustine’s own thinking as it was as a tutor to his thought.4 For Plotinus, Supreme Beauty is part of the transcendent order to which all earthly beauty is at best a pale simulacrum; he claims that only the soul can come to know it, and then only by rising above 2

3

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Augustine’s fellow North African, Albert Camus, wrote a Master’s thesis with this emphasis (1939, University of Algiers); the major study by K. Svoboda, L’Esthétique de saint Augustine et ses sources (Brno, 1933), known to Camus, is the most important study taking this view. Carol Harrison, Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992) achieves much better balance, and is still the best general study. See also her ‘An Essay in Saint Augustine’s Aesthetics’, Federación Agustiniana Española, Estudio Agustiniano (1990), pp. 205–15. Plotinus, The Enneads, ed. Stephen Mackenna, 5 vols (London: Medici Society, 1917–30; repr. New York: Pantheon, 1965).

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sense-bound experience. Harrison speculates that after the hard and dualistic materialism of the Manicheans had lost its appeal for Augustine, the transcendental idealism of Plotinus must have seemed a refreshing antidote, and she thinks that preference for the soul in his soul-body dialectic in the early Christian works is clearly indebted to Plotinus.5 Any such indebtedness, however, involves a less mystical notion of soul progress in Augustine than is found in Plotinus. This is evident as early as the De Ordine, a work of Augustine’s Cassiciacum period, in which he stresses that the soul is ordered toward its higher potential through a rigorous intellectual training in the disciplines of the liberal arts. Reason is developed through experience, beginning nominally with the arts of the trivium and moving to those of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music), in which governance by number is seen to provide the order, harmony and form we observe and confirm in the created world.6 One of Augustine’s most favoured biblical texts supporting the thesis of De Ordine is Wisdom 11: 21, ‘Thou hast ordered all things in measure, wisdom, and number.’7 This recurrent text offers an important clue to the distinctive character of Augustine’s emphatic parallel, emphasised so strongly in the De Ordine, of divine authority with reason (9.26–7; cf. 5.12–14). In the De Ordine Plotinus is not mentioned, nor is Plato; Aristotle is cited, however, and lineaments of Aristotle’s thought are visible at a number of points (e.g., 11.31; cf. 5.16). There is an aspect, then, of Augustine’s use of the notion of ascent in learning that sees ‘corporeal things as definite steps’ en route to an apprehension of incorporeal or intelligible realities.8 One should not pass too swiftly over these ‘steps’. As he puts it in his De Musica, the things of mortal beauty are beautiful in their own kind and order, and by an over-arching order they are joined together in a harmonious unity which he describes as a ‘poem of the universe’.9 It is possible for Augustine to find beauty even in a cock-fight; in its own way, he insists, it too is an evidence of the pervasiveness of order: We could see their intent heads stretched forward, hackles raised, mighty thrusts of beak and spur, uncanny dodgings. There was nothing amiss in every motion of those irrational beasts. There was clearly another Reason controlling everything from on high, down to the universal law of victor and vanquished. The first crowed in triumph and puffed its feathers in a clear sign of superiority. The other had ended up with a featherless neck, voiceless, and crippled. I don’t know how, but everything was hymn to the beauty and harmony of nature. (De ordine 1.8.25) What to some views might be a more fitting example of ugliness and disorder, Augustine describes as a ‘hymn to the harmony and beauty of nature’. Later, in De libero arbitrio, he 5

6

7 8 9

Harrison, 4–6; 12–15; she notes that Augustine’s interest in created beauty becomes much more pronounced in the course of his theological writings. I wish to correct that contextually warranted view by showing how much it already figures in his early writings. De Ordine, 1.8.4, trans. Silvano Barruso as St. Augustine: On Order (South Bend: St Augustine’s Press, 2007). Augustine’s ordering of the disciples differs slightly from later standard lists. See the discussion in Karla Pollmann and Mark Vessey, Augustine and the Disciplines: from Cassiciacum to Confessions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. pp. 69–75. Wisdom 11: 20–1 is one of Augustine’s most frequently cited biblical texts in this connection. Cf. his Retractions 1.6; Harrison, p. 25. De Musica 6.10.28, trans. Robert C. Taliaferro, in Fathers of the Church, vol. 4 (New York: Cima, 1947).

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will return to this point in a more formal, theological vein, praising the divine wisdom which ‘speaks to us in the beauty of every created thing’.10 His characteristically frank appreciation for physical beauty in a wide range of objects and phenomena portends later reflections on the way in which the beauty and harmony of mortal life necessarily entails a frisson of opposition and contraries. It is clear thus that contemplation of beauty in the natural order is, like Augustine’s view of the exercise of reason by training in the liberal arts, certainly an anagogicus; it offers an upward leading way or ascent of the soul towards a fuller vision of intelligible beauty.11 He has a variety of ways of expressing figuratively this notion of ascent, but as in this passage, the motif of an educational journey predominates among them: For those, therefore, who are ascending upwards the first action may be called, for the sake of instruction, quickening; the second, sensation; the third, art; the fourth, virtue; the fifth, tranquility; the sixth, entry; the seventh, contemplation. They may also be thus named: of the body, through the body, about the body, the soul towards itself, the soul in itself, towards God, with God. And again thus: beauty from another thing, beauty through another thing, beauty about another thing, beauty towards the beautiful, beauty in the beautiful, beauty towards Beauty, beauty in Beauty.12 That beauty is a means to Beauty makes the point; beauty of the soul does not cancel out beauty in the body, but necessarily depends upon it.13 The soul is ‘a great force of a nonbodily nature’ whose works we can nevertheless see embodied, and by which, as with the works of the Creator God, we are frequently ‘amazed’: Look round at the order imposed on things, at the beauty of cultivated fields, of thickets uprooted, of fruit trees planted and grafted, all the things we see and love in the countryside; look at the very order of the state, at the noble piles of buildings, at the variety of arts and crafts, at the number of languages, at the depths of memory, at the ripeness of eloquence. All these things are works of the soul. How many and how great are the works of the soul, all of which you can see, and you can’t see the soul itself!14 It becomes apparent to Augustine that a keener awareness of the works of the artist, including most notably the Divine Artist, makes us want to seek the artist. This is to him only natural: 10

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De libero arbitrio 2.16; trans. Anna S. Benjamin and L. H. Hackstaff, On Free Choice of the Will: Saint Augustine (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964). Cf. St Bonaventure’s De reductione artium ad theologiam (Retracing the Arts to Theology), written nine centuries later. Ed. and trans. Sister Emma Thérèse Healy, in Works of Saint Bonaventure, ed. Philotheus Boehner et al. (St Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1955). De quant. Animae, ee.70–6; cf. 35.79. Trans. Erich Przywara, S.J., An Augustine Synthesis (London: Sheed & Ward, 1939), p. 28. Sermon ‘On God’s Providence’ (Dolbeau, 29), p. 4, in The Works of Saint Augustine, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A., Series III, vol. 11, trans. Edmund Hill, O. P. (New York: New City Press, 1997), p. 57. In Sermon 243.8, in which Augustine exclaims, ‘If such a great corporeal beauty (tanta corporis pulchritudine) is manifest in our flesh even now, how much greater will it be there.’ In such remarks we hear echoes of St Paul in 1 Corinthians 2: 9, ‘Eye hath not seen or ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man, the things which God has prepared for those who love him’ (quoting, in turn, Isaiah 64: 4, 65: 17). Sermon 360B.9, ed. Hill. Ibid. p. 371.

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david lyle jeffrey Should one look at the works and not look for the craftsman? You look at the earth bearing fruit, you look at the sea full of its animals, you look at the air full of flying creatures, you look at the sky bright with stars; you recognize the changes of the seasons, you consider the four parts of the year, how the leaves fall from the trees and come back again, how their seeds are given their numbers, and each thing has its measurements, its weights, how all things are being administered in their own ranks and order, the sky up above with total peace, the earth down below having its own proper beauty, the beauty sui generis of things giving way to and succeeding each other. Gazing on all these things you behold them now all given life by created spirit, and you don’t go looking for the craftsman of such a great work?15

This passage comes from a sermon whose purpose was explicitly Christian apologetics, and unsurprisingly it is evidently far more indebted to biblical passages Augustine quotes frequently than it is to Plotinus. In fact, however, it is representative of a pattern. Seminal biblical passages in his address to the beauty of creation in his work include Wisdom 11: 20–1, alluded to here, and Psalm 19, a poem which provides much of the framework for Augustine’s method and is likewise to be found quoted everywhere in his writings. But Exodus, Genesis, Proverbs, Romans and Colossians likewise yield him touchstones. This is the element most often overlooked, I think, when Augustine’s ‘neo-Platonism’ is emphasised too strongly, as it certainly is in Karol Svoboda’s L’Esthetique de saint Augustin et ses sources,16 a work that has had a significant influence in characterising Augustine’s aesthetics in Western scholarship generally. James O’Donnell has more recently examined the role of neo-Platonism in Augustine’s writings and concluded accurately as well as succinctly, ‘It is not that he discovered that the Plotinian method did not work; he discovered that it did work, and that it was not enough.’17

Created Beauty The distinction between use and enjoyment of something for its own sake is basic to the argument of Augustine in On Christian Doctrine,18 his book on hermeneutics and what we should now call ‘literary theory’.19 Here Augustine is elaborating a method for reading the text of Scripture in such a way that readers will not be distracted by an excessive preoccupation with matters of style and language (even though one must read, note and make use of them) from a deeper intellectual purpose in reading, namely to come to an understanding of the divine authorial intention. Here too, then, in regard to a literary text, we refer from the beauty of the art object back to the intellectual being who created it. For Augustine a balanced attention should be devoted to matters of composition as a means we use en route to our enjoyment of a primary encounter with meaning in the text. He allows that some elements we may both ‘enjoy and use’ (1.3), but his concern is that 15 16 17

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Sermon 198.31, in Hill, p. 202. See note 2. James J. O’Donnell, Augustine: Confessions: Commentary in Three Volumes (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958). De doctrina Christiana 1.3–5, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr, Saint Augustine: On Christian Doctrine (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958). See David Lyle Jeffrey, People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1996), Chs 1 and 3 for an extended discussion.

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the goal of our intellectual journey not be frustrated or detained, whether by too narrow a preoccupation with style or method or indeed any other species of idolatry of the sign. This is not to deny literary language its beauty; indeed he will go on to say that rhetorical beauties are invaluable as a means of drawing us on in our quest for meaning. His point is cautionary, simply that we should guard lest the beauty of the country through which we pass, and the very pleasure of the motion, charm our hearts, and turning these things which we ought to use into objects of enjoyment, we become unwilling to hasten to the end of our journey; and becoming engrossed in a factitious delight, our thoughts are diverted from that home whose delights would make us truly happy.20 The rind or outer husk of edible fruit is what attracts us to it, and therefore is a critical element of our knowledge. Yet is not the ultimate good we seek; that is the kernel or fruit within.21 Analogously, we may be attracted to a noble intellect or virtuous person, when we are said to ‘enjoy’ their company, says Augustine, we should not ‘stop short upon the road, and place our hope of happiness in man or angel’ (1.33.36), but rather recognise that ‘when [we] have joy of a man in God, it is God rather than man that [we] enjoy’ (1.33.37). For Augustine, so far from denigrating the person in question, this recognition gives to that person the full measure of his value as a creature made in the image of God. In all of these examples, the issue is right reference, and Augustine’s classic defence of Greek and Roman pagan poetry in the education of Christians depends upon it. But here too we see that the paradigm he draws upon is biblical, even as he is acknowledging the value of neo-Platonism: Moreover, if those who are called philosophers, and especially the Platonists, have said aught that is true and in harmony with our faith, we are not only not to shrink from it, but to claim it for our own use from those who have unlawful possession of it. For as the Egyptians had not only the idols and heavy burdens which the people of Israel hated and fled from, but also vessels and ornaments of gold and silver, and garments, which the same people when going out of Egypt appropriated to themselves, designing them for a better use, not doing this on their own authority, but by the command of God, the Egyptians themselves, in their ignorance, providing them with things which they themselves were not making a good use of; in the same way all branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, which every one of us, when going out under the leadership of Christ from the fellowship of the heathen, ought to abhor and avoid; but they contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them.22 Right reference for meaning is in this context essentially a matter of discernment between rightly ordered affection and idolatry of the mere sign, in which, for Augustine as for most 20

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De doctrina 1.4, trans. J. F. Shaw, in the American edition of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 2, St. Augustine’s City of God and Christian Doctrine [1887], (repr. Peabody, MA: Hendrickkson, 2004). De doctrina 3.7.11; cf. 3.5.9; see the discussion by H. I. Marrou in S. Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Paris, 1938), p. 413. On Christian Doctrine, 2.40.60 (trans. Shaw).

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readers of the Bible in his day, we are instructed by the Scriptures narratively: no careful reader of Exodus is unaware that gold with which Aaron fashioned the golden calf idol was later, more properly, to be appropriated by the artists Bezalel, Aholiab and the ‘wisehearted women’ to adorn with art the tabernacle for God’s presence in the sanctuary.23 The issue is appropriate or fitting use. This passage is but one of many biblical archetypes on which Augustine drew for his distinction between use and enjoyment which shows that what is frequently at stake in his later works is an argument for the reader’s acquisition of rightly ordered love; such love, he will say repeatedly, does not disparage the body or any beautiful thing in the world, since they are expressions of a universal language of love emanating from the ‘Maker of all things, visible and invisible’ (Nicene Creed). In this context his pervasive praise for the beauties of nature (Creation), as Hans Urs von Balthasar has observed, is effectively a contradiction of all Platonism.24 Creation itself, rightly viewed, is for Augustine the beauty that awakes us to Beauty. Reciprocally, Beauty lets us in turn appreciate mortal beauty in a fuller way. His rhetoric seldom soars as high as when he turns his prose to this subject: Ask the loveliness of the earth, ask the loveliness of the sea, ask the loveliness of the wide airy spaces, ask the loveliness of the sky, ask the order of the stars, ask the sun making the day light with its beams, ask the moon tempering the darkness of the night that follows, ask the living things which move in the waters, which tarry on the land, which fly in the air; ask the souls that are hidden, the bodies that are perceptive; the visible things which must be governed, the invisible things which govern – ask all these things, and they will all answer thee, Lo, see we are lovely. Their loveliness is their confession. And these lovely but mutable things, who has made them, save Beauty immutable?25 Finally, in the Incarnation Christ made manifest God’s immutable Beauty in visible form; thus for Augustine the incarnate God is ‘beautiful in heaven; beautiful on earth; beautiful in the womb; beautiful in his parents’ hands’, and even ‘beautiful on the Cross’.26 Here, immutable Beauty itself has come to have a corporeal form which draws us to the beauty of Creation’s meaning; this is a principle which was to be realised abundantly in the plastic and graphic arts over the next millennium and beyond, especially in regard to the restoration of Creation (or re-creation) effected in the Atonement. Thus too for Augustine and the artists who follow in this train, it is entirely fitting to speak of the Cross, of the Crucifixion, as beautiful: ’He had no form or comeliness that we should look at Him.’ The deformity of Christ forms you. For if He had not wished to be deformed you would not have received 23

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See David Lyle Jeffrey, Modern Theology 28.4 (2012), pp. 687–706; see also Jeffrey, People of the Book, pp. 52–9. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, ed. Joseph Fessio, S. J. and John Riches, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, 7 vols (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1982), 2.123. Cf. Harrison, pp. 130–1. Sermon 241.2.2, trans. Przywara, Synthesis, p. 116. Ennarationes in Psalmos 44.3; cf. 45.7. Trans. A. Cleveland Cox, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 8 [1888], (repr. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 146, 148. See here Richard Viladesau, The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 9–12; 31–3.

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back the form that you lost. Therefore, He hung deformed upon the cross, but His deformity was our beauty.27 This is the sense of ‘aesthetic’ in Augustine that leads Michael Hanby to his conclusion that for Augustine ‘salvation is aesthetic. It consists in the restoration of beauty from the beautiful itself, and it takes the form of the love of the beautiful – because the beautiful is love, and because apart from participation in this love there is finally nothing’.28

Convertible Transcendentals By Plato and to a lesser degree by Aristotle, the transcendentals – the True, the Good, the Beautiful – were considered as properties of Being. Aquinas settles for a different schema: the One, the True and the Good. The Beautiful came again to be normatively recognised as a transcendental in the writing of Bonaventure.29 But that is to speak about aesthetic history formally; the Beautiful is a transcendental everywhere in Augustine, and it is clear that Bonaventure straightforwardly follows him in this respect as in so many others. By now it will be clear that for Augustine the content of each of the transcendentals is, consistently, more informed by biblical than Greek or Roman sources; this is to say that his articulation may owe something to Platonism, but that his governing philosophy is biblical. When, for example, Augustine discusses Plato’s Timaeus at some length in The City of God, he finds a host of similarities or parallels between the Athenian and the Hebrew Scriptures especially, and nowhere more so than the burning bush incident in which the invisible God answers to Moses’ request for his name, saying ‘I am who I am’ (Exodus 3: 14; Civitate Dei 8: 11). This suggests to Augustine a definition for transcendent Being precedent to that of Plato but compatible with it; he goes so far as to speculate in that passage that Plato may have been influenced somehow by the books of Moses. It is of further interest to Augustine’s view of the transcendentals that he connected Exodus 3: 14 and the Divine Name to the acquisition of ‘Egyptian gold’ during his own search for Truth, here applying the biblical trope to ‘the Athenians’, among and to whom Paul observed, ‘In Thee we live and move and have our being’ – an understanding of the relation of Being to being which Paul claimed to have found in the Athenians’ own poets (Acts 17: 28; Confessions 7.9.15). By a similar series of more obvious connections, the Good is found to be pre-eminently a property of Being on the biblical model also (De Trinitate 8.2.3; 8.3.4–5, commenting on Acts 17: 28).30 Hovering in the text of all these passages in Augustine, more often than not explicitly, is another of his own favourite paradigm passages, Romans 1: 18–25, which is invoked as much as for him to say that idolatry is simply a refusal to refer created and mutable goods to the uncreated Being in whom their archetypes are found. But surely this is not to be more Platonist than St Paul himself in the Romans passage. God is that Being for Augustine who can be known through his art, ‘God the Good and the Beautiful, in whom and by whom and through whom those things 27 28 29

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Sermon 27.6, cited in Harrison, p. 234. Augustine and Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 55. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 45. It seems to me that Hanby has it right when he says that ‘beauty and its convertibility with goodness and truth [is] integral’ to the procession of the Son and the Spirit from the Father in Augustine’s discussion of the nature of the Trinity (pp. 47; 48–51).

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are good and beautiful which anywhere are good and beautiful’ (Soliloquies 1.1.3). This particular passage comes early, a formulation already in his mind at Cassiciacum, and it indicates reliably Augustine’s future direction. As a synthetic theologian, of course, Augustine’s theory unavoidably subsumes aesthetics under the study of Divine Being. But he has made it clear that in respect to Beauty our study is initially made possible by our experience of Creation, in which we may trace the operations of reason, unity, harmony, number and rhythm.31 In De vera religione he argues that ‘all things have their offices and limits laid down so as to ensure the beauty of the universe’ (39.76). This beauty everywhere in nature implies a consideration of formal unity, he adds humorously, for ‘when we are judging a good-looking person we should not take account only of his hair’. Composition of harmonious and symmetrical parts yields greater aesthetic pleasure; for example, ‘the color black may very well be beautiful if you take into account the picture as a whole’ (39.76; cf. De Trinitate 9.6.9–11). Reason is a unifying natural principle; thus, ‘the world is full of designs and is beautiful not because of its size but because of the reason that is in it’ (43.80). Elsewhere he will say that knowledge itself may be beautiful (De Trinitate 10.1.1–2). The artist who will be successful in creating beauty in the art object will attune himself to the reason and harmony which orders the universe, he argues, discerning in all things the rhythm which pulses through the whole (De libro arbitrio 2.16.41–4). Monroe Beardsley enters into this theological matrix (perhaps to some degree unwittingly) when he observes – justly, as I am arguing – that in Augustine’s theological writings ‘beauty is not brought in adventitiously, because the unity that is basic to beauty is also basic to being, and things are therefore beautiful to the degree to which they really are’ (95).

Beauty and Artistic Response When it comes to human artistry, accordingly, an Aristotelian mimesis is not strictly speaking a possibility in Augustine’s aesthetic, at least in the sense that an art object, however skilfully wrought, cannot reproduce the reality it images, but can only refract it. From the time of his Soliloquies (as we have seen, one of his earliest post conversion works), mimesis so claimed is a lie which attempts to pass itself off as truth (Soliloquies 2.9.16). Yet artistic attempts at mimesis are not necessarily vicious detractions, as Plato had imagined, from pursuit of the human good, since in comedies and poems the authors’ ‘aim is to delight, rather than to deceive’. Reason in this dialogue is made to counter that paintings and statues really do try to deceive (2.9.17), but her parry functions in the context of Augustine’s argument simply as a dialectical stalking horse, for almost immediately we are told that dramatic poetry can be classified with painting and sculpture as attempting a certain illusion of reality but failing in the effort. Thus, artistic ‘falseness’ is a function of the fact that every attempt at mimesis is invention rather than a discovery, inevitably therefore to prove fallible on technical grounds (2.10.18–19).32 At least such a poem is less dangerous than the sophistry of a perverse philosopher, Augustine argues, because even when people take pleasure in poetic inventions they are not at much risk of believing in them (Confessions 3.6). It is here obvious that, unlike Plato, Augustine is 31

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This point is succinctly discussed by Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History (New York: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 93–5. Ibid. pp. 96–8.

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not made anxious by the power of poetry to allure. Further, he notices that inevitably a human artist will take creative liberties – a distinctively human imaginative property not shared by the imitative animals (De Musica 1.4.5–7; cf. Letter 7.3.6 to Hebridius), and to Augustine this trait suggests that the actual ‘imitative’ element in human nature is our imago dei, creativity itself. Augustine will permit no confusion between invention and discovery. ‘Reason does not create truth’, he observes, ‘but discovers it’ (De vera Religione 40.74). But when something of the beauty of creation is captured by the artist, its refracted simulacrum, though imperfect in itself and evidently fictional, can nevertheless suffice as a guide toward the Beauty and Truth we seek. Augustine went through a passage from Virgil each evening before dinner at Cassiciacum,33 and his work is filled with allusions and quotations from the Roman poet.34 He even ventured to write one of his own works in the form of a poem.35 As Harrison properly observes, when Augustine scolds Licentius for spending too much time with poetry, he is not offering a blanket condemnation of poetry, but correcting an imbalance in which philosophy was being too much neglected in a particular case. Overall, Augustine seems to anticipate Dante; Virgil can serve admirably as a guide, despite the fact that he cannot take us all the way. ‘Even those things which are corruptible are good’, says the Augustine of the Confessions (7.12.18). So too ‘is the verse also beautiful in its manner . . . for the reason that it displays the ultimate imprints of that beauty which art preserves immovably and immutably’ (De vera religione 22.42). The proper object of the reader’s affection ought accordingly to be the artistry by which the verse is composed more than any particular verse it itself. In this respect Augustine clearly privileging respect for artistic skill over the exercise of aesthetic judgment.

Kant’s Contra Our appreciation of Augustine’s aesthetics can become more sharply focused by means of a juxtaposition with the aesthetic principles articulated by Immanuel Kant. It was the essence of Kant’s purpose in his third critique, the Critique of Judgment (1790) to elaborate an aesthetic theory without reference either to a transcendent teleology or any precedent systems.36 His primary enquiry is similar to that of Augustine’s De pulchro et apto to the degree that he is interested in the apparently subjective element in aesthetic judgments, which he thinks are based initially neither on logic nor rational cognition, but on feelings of pleasure or displeasure (44). Kant divides the field distinctively, however, into 33 34 35

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De ordine 1.6. Harold Hagendahl, Augustine and the Latin Classics (Göteborg: Elander, 1967), pp. 384–464. His poem against the Donatists, Psalmus contra partem Donati,has been edited variously. For a summary of editions see G. Finaert, trans. Yves M. J. Congar, Oeuvres de Saint Augustin 28, Traités anti-Donatistes (Paris, 1963), pp. 143–4; good studies are those of Daniel J. Nodes, ‘The Organization of Augustine’s Psalmus contra partem Donati’, Vigilae Christianae 63 (2009), pp. 390–408; also Vincent Hunink, ‘Singing together in Church: Augustine’s Psalm against the Donatists’, Ch. 20 in A. P. M. H. Lardinois, J. H. Blok and M. G. M. van der Poel (eds), Sacred Words: Orality, Literacy and Religion (Nejmigen: Brill, 2011). All references are to the translation by Warner S. Pluhar, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1987).

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categories he calls the ‘agreeable’ (47–8), beauty itself, and (for him the category most of interest) the sublime. Unlike Augustine, for whom, as we have seen, beauty was encountered less in the realm of disinterested judgment than as a powerful experience of desire, Kant emphasises that judgments about beauty must be based on a ‘disinterested pleasure’ which does not presuppose an end or purpose (46; 51; 54–60; 89–90). Such judgment rises above conditions of the ‘agreeable’, and depends on the ‘free play’ or ‘free harmony’ of the imagination and understanding (62). For Kant, in effect, subjective aesthetic judgment of the object precedes and is the ground of our pleasure in it; for Augustine, as we have seen, the pleasure in beauty is unbidden, and it precedes and prompts reflective cognition on the experience. At least in this sense, Kant’s theory of the beautiful privileges a subjective element; Augustine wishes to acknowledge a more objective extra-mental reality. Kant’s addition of his primary category, however, that of the ‘sublime’, valorises the subjective element to a degree foreign to Augustine altogether; sublimity is not on Kant’s account to be located in external nature, even in the mountain precipice or terrifying fog which occasions awe, but in the mind of the properly prepared perceiver. Thus: For the beautiful in nature we must seek a basis outside ourselves, but for the sublime a basis merely within ourselves and in the way of thinking that introduces sublimity into our presentation of nature. (100) [accordingly] . . . true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the judging person, not in the natural object, the judgment of which prompts this mental attunement. (126) An experience of the sublime, Kant claims, is reserved for the intellect sufficiently powerful to demonstrate control of fear or awe; achieving it proves that ‘the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense’ (106). The experience must in this context be divorced from any notion of telos or reflection on design. Kant is aware that his characterisation of the sublime here incorporates elements, even as he works to suppress them, that had been earlier associated with religious awe, or ‘fear of the Lord’. He is aware, as he puts it, that ‘a virtuous person fears God without being afraid of him’ (120). While he thinks that it is impossible to ‘pass judgment at all on the sublime in nature if we are afraid’ (120), he regards the posture associated with the religious sublime as especially inimical to the experience of judgment of the sublime he envisions. Thinking, perhaps, of descriptions in the Pentateuch of the presence of God in the tabernacle or temple, he wishes to distance his own position firmly from such notions or the responses they generate. Accordingly, he is condescending in a manner that anticipates Nietzsche: It seems that in religion in general the only fitting behaviour in the presence of the deity is prostration, worship with bowed head and accompanied by contrite and timorous gestures and voice; and that is why most peoples have in fact adopted this behaviour and still engage in it. (122) A religious person in such a case, he observes, is able to encounter such a version of the sublime ‘only if he is conscious that his attitude is sincere and pleasing to God’ (122), but this will not do, he insists, when our purpose is judgment. Hence sublimity is contained not in any thing of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as well can become conscious of our superiority to nature within us, and thereby also to nature outside us (as far as it influences us). (123)

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That this ambition is strikingly contrary to the entire tenor and elaboration of Augustine’s aesthetic should be immediately apparent. It is worth noting that, for Augustine, what Kant delineates as the sublime is thoroughly integrated with and inseparable from the beautiful. It will also be clear that what Kant defines as the proper sphere of aesthetic reflection, namely judgment, is prior and superior in his schema to admiration or understanding of the artistry which produces the object for aesthetic reflection. What Kant created, and for his successors convincingly enough that his suppression of the notion of the religious sublime seemed appropriate, effects a transvaluation or redefinition of the transcendent (or of the transcendentals) that, as we have seen in Augustine, had been in his case (and in Christian aesthetic generally) crucial to a coherent conception of Being. Kant’s schema is likewise a quaternion, but for the True, the Good, the Beautiful and Being, he denominated the Agreeable, the Beautiful, the Sublime and the ‘Absolute Good’ (126). He makes his own schema explicit in his ‘General Comment on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgments’ in Chapter 30 or Part 1 of The Critique of Judgment, according them names in Latin: iucundum, pulchrum, sublime, honestum (126). When we juxtapose these two paradigms, the first subsumed and tacit in Augustine, the second originary and explicit in Kant, we cannot help but perceive the potential in Kant’s schema for modern aesthetics: TRUE

GOOD

AGREEABLE BEAUTIFUL

BEAUTIFUL

BEING

SUBLIME

ABSOLUTE GOOD

The effect of Kant’s quaternion is to relativise and subjectivise the True, to aestheticise the Good, to make rational superiority the actual object of desire and a ‘conception of a law that obligates absolutely’ (126) a replacement for the Augustinian idea of transcendent Being. What happens when Kant’s paradigm becomes implicitly normative, as it does in, say, Croce or Adorno,37 is that the integrative character of Augustine’s relation of mortal beauty and the Beauty (Heb. yapheh, tip âra, kavod; Lat. pulchrum, splendour, gloria) of God becomes obscured to the point of unintelligibility. In that he knew no Hebrew whatsoever, Augustine had less reason than Kant to appreciate that in the Bible itself terms for the beautiful were interchangeable to a degree that made the relation he sees altogether natural; terms one might apply to the beauty of a woman or the beauty of a work of art were likewise used with regard to the ‘beauty of the Lord’ and ‘the beauty of holiness’ (e.g. Psalm 29: 2; Heb. yapheh, tip âra, kavod; Lat. pulchrum, splendour, gloria); but he certainly observed the attempt in the old Latin Bible translation, partially obscured in the LXX and inconsistent as it is, to capture this philological clue. Augustine’s representation of what is, after all, a biblically grounded aesthetic more or less normative for more than a millennium after him in the West, is not in itself obscure. It is, however, a dependent aesthetic, necessarily incomplete because our understanding of its key principle of integration, namely the Incarnation of Being, is temporally imperfect in human understanding, always to some degree perceived as in a mirror (in speculum per enigmate) somewhat darkly. Full clarity awaits the Parousia. Augustine’s incarnational aesthetic is thus provisional, necessarily attended by epistemic 37

Most succinctly in Benedetto Croce, Guide to Aesthetics, trans. and pub. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1965); and Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

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humility, incomplete and necessarily tentative, especially as regards characterisation or depiction of the sublime. By men a thing can be recalled to the mind by the use of word-signs, but it is incorruptible Truth itself that teaches, the one true, the sole interior Master. He became an exterior Teacher also, that He might recall us from exterior to interior things, and taking the form of a servant, He deigned to appear in lowliness to the lowly, that His sublimity might become clear to those rising up to Him.38 For Augustine, an experience of the sublime is thus not a triumph of reason, and very far from self-willed; rather, it is reserved for the poor in spirit and pure in heart – those who, by grace, are open to an acknowledgment of the source of created beauty, and whose highest aesthetic aspiration is that they shall one day come to see the Artist as he is in the fullness of his Beauty.

Conclusion In summary, it can be said of Augustine that for him the arts – all of the arts – are useful, in that they conduce to the enhancement of human life. But the arts are to be appropriated and appreciated as instrumental, not intrinsic goods.39 The tension Augustine observes between the vehicle and its final purpose is based on a principle which Kant understands but, like many of his modern successors, does not accept. Kant says that ‘perhaps the most sublime concept in the Jewish law is the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven or on earth or under the earth’ (135); Augustine acknowledges in respect not only of this passage but everywhere that idolatry is a subtle temptation, having many guises. Yet for all that there is the gift of mortal beauty; the tension Augustine feels between the instrumental and the ultimate good would not exist if he were not cognisant and abidingly grateful for the beauty of the instrumental, whether in creation or in human arts such as music and painting (Confessions 10.33, 34). Accordingly, the biblical dialectic of emancipation and bondage, between right reference and idolatry, runs throughout all of Augustine’s writings. The lessons of the art of the tabernacle and the golden calf, of the perils of mistaking the source and telos of mortal beauty (in Romans 1: 18–25) reverberate in widely diverse parts of his canon. In the hermeneutic framework linking the narratives of Exodus to the warnings of Romans we see an epistemological platform in terms of which Augustine can celebrate the beauty of the world and of art as each in their own way reflective of the beauty of the Artist, each a means by which we may come at last to the creative source of all mortal beauty, that is, to an intellectual beauty not our own.

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Contra epistolam Manichaei, trans. Przywara, Synthesis, p. 200. On Christian Doctrine 2.30.47.

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SUBLIMITY AS RESISTANCE TO FORM IN THE EARLY MODERN BIBLE Anthony Ossa-Richardson

If these [books of the Bible] nevertheless maintain their claim to absolute authority, it is inevitable that they themselves be adapted through interpretative transformation [Umformung]. (Erich Auerbach)

T

he Bible is both that which we have read, and that which we remember reading: even those who have perused Genesis for themselves may recall Satan and an apple in Eden, so overwhelming is the weight of cultural memory, and, in this case, Christian commentary. Another example is more complex. When we remember the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22) – for instance to retell it – we bring to mind an Abraham horrified by God’s request, and flooded with relief at his son’s eventual reprieve. Hence, in a modern book of Bible Stories, we find additions: ‘Abraham must have wondered if he had heard God rightly. In those days human sacrifices were not uncommon, and people always offered to God the best that they had, but could God really want Abraham to kill and offer his only son whom God Himself had sent?  . . . What a great relief Abraham felt!’ And in another: ‘Who can imagine how Abraham must have felt as he considered killing his only precious son? . . . Abraham breathed an enormous sigh of relief.’1 Needless to say, there is none of this in the text of Genesis. Cinema offers similar interpolation, in the form of dialogue. For instance, in John Huston’s 1966 The Bible, Abraham (George C. Scott) answers God’s calling in ersatz-King James: ‘Wouldst thou I do even as the Canaanites, who lay their firstborn on fires before idols? Art thou truly the Lord my God?’ before moaning up a hill in the dark, and expostulating, ‘Thou wilt not ask this thing of me!’2 The purpose of these additions is clear: they show us the reaction that we would expect of Abraham if he were a recognisable human being in a ‘realistic’ drama. The new tellings take something which is essentially cryptic and mysterious, and make it familiar, comprehensible, but also, crucially, dramatic. They ‘bring the text to life’, seeking to give us a sense of what it ‘must have been like’ for Abraham, under his terrible injunction. This  way of talking about drama, including Biblical drama, is second nature to us, as attested by the title of a recent book of retellings: Living the Story: What it was Like to Be 1

2

Patricia Hunt, Bible Stories (London: Ward Lock, 1981), pp. 22–3; Andrew Bianchi and Emma Peterson, Bible Stories (Bath: Parragon, 1999), p. 29. The Bible, film, dir. John Huston. USA: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1966.

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There. Dramas that Bring the Bible Alive.3 It assumes that in the Bible there is something latent, waiting to be brought to life by a dramatic Umformung. John Dancy, in the preface to a 2002 collection of annotated scriptural excerpts entitled The Divine Drama, has commented: Each age has its own preferred literary patterns. My own experience in teaching the Old Testament leads me to think that the pattern currently preferred, at any rate by the young, is the dramatic, particularly the tragic . . . Such a preference is particularly suited to the Old Testament, which contains a great deal of drama.4 Dancy’s last sentence serves as a restatement, in objective terms, of the subjective claim in his second: whether or not the Old Testament does, in fact, contain ‘drama’ depends entirely on one’s understanding of both the text and the category of the dramatic, neither element static in the history of human reading. This raises the question of when the Old Testament became ‘dramatic’. If we confine ourselves to the Binding of Isaac, it is notable that retellers of the story have not always felt the need to introduce drama. Anguish is absent from our first extant retelling, in Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities (c. 94 ad): the Abraham of this account is serene and obedient, even going so far as to rationalise his obedience from a theological perspective.5 But nor is dramatic exposition a modern innovation, and an ancestor of the scenes discussed above can be seen in Théodore de Bèze’s 1550 tragedy, Abraham sacrifiant. Bèze explains in his preface that his aim in writing the drama is ‘better to consider and remember’ the biblical narratives – a Renaissance approximation, with its mnemonic flavour, of our ‘bringing the text alive’. He does not explain how this will be achieved in literary terms, but in the play itself we can already recognise the cinematic Abraham, who upon receiving his command cries: What! burne him! burne him! wel I wil do so: But yit my God, the thing thou putst me to Seemes very straunge and irksom for to be: Lord, I beseech thee, wilt thou pardon me?6 I have chosen this story, of course, because it has a canonical status in the modern literature on biblical style, thanks to its treatment in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis.7 Auerbach, as it turns out, makes the same assumptions about Abraham as the retellings: namely, that his soul was anguished, ‘torn between desperate rebellion and hopeful expectation’. The critic’s successors have not diverged on this point: Robert Alter, for instance, casually refers to

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Judith Rossall, Living the Story: What it was Like to be There. Dramas that Bring the Bible Alive (Boxhall: Kevin Mayhew, 2003). Cf. Shimon Levy, The Bible as Theatre (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2002). John Dancy, The Divine Drama: The Old Testament as Literature (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2002), p. 13. Josephus Flavius, Antiquitates Judaicae, Ch. 13. Théodore de Bèze, A Tragedie of Abrahams Sacrifice, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1577), p. 11; for the original, see Abraham sacrifiant: tragedie françoise (Geneva, 1550), sig. B3v. Tod Linafelt, ‘The Pentateuch’, in The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, ed. Andrew Hass et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 221, has called Genesis 22 the ‘locus classicus of the ambiguity of character motivation in the Pentateuch’. His discussion is worth reading in parallel to my comments here.

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Abraham as ‘an anguished father’.8 This assumption, as Kierkegaard had noted, was simply necessary in order to make human sense of the story, that is, to find a common humanity in the patriarch, a point of empathy. But Auerbach complicates the matter because he is attempting to talk about style, as distinct from content, and one suggestion of his chapter is that the shadowy style of Genesis promotes a moral engagement between author and devout reader. Abraham’s personality, including his anguish, is left hintergründig, in the background; this contributes to the ‘overwhelming suspense’ of the Binding narrative, the effect of which is to ‘rob us of our emotional freedom, to turn our intellectual and spiritual powers . . . in one direction, to concentrate them there’.9 From the absence of emotion from the telling, we respond to its ‘presence’ in the tale, to be divined rather than actually read. For Auerbach, the Abraham of Genesis 22 is brought to life, an inner life, by the very omission of what Bèze and Huston, with their dramatic models, introduce. *

*

*

When we come to read the Bible with an awareness of its absences, we may appreciate Alter’s judgement that it ‘seems both familiar and strange’.10 This dual appearance was a development of early modernity, when the Bible came to be thought of not just as a body of truth, but as a stylistic work as well. Although the literary criticism of the Bible practised since the 1970s has been reluctant to discuss theology; this aversion must be overcome if we are to study the early modern process, for its literary thinking was never divorced from theological questions, the biblical tale from the telling. In this chapter I want to explore a single problem, or cluster of problems, which may stand for, and illuminate, the germination of the literary Bible in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was the application of the word ‘sublime’ to Moses’ account of the creation of light in Genesis 1: 3, ‘fiat lux’. By the time of Robert Lowth in the mid eighteenth century, it was this verse, and this epithet, that had come to provoke intimations of Auerbach’s ideas about obscurity and hermeneutic engagement. The last decade has seen several heavy volumes given over to surveying the early modern fortunes of the sublime in England, France and Germany, and some of these have discussed the ‘fiat lux’ problem specifically.11 But these works have focused almost exclusively on the history of 8

9 10

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Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask, intro. Edward Said (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 12. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 182. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 11. ‘General Introduction’, in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 1. The first book on this subject, a classic of the Lovejoy era, was Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIIIth-century England (New York: MLA, 1935). Since then we have seen David Morris, The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18thCentury England (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1972); Marc Fumaroli, ‘Rhétorique d’École et Rhétorique Adulte: Remarques sur la Réception Européenne du Traité du Sublime au XVIe et au XVIIe Siècle’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 86 (1986), pp. 33–51; Jonathan Lamb, ‘The Sublime’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, IV: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 394–416, with a rather political angle; and, in the last decade or so, Sophie Hache, La langue du ciel: le sublime en France au XVIIe siecle (Paris: Champion, 2000); Lawrence Kerslake, Essays on the Sublime (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000); Nicholas Cronk, The Classical Sublime: French Neoclassicism

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rhetoric and literary criticism, and even those that acknowledge the significance of ‘sacred rhetoric’ tend to ignore the specific theological problems in treating the verses of the Bible. It is these aspects which I emphasise here, not merely to fill a gap in the scholarship, but because the literary and the theological are always mutually informative, and so we ignore one at the expense of both. The source of the problem was an irregularity in the ancient sources: the presence of Gen. 1: 3, or a variant thereof, in a pagan treatise on oratory, namely, the Περὶ ὕψους attributed to Dionysius Longinus. This work was first edited by Francesco Robortello in 1554, with the subtitle, ‘de grandi sive sublimi orationis genere’, and from then on the ὕψος it discussed was regularly rendered as ‘sublime’.12 Longinus defines the sublime itself rather loosely, but it represents a certain grandeur or nobility in discourse (ἀκρότης καὶ ἐξοχή τις λόγων), encompassing both the thought and its expression. Unlike eloquence, it strikes the reader or listener in one blow, like a thunderbolt, and drives him to ecstasy.13 These remarks appear in §1, the remainder of the treatise dealing with the five sources of the sublime, and their ramifications: the grasp of great ideas, strong passion, the use of rhetorical figures, nobility of diction, and fine composition. In §9, Longinus analyses the sublimity achieved by the bare thought simply expressed; alongside quotations from Homer, as found in the rest of the book, he cites ‘the lawgiver of the Hebrews’, who, to convey the ‘power of the God’, describes the Creation as follows: Εἶπεν ὁ θεός, Φησι∙ τί; γενέσθω φως, καὶ ἐγένετο∙ γενέσθω γῆ, καὶ ἐγένετο. ‘And God said’, he wrote – What? ‘“Let there be light”, and there was; “let there be earth”, and there was.’ As might be expected, this reference to Moses was of particular interest to early modern scholars: Isaac Casaubon noted on the title-page of his copy the number of the page on which it appeared, and rhetorics of the early seventeenth century often alluded to it.14 For a century after the first edition, its message was uncontroversial: the praise of a pagan author was testimony to the Bible’s evident majesty. For much of this time, the Longinian sublime was considered merely a genus dicendi, identifiable with the ‘high style’ discussed by Hermogenes and Quintilian. This was the view, for instance, of the work’s third Latin translator, Gabriel de Petra.15 It would be expressed with particular vigour in 1635 by the

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and the Language of Literature (Charlottesville, VA: Rockwood Press, 2003); Dietmar Till, Das doppelte Erhabene: Eine Argumentationsfigur von der Antike bis zum Beginn des 19 Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006); and Emma Gilby, Sublime Worlds: Early Modern French Literature (London: Legenda, 2006). Of different focus, but worth mentioning on this subject, is Debora Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). On the accuracy of this term to the original see G. M. A. Grube, ‘Notes on the περὶ ὕψους’, in American Journal of Philology, 78 (1957), pp. 355–74. Longinus, On the Sublime, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe (London and New York: Heinemann and Putnam, 1927), p. 148 (ix.9). Some early modern editions number this chapter as vii or viii. Longinus, Περὶ ὕψους, ed. Robortello (Basel: Oporinus, 1554), BL shelfmark 1088.m.2, titlepage. For relevant examples of rhetorics, see Bartholomaeus Keckermann, Systema rhetoricae (1606: Hanover, 1612), p. 578, and Nicolas Caussin, De eloquentia sacra et divina, 2 vols (1617: Cologne, 1634), vol. 1, p. 2. Gabriel De Petra, in Longinus, De grandi sive sublimi genere orationis, trans. De Petra (Geneva, 1612), p. 18.

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Vatican librarian Leone Allacci, for whom the ‘primum genus orationis’ is synonymous with the uber of Aulus Gellius, as well as magniloquum, altiloquum, grave, grande, plenum, magnum, amplum, summum, generosum, ἁδρον and ὕψηλον or sublime.16 The identification of the sublime as a style led some to play down the significance of Longinus’s reference to Genesis: as Guez de Balzac remarked in 1652, ‘The pagan critic has found his sublime genre in the style of Moses. But today this sublimity of style is not what I am passionate about: I am looking towards a still greater sublimity.’17 It is the literary critic, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711), who is best known for sharply distinguishing Longinian sublimity from the high style of classical rhetoric – as he put it, the sublime from the sublime style. The distinction is made very briefly, in the preface to his 1674 translation of Longinus. His words are often quoted: It must be understood that by ‘sublime’, Longinus did not mean what the orators call the ‘sublime style’: but rather that extraordinary and marvellous quality which strikes us in a discourse, and which makes a work capture, ravish, transport us. The sublime style always entails great words, but the sublime can exist in a single thought, a single figure, a single turn of phrase.18 The sublime, as opposed to the sublime style, thus effects an engagement between reader and text, and it is well represented by Genesis 1: 3, the brevity of which immediately conveys to us that ‘at the moment that God speaks, all things stir, all things are at hand, all things obey’.19 The Longinian notion is a godsend for the critic, because it allows him to talk about the style of the Bible without recourse to the clunky categories of classical rhetoric: it is a new literary form, one which matches the ravishing simplicity of Mosaic prose better than those habitually used to discuss Demosthenes and Cicero. In other words, it allows one to see the style of Genesis more clearly for what it is. To clarify his distinction, as regards to Genesis 1: 3, he rephrases the verse in an approximation of the sublime style. ‘Le souverain Arbitre de la Nature d’une seule parole forma la lumiere.’ This paraphrase, we are led to understand, is high and sonorous, but has little of the same emotional effect. Unbeknownst to Boileau, Milton, just a few years earlier, had gone one better: Let there be light, said God; and forthwith Light Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure, Sprung from the deep; and from her native east To journey through the aerie gloom began, Sphered in a radiant cloud, for yet the sun Was not; she in a cloudy tabernacle Sojourned the while.20 16

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Leone Allacci, De erroribus magnorum virorum in dicendo dissertatio rhetorica (Rome, 1635), p. 21. Allacci also wrote a commentary on Longinus, as he notes on p. 23, but this does not seem to have been published. Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, Socrate chrestien (Paris, 1652), p. 265. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Oeuvres diverses avec le traité du sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours (Paris, 1674), sig. *4v. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Réflexions critiques, in his Oeuvres, 4 vols (The Hague: Pierre de Hondt, 1729), vol. 3, p. 306. On the sublime and reader engagement, see Gilby, Sublime Worlds, e.g. p. 121. Paradise Lost, VII, ll. 243–9. The lines were adduced more than once in the eighteenth century, to illustrate by contrast the true sublimity of Genesis 1: 3. See, for instance, James Beattie, Essays

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As Boileau clarified in a later revision of the preface, the sublime of Genesis could be compared to the laconic sentences found in moments of high drama. He adduces, for instance, from Pierre Corneille’s 1640 Horace, the moment when Le Vieil Horace decrees that his own son should have rather died than quit the battle – ‘qu’il mourût’. For the critic, ‘it is the very simplicity of the word which gives it grandeur’.21 The example is revealing for two reasons. First, it foregrounds the difficulty in making a coherent statement about the effects of literary language. We may grant that the brevity of ‘qu’il mourût’ imbues it with an emotional punch lacking in Boileau’s paraphrase, ‘qu’il sacrifiât sa vie à l’interêt et à la gloire de son pais’; but such brevity, by itself, is meaningless without the thought that it conveys, and without the context that it presupposes. If the scene opened the play, or if it were set in the 1960s, it would have none of the same force. What the line does is to prompt a sort of alchemy in the listener, bringing together what he already knows and what he has just heard: the shock requires the prior understanding of Roman ethics that makes it comprehensible. For this reason the style, the quality of the language, is determined for the listener in part by the context. Boileau did understand this, but it is not always clear in his pronouncements on specific passages.22 Boileau’s use of drama also tells us about his literary understanding of the Creation narrative. His Moses is not simply a recorder of facts, but a bold dramatist, fully aware that ‘the best means of making known a character just introduced is to make them act: and so he immediately puts God into action, and has him speak’. For Boileau, Moses is using all his art to bring alive his subject: both to astonish and to ‘make known’ – a movement of sympathetic engagement. A different mood is discerned in Genesis 1: 2, where Boileau discerns an ‘elegant and majestic obscurity’ which ‘makes us conceive many things beyond what the words seem to say’.23 Here, perhaps, we find a hint of later judgements. In the decades after Boileau, his view of the sublime, and of Genesis 1: 3, became a commonplace among French critics: we see it, for instance, in the remarks of two Jesuit friends, René Rapin and Dominique Bouhours, as well as the Premonstratensian canon CharlesLouis Hugo – allegedly an ancestor of the novelist – all of whom noted the sublimity of grand thought and simple words in this verse.24 As Rapin put it, it is characteristic of the Holy Spirit ‘de parler peu, et de dire beaucoup’.25 The Sorbonne theologian Louis Ellies Dupin thought the same in 1701, and extended this appreciation to Genesis 22: ‘What could be more touching, more simple, and at the same time more noble, than the narration of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac? It is not adorned with useless discourses and reflections, but the natural sentiments are painted in a marvellous way, capable of touching

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(Edinburgh, 1776), pp. 270–1, or Courtney Melmoth [= Samuel Jackson Pratt], The Sublime and Beautiful of Scripture (London: Murray, 1777), pp. 3–11, who asked: ‘Is not this, at best, beating poetically about it and about it?’ Pierre Corneille, Horace, III.6, quoted by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Traité de la sublime, in Oeuvres, 2 vols (Amsterdam, 1702), vol. 2, p. 11, and again in Réflexions, pp. 302–3. Boileau, Réflexions, p. 307. Ibid. p. 306. René Rapin, Les comparaisons des grands hommes de l’antiquité, 2 vols (Paris, 1684), vol. 2: Les réflexions sur l’eloquence, p. 45; [Charles-Louis Hugo], L’histoire de Moïse tirée de la Ste Ecriture (Liège, 1699), p. 49. On the latter’s familial connection, see Victor Hugo [1862], Les Misérables, trans. Norman Denny (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 34, where Charles-Louis is identified as the writer’s great-great-uncle. Rapin, Les comparaisons, vol. 2, p. 47.

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the hardest hearts.’26 Genesis is contrasted with the discursive account in Josephus, true eloquence as against the false. Like Boileau, Dupin sees drama in the dialogue, pointing to Abraham’s line, ‘God will provide it, my son’, in which the critic finds ‘wisdom joined to a great eloquence’, comparable to Corneille and others.27 Echoes of Boileau’s view may be heard ad libitum into the eighteenth century.28 But a dissenting voice was heard as early as 1679, from a friend of Rapin’s, the learned abbé, Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721), later the Bishop of Avranches. In his masterpiece, the Demonstratio evangelica, Huet sought to prove the grounding of the Gospel in the Old Testament, against Spinoza and others.29 His fourth propositio is that the books of the Old Testament are genuine, and in the second chapter he supports the authority of Moses by reference to a litany of pagan figures, from Sanchuniathon to Lysimachus. Longinus appears in a sequence of Platonist philosophers between Numenius and Porphyry, and Huet digresses to comment on the supposed sublimity of Genesis 1: 3; although Boileau’s name is not given, his views are directly contradicted. Longinus, writes Huet, is wrong to call the verse sublime, for although the Creation itself is the grandest of subjects, the telling of it is ‘very simple indeed . . . in a low style’ – a fact which the Greek critic would have appreciated if he had gone back to the Hebrew source.30 The sublime is rather to be seen in Moses’ Canticles and the Book of Job. Both Boileau and Huet, then, appreciate that the Mosaic verse is ‘simple’, but they mean two different things by the word. The distinction neatly corresponds to one made by the great critic Northrop Frye in 1982, between the ‘simplicity of equality’ and the ‘simplicity of majesty’. With the former, a writer ‘puts himself on a level with his reader, appeals to evidence and reason, and avoids the kind of obscurity that creates a barrier’. The latter, by contrast, ‘expresses the voice of authority’, and expects an ‘automatically obedient response’. Frye’s given example is instructive: ‘God says, “Let there be light”, and light appears, unable to protest that it might have been more logical to first create a source of light, such as the sun.’ 31 As Boileau had put it, ‘at the moment that God speaks . . . all things obey’. In the preface to the second edition (1683) of his Longinus, Boileau cheeked Huet for failing to see what even Longinus, ‘au milieu des tenebres de Paganisme’, could see.32 Huet 26

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Louis Ellies Dupin, Dissertation preliminaire ou prolegomenes sur la Bible, vol.1, part 2 (Paris: André Pralard, 1701), p. 874. Dupin, Dissertation, p. 875. I translate Dupin’s French, ‘Dieu y pourvoira, mon fils’, though the Hebrew, rendered accurately in the King James, is less succinct, repeating the object of Isaac’s enquiry: ‘My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering’ (Genesis 22: 8). The sublimity, if it exists, is therefore here an effect of the translation. See Kerslake, Essays, passim, for a comprehensive list. The best recent treatment of this work is Elena Rapetti, Pierre-Daniel Huet: erudizione, filosofia, apologetica (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1999), pp. 7–79, but see also April G. Shelford, Transforming the Republic of Letters: Pierre-Daniel Huet and European Intellectual Life, 1650–1720 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2007), pp. 153–8. On the Bishop’s association with Rapin, see Shelford, Huet, pp. 61–2. Pierre-Daniel Huet, Demonstratio evangelica (Paris, 1679), p. 55. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1982), p. 211, and cf. p. 130. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Oeuvres diverses avec le traité du sublime ou du merveilleux dans le discours (Amsterdam: Abraham Wolfgang, 1683), sig. K6r.

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came back in turn, with a long letter eventually printed in 1706 in the Bibliothèque choisie, an Amsterdam journal edited by the prolific Arminian scholar Jean le Clerc (1657–1736); Le Clerc interpolated his own extensive comments, siding with Huet. Boileau then elaborated his own ideas against Le Clerc – attributing the letter’s content to the Protestant alone – in the tenth of his Réflexions critiques, published posthumously in 1713. Le Clerc, finally, responded, in the same year, with a review of the late Boileau’s last sally, largely complaining about the critic’s lack of civility. The occasion of this dispute has received its share of scholarly attention, and several recent analyses have explored the conceptual terms of the debate, including the issue of simplicity.33 It was also much remarked at the time, and many clamoured to put themselves on the side of Boileau or Huet. But contemporaries found it difficult to speak precisely when negotiating the border between style and content, and it is not always obvious which side of the fence they were on. An example is afforded by the renowned classicist André Dacier, whose manuscript hand and correction traces the confusion: in his copy of a 1694 Greek-French Longinus, he annotated the ‘fiat lux’ passage, ‘Il ne s’agit point icy de figure, mais de la seule sublimité des simples pensées simplement enoncées.’34 This aura of vagueness and ambiguity can be traced to the original dispute itself: it is evident that the three participants were not entirely sure what they were bickering about, or at least, that the point of contention shifted about as the years passed. Boileau thought it partly a matter of semantics, turning on the word ‘sublime’, which Le Clerc had confused with the sublime style.35 The latter, in 1713, played down that distinction. He agreed that the language of Genesis 1: 3 could be sublime in another context, such as a piece of deliberate oratory, but denied its sublimity here on the grounds that Moses had no intention of creating any stylistic effect. This was, he averred, a point of ‘very little consequence’.36 But it was not. Boileau’s understanding of the sublime had nothing to do with the author and everything to do with the reader: ‘the sublime is properly not a thing which is proved and demonstrated, but something marvellous which seizes and strikes you, and makes you feel’.37 The correct response to anyone who denies the sublimity of Gen. 1: 3 is therefore not rational debate but mockery for a lack of taste: more than once, Boileau implores his opponent to ‘open his eyes’ and admit the obvious. Le Clerc, by contrast, deplores the turn to the subjective, for it permits the vagaries of Boileau’s imagination:

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Gilles Declercq, ‘Boileau–Huet: la querelle du Fiat lux’, in Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721): Actes du Colloque de Caen (12–13 novembre 1993), ed. Suzanne Guellouz (Paris, etc. Biblio 17, 1994), pp. 237–62; Hache, La langue, pp. 232–6; Kerslake, Essays, pp. 45–57; Till, Doppelte Erhabene, pp. 193–206. On sublimity and simplicity in the long view, see esp. Hache, La langue, pp. 85–124, Till, Doppelte Erhabene, pp. 48–133. André Dacier, in Longinus, Περὶ ὕψους, trans. Boileau (Paris: Veuve Thibouet, 1694), BL shelfmark 871h4, p. 51. Boileau, Réflexions, p. 298. Jean Le Clerc (1713), ‘Remarques sur la Réflexion X, de la nouvelle Edition de Longin, par Mr. Despreaux’, in Bibliothèque choisie, 26 (1713), pp. 83–112, at pp. 85–6. Cf. pp. 96–7: ‘il s’agit de savoir si Moïse a eu dessein d’exprimer d’une maniere sublime la création de la lumiere’, emphasis mine. Boileau, Réflexions, p. 299.

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A person imagines that [Moses’] language must be sublime when he speaks of great things . . . and so when that person comes to read his writings, he finds in them that which he believes must be there, but which is nonetheless not there.38 Boileau’s Bible, in other words, was not that which he read, but that which he remembered reading, and Le Clerc, with his thin-lipped Arminian sola scriptura, was anxious to disqualify any second Bible, any weight of cultural memory. One scholar has observed a general resistance to form in Le Clerc, for whom ‘the great fault of theologians was to introduce into the Bible categories of thought which are foreign to it, or to make it answer questions which the sacred authors did not ask themselves’.39 Likewise, it was for the critic only prejudice that saw the ‘sublime’, an alien (and pagan) cultural form, in the style of Genesis; to overcome such expectation one had to return to the sources, to the Hebrew, and acquire a knowledge of the full context. This is why he often reverts to the nuances of the original text, and why both he and Huet insist that Longinus would not have found Genesis 1: 3 sublime if he had been conversant with the Torah, for the verse’s phrasing was common in Hebrew. The ‘fiat lux’ controversy, then, was not just a matter of judgement on one particular passage, but turned on the contrast between two orientations as to the place of meaning and value in a literary text. This can be seen played out in the nested dispute about anthropomorphism. According to Huet, there was nothing very special in the idiom of Genesis 1: 3: Would we think a man wanted to express himself figuratively and nobly who said: ‘When I left I said to my companions, Follow me, and they followed me’? Would we find anything marvellous in these words: ‘I asked my friend to lend me his horse, and he lent it me’? We would doubtless find, on the contrary, that one could hardly speak in a simpler manner.40 Assuming that the given examples are, in fact, simple in style, it follows that ‘fiat lux’ is also simple in style, and that its power derives entirely from its content. As Le Clerc noted, however, the difference in content between Genesis 1: 3 and Huet’s examples gives rise to a difference in style as well. For God is not literally giving commands in the Creation – this is only a metaphor for the divine will.41 Huet, in fact, thought much the same, suggesting that the ‘word’ of God is only a sermo interior indicating intention.42 However, as Le Clerc pointed out, to say the ‘speech’ is a metaphor is to say that the verse is written in a figurative style; it therefore cannot be compared to the literal statements of the other examples. Boileau, too, finds the stylistic analysis of the verse to turn on our appreciation of its content, and to this end Huet’s parallels are instructive: Genesis 1: 3, he asserts, is not only sublime, but much more sublime in that its terms, being very simple, and taken from ordinary language, make us understand marvellously – better than any 38

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Jean le Clerc, in Pierre-Daniel Huet, ‘Examen du sentiment de Longin’, in Bibliothèque choisie, ed. Le Clerc, 10 (1706), pp. 211–60, at p. 233. François Laplanche, L’Écriture, le sacré et l’histoire: érudits et politiques protestants devant la Bible en France au XVIIe siècle (Amsterdam and Maarssen: APA Holland University Press, 1986), p. 593. Huet, ‘Examen’, p. 230. Le Clerc, in Huet, ‘Examen’, p. 238. Huet, ‘Examen’, p. 252.

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anthony ossa-richardson lofty words – that it was as easy for God to make light, heavens and earth, as it would be for a human master to tell his valet, ‘Bring me my coat.’43

For both Huet and Le Clerc, the anthropomorphism inherent in the verse is a necessary evil. The Bishop thought it marked a failure to grasp ‘la puissance de Dieu, selon sa dignité’, and even ‘avilit infinimment, et deshonore son sujet’.44 His editor agreed, even going so far as to state that ‘it is only very improperly that we say that someone has spoken of God in a sublime manner, for this expression, along with all those like it, should be understood with respect to us [i.e. to human beings]’.45 Even the pagan Longinus, he noted, objected to Homer’s description of the gods in human terms. But for Boileau, the anthropomorphism of the verse bore its power: not only a requisite accommodation of the infinite to our poor minds, but a noble moving of the heart, a means to ‘bring alive’ the mystery of divine activity in the Creation. Here, again, is the alchemy of known and unknown. Boileau later explains that the representation of divinity with human features, actions and passions is tolerated by God ‘because he well knows that human weakness cannot praise him otherwise’; in the hands of the sacred writers, moreover, such devices ‘become noble, great, marvellous, and in some way worthy of the Divine Majesty’.46 Genesis 1 is thus not a record of Creation, but already a ‘second Bible’, a dramatic Umformung, sublime not despite, but by virtue of its extension towards humanity. Beyond the fuss over words and ideas, and over the pagan figure of Longinus himself, all three participants in the dispute understood that the greatness of Genesis 1: 3 derived from a relationship between the content and the telling; all knew that to pile on words would be to diminish it. If Boileau appealed to simple perception in locating the sublime, and Le Clerc to hermeneutics, both clung to something they were sure was irreducible. In each case, Genesis resisted form. *

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The core concerns raised by the ‘fiat lux’ dispute long pre-dated Boileau, not just among rhetoricians and theorists of language, but also among theologians. As early as 1606, the Calvinist scholar Daniel Chamier (1564–1621) asserted that the ‘maiestas’ of a sacred text depended on its content, not on its language, and was necessarily intrinsic to it, not contingent like its means of expression; he cited Longinus on Genesis, noting that the critic had read that passage only in Greek.47 Chamier’s point was that the Bible preserved its sublimity even in translation, a claim of obvious significance in confessional disputes over the dissemination of Scripture. From the start of the century, then, the aesthetic nature of Genesis was given a theological meaning, one which stretched right across early modernity to 1764, when the Irish clergyman Thomas Leland insisted, against William 43 44 45 46 47

Boileau, Réflexions, pp. 308–9. Huet, ‘Examen’, p. 252. Le Clerc, in Huet, ‘Examen’, p. 255. Boileau, Réflexions, p. 316. Daniel Chamier, Panstratiae catholicae, sive Controversiarum de religione adversus pontificios corpus, 4 vols (Geneva, 1626), vol. 1, p. 389b (XI.2.12). Despite publication in 1626, the first volume was written in 1606 against Robert Bellarmine, at the request of the Synod of La Rochelle in 1596.

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Warburton, that sublimity was an innate property of the Bible, not an accident of this or that form of its telling.48 Nearer Boileau’s generation, an unofficial circle of Longinian criticism materialised at the Academy of Saumur in the early 1660s. Saumur, already the pre-eminent centre of French Protestantism, had also become a nexus of learning in the Republic of Letters, and among its brightest stars was the classical scholar Tanneguy Le Fèvre (or Fèbvre, 1615– 72), Dacier’s tutor and father-in-law.49 In 1663 Le Fèvre produced a well-known edition of Περὶ ὕψους, incorporating the Greek and Gabriel de Petra’s Latin, with his own preface and extensive notes. Against De Petra, he argued that the Longinian sublime could not be identified with the magnitudo (μέγεθος) of Hermogenes: greatness applied essentially to the body, whereas sublimity described the soul or spirit. To put it another way, a large river like the Nile or Ganges could have greatness; but sublimity denoted the effect of storms and lightning on the soul: transports of astonishment.50 This analysis proved influential, and later appeared alongside a paraphrase of Boileau in Louis de Jaucourt’s Encyclopédie entry.51 Le Fèvre had nothing to say about the sublimity of Genesis 1: 3, but his colleagues at Saumur did pick up on this subject, in both literary and theological contexts; it is fair to surmise that his edition responded in part to a discussion already underway. Étienne Gaussen (d. 1675), upon appointment to the chair of theology in 1665, gave his inaugural address on the Word of God, devoting five paragraphs to the style of the Old Testament.52 The Bible, he said, was composed of two genera dicendi, the simple and the sublime, which were complementary: ‘For it is God who speaks, and no literary style (as indeed men know) is more fitting to God than the sublime. But God addresses common people, and so an appropriate simplicity pertains greatly to the popular understanding.’53 Indeed, the examples Gaussen presents of the sublime style are all instances of divine speech: Exodus 3: 14 (‘ego sum qui sum’), Genesis 22: 16 (‘iuro per me ipsum’), and, following Longinus, Genesis 1: 3. Together the three convey God’s power and veracity as concisely as possible. Of the last, Gaussen states, ‘You will never find a better way to portray [adumbrare] that rapidity of God’s creation.’54 And of the Exodus verse he comments: ‘you may read those words a hundred times, and you will marvel all the more greatly’.55 These statements do not fit neatly into the Boileau–Huet dichotomy. On the one hand, 48

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Thomas Leland, A Dissertation on the Principles of Human Eloquence (London, 1764), pp. 52–67, against William Warburton, The Doctrine of Grace (London, 1763), pp. 50–66. On the translatability of the sublime, see also Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 158–9. Laplanche, L’Écriture, pp. 26–31 on Saumur in the Republic of Letters, and pp. 545–50 on Le Fèvre. Tanneguy Le Fèvre, in Longinus, De sublimitate, trans. De Petra, ed. Le Fèvre (Saumur, 1663), sig. e¯2r; and sigs e¯2v–3r on procellae and fulmina, alluding to Horace, Carmina, III. 2. 23–4. Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., ed. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert, 17 vols (Paris: Briasson, etc. 1751–72), vol. 15, sv. ‘sublime’, pp. 568–9. On Gaussen’s life and thought, see Laplanche, L’Écriture, pp. 532–45. Étienne Gaussen, ‘Disputatio de verbo Dei’ (1665), in his Dissertationes (Utrecht, 1678), p. 396 (§ XXX). Gaussen, ‘Disputatio’, p. 397 (§ XXXI). Ibid.

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the sublime is a genus dicendi distinct from the simple, and the given examples are compared favourably to unnamed pagan cases of the ‘genus grande et elatum’. On the other, Gaussen implies that the sublimity of ‘fiat lux’ lies not in its subject alone, but partly in its adumbratio or representation, and that of Exodus 3: 14 in its marvellous mystery, echoing the proto-Boileauvian position of his colleague Le Fèvre. The retrospective untidiness of Gaussen’s view is only made more acute by what follows. First, he defends the idioms of the Scriptures from those who find them ‘too harsh and bold’, because ‘foreign to our usage’. Foreshadowing Huet, but with opposite intent, he observes that these idioms must be taken in context, and that while they may be unfamiliar in Latin, they are not so in the original: ‘if the custom of the Latin language spurns some figure, it does not immediately follow that the rule of Hebrew rejects it’.56 Second, Gaussen is explicit that the true power of the biblical style, which derives not from human genius but from the Holy Spirit, lies in its variety, and perfection in variety: it is just as successful in its command of the simple middle style, as of the grand and sublime. And the simple style, which is found throughout the stories of Genesis and elsewhere, brings alive the passions of its characters: Surely, when anyone reads Genesis, and turns it over in his mind, he will experience in himself all the emotions which Moses depicted in those men, as if in a picture, and to tell the truth I don’t know if he will understand or feel more; although perhaps he can scarcely realise the reasons and influences of his own feeling.57 In this can be sensed the characteristically Longinian focus on passion: not just the expression of it, but the communication of it to the reader. Unlike Auerbach, Gaussen sees emotions ‘depicted’ in the characters, not withheld from them; but like the modern critic he feels their sympathetic force. The context of Gaussen’s use of Longinus was a desire to defend the Old Testament from those who rejected its style as barbaric – a more common position than might be expected from a community of devout Christian readers.58 Nonetheless, Gaussen, like many others on the side of Moses, could point to the New Testament epistles, which explicitly gloss both Genesis 1: 3 and Genesis 22: 16 as expressing the majesty of God.59 Far from being accidental to the Bible, its style, like its doctrine, manifested its divinity.60 In this respect the sublime style, identified with the Longinian ὕψος, and the capacity to express passion in a natural style, are given theological weight. But Gen. 1: 3 contained a more specific theological crux, namely, the apparent anthropomorphism (or, to use the early modern term, anthropopathia) of its divine speech.61 A typical view of the matter can be seen in Salomo Glassius’s 1623 manual of sacred philology, which classes the ‘locutio Dei’ of the Mosaic verse among other examples of anthropopathia, on the grounds that speech here represents ‘the effective decree and 56 57 58

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Ibid. p. 399 (§ XXXIII). Ibid. pp. 400–1 (§ XXXIV). Roger Mercier, ‘La question du langage poétique au début du XVIIIe siècle: la Bible et la critique’, Révue des sciences humaines n.s. 146 (1972), pp. 255–82, at p. 256. 2 Corinthians 4: 6 on Genesis 1: 3, and Hebrews 6: 13 on Genesis 22: 16. Gaussen, ‘Disputatio’, p. 404 (§ XXXVII). Ascanio Martinengo, Glossae Magnae in sacram Genesim (Padua: Lorenzo Pasquato, 1597), pp. 393–409, offers a summary of patristic and scholastic views on the subject.

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execution of the divine will regarding his creation’.62 It is, in other words, a λόγος ἐνδιάθετος or sermo interior. In some quarters it became a matter of confessional importance to distinguish this metaphorical speech (‘verbum quod Deus dixit’) from the divine logos (‘verbum quo Deus dixit’), literal and eternal, and identified with Christ, following John 1: 1.63 However, as we have seen already with Le Clerc, to say that the speech in Genesis 1: 3 is metaphorical is also to comment on the style of the verse, and the problematic implications of this are evident in a Saumurois treatment of the subject. Moïse Amyraut (1596– 1664), arguably the most important thinker at the Academy of that era, was Gaussen’s predecessor in the Saumur chair of theology; he discussed God’s agency in Creation in his 1661 De mysterio Trinitatis, and here we find Longinus appearing in relation to the theological content of the ‘fiat lux’. Amyraut’s abiding concern was to understand why Moses expressed himself in the way he did and no other, and it is on these hermeneutic grounds that the common view is rejected: A reading of that story makes it clear to all, that if something was said by God, it not only existed within his intellect, but was outwardly enunciated in words. For when the Holy Bible wants to indicate an internal discourse, it says not ‘and he said’, but usually adds, ‘in his heart’, a phrase sometimes used of God himself by means of anthropopathia.64 Some exegetes want to reduce the whole passage to metaphor, reading the ‘speech’ as indicating only that the Creation is accomplished by some marvellous power and facility; but this is no good, for if Moses had meant this he would have said so ‘without any circumlocution’.65 It is important that the rhetorical idea of ‘circumlocution’ is given a theological weight, for whatever the prophet wanted to convey, he must have done it in the best way possible. Speech is not even the best corporeal metaphor for an act of will: Moses, if he were speaking figuratively, would have done better to say that the Creation was accomplished by a divine ‘nod’ (nutus), since the nod is a more powerful gesture than speech, as is evident from a line in Vergil.66 Moreover, so that there should be no doubt as to his meaning, Moses repeated the image of speech ten times. If he had written just once, ‘God ordered the world to come into existence, saying “Let there be the world”, and suddenly it appeared’, his account might indeed have been sublime [ὕψος], as Longinus himself observes. But so frequent a repetition – if, I say, it meant nothing else – could only degenerate from what is sublime to what the Greek orators call insipid [ψυχρόν] or coarse [φορτικόν].67

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Salomo Glassius, [1623], Philologia sacra, ed. Johannes Franciscus Buddaeus, 2 vols (Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1713), vol. 2, col. 1563 (V.1.7). Cf. Till, Doppelte Erhabene, pp. 142–3. See, for example, André Rivet, Theologicae et scholasticae exercitationes CXC in Genesin (Leiden, 1633), pp. 15–17. On the Trinitarian context, see Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, vol. 4: The Triunity of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), pp. 217–20. Moïse Amyraut, De mysterio Trinitatis (Paris, 1661), p. 169. Amyraut, De mysterio, p. 170. Ibid. p. 171, citing Aeneid X.115. Ibid.

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Amyraut’s solution is evasive and not wholly satisfactory: the divine logos, he says, is neither external nor internal, but rather consisted in ‘some thing which was God (for what could there have been except God?) and which nevertheless differed somewhat from God (as speech is distinct from speaker)’.68 The problem of the tenfold repetition is never quite solved: it retains the ‘mystery’ Amyraut first identifies in it.69 But it was important above all to deny that Genesis 1: 3 was figurative, and to deny it on the grounds of intention. If Gaussen, like Boileau, played up the affective qualities of the Bible, affirming its sublimity, Amyraut, like Le Clerc, focused on the author. His analysis represents a real interpenetration of literary and theological considerations on the problem: sublimity, here, turns not on content or phrasing alone, but on the relation between the two, held in tension within a given reading. *

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It is worth looking back to these Protestant discussions, for they remind us that, in early modernity, the literary analysis of Genesis 1: 3 carried theology with it. Admittedly, this latter aspect was suppressed by Boileau, and featured little in the responses to his work in contemporary England or Italy. In England, the sublime simplicity of Genesis would remain the province of literary types, and few said anything new on the subject before Robert Lowth in the 1740s. Among the Italians we may mention Giovanni Giuseppe Orsi (1652–1733), a Bolognese nobleman who in 1703 published a commentary on Dominique Bouhours’s La manière de bien penser, in the form of a dialogue. When the interlocutors come to discuss the supposed ‘Laconismo’ of the Bible, Filalete raises Huet’s objections against Bouhours’s Boileauvian view of Genesis 1: 3. However, he adds: But who can deny that this pithy conciseness of expression is notable for its perfect appropriateness, and for its capacity to match the thing which it expresses; moreover, the speed with which this sense is expressed in some way imitates, if one can put it this way, the inimitable speed of omnipotence in the Creation.70 While writers like Orsi emphasised the literary aspect of the question, theology persisted elsewhere. Saumur had dissolved with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1686, but its discourse about the sublimity of Genesis 1: 3 lived on. In 1692 there appeared at Rotterdam four volumes of sermons by Pierre du Bosc (1623–92), a prominent pastor and theologian who had trained at Saumur and served at Caen until 1685. An undated sermon on John 1: 14, ‘the Word made flesh’, broaches the same material as Amyraut. According to Du Bosc, Longinus praised the first verses of Genesis ‘because, he said, the Legislator of the Hebrews worthily represented the power of God there, in making him produce things with a word only’ – the last clause not from Longinus at all, but from Boileau.71 However, ‘Moses wrote a history, and not a piece of rhetoric’.72 ‘Longinus’ (Boileau) is therefore guilty of a category error: ‘fiat lux’ is not figurative and sublime, but plain and literal. Still, 68 69 70

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Ibid. p. 173. Ibid. p. 165. [Giovanni Giuseppe Orsi], Considerazioni sopra un famoso libro franzese intitolato La maniere de bien penser (Bologna: Pisarri, 1703), pp. 352–3. Pierre Du Bosc, ‘Le Verbe incarné’, in Sermons sur divers textes de l’Écriture Sainte, 4 vols (Rotterdam, 1692), vol. 2, p. 52. Du Bosc, ‘Le Verbe’, p. 53.

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Du Bosc wants God’s creative ‘word’ to denote a sermo interior or intention, and to denote it literally.73 The inheritance of Saumur can be seen also in Jean Le Clerc. The critic stayed in the town for a short period in the early 1680s, when the Academy was in decline ahead of its closure; he left after provoking hostility from the establishment with a book of theological letters, published pseudonymously.74 Nonetheless, he was familiar with the Saumurois work of the 1660s; he studied Amyraut, who had taught Le Clerc’s close friend Louis Tronchin twenty years earlier, and expressed a particular admiration for the philological efforts of Tanneguy Le Fèvre.75 Le Clerc bristled at Boileau’s reference to his ‘Calvinist and Socinian hauteur’, denying both labels, but perhaps there was still something of Amyraut and Du Bosc in his reluctance to allow sublimity in the first verses of Genesis.76 Amyraut, too, had anticipated Le Clerc’s concern to do justice to Moses’ intentions as a writer. For both, the literary analysis could not be divorced from the theological consideration of God’s word. A generation later, the Saumurois considerations of Gen. 1: 3 would appear again among the theologians and academics of Lutheran Germany, now under the influence of Huet and especially Le Clerc. The latter is already evident in a short passage by the eminent Halle jurist Christian Thomasius (1655–1728). Discussing models of eloquence for jurisprudence, he rejects Longinus entirely; on Genesis he follows Le Clerc, ignoring Huet, perhaps for confessional reasons, since in the same passage he counsels his reader to avoid the baroque eloquence characteristic of Catholic Spain and Italy.77 The Boileau–Huet exchange remained familiar to German critics of the early eighteenth century, and would be summarised at length by Carl Heinrich Heinecken (or Heineccius, 1706–91) in his 1738 translation of Longinus.78 In the 1730s appeared two disputations on the subject, a good sign of its general popularity among university intellectuals.79 But the theological and literary aspects had already begun to interpenetrate by the 1720s, and this was thanks in part to the legacy of Saumur. The Giessen theology professor Johann Jakob Rambach (1693–1735) is a case in point. The analysis of the Longinian Moses in his 1723 Institutiones hermeneuticae sacrae primarily follows Huet, like most of his colleagues.80 But he finds a parallel for ‘fiat lux’ in Genesis 22: 16, noting the gloss at Hebrews 6: 13 – the same comparison drawn by Gaussen. This is no coincidence: in 1727 Rambach would publish an edition of Gaussen’s Dissertationes, and he was evidently familiar with its contents already. Another discussion influenced by French Calvinism was offered by 73 74

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Ibid. pp. 56–7. Annie Barnes, Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) et la République des lettres (Paris: Droz, 1938), pp. 54–64. Le Clerc’s book was published in 1679 as Liberii de Sancto Amore Epistolae theologicae. Laplanche, L’Écriture, p. 549, noting that Le Fèvre ‘is always seeking to clarify an obscure text by precisely ascertaining the author’s intention’. Boileau, Réflexions, p. 274; Le Clerc, ‘Remarques’, p. 107. Christian Thomasius, Cautelae circa praecognita jurisprudentiae in usum auditorii Thomasiani (Halle, 1710), p. 111 (IX.1.8). Carl Heinrich Heinecken, in his translation of Longinus, Vom Erhabenen (Leipzig and Hamburg: Conrad König, 1738), pp. 75–9n. Christoph Wolle, praes., De eo quod sublime est in his Moseis verbis ΓΕΝΕΣΘΩ ΦΩΣ (Leipzig, 1735); Johann Hermann Benner, praes., De censura Dionysii Longini in verba Mosis Gen. 1 com. 3 (Giessen, 1739) Johann Jakob Rambach, Institutiones hermeneuticae sacrae, 2nd edn (Jena, 1725), p. 32 (II.8.4).

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Friedrich Adolph Lampe (1683–1729), a German theologian then based at Utrecht, in a 1727 dissertation on the word logos. Lampe, after relating the dispute between Boileau and Huet, concludes that both are incorrect: As far as I see it, this controversy is largely a matter of semantics [logomachia], and indeed, beneath the veil of words lies hidden a much more profound meaning which neither [Boileau nor Huet] has pursued. I observe only that these very learned men are shooting themselves in the foot when they claim that Moses was talking about the effective operation of God. For if this hypothesis were correct, then indeed we could acknowledge in Moses’s words that sublime which Longinus ascribes to them.81 He proceeds to note the repetition of the phrase ‘he said’ in the early verses of Genesis 1: if all these could be summarised by a single phrase indicating intention, there would be no place for the popular image of the ‘simplicity’ and conciseness of Mosaic diction. Rather, the command and its execution are distinct acts, identifiable with the Father and the Son, and so the literal sense of ‘he said’ must be preserved. In all this Lampe is precisely following the argument of Amyraut, and indeed, although he criticises the Frenchman on a slightly different point, he acknowledges his general debt at the outset of his dissertation.82 The old theological argument, then, is being used to offer a tertium quid in the Boileau–Huet exchange. That literary controversy, for Lampe, was vitiated by a failure to understand the tenor of Genesis 1: 3, and sublimity, being dependent on metaphor, now appears not just as a specious model for the language of Moses, but as a specious category for discussion. The arguments of eighteenth-century Germany did not go beyond those of seventeenth-century France, on either a theological or a literary level. Innovation, rather, occurred back in England, when Robert Lowth turned his attention to the style of Hebrew poetry in a series of lectures given at Oxford from 1746. These were published in 1753 as Praelectiones de sacra poesi Hebraeorum, with an English translation following in 1787. Four of the lectures (# 14–17) concern the ‘sublimity’ of the Old Testament; while his treatment of this theme develops in part from his own analysis of Hebrew metrics and parallelism, it also marks a comment on the aesthetic and theological conversation before him.83 Although he mentions no names, Lowth was surely familiar with the Boileau– Huet exchange, and his lectures serve to uphold Boileau’s reading of both Longinus and Genesis. His discussion, like Boileau’s, but unlike that of Saumur and its heirs, is not doctrinal: to say that it is theological is rather to affirm that it presupposes a view of man’s relation to the divine. The sublime, insists Lowth, ‘can neither be comprehended in any minute or artificial precepts whatever, nor perhaps be reduced altogether to rule and method’ – as for Boileau, its presence is perceived subjectively, not demonstrated objectively.84 There is both a 81

82 83

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Friedrich Adolph Lampe, ‘Dissertatio theologica de origine nominis λογος’ in his Dissertationum philologico-theologicarum syntagma, 2 vols (Amsterdam, 1737), vol. 1, p. 380 (§ 22). Lampe, ‘Dissertatio’, p. 370 (§ 4). In this I disagree with Till, Doppelte Erhabene, pp. 180–1, who denies the significance of theological context. Robert Lowth, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, trans. G. Gregory, 2 vols (London: Johnson, 1787), vol. 1, p. 345 (XV); for the original, see Lowth, De sacra poesi Hebraeorum praelectiones academicae (Oxford: Clarendon, 1753), p. 142.

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‘sublimity of expression’ and a ‘sublimity of sentiment’, treated in separate lectures. The former appears in the passages of elevated poetry identified by Huet and others, such as the Canticle of Moses, but now defined much more precisely with Lowth’s innovations in Hebrew philology. The latter, meanwhile, appears in passages such as Genesis 1: 3. Terms aside, this distinction would have been accepted by both Boileau and Huet. But the professor pushed farther than Boileau in considering the sublimity of sentiment as a subjective phenomenon. He observes of Genesis 1: 3, ‘The more words you would accumulate upon this thought, the more you would detract from the sublimity of it’; so far, so familiar. But he continues: the understanding quickly comprehends the Divine power from the effect, and perhaps most completely, when it is not attempted to be explained; the perception in that case is the more vivid, inasmuch as it seems to proceed from the proper action and energy of the mind itself.85 Again, ‘while the imagination labours to comprehend what is beyond its powers, this very labour itself, and these ineffectual endeavours, sufficiently demonstrate the immensity and sublimity of the object’.86 The revolutionary nature of these claims, and their intimation of Kant, has long been observed.87 What I want to stress here is the specific context of the ‘fiat lux’ dispute. Where Boileau had asserted that we should judge sublimity by our own lights, that is, by our own subjective response to the grandeur of Mosaic language, Lowth invokes the activity of our intellect in generating the sublime effect – the one argument is an extension of the other. This has implications in turn for the theological discourse about the anthropomorphism of God’s speech. Like Le Clerc, Lowth notes Longinus’s criticism of Homer for portraying the gods like men, and asks if the human figuration of God in Genesis does not ‘disgrace and degrade’ the divine subject. But the key difference is now the sheer impossibility of taking Moses’ imagery literally, in the way we might take Homer’s. In Genesis, the intellect is ‘continually referred from the shadow to the reality’, and this thought leads on in turn to the still more important point, that anthropomorphisms are more sublime than subtler imagery: in those figurative expressions derived from the nobler and more excellent qualities of human nature, when applied to the Almighty, we frequently acquiesce, as if they were in strict literal propriety to be attributed to him: on the contrary, our understanding immediately rejects the literal sense of those which seem quite inconsistent with the Divine Being, and derived from an ignoble source; and, while it pursues the analogy, it constantly rises to a contemplation, which, though obscure, is yet grand and magnificent.88 Or, as he has already put it, ‘The monstrous absurdity of a comparison between things extremely unequal, the more forcibly serves to demonstrate that inequality, and sets them at an infinite distance from each other.’89 This paradox represents a complete bouleversement of Le Clerc’s position, and reinforces the idea that sublimity is established by 85 86 87 88 89

Lowth, Lectures, I, p. 350 (XVI); Praelectiones, p. 144. Lowth, Lectures, I, p. 353 (XVI); Praelectiones, p. 147. Monk, The Sublime, p. 82. Lowth, Lectures, I, p. 362 (XVI); Praelectiones, p. 152. Lowth, Lectures, I, p. 359 (XVI); Praelectiones, p. 151.

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intellectual process, the active ascent from the real to the divine. However, it should not be imagined that Lowth’s argument is original. Quite the contrary: it is precisely that set forth in the second chapter of the pseudo-Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy, one of the oldest and most important Christian treatises on the theology of representation. Arguments are recovered from history, or devised again from the same principles, when they are needed. What mattered for Lowth was to ground the aesthetic effects of some Scripture in the activity of the individual mind, and not in a canon of rules or body of philological knowledge. This was the function of the term ‘sublime’: far from circumscribing the sacred texts within an alien form, it opened them to the subjective. The Bible had to remain susceptible to continual reappreciation. *

*

*

The Bible, and especially the Old Testament, has always been resistant to theological form, a patchwork of voices not yet in thrall to the doctrines imposed upon them retrospectively. This resistance, as I have tried to suggest above, is echoed by, and kindled in, a resistance to literary form. Early modern critics and scholars were sure they knew what the sublime was, and what the Bible said, but they agreed on neither, and the elasticity of each term impinged on the other. The quandaries thrown up by this inability to agree on terms are seen acutely in the controversy over Genesis 1: 3 – but this is only one case among many, and everywhere we look, we will find a literary problem becoming theological. One of Kierkegaard’s insights in Fear and Trembling is that Abraham’s great attribute, his faith, is inevitably deformed by any retelling of Genesis 22. Several such retellings are offered at the start of the book, each introducing an element of drama. In one, Abraham decides to convince his son that he is a monster, lest Isaac think ill of God; in another, Isaac looks up to see ‘that Abraham’s left hand was clenched in despair, that a shudder went through his body’.90 These versions are attempts to make Abraham intelligible to us, but in doing so, they give us a substitute, for the real Abraham ‘did not doubt, he did not look in anguish to left or right, he did not challenge heaven with his prayers’.91 The retellings, in other words, give us anthropomorphisms. As Kierkegaard’s alter ego Johannes de Silentio maintains, ‘Abraham I cannot understand; in a way all I can learn from him is to be amazed.’92 The sublimity of Genesis 22 lies above all in what Abraham is not. It might be objected that an anguished Abraham differs from the hintergründig Abraham of Genesis with respect to content – the anguish – rather than style. But the Bible is unique (at least in the modern West) in that its content cannot be strictly identified with the actual text. As Auerbach and Alter show, Abraham ‘is’ anguished – he must be – and so, with the scriptural content fixed, the telling of it in Genesis 22, no less than in Bèze’s play or Huston’s film, represents a stylistic choice. The absence which Kierkegaard notes in the tale, with all its theological weight, is thus the same absence noted by Auerbach in the telling, with all its aesthetic significance. The two dimensions simply cannot be kept apart in the traditional manner. It is not surprising that Auerbach’s literary analysis, apparently secular, should retain within it a trace of religious thinking, 90

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Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hanning (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 47. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, p. 55. Ibid. p. 66.

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nor that this trace should appear broadly identifiable with the sublime. We recall his list of Old Testament features: certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, ‘background’ quality [Hintergründlichkeit], multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation . . . and preoccupation with the problematic.93 In this is a clear echo of Lowth, who found active intellectual engagement, and therefore sublimity, in the words left out of Genesis 1: 3; Auerbach’s ‘abruptness’ even matches Lowth’s description of Hebrew poetry as full of ‘sudden impulses’ and ‘hasty sallies and irregularities’, ‘scarcely to be explained’.94 Behind these again was the ‘obscurité élégante et majestueuse’ observed by Boileau in Genesis 1: 2. The descriptions of Boileau, Lowth and Auerbach are not one and the same, and should not be conflated; nonetheless, they belong to a tradition. Auerbach, in fact, makes the link explicit. When he tells us that the terseness and chiaroscuro of the Binding story generate ‘overwhelming suspense’ and ‘rob us of our emotional freedom’, he refers the reader to Schiller, who had identified these psychological effects as ‘the goal of the tragic poet’.95 It is no coincidence that Schiller’s thoughts on tragedy were closely related to his consideration of the sublime, both themes having been developed in 1790–3 in response to Kant. While Schiller’s sublime had grown beyond that of Boileau, it remained an aesthetic of engagement – the imitation of moral fortitude in suffering, above all in tragedy.96 It is a peculiarity of Mimesis that it fails adequately to deal with drama, but the spectre of drama, conceived with Schiller as a token of the sublime, haunts Auerbach’s characterisation of the Genesis narrative.97 It is not entirely fanciful, then, to suggest that the dichotomy he established between dark Moses and bright Homer was a great-grandchild of Boileau’s demarcation of the sublime from the sublime style. In all cases, something shadowy and intangible was perceived in the Bible, the ‘beaucoup’ behind the ‘peu’, which the straight lines of classical aesthetics could not quite make sense of. The sublime sometimes appeared on one side of this fence, sometimes on the other; either way, to preserve the mystery from its retelling was as much a religious as an aesthetic impetus. Hence, eventually, the ‘heresy of paraphrase’; if we have banished talk of sublimity from our comments on Genesis, in our dealings with the literary we have not transcended its terms.

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Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 23. Lowth, Lectures, vol. 1, p. 312 (XIV); Praelectiones, p. 127. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 11. The reference is presumably to Friedrich Schiller, Über die tragische Kunst, in his Essays, ed. and trans. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 1993), p. 15: ‘The passion produced in us by others’ sufferings is a state of coercion from which we rush to free ourselves and it is all too easy for the illusion so indispensable for compassion to disappear. For this reason, our minds must be forcibly fettered to these images and robbed of the freedom of tearing themselves away from the illusion prematurely.’ Compare to the argument of Über die tragische Kunst, the description of the ‘pathetically sublime’ in Schiller, Vom Erhabenen, in his Essays, p. 44. Note, for instance, the conflation in Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 22: ‘the sublime, tragic and problematic take shape precisely in the domestic and commonplace’.

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‘A BABEL OF BIBLES’: AESTHETICS, TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION SINCE 1885 Nicholas Bielby Even when, in the past, we didn’t always understand the King James Version, we benefited from something that was seriously beautiful and beautifully serious . . . Now there are many Bibles, but no known one – a Babel of Bibles, in fact. Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph, 27 November 2010

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t the royal wedding in April 2011, despite the fact that the groom’s father, the Prince of Wales, was Patron of the King James Bible Trust, the reading was taken from the New Revised Standard Version (1989).1 This translation remains within the tradition, begun with the Revised Version of 1885, of following the King James Version as far as possible, but correcting it in the light of new scholarship and modernising the language to make it more accessible to a contemporary readership. The NRSV reading from Romans 12 begins: I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. The KJV reads: I beseech you therefore, brethren, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, (which is) your reasonable service. The commonality is obvious, and so is the modernising: it is politically correct and it avoids archaisms. The term ‘worship’ is used in place of ‘service’, it might appear, because the feudal and courtly significance of the term ‘service’ is now largely lost to us. The most curious change is substituting ‘spiritual’ for ‘reasonable’. The original Greek logikos has (like logos, from which it is derived) a range of meanings. These include ‘rational’, ‘reasonable’ and ‘spiritual’. However, in context, the term ‘spiritual’, attached to ‘worship’, is a tautology. Over all, the older translation seems preferable: it adds something to the meaning by emphasising moral and rational appropriateness or fittingness. The Jerusalem Bible (1968) translates the passage thus: ‘Think of God’s mercy, my 1

The same passage, from the same translation, was read at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s.

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brothers, and worship him, I beg you, in a way that is worthy of thinking beings . . .’ That word logikos has expanded into a clause drawing out the notions both of moral appropriateness and rationality. The New English Bible (1970), in a footnote, does something similar: ‘. . . the worship which you, as rational creatures, should offer’. Both these translations seem intellectually and morally richer than the tautology. Yet what we perceive as a tautology may not have been a tautology for Paul. The term logikos also connotes the sense ‘non-material’. Perhaps Paul, in invoking self-sacrifice, was contrasting non-material Christian worship with the Jewish material practice of animal sacrifice. We can see how, in this small issue of translation, cultural, theological and aesthetic elements are inextricably entwined in the notion of accuracy, and how translation involves aesthetic judgement based on interpretation.

Aesthetics and literary criticism What is meant by ‘aesthetics’ here? Balthasar’s2 notion of Herrlichkeit, the glory of God in his incarnate Word, is relevant. If beauty is an attribute of God and his Word, then we should hope for intimations of it in the translation of his word. This beauty is in the story the Bible tells and we would hope to find it in the way it is told. The term ‘aesthetics’, in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, came to have two divergent emphases. In one, it concerned itself with a special quality in experience, a sense of wonder, harmony and completeness experienced emotionally as transcendence. In the other, it was concerned with the theory of art, whether visual, literary or musical. It was intellectual, concerned with structure and form, interpretation and value judgement. In the English moralist tradition which sees beauty as the sensory expression of moral goodness, Iris Murdoch3, argues that we can only perceive the transcendent if we have cleaned our perceptions of illusion and self-centred fantasy, a moral task. The meaning of ‘aesthetics’, when related to language, the grubby stuff of everyday life, is not a very pure concept. Language asserts and speculates, analyses ideas, asks questions, expresses feelings and judgements, directs behaviour and makes promises and deals in the real world. Language is contingent, grounded in our negotiating our way through the human world. Our response to, say, a poem or novel has many elements. In so far as a response may be of the order ‘I have felt that, too’, ‘How would I act in this situation?’ or ‘I recognise and can empathise with that character, situation or emotion’, the response is psychological and moral, as much as aesthetic. Its moral import is a matter of clarifying what we might desire for ourselves. Whatever other functions it may possess, language is fundamentally cognitive, asserting content in propositions. Words and syntax make a text assert something in the public market place, subject to everyday human interpretation and judgement. Language is at its most characteristic when nouns and verbs combine in sentences, making statements that relate to, or picture, the world or possible states in the world. It is about agency. It extends in time and sequence. Its natural mode is narrative: somebody or something (a noun) does 2

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Hans Urs von Balthasar: The Glory of the Lord, A theological aesthetics, Vol. 1, Seeing the Form (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002). Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 36 ff.

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something (a verb) – and then over again, in a new clause, one damn thing after another, all adding up, making a narrative. The fact that the Bible is primarily a book full of stories accords well with what is natural to language. We make sense of our experience by telling stories, in gossip and epic, myth and the novel. As Iris Murdoch4 says, ‘the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand the human situation’. Psychologically, story is a running simulation of a possible world in the brain, just as consciousness is a running simulation of the world we each subjectively inhabit, modelled from current perceptions and from memories. As readers, our understanding depends not only upon the text but also upon what we bring to the text. We make sense in dialogue with the text. The world of the story affects the model of the world we live in, hopefully making it less self-centred and fantastic, more in accord with reality. That is, it is an education of the imagination where imagination is the ability to picture and entertain possibilities, refine desires and perceive what is real. What we owe allegiance to is the highest reality that we can imagine. If this happens to be the story of God in his incarnate Word, it is as if, aesthetically and morally, we live an ontological proof of the existence of God. Aesthetic experience relates closely to religious experience. Or, more specifically, literary language that elicits aesthetic experience is closely reminiscent of religious language, in that it gestures towards something ineffable beyond itself – and beyond ourselves. For some of us, aesthetic experience is as close as we’ll ever get to religious experience. The aesthetic element in response is to something more ineffable than recognition. It may, however, feel like recognition – possibly, the recognition of something we have never known before. It is an experience we want to honour with the name ‘truth’ because we don’t know what else to call it; because, though subjective, it feels like the recognition of something objective and eternal. It lives with us as a datum forever. It is life-shaping. Recognition of what? C. S. Lewis,5 in denying (rather unconvincingly) that his Narnia stories were allegorical, argued that what he wanted was for his stories to linger in the back of children’s minds in such a way that when they encountered the Christian story, they should experience it as something half-remembered, something not wholly unfamiliar, as if they had always known it. The experience of the story, whether moral or aesthetic, was a preparation of the child’s imagination for the moral and aesthetic experience of the Christian story. An aesthetic experience has this sense of re-discovery of something unknown but strangely familiar because it feels right and true and beautiful. But such feeling is not enough. Language, because it asserts propositions, is subject to issues of meaning and truth. The philosopher Ronald Hepburn,6 discusses these issues in relation to the ending of Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot: . . . all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well 4 5

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Ibid. p. 34. C. S. Lewis, ‘On three ways of writing for children’, in Sheila A. Egoff et al., Only Connect (Toronto: Oxford University Press Canada, 1969). Ronald Hepburn, ‘Poetry and Religious Belief’ in Metaphysical Beliefs, Stephen Toulmin, Ronald Heburn and Alasdair MacIntyre (London: SCM Press, 1957), pp. 135–6.

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When the tongues of flame are infolded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. He says ‘this extraordinary image gathers up a wealth of symbolic elements from the poetry gone before . . . and here . . . Eliot unites them all . . . unifying and reconciling all that has been in conflict throughout the sequence of poems’. It is, he suggests, an aesthetic triumph. But, he argues, Eliot’s image is not self-authenticating: Its extreme beauty and integrating power must not lead the reader to imagine that its extra-poetic truth has been established, that the integrative power of the poetry is pragmatic proof of the truth of what its expresses. Any statement in language asserts something and is subject to the question of its truth. The fact that poems and novels are fictions doesn’t change these issues of meaning and truth, though it does complicate them in interesting ways. The world of ‘pretend’ exists in dialogue with the real world, and we know that, while all else can change in it, the moral law remains constant. Religious experience always involves something cognitive, an existential affirmation, a claim that what is experienced is really there – in some ways more real and more personal than everyday, and aesthetic, personal experience. The kind of truth that appears appropriate to consider here is not pragmatic nor a matter of coherence but is a matter of correspondence – where the proposition corresponds with the fact. The only problem with this is that one has to be able to stand outside the proposition and the fact to see them correspond. The nature of the God who is proposed is such that we cannot stand outside that in which we live and move and have our being. The correspondence cannot be put to the test intellectually.

Language and religious experience Nevertheless, religion (for people of the book, at least) is fundamentally couched in language. Religion is primarily a matter of words, though words used, to quote Hepburn7 again, ‘to express what language as it stands cannot express’. It’s paradoxical and religious experience often expresses itself in paradoxes and oxymorons. In this, it is more cognate with poetry than with science. In the late seventeenth century, the Royal Society, with its motto Nullius In Verba,8 followed the Baconian paradigm of the primacy of sense experience and promoted a new style of English prose. Thomas Sprat, in the History of the Royal Society (1667), says scientific writing should avoid adjectives, nebulous terminology and subjectivity, use only a spare, clear and precise vocabulary, and aim to be comprehensible to all. This new paradigm for English prose is one we largely adhere to today. We aim to write clearly and unambiguously and unpretentiously. The expression of objective and subjective experience must to be separated. Objectivity, rationality and transparency abhor oxymorons and ambiguities. They are not too happy with value judgements. 7 8

Ibid. p. 78. The motto of the Royal Society, taken from Horace, meaning ‘Take nobody’s word for it.’ That is, accept no claims ‘on authority’ but put them to the test of physical experience or experiment.

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Contemporary culture with its background of objective, secular prose and democratic journalism, privileges ‘easy understanding’ (the linguistic equivalent of ‘easy listening’). Additionally, the language of persuasion, as found in advertising and in politics, creates a suspicion of any emotive effects in expression. There are intrinsic problems, then, with biblical translation if the goal is a modern, accessible, natural idiom that the person in the street can readily understand. Contemporary English does not readily lend itself to attempts to express the ineffable.

The challenges of translation The two most immediate sources of aesthetic experience in the literary arts are local felicities of language (typically, the sort of thing that can be highlighted by quotation) and formal structures (typically, the juxtaposition and sequencing of situations, motifs or symbols to establish patterns of relationship – as in, say, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe9 and Four Quartets). An example of a felicity of translation is the phrase in the KJV (Matthew 1: 18), ‘with child of the Holy Ghost’.10 Neither Tyndale nor the Bishops’ Bible says ‘with child of . . .’ (although a cognate expression is found in Wycliffe’s older English of 1380: ‘she was foundun hauynge of the Hooli Goost in the wombe’). In fact, both Tyndale and the NEB, more than four centuries apart, used the natural idiom ‘with child by . . .’ ‘With child of . . .’ was not a natural English idiom. But then, the event was not exactly natural. The KJV translators took the expression ‘with child of . . .’ from the Geneva Bible, presumably because it was a unique expression suited to express a unique event in all its strangeness. Formal structures in narrative require more extensive discussion. The disturbing story of the Hellenised Canaanite woman (Mark 7: 25 ff., Matthew 15: 22 ff.) raises many issues, for example, how it relates to the preceding episode to do with ritual cleanliness and whether Jesus himself learns something from the encounter that he did not know before. But some issues turn very precisely on questions of translation. There are no precise one-to-one correspondences between words in different languages. Word meanings exist in cultural webs of usage, denotations and connotations. In modern translations of the episode almost invariably the word ‘dogs’ is used. What are we to make of Jesus’s offensiveness and racism, effectively calling the woman or, rather, her child a dog? The curious thing about the word ‘dogs’ here is that it is the translation of the koine¯ Greek diminutive kunaria,11 literally meaning ‘little dogs’, ‘puppies’ or even ‘doggies’. Is it accurate, therefore, to translate kunaria baldly as ‘dogs’ and activate a different set of connotations from that activated by ‘puppies’? The word has not always been translated ‘dogs’. Since kunaria is a diminutive, Tyndale chooses to use the word ‘whelps’,12 a term that did not necessarily carry any pejorative connotations at the time. Wycliffe, likewise, about 1380, uses the term ‘whelps’. He was trans9 10

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C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: Geoffrey Bless, 1950). Stephen Prickett first alerted me to the novelty of this usage – as to much else that has been of use to me in this article. I am extremely grateful to the Rev. Dr Ruth Edwards for the instruction in Greek and Hebrew usage that I depend on throughout this chapter. I am indebted to discussions with Dr Ed Reiss about ‘whelps’, Tyndale, Wycliffe and the Vulgate.

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lating from the Vulgate, written in Latin. In the Latin, two different words are used in this episode. Jesus uses canes, dogs or hounds, but the woman, in her reply, uses the word catelli, little dogs or puppies. In Wycliffe, Jesus refers to ‘hounds’ but the woman refers to ‘whelps’ (Matthew) or ‘little whelps’ (Mark). The woman, by changing the terms from ‘hounds’ to ‘little whelps’ is undermining the hostility and reminding Jesus that it is a child that he is being asked to help. Jesus, always with a soft spot for children, appreciates her verbal adroitness. Wycliffe’s Mark (but not Matthew) has Jesus saying ‘Go thou, for this word the fiend went out of thy daughter.’ It is as much her feisty wit as her faith that wins the day. But since the KJV (which follows the Geneva Bible, 1560), virtually all translators have simply said ‘dogs’. Among the few exceptions is Young’s Literal Translation (1901) which, like the Bishops’ Bible (1568), says ‘little dogs’, providing a literal translation of the diminutive. Why do so few others? Two factors call in doubt the translation of the diminutive kunaria into an English diminutive like ‘little dogs’ or ‘puppies’. One is to do with the usage of diminutives in New Testament koine¯ Greek and the other to do with the cultural and social attitudes towards dogs that were prevalent at the time. In the koine¯ Greek of Hellenistic times, diminutive forms were often used without any diminutive connotations, simply as a version of certain regular nouns.13 This tendency persisted and increased over the centuries, with diminutive forms being exceedingly common in modern Greek. Diminutives are frequently used in New Testament Greek without any idea of small size or affection, especially in Mark. So the use of the term kunarion may well not have any diminutive significance. On the other hand, everywhere else in the New Testament dogs are referred to by the ordinary form kuon, and always used with negative connotations. As this is the only use of kunarion in the New Testament, and as this is the only occasion when a diminutive might be significant if it conveyed positive connotations, the use of the diminutive form here could be significant. In relation to social attitudes towards dogs, in the New Testament (this episode possibly excepted), every reference to dogs is negative. For traditional Jews, dogs were despicable and dirty and they were not kept as household pets. The term ‘dog’ was an insult, one commonly used to refer contemptuously to Gentiles. Indeed, it is plausible that this is the significance of Jesus’s usage when talking to the Canaanite woman. In contrast, the Greek culture of the Canaanite woman had a different attitude towards dogs. Unlike the Jews, the Greeks used dogs for hunting and commonly kept them as household pets. Greek vases depict dogs in domestic scenes and Odysseus’ dog (which has its own individual name) is presented as a model of faithfulness. For the woman, therefore, the notion of dogs would not seem to have the same negative connotations as it does for the Jewish Jesus. It seems, then, that Jesus is expressing hostile racism in referring to dogs, and that the woman’s response cleverly refers to her cultural custom of having dogs as pets, and thereby disarms Jesus’s verbal assault. The one good thing to be said for Jesus, in this case, would be that at least he had the good grace to recognise he had been worsted! If this is the situation, then Wycliffe, in giving Jesus and the woman different words, is more revealing than any subsequent translation. 13

J. H. Moulton and W. F. Howard, A Grammar of New Testament Greek, Vol. II (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1929), p. 347.

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Of course, there are many people who would like to mitigate the apparent harshness of Jesus’s opening remark to the woman. For example, Robert Gundry,14 argues for dogs as pets, and William Barclay15 builds on the fact that kunaria is the diminutive for dogs, referring to them as ‘little household pets’. For him, the effect of the diminutive is to mitigate the insult. On this basis, he argues ‘thing(s) which sound hard can be said with a disarming smile . . . We can be quite sure that the smile on Jesus’s face and the compassion in his eyes robbed the words of all insult and bitterness’. In effect, he invited the woman’s response and when it came, ‘Jesus’ eyes lit up with joy at such indomitable faith.’ His interpretation grows out of the Jesus in his imagination as much as out of the immediate text. There is a further possible argument, an aesthetic argument, to support the ‘mitigating’ claim that Jesus deliberately acts as the woman’s ‘feed’ to enable her to supply the punchline. This argument depends upon the rhetoric of Jesus’s reported speech. Typically, biblical rhetoric exploits balanced phrases or parallelisms, for example Matthew 7: 6: ‘Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine.’ Indeed, Geza Vermes16 suggests ‘“Do not give dogs what is holy” may be a mistranslation from an Aramaic original. In Aramaic the same group of consonants q-d-sh can be read either as qedasha (ring) or qudsha (holy thing).’ Perhaps the Greek translator got it wrong and slightly marred an even more neatly balanced parallelism, dogs/rings: pearls/swine. Or perhaps q-d-sh was a deliberate pun that gets lost in translation. Since Jesus is given to parallelisms, then it would be neater to have him balance children against puppies rather than children against pariahs. However, the argument from rhetoric is by no means conclusive. Since the Bishops’ Bible, virtually no translation has tried to represent the diminutive force of kunaria. It seems the argument that the diminutive in koine¯ Greek does not necessarily have diminutive force has carried the day. But not totally. The Jerusalem Bible (1968) says ‘house-dogs’, thereby domesticating them and thus partially acknowledging the mitigating effect of the diminutive. The revised New Jerusalem Bible (1985) fully recognises the diminutive, calling them ‘little dogs’. So what are we to conclude from this protracted discussion of these dogs, little or otherwise? There are no knock-down arguments on either side for regarding either ‘dogs’ or ‘puppies’ as the preferable translation. But it might be fair to say that translations that simply say ‘dogs’, without any footnote to alert the reader to a possible alternative reading, fall short of full transparency. The translation ‘puppies’ might mitigate Jesus’s apparent harshness and racism – and suggest he might have been enjoying verbal sparring (as he often did) with an intelligent and feisty woman. Readers have to entertain both possibilities and weigh them against the Jesus of their imaginations. Is this a story about a man learning, with the woman’s help, to burst out of the restrictions of his culture? Is this a quasi-parable, teaching the wider meaning of Christ’s pronouncements about where cleanliness resides? This discussion, simplified though it is, shows something of the range of considerations that have to be balanced in the process of translation. It is perhaps small wonder that awesome beauty does not characterise many translations. 14

15 16

Robert Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982). William Barclay, Gospel of Matthew (Edinburgh: St Andrew Press, 1956), p. 135. Geza Vermes, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 109.

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The Pre-eminence and Heritage of the KJV The KJV’s reputation for awesome beauty is one of the facts of life that any discussion of modern translations has to deal with. It has stood the test of time on both sides of the Atlantic. In England the KJV became so much part of our culture that it has provided even more expressions to the language than Shakespeare and, together with Shakespeare, equips every desert island.17 The KJV is so much a part of our life, it is hard to take an objective view. If we think it beautiful, it is perhaps because it has, though familiarity and authority, conditioned our sense of linguistic beauty. The aura of sanctity that surrounds the KJV is such that thousands of Bible churches in America, even today, confess (as the very first statement in a quasi-creed): We believe the King James ‘Authorized Version’ Bible to be the perfect and infallible word of God. We believe the Bible was inspired in its origination and then divinely preserved throughout its various generations and languages until it reached us in its final form. By this we mean that the Authorized Version preserves the very words of God in the form in which He wished them to be represented in the universal language of these last days: English.18 As a belief about biblical translation, this certainly simplifies things greatly! We can consider the Revised Version (1885) as marking the start of a new age of biblical translation, with its aim of adapting ‘the KJV to the present state of the English language without changing the idiom and vocabulary’ (a somewhat contradictory aim), and of adapting it ‘to the present standard of Biblical scholarship’. It aimed to be ‘the best possible version in the nineteenth century, as King James’ version was the best which could be made in the seventeenth century’. The translators used Edwin Palmer’s Greek texts for the NT that were believed to be more reliable than the Textus Receptus used in the early 1600s; and the end product is a bit more accurate than the KJV but, through its ‘laboured fidelity’19 in bending native English idiom to conform with the Greek, it loses much in literary authority. When the Revised Version came out, various unauthorised versions were published in the US with revisions designed to suit an American readership. To counter such doctored versions, the American Standard Version, an Americanisation of the Revised Version undertaken by scholars who had been associated with the RV as consultants, was published in 1901 and its text was copyrighted to protect its integrity. In 1928, both increased understanding of the Hebrew and Greek texts and changes in American English prompted work on a revision of the ASV, which was authorised in 1937. The organisational structure for doing this in some ways mirrored the organisation for the KJV, with groups of translators submitting their work to the scrutiny of the other groups. During its gestation, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered and their readings were taken into account. The complete Revised Standard Version was published in 1952. 17

18 19

Desert Island Discs is a long running BBC radio programme in which celebrity ‘castaways’ choose music to live with when alone on the island. They are also allowed to choose one book, but are told the island is already is equipped with the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible – presumably the KJV. www.biblebelievers.com Edinburgh Review, Vol. 154, No. 315, July 1881, p. 188.

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The RSV claimed, following the KJV, not to be ‘a new Translation . . . but to make a good one better’. It sought ‘to put the message of the Bible in simple, enduring words that are worthy to stand in the Tyndale-King James tradition’. An example of its ‘simple, enduring words’ can be found in 1 Samuel 24: 3, when King Saul goes into a cave. The KJV (and the RV) has, bafflingly, ‘and Saul went in to cover his feet’. But the RSV says, ‘and Saul went in to relieve himself’. This expression is simple and is an idiom with a long pedigree. (And it is more enduring and more dignified than the Living Bible’s euphemism, where Saul goes into the cave ‘to go to the bathroom’!) The RSV was quite controversial when it came out and led to a flood of new translations including the New American Standard Bible (1960), the Twenty-First Century King James Version (1994) and the New King James Version (1982) which, while updating the translation, goes back to the original KJV’s Hebrew and Greek texts, eschewing more recent textual discoveries. And, as we saw in the reading at the recent royal wedding, the NRSV (1989) has replaced the RSV. The Dead Sea Scrolls20 have influenced the translation of the Old Testament more than the New Testament, since they include the earliest manuscripts available of many Old Testament texts and only a little that affects the New Testament (and that, only indirectly). What is clear is that there are many variant versions of texts. For example, there are a long and a short version of Jeremiah, with the shorter probably earlier (because texts tend to grow rather than shrink!). But there is no indication that the variants are corruptions of some original ur-text. The notion of verbal inspiration by God, in the manner claimed for the Qur’an or by fundamentalists, appears untenable. We have a palimpsest of inspirational, but not directly inspired, writings. To this extent, the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm what Textual Criticism had argued about the nature of scriptural texts. Various modern Bibles have taken account of the scroll texts, modifying their translations accordingly. For example, the NRSV, to be true to the scroll texts, includes, in Deuteronomy 32: 43, the expression ‘Worship him all you gods.’ Presumably, the later Masoretic texts21 excluded reference to subordinate gods as not being congruent with monotheism. For Muslims, the Satanic Verses caused a very similar embarrassment! But the NRSV translators seem happy to tolerate remnants of a pre-monotheistic theology in order to use the earliest texts available. What this demonstrates, however, is that earlier texts are not necessarily closer to divine revelation! Some recent translations have played fast and loose with the scroll texts. In the light of the scrolls, the New International Version, in relation to Isaiah 53: 11, updates the Masoretic text where the verb oddly has no direct object. The KJV gives us, ‘He shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied.’ The NIV now gives us the more coherent: After he has suffered, he will see the light of life and be satisfied . . . A footnote observes ‘Masoretic Text does not have the light of life.’ But, strictly, neither do the Dead Sea Scrolls. The three texts from Qumran say, ‘he shall see light’, not ‘he shall see the light of life’. The NIV is inventing material, apparently in order to make the text sound more prophetic of the resurrection of Christ. 20

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The information here about the Dead Sea Scrolls comes from a lecture by Prof. George J. Brooke on 15 March 2012, to the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. The traditionally accepted texts of the Hebrew Bible.

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The New King James Version (1975, etc.) comes in many editions: a Mom’s edition, a pink edition for women and even an American Patriot’s Bible that shows ‘how “a light from above” shaped our nation’. It targets the spiritual needs of those who love our country . . . This extremely unique (sic) Bible shows how the history of the United States connects the people and events of the Bible to our lives in a modern world. The story of the United States is wonderfully woven into the teachings of the Bible. The tendentious material in the Patriot’s Bible is less in the text itself than in the glosses and commentary. The issue of glosses and commentary touches on another tradition. Just as the Geneva Bible of 1560 was even more tendentious in its glosses than in the translation, so many editions of the Bible use the KJV text with their own tendentious commentaries. For example, the Scofield Reference Bible (1909) uses the KJV text but the interpolated notes popularised the theology of ‘dispensations’ and the ‘rapture’ (discussed in relation to fundamentalism below). Scofield’s notes are seen by many Bible Christians in America as almost as authoritative as the KJV itself. What is clear is that interpretations matter just as much as, if not more than, translations.

Translating Anew Instead of improving the KJV, a different approach was taken by some translators, translating anew from the Greek and Hebrew texts. For example, the Darby Bible (1890) was the posthumous completion of the work by John Nelson Darby (1800–82), the promulgator of dispensationalism (mentioned above) and one of the founders of the Plymouth Brethren. What he aimed for was to produce a translation that would help the ‘unlearned reader’ in private study, an aim that is reminiscent of Tyndale’s writing for the ploughboy. Even so, Darby still used the KJV in public worship. In the Old Testament, Darby translates the tetragrammaton as ‘Jehovah’, instead of rendering it as ‘Lord’ or ‘God’, as is the case in most English translations. Young’s Literal Translation and the American Standard Version (1901) do likewise. The Jehovah’s Witnesses go one step further: for example, in their New World Translation (1950), they use the term ‘Jehovah’ not only in the Old Testament but also in the New Testament. Here, clearly, because there is no justification for this in the koine¯ Greek texts, they are not so much concerned with accurately representing the original texts as, to their mind, improving on them for their own theological purposes. But then, you might argue, the KJV shows its own predilections in rendering the tetragrammaton as ‘God’ or ‘Lord’ even in the Old Testament. In both cases, the regularising of nomenclature was designed to show the continuity between the Old and New Testaments. The Roman Catholic Jerusalem Bible’s (1966) stated aim was to serve two pressing needs of the Church: ‘the need to keep abreast of the times and the need to deepen theological thought’. Its aim was to translate into ‘the language we use today’ and to provide notes to the texts that are ‘neither sectarian nor superficial’, taking into account the most recent researches in history, archaeolology and literary criticism. Poetry was printed as poetry, and prose as prose. It set a new standard for all modern Bibles, even receiving qualified approval from the Assembly of Yahweh, an American Bible Church – largely because it uses the term ‘Yahweh’ in the Old Testament. As discussed above, the translation of Romans 12: 1 (‘worship him . . . in a way that is

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worthy of thinking beings’) exemplifies the attempt ‘to deepen theological thought’. The translation challenges the reader with St Paul’s notion of a grown-up religion. Elsewhere, what must strike the reader is how close the Jerusalem translation remains to the KJV. For example, the first verse of John’s gopsel is identical to the KJV except that it is lineated as poetry. Verse 5 reads, ‘a light that shines in the dark, / a light that darkness could not overpower’. The note to the last word, ‘overpower’, says, ‘Or “grasp”, in the sense of “enclose” or “understand”.’ It seems the need for ‘the language we use today’ prohibits the use of ambiguous language. Yet the Jerusalem Bible draws attention to a rich ambiguity in the original. To reflect the same ambiguity, the New English Bible uses the term ‘mastered’, with its dual meanings of ‘understand’ and ‘gain power over’. A place where all modern versions fail to capture the richness and beauty of the original text is in the translation of 1 Kings 19: 12. The KJV translation gives us the expression, ‘a still small voice’. The relevant words in the Hebrew are qol, a voice or sound, demamah, silence or dumbness, and daqqah, lean or thin, shrunken or withered. Qol can be used to denote the human voice or God’s, the sounds of animals or other natural phenomena. The adjective daqqah is feminine to agree with demamah. Often, in Hebrew, the preferred way of qualifying a noun is to follow it with another noun, a construction that readily translates into English in resonant phrases like ‘land of our fathers’ (= our fathers’ land) or ‘a man of distinction’ (= a distinguished man). Thus, qol demamah translates as ‘voice of silence’ (= silent voice). A literal translation of the original Hebrew, then, could be something like ‘a voice of shrunken silence’. In terms of rhetoric, what we are dealing with here is an oxymoron. An oxymoron is a linguistic self-contradiction, like ‘sweet sorrow’ or ‘bitter-sweet’ or like Paul Simon’s ‘the sound of silence’.22 Typically, as a rhetorical device, it is used to describe something beyond words, so far beyond ordinary experience that ordinary language contradicts itself in trying to express it. An oxymoron seems a more appropriate rhetorical  device for intimating something ineffable than  any expression  that naturalises the event. Yet every modern translation naturalises the expression. They either present God as having a quiet word with Elijah or naturalise the expression to indicate a peaceful sound of nature. The Good News Bible says, ‘there was a soft whisper of a voice’. The NEB says ‘a low murmuring sound’. Following the Darby Bible, many versions, for example, New Century Bible, NIV and The Message find the sound or the voice ‘gentle’. Nothing awe-inspiring or perplexing in all this, apparently. ‘A still small voice’, even if it hasn’t got the full impact of the original oxymoron, has a sense of inwardness. The modern translations reject any sense of inwardness or oddness, making the event an external matter of objective sense data. This failure is not just characteristic of modern Protestant translations. The Jerusalem Bible appears to have taken its cue from the Vulgate and gives ‘the sound of a gentle breeze’. This is not a bad translation of the Vulgate’s sibilis aurae tenuis, ‘a slight hissing of breath’ (or ‘a faint whistling in the air’). Wycliffe, half a millennium earlier, had translated Jerome’s Latin as ‘a hissing of (thin) wind’ or ‘as if softly breathing’; translations that would not seem out of place today. But even in the fifth century, Jerome seems to have missed the point that encounters with God do not fall within the natural order of things that natural language can contain. While modern translations often correct older ones and clarify things, they tend to lose 22

Paul Simon’s song, The Sound of Silence, was first recorded in 1964.

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any numinous quality. It is significant that the NEB translation protocols set up a group of style consultants separate from the translators – as if style were cosmetic, separable from meaning rather than intrinsic to it. The age of Shakespeare and of the KJV was the last great age when the richness of ambiguity in language was used to express the richness and ambiguities of experience. The scope for poetry in our culture has steadily diminished over the succeeding centuries. It is the poetic in the KJV that has kept it alive, enriching our expression and experience ever since. Modern biblical translation has aimed for the rational clarity of scientific prose, making sense at the level of the everyday. But religious experience doesn’t make sense at the level of the everyday. Wittgenstein tells us that, ‘Everything that can be said can be said clearly.’23 But what religion has to say cannot necessarily be said clearly. The procrustean bed of contemporary language does not lend itself to religious expression. We only permit linguistic contortions like ‘the sound of silence’ in popular songs where the music is allowed to lift the expression out of the realm of rational discourse into emotional significance.

Interpretation: the Liberal and the Literal The influence of the rise of scientific styles of thinking and expression shows itself in the area of interpretation as well as translation. It shows itself in the reductionisms of the Higher Criticisms. It shows itself in fundamentalism, the reading of scripture for supposed facts, especially eschatological ‘facts’. When I was small, my mother explained the frightening story of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22) to me, saying that God didn’t really ask Abraham to sacrifice his son but in those days, when people loved God, they believed they should give Him what they loved and valued most. So Abraham thought he ought to give Him Isaac by sacrificing him. But God told him this was wrong. My ex-Plymouth Brethren, ex-Primitive Methodist grandfather, who was listening, was furious, telling my mother that if it said God tempted Abraham and told him to sacrifice Isaac, then that is what God did. My mother was offering a liberal interpretation while my grandfather was wedded to a literal interpretation. The conflicting liberal and the literal approaches in the nineteenth century were both deeply influenced by the rationalist approaches of Spinoza, developed at the University of Halle and culminating in the Higher Criticism of the early nineteenth century. Influenced by the Higher Criticism, the liberals rationalised and naturalised the Bible. On the other hand, the literalists reacted by denial of the historical method, textual criticism and the Higher Criticism. The tradition of liberal interpretation grew out of the reaction of Schleiermacher,24 in the early nineteenth century, to the uncertainties that the Higher Criticism engendered. One result of the liberal tendency, aiming at mining the Bible for religious universals, was to naturalise interpretation and leave only residual moral and aesthetic meanings. Matthew Arnold25 provides a representative example of this position. For him, ‘the object of religion 23

24

25

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922), p. 79. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is often called ‘the father of modern liberal theology’ because of his development of hermeneutics. Matthew Arnold, ‘God and the Bible’ (1875), Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Vol. vii, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), p. 155.

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is conduct’ and the way the pills of moral truth are sugared with mythological poetry to help them go down is advantageous for the motivation it provides. For him, ‘the God of popular religion is a legend, a fairy-tale’. What is important is the moral principles concealed within the fairy tales. He argued, ‘the language of the Bible is not scientific, but literary’. For others, this rationalising tendency which naturalised interpretation, initiated ‘the quest for the historical Jesus’. Strauss26 in Germany (translated into English by George Eliot in 1846) and Renan27 in France attempted the rewriting of the life of Jesus without miracles and Christology. More widely, the result was an approach to reading that sidelined the embarrassing bits. Rationalisation led to Bultmann28 in the twentieth century, and ‘demythologising’. This approach was based on the belief that you could not seek history in the gospel narrative, but that the episodes were rightly interpreted as presenting theology through their various genre-forms, for example, narrative, parables. The embarrassing bits were fairy-stories with a spiritual moral – or even, possibly in some cases, parables that had been mistakenly rewritten as history. Bultmann’s is a tougher approach than Arnold’s, but still sees the Bible as a system of theological or anthropological ‘fairy-stories’ – an expression still used by bishops today, talking about the Christmas story and thereby scandalising sentimentalists. The outcome of this process was to call the historicity of the gospels into question – except for the Crucifixion which Bultmann needed to hang onto.29

Literalism If the liberal naturalising and demythologising approaches left people uncertain what there was left to believe in, literalism swung the other way, defensively believing too much, too uncritically. Fundamentalism30 is a complex of beliefs characterised by militant evangelicalism and a belief in the factual truth of the Bible because it is literally ‘the Word of God’. As a term, it appeared first in the 1920s in the USA, its chief place of origin. But its roots are in the nineteenth century, in the anti-intellectual reaction to the Higher Criticism. This reaction led to the claim by Hodge and Warfield (1881)31 that the affirmations of the Bible 26

27

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29

30

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David Friedrich Strauss (1808–74), The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined [1835], trans. Marian Evans (aka George Eliot), 1846, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972) was influenced by his studying under Schleiermacher (see note 23). Ernest Renan (1823–92) published his Life of Jesus (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1863), scandalising many by his treating Jesus as just another historical figure. Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was inclined to deny we could know very much at all about the historical Jesus – the stories were designed to teach lessons, not history. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’ (Tree and Leaf, London, 1964), in accepting ‘the Gospels contain a fairy-story’ (p. 62), raises the concept of fairy story to transcendent heights – ‘this story is supreme – and it is true’. The universe and everything has a happy ending. Though the term ‘Fundamentalist’ was first used by Curtis Lee Laws in 1920, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America in 1910 had pronounced on the ‘five fundamentals’ of Christian belief: the divine inspiration of the Bible and its consequent inerrancy; the virgin birth; substitutionary atonement for sin; the bodily resurrection of Christ; and the historical reality of Christ’s miracles. Archibald Hodge and Benjamin Warfield, The Presbyterian Review 6 (April 1881), pp. 225–60.

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were ‘absolutely errorless’, even that any statement in the Bible was absolute ‘truth to the facts’. This search for certainty through factualism even claimed to be ‘scientific’. Pierson (1895)32 advocated an approach to the Bible in an impartial scientific, Baconian spirit but turned the whole concept of Bacon and science upside down in the process. Even earlier, the popular naturalist Gosse,33 two years before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, argued that God, at the Creation, had planted the fossils in the rocks as a test of faith. The test was to accept the ‘facts’ as presented in the Bible in place of the ‘facts’ in the rocks. The notion of ‘facts’, as fundamentalists understood them, was a product of the scientific age, applied most unscientifically. Another contributory element in fundamentalism was the development of dispensationalism in Britain by John Nelson Darby whose ideas were greatly popularised in the USA at the end of the century by Scofield’s Reference Bible, as mentioned earlier. Dispensationalism maintains that the Bible shows God’s dealings with humankind go historically through seven distinct eras, following a progressive revelation and leading ultimately to the Second Coming and Judgement. We are now approaching the final era and the imminent end of the world. The theory of dispensations grew from factualist interpretation. Selected bits from Matthew 24, 1 Thessalonians 4, Revelation 20 and Daniel are synthesised into a future history of the world’s end. Different writers and different Churches tell the tale somewhat differently, but the basic story is this: a time of Tribulation will come upon the world, to be ended by the second coming of Christ. Christ will then rule the world for a thousand years, the Millennium. This will conclude with the Day of Judgement after which will follow an eternity of heaven for the just and an eternity within a fiery lake for sinners. True believers will be delivered at some point, variously identified, during the Tribulation by being snatched up into the air by Christ in a Rapture. They will reign with him in the Millennium. So widespread is the belief in the Rapture in the US that even the satiric cartoon characters Homer Simpson and American Dad have got caught up in it! Dispensationalism is widely believed in within the evangelical churches in the United States. And it has deep practical and political consequences. President Reagan’s approach to the world was influenced by this eschatology, married with real politic. Where he saw an ‘evil empire’, his vision was coloured by the vision of Revelation. The support given so uncritically to Israel is not a matter of politicians placating the Jewish voters of New York but is a matter of placating the Bible believers who see the end of the world approaching. For Armageddon to be able to take place, the Jews have to be in Jerusalem. The task of the United States is to help God’s plan come to fruition as soon as possible by supporting Israel.34 32

33

34

Arthur T. Pierson, Many Infallible Proofs, 1895, quoted in George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 55. Pierson was a consulting editor of the Scofield Reference Bible and contributed so much to the ‘five fundamentals’ argument (see note 28) that he became known as ‘the Father of Fundamentalism’. Philip Henry Gosse argued in Omphalos (London: John Van Voorst, 1857; repr. London: Routledge, 2003) that just as God had created Adam with a navel and the trees with rings, so there would be other signs in nature suggesting some existence prior to the Creation. This ingenious argument met with derision, and even his friend, Charles Kingsley, could not believe that God had ‘written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie’. See, for example, John Hagee, Jerusalem Countdown: Revised and Updated (Lake Mary, FL: Frontline, 2007).

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This syncretic way of interpreting divergent selected texts results from treating the Bible as a book full of facts rather than as a book full of stories. It is a failure of literary criticism, of understanding the nature of texts and how they mean.

What Literary Criticism has to Offer 35

Bonhoeffer exemplifies the modern dilemma in interpreting the Bible. When he went to Union Theological Seminary in New York, he was very offended to find students laughed at theological terms like sin and grace, apparently finding such language out of keeping with the modern age. The liberal Gospel had become very much a social gospel, an ethical gospel. He felt that Christ had been marginalised by being viewed simply as a historical figure and moral teacher. On the other hand, he found the fundamentalist seminaries that he visited backward and unscholarly. Bonhoeffer believed that ‘none of us can return to a pre-critical time’ but historical criticism only leaves ‘debris and fragments’ behind. It is necessary but the effect is destructive, not constructive. What is to be put in the place of pre-critical belief? He tried to find for himself a positive way of reading the Bible, something he felt that theologians weren’t much doing. When reading the Bible, he told his brother-in-law, he didn’t want to try to distinguish between what was of God and what was of human origin, because there was the danger of only meeting his ‘divine double’ (a reflection of his own predilections) in doing so and thus believing his own prejudices and limitations were also God’s. Elsewhere, he argued ‘we are no longer reading (the Bible) against ourselves, but only in our own favour’ (p. 92). He practised, and promoted among his students, a form of meditation upon texts, to help them ‘go on echoing in our minds’. In this context, Cranmer’s Preface to the Great Bible of 1540 remains relevant. He argues that, because the New Testament was written in everyday koine¯ Greek, it clearly was intended to be read by ordinary people ‘in the vulgar tongue’. He does not ‘forbid to reason’ but he forbids ‘to reason’ in a particular way – any way that gives rise to disputatiousness and ‘vain glory’. The reader should approached the Bible ‘with the fear of God and a firm and stable purpose to reform his own self’. The nature of reading is that we each bring our own lives and cultural understandings to a text as we read it, and make sense of it in these terms, while at the same time reassessing and reconfiguring all that we know in relation to what we are reading. Some texts stretch us more than others to accommodate them and to become more than we know we are. To work, reading involves humility and hospitality to the text. We entertain the text in the willing suspension of issues of belief and criticism. How else could we get the most we can from the Qur’an? And it is similar with the Bible. Reflection, criticism and judgement come after the event, as part of the total experience. And the reward, if there is to be reward, is a glimpse of wonder and glory that seizes the imagination. The only Jesus we can know from the Bible is a literary product, the Jesus who lives in our imaginations and thereby shapes our lives.

35

Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, Dietrich Bonhoeffeer 1906–1945 (London: T&T Clark International, 2006), p. 181.

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Conclusion What, finally, can we say about the contemporary Babel of Bibles? For fundamentalists, only one version of the Bible is the true version (whichever it happens to be), and only one way of reading it, a literalist way, is the true way. The fundamental failure of fundamentalism is a failure in its aesthetics, its literary critical inability to recognise what kind of texts it is dealing with and how they each should be read and interpreted. Among liberals, however, the danger is of evading hard sayings by easy naturalisations. Variety of translation is valued since different translations suggest different possibilities and understandings. This enables liberals, on the one hand, to widen their understandings and perspectives and, on the other, to select their own preferred translations and interpretations in a pick-and-mix kind of way. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it is certainly the way the Bible has always, prior to fundamentalism, been interpreted. Our contemporary Babel of Bibles is truer to the scriptural tradition of multiple texts and readings than a single self-consistent authoritative text would be. Our desire to re-interpret the Bible in the light of our contemporary concerns is true to the history of exegesis. Our task today is to learn how to read, not despite the debris but acknowledging the debris; and acknowledging that plurality of readings is as true of the Bible as it is of Shakespeare. It is not so much the Babel of Bibles we need to beware of, as seduction by ‘vain glory’ and our own ‘divine doubles’. A grown-up religion requires a rational rifling through the debris, entertaining the scriptures and, guided by our critical, aesthetic sense, laying ourselves open to the noblest that we can imagine – the glory of the Lord.

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LEST THE STORY BE LOST: BIBLICAL FICTION David Dickinson

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t the turn of the twenty-first century, targeted marketing saved a novel from being almost entirely overlooked when so many hardback copies remained unsold that, in advance of a paperback edition, free copies of the hardback were sent out to female rabbis, Christian clergy and the leaders of women’s reading groups. Within four years, by 2001, this ignored book, Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, became a best seller. It thus encapsulates three stages of change in the world of publishing: the direct ‘if you enjoyed that you will like this’ style of marketing that has become a standard feature of online bookselling, the reading group phenomenon that restores both the social aspect of reading and the role of ‘word of mouth’ recommendation, and the rediscovery of biblical narrative as a source of fiction, as The Red Tent, whose prologue invites women readers to gather around to hear its first-person narrative, retells the story of Dinah’s rape that, in Genesis 34, interrupts the Jacob narrative. This novelistic interest in biblical narratives, which seems strange in a secular age, provides the subject for this essay which, after necessarily brief discussion of some noteworthy examples of biblical fiction, will consider its implications for scripture, literature and narrative. From the early years of novel writing, biblical stories have been sources for plots. Indeed biblical sources can be found in Defoe’s The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719 and widely regarded as the first English novel, although it also has origins in the real-life adventures of the ship-wrecked and castaway Alexander Selkirk. Furthermore, its style was inspired by the spiritual lifewriting of Augustine’s Confessions and John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. The novel has often been read as a rewriting and interpretation of the story of Jonah, referenced early in the novel when a ship’s captain urged Crusoe never to go to sea again after a first short, ominously disastrous voyage: ‘Perhaps this has all befallen us on your account, like Jonah in the ship of Tarshish’ (13).1 On this voyage, Crusoe, like Jonah, had cowered in his cabin while the storm raged and had only come up on deck to help at the pumps when he saw the crew at their prayers. Jonah’s essential loneliness – on board the ship, in the belly of the great fish, on vigil outside Nineveh and set apart from the rest of humanity as God’s chosen spokesperson – sets the tone for Crusoe’s condition later in Defoe’s novel. Defoe almost always refers to the island in terms of a desert or a wilderness and often has Crusoe fretting about why he is singled out for special trials. For instance, Crusoe marvels at the way corn 1

The page numbers of all references to novels in the text of this essay will be included in brackets.

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grows in the vicinity of his hut to such an extent that he is moved to give thanks to God for what seems as miraculous as the gourd that grew to shelter Jonah, but, in contrast, his first attempts to sow corn fail and the harvest is as withered as Jonah’s gourd eventually is. In these and other ways, Defoe’s novel uses the Jonah narrative as a fundamental myth to face readers with ultimate questions about self-perception and the nature of reality: to what extent is human existence a lonely struggle against the elements in a wild place? An early English novel with a more explicit use of biblical narrative as a source is Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, first published in 1742. Whilst it lampoons its characters, borrowed from Samuel Richardson, and uses their comic escapades to examine critically some aspects of contemporary society, its shape and eponymous hero derive from the character and adventures of the biblical Joseph, son of Isaac. In his second letter to Pamela, Joseph Andrews describes himself as the biblical Joseph’s namesake and declares that, like him, he seeks to maintain his ‘virtue against all temptations’ (41). Robbers ambush both Josephs; both Josephs face an ultimate showdown, one in the Pharaoh’s court, the other in Squire Booby’s country seat; and both Josephs are finally reconciled with people they left behind through revelations of identity, the biblical Joseph initially unrecognised by his brothers who came to Egypt to do trade, and Joseph Andrews discovering that his parents are not who he thought they were and that Pamela is not his sister.2 When following the adventures of Joseph Andrews and his companion Abraham Adams, the reader discovers that the epic, in the tradition of which Fielding claimed to be writing (1), is not only the Homeric epic he cites in the Preface and the travel epic he alludes to in his longer title that ends ‘Written in Imitation of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote’, but also the biblical epic of the patriarchal narratives. All these comments on Defoe and Fielding are well rehearsed and the tradition of novels based on biblical stories has been sustained in the intervening centuries, as surveys such as those by David Lyle Jeffrey, Terry Wright and Anthony Swindell attest. In these early novels, Crusoe is only based on Jonah and Joseph Andrews is clearly other than Joseph the patriarch, but in the case of the contemporary phenomenon of biblical fictions, the protagonists are biblical personae fictionalised. Some writers such as David Maine and Jenny Diski have majored on re-telling Old Testament stories, with Maine publishing novels re-telling the stories of the Fall, Noah’s flood and Samson, and Diski publishing two novels, the first based on the Abraham narrative and the second on the next generation in the patriarchal narratives. This genre of biblical fiction includes some writers who have consciously sought to capitalise on the success of Diamant’s The Red Tent and published books on significant Old Testament women such as Esther and Eve.3 Writers such as C. K. Stead, Simon Mawer and Michael Dickinson have to some extent been inspired by the originally rumoured discovery in the 1970s and, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the eventual publication of The Gospel of Judas, to write novels focused on this, one of the most fascinating of Christ’s disciples.4 Their precursors included medieval texts such as The Golden Legend of c. 1260, whose author, Jacobus, 2

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Harold Fisch exhaustively traces the web of biblical allusions in Joseph Andrews in his New Stories for Old. The scope of this essay permits no more than hints at the parallels. Eve has attracted much attention from authors such as Lamming, Aidenhoff and Elliott, whilst Kohn’s re-telling of Esther stands almost alone. In Brendan Kennelly’s prize-winning book-length poem The Little Book of Judas, Judas remarks, ‘All kinds of scribblers find me an absorbing theme.’

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drew on apocryphal material to provide a murderous backstory for his arch villain, and Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, Three Versions of Judas, published in 1944 in Ficciones. The academic at the centre of Borges’s story responds to adverse reactions to his attempts to account for Judas’s actions by rewriting the story three times, until he ends up with what he calls a ‘monstrous’ version. They also stand in the tradition of pietistic novels imagining the lives of Jesus’s disciples such as Lloyd C. Douglas’s The Big Fisherman of 1949, yet Dickinson’s, Mawer’s and Stead’s versions of the story of Judas are more scandalous. Dickinson’s novel purports to be the text of an apologia addressed by Judas to Peter in which Judas exposes the intrigue he was involved in. Dickinson’s Judas had implored Jesus not to go through with his face-off with the religious and political authorities in Jerusalem and conspired with one Darius, another follower of Jesus, to save Jesus from his fate. Darius agreed to stand in for Jesus and, although Jesus insisted that Judas should inform the authorities that the wrong man has been handed over, Darius dies on the cross, too far away from onlookers to be recognised. When, after his hasty burial, Judas persuades Jesus that he can now fake his resurrection, Jesus says he never wants to see Judas’s face again. Having watched the women discover the empty tomb and meet Jesus, Judas does not know what to do or where to go, so he seeks help from Martha who, for Jesus’s sake, gives him sanctuary in the tomb. There Judas is trapped because Peter does not come as expected, and his apologia comes to an abrupt end as the light disappears, and his life ends slowly as the air is consumed. Mawer’s novel, written before the contents of the Gospel of Judas were in the public domain, interweaves four related narratives – a scholarly priest, Leo, working on an ancient codex in which Judas claims to have seen the decomposing body of Jesus, the Judas story behind the codex, the older Leo now defrocked, and the story of Leo’s mother’s tragic love affair in wartime Rome – with the unifying themes of betrayal and resurrection. And Stead’s novel, published after Judas’s Gospel was common knowledge, imagines a decent and fair-minded Judas, now an old man retired from his work as a trader, looking back on his childhood and youth and setting down, in poetry and prose, for the sake of his children, an account of how he came to be unjustly reviled as a traitor. Fictionalised accounts of the story of Jesus form another subgroup within the genre of biblical fiction. Some of these novels have caused outrage and protests, but this is not only a recent phenomenon: George Moore’s The Brook Kerith caused a stir when it was published in 1927 because it presents Jesus as both a pre-crucifixion wonder-worker and a post-resurrection shepherd after Joseph of Arimathea found the supposedly dead Jesus in a coma and nursed him back to health. Controversy on this matter was most recently revived with the publication of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ as part of Canongate’s The Myths series (which includes another retold Bible story, David Grossman’s Lion’s Honey about Samson and another about the discovery of a fifth gospel purportedly written by Malchus, The Fire Gospel by Michel Faber). Pullman’s novella follows the general lines of the Synoptic Gospels for the narrative but adds one radical innovation: the author splits the character of Jesus into two, one a sickly child called Christ who is favoured by his mother, the other a lusty healthy boy called Jesus. The chief heresy of the novel – that Jesus really does die and his brother, Christ, plays the part of his resurrected person in some sort of publicity stunt – is less authorial mischief than purposeful invention: it highlights the disjunction between the historical Jesus Christ and the Christian Church, whose behaviour has often not shown love to its neighbours. Between Moore and Pullman, fictionalised accounts of Jesus’s life include some wellknown works such as King Jesus, by Robert Graves, whose abiding interest in myths is

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evident herein with the unintended effect that readers sense the dangers of Gnosticism; Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son, which so stresses the humanity of its central character that readers are reminded of the delicate doctrinal balance in the hypostatic union; The Gospel According to Jesus Christ by José Saramago, a Communist atheist whose satirical intention in the novel is achieved by inverting the moral polarities of the universe with Satan, renamed Pastor in the novel, looking after Jesus who at the end bewails the mess the world is in as a result of Christianity; Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, whose novel is not blasphemous as those who protested outside screenings of its film version in 1991 alleged, but is, rather, a sturdy defence of Christian orthodoxy against the docetic heresy; and Anne Rice’s two volume work, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, which are first-person narratives faithful to the New Testament, and whose popularity derives both from the author’s previous success as a writer of vampire thrillers and the pietism of conservative American Christian readers. Others, such as Michèle Roberts’s The Wild Girl, which takes the form of a fifth gospel written by Mary Magdalene giving an account of her relationship with Jesus, and Jim Crace’s Quarantine which imagines an alternative account of Jesus’s forty days in the wilderness, concentrate on particular episodes of the canonical Jesus’s life. In their various ways, these and other fictionalised accounts of the life of Jesus pose questions about the historicity of the canonical gospels, the perspective of their narratives and the adequacy of Christological interpretations. They thus facilitate fresh readings of the gospels and sharpen readers’ attentiveness to their nuances. Three main types of biblical fictions have emerged recently: those that retell the stories to fill their lacunae, amplify their themes or explore the psychology of their characters, those that refocus the stories telling them from a different perspective, and those that confound the stories by testing, probing, challenging and subverting their assumed norms. Biblical fictions of the first type belong to, or, more accurately, are derivative of, an honoured rabbinical tradition of midrash in which the primary interpretative tool was playful exploration of a text’s gaps, inconsistencies and foibles, but which fell into disuse by about 700 ce. Often moving far from the text’s plain sense, midrash relied on each word and gap in the text being pregnant with meaning and on all possible lines of interpretation being kept open. Although some elements of Christianity have found midrash problematic because it resists interpretative finality and contradicts the oft-held opinion that there might be a best interpretation of any text, supplementations of the biblical narratives in the fictions of novelists such as David Maine and Jenny Diski explode this view and help readers to discover the multiplicity of interpretative layers and wealth of ‘meaning’ in biblical narrative. Writing about the Bible stories being almost forgotten, Maine explained that he retells some of its stories in his novels because they suggest so much but tell so little, because they ignore the psychology and motivation of the characters that interest many modern readers and he wants to explore these with them, because the narratives can be changed so much whilst remaining unchanged and, most of all, because so long as readers keep responding to them writers will keep turning to these stories and he wants to ensure that they are remembered.5 Evidently, straightforward re-tellings of this type are capable of drawing out theological and spiritual themes of significance to contemporary readers, as well as giving voice to biblically silent characters like Noah’s wife, Isaac as Abraham bound him and Judas at the Last Supper. 5

From www.jewishbookweek.com/2007/270207d.php (accessed 25 June 2012).

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When a novelist refocalises a biblical story by reorienting its narratival perspective, readers often find this refreshingly illuminating as new light is cast on the tale, its character and its themes. The authorial motivation behind such refocused tales is to point away from the original biblical perspective, which is dominating, to foreground a subsumed, hidden or neglected facet of the narrative. To demonstrate the technique, look at John Millais’ painting The Boyhood of Raleigh where two boys are enwrapped by a tale told by an old salt. Their eyes are fixed on him; he looks at them; he points out to sea; but the onlooker’s gaze is drawn, not to where the figures in the painting are focused, but to something to which the older man points, beyond both the painting and his tale. Similarly, biblical fictions often direct readers’ attention to characters in the biblical narrative that do not occupy centre ground. For instance, Roberts’s The Wild Girl focuses its reader’s gaze, away from the canonical gospels’ attention on the figure of Jesus, to the story of Mary Magdalene. Stories refocused on women are particularly common, with several recovering Eve from the strongly implied slur on her character in Genesis,6 some rescuing neglected and ill-treated biblical women from perpetual victimhood,7 some (like the self-acclaimed modern midrashist Norma Rosen) exploring how women in the Bible’s stories might have reacted to the behaviour of their menfolk,8 and others lauding the lives and achievements of the Bible’s great women, among whom Deborah, Jael, Esther and Judith rank. Some novels based on the story of David focus readers’ interest on his sexuality and relationship with Jonathan.9 Another authorial refocusing technique introduces a sense of timelessness to the novel, often bringing the narrative from times long ago into the present age. For instance, in Dan Jacobson’s The Rape of Tamar, the omniscient first-person narrator’s frequent anachronistic references to Jesuitical casuistry and Kantian philosophy, and his use of ‘Christ’ as an expletive knowingly referring to an era that has not yet come, joins with his tendency directly to address his reader, whom he assumes knows his story, to achieve timelessness. The story does not belong exclusively in the past, but its events could be unfolding as the reader progresses through the text. Its narrative is set free from the shackles of the past. In an age suspicious of authoritative texts and showing less respect for dominant religious texts – in short, in a postmodern age – there are abundant novels that in some way confound the biblical narratives on which they are based. Consider the story of Noah with its troubling portrayal of a God who makes mistakes, changes his mind, is ready to exterminate the human race like vermin and who needs to be reminded not to do the same again. Of the many novelists who have written fictionalised accounts of Noah, the best known are Julian Barnes (in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters), Michèle Roberts (in The Book of Mrs Noah), Geraldine McCaughrean (in a daring Whitbread prize-winning children’s novel Not the End of the World), Jeanette Winterson (in her self-confessedly lame Boating for Beginners) and David Maine (in The Flood). The overall result of such novelistic interest in the Noah saga is, as the last of these concludes, that: 6 7 8

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For instance, Lamming, Elliott and Aidenhoff. For example, Jacobson, The Rape of Tamar. Unbinding Sarah in Rosen’s Biblical Women Unbound ponders how Sarah might have reacted to the news of the near-fatal episode when Abraham took his son into the desert. For example, Massie (1995), the first sentence of which indicates that history is written by the priests, the implication being that this account will liberate the story from their controlling grasp.

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[a] story like that won’t be forgotten. But things will get added and left out and confused, until in a little while people won’t even know what’s true and what’s been made up. The least we can do [. . .] is get as much of it right as we can. (258) Therein lies the exciting challenge and, for some, the problem of biblical fictions. They contribute to the destabilisation of the relationship between the Bible and the arts; their existence blurs the border between biblical narrative and fictionalised Bible stories, and that opens up the way for the narratives to host new interpretations. Because readers can read back into biblical narratives what they have read in fictionalised accounts (and vice versa) the border between them has become porous and permeable. This can be creative, but there are tensions. What distinction remains between fact and fiction? Can what actually happened in the events recounted in books of the Bible be determined? At what point can readers be sure fiction has been introduced into the narrative? Richard Beard’s recent novel, Lazarus is Dead, explores these problems. It intentionally bends genres in that, throughout the novel provocatively subtitled ‘A Biography’, scholarly New Testament commentary, literary reworkings of the story and academic reflections by respected theologians mingle with the original biblical references to tell a new story of Lazarus. These citations, carefully italicised, with the year of publication added and often discussed in essay-like digressions, help Beard in his apparent aim to resurrect Lazarus as a significant messianic contender, who, he tells readers, is commemorated in a minor festival eight days before Easter in churches of the Byzantine tradition. Readers of the novel cannot avoid questioning the relationship between novel and biography, as well as the nature of truth in Beard’s new story of Lazarus. Beard himself straddles the divide between the Bible and fiction: on the one hand, through his novel he raises the possibility that the Bible could be fiction (150), and throughout, insights from fiction fill out the biblical story (221) but, on the other hand, he suggests that, because theology has reached ‘a point of stagnation, . . . [a] new approach is needed’ (246), one that allows imaginative representations and reconfigurations of the narrative to fund the reader’s reception of the story. Blurring the boundary between the Bible and fiction, allowing biblical stories to veer away from the canon and slide into the marginalia of the non-canonical by recasting scripture as literature, as all these novels do, carries implications for the status of scripture, literature and narrative. First, what if the biblical text is as fictional as novels are? Because no narrative is entirely innocent, it is already acknowledged that the Bible’s stories are not straight. There are elements of fiction in them. The histories of the Old Testament are formally known as ‘the Former Prophets’ because historians such as the Chronicler and the Deuteronomist were, above all else, theologians and prophets whose overt intention in recording their histories was to make theological claims and prophetic judgements: long-lived kings who were ‘bad’ in that they were unfaithful, impious or broke God’s law in some way, are passed over in a sentence, whilst short-lived and politically insignificant kings who were faithful and obedient are given fuller attention. Inconsistent legends about the selection of David as king – in one he is chosen from among his seven brothers when he is called back from tending his family’s sheep, in another he is chosen because his music can soothe the furrowed brow of Saul, and in another he is chosen because he killed Goliath – are difficult to reconcile, unless the biblical historian has introduced three different narratives to stress that David is a shepherd who will be a pastor to his people, a harpist who will hymn God’s praises in psalmody and a warrior

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who will protect his people from danger. The biblical authors and editors use many such literary techniques, each of which introduces fictionalising elements, to explicate their theological, spiritual, ethical or religious purpose. The practice continued into the New Testament. The very nature of the gospels – they are not biographies of Jesus but proclamations of good news, propaganda in a non-pejorative sense – demonstrates that biblical narrative, in common with all narrative, is inflected. As David Jasper said when discussing Crace’s Quarantine, ‘[A]ll literature [. . .] plays with other texts and fictions which have influenced it, consciously or unconsciously’ (Jasper 2004: 103). The gospels are no exception: the four Evangelists crafted their stories with an ear to Old Testament echoes, sometimes directly citing texts from the prophets and specifying that what happened was ‘so that the scripture can be fulfilled’, but more often simply allowing readers to discern the allusion for themselves. The pericope of Jesus’s miraculous feeding of the multitude can serve as a helpful first example, partly because, unlike most accounts of Jesus as a miracle worker, versions of this narrative occur in all four gospels. Both Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels also have an additional variant, and, although detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this essay, enough can be said to demonstrate how intertextuality plays with historicity and adds fictionality to the episode. Mark explains that Jesus looks with compassion on the people because they were like sheep without a shepherd (6: 34), echoing an image criticising leaderless Israel used in Numbers, 1 Kings and Ezekiel. The collection of basketfuls of waste at the end of the miracle is reminiscent, but an exaggeration, of a story about Elisha told in 2 Kings 4, and the fourth gospel further heightens this allusion in its distinctive depiction of the boy as παιδάριον (paidarion), a term of uncertain meaning, possibly indicating a child servant, and used nowhere else in the New Testament. This, according to Barrett, probably originated in John’s recollection of the same Elisha narrative, where the prophet was assisted by a servant (Barrett 1978: 274–5). Such knowing intertextuality makes claims for the identity and nature of Jesus – that was its purpose – but it also troubles the historicity of the accounts. If this suggests that a literary reading of biblical narratives as fiction finds within them theological or spiritual truths greater than mere historicity, reference to the accounts of the Transfiguration reinforces the point. The story is so reminiscent of Moses’ ascent of Sinai, and so peppered with imprecise Old Testament allusions, that many commentators find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that here is a narrative imaged (or imagined) in such a way that it expresses what Mark and his readers believed about Jesus – that he was God’s beloved son – but, in the process, fiction and ‘historical “happening”’, to use Hooker’s term, have been fused together in the narrative so firmly that they can no longer be separated (Hooker 1991: 214). In all biblical narrative, the element with which readers creatively engage is the fiction within and around the facts, more than the facts within the fiction; it is this that creates theological understanding, enables readers to find their place of participation in the narrative and facilitates spiritual involvement. It is this that lifts the narrative out of the past and away from a distant land. This ought not to disturb Christian believers; it need not even disturb biblical literalists; it certainly did not bother the biblical literalist, Milton, or deter him from his fictionalisations of the Fall and the Samson story. Reading the Bible as fiction does not lessen the status of the Bible as Christianity’s sacred and authoritative text. Rather, if the Bible is read as fiction – or, to use a more provocative term from childhood, if it is read as ‘make-believe’ – the text is liberated from a specific period and place to

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everywhere and all time. It becomes a present reality which encourages belief. Why should people be surprised if the gospel writers turned to fiction to do justice to their understanding of Jesus, just as Jesus himself turned to short stories, in the form of parables, to get his hearers to understand the content of his teaching and the nature of his being? Stories narrate truth. As Douglas Templeton argued in his book on reading the New Testament, ‘To lose the Bible as history is not to lose truth, but to lose one kind of it and find another’ (Templeton 1999: 327, his italics), and this other theological, spiritual and religious truth reaches further and deeper into the reader than mere historical happenings. Reading the Bible as fiction energises scripture. Indeed, modern biblical fiction, by the accretion of further interpretative layers, opens up the Bible for readers to whom it has often previously been an alien text. The biblical fiction genre has the further implication that literature can be read as scripture, that is, as an authoritative text capable of carrying religious truth. In the contemporary secularised or secularising age, commentators have often remarked on people’s disaffection with organised religion while retaining a strong sense of spirituality. The spiritual curiosity that continues to characterise Western society often finds expression in popular interest in the arts because, in the absence of participation in corporate acts of worship, people look elsewhere for the aesthetics and artistic stimulation that ‘feed the soul’. They visit art galleries, attend musical recitals, listen to poetry readings, read books, watch drama and film, and follow football clubs. Novels that retell stories from the Bible provide continuing access to narratives that have been formative in the past and that still establish norms for theistic belief, ethical behaviour and spiritual practice. For some, literature, with its imaginative, almost supernatural, power that demands leaps of faith from its readers to unleash its magic, has replaced the old religion. The divine can be found and heard in literature’s beauty, truth and goodness. Fiction is as capable of holding authority as any other text, in that authority is never intrinsic to a text but negotiated by three interested parties – the writer, the reader and the text itself. This means that textual authority should never be coercive or absolute, but is either attributed to a text by its reader or agreed between the reader and author. Even as widely recognised an authoritative text as the Bible cannot impose or force its authority; it can be ignored or disagreed with, and it only becomes authoritative when the reader agrees to read it as such. Readers of biblical fiction may choose to read novels in the same way, attributing to them either a deontic authority from which they can learn how to behave or an epistemic authority from which they can discover theological or religious insights. Thus, novels with Jesus as a central character may inspire readers to follow his lifestyle or convey insights into the nature of Christian belief about him. Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, for instance, offers important corrective insights into the doctrine of the incarnation and Saramago’s Marxist version of Jesus’s story encourages readers to judge Jesus by his life, rather than by the Church of his followers, then to follow him. Novels based on Bible stories liberate theology from the grip of the guardians of orthodoxy, patriarchal religion and the established Church, and move theology back into the public realm where debate, dispute and quarrel, rather than privileged dominance, establish what is true.10 Openness to textual interpretation need not conflict with reverence for sacred texts. 10

Salman Rushdie, in an essay collected in his Imaginary Homelands, distinguished between religion whose tendency is to privilege one language above all others and novels where different languages, narratives and values quarrel.

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Finally, if, as this essay has argued, the genre of biblical fiction implies that scripture can be read as literature and literature as scripture, it has a further effect: it heightens the role of narrative, for it emphasises that narrative carries theology and reminds believers that the stories of the Bible are, indeed, stories. Moreover, these stories are inconclusive stories, kept open by biblical fictions that prevent their closure.11 In the last thirty years, a strand of theology dubbed ‘narrative theology’ has emerged, bolstered by the belief that all stories are essentially and unavoidably theological. This places the burden of theological reflection on narrative’s shoulders. It is no accident, for instance, that much of the Torah – the books of the Old Testament that contain the Mosaic Law – is in the form of narrative, for narrative teaches morality, establishes norms and gives theological instruction. Simply because narrative unfolds in an ordered manner, and because narrators tell stories for a reason, narrative promises to make sense of what it narrates and, when it reflects life as it is lived, it offers hope that life makes sense. The reasons for people telling stories include the desire to communicate what the storyteller has learnt and the intention to inculcate a value by which the storyteller believes the hearer should live. These are also the tasks or purposes of confessional theology. The indeterminacy of narrative – and novels, in particular, with their capacity to host inconsistency – offers to approach the ineffable and sound the depths. Because narrative theology and the power of narrative meet in the phenomenon of biblical fiction, here narrative works as a valued tool in the theological task, and reading fiction becomes a fruitful way of doing theology.

Bibliography Aidenhoff, Elsie V. (2006), The Garden, London: Doubleday. Alter, Robert (1981), The Art of Biblical Narrative, New York: Harper Collins. Augustine [c. 398] (1961), Confessions, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. Barrett, C. Kingsley (1978), The Gospel According to St John: An Introduction with Commentary and Notes on the Greek Text, Second Edition, London: SPCK. Barnes, Julian (1989), A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, London: Picador. Beard, Richard (2011), Lazarus is Dead: A Biography, London: Harvill Secker. Borges, Jorge L. [1944] (1991), Ficciones, London: French and European Publications Inc. Bunyan, John [1666] (1987), Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. Crace, Jim (1997), Quarantine, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cunningham, V. (2000), ‘The Best Stories in the Best Order? Canons, apocryphas and (post) modern reading’, Literature and Theology, 14/1, 69–80. Cupitt, Don (1991), What is a Story? London: SCM. Defoe, Daniel [1719] (1988), The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, London: Marshall Cavendish. Diamant, Anita [1997] (2001), The Red Tent, London: Macmillan. Dickinson, Michael (1994), The Lost Testament of Judas Iscariot, Dingle: Brandon. Diski, Jenny (2000), Only Human, London: Virago. Diski, Jenny (2004), After These Things, London: Virago. Douglas, Lloyd C. (1949), The Big Fisherman, London: Peter Davies. Douglas, Lloyd C. (1942), The Robe, London: Peter Davies. Elliott, Elissa (2009), Eve, New York: Bantam. 11

Fisch makes a similar point when discussing how biblical narratives remain alive for future generations in the first chapter of his book (Fisch 1998: 4).

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Faber, Michel (2008), The Fire Gospel, Edinburgh: Canongate. Fielding, Henry [1742] (1932), The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Mr Abraham Adams, London: G. Bell & Sons. Fisch, Harold (1998), New Stories for Old: Biblical Patterns in the Novel, London: Macmillan. Graves, Robert [1946] (1981), King Jesus, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux. Grossman, David (2006), Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Samson, Edinburgh: Canongate. Hooker, Morna D. (1991), The Gospel According to St Mark, London: A & C Black. Jacobson, Dan (1970), The Rape of Tamar, London: Andre Deutsch. Jasper, David (2004), The Sacred Desert: Religion, Literature, Art and Culture, Oxford: Blackwell. Jeffrey, David L. (ed.) (1992), A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Jeffrey, David L. (1996), People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Kazantzakis, Nikos (1975), The Last Temptation of Christ, London: Faber & Faber. Keefer, Kyle (2008), The New Testament as Literature: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kennelly, Brendan (1991), The Little Book of Judas, Tarset: Bloodaxe Books. Kohn, Rebecca (2004), The Gilded Chamber, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kraemer, David (1996), Reading the Rabbis: The Talmud as Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lamming, R. M. (2005), As in Eden, London: Faber and Faber. Mailer, Norman (1997), The Gospel According to the Son, London: Little, Brown. Maine, David (2004), The Flood, Edinburgh: Canongate. Maine, David (2005), Fallen, Edinburgh: Canongate. Maine, David (2006), The Book of Samson, Edinburgh: Canongate. Maine, David (2007), Tall Tales at (accessed 25 June 2012). Massie, Allan (1995), King David, London: Sceptre. Mawer, Simon (2000), The Gospel of Judas, London: Little, Brown. McCaughrean, Geraldine (2004), Not the End of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moore, George (1933), The Brook Kerith: A Syrian Story, London: William Heinemann Ltd. Pullman, Philip (2010), The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Edinburgh: Canongate. Rice, Anne (2005), Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, London: Chatto & Windus. Rice, Anne (2008), Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, London: Chatto & Windus. Roberts, Michèle (1984), The Wild Girl, London: Methuen. Roberts, Michèle (1999), The Book of Mrs Noah, London: Vintage. Rosen, Norma (1996), Biblical Women Unbound, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society. Rushdie, Salman (1991), Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991, London: Granta. Saramago, José (1993), The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, London: The Harvill Press. Stead, C. K. (2006), My Name was Judas, London: Harvill Secker. Stroup, George W. (1981), The Promise of Narrative Theology, London: SCM. Swindell, Anthony C. (2009), How Contemporary Novelists Rewrite Stories from the Bible, New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Swindell, Anthony C. (2010), Reworking the Bible: The Literary Reception History of Fourteen Biblical Stories, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press. Tate, Andrew (2008), Contemporary Fiction and Christianity, London: Continuum. Templeton, Douglas A. (1999), The New Testament as True Fiction: Literature, Literary Criticism, Aesthetics, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Winterson, Jeanette (1985), Boating for Beginners, London: Vintage. Wright, Terry R. (2007), The Genesis of Fiction: Modern Novelists as Biblical Interpreters, London: Ashgate.

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THE BIBLE AND PHENOMENOLOGY Kevin Hart

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dmund Husserl (1859–1938), the father of phenomenology, did not do ‘readings’ of any literary, philosophical or scriptural texts. His interest in religion was confined to ensuring that divine transcendence was excluded from phenomenological investigation and in speculating on God as an absolute monad.1 It was Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) who started the practice of philosophical readings of texts, although mostly after his period of creative rethinking of phenomenology had come to an end.2 There is one exception, and that is his courses of 1920–1. In the winter semester he offered lectures on the topic ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion’ in which he showed how Paul’s letters to the Galatians and Thessalonians manifest radical Christian life, and in the summer semester he presented a phenomenological interpretation of book ten of Augustine’s Confessions.3 Thereafter one finds phenomenology leagued with reading, infrequently at first and then, in our day, quite often.4 True, in the most startling case, that of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), phenomenology is first submitted to a rigorous critique and then reset as ‘deconstruction’; and yet one also finds other philosophers who have inherited from Husserl, themselves free in re-orienting what they have learned from him, seeking to read texts, including scripture: Michel Henry (1922–2002) and Jean-Luc Marion (1946–), 1

2

3

4

See Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, I: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998), § 58, and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910–1911, trans. Ingo Farin and James G. Hart (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), Appendix XIII. Also see Angela Ales Bello, The Divine in Husserl and Other Explorations, Analecta Husserliana XCVIII (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009) and Emmanuel Housett, Husserl et l’idée de Dieu (Paris: Cerf, 2010). See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. and intro. Keith Hoeller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000). See Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). See Adam Wells (ed.), Scripture Illumined: Phenomenological Approaches to the Bible (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). More generally, see the Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, the first issue of which appeared in 2003. Jean-Louis Chrétien is sometimes to be found on the fringes of phenomenology, and several of his books touch on the Bible. See, in particular, Sous le regard de la Bible (Paris: Bayard, 2008). For a phenomenological reading of several novels, see Claude Romano, Le chant de la vie: phénoménologie de Faulkner (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).

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above all. I shall focus on how Heidegger reads Paul’s letters, how Henry and Marion offer quite different phenomenological readings of the parable of the father and his two sons (Luke 15: 11–32), and how Derrida approaches the story of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9).5 Phenomenological explication of scripture, Heidegger insists, differs sharply from ‘dogmatic or theological-exegetical interpretation’ (47); it seeks ‘the fundamental religious experience’ [die religiöse Grunderfahrung] (51). How one gains access to this experience is Heidegger’s initial question, and he answers it in good Husserlian fashion by distinguishing generalisation and formalisation. In generalising we consider the ‘what’ of a phenomenon by passing from species to genus, while in formalisation we attend to the ‘how’ of the phenomenon, looking for an instance in which what is essential concretely manifests itself.6 Heidegger speaks of ‘formal indication’: one determines what is to be interpreted by the very way in which it becomes accessible. The inessential is taken as a non-binding clue to what is essential. Thus Paul’s apostolic proclamation directs us to his being as an apostle in relation with the Galatians and Thessalonians. It is a formal indication only, since Heidegger proposes that we drop all that we know about the historical nature of this proclamation and remain only with its manner of being proclaimed. Heidegger is not interested in when the proclamation takes place, what is proclaimed, or even who proclaims it. Rather, how the proclamation is undertaken is the guiding question, and clearly it differs from Jesus’s preaching of the Kingdom, for Paul’s cause is the risen Jesus as Messiah. How Paul’s proclamation is given to us directs us to its relational meaning (Paul’s being in relation to those he addresses, and their being in relation to him) and to how it is enacted (what Christian life is for all concerned). We must leave content to one side and attend solely to philosophical method. Accordingly, Heidegger elaborates the ‘how’-question that will lead us to see the way in which a phenomenon gives itself to the enquirer: How does Paul, in the situation of a letter-writer, stand to the Thessalonians? How are they experienced [erfahren] by him? How is his communal world given to him in the situation of writing the letter? That is connected to the question, how Paul stands to this communal world. The content of the communal world is to be seen in its determination in connection with How of the relation to this communal world. (61) These questions are at heart answered in one sentence: ‘Christian religiosity’, Heidegger says, ‘is in factical life experience [der faktischen Lebenserfahrung], it actually is this itself’ (93). Factical life is a notion that Heidegger draws in the first instance from his Destruktion of Dilthey’s account of historical life as the true starting point of philosophy. Far from being simply negative, Destruktion is the exfoliation of pseudo-questions, unwarranted 5

6

These are not the only biblical passages that Marion and Derrida discuss. Both attend to Genesis 22: 1–19, the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac. See Marion, The Reason of the Gift, trans. Stephen Lewis (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), Ch. 4, and Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Ch. 3. Derrida also folds a consideration of parts of the book of Revelation into his essay ‘Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy’, Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 25–71. See Husserl, Ideas I § 13, and Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, § 12.

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assumptions, and other accretions that have attached themselves to a concept over time, the point of the operation being to recover the animating impulse at the heart of a concept.7 The project of a Destruktion of Dilthey’s notion of ‘life’ was to engross Heidegger in the summer of 1923, though he had come across it several years earlier.8 Factical life, for Heidegger, is not just a matter of reflecting on something one encounters, or taking stock of a ‘complex of lived experiences [Erlebniszusammenhang]’ (10); it is concrete everyday existence, which is forever on the move and in which one is always and already involved in a world. In this mode of experience one cares solely about what is needed to get through the day. No surprise then that this experience is radically pre-theoretical: it is ‘the “attitudinal, falling, relationally indifferent, self-sufficient concern for significance”’, as Heidegger says (11). We attend, that is, to the relational sense of the experience, realising that we interpret the self strictly in the narrow and often inauthentic terms of the present world, bypass the ways in which experience comes to us, and are alert only to ‘connections of significance’ (12) – the world around us – and not theses about objects. As Heidegger reads the Pauline epistles, the apostle and the communities to which he writes live time itself, not in distraction but in full awareness that these are the last days of the world. ‘The compressed temporality is constitutive for Christian religiosity: an “onlyyet”, there is no time for postponement’ (85). This factical life experience is the enactment of the relational meaning of the proclamation that Jesus is the Christ. One takes this meaning upon oneself in anguish and joy, being oriented to God instead of ‘the world’, and so lives henceforth in spirit. This sense of the enactment of relational meaning is the starting point for the philosophy of religion insofar as it touches early Christianity, and not pre-formed questions or, worse, pseudo-questions in the philosophy of religion understood as a discipline inherited from Kant and Hegel (and, one might add, Hume) and refined by Troeltsch and others. That tradition must be subject to Destruktion before it can be of any use; its questions must be shaken so as to reveal their animating concerns, which we approach by way of formal indication. In Acts we hear of Paul preaching to the Jews in Thessalonica, how ‘for three sabbath days’ he ‘reasoned with them out of the scriptures’ (Acts 17: 3), and how ‘some of them believed, and consorted with Paul and Silas’ (Acts 17: 4). Paul’s proclamation partly yields the experience of conversion for some of the Jews and partly enables him to encounter himself. According to Heidegger, Paul experiences the Thessalonians in two ways: ‘their having become (γενηθῆναι)’ and ‘that they have a knowledge of their having-become (οἴδατε)’ (65). Now γενηθῆναι appears only in Hebrews 5: 5, although γενέσθαι appears throughout Acts and once in the first letter to the Thessalonians (at 1 Thessalonians 1: 7

8

See Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), ¶ 6. See Heidegger, Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression (New York: Continuum, 2010), §§ 5 c and 10 b, and Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 82. Also see Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Plan der Fortsetzung zum Aufbau der Geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften’, Gesammelte Schriften (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1973), vol. 7, p. 261. Heidegger speaks affirmatively of Dilthey in Being and Time, p. 429. For a detailed account of Heidegger’s method when reading Paul, see Jean Greisch, ‘Heidegger’s Methodological Principles for Understanding Religious Phenomena’, trans. Isabel Taylor, A Companion to Heidegger’s ‘Phenomenology of Religious Life’, ed. S. J. McGrath and Andrzej Wiercienski (Amsterdam: Rodolphi B.V., 2010), pp. 137–48.

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7: ὥστε γενέσθαι ὑμᾶς τύπον πᾶσιντοῖς πιστεύουσιν), and οἴδατε is used in Acts and throughout I Thessalonians. That the Thessalonians know themselves to have become followers of Christ through Paul’s proclamation is a strong motif of the apostle’s letter to them, and that Paul sees himself in their experience, and realises that this knowledge is unlike other epistemic modes, is certainly apparent. One does not know Christianity as just so much doctrine abstracted from life – what we might figure as Paul’s christology and soteriology, his ecclesiology, his theology of Israel and, more generally, of history – for the factical life experience is a part of the knowing. For Paul, this means that one is closer to God in weakness rather than strength, in anguish rather than joy. Christianity is lived without security, in constant vigilance, with the παρουσία always pressing on one. The ‘when’ of the second coming is not of primary importance for Paul, Heidegger thinks, for it ‘is determined through the How of self-comportment, which is determined through the enactment of factical life experience in each of its moments’ (75). On Heidegger’s understanding, then, Paul is not at all guided by doctrine in his experience of the Christ and in his proclamation of that experience. He is gripped by something prior to theoretical formulations such as one will find later in the proem of John’s Gospel and the Apostle’s Creed: factical life experience itself. The nature of this anterior claim and its effects on early Christians can be found by reading scripture phenomenologically, and indeed this reading puts the philosophy of religion on a more secure ground that it has previously enjoyed. Philosophical problems arise directly from ‘the things themselves’ in religion and not from prefabricated questions such as whether there is a synthetic a priori of the religious (Troeltsch) or whether religious experience is rational (Hegel) or irrational (Otto). By the same token, when we read Paul properly – that is, phenomenologically – we can see that Nietzsche in The Antichrist (1895) misconstrues him in his sharp-tongued criticisms. ‘The connections Paul [makes] should not be ethically understood’, Heidegger insists. ‘That is why it is a misperception when Nietzsche accuses Paul of ressentiment. Ressentiment in no way belongs to this realm . . . If one enters into that kind of talk, one shows only that one has understood nothing’ (86). I leave Heidegger to fade into the background for a while and turn to consider a triptych, two readings of the parable of the father and his two sons, each by a prominent contemporary French phenomenologist. The parable appears only the once, in Luke 15: 11–32. Here is the central panel, given in the King James Version of the Bible: 11. And he said, A certain man had two sons: 12. And the younger of them said to [his] father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth [to me]. And he divided unto them [his] living. 13. And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living. 14. And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want. 15. And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. 16 And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him. 17. And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! 18. I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, 19. And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. 20. And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed

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him. 21. And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. 22. But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put [it] on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on [his] feet: 23. And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill [it]; and let us eat, and be merry: 24. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry. 25. Now his elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard musick and dancing. 26. And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant. 27. And he said unto him, Thy brother is come; and thy father hath killed the fatted calf, because he hath received him safe and sound. 28. And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him. 29. And he answering said to [his] father, Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment: and yet thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends: 30. But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf. 31. And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. 32. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found. Before I proceed to look at the very modern left-hand and right-hand panels around this venerable text, several preliminary remarks are in order. First of all, it needs to be noted that, for all their differences, Husserl and Heidegger agree with one another that phenomenology is primarily an ecstatic enterprise. For Husserl, this means that transcendental consciousness is structured by way of intentionality: its acts are outwardly directed and result in various degrees of fulfilment. For Heidegger, Dasein is perpetually anticipating the future, retrieving the past, and attending to the present moment; it is always directed towards something. Not so for Henry, for whom both German philosophers are uncritically committed to the priority of epistemological transcendence (the recovery of worldly presence by way of representation) and who bypass inner life which, for Henry, is the fundamental orientation of phenomenology. His reading of Luke 15: 11–32 is one of many instances of his general conviction, but a second preliminary comment about his general philosophical position is needed before we can make decent sense of his exegesis. Henry’s philosophy, what he calls ‘material phenomenology’, is firmly rooted in the primary of immanence. Accordingly, he is less interested in the phenomenon that appears by way of intentionality than in the phenomenality of auto-affection. Indeed, he thinks that all modes of representation, including intentionality, hide phenomenality understood as the self-appearing of life itself. Now ‘life’ for Henry has nothing to do with biology or even with life as grasped as a ‘primal phenomenon’ by the young Heidegger.9 Rather, ‘life’ for Henry denotes pure, unconditioned, non-intentional pathos, the suffering and joy that are anterior to all acts of representation and in which those acts are grounded. This is the ‘materiality’ that compels his attention. ‘Transcendence rests upon immanence’, he maintains: the enstatic precedes and establishes the ecstatic.10 One virtue of this position, 9 10

See Heidegger, Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression, § 4. Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 41.

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Henry thinks, is that Being is not alienated from consciousness, as it is for Husserl and Heidegger; it surges invisibly within each person, and we lose touch with it only when we fall blindly into a world of representation and production, one that in modernity, absorbed as it is with technology, has become increasingly barbarous.11 To be sure, this ‘fall’ is endorsed by a major tradition in Western philosophy, yet there is a countertradition that may be uncovered in Eckhart, Fichte, Maine de Biran, Schopenhauer, Marx and Nietzsche, among other thinkers, which affirms the primacy of the enstatic over the ecstatic.12 One of those other thinkers, Henry believes, is Jesus of Nazareth. ‘All thought is essentially religious’, Henry declares towards the end of his major work L’Essence de la manifestation (1963), by which he means that we, individual ‘livings’, are moments of the divine life.13 Yet it is only in a trilogy of his last years – C’est moi la vérité (1996), Incarnation (2000) and Paroles du Christ (2002) – that Henry develops his ‘philosophy of Christianity’. What Dominique Janicaud in 1992 called ‘the theological turn’ in phenomenology had happened for Henry in the 1960s.14 Yet it is in the trilogy that Henry explicitly identifies God and Life. He is not following Aquinas who tells us that ‘God has life in the truest sense [maxime proprie]’; he sides with the angelic doctor’s younger confrère, Meister Eckhart, when the latter writes, ‘God engenders himself as me’.15 So Life is God, and not vice versa, and this Life is its own self-affectivity, phenomenality itself, and it phenomenalises itself in everything that is alive.16 Odd though this philosophy of Christianity might appear in its language, Henry takes pains to square it as best he can with creedal Christianity. Christ, the Arch-Son of God, is precisely ‘the self-generation of absolute Life’ (99) and also the ‘First Living’ (109), and so both divine and human. If there is little or no teaching of the Holy Spirit in C’est moi la vérité, one is sketched in Paroles du Christ. Yet Henry’s focus remains the Father and the Arch-Son, and within that focus is an interest in what Jesus says, including his parables.17 It is an interest, however, that could not be further removed from the insights of the historical-critical method of reading the gospels. ‘The truth of Christianity is not that a certain Jesus wandered from village to village, trailing crowds after him, arousing admiration for his teaching as for his works’ but is something that ‘can testify only to itself’, something that Henry calls ‘Life’.18 Source criticism, form criticism and redaction criticism are all beside the point in Henry’s trilogy. Henry discusses the parable of the father and his two sons in C’est moi la vérité, which is largely occupied with the fourth gospel, although the exegesis is appropriate in that context since Henry is preoccupied there with the relation between God as Father and 11 12

13 14

15

16 17

18

See Henry, Barbarism, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Continuum, 2012). See Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, pp. 727, 387. See Dominique Janicaud, ‘The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology’, trans. Bernard G. Prusak, in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, 60 vols, vol. 4, trans. Thomas Gornall (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964), 1a q. 18 art. 3, and Henry, I am the Truth, p. 104. See Henry, I am the Truth, pp. 55–6. Henry briefly discusses several parables, including passages in the fourth gospel not usually regarded as parabolic in I am the Truth, pp. 114, 125, 255. See Henry, I am the Truth, pp. 6, 10. Henry rejects the historical critical method, without naming it directly, in the introduction to I am the Truth.

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we ‘livings’, his sons (regardless of whether we are male or female). Yet we should begin with the later volume, Paroles du Christ, which attends to the Synoptic Gospels and in which Henry gives his general view of parables. Why does Jesus speak in parables? Before we answer that question, Henry thinks, we need to reflect on Jesus’s words in general. The ‘Word [Parole] of God’, he says, ‘speaks a completely different language, different in principle from human language’, and so ‘we are compelled to recognize that his Word [Parole] eludes all the conceptions of language’ with which we moderns are familiar (3). Those conceptions, whether in analytic philosophy of language or in hermeneutics, converge in that they all regard language ‘in its act of speech as different from that about which it speaks, its “content”’ (3). Yet this is not the case with Jesus: ‘His claim is not only to transmit a divine revelation but purely and simply to be in himself this Revelation’ (7). Or, in a later formulation, Christ is precisely ‘the way in which God speaks to us’: his words are one with their content.19 With this formulation in mind, we may return to the earlier question, ‘Why does Jesus speak in parables?’ The answer Henry gives is because of the ‘nature of reality’ Jesus discerns and about which he wishes to instruct his audiences. The reality that Jesus sees, according to Henry, is divided between the visible and the invisible: From an astonishingly brief and very often concise story, happening in the world and told in the language of the world, the parable suggests laws and types of relationships which are no longer those of the world but of life. And it does so in the double sense of this life which we experience in ourselves as our own life and also of that which never ceases to give life to itself and to enable it: eternal Life. The goal of the parable hence is to establish an analogy between two universes, that of the visible and of the invisible, of the finite and of the infinite, in such a way that a series of events occurring in the first prompts us to form a notion of the second, namely the reign of God.20 We pass by way of parable not from this world to another world as thought within the duplex ordo of natural and supernatural worlds but from the world of representation to the non-world of Life. We hear the words of Christ ‘in the silence where no noise is possible, no gaze – in the silence of the heart where God sees, where his Word speaks’ (117). This view of the Word is what informs Henry’s reading of Luke 15: 11–32. Henry approaches the parable by way of the question of spiritual birth and how we may fall away from it. As he says in C’est moi la vérité: The issue is not understanding how people living from an uncertain and ill-assured life, incapable of founding itself – how people similar to the dead – could be capable by some radical transformation in their nature of changing into quite different beings, those Sons dressed in white that are described in Revelation, those ‘children of God’s promise’ that Paul speaks of (Galatians 4: 28), who are promised to an incorruptible life. (163) Not at all: the issue is ‘how the Sons who are all Sons of God’s absolute Life, living only in and through it, can actually lose this condition’ (163). How can a person fall from light into darkness, from life into representation (and, from there, into barbarism)? More than 19

20

Henry, Words of Christ, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2012), p. 3. Also see I am the Truth, p. 123. Henry, Words of Christ, p. 91.

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that, the issue pivots on ‘how, having lost it [life], they can find it again and be reborn in this unique and absolute Life that, from affecting itself and giving itself, does not know death’ (163). Thus led into the parable, Henry reads it as about a recovery from having fallen into ‘the world’ (the ‘far country’) and a return to ‘life’ (‘my father’): It is in his capacity as Son and because he is one that the lost Son can regain a condition that was originally his, and that, for this reason, he in fact regains it. The prior character of the condition of living does not merely mean that living precedes any becoming that may occur. Rather, this condition of living itself refers back to its own precondition, to the absolute-Before of Life from which the living person takes his living quality. Any becoming that can happen to him presupposes within the living that absolute-Before, to which this becoming ultimately returns. It is to this radical presupposition of absolute Life, included in the condition of the living and making it possible, that the Christian concept of Son refers. (163–4) All of us are alive only because of the primal movement of Life within us, Henry argues, and the nexus between life and Life cannot be severed. Someone can forget his or her status as a living being, which means forgetting the ‘interior presupposition of his condition’ (164), and Henry describes what brings about this forgetfulness: Phenomenologically, someone who lives only for himself, who cares only about his own feelings and pleasures (as if he gave them to himself and as if the power that really gives them did not exist), who believes that he leads an autonomous life and is not the beneficiary or debtor of any heritage or any promise – is that person not the prodigal Son? (164) We are lost when in the ‘far country’ that Henry calls the world. I turn now to look at the right-hand panel of the triptych, a reading of the same parable by Jean-Luc Marion. Close to Henry in some respects, especially in his understanding of the auto-affection of the flesh, Marion is nonetheless far from him in that his broad commitment is to an ecstatic phenomenology. In the work of his latest maturity, he seeks to register and describe a new class of phenomena in which intentionality is saturated by intuition or, if you wish, in which givenness (Gegebenheit) is as primary as Husserl suggested it was in Die Idee der Phänomenologie (1907). ‘To give pure giving to be thought – that, in retrospect it seems to me, is what is at stake in God without Being. It is also the task of my future work . . .’21 With these words Marion concludes the preface to the English translation of Dieu sans l’être in January 1991, and in writing them he is thinking of Réduction et donation (1989), in which he develops the ‘third reduction’, the one that leads past present objectness (Husserl) and even Being (Heidegger) to givenness and hence to the discovery of saturated phenomena. ‘So much reduction, so much givenness’ becomes his touchstone.22 If we perform the third reduction we shall discover four 21

22

Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, foreword David Tracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. xxv. Marion’s clearest account of this situation is in ‘Phenomenology of Givenness and First Philosophy’, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), §§ 4–5. Also see his Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), §1.

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sorts of saturated phenomena: with respect to quantity, an event cannot be aimed at; as regards quality, an idol dazzles us; as to relation, the flesh is absolute; and with reference to modality, an icon cannot be gazed upon. Revelation will be saturation to the second degree, involving all four types, we are told, and if scripture is revealed it will be open to be read by way of these paradoxes. Yet in Dieu sans l’être Marion is concerned with ‘pure giving’ rather than ‘givenness’, and while it may well be possible to read the parable of the father and his two sons by way of givenness (and while there may be a common root to the question of the gift and the question of givenness) Marion does so here in terms of the gift. Marion’s exegesis of the parable is the third of three analyses of biblical texts the intent of which is to uncover ‘a difference that is indifferent to ontological difference’ and how it can ‘outwit the play of being with Being’ (86). The first text is Romans 4: 17, the evocation of Abraham’s faith; the second is 1 Corinthians 1: 28, in which the wisdom of God is set against the wisdom of the world; and the third is Luke 15: 12–32, the parable that has been our text for some time. Why this parable? Because, Marion says: This text ineluctably demands our attention, since it offers the only usage in all the New Testament of the philosophical term par excellence, ousia (Luke 15: 12–13): A man had two sons. And the younger of the two said to his father: ‘Father, give me the share of ousia that is coming to me.’ (95–6) Of course, ousia is used here in a pre-philosophical sense (‘disposable goods’), something that Luther and Heidegger both knew, but Marion does not need there to be an Aristotelian understanding of ousia in the parable in order to develop a philosophical reading of the text. He glosses it as follows: The son, in the role of heir, although the younger, already had the use and enjoyment of them [the family’s goods]: son of the master, heir by right, he was able to look on these goods as his own; or rather, this enjoyment did not strictly coincide with possession, nor this usage with disposability: between one and the other term intervened an irreducible authority: the father. Not that the father, abusive and stingy, would disinherit his sons (proof being that as soon as the share is asked for, he gives it with neither delay nor discussion). The father gave, and immediately gives what one asks of him, the share of the ousia; the younger son therefore does not suffer from not having the enjoyment of the ousia, but from owing it to a tacit and imprescriptible gift from his father. Therefore he asks not so much for his share of ousia – since he has always enjoyed that – but not to have to owe that share of ousia to a gift; he demands less the ousia than ‘the share of the ousia that is coming to him’ as out and out property – not the ousia but possession of the ousia. (97) Marion seizes on the motif of gift in the parable or, more exactly, the antithesis between gift and possession. Almost invisible in the biblical narrative, the phenomenological gaze renders it visible. What is the son’s fault? The refusal of a gift, the declining of obligation to the father: He asks that one grant that he no longer have to receive any gift – precisely, no longer have to receive the ousia as gift: He asks to possess it, dispose of it, enjoy it without passing through the gift and the reception of the gift. The son wants to owe nothing to his father, and above all not to owe him a gift; he asks to have a father no longer – the ousia without the father or the gift. (97)

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When the younger son comes home the father ‘returns filiation’ (99) to him only to find that the older son expresses his preoccupation with the ousia (‘thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends’). The father ‘does not see the ousia as the sons see it’ (99), and this is because ‘with his gaze he transpierces all that is not inscribed in the rigor of a gift, giving, received, given: goods, common by definition and circulation, are presented as the indifferent stakes of those who, through them, give themselves to each other, in a circulation that is more essential than what it exchanges’ (99). Ousia becomes an idol once it stops the gaze, becomes a possession, yet when it is put into the play of gift giving ‘it refers the gaze to the infinity of other gazes that envisage it’ (100), and in this way ousia escapes the game of being and Being that Heidegger sets up. What game is this? It is what Heidegger calls the ‘ontico-ontological difference’, namely that there is a fundamental distinction between beings and Being. In the West we have forgotten Being and attend only to beings: such is the starting point of Sein und Zeit (1927). ‘In the question which we are to work out’, he writes there, ‘what is asked about is Being – that which determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which [woraufhin] entities are already understood, however we may discuss them in details. The Being of entities “is” not itself an entity.’23 Only by accomplishing the Destruktion of Western ontology and thereby clearing away the substance metaphysics of Western philosophy can one begin to think again, whether with Aristotle as guide (as in the earlier works) or with Hölderlin’s poems before one (as in the later writings). Henry distances himself from the ontico-ontological distinction, especially the prizing of Being, in order to affirm Life; and Marion is also wary of it, for he does not think it right to think of God in terms of either a being (the first being, the highest being) or even Being. We should think of God as ‘without Being’ and ‘without being the God of the philosophers’ (the latter is quietly implied by the l in the French title, Dieu sans l’être) because the tradition, coming to us from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, is that the first of the divine names is the good.24 Heidegger, who regards theology as an ontic science is as much a block to Christian thinking as he is someone who provokes it to a new radicalism in his readings of Paul’s letters. Taken together, the three biblical texts allow Marion to draw a conclusion: ‘biblical revelation offers, in some rare texts, the emergence of a certain indifference of being to Being; being thus makes sport of Being only in outwitting ontological difference’ (101), and it does so by way of the gift. Here we recall that Marion, scholar of Descartes, argues that the great philosopher ‘teaches us what is at stake in the onto-theo-logical constitution of all metaphysics, and Descartes recognizes limits to onto-theo-logical constitution to the point of exposing it to its eventual destitution’.25 The word ‘destitution’ is carefully 23

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Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), pp. 25–6. See Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, ‘The Divine Names’, in The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, foreword, notes and translation collaboration Paul Rorem, pref. René Roques (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), Ch. 4. Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-Theology in Cartesian Thought, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1999), p. 352. With respect to Marion on destitution, see Vincent Carraud, Pascal et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), Ch. III, esp. §16.

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chosen. It comes from Pascal who, as Marion reads him, argues that metaphysics, regarded as a conceptual order with its own rigour, is lower than the order of charity; and Marion suggests that Descartes brings metaphysics to the very place where Pascal can underline its limits.26 The higher order of divine love has no interest in refuting metaphysics, since it has its own ‘logic’, that of caritas, and it merely continues in its own way, aware that metaphysics is destitute of charity. Here, in Marion’s reading of the parable, we may see Marion repeating with respect to Heidegger what Pascal did in relation to Descartes: gift giving, when properly understood, renders destitute the thinking of being. Marion acknowledges his debt to the author of the Pensées in the words that conclude his reading, ‘Charity delivers Being/being’ (102). It will readily be seen that both Henry and Marion find their own philosophical views confirmed in the parable of the father and his own sons. Scripture, which usually challenges its readers by falling outside or beyond usual patterns of thought, here confirms two quite different styles of phenomenology. True, Henry and Marion seek to nudge the parable to manifest quite different things – life and gift – yet one can only wonder how other parables would square with enstatic or ecstatic phenomenology. In much the same way, as we shall see, Derrida reads Genesis 11: 1–9 as a story about deconstruction. Before examining his reading of the passage, however, we need to know what deconstruction is and, in particular, its relation with phenomenology. Often enough, deconstruction is taken to be a decisive turn away from phenomenology as practised by Husserl and even Heidegger. After all, Derrida finds a hidden reliance on presence in Husserl’s theory of signs, and seeks to deconstruct Heidegger when he adopts a vocabulary of spirit.27 I shall focus only on what Derrida says of Husserl, beginning with his reading of the German’s late essay ‘The Origin of Geometry as an Intentional-Historical Problem’ (1936). Husserl’s concern in this essay is with ideal objects. They do not abide in a Platonic topos hyperouranios, a sphere above the heavens, as evoked in Phaedrus 247c. Not at all: their ideality is given in the constituting power of the phenomenological gaze, an intentionality that regards ‘a world of absolutely pure possibility’, a world marked by historicity sooner than history.28 Ideal objects are always before one as possibilities, and indeed the possibility of finding an ideal object in all places and at all times is required for there to be an ideal object in the first place. Husserl insists that ideal objects need language: the pure transcendental language of intentionality that constitutes meaning, Verleiblichung. Derrida argues that even if transcendental language constitutes meaning this pure language requires empirical script, Verkörperung, to be preserved. Otherwise, the ideal object would be tied to the transcendental subjectivity of individuals. A mathematician who discovers a geometrical object would be able to tell of his or her find, yet a restriction of ideal 26

27

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See Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 2005), S329, 339, 755. Also see Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism, Ch. 5. See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison, pref. Newton Garver (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), and Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic, rev. and ed. Ludwig Landgreb, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks, intro. James S. Churchill, afterword Lothar Eley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 351.

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objects to living speech would limit their circulation to a contingent living community and thereby compromise their objectivity.29 Only empirical writing can allow the original sense of ideal objects to be reactivated by mathematicians and guarantee the objective status of those objects. Yet Verköperung introduces death in its transcendental register into the scene. For as soon as something is committed to script, it announces the possibility of the writer’s demise; signification will take place regardless of whether or not the writer is alive. Put otherwise: without the possibility of the mathematician’s death, there could be no objectivity in the realm of ideal objects. Such is one thrust of Derrida’s reading of Husserl’s essay. In his next study of the German philosopher, La Voix et le phénomène (1967), he attends again to ideality. ‘The ultimate form of ideality, the ideality of ideality, that in which in the last instance one may anticipate or recall all repetition, is the living present, the self-presence [la présence à soi] of transcendental life’, he insists.30 ‘Presence has always been and will always, forever, be the form in which, we say apodictically, the infinite diversity of contents is produced’ (6). It is ‘the concept of life’ (6) that is at issue insofar as it is found in ‘living present’ and ‘transcendental life’ (6). Now Derrida has already shown that transcendental life requires empirical script, and that this script introduces the possibility of death. Accordingly, the living present must be adjusted so as to include death. It becomes ‘la vie la mort’, a play of life and death.31 Two things immediately follow from this demonstration. The first is that self-presence is not a burst of intuition for which we might long but the rigidity of death. And the second is that the possibility of death is inserted into the centre of phenomenology with the consequence that phenomenology is reoriented. It becomes deconstruction: meaning overflows the living present. ‘The deconstruction of the Tower of Babel . . . gives a good idea of what deconstruction is: an unfinished edifice whose half-completed structures are visible, letting one guess at the scaffolding behind them.’32 So Derrida reads Genesis 11: 1–9 as a story about deconstruction, about the passage from a presumptive unity to difference. It is an apt choice of a biblical text to read, for the narrative is set in the time when ‘the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech’ (Genesis 11: 1, KJV). Here is Derrida extemporising an exegesis of the passage: What happens in the Babel episode, in the tribe of the Shems? Notice that the word ‘shem’ already means name: Shem equals name. The Shems decide to raise a tower – not just in order to reach all the way to the heavens but also, it says in the text, to make a name for themselves . . . So they want to make a name for themselves – how will they do it? By imposing their tongue on the entire universe on the basis of this sublime edification. Tongue: actually the Hebrew word here is the word that signifies lip. Not tongue but lip. Thus, they want to impose their lip on the entire universe. 29

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See Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’: An Introduction, trans. and pref. John P. Leavey, ed. David B. Allison (Stony Brook, NY: Nicolas Hays, 1978), p. 87. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. and intro. David B. Allison, pref. Newton Garver (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 6. See Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 259. Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), p. 102.

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Had their enterprise succeeded, the universal tongue would have been a particular language imposed by violence, by force, by violent hegemony over the rest of the world. It would not have been a universal language – for example in the Leibnizian sense – a transparent language to which everyone would have had access. Rather, the master with the most force would have imposed this language on the world and, by virtue of this fact, it would have become the universal tongue . . . (101)33 So the Shem propose a name, their own, for the tower and for the universe. Immediately, though, God intervenes. ‘And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded’ (Genesis 11: 5, KJV), and what he sees is threatening. ‘So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth’ (Genesis 11: 8–9a, KJV). For Derrida, the biblical narrative is about a conflict of two proper names, Shem and Babel: The text says: God proclaimed his name loudly, the name which he himself has chosen and which thus his. Already one can see that the conflict is a war between two proper names and the one that will carry the day is the one that either imposes its law or in any case prevents the other from imposing its own. God says: Babel . . . It can be confusedly understood as ‘confusion’ – it is a word that will come to signify confusion, which seems confusedly to mean confusion . . . Thus one sees that God declares war by forcing men, if you will, to translate his proper name with a common noun. In effect, he says to them: Now you will not impose a single tongue; you will be condemned to the multiplicity of tongues; translate and, to begin with, translate my name. (101–2) God catches the Shem in a double bind: they are required to translate the name he has imposed on the tower (Babel), while also pointing out that the task can never be done, for no proper name can be translated. What occurs, Derrida says in a Joycean moment, is a ‘disschemination’ (103): the Shem is disseminated, diverted along other paths (chemins). More generally, Derrida argues, we see that every sacred text, every literary work, is at once structured like a proper name, unable to be translated, while nonetheless calling for translation. The exploration of this double bind is the basis for a great deal of Derrida’s work. Phenomenological reflection on scripture approaches its centenary, yet it has not been very extensive or, as yet, prominent. It has been marked either by a hostility to the historical-critical method or by a lack of interest in it. Recent signs, however, suggest that there is a renewed interest among phenomenologists in the Bible, and the promise of careful and nuanced readings of scripture by way of intentional analysis, attention to saturated phenomena, and the imbrication of history and revelation is to be valued. Heidegger abandoned phenomenological reading of scripture in 1921, and there is a need to return to his readings of Paul’s letters and to extend his work on the Bible by folding it into new 33

Also see the account given by Derrida in ‘Des Tours de Babel’, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 102–33, and in Ulysse gramophone/Deux mots pour Joyce (Paris: Galilée, 1987): the whole of ‘Deux mots pour Joyce’ turns around the Babel motif, especially the two words ‘HE WAR’ (Finnegans Wake 258: 12).

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insights made by later phenomenologists. It is to be hoped that the new work in this field will respond more directly to biblical texts, learn from historical critics (while observing the limits of historical criticism), and not succumb to temptation to find images of the reader’s own practice in scripture.

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THE GOSPEL OF JOHN IN EARLY CHRISTIAN ART Robin M. Jensen

Introduction

T

he earliest surviving examples of early Christian painting and relief sculpture come predominantly from a funerary context. In addition, a large proportion of the paintings, mostly found in the catacombs of Rome, tend to strike modern viewers as rather sketchy or even clumsy while the reliefs, seen on third- and fourth-century sarcophagi, often seem a collection of stock motifs somewhat arbitrarily selected and arranged. The iconographic themes and their arrangement and execution may have been dictated, to some extent, by the contexts or circumstances of their placement, just as the materials and quality of the works likely varied according to patrons’ budgets and artisans’ abilities. Thus, most scholars value these artefacts as much for their value as visual testimony to the economic or social circumstances of lived religion as for any intrinsic beauty they may have. Specifically, since their intended sepulchral setting must have influenced their composition, it is reasonable to assume that these monuments pictorially expressed certain aspects of Christian beliefs, hopes or values, especially with regard to death and the afterlife. Yet, initially it might have been hard to distinguish anything decidedly Christian about many of the artefacts. The oldest examples borrowed or adapted generically decorative or universally acceptable religious motifs that would have suited pagan as well as Christian clients: grapevines, birds, vases with fruit or flowers, maritime motifs, harvest scenes, or simple geometric patterns. Arguably, Christian patrons chose the most adaptable designs – ones they could infuse with Christian significance (e.g. the shepherd, dove, fish or anchor). Soon, however, artists’ workshops developed a catalogue of clearly recognisable Christian themes that were drawn from specific biblical narratives that, along with lamps, bowls, or gems, adorned the tomb chambers or sculpted burial boxes of adherents to this relatively young religion. The oldest of these figures largely were derived from Hebrew Bible narratives: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham offering Isaac, Noah, Daniel, the three Babylonian youths and, especially, Jonah, whose story was uniquely told in a sequence of scenes depicting his being tossed into the sea, swallowed by the monster, regurgitated onto land, and reclining under a leafy pergola. Given their Christian context, many of these characters undoubtedly were seen as pre-Christian heroes for the faith, rescued by God from danger or death (appropriate for a tomb). However, their stories also carry less obvious significance, influenced by typological exegesis that saw them as signifying Christian sacraments or as

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prophetically alluding to events of Jesus’s life. For example, Jonah’s enormous popularity in Christian funeral art might be explained by the malleability of his story to a variety of interpretations. As a moral exemplar, he is delivered from death and ultimately obeys God’s command. In addition, Jonah’s tale also serves as a ‘sign’ referring to Jesus’ resurrection (following Matthew 12: 40), which in turn is an affirmation of the deceased’s own blissful afterlife – symbolised by his repose under his leafy shelter. Finally, that afterlife was promised in the baptismal sacrament, which itself is symbolised by Jonah’s death-like plunge into the water and the belly of the beast, followed by his regenerative emergence out of the water and repose on dry land.1 By the late third century, New Testament stories began to appear in conjunction with this catalogue of Old Testament figures and vied for space on Christian catacombs and sarcophagus friezes. Like the Hebrew Scripture images, the New Testament scenes that joined them followed certain stock patterns. Although never exactly alike, their identification is relatively easy, once viewers are familiar with those conventions. Among the earliest were images of Jesus’s baptism and the adoration of the magi. By the early fourth century, the scene of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead was a common motif. Following this in popularity were pictorial representations of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus changing water to wine at the Cana wedding feast, Jesus multiplying loaves and fishes, and a stock set of healing scenes: Jesus healing the man born blind, the paralytic, and the woman with the issue of blood. These figures appeared in other media as well (e.g. ivory, glass, pottery, gems, metalwork and mosaic), expanding not only the repertoire of Christian iconography but also its context and function. By the mid fourth century, Christian art began to appear in other venues, including the walls and apses of newly built basilicas, and other New Testament scenes appeared, including the nativity (with manger, ox and ass), Jesus raising the dead widow’s son and Jairus’s daughter, Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem, Jesus washing Peter’s feet, Jesus before Pilate, and Peter’s denial and arrest. Even as it expanded, however, the iconographic catalogue lacked scenes that modern viewers tend to take for granted: the Annunciation, Transfiguration, Last Supper, Crucifixion, or the empty tomb, for example. These do not appear with regularity before the fifth or sixth century. Illustrations of the parables are similarly rare. Instead, we mainly see depictions of Jesus’s miracles and healings, particularly of those described in the fourth gospel.2 In fact, images from the Gospel of John account for about half of all the New Testament scenes in third- and fourth-century Christian art.3 Thus, Christian visual art represents its own scriptural canon, one that is conspicuously intertestamental in its inclusive alignment of figures from both Hebrew Scriptures and 1

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Jonah’s depiction as naked is not inconsequential here. It may well be an allusion to baptismal nudity. On the ways that Hebrew Bible images functioned in early Christian art see Robin M. Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 64–93. For an important work on the subject of Christ as healer on sarcophagi see David Knipp, Christus Medicus’ in der frühchristlichen Sarkophagskulptur (Leiden: Brill, 1998). This figure is approximate, based on my own research and a variety of other studies including the tabulations of Theodor Klauser, ‘Studien zur Enstehungsgeschichte der christlichen Kunst’, JbAC 4 (1961), pp. 128–45. Also see a more recent essay by Jutta Dresken-Weiland, ‘Bilder im Grab und ihre Bedeutung im Kontext der Christianisierung der frühchristlichen Welt’, AnTard 19 (2011), pp. 63–78.

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Figure 10.1: Mid fourth-century Christian sarcophagus, Vatican Museo Pio Cristiano. Photo: Robin M. Jensen. Gospels and, of the latter, in its marked emphasis for narratives that are specifically or uniquely Johannine. For example, the main frieze of a typical mid fourth-century Christian sarcophagus, now in the Vatican’s Museo Pio Cristiano, shows a series of motifs common to this time, place, and type of monument (Fig. 10.1). From left to right we see Cain and Abel presenting their offerings to God, Jesus with Adam and Eve, an unidentified figure (the deceased?) holding a scroll, Jesus healing the paralytic (who carries off his bed), Jesus healing the man born blind, Jesus changing water to wine, and Jesus raising Lazarus. A different example presents Jesus with Adam and Eve, Jesus healing the paralytic, Jesus changing water to wine, Jesus entering Jerusalem, Jesus healing the blind man, and Jesus raising Lazarus. Both of these friezes depict stories unique to the Gospel of John: the Cana miracle, the healing of the man born blind, and the raising of Lazarus. The Johannine version of the paralytic’s healing could be the source for the image of a man carrying a bed on his back (John 5: 9), although it might also be based on the story of the man lowered through the roof (see Mark 2: 12 and parallels). This pattern repeatedly appears in early Christian art, with the addition of the woman at the well, which is somewhat less common. Excluding the apocryphal scenes of Peter’s arrest and striking the rock or Jesus giving the law to Peter and Paul, a rough survey of the top ten most frequently depicted New Testament narratives, shows that five of these Johannine stories rank among them as numbers one (Lazarus), three (paralytic), five (blind man), six (wedding at Cana), and nine (Samaritan woman). The second most popular scene, the multiplication of loaves and fishes, occurs in all four gospels. The adoration of the magi ranks in the fourth position, Peter’s denial in the seventh, Jesus healing the woman with the issue of blood in the eighth, and Jesus’s baptism at the tenth spot, more or less tied with the image of the Samaritan woman. Jesus washing Peter’s feet appears occasionally, primarily on sarcophagus reliefs of the mid to later fourth century, and often is juxtaposed with the scene of Pilate washing his hands. A number of explanations could account for the notable popularity of these top five Johannine scenes in early Christian art. First, they are among the most richly detailed and dramatic stories in the gospels; their characters and settings are described and imaginatively

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elaborated. These features also made them especially favoured for early Christian homilies and exegetical writings.4 While the Synoptic Gospels also recount healing miracles, they often do so only in a few lines, whereas John’s gospel usually devotes nearly a whole chapter to their narration, even adding dialogue, which makes them especially vivid and even theatrical. As such, they are natural subjects for visual art; they practically demand to be illustrated. The only comparable synoptic pericopes are the alternative accounts of the healing of the paralytic, the healing of Jairus’s daughter, and the healing of the woman with the issue of blood (Matthew 9: 18–26 and parallels). The latter two stories, which are juxtaposed in the gospels and, like narratives in the fourth gospel, include several characters and dialogue, also appear frequently in early Christian art. Second, John’s marked tendency to incorporate symbolic images and figurative language (‘good wine’, ‘living water’, etc.) gives it a natural kinship with figurative art, which uses these kinds of devices as iconographic aids. Whether in textual or pictorial narrative, they imply that the stories reveal more than they seem to on the surface, giving them both depth and dimension. They signify more profound events (e.g. Jesus’s resurrection), allude to core Christian hopes (e.g. forgiveness of sins, deliverance from death), or typify Christian sacraments, especially baptism, but in a related way, the Eucharist.5 Similarly, the theological significance of these particular miracle stories are elaborated even within the texts themselves, so that exegetes and artists alike could not treat them as simple historical episodes. Just as when Jesus tells Martha, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ (John 11: 25), their transcendent connotations are evident and even obvious. Moreover, some of these themes are particularly appropriate for the funerary context of the artworks – catacombs and sarcophagi – a fact that undoubtedly influenced their selection. Like the raising of Lazarus, which is an obvious choice for a sepulchral monument, the other Johannine motifs also point to life beyond death. For example, the woman at the well receives the water of eternal life, and the paralytic is restored. Third, these five narratives are explicitly epiphanic. They do more than teach about Jesus. Like the Cana story, John’s gospel describes these episodes as signs that reveal God’s glory and Jesus’s identity and authority. Such revelations bring people to believe in him as Messiah and Son of God (see John 2: 11; 9: 16; 11: 47). The signs also show that Jesus is the source of the law and therefore not subject to it (see John 5: 15–18). By seeing his works (his self-disclosure), his followers perceived who he was and comprehended his mission and his power. Their presentation in visual art is, arguably, a way for these stories to be seen again, and not just retold or read from a manuscript. In this 4

5

John was an especially popular gospel for early Christian exegetes. Augustine, John Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia, are among fourth and fifth-century writers who composed homilies or wrote commentaries on the fourth gospel. The Gospel of John also played an important role in the doctrinal controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, which may have contributed to its widespread popularity in art. In Hist. 6.14, Eusebius of Caesarea notes that Clement of Alexandria distinguished John from the Synoptic Gospels, saying that unlike Matthew, Mark and Luke, John’s was a ‘spiritual Gospel’. This is a core argument that runs throughout my recent book, Baptismal Imagery in Early Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012). See also the essay by Martine Dulaey, which emphasises the significance of the images of the Samaritan woman and Lazarus as related to early Christian baptismal catechesis: ‘L’évangile de Jean et l’iconographie: Lazare, la Samaritaine et la pédagogie des Pères’, in C. Badilita and C. Kannengiesser (eds), Les Pères de l’Eglise dans le monde d’aujourd’hui (Bucharest: Curtea Veche, 2006), pp. 137–64.

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regard, all Christians have the opportunity to perceive and grasp the theophanic point of these stories. Jesus’s words to Philip, ‘whoever has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14: 9) are here connected to the recognition generated by Christ’s revelatory works: his signs and wonders. Thus, taking them in order of their appearance in the Gospel of John, the following analysis will consider the possible significance of these five scenes to viewers, not only in light of their physical appearance or artistic attributes, but also by reference to early Christian exegetical and theological reflection on the meaning of these stories as they were interpreted both verbally and pictorially. Finally, this examination views the sepulchral context of most of these early examples as relevant to their composition and their potential meaning or message.

The Wedding at Cana (John 2: 1–11) The story of Jesus arriving at a marriage feast and turning water into wine is Jesus’s first miracle in the fourth gospel, which describes this event as the initial moment of Christ’s epiphany: ‘This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him’ (John 2: 11). Early Christian visual art depicts this story by focusing on a single moment: a youthful Jesus pointing his staff at a group of jars (see Figs 10.1 and 10.2). Although the narrative specifies that there were six of these jars, large enough to hold twenty or thirty gallons, the images often show a group of three or five small vessels. Normally, only Jesus and one or two male servants or witnesses are shown; Jesus’s mother appears only rarely.6 Jesus is dressed, as he usually is in early Christian art, like most of the other men in the scene – in the tunic and pallium of a well-dressed Roman citizen. He points at the jars with a staff and also carries a scroll, indicating his role as a teacher or philosopher. Other than that, only his long curly hair and beardless face tend to set him apart from his followers (cf. Fig. 10.1). This simple, abbreviated composition occasionally turns up in catacomb painting, but is commonplace on sarcophagus friezes from the early fourth century where it is part of a series of scenes that includes the multiplication of the loaves and other Johannine scenes, especially the raising of Lazarus, and the healing of the man born blind, or the healing of the paralytic (see Fig. 10.1). The image also appears in non-funerary art, for example on a fourth-century glass bowl now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (along with the three Hebrew youths, Tobias and his fish, and the healing of the paralytic), on the early fifth-century wooden doors of Santa Sabina in Rome (Fig. 10.2), in the mosaic vault of the Naples baptistery (Plate 1), and on several fifth- and sixth-century Christian ivories, including those on the cathedra of Ravenna’s Bishop Maximian. Unlike later representations of this scene, the early compositions contain no obvious reference to marriage or the wedding couple. In fact, without an explanation, one might not even know the narrative source for this iconography. Rather, this image seems more aimed at showing Jesus’s singular power. Considering its frequent proximity to depictions of Jesus’s miracle of the loaves, it might also have eucharistic significance, suggesting the 6

One example comes from the so-called Andrews ivory diptych, now in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. This ivory, long thought to be of a fifth-century date is now more commonly dated to the Carolingian period, although scholars think its composition probably was based on a fifth-century model.

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Figure 10.2: Jesus changing water to wine: early fifth-century wooden door panel, Basilica of Santa Sabina in Rome. Photo: Robin M. Jensen. wine for the sacred meal. Its proximity to the healing scenes also suggests that it broadly alludes to Jesus’s manifestation of his power, as the gospel indicates: ‘Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory’ (John 2: 11). To some extent seeing this miracle as the first of Jesus’s signs is consistent with early Christian textual interpretation of the narrative, but early exegetes did not overlook its possible eucharistic and even nuptial symbolism. Cyprian of Carthage, for example, incorporated wedding themes with the eucharistic significance of the story by emphasising the marital bond between Christ and the Church, symbolised by the water and wine in the eucharistic cup.7 Closer to the time of these monuments, in a sermon he delivered to the newly baptised, Cyril of Jerusalem cites the Cana story as proof of Christ’s physical presence in the eucharistic elements and describes the sacred meal as a kind of mystical wedding feast: Since once, at Cana in Galilee, he changed water into wine by the force of his will. Isn’t it reasonable, then, to believe that he now changes wine into blood? If when invited to an earthly marriage, he performed this marvel, would he not more readily 7

See Cyprian, Ep. 63.12.1–2; also Tertullian, Bapt. 9: ‘When called to a marriage he inaugurates with water the first rudiments of his power.’

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bestow on his friends (the friends of the true bridegroom), the benefits of his own body?8 This wedding feast was ritually observed in the eucharistic meal, which itself had parallels to the funerary banquets celebrated at the tomb. The deceased would hope to share such a feast in Paradise but in the interim, their families would gather at the grave to share a memorial repast in their honour.9 Some decades after Cyril, in one of his homilies on the fourth gospel, Augustine takes a different approach, focusing instead on the metaphor of the transformation of water to wine as a symbolising Christ’s renewal of the law, filling it with the inebriating spirit of his message: Thus, our Lord Jesus Christ changed water into wine, and what was tasteless became flavorful; what was not intoxicating became intoxicating (inebriat). If, however, he had ordered the water to be poured out and then put wine into them from the secret storehouses of creation . . . thereby emptying out the water, so that he could pour in wine, it would seem that he had expressed disavowed the old scriptures. But as he turned the water itself into wine, he showed us that the old scriptures too came from him . . . Indeed, those scriptures are also from the Lord. Yet, they have no flavor or intoxicating properties, unless Christ is recognized in them.10 The flavour and intoxicating aspects of the water-turned-wine symbolise, for Augustine, at least, the way that Jesus fulfilled scripture and, in that way, infused new significance into the sacred texts of the Jews. Thus the image’s specific concentration on the single moment of Jesus’s touching the jars of water to turn them to fine wine makes sense when seen as a messianic event or an instance of epiphany. However, the incorporation of the scene within a funereal setting (a tomb), also allows the nuptial symbolism to have some relevance. The deceased is invited to a paradisiacal wedding banquet. This sense is strengthened by the proximity of the multiplication of loaves and fishes, which underscores the ideas of abundance. Finally, one might see some baptismal significance of the image, in the sense that it emphasises the transformation of ordinary water through divine power (i.e. the invocation of the Holy Spirit into the font). This possibility is supported by the insertion of the servants and the water jars into the scene of Jesus speaking with the Samaritan woman at the well in the dome mosaic of the late fourth-century Naples baptistery (Plate 1). The juxtaposition of these two scenes suggests that the source of the water-turned-wine was that spring gushing up to eternal life (John 4: 14).

The Samaritan Woman at the Well (John 4: 4–42) The story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman draws her character with some detail and includes an interesting verbal exchange regarding why Jesus would ask a Samaritan for a 8 9

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Cyril, Myst. 4.2, trans. Robin M. Jensen (SC 126:136). See Robin M. Jensen, ‘Dining with the Dead: From the Mensa to the Altar in Christian Late Antiquity’, in L. Brink and D. Green (eds), Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context (Berlin: Walter DeGruyter, 2008), pp. 107–43. Augustine, Eu. Io. 9.5, trans. Robin M. Jensen (CCL 36:92–3).

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Figure 10.3: Detail from an early Christian sarcophagus; Jesus speaking with the Samaritan woman at the well: fourth-century Christian sarcophagus, Louvre Museum. Photo: Robin M. Jensen. drink. He offers her ‘living water’ in exchange and reveals that he knows the secrets of her life. At the conclusion of their conversation, Jesus discloses himself to her as the Messiah and she goes off testifying to others who come to believe in him. Visual representations of this story are more rare than the other Johannine stories discussed here, but have been identified in the third-century baptistery at Dura Europos and in the Catacomb of Callixtus.11 It also shows up in the fourth-century Catacomb of Peter and Marcellinus and the Catacomb of Via Latina, on a series of fourth-century sarcophagus reliefs (Fig. 10.3), and in a variety of non-funerary contexts from the fifth through the sixth centuries, including the dome of the Naples baptistery (with the Cana scene – Plate 1), terracotta tiles from North Africa, one of the ivory panels from the Maximian cathedra in Ravenna, a manuscript illumination in the Gospel of Rabbula, and mosaic panels such as the one at Ravenna’s Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. In most of the earlier compositions, the well is positioned between Jesus and the woman; in later images it is sometimes moved to one side, breaking the symmetry of the scene, but perhaps emphasising the dialogue 11

Michael Peppard has suggested that the Dura Europos image might depict the annunciation at the spring, rather than the woman at the well, however. See Peppard, ‘New Testament Imagery in the Early Christian Baptistery’, in L. Brody and G. Hoffman (eds), Dura-Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity (Boston: Macmillan Museum of Art, 2011).

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between Jesus and the woman over the centrality of the well. On the Maximian cathedra, Jesus holds a cross and the woman makes a gesture of acclamation toward it. Normally only Jesus and the woman appear in the scene. In a few instances a witness joins them.12 Early exegetes consistently treated this story’s reference to living water as an allusion to Christian baptism and the promise of eternal life that it offered. For example, Irenaeus poetically compared the unbaptised members of the community to dry flour that could not become inspirited lumps of dough without the addition of water. Noting that Jesus showed compassion to the sinful Samaritan woman by promising her living water, Irenaeus says that he offers the same ‘bath of incorruption’ is offered to all those wishing to join him.13 In one place, Tertullian spoke about the forgiveness offered by Christ even to this ‘sinful’ woman but in another mentioned her story in his list of baptismal figures: ‘When engaged in conversation he invites those who thirst to come to his everlasting water.’14 Cyprian saw it as signifying the one-time saving waters of baptism in contrast to the eucharistic cup, which is received again and again.15 In the fourth century, the story found its way into catechetical instruction. Gregory Nazianzen cited it in his Oration on Baptism, along with the text of Isaiah 55: 1 (‘All who thirst, let them come to the water’): The blessing is on sale to you for your will alone; God accepts the yearning itself as a high price. He thirsts to be thirsted for, he gives a drink to those wishing to drink, he is benefited by being asked for benefit. The great gift is at hand; he gives with more pleasure than others take in receiving . . . Blessed is the one of whom Christ asks a drink, like that Samaritan woman, and to whom he gives ‘a fountain of water springing up to eternal life’.16 Gregory’s reading is much like Cyril of Jerusalem’s or Ambrose of Milan’s who also cites the passage from the Gospel of John (7: 37–9) in which Jesus invites anyone who is thirsty to come to him and drink. At least one fifth-century bishop, Gaudentius of Brescia, interpreted the story to suggest that Jesus actually baptised the woman.17 Augustine offers a slightly different reading. He sees the woman as a model of the Church; she was a Samaritan and not a Jew. Augustine therefore asks his congregation of Gentiles to recognise themselves in her, as a figure of someone who believed and followed the one who told her to draw living water.18 None of these various interpretations ever strays far from a baptismal meaning, of course. That seems obvious, given the narrative’s allusion to Jesus’s water as ‘the water of 12 13

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Descriptions of more images can be found in Dulaey, ‘L’évangile de Jean’, pp. 150–5. Irenaeus, Haer. 3.17.2. This image of the newly baptised as dough appears also in Augustine’s sermons to the newly baptised, see Serm. 227; Serm. 229.1; and Serm. 229A.2. Tertullian, Pud. 11.1–3; Bapt. 9.4. See also Ernst Dassmann, Sündenvergebung durch Taufe, Busse und Märtyrerfürbitte in den Zeugnissen frühchristlicher Frömmigkeit und Kunst (Münster: Aschendorff, 1973), pp. 293–4. Cyprian, Ep. 63.8.4. See also Ep. 69.2.1. Gregory of Naz., Or. 40.27 (On Baptism), trans. Verna Harrison, Festal Orations: St. Gregory of Nazianzus (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Press, 2008), p. 123. See also Cyril of Jerusalem, Cat. 16.11. Alternatively Optatus, Parm. 5.5, in which the water signifies the Gospel, not specifically baptism. Gaudentius, Tract. 19.11. Augustine, Eu. Io. 15.10.

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eternal life’. This closely parallels the idea that baptismal water was ‘living’ in the sense of being cleansing as well as life giving or salvific. The story’s well is the font, the woman the baptismal candidate (the one who seeks the water), and Jesus is the one who supplies the spiritual thirst-quenching water and also serves as the rite’s administrator. The woman’s sins are, in a sense, forgiven by Jesus giving her access to his living water, just as the lifegiving baptismal water washes away the neophyte’s accumulated sins. The image is thus especially appropriate for the decoration of a baptistery (as at Dura Europos and Naples), but it also suits the pictorial adornment of a tomb, specifically as an allusion to baptism, and its promise of eternal life for those who receive it. Like the Cana scene, this image alludes to the efficacy of the sacraments and emphasises the abundance of grace available to those who receive them.

Jesus Healing the Invalid at the Pool of Bethesda (John 5: 2–9) John’s account of Jesus healing the sick man by the pool is quite different from the story in the Synoptic Gospels concerning the healing of a paralytic. According to Mark and Luke, four men carried the man to Jesus and, when they could not otherwise get near him, let him down on his pallet through the roof of the house where Jesus was staying (Mark 2: 3–5; Luke 5: 17–26). Matthew’s briefer episode reports only that Jesus heals a paralytic and, as in the other three gospels, tells him that his sins are forgiven and to ‘take up his bed and walk’ (Matt 9: 2–6). All four narratives share the association with forgiveness of sins and the command that the man rise, pick up his pallet, and walk (or go home). However, John’s story has a completely different beginning and setting. It takes place by the Jerusalem pool known as Bethesda (or Bethsaida or Bethzatha), known for its healing properties. Jesus sees the sick man (not specified as a paralytic) and knew that he had been lying there a long time, hoping that someone would come along to help him into the water. Instead of offering him assistance, Jesus simply instructs him to rise, pick up his bed, and walk. Some ancient variations in the story add an explanation of the water’s healing properties: an angel of the Lord goes down at certain times and troubles the water so that the first one to step in would be cured of disease or infirmity. In all four gospels, the healing leads to a conflict over Jesus’s authority to forgive sins, although in John’s version, the problem primarily is whether Jesus broke the Sabbath law. One additional distinction in John’s narrative is Jesus’s claim, not only that the Son of Man has authority to forgive sins (Matthew 9: 6 and parallels), but also that ‘the one who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life – he does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life’ (John 5: 24). Jesus and this sick or paralysed man appear often in early Christian art. As is typical of most early Christian iconography, the depiction is often abbreviated, thus revealing little that would help clarify which gospel version it shows, although any reference to the paralytic’s being lowered through the roof are rare in early Christian art. Jesus stands near the man, who is quite small or even childlike in stature, either sitting on or carrying away his bed (see Fig. 10.1). Sometimes a witness or two appear, but in some cases we see only the man carrying away his bed, as in the Catacomb of Domitilla. This latter scene appears on the ceiling of cubiculum 77 (Plate 2), as a part of a series of images that includes Jesus raising Lazarus, the adoration of the Magi, Jesus’s baptism, the multiplication of the loaves, and Moses striking the rock. The early sixth-century mosaic programme of scenes from Jesus’s life in the nave

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Figure 10.4: Invalid at the Pool of Bethseda: detail from a fourth-century Christian sarcophagus, Vatican Museo Pio Cristiano. Photo: Robin M. Jensen. of Ravenna’s basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo includes an unusual exception to the standard presentation of the story. Here we see both the synoptic and Johannine versions of the healing in two separate panels. One shows a man being lowered through the roof; the other shows the invalid carrying off his bed. A few depictions occur on sarcophagi that have come to be labelled the ‘Bethesda’ type, and belong to a group of the city-gate type, dated to the last part of the fourth century.19 Slightly more than a dozen exist, each presenting the same scenes in roughly the same compositional order (Fig. 10.4). On the far left is a city gate, through which Jesus and his followers appear to have entered. Jesus appears twice as a healer (the two blind men, the woman with the issue of blood) and a third time looking down upon the reclining paralytic in the central section of the frieze. On the right half of the sarcophagus we see the image of Jesus entering Jerusalem on his donkey. Zaccheus is in a tree above him; several onlookers wave palms or lay down garments in the street. A city gate on the far right balances the composition. The central image of the paralytic is unusual, first of all in that it is not actually in the centre of the composition. Rather, it sits just slightly to the right of centre. Second, it somewhat oddly breaks the single register of the rest of the sarcophagus into two stacked scenes. This not only interrupts the flow of the composition by inserting a horizontally divided scene but also disrupts the scale of the images as its figures are considerably smaller than those shown to the left and right (the entrance scenes). Furthermore, the viewer must read the story from the bottom to the top. Divided by a band that suggests the waves of the pool, below the paralytic lies on his bed. Others near him might be his companions or, perhaps, others seeking the cure. Above, he departs with his bed on his shoulders. Jesus and his companions appear to wave him off. As other art historians have noted, this is one 19

See an essay by Galit Noga-Banai, ‘Christian Healing at Bethesda and/or Siloam’, in H. Brandenburg, S. Heid, and C. Markschies, Salute e guarigione nella tarda antichità. Atti della giornata tematica dei Seminari di Archeologia Cristiana (Vatican City: Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, 2007), pp. 107–23.

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of the few instances of this scene in Christian art that actually incorporates a reference to the healing water – a fact that arguably emphasises its association with baptism.20 Tertullian cited the story of the paralytic in his treatise on baptism, comparing the healing offered by baptism with ordinary healing of the body. Such bodily healing, he said, signified the paralytic’s spiritual healing and the restoration of the image of God lost through sin. This, Tertullian explained, followed the general principle that carnal matters precede and point to higher spiritual truths. As God’s grace makes headway, the angel and the water that once healed only bodies now also heal spirits. That which used to give earthly health now offers spiritual remedy.21 In the fourth century, Ambrose prepared his catechumens for baptism by citing this story. While allowing that the angel who normally stirred the water in the Bethesda pool foreshadowed Jesus, Ambrose explained that, in this instance, Jesus himself appeared. Jesus chose this single individual to heal because he alone recognised that he needed someone to help him into the water. 22 He explains the significance of this: See the mystery. Our Lord Jesus Christ came to the pool where many sick people were reclining. Truly many sick were lying there, and yet only one was cured. Then he said to the paralytic: ‘Go down [into the water].’ He replied: ‘I have no one [to lower me].’ See where you are baptized, see that it is none other than the cross of Christ, the death of Christ. Here is the whole mystery: for you he suffered. In him you are redeemed, in him you are saved.23 Ambrose pointed out that the water of the font and the water of this pool were both miraculously consecrated for their purpose. But the paralytic needed the arrival of the man, Jesus, to make the water efficacious.24 Similarly, Gregory of Nazianzus’s Oration on Baptism compares those who are not yet baptised with the paralytic, who had no one to put him into the pool. Baptism brings that person help – by the presence of a person both human and divine.25 Perhaps the most extensive early treatment of the paralytic story comes from Cyril of Jerusalem, whose Sermon on the Paralytic attended primarily to the healing ministry of Jesus. Cyril’s description of the pool paid close attention to the details noted in the gospel, probably because, as Bishop of Jerusalem, he would have been particularly attentive to the setting, which he identifies as being long gone. For Cyril, the Bethesda pool had its counterpart in the fountain of everlasting life, citing Psalm 36: 9 and John 7: 38 as well as the story of the Samaritan woman at the well.26 Here, however, Cyril never makes an explicit connection between this story and baptism. Rather, he focuses on Jesus’s power to heal and its connection to forgiveness of sin. Thus, early exegetes often saw the healing of the paralytic as having baptismal 20

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22 23 24 25 26

See Noga-Banai, ‘Loca Sancta’, 113, who argues that the baptismal connection is less important than the sarcophagus allusion to pilgrimage sites in Jerusalem. Tertullian, Bapt. 5. Cyprian talks about this story in regard to the validity of sickbed baptism, Ep. 69. 13.1. Ambrose, Sac. 2.3–5. Ambrose, Sac. 2.2.6–7, trans. Robin M. Jensen (CSEL 73:27–8). Ambrose, Myst. 4.24 also. Gregory of Nazianzen, Or. 40.33. Cyril of Jerusalem, Hom. para. 7.

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significance, specifically since the story mentions a therapeutic pool of water. For some, like Cyril of Jerusalem, Jesus forgiving the man’s sins is an important dimension of the story. Of course the forgiveness of sins is an inherent component of baptism, making its appearance on a funerary monument a kind of assurance of pardon and thus deliverance for the deceased.

Jesus Healing the Man Born Blind (John 9: 1–12) At least one early Christian writer linked the Pool of Bethesda with another curative pool in Jerusalem, the Pool of Siloam, which shows up in John’s account of the healing of the blind man.27 As before, in the invalid’s story, this healing takes place on the Sabbath, causing conflict with religious authorities. Like the account of Jesus healing the invalid at the pool, the fourth gospel’s account of Jesus healing the man born blind has parallels in the Synoptic Gospels. In Matthew 9: 27–34 Jesus heals two blind men by touching their eyes. A similar story in Mark 8: 22–6 is set at Bethesda and involves only one blind man, whom Jesus cures by putting saliva on his eyes and imposing hands. The dramatic (and visually promising) account of the blind beggar, Bartimaeus, appears in Mark 10: 46–52, and paralleled in Luke 18: 35–43. Despite these comparable stories of Jesus healing blind men, John’s version is longer and includes more dramatic details, complete with characters, dialogue and dramatic tension. In Matthew’s account, Jesus touches the blind men’s eyes; in Luke’s he uses only words, and in Mark, Jesus both applies saliva and imposes hands. John’s narrative describes a complex action that includes most of these actions: Jesus spits on the ground, makes clay, and anoints the man’s eyes with the clay. He then tells the man to go to the Pool of Siloam to wash. The framing narrative gives an interpretation that – in its figurative language and dialogical presentation – parallels the one given to the woman at the well, and reveals Jesus’s identity as Son of Man and the man’s belief in him. The visual depictions of this scene normally show Jesus using either his thumb or the first two fingers of his right hand to cover the eyes of a single, small person (see Fig. 10.1). The man often carries a stick, his identifying attribute, but sometimes holds out one or both hands as a gesture of petition or acclaim (see Figs 10.1 and 10.2). This figure’s diminutive stature matches the usual presentation of the paralytic on his bed or other healed figures (e.g. the woman with the issue of blood) and links them together. Presumably their smallness has some meaning, perhaps that they are returned to the status – and innocence – of children through this healing (associated with baptism) and the consequent forgiveness of sins. Jesus’s cure of the man born blind (John 9: 1–7) does not appear as commonly in the extant documents as a specific reference to baptismal washing, although it also refers to a pool of water (John 9: 6–7). Instead of the washing, homilists like Ambrose tended to pay more attention to Jesus’s application of mud, an act that was linked with the enrolment for baptism, the acknowledgement of sin and the beginning of enlightenment. The man’s transformation from blindness to sightedness was taken as indicating his deeper spiritual insight – a gift inaugurated in the early stages of catechism, continued in the passage through the baptismal water, and completed by ritual of confirmation and gift of the Holy 27

This is discussed by Noga-Banai, who notes (and translates) part of Ephrem’s Commentary on Tatian. See ‘Loca Sancta’, p. 116, fn. 39.

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Spirit. This is especially clear in one of Ambrose’s third catechetical lectures where he invokes this story as one of spiritual conversion: Thus, the one who knows himself to be human, seeks refuge in Christ’s baptism. Accordingly, he has applied mud on you; that is, reverence, prudence, and the awareness of your frailty; and he has said to you: ‘Go to Siloam.’ What is this Siloam? ‘It means,’ the text says, ‘Sent;’ that is, go to that font where Christ’s cross is preached; go to that font where all your errors are pardoned. You went there, you washed, you came to the altar, you began to see what you had not seen before: that is to say, through the font of the Lord and the preaching of the Lord’s Passion, your eyes were opened. Before, you seemed to be blind of heart; but now you began to perceive the light of the sacraments.28 These same themes are echoed by Augustine in his Tractates on the Gospel of John. He interprets the story as alluding to the liberation from sin that starts when someone is enrolled as a catechumen and the eye-opening illumination that follows through the ritual steps of the baptismal sacrament.29 Thus, the image of Jesus healing the man born blind is an epiphanic moment in the most dramatic sense. It literally has to do with the healing of the eyes, which become a symbol for spiritual perception, and thus recognising with the heart the truth of who Jesus is.

Jesus Raising Lazarus from the Tomb (John 11: 1–44) The story of Jesus raising Lazarus concludes the signs and wonders section of John’s Gospel. In the biblical text, the story unquestionably anticipates Jesus’s own death and resurrection. Its narrative has several indications of this in addition to the straightforward plot line. For example, it includes weeping women, a stone rolled away and cast off grave clothes. However, its visual depiction in a funerary setting must be understood as clearly predicting the resurrection of the person whose tomb it adorns. The raising of Lazarus was found on more than third- and fourth-century catacomb paintings and sarcophagus reliefs (Fig. 10.5). It also appears on fourth- and fifth-century gold glasses, ivory diptychs, silver reliquaries, and pyxides. Overall, it is one of the most frequently depicted biblical scenes in early Christian art, rivalling only the image of Jonah and the multiplication of loaves in popularity. In most examples, the scene is notably consistent. The ordinary presentation of Jesus raising Lazarus usually shows Jesus pointing with a staff at a small aedicule-styled tomb with a gabled roof and accessed by a small flight of steps (rather than the cave mentioned in the biblical narrative). The figure of Lazarus appears at the open entrance, almost always presented as a small wrapped, mummy-like figure (see Fig. 10.1).30 In many of these images one or both of Lazarus’s sisters appear; one of them kneels at Jesus’s feet. One of the most complex instances of the scene appears in the Via Latina Catacomb, which includes a large crowd of witnesses. Above are small 28 29 30

Ambrose, Sac. 3.14–15, trans. Robin M. Jensen (CSEL 73:45). Augustine, Eu. Io. 44.1. The image of Jesus raising Lazarus from the Catacomb of Callixtus appears to be a rare instance of showing Lazarus without his bindings, although still in his tomb. On the iconography of Lazarus see also Robert Darmstaedter, Die Auferweckung des Lazarus in der altchristlichen und byzantinischen Kunst (Bern: Arnaud, 1955).

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Figure 10.5: The raising of Lazarus, Catacomb of Callixtus, chamber 21, mid to late third century. G. Wilpert, Roma sotterranea: Le pitture delle catacombe romane (1903) taf. 46. Photo: Robin M. Jensen. images of Moses receiving the Law and the column of fire from the Book of Exodus. In a few instances, a small naked figure also appears at Jesus’s feet. He is, perhaps, intended to be the figure of the resurrected Lazarus, now restored to appear like an innocent child (see Fig. 10.6). The scene’s allusion to the resurrection of the deceased as well as to the biblical Lazarus is consistent with common early Christian exegesis of the story. Certainly the biblical story itself points to such interpretation. Jesus tells Martha: ‘I am the resurrection and the life; the one who believes in me, though dead, yet shall live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die’ (John 11: 25–40). For example, according to Irenaeus, the raising of Lazarus proved that even though the body decays after death, at God’s command even decomposing flesh can be restored and glorified.31 Irenaeus added an extra dimension to his analysis, however. He concluded that Jesus’s command to the bystanders to unbind Lazarus signified his being released from the bondage of sin. Tertullian more simply saw Christ restoring Lazarus’s decaying flesh to wholeness and beauty as the pre-eminent sign and promise of bodily resurrection.32 The writings of fourth- and fifth-century commentators continued this tradition. 31 32

Irenaeus, Haer. 5.13.1. Tertullian, Res. carn. 53.

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Figure 10.6: Detail; Jesus raising Lazarus: sarcophagus in the Vatican Museo Pio Cristiano. Photo: Robin M. Jensen. Ambrose and Augustine both explored the allegorical possibilities of Lazarus’s story with regard to the rituals of repentance and the assurance of pardon. Ambrose remarked that the stench of the dead body was lifted as soon as Jesus gave the command to unbind Lazarus’s hands and lift his veil.33 Augustine, like Irenaeus, mined its possible moral implication, seeing Lazarus’s tomb as symbolising his alienation from God and the stone across its entrance as indicating the weight of sin or guilty habits on the human soul.34 Ambrose also saw the story of Lazarus as clear proof of the Christ’s promise of future bodily resurrection for all who, like Martha, believe in him: For he raised not only Lazarus, but the faith of all, which if you believe as you read, your spirit which was dead will be revived as that Lazarus. For what do you make of the Lord entering that tomb and calling out in a loud voice: ‘Lazarus come out,’ except that the he presents visible evidence of the future resurrection?35 Some fourth-century catechetical sermons tended to make the baptismal connection more explicit. Gregory of Nazianzus admonished the not-yet-baptised in his congregation to listen, like Lazarus, to the voice telling them to come out of their tombs and to 33 34 35

Ambrose, Paen. 2.7.58. See other texts mentioned in Dulaey, ‘L’évangile de Jean’, pp. 144–50. Augustine, Eu. Io. 49.20–5. Ambrose, Ob. Saty. 2.77, trans. Robin M. Jensen (CSEL 73:291).

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be released from the bindings of their sins.36 Cyril of Jerusalem also made a direct link between Lazarus’s story and baptismal regeneration, comparing the newly baptised to Lazarus since they also had been raised from death.37 Cyril also noted earlier figures of Christ’s raising the dead, especially Ezekiel, who opened the graves in the Valley of the Dry Bones (Ezekiel 37).38 This emphasis on Lazarus’s bindings as indicating sins, forgiven by Christ at his command that Lazarus exit his tomb, might explain why Lazarus is almost always shown with his wrappings and, in some places, also shows up as a small nude who is free of them. Early Christians who underwent baptism also were also stripped of their old clothing and entered the font nude. Once they emerged from the water those who received them addressed them as newly born children, freshly delivered from their holy mother’s (the church’s) womb, naked, wet and free of both ancestral and personal sins.39 The staff that Jesus consistently uses in these scenes of his raising Lazarus has prompted much scholarly comment; sometimes even being referred to as a magician’s wand.40 This staff, an object given to Jesus in other depictions of his working wonders (e.g. the miracle at Cana, the multiplication of loaves, or in other resurrection scenes – of Jairus’s daughter, for example), does not appear in representations of healing miracles. In these he usually cures by the touch of his hand. Although some commentators have used this object to align Jesus with ancient wonder workers or magicians (thaumaturgists), more persuasive analysis has argued that Jesus is here depicted as a new Moses, who also performed miracles (e.g. the parting of the sea, bringing water from a rock) with his staff.41

Conclusion The emphasis on Jesus as healer or miracle worker in early Christian art has led some commentators to argue that Jesus was revered primarily as a someone who had special – or magical – powers that could produce miracles. However, Origen was already refuting this claim in the third century. In his response to the critic Celsus, who characterised Jesus as a mere wonder worker, Origen, argued that Jesus’s healings, transformation of water, multiplication of loaves or other prodigies were simply the results of his efforts to gain the attention of those needing to reform and lead more virtuous lives. Thus, according to Origen, Jesus’s ‘signs’ were only a means to a much more important end: the initial acknowledgment of Jesus as Son of God, followed by a commitment to follow him.42 Similarly, the widely depicted scenes drawn from those signs and wonders in the fourth gospel clearly manifest Jesus as Son of God (along with his glory) so that, as John’s Gospel 36 37 38

39 40

41

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Gregory of Nazianzus, Or. 40. 33. Cyril of Jerusalem, Cat. 2.5; 5.9. Cyril of Jerusalem, Cat. 18.1–21. The image of Jesus raising other dead persons (often two or three) probably illustrates this association of Jesus with Ezekiel. See Jensen, Baptismal Imagery, pp. 167–70. See the discussion in Thomas Mathews, The Clash of the Gods (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 54–89, esp. p. 61; and Paul Corby Finney, ‘Do You Think God is a Magician?’, in Akten des Symposiums ‘frühchristliche Sarkophage’, Deutches Archäologisches Institut, 1999 (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 2002), pp. 99–108. See Lee M. Jefferson, The Image of Christ the Miracle Worker in Early Christian Art, PhD Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 2008. Origen, Cels. 68.1.

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says repeatedly, the people could believe in him. This is explicitly true in regard to the disciples at Cana (2: 11); the Samaritan woman (4: 25–6); the man born blind (9: 33); and Lazarus’s sister, Martha (11: 27). The visual presentation of Jesus’s works had a particular value, in that people who had only heard or read about them could see them in a way that made them more vivid and, in some sense truly present and revelatory. This explanation, however, does not fully account for the particular popularity of the Johannine narratives in early Christian funerary art. The appeal of these stories (and their pictorial representation) may be due to their special relevance for those seeking solace as they confronted death and anticipated the afterlife. The account of the raising of Lazarus – and its embedded promise of resurrection – would have an obvious resonance in such circumstances, which is probably why it was more popular than any other New Testament narrative and almost as beloved and widely depicted as scenes from the Jonah legend. Both of these stories have to do with death and rebirth and, as such, both could also allude to the sacrament of baptism. Jonah’s narrative is, perhaps, more obvious in that regard, as it includes water in its plot, but Lazarus’s shed bindings (of sin) and nude emergence from his tomb has definite potential as a baptismal allegory. The baptismal associations of the story of Jesus offering the Samaritan woman the living water is without question, but it is easy to see how the account of the Cana miracle, and its abundance of wine, could be also be viewed as a baptismal allegory, both as an allusion to the Spirit’s invocation into the font and to the neophytes’ post-baptismal eucharistic banquet. As a counterpart to the hugely popular image of the multiplication of loaves, the Cana banquet also could be read – and seen – as referring to the abundant paradisiacal wedding feast. This is what the deceased hoped for and what his or her family would symbolically celebrate near the tomb in the meantime. Finally, the healing images – of the blind man or the paralytic – illustrate the sacramental forgiveness of sins and the transitional passage from illness to health, ignorance to awareness, and death to new life. These transitions are all symbolised in these five stories whose representations appear with such regularity in Roman catacomb painting or on early Christian sarcophagi. It may be a result of the popularity of Johannine pericopes that they are interpreted to contain so much symbolism, or the symbolism may be the reason for their popularity. Whatever the case, coordinating their textual readings with their pictorial depiction demonstrates that they were far more than simple stories taken from the life of Jesus. They indicated the ways that Christians were sacramentally incorporated into that story and came to share in its promises, especially in a promised resurrection and life beyond death.

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IMAGES OF CONFLICT: THE ART OF ANTI-JUDAISM IN FIFTH-CENTURY ROME Geri Parlby

S

ixteen centuries ago St Augustine of Hippo, one of the great Fathers of the Christian Church, wrote these damning lines:

The Jew carried the book from which the Christian takes his faith. They have become our librarians, like slaves who carry books behind their masters; the slaves gain no profit by their carrying, but the masters profit by their reading.1 With just a few eloquently chosen words Augustine dismissed over a thousand years of Judaism turning the ancient faith into an obsolete religion fit only to serve the needs of the new Christian Church. Despite this quote and his other equally negative observations on Judaism, some scholars suggest that Augustine was a moderate when compared to some of his contemporaries.2 The analysis of the polemical writings of the early Church Fathers is a complex and much debated topic and it is not my intention to throw another log onto this slow burning bonfire of controversy. My interest lies instead with a rather more subtle propaganda tool, that of monumental art in the early churches of Rome. Before looking more closely at the rapidly developing programme of art of the early Christian Church, it may be helpful to set the scene both historically and politically. In the early decades of the fourth century Christianity had, thanks to the emperor Constantine, been rather unexpectedly catapulted into the forefront of the Roman Empire’s range of multi faiths. Not only did the new emperor issue the Edict of Milan in 313 which ordered religious tolerance for all faiths throughout the empire, but he also proclaimed himself to be a Christian convert. Throughout his rule, Constantine supported the Church 1

2

Margaret R. Miles (1993), ‘Santa Maria Maggiore’s Fifth Century Mosaics: Triumphal Christianity and the Jews’, HTR, vol. 86, p. 162. Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008). John Chrysostom (d. 407) is said to have been one of the most notorious anti-Jewish theologians, although there is still some debate as to whether his eight homilies were intended to be as anti-Jewish as they appear to us today. Adversus Judaeos: John Chrysostom, Discourses against Judaizing Christians, trans. P. W. Harkins (1979), The Fathers of the Church; vol. 68, pp. 163–6; James Parkes [1934], The Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A Study in the Origins of Antisemitism.

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financially, built basilicas, granted privileges to clergy, promoted Christians to high office and returned property confiscated during the persecutions. However, this sudden surge of power for the Christian Church came with a flip side. As Christianity grew ever more powerful across the empire so also did the hostility to the Jewish faith that had preceded it. Despite his campaign for religious toleration it seems the emperor himself may have helped fan the flames of anti-Judaism. At the Council of Nicaea in 325 he instigated the abandonment of the Jewish system of calculating the date of the Passover as a way of fixing the date of Easter. This rejection of an integral link between the two faiths is said to have marked the final step in separating Christianity from Judaism. In a letter explaining the Council’s decision the emperor is said to have written his own damning indictment on Judaism: It appeared an unworthy thing that in the celebration of this most holy feast we should follow the practice of the Jews, who have impiously defiled their hands with enormous sin, and are, therefore, deservedly afflicted with blindness of soul . . . Let us then have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd; for we have received from our Saviour a different way.3 Despite their hostility to Judaism it was impossible for Church leaders during the reign of Constantine and beyond to completely ignore Christianity’s own roots in the Jewish religion. Indeed the ever-resourceful Damasus (366–84), who became pope three decades after the death of Constantine, found a way to make this history work in a positive way in order to promote the religious significance of his city. He developed the details of an earlier legend that the apostles Peter and Paul had been friends and had both chosen to end their days as martyrs in Rome where their relics remained. These two saints were turned into figureheads for the gentile and Jewish roots of the Church, St Peter for the Jews and St Paul for the Gentiles. Their dual images, often portrayed in a warm embrace, conveyed an essential tenet of Church history: that the Christian empire was established primarily through the combined efforts of the two chief apostles who had brought both Jews and Gentiles into the Christian faith. By the fifth century Peter and Paul were taking pride of place in the decorative schemes of the city’s newest church buildings, exhibiting a brotherly bond that in reality had almost certainly never existed. Whilst Damasus manipulated history in order to turn Rome into the first city of Christendom, the emperor Theodosius I (379–95) was advancing his plans to make Christianity the sole legal religion of the whole Roman Empire. With Christianity’s dominance came Judaism’s crisis, no longer referred to as a religio it became relegated to the category of a superstitio with Jews forbidden from actively proselytising or intermarrying with Christians.4 Then in 410 the unthinkable happened, after 800 years of invincibility, Rome was sacked by the barbarian Visigoths leaving the shock waves to reverberate across the entire 3

4

NPNF2–01. Eusebius Pamphilius: Church History, Life of Constantine, Oration in Praise of Constantine Book IV Chapter XVIII www.ccel.org. Fergus Millar, ‘The Jews of the Graceo-Roman Diaspora Between Paganism and Christianity, ad 312–438’, in Judith Lieu et al., The Jew Among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 97–123; Henry N. Claman, Jewish Images in the Christian Church (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000), p. 63.

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Roman Empire. Over the next two decades the city struggled to recover physically and emotionally. The Western emperor Honorius had abandoned Rome for Ravenna even before the invasion, and it was left to the pope to bring the city back to life and instil a new orthodoxy within the Roman Church. During this time of re-growth a new and magnificent basilica church was built and funded by a mysterious presbyter called Peter the Illyrian. The church of Santa Sabina was built between 422 and 432 and although the original mosaics of the triumphal arch and the apse have not survived there are still remnants of the original mosaic dedicatory inscription on the inside of the entrance wall.5 A translation of the inscription reads: When Celestinus held the highest apostolic throne and shone forth gloriously as the foremost bishop of the whole world, a presbyter of the city, Illyrian by birth, named Peter and worthy of that great name, established this building at which you look in wonder. From his earliest years he was brought up in the hall of Christ – rich to the poor, poor to himself, one who shunned the good things of life on earth and deserved to hope for the life to come. Celestine may have been pope, but it was Peter the presbyter who paid for the church building and commissioned its decorative designs. The dedication panel inscribed in his honour is unusual, but what is even more intriguing are the two female figures that flank the inscription.6 Heavily veiled and draped in dark coloured robes and holding open books they stand above the words Ecclesia ex Circumcisione and Ecclesia ex Gentibus translated from the Latin as the Church from the Circumcised and the Church from the Gentiles (Plates 3a and 3b). Although the women appear at first sight to be identical, on closer inspection there are some distinct differences. The figure of Ecclesia ex Gentibus on the right (Plate 3b) is depicted wearing a white padded head roll while her mantle, with its ends decorated with gold embroidery, is loosely draped over it in the traditional Roman manner. In her left hand she holds a folded white napkin or mappa beneath an open book.7 Although the text on the book is illegible, it appears to represent a style of cursive writing with the pages stitched together in a way that indicates that the book is bound between a wooden book cover. With her right hand she has two fingers extended pointing towards the book. The figure of Ecclesia ex Circumcisione on the left side (Plate 3a) wears a hooded mantle pinned to a white bonnet worn underneath. The ends of her mantle are decorated with gold oval panels with a black cross outlined inside.8 In her left hand she holds a book 5

6 7

8

Emile Mâle, The Early Churches of Rome, trans. D. R. Buxton (London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1960), pp. 50–1; F. Bisconti, ‘Early Christian Art’ in M. Bussagli (ed.), Rome Art & Architecture (Cologne: Könemann, 1999), pp. 207–8. Walter Oakeshott, The Mosaics of Rome (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1967), p. 62. The mappa was the symbol of authority of the Roman consul as designated representatives of the emperor. By the fourth century it had become incorporated into the design of clerical vestments. Herbert Norris [1950], Church Vestments Their Origin and Development (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2002), p. 92. It is curious that Ecclesia Circumcisione has the symbol of a cross on her robes whilst Ecclesia Gentibus does not. However it is likely that rather than a Christian cross it was the symbol Tau the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet which was written as an ‘x’ or a ‘+’ or a ‘T’. The prophet uses the imagery of this last letter as a way of urging people to remain faithful to God. Sverre Boe, Cross-Bearing in Luke (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck Gmbh & Co., 2010), p. 20.

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with the pages stitched inside a leather binding. The text, also illegible, is more spaced in the style of Semitic writing. Like her fellow ecclesia she is also gesturing toward the book with her right hand. Extended pointing figures are usually interpreted as a gesture of speech suggesting that the women are expounding on the contents of their respective books – the Old and New Testaments. Although there are no other examples of female figures similarly identified, most scholars agree that the women are intended to represent personifications of the Church of the Gentiles and the Church of the Circumcised, a composition alluding to the Jewish and gentile origins of the Universal Church.9 This is a puzzling interpretation in the light of Peter and Pauls’ role as symbols of the Jewish and gentile roots of the Church. Indeed there is evidence that the two apostles were originally depicted standing above the female figures.10 It seems unlikely that Peter would have felt the need to re-emphasise Christianity’s ethnic roots with a second set of figures. So rather than being a replacement for Peter and Paul perhaps the ecclesiae figures at Santa Sabina were added to the dedicatory panel to acknowledge the ancestry of Peter the Illyrian himself. The dedication states that from his ‘earliest years he (Peter) was brought up in the hall of Christ’. The implication being that Peter had not been born a Christian and that his family had been converted, possibly from Judaism, when he was still a child.11 The figures of Ecclesia ex Gentibus and Ecclesia ex Circumcisione could therefore be seen as symbols of Peter’s own roots in the communities of the uncircumcised Gentiles and the circumcised Jews. Rather than symbolising one of the roots of the Christian Church, Ecclesia ex Circumcisione might more accurately be interpreted as an early version of the medieval figure of Synagoga. Ecclesia and Synagoga were twin female sculptures that became favoured motifs on cathedral facades in medieval Europe. Whilst the Ecclesia figure was depicted crowned and holding a battle standard and chalice, Synagoga in contrast was blindfolded and dejected, holding a broken staff and dropping the tablets of the law.12 Indeed Peter’s ecclesiae figures may have been designed to convey an equally controversial visual message. Their veiling is heavy and restricting: Ecclesia ex Circumcisione  wears the style of hooded mantle adopted by widows in the eastern empire. Ecclesia ex Gentibus’ dark-coloured robe is the typical dress of a widowed Roman matron. Perhaps the Illyrian priest was subtly bewailing the increasing rift between the two faiths. 9

10

11

12

Bisconti, ‘Early Christian Art’, p. 207; Mâle, The Early Churches of Rome, p. 49; Oakeshott, The Mosaics of Rome, pp. 89–90. Drawing by Giovanni Ciampini from ‘Vetera Monimenta’, 1699, pl. 48; Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome; Oakeshott, p. 104, n.101. Recent excavations around the ancient Illyrian town of Onchesmos in present-day Albania have  revealed evidence of a fifth-century synagogue having been converted into a Christian church. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/10/041020094144.htm (accessed January 2006). The use of the term Ecclesia to describe both figures has perhaps confused our understanding of their meaning. Although we have come to understand the word Ecclesia as meaning Church, in its original Greek ekkle¯sía meant ‘assembly’ as indeed did synagog synago¯ge¯' and neither term had any religious connotation. The most recent study on Synagoga and Ecclesia statues in the thirteenth century is by Nina Rowe, The Jew, The Cathedral and the Medieval City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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By the time the mosaics of Santa Sabina had been created, alongside all the legal restrictions that were being enforced, Roman Jews were now being publicly labelled ‘beasts  and  madmen’, with the Jewish population in the city being systematically suppressed.13 Just a few years after the completion of Santa Sabina, during the reign of the new pope, Sixtus III (432–440), work commenced on a magnificent new papal basilica on the summit of the Esquiline Hill. On completion it was said to have been named after Mary; Rome’s first church to be dedicated to mother of Jesus. Nowadays it is known as Santa Maria Maggiore.14 Many scholars maintain that the church’s decorative scheme was designed to celebrate Mary’s new role as Theotokos following on from the rulings of the Council of Ephesus in 431.15 Others suggest that it was actually intended as a public announcement of papal power in the aftermath of Alaric’s Sack of Rome in 410 and the retreat of the Western emperor to Ravenna.16 A far more controversial viewpoint has been presented by feminist theologian and historian Margaret Miles. She maintains that rather than a tribute to Mary, the artists of S. Maria Maggiore had been tasked with designing a mosaic programme with a clear message of anti-Jewishness. She sees the anti-Jewish message portrayed in the nave mosaics, whereas I believe that the scenes depicted on the triumphal arch carry an even more blatant condemnation of Judaism (Plate 4).17 The surviving mosaics that decorate the nave all feature episodes from the Old Testament.18 On the left wall facing the altar are key moments from the lives of Abraham and Jacob, whilst on the right wall are scenes featuring Moses and Joshua. The principal players in these mosaics are Melchizedek, the righteous priest king, Isaac, Jacob, Moses 13 14

15

16

17 18

Miles, ‘Santa Maria Maggiore’s Fifth Century Mosaics’, p. 168. Matilda Webb, Churches and Catacombs of Rome (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001), p. 59; Miles, ‘Santa Maria Maggiore’s Fifth Century Mosaics’, pp. 157–9. Although one of the key edicts to come from the Council of Ephesus was the confirmation that Mary should be known as Theotokos or ‘god-bearer’ there is still considerable debate as to the real significance of the title. For the most recent discussions on the meaning of Theotokos see Sarah Jane Boss ‘The Title Theotokos’ and Richard M. Price, ‘Theotokos: The Title and its Significance in Doctrine and Devotion’ in Boss (ed.), Mary: The Complete Resource (London: Continuum, 2007); Price, ‘The Theotokos and the Council of Ephesus’ in Chris Maunder (ed.), The Origin of the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Burns & Oates, 2008). Mâle, The Early Churches of Rome, pp. 60–8. Richard Krautheimer (1942), ‘Recent Publications on S. Maria Maggiore in Rome’ AJA, vol. 46, p. 374 n. 6. The most comprehensive studies of the mosaics are still Joseph Wilpert, Die römischen Mosaiken und Malereien der kirchlichen Bauten, vom IV. bis XIII. Jahrhundert (Freiburg im Breisgau: Verlag Herder, 1916); Beat Brenk, Die frühchristlichen Mosaiken in S. Maria Maggiore zu Rom (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1975); Carlo Cecchelli, I Mosaici della basilica di S. Maria Maggiore (ILTE Torino, 1956). Walter Oakeshott, The Mosaics of Rome. For a more controversial view point see Suzanne Spain (1977), ‘Carolingian Restorations of the Mosaics of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome’, Gesta, XVI, pp. 13–22; Spain (1979), ‘The Promised Blessing: The Iconography of the Mosaics of S. Maria Maggiore’ AB, vol. 61, pp. 518–40 and Spain, (1983), ‘The Restorations of the Sta. Maria Maggiore Mosaics’, AB, vol. 65, pp. 325–8. Miles, ‘Santa Maria Maggiore’s Fifth Century Mosaics’, pp. 155–75. Originally there were forty-two panels in place, whereas only twenty-seven have survived with some heavily restored.

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and Joshua. Interestingly, each of these characters has been identified by early Christian writers as ‘types’ or prefigurations of Christ.19 Miles maintains that the nave mosaics were designed as a pictorial indication that the sole purpose of the Hebrew Bible was as a precursor to Christianity, an illustrated version of Augustine’s ideas of the ‘The Jews as librarians for Christianity’. She also sees the nave mosaics as an introduction to the moment of Christ’s incarnation depicted on the triumphal arch. Churchgoers would be able to follow the story of Christianity and its ultimate climax as they walked down the aisle toward the altar. Whilst I agree in part with Miles’s hypothesis, I also believe that the message of the arch is more complex and far more aligned to the Roman civic tradition of using triumphal arches to commemorate some extraordinary political event such as the defeat of their enemies.20 Centuries of restoration work and conflicting texts have obliterated the original meaning of the St Maria Maggiore triumphal arch and apse mosaics. However, a clue as to the intended design of the arch lies with the confusing addition of two mysterious female figures that have, at various times in their history, both been identified as images of the Virgin Mary. The figure on the left (Fig. 11.1a) dressed in elaborate gold and bejewelled robes appears in four different scenes identified as the annunciation, adoration, escape into Egypt and presentation in the temple. The figure on the right (Fig. 11.1b) in contrast is heavily veiled and draped and she appears along with her more sumptuously dressed counterpart in the presentation and adoration scenes. Theories as to the identities of the two women abound. However, I believe the clearest clue as to who they were intended to represent lies just a few yards away in the nave mosaics. Here in two separate panels we find wedding scenes featuring the Old Testament figures of Rachel and Zipporah both dressed in a near identical fashion to the ‘woman in gold’ from the triumphal arch. What is especially striking about the similarity of their appearance is that like their male counterparts both women had also been identified by early Christian writers as ‘types’ or prefigurations. Rather than symbolising a person, they were both said to have been prefigurations of Ecclesia, the Church. The mosaic panels in the nave are divided into two levels and the one that features Rachel shows her first alongside her father Laban and her older sister Leah, Jacob’s first wife. This is the moment when Jacob demands the hand of Rachel having been first tricked into marrying Leah by Laban. In the partially damaged wedding scene below, Rachel and Jacob are finally united in marriage (Fig. 11.2). On the north east side of the nave Zipporah, the daughter Jethro, is depicted during her rather elaborate marriage ceremony to Moses. She is dressed in the same style as both ‘the woman in gold’ and Rachel (Fig. 11.3).21 19

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The typology of the patriarchs and their wives as prefigurations for Christ and the Church appear early in Christian writings. See Jean Danielou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers (London: Burns & Oates, 1950; Eng. trans., 1960). Although the term ‘triumphal’ arch dates from the early ninth century, the arch before the apse was always regarded as a symbol of the Church triumphant. L. M. O. Duchesne, Le Liber pontificalis (Paris: E. Thorin, 1886–92), vol. 2, pp. 54–79. Of the three women in Zipporah’s entourage one is dressed in a near-identical fashion, but without a veil. It was traditional at Roman weddings for the bridesmaid to wear the same dress as the bride as a way of confusing the evil spirits that were thought to prey on newlyweds. http:// www.explore-italian-culture.com/ancient-roman-weddings.html (accessed 30 March 2009).

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Figures 11.1a and 11.1b: Mystery women from the St Maria Maggiore triumphal arch. J. Wilpert (1916), Die römischen Mosaiken und Malereien der kirchlichen Bauten vom IV. bis XIII. Jahrhundert.

Figure 11.2: Above: Jacob demanding the hand of Rachel. Below: Rachel and Jacob marry. Nave mosaic, St Maria Maggiore, Rome. J. Wilpert (1916), Die römischen Mosaiken und Malereien der kirchlichen Bauten vom IV. bis XIII. Jahrhundert.

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Figure 11.3: Wedding of Moses and Zipporah. Nave mosaic, St Maria Maggiore, Rome. J. Wilpert (1916), Die römischen Mosaiken und Malereien der kirchlichen Bauten vom IV. bis XIII. Jahrhundert.

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The robes worn by the three women appear to be almost identical to the type of wedding apparel traditionally worn by Roman women in the fourth and fifth centuries. A handful of commemorative gold glass bowls dated to the same period feature a bride and groom being crowned as part of the wedding ceremony. Although they only show the figures from the waist upwards it is possible to see that the brides are dressed in a similar style to the S. Maria Maggiore women.22 An even clearer example of wedding finery can be found on the magnificent ‘Projecta Casket’. This beautifully embellished silver gilt toilet casket dated to c. 380 ad and now in the British Museum, is said to have been a wedding gift for a wealthy Christian woman named Projecta who is depicted on the lid alongside her new husband.23 In the light of this evidence I suggest an entirely new reading for the mosaic cycle at St Maria Maggiore, one that takes us back to the writings of two theologians from the second and third centuries. The first is the early Christian apologist Justin Martyr (ad 100–65) who saw the story of Jacob’s trials and tribulations as a precursor to the life of Christ. In his ‘Dialogue with Trypho the Jew’ he wrote: The marriages of Jacob were types of that which Christ was about to accomplish. For it was not lawful for Jacob to marry two sisters at once. And he serves Laban for [one of] the daughters; and being deceived in [the obtaining of] the younger, he again served seven years. Now Leah is your people and synagogue; but Rachel is our Church. Justin was followed by the Roman theologian Hippolytus (ad 170–235) who wrote: ‘Let the days’, says he, ‘of the mourning for my father come on, that I may slay my brother.’ Wherefore Rebecca – that is, patience – told her husband of the brother’s plot: who, summoning Jacob, bade him go to Mesopotamia and thence take a wife of the family of Laban the Syrian, his mother’s brother. As therefore Jacob, to escape his brother’s evil designs, proceeds to Mesopotamia, so Christ, too, constrained by the unbelief of the Jews, goes into Galilee, to take from thence to Himself a bride from the Gentiles, His Church.24 22 23

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See G. Vikan (1990), ‘Art and Marriage in Early Byzantium’ DOP, vol. 44, pp. 145–63. David Buckton, Byzantium: Treasures of Byzantine Art & Culture (London: British Museum Press, 1994), pp. 33–4. http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_image.aspx? image=ps214223.jpg&retpage=20959 (accessed 12 February 2013). Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, Ch. CXXXIV, ANF. (accessed 30 March 2009). Hippolytus, quoted in Jerome, Epist. 36, ad Damasum, Num. xviii, ANF. (accessed 30 March 2009). This idea of a union between Christ and Ecclesia was first suggested by Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians when he called on husbands to: love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, so as to present the church to himself in splendour, without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind – yes, so that she may be holy and without blemish. (Ephesians 5: 21–33) Origen had followed a similar theme when he reinterpreted the allegorical meaning of the Song of Songs changing the Jewish message of the love between Shekhinah and Israel to that of Christ and his chosen bride, the Church. J. C. King, Origen on the Song of Songs as the Spirit of Scripture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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Rather than a narrative tale of the events leading up to and beyond the birth of Christ, I suggest that the arch mosaics are closely linked with the Old Testament story of Rachel and Leah and actually depict Christ’s rejection of the Jewish Synagoga and his allegorical marriage to the Figure 11.4: Marco Tullio Montagna: Drawing of the Gentile Ecclesia. The ultitriumphal arch 1640. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, ms. mate moment of triumph Barb.lat.4405, fol. 1r. was depicted in the monumental mosaic of the apse where directly above the altar sat Christ the bridegroom crowning his beautiful new bride Ecclesia – the Church. Although the existing thirteenth-century apse mosaic has been interpreted as a depiction of the crowning of Mary as Queen of Heaven, it is also said to be a faithful copy of the original fifth-century design.25 Centuries of restoration work may have obscured the intended meaning of the mosaics, but thanks to a seventeenth-century drawing of the triumphal arch (Fig. 11.4) we can still piece together some of the original iconography.26 The drawing by the artist Marco Tullio Montagna provides a selection of different views of the arch mosaics. In the top left-hand corner is the scene usually interpreted as the annunciation with Mary seated and surrounded by six different angels.27 The iconography of this scene is entirely unique and rather than a seated Mary I suggest we are actually seeing Ecclesia ex Gentibus enthroned and surrounded by a guard of angels. The modern 25

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The apse mosaic which features the crowning of Mary was executed by the Franciscan friar Jacopo Torriti at the order of Pope Nicholas IV (1288–92). It is said to be an accurate reproduction of the original scene that was removed in order to accommodate a new transept. Montagna had been commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Barberini to record the appearance of the mosaics in around 1640. A century later Benedict XIII (1724–30) had the mosaics of the triumphal arch cleaned and restored as did Benedict XIV (1743–50). This scene is said to show the Virgin spinning thread for the temple veil, a description found in the apocryphal gospels of the Protevangelium of James and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. While the Protevangelium is dated to the second half of the second century, Pseudo-Matthew was probably first compiled in around the sixth century. J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 48–67 and pp. 84–99. Susan Spain makes the point that at the time the mosaics were commissioned the apocrypha were being suppressed by the bishops of Rome so it is unlikely that they would have chosen this interpretation of the story for the church’s triumphal arch. Spain, ‘The promised blessing: The Iconography of the Mosaics of S. Maria Maggiore’, p. 538, n.85, p. 539. Rather than purple thread I suggest the seated figure is holding a scroll with a container of scrolls on the floor at her feet. Scrolls signified learning and in a Christian context the teachings of the church. Sharon Marie Salvadori, Per Feminam Mors, Per Feminam Vita: Images of Women in the Early Christian Funerary Art of Rome (PhD Dissertation, New York University, 2002), pp. 489, 492.

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version of the mosaic shows an over-large dove careering towards the seated woman (Plate 4) whilst the Montagna sketch has no indication of a bird hovering overhead.28 To the left and right of the seated woman are two brick buildings. The building on the left has at its entrance a pair of inlaid doors set between two marble pillars topped with carved capitals. The outline of a cross can be seen inside the building. The building on the right has a pair of pulled-back curtains set between two pillars with a sanctuary lamp hanging in between. I suggest that the building with the inlaid doors was intended to represent the basilica style of church building favoured by the gentile Christians. In contrast, the building with the curtains and lamp represents the Jewish temple. The figure standing in front of the temple is usually identified as Joseph, although in the light of the revised interpretations of the arch iconography it might be more accurately identified as Peter being told by the angel to turn away from his roots within the Jewish Church and instead embrace the gentile Church. 29 The Peter figure appears again on the opposite side of the triumphal arch in a tableau that is normally interpreted as a representation of the presentation in the temple (Plate 4). However, I suggest that the scene is actually a depiction of the meeting between the dynamic and triumphant Ecclesia ex Gentibus dressed like a bride and the rejected Ecclesia ex Circumcisione, sombrely dressed and heavily veiled in a similar style to her counterpart in the church of Santa Sabina. Returning once again to the Montagna drawing (fig. 11.4), it seems that he failed to see a miniature figure of Jesus in the arms of the ‘woman in gold’. The Peter figure is standing between the ‘woman in gold’ and the sombrely veiled figure. Although he has his body turned towards the veiled woman he is looking to his right as if he is welcoming the approaching ‘woman in gold’. Another group of men are gathered to the right of the tableau behind a crouching white haired, bearded figure who has his hands veiled. Stylistically, this crouching figure appears out of place alongside the group of standing figures behind it and may also be a later addition.30 To the right of the scene is the outline of a building with the emblem of the goddess Roma on its pediment. On its steps are pairs of turtle doves and pigeons denoting sacrificial offerings made by both Jews and pagans in the city. I suggest this scene may have been designed to represent the triumph of Christianity over both Judaism and paganism in the city as well as confirmation of the Roman Church’s dominance across the Christian empire.31 On the second level of the right hand side of the arch is a scene usually interpreted 28

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This early in the development of standardised iconography for the narrative scenes from the New Testament, the descending dove was more commonly linked with Jesus’s baptism by John the Baptist. Examples of this can be found in catacomb frescoes. I suggest the dove was a later addition made during the ninth-century restoration work. Spain claims that the figure is a restoration of the early ninth century and may originally have had white hair and a beard. She identifies the figure as Abraham. Suzanne Spain, ‘Carolingian Restorations of the Mosaics of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome’, p. 15, n. 10; Spain, ‘The Promised Blessing: The Iconography of the Mosaics of S. Maria Maggiore’, p. 538, n. 86. There is evidence of disturbed tessellation which might form part of the later ‘Carolingian Restorations’. Spain, ‘Carolingian Restorations’, pp. 13–22. The restored mosaic now features a sleeping figure in front of the temple being addressed by an angel; this scene has been read as a dreaming Joseph receiving the warning to flee to Egypt. However Montagna records that he saw an angel addressing a seated figure. Spain, ‘The Promised Blessing’, pp. 537–8, n. 85.

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as the flight to Egypt with Mary, Joseph and Jesus meeting Aphrodosius the governor of Sotinen-Hermopolis in Egypt. Returning again to Montagna’s drawing of the arch (Fig. 11.4), it is clear that he has portrayed the scene without the figure of the young Jesus. I suggest that, rather than Aphrodosius, the regal-looking male figure was actually intended to represent Christ the bridegroom, flanked by John the Baptist arriving in Galilee to meet his new bride Ecclesia ex Gentibus. Returning to the left-hand arch (Plate 4) on the second level we have the unique and controversial scene said to represent the adoration with the magi. The young Christ figure is seated on a large and elaborately decorated throne between the ‘woman in gold’ on the left who, I suggest, is actually the triumphant Ecclesia ex Gentibus, and the heavily veiled, dejected woman on the right who might readily be identified as Ecclesia ex Circumcisione. The fact that the Christ figure sits alone suggests a far more symbolic image of Christ as the Logos rather than the child Jesus of the nativity, the magi figures symbolise the first gentile converts to Christianity. The meaning of the two scenes at the base of the opposite sides of the arch is puzzling (Plate 4). Certainly these parts of the arch have undergone some extensive restoration work over the centuries.32 The current interpretation is that the scene on the left represents the massacre of the Innocents before the enthroned figure of Herod, with a depiction of the city of Jerusalem below.33 On the right is said to be the three magi arriving before a similarly enthroned Herod. Beneath this tableau is another cityscape said to represent Bethlehem. Although the enthroned figure has the helpful inscription Herodes added above his head, the addition of a halo makes this identification extremely unlikely.34 The only other figures on the arch that are haloed are the angels and the enthroned Christ figure. It is therefore inconceivable to imagine that the mosaicists would have provided Herod with a similar symbol of divinity. I suggest instead that this enthroned figure was intended to represent God the Father, seated in judgement before the mourning Jewish populace from Jerusalem on the left and the triumphant gentile faithful from Bethlehem on the right. The elaborate throne on which he sits seems to confirm this identification. Although these scenes are unfamiliar to us today, I suggest that when the mosaic programmes for the triumphal arch, apse and nave were first designed in the fifth century their message would have been very clear. As predicted in the Old Testament scenes in the nave, Christ had chosen Ecclesia ex gentibus to be his bride and following their courtship and marriage as depicted on the arch, he crowned her as his heavenly consort in the final scene in the apse.35 32 33

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Spain, ‘The Restorations of the Santa Maria Maggiore Mosaics’, pp. 325–8. This part of the mosaic was repaired in fresco at some point before the seventeenth century. Spain, ibid. p. 327. Spain suggests that this inscription, along with that of Bethlehem and Jerusalem, were added during the Carolingian period either in the eighth or ninth century. Spain, ‘Carolingian Restorations’, p. 16. Montagna did not include the figures of ‘Herod’ in his drawing. By the seventeenth century the left-hand scene had become damaged and the seated figure lost, whereas the city of Bethlehem and Herod and the magi had been repaired in fresco so did not form part of the original mosaic. Spain, ‘The Restorations of the Santa Maria Maggiore Mosaics’, p. 327. Inevitable deterioration of the mosaics and damage to the structure of the church may have made the scenes harder to read, leading to them being given a more straight forward narrative interpretation. When the first serious restoration work was undertaken during the eighth or ninth century the mosaicists may have made stylistic changes in order to bring the scenes more in line

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However, alongside the triumph of Ecclesia ex Gentibus came the humiliation of Ecclesia ex Circumcisione – the Synagogue. Her rejection conveyed a very powerful message about the primacy of Roman Church and the growing spectre of anti-Judaism. Christ had taken the Gentile Church as his bride and in the process rejected the Jewish Church and all that she represented. As with so many imperial victories throughout the ages the victory of Church over Synagoga became the central theme on the triumphal arch.36 Whilst the church was commissioned by Pope Sixtus it was his successor Leo I (440–61) who dedicated it. Known as Leo the Great he was a formidable father of the Church and a man most famous for standing his ground against Attila the Hun. He was also noted for his efforts to unify the Church.37 Rather strikingly Leo’s ideas about the Jews appear to have been equally forthright in a sermon he delivered on 19 April 444 during Holy Week when he proclaimed: It is on you, on you, false Jews sacrilegious leaders of the people that the whole of this evil deed falls . . . it makes you worthy of the hatred of the human race.38 It was a striking indictment which together with the monumental art decorating the papal basilica provided an uncompromising message to the people of Rome: the Gentile Church was triumphant and the Jewish Synagogue defeated and ultimately condemned.

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with the current perception of the iconography. Taking this idea one step further, it is tempting to suggest that if the apse had indeed featured a portrayal of Christ crowning his bride Ecclesia then this image may have been the inspiration behind the later depictions of Mary being crowned as Queen of Heaven. For a detailed outline of the restoration work from the Carolingian period to the twentieth century see Spain, ‘The Restorations of the Santa Maria Maggiore Mosaics’, pp. 325–8. Miles, ‘Santa Maria Maggiore’s Fifth Century Mosaics’, pp. 155–75. In 1961 Pope John XXIII gave Leo the official title of ‘Doctor of the Church’s Unity’; J. P. Freeland and A. J. Conway (1996), Sermons of St Leo 1 (Washington, DC: Fathers of the Church, 93), p. 17. Ibid. p. 256.

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Plate 1: Jesus speaking with the woman at the well: changing water into wine at Cana. Detail from dome mosaic of an early fifth-century baptistery, Naples. Photo: Robin M. Jensen.

Plate 2: Wall painting, Catacomb of Domitilla, Rome, from arcosolium 77. Taken from G. Wilpert, Roma sotterranea: Le pitture delle catacombe romane (1903) taf. 239. Photo: Robin M. Jensen.

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Plate 3a: Ecclesia Ex Circumcisione and Plate 3b: Ecclesia Ex Gentibus: part of the dedicatory mosaic from Santa Sabina Church, Rome. Photo © Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P.

Plate 4: St Maria Maggiore nave and triumphal arch. Photo © Holly Hayes Art History Images. More detailed images can be viewed at http://www.flickr.com/photos/geri-parlby.

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Plate 6: Frontispiece, Qur’an, San’a, first half of the eighth century? After Ettinghausen, et al., Islamic Art and Architecture, fig. 116. Plate 5: Bible, Perpignan, 1299 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, Ms. hebreu 7, fols. 12b and 13a). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris.

Plate 7: Micrographic Carpet Page (New York, Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, ENA 2630.1). Courtesy of the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary.

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Plate 8: Karaite Book of Exodus, tenth century (London, British Library, Ms. Or. 2540, fol. 2v), © British Library Board.

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Plate 9: Qur’an, Damascus, ninth century (Al-Haram Al-Sharif Islamic Museum, Raba’ah no. 5). Courtesy of the Al-Haram Al-Sharif Islamic Museum.

Plate 10: Z·emah· ben Abraham, Colophon, Hebrew Bible, tenth century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, MS. A 42.2). © Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

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Plate 11: Fragment of a Marriage Contract, twelfth century? (Cambridge University Library, T-S. K8.90; photo: author). © Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Plate 12: Qur’an, Andalusia, 1304 (Paris Bibliothèque nationale, Ms. arabe 385, fol. 130r). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris.

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Plate 13: Hebrew Bible, Spain, late fifteenth century (Cambridge, Trinity College Library, F 12.06, fol. 4r). Courtesy of the Masters and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Plate 14: Qur’an, ninth century (Jerusalem, National Library Israel, Yehuda Ms. Ar. 969, fol. 41r). Courtesy of the National Library of Israel.

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Plate 15: Fragment of a Marriage Contract, tenth century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, T-S. K10.7; photo: author). © Syndics of Cambridge University Library.

Plate 16: Qur’an, ninth century (Jerusalem, National Library Israel, Yehuda Ms. Ar. 969, fol. 41v). Courtesy of the National Library of Israel.

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Plate 17: Samuel ben Jacob (scribe), Second Leningrad Bible, Fostat, 1008/9 (St Petersburg State Public Library, II. B. 19a).

Plate 18: Qur’an, Spain or North Africa, 1344 (Jerusalem, Al-Haram Al-Sharif Islamic Museum, Maghribi Rab‘ah no. 3: photo: author). Courtesy of the Al-Haram Al-Sharif Islamic Museum.

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A SHARED TRADITION: THE DECORATED PAGES OF MEDIEVAL BIBLES AND QUR’ANS Vivian B. Mann Introduction

O

ur knowledge of the Mediterranean world in the period of Fatimid rule over Egypt, North Africa, and Syria (909–1171)1 has greatly expanded with the study of the more than 200,000 folio pages found in the Cairo Geniza, a repository for worn Hebrew manuscripts found in the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Fustat.2 Facilitated by the online presentation of original documents – both by libraries with geniza collections and by the Friedberg Geniza Project3 – scholarship based on finds from the Cairo Geniza has grown exponentially in the last decade. The results offer a fuller picture of medieval Jewish life in countries ruled by Muslims (then home to ninety per cent of the world’s Jewish population), and a much more nuanced view of Islamic history, economics and social dynamics in the centuries after the first Muslim conquests. The newly published documents – both in print and online – provide an amplified cultural context for studying the art of contemporaneous manuscript decoration. In regard to Jewish studies, texts found in the Cairo Geniza have expanded knowledge of rabbinics, of liturgical poetry, and of other forms of Hebrew and Aramaic literature that were considered basic to the study of Jewish culture prior to the discovery of the Cairo repository.4 As a result, literary finds from the geniza have been situated in a previously established context, but only a few attempts have been devoted to establishing a historical or artistic context for the illuminated texts and documents, such as marriage contracts, 1

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Although North Africa, Syria and Palestine were at times not ruled by the Fatimids between 909 and 1171, the term Fatimid will be used in this essay to refer to the artistic culture of the entire geographic area (including Egypt) that was part of the realm at its greatest extent, as in Jonathan Bloom’s Arts of the City Victorious. Islamic Art and Architecture in Fatimid North Africa and Egypt (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007). Estimates of the number of texts found in the Cairo Geniza vary. Marina Rustow estimates over 250,000. (Heresy and the Politics of Community. The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008], p. xx.) On the Ben Ezra Synagogue, see Phyllis Lambert (ed.), Fortifications and the Synagogue, The Fortress of Babylonia and the Ben Ezra Synagogue, Cairo (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994). (accessed 12 July 2012). See, for example, Yaakov Elman, ‘The Small Scale of Things: the World before the Genizah’, Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research, 63 (2001), pp. 49–85.

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found in the Cairo Geniza and for those illuminated manuscripts of the tenth–eleventh century that survived independently in communal or public collections. This essay is a prolegomenon to the study of one innovative type of illumination that appeared in the sacred texts of Jews and Muslims during the period of Fatimid rule as single or paired frontispieces or finispieces or to mark the beginning of a new text. Some of these nonrepresentational page designs were transmitted through North Africa to the Iberian Peninsula and appeared in later medieval manuscripts of the Qur’an and Bibles, but architectural compositions – that first appear as unique frontispieces in a Qur’an from Damascus or Yemen dated to the first half of the eighth century and in tenth-century Bibles – are rare in later copies.

Muslims, Jews and Christians and the Making of Islamic Art The scholarly study of Islamic art has blossomed in the last fifty years in response to the interest of collectors and museums,5 and to the reconsideration of the ‘decorative or treasury’ arts relative to the traditional categories of art history that privileged the ‘fine arts’ of painting, sculpture and architecture. A recurring topic at recent conferences and in current literature is the establishment of parity between these two categories.6 The newer inclusive approach recognises the value of calligraphy, illumination, metalwork, textiles and carvings in stucco and wood that have been the major art forms in the Dar al-Islam, the countries under the rule of Muslims. Another factor in the re-evaluation of Islamic art has been the interest of collectors and governments in showcasing their holdings in world-class museums designed by prominent architects. There has yet to be, however, widespread recognition of the artistic participation of minorities in the creation of Islamic art and the place of works made for those of other faiths within the field. One exception are the galleries of Islamic art in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, newly re-installed in late 2011, that include Hebrew manuscripts decorated with mudejar ornaments and southeastern Asian art in Islamic style.7 In most Western texts on Islamic art, the emphasis is on architecture and its decoration, and on objects made to be used in Muslim worship or study, or in homes presumably belonging to Muslims. Ignored in these writings is the fact that countries ruled by Muslims were, from their very beginning, multicultural societies that included Jews and Christians. The late Oleg Grabar was one of the few to recognise the role of minorities: ‘Islamic’ [art] does not refer to the art of a particular religion, for a vast proportion of the monuments have little if anything to do with the faith of Islam. Works of art demonstrably made by and for non-Muslims can appropriately be studied as 5 6

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James Allen, ‘Islamic Metalwork’, Louisiana Revy, 27, no. 3 (1987), p. 25. For example, a panel titled ‘The Decorative Arts within Art Historical Discourse: Where is the Dialogue Now and Where is it Heading?’ at the 2013 conference of the College Art Association in New York. Marilyn D. Ekhtiar, Priscilla P. Soucek, Sheila R. Canby, and Navina Najat Hadar (eds), Masterpieces of the Department of Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), pp. 338–405.

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works of Islamic art. There is, for instance, a Jewish Islamic art, since large Jewish communities lived within the predominantly Muslim world . . .8 Islamic art is then ‘the art created in a society dominated by Islam – art from the world of Islam’.9 As a result of their long history of living in the Dar al-Islam, Jews were closely integrated within Muslim society, even living in the same apartment complexes in medieval Cairo. Social integration extended to Jews who were businessmen and artists. As William Brinner has written, ‘In the absence of European-type guilds . . . there was a great deal of cohesion and cooperation within trades and professions; thus at all levels Jews interacted with their Muslim and, to a lesser extent, their Christian counterparts.’10 In other words, Jews were engaged in the same arts and crafts as non-Jews, as attested by documents from the Cairo Geniza and rabbinic responsa that mention Jewish goldsmiths, weavers, glassblowers, scribes, and other artists, and in all these and other occupations they worked on a par with Muslims.11 Jews engaged as weavers prompted the following question posed to Rabbi Solomon ibn Abraham Adret (1235–1310) of Barcelona: could Jewish women in Toledo weave textiles incorporating crosses?12 He answered: Those images of crosses that women weave in their silks [made] for non-Jews should be forbidden. Nevertheless, they can be deemed permissible because non-Jews do not worship their deity in this way. The [women] make nothing with their looms but [designs] for beauty in the manner of drawings. Even though the same images are worshipped on other articles, since it is not customary to worship them in this manner, [the images are] permissible. Solomon Adret’s responsum is noteworthy for the information that the Jewish women of Toledo were weavers of deluxe silk textiles in the thirteenth century. Muslims had introduced the production of silk cloth to Spain in the early tenth century, three centuries prior to its manufacture in the rest of Europe. Silks created by Muslims and Jews before and after the Reconquest were thought to be the finest in Spain, and were purchased and used by the Catholic kings and queens and served as their burial garments.13 Even more significant for this study are various texts that attest to cooperative relationships between Jewish and Muslim artists and to the formation of inter-religious partnerships. A responsum of Maimonides (1138–1204), who lived in Fustat (medieval Cairo) for 8

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Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art, rev. edn (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 1. Kjeld von Folsach, ‘Islamic Art or Art from the World of Islam’, Louisiana Revy, 27, 3 (1987), p. 11. William Brinner, ‘The Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Communities in Egypt’, in Fortifications and the Synagogue, pp. 14–15. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society. The Jewish Communities of the World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. Volume 1. Economic Foundations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 100–1. Quoted in David ibn Abi Zimra, Responsa Radbaz, vol. 4 (Warsaw: Aaron Walden, 1882), no. 107 (1178), trans. Eliezer Diamond. Concha Herrero Carretero, Museo de Telas Medievales. Monasterio de Santa Maria La Real de Huelgas Burgos (Barcelona: Lunweg Editores, 1988), pp. 26–31, 48–9, 52–5, 60–1, 66–7, 82–3, 92–3, 97–103, 107–10, 115–24.

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much of his adult life, explores some of the consequences of mixed ateliers.14 Maimonides was asked: What does our Master say with regard to partners in a workshop, some being Jews and some Muslims, exercising the same art. The partners have agreed between themselves that the [gains made on] Friday should go to the Jews and those made on Saturday to the Muslims. The implements of the workshop are held in partnership; the crafts exercised are in one case goldsmithing and the other is the making of glass. Maimonides allowed the arrangement as long as the Jewish craftsman did not benefit from revenues earned on the Jewish Sabbath. Another mixed shop mentioned in a geniza document of the Fatimid period consisted of a Jewish silk weaver who employed Muslims, a Jew and a Jewish convert to Islam.15 This documentary evidence for the role of Jews as artists practising various artistic métiers in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, and for their collaboration with Muslims, establishes a historical basis for considering the possibility of inter-religious cooperation in the production of manuscripts.

The Case for Muslim-Jewish Cooperation in the Decoration of Bibles and Qur’ans The premise that Muslims and Jews cooperated in the production of codices in the tenth–twelfth centuries is based partly on documentary evidence concerning artists, but primarily on visual evidence: common scribal practices, similarities of text decoration, and the incorporation of similar frontispieces and finispieces into both Qur’ans and Bibles. Prior discussions of decorated page designs in early illuminated Bibles tend to focus on two representations of the Tabernacle and Temple implements, both in the First Leningrad Bible written by Solomon Levi ben Bouya’a in 929,16 probably in Fustat (Fig. 12.1), and on their relationship to representations of Temple implements in Spanish Hebrew manuscripts beginning in the thirteenth century.17 The later Spanish miniatures, however, are 14

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Maimonides, Teshuvot ha-Rambam, ed. Yehoshua Blau (Jerusalem: Mikitse nirdamim, 1958), 360, no. 204. This text is noteworthy for its mention of a partnership between a Muslim and a Jew who are artisans. Other discussions of inter-religious partnership describe joint ventures in fields such as agriculture. (For an example, see Louis Ginzberg, Geonica. II Genizah Studies (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1909), pp. 186–7, 194–6 (Hebrew and English). Goitein, A Mediterranean Society. Volume 1, p. 112. Ben Bouya’a is thought to be the scribe of the Aleppo Codex dated c. 935, the oldest complete biblical codex known, which is also considered the most authoritative text. Its vocalisation was added by Aaron ben Asher (see below, p. 168). On the present state of the Codex, see (accessed 15 December 2012). For the opinion that that the Spanish miniatures are a continuation of the earlier Fatimid compositions, see Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, Ancient Jewish Art (Paris: Éditions Citadelles et Mazenod, 1995), p. 168. For a recent interpretation of other pages with architectural compositions as representations of the Temple, see Rachel Milstein, ‘Multi-Cultural Symbolic Language in the Earliest Illustrations of the Hebrew Bible’, in Nehamia Levitzion et al. (eds), The Intertwined World of Islam. Essays in Memory of Hava Lazarus-Yafeh (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute and the Hebrew University, 2002), pp. 421–7 (Hebrew). An interesting parallel to the central portal of the gate to the Temple in the First Leningrad Bible is a text marker in the thirty-ninth volume of a Qur’an manuscript written in Granada in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century

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Figure 12.1: First Leningrad Bible, Scribe: Solomon Levi ben Bouya’a, probably Fustat, 929. St Petersburg, State Public Library, MS. II, B. 17. not comparable to the illuminated pages in the Leningrad Bible (Plate 5). The earlier pages with Temple instruments are set within a stylised architectural precinct; the Spanish compositions are isolated depictions of individual implements arranged on facing pages, which are similar in format to depictions of surgical instruments in Arabic scientific texts.18 Since illustrations of Temple implements never appear in Qur’ans, this narrow discussion of the biblical miniatures obscures the important and continuing relationship between the decoration of manuscripts of Bibles and Qur’ans from the ninth–eleventh centuries and later. An example of a composition used in different religious contexts is the symmetrical, stylised arcuated design incorporating lozenges that was tooled on the front covers of three early tenth-century Coptic book bindings from the monastery in Touton,19

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(Tetouan: Dawed Collection; see Jerrilynn D. Dodds (ed.), Al-Andalus. The Art of Islamic Spain [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992], Pl. 3, p. 118). Both images incorporate horseshoe arches crowned by stepped domes and sharply tapering finials. Their relationship requires further research. For an example of a grouping of separate surgical instruments on one page, see a Hebrew translation of Abulcasis’ Kitab al-Tasrif (Michel Garel, D’une main forte. Manuscrits hébreux des collections françaises (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale, 1991), no. 43. On the bindings, see Paul Needham, Twelve Centuries of Bookbindings 400–1600 (New York and London: Pierpont Morgan Library and Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 20–1, Pl. 4.

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was drawn on similarly dated single-page compositions found in the geniza,20 and appears on numerous pages of the Second Leningrad Bible (St Petersburg Public Library, Firk. Bibl. II. B 19a).21 The last comparisons suggest that Jewish artists knew art made for Copts, the other major religious minority living in Egypt under Muslim rule. Tenth- and eleventh-century texts of the Qur’an and the Bible are noted for measures intended to ensure their accuracy. That this was true for the sacred texts of both Muslims and Jews was the result of a conjunction of causes.22 In the case of the Bible, a major factor was the development of Karaism – a movement within Judaism – in the late ninth century. Karaites based their religious practice solely on the twenty-four books of the Bible, rejecting later texts on Jewish law such as the Mishnah and the Talmud that were accepted by Rabbinates. The two groups were not antagonistic during the Fatimid period, as is evident by numerous intermarriages and their common efforts on behalf of the community as a whole, for example the ransoming of captives and the redemption of prized liturgical texts.23 The Karaite emphasis on the Bible, however, demanded accurate transcriptions, with the result that their scribes became expert in Hebrew grammar and in the traditions of writing the Bible, and were the first to incorporate the masorah – notes on spelling, pronunciation, and unusual words – within biblical texts.24 These minutely inscribed notes – unique to biblical codices – were often shaped as decorative or architectural forms, an art form that became known as micrography. Indeed, most of the extant Hebrew manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries were written by and for Karaites. Although in Islam primacy is given to oral recitation of the Qur’an, the need for a written text became apparent as early as the end of the seventh century, and a concern for the accuracy of the written Qur’an emerged in the tenth century with the result that diacritical marks, vowels and text markers were added to the sacred text.25 In the same period, six consistent scripts were chosen by the Abbasid vizier ‘Ali Muhammad ibn Muqla (886–940) to be used in writing chancery documents that likewise became standard for writing the Qur’an, their legibility and comprehensibility were designed to create an accurate text that was accessible to the reader.26 Extensive visual comparisons can be made between the forms and decoration of the sacred texts of Islam and Judaism. The earliest extant examples, Qur’ans of the eighth century and Hebrew Bibles of the ninth, are vertically oriented and incorporate text markers in the form of a linear series of geometric shapes set against the parchment or vellum ground. These markers were used both to distinguish chapters of the text such as the suras in Qur’ans, and to fill incomplete lines of text as in the ninth–tenth-century Gaster Bible 20

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For single-page devotional texts see Milstein, ‘Multi-Cultural Symbolic Language’, pp. 427–30, and Pl. 11; Jay Rovner, ‘A Unique and Early Use of Micrographic Carpet Page Format in JTS MS ENA 2630.1’, Ginzei Qedem, 7 (2011). For example, David Noel Freedman (ed.), The Leningrad Codex. A Facsimile (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: William B. E. Erdmans Publishing Company, 1998), 476v and 478r. Milstein, ‘Multi-Cultural Symbolic Language’, pp. 413–14. Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community, pp. 239–65. Milstein, ‘Multi-Cultural Symbolic Language’, pp. 414–15. On the dating of the first written text of the Qur’an, see Estelle Whelan, ‘Forgotten Witness: Evidence for the Early Codification of the Qur’an’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 118 (1998), pp. 1–14; Annemarie Schimmel, Calligraphy and Islamic Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1984), p. 4. Oleg Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 98–9.

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(British Library Mss Or. 9879) or in a Karaite Book of Exodus whose text was translated into Arabic (British Library Ms Or. 2540).27 Since the earliest examples of these workshop practices appear in Qur’an manuscripts, and the Hebrew word for codex, mizhaf, derives from the Arabic term mus·h· af, it is likely that the vertical format and geometric text markers were first developed by Muslim scribes.28 A new format for the Qur’an appeared in Egypt and Ifriqiya during the ninth century and remained popular during the remaining period of Fatimid rule. Oblong in shape with only a few lines of text on each page, this new form was a deluxe and expensive manuscript requiring many animal skins, and is further distinguished by the incorporation of a differentiated system of markers for the text. Bands of gold ornament ending in palmettes highlighted in blue and red separate the suras, while smaller circular and piriform gold markers designate groupings of sentences. Extant Hebrew manuscripts from the same period are far fewer in number. One oblong codex containing a single lection from Numbers, Shlakh Le’kha, dated 1106/7 (Jerusalem, National Library of Israel, Ms. Heb. 8˚2238) is embellished with gold bands ending in palmettes, together with circular and piriform shapes in gold, highlighted in blue and red, as in the similarly dated manuscripts of the Qur’an. In this Hebrew codex, however, the markers are mere decoration and do not denote divisions of the text, which implies that the painter misunderstood their use in the Qur’an codex that served as his model.29 Another similarity between early Hebrew manuscripts and Qur’ans is the incorporation of motifs known from classical art. Numerous writers cite the survival of the tabula ansata (a plaque with side panels that framed inscriptions) in illuminations with rectangular fields and projecting palmettes.30 Other organising principles derived from classical art are the repeating lozenges and other patterns commonly found in mosaic floors and on textiles.31 Architectural themes – either arcades or single arches – constitute another 27

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For examples of early Qur’an manuscripts, see Seracettin S¸ahin, Ali Serkander Demirkol and Sevgi Kultuay, The 1400th Anniversary of the Qur’an (Istanbul: Antik A.S¸., 2010), pp. 144–51; for the Gaster Bible and the Karaite Book of Exodus, see Ilana Tahan, Hebrew Manuscripts. The Power of Script and Image (London: The British Library, 2007), pp. 14–19. Raymond Scheindlin has posited that upper-class Karaites, who were exposed to Muslim culture and preferred to read Arabic, were responsible for these translations of the Bible. (‘Merchants and Intellectuals, Rabbis and Poets’, in Cultures of the Jews. A New History, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), p. 331. Malachi Beit Arié, Hebrew Manuscripts of East and West. Towards a Comparative Codicology (London: British Library, 1992), p. 11. The earliest dated Hebrew book was written in 904, later than the earliest Qur’an codices, which are largely undated. The circular and piriform text markers do not appear in Hebrew manuscripts after the Fatimid period. Richard Ettinghausen, Oleg Grabar and Marilyn Jenkins-Madina, Islamic Art and Architecture 650–1250 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 75 and Pl. 119. The Walters Art Gallery, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (Baltimore: Trustees of the Walters Art Gallery, 1947), no. 664 (Pl. LXXXIV), a fifth-century mosaic from Antioch. See Helen C. Evans (ed.), Byzantium and Islam. Age of Transition 7th–9th Century (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011) for lozenges, intersecting circles and interlace used as floor patterns in the Church of the Virgin (Madaba) dated 767 (p. 35); and a sample textile with a diamond pattern from Egypt, seventh–ninth century (p. 150). Earlier textiles with lozenges enclosing various motifs are found in Marie-Hélène Rutschowscaya, Coptic Fabrics (Paris: Editions Adam Biro, 1990), pp. 46, 47, 129 and 130.

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compositional type with roots in antique art. The earliest examples are two facing pages bearing images of buildings with arcades in which hang ‘mosque’ lamps from a fragmentary Qur’an manuscript dated to the first half of the eighth century that was found in a repository for worn texts, a ‘geniza’, in the mosque of San’a, Yemen (Plate 6).32 The occurrence of arches with pendant lamps in late seventh-century Islamic art suggests that this pair of motifs continued to signify a holy place as it had in late antique art.33 On numerous folios of two important Bibles written in Fustat: the Ben Asher Codex (whose masorah text was added by Aaron ben Moshe ben Asher in the early tenth century; Cairo, Karaite Synagogue)34 and the Second Leningrad Bible,35 and on a group of single folios from the geniza,36 the meaning of the arch and lamp motif is explicated by surrounding masoretic notes. The association of inscriptions with architecture dates to the earliest monumental building erected by Muslims, the Dome of the Rock (691/2), and inscriptions remained a common form of architectural decoration under the Fatimids.37 This was true not only for buildings intended for Muslim use but also for synagogues, as is attested by carved boards with inscriptions dated to the eleventh and twelfth centuries found in the Cairo Geniza.38 The use of inscriptions in actual buildings may have inspired or supported the representation of architectural forms accompanied by masoretic notes in Hebrew Bibles and the use of text on other compositions of the period (Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, ENA 2630.1; Plate 7). The incorporation of full-page, non-representational illuminations in biblical and qur’anic codices became standard from the ninth century on. They served as frontispieces and finispieces, marked important divisions within the text, or drew attention to important passages: for example, one was painted opposite the colophon in the Shelakh

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Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament, pp. 155–64, Plates 16–17; and Hans-Caspar Graf von Bothmer, ‘Koranic Calligraphy and Illumination in the Manuscripts found in the Great Mosque in Sanaa’, in Werner Daum (ed.), Yemen. 3000 Years of Art and Civilisation in Arabia Felix (Innsbruck: Pinguin-Verlag, 1987), pp. 178–81. See Nahum Avigad, Beth She’arim. Volume III: Catacombs 12–23 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1972), p. 211 for the equation of a lamp within an arch to a Torah ark; and Hugo Buchthal, ‘Hellenistic Miniatures in Early Islamic Manuscripts’, Ars Islamica, 7 (1940), pp. 125–33 for Hellenistic influences on Arabic manuscripts. For the date and attribution of the Ben Asher Codex, see Jordan S. Penkower, ‘Fragment of a Biblical Manuscript of the Tenth Century Attributed to Moshe ben Asher’, Tarbiz·, 60 (1991), pp. 355–70 (Hebrew); for pages from this manuscript with architectural motifs surrounded by the masorah, see Paul Kahle, Der Hebräische Bibeltext seit Franz Delitzsch (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1961; first published as Franz Delitzsch-Vorlesungen, 1958), figs 5–6, and 18; Milstein, ‘Multi-Cultural Symbolic Language’, figs 5, 8, 11–13. For an example in the Second Leningrad Bible, see Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, Ltd, 1969), Pl. 2. Bezalel Narkiss, Illuminations from Hebrew Bibles of Leningrad (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1990), Pl. 9; Rovner, ‘A Unique and Early Use of Micrographic Carpet Page Format’, Pl. 2b. On the Fatimid use of inscriptions on architecture, see Irene Bierman, Writing Signs: The Fatimid Public Text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Bloom, Arts of the City Victorious, 3. For the geniza boards, see Menahem Ben-Sasson, ‘The Medieval Period. The Tenth to Fourteenth Centuries’, in Lambert (ed.), Fortifications and the Synagogue, pp. 219–23. Boards with inscriptions found in the Cairo Geniza date as late as the fifteenth century.

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Lekha codex.39 The motifs and compositions in these ninth–eleventh-century Arabic and Hebrew codices are very similar. One popular design element, repeated rows of small flowers with petals and centres outlined in ink, fill frames on pages in the Karaite Exodus mentioned earlier and a ninth-century Qur’an codex (Al-Haram Al-Sharif Islamic Museum, Raba’ah no. 5) (Plates 8 and 9). The frame in the Bible encloses rows of tri-lobed arabesques, while the frame in the Qur’an manuscript draws attention to a text. Another full-page composition with a history in classical art consists of repeated diamond shapes that fill a frame. In its simplest form within Hebrew Bibles, the lozenges are formed of micrographic texts.40 In one early fragment, the text includes both biblical verses and the colophon written by the scribe, Z·emah· ben Abraham the Scribe (Cambridge University Library, MS. A 42.2, Plate 10).41 This relatively simple composition reappears in later manuscripts written in Toledo: two Bibles written c. 1300 by the scribe Ibn Merwas and another written in 1481 by Isaac ben David Kimci.42 In a variant form, the diamonds are filled with subsidiary motifs; an early example is a Coptic bookbinding dated c. 855 with white circles of vellum inset within the diamonds that were tooled into the darker leather cover.43 Lozenges filled with leaves and small squares appear on pages of the Second Leningrad Bible of 1008/9, for example those within a circular frame on folio 473r, and as a border design on a Jewish marriage contract of similar date (Cambridge University Library, Ms. T-S. 8.90, Plate 11), which indicates the production of ketubbot in the scriptoria that produced Bibles. The same pattern decorates a page in the Spanish Perpignan Bible dated c. 1300.44 A more complex variant of the repeating diamond composition appears in codices from the Maghreb and Spain. The frames of these frontispieces and finispieces are filled with rows of small squares criss-crossed by diagonals, the stars formed by their intersection highlighted in a contrasting colour. This composition was used on facing pages of a Maghrebi Qur’an manuscript dated l304 (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, Ms. arabe 385, fol. 130r; Plate 12); in a Maghrebi example dated fourteenth century (Marrakesh, Royal Library, Ms. No. 4a); 39

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The colophon is on fol. 34a; the illuminated page is 33b. (Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts, Pl. 3.) For example, Sed-Rajna, Ancient Jewish Art, p. 174. Z·emah· wrote that his father was a noted scribe, an example of the high degree of occupational continuity within scribes’ families as noted by Goitein. (A Mediterranean Society. Volume 1, p. 79.) In the literature on this Bible, a later, incomplete colophon written beside the page with micrographic texts is always cited as the source for information on the date of the manuscript and on the scribe. The micrography is said to be composed of biblical verses. A comparison between the two texts reveals that the micrographic text also includes the colophon; the later transcription is incomplete. For example, there is no information on the scribe’s grandfather who was also a scribe. For the Ibn Merwas Bibles, see Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, ‘Toledo or Burgos?’, Journal of Jewish Art, 2 (1975), pp. 7–8; for the Isaac ben David Kimci Bible, see Valeria Antonioli Martelli and Luisa Mortara Ottolenghi, Manoscritti Biblici Ebraici Decorati (Milan: ADEI-WIZO, 1966), no. 44 and Plate 31. See n. 19. On the Perpignan Bible, see Gabrielle Sed-Rajna, Les Manuscrits hébreux enluminés des bibliothèques de France (Louvain and Paris: Peeters, 1994), pp. 24–9, there the older literature.

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and in a Spanish Bible written in the late fifteenth century (Cambridge, Trinity College Library, F 12.06, Plate 13).45 A third composition linking Hebrew and Arabic manuscript decoration consists of interlocking circles and other geometric shapes whose interiors are filled with arabesques, interlace, or checkerboard designs as on facing frontispieces in two ninth-century manuscripts of the Qur’an (Jerusalem, National Library of Israel, Yahuda Msar 969, Plate 14), and Istanbul, Museum of Islamic and Turkish Art, S¸E 12727),46 on a fragment of a ketubbah or marriage contract of the tenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, T-S. 10.2, Plate 15), and on several pages of the First Leningrad Bible of 929 whose square format required an adjustment of the basic composition.47 That the geometric forms on these examples were made by scoring the folio and then painting the design can be seen from the regularity of their outlines and the scoring marks visible on the reverse (Jerusalem, National Library of Israel, Yahuda Msar 969, Plate 16). Unlike the first three examples whose interlocked circles remain distinct forms, the circular outlines in the Leningrad manuscript split to form geometric shapes filled with flowers and rinceaux.48 Early prototypes of this design decorate a Coptic book cover of the seventh–eighth century found in the Fayum and the carved woodwork from the Al-Aqsa Mosque of the early eighth century.49 Late and elaborate examples of interlocking geometric forms also appear in the First Kennicott Bible written in La Coruña, Spain, in 1476 (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Kennicott I, fol. 352 v).50 45

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For the Spanish Qur’an of 1303, see Martin Lings, Splendours of Qur’an. Calligraphy & Illumination (Westerham, Kent: Westerham Press Ltd, 1976), p. 171. The Maghrebi facing pages are illustrated in John Reeve (ed.), Sacred. Books of the Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam (London: British Library, 2007), p. 134. See Pl. 4b for the Barcelona Hebrew Bible of the late fifteenth century. This fragment is illustrated in S¸ahin et al., The 1400th Anniversary of the Qur’an, p. 134, picture 1, without a collection number. For an example from the First Leningrad Bible, see Milstein, ‘Multi-Cultural Symbolic Language’, Pl. 4; for the Qur’an manuscript, see Hispanic Society of America, Illuminated Manuscripts (Madrid: n. p., 2006), p. 152. Although the 2001 reprint of Richard Ettinghausen’s Islamic Art and Architecture attributes the innovative composition of interlocking geometric forms enclosing secondary ornamental motifs that appears in the Qur’an manuscript of 1001 to its Baghdadi scribe Ibn al-Bawwab, the manuscripts from the Damascus mosque now in Istanbul, the Qur’an manuscript in Jerusalem, and the marriage contract in the Cambridge University Library (Pls 3a and 3b) suggest this type of illumination was invented earlier. (Ettinghausen et al., Islamic Art and Architecture, 76; S¸ahin et al., The 1400th Anniversary of the Qur’an, 134, and cat. no. 9.) The nature of the relationship between Ibn al-Bawwab’s illuminated pages to similar Qur’an illuminations from Egypt is complicated as the Fatimid caliphs are known to have owned Qur’an codices written by Ibn al-Bawwab, the famous Baghdadi scribe. (Paul Walker, ‘Fatimid Institutions of Learning’, Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, 34 [1997], 195.) Rectilinear motifs that split to form subsidiary shapes appear on other pages of the Leningrad codex and in an early text of the Qur’an dated 870–8 (S¸ahin, et al., The 1400th Anniversary of the Qur’an, 157). For the bookbinding, see Needham, Twelve Centuries of Bookbindings, no. 2 and p. xvii; on the Al Aqsa carving, see Israel Museum, Jerusalem in History and Vision (Jerusalem: Jerusalem Post Press, 1968), Ch. 2 (n. p.). Bezalel Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts in the British Isles. Spanish and Portuguese Manuscripts. A Catalogue Raisonée. Volume 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), figs 456–60, 462.

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An additional frontispiece/finispiece composition found in both Qur’an and Bible manuscripts is centred on a rosette composed of narrow bands emanating from a circular or star-shaped centre. In an early example in the Second Leningrad Bible of 1008/9 (Plate 17), the micrographic quotations surrounding the rays indicate that the emanations from the centre may symbolise blessings (or curses) sent from God, at the centre, to man at the periphery.51 Later examples of the same composition (without micrographic notes) are found in Bibles, manuscripts of the Qur’an (Jerusalem, Al-Haram Al-Sharif Islamic Museum, Maghrebi Rab‘ah no. 3, Plate 18), and on leather book bindings decorated in the Maghreb, Andalusia and Spain.52 There are, however, a few designs with a long history that appear only in Bibles, for example, those composed of strapwork, although interlace designs were commonly used on earlier, ninth–eleventh-century book covers from Egypt and Kairouan and as framing or filler elements in Qur’an illuminations.53 The trajectory traced by these manuscripts indicates the transmission of text markers and full-page illuminations from Cairo and Ifriqiya to the Maghreb and Spain followed the path of the conquering Arab armies, trade and immigration from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. Some of those travelling appear to have carried manuscripts westward that served as artistic models for later texts.

The Case for Shared Models in Jewish and Muslim Scripture One of the questions that arises from the correspondences in the decoration of qur’anic and biblical texts is: what facilitated their appearance? An important factor may be that the production of goods in Muslim countries during the Middle Ages was characterised by specialisation and subdivision, which would have allowed Jews and Muslims to cooperate on many levels in the manufacturing process.54 The preparation of a manuscript written on leather, parchment or vellum, for example, is a multi-stage process involving the curing of skins, cutting them into folios which are then gathered into quires, followed by the preparation of the surface through priming to ensure the beauty of the text and its decoration, and scoring that established the structure of the page.55 Finally, the book was bound, an intricate procedure involving

51 52

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Milstein, ‘Multi-Cultural Symbolic Language’, pp. 434–5. See the Qur’an page of the thirteenth century from either North Africa or Spain, Heather Ecker, Caliphs and Kings. The Art and Influence of Islamic Spain (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2004), Pl. 57; for a leather cover with the same composition see Garel, D’Une Main Forte, pp. 80–1, the cover of a philosophical treatise written in late fifteenth-century Toledo. A distinctive interlace composition is formed by double rows of strapwork surrounded by a guilloche border, for example: Pentateuch and Earlier Prophets dated c. 1470 (Bibliothèque nationale, Ms. hebreu 1314–15 in Garel, D’Un Main Forte, pp. 52–3); the Abravanel Pentateuch (Bodleian Library, Opp. Add. 4˚ 26 in Narkiss, Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts in the British Isles, fig. 526), and in the Second Hispano-Portuguese Bible (Cambridge, Trinity College Library, F. 12.101), fig. 541. For an example of an Islamic bookbinding with interlace decoration, see S¸ahin, The 1400th Anniversary of the Qur’an, no. 13. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, Volume 1, pp. 99–101. On the process of preparing materials for a manuscript, see Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and their Methods of Work (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 35–51.

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many tools as described in three medieval Maghrebi treatises.56 The use of leather for the Torah scroll read in the synagogue is mandated by Jewish law. Ketubbot (Jewish marriage contracts) and divorce decrees, as well as some personal and business correspondence, were also inscribed on parchment to ensure their permanence. Until the manufacture of paper became common in Egypt at the beginning of the tenth century, the Qur’an was written on vellum, a practice that continued until the end of the fourteenth century in the Maghreb and Andalusia.57 Although only scholarly, religious scribes in a state of ritual purity wrote the texts of the Qur’an or the Torah, other types of documents, and other stages in the preparation of manuscripts could be the responsibility of specialists.58 Both Muslims and Jews are known to have been makers of parchment, of ink, of paint, and bookbindings.59 Another factor facilitating cooperation in production and mutual artistic practices is that those who engaged in the same professions in cities under Muslim rule tended to have their workshops and stores in the same area, even on the same street.60 This was already true in the late seventh century: the scribes who copied the Qur’an lived in one or two specific areas of al-Madinah.61 The physical proximity of Arab and Jewish ateliers coupled with documented partnerships and financial transactions62 were factors that may have contributed to the common adoption of ways to organise the text and to decorate it. Inter-religious cooperation in the making of books would have been facilitated by knowledge of the Other’s language. As a minority, Jews who had business or social relationships with Muslims had to speak Arabic, the lingua franca of the Muslim world. In the words of the Jewish philosopher Ibn Kammu¯ na (d. 1285), ‘When a linguistic minority is in contact with a linguistic majority, the minority learns the language of the majority whilst the majority does not learn the language of the minority or, at best, learns it much later.’63 That Karaites knew literary Arabic is evidenced by their translations of the Hebrew Bible into that language, for example the tenth-century Book of Exodus now in the British Library, and by the writing of bilingual texts, for example, Japheth ben’ Ali ha-Levi’s Commentary in Hebrew and Arabic on the Book of Genesis, a work composed in the tenth 56

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Adam Gacek, ‘Arabic bookmaking and terminology as portrayed by Bakr al-Ishbı¯lı¯ in his Kita¯ altaysı¯r fı¯ ·s ina¯ ‘at al-tasfı¯r’, Manuscripts of the Middle East, 5(1990–1), pp. 106–13; Jerrilynn D. Dodds (ed.), Al-Andalus. The Art of Islamic Spain (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992), pp. 123–4. Jonathan M. Bloom, Paper before Print. The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 74 and 85. On the ritual purity of Muslim scribes, see Schimmel, Calligraphy and Islamic Culture, 1984), p. 37; on preparations by Jewish scribes, see (accessed 14 December 2012). On the subdivision of labour in the making of books, see Johannes Pedersen, The Arabic Book, trans. Geoffrey French, ed. Robert Hillenbrand (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 102–3. Schimmel, Calligraphy and Islamic Culture, pp. 101, 112. For makers of ink, see Goitein, A Mediterranean Society. Volume II, p. 233. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society. Volume I, pp. 83–4. Whelan, ‘Forgotten Witness: Evidence for the Early Codification of the Qur’an’, p. 11. See ‘Appendix C: Industrial Partnerships’ in Goitein, A Mediterranean Society. Volume I, pp. 362–7 for geniza documents referring to partnerships between Muslims and Jews. Kahle, Der Hebräische Bibeltext seit Franz Delitzsch, p. 143.

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the decorated pages of medieval bibles and qur’ans

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century.64 Japhet ben ‘Ali was also known as Abu¯ ‘Ali al-H · asan ibn ‘Ali al-La¯ wı¯ al-Bas¸rı¯, an Arabic name, whose adoption was a common practice among Jews living in the Dar al-Islam and a sign of their cultural integration. Finally, the fact that texts of the Qur’an and the Hebrew Bible were the first manuscripts to be decorated in both cultures means that their scribes and painters were pioneers in establishing appropriate compositions and images for the embellishment of sacred texts. With no tradition to follow, the first illuminators drew on disparate sources: classical and early Jewish art known from extant art and architecture and the art of the already established Christian communities in their midst – the Copts and the Syriac Christians. This pragmatic openness lies behind numerous frontispieces and finispieces based on Coptic book covers, and pages with two types of representation: stylised architectural forms together with more modelled floral elements as on seventh-century Canon Tables and later in the Ben Asher Codex in Cairo.65 The parallels that emerge between the decoration of contemporaneous Qur’an manuscripts and Hebrew Bibles can be viewed as part of a common search for models on the part of Muslim and Jewish illuminators. The Jewish and Muslim practice of incorporating full-page compositions with repeated motifs into their sacred texts may also be interpreted as a painted expression of the ways textiles were used with codices in the ancient and medieval worlds.66 At the most basic level, textiles were sewn into deluxe codices to protect their illuminations, which could be abraded from rubbing against the facing page. Other usages were the wrapping of sacred books in textiles to protect them, and the covering of the hand touching a sacred text.67 The Babylonian Talmud (redacted seventh century) predicted an unfortunate end for any person touching a Torah scroll without wrapping his hand or finger in a textile.68 By the Fatimid period, the use of textiles in conjunction with written texts of the Qur’an and Bible must have become symbolic of their sacred nature, a meaning that was enhanced by the preciosity of the cloths used for protecting and wrapping. As a result, when the text of the Qur’an was written on paper, beginning in the tenth century, and bound in pasteboard, its binding was lined with fine cloth.69 Seen in the context of the symbolic role played by actual textiles used in conjunction with Scripture, the pages with repeated 64 65 66

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Institut du Monde Arabe, Trésors fatimides du Caire, exhibition catalogue, 1998, no. 27. Kahle, Der Hebräische Bibeltext seit Franz Delitzsch, figs 5 and 16. My reading of Christine Sciacca’s essay, ‘Raising the Curtain on the Use of Textiles in Manuscripts’, in Kathryn M. Rudy and Barbara Baert (eds), Weaving, Veiling, and Dressing. Textiles and their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2007), pp. 161–90, inspired the following discussion. Brief comments on the use of textile designs in Insular and Ottonian Gospels appear in Robert G. Calkins, Illuminated Books of the Middle Ages, (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 57 and 62. For textile book coverings, see Shlomo Dov Goitein, ‘The Synagogue and its Furnishings according to the Writings of the Cairo Geniza’, Eretz-Israel, 7 (1964), p. 95 (Hebrew with English summary). For Qur’an wrappings, see Thomas Walker Arnold and Adolf Grohmann, The Islamic Book (Paris: Pegasus Press, 1929), p. 32. On their use in Europe and possible derivation from Coptic and Islamic traditions, see Calkins, Illuminated Books, p. 57. Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 14a. The use of fine textiles to line pasteboard bindings (those made of pasted papers) is known as early as the tenth century, but only became common in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Silk and cloth dyed blue were both used; see J. A. Szirmai, The Archaeology of Medieval Bookbinding (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 56.

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motifs and centralised compositions painted at the beginning and ending of qur’anic and biblical manuscripts announce the sacred nature of the text. They also veil the God-given text and so endow it with mysterious power until the moment that the reader turns the page.70 These sumptuously decorated pages mediate between the material world of the reader and his experience of the Word of God, an experience actualised by turning the page. At the end of the codex, similarly decorated and embellished finispieces announce the conclusion of reading the sacred text. In the words of Oleg Grabar, [the illuminated pages] ‘signaled [the Qur’an’s] importance and uniqueness by physically and visually separating it from its surroundings or by inciting in the user a sentiment of awe, perhaps holiness, certainly of anticipatory and sensory pleasure . . .’71 Obvious questions remain. Why did the early full-page biblical and qur’anic illuminations that were based on geometry continue to be painted in other countries and times, while architectural motifs seldom appear? Was continuity a consequence of meaning and value attached to certain compositions? What is the relationship between the frontispieces/finispieces of early Qur’ans and Bibles with those in earlier Gospels written and decorated in Insular monasteries that were served by Coptic monks? The use of decorated pages to separate books of the Gospels, the incorporation of geometric and compositional elements known from Roman floor mosaics, and even the predominance of red and green in both Irish Gospels and a group of early Qur’an texts suggest that both were based on an earlier Coptic tradition.72 These are all matters requiring further study. The present paper is intended to lay the groundwork.

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Soiacca, ‘Raising the Curtain on the Use of Textiles in Manuscripts’, p. 186. Grabar, The Mediation of Ornament, p. 190. For manuscripts of the Qur’an in which red and green colours predominate in the decoration see S¸ahin et al., The 1400th Anniversary of the Qur’an, cat. 4 dated to the end of the eighth century, Khader Salameh, The Qur’an Manuscripts in the al-Haram al-Sharif Islamic Museum, Jerusalem (Reading: Garnet Publishing Limited, 2001), no. 5, dated to the ninth century; and Hans-Caspar Graf von Bothmer, ‘Koranic Calligraphy and Illumination in the Manuscripts found in the Great Mosque in Sanaa’, pp. 180–1 and Pls 7–9.

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13

SPEAKING PICTURES: MEDIEVAL RELIGIOUS ART AND ITS VIEWERS Charles Moseley

I ‘And what is the use of a book’, thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’ (Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865, Ch. 1)

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his essay is about both: a conversation, or transaction, implied between a thing seen and its viewer. It is also about the reading of ‘books’: the Scriptures, and the Book of Nature.1 In 1898 Emile Mâle summarised his opening chapter on the ‘General Character of Mediaeval Iconography’ thus: i. The iconography of the middle ages is a kind of writing. ii. It is arithmetic. Mystical numbers. iii. It is symbolism. Art and Liturgy.2 Though much work has been done since Mâle, that emphasis on multi-sensory inscribing and communication is not a bad place to start. I shall offer some suggestions about the relationship between verbal and visual conceptualisation in sacred art of the Middle Ages. Though the time span so referred to is enormous and far too often broad surveys can overlook substantial changes in ideologies, structures and procedures – and the conceptual content of common words – my argument is as applicable, I suggest, to eleventh- or twelfth-century art as to fifteenth. Iconography is, strictly, a notation of a language: writing through pictures implies something beyond those pictures. I suggest that by the high Middle Ages it has become more than that, that it has become a language in itself, where it both refers to a reality and is itself one. This essay’s interest is in the response to iconography, in both these senses. That takes place in a physical, indeed a ritual space (like a church) which is dynamic, only fully active when people are doing things in it. But the sort of relationship with the viewer/ reader that jewels, or reliquaries, or Books of Hours, or (later) devotional block books, presume and/or facilitate may give us a bearing on, how, say, an altarpiece functioned. 1

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Cf. Augustine’s ‘Two Books’, Sermones, 68, V, 6, trans. Vernon J. Bourke, The Essential Augustine (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1974), p. 123. Augustine draws on Romans 1: 20–1, Wisdom 13: 5, and Psalm 19: 1. L’Art religieux du XIIIème siècle en France (Paris: Armand Colin, 1st edn 1898) trans. as Religious Art in France: the Thirteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. v.

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A preliminary summary of ways the majority of people knew the Bible, the ultimate source of religious art, may be useful. Yet before even doing that, we need to remember that ways of seeing change, and however exacting we may be, some things we shall never understand. My pupils often find this image amusing, and then are puzzled when I point out that Villard de Honnecourt, an extremely exact draughtsman, says he drew this ‘al vif’ – from the life. There were plenty of (captive) lions about in medieval Europe, and nobody could doubt that our ancestors could draw accurately, for the evidence is all around – not least in Villard’s own sketchbook.3 But Villard’s lion, indeed, is very like one 200 years later in the Peterborough Bestiary in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 53 (fo.195vo),4 and other examples could be found where representation does not match what we naturally think must have been seen. We glimpse here the deployment of a different set of conventions for representFigure 13.1: Lion ‘drawn from life’ from ing the world, even a different grammar for making sense of the visual stimuli that the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt, MS in the Bibliothèque nationale Paris reach the brain through the eye (Fig. 13.1). (MS fr.19093 fol. 24v). E. H. Gombrich5 argues cogently that onto the physical stimuli reaching the eye we project a frame that enables us to make sense of it by matching it to what we have already understood. This is helpful in thinking about the visual and conceptual frameworks in which medieval images work. Medieval cognitive theory itself suggested that memory stored the ‘intention’ of an image, not simply the image itself.6 Gestalt theory suggests that the brain is holistic, self-organising and parallel, and translates what eyes see into form and space. In fact, it reifies: the image the brain ‘sees’ has more information than what the eye sees. We can test this by seeing how ambiguous perceptual experience 3

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Bibliothèque nationale, MS fr.19093. Facsimiles have been published, for example, ed. T. Bowie, The Medieval Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005). (accessed 3 June 2013). Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 1960), Ch. 1: see New Yorker cartoon facing p. 3. J. Tasioulas, ‘“Dying of Imagination” in the First Fragment of the Canterbury Tales’ (Medium Aevum, lxxxii (2013) pp. 213–35) summarises Roger Bacon’s, Avicenna’s and Albertus Magnus’ analysis of the workings of the ‘celles’ of the brain, and demonstrates Chaucer’s detailed knowledge of this discussion.

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speaking pictures: medieval religious art and its viewers 177 can oscillate between two or more views which present mutually exclusive interpretations of the same thing: works like Mauritz Escher’s Night into day or Bridget Riley’s Let’s be hypnotized illustrate this beautifully.7 If humans do have a grammar of seeing, which may, like any grammar, mutate with time and cultural context, this must be as important as any content that we, with our very different sensibility, living in a world that circles a different sun, can discern and analyse in medieval iconography. Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, bases itself on a text – secundum scripturas. But ‘The Bible’ our ancestors knew differed significantly from what we, living in an increasingly secularised post-(Counter)Reformation culture, might assume. Almost invariably we moderns think of the Bible as text: and it is only slight overstatement to say that that is exactly what most medieval folk did not do.8 The establishment of the canonical books by the late fourth century had relegated to ‘apocryphal’ status a lot of books that were, and remained, in common if not universal circulation. At the Reformation the Protestant canon excluded more. But those apocryphal books were still read. They contain some of the narratives which remained tenaciously influential on the imagination: cases in point are the Childhood Gospels, or the Harrowing of Hell in the Gospel of Nicodemus (widely current by ad 300). These not only elaborated the stark narratives in the canonical gospels, but also made space for the speculative play of the curious mind round the gaps in the human narrative: in some ways a regrettable film like The Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese, 1988; novel Nikos Kazantzakis, 1953) is only doing the same thing. By the end of the Middle Ages virtually all churches, and certainly all cycles of what are loosely called ‘Mystery’ plays, would have made visual or dramatic reference to the Harrowing of Hell.9 For the learned who could know ‘the Bible’ as a text, it would have been impossible by the early Middle Ages to approach it without awareness of the huge weight of commentary and interpretation accumulated over centuries: Walafrid Strabo’s Glossa Ordinaria is extant in thousands of MSS.10 The four-fold method of exegesis, with ultimate roots in Rabbinical reading of the Old Testament in the final pre-Christian centuries, was standard academic habit.11 The perception of parallels, correspondences, 7

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; whospeaksforart.blogspot.com/ 2011 / 05 / bridget - riley - lets - be - hypnotize . htmlwhospeaksforart . blogspot . com / 2011 / 05 / bridget -riley-lets-be-hypnotize.html Access to Latin was obviously limited, and vernacular versions were scarce and contentious. In England the ‘Wyclifite’ translations were vigorously opposed by the church hierarchy. How later medieval clergy, themselves often of doubtful scholarship, mediated the essentials of the faith to the laity is discussed by E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), Ch. 2. M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament – Translation and Notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924); J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). Finally compiled in twelfth-century France, this work, containing the entire Scriptures surrounded by a commentary drawn from patristic and later authors, was central for generations of scholars (see Lesley Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria: the making of a Medieval Bible Commentary (Leyden: Brill, European History and Culture e-books, 2010)). The formula Littera gesta docet; quid credas allegoria, moralis quid agas, quid speres anagogia, is often attributed to Hugh of St Victor or Augustine of Denmark but its actual origin is probably now impossible to determine. See Henri de Lubac: Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Wm B. Eerdmans, and Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), vol. 2. Dante’s casual reference to it (Convivio, II), suggests their familiarity to his reader.

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types and antitypes, the sacramental view (so to speak) of the physical world, invested everything from stones to stars with multiple significance, as part of the great interlocking pattern of Creation. All this must have had a ‘trickle down’ effect on the way the less learned, whose knowledge came through a variety of routes visual and aural, knew their Bible. The majority of lay folk would know their Bible visually: at its most sophisticated level, as a narrative recreated through, well, cartoons in the stained glass in a great church, that, by the sequence of people and events depicted, often walks you through historical Time, reminding you of its story, as you physically move East.12 (That medieval churches of standing functioned as artificial and encyclopedic memory systems was first suggested by Mâle.)13 They would know it through sculpture (often vividly painted and obeying a strict code of signification), through preaching and through plays: through paraphrase, in fact. A fine example of how playing can affect illustration of a biblical event in a wholly nondramatic setting is the portrayal of the Expulsion from Eden on a twelfth-century font in East Meon, Hampshire. Carved as background is a bang-up-to-the-minute Romanesque twin-towered west front. To be sure, in the mind of God every time is now. But the immediate point is not just about time, and the expulsion from the symbol of paradise that is the church: the sculptor is portraying what he has seen, namely, a play performed in front of a church (Fig. 13.2). Note, incidentally, that the body language of Adam and Eve here is already part of a standard code: their gestures are those Masaccio gives them much later in the Brancacci Chapel frescos in the Carmine in Florence. Similarly the fourteenth-century Holkham Picture Bible shows the story of the midwife helping at the Nativity whose withered hand was healed as she touched the Christ Child (Fig. 13.3). This is no canonical story, but a popular trope on the Nativity, and the picture documents not even that naturalistically, but how the ‘miraculous’ healing was performed in the play. For dangling by a string from the perfectly normal hand of the midwife is a glove that represented the deformed one.14 Other sources of devotional art (a bad term: it is hard to separate the devotional from the everyday in any period before the Reformation) would include Saints’ Lives. In volume terms these represent perhaps the largest single corpus of narrative the Middle Ages produced, with as rigid and well-understood conventions as their secular counterparts, the romances. They too were material for plays. Plants, animals, birds, all carrying as needed the sort of regular symbolism we see reflected in bestiaries or herbals, would also be used, often following masons’ or carvers’ or glaziers’ pattern books, which ensure a clear and enduring common repertoire. Though not really the concern of this essay, they should be kept in mind as providing a framing or illustrative context, 12

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Examples of this sequential ordering are cited by, among others, M. D. Anderson, History and Imagery in British Churches (London: John Murray, 1971), p. 82 ff. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) underlines how important images were in medieval conceptions of memory and its powers; including its creative potential – going well beyond ‘recollection’ as narrowly conceived. Holkham Picture Bible, BL Addit. MS 47682, fo. 12 vo (Facsimile ed. Michelle P. Brown, London: The British Library, 2007).

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speaking pictures: medieval religious art and its viewers 179

Figure 13.2: The Expulsion from Paradise: Font, mid twelfth century, All Saints, East Meon. Photo by William George Charles Moseley.

Figure 13.3: The Midwife’s Withered Hand, the Nativity, in the Holkham Picture Bible, British Library Addit. MS 47682, fo. 12 vo. The British Library, 2007.

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a world of symbol, and, following absolutely standard ideas, remind us that all ‘nature’ was sacralised. Choosing individual examples for discussion can dangerously obscure the fact that those examples had a specific significant function in the dynamic of the whole building, or in an operative context, which is affected not just by spatial location but by the season of the liturgical year. An object or space may not mean the same at Easter as it does at Christmas. (Consider how tomb chests on a chancel’s north side might double on Good Friday and Holy Saturday as Easter Sepulchres.) A font is meaningless outside a church, and it may indeed end up as an ‘art’ object in a museum, just as a MS illumination may be examined completely apart from the text with which it is in dynamic symbiosis.15 In the case of a Book of Hours, or a church, the physical form of the whole affects reception of every one of the parts. The structure of movement through a church (especially a major one),16 the devout movement through real, daily time in the Hours in parallel to the remembered time of the sacred narrative and in hopeful expectation of the Eternal Present – these are not artistic experiences but ritual. Suger of St Denis, whose influence on the development of the Gothic style was vast, drew on the neo-Platonic concepts in the Mystical Theology of Pseudo-Dionysus to justify the stained glass, and the decoration throughout the abbey church, as the perception through sense, matter and time, of the white radiance of eternity. His poem in De Administratione, central to his Dionysian framework for the symbolic function of the sanctuary, was inscribed on the cathedral door: Whoever thou art, if thou seekest to extol the glory of these doors, marvel not at the gold and the expense but at the craftsmanship of the work. Bright is the noble work; but, being nobly bright, the work should brighten the minds, so that they may travel, through the true lights, to the True Light where Christ is the true door. In what manner it be inherent in this world the golden door defines: the dull mind rises to truth through that which is material and, in seeing this light, is resurrected from its former submersion. (trans. Erwin Panofsky, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St Denis and its Art Treasures, Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 47–8) The biblical narrative imposes a teleology on all history – including the present moment. One day time will stop, and all shall know as they are known in the great and terrible day of the Lord. The urgency this gives to that narrative and to the art that draws on it is clear. It is easy to overlook, too, that that context, that telos, will include grotesques, gargoyles, 15

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Michael Camille showed (Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the making of medieval England, London: Reaktion, 1998) that the illuminations are no simple happy picture of English rural life, but a complex series of commentaries on the Psalms; cf. the Macclesfield Psalter, to which it is artistically related. Even those elements of the margins too glibly dismissed as mere fun are significant and related to the text alongside. Babewyns are not simply the luxuriating imagination of a bored illuminator. The mnemonic /classificatory function of MS illumination cannot be discounted. As in the later emblem, these illuminations are in an oblique relationship to, in dialogue with, the adjoining text. That movement can be seen as a mini-pilgrimage, one of the oldest metaphors of Christian life (Hebrews 11: 13). Something similar survives in the following of the Stations of the Cross in some churches today

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speaking pictures: medieval religious art and its viewers 181 babewyns, the green men which, however anarchic or carnivalesque, luxuriate in the shadows of the holy. In a mentalité conditioned as just described, they too will have more than merely decorative force. The topsy-turvy worlds of Rabelais’ Abbey of Thélème, of the Land of Cockaigne, or of the fabliaux, tease, burlesque, parody the normal, but are themselves included within it.17

II Mâle’s insight that medieval iconography is a script is in some sense anticipated by Gregory the Great’s remarks about paintings and sculpture being the books of the unlearned.18 Gregory’s letters in 599 and 600 to Bishop Serenus of Marseilles reacted to recent destruction of imagines there. His defence – he slips into ‘pictura’ to cover twodimensional as well as three-dimensional representation – rests on their usefulness for those who do not ‘know letters’, ‘to guide us to knowledge, reveal and make sense of what is hidden’ (my italics). He sees a relationship between the persuasive power of rhetoric and the persuasiveness of pictures. The later letter distinguishes clearly between adoring a picture and looking at a picture to learn what is to be adored.19 The iconoclasm in East and West in the seventh century, of which the Marseilles destructions may be seen as early symptoms, forces the orthodox to clarify their thinking. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 expressly declared: the more continually [the Saviour, the Virgin, the angels and saints] are observed by means of such representations, so much the more will the beholders be aroused to recollect the originals and to long after them . . . the honour paid to an image passes to its original, and he that adores an image adores in it the person represented thereby . . .’20 Gregory too remarks on the emotional element in striking visual imagery, and how narrative images stir memories of edifying stories. Moreover, he speaks of ‘revolving images in the mind until they are portrayed on the heart’ and of the power of the visual to change the soul of the viewer if it is prepared by prayer. Gregory’s ideas seem significantly to 17

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Anderson, History and Imagery in British Churches (London: John Murray, 1971), p. 20 drew attention to the inclusion of the anarchic in the authoritative. Cf. the classic discussion of the carnivalesque and its function in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Gregory the Great: letters to Serenus of Marseille, in Registrum Epistolarum, ed. Dag Norberg, in Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina, 140–140A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1982) 140A Ep. 9 (209), 768; Ep. 11(10) 873. (Also in Caecilia Davis-Weyer, Early Medieval Art: Sources and Documents 300–1150, MART: The Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching (1986), pp. 47, 49.) Gregory’s defence (sometimes summarised by the phrase Biblia pauperum) more easily applies to narrative imagery, like the fifth-century mosaic cycle at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome which he certainly knew, than to iconic images, like the Madonna and Child or Christ as Pantocrator. Moreover, it defends art for the poor. It offers no defence of imagery used or commissioned by people, like monks, who could read: St Bernard sharply attacked that when he asked what use monks, without the excuse of ignorance, had for pictures of ‘unclean’ apes and monsters and even less innocent depictions in their cloisters. Quoted by C. M. Bettenson, Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), p. 130.

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anticipate the ‘New Ethicist’ approach to the emotions: the emotions carry cognitive content, and I suggest this as an important strand in the reception of medieval images, particularly those that are narrative. I shall return to this point later.21 There is much theoretical exploration of the importance and types of vision. Augustine suggested three levels of vision in De Genesi ad Litteram: the lowest is corporeal vision, with the eyes of the body; the second is spiritual, the occurrence of images in dreams or imagination, largely but not wholly dependent on recollection of bodily vision; and finally the intellectual, occurring only in the highest levels of the mind. This last is not visual in the normal sense, but concerned with divine knowledge.22 Moreover, axiomatically, the world perceived by the senses expressed a hidden sense: Alanus ab Insulis’ trope on the concept of the Book of Nature is well known: Omnis mundi creatura Quasi liber et pictura Nobis est et speculum; Nostri mundi, nostrae mortis, Nostri status, nostrae sortis, Fidele signaculum.23 And just as God’s art, his world, is shot through with his glory, so man’s art, by definition a subset, must be also be polysemous. But this (so to speak) vertical axis of understanding is also qualified by the horizontal of typology: linear historic time, from Creation to Last judgment, is netted by a web of symbol, anticipation, fulfilment of past in present. Typology24 provided a grammar, so to speak, of medieval thought, a grammar of picturing, a rich meta-language used again and again and acquiring ever richer resonances. To take only one (late) example: George Herbert, in ‘Easter’ in The Temple (1633) writes: Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part With all thy art. The crosse taught all wood to resound his name, Who bore the same. His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key Is best to celebrate this most high day. This is not extraordinary ‘metaphysical’ inventiveness, for ‘His stretched sinews’ reaches back centuries to a fairly common idea of the crucified Lord as a lute, which iconographically links back to the type, David, and to the notion of the discord that Man’s 21

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Stories can convey or discuss ideas that philosophical discussion cannot, and vice versa. The conclusions of Boethius in De Consolatione Philosophiae may convince intellectually, but it is Chaucer’s reworking of them in Troilus and Criseyde with which we can engage on an imaginative level to make them part of emotional experience. De Genesi ad Litteram XII, 6, 15–11, 22; 30, 58–31, 59 In Migne, Patrologia Latina vol. CCX, col. 579: ‘Every created thing in the universe is like a book or a picture, or mirror, to us. It is a faithful sign of our world, our death, our state, our fate.’ The Hellenistic Jewish world in the last centuries bc developed (especially among Alexandrian scholars like Philo) ways of reading the Scriptures as a foreshadowing, even allegory, borrowing many Platonic concepts. The system was Christianised by Origen, but is clearly understood by St Paul (Colossians 2: 16–17) and the writer of Hebrews, and provides a theory of history which is clearly important to Augustine’s.

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speaking pictures: medieval religious art and its viewers 183 sin introduced into the musica mundana, which by that Sacrifice will be resolved into concord.25 To generalise, Herbert’s use of this ancient image reminds us that a lot of medieval art is, as we might say, synecdochal: it presumed a rich anterior grammar/discourse of visual vocabulary and memory consciously being used and expected. The scallop shell, for example, progresses from being the summarised object of St James’s miracles, to being his badge, then to a summary of the pilgrimage to Compostela, and then adds the further significance as a sign of the contemplative peace which the pilgrim could attain: Walter Raleigh’s ‘scallop shell of quiet’. The more an image or sign is used the more baggage it carries. One might compare the importance of visual/ pictorial allusion in poetry as focal, summarising: and indeed, reflexive. David Rijser’s analysis of the paintings of Raphael indicates how the skills used in reading books and poems are equally relevant to the reading of paintings.26 This complex and nuanced visual language – a Western Christian language transcending speech – was current for 1,000 years from the Mediterranean to Norway, and the Atlantic to the Eastern March. In remote Finland is Lohja church, its interior completely covered with wall paintings of the late fifteenth century, painted perhaps with more optimism than aplomb (Fig. 13.4). But the iconographic scheme would have been as intelligible to a sophisticated Florentine who might visit, as it would have been to a thirteenth-century pilgrim to the shrine of Our Lady at Chartres.27 This language is part of the cultural memory, and like any language it develops. Jan Assmann28 remarked that ‘Cultural memory is a collective and social achievement’ that is, it is not simply passive, but ‘a willed thing presuming consent, even if that consent is not articulated’. This is similar to Bourdieu’s idea of habitus, the set of socially learnt dispositions, skills and ways of acting, often taken for granted, which are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life.29 Michael Polanyi’s concept of ‘tacit knowledge’ is also helpful: our understanding of the world from earliest childhood onwards develops from our ability to interrogate all the signs we read rather than trying to understand them in isolation from each other.30

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See F. P. Pickering, Literature and Arts in the Middle Ages (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 271–2, p. 285, and Plates 10a, 29b. Cf. Milton, ‘At a Solemn Music’. Herbert’s ‘The Bag’ has an extraordinary image of the Wound in Christ’s side as a bag, remarkably similar to Lady Julian’s vision of ‘a faire delectabil place, and large enow for al mankind that shal be save to resten in pece and loue’ (Ch. 26). David Rijser, Raphael’s Poetics: Art and Poetry in High Renaissance Rome (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011). But Adam and Eve’s fig leaves become birch twigs! Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). See pp. 1–9. Habitus is a complex concept, but in its simplest usage could be understood as a structure of the mind characterised by a set of acquired schemata, sensibilities, dispositions and taste. In Science, Faith and Society (1946), Polanyi attacked a positivist account of science, noting that it fails to recognise the role which personal commitments play in its practice. His Personal Knowledge (1958) identifies the ‘structure of tacit knowing’: we experience the world by integrating our subsidiary awareness into a focal awareness. We believe more than we can prove, and know more than we can say, for a knower does not stand apart from the universe, they participate personally within it. Cf. The Tacit Dimension (1966).

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Figure 13.4: Deposition from the Cross, fresco, early sixteenth century, Church of St Lawrence, Lohja, Finland. Photo by C. W. R. D. Moseley.

III The oculocentricity of medieval culture is beyond question. Up to the Reformation, (which is coincident with and partly dependent on the invention of printing) religion had been precisely about vision, about looking for what lay beyond language. People thought not so much in terms of words or concepts or arguments but in terms of images, of icons, in terms of music, or action. After printing, everything becomes much more text based.31 As Eamon Duffy has remarked, for the Middle Ages ‘seeing was the only way of communicating with the Divine: you looked at the Blessed Sacrament’. Vision was a normative way of communicating with God (as in the opening of Lady Julian’s ‘Shewings’ – my italics – or in venerating an image). Objects made for contemplation were intended to evoke strong emotion and were clearly effective even if they were deplorable artistically. Not a few of the medieval paintings of holy subjects guarded so respectfully in galleries across the world are, simply, awful – the sort of thing that Francesco di Marco’s succursale in Avignon

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Cf. Neil Macgregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (London: British Museum and Allen Lane, 2010), p. 556, discussing a broadsheet issued on the centenary of the Reformation. Luther remarked ‘Christ’s kingdom is a hearing kingdom, not a seeing kingdom’ (Sermon delivered in Merseburg, 1545, Weimarer Ausgabe 51, 11, 25).

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speaking pictures: medieval religious art and its viewers 185 could order from Head Office in Prato virtually by the gross.32 But they did their job – for example, countless Madonnas or pietàs, or prints and statues of Christ as Man of Sorrows. Indeed, there are many examples of this sort of image which are clearly stimuli to devotion, a human conduit for Divine Grace, almost enabling a transaction: they bear legends like ‘Who sum euer deuoutly beholdith these armys off Christis passion hat vjm vijClv yeres off pardon.’ Robert Vischer’s concept of Einfühlung, first used in his doctoral thesis On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics (1873), is helpful, and cognitive neuroscientists interested in the physically sympathetic response to images have developed it.33 It is precisely the stimulation of emotional response so strong as to be perceptible physically that is the purpose of this type of art. What needs special stress is that this pictorial tradition is never merely decorative: it sought to give memorable form to major themes and master narratives that informed medieval understanding of the world and the human predicament. Visual images enable the memory of things experienced, the imagination of things not experienced, and deep thought about their significance.34 Medieval images in sacred contexts are functional – as ‘applied’, as functional, as advertising is now. Gru˝newald’s Isenheim altarpiece was painted for a plague hospital: the main donor, Guido Guersi, intended it to ‘serve as the first stage of the healing process . . . sufferers should be taken to the altarpiece and encouraged to examine Grunewald’s images . . . Only then were they deemed receptive enough to benefit from medical treatment’. Similarly, in the hospital at Beaune, the dying lay where they saw van der Weyden’s Last Judgement. In both cases, the aim is a shock, a cleansing of the sight, inseparable from the healing function.35 The parallel with advertising is instructive. Advertising’s cleverness, even beauty, has an aim beyond art – namely to separate the viewer from his money, and it uses art to achieve its end. It uses sex and the erotic, the physically desirable, to gain our attention: the eyes of the model in the embrace engage with our own, not with the partner, and we are the invited voyeur. And we buy the toothpaste or the shampoo or the ice cream. So in many medieval images of martyrs and saints, of the Blessed Virgin, of the Saviour, often the eyes look out, interrogating the viewer: ‘What have I done to thee, O my people?’ (Micah 6: 3; part of the Improperia for the Good Friday Office). They disturb, challenge, interrogate. There is no idea of art qua art, of the aesthetic.36 That does not mean there is 32 33

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Iris Origo, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini (London: Cape, 1957), pp. 41–2. See David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). This discussion of emotional and corporeal responses to works of art is mainly interested in the symptoms of such responses. Cf. David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, ‘Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Aesthetic Experience’, Trends in Cognitive Science 11 (2007): pp. 197–203. Cf., perhaps, Hugh of St Victor’s stages of meditation: cogitatio, thought, or use of sense or memory on ideas, with which we see God in nature; meditatio, use of reason and memory to explain the involved or hidden (with which we see God within ourselves); contemplatio, concentration on manifested universals, with which we see God as if face to face. Richard Cork: The healing presence of Art: A history of Art in Western hospitals (Yale, 2011), and review by T. Hyman, TLS 13 July 2012. Wikipedia – the Elysium of the opinion of the half educated – has the ineffable comment ‘During the Gothic era the classical aesthetical canon of beauty was regarded as sinful.’ ‘Aesthetic’ in German first occurs in 1744, in English 1764 (OED). Kant uses it in his third critique about sensation – which is its original Greek sense. The word was coined by Alexander Baumgarten.

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no response to or interest in beauty or beautiful things, for clearly there is – one need only cite the passionate, sensuous response to physical beauty that is implied in Augustine’s Confessions or explored in his De Musica.37 What is perhaps strange to us is that sometimes beautiful things are placed where only the angels can see them.38 But they are God’s people too. By definition, art in a sacred context like a church building is in a ritual space where we do things in front of it. Even the act of reading, or turning the pages of a text known to be sacred can be a ritual (one thinks of how Psalters or Books of Hours might be read). So how were Gregory’s ‘books for the unlearned’ actually received? Does the ‘script’ itself give any clues to a now unrecoverable sensibility? What was it like to experience the images not as scholars but as something as natural as breathing, when the whole universe signified beyond itself? How did that affect how they saw with the bodily eye? Such seeing, even at quite a simple level in society, must be affected by this tradition of expected polysemy. Margery Kempe, no scholar she, distinguishes with casual confidence between that seen with the ‘bodily eye’ and that experienced with ‘gostly si3t’, typically a multi-sensory experience in which she herself is present, for example, at moments of the Passion, e.g. the Deposition39. Much later, fiercely Protestant George Wither40 remarks on a similar disjunction between the ‘eye of sense’ and the ‘eye of understanding’ – yet is the division as easy or as rigid as this suggests? I turn now therefore to considering some plausible models for the reception of medieval images. My first example is the so-called Wykeham Jewel in New College, Oxford (Plate 19). This is curiously balanced between sacred and secular, in so far as they could ever then be separated. It may not actually have been William of Wykeham’s, but it is the sort of jewel that a prelate might have worn, part of the conspicuous display decorous to a prince of the Church, while a hair shirt might well have been next to his skin – like Thomas Becket, if we believe the monks who recorded his murder – and I am not yet so cynical as automatically to assume we should not. It draws on one moment in the biblical narrative, but does far more than portray it. The materials are gold, precious stones, pearls, emeralds, rubies and diamonds. Medieval eyes would subconsciously see not simple stones, but things of symbol and power – the emerald, for example, was thought to have the power to clear sight – intimately connected with the fabric of the universe. Each draws attention by its colour, by the way it has been shaped – the ruby carved into a pot on the central stroke of the M, for example. But in soft focus you see the overall shape, the crowned Lombardic M of Mary, Queen of Heaven: a massive doctrinal statement, but also literally a memento every time you put the jewel on. Looking closer, you see that that central stroke is not simple, but that lilies

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The OED comments acerbically that it was ‘misapplied in German by Baumgarten, [to mean “pertaining to the beautiful”] and so used in England since 1830’. Cf. Robert J. O’Connell, S.J., Art and the Christian Intelligence in St Augustine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), Chs 2 and 5. Consider Richard Rosewell’s example of a painting on the underside of a tomb canopy that only the effigy of the deceased could see (Mediaeval Wall Painting, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), p. 194, Figs 213, 214. There is a less extreme example in Fig. 219, Walter de Stapledon’s tomb in Exeter Cathedral. Cf. note 32. George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (London, 1635) II, emblem xxviii, p. 90.

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speaking pictures: medieval religious art and its viewers 187 of pearl – purity again, and wisdom – grow from the ruby pot: Gabriel is making that cataclysmic greeting. That ruby signifies now in a different way: no longer just part of a sign, but part of a narrative – a narrative in which the beginning is subsumed instantaneously into its conclusion with the symbol of Mary as Queen of Heaven. The stones become the stones of the Heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation 21, which some commentators interpreted as symbolic of Mary. Yet each element is discrete, highly finished, claiming attention in its own right to what it is and how it is made. No one level is more important than another. But the whole is greater that the sum of its individually significant parts. Mary, patroness of the arts of which this is an example, is revealed in the shape of the narrative of the girl humbly saying ‘ecce ancilla Domini’. The narrative signified becomes itself a sign of the literally unspeakable mystery of the Incarnation. I have no idea how this jewel was commissioned, planned, worn or used. I have no idea how people would have seen it, for it is small and to ‘read’ it you would have had to put your head very close to the prelate’s breast if he was wearing it, with a consequent breach of polite decorum. The investment of time and treasure makes clear that it was regarded as important, to be revered if for that alone, but its subject demanded veneration and contemplation. The late fourteenth-century Holy Thorn Reliquary, made probably for Jean duc de Berri, is an even more elaborate tour de force. Its (tiny) enamel label asserts ista est una spinea corone Domini nostri Ihesu Christi.41 It encases the physical relic of the Sacrifice in a representation of the drama of the Last Judgement in which every one venerating the relic will participate. If that thorn is authentic – and many people staked a lot of effort and money on the belief that it was – then it was actually piercing the head of Christ during His suffering, and connects our suffering on this earth to His suffering for us. Given belief in its authenticity, it is impossible to exaggerate how powerfully this object would affect any believer kneeling in front of it. The reliquary is ‘a sermon in gold and jewels, an aid to intense contemplation and a source of deepest comfort’.42 But how close could people get to it to ‘read’ it? (It is only 20 cm high.) ‘Ista’, ‘This’, addresses the observer; but dare we suggest that, perhaps as with the Wykeham jewel, in the mind of its makers/ commissioners that is less important than the act of making that narrative which brackets the whole Time of Grace? That having the receptacle for the holy relic made is itself a work of piety, turned not, so to speak, primarily outward to the viewer but inward, a veneration of the relic? Such huge expenditure on making this object, like the proportion of GDP expended on building a great church, argues for a more pressing motive than simply conspicuous display of wealth. Inevitably, few would have seen the Wykeham jewel and not many more the Holy Thorn reliquary (Plate 20). But what about art that everyone sees, that reaches across all social divisions? Here, once again, strictly artistic quality hardly matters; what matters is the interaction of static, permanent picture, the moment of vision, and consequent response. Nobody painted great wall paintings because they felt it would look nice: they did it, and were paid for it, because it had a clear purpose, and they usually, as at Lohja, did 41

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The detailing is stupendous. Behind the figure of God is a gold relief of the Holy Face on the vernicle. (A fragment of this was possibly in the secondary compartment at the reverse.) Two gold doors have tiny reliefs of Saints Christopher and Michael: the ‘bearer of Christ’ and the Psychopomp, or bearer of souls. Macgregor, History of the World, p. 425 f.

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it as part of a coherent, articulate scheme, whether or not the money lasted long enough for its full completion. A faded wall painting on the north wall, opposite to and visible from the south door of the church in Ashby St Leger’s, Northamptonshire, in its subject and position is typical of many that still survive and of many, many more than have been lost.43 It shows St Christopher, patron of wayfarers, and it is (as commonly) positioned opposite the normal door of entry (when there is a choice) where people passing the church could see it through the open door, or if they came to hear the early, ‘morrow’, mass, would see it on entering and leaving at the beginning of their ‘go[ing] forth unto their labour until the evening’. ‘. . . St Christopher, holy patron of travellers, protect me and lead me safely to my destiny. Amen.’ That these paintings were treated as powerful foci for devotion is proved by the scornful drawing in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Superstitiosus imaginu¯ cultus, by Hans Holbein the Younger, of a man praying before a St Christopher.44 Many of these images survived the destructions of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, being whitewashed over until the whirligig of Time brought in his revenges. The one in Ashby St Leger has been – as far as I know uniquely – flanked by a sign of the times, a later text of the Decalogue, also to be seen as you pass by or enter in, a stern verbal command demanding some literacy – not a story summarised in its crucial moment of comprehension. Now this is not a biblical image, for St Christopher’s legend is, to say the least, doubtful. But it illustrates perfectly how the (so to speak) spinal biblical narrative which the church building itself, and its liturgy, narrate could be flanked and reinforced by non-biblical material which had huge imaginative force on the way the teaching, the myth, of the church might affect lay memory and devotion. A similar point could be made from the St Christopher in the far more private Bodleian MS Latin liturg. G. 5, made in Flanders in the later fifteenth or early sixteenth century for an English patron.45 It is an Hours of the Holy Spirit; the prayers are in Latin with mainly English rubrics. This is not an ‘art object’. The prayers are intended to be prayed and the pictures are to memorialise a critical moment or action, and make instantaneously visual the conceptual relationship to the saint and through the saint to God. Clearly the miniaturist and wall painter worked to the same iconographic norm. Too often one is told, by people who should know better, that the ‘Mystery’ or cycle plays of the Middle Ages, or the iconographic schemes of church art, were ‘propaganda’, or, more kindly, for ‘teaching’ the laity, executed by a group called loosely ‘the Church’.46 This ignores the symbiotic interaction of ‘the Church’ at all levels with the society in which it grew47: it is not an organisation distinct from and automatically oppressive of the people it was supposed to serve, but was staffed by men of like passions with everyone else, was a major employer, and provided the infrastructure of society – for example bridges, education, healthcare – that is now provided by secular government. Religious art deserves more thoughtful analysis than so reductive an explanation offers. First, that 43 44

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http://www.britainexpress.com/attractions.htm?attraction=4537 The iconoclast, as here, re-describes images as pure matter, and thus objects of mere idolatry worthy only of the hammer. http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/medieval/mss/lat/wwmss/mss/latin/liturg/g/005.bak Some plays, not of the cycles, like the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, did have a polemic function: one that aimed to resist Lollard views of the Eucharist. W. Blockmans and P. Hoppenbrouwers, Introduction to Medieval Europe 300–1550 (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 1.

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speaking pictures: medieval religious art and its viewers 189 explanation ignores the fact that once you have taught someone something, you have taught it:48 what new fact would you learn from a play in a cycle you had seen dozens of times before? Or from the wall painting or glass or sculpture or panel that you had seen perhaps every day since childhood? (What might, on the other hand, happen is that the familiar object grows new significance without losing its earlier ones as the observer ages.) The real function of these things, these actions, is to articulate the common myth by which a society understands itself, its status, in Alain de Lille’s word – which is not that far from Bourdieu’s habitus – its telos. They reinforce the common consent in that myth which allows a perspective of understanding, a ritual imaginative space in which the everyday, even the topical and ephemeral concerns that bother any social group, at any time, can be explored sub specie aeternitatis. And they do it in a context which for the vast majority is not intellectualised but as natural, as taken for granted, as breathing. I cite three instances: the doom paintings49 that became increasingly common in even humble churches in the later Middle Ages; one of the most subtle of the surviving English ‘Mystery’ plays; and an altarpiece of exceptional quality. The first two are as public as one can get; the last, less so, but not as private as the Wykeham jewel. Depictions of the Last Judgement were as common as blackberries in medieval Europe. They range from monumental examples at Autun, by Gislebertus, or Chartres (South Porch), or the bravura Michelangelo ceiling in the Sistine Chapel,50 to the humblest of examples. Holy Trinity, Coventry’s fine painted one c. 1430 has survived relatively well.51 In the earlier Middle Ages as sculptures they usually were placed over a portal, or as glass in a western rose window where the last rays of sunset will make them flame with the glory of the Lord. Later, humbler, examples are often over the chancel arch, which marks the division of the building between the nave, in this world, and the space for more removed mysteries.52 They mark the symbolic space where the things of this world are focused by the mysteries of the next; and they frame, provide scenery for, the repeated ritual action of the liturgy. If a rood screen is added as was common later, then we have exactly the same collapsing of time past and time future as in the Holy Thorn reliquary. These paintings are genuinely interactive: even the least devout worshipper is brought by the structure of the building to this limen, the balance to the other great threshold of the font, where the representation of the history of the future cannot be ignored. The casual, sometimes irreverent, familiarity with the sacred that medieval religion engendered, and which can sometimes still be glimpsed in parts of Catholic Europe, does not prevent the cheerful sinner from being challenged by what he or she knows so well. And looking east, 48

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That is not to ignore the fact that the church constantly stressed the need for orthodox instruction of the laity – a major concern of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) whose decree Omnis utriusque sexus enjoined yearly confession of the laity and their instruction according to the new confession encyclopediae, like the Somme des Pechiez Chaucer translated as the Parson’s Tale. In Continental tradition, the west end of the church (as in Western Rose windows) was the place for representations of death and judgement. English tradition (to which Fairford in Gloucestershire is a notable exception) usually places Dooms where nave divides from chancel. Note that despite the bravura contraposto of Christ’s pose, the code is exactly that used five centuries before for ‘Christ as Judge’: robe open and wounds showing. http://historiccoventry.co.uk/tour/doom-large.php The Michelangelo is at the climactic east end. On the division between nave and choir, see M. D. Anderson, Drama and Imagery in British Churches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 34.

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they look through the judgement to the anticipation of the Lamb’s high feast in the Mass. This painting does not justify itself in ways we find familiar: it aims to make us feel what intellectually we know, to change the way we see, to have results in moral action. The York play of the Crucifixion makes visible in the everyday the narrative and the mysteries of the Faith.53 Its deixis forces the audience to see the Instruments of the Passion: ‘here is . . .’ When the supine cross is raised from the cart, (at around five feet, roughly the same height above the heads of the crowd as a church altar, approached by steps, would be), the play makes explicit what happens in the daily, eternally offered, sacrifice of the Mass. The elevation of the consecrated Host re-enacts the lifting up of the Son of Man on the Cross. Plays in this culture interrogate, challenge, the viewers and actors. Lay people participated in this yearly ritual action, the annual holiday, when the town was en fête: what must it have been like to play Christ54, or Pilate, or the comic St Joseph? Or the soldiers? What did the neighbours say? The audience, the throng of misbehaving (if we trust Wyclifite strictures) townsfolk, is now willy-nilly the crowd on an eternal Calvary, while the torturer’s horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree. And they are redeemed – if they will be. For linear time is comprehended in the eternal Now of the mind of God. All times become one. Boethius’ argument is powerful: and academic.55 There is plenty of evidence for quite sophisticated response to the problem of representing lapsed time in static visual art. In many MSS, illuminations will show the same person at different points in the narrative’s time: for example, the Fall and Expulsion in the same frame on fo 4ro of the Holkham Picture Bible. But this collapsing of diachronic time into a single visually synchronous moment can be more complex, and what is striking is how common is its representation. In the Gorleston Psalter (early fourteenth century; BL Addit MS 49622 fo 126ro) the initial ‘C’ of ‘Cantate [Domino]’ (Ps 98, Vulgate) shows three men singing a motet, and one of them looks up to the upper register in which the angel announces the Nativity to the shepherds, one of whom is also making music playing a shawm.56 (This psalm was traditionally associated with the Annunciation to the Shepherds) The singers are joining in with the angelic choir and with the musical shepherds themselves. The initial introduces the injunction in the present to ‘sing to the Lord a new song’: the picture illustrates a scriptural action in the past being echoed in a motet by clerks in a text which commands the making of music whenever it is read. Even long after the end of our period, after nearly a century of sporadic official assault upon the old devotional languages, there are hints that lay folk of no education grasped this close relationship of past and present with no 53

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Penny Granger, The N-town play: Drama and Liturgy In Mediaeval East Anglia (Ipswich: Boydell & Brewer, 2011) underlines the importance of the liturgy (especially the Eucharist and Magnificat) to the conception and effects of this mysterious text. She explores its possible use as a reading text, designed especially for women, which would draw on their memory of both liturgy and plays. See pp. 188–94. The number of people actually acting at (e.g.) York was high: several were required to play Christ alone, for example, and, considering the city’s much smaller population then, the percentage acting was very high. There is similar evidence of substantial numbers of the community being involved in a yearly cycle of plays at Beverley (English Historical Documents IV, ed. A. R. Myers (London and New York: Routledge, rev. edn 1996), pp. 1065–6. De Consolatione Philosophiae V. 6 Christopher Page, ‘An English Motet of the 14th Century in Performance: Two Contemporary Images’ Early Music 25 No. 1 (1997) pp. 7–32. See illustration 1.

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speaking pictures: medieval religious art and its viewers 191 difficulty – perhaps were not even aware of it, for the concept of the past as a receding perspective is a sophisticated idea that not many of our own contemporaries share. In 1642 the parliamentary commissioner Shaw, visiting Kendal to ascertain the state of its citizens’ Scriptural knowledge, was appalled. He found one old man who asserted that of course he knew Jesus Christ: he had seen him on a cross with ‘blood running down’.57 His memory was clearly of the old plays (Kendal’s cycle was performed last in 1576), and two interpretations are possible. One is that he telescoped all the past into a flat, unperspectived backdrop for the present; the other, which does not exclude the first, is that what he saw his neighbours act all those years ago made present the real event it represented. Similarly, this collapsing of time makes active in the ritual of the present the event of the past. Exactly in this way the shepherd in the Towneley Secunda Pastorum offers the Child a bob of cherries – a fruit ripe about the time of Corpus Christi in Yorkshire, but not freely available on the bitter winter night to which the play’s opening makes gesture. Precisely this active relation of past to present is what I explore in my final example. In Nicole Froment’s triptych Le Buisson Ardent, painted for René d’Anjou c. 1463, now in Saint Sauveur, Aix-en-Provence, we glimpse the seer as well as the seen (Plate 21). By definition paintings like this are in, and part of, a ritual space where we do things. Even the act of reading, or turning over the pages of a text known as sacred – is a ritual (for example, think how a Psalter or Book of Hours might be ‘read’). This, like other altarpieces, is intended as backdrop before which the Eternal Moment, the indivisible Now of the mystery of the Mass is made present. Before that action, the worshipper kneels before the Inconceivable substantiated into concept, narrative and matter. This painting therefore literally provides the history of the present action and a reassurance of its effects in the future. You look not at but through and by the object (Fig. 13.5). This triptych would have been opened only on festivals. Its outside panels show the Annunciation, a climactic summary of the typological story that opening it reveals, as we move into the yet deeper mystery, the no-time, of the Mass. The elaborate typological discourse of the architectural border of the central panel (which may not be by Froment, of course) is a tour de force, and whether or not it originates with or at the same time as Froment’s painting is unimportant: it wholly converges with the painting’s subject.58 The central panel shows the Burning Bush, a Type of the Virgin Birth. There is an obvious visual pun in the foreground between Moses (as usual on the right of the composition) encountering the divine59 and the Annunciation to Mary, and, with all those sheep, traditionally featuring in pictures of Moses on Sinai, of the annunciation to the shepherds. White sheep drink from the fountain of life flowing from the foot of the mount, symbolising the new order; the other sheep and a single goat in the background symbolise the old order, the old Covenant and the old Law which Moses transmitted to the Israelites, which Gabriel’s announcement sets aside. Reinforcing this, the medallion Gabriel wears shows the Fall, 57

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Helen Cooper, ‘Blood running down’, London Review of Books, 23 No. 15, 9 August 2001, pp. 13–14. Our concept of authorship, of an artist ‘owning’ his own work, is still far in the future. Cf. the woodcuts in Adrian and Joyce Lancaster Wilson, A Medieval Mirror: Speculum Humanae Salvationis 1324–1500 (University of California Press, 1984). As the Wilsons stress, there is often a close relationship between (MS or printed) Specula and ‘high’ art: the four scenes of the Blessed Sacrament altarpiece by Dirck Bouts in St Pierre at Louvain exactly matches the page in Ch. XVI of a fifteenth-century blockbook (pp. 138–9).

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Figure 13.5: The Triptych closed, showing the Annunciation (see also Plate 21). Photo by Charles Moseley. while the mirror the Child holds shows the Virgin and Child, the route/root of Salvation. Note that the folds of Mary’s robe on her right side resemble a dead dragon. The bush flames with roses, for enthroned in it is the mystic Rose, the Rose of Sharon of the Song of Songs. Its circular shape is another visual pun, on the Hortus conclusus, symbol of the virginity of Mary. Clearly, the point is that apprehension of this image is not sequential, or in isolation, but authorises itself in the sacred narrative from Fall to Sinai to Bethlehem to the Sacrifice on Calvary, which is being re-enacted in front of it on the altar – the longue durée collapsed into a single moment which includes the worshipper in the redeemed, remade creation. It makes present the past in the Now, in a story whose telos is known. This painting collapses all sacred history into a single visual moment. But it is meaningless without memory of at least a mediated text. And it is functionless without the action in front of it. And, it is beautiful, and nobody but a fool would say our ancestors did not appreciate beauty. So here is a good example of what critics like Dorothy J. Hale and the New Ethicists are arguing: that aesthetic experience can be cognitive. ‘Ethical knowledge is the experience of irresistible encounter with what one does not try to know, what one cannot know. It is the knowledge that is beyond reason, that is of the emotions, and that is so intuitive as to seem a bodily knowing.’60 Furthermore, the physical and mental response that is demanded of 60

Dorothy J. Hale, ‘Aesthetic and the New Ethics: Theorising the Novel in the Twenty-first century’, PMLA 124 (2009), 896–905. This owes something to Hans Urs von Balthazar, who

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Plate 19: The Hylle or Wykham Jewel, in the form of a crowned Lombardic initial ‘M’ with annunciation figures, late fourteenth century (silver-gilt set with rubies, diamond, emerald and pearls), French school (fourteenth century) (attr. to) / © Courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford / The Bridgeman ArtLibrary.

Plate 20: The Holy Thorn Reliquary (early fifteenth century) made for John, Duc de Berry to house a relic of the Crown of Thorns. From the Waddesdon bequest, © The Trustees of The British Museum.

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Plate 21: Nicole Froment (c. 1425–83/6), Madonna and Child in the Burning Bush, central panel from the Triptych of Moses and the Burning Bush c. 1476 (oil on panel). St Sauveur Cathedral, Aix-en-Provence, France. Giraudon /The Bridgeman Art Library.

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Plate 22: The ‘Lily Crucifix’, fifteenth century. Clopton Chapel, Holy Trinity, Long Melford, Suffolk. This uncommon device, which brings together the moments of Conception, symbolised by the Lilies of the Annunciation, and of Death, is also to be seen carved on a misericorde in the ‘Decani’ stall in Tong Church, Shropshire. Photo: Charles Moseley.

Plate 23: Canon Table, Carolingian Gospel Book. A canon table with detail of a blossoming and fruitful cross (Harley MS 2788, f.7), © British Library.

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Plate 24: A twelfth-century wall painting of the Crucifixion with green cross, St Albans Abbey, Hertfordshire. With thanks to Kevin Walton and by permission of the Chapter of St Albans Cathedral. Photo: Ben Smith.

Plate 25: Jesse tree window, Figure of Mary, Corona Chapel Jesse Tree, the Corona Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral, by permission of the Dean and Chapter, Canterbury Cathedral.

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Plate 26: Roger Wagner, Dartmoor Crucifixion (2007), by permission of the artist, Roger Wagner.

Plate 27: Titian, Noli me tangere, Bridgeman Art Library.

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Plate 28: Bishop Bernward’s Bronze Doors, Hildesheim.

Plate 29: Hans Memling, Scenes from the Passion of Christ (The Turin Altarpiece), Bridgeman Art Library.

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Plate 30: Fresco: Dura Europos House-Church: The Three Women Visiting the Tomb.

Plate 31: The St Albans Psalter: The Three Marys, Dombibliothek Hildesheim.

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Plate 32: Stigmatization of St Francis (left wall, lower tier) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, by permission of Antonio Quattrone, Quattrone snc, Via dell’ Arcolaio 48, 50137 Firenze.

Plate 33: Trial before Sultan (right wall lunette, Sassetti Chapel) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, by permission of Antonio Quattrone, Quattrone snc, Via dell’ Arcolaio 48, 50137 Firenze.

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speaking pictures: medieval religious art and its viewers 193 the worshipper seems complementary to what Nicolas of Cusa described in the opening of his De Visione Dei (1453). That guide to meditation uses the inescapable gaze of a figure in a religious icon as a metaphor for the all-seeing gaze of God. Referring to a painting by Roger van der Weyden, Nicholas marvels that the eyes appear to follow him as he moves about the room while simultaneously they remain fixed on another person standing still.61 Thus the emotional and aesthetic response, informed by memory and recognition, is made a challenge, demanding self-knowledge and commitment. Of course, this particular painting by Froment might not have been seen by that many people: it was after all in a Carmelite convent. But I think that the sort of response it suggests is not limited to what we might call high art. We have seen that Doom paintings over chancel arches were functional, used. We have glanced at the complex semiotic of drama. The stained glass of Christ crucified on a lily in Long Melford cannot have been without meaning to the man from the ploughtail who stood beneath it to hear Mass (Plate 22). An English medieval translation of the Speculum Humanae Salvationis explains that the Virgin (Virgo) is the rod (virga) from Jesse’s root, and after specifying the virtues of the symbolic lily, adds: A man is strengthid noblye That he no payne may fele, Of this floure, Crist-on-Crosse Behalding the colour.62 The devotional image is not only surrogate for what it represents but at the same time interrogates, and challenges, by looking back at the viewer, and the viewer’s looking has promised effects. This altarpiece, where the flower/virgo/virga/root is also implicit, itself becomes a holy object, because of what is says, of how it is used: not worshipped, as Pope Gregory stressed, but making visible to the eye of sense what the eye of spirit adores. The crudity of the woodcut does not stop it working in its measure in the same way. Thus meaning does not reside in objects, but rather meaning resides in our relation with objects – and in each case, ‘our’ means ‘my’ – you, me, someone else – who actually is in the relation. It is that relation that makes effective in the present an event in the past. Like the crude blockprints of the Man of Sorrows, the altarpiece is quasi-sacramental, and an outward and visible sign of an inward and dynamic grace. In his old age, John Lydgate recalled the effective familiarity, the repeated challenge of a picture he says as a youngster: Which nowe remembring / in my later age Tyme of my chyldhode / as I reherce shall

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argued that great works of art occur with the same uncontrollable and numinous quality as Old Testament theophanies, appearing ‘like inexplicable eruptions on the stage of history . . . [Art’s] unique utterance becomes a universal language; and the greater a work of art, the more extensive the cultural sphere it dominates will be’, Hans Urs von Balthazar, Two Say Why, trans. John Griffiths (Search Press, 1973), pp. 20–1. Similarly, George Steiner claims ‘the experience of aesthetic meaning in particular, that of literature, of the arts, of musical form, infers the necessary possibility of a theological “real presence”’, George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 3. Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God, 42.3. M. D. Anderson, History and Imagery in British Churches (London: John Murray, 1971), p. 110.

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Within fyftene / holdyng my passage Mydde of a cloyster / depyct vpon a wall I sawe a crucyfixe / whose wou¯ des were nat small With this worde / vide / written there besyde Beholde my mekenes chylde / and leaue thy pride 63 Pioneers like Mâle, Panofsky and Gombrich recovered so much that had been overlooked or forgotten or ignored of how medieval people saw and represented their world, and it is possible now to read what has been left to us with some understanding. But what is not possible is to feel their art, to live with it, as our forebears did: the Long Melford ploughman is long dead, and with him the world he saw. Villard’s Lion smiles enigmatically at us. John Lydgate’s cloister is no more, and we cannot enter it. We are on the outside, looking in, and all we can do is write essays about it.

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Here Begynneth the testame[n]t of Iohn Lydgate monke of Berry which he made hymselfe, by his lyfe dayes (Emprinted at Lo[n]don : In fletestrete, by Richard Pynson: printer vnto the kynges noble grace, [1520?]) Sig c1ro (STC (2nd edn) / 17035).

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THE ICONOGRAPHY OF THE CROSS AS THE GREEN TREE Christopher Irvine

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n a century that saw two world wars it is not surprising that the dominant image of the cross became that of a suffering God. Indeed, in the twentieth-century iconography of the cross, influenced by such modernist artists as Pablo Picasso, the cross came to function as an emblem of God’s refusal to recoil from human suffering. Here is the stark image of Christ, with a body contorted with pain representing a God who enters into the dark side of human experience, of pain and loss.1 One systematic theologian has described this sensibility as the solidarity model of the cross.2 But it is one model among others. In 1947 Walter Hussey, one of the greatest patrons of contemporary art in British churches, cited the words of the German painter Hans Feibusch: ‘[we and] those returned from the war have seen too much evil and horror. Only the most profound moving sublime vision can redeem us’.3 But again, there are many ways of picturing the sublime and of conveying the significance of the cross. Among the different ways of figuring the significance of the cross suggested by scripture and celebrated in liturgical poetry, is that of the living cross, the fresh and green life-giving tree, and it is this image which is to be explored in this essay in relation to Christian discourse on the cross. In terms of methodology, material evidence will be examined across a wide time frame in a diachronic way, and so images will be related to both key texts and to one another. In the Passion narrative in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus likens his own fate as he moves towards Calvary to that of a lopped fresh green tree: ‘Because if in the green wood they do such things, in the dry what will happen?’ (Luke 23: 31). This is the second part of a double pronouncement made by Jesus on his way to Calvary which seemingly implied the occurrence of some greater catastrophe.4 There may also be an allusion to the prophetic passage in Ezekiel which contrasts the green and the dry tree, and expresses the divine intention to plant a tree of extraordinary fecundity (Ezekiel 17: 24). But even so, there 1

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For examples see the exhibition catalogue Cross Purposes: Shock and Contemplation in Images of the Crucifixion (2010), Mascalls Gallery and Ben Uri Gallery, Paddock Wood and London. Hans Urs von Balthasar Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Volume IV, The Action (San Francesco: Ignatius Press, 1994), pp. 267–73. Walter Hussey Patron of the Art (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1985), p. 55. Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah, vol. 2 (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1994), p. 925.

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is a rich intertextuality of this pronouncement of Jesus with other pericopes in the wider sweep of the Gospel story, where one image serves to reinforce and extend the meaning of another. The reference to the green and the dry tree resonates most immediately with those pericopes in the passion narrative, which include the symbolic episode of the cursing of the unfruitful fig tree, recorded in Mark 11: 12–14 and Matthew 21: 18–19, and developed into a parable in Luke (13: 6–9). The parable of the vineyard, an allegory spun from the love song of the vineyard in Isaiah 5, through which Jesus presents his hearers with his immanent rejection and death in Jerusalem (Mark 12: 1–11, Matthew 21: 33–46, and Luke 20: 9–19). And finally, what is effectively the only parabolic passage in the Gospel of John. In John’s narrative this short parabolic passage follows immediately from the account of Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem, the city which was to be the very epicentre of the drama that was to be played out in the Passion. In this parabolic statement the death and burial of Christ are set out in terms of planting and new growth: ‘unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit’ (John 12: 24). There are two points which should have bearing upon our reading of this parabolic statement. The first is the fact that the language is figurative and therefore intentionally invites the reader’s imaginative engagement with it, and the second is the positioning of the passage in the structure of the narrative. Indeed, on structural grounds alone, one could say that this single parabolic statement summarises the narrative plot of John’s Gospel which effectively recapitulates the second creation myth in Genesis in locating the site of Christ’s burial and resurrection in a garden. Furthermore, the verdant setting of the destination of John’s complex story refers back to the figure of the Vine in Chapter 15, and takes the reader forward beyond the chronology of Christ’s death and resurrection to subsequent Christian existence made possible by being grafted into Christ, the true vine. The imagery of the Vine discourse in John 15 recalls a plethora of images in the Hebrew Scriptures which speak of Israel, God’s people, as a vine or vineyard. Although the image of the vine/vineyard is a dominant metaphor for Israel, it is deployed in a range of complex passages which each serve a specific rhetorical purpose. Isaiah 5: 1–7, Jeremiah 2: 21, and Ezekiel 17: 6–9, for instance, are oracles which implicated the original audience in the pronouncement of God’s judgement. Psalm 80: 8–13 is a plea to God to avert disaster, and the prophet Hosea articulates a hope for future restoration by evoking a scene of luxuriant growth and intoxicating fecundity: ‘They shall again live beneath my shadow, they shall flourish as a garden; they shall blossom like the vine, their fragrance shall be like the wine of Lebanon’ (Hosea 14: 7). The complex of biblical vine and tree imagery was soon embedded in early Christian culture, as evidenced in Syria, a far more expansive country than present day Syria, from where Christianity travelled south and east as well as to the more familiar west. Given the geographical proximity and the close linguistic ties between Palestine and Syria, it is not surprising that Syria became the cradle of primitive Christianity, influencing its cultural forms and extending the reach of early Christianity from this pivotal crossing point between east and west. Collections of prophetic oracles, known as testimonia, were compiled to witness to the fulfilment of that hope enunciated by the Hebrew prophets of the restoration of God’s people, first planted in Canaan, and for their flourishing and fruitfulness in a peaceable kingdom, each with their neighbour under the shade of his vine and fig tree (see Zechariah 3: 10; cf. John 1: 48–9). This arborial and viticultural imagery was prevalent in both the literary and the material culture of early fourth-century Syriac Christianity, and organic forms of unfurling

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leaves and tendrils were carved into the facing stones of churches and monastic buildings. Examples of carved stones can be seen in the ruins of the monastic settlement built around the alleged site of the hermit Simon Stylites, northwest of the present day city of Aleppo. These carved stones, apparently designed to protect water sources, were decorated with incised palmate forms, and in one of these a cross is enclosed within a circle of foliate decoration. In terms of literature, the complex biblical image of the vine and the vineyard was appropriated by early Syriac theologians such as Aphrahat and Ephrem. Both of these writers delighted in wordplay and often resorted to the language of paradox in their writing. Ephrem typically cast his theological thought in poetic form and apparently trained a women’s choir to perform his hymns on appropriate liturgical days and seasons of the Christian year. These poetic compositions were incorporated into the repertoire of liturgical compositions in both East and West liturgical traditions.5 In one of these hymns, Ephrem tells of how Zacchaeus was called from a tree (the sycamore tree which he had climbed to catch a sight of Jesus as he passed along the way) to be saved by a tree (that is, by the wood of the cross): ‘He had you come down from the tree you had gone up [Luke 19: 5], and he saved you by His wood.’6 Deploying a whole nexus of related images to the central figure of the vine in John 15 and the parable of the vineyard (Mark 12: 1–9, and parallels in Matthew and Luke), Christ is figured by Ephrem as being both the vine and its fruit. Here images are densely layered and associations extended between the different vine and vineyard stories and images. And so, Ephrem refers to the eucharistic cup as the ‘medicine of life’ given for those, who in the terms of another parable of Jesus, laboured faithfully in the vineyard (Matthew 20: 1–16). But what of the cross itself? One commentator has stated that it was de rigueur in the Syriac literature of this early period to present the Crucifixion in vine-imagery.7 The literary image of Christ crucified against the wood of the vine seems a little too forced,8 but the artistic portrayal of a vine cross was typical of the period and can be seen in a mosaic set in the floor of a small excavated fourth-century church at Beth ha Shitta. An adapted form of the image entered the Byzantine repertoire of cross iconography, and a good example of a simple mosaic cross set against the tree of life is to be seen in the twelfth-century Dome mosaic at St. Mark’s Church in Venice.9 A particularly spectacular iconographic example of a cross sprouting leaves from its base is to be seen in the church of the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Georgia. Georgia is another Christian culture with exceptionally deep historical roots. The country was officially converted to Christianity soon after the conversion of Armenia in the fourth 5 6

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Baby Varghese, West Syrian Liturgical Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 2. Hymn 16, Hymns on Virginity, trans. Kathleen E. McVey, in Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), p. 330. Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 122. See stanza 13 of ‘Rest firm on the Truth’ in the collection On Paradise. A more plausible image was provided by Zeno of Verona, born around the time of Ephrem’s death in Edessa, who, in a sermon delivered to baptismal candidates drew on viticulture and spoke of the Christian being like the shoot of the vine being tied to the upright stake, representing the cross itself. Gordon P. Jeanes, The Day Has Come! Easter and Baptism in Zeno of Verona (Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1995), pp. 153–4. Gerhart B. Ladner, God, Cosmos and Humankind: The World of Early Christian Symbolism, trans. T. Dunlap (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 7 (illustration 14) and p. 101.

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century, and the cultural correspondences between these neighbouring countries are considerable, particularly in architectural style. The Holy Cross, or Jvari monastery is built on the top of a hill over-looking Mtskheta, the old capital city of Georgia.10 The west elevation is close to a precipitous cliff, and so the main entrance to the church is on the south side. The tympanum relief sculpture above this door is believed to date back to the late sixth, or early seventh century. The monastery boasted a relic of the true cross, and the ritual act of showing the cross to the people seems to have inspired the composition of the sculpted cross. An encircled so-called Greek-style cross is presented by two elegantly carved angels, one on each side of the cross, as if the cross itself was being presented for veneration. Rich foliage grows out from the base of the cross in a way that is familiar to us through other Syrian and Syrian inspired examples. The almost interchangeable images of vine and tree have persisted through different historical epochs and occurred in different cultural settings, and ultimately derive from the elementary (one could almost say elemental) metaphor of the tree/vine in biblical literature and near-eastern religious mythology. More specifically, the metaphor of the cross tree is associated with the vision of the great tree (see Daniel 4: 10–15), and resonates with those images of the tree of life which were conflated in the Christian imagination and which occur in the first and last books of the canonical bible (see Genesis 2: 9, Revelation 2: 7, and 22: 2). Historically, these images are to be found as illustrations in Carolingian, Anglo-Saxon, and later medieval liturgical books, such as the famous Sherborne Missal c. 1400.11 In the Sherborne image (folio 53) the figure of Ecclesia points to the wound in Christ’s side, and fresh foliage sprouts from where the spurting blood of Christ falls. Rather surprisingly the image surfaced even in high Gothic art, despite its propensity for a more realistic rendering of the suffering Christ on the cross, and a stunning example is to be seen in a fifteenth-century tree cross which was suspended on a rood beam in the Cathedral Church of St Lawrence, Nuremberg. The motif is even to be seen in the baroque setting of Christopher Wren’s dome at St Paul’s Cathedral, London. Here, a glittering glass mosaic of Christ crucified against a green Tree of Life extends across the width of the quarter dome in the northeast conch. This ‘redemption scene’ was designed and made by the accomplished Victorian painter, William Blake Richmond (1842–1921), and according to one source, it was this tree of life motif which became the artist’s chosen religious symbol in his old age.12 These images may well strike the contemporary reader as being rather too distant from a literal reading and picturing of the crucifixion, but on reflection, one can see how the combination of the image of the cross, the site of Christ’s sacrifice, and the tree results from a telescoping of Eden, the cross, and the heavenly Jerusalem through a rich inter-textual reading of scripture. The combining of the cross with the tree resulted from a typological way of reading biblical texts which was exemplified by patristic and early Christian 10

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I am most grateful to Archbishop Malchaz Songulashvili for drawing my attention to this extraordinary monument. The illustration, drawn around the letter T of the Te igitur in the Canon of the Mass, shows a wide-eyed Christ crucified against a tree-cross. See Barbara C. Raw, Anglo-Saxon Crucifixion Iconography and the art of the monastic revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 151. See Simon Reynolds, A Companion to the Mosaics of St. Paul’s Cathedral (London: The Friends of St Paul’s Cathedral, 1994).

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writers such as Origen (c. 185–c. 254) and the Venerable Bede (c. 670–735), and has more recently been recommended as a significantly productive strategy for the reading of texts.13 The typological method of reading and interpreting texts will recur throughout this exploration of the cross-tree. The Venerable Bede reiterated an earlier patristic view which spoke of the cross as being planted in the earth as an axial tree uniting heaven and earth.14 It was this cross-tree which represented God’s saving purpose, that salvation of humankind which was decisively expressed and fulfilled in and through the incarnation and Passion of the eternal Word of the Father.15 This complex understanding was given visual form in monumental artefacts such as the seventh- and eighth-century Anglo-Saxon and Celtic stone crosses. These crosses were monumental, and often depicted particular scenes and figures from the Bible. A celebrated example is the so-called Ruthwell Cross, which is now to be seen in Ruthwell Parish Church in Dumfrieshire in Scotland. The correlation of the annunciation and the crucifixion scenes carved on the pinkish-grey sandstone cross at Ruthwell is a celebrated example of this, and echoes Bede’s dual emphasis on incarnation and Passion in his Commentary on the Song of Songs (5.IV). Recent studies of the Ruthwell cross have been cautious in attributing specific influences on its decorative scheme,16 but the decorative vine on the narrower south and north sides of the tapered vertical axis of this monument certainly resonate with the polysemous motif of the tree of life. Furthermore, the relief sculpture of the unfurling plant-scroll on the Ruthwell Cross is inhabited by carved birds, flowers, fruit and animals. In this way the story of the Passion of the incarnate Christ is integrated into the meta-narrative of the Christian story, which is the overarching story telling of God’s intention to create a new heaven and a new earth (Revelation 21). The cross, in other words, does not simply represent the suffering and death of Christ, but graphically presents God’s purpose, as illustrated by the relief sculptures on the present south side of the monument, which is to heal and renew creation (Revelation 22: 2). By literally walking around the monument and looking at its decorative scheme, the viewer can see, as the original monastic viewers of this monument did,17 that life flourishes and grows through the saving death and resurrection of the incarnate Christ.18 The inscribed runes of heroic verse in the Ruthwell Cross cite the old English poem The Dream of the Rood, and in this poem the cross of Jesus is called the Saviour’s tree. The most striking feature, however, is that in this poem the cross itself is given a voice, and witnesses to how it had been viciously hacked down from the edge of the wood: ‘It was long

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See, for example, Tibor Fabiny, The Lion and the Lamb: Figuralism and Fulfilment in the Bible, Art and Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). See Pseudo-Cyprian’s De Pascha, PL 2: 1171–4. This receives extensive and critical treatment in Eamonn O’Carragain’s definitive study, Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition (London and Toronto: The British Library and the University of Toronto, 2005). See Fred Orton and Ian Wood with Clare A. Lee, Fragments of History: Rethinking the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007). Ibid. pp. 186–8, and p. 196. For a full historical survey of the appropriation of the motif of the tree of life in Christian art, including the Reformation and Counter Reformation epochs in Europe, see ‘The Verdant Cross’ in Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred E. Knopf, 1995).

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ago, it yet lives in my mind, that I was felled in a forest’s end, removed from my roots.’19 The wood of the cross is to be honoured like Mary, through whom the eternal Word took flesh, and who is honoured in the singing of the evening Canticle, the Magnificat. But most surprisingly, the cross and Jesus are identified together in their shared experience of suffering: ‘Each of us two, they reviled at once. I stood drenched with blood.’20 The cross and Jesus are one. And the way the cross tells how it was hurriedly lopped from the wood, felled, and torn from its roots is reminiscent of the vocabulary the prophet used to speak of how God’s suffering servant would be ‘uprooted’ as a ‘tender plant’ (Isaiah 53: 1). And in this correspondence we may detect an allusion to the Lucan passage cited above in which Jesus, bearing his cross seems to describe his fate to the women of Jerusalem in terms of a newly felled tree (Luke 23: 31). It was actually this Old Testament passage and this gospel text which were set to be read, certainly by the end of the eighth century, at the Papal ‘stational mass’ at Sancta Maria ad Praesepe in Rome on the Wednesday of Holy Week.21 Here is evidently an instance of the fact that the combining of the images of the tree and the cross belonged to the reception history of these texts, and was transmitted in liturgical texts, as well as the art and artefacts which graced places of worship. The parameters of an essay preclude a comprehensive survey of the figuring of the cross as a tree in Christian visual art and literature, but let me here marshal three further examples, each taken from a different historical epoch and cultural setting, in order to demonstrate the robustness of the multivalent image of the green cross-tree. 1. A particular example in which words and images illuminate and illustrate each other, is found in a Carolingian Gospel Book, now in the British Library (Harley MS 2788). This Gospel Book, which was compiled and decorated at the court workshop of Charlemagne in Arles around 800, was probably not a liturgical book as such, in the sense of actually being used in the performance of the liturgy, as today we may use a Lectionary, but it was clearly intended as a liturgical resource book, to be consulted and studied by those who had a role in the planning of liturgical celebrations and responsibility to promote the study of Gospel texts proclaimed in worship through the liturgical year. The decoration of this particular book is sparse, but a rather striking image is seen in its canon table, a list of Gospel pericopes (Plate 23). The decorative framework of this list of gospel passages is architectural in design, and is framed by a painting of columns with highly decorated capitals. Above each list of readings is the conventional symbol of the relevant Evangelist rendered in late Antique western style.22 Above the pinnacle of the decorative architectural frame is a dominant ‘vine cross’ which shows the vine bearing fruit at the very base of a cross, which is reminiscent of the mosaic cross in the apse of the papal Church of St John Lateran in Rome, whose design may certainly be dated back to the ninth, or even as early as the sixth century. 19

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From the translation of Robert Boenig, Anglo-Saxon Spirituality: Selected Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), p. 260. I have chosen Bennett’s translation here because of the directness of the language. See J. A. W. Bennett Poetry of the Passion: Studies in Twelve Centuries of English Verse (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1982), p. 29. See Eamonn O’Carragain, Ritual and the Rood, pp. 311–16. Henry Mayr Harting ‘Charlemagne as a Patron of the Arts’ in The Church and the Arts, ed. Diane Woods (Oxford: Blackwells, 1995), p. 53.

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The verticality of Gothic architecture allowed for far larger areas of the walls of the building to be given to windows, and the result of this is stunningly seen in the cathedrals at Chartres and at Notre Dame in Paris. But the story of this development begins with the ambitious ten-year rebuilding project undertaken by Abbot Suger at the royal Abbey Church of St Denys, just north of Paris, which he began in 1134. His expressed aim in doing this was to lift the worshipping soul through the light of visible splendour to the invisible beauty of God,23 and this brings me to my second chosen example. 2. The most glorious example of a living, fruitful cross is to be seen in a glass roundel in the choir of the Abbey Church, which was installed sometime in the 1140s. Abbot Suger’s ambition was to give architectural expression to the colour and the detail of Carolingian metalwork and manuscript illumination, and to surpass the glories of the vast Abbey Church at Cluny. He combined patristic typology, a method of interpreting Old Testament figures and incidents as illuminating the events and figures recorded in the New Testament, with a sophisticated theology of light. Suger justified his intention to beautify the church building by drawing upon the description of the heavenly city in the book of Revelation and the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. 500). A ninth-century abbot of St Denys confused the patron saint of France, possibly one of the seven bishops sent to convert Gaul by Clement of Rome, with Dionysius the early sixth-century theologian probably from Syria. Abbot Suger exploited this confusion and drew heavily on this theologian, known mainly through his mystical writings. In this corpus of literature, Dionysius spoke of the radiance of God’s glory. This radiance was understood to emanate through the whole cosmos and to draw the worshipper into koinonia with the God to whom the thanksgiving (eucharistia) was made. Mere illumination was seen to be superfluous in the presence of the One who is the light of light, and it was this divine light which was understood to suffuse the interior of the church. And so Suger instructed the builders and craftsmen engaged in the rebuilding of the eastern end of the church to apply their skills so that in the daytime the Choir would gleam with a marvellous and uninterrupted light to enlighten and elevate the souls of the monks who worshipped there.24 The required light was lumen, as distinguished from lux, which shone through the glass into the Choir of the Abbey church and streaked its shifting pattern of colour onto the pavement of the ambulatory. One of these windows contained an image of the Chariot of Abinadab which carried the ark of the Covenant (2 Samuel 6: 3 & 4). This image shows the figure of God the Father holding the cross in front of the four-wheeled rectangular chariot, which possibly also represents the altar, the site of meeting between the human and the divine. As a typological image, the chariot which carried the Ark of the Old Covenant becomes a vehicle for transmitting the meaning of the New Testament, with its message of the cross and its rite of the new covenant. Herbert Kessler is correct in saying that the cross depicted in the glass is not a portrayal 23

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Anselme Dimier, Stones Laid Before the Lord: Architecture and Monastic Life, trans. Gilchrist Lavigne (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1999), pp. 172–4. Georges Duby, Art and Society in the Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Oxford: Polity Press, 2000), p. 34.

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of the actual crucifixion, and although he draws attention to how it is coloured green and worked with vine decoration, he stops short of saying that the intention of the composition was to allow the meaning of the cross to shine through, or, one could almost say, reveal the purpose of Christ’s sacrifice to be the renewal and remaking of creation.25 Furthermore, the inscription in the glass brings the cross and the altar into direct relation through the reference to the altar, and reinforces the intended and perceived meaning. An English translation of the words of the inscription reads: ‘On the ark of the covenant is established the altar with the cross of Christ; here, Life wishes to die under a greater covenant.’26 The green cross brings into focus a particularly English tradition, which persisted through the high Middle Ages, of depicting the cross as rough-hewn; and this brings us to the third example. 3. The third example invites us to consider a different artistic medium, and nudges us forward chronologically to another example of the cross as a green tree, and this is the series of thirteenth-century wall paintings at St Albans Abbey, Hertfordshire (Plate 24). This series of crosses, believed to have been painted between 1215 and approximately 1275,27 were painted on the western surface of the monumental square piers of the massive nave of the Abbey Church. The surviving set of five wall paintings served as altarpieces, as they were painted directly behind the altars which were originally set up against the piers. Although much faded now, these paintings, which were originally brilliantly coloured, were painted directly onto the plaster, and provide a crucifixion scene as a backdrop to the ritual action of the Mass which would have been performed at the altar. Below each crucifixion scene is a painting of Mary, and this pairing of subjects is a topic to which we shall return at the end of this essay. At this stage in the exploration, let us stay with these thirteenth-century paintings of the crucifixion. In terms of style, they resemble manuscript illustrations writ large. St Albans Abbey became a major centre for the writing and decoration of manuscripts in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, comparable to those of Winchester and Westminster Abbey. St Albans was especially noted because of the literary work of Matthew Paris, and attention has been drawn to the style of the cross in this series and to a small tinted manuscript drawing of the crucifixion executed at St Albans Abbey and now held in the British Museum.28 The ‘green crosses’ at St Albans exemplify a particularly English artistic tradition of rendering the cross as a rough-hewn timber cross. This figuring of the cross, also seen in a number of mid thirteenth-century Psalter illustrations such as the exquisite rendering of the crucifixion scene in the Amesbury Psalter (Oxford, All Souls College, MS 6, f.5), dates back to the eighth-century Old English poetry of the Dream, and ultimately has its roots in the patristic typology which contrasted the 25

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Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 145. Translation from Jeffrey F. Hamburger, ‘The Medieval Work of Art’ in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 377. This is the time frame assigned by Tristram. See E. W. Tristram, English Medieval Wall Painting: The Thirteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), pp. 325–7. See illustration in Richard Vaughan, Matthew Paris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), pl. ixa

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life-giving fruit of the cross-tree with the deadly fruit of the tree of knowledge which was set in the midst of Eden.29 Four of the five crosses at St Albans reproduce the crucifixion scene suggested in the  Passion narrative of St John, and show the figures of Mary, the mother of the Lord, and John, the beloved disciple, standing on either side of the cross (see John 19: 26). The figure of the crucified is rendered more realistically as the chronology advances, with the last painting showing a contorted body, with a grieving Mary and a recoiling figure of the beloved disciple. But what is of particular interest in this exploration is the rendering of the cross in these compositions. The cross itself is painted green, and was made to look as though it was a freshly lopped trunk from which the branches have been sawn off. This style of the roughly hewn cross has come to be known as the raguly type of cross. How, we might ask, is this, as the other examples in glass and manuscript illumination to be interpreted? Perhaps the first point to register is that the very colouring of the cross is itself an interpretation, and one which takes its cue from that passage to which we referred at the beginning of this essay: ‘if they do this when the wood is green . . .’ Here a form of speech is appropriated and deployed visually as a sign of life, making the cross a living thing. It is a metaphor translated from the realm of mere materiality to the ecosphere of living things. Furthermore, it is the fullest instantiation of the parabolic image of the Kingdom of God which, beginning as the smallest of all seeds, when fully grown gives shelter to the birds and creatures of the world (cf. the parable of the mustard seed in Mark 4: 30–2 and synoptic parallels: Matthew 13: 31–2, and Luke 13: 18–19). As in the modernist imagination, such as in the writing of T. S. Eliot30 and the artist-poet David Jones, the cross functions as a living sign of that Kingdom planted among the collapsed monuments of worldly empires and human powers. This is a motif which resonates with biblical images of the tree, specifically the tree which occurred in King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Daniel 4: 10–14, and the tree planted by God which reverses the dominant order of things in Ezekiel 17: 22–4. David Jones, who was regarded as a superb water-colourist, produced one of the most intricate and deeply layered drawings of the cross-tree in 1947/8. The delicate coloured line-drawing, produced at a time when he was undergoing psychotherapy, is dense with allusion and was entitled Vexilla Regis. This painting was one of a number of tree drawings,31 and its title is that of a hymn: ‘The Royal banners forward go’. This hymn was originally composed by Venantius Fortunata (c. 530–609) to welcome a fragment of the true cross, and was known by David Jones as a hymn which was sung at the liturgy on Good Friday.32 The 29

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Jennifer O’Reilley, ‘The Trees of Eden in Medieval Iconography’, in A Walk in the Garden: Biblical, Iconographical and Literary Images of Eden, ed. Paul Morris and Deborah Sawyer (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992), pp. 185–6. Mention is made of ‘three trees’ alluding to Calvary in T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘Journey of the Magi’ (1927) which above all else tells of the turning of dispensations which renders the old order obsolete and void. See Keith Alldritt, David Jones: Writer and Artist (London: Constable and Robinson Ltd, 2003), pp. 137–40, and Merlin James, David Jones 1895–1974: A Map of the Artist’s Mind (Lund Humphries Publishers, University of Wales, 1995), pp. 44–5. David Jones regarded the Fortunatus hymn as a work of cultural genius, and in a letter to the

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prized relic of the true cross was a gift by Justin, the emperor of Constantinople, to Princess Radegunda for her convent, which was dedicated to the Holy Cross. The original Latin verses of Fortunatus speak of the cross as a ‘noble tree’, bearing the bloodied king of heaven and surpassing all others in its foliage, fruit and blossom. David Jones’s painting, now to be seen at Kettles Yard in Cambridge, reflects the scene of Calvary with its three trees and characteristically includes details which locate the scene in the Romano-British world. The dense and delicate symbolism of the painting was explained by Jones in a letter to the recipient of the painting, and, in summary, was explained in terms of a new sacramental ordering superseding the imposed social ordering of an occupying force. In the foreground of a densely wooded scene is a spreading central tree, in which the poet has fused the image of the axial world-tree, (the Nordic ash tree ‘Yggdrasil’) linking earth and heaven33 and the cross of Christ’s sacrificial surrender. There are scattered emblems of a lost empire. Horses run free towards the distant wooded hill of Wales, and painted in the tree on the left is a Pelican, a Eucharistic image of Christ as, according to legend, the Pelican plucks her flesh to feed her young. With all these mythical elements the cross-tree is set in the context of the Mass, the setting forth of Christ’s self-giving to God the Father, which provides the unifying theme, and one that is brought to consummate expression in what has been described by Rowan Williams as Jones’s most sophisticated and ‘achieved’ poetic work, the Anathemata and its figuring of the Axial tree stretching from earth to heaven.34 The cross as the greening tree of life has its counterpart in the image of the Jesse tree. In the Hebrew Scriptures, King David, the son of Jesse, was an idealised figure who attracted some of the earliest hopes of a promised Messiah. The figuring of the lineage of Jesus as the greater Son of David in the Jesse tree is derived from the metaphor of the sprouting root or branch which in a number of prophetic oracles became a figure of restoration and future hope.35 The idea that a tree can regenerate itself from a remaining stump is found in the narrative of the calling and commissioning of the prophet, and refers immediately to  the announcement of YHWH’s judgement that although the present king would be felled, the holy seed would remain in his stump (see Isaiah 6: 13b). The locus classicus of the image of a felled tree stump throwing up new growth is the prophetic oracle in Isaiah 11: 1–9 with its opening announcement of the appearing of a future Davidic king who, reigning justly, would inaugurate a time of peace in which even the creatures of the natural world would live in harmony. Tree imagery was deployed throughout the oracles of proto-Isaiah (chapters 1–39) to address a variety of situations,36 but the key messianic text is 11: 1 and its familiar line: ‘A shoot shall come out from the stock of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.’

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Tablet he objected to it being moved in the revised Roman Catholic services for Holy Week from its customary use on Good Friday to a new position as the Office hymn at Vespers during Passiontide. See David Jones ‘The Eclipse of a Hymn’ in Epoch and Artist, ed. Harman Grisewood (London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 1959), pp. 260–1. This is referred to in a post-script in a letter from Jones to Mrs Mildred Ede, dated 28 August 1949, printed in Kettles Yard and its Artists, Cambridge, 1995, p. 37. See Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity (London: Continuum, 2005), pp. 74–81. See, for example, Jeremiah 23: 5; 33: 15, Zechariah 3: 8; 6: 12. For a sustained study of the motif, see Kirsten Nielsen, There is Hope for a Tree: The Tree as a Metaphor in Isaiah, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplementary Series 65 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989), especially pp. 123–5, 132–5, 140, 150 and 184. For a summary of the biblical tree of life trope, see Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (London: T&T Clark, 2010), pp. 263–74.

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As a visual image showing the lineage of Jesus, the Jesse tree first featured in manuscript illuminations, such as the twelfth-century St Albans Psalter (St Godehard, Hildesheim), and then later in stained glass, famously at St Denis and in Chartres Cathedral. The Jesse tree window at the royal abbey church of St Denis, made around 1144, was designed around the classic tree of life shape, and so the very pattern itself would have connotations with the iconographical figuring of the cross as the noble and fruitful tree. In England a number of Jesse tree windows were made for Canterbury Cathedral in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.37 Many of the panels of these windows survive, although some have been removed from their original location and sequence. The Canterbury series, commissioned by the Benedictine community of Christ Church Priory, is visual evidence of a continuing monastic interest in the typological interpretation of scripture established by earlier patristic writers, and believed to yield the spiritual meaning of scriptural figures and narratives. This typological approach to the lineage of Jesus saw each of the ancestors of Christ as prefiguring an aspect of the whole mystery of Christ’s salvation, from the taking of human flesh at the incarnation to the taking of humanity into the heart of God at the ascension. According to the North African theologian and Christian apologist Tertullian (c. 160– c. 220), the flesh was the hinge of salvation.38 And although the genealogies of Jesus in the gospels of both Matthew and Luke trace the patriarchal lineage, both speak of Jesus as being born of Mary. The Canterbury Jesse tree window followed the genealogy of Jesus as set out in Luke’s Gospel, and it is this gospel which, more than the other three gospels, provides the greatest coverage for the figure of Mary. Unsurprisingly, the finely drawn figure of Mary had a prominent place in the composition of the Jesse tree window in the Corona Chapel of Canterbury Cathedral (Plate 25). In part, this explains the choice in this instance of the lineage of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel narrative, which gives a privileged position to Mary, and also reflects the wordplay, again established by Tertullian, of the honorific title ‘the Blessed Virgin Mary’, and the messianic passage from Isaiah in which the Latin term for rod or shoot, virga, is taken as a pun on the word virgo, or virgin, which may well be known to readers in the lyrics of medieval Christmas carols.39 The one who was born of Mary, suffered on the cross in the flesh and was raised bodily on the third day, and thereby correlates through the common term of the flesh, the Christmas and Easter references to the sprouting stump of Jesse and the new growth sprouting from the tree cruelly cut down (see also the later biblical and early Jewish literature in Job 14: 7–9 and 1 Enoch 26: 1–6 respectively). As indicated earlier, much more could be said on this subject, but what immediately concerns us in this exploration is the relationship between the two images. It has already been suggested that there is a complementary relationship between the theological truths celebrated around Christmas and Easter, and this confluence of themes implies that in 37

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See Madeline Harrison Caviness, The Early Stained Glass of Canterbury Cathedral, circa 1174– 1220 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 72–5, 107–11. Comparisons may also be drawn with the glass at York Minster. The figurative lineage of Christ persisted and a finely worked fourteenth-century example is to be seen at Dorchester Abbey. This elegantly wrought Jesse tree, made between 1340 and 1350, with its five undulating branches combines sculptured and glass figures growing out of a recumbent figure of Jesse. De res. 8.2; PL 2. 852 For example: ‘Virga Jesse floruit, / Virgo Deum et hominem genuit.’

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some respects Christmas and Easter are a mirror image of each other. There is a melding together of the foundational Christian feasts of Easter and Christmas. It is predicated on the two poles of salvation, namely, the incarnation, and the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and found its most explicit expression in the early Christian legend that the date of Christ’s crucifixion coincided with the date of his conception, that is 25 March. In seventh-century Rome this became the date on which the feast of the Annunciation was celebrated. This feast was a feast of the Lord, hence the title Adnunciatio Domini, and not a Marian feast, and the themes of incarnation, cross and resurrection were compressed into a single complex sentence in the Collect for the day, praying that those who know the Incarnation by the message of the angel, may by his cross and passion be brought to the glory of his resurrection.40 The scriptural images appropriated for the chants and readings for the Advent and Christmas cycle, such as the Rorate Caeli (‘Drop down you heavens from above; and let the skies rain down righteousness’) hint at the promised growth and burgeoning of creation presaged by the blossoming of the crocus in the arid desert place (see Isaiah 35: 1, and 51: 3). The sprouting growth triggered by the fall of heaven’s mercy was recalled in the words of chants and carols celebrating the nativity, and was also an emblem in the iconography of the cross, the sign of Christ’s victory over the forces of destruction, death and decay, as the tree of life. What I hope to have demonstrated in this essay is how the image of the cross as the green tree is a robust, composite and persistent image. We have attributed the conflation of the image of cross and tree to a typological reading of scriptural texts, especially those texts whose imagery evokes the Eden narrative with its figuring of the tree of life (Genesis 2: 9), and the biblical tradition of apocalyptic visionary literature in Ezekiel 47: 1, 12, and Revelation 22: 1–2 which speaks of the tree of life in a creation made new. The figuring of the cross-tree was expressed in the earliest cultural expressions of Christianity in Syria, and as Sebastian Brock has observed, the spiritual vision of Ephrem was a vision of the interconnectedness of the whole of creation.41 Seeing the cross as a tree is a way of figuring the cross which speaks directly to our own times when the very life of the planet is threatened by the degradation of the environment through pollution and the avaricious plundering of the finite natural resources from the earth. Images of the tree do resonate in a culture more environmentally aware, and so it is not surprising to see the imagery being worked in contemporary sacred art. One may view, for instance, the modern free-standing altars which were commissioned and made for the cathedral at Trier, and in Xanten in Germany. More recently one can see how the composite image of the cross-tree continues to be worked by the contemporary artistic imagination, and two recent works are very notable examples. There is the series of tree paintings by Roger Wagner, culminating in Dartmoor Crucifixion (2007) which shows the three crosses of Calvary superimposed upon three trees in a sublime and luminous landscape42 (Plate 26). Secondly, the image of the 40

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See Eamonn O’Carragain (2005), pp. 83–8, and 185. The point is overlooked in what is otherwise a comprehensive discussion of the major development of the Christian Year by Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson in The Origins of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 2011). Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992), p. 164. Chris Miller, Forms of Transcendence: The Art of Roger Wagner (Carlisle: Piquant editions, 2009), pp. 32–41.

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cross as the tree of life has been brought to expression by the poet Fiona Sampson. In a spare and sonorous poem entitled ‘The Magic Tree’, Fiona Sampson speaks paradoxically of the Rood (the cross-tree) presenting us with death and yet drawing up life like sap.43 Such a consummate image returns us to the starting point of this exploration, in seeing the cross, the ubiquitous symbol of Christian salvation, as the green, or perhaps the greening tree. This complex image eludes translation into any straightforward human strategy or action plan, but as in the former days of Israel, it may yet kindle a vision and its meaning be transposed into song: The righteous flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon. They are planted in the house of the Lord; they flourish in the courts of our God. In old age they still produce fruit; they are always green and full of sap. (Psalm 92: 12–14)

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See Fiona Sampson, Rough Music (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd, 2010).

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ART AND THE RESURRECTION NARRATIVES Christopher Herbert

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n the January 2001 edition of the Pastoral Review,1 Gabriele Finaldi, then the Curator of the National Gallery’s Later Italian and Spanish Painting Collection, asked himself a question about the success of the Millennium exhibition organised by the NG entitled ‘Seeing Salvation: the Image of Christ’. Having noted with some degree of astonishment that over 360,000 people had visited the exhibition in London during a ten-week period, he went on to consider what it had been about the exhibition which had attracted so many people to it and why it had been so appreciated. He concluded: The appreciation of the ‘Seeing Salvation’ exhibition by a very wide range of denominations suggested to me that the suspicion and distrust of the religious image which has characterised most Protestant Churches in Britain since the sixteenth century has largely evaporated. From the Methodist Recorder to Reform, the magazine of the United Reformed Church, and to the Salvation Army’s War Cry, the response to the exhibition and the religious images in it was profound and thoughtful and recognised the role that images can play in making the mysteries of Christianity visible, in calling people to faith and deepening believers’ experience of it. I had the impression that after a long exile, the religious image had come home.

It’s an interesting and challenging insight, particularly apt in an age shaped and teased by the visual. One of the NG’s own paintings, placed as it was in this new exhibition context, had a considerable impact upon those who saw it. Titian’s Noli me tangere, a relatively small oil painting, measuring 109 x 91cm (42.9 inches x 35.8 inches), somehow demanded that it be looked at with a kind of reverential disinterestedness and quiet attention (Plate 27). What was it about Mary Magdalene, kneeling on the ground, resting her weight with her left hand on an ointment jar, and reaching out with her right hand to touch the Christ figure that caught the imagination? Was it the sense of existential yearning, humankind seeking after God but not quite succeeding? Was it the way in which the Christ figure arched away from her outstretched hand with a movement of dancing and tender grace? Was it the half-clothed bodily beauty of the Christ, who held in his left hand, by contrast, a rough and earthy garden hoe, thus setting up a tension between the divine and the human? Or was it, paradoxically, what was not there which was so intriguing? There 1

Gabriele Finaldi, Pastoral Review, January 2001.

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is nothing in the painting which can be construed as the Empty Tomb. There is instead a gently pastoral landscape edging away towards a line of blue hills in the far distance; nearer to hand there is a walled city gate on a hill, approached by a sandy track down which walks the tiny figure of a man with a dog. Inside the city there appears to be an old fortification topped with a gentle mound of grass. Next to the Christ figure and overarching him is a tree which Nicholas Penny suggests, along with the contours, hills and shrubs, mimics the ‘quivering excitement of the kneeling Magdalene’.2 Or perhaps it is meant to be a reference not only to the Tree of the Cross, but also to the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. There is something about this particular image of the encounter between the Risen Christ and Mary Magdalene which holds one’s eyes and deepens thought. But it also raises some questions about the ways in which artists across the centuries have depicted the Resurrection. What has been the interplay between the biblical text and artists’ imagination and painterly skills? What part have patrons played in determining the choice of subject matter? Have previous depictions influenced artists in the ways they have approached the subject? What role, if any, has been played by doctrinal and theological considerations? Have liturgical or spiritual developments been in any sense determinative? It is simply not possible in such a brief compass as this to tackle all these questions, but what I am hoping to achieve is to explore two of the main sub-sets of stories within the Resurrection narratives to see how artists have tackled each of these areas across the centuries and, by so doing, to draw some conclusions about the relationship between art and biblical texts which can perhaps apply across the board. There are at least seven sub-sets that artists have used in their works based around the Resurrection event: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 2 3

The Resurrection moment itself. The ‘Noli me tangere’ episode. The Three Marys at the Empty Tomb. The Encounter with the women. The Incredulity of St Thomas. The Supper at Emmaus. The Visit to the Virgin Mary of the Risen Christ.3 Nicholas Penny, Titian (London: National Gallery, 2003), p. 86. The ‘Visit to the Virgin Mary of the Risen Christ’ is, of course, not a biblical episode. It was however, a relatively popular choice for some artists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; for example, Gerard David (c. 1455–1523) painted such a scene which also incorporated two other female figures (Metropolitan Museum, New York). The story of the Visit to the Virgin Mary by the Risen Christ derives from Pseudo-Bonaventura’s ‘Meditations on the Life of Christ’ (1308), and also from Jacobus de Voragine’s ‘Golden Legend’ (c. 1260) in which he says: ‘The third apparition was to the Virgin Mary and is believed to have taken place before all the others, although the evangelists say nothing about it . . . Indeed if this is not to be believed because no evangelist testifies to it, we would have to conclude that Jesus never appeared to his mother after his resurrection because no gospel tells us where or when this happened. But perish the thought that such a son would fail to honour such a mother by being so negligent!’ Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. W. G. Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), vol. 1, p. 221.

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Of these seven sub-sets, this essay will investigate two: the ‘Noli me tangere’ and the ‘Three Marys’.

Noli Me Tangere 1. Bishop Bernward and the Hildesheim Bronze Doors In the early eleventh century in Hildesheim, the bishop, Bernward (c. 960–1022; bishop 993–1022) a man noted not only for his piety of life but also for his technical skills as a goldsmith, commissioned a pair of large bronze doors for the Abbey of St Michael (Plate 28). They were remarkable for their technical execution, for each door was cast in one piece using the lost wax process, but the doors also had a serious theological function. They told the story of the Creation and Redemption through a series of high-relief images. The left hand door tells the story of the Creation and Fall of humankind. The images begin at the top of the door with the story of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib and continue down to the final bottom panel, which concerns the murder of Abel by Cain. The right-hand door tells the story of Redemption, beginning with the Annunciation at the foot of the door and concluding at the top with the scene of the ‘Noli me tangere’. The story of the creation of Eve is placed exactly opposite the story of Mary Magdalene reaching out to touch the risen Christ. It would seem that the episodes are meant to be read not only in a sequential fashion, from top to bottom on the left-hand side and from bottom to top on the right-hand side, but should also be read across from the Old Testament to the New and vice versa. It seems as though Bernward was attempting to convey not only the great sweep of salvation history but was also providing parallels which had a provoking and engaging theological content. For example, by placing the story of the creation of Eve from the rib of Adam exactly opposite the ‘Noli me tangere’ episode he was drawing attention to the Pauline concept of Christ as the new Adam, but was also making reference to the resurrection of Christ as being the dawning of the New Creation. The fact that the Creation/Fall sequence begins with the creation of Eve and not with Adam, and is placed opposite the ‘Noli Me Tangere’, the climax of the right-hand door, also suggests that he was saying something about the role of women in the Fall and in Redemption. Eve, in this view, was the cause of the Fall at the original Creation; Mary Magdalene was the first witness of the New Creation. The overt theological programme of the doors is rich. The stories play off and illuminate each other. But there are other reasons to account for his choice of the ‘Noli me tangere’ episode; for example, there is some evidence that he might have drawn on his knowledge of the ninthcentury Old Saxon poem ‘The Heliand’ (Saviour) for the iconographic programme of the doors. And if he did, then the emotional content of the ‘Noli me tangere’ episode, which is recounted in that poem with sensitive emphasis on Mary Magdalene’s tear-stricken grief, will have appealed to his own theological emphasis on humility. Furthermore, from examples in other works of art that he commissioned, it would seem that Bernward was fascinated by the intricate and profound relationship in the life of Christ between his humanity and his divinity.4 The ‘Noli me tangere’ story can be described as a paradigmatic example of that relationship. 4

See: Henry Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1999), 2nd rev. edn, p. 98.

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In considering the doors it is also important, if we are to understand them, to set them in their cultural/religious context. They were designed for the Abbey of St Michael at Hildesheim which Bernward had founded in the early years of the eleventh century. He espoused the reforms that the abbey of Gorze was promulgating, which were essentially about creating a closer and more rigorous following of the Rule of St Benedict, a means of ensuring greater holiness of life and liturgical discipline amongst the monks. (It was a movement which was not confined to Germany but had a great impact on the monastic reforms carried out by Dunstan, Aethelwold and Oswald in England, which led to the drawing up of the Regularis Concordia at Winchester in about 973.) The doors at Hildesheim, therefore, can be seen not simply as biblical stories translated into bronze but as playing a part in the reforming educative programme for St Michael’s Abbey. In addition they might also be ‘read’ as a statement about Bernward’s own political and cultural heritage. He was very close to the Ottonian court. He had been the tutor to the young Otto III and had travelled with him to Rome in 1001. There he would have seen the fifth-century doors at the church of Santa Sabina, carved with scenes from the life of Christ and with episodes from the Old Testament. It is possible that he wished to emulate and even supersede these doors in Rome by creating the massive bronze doors at his monastery in Hildesheim. There is one further detail about Bernward which needs to be added at this point. He commissioned a Book of the Gospels for St Michael’s which he presented to the abbey in 1015. In that Gospel Book there is an image of the ‘Noli me tangere’ scene which is most unusual, for instead of the Mary Magdalene figure reaching out to touch the Christ and the Christ flinching away, in the Gospel Book she is shown actually touching him, penetrating the mandorla5 which surrounds him – though he stands on her outstretched hand. The meaning of this is unclear. It could be that it indicates the human desire to break into and invade eternity, and that Jesus’s reaction of standing on Mary Magdalene’s hand is a brutal way of enforcing the ‘Do not touch me’ injunction. It would be wrong to infer from just two pictorial representations of Mary Magdalene that Bernward had a particular devotion to her, but it does suggest that interpreting the bronze door scene as a straightforward ‘translation’ of the New Testament story is an over-simplification. 2. Hans Memling: the Turin Altarpiece In the last decades of the fifteenth century Hans Memling (c. 1430–94) was commissioned to paint an altarpiece by Tomasso Portinari, a wealthy and entrepreneurial young banker working as a partner in the Medici bank in Bruges (Plate 29). In this altarpiece, now called Scenes from the Passion of Christ (c. 1470), Memling has included at least twenty-seven small scenes that encompass the events of the last days of Christ, including the Resurrection itself and his appearance to Mary Magdalene.6 Unlike the Bernward bronze doors there appears to be no explicit theologically didactic element in Memling’s painting. There are no references, for example, to Old Testament stories or Types, instead we are given a bird’s eye view of the sweeping narrative of the last days of Christ on earth, 5

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A mandorla is an almond-shaped halo which surrounds not simply the head of a holy person, but their entire body. See Dirk de Vos, Hans Memling: The Complete Works (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), pp. 105–9. The Turin altarpiece is in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin, hence its name.

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from the entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the appearance of the risen Christ at the lakeside in Galilee. The central focus of the painting is a scene of the Flagellation, taking place as though it were in a brightly lit stage set, whereas the Crucifixion is placed to the top right-hand side of the painting and is on a much smaller scale, and the ‘Noli me tangere’ episode is so small and tucked away it almost requires a magnifying glass to see it. What was the painting for? Whilst it is often described as an altarpiece there is debate about whether or not such a small piece might have been designed for that purpose; it measures 56.7cm x 92.2cm, or 22.3 inches x 36.3 inches. Its size suggests that if it provided the backdrop to an altar such as the one that the patron of the painting, Tomasso Portinari, created at St James’s, Bruges, it would have been visible to only a few privileged people. It is possible however, that it was a kind of pilgrim piece. It provided the viewer with a visual reminder of each episode in Jesus’s last days and by so doing, enabled the viewer to make an imaginative spiritual journey in the footsteps of Christ. Such imaginative spiritual exercises were much encouraged by the Devotio Moderna and were laden with indulgences.7 Certainly it is a painting which requires the eye to wander sequentially across its surface, lingering at each of the events that are portrayed. Might it also have had an educative function, a visual aid for those who were learning about the last week of Christ’s life, enabling them to remember the sequence of the narrative? If we could be sure about the original context of the painting our ability to understand it would be increased. If it really were designed as an altarpiece, for example, then it would need to be ‘read’ in the context of the Mass, so that at the Elevation of the Host there would be a subtle interplay between the story as painted and the theology of the Mass itself. But whilst the painting is indeed a narrative portrayal of the last days of Christ we should not overlook the fact that the Jerusalem scenes also provide the setting for the patron and his wife to be seen. Their portraits are placed to the left and right of the painting. They have a privileged position in the drama that unfolds and presumably looked to the viewer to remember them in their prayers. This was a painting that set up a complex spiritual dialogue between the viewer and the episodes portrayed from the life of Christ, and a more nuanced political dialogue between the viewer and Tomasso Portinari and his young wife Maria Baroncelli. The Florentine banker, living in the Hof Bladelin in central Bruges, was very well known, and no doubt wished himself to be seen as a generous benefactor in the community, a devout and religious man, one who walked with princes on this earth and who also walked, at least imaginatively, with the King of heaven. Quite what the average citizen of Bruges made of all of this is, sadly, unknown.

The Three Marys Having looked very briefly at the ‘Noli me tangere’ episode it is to the Three Marys that we turn next. The gospels are notoriously confused about the names of the women who went to the tomb of Christ on the ‘first day of the week’. Mark says that they were Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome. (Mark 16: 1). Matthew says that they were Mary of Magdala and ‘the other Mary’ (Matthew 28: 1). Luke names them as Mary of Magdala, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James (Luke 24: 10). John in his Gospel simplifies things by only mentioning Mary of Magdala, though he said that there were three women at the 7

See: de Vos, p. 109, n. 3.

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foot of the cross – Mary, the mother of Jesus, Mary, wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala (John 19: 25). The confusion might have been caused by each of the authors drawing on separate traditions, but whatever the cause it left later commentators and artists puzzled. It is perhaps hardly surprising, therefore, that many artists plumped for a kind of symbolic group of three, usually referred to as the Three Marys. The Dura-Europos House-Church The earliest extant painted reference to the women at the Tomb is found in the so-called house-church of Dura Europos8 dating from the mid third century (Plate 30). In fact there are only clear images of two women, the third image is so damaged that it is difficult to decipher, but it is usually assumed to be one of the women hurrying with the others to the tomb, for also included in the scene is a large sarcophagus, at either corner of which are stars representing the angels present in the gospel stories. The fresco is in the baptistery area of the house-church and it is in that doctrinal and liturgical context that we need to consider the iconographic narrative. The Dura Europos house-church was probably converted from its primary use as a domestic dwelling to its explicit religious function in 232. It consisted of a small entrance at the northeast corner which led into an inner courtyard. Off that courtyard to the south was a rectangular assembly room which could accommodate about fifty people. On the west side of the inner courtyard was a small teaching room, and off that, to the north, was the baptistery. It is in the baptistery that the frescoed image of the women going to the sepulchre is found. But that fresco is part of a larger cycle, much of it rather damaged. If we assume that the catechumens for baptism were educated in the Teaching room, when they came for baptism they would have processed through the Teaching room and entered the baptistery opposite the north wall. It is on that north wall that the image of the women going to the tomb is situated. Above it, in the upper register, is a fresco of the Healing of the Paralytic, and Peter walking towards Jesus on the water. As the baptismal candidates entered the room, on their right was a small arched recess, probably for the storage of the oils used in the pre-baptismal rite of anointing, and just below it a fresco of David slaying Goliath. The candidates processed in an anti-clockwise direction, and would have followed, as it were, in the footsteps of the women hurrying to the tomb. Then, at the western end of the baptistery they were baptised. The decorative programme in this baptistery is clearly designed with the theme of baptism in mind. Each of the surviving frescoes has a baptismal reference. For example, David slays Goliath, just as Christ slays death and evil. The women hurry to the tomb-cave and enter it; in the same way, at their baptism, the catechumens enter into the waters of death and at their baptism come up out of the waters into new life. Just as the women were the first witnesses of the resurrection, so the catechumens witness to their own resurrection faith. The frescoes in Dura Europos need also to be seen in their cultural context. In the city at that time there were temples to Zeus, Bel, Adonis, Artemis, and others, as well as a 8

For more on the Dura-Europos house-church and its role in liturgy see Allan Doig, Liturgy and Architecture From the Early Church to the Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), pp. 10–17.

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Mithraeum and a synagogue. In fact the decorative programme in the house-church is of a much poorer quality than the frescoes in the synagogue. It would seem that the Christian congregation was not as wealthy as some of the other communities in the area. It is clear from our consideration of the context that the Women at the Tomb fresco in the house-church had a liturgical rather than simply a didactic function. It was designed to elicit a theological and spiritual identification between the catechumens and the images. There is not enough evidence to indicate whether the audience for these images was a large one, but it seems reasonable to assume that they would not have been viewed by the populace at large, but were, rather, confined to Christian adherents and worshippers. They were a visual part of a rite which was designed to differentiate clearly between those who were baptised and those who were not, between Christians and the adherents of the other religions which were flourishing in Dura Europos at that time. St Albans Psalter There was an even more limited audience for the image of the Three Marys that is found in the twelfth-century St Albans Psalter (Plate 31).9 Originally commissioned by the Abbot of St Albans, Geoffrey of Gorham (Abbot, 1119–46) who originated from Le Mans, the Psalter was a gift from him to a woman called Christina, an anchoress who lived in the village of Markyate, a few miles northwest from St Albans along Watling Street. Created in the 1130s, the St Albans Psalter consists of four sections: a Calendar, a Cycle of full-page miniatures, the ‘Alexis Quire’ and the Psalter itself. The image of the Three Marys at the Tomb forms part of the Cycle of miniatures created by an artist known as the Alexis Master. Careful analysis of his style reveals Ottonian, Byzantine, central Italian, English and northern French influences. There is debate about whether he was originally from France, or whether all the international influences which helped to shape his work might be explained by a peripatetic life or by other material that was in England at the time. What is clear is that these miniatures mark a distinct break from the previous Anglo-Saxon tradition and are the earliest (surviving) example of fullpage Romanesque miniatures in England. The miniatures have no text attached to them, and are designed to be looked at not in a public liturgical context but during private prayer and meditation. They are a visual provision designed to stimulate a form of meditation popularised by St Anselm in the late eleventh century in which a more affective approach to the life of Christ was developed. In the Preface to his ‘Prayers and Meditations’ Anselm wrote: The purpose of the prayers and meditations that follow is to stir up the mind of the reader to the love and fear of God, or to self-examination. They are not to be read in a turmoil, but quietly, not skimmed or hurried through, but taken a little at a time, with deep and thoughtful meditation. The reader should not trouble about reading the whole of any of them, but only so much as by God’s help he finds useful in stirring up his spirit to pray, or as much as he likes. Nor is it necessary for him to always begin at the beginning, but wherever he pleases . . . 9

See Jane Geddes, The St Albans Psalter: a book for Christina Markyate (London: British Library, 2005) for a detailed analysis.

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The forty full-page miniatures of the St Albans Psalter seem to have been designed to be looked at in a similar kind of way, with quietness of soul and gentle attention, allowing the images from the life of Christ to elicit a spiritual response. The images are based largely upon the story of Christ as found in the gospels, but the artist has given an interesting and important weighting to the role of women in that story; for example, in the miniatures which concentrate on Holy Week, the days leading up to the crucifixion are dominated by men, whereas in the post-resurrection period, women are given much more attention. The post-resurrection miniatures include one which is an iconographically rare image of Mary Magdalene as ‘Apostle to the Apostles’. It is likely that this weighting towards women was a direct result of Abbot Geoffrey considering the needs and expectations of Christina of Markyate herself and commissioning the images accordingly. It was a tender, affectionate and thoughtful gesture. The iconographic content of the Three Women in the St Albans Psalter follows in a long tradition. The women stand closely together at the Tomb; one of them, Mary Magdalene, is carrying an ointment jar, another is holding a thurible. Soldiers huddle asleep at the base of the tomb and upon the open sarcophagus sits an angel holding a sceptre in his left hand and gesturing with his right hand to indicate that the Christ is not there but has risen. Above the head of the angel an oil lamp hangs from the ceiling. The sarcophagus is in an architecturally designed space; a room with arches and pillars. It might be that the artist had a liturgical stage-set in mind in which the sarcophagus was used for the resurrection appearance of Christ. Certainly Abbot Geoffrey was keen on liturgical drama and had the ignominious distinction of having borrowed some of the abbey’s vestments for a play he was directing in Dunstable, only to see them destroyed in a fire. The full-page miniature of the Three Women at the tomb is followed immediately in the Cycle by one which shows Mary Magdalene going to the disciples to tell them of Christ’s resurrection. Anyone meditating on these scenes would have been reminded of the important part that Mary Magdalene played in the post-resurrection events, and, because Mary was regarded as the classic case of a forgiven and restored sinner, would have drawn spiritual hope from the images. It is worth bringing to mind the images featuring Mary Magdalene in the St Albans Psalter whilst reading the opening verses of Anselm’s prayer addressed to the saint:10 St Mary Magdalene, You came with springing tears To the spring of mercy, Christ; From him your burning thirst was abundantly refreshed; Your sins were forgiven; By him your bitter sorrow was consoled. My dearest lady, Well you know by your own life How a sinful soul can be reconciled with its creator, What counsel a soul in misery needs, What medicine will restore the soul to health . . . 10

See The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm with the Proslogion, trans. Benedicta Ward (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1973), p. 201.

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Anselm concentrates initial attention on sin and reconciliation. The images in the St Albans Psalter might well have been designed to elicit a similar spiritual response. In addition to this meditative purpose it is worth noting that the relationship between Abbot Geoffrey and Christina was a very close one and gave cause for concern, not to say gossip. It is not inconceivable that the images chosen for illustration were deliberately chosen by Abbot Geoffrey in a complex desire to express his affection for Christina (and recognising hers for him), and also as a means perhaps of acknowledging the need to keep a safe emotional distance between them. The images in the St Albans Psalter, then, had a rich and complicated emotional and spiritual origin and were created for a specific person. They were part of a cultural and  spiritual milieu in which meditation and prayer played a significant and profound role and were looked at in a particular way. Whilst they would have been admired for their simple beauty, they were meant to be internalised as part of a regular and disciplined life of devotion. They were images for the nourishment of the soul.

Conclusions It is now time to draw some conclusions about the relationship between Art and the Resurrection Narratives. It can be seen that each of the images cited in this essay draws upon the biblical text for its inspiration and for some (but only some) of its iconography. However, it is very important to recognise that the biblical text is not treated by any of the artists as a fixed and unalterable template. Rather, each artist has chosen, shaped and modified the biblical material for his own purposes; for example, Bernward, by placing the biblical episode of the ‘Noli me tangere’ opposite the scene of the creation of Eve, is making a didactic theological point about the nature of Creation and Redemption; the anonymous artist at Dura Europos is using the story for liturgical and doctrinal purposes, to encourage the catechumens to follow in the footsteps of their Christian predecessors. The use of biblical material is, however, even more subtle than has been outlined. Each of the images is based upon the assumption that the viewer will not only know the content of the image in front of them, but will also know the biblical narrative that precedes and succeeds the image itself. If the viewer does not have that kind of biblical knowledge then the impact of the image will be weakened. But the image does not act simply and solely as a memory-jogger; it also sets up an internal dialogue between the viewer and the remembered or read biblical material. It presupposes the desire and ability of the viewer to tell the entire story to themselves, even as they look at one part of that story, and to set the fragment in the context of the whole. It is a highly sophisticated and nuanced form of dialogue. That dialogue between the viewer and the image, it should be noted, is not a carefully contrived and predominantly cerebral activity; it goes deeper than that. All five of the images cited in this essay can be used not only for theological reflection but also for personal and private spiritual meditation. This is particularly the case with the St Albans Psalter (and possibly also the Turin altarpiece) which has a specifically personal spiritual purpose in mind. It is worth drawing a fine distinction between the Psalter and the Turin altarpiece. The former is designed for a very limited viewing public, possibly a viewing public of just one person, Christina of Markyate herself. The Turin altarpiece, by contrast (a painting which encourages spiritual pilgrimage by enabling the viewer to follow imaginatively in the footsteps of Christ), is designed to be viewed in a much more public

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setting, that of a chapel in a large and fashionable church. But whether any of the images are viewed privately or corporately it is important to recognise the spiritual dimension of what is taking place. The concept of the ‘Sacramental Gaze’,11 a profoundly important way of perceiving the elevated Host at Mass, might well have shaped the perceptual activity (and therefore the spiritual understanding) of the medieval viewer of the images that we have been discussing. What we have seen, therefore, as we have been considering these images, is that each of the artists has chosen to take an episode from the longer biblical narrative and, to a greater or lesser extent, has used it to encompass and focus a specific religious purpose, be that in relation to liturgy, theology, doctrine or spirituality. Titian, however, has taken this one stage further; he seems to have selected the specific incident to capture, reveal and illuminate the essence of the entire overarching Resurrection narrative but has concentrated on its inherent human dimension. Like the other artists he has omitted the lead-up to that moment – Mary’s initial journey to the Tomb while it was still dark, the headlong dash to fetch Peter and ‘the other disciple’ to show them what has happened – and he has omitted the subsequent action of Mary when, after her encounter with the Risen Christ, she goes to tell the disciples that she has ‘seen the Lord’. He has centred our attention on the poignant and deeply human encounter of Mary with the divine. Everything in the painting is directed towards that. But this is not a kind of photographic record, like a snapshot. It is far more than that. Titian adds details that are not in the biblical text to engage and deepen our imaginative attention. For example, the man strolling downs the hill from the city gates accompanied by his dog; who is he? Can he see or know what we, the viewer of the painting can see and know? And those sheep grazing in a nearby meadow, are they a reference to Christ as Good Shepherd? And that tree arching above Christ’s head, is that a reference to the stories of the Garden of Eden? These imaginative additions to the biblical text are then deepened and enhanced by the very structure of the composition itself – all those diagonals and curves, and through his skill in design and choice of colour he has created poise and balance. He has used the concept of the Golden Section (it is marked by the point at which Christ’s head intersects with the arching tree) to delight our sense of proportion. He has also added a number of tensions: the tension created by a semi-nude Christ and a sumptuously clothed Magdalene; the tension between physical love and spiritual love; the tension created by the early morning sunrise behind the head of Christ and the darkness of the worldly city behind the head of the Magdalene; the tension created by the diagonal of the garden hoe which separates the divinity of the Christ from the humanity of Mary. In other words, Titian has taken one small episode in the Resurrection narratives, has reflected deeply upon it himself and has then added to our understanding of it by his consummate artistry and skill. He has created a painting which demands not only respect for its astonishing beauty but which also requires with courtesy and gentleness that we the viewers should stand in front of it in a reflective mode. It does not preach at us, it persuades. It engages our imaginative sympathies and deepens them. It teases at and challenges our self-understanding and our understanding of God. It raises questions. In short, it constructs a profound dialogue between us and the painting, and what the painting represents and reveals. 11

See Robert Scribner, Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late Medieval and Reformation Germany, Journal of Religious History 15, 1989, pp. 448–69.

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Although Titian has engaged our sympathetic attention through his bold and imaginative additions to the episode he has portrayed, some of the artists have approached the subject with much more reticence; for example, the Alexis Master in the St Albans Psalter. In being more reticent, the Alexis Master is following, whether consciously or not, a long tradition. In the earliest Christian images found in the catacombs of Rome in the third and fourth centuries, there are no explicit images of the Resurrection extant. Instead, the theology of the Resurrection is hinted at through the use of Types, such as Jonah, and in the use of the Chi-Rho. Similarly, in the mosaics of Ravenna in the fifth and sixth centuries, there are no explicit images of the Resurrection. The event of the resurrection is hinted at through the use of the image of the Cross in Glory, and in the Church of St Vitale, in particular, the universality of the reign of Christ (only achieved through death and resurrection) is expressed in an image in the apse of a beardless young Christ seated in glory. It is tempting to suggest that the mystery and ambiguity of the Resurrection stories in Mark’s Gospel, for example, are more accurately reflected in that early Christian iconography than in the more explicit images of later Christendom. It might be that the lack of Resurrection iconography in the earliest centuries, therefore, resulted from the recognition by artists of that time of the essential mysteriousness and holiness of the event, or perhaps more prosaically, that, not having Antique images to draw upon which could be adapted for Christian use, they simply did not have the artistic vocabulary necessary to create Resurrection images. There is one further element in all of this which deserves our attention. It is perhaps possible to discern that each of the artists in choosing their biblical material has been influenced by contemporary religious and cultural needs; for example, the Dura Europos artist was reflecting the need for Christians to have a distinctive initiation rite; the Turin altarpiece, by its inclusion of the patrons in the narrative scene, is reflecting the contemporary desire to have intercessions offered in order to lessen the duration of time spent in Purgatory. In trying to read these images therefore, we need to discover in so far as this is possible, those contemporary mentalities which shaped both the artist and the original viewers. The conclusions that have been drawn in this essay are based, as it were, on a ‘surface’ reading of the artworks, comparing them closely with a ‘surface’ reading of the biblical material. But this process raises, at a more philosophical level, a number of questions. It is worth asking, for example, what the relationship might be between the literary artistry of the gospel accounts of the Resurrection and the visual artistry of the images of the Resurrection we have been considering. Is beauty of form and content something that they have in common?12 Indeed, is it possible to use the word ‘beauty’ of the biblical narrative? It’s a question which necessarily takes us beyond the bounds of this essay, but the concept of beauty in relation both to biblical material and works of art is one which deserves much greater thought than has been possible here. What this essay has tried to demonstrate is that a careful comparison of the biblical text with works of art, taking seriously the insights and discipline of art history, is a fruitful and stimulating exercise and one which could and should be developed further in the future. 12

For a robust defence of the importance of the concept of beauty in understanding art, see Elizabeth Prettejohn, Beauty and Art: 1750–2000 (Oxford History of Art) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and for a theological analysis of the concept, see Richard Harries, Art and the Beauty of Good: A Christian Understanding (London: Continuum, 2000).

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COVENANTS AND CONNECTIONS: THE SASSETTI CHAPEL, SANTA TRINITA: SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF ST FRANCIS, GHIRLANDAIO, 1479–85 Chloë Reddaway Introduction

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n the late fifteenth century, Francesco Sassetti, a wealthy banker and prominent citizen of Florence,1 acquired the patronal rights for a funerary chapel in the Vallombrosan2 church of Santa Trinita3 and commissioned Domenico Ghirlandaio to paint a fresco cycle of St Francis on its walls. The episodes depicted would have been recognisable to contemporary viewers for whom the stories of the saints’ lives, which were told in popular texts and represented in publically accessible images, were probably as familiar as those of the Bible. Francis was a well-loved saint whose image was widely disseminated, and his life was recounted in various biographies, as well as the Golden Legend.4 He had a strong following in Florence and was considered to be especially close to Christ, as indicated by 1

2

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For background information about Sassetti see, for example, Eve Borsook and Johannes Offerhaus (eds), Sassetti and Ghirlandaio at Santa Trinita, Florence, History and Legend in a Renaissance Chapel (Holland: Davoco Publishing, 1981), p. 11 ff. A Benedictine congregation of monks rather than a fully independent order, the Vallombrosans were founded in the early eleventh century and originally wore grey habits. For a discussion of Sassetti’s patronage at Santa Maria Novella and Santa Trinita see Borsook and Offerhaus (eds), pp. 13–18. Ernst Gombrich, ‘The Sassetti Chapel Revisited: Santa Trinita and Lorenzo De’ Medici’, I Tatti Studies, Essays in the Renaissance 7 (1997). Steffi Roettgen, Italian Frescoes, the Flowering of the Renaissance 1470–1510, trans. R. Stockman (New York and London: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1996), pp. 136–9. Source references: St Bonaventure, ‘The Life of St Francis (Legenda Maior)’, in Bonaventure, the Soul’s Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of St Francis (London: SPCK, 1978). See especially chapters 2, 3, 4, 9, 13, 15. Although Goffen argues that the Bardi images are based on Bonaventure, these stories are also told, with some variation, in the two lives written by Francis’s first biographer, Celano. Thomas of Celano, St Francis of Assisi, trans. Placid Hermann O.F.M. (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1988). First Life: 13–15, 32–3, 48, 57, 94–6, 112–13. Second Life: 218, 220. See also Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, Readings on the Saints, trans. William G. Ryan, 2 vols, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 220–30. In addition to textual sources for Francis’s life, Ghirlandaio and his viewers would have known the frescoes painted by Giotto in the early fourteenth century in the Bardi Chapel at Santa Croce.

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the exceptional honour of bearing the stigmata.5 The lives of the saints were a way for people to engage with the New Testament narratives through more contemporary contexts and Francis was a saint whose imitatio Christi represented the perfect life ‘in Christ’ and who was a relatively recent example of apostolic virtue. At times he was even seen as a second Christ (Franciscus alter Christus), although he is not presented as such in the Sassetti frescoes. Despite fluctuations in Ghirlandaio’s artistic reputation6 the cycle has attracted considerable art historical attention, mostly focused on the Florentine settings of two scenes and its many portraits. In addition, art historians have identified thematic references to the presentation of Florence as a New Rome, the celebration of peace, the Florentine practice of family record-keeping, the Last Judgement, and birth, death and resurrection. The frescoes have also invited comment on the relation between classical and Christian elements of the programme, and the compositional and narrative aspects of the scenes.7 Illuminating as these interpretations are, they barely mention the protagonist.8 Although the portrait faces and Florentine locations in the scenes might seem to invite the modern viewer to look outwards from the images to find confirmation of their meaning in the events and customs of contemporary life,9 a richer experience of the frescoes may result from focusing on the presentation of the protagonist and on the complex spatial and spiritual relationships which he mediates. I want to argue that Francis, patron saint of the donor, is portrayed here as the lynchpin in a network of spiritual relationships: the connecting point between Christ, the Church,10 the laity, and the natural world. These spiritual connections can be explored spatially in the interaction between the Chapel’s 5

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It has been argued that Francis was, at times, seen as a second Christ. For a discussion of Fransicus alter Christus and the presentation of Francis in Giotto’s Bardi Chapel cycle see Rona Goffen, Spirituality in Conflict: St Francis and Giotto’s Bardi Chapel (University Park Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988). However, cf. Jane C. Long, ‘The Program of Giotto’s Saint Francis Cycle at Santa Croce in Florence’, Franciscan Studies 52, (1992). A helpful survey is provided in Jean K. Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio Artist and Artisan (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 1–15. For art historical discussion of the frescoes see, for example, Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance Ii. The Florentine and Central Italian Schools (London: Phaidon, 1952); Cadogan; Aby Warburg, ‘Bildniskunst Und Florentinisches Burgertum 1: Domenico Ghirlandajo in Santa Trinita; Die Bildnisse Des Lorenzo De’ Medici Und Seiner Angehoriger’, in Gesammelte Schriften: Die Erneuerung Der Heidnischen Antike, ed. G. Bing (Berlin: H. Seeman, 1932), pp.  93–4; see also Aby Warburg, ‘Bildniskunst Und Florentinisches Burgertum 1: Domenico Ghirlandajo in Santa Trinita; Die Bildnisse Des Lorenzo De’ Medici Und Seiner Angehorigen’, in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, ed. Kurt W. Forster (Los Angeles: 1999); Borsook and Offerhaus (eds); Roettgen; Patricia Rubin, ‘Domenico Ghirlandaio and the Meaning of History in Fifteenth Century Florence’ in Domenico Ghirlandaio 1449–1494, Atti Del Convegno Internazionale Firenze, 16–18 Ottobre 1994, ed. Wolfram Prinz and Max Seidel (Florence: Centro Di, 1996). Lavin does acknowledge Francis’s role, successfully linking Francis to other themes in the Chapel, but her treatment is brief. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches 431–1600 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), pp. 203–12. The term ‘contemporary’ is used to mean contemporary with the frescoes (i.e. fifteenth century) and ‘modern’ of the time of writing (not ‘Modern’). For the sake of brevity the viewer is treated as masculine throughout. That is, the clerical hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

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material, three-dimensional, space, the pictorial space within the images, and the viewer’s own ‘receptive’ space, standing among them. Acting as an anchor in each scene, and as the bond between the scenes of the cycle, the figure of Francis binds them in a web of associations and provides a foundation from which to understand them individually and as a whole. The cycle’s spiritual and spatial connections carry theological messages of promises made and covenants fulfilled, and the coherence of content and form supports Francis’s role, not as alter Christus, but as mediator of those covenants. Ultimately these themes of covenant, fulfilment, connection and mediation are as relevant to contemporary Florentines as the identifiable portraits and buildings, and they remain entirely relevant for the modern Christian viewer.11

The cycle A lunette above the Chapel entrance shows the Vision of Augustus12 with the Sassetti coat of arms beneath and David portrayed as a statue to the left. Inside, four sibyls occupy the vaults. Although these elements are iconographically significant there is not space to discuss them here and I want instead to focus on the scenes of Francis’s life.13 The cycle proper is arranged in two tiers on each side wall and three on the altar wall.14 The left lunette depicts the Renunciation of Worldly Goods (Fig. 16.1) in which Francis returns his clothing to his father in a symbolic gesture of his renunciation of worldliness, and is received by the Bishop into the service of Christ. In the Stigmatization (Plate 32) below, Francis is praying at his mountain retreat of La Verna, accompanied by Brother Leo,15 and sees a vision of the Crucified Christ supported by a blazing seraph from whom he receives the wounds of Christ. The right lunette shows the Trial before the Sultan (Plate 33), an episode from Francis’s missionary activity in the East when Francis challenged the Sultan’s own priests to enter a fire and demonstrate whose faith was the greater and more efficacious.16 Below this scene is the Funeral of St Francis and Verification of the Stigmata (Fig. 16.2) in which a sceptic, Jerome, confirms the presence of Francis’s wounds.17 11

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This chapter is based on part of a doctoral thesis on visual theology, focusing on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florentine fresco cycles, submitted for examination at King’s College London in 2012. A description and analysis of this scene is available in Paul F. Burke, ‘Augustus and Christianity in Myth and Legend’, New England Classical Journal 32.3 (2005). See also Borsook and Offerhaus (eds), p. 31 and Roettgen, p. 146. For further information see Borsook and Offerhaus (eds), pp. 30–3 and Roettgen, pp. 146–7, 458. For an analysis of the cycle arrangement see Lavin, pp. 203–12. Regarding the altar wall scenes see also Borsook and Offerhaus (eds), p. 19; Roettgen, pp. 142–7. Regarding the presence of Brother Leo and other witnesses see Arnold Davidson, ‘Miracles of Bodily Transformation, or, How St Francis Received the Stigmata’, in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York and London: Routledge, 1998). Bonaventure describes this episode as taking place in Syria and the Sultan as the Sultan of Babylon (Bonaventure, Ch. 9). The same is recorded in W. Heywood (ed.), The Little Flowers of St Francis of Assisi (New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, Random House, 1998), Ch. 24, pp. 52–4. Here the Sultan is converted and baptised on his deathbed. Celano describes him as the Sultan of the Saracens in Syria (Celano, First Life: 57). However, the scene is often referred to as taking place in Egypt and the Sultan in question is identified as Al-Kamil who ruled much of North Africa during the Fifth Crusade, 1213–21. Davies describes Jerome as a physician. Gerald S. Davies, Ghirlandaio, (London: Methuen and

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Figure 16.1: Renunciation of Worldly Goods (left wall lunette, Sassetti Chapel) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, by permission of Antonio Quattrone, Quattrone snc, Via dell’ Arcolaio 48, 50137 Firenze.

Figure 16.2: Funeral of St Francis and Verification of the Stigmata (right wall, lower tier, Sassetti Chapel) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, by permission of Antonio Quattrone, Quattrone snc, Via dell’ Arcolaio 48, 50137 Firenze.

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Figure 16.3: Confirmation of the Rule (altar wall lunette, Sassetti Chapel) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, by permission of Antonio Quattrone, Quattrone snc, Via dell’ Arcolaio 48, 50137 Firenze. Sassetti’s own tomb lies below the depiction of his patron’s death in the hope that Francis would be his intercessor at Judgement Day and that, like Francis, he would be resurrected into a heavenly life. On the altar wall is the Confirmation of the Rule (Fig. 16.3), in which the pope confirms the Franciscan Rule against a background of the Florentine Piazza della Signoria. In front of this, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s sons and their tutors climb a staircase towards their father and Francesco Sassetti. Beneath the Confirmation is the unusual scene of the Resuscitation of the Roman Notary’s Son (Fig. 16.4). In this posthumous miracle a boy died falling from a window and was resuscitated after appeal to Francis. The scene has been relocated from Rome to the piazza outside Santa Trinita and we know that the programme was altered to include this scene, possibly following the death of one of Sassetti’s sons and the birth of another shortly afterwards. On the lowest tier are donor portraits of Francesco Sassetti and his wife, Nera Corsi, kneeling on either side of the altarpiece, as if converting its single panel into a triptych (Fig. 16.4). The fictive marble backgrounds against which they are set are not really niches, but are nevertheless architecturally distinct from both the Chapel and the other frescoes. Arguably these are not traditional donor portraits in that there is no patron saint recommending the donors to the Virgin and Child, but this is hardly necessary since Co., 1908), p. 81. Bonaventure, however, describes him as a soldier and sceptic. Bonaventure, The Life of St Francis of Assisi, p. 122.

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Figure 16.4: Resuscitation of the Roman Notary’s Son. Donor portraits of Francesco Sassetti and Nera (Corsi) Sassetti; Altarpiece, Nativity (altar wall, middle and lower tiers) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, by permission of Antonio Quattrone, Quattrone snc, Via dell’ Arcolaio 48, 50137 Firenze. Francesco and Nera are surrounded by images of Francis. These are, however, transitional images, situated between corpse and resurrection, between death and new life in Christ.18 The Nativity altarpiece, also by Ghirlandaio, shows the Christ Child lying beside an antique sarcophagus (serving as a manger), indicating both an empty tomb – and, hence, the resurrection – and salvation through the coming of Christ, and the replacement of pagan antiquity with Christianity. The Nativity – the Incarnation – was a popular theme for altarpieces because of its eucharistic significance, but is here linked thematically to the resurrected life for which the faithful patrons hope. The sarcophagus is positioned directly below the scene of the notary’s son in which the resuscitated child is still sitting on his funeral bier.19 There is also something sarcophagus-like about the marble-lined staircase in the Confirmation above (of which we see only part of the top step), which gives the impression that the figures climbing the stairs are ascending from an underworld, and relates the two scenes further through the theme of children rising, by means natural and miraculous. Life, death and resurrection are very closely juxtaposed on the altar wall. 18 19

See also Roettgen, p. 145. Originally the fresco also featured a sarcophagus, in front of the bier, and the altarpiece was lower, coming to the level of the painted cornice between the lowest and middle registers, whereas now the top of the altarpiece juts into the fresco, obscuring the damaged sarcophagus. Ibid. p. 142.

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Interpreting the Cycle: Theological Considerations From a theological perspective there are two distinct gaps in the art historical interpretations of these scenes. Firstly, art historical analyses focus on the scenes with the most ‘historical interest’ (i.e. the portraits and Florentine locations) and relate these to the contemporary context and the theme of birth, death and resurrection, at the expense of the protagonist.20 Discussion of Francis in the Confirmation is invariably secondary to the contemporary elements, and his presence in the Resuscitation is barely registered amidst consideration of the portraits and the (undeniable) link between the resuscitated child, the Nativity altarpiece and the funerary setting. While such contemporary and thematic references are highly significant, the relegation of Francis to the margins of a cycle in which he is the single most important figure has an unsurprisingly distorting effect. The second gap relates to the use of space in the images. Much has been said about some spatial matters, namely the importance of the Florentine locations as settings for sacred events, the placement of certain frescoes in respect of the Sassetti tombs, and the influence of Giotto and Masaccio on Ghirlandaio’s compositions. What has barely featured in such discussions, however, is the spatial aspect of the viewer’s interaction with these scenes,21 or how the presence of a viewer among them reveals additional, spatial, aspects of the cycle’s communication of theological content. While the art historical analyses offer pertinent insights (though not, perhaps, as exclusively as they suggest),22 they are not comprehensive, and we can get a deeper understanding of the cycle by considering the significance of the protagonist, and by attending to the spatial techniques used to convey the frescoes’ meaning to the viewer.

Francis as the Link within a Web of Spiritual Connections Throughout the cycle, Francis is presented as the connecting point between heaven and earth, between secular life and sacred events and, ultimately, between the viewer and God. As the viewer stands in the small Chapel space, surrounded closely on three sides by the frescoes, altar and tombs, eyes moving from one wall and tier to another, Francis is the point by which he orientates himself to each scene and from which he begins to interpret its narrative. In the discussion of portraits as a means of engaging the viewer, it has been forgotten that, while Ghirlandaio did not paint Francis’s physiognomy from life, he remains the most recognisable figure, long after other faces have been forgotten or their identity become disputed. Francis was, moreover, a very personally engaging saint. As a mendicant friar, his life was one of ministry to the world, and the popularity of the Franciscans in Florence is attested to by the vast scale of Santa Croce and the piazza in front of it where crowds would gather to listen to the preachers. He was a very ‘approachable’ saint, someone who had lived locally, whose image was widely disseminated on panel paintings, and whose order remained prominent. By taking Francis as the anchor point in 20

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In contrast, the literature surrounding the Bardi Chapel is largely occupied with the depictions of Francis himself. As opposed to the viewer’s recognition of portraits or locations. For example, portraiture is not the sole ‘key’ to appreciating the cycle, while Rubin’s ricordanze interpretation barely considers compositional matters beyond praising Ghirlandaio’s skill in handling multiple concerns.

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each image it can be seen that the cycle presents a web of spiritually significant themes and events, linked by the saint not only to each other but to the viewer. In the Renunciation, the saint takes a bold step and is welcomed by the Church, as witnessed by the townsfolk and (unwillingly) his own father. Francis changes his relationship to the world around him, exchanging the material wealth of mercantile transactions for relations with other people that are modelled on Christ. This is the start of the cycle both chronologically and psychologically, as far as the viewer is concerned. From now on Francis is there ‘for them’, an exemplar of the moral life, a spiritual mentor, and an intercessor. In the Stigmatization directly below (Plate 32), Francis is affirmed by Christ himself, and affirms his dedication to Christ. As well as being visionary and miraculous, the story and its image here are of reciprocity in giving and receiving. Christ gives Francis his own wounds; Francis gives his body (and his earthly life) to Christ. Francis’s body is a locus of spiritual transformation as signified by his gaze, fixed upon the vision, and his outstretched arms, opening the space of his body in an orant gesture23 of awe and praise which is also one of welcome (the Bishop’s gesture in the Renunciation echoes Francis’s broader gesture here), like opening a door to allow Christ entry. The golden rays from the Christ-seraph connect Francis and the vision, and imprint the spiritual, physically. Where the witnesses to the Renunciation were a few citizens, here they are more varied and significant. Ghirlandaio presents a lush and populated scene with a small town, large city, broad river, birds and animals and, most importantly, other people who witness something extraordinary. Brother Leo is facing away from the vision as seen by Francis, but is clearly witness to the event, if not to the vision in its totality, as he shields his eyes from the light. The two friars in the background presumably do not see the figure of Christ24 but they point towards it and one shields his eyes in a gesture like Leo’s. As for the horsemen fording the river, their eyes seem to be directed towards a falcon attacking a duck. It is possible that they too see the visionary light, but the birds are more immediately in their line of sight and they are probably hunters, using the falcon to catch their birds. The presence of additional witnesses, and the role of the huntsmen does not seem to have been remarked upon in discussions of this fresco but, if it is the case, as I suggest, that the friars witness something of the event while the hunters (despite their upward glances and the gesture of the man with his hand to his eyes) see only their quarry, then the scene becomes divided into two quite distinct halves so far as the background is concerned. On the right, the city of Pisa would represent worldly affairs, while the huntsmen represent its citizens, engaged in worldly pursuits. On the left, Leo and the other friars witness the brightness of the vision that appears to Francis, against the backdrop of La Verna. The two sides are divided by the figure of Francis in the centre, with the falcon and duck above him, and the vision to his right in the top left-hand corner of the picture. Nevertheless, there is no sense of a rift between the two: Francis bridges them and we see them in relation to him. Indeed, a web of connections branches out from the central figure of Francis: to Leo, his trusted fellow friar; to the Franciscan order in general as represented by the friars in the background and (anachronistically) the village of La Verna with the church built on the 23

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Orant figures are common in early Christian art and show the person standing in prayer with the forearms extended sideways and palms upturned. The Christ-seraph is angled towards Francis and the friars would be seeing it sideways on, and so the figure of Christ would be hidden by the blazing seraph.

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site of the vision; to the world beyond and the laity to whom the Franciscans ministered, as represented by Pisa and the huntsmen; and perhaps even to the animal kingdom as represented by the deer – Francis being legendary for his rapport with the animals and birds. A number of different spatial ‘levels’ are linked by this web. There is the space which is Francis himself: a locus of revelation, he occupies space continuous with the rest of the scene, and yet his miraculous vision and stigmatisation set him apart. Then there is the heavenly space occupied by the vision, and the everyday space25 of the background which is partially transformed on the left-hand side as Leo and the two other friars become aware of the vision, and the church at La Verna testifies to the later veneration of this event, while on the right is the untransformed world, waiting for Francis’s mission. The Saint’s open gesture of welcome links the everyday physical reality and the spiritual, heavenly reality of Christ. He becomes the point of connection, the open pathway between the heavenly and the earthly, connected by the golden rays issuing from the Christ-seraph. The effect of this spiritual encounter is, of course, spiritual, but it is also physical (the wounds are evidence of this) and there are witnesses to it. This is a stigmatisation but it is also typologically similar to the Transfiguration: the witnesses see a transformation but do not fully understand its significance. In the Confirmation, the central event of the papal approval of the Franciscan Rule is related to Franciscan ministry in Florence. Behind the papal court, and barely separated from it, the Piazza della Signoria is filled with Florentines going about their business so that the central scene is ‘sandwiched’ between the painted Florence in the background and the three-dimensional Florence behind the viewer. Florence was a major locus of Franciscan activity, and the viewer sees here how the Franciscan Rule relates to his own life as a citizen, through the friars who come there. In the foreground, the Medici boys and their tutors ascend the stairs to meet Sassetti and Lorenzo de’ Medici who greet them with gestures which, while not specifically blessing, echo the pope’s gesture behind them. The direction of their movement up the stairs follows the same trajectory as that of Francis kneeling on the steps of the papal throne and reaching up to receive the Rule, while a cleric turns round from the central scene to inspect the new arrivals, further linking the scenes. Clearly some parallel is indicated here, and the most obvious explanation is that the fathers of prominent families must guide and teach their children as the pope guides the Franciscans and as the Franciscans guide the laity.26 As before, Francis is the anchor point in the picture, connecting papal authority handed down from St Peter – and therefore, ultimately, Christ – to the lives of everyday citizens in Florence, and providing an exemplar for bringing up children to be moral and responsible citizens, capable of fulfilling their duty to Church and City. In the Resuscitation below, Francis appears posthumously as a vision, miraculously resuscitating the dead child. The incident is located in front of Santa Trinita with the Sassetti palace visible on the left and the two choric groups of onlookers on either side of the child’s bier contain many contemporary portraits, including of Sassetti’s family, with his daughters and their husbands depicted above their mother’s portrait on the tier below.27 They are witnesses to the event, though not engaged in the actual narrative. The viewer stands before the altarpiece where the Christ Child lies beside an empty sarcophagus and 25 26 27

In Roettgen’s words, ‘the miracle is anchored in the reality we know’. Roettgen, p. 141. See, for example, Gerald S. Davies, Ghirlandaio (London: Methuen and Co., 1908), p. 74. Roettgen, p. 142.

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looks up to the sarcophagus and bier in the fresco, to the child sitting up, and to Francis appearing above him. The vertical connection makes the simple point that faith in Christ leads to resurrection, and that Francis is both the exemplar of the faithful and their intercessor. As he was transformed by the stigmata, so he can effect transformation in others, through Christ. The implication is that such occurrences are not limited to the past: faith in Christ and prayer to Francis can transform the contemporary world too. In the Trial (Plate 33) the Sultan is set back, behind a very bright fire in the central foreground. In part this emphasises the contrast between Francis’s readiness to enter the flames and the Sultan’s reluctant priests. However, the viewer stands directly in front of the fire, opposite the Sultan, creating a cross whose four points are Francis, the man in yellow pointing the priests towards the fire, the Sultan, and the viewer. As the man in yellow stands challenging the priests to enter the fire, so the viewer is in the position of challenging the Sultan to make a leap of faith (as Francis is willing to do). He is also, however, being challenged by the Sultan to enter the fire and profess his own faith, like Francis, and unlike the Sultan’s priests. Both the Sultan’s indecision and his gesture (whether of command or choice) demand a response from the viewer. Ghirlandaio opens the scene outwards into the Chapel, including the viewer and challenging him to profess his own faith, using Francis as his model. In the Funeral Francis’s body is laid out but his soul ascending to heaven is not depicted. Instead it is implied by the direction of the viewer’s gaze which runs up from Francis’s face, left of centre, to the friar kneeling close to him in grief on the far side of the bier, through Jerome and the group behind him, and thence up to the crucifix on the altar in the apse behind, which is directly above the standing friar’s head.28 The soul itself is not shown but the eye sweeps naturally from Francis up to the crucifix, signifying the saint’s physical and spiritual link with Christ, and assuring the viewer of Francis’s resurrection. If anything, this composition brings the viewer more closely in contact both with Francis and with faithful belief in the resurrection of the dead, since what we see is not the soul being assumed into heaven but the link between Francis and Christ. This is a link to which the viewer is invited to attach himself through the example provided by the friar kneeling in front of the bier. This friar is closest to the viewer’s own position and models the correct response to the scene, kneeling and venerating the saint with his Christ-like wounds. The visual implication is that, by coming close to Francis, one comes close to Christ, a connection made not only on the basis of the stigmata with which the saint was blessed, but spatially, through the composition of the scene. Again Francis is the linking figure, making the connection with the viewer, offering a way into spiritual transformation. As an ‘anchor’ in each scene, Francis is the foundation from which the viewer understands the individual scenes and the cycle as a whole. There are strong precedents for seeing Francis as a foundational figure: Francis himself had received a vision at San Damiano in which Christ told him to rebuild the Church, and Pope Innocent III had initially approved the Franciscan order after his objections were overcome by a dream in which he saw the Lateran Basilica about to collapse, but propped up by a humble friar like Francis. Both Francis and the ecclesiastical authorities saw it as his job to reinvigorate the Church, and in Florence Santa Croce eventually became the headquarters of the Inquisition. The Franciscan Order, though divided by infighting, was seen as a force that 28

The crucifix is also the point of convergence of the lines of the upper architecture. See Davies, p. 79.

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cleansed and renewed the Church and inspired greater faith. Francis’s foundational role in the frescoes is thus in tune with his role as the re-builder of the Church, and sits well with other ideas reflected in the frescoes, including the concept of Florence as a New Rome, and the theme of birth, death and resurrection which is so prominent in the Chapel.29

Francis as Mediator If Giotto’s presentation of Francis at Santa Croce was as a moderate figure, then Ghirlandaio’s is even more so. Rubin notes the absence of ‘outrage and misunderstanding’ in the Renunciation, and the apparent acceptance of what should be a jarring portrayal of Francis’s rejection of worldly goods against a background of the city where Sassetti made a fortune, asking why this reading was ‘not viewed as perversion’.30 However, the cycle is not dramatic. The only scene containing any conflict is the Trial and there the conflict is that of a heathen ruler struggling with the possibility of conversion, and an open challenge to the viewer to determine and defend his own position as a Christian, in imitation of Francis. Francis’s likeness to Christ here is based on perfect imitatio Christi, rather than actual identification with Christ, as alter Christus. This is not a cycle of the radical Francis and there is no pictorial tension between the powerful and wealthy, and the Saint who espoused poverty, chastity and obedience. Francis is no threat to the Church or civic authorities and, with the exception of the Trial, demands very little of the viewer. He is the intercessor, the bridging point between God, Church and layman: a mediator rather than a challenger or judge. Francis is able to be this bridging point, this mediator, because he is both active in the world, and the perfect example of imitatio Christi, as physically attested by the stigmata. Francis’s own christoform body mediates his vision and his approval by Christ. Christ has made his mark on Francis, who opened his body to Christ for him to imprint, thereby opening the possibility of man of becoming more like Christ. Thus Francis is, in himself, an image, though a divinely ‘painted’ one,31 and the portrayal of his mediation in images seems particularly appropriate, suggesting a mediation of grace that is highly visual. Francis mediates his vision physically.32 Form and content in this cycle are thus perfectly attuned in the figure of Francis and he is presented as mediator, as bridge between man and God, on earth and after death. The funerary theme of the Resuscitation, the sarcophagus in the Nativity, and the saint’s Funeral (placed above Sassetti’s tomb) emphasises Francis’s role as intercessor for Sassetti and his family after their deaths. The Resuscitation in particular suggests that Francis is active beyond death, while the verification of his stigmata proves his efficacy through his likeness to Christ. As well as being an effective intercessor, Francis seems to mediate between the many themes expressed in the frescoes. By acting as the connecting point between Christ, Church, 29

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I am grateful to Ben Quash for bringing to my attention the theme of renewal as distinct from resurrection. Rubin, p. 103. C.f. Amanda Lillie, ‘Francesco Sassetti and Ghirlandaio at Santa Trinita Florence – History and Legend in a Renaissance Chapel – Borsook, E. Offerhaus J.,’ Burlington Magazine 126, no. 974 (1984). An acheiropoieta, so to speak. I am grateful to Ben Quash for drawing my attention to the particular physicality of Francis’s role as a mediator.

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and laity, the figure of Francis also harmonises diverse themes of peace, reconciliation, Florence as a New Rome, life, death and resurrection, political affiliations, and family matters. As intercessor he represents the individual, as an approved re-invigorator of the Church he represents ecclesiastical authority, and as stigmatised saint he represents Christ. If Francesco Sassetti were ever in doubt about the possibility of harmonising the many aspects of his life, with its intertwined secular and religious concerns, he could not have chosen a better saint than Francis, as presented by Ghirlandaio. This is not the Francis of earlier fresco cycles (he is less radical than at Santa Croce and far removed from Assisi), but a moderate, mediating, interceding, saint who smoothes out frictions in this life, gently embodies good and humble behaviour, and offers hope of resurrection in Christ.

Compositional Strategies Ghirlandaio applied what he had learned from studying the frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel33 to his work at Santa Trinita. In particular, he adopted Masaccio’s characteristic compositional device of a central event to which the eye is drawn and around which all the activity is concentrated, surrounded by a semi-circle of onlookers which the viewer himself completes into a circle, becoming part of the scene.34 This technique, which involves the viewer in the scene, and conveys content through spatial manipulation, is found particularly in the Renunciation, Trial, Funeral, and (in a modified form) Resuscitation, and is instrumental in achieving the connections between Francis, Christ, the world of Franciscan ministry, and the viewer. Another technique which creates these connections, and forms this web of relations, is Ghirlandaio’s development of the relationship between foreground and background.35 This is important both technically, in terms of his perspectival skill, which gives his scenes considerable credible depth, and in terms of the significance of relation between foreground and background for the communication of content. Such a relationship barely exists in Giotto’s scenes, with their limited depth, and is only used in a few scenes in the Brancacci Chapel and to a much lesser extent.36 In the Renunciation, the relation that Francis, kneeling in the central foreground, has to the background scene of a prosperous-looking trading port and city (possibly Geneva) changes fundamentally as he discards his rich clothes for the protection of the Bishop’s cloak. He is no longer determined by that world, taking from its wealth but spiritually constrained by familial obligations and that very prosperity; instead he renounces the world in order to give to it. His relation to the world is radically altered so that from now on it is expressed in spiritual terms: he offers ministry, and he asks for Christian charity. Giotto set this scene of Francis’s translation from the secular to the spiritual against the Episcopal Palace, indicating the protection and strength of the Church; Ghirlandaio sets 33

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And possibly the lost fresco known as the Sagra that was once at Santa Maria del Carmine, which was recorded as including many contemporary portraits. This technique is discussed in more detail in the thesis on which this chapter is based. Ghirlandaio’s landscape and townscape backgrounds are influenced by Netherlandish art but his employment of them on the left wall at Santa Trinita appears to convey content rather than solely to display his talent in the fashionable style of the time. For example, in the Oltrarno piazza in the Raising of Tabitha and Healing of a Cripple, the Tribute Money, and perhaps the countryside glimpsed through the archway in Crucifixion of St Peter.

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it against the world that Francis will minister to, expressing the change in his orientation as much in terms of the world he will serve as in terms of the Church which welcomes and approves him. Similarly, in the Stigmatization, Francis’s relation to his brothers, the secular world, and perhaps the animal kingdom, is re-defined through his receiving of the stigmata. On the altar wall, the Florentine settings inform viewers that what happens here is directly relevant to their own lives. We see the world ‘as it is’ (or ‘as it was’ for the contemporary viewer) and we see also the spiritual transformation that Francis effects in it. Florence is presented as a city of God, perhaps a New Rome,37 with religion as the warp and weft of public and private life. In the Confirmation, the Florentine setting is literally the backdrop to Franciscan life: the brothers receiving their rule will minister to this city. We have moved from the sweeping landscape of the Stigmatization where Francis’s relation to the world was re-defined, to the specific case of Franciscan ministry to Florence. In the Resuscitation, the incident is transported to the piazza in front of Santa Trinita: the viewer is invited to transform his view of the Florence, starting just outside, and to invoke Francis as a protector of family and city, two primary concerns of the contemporary viewer. Where the left wall depicts broad landscapes as backgrounds to Francis’s approval by Church and Christ, and the altar wall relates his earthly ministry and continued heavenly protection to Florence, the landscapes and buildings in the scenes on the right wall are of less importance. Here, the relation between foreground and background attaches to what occupies the central space at the deepest point of the scene, i.e. the Sultan in the upper scene, and the crucifix on the altar in the lower. The Sultan represents the universal scope of Francis’s mission to the world (including the heathen of foreign lands) and the conversion that he effects,38 while the crucifix represents the assumption of Francis’s soul into heaven and his resurrection, and relates the Saint’s physical likeness to Christ (through his stigmata) to Christ’s suffering on the cross, and therefore Francis’s role as an intercessor for Sassetti and others. The exception to the rule is the pair of donor portraits. Francesco and Nera have no background depth to relate to. They are between the earthly and heavenly spheres,39 and one must assume that their images are no longer related to anything earthly but defined by their perpetual prayers, directed towards the Christ Child in the altarpiece.

Connections as Covenants Having established the nature of the cycle as a network of connections between the heavenly and the earthly, anchored in each scene by Francis himself, one might ask what these ‘connections’ consist of. They are not solely mimetic, relating a representation to its subject. Nor are they purely active or efficacious: the donor portraits are intended to 37

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On the subject of Florence as a New Rome see Borsook and Offerhaus (eds), pp. 30–52. Cf. Lillie, p. 294. At times Florence also saw herself as a New Jerusalem: see Crum and Paoletti (eds), pp. 10, 47, 99, 101, 147. Crum and Paoletti also cite Phillip Earenfight, ‘Florence as the New Jerusalem: The Metaphor and the Real in the Piazza San Giovanni’, in College Art Association Annual Conference (Chicago: Unpub., 2001). Bonaventure suggests that the Sultan was sympathetic to Francis but that he dared not convert, for reasons of political expedience. Bonaventure, Ch. 9. See Roettgen, p. 145.

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perpetuate their prayers and their faith in Christ and the resurrection he brings, while the portraits in narrative scenes may, as discussed above, bear witness to the truth of sacred events and express the faith of their subjects, but the narrative scenes themselves are not like this. The connections seem rather to be variations on a theme of promises, commitments and covenants, and concomitant incidents of fulfilment, proof or attestation. In the web of these connections, the viewer is assured, by reference to promises and fulfilments, that divine promises are indeed fulfilled. Francis is accorded the Church’s protection when he leaves the secular world and dedicates his life to Christ. His own vow is reciprocated, first by Christ’s representative (the Bishop who welcomes him into the Church) and then by Christ himself through the vision of the Christ-seraph and the imprinting of the stigmata, which are a physical seal of Francis’s spiritual relation with Christ.40 This is attested at the verification of the stigmata, while the depth of Francis’s faith is proved by his readiness to walk through fire. The confirmation of the Rule creates a covenant between the papacy and the Franciscans and establishes formally the commitment that a friar makes on entering the Order. The juxtaposition of this scene with the Medici boys and their tutors being greeted by Sassetti and Lorenzo de’ Medici implies correspondence between the Pope’s covenant with the Franciscans and the commitment of these leading citizens to their families and the next generation. Children themselves are a kind of covenant, a promise of the future, equated with new and continued life41 and welcomed as a divine blessing as God blessed Abraham and Sarah, Joachim and Anne, and Elizabeth and Zachariah. On the altar wall, the Christ Child on the altarpiece is vertically linked with the resuscitated notary’s child, and with the children ascending the stairs. So we look from the Son of God, to the son of the miracle in times past, to the contemporary Medici sons, on a vertical axis which presents life as blessed by God and full of promise in the guise of the next generation. For Sassetti, having lost one son, the birth of another must have seemed like a divine blessing and affirmation of his family’s future. Sassetti himself was said to be fulfilling a vow in endowing the Chapel, possibly related to this death and birth. Finally, Sassetti’s tomb lies directly beneath the Funeral, close to his patron saint whom he hopes will intercede for him at the Last Judgement, as he has interceded for the notary’s son in the Resuscitation. One might reasonably ask whether these covenants, expressed as promises, commitments, and fulfilments, imply a Doubting Thomas-like need for proof. The tone of the cycle, however, suggests otherwise: the lack of dramatic tension in these scenes has been noted already, as has the way in which Ghirlandaio harmonises various (potentially conflicting) themes. Rather than a need for proof, the cycle expresses affirmation and an atmosphere of fulfilment, whether of promises already fulfilled, or of faith in their fulfilment in the future. As Francis promised himself to the Church and Christ and received earthly and divine seals of approval (the latter verified at his death), as he ventured martyrdom to convert the heathen, and as he resuscitated the dead child at the invocation of his friars, so he will intercede for Sassetti and his family, who have affirmed their faith by representing themselves as witnesses to the sacred events, and in perpetual prayer. Whether Sassetti’s faith was as sure as the frescoes imply, or whether they present an ideal, is impossible to know, but the stories of Francis provide assurances of promises that are 40 41

Bonaventure describes the stigmata as a seal. See Goffen, p. 67. Arnold V. Coonin, ‘Portrait Busts of Children in Quattrocento Florence’, Metropolitan Museum Journal 30 (1995), p. 64.

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then, visibly, fulfilled, and the miracles of the Stigmatization and the Resuscitation represent specific instances of the fulfilment of God’s covenant with man. Indeed, Francis himself is a form of covenant between God and man, fulfilling his promise to God in his life, in his willingness to suffer, and in his posthumous intercession.42 Contemporary Florentines would have understood promises, covenants, commitments and alliances, not only as biblical concepts expressing the relationship between God and mankind, but as vital elements of their own daily lives, as recorded in legal documents and their family notebooks. Sassetti was a banker and a prominent citizen, versed in the legalities and formalities of trading and finance. He and his contemporaries would have been used to making agreements, having them witnessed and recorded by notaries43 and carrying out their commitments as men whose financial, political and social positions depended on being as good as their word.

Conclusions The frescoes use the intimate, three-dimensional, ‘material’ space of this small funerary chapel to establish a network of connections among which the viewer stands, turning from one wall to the next, reading the images horizontally, vertically, diagonally. The content of these cross-references is rich and varied, relating to numerous themes within the frescoes’ imagery, but in each case Francis is the pin or anchor that connects one point and the next. The connections themselves can be seen as covenants or commitments, threads that bind Christ, Francis, the Church, laymen, and the natural world, through events that indicate or invite faith. The two-dimensional, ‘visual’ space within the frescoes portrays these connections and covenants through depictions of spiritually charged and transformatory moments. Francis leaves the secular world, obtains papal approval of his rule, prepares to walk through fire, receives the stigmata which are verified after his death, and performs a posthumous miracle. He makes a commitment and receives ecclesiastical and divine approval; he proves his faith and his faith is itself proved in the verification of his wounds. The use of local and contemporary settings, particularly Florentine ones, supports the web of spiritual connections between events in the life of the Saint and the lives of contemporary Florentines, especially the Sassetti and their friends. From a theological perspective, the figure of Francis himself fulfils the role of the ‘engaging portrait’.44 He attracts the viewer and offers them a way to a transformed reality, while the compositional technique and placing of figures draws the viewer into the scene as witness (as in the left wall scenes), participant (as 42

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I am grateful to Ben Quash for encouraging me to consider the theme of proof as allied to promise fulfilment. The man behind Jerome in the Funeral may be a notary. Celano describes Francis’s close relationship with Brother Elias of Cortona whom he appointed as vicar-general c. 1221 and who still held that office at the time of Francis’s death. Elias was privileged to see the stigmata during Francis’s life time, and after Francis’s death he wrote to the friars informing them of this. For references see the index entry on Brother Elias in Celano, p. 393. Thomas of Ecclestone, author of the Analactaca Franciscana, records that Elias had been a notary in Bologna before joining the Franciscans. The clothing of the figure next to the sceptic Jerome suggests that this is meant to be Elias in the garb of a notary, lending formality to the verification of the stigmata. The figure whose familiar face ‘invites’ the viewer into the scene.

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in the right wall scenes), or direct beneficiary (as in the altar wall scenes where Francis’s activity is immediately related to contemporary Florence). In nature and form, the frescoes are an ideal medium for communicating Francis’s transformed, gracious humanity, and his relationship to the world to which he ministered, to his supplicant, Francesco Sassetti, and to the viewer. The relationship of the two-dimensional frescoes to the ‘reality’ they reflect is analogous to Francis’s relation to the world. Both are physically part of ‘reality’ but distinguished from it by the absence of certain features usually assumed of this reality, such as three-dimensionality, or ‘secular’ pursuits. In dispensing with these aspects of ‘reality’ Francis, and the frescoes of his life, are reduced (in the sense of evaporating the unnecessary) to an intense concentration of the essential, such that those absences are distilled into presence: a kind of ‘hyper-reality’ which is both recognisable and transformative. Francis’s proven faith is verified by the Church and by God, the one shaping his life within the structure of the authority of apostolic succession, the other imprinting his flesh such that his own bodily existence becomes a verification of God’s covenant with mankind in Christ. Francis is the visible fulfilment of that promise, and his christoform image – seen in his actions and in his wounds – is challenging and fertile, propagating imitatio Christi by transformative encounter with others, so that they too may become images of Christ. The nature of Franciscan ministry45 – as travelling, mendicant preachers – brought the friars into contact with people of all ranks and occupations, and thus with ‘the world’ in all its diversity. That the Sassetti frescoes include multiple themes and concerns, (including life, death and resurrection, the Nativity, the Last Judgement, the peace with the papacy, humanist interests such classical art and literature, Florence as the New Rome, istoria as exemplum, and the uses of portraiture, as well as family matters, as detailed in ricordanze) is thus entirely in accord with a cycle of Francis, whose mission was, after all, to the world. The attentive viewer follows these threads within and between the scenes, and sees there the connections between his own life, the lives of contemporaries, the life of Francis, and the promised life of the resurrection. Surrounded by images of life and death, he is invited to join himself to a network of spiritual activity in the physical world, in faithful hope of the life to come, a hope expressed three-dimensionally in a cruciform shape, extending from the altarpiece on a vertical axis to the scene of the resuscitation, and on a horizontal axis towards the donors and their tombs. The viewer’s physical engagement with the images is heightened by the need to look back and forth from one image to another, following their connections. The viewer is both physically part of the network by virtue simply of his presence in the Chapel, and potentially spiritually part of it, if he so wills. The frescoes open themselves to the viewer through this spiritual web, and enable a connection which is both physically and spiritually mediated (echoing the intense physical mediation of the spiritual which characterises the stigmatization) between the ‘visual’ space of the images and the ‘receptive’ space of the viewer.46

45 46

At least in its early days, and to some extent thereafter. An analysis of images which are inherently part of their material surroundings, as frescoes are, in terms of ‘material’, ‘visual’ and ‘receptive’ space, is a key part of the methodological framework of the thesis on which this chapter is based.

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Bibliography Berenson, Bernard, Italian Painters of the Renaissance II. The Florentine and Central Italian Schools. London: Phaidon, 1952. Bonaventure, St, ‘The Life of St Francis (Legenda Maior)’, in Bonaventure, the Soul’s Journey into God, the Tree of Life, the Life of St Francis. London: SPCK, 1978. Borsook, Eve, and Johannes Offerhaus (eds), Sassetti and Ghirlandaio at Santa Trinita, Florence: History and Legend in a Renaissance Chapel. Holland: Davoco Publishing, 1981. Burke, Paul F., ‘Augustus and Christianity in Myth and Legend’, New England Classical Journal 32.3 (2005): 213–20. Cadogan, Jean K., Domenico Ghirlandaio Artist and Artisan. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. Celano, Thomas of, St Francis of Assisi, trans. Placid Hermann O.F.M. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1988. Coonin, Arnold V., ‘Portrait Busts of Children in Quattrocento Florence’, Metropolitan Museum Journal 30 (1995): 61–71. Crum, Roger J., and John T. Paoletti (eds), Renaissance Florence: A Social History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Davidson, Arnold, ‘Miracles of Bodily Transformation, or, How St Francis Received the Stigmata’ in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison. New York and London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 101–24. Davies, Gerald S., Ghirlandaio. London: Methuen and Co., 1908. de Voragine, Jacobus, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William G. Ryan. 2 vols, vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Earenfight, Phillip, ‘Florence as the New Jerusalem: The Metaphor and the Real in the Piazza San Giovanni’ in College Art Association Annual Conference. Chicago: Unpub., 2001. Goffen, Rona, Spirituality in Conflict: St Francis and Giotto’s Bardi Chapel. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. Gombrich, Ernst, ‘The Sassetti Chapel Revisited: Santa Trinita and Lorenzo De’ Medici’, I Tatti Studies, Essays in the Renaissance 7 (1997): 11–35. Heywood, W. (ed.), The Little Flowers of St Francis of Assisi. New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, Random House, 1998. Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg, The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches 431–1600. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Lillie, Amanda, ‘Francesco Sassetti and Ghirlandaio at Santa Trinita Florence: History and Legend in a Renaissance Chapel – Borsook, E. and Offerhaus, J.’, Burlington Magazine 126, no. 974 (1984): 293–5. Long, Jane C., ‘The Program of Giotto’s Saint Francis Cycle at Santa Croce in Florence’, Franciscan Studies 52, (1992): 85–133. Roettgen, Steffi, Italian Frescoes, the Flowering of the Renaissance 1470–1510, trans. R. Stockman. New York, London: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1996. Rubin, Patricia, ‘Domenico Ghirlandaio and the Meaning of History in Fifteenth Century Florence’, in Domenico Ghirlandaio 1449–1494, Atti Del Convegno Internazionale Firenze, 16–18 Ottobre 1994, ed. Wolfram Prinz and Max Seidel. Florence: Centro Di, 1996. Warburg, Aby, ‘Bildniskunst Und Florentinisches Burgertum 1: Domenico Ghirlandajo in Santa Trinita; Die Bildnisse Des Lorenzo De’ Medici Und Seiner Angehoriger’, in Gesammelte Schriften: Die Erneuerung Der Heidnischen Antike, ed. G. Bing. Berlin: H. Seeman, 1932. ––, ‘Bildniskunst Und Florentinisches Burgertum 1: Domenico Ghirlandajo in Santa Trinita; Die Bildnisse Des Lorenzo De’ Medici Und Seiner Angehorigen’, in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, ed. Kurt W. Forster. Los Angeles, 1999.

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WHO FRAMED BATHSHEBA? Vivienne Westbrook

And aboute the eventide it fortuned that David arose from his resting place, & wente up to y toppe of the kynges palace, and from y toppe he sawe a woman wasshinge hir selfe, and the woman was of a very fayre bewtye. And David sent and caused to axe what woman it was and sayde : Is not that Bethseba the doughter of Eliam the wife of Urias the Hithite. And David sent messangers, and caused for to fetch her. And whan she was come in unto him he laye with her. Nevertheles she hallowed hir selfe from hir unclennes, and returned agayne unto her [house]. (2 Samuel 11: 2–4)1

T

he story of David and Bathsheba is a powerful ur-narrative of forbidden desire, and its consequences, that has been appropriated through time, through cultures and through a variety of technologies of capture to reveal a wider range of perspectives on the relationship between a king and his subject, illicit relationships between the sexes and the betrayal of God by even the best of men.2 This chapter will attempt to discover where this tradition of reading Bathsheba as a seductress really began: in the biblical texts, the literature, the paintings? Beyond a cultural historical hunt to find out who framed Bathsheba, the frameworks offered by centuries of readers of Bathsheba may be used to re-read the biblical narrative; to explore not only the extent to which Bathsheba herself has been re-invented for a wide range of purposes, but the way in which adaptation, in turn, promotes re-readings that occasionally expose the more subtle and nuanced aspects of the biblical narrative itself. Much feminist criticism in the West established itself as a response to patriarchal ideology that it understood as being rooted in that fundamentally important text of Western culture, the Bible. By reading disobediently, it became possible to give a voice to the often obscured, marginalised and silenced female figures and to forge new perspectives not only on the roles of females in the Bible, but on their roles in Western society.3 An 1

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Miles Coverdale, Biblia the Bible, that is, the holy Scripture of the Olde and New Testament (Cologne: E. Cervicornus and J. Soter, 1535), STC 2063. See Alice Bach, Women, Seduction, and Betrayal in Biblical Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 132. See Esther Fuchs, Sexual Politics in the Biblical Narrative: Reading the Hebrew Bible as a Woman, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 310 (Sheffield: Academic Press, 2000). Fuchs compares the fictional world of the Bible with the social reality of female subjection. See also Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Studies in Bible and Feminist Criticism (Philadelphia: Jewish

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exploration of the multiple contexts in which Bathsheba has been appropriated, from the literature extending from the biblical text, through to objects to be viewed, or watched, handled and circulated renders fascinating results, though there is room only for a slim treatment here. Within the English language not only is Bathsheba a half-pun on the bath in which she is seen bathing, turning her into the quintessential bathing beauty, but the drama in which she is caught also hinges on a pun, that of lying. David expects Bathsheba to lie to her husband, but Uriah’s failure to lie with his wife saves Bathsheba from having to lie to him. His honour saves her from dishonour/dishonesty and David fails spectacularly in a game of lying, exposing his own naïve assumption that he can escape the scene, seen or unseen, once he has created it. Although Bathsheba begins as an object, a beautiful woman to be possessed even while she bathes, through a process that is more akin to a hunt than a mere act of possession, Bathsheba’s trajectory returns her from being an object of beauty to a thinking subject and the most powerful woman in Israel to whom even King David bends his will. Bathsheba has been a persistent focus for feminist biblical critics, yet no scriptural precedent for Bathsheba as the seductress or whore in the Hebrew Bible, in the Septuagint or the Vulgate exists, perhaps as a further testament to her power, that might explain the attachment of that attribute which transformed her from a powerful woman to a type in Western culture. Through multiple cultural re-framings in particular historical contexts and through developing technologies of representation Bathsheba became synonymous with irresistible allure for which she was variously praised or blamed.4 In the process of being painted, Bathsheba became tainted with the associated dangers of naked female beauty’s relationship to the fall of man. In one of the earliest surviving representations, in the Sacra Parallela, attributed to John of Damascus, the ninth-century Bathsheba is entirely naked and on full display to the viewer (Plate 34).5 In an interesting compression both Bathsheba and her naked maid are placed directly beneath King David’s window. She dips her left hand into an ornate water bowl, a perfunctory gesture denoting an ulterior motive.6 However, not all Bathshebas have been depicted as naked; indeed, the body of Bathsheba has often been variously veiled and partitioned. In many of the medieval tapestries Bathsheba appears clothed, for instance in the well-known ‘Bathsheba Welcomed at Court’ tapestry of 1510–15,7 or ‘David Sees Bathsheba Washing’ 1526–8, in which the whole 2 Samuel 11 story is encapsulated and Bathsheba is seen even at the water tower in full dress as she receives the king’s message.8 This representation of the fully clothed

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Publication Society, 2006). Frymer-Kensky argues that the objectification of women is present even in the Ten Commandments. See Monica Ann Walker Vadillo, Bathsheba in Late Medieval French Manuscript Illumination: Innocent Object of Desire or Agent of Sin? (Lewiston, NY and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). There is some disagreement about the date of the Sacra Parallela. Monica Ann Walker Vadillo dates it as early as the sixth to the eighth century. She suggests that its purpose was primarily that of providing ‘ethical, moral and ascetic edification’, p. 19. Kurt Weitzmann, The Miniatures of the Sacra Parallela: Parisinus Graecus 923 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Bathsheba Welcomed at Court, tapestry of 1510–15 http://www.allposters.com; David Sees Bathsheba Washing, 1526–8 http://en.wikipedia.org (accessed 30 June 2011). Compare representations of Diana in tapestries, for instance, Diana and Her Nymphs 1644 http://www.metmuseum.org (accessed 30 June 2011).

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bather is a stark contrast to representations of Bathsheba in medieval Horae where, as in the Sacra Parallela, she is often a naked, or transparently veiled, golden red-haired beauty. Horae were objects of beauty themselves as incitements to religious contemplation. They often included a selection of psalms and prayers which were lavishly embellished with gold leaf and painted uncials or illustrations that incorporated a biblical scene. The story of David and Bathsheba, which was linked into the psalms through the penitential Psalm 51 in which David asks for God’s forgiveness for this incident, was often included in such volumes; images of bathing Bathsheba became increasingly popular throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth century even as they competed with works by Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives and Thomas Elyot, which advised mothers to inculcate the virtues of chastity, silence and obedience in their daughters.9 The pictures themselves, in the Horae often reveal interesting and variant readings of the biblical texts while participating in a shared tradition of representation that seems to insist upon Bathsheba having golden red hair. For instance Jean Colombe’s late fifteenthcentury, fully clothed Bathsheba dangles her legs in a garden pond.10 Her eyes shift to the left to denote that she has been disturbed by the approaching King David. Since he can only see her from the back, the golden red hair is the focus of his desire. The hair provides a visual link back to David’s gown and crown, as though Bathsheba is a natural extension of the king’s golden possessions. Here he appears to have come upon Bathsheba accidentally. His hand reaches out to stabilise his body which has been thrown off-balance, perhaps indicating his loss of judgement. In another example of the same period by Jean Bourdichon, David stands in a small tower at the end of a castle wall overlooking a bath in which Bathsheba stands upright, naked and on full display to the viewer (Plate 35). The water veils her genitalia while her golden red hair flows down her back. Her eyes shift to the direction of David, who she knows is watching her. The gold of the palace roof, his crown and the cloth on which he rests match her hair and the golden lion-headed jetto – which also appears to be watching her. This scene reads 2 Samuel 11 as a deliberate entrapment. She is the whore in the Horae.11 In a third example, by an unknown artist, a voyeuristic King has his watch-tower perfectly located for observing bathing beauties. Bathsheba’s right hand covers her genitalia as her left reaches into the water tower. Bathsheba and the King both have golden red hair and two golden pillars support the tower structure in which the king is lodged. Although Bathsheba seems entirely occupied with the process of washing and even her maid seems oblivious to the fact that they are being watched, the compositional linking of Bathsheba’s hand with the phallic golden water tower transforms her innocent washing into a seduction that incorporates a change of fortune.12 9

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Walker Vadillo, Bathsheba in Late Medieval French Manuscript Illumination. See also Vivienne Westbrook, ‘Reflecting Resistant Typologies in Renaissance Women’s Writing’, in Identity and Politics: Early Modern Culture, ed. Janet Levarie Smarr, Francis K. So and I-chun Wang, Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Series 7 (2005): pp. 35–64. Jean Colombe, David and Bathsheba, Hours of Jacques Laroche for Rome use, France, Bourges, c. 1490–1500 (Private Collection, f. 85) http://www.medievalbooksofhours.com (accessed 30 June 2011). Jean Bourdichon, Bathsheba Bathing, France 1498/9. The J. Paul Getty Museum. http://www.vam. ac.uk (accessed 30 June 2011). Unknown artist, ‘Bathsheba Bathing’, Book of Hours (Morgan M. 156, 54r) c. 1500. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. http://www.tali-virtualmidrash.org (accessed 30 June 2011).

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In each of these Horae, designed for contemplation and prayer, a different story is conveyed about the events of 2 Samuel 11. In the first instance the encounter between David and Bathsheba is an accident. Both are clothed, though Bathsheba’s legs are visible. Neither Bathsheba nor David appear to be looking for a sexual encounter; neither one of them is to be blamed. In the second example Bathsheba displays her naked beauty enticingly. David is sufficiently diminutive to suggest that his watch-tower is at some distance from the lake in the garden, while Bathsheba stands substantially larger in the foreground, as though attempting to please the viewer even more than the king. The king can see only her hair, which flows down the length of her body. In these examples it is the golden red hair that attracts David and which renders her merely another golden object to be possessed. In the third example David is clearly to blame as he watches an innocent Bathsheba washing. However, she is on full display to the reader, advertising an accessibility that later Tudor printed texts recognised as being a useful device in drawing readers to that which would be pleasurable while being good for their ‘souls’. In subsequent printed editions of the psalms that included, albeit crude, woodblock illustrations, Bathsheba was usually naked and foregrounded for the pleasure of the viewer. In these cheap Early Modern versions of their manuscript cousins, Bathsheba became a ghostly black and white product of the print houses for circulation in the marketplace, to be handled for a modest fee.13 In the English Reformation Bibles themselves, which were advertised as wholesome and delightful as an attempt to lure the reader away from their Canterbury Tales and Chronicles, the story of Bathsheba often carried a small woodcut illustration that is first seen in an English Bible in Coverdale’s 1535 edition. In this Bible King David is depicted on his balcony staring out. In the foreground is Bathsheba bathing in his forecourt, some distance from King David and apparently oblivious to him. Her body is exposed but for her feet, which she appears to be soaking, and a veil in her right hand which she draws across her genitalia in a gesture of modesty. She is depicted sideways in relation to the viewer, rather than in the full-frontal framing that is a feature of the Great Bible, 1539, and discrete editions of the psalms.14 There are no subject running heads and few annotations in this Bible, but there are cross-references to the text ‘a woman washing her self’. The first is to ‘Exodus 2.a’, which is a reference to Pharaoh’s daughter bathing in the river in which she then finds Moses, and the second to ‘Susanna c’, which is a reference to her bathing in the garden. These cross-references serve to contextualise Bathsheba in the company of good women of the Bible. Of all of the possible moments that might present themselves for elucidation, a woman washing herself is hardly one of them, yet only this is cross-referenced. The crossreferences establish the fact that it was a common thing for women to wash in what we might consider to be public places and, by extension, that there was nothing strange about Bathsheba washing where she might be seen. 13

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See ‘David and Bathsheba’, from Horae, Paris (Dupre), 1488/89. http://www.godecookery.com (accessed 30 June 2011). The woodcut in Joye’s edition of the psalms was often used in discrete editions of the psalms during the period. George Joye, The Psalter of David in English (London: Edwarde Whytchurch, 1544), STC 2374. For a treatment of David and Bathsheba in editions of the Penitential Psalms, see Clare L. Costley, ‘David, Bathsheba, and the Penitential Psalms’, Renaissance Quarterly, 57.4, Winter, 2004, pp. 1235–77.

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In Coverdale’s version, David already knows who the woman is and asks for confirmation of her identity before he then sends for her in order to have sex. Bathsheba then appears to cleanse herself of this sin and returns home. This translation reads 2 Samuel 11 as being less about the seduction of a woman than it is a complex power game between men in which the body of Bathsheba is merely the site.15 As the daughter and wife of elite warriors Bathsheba should be doubly untouchable.16 Further problems arise when we consider the encounter with Bathsheba in its broader context. David has stayed behind instead of going into battle with his men, he has failed to show self-control and is then unable to control his men, manifested in the disobedience of Uriah; this will later extend to the disobedience of his own son, Absolom. While David’s apparent passivity feminises him within the text – he’s at home with the girls – we are also alerted to David’s attempt to feminise Uriah. Within Hittite culture the failure either to win a battle or fulfil oaths resulted in the attribution of feminine epithets.17 In this context, that Uriah was a Hittite becomes important for the way that we read his behaviour. He is a soldier of honour who would be doubly compromised by being doubly out of context, first at David’s palace and second at his own home. Susan Ackerman has also suggested that it would have been against Deuteronomic laws governing soldiers for Uriah to have slept with his wife at this time.18 Although Coverdale’s Bible was the earliest to be printed, it was ignored on account of the fact that it had been translated mostly from the Vulgate. The real foundation of all subsequent Tudor Bibles was the Matthew Bible, containing the work of William Tyndale translated from the original languages of Scripture, edited by John Rogers in 1537 and licensed in 1538 by Henry VIII.19 Because of developments in printing technology, advances in the knowledge of the biblical languages and changing political and religious agendas, Tudor Bibles all had subtly different interpretations of the 2 Samuel 11 story. The 1537 Matthew Bible page had the running head ‘David and Bethsabe’ and a chapter note just above the woodcut which read ‘The adoutrye of David with Bethsabe the wife of Urias. Urias is gylefully slayne. After that David taketh Bethsabe to wife.’ The paratext assigned the blame for adultery and Urias’s death clearly to David. The text read: And it chaunced in an evening yt David arose from his cowche & walked upon the roufe of the kynges palace/ & from the roufe saw a very bewtyfull woman washyng 15

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Elna K. Solvang, A Woman’s Place is in the House: Royal Women of Judah and their Involvement in the House of David (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003). See Robert Alter, The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Uriah Y. Kim, Identity and Loyalty in the David Story: A postcolonial reading (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008). Kim argues that being identified with two powerful men can also be an indicator of conflict. See Claudia D. Bergmann, ‘We have seen the enemy, and he is only a “she”: the portrayal of warriors as women’, in Brad E. Kelle and Frank Ritchel Ames (eds), Writing and Reading War: Rhetoric, Gender, and Ethics in Biblical and Modern Contexts (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008), pp. 129–42, at p. 135. See also Delbert R. Hillers, Treaty Curses and the Old Testament Prophets (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1964), p. 66. Susan Ackerman, Women in Judges and Biblical Israel: Warrior, Dancer, Seductress, Queen (New York: Doubleday, 1998), p. 39. John Rogers, The Byble which is all the Holy Scripture (Antwerp: Matthew Crom, 1537), STC 2066.

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her selfe. And he sent to enquire what woman it shuld be. And it was answered agayne/ yt she was Bethsabe ye daughter of Eliam & wife to Urias ye Hethite. And David sent messengers & fett her/ and she came unto him/ and he laye wt her. And she was streyght waye* purified from her unclenesse/ & returned unto her house. In this rendering David does not know who the bathing beauty is, but when he is told he immediately sends for her and has sex with her. Again it is made clear that David is told that Bathsheba belongs to Eliam and Uriah before he then takes her, but why ask the question? If it simply a matter of taking a beautiful woman, why does he need to know who she is? The question remains open. If it is his opinion that what belongs to his men by extension belongs to him, there would be no need to hide his act, let alone attempt subterfuge and then murder the husband. Another rather curious translation is that as soon as she had had sex with David she was ‘streyghtwaye purified from her unclenesse and returned unto her house’, as though David had cured her of a disease – reminding us of the encounter of the hemorrhaging woman of Matthew 9: 20. How are we supposed to read this? A short annotation in the margin explains: ‘That is, her floures or monethes disease ceased: yt which is a token that wemen have conceaved.’ Here, Bathsheba’s purification does not entail bathing, but rather a miraculous conception which ‘streyghtway’ stops her bleeding. However, if this is the truth of the matter, then David was breaking more than one law in taking another man’s wife who was also menstruating. Elna K. Solvang has suggested that the reference to the washing and purifying belong together, if only to explain Bathsheba’s activity that day, the two participial forms – bathing (Rachats) and purifying herself (Qadash) – belong together and offer the reader a functional activity. The author, however, has separated them. Bathsheba is introduced, through the eyes of David, as a bathing beauty. The ritual notice of her washing has been relocated where it serves a different purpose as a shadowy omen following the adulterous act.20 The narrative of blood that runs throughout the David and Bathsheba sequence is spliced with motifs of private and public cleansing and renewal. The fruit of David and Bathsheba’s encounter is killed in infancy, thereby ensuring that the next king, Solomon, is the legitimate offspring of David and Bathsheba. Unlike Coverdale’s 1535 Bible account, there is no cross-reference to Pharaoh’s daughter or Susannah bathing. Bathsheba’s behaviour remains unexplained. The verse format of the Geneva Bible’s text in compact columns allowed space for the running head to include ‘David & Bathsheba’ and ‘Uriah Murthered’ on the same page.21 The chapter note read ‘1. The citie Rabbah is besieged. 4. David committeth adulterie. 17. Uriah is slaine. 27. David marieth Bathsheba.’ Both the running head and the chapter note alert us to the causal relationships between David and Bathsheba coming together  and Uriah’s fate, but in the running head it is described in a civil context – ‘murthered’ – and in the chapter note a martial one – ‘slaine’ – thereby eliding the events of the private and public, the court and the battlefield, into a new trajectory for Davidic history. 20 21

Solvang, A Woman’s Place is in the House, pp. 130–1. William Whittingham, The Bible and the Holy Scriptures (Geneva: Rouland Hall, 1560), STC 2093.

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The Geneva Bible was translated by the English exiles who had left England in order to escape persecution when the Roman Catholic Mary succeeded her Protestant brother Edward in 1553. This Bible was completed by William Whittingham in 1560, two years after the Protestant Elizabeth succeeded Mary in 1558. This version followed the Matthew Bible text with one or two small changes, including the substitution of ‘it chaunced in an evening’ with ‘when it was evening tide’, and it included new annotations. The first note to verse 2 explained that David rose out of his bed ‘whereupon he used to rest at after none, as was red of ish-bosheth, chap.4.7.’ This note resisted a negative interpretation and, rather, established David’s nap as merely habit, albeit a dangerous one – Ish-bosheth was slain while napping in this fashion. The second note explains that Uriah ‘was not an Israelite borne, but converted to the true religion’ in order to legitimate his marriage to Bathsheba. The term ‘purified’ was given no discrete annotation but it did have a crossreference to Leviticus 15: 19 and 18: 19; both texts refer to the fact that a menstruating woman should not be touched and should be put apart for seven days. However, 2 Samuel 11: 4 does not include either a miraculous stopping of the blood to denote conception, as the Matthew Bible had suggested, nor even the purification that should take place after sex for both men and women, also outlined in Leviticus 15: 18. The Geneva revisers rendered the verse ‘and she came unto him and he laye with her’ then they added a colon and in parentheses gave ‘(now she was *purified from her unclennes)’, thereby suggesting that she had been purifying herself from her period of menstruation when David saw her bathing. It is a very tricky bit of translation but it explains her bathing and lets David at least off that hook of defiling himself with an unclean woman. His perfect timing for procreation lends a providential element to the narrative. It is the baby, not the sex, that must be owned or concealed and which ultimately necessitates Uriah’s death. Although Bathsheba is exonerated in this account, there is no explanation, of the kind that is offered in the Coverdale Bible, of why she would be bathing where she might be seen. Like the Matthew Bible it remains silent on this issue. Unlike the Matthew Bible and the Geneva Bible, The Bishops’ Bible, which was Matthew Parker’s attempt to provide Elizabeth with an uncontroversial lectern Bible in 1568, had a running head that simply read ‘David’, though the chapter note followed that of the Geneva Bible verbatim.22 The Bishops were clearly following the Geneva Bible, even to the extent of including the parenthetical troublesome reference to Bathsheba’s purification. They added a marginal annotation from the Geneva Bible to David’s bed, which they paired with a note to Exodus 2: a, the account of the Pharaoh’s daughter bathing, prompted by Coverdale’s 1535 Bible annotation. Taken together, both the annotation and the cross-references explain that both resting and bathing were not unusual; David was not looking for someone to share his bed when he found Bathsheba bathing, any more than she was looking for someone to share her bath. To the text ‘she came unto him’ there was a cross-references to Leviticus 18: c. This cross-reference dealt with both the law prohibiting sex with a menstruating woman as well as sex with one’s neighbour’s wife. In the Bishops’ Bible it was verse 20 and is cross-referenced back to 2 Reg. xi.a.23 The purpose of the note was 22 23

Matthew Parker, The Holie Bible (London: Richard Jugge, 1568), STC 2099.2. This cross-reference has been imported from another Bible in which 1 and 2 Samuel are designated 1 and 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Kings designated 3 and 4 Kings. In the Bishops’ Bible these four books are designated 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. Since 2 Kings 11.a is the unrelated story

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not to explain that David slept with an unclean woman, but that he slept with his neighbour’s wife, thereby rendering it more applicable to Christians to whom the Jewish laws governing menstruation would have meant little. The Bishops’ Bible included another annotation to verse 5 which explained that when Bathsheba discovered she was pregnant she sent to David, ‘Fearing lest she should be stoned according to the lawe.’ Aside from breaking the rules to have sex with Bathsheba, the note emphasises the fact that he had also put her life in danger. In ‘Private Lives and Public Censure’, Pnina Galpaz-Feller points out that ‘the nature of biblical law was such that the crimes of murder and adultery were, in fact, equivalent. It might even be argued that adultery was the more heinous of the two as the punishment for adultery was death (Leviticus 20: 10), while that for murder might be mitigated by certain circumstances (Exodus 21: 12–13).’24 Bathsheba emerges from the Bishops’ Bible as victim rather than seductress. In the Catholic Rheims/Douay Bible, translated from Latin by the Roman Catholic exiles who had fled Elizabeth’s Protestant England, the running head, like that of the Bishops’ Bible, simply read, ‘David’. The chapter note read ‘David overcome with concupiscence committeth adulterie with Bethsabe: 6. Not finding other meanes to hide the crime, causeth her husband Urias to be slaine. 27. Then marieth her, she beareth a sonnne, and God is offended.’25 Gregory Martin and William Allen explain as much of the story as possible in a chapter note while making the language more complex than that found in other English Bibles of the period. Here, David was not directly blamed, but rather described as the victim of concupiscence from which other sins followed. Again, the emphasis was on the sex, rather than the baby as the visible sign of it, which is the real the problem in the narrative account. Verse 4 is rendered, ‘David therefore sending messengers, ::tooke her, who when she was entered into him, he slept with her: and forth with she was sanctified from her unclennes:’. The side note to ‘tooke her’ read: Theodosius the Emperour pretending to be excused from punishment for his sines because king David also was an adulterer and a manslayer, S. Ambrose replied, saying: Thou that hast followed king David erring, follow him repenting. After which adminition the Emperour most humbly did publique penance injoyned him by the Bishop. [in vita. Theodosius] Instead of engaging with the story, the note deflected attention from it to St Ambrose’s moral lesson. David’s bad behaviour had set a bad example; his repentance had set a good one. There were no other notes concerning the almost incomprehensible account of the encounter between David and Bathsheba. The King James Version of the Bible, which was the revision ordered by James I and printed in 1611 as a means of reconciling sixteenth-century religious controversy in England, begins by exposing David first in the running head ‘David’s adultery and murder’ and then in its chapter notes:

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of Athaliah and Ahaziah, we can only assume that here 2 Kings is actually 2 Samuel – which is of course a reflex cross-reference to David and Bathsheba. Pnina Galpaz-Feller, ‘Private Lives and Public Censure: – Adultery in Ancient Egypt and Biblical Israel’, Near Eastern Archaeology, 67.3 2004, pp. 153–61. Gregory Martin and William Allen, The Holie Bible (Doway: Laurence Kellam, 1568), STC 2207.

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While Joab besieged Rabbah, David committeth adulterie with Bath-sheba.26 Uriah sent for by David to cover the adulterie, would not goe home neither sober nor drunken. Hee carieth to Joab the letter of his death. Joab sendeth newes thereof to David. David taketh Bath-sheba to wife. The running head attached the adultery and murder only to David. The translators then followed the Rheims/Douay version in giving the plot away in the chapter notes, albeit in clearer English. Here the focus was neither David nor Bathsheba but Uriah, the innocent pawn in the game who carries his own death warrant to Joab and ‘goes to it’. The King James Version first of all domesticates the scene so that David is now rising from his bed in his house, rather than from the palace: ‘And it came to passe in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roofe of the kings house.’ The effect of this simple change is to reduce the political disaster to a domestic tragedy. The tricky translation concerning Bathsheba’s purification was also clarified. David was able to have sex with Bathsheba, ‘for she was purified from her uncleannesse’. This exonerates David from breaking that second Levitical rule with which he is tainted in the earlier versions. An alternative interpretation is then offered in the margin ‘or, and when she had purified her selfe, &c. she returned *Levit. 15: 19 and 18: 19’, which accommodates the possibility of the earlier versions. The dominant pattern which emerges from the major English Bible versions up to and including the King James Version is that David was to blame, not Bathsheba. There is no instance of Bathsheba being blamed in the margin, not even in the Catholic Rheims/ Douay. In Becke’s Matthew Bible 1549 revision she appeared in the table of ‘famous’ rather than ‘wycked’ women, and in several versions her bathing is contextualised with that of Susannah, the paragon of chaste virtue, and Pharaoh’s daughter, the rescuer of Moses. Bathsheba’s bathing episode in the first printed English Bibles cannot be responsible for the interpretation of her as blameworthy. So now we have to ask how Bathsheba became the typologically defined seductress who was responsible for her husband’s death, David’s unquiet conscience and his politically unquiet times, when the Bibles themselves gave neither textual nor paratextual cues for such an interpretation. In the literature of the period Bathsheba was also depicted as more sinned against than sinning. The David and Bathsheba narrative was useful for discussing political and religious obedience within the context of Tudor power struggles. The tracts and sermons of the period were engaged in reminding the reader of the necessity for true obedience, and of resistance when necessary.27 In George Peele’s play, The Love of King David and fair Bethsabe (1599), Bethsabe begins innocently enough, apparently unaware that David was even watching her bathe, let alone that she had incited his lust. However, the amorous David cannot so easily be dowsed and he declares: ‘As erst my heart was hurt, displeasing thee, / So come and tast thy ease, with easing me.’ 28 Bathsheba then suggests that he find the medicine that will cure them both. After the slaying of Uriah, Bathsheba enters full of grief: 26 27

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Miles Smith, The Holy Bible (London: Robert Barker, 1611), STC 2217. In the wake of religious turmoil and open rebellion throughout the Tudor reigns, writing about obedience ranged from the prefatory epistles through to homilies which advised whole obedience to the monarch, and tracts which advised against it. George Peele, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (London: Adam Islip, 1599), ll. 122–3.

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Beth. O what is it to serue the lust of Kings, How Lyonlike thy rage when we resist, But Bersabe in humblenesse attend, The grace that God will to his handmaid send.29 Bathsheba substitutes Joab as David’s political saviour when he risks losing control over his army and the nation by grieving for the rebellious Absolom. She becomes a heroine of the kind that we recognise in many of the plays of the period which do not advertise  themselves overtly as David and Bathsheba plays. For instance, in Shakespeare’s Edward III (1596), the Countess of Salisbury is hotly pursued by the king, who would have her ‘chased’ rather than ‘chast’, as he famously declares, while his pregnant queen is  slaying David of Scotland, and the countess’s husband is fighting the king’s wars.30 Even  though her own father attempts to persuade her, the countess refuses to submit herself to King Edward’s lust. Lucrece, as Edward points out, pales into insignificance as an icon of chastity, since her encounter with the dagger was as well as, rather than instead of, the sex: Arise and be my fault, thy honors fame, Which after ages shall enrich thee with, I am awaked from this idle dreame,31 Because of the countess’s virtue, the king’s desire quickly returns to his duties and England is triumphant. The countess distinguishes herself from those figures in Renaissance drama such as Lady Anne of Shakespeare’s Richard III play and Beatrice Joanna of Middleton’s The Changeling, who protest but fall – quickly becoming lovers of those who kill their husbands –or intended husbands. As a framework through which to read 2 Samuel 11, Edward III alerts us to the fact that Bathsheba could have refused, and the consequences would not have been any greater than those which the Countess of Salisbury is prepared to suffer. If Bathsheba does not now seem so innocent, we must also remember that David’s sexual conquests are never framed as rapes. In the poetry of the period Bathsheba escapes blame. In Thomas Fuller’s (1608–61) poem ‘Davids Hainous Sinne’ Bathsheba is the focus of David’s inner struggle between good and bad. As he gazes at her his ‘heavenly half’ tells him to look at something else lest he lose himself. Now David when on Bathsheba loose eyes He fixt, his heavenly halfe did him disswade; Turne, turne away thy sight from vanities, Exchange thy object, else thou wilt be made Vnmindfull of thy Soule, her corps to minde, Made for to lose the truth, such toyes to finde, By looking long, made at the last, starke blinde.32 29 30

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Ibid. ll. 575–8. William Shakespeare, The Raigne of King Edward the Third (London: Cuthbert Burby, 1596), l. 489. Edward III has only recently been accepted into the Shakespeare canon. Shakespeare, The Raigne of King Edward the Third, ll. 982–98. Thomas Fuller, ‘Davids Hainous Sinne’ (London: Thomas Cotes for John Bellamie, 1631), ll. 36–42.

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In Robert Aylett’s (1583–1655) poem ‘David’s Troubles’ (1638), the 2 Samuel 11 incident is first established through a description of the might and valour of Uriah and the perfection of Uriah and Bathsheba’s love. David’s lust for Bathsheba is depicted as an unfortunate accident while David is innocently star-gazing. Bathsheba is first described as a ‘glorious object’ but as David narrows his focus on it he sees that it is a beautiful woman. She is then dissected in good Petrarchan fashion before David sends for her. The implication is that David merely invites her so that he can gaze on her beauty, although the juxtaposition of Bathsheba ‘all naked in a velvet chaire / Broad-spreading with white Comb her golden hair’ lends an erotic texture to the poem that renders Bathsheba tangibly open to invitation. Bathsheba comes to court in an aspect of innocence that we are told David matches: Not once suspecting such a godly King Would offer her the least dishonouring: Nor could all Satans cunning him have brought.33 We are then told that the power of her beauty was so overwhelming that David was soon ensnared. Neither David nor Bathsheba are blamed, but rather female beauty and male weakness before the poem descends into moral diatribe: He unawares in Beauties snare is took, Ev’n as the Lamb was drowned in the Brook. Oh lothsomnesse, deceitfulnesse of sinne? The sweetnesse, bitternesse we finde therein, Beginnings, fawnings, growing, terrour, smart, Our weaknesse, Satans envie, mans false heart! Even when David gets Uriah drunk and then has him murdered on the front line, David escapes real censure; his lust is described as ‘The wicked stranger’ that he lets in unwittingly. David relents and confesses to Nathan, ‘And sings this Penitentiall Psalme at last.’34 The poem becomes an extended treatment of the dangerous distraction and allure of beauty and the need for self-control, especially by the monarch. This is a period in which women are themselves taking up the pen and writing defences, re-writing the conduct books and surreptitiously earning a living by it, even while they continue to participate in patriarchal society in all other respects. Rachel Speght is credited with being the first female to actually put her name to a publication, A Mouzell for Melastomas (1617), in which she re-reads the Bible for the benefit of Joseph Swetenam, and men like him, who think that they can authorise misogynistic discourse through the appropriation of biblical narratives of women.35 Within the texts of the seventeenth century the battle lines of the gender wars are already, if subtly, beginning to be drawn. In the visual culture of the period, Eric Jan Sluijter has noted that there was a vogue 33 34 35

Robert Aylett, ‘David’s Troubles’ (London: Richard Hodgkinsonne, 1638), lines 409–411. Robert Aylett, ‘David’s Troubles’, l. 616. See Rachel Speght, A Mouzell for Melastomus (London: Nicholas Oakes for Thomas Archer, 1617), STC:23058; See also Dorothy Leigh, The Mothers Blessing (1616), in Sylvia Brown (ed.), Women’s Writing in Stuart England (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999); and Aemelia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (London: Valentine Simmes for Richard Bonian, 1611), STC:15227.5.

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for pictures of naked women, Bathsheba and Susannah among them, and a preoccupation with the theme of men being aroused by the sight of female nakedness.36 While patronage pieces of the early sixteenth century had often combined figures from both classical and biblical narratives as a means of expressing the superlative virtue of the patron, more often by way of an encouraging ‘mirror’ rather than a true reflection, the kind of secularisation of the biblical models that Eric Jan Sluijter discusses represents, rather, a freedom from the confines of the Church and Christian morality to the service of a circulating mercantile immorality. Of Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem’s Het toilet van Bathseba (1594) (Plate 36), Cheryl Exum notes, ‘The women appear to be in a magnificent garden, and almost at the center of the painting is a tree in the middle of a landscaped area, like the tree of (sexual?) knowledge in the midst of the garden of Eden.’37 Here what is most startling is the black arm of the servant which cuts across Bathsheba’s displayed white thigh. Exum notes that ‘Bathsheba’s gaze seems to be directed at this enlarged foreign body between her legs.’ Given that we have the problem of the two washings in the text, the first a domestic wash and the second a purification, this may be Bathsheba’s purification. The darkness that she stares not at but into, which appears to dismember her thigh may indeed be a sign of her separation in the shadow of her sexual encounter. It also creates a dark void that is her unknowable future, even as the light behind her, which leads back to the palace, draws her future for the viewer. The fountain which spews water from both breasts, which Exum understands ‘as a fore-shadowing of Bathsheba’s motherhood’ may, instead, be a sign that she is already pregnant.38 If we use this to frame the 2 Samuel 11 narrative then Bathsheba is surely an unwilling victim, presently lost in a sequence of events in which she will eventually play a major role. In the next portrait by Hans van Aachen, Scherzendes Paar mit einem Spiegel (1612–15) Exum notes that the ‘artist both invites the voyeuristic gaze by exposing the woman (his wife) and at the same time implicitly criticises it: David ought not to be looking; the viewer of Scherzendes Paar is chided for it’.39 The viewer can gaze at the picture but the woman is his, or so he thinks. In the context of 2 Samuel 11 it becomes a warning about the easy transference of property. An object may circulate and have many owners during its lifetime; there are implicit dangers in making objects of women. Of the Bathsheba paintings in this period, Rembrandt’s Bathsheba in het bad (1654) (Plate 37) has provoked the greatest discussion among cultural historians, feminist critics and art historians.40 Aside from the paratext which announces that this is Bathsheba bathing, there is little in this painting to suggest that it has anything to do with 2 Samuel 11, 36

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Eric Jan Sluijter, ‘Rembrandt’s Bathsheba and the Conventions of a Seductive Theme’, in Ann Jensen Adams (ed.), Rembrandt’s Bathsheba Reading King David’s Letter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 48–99. Cheryl Exum, Plotted, Shot and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), p. 37. See Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem (1594), Het toilet van Bathseba, http://www.rijksmuseum.nl (accessed 30 June 2011). Exum, Plotted, Shot and Painted, pp. 37–43. It may also be interesting to note that In Numbers 5: n22–7 a woman who is found to have slept with a man other than her husband is made to drink bitter waters. If she is unclean her womb swells and her thigh rots, if innocent then she is pregnant. The picture combines both of these elements. Hans van Aachen (1612–15), Scherzendes Paar mit einem Spiegel, http://www.khm.at (accessed 30 June 2011). See Exum’s fascinating discussion, Plotted, Shot and Painted, p. 43. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–69), Bathsheba in het bad, http://www.louvre.fr/en/ oeuvre-notices/bathsheba-her-bath (accessed 30 June 2011).

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yet it has achieved an iconic status as Bathsheba and served a wide range of uses through the ages, from postage stamps to accounts of breast cancer.41 Mieke Bal reads the painting through the focal point of the letter to understand the relationship between paint, text and reader. She cites Kenneth Clark’s observations that Rembrandt’s Bathsheba is ‘a kind of beauty which is dependent on inner life and not on physical form’.42 However, any such reading of Rembrandt’s nude as Bathsheba is difficult to frame. To argue that Rembrandt’s Bathsheba has an inner beauty is to deny the narrative one of its few moments of clarity. David was distracted because he saw from his rooftop Bathsheba’s beauty, not her inner beauty. Because Bathsheba has a narrative what is immediately noticeable is that most of it is missing; it fundamentally fails to represent her. It is a painterly text that depends entirely on its paratext for its backstory and context. The plethora of critical studies surrounding this painting demonstrates the willingness of critics to participate in the painter’s intentions while straining to find a relationship between the paint and the text. In the biblical narrative there is no such letter scene. David sends only messengers to Bathsheba. This is not an epistolary relationship. However Bal persuades us to think spatially, rather than temporally, about the role of the letter in the narrative and the painting, the fact remains that Rembrandt deliberately attaches his picture to a prior narrative that his readers will know, and he also knows that they will understand the relationship between the narrative elements and their visual representations, even when, perhaps especially when, they are dislocated or relocated. The only letter that David writes in the 2 Samuel 11 narrative is Uriah’s death warrant which he sends with Uriah to Joab. If we examine the shadow on Bathsheba’s left leg we notice that it is the shadow not of the raised right leg but the shadow of the fragile letter against the mass of flesh. It may well be a visual pun on the relationship between the letter and the spirit of obedience. In his treatment of biblical art through the ages, John Tinsley argues that Rembrandt’s biblical paintings were less concerned with past events than with present ones that impacted on the lives of everyone: ‘Rembrandt came to see in the biblical history his own and everyone’s personal story.’43 Rembrandt’s Bathsheba incorporates and reflects multiple narratives beyond that of the biblically constrained figure to articulate the sad consequences of corporeality, thereby lending the biblical Bathsheba a universal significance enjoyed only by Eve, and Mary within Christianity. In later post-Restoration and early eighteenth-century literature Bathsheba received less sympathetic treatments. She was both vulgarised and demonised. With the relaxation of censorship the theatre celebrated women as objects of sexual desire and their willing or unwilling subjection to it as sport in which audiences were complicit; venereal disease, also a focus of this theatre, came to represent the corruption of society more generally, with women at the centre of the problem. Antagonistic responses to this culture impacted on representations of Bathsheba as well. In Rowland Watkins’s (1614–64) poem ‘The Devil’ (1662) Bathsheba becomes a mere agent of evil ‘With pleasant potions, and with 41

42

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See James S. Olson, Bathsheba’s Breast: Women, Cancer & History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Kenneth Clark, Feminine Beauty (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1980), p. 23, cited in Mieke Bal, ‘Reading Bathsheba: From Mastercodes to Misfits’, in Ann Jensen Adams (ed.), Rembrandt’s Bathsheba Reading King David’s Letter, pp. 119–46, at p. 122. John Tinsley, ‘Art and the Bible’, in Bruce Metzger and Michael Coogan (eds), The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 56–60.

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sugred pills / The Devil tempts his patient when he kills.’44 Bathsheba is then oddly juxtaposed with the silver that is used to tempt Judas to betray Christ. William Pattison’s (1706–27) ‘On a Lady’s Erasing the Picture of Bathsheba Bathing, represented in a SnuffBox’ depicts Bathsheba inciting the envy of the owner of the snuff-box to the point of her actually trying to erase Bathsheba from it.45 Bathsheba’s depicted beauty becomes merely a sign that is effaced in any case when the temptress is present in the flesh; the implication is that the sitter is more Bathsheba than Cynthia. In Alexander Pennecuik’s (d. 1730) ‘Beauty in Distress’ David is described as nearly breaking his neck to get to Bathsheba. The sin itself is quickly dismissed as just one more in a history of many such ravishings. It is a cynical treatment of the relationship of sex and politics. By this ‘Royal sin’ Bathsheba is ultimately promoted from army wife to Queen mother: Viewing her Limbs, and all beneath the Wast, He run, and almost broke his Neck for hast: Commands the Watch to bring her Pris’ner in, The Royal Prince, commits the Royal Sin. The naked Bride climbs to Imperial State, And from that Hour became a Prince’s Mate.46 Although there is no mention of Bathsheba’s resistance, what we cannot miss is the fact that she is brought in ‘prisoner’ and that this ‘naked bride’ belongs to someone else. In George Alexander Stevens (1710–84) ‘The Sentiment Song’ (1788) Bathsheba is reduced to the ‘cockpit where David stood centry’,47 while Samuel Wesley’s (1662–1735) ‘History of the Old Testament in verse’ (1715), recalls 2 Samuel 11 in the following way: Had David clos’d his Eyes, the fatal Dart From Bathsheba had never reach’d his Heart; Vain of her Form, tho’ she th’ occasion gave, And proud to have a Monarch call’d her Slave. That Virtue which so many Storms cou’d bear, Relax’d with Ease, grew sick in milder Air; Loose from his Couch with the declining Sun, He rose, and came, and saw, and was undone 48 Wesley’s somewhat ironic heroic rhyming couplets clearly blame Bathsheba for David’s offence. Bathsheba begins as an Artemis, ready to shoot darts of desire at those who look on her, but who also destroys when she shoots. Wesley suggests that David should have closed his eyes to save himself. It is Bathsheba’s ‘fatal’ dart that leads to David’s lust and Uriah’s death. Wesley imitates Caesar’s ‘Veni, vini, vici’ response to his triumph over Pharnaces II in order to doubly feminise David as ravaged territory: the conquered and undone. Through this Roman reference Wesley also transforms Bathsheba into the less 44 45

46 47 48

Rowland Watkins, ‘The Devil’ (London: William Leake, 1662), ll. 7–10. William Pattison, ‘On a Lady’s Erasing the Picture of Bathsheba Bathing, represented in a SnuffBox’ (London: H. Curl, 1728). Alexander Pennecuik, ‘Beauty in Distress’ (Edinburgh: John Mosman and Co., 1720), ll. 435–40. George Alexander Stevens, ‘The Sentiment Song’ (London: G. Kearsley, 1788), l. 42. Samuel Wesley, ‘The History of the Old Testament in Verse’ (London: Benjamin Cowse and John Hooke, 1715), ll. 4856–63.

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chaste, red-headed native warrior, Boudicca. In later eighteenth-century literature the glory and the dangers of women competed; red Britannia came to be represented as all that was great about the nation while women in the colonies were scrutinised and objectified in ways that deprived them of any identity outside of the patriarchal frameworks in which they were incorporated and incarcerated.49 In the art of this period, Bathsheba is represented on open display – a mass of white flesh and an open invitation to the viewer. For instance, in Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari (1654–1727) Bathsheba at Her Bath (n.d.) Bathsheba, attended by her maids relaxes in a large chair preparing her mazy ringlets, while her right foot rests in a large pewter basin, creating a reflection.50 However, this reflection is obscured and instead a white drape which rises from the floor and up between her legs folds into her labia then winds around her right leg in serpentine fashion; this is Bathsheba as Eve. Immediately behind her is a large stone pillar which runs through her body and up towards a large curtain to the right of which is a very faint image of David in pink, watching from his balcony. Again in The Toilet of Bathsheba, after Luca Giordano (c. 1705), Bathsheba sits in the centre of a dais surrounded by six maids.51 She already has her court. Her left hand reaches into an open treasure box, rather than water as in the Sacra Parallela, while she combs her hair with her right hand. She is on full display except for a blue drape which runs from the ground and up between her legs and around her right leg and a white drape which runs parallel with it up around her left leg. Boxes of hair ties, a white garment and jewels are offered with which to adorn her body. In the foreground to the left is a discarded bathing pan. In the moonlight a miniature David is discernable, leaning across his balcony to view the staged spectacle. In Sebastiano Ricci’s Bathsheba at her bath (1720) Bathsheba is again a large white centrepiece attended by maids: one combs her hair, one shows her a mirror into which she looks, another pampers her leg, a fourth holds a tray for her. Her left foot is dipped in a large pool as if testing the water, while her hand stops her white drape from slipping and exposing her genitalia.52 In the distance a diminutive David looks on. In all of these paintings, David has diminished in significance and it is the large luminescent and almost bovine Bathsheba herself who holds court. With her legs spread apart she invites opportunity for only the most intrepid of adventurers. In an historical and cultural confrontation with the rape victim of Titian’s Europa (1560–2), this Bathsheba is enlightened, confident and daring.53 In the early, pre-Victorian, nineteenth-century work by Charles Lloyd, The Duke D’Ormond: a Tragedy (1822) ‘Royal Bathsheba’, rather than Eve, is described as setting the pattern in an historical line of ‘enslavers’ of mankind ‘Down to the present time.’54 49

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See Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari (1654–1727), Bathsheba at Her Bath, http://metmuseum.org (accessed 30 June 2011). Luca Giordano (1705), Toilet of Bathsheba, http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk (accessed 30 June 2011). Sebastiano Ricci (1720), ‘Bathsheba at her Bath’, http://www.szepmuveszeti.hu (accessed 30 June 2011). Tiziano Vecelli ‘Titian’ (1562), ‘The Rape of Europa’, http://www.gardnermuseum.org (accessed 30 June 2011). Charles Lloyd, The Duke D’Ormond: a Tragedy (London, Birmingham: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, and C. and H. Baldwyn-Beilby and Knotts, 1822), ll. 263–8.

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Queen Victoria was crowned in 1837; even while she projected an image of the nurturing mother she was queen of an empire. The nineteenth century was an age of mass production, competition, innovation and paradigm shifts in science and religion. The concomitant class and gender struggles were reflected in the period’s literature and art. Bathsheba was again blamed for David’s downfall. In Longfellow’s (1807–82) ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish’ (1858) John Alden is conscience-stricken when he considers his own triumph in the game of love. Interestingly, he is reminded of 2 Samuel 11 and in this context he places Bathsheba as the one who chose one man over another: ‘It hath displeased the Lord!’ – and he thought of David’s transgression, Bathsheba’s beautiful face, and his friend in the front of the battle! Shame and confusion of guilt, and abasement and self-condemnation, Overwhelmed him at once; and he cried in the deepest contrition: ‘It hath displeased the Lord! It is the temptation of Satan!’ 55 By eliding Priscilla Mullens’s act of choosing with Bathsheba’s compliance, the poem becomes a framework for re-reading Bathsheba as the instigator of the chain of events from David’s lust to Uriah’s death, and the site not merely of guilt but of male bonding. In the biblical narrative it is through Nathan, rather than Bathsheba herself, that this process is instigated. A writer of the period who is often regarded as being more sympathetic to women, Thomas Hardy, contrasts his dominant, landowning and seductive female, Bathsheba, with the condition of the common Fanny: disapproving of both in his Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). In Herman Melville’s (1819–91) Clarel (1908) Bathsheba is again depicted as the deliberate ensnarer of virtuous David: That grave, deep Hebrew coquetry! Thereby Bathsheba David won; In bath a purposed bait! 56 The nineteenth century was also the great age of Impressionism. Cezanne (1839–1906) created Bathsheba in a paradisiacal haze of colour.57 She reclines, half asleep under a tree by a river, her legs apart and the flesh reflected indiscernibly in the water; the image itself a reflection of the daring eighteenth-century bovine beauties reconfigured as a white space of possibility. Her body contours into the landscape: an expanse of white flesh and red flowing hair. Even the clouds seem gathered in adoration of the bather. In a second, more formulaic, painting the red-haired Bathsheba sits upright and cross-legged under a tree while her maid washes her feet. In the background is a court, suggested by three Doric pillars. There is no sign of David. The two paintings represent the two dominant readings of Bathsheba as chaste and unchaste. Cezanne’s Bathshebas offer a stark contrast to Blake’s (1757–1827) Bathsheba, painted at the beginning of the century (1800) in a rigidly classical formulation; a perfect order that is about to be disrupted.58 55

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘The Courtship of Miles Standish’ (Boston, Cambridge, New York: The Riverside Press, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1886–91), ll. 362–6. Herman Melville, ‘Clarel: a poem and pilgrimage in the Holy Land’ (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876), ll. 3395–7. Paul Cezanne, Bathsheba (1885–90), http://www.paintingmania.com (accessed 30 June 2011). William Blake (1799–1800), Bathsheba at the Bath, http://www.tate.org.uk (accessed 30 June 2011).

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In his series of red-haired bathers, Degas (1834–1917) (Plate 38) creates the impression of a private domestic scene. As in all Bathsheba paintings in which David is missing the viewer becomes his substitute. In each case the golden-red bather performs some aspect of the washing process; but the very awkwardness of the gestures Degas captures creates the sense that this woman does not know that she is being watched. The apparently candid cleansing creates an aura of innocence.59 Degas alerts us to the fact that the issue of public or private bathing as a determinant of Bathsheba’s guilt is a distraction from the much more important one of how she was bathing; from the palace roof there probably wasn’t much that David couldn’t see. Degas’ bathers do not possess what Mulvey calls a ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’.60 Degas creates an accidental moment of finding someone naked in the bathroom, generating the impulse to exit before the gaze meets with an embarrassed challenge. In the 2 Samuel 11 narrative David’s insertion into Bathsheba’s naked bathing context does not only fail to shame him, he immediately orders her to be transferred to his own context. This opens up two more possibilities for our re-reading of the biblical text; either David was simply shameless, or the way in which Bathsheba was bathing let him know that she was available. The necessary details are missing from the text, though David has already lost one wife, Michal, on account of his shamelessness before women in 2 Samuel 6. Having had an unkind treatment in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, Bathsheba was invoked in the twentieth century for a wider range of uses, including postage stamps that remembered her in the works of the great master painters of the previous centuries.61 While the Victorians, steeped in a culture of empire, example and moral double standards, tended to blame Bathsheba for David’s fall, in the twentieth century she represented a range of issues beyond those of forbidden desire. World war, scientific and technological revolutions all generated challenges to political, religious, economic and social infrastructure. As cinematography developed into the dominant media of the twentieth century the possibilities for representation and circulation increased on an unprecedented scale. While there were numerous examples of adaptations of the David and Bathsheba story, there was only one notable screenplay and film version that was explicitly marketed as that of David and Bathsheba, directed by Henry King in 1951.62 In King’s version Bathsheba strategically and aggressively pursues David, while demonstrating much more concern with the representation of discontent with political leadership and the potential consequences of lost integrity for the nation as a whole. The reversal of sexually aggressive behaviour norms continued to develop in David and Bathsheba films, even when the Bathsheba was Amish, (Witness, 1985), or teenage (American Beauty, 59

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Edgar Degas’ bathers series is scattered throughout art galleries and museums in Europe. See http://www.musee-orsay.fr; http://www.hermitagemuseum.org (accessed 30 June 2011). Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, [1989] 2009). Her article appeared first in Screen 1975. In this seminal work she explores the treatment of women on film as sexualised objects. By ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ she meant images of women that are erotically charged for the male gaze. Hungary, Grenada, GDR and San Marino have all issued stamps of Bathsheba. See http:// colnect.com/zt/ stamps; http://www.zazzle.co.uk; http://www.zazzle.co.uk; See http://joystamps. com; http://www.stampmasteralbum.com (all accessed 30 June 2011). Bach, Women, Seduction, and Betrayal in Biblical Narrative, p. 159; See David and Bathsheba, film, directed by Henry King. USA: Twentieth Century Fox, 1951.

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1999) and David an angel (City of Angels, 1998). The fully secularised Bathsheba could be appropriated for almost any context. In the last decade of the twentieth century the technologies for representation and circulation proliferated. Through internet sites Bathsheba again became a seductive vehicle for marketing everything from Beer through to soap and tourist destinations. Bathsheba’s cultural frameworks continue to offer new perspectives on the woman at the centre of the biblical text of 2 Samuel 11, releasing adaptations from the evaluative shackles of fidelity by appreciating the relationship of an original to an adaptation as mutually engaging and informative. The idea that David could ogle Bathsheba but couldn’t Google her creates a historical bridge on which we can stand to consider the relationship of past to present technologies of perception and adaptation and their roles in shaping cultural memory within collective frameworks towards a poetics of adaptation.

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18

THE FRESCO DECORATION IN THE SISTINE CHAPEL: BIBLICAL AUTHORITY AND THE CHURCH OF ROME Shirley Smith

H

ow many people when looking at the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel ever give a thought to the popes who commissioned them or the problems besetting the Church at that time? Yet they span a period when the supremacy of the papacy was under increasing threat and the Catholic Church faced one of the greatest challenges to its authority: the Reformation. This essay will look at these frescoes in the light of these challenges and of the patrons who commissioned them. Built between 1475 and 1481 by Pope Sixtus IV, the chapel coincides with the reestablishment of the papacy in Rome after its seventy-year exile in Avignon (1307–77) during the so-called Great Schism when two popes each claimed legitimacy.1 In 1414, at the Council of Constance, Pope Martin V was elected on the understanding that he would recognise the superiority of the ecclesiastical authority of the Council – a threat to pontifical power that was to cause centuries of conflict.2 So it was imperative for future popes to restore the credibility of both the Western Church and of its head, the pope. With this in mind Sixtus IV decided to replace the thirteenth-century palace chapel of Pope Nicholas III with an enormous new one, named after himself, the Sistine Chapel, its defensive nature clearly reflected in its fortress-like exterior with its crenellations and slits for archers (Fig. 18.1). For this was to be no private chapel. Intended for major Church festivals, it was also where conclaves of cardinals met to choose a new pope, accommodating, in all, approximately two hundred people, both members of the Church hierarchy and secular princes. Larger than any other chapel in Rome, its size testified to its importance: 40m long x 20.7m high x 13.5m wide. However, the dimensions were deliberately modelled on a far older building, the Temple of Solomon. Its length, as described in the Bible, was twice its height and three times its width, the very proportions of the Sistine Chapel, so not only aligning

1 2

See Hollingsworth 1994: 230–2. The decree Sacrosancta of 1415 stated that the Council derived its power from Christ and the decree Frequens, promulgated two years later, instituted the holding of Councils at regular intervals: see Ettlinger 1965: 110.

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Figure 18.1: Reconstruction of the Exterior of the Sistine Chapel. Ernst Steinmann, Die Sixtinische Kapelle (Tefeln, Erster Teil, Munich, 1901). Sixtus with a biblical ruler, renowned for his wisdom but also justifying such a huge expense.3 Criticism of papal expenditure increased in the second half of the fifteenth century, in particular the methods used to raise finance which included the selling of clerical offices and benefices.4 Most lucrative of all was the selling of indulgences. Sixtus claimed in his Bull Salvator Noster of 1476 that the pope, as Christ’s vicar in his role as a healer and purifier of souls, could reduce purgatorial punishment for those already dead by issuing indulgences, purchasable by living friends or relatives on the deceased’s behalf.5 The interior of the chapel, as seen in this reconstruction, was originally divided in the centre by the choir screen. The screen was moved in the sixteenth century to make the nave smaller and so accommodate an enlarged College of Cardinals in the presbytery 3 4

5

l Kings 6: 2. For the linking of Sixtus with Solomon, see Stinger 1998: 222–6. These permitted the holding of more than one benefice, which meant bishops did not actually have to reside in the region or even country under their jurisdiction; see Stinger 1998: 124–6. By this time, 13 per cent of papal income came from the sale of indulgences, rising to one third by 1525; see Stinger 1998: 129. On the Sacrament of Penance and the sale of indulgences; ibid.: 149–51.

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Figure 18.2: Reconstruction of the Original Interior Decorations of the Sistine Chapel. Ernst Steinmann, Die Sixtinische Kapelle (Tefeln, Erster Teil, Munich, 1901). area. A contemporary writer described the ceiling as painted in blue with gold stars, traditionally found in early Christian churches (Fig. 18.2).6 The walls are divided horizontally into three. The upper section has painted niches containing full-size figures of all the popes martyred before the rule of the first Christian emperor, Constantine, starting with St Peter, thus establishing Sixtus as successor to the apostle himself. This link was further stressed by the fact that a similar decorative scheme had been used in the old basilica of St Peter. In the middle register is a series of narrative scenes, again as in Old St Peter’s, framed by richly ornamented pilasters and, in the lower register, gold and silver painted draperies, once more, a traditional form of decoration although here liberally sprinkled with Sixtus’s emblem of an oak tree.7 So throughout Sixtus can be seen to be consciously looking back to early Christian iconography. However, closer inspection of the decorations suggests the content was specifically chosen to suit the needs and concerns of the papacy at that time and of Sixtus in particular. The altar wall, prior to Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, was decorated by Perugino with 6 7

For details of the interior of the chapel and its symbolism, see Shearman 1986: 34–7. Sixtus’s family name was della Rovere and rovere means oak in Italian. The ceiling decoration, narrative scenes and draperies were also to be found in the upper church of San Francesco of Assisi. As a Franciscan friar, this would have been Sixtus’s mother church.

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Plate 34: Sacra Parallela, by John of Damascus, Grec 923 (Vue 568 / 796) © The National Library of France.

Plate 35: Bathsheba Bathing, by Jean Bourdichon. Tours, 1498–9. French, Leaf from the Hours of Louis XII, Tempera colors and gold on parchment. 9 9/16 x 6 11/16 in. MS. 79, Recto. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

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Plate 36: Het toilet van Bathseba, by Cornelis Cornelisz, 1594. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, SK-A-3982.

Plate 37: Rembrandt van Rijn: Bathsheba in her bath, 1654. Oil on canvas. Le Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski.

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Plate 38: Edgar Degas: The Tub, Hill-Stead Museum, 35 Mountain Road, Farmington, CT 06032.

Plate 39: Pietro Perugino: Giving of the Keys, 1481–2, Sistine Chapel. Photo © Vatican Museums.

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Plate 40: Sandro Botticelli: Punishment of Korah, 1481–2. Sistine Chapel. Photo © Vatican Museums.

Plate 41: Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel Ceiling 1508–12. Sistine Chapel. Photo © Vatican Museums.

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Plate 42: Michelangelo, Detail of Ignudi, Separation of Light from Darkness, 1508–12. Sistine Chapel Ceiling. Photo © Vatican Museums.

Plate 43: Arch of Constantine, fourth century. © 2013 Photo Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali.

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Plate 44: Michelangelo, Last Judgement, 1537–41. Sistine Chapel. Photo © Vatican Museums.

Plate 45: Michelangelo, St Bartholomew, Last Judgement (detail), 1537–41. Photo © Vatican Museums.

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Plate 46: Jan Swart van Groningen, Title Page, Den Bibel. Antwerp: Willem Vorsterman, 1528. Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, OTM: Ned. Inc. 100.

Plate 47: Reredos with commandments, creed and paternoster: Chiselhampton Parish Church, Oxon. Photo: Nigel Aston.

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Plate 48: Aaron the high priest: Edmondthorpe Parish Church, Leics. Photo: Nigel Aston.

Plate 49: Moses the lawgiver: Edmondthorpe Parish Church, Leics. Photo: Nigel Aston.

Plate 50: Moses and Aaron with commandments, Allerton Mauleverer, W. R. Yorks. Photo: Nigel Aston.

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a scene of the Assumption of the Virgin. According to Giorgio Vasari, Sixtus was shown kneeling with his tiara on the ground beside him, with St Peter actually touching him with his key as a blatant message of succession.8 As the chapel was originally dedicated to the Virgin, the loss of this fresco completely altered the central focus of the decorations. But it also neutralised what was in the fifteenth century a fierce debate between the Dominicans and Franciscans regarding the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. The latter firmly believed that the Virgin was immaculately conceived whereas the former believed she was purified whilst in the womb.9 At an early age Sixtus had joined the Franciscan order, at this time divided into two camps: the Conventuals and the Observants. The former, to which Sixtus belonged, allowed its members ownership of property whereas the latter adhered to St Francis’s original tenets of poverty. The debate had become so heated that it threatened the very order itself. Sixtus’s publication of a Bull facilitating the friars’ inheritance of property did little to help the situation nor did his attempts to deprive the Observants of their autonomy.10 However, the belief in the immaculate conception of the Virgin was one of the few areas in which both Conventual and Observant Franciscans agreed, so could be seen as a way of uniting the Franciscan Order. Nevertheless, to dedicate such an important chapel to what was still a contentious issue could have proved problematic, so Sixtus dedicated it to the Assumption, for the assumption of the Virgin’s body into heaven was said to be evidence of her spiritual immaculacy and of her conception free of the stain of original sin, thereby openly confirming the Franciscan belief over that of dissenters. The frescoes were painted by five different artists with scenes from the life of Christ paralleled across the chapel with those of Moses.11 Each frame contains between two and seven scenes with prominence in each case given to the central scene. The use of events from the Old Testament to prefigure those of the New was by this time a long-held tradition. So, for example, Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law is paired on the opposite wall with the Sermon on the Mount when Christ preached the New Law, replacing the Old Law and Ten Commandments of Moses. Although painted by five different artists, the frescoes are remarkably similar in composition, which would suggest that the overall programme was very much controlled by one person. It would have been most unusual at this time for artists to have devised the programme for such a large and important fresco cycle as they would not have been familiar with the numerous theological texts needed for such a major work. It was common practice, therefore, for a theologian to produce the programme together with the patron.12 8 9

10 11

12

See Vasari 1987: 95. The doctrine had been promulgated at the Council of Basel in 1439. For details of Sixtus’s support of the cult of the Immaculate Conception, see Goffen 1985: 228–31. For details, see Hollingsworth 1994: 259–61; John Moorman 1968: 487–500. Pietro Perugino, Cosimo Rosselli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli and, later, Luca Signorelli. The contract merely mentions the names of the artists employed, the number of frescoes to be painted and the salaries to be paid with only a brief reference to stories from the Old and New Testament: see Shearman 1986: 45–7.

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However, in this case, there is a very strong possibility that the theological adviser was Sixtus himself. He was one of the foremost theologians of his day and had taught at several Italian universities before becoming Vicar General of the Franciscan Order. This theory is further supported by the discovery during restoration in 1965 of a series of inscriptions explaining the content of the frescoes which are thought to have been written by Sixtus.13 What is unusual, however, is the emphasis on Moses, an Old Testament prophet seldom found in Early Christian and Renaissance art. So why this emphasis? The answer may lie first in Sixtus being a Franciscan. There is constant reference to the Books of Moses in Franciscan writings both by St Francis himself in his Testament and St Bonaventura, a thirteenth-century theologian and General of the Order of the Friars Minor, whose canonisation Sixtus was promoting during the very years of the chapel’s decoration.14 Both placed great emphasis on the Ten Commandments as listed in the Book of Deuteronomy, with its exhortation to obedience.15 It is surely not accidental that pride of place in the scene of Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law shows him smashing the tablets on discovering the Israelites’ disobedience in worshipping the Golden Calf. Such an emphasis on obeying the rule would have been of particular importance to Sixtus at this time with the rift between the Observants and Conventuals. However, the link between some of the scenes is far less obvious: for example, the pairing of the Calling of the First Apostles with the Crossing of the Red Sea.16 The inscription tells us: ‘The People accept the Written Law of Moses and the Evangelical Law of Christ’ so it would seem both are intended to show obedience in leaving a former life to follow God’s chosen leader. According to Bonaventura, Pharaoh’s Egypt symbolised the depraved world from which the Israelites were rescued by Moses. In the same way, he said, St Francis, the new Moses would lead his followers away from corruption.17 So, by inference, Sixtus, the follower of St Francis and himself a leader like Moses, would defend the Church against those who persecuted it, both those within Italy and without. For the image of the infidel in pursuit of Moses and the chosen people could equally well have called to mind the ongoing threat from the other infidels, the Turks, against whom Sixtus was continually attempting to mount a crusade. Indeed, in his Crusade Bull of 1480, Sixtus had exhorted Christians to trust themselves to God, Who had drowned Pharaoh’s hosts and the following year, the papal fleet recovered Otranto from the Turks.18 However there is an arguably more important relevance for Sixtus of the choice of Moses. Moses can be seen as the forerunner of Christ, a typus Christi, in his triple role of priest, lawgiver and leader of men, vested in him under the terms of the Old Covenant. These were the very roles claimed to be the prerogative of the pope, so, in effect, rendering Moses a typus papae as well, a point further underlined by the succession of popes

13 14 15 16 17

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see Goffen 1985: 235; Shearman 1986: 50–2. Goffen 1985: 237–8. Deuteronomy 6: 1–25. St Mark 1: 16–20 and Exodus 14: 1–31 respectively. In his life of St Francis, Bonaventura states: ‘Those who abandon the Egypt of this world can follow you [Francis] with complete confidence; the Cross of Christ will part the waters of the sea for them like Moses’ rod, and they shall traverse the desert to the promised land of the living . . .’ quoted Goffen 1985: 247 and n. 107. Shearman 1986: 68–9.

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above.19 In other words, Sixtus is using these frescoes to underline papal authority in the face of constant attempts to undermine it by various Councils.20 This point is further stressed by the two scenes that, in effect, provide the key to the meaning of these frescoes: Perugino’s Christ Giving the Keys to Peter and Botticelli’s Punishment of Korah. The Giving of the Keys is taken from St Matthew: ‘Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven . . .’21 It was the singling out of Peter by Christ over the other apostles and the power given to him in the giving of the keys that formed the basis of the papal claim to absolute power over the Councils, while the subsequent words, ‘whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven . . .’ imply the granting of temporal power as well. So in the fresco Perugino has made the enormous gold and silver keys the focus of the painting with the other apostles and figures in contemporary dress witnessing the handing over of authority (Plate 39). The building in the centre background represents Solomon’s Temple, on which, as already mentioned, the proportions of the Sistine Chapel are based.22 This link is further emphasised by the inscription on the Roman triumphal arches in the background which reads: ‘You, Sixtus IV, unequal to Solomon in his works but surpassing him in piety, have consecrated this magnificent temple’, no doubt intended as a snub to those who criticised Sixtus for spending so much on building the chapel when the papal coffers were in dire straits. In the left background is a scene of the Tribute Money in which Christ handed the coin bearing Caesar’s head to the Pharisees with the words: ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s: and unto God the things which are God’s.’ a text which had been used repeatedly to define the relationship between spiritual and secular power.23 Only two years after Sixtus’s election, in 1473, the Emperor Frederick III and Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, had attempted to call a Council with the aim of curbing papal supremacy, followed by a similar attempt by Louis XI in 1476, a point which would not have been lost on those standing in the lay part of the chapel. On the right hand side, we see the Stoning of Christ (John 8: 59) an unusual choice of subject and one which, at first, would seem to have little relevance to the overall theme of obedience. However, it is paralleled by the scene of the Stoning of Moses (Exodus 17: 4) in the background of the painting opposite, The Punishment of Korah (Numbers 16: 19

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The triple role of Moses as priest, leader and lawgiver had appeared as early as the first century in the works of the Alexandrian Greek author, Philo Judaeus, and in the late 1470s his complete works were translated for Sixtus. See Ettlinger 1965: 116–17. In 1482, the very time when the chapel was being decorated, Andreas Zamometicˇ, archbishop of Krain in Thessaly, called for a Council to be held at Basel and the following year Venice, at that time at war with the pope, also threatened to summon a Council: see Ettlinger 1965: 107. In addition, prior to becoming pope, Sixtus had made several references to the absolute power of the Vicar of Christ in his book De Potentia Dei. See Ettlinger 1965: 114. Matthew 16: 18–19. Hollingsworth 1994: 269. The octagonal structure in the centre can also seem to resemble the Dome of the Rock which was believed to be built on the site of Solomon’s Temple: Onians 1988: 200. Matthew 22: 15–22. St Francis had also quoted this text in his Admonitions, encouraging his friars to obey the vow of poverty by rendering ‘to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’, quoted Goffen 1985: 256.

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1–40) (Plate 40). Both can be seen to signify the challenges that faced the head of the Church at that time. Indeed, not only then. As a potent reminder of the challenges faced by the pope, on Sixtus’s coronation day in 1471 a riot had broken out and stones had been thrown at him.24 The very subject of this fresco is a clear reference to the punishment that awaited those who challenged Church authority. Korah was a Jewish priest who had rebelled against the authority of Moses and Aaron. On the right, he attempts to stone Moses but is prevented from doing so by Joshua. In the centre, Korah and his followers challenge Aaron’s authority by setting up their own sacrifice but are prevented this time by Moses wielding his baton of power, so causing the ground on the left to open up and swallow Korah and his fellow conspirators. The story had been used repeatedly by earlier theologians as an example of heresy and in the fifteenth century, likened to disobedience to the pope.25 The power wielded by Moses’ baton could also be compared to the papal power of excommunication.26 So it is possibly not surprising that the inscription on the Roman triumphal arch in the background reads: ‘Let no man assume the honour unless he is called by God’, an inscription given further emphasis by the fact that the arch is based on the Arch of Constantine, the first Christian emperor, who allegedly handed over power of the Western Church to the then pope, Sylvester, before moving his court east, to Constantinople.27 So a dire warning of the consequences that would befall all those, whether Church Council or secular ruler, who challenged the power of God’s chosen leader – and which leader is made even more explicit by dressing the priest Aaron in the papal tiara and the blue and yellow colours of the della Rovere, Sixtus’s family name. Remember this was no private chapel. Here the pope attended mass on major Church festivals or when important state visitors were in Rome. It is not accidental that the scenes which are in the lay area of the chapel, the Sermon on the Mount, Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law, the Giving of the Keys and the Punishment of Korah, all deal with obedience, the power vested in God’s chosen leaders and papal primacy. Services were often of great length and these frescoes were aimed specifically at providing food for thought for wandering eyes and minds. All would have been well aware of the problems and debates affecting the Church and its leader and the decorations were intended to underline papal authority in the face of constant attempts to undermine it by Church Councils and secular rulers. In 1503 Sixtus’s nephew, Giuliano della Rovere was elected pope, taking the name of Julius II: a reminder that nepotism, although condemned by reformers, was by now 24 25

26

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Roberto Salvini 1965: 149. Ettlinger names St Augustine, Isidore of Seville and Rhabanus Maurus. Pope Eugenius IV also referred to the insurrection of Korah in his papal bull of 1439 condemning the anti-papal decisions of the Council of Basel (1431). Pope Sixtus himself used the story against Andreas Zamometicˇ, see my note 24 above and Ettlinger 1965: 103–8. A few years earlier Sixtus had used this power against Lorenzo de’Medici following his execution of the Archbishop of Pisa for his involvement in the Pazzi Conspiracy which had attempted to assassinate Lorenzo and end Medici power in Florence. For a detailed account see Martines 2003. Epistles to the Hebrews 5: 4. The so-called Donation of Constantine had been used for centuries to support the claim of the papacy to supreme authority as it was claimed that the emperor merely restored to the pope what belonged to him by divine right. Although by this time proved a forgery by the humanist scholar Valla, it was still cited by numerous supporters of papal supremacy as a legitimate document. See Stinger 1998: 248–54.

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standard practice as a means of maintaining power in the Curia.28 With the dawn of the sixteenth century the problems besetting the Church of Rome intensified. The flagrant expenditure of Julius’s predecessor, the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, left the papal coffers virtually empty while his flaunting of his mistress and four children only increased the calls for reform.29 Julius’s sale of indulgences on an unprecendented scale to finance his rebuilding of the old Constantinian basilica of St Peter’s, did little to allay such criticism. It was intended to symbolise the resurrection of the Church under his leadership but also to house his gargantuan tomb, designed by Michelangelo.30 On the political front, while the Turks continued to threaten the Adriatic coast, the mainland became a battleground for supremacy between the Emperor Maximilian and Louis XII, both of whom had legitimate claims to Milan and the Kingdom of Naples.31 In 1511 they called a Council at Pisa, criticising the behaviour of the Curia and questioning the right of the pope to rule. In an attempt to outmanoeuvre them, Julius called the Fifth Lateran Council ostensibly to promote morality in clerical life although in reality he failed to respond to the urgency of the situation.32 For of prime importance to Julius was the restoration, consolidation and extension of the temporal possessions of the Church to ensure its freedom and independence from secular power. He established a permanent papal army, the Swiss Guard, leading his armies himself.33 It could be said that under Julius, the term ‘Church Militant’ took on a whole new meaning. Erasmus claimed, ‘Pope Julius wages war, conquers, triumphs and acts wholly like Julius [Caesar].’34 Indeed, Julius’s campaign medal, struck to celebrate his triumphant return from Bologna, shows him in his cope with the inscription ‘IVLIVS. CAESAR.PONT II’, together with a shield bearing the della Rovere arms, surmounted by the papal tiara and crossed keys.35 It is the imperial aspect of Julius’s patronage that is evident in his redecoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. For while his uncle had turned to early Christian imagery to establish his authority and that of the Church of Rome, as the reconciliation of Christian doctrine with pagan tradition was further developed in the sixteenth century, humanist scholars began to promote the pope as heir to the imperial rulers of pre-Christian Rome (Plate 41).36 According to Michelangelo’s biographer, Asconio Condivi, the original commission was for a design of geometric forms with apostles seated on thrones but Michelangelo claimed he told the pope that ‘If only the Apostles were done and nothing else, I thought it would succeed very poorly. He asked me why and I said “Because they 28

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For details of the political machinations following the death of Alexander VI and Pius III, see von Pastor, vol. 6, 2009: 185–210. Egilio of Viterbo claimed that Rome under Alexander VI was a city completely under the sway of gold, violence and lust: quoted O’Malley 1968: 133, n. 2. For details of the rebuilding of St Peter’s see Ackerman 1995: 193–220. For details of Michelangelo’s tomb, see Hibbard 1985: 86–92. Von Pastor, vol. 6, 2009: 290–300. Hollingsworth 1996: 163–251. For details of Julius’s attempts to recover papal territory, see Pastor VI2009: 266–83. Quoted Stinger 1998: 236, n. 3. For details of Julius’s medals see Weiss 1965: 180. On Julius as Caesar and humanism in Rome, see Stinger 1998: 238–46; John D. Amico 1983.

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themselves were poor men.” Then he gave me a fresh commission to do what I wanted.’37 Now whilst there is no doubt that Michelangelo’s monumental forms and composition created a new language for the demonstration of papal power, Julius was not a man to relinquish control of such an important project to an artist whose experience in fresco painting was at this time virtually non-existent. There is also little doubt that the subject matter, taken from the Book of Genesis, was provided either by the pope or a learned theologian who would possibly even have specified the scenes to be included. A leading candidate is thought to be Giles of Viterbo, Prior General of the Augustinian order, on close terms with Julius.38 The choice of the Book of Genesis would seem to support this, for St Augustine had divided the history of the world into three ages which he called Ante Legem, seen here in the scenes of the Creation; Sub-Lege when Moses received the Tablets of the Law; and Sub Gratia, with the birth of Christ; so clearly relating the new decoration of the ceiling to the earlier frescoes on the wall, commissioned by Julius’s uncle, Sixtus IV (Fig. 18.3).39 Round the outer edge sit sibyls and prophets. By the Renaissance it had become accepted theory that while God spoke to the Jews through the prophets, he spoke to the Gentiles through the sibyls who prepared the Roman Empire for the gospel proclaimed by Jesus.40 Of greatest significance to the Church was the Cumaean Sibyl who prophesied in Virgil’s Fourth Book of the Eclogues the return of a Golden Age through a new progeny from heaven, seen in Christian terms to refer to the birth of Christ, which occurred during the reign of Emperor Augustus.41 This concept was taken up by Giles of Viterbo who claimed the birth of a new Golden Age through the accomplishments of Julius.42 The Cumaean Sibyl is joined by the Delphic, Erythraean, Persian and Libyan, representing respectively Greece, Ionia, Asia and Africa and signifying the extent of the rule of ancient Rome which, by reason of the discovery of the New World, had now been eclipsed by the reign of the Roman Church under its new Vicar, Julius.43 Separating the thrones of the sibyls in triangles and lunettes are the families named in St Matthew as the ancestors of Christ through his descent from the house of David.44 Most are now unknown but their position above the figures of the popes painted in the 37

38 39

40 41 42 43

44

See letter from Michelangelo to Gian Francesco Fattucci of 1523, quoted. Michelangelo 2008: 101. See Dotson 1979, 223–56 and 405–29. For details of Gilio da Viterbo, see O’Malley 1968: 4–6. Stinger 1998: 312–14. Some scholars have also argued that the decoration of the ceiling reflects the revival of neo-Platonic philosophy in the Renaissance: see de Tolnay 1964: 40–8. For a summing up of interpretations of the ceiling decoration, see O’Malley 1986: 107–8. Stinger 1998: 308–12. Stinger 1982: 153–69; Stinger 1998: 311–12. Stinger 1998: 298–9; O’Malley 1969: 265–75. Giles of Viterbo, in his letter to Julius of 1506, compared the imperial rule of the two great Juliuses: Julius Caesar and Pope Julius II, claiming that, whereas the former Julius, thinking himself ruler of the whole world, in fact ruled only half of it, the present Julius, by reason of the discovery of the New World, really does reign supreme over the whole human family: see O’Malley 1968: 127; see also Stinger 1982: 235–42 The humanist scholar Fedra Inghiriami further claimed the Roman Empire was no longer the political empire of history but the papacy and the Curia: see John d’Amico 1991: 134. Matthew 1: 1.

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Figure 18.3: Plan of Ceiling Frescoes, Sistine Chapel. By kind permission of Reginald Piggott.

time of Pope Sixtus, extends the line of the ancestry of the popes further back into the history of the Church. At the apex of the triangles are rams’ skulls based on Roman pagan sacrificial reliefs. These, together with the classical putti of fictive marble which support the painted cornice surrounding the central section of the ceiling, reveal to what extent the cult of antiquity had penetrated to the very heart of the Christian Church by the sixteenth century.

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In the four corner spandrels are biblical subjects indicating intervention by God in the salvation of his chosen people: Judith beheading Holofernes, the Assyrian general who planned to rape her and her city, and David defeating the giant Goliath, both exemplifying virtue overcoming evil despite apparently hopeless odds. But they could also be seen as biblical precedents for Julius who was much criticised for physically taking up arms on behalf of the Church. At the other end, the Brazen Serpent refers to the plague of poisonous snakes which was inflicted on the Israelites as a punishment for having criticised Moses for leading them into the desert, so continuing the theme of obedience and disobedience found in the earlier frescoes painted for Pope Sixtus IV. Of course, these themes were still of concern, following new attempts to call a Council at Pisa. The nine panels in the centre are taken from the Book of Genesis, moving from the scenes of Noah, the Flood and the Temptation and Fall over the lay area to the glory of God’s creation of the world over the altar. Much of the iconography is traditional. For example, the Flood is a commonplace story of the punishment suffered for man’s sin but the ultimate survival of a single pious man, Noah, chosen by God points the way to the salvation of the just. Is it accidental that the ark, the visual symbol of that salvation, bears a resemblance to the exterior of Sixtus’s chapel? The flood itself can be seen as a symbol of baptism. Michelangelo also continued the theme of the lower walls in using the Old Testament to predict the New. So the mocking of Noah in the Drunkeness of Noah over the entrance door was thought to prefigure the mocking of Christ by the Roman soldiers. Over the altar and a focal point on entering the chapel from the ceremonial door at the rear is the prophet Jonah, whose three days in the whale are equated with Christ’s in the tomb before his resurrection. It was originally designed to accommodate the image of Christ which hovered over the Virgin in the Assumption below but took on a different yet equally symbolic meaning when the Assumption was replaced by Michelangelo’s Last Judgement. The Creation of Eve is shown in the centre where once the choir screen separated the lay half of the church from the sanctuary. As mentioned earlier, this was moved, thereby partially nullifying Eve’s position, for according to theologians the Virgin Mary was the new Eve who redeemed the sin of her predecessor and Eve/Mary symbolised the Church. So the creation of Eve symbolised the foundation of the Church, a Church which had now been restored to its former glory through Julius. Meanwhile, the Fall was the event that made the incarnation necessary, so its position over the lay section was a reminder to the congregation of the cause of the punishment suffered by man. So anyone entering the chapel is first made aware of the weakness and sin of man before being met with the breathtaking power with which God moves in the scenes of the Creation over the altar. In the same way, contemporary writers claimed, the breathing forth of Julius’s spirit would cause the waters to flow and the land to become fertile.45 This sense of progression is further emphasised by the composition of the scenes themselves. Those nearer the door, the first done, are filled with small figures and fiddly details compared with the large-scale, sweeping figures of God and the newly created Adam at the altar end, nearly three times the size. Now it is possible that this came about due to the moving of the scaffolding half way through the painting, at which time Michelangelo would have had a chance to view the work from the floor below. As a result, he abandoned 45

Quoted Stinger 1998: 298.

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the small, detailed scenes for a more monumental but simpler composition which showed up better from a distance. However, the change in scale can also be seen as man achieving greater monumentality and perfection as he reaches the altar, signifying his closeness to God and the Divine before he was hampered by the chains of mortal sin. The touching of Adam’s finger prefigures the redemptive Incarnation. Giles of Viterbo claimed that in the creation of Adam ‘God became man so that man might become God’ (Plate 42).46 Separating the scenes from Genesis are pairs of nudes or ignudi and between each pair is a fictive bronze medallion, again based on antique medals. These depict biblical scenes mainly from the Books of Samuel, Kings and Maccabees, largely moral tales showing the consequences of disobedience to the supreme authority of God and, by implication, of his vicar on earth, the pope.47 This was an even more relevant message at this time,  not  only due to the troublesome councils determined to undermine the supreme power of the papacy, but also to the clerics of the north, most notably Erasmus, whose criticism of the Curia and of Julius in particular was becoming increasingly vociferous. The meaning of the ignudi and their relevance to the scenes from the Book of Genesis remain a matter of debate. They are possibly angels, as in an earlier sketch Michelangelo showed them with wings. Or perhaps their ideal forms represent the perfection of the soul in human form, free of all sin. Whatever their possible religious symbolism, however, the figures carry a far less divine meaning, for they are weighed down by bunches of acorns, a reference once again to the della Rovere name carried by both Sixtus and Julius. Possibly due to this, Giorgio Vasari suggested that they personified the Golden Age of Julius II before the trials and tribulations that were soon to be heaped upon Italy and the Church.48 Two features mark out the Sistine ceiling as executed from the ‘apostle’ scheme: the emulation of the antique in its architectural framework and figures and the complexity of the programme. So, what criteria governed the selection of the subject matter? As we have seen, not all the symbols refer to biblical texts. Attention has already been drawn to the frequent appearance of acorns and oak trees, which have little to do with the Book of Genesis. Even those that do have biblical references have hidden meanings: for example, the Prophet Zechariah is shown over the entrance to the chapel. It was Zechariah who prophesied: ‘Here is a man named the Branch: he will shoot up from the ground where he is and will build the temple of the Lord’ (Zechariah 6: 12) and it was Sixtus IV, Francesco della Rovere, the ‘oak’, who had built the Sistine Chapel. Zechariah is also said to have predicted Christ’s symbolic entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and on Julius’s triumphal entry into Rome on Palm Sunday, following his defeat of Bologna, he distributed palms to the people, then made a ceremonial entry into the chapel, so symbolising his almost Christ-like triumph.49 Indeed, the redecoration of the ceiling was initiated immediately after Julius’s triumphal return and this must be born in mind. He had constructed a copy of the Arch 46 47

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Quoted Stinger 1998: 316. They are largely based on an early printed edition of the Bible, the so-called Malermi Bible, so would have been known to all who saw them. For more details see Hope 1987: 200–4. Vasari 1987, vol. 1: 355. See Stinger 1998: 235–6.

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of Constantine in front of the Vatican representing the whole history of the expedition.50 So it is possibly no coincidence that the compositional layout of the whole ceiling is based on the Arch of Constantine: the putti supporting the painted cornice can be found at the bases of the marble columns; the placing of the prophets and sibyls either side of the rectangular central panels containing scenes correspond to the barbarian princes flanking the reliefs on the attic of the arch; the medallions between the ignudi recall the pictorial medallions set in pairs between the fluted columns (Plate 43). So whereas Julius’s uncle, Sixtus, had sought comparison with Solomon in the building and decoration of his Sistine Chapel, Julius sought comparison with the imperial emperors of Rome. It was all intended to glorify the Christian message and the Church of Rome, which under its new leader, Julius II, had triumphed over dissenters and infidels. Drawing on the precedents of both Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian texts, God and Caesar were fused in his glorious triumph. Some have claimed Julius was instrumental in causing the rift that was to lead to the Reformation. Certainly, the massive undertaking of the rebuilding of St Peter’s was far removed from Luther’s emphasis on conscience and the inner experience of faith and grace. To him it seemed unforgiveable worldliness and love of splendour where there was no place for Christianity.51 Yet it could equally be argued that with Italy torn by the warring factions of Spain and France, the Church Triumphant needed a new image. This new Vicar of Christ was the successor not only to Moses, Solomon and St Peter, as earlier popes, but to Caesar and the imperial might of ancient Rome, which had once ruled half of the known world, but this time with a pope not an emperor at its head. So the imperial imagery and monumental forms found on the Sistine ceiling were intended to reflect Rome and the papacy as the most powerful players on the political stage. Unfortunately, this triumph was to be short-lived. Julius was succeeded by Giovanni de’ Medici as Pope Leo X, who failed yet again to address the increasing calls for reform of the Church. It was during his pontificate that Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg Church, condemning the papacy for its profligacy and worldliness.52 Instead of addressing the points raised, Leo excommunicated him so initiating an irretrievable rift with northern Europe and setting in motion the Protestant rebellion that was to split the Western Church asunder. Although his successor, Pope Adrian VI, attempted to address the problems, his reign lasted for a mere eighteen months. So it was another Medici pope, Clement VII, who took the full brunt of the storm together with a bankrupt papacy, Turkish armies threatening eastern Europe, and the ongoing rivalry between the super-powers of France and the Empire, which was being played out on Italian soil. In 1527 Rome was sacked by the troops of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, leaving the city and the power of the papacy in tatters.53 Such was the situation facing the next patron of the Sistine Chapel, Alessandro Farnese, Pope Paul III. Not only did Paul take over a Church and city in dire straits but to compound his problems in 1534, the very year in which he came to power, King Henry VIII of England issued his Act of Supremacy severing England and its revenues from the

50 51 52 53

See von Pastor, vol. 9, 2009: 287; Stinger 1998: 237–8. For details of Luther’s doctrine, see Dillenberger 1961. For transcript of the Ninety-Five Theses, see Dillenberger 1961: 489–500. See Chastel 1992; von Pastor, vol. 9, 2009: 388–423

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Church of Rome and establishing the Church of England with himself at its head.54 So Paul faced the monumental task not only of restoring the social and political life of the city of Rome but also of reaffirming the tenets and practices of the Catholic Church which had been severely challenged by the Protestant Reformers. Above all, he needed to address the increasing calls for reform. He approved new religious orders, notably the Jesuits, whose strict faith and rejection of worldly trappings helped allay criticism of the established Church.55 He further convened the Council of Trent in 1545, in an attempt to establish a solid base for the renewal of discipline within the Catholic Church, outlawing the decadence of the Curia.56 Even his choice of the name Paul was significant. St Paul was credited with having converted the Roman people to Christianity and is usually considered with Peter, who converted the Jews, to be co-founder of the Christian Church. So Alessandro’s choice of the name Paul was intended to reflect the pope’s determination to re-establish the authority of the Roman Church. However, with the Reformation in full swing, the emphasis had subtly altered. Rome was no longer the heir to its imperial past. It was now promoted as capital of the Christian Empire, the seat of the true religion with the pope at its head. All of which needs to be born in mind when studying the painting of the Last Judgement. The chapel by this time was completely decorated: the upper walls under Sixtus IV in the 1480s, the ceiling under Julius II in the first decade of the sixteenth century, and the lower walls with the tapestries, designed by Raphael, which were commissioned by Leo X in 1515.57 According to Giorgio Vasari, Paul’s predecessor, Clement VII, had commissioned Michelangelo to redecorate the altar wall with a scene of the Last Judgement in place of Perugino’s Assumption of the Virgin.58 Bearing in mind the problems besetting the Church and its leader at this time, the subject of the Last Judgement would have seemed fitting. However, Clement died before work was started and Paul took over the commission on his election (Plate 44). The account of the Last Judgement in St Matthew describes Christ enthroned in glory, dividing the good sheep on his right from the bad goats on his left, and calling the former to his kingdom in heaven while damning the latter to everlasting fire for all time.59 However, here, there is no traditional contrast between the safe order of heaven and the frightening chaos of hell. Michelangelo’s figures twist and turn in limitless space, he has even dispensed with a frame suggesting that what we see is not confined to this chapel but all-encompassing. The figures carry none of the attributes of their earthly life, no thrones or insignia of rank, in most cases no clothes. Nor do the resurrected show any signs of the perpetual youth which, according to St Augustine, would be enjoyed in the afterlife. Neither is the joy of salvation shown in contrast to the horror of damnation as in the past. The pair of the elect on the right being hauled up by their rosary, a symbol of their faith, look scarcely happier than do the damned being dragged down to hell on the 54 55

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For details of Henry VIII’s break with Rome, see Guy 1990: 116–53. For full details of the new religious movements, see Black 2003 and of reformers, see Meyer 2005: 83–7. It convened between 13 December 1545 and 4 December 1563 in twenty-five sessions for three periods. For full details see Council of Trent and Schroeder 1982. For more information on the tapestries, see Evans and Brown 2010. Vasari 1987, vol. 1: 374–5. Matthew 25: 31–46.

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bottom right. All are united in their dread of the judgement taking place around them. It is the unworthiness of mankind per se that is stressed and its helpless dependence on the awesome power of Christ. Even the devils are only humans in distorted and grotesque form, man deformed by his vices and sins. The whole painting has a circular movement with the figures on the right rising from the grave to the sound of trumpets, being re-clothed in flesh and increasing in size, balanced by the descent of the damned on the left. The source of the movement is Christ Himself with, below Him and directly over the altar, Charon and the mouth of hell, the embodiment of evil. Even Mary is no longer shown in her traditional pose of the welcoming intercessor between humankind and its God. She appears to have given up, powerless to change the ineluctable force of events and sits, as described by Giorgio Vasari, ‘in great fear, drawing her mantle around her in fear, as she hears and sees such tremendous desolation’.60 The very way in which Christ’s arm is shown across his chest seems to prohibit approach. Yet traditionally Mary symbolises the Church. So does this show her own admission of helplessness to be able to save humankind in the face of the Last Judgement? Yet, is this not also the risen Christ? The way in which He is shown seemingly stepping forward is certainly reminiscent of traditional renderings of the resurrected Christ. The painting is thought to be based not on the text of Matthew, but on St Paul’s Letters to the Corinthians.61 According to Paul, it was Christ’s resurrection that made possible the resurrection of the dead in the final Judgement: Now if Christ be preached that He rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead then is Christ not risen. And if Christ be not risen then is our preaching vain and your faith is also vain.62 Dire words and a response to the Protestants who questioned the very teaching of the Catholic Church. Between 1532 and 1533, Luther had preached seventeen sermons examining the writings of St Paul and citing him, on the grounds of his conversion, as a supreme example of the doctrine of salvation through faith alone without the aid of priests and saints.63 Yet here, Pope Paul is using the same text to support the Church, its hierarchy and its saints who closely encircle Christ, each bearing the instrument of their martyrdom. However, says St Paul, it will not be the same body but rather one metamorphosed: ‘sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption . . . sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory’ 64 – a concept graphically portrayed in the firm, muscular figure of St Bartholomew shown with his old flayed skin over his arm. Could he not symbolise the Church of Rome newly resurrected under the reforming zeal of the pope and clergy (Plate 45)? 60

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Vasari 1987, vol. 1: 380. It is interesting that in an earlier sketch now in the Casa Buonarotti in Florence, Michelangelo showed Mary far more actively interceding on behalf of the blessed on the right. For a reproduction of the sketch, see Hall 2005: 8. Hall 2005: 19–20. 1 Corinthians 15: 12–14. ‘It is as St. Paul says in 1 Timothy 1: 19, “Understand this, that a man is given righteousness, life, and salvation by faith, and nought is required of him to give proof of this faith.”’ Dillenberger 1961: 17–18. 1 Corinthians 15: 42–4.

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As I have indicated, Pope Paul was well aware of the dire need for reform, convening the Council of Trent to establish a basis for the renewal of the Church. Regarding art, it stated unambiguously that images of the Virgin and saints were to be retained as the intercessors for redemption of the faithful, adding that they were to be venerated not for themselves, but for whom they represent and to provide examples for the faithful to follow.65 This was no doubt a response to the Protestant rejection of their images as idolatrous as there was no need of an intercessor between man and God. Here, to reaffirm the dictates of the Council of Trent, the Virgin is surrounded by a whole pantheon of saints. Despite this, hard-line reformers condemned Paul for tolerating such sacrilegious art in his chapel. Determined not to give the Protestants further ammunition against the Church of Rome, they insisted that all paintings in churches should be free from heretical or pagan images such as Charon, or any which might be open to the charge of profanity or indecency.66 Thus the principles espoused by the humanist scholars of the early sixteenth century, epitomised by the juxtaposition of pagan sibyls and Old Testament prophets on the ceiling, were rejected in favour of strict adherence to Church dogma. Moreover, the calls for censorship became ever more vociferous as the fame of the work grew with the rise of a thriving market for engravings, so making this painting accessible to a far wider audience than the elite and scholarly theologians normally allowed in the presbytery of the Sistine Chapel. Indeed it could be argued that the real problem lay in its availability to a new audience unfamiliar with theological intricacies.67 The result was that under Paul V, in the final session of the Council of Trent in 1563, the decision was taken to cover up all naked figures with loincloths.68 Yet the Tridentine decrees regarding the naked figure are very general: ‘All lasciviousness must be avoided; so that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty inciting to lust.’69 Is this the case? These lumpish, distorted figures are far removed from the glorious beauty of man as seen in the figure of Adam on the ceiling. Based on the ideal body of Hellenic Greek art, he is a magnificent, powerful figure. Newly created, he rivals the figure of God himself, anticipating God’s incarnation as a mortal man in the person of Jesus Christ. So what could have caused the difference between the painting of the Sistine ceiling in 1508 and the Last Judgement in 1536? Its bleak forbidding tone would appear to offer a visual expression of the religious uncertainties that were pervading the heart of the Church of Rome. The distortion of human proportions, lack of perspective and daring foreshortening of the figures seem to define the crisis of values, reflecting the lack of 65

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‘Not, however, that any divinity or virtue is believed to be in them [the images] by reason of which they are to be venerated . . . but because by means of the images which we kiss and before which we uncover the head and prostrate ourselves . . . salutary examples are set before the eyes of the faithful, so that they . . . may fashion their own life and conduct in imitation of the saints and be moved to adore and love God and cultivate piety . . .’ See Blunt 1963: 107–8 Blunt 1963: 114. Although it was pointed out that Michelangelo was here acting on the authority of Dante, it was still felt it was inadmissible in this new spirit of reform. Ibid. pp. 111–14 for a range of contemporary reactions; Hall 2005: 118–37. Gilio da Fabriano: ‘Now, finding that the painting has been put into the hands of many who for the most part are ignorant, I am prepared to give them a guide in order to demonstrate the diligence that is necessary in understanding religious painting’ quoted Hall 2005: 116. See de Vecchi 1986: 193–4. Quoted Blunt 1963: 118 and n. 1.

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security as the very existence of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy was threatened. The emphasis on the dignity of man and his pivotal place in the universe, so central to the frescoes on the Sistine ceiling, has been superseded by one based on his sinfulness and need for atonement. Yet inherent in this painting, is the promise of resurrection and rebirth. Indeed, there is no doubt that the Christian message of Christ’s pivotal role in the salvation of man is central to the decorations of the whole chapel. Nevertheless, the religious and political situations facing the three popes who commissioned these frescoes were shaped by different experiences. When Sixtus IV planned his new chapel, the papacy was rebuilding its position and authority following the Great Schism and conciliar controversy. So he consciously used early Christian iconography to re-establish the credibility of the Church and support the supreme power of the pope. By the time of Julius II, however, the Church and its leader were firmly re-established in Rome and the greatest threats from secular powers were to its temporal possessions. So Julius consciously linked his restoration of Rome and its Church to the imperial expansion of ancient Rome, with Christian and pagan iconography harnessed to support these imperial pretensions. For a brief period, the two ages, the Antique and the Christian, were fused into a whole. Unfortunately, this did little to address the increasingly vociferous calls for reform resulting in the Protestant Reformation, an irretrievable rift in the Church and the subsequent loss of income. Moreover the Sack of Rome by the Holy Roman Emperor had proved how fragile was the papal claim to be the heirs of the imperial rulers of antiquity. A very different image was needed: one which distanced itself from the pagan associations of ancient Rome with its emphasis on human freewill, but which, in its adherence to traditional biblical texts with their emphasis on divine grace, would satisfy the dire need for reform. This was the situation faced by Pope Paul III and which is reflected in the form and content of the Last Judgement. Certainly the papacy underestimated the scale of the demand for Church reform, but the aim was the restoration of the power and authority of the pope. The decoration of the Sistine Chapel provided the perfect arena, a fitting setting for the capital of Christendom, the seat of the successors to St Peter as well as to the imperial tradition of ancient Rome. There is no doubt that the innovative and monumental style of Michelangelo was a crucial element in the impact of the work and hence its ability to transmit the desired message. We only have to compare it with the crowded compositions and decorative style of the painters of the earlier works to appreciate to what extent the skill of an artist could transform the original commission. However, the premise of this essay is the relevance of the content of these frescoes to the patrons, their problems and those of the Church of Rome, so the input of the artists must be left for others to discuss.

Bibliography Ackerman, John (1995), The Architecture of Michelangelo, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. d’Amico, John F. (1991), Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Black, Christopher (2003), Italian Confraternities in the 16th Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blunt, Anthony (1963), Artistic Theory in Italy 1450–1650, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks. Chastel, André (1992), The Sack of Rome, 1527, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Council of Trent and H. Schroeder (1982), Canons and Decrees: 1545–1563, Rockford, IL: Tan Books & Publishers Inc. Dillenberger, J. (ed.) (1961), Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company Inc. Dotson, Esther Gordon (1979), ‘An Augustinian Interpretation of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling’, The Art Bulletin LXI, pp. 223–56, 405–29. Ettlinger, L. D. (1965), The Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo: Religious Imagery and Papal Primacy, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Evans M. and C. Brown (eds) (2010), Raphael Cartoons and Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, London: V&A Publishing. Goffen, Rona (1985), ‘Friar Sixtus IV and the Sistine Chapel’, Renaissance Quarterly 1986, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 218–62. Guy, John (1990), Tudor England, Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks. Hall, Marcia (ed.) (2005), Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgement’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hollingsworth, Mary (1994), Patronage in Renaissance Italy: From 1400 to the Early Sixteenth Century, London: John Murray. Hollingsworth, Mary (1996), Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Italy, London: John Murray. Hope, Charles (1987), ‘The Medallions of the Sistine Ceiling’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 50, pp. 200–4. Luther, Martin (1961), Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings, ed. J. Dillenberger, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company Inc. Martines, Lauro (2003), April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mayer, Thomas (2005), ‘The Historical and Religious Circumstances of the Last Judgement’ in Marcia B. Hall (ed.) Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgement’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Michelangelo, (2008), Michelangelo: Life, Letters and Poetry, trans. G. Bull and P. Porter, Oxford: Oxford Classics. Moorman, John (1968), A History of the Franciscan Order from its Origins to the Year 1517, Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Malley, John (1968), Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform: A Study in Renaissance Thought, Leiden: E. J. Brill. O’Malley, John (1986), ‘The Theology behind Michelangelo’s Ceiling’ in M. Giacometti (ed.), The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo Rediscovered, London: Muller, Blond & White. Onians, John (1988), Bearers of Meaning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. von Pastor, Ludwig [1894–1951] (2009), History of the Popes From the Close of the Middle Ages, 29 vols, Forgotten Books. Salvini , Roberto (1965), Sistine Chapel, New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc. Schlitt, Melinda (2005), ‘Painting, Criticism and Michelangelo’s Last Judgement’ in Marcia B. Hall (ed.), Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgement’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shearman, John (1986), ‘The Fresco Decoration of Sixtus IV’ in M. Giacometti (ed.), The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo Rediscovered, London: Muller, Blond & White. Stinger, Charles (1982), ‘Greek Patristics and Christian Antiquity in Renaissance Rome’ in P. A. Ramsey (ed.), Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth. Papers from the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Centre for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, Binghampton, NY. Stinger, Charles (1998), The Renaissance in Rome, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. de Tolnay, Charles (1964), The Art and Thought of Michelangelo, New York: Pantheon Books. Vasari , Giorgio (1987), Lives of the Artists, trans. George Bull, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. de Vecchi, Pierluigi (1986), ‘Michelangelo’s Last Judgement’, in M. Giacometti (ed.), The Sistine Chapel: Michelangelo Rediscovered, London: Muller, Blond & White. Weiss, Roberto (1965), ‘The Medals of Julius II (1503–1513)’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute XXVIII, pp. 163–81.

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THE MATERIALITY AND ICONOGRAPHY OF THE COVERDALE BIBLE (1535) TITLE PAGE IN CONTEXT Mark Rankin and Guido Latré

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he Coverdale Bible (1535) has attained a place of prominence in the study of Tudor literature and the visual iconography of the English Reformation.1 Printed in Antwerp by Merten de Keyser,2 this book emerged from one of Europe’s leading commercial and printing centres, where the first complete Dutch, French and English Bibles were produced within the same decade of the sixteenth century.3 Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s vicegerent for religious affairs, in all likelihood commissioned this book’s woodcut title-page border from the atelier of the German artist and printmaker, Hans Holbein the Younger, who was resident in England (Fig. 19.1).4 Despite the fact that publication of this Bible was never officially licensed, its title-illustration affords a dramatic visual depiction of the perceived divine sanction of the English Reformation and, in particular, the policies of Henry VIII, who sits enthroned in the image on a vertical axis descending from God and flanked by representations of scriptural figures and scenes.5 A former Augustinian friar, Miles Coverdale, translated and edited the work, which may have 1

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We preserve old-style spelling with the exception of u/v. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are our own. Miles Coverdale, ed., Biblia The Bible / that is, the holy Scripture of the Olde and New Testament, faithfully and truly translated out of Douche and Latyn in to Englishe (1535). See A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave; 2nd edn revised and enlarged by W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson and Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1976–91) (hereafter STC), no. 2063. Subsequent citations to the Coverdale translation will be cited parenthetically. The tentative identification of Cologne as the printing location of the Coverdale Bible by the STC must be rejected in light of conclusive evidence presented in Guido Latré, ‘The 1535 Coverdale Bible and its Antwerp Origins’, in Orlaith O’Sullivan (ed.), The Bible as Book: The Reformation (London and New Castle, DE: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2000), pp. 89–102. Latré, ‘The 1535 Coverdale Bible’, p. 91. Susan Foister, Holbein and England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2004), p. 159. Our study builds throughout upon John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 54–64.

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Figure 19.1: Hans Holbein the Younger: Title Page, Biblia The Bible / that is, the holy Scripture of the Olde and New Testament, faithfully and truly translated out of Douche and Latyn in to Englishe. Edited by Miles Coverdale. Antwerp: Merten de Keyser, 1535. STC 2063. © The British Library Board (shelfmark C.132.h.46).

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been co-published by the Antwerp merchant, Jacob van Meteren.6 Coverdale expanded upon earlier published translations of William Tyndale, whose English New Testament had appeared in simultaneous Worms and Antwerp editions in 1526, both published by the English bookseller and merchant, Francis Byrckman.7 Tyndale was executed in 1536 before he could complete his translation of the whole Bible.8 The translation begun by Tyndale and completed by Coverdale would endure. Coverdale’s psalter went into the vernacular Book of Common Prayer,9 and subsequent English Bibles based upon Tyndale and Coverdale would shape the language spoken by Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and others. Scholars sometimes discuss the visual narrative of the Coverdale Bible title page as specifically, even uniquely, English in origin.10 Given the demonstrable Dutch and German iconographical sources of this narrative, such a narrow explanation is clearly inadequate. The Coverdale title border explicitly reworks what has been described as a ‘law and gospel’ Lutheran evangelical pictorial motif.11 Designed in 1528 by the German woodcutter, Lucas Cranach the elder, the ‘law and gospel’ motif is based upon interpretation of Romans 8: 2, which Coverdale renders as ‘For ye lawe of ye sprete [i.e. spirit] (yt bryngeth life in Christ Iesu) hath made me fre from the lawe of synne & death’ (sig. MM3r).12 Cranach’s device illustrates both the crucified Christ and Christ emerging from his grave opposite the figures of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit.13 It underwent modification in two variant 1529 designs, one in Prague and the other in Gotha, before de Keyser incorporated it within the woodcut title-page illustration of Jacques Lefevre d’Étaples’s French Bible, which he published in Antwerp in 1530.14 This fluid motif continued to shape the visual designs of vernacular folio Bible title pages, following further revision undertaken by the Regensburg artist Erhard Altdorfer in 1533, through its appearance on the title pages of the 1537 ‘Matthew’ Bible and the 1538 edition of the Jacob van Liesvelt Dutch Bible.15 6

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J. F. Mozley, Coverdale and His Bibles (London: Lutterworth, 1953), pp. 72–4, quoted in Foister, Holbein and England, p. 164. Knowledge of Byrckman’s involvement as publisher of the 1526 Tyndale New Testament (STC 2824) and of the simultaneous Antwerp edition, printed by Christoffel van Ruremund, emerges from the research of Andrew Hope. See his ‘The Printed Book Trade in Response to Luther: English Books Printed Abroad’ (forthcoming). See also Eunice Burton’s report of his research in ‘Opening the Word to the World’, report of the Fourth Oxford Tyndale Conference (15–18 September 2005), in The Tyndale Society Journal 30 (2006), pp. 38–9. We are grateful to Andrew Hope for sharing a copy of his essay with us prior to its publication. David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 174. Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 32. For example, Daniell, The Bible in English, pp. 174–6. Foister, Holbein and England, p. 159. Because pagination is often absent or irregular in sixteenth-century Bibles, we cite the number of the leaf in each signature and either its recto or verso side. James Clifton, ‘A Lutheran Image on the Title-Page of the Last Bible without a Confessional Label’, Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 84 (2008): 69–86, at figs 1, 4. Clifton, pp. 75–6. Andrew Pettegree, ‘“The Law and the Gospel”: The Evolution of an Evangelical Pictorial Theme in the Bibles of the Reformation’, in O’Sullivan (ed.), The Bible as Book, pp. 123–35. Susan

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The Coverdale title border incorporates figures of Adam and Eve, in the upper left panel, but its lack of an illustrated Christ on the cross and its departure from Cranach in its design of the figure of the risen Christ would seem to place it outside the Lutheran ‘law and gospel’ visual tradition.16 Nevertheless, this essay will demonstrate a conclusive link to this Lutheran motif by examining the structural similarity of the Coverdale design to two Dutch sources or analogues for Holbein’s iconographical program. Jacob van Liesvelt printed the first complete Dutch Bible, in folio, at Antwerp in 1526.17 A separate folio edition of an anonymous Dutch translation of the Bible appeared from the Antwerp presses of Willem Vorsterman two years later.18 We shall demonstrate how both of these editions employ woodcut title-page borders whose designs anticipate that of the Coverdale Bible. Based upon models afforded by folio title pages of Dutch vernacular Bibles, we show that the Henrician iconography of the Coverdale title border is fully continental in origin.19 We also examine the Coverdale title-page design alongside a relatively unknown early Elizabethan illustrated revision to this illustration, which appears as the woodcut title-page border of a Rouen edition of the Great Bible (1539) printed in 1566.20 We demonstrate the fluid nature of the iconographical motifs used on the Coverdale title page by tracing their evolution in response to shifting political and religious contexts of the sixteenth-century English and Dutch reformations. *

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Bible production in Reformation Europe was an international phenomenon. The earliest English Bibles were produced in Antwerp alongside numerous editions of vernacular as well as Latin Bibles.21 Before 1546, when the Theological Faculty at the University of Louvain published an index of banned books,22 a cautious Antwerp printer could

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Foister’s excellent study misleads in suggesting that ‘[t]he earliest use of these extensive oppositions in Bible title-pages seems to have been in that designed by Erhard Altdorfer for the Lübeck Bible of 1533’. Holbein and England, p. 159. However, see King, Tudor Royal Iconography, pp. 60–3. Dat oude ende dat nieuwe testament (Antwerp: Jacob van Liesvelt, 1526). Andrew Pettegree and Malcolm Walsby, NB: Netherlandish Books. Books published in the Low Countries and in the Dutch language abroad before 1601 (Leiden: Brill, 2011) [hereafter NB], no. 3704. Den Bibel (Antwerp: Willem Vorsterman, 1528). NB, no. 3707. On the careers of Liesvelt and Vorsterman, see Andrew G. Johnston and Jean-François Gilmont, ‘Printing and the Reformation in Antwerp’, in Jean-François Gilmont (ed.), The Reformation and the Book, trans. Karin Maag (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 200–1. Foister’s comment, that ‘[t]he use of compartments for this title-page differentiates Holbein’s design from other contemporary title-pages, also using the opposition between the Old and New Laws’ should be treated with caution. Holbein and England, p. 163. The Bible in Englyshe of The Largest and greatest volume (Rouen: Richard Carmarden, 1566) (STC 2098). See the analysis of de Keyser’s premises in Paul Valkema-Blouw, ‘Early Protestant Publications in Antwerp, 1526–30: The Pseudonyms Adam Anonymous in Basel and Hans Luft in Marlborow’, Quaerendo 26.2 (Spring 1996), pp. 94–110, cited in Latré, ‘The 1535 Coverdale Bible’, p. 92. The Biblia Sacra online database provides further evidence of the Low Countries’ central role in sixteenth-century Bible production. F. de Nave, ‘Antwerp, Dissident Typographical Centre in the 16th Century: General Synthesis’, in Antwerp, Dissident Typographical Centre: The Role of Antwerp Printers in the Religious Conflicts in England (16th Century) (Antwerp: Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon, 1994), p. 15.

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successfully produce an edition of a vernacular Bible, provided that he avoided inserting controversial printed marginal glosses.23 In fact, the Antwerp origins of the English Bible are not fully understood and sometimes neglected by scholars. Misunderstanding concerning the origin of the earliest English Bibles begins with the account of Tyndale found within John Foxe’s influential martyrology, Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes (the ‘Book of Martyrs’) (1563), and with Foxe’s expanded account of Tyndale’s life in the second edition of this book, published in 1570.24 Foxe reprints a highly biased source, which describes Tyndale completing his translation work in a state of anxious penury.25 The probable facts tell a different story. Tyndale arrived in Antwerp after the printing of his English New Testament. His proximity to the nearby University of Louvain and the Collegium Trilinguae, a philological foundation established by the Dutch humanists Desiderius Erasmus and Hieronymus Busleyden in 1517, afforded Tyndale a unique opportunity to complete his translation in a learned environment surrounded by the requisite materials needed for the translation the Bible into English from the original Greek and Hebrew.26 Copies of Hebrew and Latin grammars dating from Tyndale’s day survive in at least one student copy at the Plantin-Moretus Museum, in Antwerp, and Tyndale is likely to have used books such as these.27 What is more, Antwerp’s ideal location on the river Scheldt encouraged the development of international trade, which in turn awarded the city a degree of local autonomy which benefited Tyndale’s illicit activities.28 23

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See C. C. de Bruyn, De Statenbijbel en zijn voorgangers: Nederlandse bijbelvertalingen vanaf de Reformatie tot 1637, adapted by F. G. M. Broeyer (Haarlem: Nederlands bijbelgenootschap, Brussels: Belgisch bijbelgenootschap, 1993), pp. 98–102, on Liesvelt’s increasingly protestant Bible editions. According to de Bruyn, he was sentenced to death in 1545 for printing a gloss defending Luther’s sola gratia in the last Bible translation he printed [1542]. Rik De Busser, in Paul Arblaster et al., Tyndale’s Testament (Turnhout, BE: Brepols, 2002), p. 120 (cat.62), mentions that ‘In 1545 (. . .) he [Liesvelt] was charged again, his Bible of 1542 having contained numerous marginal notes of a heretical nature. He tried to argue that his Bible had been printed “cum gratia et privilegio”, so that he was not to know that the writings were heretical, but the magistrates were unconvinced. On 27 November 1545 Jacob van Liesvelt was sentenced to death, under the provisions of a proclamation he had himself printed, and he was beheaded the following day.’ A&M (1563) (STC 11222): ‘The life & story of maister William Tyndall’ (sig. AA5r-BB2v); A&M (1570) (STC 11223): ‘The life and story of the true servaunt and martyr of God William Tyndall: Who for his notable paynes and travell may well be called the Apostle of England in this our latter age’ (sig. DDD1v-DDD4v). On Foxe’s changes to his biography of Tyndale, see John N. King, ‘“The Light of Printing”: William Tyndale, John Foxe, John Day, and Early Modern Print Culture’, Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001), pp. 52–85. See A&M (1570), where one learns that Tyndale’s cruel handling and alleged shipwreck en route to Hamburg (which has no other historical source) indicates that Satan opposed his translating (sig. DDD3r). Henry de Vocht, History of the Foundation and the Rise of the Collegium Trilingue Lovaniense, 1517–1550, 4 vols, Humanistica Lovaniensia, pp. 10–13 (1951–5). Johannes Campensis, Ex variis libellis . . . grammaticen Hebraicam est necessarium (Louvain: Thierry Martens, 1528), NB 6474. Plantin-Moretus Museum, shelfmark A2740. Latré, ‘The 1535 Coverdale Bible’, pp. 94, 99. On Antwerp’s emergence as a printing centre see Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 48, 65; and Johnston and Gilmont, ‘Printing and the Reformation in Antwerp’, p. 188.

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Holbein’s illustration presumably reached de Keyser via Coverdale, who worked for de Keyser as a learned corrector29 and had enjoyed the patronage of Thomas Cromwell from 1527.30 Cromwell sat for Holbein in 1534 and presumably exercised control over the intellectual design of the image, perhaps in collaboration with van Meteren, leaving the working out of the visual programme to Holbein or his associates.31 Evidence of Cromwell’s involvement features specifically in the finished illustration, which shows Cromwell kneeling to Henry’s right, at the bottom of the image, behind bishops. This portrayal displays characteristic facial features which match Holbein’s portrait of the minister.32 Holbein and his assistants would likely have been familiar with the Dutch title pages of Liesvelt and Vorsterman; after all, English printers frequently employed foreign woodcutters from 1476, when William Caxton first established his printing enterprise in Westminster after learning the trade in Bruges.33 Evidence supplied by the Liesvelt and Vorsterman title pages, however, suggests that Cromwell’s motives in executing this design – if indeed he acted alone in this capacity – go beyond mere royal flattery. Coverdale would probably have been aware of the Dutch visual models from which Holbein is likely to have worked. He must have encountered them in de Keyser’s printing shop and may have been responsible for bringing them to the attention either of Holbein or Cromwell. After all, de Keyser was in competition with both Liesvelt and Vorsterman and had employed the ‘law and gospel’ device in the 1530 Lefèvre Bible. Because woodblocks afforded valuable fabric within the print trade during the sixteenth century, Liesvelt, Vorsterman, and de Keyser may also have each exerted some control over the visual design for their respective title pages. The final Coverdale title-page design may well have been the product of collaborative effort among patron, translator/corrector, woodcutter, and printer. It was not unusual for pictorial themes to migrate from one folio Bible title page to another during the 1520s and 30s. Jacob van Liesvelt’s 1538 Dutch Bible, for example, borrows Cranach’s visual motif directly from Erhard Altdorfer’s 1533 Lübeck Bible.34 As early as 1526, when Liesvelt published Dat oude ende dat nieuvve testament, we find a version of this narrative in Liesvelt’s title-page border (Fig. 19.2). It affords the earliest complete Dutch printed Bible. Liesvelt anticipates Coverdale’s title page by incorporating illustrations of scriptural scenes directly to the left and right of the title. Significantly, these illustrations depict a ‘law and gospel’ pattern and predate Cranach’s version by two years. Coverdale or Holbein could hardly have failed to notice the woodcuts that kept appearing in the successive editions of the first complete Bible in Dutch. After all, Jacob van Liesvelt’s officina was proximate to de Keyser’s in the vicinity of the Cammerstraat and 29 30 31

32 33

34

Latré, ‘The 1535 Coverdale Bible’, pp. 89–91. Foister, Holbein and England, p. 159. Draft manuscript designs for title-page borders are on permanent display at the Plantin-Moretus museum beside the copper-plate engravings designed from them by Peter Paul Rubens. They suggest that Rubens must have worked out basic designs with the Moretuses, who succeeded Plantin, and then handed projects off to assistants to complete the actual engraving work. Foister, Holbein and England, p. 159. Andrew Pettegree, ‘Printing and the Reformation: The English Exception’, in Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (eds), The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 163. Pettegree, ‘“The Law and the Gospel”’, 129; Foister, Holbein and England, p. 161.

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Figure 19.2: Title Page: Dat oude ende dat nieuwe testament. Antwerp: Jacob van Liesvelt, 1526. Artist unknown. Special Collections, University of Amsterdam, OTM: Ned. Inc. 119.

Lombardenvest, the centre of Antwerp’s printing district during the sixteenth century.35 The ‘law and gospel’ theme is also represented in the d’Etaples French Bibles of 1530 and 1534, on both the title page and the subsidiary title page located at the beginning of the New Testament. Both were printed by de Keyser, who incorporated the same visual motif on the title page of his edition of Robert Estienne’s Latin Bible in 1534.36 Neither Lefèvre nor Estienne was evangelical or Lutheran; indeed, Estienne’s title explicitly presents itself as a ‘corrected’ version of the Vulgate. In other words, the ‘law and gospel’ illustration was an exceptionally fluid motif not exclusive to Protestant Bibles. The Liesvelt title border features figures of Joshua and David, representing Old Testament 35 36

Latré, ‘The 1535 Coverdale Bible’, p. 92. BIBLIA BREVES IN eadem Annotationes, ex doctiss. interpretationibus, & Hebraeorum commentariis. Interpretatio propriorum nominum Hebraicorum. Index copiosissimus rerum & sententiarum utriusque testamenti. Four title pages digitised at the Biblia sacra database 1534.B.lat.GvdH.a. (accessed 2 October 2012).

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‘law’ on the right, and the apostles Mark and John, representing New Testament ‘gospel’, on the left. Separate cartouches display scriptural texts which confirm this bifurcation. The right-hand side is represented by Joshua 1: 8: ‘En laet dit boec van deser wet uut uwen monde niet comen / mer peist daer om dach ende nacht.’ In the Coverdale title page, an English version of this same passage appears as an epigraph to the whole book within the enclosed box, beneath the title itself: ‘Let not the boke of this lawe departe out of thy mouth, but exercyse thyselfe therin daye and nighte.’ The right-portion of the Liesvelt title page also includes the text of Psalm 19: 8 (Vulgate Psalm 18: 8), which observes that the Lord’s commands, or laws, afford light to the eyes. The left-hand side encapsulates the ‘gospel’ through inclusion of Mark 16: 15, ‘Gaet in alle dye werelt / ende predict dat Evangelium allen creatueren.’ In the Coverdale title page, the same text is quoted opposite the figure of Moses receiving the tablets of the law, where Christ sends his disciples to spread the good news, or ‘Evangelium’: ‘Go youre waye in to all the worlde, & preach the Gospel.’37 This text also appears on a scroll held by Henry VIII, in a portrait of the king dated c. 1535 and attributed to Joos van Cleve,38 but Coverdale may have borrowed this application from Liesvelt. Liesvelt’s four cartouches conclude with the text of 2 John 1: 10, which instructs readers not to offer hospitality to unbelievers. The close correspondence of two of the four side-column illustrations appearing on Liesvelt’s title page to text included in a corresponding location on the title page of the Coverdale Bible establishes a connection in the design of both title pages. Further similarities are also present. In both illustrations David carries the harp, a traditional symbol which designates his purported authorship of the Psalms. Because ‘law’ corresponds to the right-hand scenes in Liesvelt and the left-hand scenes in Coverdale, the conceptual artist or woodcutter for the Coverdale woodblock may have worked in mirror-reverse from this Dutch exemplar. The appearance in the Liesvelt title of prophetic prototypes to the New Testament apostolic dispensation accompanied by textual explication anticipates the design layout on the Coverdale and later title borders. Liesvelt’s complete Bible was reprinted several times between 1526 and 1535, the year of publication of the Coverdale Bible. Its title page remained largely unchanged, but new editions dating from 1532, 1534, and 153539 incorporate a one-page prologue in the shape of a wine cup or chalice. This carmen figuratum (i.e. shape poem) supplies additional evidence that Liesvelt may anticipate Coverdale’s title page. This poem reinforces the ‘law and gospel’ pictorial motif by emphasising the importance of the Old Testament for the reader’s understanding of the New: ‘Ende dat oude Testament is ons als dy[e wendel] doecken daer Cristus in gewonden leyt, ende daer wi hem oock in vinden sullen.’ (‘And the Old Testament is to us like the swaddling clothes in which Christ has been wrapped, and in which we too shall find him.’) The Old Testament may look poor to the untrained eye, this text argues, but a very precious treasure is to be found in it, namely Christ. The anonymous author of this prologue worked this formulation directly from Luther’s prologue to his Old Testament of 1523: ‘Hier wirst du die Windeln und die Krippe finden, da Christus drinnen liegt.’ (‘Here you will find the swaddling clothes and the crib in which Christ is lying.’) The chalice-shape text develops this argument: 37

38 39

‘Gospel’ is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘good news’. Oxford English Dictionary (online), ‘gospel, n.’ (accessed 1 July 2012). King, Tudor Royal Iconography, pp. 61–3. NB, nos. 3711, 3717, and 3719.

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door dat oude bevestiget worden, daer om sullen alle christen menschen dat oude Testament van geender minder weerden houden, dan dat nieuwe, Ende dat nieuwe Testament en is anders niet dan een ver vullinge des ouden Testaments, ende een clare vercondinge, ende predicatie, hoe dat die hoge beloften des alderhoochsten, onser salichmakinghen, ons nu ghegheven sijn, ende dat door Christum, die welcke ons vander ghenaden, ende goedertierenheyt des vaders, in menigerley sproken des ouden Testaments belooft was, Daerom salmen dye heylighe schriftuere, beyde des Ouden ende des nieuwen Testaments, houden ende hebben, voor dat alderhooch ste heylichdom, ende aldercostelijcste fonteyne, ende meesten rijcdom, die nim mermeer uut geput en mach worden, op dat ghi die Godlijcke wijsheyt vinden moghet, die welcke God ons inder schriftueren tot veel plaetsen so slechtelijck voor leyt, Ende weet sekerlijck, ende vast, dat dit boeck des ouden Testaments, een vast wetboeck is, dat welcke leert watmen doen, ende laten sal. Ende dat nieuwe Testament, een Evangelium ende ghenaden boec is ende ons leert ende wijst, hoe wy die wet, ende die geboden Gods onderhouden ende vervullen sullen.40

[. . . Therefore all Christians should not consider the Old Testament as less valuable than the New. And the New Testament is nothing else than a fulfilment of the Old, and a proclamation and predication, of how the high promises of the Highest, our Saviour, have now been given to us, and this through Christ, who was promised to us through the grace and goodness of the Father, in many sayings of the Old Testament. Therefore one shall have and hold the holy scripture, both of the Old and New Testament, as the most sacred place, the most precious fountain, the greatest riches . . . And have no doubt that this book of the Old Testament is a lasting book of law that teaches you what to do and what to avoid. And that the New Testament is a book of gospel and grace and teaches and shows us, how we shall respect and fulfil God’s commandments.] This material follows Luther’s formulation in the ‘Vorrede’ to his 1523 Old Testament: ‘So wisse nun daβ dies Buch ein Gesetzbuch is, das da lehret, was man tun und lassen soll [. . .]. Gleichwie das Neue Testament ein Evangelium oder Gnadenbuch ist.’ (‘Now you should know that this book is a Book of Law that teaches us what one should do and what one should not do [. . .]. Just like the New Testament is a Gospel or a Book of Grace.’)41 40

41

Text transcribed from the University of Amsterdam, Special Collections copy of Liesvelt’s 1534 Bible, shelfmark Ned.Inc. 579, 1, sig. #1v, digitised at www.bibliasacra.nl (accessed 9 April 2012), 1534.B.dut.JvL.a. Martin Luther, Luther deutsch: die Werke Martin Luthers in neuer Auswahl für die Gegenwart, ed. Kurt Aland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1990), p. 10.

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Instances of law-giving, both texts argue, are to be found in the New Testament, whereas the Old contains many references to God’s grace, thus showing how the two are intertwined. The figure of the chalice unites the two dispensations because it symbolised the old order of ritual offerings under ‘law’ and the new system, whereby Christ’s passing of the cup to his followers during the Last Supper instituted a ‘new covenant’ based upon his blood.42 In this manner, Liesvelt’s prologue verbalises and adds nuance to his title page ‘law and gospel’ iconography. Incorporation of Moses as lawgiver at the top of the title-page design signifies the divine inspiration of the text, as Moses holds text which he purportedly received directly from God.43 Liesvelt’s Moses points toward Mark and John, directing the viewer’s gaze toward figures that complement their Old Testament predecessors.44 Throughout his Bible editions, de Keyser frequently illustrated Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. The illustration appears, for example, and perhaps rather unexpectedly, in the title page of de Keyser’s publication of the Psalms in French, Le livre des Pseaulmes de David (1531),45 and again, more appropriately, on sig. D3r of his La saincte Bible en François (1534),46 where it illustrates Lefèvre’s translation ‘corrected’ by Robert Estienne. Illustrations of Moses receiving the tablets of the law were not infrequent in Low Countries biblical illustration in Coverdale’s time. Moreover, before beginning work on the Coverdale image, Holbein had already incorporated both Moses and the ‘law and gospel’ motif in his Allegory of the Old and New Testaments (c.1532).47 It features a hinged diptych whereby the two opposite sides comprise a visual allegory of the Old and New Testaments. The Coverdale illustration features a similar bifurcation of illustrated scenes, on either side of the title itself, of both the ‘law’ [i.e. Old Testament] and the ‘gospel’ [i.e. New Testament]. Representation of the ‘law’ appears at the left and includes Moses receiving the Ten Commandments and Esdras reciting the book of the Law in the presence of people. In similar fashion, ‘gospel’ incorporates rightside scenes of Jesus commissioning the disciples and the apostles preaching on the day of Pentecost. At the top of the image, Adam and Eve designate old dispensation while Christ tramples Death to signify the new.48 It seems certain that Holbein gravitated to international models such as this one in order to please Henry VIII, who demanded art that would rival that produced at royal courts on the continent.49 In fact, this Bible may have been intended as one of a three-book set incorporating royal iconography designed by Holbein. 42 43 44

45

46

47 48 49

See, by way of comparison, Numbers 28: 7 and Matthew 26: 27–8. Exodus 32: 15–16. James Clifton and Walter S. Melion (eds), Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration in Netherlandish Prints of the Sixteenth Century (New York and London: Museum of Biblical Art and D. Giles Ltd, 2009), pp. 26–7. University of Amsterdam Special Collections, shelfmark Ned.Inc. 548, 1, digitised at (accessed 23 August 2012), 1531.Ps.fre.MdK.a. University of Amsterdam Special Collections, shelfmark Ned.Inc. 367, 1, digitised at (accessed 23 August 2012), 1534.B.fre.MdK.a. Foister, Holbein and England, fig. 159. King, Tudor Royal Iconography, p. 54; Foister, Holbein and England, p. 161. Foister, Holbein and England, pp. 9–12, 149–61; Stephanie Buck, ‘International Exchange: Holbein at the Crossroads of Art and Craftsmanship’, in Mark Roskill and John Oliver Hand (eds), Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception (New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the National Gallery of Art, 2001), pp. 62–4. O’Sullivan (ed.), The Bible as Book, figs 14–16.

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In Coverdale’s woodcut as well as his dedicatory preface to the king, Henry VIII unites and balances the ‘law and gospel’ design anticipated on the Liesvelt title page. Coverdale’s illustration replaces Liesvelt’s printing device with Henry himself at the bottom of the illustration. Coverdale’s dedication compares Henry’s hoped-for support for an English Bible to the rediscovery of the Law of Moses by Josiah, prototype for evangelical kingship during this era (+ iii v).50 In the image itself, the figure of Henry completes a both literal and typological triangle. A literal triangle is formed by the horizontal line connecting Moses to Christ and two slanting lines connecting them each to Henry. Coverdale’s Moses receives the law tablets from their divine source opposite Christ, on the other side of the image, who conveys a new divine message in oral form to those who will spread ‘gospel’. From a typological perspective, the woodcut of Henry offering or receiving the Bible from his bishops thus draws the Old and New Testament scenes temporally into the present. This iconographical triangulation adds a moral reading to the historical (i.e. Old Testament) one and to the allegorical reading in the narrow sense (i.e. the Old Testament applied to the New). In typological studies, this is known as the moral reading of the image or text (the anagogical reading being the fourth type of reading, along with the literal, allegorical and moral).51 This moral interpretation of the Coverdale illustration contains a clear political charge. As receivers of Henry’s text, the bishops function dually as the fulfilment both of Moses and Christ’s disciples, who each receive divine text at the top of the triangle. Henry, in turn, affords the visual token of divine presence itself, given the triangular configuration of the historical, the allegorical in the strict sense, and the moral implications of the illustration’s iconography. The invisible God behind the cloud in the Moses inset scene manifests himself in a visible form, in the here and now of 1535, as none other than Henry himself, who at the same time seems to be sending forth his bishops in the same way as Christ sent forth his disciples.52 In this approach, Henry completes a circuit involving the ‘transfer’ of the sacred message (e.g. from God to Moses, from Jesus to the disciples, from Henry to the bishops). There exists a grammatical component to this ‘transfer’, for the Latin past participle of ‘transferre’ is trans-latus. The ‘trans-latio’, or translation, itself is a transfer, and Coverdale becomes, like Moses and the disciples, a mediator or ‘corrector’ in a ‘translation’ process. The Coverdale title page thus takes on a sophisticated iconographic representation of the parallel between the governance of the Tudor state and the notion that ‘correct’ philology should lead to greater understanding of the divine message. Both sides of this parallel correspond to the title’s description, that the text is ‘faithfully and truly translated’ from the top to the bottom of the hierarchy.53 Holbein establishes a link between the title of Coverdale’s translation in the middle of the image and the ‘trans-lation’ activities suggested by biblical scenes and Henry’s handing on of the Bible in the margin. The ‘correction’ or translation of the Bible thus finds common ground with 50

51

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John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 185–6. Tyndale’s rejection of the four-fold method of typological reading, in The obedience of a Christian man (1528), set a precedent for later English reformers. We build upon and complement King, Tudor Royal Iconography, who views Henry in this image as both a new Moses and a new David. See pp. 59–61. Interestingly, the Greek term for ‘transferre’ is ‘meta-phero’, and metaphora (i.e. metaphor) is an underlying principle of typology.

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Henry’s purported government and its biblical antecedents. When ‘faithfully and truly translated’, the iconography of Coverdale’s title page suggests, the English Bible gracefully becomes the principal tool to govern the English. England will be ruled ‘correctly’, in the manner of the ‘correcteur’, if its king carries across God’s and Christ’s message to his people, using the secular and worldly authorities under his supervision. The title page of Willem Vorsterman’s 1528 Dutch Bible affords a second variant of the ‘law and gospel’ design analogous to Coverdale (Plate 46). Its appearance the same year as Cranach’s device further suggests that this scriptural motif prompted the development of a widespread iconography not limited to his workshop. Coverdale may have known of Vorsterman via de Keyser, since the two Antwerp printers collaborated on at least five projects prior to 1535. These included their joint edition of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples’s 1529 French New Testament.54 Several visual features emerge in the Vorsterman image which would recur on the Coverdale title and on the title pages of later English Bibles. Vorsterman established himself as a major figure in the Antwerp book market, producing more than 400 titles over the course of thirty years.55 His illustrated title page was designed by the Dutch artist Jan Swart van Groningen.56 The pre-Christian dispensation, or ‘law’, is figured through the appearance of the Old Testament prophets Jeremiah, Daniel, Isaiah and Ezekiel in vertical columns flanking the title. They match panels positioned in similar fashion on the Coverdale title page. At the head of the design the portrayal of Father, Son and Holy Spirit articulate the ‘gospel’ portion of this design and anticipate the anthropomorphic representation of God on the 1539 Great Bible title-page border.57 Van Groningen copied the woodblock representation of the Trinity from a similar design executed by the Basle woodcutter Jacob Faber, who based this image upon Andreas Cratander’s Basle edition of Theophylactus’s In quatuor evangelia enarrationes (1524).58 The bottom and lower left-hand panels of this design respectively feature the arms of Antwerp and of Ximénez de Cisneros, head of the Spanish Inquisition and supervisor of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, published in Alcalá de Henares (1514–22). Christ features in the lower right of the Vorsterman illustration as well, in the guise of a unicorn, the traditional messianic symbol in medieval bestiary. These lower panels constitute a unified design, since the unicorn’s right foreleg touches the Antwerp arms. Not only does this afford an example of fine craftsmanship, it also establishes a clear link between Christ and Antwerp (following the ‘moral’ reading in typology). In similar fashion, the design of the Coverdale title page links Christ to Henry’s England.59 The ‘law and gospel’ visual motif on Vorsterman’s title page receives explicit focus in his Prologue (‘Die Prologhe’). Both the translator(s) of the Dutch Bible and those responsible 54 55

56

57 58 59

Latré, ‘The 1535 Coverdale Bible and its Antwerp Origins’, p. 93. Anne Rouzet, Dictionnaire des imprimeurs, libraries et éditeurs des XVe et XVIe siècles dans les limites géographiques de la Belgique actuelle (Nieuwkoop: de Graaf, 1975), pp. 239–40, quoted in Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, p. 72. Bart A. Rosier, The Bible in Print: Netherlandish Bible Illustration in the Sixteenth Century, 2 vols, trans. from the Dutch by Chris F. Weterings (Leiden: Foleor Publishers, 1997), vol. 1, p. 74. For an illustration, see King, Tudor Royal Iconography, fig. 14. Rosier, The Bible in Print, vol. 1, p. 74. Rosier, The Bible in Print, vol. 1, pp. 75, 79 discusses the similar appearance of the ‘law and gospel’ iconography on De Keyser’s La saincte Bible [Lefèvre’s 1530 translation into French] and a number of other Bibles. See also Clifton, ‘A Lutheran Image on the Title-Page of the Last Bible without a Confessional Label’, pp. 69–75 and figs 1–2.

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for this prologue remain anonymous, but the prologue authors present themselves in the plural as ‘correctuers’ [i.e. translators].60 Perhaps following Liesvelt’s edition, they suggest that a typological reading of the Scripture remains the principal key for its interpretation: ‘So is dan doude testament, een figuere ende voorbode des nieuwen testaments, gelijc nu breet genoech geseyt is.’61 (‘And so the Old Testament pre-figures and heralds the new [literally: it is a figure and a herald of the New], as has now been said often enough.’) From its fourth page onwards (*3r), where a marginal gloss insists that the Old Testament must not be despised (‘Dat oude testament niet te verachten’), this prologue takes as its principal subject the relationship between Old Testament ‘law’ and New Testament ‘grace’. One should know, the ‘translators’ argue, that the Old Testament is sometimes called a book of the law (‘een boeck der wet ghenoemt wort’) in its entirety, and that the New Testament is a book of grace (‘een boec der gratien’).62 Using some new and some by now familiar images that have their antecedents in Luther, and ultimately Jerome and the Bible itself, they describe the book of the law, ‘die bornput, daermen altoos uut drincken mach, ende nimmermeer uut putten en mach’ (‘the well from which one can always carry on drinking and that can never be exhausted’), ‘dat diepe water, daer die Eliphant in verdrinct ende dat lammeken in swemt’ (‘the deep water in which the elephant drowns and the little lamb swims’), and ‘die cribbe daer die herders vonden Jesum in doexkens ghewonden’ (‘the crib in which the shepherds found Jesus wrapped in swaddling cloth’).63 Passages such as these develop and extend the law-and-grace typology found embodied within Liesvelt’s chalice-prologue. This discussion emphasises the flexibility and fluidity governing the approach of the ‘translators’ to the text. Given the parallel iconographies among the Coverdale, Liesvelt and Vorsterman designs, the ‘law and gospel’ motif appears to have enjoyed a similar degree of malleability on the covers of these books.64 The ‘correctors’ explain, for example, how they selected from among the best source texts, made the ‘safe’ decision of using the Latin work of Jerome, but also, as the title of the book indicates, added literal translations from the original Hebrew and Greek.65 They also claim that they drew upon Cardinal Ximénez’ Complutensian Polyglot Bible, a claim which may simply have been inserted to enhance the Roman-Catholic orthodoxy of this Bible translation (hence the appearance of his coat 60 61

62 63 64

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Latré, ‘The 1535 Coverdale Bible and its Antwerp Origins’, p. 90. Den Bibel (Antwerp: Willem Vorsterman, 1528), sig. *4v. All quotations from Vorsterman’s Prologue are taken from the copy at University of Amsterdam Special Collections, shelfmark Ned.Inc. 100, transcribed at . Den Bibel, *3v. Den Bibel, *3v. For a discussion of the compromising attitude of the translators, and the great care they take not to offend the Church authorities, see, among others, C. C. de Bruin, De Statenbijbel en zijn voorgangers: Nederlandse bijbelvertalingen vanaf de Reformatie tot 1637, adapted by F. G. M. Broeyer, Haarlem (Nederlands Bijbelgenootschap) and Brussels (Belgisch bijbelgenootschap, 1993). Willem Vorsterman, Den Bibel. Tgeheele Oude ende Nieuwe Testament met grooter naersticheyt naden Latijnschen text gecorrigeert, ende opten cant des boecks die alteratie die hebreeusche veranderinge, naerder hebreeuscer waerheyt der boecken die int hebreus zijn, ende die griecse der boecken die int griecs zijn [‘Willem Vorsterman, The Bible. The Entire Old and New Testament diligently translated (‘corrected’) after the Latin text, and in the margin of the book, the variant readings, the Hebrew ones, after the Hebrew truth of the books that are in Hebrew, and the Greek ones, of the books that are in Greek’].

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of arms on the title page). Vorsterman wishes to give all appearances of his orthodoxy. The ‘correctors’ indicate that alternative translations based on the Hebrew or Greek will be mentioned in the margin, without implying that they are the only ‘correct’ readings. They also explain how they coped with the absence of a standard ‘dialect’ for the use of the Dutch language and settle upon Brabant speech as a norm. Finally, they try to pacify both Catholics and Protestants by validating the use of both ‘Church’ and ‘congregation’ for the Greek ‘ekklesia’, an issue on which Tyndale and his antagonist, Thomas More, also did not agree.66 In his 1532 Bible, Vorsterman would replace the 1528 text’s choice of oudste for the Greek presbyteroi (i.e. elders in Tyndale) and ghemeinte for the Greek ekklesia (i.e. congregation in Tyndale) with new terms, ‘priesters’ and ‘kerc’.67 A link exists in this prologue between the technical and philological issues of the ‘interpretatie’ (one of the words used for ‘translation’) on the one hand, and the interpretation of the ‘law and gospel’ theme on the other. With reference to literal reading of the Old Testament, the ‘correctors’ write: ‘Al schijnt die letter naect, die schat is al te costelijc, te weten, die eewighe waerheyt, wijsheyt, ende wech, die daer in verborghen is. Hierom is te weten dat, dat Oude testament gheheel somtijts, een boeck der wet ghenoemt wort.’ (‘Even though the letter (i.e. the literal text) seems naked, the treasure is priceless, to wit, the eternal truth, wisdom and way, which are hidden in it. For this reason you should know that the Old Testament is sometimes in its entirety called a book of the law.’)68 The literal rendering of the text is related here to its deeper meaning (Jerome’s ‘sensus’), in exactly the same way as ‘law’ is related to ‘gospel’. Understanding the literal meaning is essential, a fact that Jerome did not deny and that Luther, of course, very much emphasised. But in the husk of the literal text lies hidden the truth of its deeper sense: ‘want dit is die schrift die verborghen wort voor den wisen menschen, in haer eyghen ooghen, ende wort gheopenbaert den simpelen ende ootmoedighen’ (‘for this is the Scripture that remains hidden to those who in their own eyes are wise, and is revealed to the simple and humble people’).69 The law itself is the deep water in which translators and readers will founder if they lack understanding of how the norms governing literal meaning ‘reveal’ spiritual meaning. Rules and norms determine the philologist’s decisions, but the sense of the text is revealed only to the sensitive reader. The designers of both the Vorsterman and Coverdale title pages seem aware of this thinking about textuality and meaning. The metaphor of ‘carrying across’ meanings and readings is used literally in the Vorsterman Prologue. It is the correctors’ intention, so they claim, ‘to carry across’ the biblical text ‘in the best possible manner into the Dutch language, but after the teachings of Saint Jerome, following at times the sense more than the words’ (‘in onser nederlantsche duytscher talen, nochtans naerder leeringhe van .S. Jeronimus inden boeck van die alder beste maniere van over te setten, den sin somtijts meer volgende dan die 66

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68 69

Thomas More, A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. Thomas M. C. Lawler et al., 2 vols (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), vol. 1, p. 286. Latré, ‘The 1535 Coverdale Bible’, p. 93. In a publication that is still in manuscript form, and which will be published in a complete history of the Dutch Bible (to appear in 2013–14), Wim François discusses Vorsterman’s strategies by which he rendered his 1528 Bible acceptable to the Roman Catholic community. François argues convincingly that Vorsterman’s was not in effect an evangelical Bible thinly disguised as Roman Catholic. Den Bibel, *3v. Den Bibel, *3v. Compare to Matt. 13: 11.

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woorden’).70 But the text does not exist only to be trans-ferred or interpreted, but also to be ‘done’: ‘Weest doenders des woorts ende niet alleen aenhoorders.’ (‘Be not just listeners to the word, but its “doers” also.’)71 There exists, therefore, a parallel between morality (i.e. putting the Word into practice), and translation (i.e. giving the Word its meaning). ‘Translating’ the literal text into Dutch is akin to interpreting ‘law’ in terms of ‘gospel’ in the same way that Henry VIII delivers the text to be ‘enacted’ by his bishops. The second edition of Lefèvre’s French version offers yet another exemplar for the design of the Coverdale border. Published by de Keyser in Antwerp in 1534, its title cited the Vulgate as its chief source (‘translatee selon la pure et entiere traduction de Sainct Hierome’). It is more protestant than de Keyser’s first edition of 1530, particularly in its prologue and glosses. The work of Lefèvre as principal translator is, in the second edition, supplemented with material drawn from Robert Estienne’s 1532 edition of the Vulgate.72 The title page of the 1534 edition is followed by a two-page explanation of textual contents (entitled ‘Le contenu / de lescripture’). In this summary, two substantial paragraphs on the first page are of particular interest from the perspective of the ‘law and gospel’ theme. Printed marginal glosses in this location offer guides to reading preface and larger text, including Lefèvre’s woodcut title page border: ‘La loy’ (i.e. the law) and ‘Jesu Christ est venu’ (i.e. Christ has come). God gave the law so that people might become aware of what acting sinfully means (‘nous enseignent que Dieu donna sa loy / par laquelle les homes cogneussent que cest que peche’).73 Nevertheless, Christ is pre-figured in the Old Law, which in traditional typological fashion is interpreted literally as a ‘figura’ of the Christ who is promised in it: ‘iceluy Jesu Christ promis / figure et represente en lancienne loy’ (‘this promised Jesus Christ is “figuré et représenté” [i.e. figured and shown] in the Old Law’). Both the 1530 and 1534 editions of this first complete printed French Bible employ the ‘law’ and ‘gospel’ motif on the title page, as does the Estienne Biblia Breves of 1534, which de Keyser printed for Godevaert van der Haghen, the same year as he printed the second edition of Lefèvre’s French Bible.74 As has now become clear, the ‘law and gospel’ theme is explained at length in several prologues and introductions to Bibles (or parts of the Bible) printed by de Keyser and others prior to the Antwerp printing of Coverdale in 1535. It is therefore unlikely that the Coverdale design, which treats the ‘law and gospel’ theme, could have been executed without an awareness of these precedents. The theme does not disappear from Low Countries Bible illustrations after 1535. In particular, ‘law’ and ‘gospel’ are contrasted on the title pages of editions of the Bible printed by Hansken (not to be confused with Jacob) van Liesveldt (1538), Ctematius (1559–64), De Laet (1560–5) and Plantin (1566).75 This versatile pictorial motif re-emerges on the title page of Richard Carmarden’s 1566 Rouen edition of the Great Bible, which affords yet another visual response to the Coverdale title (Fig. 19.3).76 One of the final Great Bibles printed prior to its replacement by the 70 71 72

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Den Bibel, *1v. Den Bibel, *1v. This is based upon James 1: 22. Quoted from Jean-François Gilmont, catalogue item 81, in Arblaster et al. (eds), Tyndale’s Testament, p. 135. Cf. Rom. 3: 20. Arblaster et al. (eds), Tyndale’s Testament, cat. Item 36. Rosier, The Bible in Print, vol. 1, pp. 76–9. STC 2098.

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Figure 19.3: Title Page: The Bible in Englyshe of The Largest and greatest volume. Rouen: Cardin Hamillon, for Richard Carmarden, 1566. STC 2098. Artist unknown. St John’s College, Cambridge, shelfmark T.3.21. By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge.

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Bishops’ Bible in 1568 as the official text appointed for use in English churches, this edition reveals a conscious attempt to advise Queen Elizabeth to receive and implement the divine word after the manner of Henry VIII. It is noteworthy that Archbishop Cranmer’s prologue to the reader, which describes strategies for acceptable and unacceptable Bible reading under the authority established by Henry VIII, appears in other editions of the Great Bible but does not appear in this edition. This document was perhaps deemed incongruous following the publication of the Second Prayer Book (1552) and the promulgation of new royal injunctions designed to foster widespread Bible reading; it vanishes in Nicholas Hyll’s 1552 quarto edition77 and reappears just once thereafter.78 Prior to the appearance of the Bishops’ Bible in 1568, the Great Bible enjoyed Crown support, and for this reason editors freely modified the original contents of the 1539 version, including the title page’s heavily Henrician overtones. The Carmarden edition gravitates away from the socially stratified layout of the Great Bible title and toward the ‘law and gospel’ format of Coverdale. It simultaneously updates the iconography for a specifically Elizabethan context. Carmarden served as a customs agent with ties to Elizabeth’s secretary of state, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and commissioned this book from Cardin Hamillon, a Rouen printer who appends a new prologue ‘shewing the use of the scripture’.79 The choice of Rouen as a location for the printing of the text seems to have provided a satisfactory alternative to publishing in London in competition with Richard Harrison, who had produced the previous folio Great Bible and who would go on to publish the only other large-format Great Bible printed in England during Elizabeth’s reign. Rouen was a major shipping centre and contained a strong Huguenot population during the 1560s at a time when presses in England were just starting to rival the output of their continental counterparts.80 Carmarden may have sought a continental press to avoid ecclesiastical censure, since Harrison had been fined for printing his 1562 edition without a licence.81 Rouen offered strategic importance for Carmarden or, more likely, Cecil, since an English garrison had undertaken the defence of the city under the terms of a 1562 peace treaty that governed England’s support of the Huguenots in the French Wars of Religion.82 Given these connections, it seems possible that Cecil underwrote a portion of the cost of this venture. In adapting the Coverdale iconography to fit a new political situation, Carmarden (or Cecil) followed the precedent established by other mid-century editions of the Coverdale Bible. As we have seen, the ‘law and gospel’ visual motif itself supplied this 77 78 79

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STC 2089. The folio edition of Richard Harrison (1562): STC 2096. Howell A. Lloyd, ‘Camden, Carmarden and the Customs’, English Historical Review 85 (1970), pp. 776–87. Alfred W. Pollard (ed.), Records of the English Bible (London: Oxford University Press, 1911), p. 28. See also A. S. Herbert, Historical catalogue of printed editions of the English Bible: 1525–1961 (London and New York: British & Foreign Bible Society and The American Bible Society, 1968), no. 119 and Philip Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). On the growth of the printing trade in England compared to the continent, see Pettegree, ‘Printing and the Reformation: the English Exception’, pp. 157–79. Herbert, Historical catalogue, p. 66. Thomas McCoog, S. J., The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1541–1588: ‘Our Way of Proceeding?’ (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), p. 72.

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book with a degree of fluidity. It in turn supported revision to other portions of its paratext. Contemporaries would not necessarily have associated the Coverdale text with its prominent Henrician illustrated title border, since only the 1535 and 1537 editions contained it. The quarto editions of 1537, 1550, and 1553 do not contain any redesigned version of Holbein’s border.83 The absence of the title border from later editions accentuates the topicality of the first two folio editions and suggests that the association between this book and the visual portrayal of Henry VIII was short-lived. The dedicatory preface underwent modification with equal rapidity. The royal dedication to the edition of this work published in 1537, by the Dutch émigré James Nicholson, lauds Henry’s ‘dearest just wyfe, and moost vertuous Pryncesse, Quene Jane, Amen’.84 Some extant copies of the 1535 de Keyser edition contain versions of this dedication rather than the original, which had contained a prayer for the king’s second wife, Anne Boleyn.85 Henry married Jane Seymour after Anne’s execution for treason in May 1536. The change would seem natural to the editor or printer of subsequent editions, but the presence of the newer dedication in surviving copies of the 1535 edition, which appeared when Anne Boleyn still lived, is significant. This replacement suggests that some readers evidently deemed the original statement honouring Anne to be impolitic after Henry had repudiated Anne in favour of Jane, his third wife. For his edition of the Great Bible, Carmarden extended the dynastic flexibility found within the paratext of earlier editions and incorporated a new variant of Coverdale’s ‘law and gospel’ pictorial motif.86 On its title page, Elizabeth carries a staff of office and a Bible bearing the designation ‘Verbum Dei’ (i.e. word of God). Several iconographical topoi recur on the Carmarden title border from earlier instances. They include the Tetragrammaton (i.e. the Hebrew letters YHWH) appearing above the queen at the pinnacle of the image, with a translation into Greek, Latin and English, and the figures of Moses and Christ; each of these constitute borrowings from Coverdale. Accompanied by scriptural texts, these biblical prototypes flank either side of the title block to symbolise dual dispensations of ‘law’ and ‘gospel’ made manifest through Elizabeth’s descent from Henry VIII. In this way the motif becomes newly politicised with reference to the Elizabethan Settlement of Religion, as Carmarden constructs an explicit extension of the Henrician Reformation through his revision of the Coverdale iconography. Cherubim draw back a curtain to reveal the queen flanked by the virtues of Faith and Hope, who bear their respective emblems of the shield and anchor. These figures are common in Tudor dynastic panegyric, and here they afford a conceptual link between Henry and Elizabeth, who each distribute scripture in the manner of their prototypes.87 83

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See the description of these volumes at Herbert, Historical catalogue, nos 33, 84, and 101 and actual copies which reside, among other places, at the Bible Society Library at the University of Cambridge. Herbert, Historical catalogue, no. 32; STC 2064. See Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp, ‘Introduction’, in Hellinga and Trapp (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, Vol. III: 1400–1557 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 25–6. Herbert, Historical catalogue, p. 10. R. B. McKerrow does not list Carmarden’s title-page border in his Title-page Borders used in England and Scotland, 1485–1640 (London: Oxford University Press for the Bibliographical Society, 1932). King, Tudor Royal Iconography, figs 29 and 75.

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By replacing Henry with Elizabeth at the bottom of the original Coverdale design, Carmarden modifies the general pictorial theme of ‘law and gospel’ so as to counsel Elizabeth to fulfil a specific, and anachronistic, interpretation of Henrician monarchy. The illustration of Elizabeth also replicates the historiated initial C (i.e. the capital ‘C’ decorated with depictions of people or narrative scenes) that opens John Foxe’s dedication to the queen in the first edition of his Actes and Monuments (1563) (Fig. 19.4). The Foxean text encourages the queen to protect the English Protestant Church in the manner of a latter-day Constantine, the Roman emperor who halted religious persecution.88 Foxe’s dedication offers Carmarden an example of royal counsel magnified through the reused Eliza enthroned design. Because he lacked access to this valuable woodblock owned by Foxe’s publisher John Day, Carmarden commissioned a clever copy that differs from Day’s design in several important elements. Most significantly, the redesign lacks the figure of the pope, who is entwined in serpents at the base of the C initial in Foxe. The figures of Foxe, Day and Cecil vanish in the Bible version, as would be expected given the shift in auspices for this book from its Foxean exemplar. Close scrutiny also reveals that the artist responsible for the new illustration worked in mirror-reverse from copy in Foxe, since the queen raises her eyes to her left in Day’s figure and to her right in Carmarden’s. By modelling his queen on Day’s, Carmarden portrays Elizabeth as the victorious monarch whose tragicomic story of survival during the reign of Mary I greeted readers of Foxe.89 At the same time, the new title page supplements Henry in the readers’ minds by pointing away from Foxe’s discussion of Henry, which is ambivalent, toward his account of Elizabeth, which is full of praise.90 The Rouen title page incorporates elements from the Day woodcut design in order to portray Elizabeth as an enthusiastic supporter of the vernacular scripture in a martyrological tradition that anachronistically encompasses Henry VIII as its champion. *

*

*

As this review of selected sixteenth-century illustrated Bible title pages indicates, the iconography of the 1535 Coverdale Bible title-page border was neither insular nor static. Its design emerged as an extension of the ‘law and gospel’ pictorial motif that was characteristically but not wholly Lutheran in origin. This visual model was sufficiently dynamic as to undergo reuse on the titles of evangelical as well as Vulgate Bible editions. Insofar as each Bible emerged at a different political moment, the ‘gospel’ component of these texts was never straightforward or self-evident. Liesvelt shuns an overt political linkage in his usage of the motif, perhaps out of caution, while Vorsterman identifies an explicitly cautionary frame, through the inclusion of Cardinal Ximénez’ arms, in what was in effect an ambiguous project, including evangelical elements in a translation that aimed to be 88

89

90

On Constantine and Tudor royal iconography, see Richard Koebner, ‘“The Imperial Crown of this Realm”: Henry VIII, Constantine the Great, and Polydore Vergil’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 26 (1953): pp. 29–52. John N. King, ‘Fiction and Fact in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in David Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997), pp. 26–31. Mark Rankin, ‘Rereading Henry VIII in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments’, Reformation: The Journal of the Tyndale Society 12 (2007), pp. 69–102; Thomas S. Freeman, ‘“As True a Subiect being Prysoner”: John Foxe’s Notes on the Imprisonment of Princess Elizabeth, 1554–5’, English Historical Review 117 (2002), pp. 104–16.

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Figure 19.4: Queen Elizabeth I enthroned as Emperor Constantine, initial capital ‘C’, dedicatory preface to Elizabeth, in John Foxe, Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes. London: John Day, 1563, sig. B1r. STC 11222. Artist unknown. From The Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of The Ohio State University Libraries, shelfmark BR1600. F6 1563.

acceptable within the Roman-Catholic tradition. Carmarden displays the same eagerness to modify earlier uses of this device, and Coverdale was himself probably fully aware of the movement of this motif among various Bible editions. In the 1566 Rouen edition, this title-design is invariably Elizabeth’s, who may (or may not) receive it in the manner of her predecessors. What seems clear is that we need look not solely to Henry VIII and his policies when seeking understanding of the Coverdale title page iconography. We also need to examine the continental printers, publishers and woodcutters of France, Germany and Antwerp, who created and subsequently adapted the visual models for the Coverdale image.

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MOSES AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS ART Nigel Aston

M

oses was a scriptural figure of profound significance for eighteenth-century Christians. All traditions honoured his foundational place in the providential ordering that had brought the Jews out of captivity in Egypt and established them in Israel and, in so doing, prepared the way for the coming of the Messiah and the redemption of the world through Jesus Christ. In other words, any understanding of the Christian dispensation would be flawed and partial unless it was understood within a multitude of Mosaic origins and contexts. Moses was perceived and presented as a crucial intermediary between God and his people, a prophet, a lawgiver, a scientist, and a statesman. Above all, he was deeply favoured by God as a man who had encountered the divine presence personally and directly in a way that had no precedent before the coming of Christ (above all, at Exodus 24: 12–18). Moses, as a mere man, both anticipated Christ and pointed the way to Him. His divine commission was held by the majority of educated Christians to prefigure and be second only to Christ’s, even if there was no cross- and intra-confessional consensus on the exact compatibility of all their teachings. Moses’ most obvious legacy and relic of his meeting with Jehovah on Mount Sinai was the Ten Commandments that were central to the moral understanding of eighteenth-century Christians. Moses was a deeply inspiring and awesome presence in contemporary religious culture, not least because it was presumed that he was the divine penman, the author of the first five books of the Old Testament who was recounting at first hand in the Pentateuch the experiences of his people. He was thus uniquely blessed with a quasi-divine insight into the purposes of Jehovah. Even if God had withheld from his servant such knowledge that He judged inappropriate to disclose before the Incarnation of His Son in the world, careful scrutiny of the scriptures was believed to disclose indicators of God’s loving kindness and the Trinitarian dispensation. There was, then, a typological plenitude in the Pentateuch that it was the task of exegetes to place before the faithful, to set alongside the explicit teachings of Moses in the Decalogue. Of course, just as Moses’ status as a natural philosopher possessed of a fullness of knowledge unknown even to a Newton was unevenly asserted by apologists so there was no scholarly consensus on specific typological disclosures. Neither artists nor authors were therefore potentially going to be short of material either in depicting Moses personally or emphasising particular aspects of his mission. Indeed, he had been omnipresent in Christian iconographic schemes since the third century ad. It was conventional for artists either to depict Moses as the Law-Giver complete with the Tablets or, more dynamically, to show him as a central presence within an episode of

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Jewish history as recorded in the Pentateuch. Painting the discovery of the infant Moses in the bull rushes also had an enduring appeal, and acted as a counterpoint for both Catholics and Protestants to scenes of the Nativity of Christ. One distinctive aspect of painted or sculptural representations of Moses as a mature man was sometimes the use of a curious form of nimbus composed of two rays, or groups of rays. Some authorities traditionally held that God did not reveal Himself to Moses in all His glory, and that He only delivered to him such portion of the Divine Law as was especially applicable to the Jews; and that as the advent of Christ, though foretold, was not accomplished, the nimbus of Moses bears testimony to the other two Persons in the Godhead. This elaborate if satisfying gloss was a result of a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for shining at Exodus 34 when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the Ten Commandments.1 Mistaking particles of Hebrew, St Jerome had turned this into a description of Moses wearing a pair of horns. In sculpture these rays can indeed be curiously like horns. Thus the colossal statue of Moses by Michaelangelo on the monument to Julius II has them.2

Moses and Intellectual Life: Critics and Apologists Moses was a continuing major presence in European intellectual life, and yet a controversial, even unstable one. It was entirely possible for all sides to concur that, in his own time, he was an exceptionally learned man, indeed an enlightened one, acquainted with all the knowledge of the Egyptians as St Stephen had pointed out (Acts 7: 22).3 Religious reformers were apt to claim that aspects of his teachings essential to a correct understanding of the Christian faith had either been misrepresented or submerged, while the small but influential band of sceptics and free-thinkers denied his influence and mocked his teachings. It was Spinoza who had inaugurated this tendency in notoriously depicting Moses as a legislator in his own right, presenting his own law as divine law, so that people would comply with it from devotion rather than from fear.4 Spinoza called into question Moses’ authorship of the Pentateuch and some Christian exegetes were sympathetic to this interpretation. Controversy raged from the 1680s onwards, fuelled further by the French Oratorian, Père Richard Simon (1638–1712), for whom the Pentateuch was authored by inspired scribes of whom the last might well have been Esdras.5 Some radical Protestants more than flirted with this interpretation. The multilingual Genevan author and biblical scholar, Jean Le Clerc (1657–1736) used a historico-critical method to interpret scripture 1

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G. W. H. Lampe (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Bible: Vol. 2. The West from the Fathers to the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 301. F. Edward Hulme, The History Principles and Practice of Symbolism in Christian Art (London: Sonnenschein & Co., 1908), 56; Ruth Mellinkoff, The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 7, 8, 65, 72. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian. The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), esp. Ch. 4. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650– 1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). The background is nicely summarised in François Laplanche, ‘Les Eglises et la culture au xviie siècle’, in J.-M. Mayeur et al. (eds), Histoire du Christianisme. Vol. 9: L’Age de raison (1620–1750) (Paris: Desclée de Brouer, 1997), pp. 931–87, at pp. 977–8; Hans-Joachim Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritischen Erforschung des Alten Testaments (2nd edn, Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag, 1969), pp. 44–73.

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and originally denied the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. He retracted this position in 1693 but it still left him under the shadow of Spinozism.6 Worse was to come. In the clandestine, francophone philosophical treatise originating in the Netherlands c. 1680, the Treatise of the three imposters, which finally appeared in print in 1719, Moses figured with Christ and Muhammad as one of the quack founders of a monotheism.7 Few Enlightened figures were willing to be that extreme, though any opportunities for detraction or sly aspersions were not uncommonly taken and are classically on show in Voltaire’s sparklingly subversive presentation of Moses in his Pocket Philosophical Dictionary of 1764.8 Most of his fellow philosophes were quite comfortable with seeing Moses as a great legislator, a wise deist and an inventor of religion from pure utilitarian motives, ‘concocting the whole story of Mount Sinai with an eye to backing up a good ten-article moral code with supernatural sanctions’.9 Others, notably Diderot, turned Moses into the symbol of an epic, poetic culture that he heartily admired.10 Despite the criticism of Moses’ historic status as a founding father of the JudaeoChristian tradition, there was no shortage of theologians willing to endorse his continuing importance for the faith and expound it for believers. Within Gallicanism the abbé Antoine François (1698–1782) was a typically straightforward apologist who insisted (in the volume on the Old Testament of his four volumes Preuves de la religion de Jésus-Christ contre les Spinozistes et les deists (1751), that Moses was on a divine mission as his miracles attested, and that Christians should not hesitate to believe the books he had written were genuinely his.11 The point was made in a more sophisticated way by the most outstanding French Catholic apologist of the century, Nicolas-Sylvestre Bergier (1714–90), a writer who was not uncritical of the barbarous practices of the Old Testament Jews. Bergier contended that false miracles could always be exposed by empirical tests, that the prodigies of imposters were never as wonderful as those of true believers, and that the magicians of Pharoah had been able to imitate only a few of the true miracles of Moses. If it came down to a choice, Bergier suggested, as to whether the learned world was going to trust Buffon or Moses, the latter was much the safest wager.12 There was almost entire convergence between Roman Catholic and Anglican apologists in these expository strategies. Thomas Knowles, a Suffolk rector and client of the Hervey family at Ickworth, writing just before Bergier, had the same confidence both in the efficacy of Moses as a miracle worker and the significance of those powers:

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Maria-Cristina Pitassi, Entre croire et savoir: Le problème de la méthode critique chez Jean Le Clerc (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987). Georges Monois, The Atheist’s Bible: The Most Dangerous Book that never Existed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). ed. Theodore Besterman (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), pp. 317–21. William R. Everdell, Christian Apologetics in France, 1730–1790. The Roots of Romantic Religion (Lewiston, NY: EMP, 1987), p. 111. Leon Schwartz, Diderot and the Jews (East Brunswick, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981), pp. 118–21. Everdell, Christian Apologetics, p. 34. Le déisme refute par lui-même (Paris: Humblot, 1771), vol. 1, pp. 151–3; vol. 2, pp. 170–4, 180–259, cited in R. R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939), pp. 99, 165

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MOSES was the first, that we read of, who was commissioned to work miracles: All the Patriarchs who lived before him, however graciously assured of the protection of God, did yet only see visions, or dream dreams to convince them of his immediate favour and preference.13 Moses could even be presented as a Patriot, a disinterested servant of his people, ready both to lead them and take responsibility for their errancy as in his asking God to blot him out rather than direct his wrath at the Jews for making the golden calf (Exodus 32: 31–3). The Rev. Bartholomew Keeling, chaplain to Richard, first Earl Temple, might have had his patron’s brother-in-law, William Pitt the Elder, in mind, in writing: If ever any Man demonstrated an unfeigned Humility and Simplicity of Heart, a real Disinterestedness and Indifference to worldly Honour and Advantage, and a truly patriotick Love to any People, the Praise of these Qualities cannot be denied to Moses.14 One group of Anglican apologists, the Hutchinsonians, associated particularly with High Churchmanship and the University of Oxford, went much further and presented Moses and his writings as epistemologically fundamental to a correct understanding of the workings of the world and, if read correctly, containing implicit disclosures of a trinitarian ordering of things. Their distinctive and influential physico-theology was founded on a reading of Hebrew vowel points explicated in the copious writings of the self-taught John Hutchinson (1674–1737), notably his Moses’s Principia (2 vols, 1724, 1727). He set up Moses as a true natural philosopher vis-à-vis Sir Isaac Newton, a linguistic understanding and a selective scientific juxtaposition that that did not commend itself to a majority of other apologists and scholars. As one of his number put it: Here the veil is taken off Moses and the Prophets, the antient hieroglyphics are found equally pregnant with philosophical knowledge and the important truths of Christianity, and the reasons largely explain’d why that inestimable treatise the HEBREW scripture has lain so long wrapt in obscurity.15 Hutchinson and his followers were determined to use the figure of Moses as a way of correcting the contemporary tendency of Newtonians in divinity such as Samuel Clarke and William Whiston to place the defence of Christianity on natural religion, a road that, as far as Hutchinson and his followers were concerned, led only to rationalism and heterodoxy.16 The Hutchinsonians do not appear to have attracted artistic allies, partly no doubt because of the limited tradition for religious imagery in England. That said, the 13

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Thomas Knowles, Observations on the Divine Mission and Administration of Moses (London: printed for R. and J. Dodsley, 1762). Bartholomew Keeling, Moses’s Petition to be Blotted out of the Book of God, Explained and Vindicated from Misconstruction; and the Excellence of his Character displayed. In Three Discourses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1767), p. 64. An Abstract from the Works of John Hutchinson Esq.; Being a Summary of his Discoveries in Philosophy and Divinity (Edinburgh: R. Fleming, 1753), pp. 1–2. C. B. Wilde, ‘Hutchinsonianism, Natural Philosophy and Religious Controversy in EighteenthCentury Britain’, History of Science, 18 (1980), pp. 1–24; John C. English, ‘John Hutchinson’s Critique of Newtonian Heterodoxy’, Church History, 68 (1999); Nigel Aston, ‘Hutchinsonians (act. c. 1724–c.1770), ODNB.

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hundreds of images of Moses (usually in company with Aaron) the lawgiver to be encountered in parish churches flanking the reredos or contained in the chancel arch (discussed below) acted as expressive articulators of Christian values that the Hutchinsonians would have been the first to endorse. From a very different angle to the Hutchinsonians, William Warburton (1698–1779), later bishop of Gloucester, was equally responsible for ensuring that Moses was central to the controversial life of Anglicanism with his The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (1738–41). Moses was here being pressed into service to undermine the deist argument against the unique Judaeo-Christian revelation. Its doctrine of a future life had been made known to Moses by God but, Warburton insisted, was not made known by him to the Jews. They had no need of it since God intervened providentially in their everyday life. The doctrine of a future life was imparted over time although its presence as a full revelation was proleptically revealed through types and analogies in the Old Testament. Moses was thus defending the truth as revealed by God as he was the only promulgator of a religion in the ancient world that did not rest on the promise of a future state to attract adherents. And he had paid no heed to the popular Egyptian doctrine of a future state making his subsequent private conversion to it all the more remarkable. Warburton was insistent on scripture as a source of history and that the Mosaic legislation represented something radically new, even if many elements were derived from Egyptian practice.17 Warburton was a pugnacious author and The Divine Legation unleashed a torrent of pamphlets and more substantial productions contesting his claims and attempting to rescue Moses from his singular, paradoxical presentation. For his paradoxical pains – or extreme originality – Warburton found himself assailed from all points of the theological compass. An Arian theologian, Arthur Ashley Sykes, agreed that while Moses may not have mentioned the doctrine with any degree of explicitness, his acceptance of its doctrines was made clear by many of the sanctions of the Law as well as by the general spirit of the Old Testament. From the other angle, the non-juring deacon, William Law, insisted that Moses had never made a secret of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, one that had been known since the days of Adam. As far as he was concerned, the only secret to be kept by Moses was that Christ was the exclusive way to immortality.18 These recurrent exchanges over nearly two decades kept Moses in the mainstream of English intellectual life.

Moses and Catholic Art One might expect, given Moses’ importance in contemporary polemical theology, that paintings of scenes from his life could function alongside literary testimonies as a means of restating his importance against those who were trying to denigrate the importance of the faith by undermining its origins in his person. Within later Tridentine Catholicism, however, he turns out to be no more than an occasional subject in Counter-Reformation iconography. One explanation is that despite the prescriptive restrictions on what was and what was not acceptable subject matter in religious art according to the decrees of the Council of Trent, Catholics had access to a huge repertoire of hagiographical subject 17 18

Asserman, Moses the Egyptian, pp. 96–115. Brian Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England. Theological debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 174–82.

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matter that extended well beyond the scriptural. It was also one that had a strong feminine component not least in its Marian possibilities; an area that was out of bounds for Protestants. Moreover, the eighteenth century was a great age of saint making and new saintly subject matter was readily produced and marketed, for instance images of St John Nepomuk (canonised 1729) and St Vincent de Paul (canonised 1737).19 Of course, Moses in all his variety was no less honoured and acknowledged by Roman Catholics as central to the origins of the faith and the transmitter of the Ten Commandments. However, the centrality of eucharistic imagery in and around the altars of churches tended to leave reduced room for paintings of Moses (and indeed Aaron in the vicinity), and catechitical inculcation of the Decalogue was done without recourse to commandment boards. This was both a reflection of lesser expectations of literacy in rural Catholic areas and a slightly different emphasis in conveying a divinely ordained insistence that a monarch’s subjects behave dutifully and obediently to all those set in authority over them. Where there was an opportunity for linking the life of Moses to anticipations of the Eucharist in painterly schemes, Catholic artists and patrons were not unwilling to take it. The thirty-nine ceiling paintings Rubens had provided for the Jesuit church in Antwerp was a case in point and give an instructive instance of Tridentine typological understanding of Moses, a visualisation of concordances between the two dispensations. In the north gallery the starting point for the viewer was Moses in Prayer where the prophet’s raised arms, supported by Aaron and Hur, were emphasised. The pose acts as both a pre-figuration of the cross and an indicator of the gesture of the priest elevating the host during the mass. In this artistic scheme, Moses was clearly foreshadowing the institution of the Eucharist. The thirty-nine ceiling paintings perished in a fire in 1718, but survive in drawings, a rare Catholic example of Moses’ central place within a large-scale didactic, decorative scheme designed to celebrate and illustrate the Catholic faith, confirm the faithful and guide waverers in a city that had become a bastion of Tridentine values, defiant against its Protestant neighbours north of the Scheldt.20 Nevertheless, Rubens’s incorporation of Moses centrally into his decorative depiction of the Christian scheme of salvation had relatively few imitators. Another possible reason for this omission might be a faint strain of Mosaic criticism in Catholicism, especially in its Gallican versions. Moses was, after all, a Jew, whose descendants had culpably failed to embrace the new dispensation as revealed by Jesus Christ. This line of thinking was perfectly reconcilable with Catholic orthodoxy (interestingly, it does not seem to have commended itself particularly to Jansenists) but one can see how it inadvertently gave sceptics and free-thinkers an offensive opportunity they were not tardy to exploit. It is encountered in the Benedictine exegete Dom Antoine Augustine Calmet, whose Préface sur le Pentateuque et en particulier de Genèse (1720) reminds readers of the inferiority of the law of Moses to that of Christ. The ritualistic precepts can only be explained by divine condescension towards a vulgar people, but even the Decalogue ‘qui comprend en raccourci 19

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Eric Suire, Sainteté et Lumières. Hagiographie, Spiritualité et propagande religieuse dans la France du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2011). Anna C. Knapp, ‘Meditation, Ministry, and Visual Rhetoric in Peter Paul Rubens’s Program for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp’, pp. 157–81, in John W. O’Malley, SJ et al. (eds), The Jesuits II. Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006) at pp. 162, 166; Harvey Miller, The Ceiling Painting for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1968).

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tout le droit naturel et divin’ does not know the precept of God’s love, something only once mentioned in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy).21 Another celebrated critique was contained in the thesis of the abbé de Prades condemned by the Church authorities and the Sorbonne in 1751. It pointed out inconsistencies in the cosmogony attributed to Moses and denied that the Mosaic system envisioned rewards and punishments in an afterlife. These incendiary points made the enemies of the philosophes suspect that Diderot, the editor of the Encyclopédie, had ghost-written de Prades’s thesis.22 Eighteenth-century painted or sculptural representations of Moses are therefore, for various reasons, comparatively unusual in Catholic churches. There are some important exceptions, for instance the chiesa dei Gesuati or Santa Maria del Rosario in Venice, designed as a whole by Giorgio Massari (1726–35) principally as a thanks-offering for the defeat and containment of the Turkish threat. The building is filled with religious art showing a pride in the history and heritage of the Dominican order and its contemporary importance (the Patriarch of Venice laid the foundation stone on 17 May 1726 during the pontificate of a Dominican pope, Benedict XIII). The Venetian Dominicans wanted some of the best artists available and they were willing to pay: Tiepolo and Giovanni Maria Morlaiter advised the clergy on appropriate iconography and it was the latter who produced the large statue of Moses for the church in 1748–50.23 Other Catholic artists chose subjects from the life of Moses that were primarily episodic and narratorial rather than devotional and would be better fitted for private viewing spaces rather than ecclesiastical interiors. Pierre Subleyras (1699–1749) – ‘the greatest exponent of classicism in Rome during the first half of the eighteenth century’ and an artist often compared to Chardin24 – produced Moses and the Brazen Serpent and won the prix de Rome with it in Paris in 1727. It was a popular subject that had previously been undertaken by, amongst others, Poussin, Rubens and Le Brun. Subleyras had become a major presence in Rome by the 1740s, and was a great favourite of Benedict XIV, yet tellingly he did not return to this winning Mosaic theme again.25 Few later French artists did. Another Mosaic subject did commend itself to Roman Catholic commissions and that was the finding of Moses (Exodus 2: 1–10) in the bulrushes. Here could be found one theme about the great prophet and lawgiver that was neither sternly masculine nor emphatically didactic, one that could be better displayed outside a consecrated building. Beyond its typological relation to the birth of Christ its specific theological content was slight, but the touching behaviour of Pharaoh’s daughter in adopting the infant son of Levi had an unfailing appeal in every generation in precisely the same way that scenes of the Nativity did. Here was a subject that displayed both human compassion and maternal 21

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Calmet, Dissertations qui peuvent servir de prolégomènes à l’Écriture sainte (3 vols, Paris, 1720), vol. 2, pp. 21–2. Schwartz, Diderot and the Jews, pp. 46–7. Giovanni Maria Morlaiter: Ein venezianischer Bildhauer des 18. Jahrhunderts (Centro tedesco di studi veneziani = Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venedig. Studien, 1979). Edgar Peters Bowron and Joseph J. Richel (eds), Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century (London: Merrell in association with Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001), pp. 435, 439. Olivier Michel and Pierre Rosenberg (eds), Subleyras, 1699–1749 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1987), pp. 146–9; Philip Conisbee, Painting in Eighteenth-Century France (London: Phaidon Press, 1981), pp. 64–5; ed. L. Dimier, Les peintres français du xviiie siècle (2 vols, Paris/ Brussels: Les Éditions G. van Oest, 1928), vol. 2, p. 62, no. 32; 9.

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goodness that left artists plenty of scope for depicting the sumptuous attire of the ladies of the Egyptian court and contrasting it with the vulnerability of the infant Moses, naked in his carrycot of rushes. It is shown to good effect in Nicolas de Largillière’s (1656–1746) The Finding of Moses, a relatively rare Old Testament subject in this leading portraitist’s oeuvre.26 Its opulent colour scheme may well have been inspired by Rubens and the artists of the Venetian Renaissance.

Moses and Protestant Art By contrast with Roman Catholic reticence, Moses as a subject was decidedly popular with artists working within or for the Protestant churches. Such an identification is not as anomalous as it might have appeared a generation previously. Recent scholarship has argued persuasively that the majority of the Churches of the Reformation were by no means as averse to artistic presentation of religious subject matter as was once presumed and that historians have not looked hard enough for its manifestations.27 In Elizabeth I’s reign, representations of Moses occurred mainly in domestic settings (often alongside King David)28 but, by the early seventeenth century, as part of the Laudian programme that insisted that ‘the beauty of holiness’ was integral to the identity of the Church of England, artists were willing to put the great prophet back inside ecclesiastical interiors. Thus the glazing of Lincoln College chapel, Oxford, in 1629–31 by Abraham van Linge includes many typological references pairing Old and New Testaments. The Brazen Serpent of Moses on its pole is placed alongside the Crucifixion. The former was conventionally regarded as an antetype of the Crucifixion because of the Lord’s words to Moses about the Israelites who had been bitten by the fiery serpents: ‘it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live’ (Numbers 21: 8).29 By the early eighteenth century, so long as the conventions respecting scriptural associations were observed, the deployment of religious art in parish churches had had most of its controversial sting extracted. And Protestants were undoubtedly comfortable with Moses. He was a solid masculine presence, one that was thoroughly biblical, whose life offered many opportunities for legitimate painterly depiction. He was, one might say, the premier Protestant saint, above all a familiar presence in many Anglican and Lutheran parish churches set on one side against the Decalogue with his brother Aaron on the 26

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Donald A. Rosenthal, La Grande Manière. Historical and Religious Painting in France 1700–1800 (Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 1987), pp. 39–41. See also G. Pascal, Largillière (Paris: les Beaux-Arts, edition d’études et de documents, 1928). Nigel Aston, Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 2009); Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (eds), Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored. The Changing face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Tara Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Clare Haynes, Pictures and Popery. Art and Religion in England, 1660–1760 (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2006). Tara Hamling, ‘Guides to godliness: From Print to Plaster’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Essays in Interpretation (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2010), pp. 65–85, at pp. 74–6. Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation. Glory, Laud and Honour (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), pp. 63–4.

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other, the lawgiver and priest, emblems of the abiding power of state and Church from their Jewish beginnings, enjoiners of obedience. And ‘Moses’ was to be encountered in settings outside parish churches. Anglican artists were drawn to his early life. In so doing, they could both show themselves as ambitious history painters working on a canonical religious subject that would be acceptable to the sensibilities of their communion and chose a subject that, while being unquestionably historical, was calculated to touch the hearts of its viewers both men and, especially, women. The opening of a new Foundling Hospital at St Bartholomew’s in London in 1741 offered artists the chance to fill staircases and public rooms with the kind of paintings that would suggest the divine injunction to heal the sick and care for one’s neighbour. Artists, mostly from the Saint Martin’s Lane Academy, were tied in with the running of this hospital to the extent that many of them were elected to its governing body with the proviso that they would donate a work of art to the premises.30 Two of them chose affecting scenes from the early life of Moses to intersperse with the predominantly New Testament selections. Francis Hayman opted for The Finding of the Infant Moses in the Bulrushes and William Hogarth produced Moses Brought to Pharoah’s Daughter (1746). It may well be that the hospital’s founder and benefactor, Captain Thomas Coram, had a dictating hand in the subject matter, for when he presented the first seal of the Corporation from his own design at the first meeting of the General Committee of the Hospital in November 1739, he observed that the idea for the seal came to him from ‘the affair Mentioned in the Second of Exodus of Pharoah’s daughter and her Maids finding Moses in the ark of Bulrushes which I thought would be very apropos for a hospital for foundlings, Moses being the first foundling we read of’.31 Hayman’s offering to the Foundling Hospital has been judged inferior to Hogarth’s by some art historians; David Bindman finding it ‘a static and academic version of Poussin’.32 Hogarth’s work, however, is one of his greatest history paintings. Moses is about to be handed over from his natural mother, who is depicted in tears as she proffers her trembling son and receives her coins in part exchange. On the right-hand side of the canvas against heavy drapery reclines Pharaoh’s daughter, bejewelled and dressed in a flowing pastelshaded gown, placed against a background of loosely Egyptian temples and pyramids. But she looks tenderly and with beckoning, outstretched hand towards the child Moses, thus personifying the feminine figure of Charity with Moses an archetypal foundling himself. The most original piece of this superb work is Hogarth’s exploration of the child Moses’ obvious anxiety ‘through a brilliant manipulation of gesture, space and pictorial detail’.33 Of this painting, as has been well said of Hayman’s Poussin-esque The Finding of the Infant Moses in the Bulrushes [1746], the subject could hardly be more appropriate for the 30

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Brian Allen, Francis Hayman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 53–5. See generally D. T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); R. K. McClure, Coram’s Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Benedict Nicholson, The Treasures of the Foundling Hospital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). John Brownlow, The History and Design of the Foundling Hospital with a Memoir of the Founder (London: Warr, 1858), pp. 20–1, quoted in Allen, Hayman, p. 55. David Bindman, Hogarth (London: Thames & Hudson, 1981), pp. 119, 163–5, 176. Mark Hallett, ‘High Art’, in Mark Hallett and Christine Riding (eds), Hogarth (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), p. 206.

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Foundling Hospital.34 The subject and its setting permitted Hogarth to transcend what he later – and ungrudgingly – identified as one of the drawbacks of Protestantism from the painter’s perspective: Our Religion forbids, nay doth not require, images for worship or pictures to work up enthusiasm. Reading books is common now even amongst the lowest. Pictures and statues now are only wanted for furniture.35 For much of the 1750s the Foundling Hospital acted in effect as London’s art centre, functioning as both an institution for abandoned children and a site of polite assembly.36 And thus the empty walls of the Foundling hospital served as ‘a splendid opportunity to make propaganda for home-grown history painting’.37 Art works within a hospital or educational setting were never intended for veneration, but as didactic indicators of the values proclaimed in their host institution and recommended to staff and visitors. Hospitals were adjudged a safe setting to display religious art for Protestants where the moral and not the theological dimension was secured and supreme.38 Located inside a hospital and outside a consecrated place of worship, they could be instructive as well as edifying for a variety of audiences including inmates, visitors and governors. The scope for proposing and positioning religious art therefore increased appreciably as a result of these – in Protestant cultures certainly – additional locations becoming available. Though artists undertaking commissions for parish churches usually had to work around what could often be formulaic depictions of Moses as lawgiver for the chancel, there were occasional opportunities for placing paintings in consecrated buildings showing other episodes from the prophet’s career. Thus in 1716 Sir James Thornhill produced Moses and the Brazen Serpent for Dunster castle chapel in Somerset (now in the parish church).39 Thornhill had limited success as a history painter but times were more propitious at the latter end of the century for Benjamin West, the second President of the Royal Academy, and the most prolific religious artist working in a Protestant polity. No eighteenth-century painter depicted Moses on canvas more regularly. Most of these were painted for George III’s decorative scheme of revealed religion intended for the Royal Chapel at Windsor, an unfinished project on which West worked at intervals from 1779 to 1801. It was planned to function as a pictorial celebration of the genesis and advent of Christianity that was dear to the heart of the king, a pious Anglican who took his role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England immensely seriously. The 34 35

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Allen, Hayman, p. 119. William Hogarth, Apology for Painters, ed. Michael Kitson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), [Walpole Society, vol. xli, 46–111] p. 89. David H. Solkin, Painting for Money. The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 160. McClure, Coram’s Children, p. 97. Jeremy Gregory argues that the Foundling Hospital series ‘take faith and worship out of churches into the scenes of human society’ and are ‘part of an Anglican attempt to contrast its position with popery’, ‘Anglicanism and the arts: religion, culture and politics in the eighteenth century’, in Jeremy Black and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Culture, Politics and Society in Britain, 1660–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), pp. 82–109, at p. 87. Jeremy Barker, ‘Sir James Thornhill, Dorothy Luttrell and the Chapel in Dunster Castle’, Procs. of the Somerset Archaeological Society, 1997, pp. 125–6; Joan Brocklebank, ‘James Thornhill’, Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset, 30 (1975), pp. 73–82.

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overthrow of Christianity in France following on from the trial and execution of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette was received with a mixture of shock and amazement across Europe and pictorially restating the truths of revealed religion appeared one way of reaffirming its cultural superiority. Thus we have Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh (1796), Pharaoh and his Host lost in the Red Sea (1792), Moses and Aaron Sacrificing (c. 1795), Moses Showing the Brazen Serpent to the Israelites (1790), and Moses receiving the Laws (1784), the latter a central work in his plan for the chapel occupying a place of honour above a (much smaller) painting of the Last Supper situated immediately above the high altar. It seems likely that West received advice on the subject matter and arrangement of the programme from the king’s favourite bishop, Richard Hurd, who was himself the protégé of William Warburton.40 The Windsor scheme of religious paintings was never completed, yet Moses in conjunction with his brother (Exodus 4: 14) the high priest Aaron was a familiar figure to a high proportion of eighteenth-century Church of England congregations as a key ‘part of a visual rhetoric’.41

Moses and Aaron in Church These two great founding fathers of Israel were a popular and generally acceptable choice for pictorial representation in the east end arrangement of parish churches as flanking adjuncts to the painted Commandments, Apostles Creed, and Paternoster (Plate 47). At the Reformation it had become normative to position quite elaborate (and extremely visible) painted scripts of the Decalogue and Creed at the east end of Anglican and (to a lesser degree) Lutheran churches so that the congregation could read for themselves what the law of the new covenant required and the exact articles of their belief: the 82nd canon of the Church of England (1604) ordered the commandment on the east wall ‘where the people may best see and read the same’.42 These huge boards usually stood on either side of the holy table and, by the late seventeenth century were often objects of consummate craftsmanship and beauty, as local artists took advantage of one of the few opportunities for decoration in the average parish church. Nevertheless, their visual character was entirely subordinate to their verbal one: even adjacent to the holy table the Protestant could – literally – never lose sight of what his faith instructed and commanded him.43 The Commandments were to be recited by the whole congregation according to the 1552 Book of Common Prayer and the stipulation was retained in that of 1662 (Plates 48 and 49). More than that, where space and money allowed and patrons and vestries were amenable, the boards were now themselves flanked by separate paintings of, on one side, the lawgiver Moses and, on the other, his brother the great high priest, Aaron, both in their 40

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Helmut von Erffa and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 90, 102, 296–309, 577–81. Jerry D. Meyer, ‘Benjamin West’s Chapel of Revealed Religion: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Protestant Religious Art’, Art Bulletin, lvii (1975), pp. 247–65, at pp. 254–5. Haynes, Pictures and Popery, p. 131. Margaret Aston, England’s Inconoclasts. Vol. i. Laws against Images (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 362. Nigel Yates, Buildings, Faith and Worship. The Liturgical Arrangement of Anglican Churches 1600–1900 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), pp. 41–3; 104.

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manner foreshadowing Jesus Christ, who taught the New Law and was the One Priest of His New Testament. These paintings were often full-life and came to dominate many a chancel setting, being installed as early as 1676 at Ashburnham Church in Sussex. But the eighteenth century saw this decorative trend at its height as, for instance, at Sowerby in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where figures in coloured stucco of Moses and Christ, dated 1766,were provided in a remarkably theatrical display for what was, essentially, an Anglican ‘preaching box’. They were actually executed by a Catholic, the Italian Giuseppe Cortese (active 1725–78) working nearby for John Carr of York.44 The ascription of authorship to paintings of Moses and Aaron is problematic in individual cases and much research remains to be done in the reconstruction of provincial artistic milieu and markets. Those of c. 1730 at St Peter’s Church, Sudbury, Suffolk, can be definitely attributed to a local artist, Robert Cardinall, the former pupil of Sir Godfrey Kneller c. 1730.45 At St Peter’s Church, Nottingham, a comparable figure, Edward Dovey, painted the Last Supper with Corinthian columns in the foreground and a rich entablature that contained whole length figures of Moses and Aaron in priestly robes, over which were two angels presenting a portrait of Queen Anne. It was an impressive achievement reflective of what turned out to be the High Church Indian summer of the last Stuart, too fiddly and popish and too obviously an altarpiece for the taste of some in the city.46 Extraordinary care had to be exercised in the setting of Moses and Aaron, especially when as at St James’s, Clerkenwell, the figures at a newly installed altarpiece flanked a painting of the Holy Family elicited a press complaint in 1735 that it was ‘very nearly ally’d to Images, which we so justly condemn in the Church of Rome. And as such Fopperies are now growing upon us’ the Bishop of London should insist on its removal.47 Other contemporary critics wondered whether Aaron, the idolater who made the golden calf that the Israelites worshipped, was fit to be paired with Moses.48 Cardinall and Dovey were familiar presences within distinctive provincial circles but even where attribution and provenance is unknown the painterly quality of ‘Moses and Aaron’ can be exceptionally high. This is the case at St Michael & All Angels’ Church, Edmondthorpe, Leicestershire, where Aaron, wearing a jewel-encrusted chasuble and clutching a thurible across his breast faces a sterner, more ascetic Moses who, with a schoolmasterly intent, uses his rod to point the attention of villagers to the commandment board originally on his right. The provision of paintings of Moses and Aaron would often be the result of the benefaction of a local landowner, commonly the one in whose 44

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Derek Linstrum, West Yorkshire. Architects and Architecture (London: Lund Humphries, 1978), p. 187. They originally flanked the reredos at the east end but are now positioned over the north and south door. The Suffolk Mercury, or St Edmund’s Bury Post, 20 September 1725; http://www. sudburyhistorysociety.co.uk/Properties.htm See the pamphlet An historical account of the rise of image worship taken chiefly from Chemnitius his examen of the Council of Trent, in a letter to the parishioners of St. Peter in Nottingham, on the occasion of an alter-piece lately set up in that church (Nottingham, 1715); William Stretton, The Stretton Manuscripts (London, 1910), p. 147. Quoted in Terry Friedman, The Eighteenth-Century Church in Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 120–2. A Letter from a Parishioner of St Clement Danes to Edmund . . . Bishop of London, occasion’d by his . . . causing the picture [of a certain Saint] over the Altar, to be taken down; with some observations on the use and abuse of Church paintings, etc. (London, 1725).

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gift the living lay. Such was the case at St Martin’s, Allerton Maulevrer, Yorkshire, a church rebuilt in a restrained Romanesque style c.1745 by the Hon. Richard Arundell (1698–1758), brother-in-law of the Prime Minister, Henry Pelham, and himself successively Surveyor-General of the Office of Works, Master of the Mint, and Treasurer of the Chamber in the reign of George II. Moses and Aaron are placed together in one large canvas sited within the chancel arch with the Decalogue positioned in the centre of the painting and resting at ground level in relation to the two prophets.49 In the Allerton painting, as in so many contemporary renditions, Moses has horns of light flaring from his temples (Plate 50). The location of the painting, approximately where the rood loft had been, posed problems for a congregation wishing to view the Decalogue. As the incumbent of Heyford, Oxfordshire said in 1738, asking for the permission of the bishop to place the version in his church lower against the side wall, ‘It looks ill, darkens the church, and in its present situation is not legible.’50 The interaction between these figures and the Decalogue laid out adjacent to them can be complicated, but it was predicated on an implicit but dynamic link between the figurative and the linguistic in the worship of the Church of England that had a direct liturgical basis: the Anglican 1662 Communion service was begun by the congregation reciting together the words of the Ten Commandments and, at a later stage in the service, the Apostles Creed would also be read. The design can be viewed as a permanent visual supplement to the text and, as such, minimally problematic because of its profoundly scriptural nature. The presence of these iconic fathers of the Old Testament helped confirm the average Protestant’s sense of himself as belonging to the new Israel, a worthy successor to one constructed by Moses and Aaron, a member of a national family set apart by God to preserve a form of religion unsullied by man-made popish corruptions. Moses was in effect an honorary saint, fit for Protestant veneration, whose attributes were constructed so as to reflect the ideals of mainstream Anglicanism. Here was an intermediary between God and man that could be recommended safely to the laity, with the result that one can talk accurately of his cult in the Church of England. Moses, the divine lawgiver, and Aaron the high priest were also obvious emblems of the alliance of Church and state in Protestant polities with a pictorial suggestion of equality that did not always correspond to the reality. Their presence in the church adjacent to the Decalogue board gave further emphasis to the God-given nature of authority in society that was placed at the most holy space available, one that could not be missed by any resident, and vividly drove home the fundamental notion of obedience to the law both divine and human.51 They were, as one high Anglican insisted, the enemies of those twin sisters, schism and rebellion: Moses was perfectly convinc’d of this, when Korah and his accomplices made a disturbance in the congregation; the design of the Mutiny was pretended only against the Pontifical dignity, and the Episcopal Preheminence of Aaron; but the Prophet perceiv’d that they aim’d at the Civil Power through the sides of the High Priest; and 49

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The east window has glass by Peckitt of York. In the upper row are the figures of Moses with the Commandments (Mount Sinai), the crucifixion (Mount Calvary); also a displaced figure of Moses flanked by two cherubs. H. A. L. Jukes (ed.), Articles of Enquiry addressed to the Clergy of the Diocese of Oxford at the Primary Visitation of Dr Thomas Secker 1738 (Oxfordshire Record Society, 1957), p. 80. cf. Haynes, Pictures and Popery, p. 132.

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therefore, however they were cried up for the People of the Lord; he dealt with them as State-Rebels . . .52 Apologists would never concede that Moses was a law-maker in his own right. Warburton in A Divine Legation attacked the deist Lord Bolingbroke for trying to strip Moses of his divine mission thus turning him a mere human legislator and making God as well as Moses ‘deceivers’.53 Moses and Aaron often stood in direct relationship to another potent symbol of power visually represented in regalian churches such as the Church of England: the royal coat of arms, often displayed above the chancel arch or the entrance door. And what a parishioner saw and read as he or she faced the east end would be reinforced by the theme of obedience to divinely ordained authorities in Church and state so frequently proclaimed by the preacher in the pulpit. With Moses and Aaron depicted in a Protestant, liturgical context primarily as authority figures rather than holy men, the Church leadership knew that the possibility of parishioners venerating these iconic presences as Catholics might a saint was virtually non-existent. That Samuel Parr, ‘the Whig Dr Johnson’, in his alterations at Hatton Parish Church in the 1790s could include oil paintings of Moses and Aaron was a sure sign that even Whig clerics were comfortable with this dimension of religious art by the close of the eighteenth century.54 This customary combination of figures offers other overlooked insights into the practice of eighteenth-century Anglicanism. The presence of Moses and Aaron above the altar may be considered a very Judaising understanding of liturgical performance. Moses represented the law, Aaron, the prototype of the Christian priesthood, symbolised sacrifice and, indeed, according to the rubric, the cleric celebrating holy communion would be kneeling at the north end offering sacrifice as enjoined for the Aaronic priest in Leviticus 1: 11. The sacrificial aspect of the Eucharist that High Churchmen never abandoned was thus aligned with the Jewish sacrificial system. The holy table could in this light be considered an altar of propitiation, comparable to the ark upon which the High Priest sprinkled blood. Aaron’s fine vestments (described in Exodus 28) are also noteworthy, depicted as he invariably was wearing a mitre that no eighteenth-century Anglican prelate would ever have been seen in and carrying a thurible indicating propitiatory oblation and foreshadowing the good odour of Christ. That such tableaux of Moses and Aaron can be found in many Swedish parish churches, where they appear to have become almost a ‘standard feature’ of late seventeenth-/eighteenth-century church appointments, is striking, and yet the Swedes were as fierce as any other Lutherans in rejecting any sacrificial understanding of the Eucharist other than that of the ‘sacrifice of thanksgiving’ offered by the collectivity of the individuals present at it.55

Conclusion Moses was thus a central presence in the sacred spaces of eighteenth-century Anglicanism. But he appeared in a somewhat static, two-dimensional format in conjunction with Aaron. 52 53

54 55

The Scourge in Vindication of the Church of England (London, 1717), pp. 47–8. David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment. Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 46–9. Basil F. L. Clarke, The Building of the Eighteenth-Century Church (London: SPCK, 1963), p. 84. Cf. the discussion in Haynes, Pictures and Popery, p. 131.

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If it was Moses the lawgiver that artists working within Anglican and Lutheran ecclesiastical contexts wanted to capture then that was at least the supreme moment in the prophet’s life and they could be assured of a ready market for their canvases. This bias, of course, for reasons that remain to be thoroughly elucidated, disregarded the considerable number of episodes in his earthly life that would be familiar to scripture readers. Arguably, they were insufficiently didactic, too likely to entertain rather than instruct such readers if depicted in a religious setting. Outside that space, there was a surprising dearth of artists commissioned or otherwise minded to use an event drawn from his life or one of his character traits as a means of restating the Church’s teaching about the origins of salvation. The market for religious art was never strong in England yet this omission also suggests the disconnection between artists working in eighteenth-century Britain and religious apologetics, again for reasons that are not wholly certain. It remains to be established how far this was the case within German and Scandinavian Lutheranism.56 High festival honours were accorded to Moses, chief among the Jewish patriarchs and prophets, within the Orthodox Church yet Catholicism on the high tide of mature Tridentism managed to an appreciable extent without Moses. He was, so often, an artistic absence, overlooked as Catholic artists chose to embellish churches and convents with more recent and more human figures of sanctity. They were spoilt for choice in a way that was not the case for Protestant artists, yet, paradoxically, the Church seems to have viewed him as a foundational figure whose polemical uses in pictorial format for contemporary Catholicism were limited. God had made a revelation of Himself to man through this uniquely prophetic and holy Hebrew yet the artistic absences of Moses in eighteenth-century visual culture paradoxically suggest that the injunction against making graven images he received on Mount Sinai also managed to apply against himself.

56

Andrew Spicer, Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2012).

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BLAKE: TEXT AND IMAGE Christopher Rowland

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he details of Blake’s life may be briefly told. He was born in 1757 and died in 1827. He was married to Catherine, who in his later years was a collaborator in his engraving and printing. He lived most of his life in London with the exception of a few difficult years in Felpham, Sussex. Those years were difficult because they marked a time of great personal upheaval, when the ideas which formed his long illuminated poems, Milton A Poem and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, took shape. He was put on trial at this time for sedition, for comments he was alleged to have made to an English soldier. Blake was trained as an engraver and pioneered his own technique. This remained the basis of his art. After his move back to London, he lived in obscurity and on the fringes of poverty, indebted to the support of patrons like Thomas Butts, for whom he painted many biblical scenes. Only in the last years of his life was he discovered by a group of artists. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell the narrator tells us that ‘The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spake to them’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell = MHH12; E38). Admittedly, this satirical irreverent critique of religion should not be considered an infallible guide to Blake’s view of the Bible but two things stand out. First of all: the companionship of the writer and the biblical prophets. Blake thought of himself as a prophet just as they were. After all, ‘every honest man is a Prophet’ (Ann Watson14; E617). There is no modest submission to the Bible, for Blake is as much a critic as he is an enthusiastic devotee. But, it is a critical hermeneutic which is both self-involving and every bit as imaginative as the most daring medieval exegete (Carruthers 1990, 1998). The fact that there is only one extant fully illuminated example of Blake’s Jerusalem is a reminder of the cost, not only in terms of labour but also expense, which probably prohibited any further copies like it being made. The engraving and the printing together enabled this self-proclaimed prophet to match inspiration with production in ways which have rarely been equalled. The complexity of the words and the designs in Jerusalem should not stop us admiring this example of Blake’s art. Art, for Blake, was not just an aesthetic experience but part of what he termed the ‘mental fight’ needed to build Jerusalem. It was a religious and political activity and was part of the spiritual warfare in which he believed he was engaged, to awaken slumbering spirits from their adherence to state religion and the quenching of the Spirit and the exclusion of the poetic genius. Blake exemplifies as well as anybody the relationship between the Bible and the arts. The text of the Bible is a central part of his intellectual furniture, and yet his work, more

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than any, problematises the devotion to text. His juxtaposition of text and image from his earliest illuminated books right the way through to the acme of his engagement with both the Bible and art, in Illustrations of the Book of Job, evinces the way in which he refuses to allow the words to dominate. When he juxtaposes text and image, he allows both to have an effect. His words do not paint pictures nor do his images serve solely to illuminate texts. Both serve the intellectual counterpoint in a fugal complexity whose completion requires the viewer and reader to complete the hermeneutical circle, for (and in this the Bible is a supreme example) ‘what is not too Explicit as the fittest for Instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act’ (Letter to Trusler; E702). Blake hardly evinces submission to canonical texts. The publication of the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Enoch in 1820 called forth a remarkable sequence of pencil sketches, which complemented Blake’s earlier views of the Book of Genesis as a mythological anthology, the understanding of which was left incomplete at his death. The Bible was crucial for Blake’s poetic genius. It was his inspiration, as well as the object of his criticism, alongside Milton and Swedenborg. Blake’s relationship with the Bible parallels his relationship with Milton. According to MHH 6 (E35) Milton was on the right side without even knowing it. Milton’s words are so much part of Blake’s intellectual life that he can redeem Milton (which is what happens in Milton A Poem) and can write what Milton would have said if he had thought aright and not been encumbered by his cultural assumptions. Blake not only receives inspiration from tradition but also enables the redemption of that tradition from what he considers its worst excesses. There is great respect for what is received (Bloom 1997). The text from the past, therefore, is no mere object to be studied; it is to be taken in and the reader suffused with its potency. But what it once was, with its own distinctiveness, does not remain the same, for it has to become something else: the medium of a new form of creativity in the one who creates afresh. This is crucial for Blake’s understanding of the Bible. The biblical words have the potential for stimulating the imagination of the reader in ways that transcend the literal sense of the text. Like Milton’s words, they could be wrong and need to be corrected by the later interpreter. This essay examines three key areas of Blake’s engagement with the Bible. What is particularly distinctive about his work is the way in which text and image are juxtaposed, with the latter functioning not as some kind of decorative illustration of words but as the necessary counterpoint to words, often at odds with what is written, or stimulating new ways of construing the words. As we shall see, the acme of Blake’s attempt to juxtapose words and images is found in his Illustrations of the Book of Job where the image takes centre stage and words are relegated to marginal comment. A reader of Blake’s words will rarely find word painting, for the image is allowed to have its own effect and make its own contribution to the interpretative process. Indeed, Blake seems to exemplify the plausibility of Lessing’s thesis in ‘Laocöon’, that poetry and images have different effects, the former being engaged with in a diachronic way, the latter synchronically. The effect of ‘contrary’ media on the same page is crucial to Blake’s art. Some consideration will be given to a sample of the remarkable collection of biblical images that Blake produced for Thomas Butts and the way in which they illustrate his talent as a ‘visual exegete’. Finally, there will be some consideration of Blake’s position in the history of biblical interpretation. His hermeneutic is not that of the detached interpreter. He was himself involved with the text, understanding it, reacting to it, discerning its strengths and weaknesses and bringing out what he considered important about it.

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Text and Image The contrasting views of London in two short poems by Wordsworth (‘On London Bridge’ and ‘London’ of 1802) indicate the perspectives of Blake and Wordsworth. It is not as if Wordsworth is unaware of a problem, but the invocation of Milton and the breathtaking beauty viewed from an Olympian height contrasts with Blake’s altogether more sombre words and image in ‘London’ from Songs of Experience (Plate 51). Here the poet engages with ‘minute particulars’, captured in the image, a decrepit old man is led by a child, while another child takes the opportunity to warm itself from the flames. Here the eye of the poetic genius of the Spirit of Prophecy (All Religions are One, 5, E1) discerns the reality of life at close hand. But his inspiration is not Milton but Ezekiel. After all, for Blake, Milton is part of the problem and without redemption by the latter-day poetic genius he cannot be part of the solution. So the words of the Bible are the muse not Milton. The first stanza of ‘London’ shows how biblical words and images, from Blake’s favourite prophets, Ezekiel and John of Patmos, continue in his own time and place, to manifest the same spirit of prophecy which fired Ezekiel and John. Like Ezekiel who wanders through the streets of Jerusalem, the poet-prophet wanders through London, his Jerusalem, and ‘marks’ the sighs and abominations that are done in its midst. Like the mark of the beast in Revelation 13: 16, these marks consign the inhabitants of the latter-day Jerusalem to the woes brought about by hypocrisy and exploitation of unfettered trade and warfare, in which the victims are the young men and women and children who find themselves exploited, and both church and monarchy are deeply implicated. The poet-prophet must ‘mark’ the ‘marks’ of the beast in his midst (Thompson 1993: 179–94). This short poem is typical in another respect. Text and image stand side by side, here as a complement to each other but elsewhere in tension with each other. Blake never lets go of the fact that there is no neat dualistic solution. Rather there are opposites, contraries, in society, in humanity, in God even, and he refuses to allow one to negate the other. So, what is central to everything he depicted and wrote was acceptance of, and engagement with, the Other, divine, human or intra-human – ‘Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul’ (Songs of Innocence and of Experience, E7). He wrote the words ‘Opposition is true Friendship’ which are barely legible on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell plate 20, covered as the words are by the image of the Leviathan of negation and destruction. He used two ways of speaking of this, a biblical one, ‘the forgiveness of sins’, the other his own formulation, indebted to a tradition of theology which goes back to Jacob Boehme and even further back, that ‘Without Contraries is no Progression’. When one reads William Blake’s words in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘All Bibles or sacred codes. have been the causes of . . . Errors’, one is expecting to find a critique of the Bible, its form and contents, and Blake does not disappoint. What Blake wrote about Bibles and sacred codes applies to all holy books, but the Bible was his inspiration as well as the target of his criticism. Blake may have been influenced by the higher criticism and indeed his was the first English poetic reflection of the German higher criticism mediated by Alexander Geddes (McGann 1986; Goldie 2010). There is some truth in this. In Blake’s mythical re-telling of Genesis in The First Book of Urizen the surviving copies are, deliberately, at variance with one another in their colouring, and in the order of the plates, thereby challenging the notion of an authoritative text. The opening words of The First Book of Urizen indicate that it is about the origin of hierarchy: ‘of the primeval priests assum’d power When Eternals spurn’d back his religion,

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Figure 21.1: William Blake: The First Book of Urizen, Copy A, 8, 1794. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. And gave him a place in the north, Obscure, shadowy and solitary’ (E70). Its frontispiece shows the way in which divinely authorised texts have been handed down in a mechanical fashion, divinely endorsed, devoid of any contemporary inspiration or imagination. In The First Book of Urizen not only do we have a format akin to biblical pages familiar to Blake and his contemporaries, but also when we see the book we see it covered with undecipherable smudges (Fig. 21.1). Here there is both a tradition of transmission of the text but also of interpretation of the signs on the page, which, according to Blake, was in the control of ‘the primeval priests’. Blake’s various versions of The First Book of Urizen anticipated the questions raised by textual scholars about the transmission of text and its contents (Parker 2008). What are in effect rival versions of The First Book of Urizen, with different orders of pages and colouring, deliberately make it impossible to know which one is the ‘authorised version’. It is as if Blake wanted us to see that the task of interpretation is never done and the supposedly unproblematic holy book does not come with ready-made answers to life’s questions but also excludes two things, which Blake considered paramount. The first is the ongoing activity of ‘the spirit of prophecy’ or the ‘poetic genius’ in interpreting not only texts, but events and individual existence. Blake implicitly recognises the importance of this at the very start of the book. Indeed, after the opening words, the poet pleads with the Eternals: ‘Eternals I hear your call gladly, Dictate swiftwinged words, & fear not To unfold your dark visions of torment’ (E70). Here the poet-prophet, like Isaiah or John on

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Figure 21.2: William Blake: Europe A Prophecy, 12, Copy A, 1794, 12. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Patmos, accepts the call to write down the dark visions and probe the nature of religion and its negative effects. The imitation of divine monarchy in human polity is a particular target of Blake’s criticism in the 1790s. Blake here (Fig. 21.2) depicts a bat-like divinity with, in all probability, the facial features of George III, an open book of brass on his lap and a papal tiara (Europe 10; E64). The text accompanying the image echoes the language of The First Book of Urizen and speaks of the ‘brazen Book That Kings & Priests had copied on Earth’. Blake’s pungent marginal comments on his copy of the Essays of Francis Bacon, James I’s Lord Chancellor, written four years after Europe A Prophecy, suggest that he would not have approved of the extravagant address to ‘the most high and mighty prince, James’ in the preface of the KJV. For example, commenting on Bacon’s words, ‘The motions of factions under Kings, ought to be like the motions of the inferior orbs; which may have their proper motions, but yet still are quietly carried by the higher motion of “primum mobile”, Blake quipped waspishly, ‘King James was Bacons Primum Mobile’ (Annotations to Bacon E632: Adams 2009). At one point he wrote the one word ‘blasphemy’ to comment on Bacon’s ‘He then that honoureth him [the King] not is next an atheist’ (E624). As for a king being a mortal god on earth, Blake comments, ‘O Contemptible and Abject Slave!’ In his writing and images about monarchy, human and divine, Blake manifests an antipathy to the obsequiousness which pervades the ideology of monarchy and royalty, and the sanction

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which theology gave to kings and priests. He will have none of ‘the divine right of kings’, so beloved of Stuart monarchs. Part of the way in which Blake wanted to get people to understand things differently was through prophecy. That did not mean predicting what would happen, but understanding more deeply what was going on and telling the truth as one saw it. ‘Every honest man (and woman) is a prophet’, he wrote. Blake prophesied about the nations, about America and Europe in particular. In both cases he was writing after the event. Prophecy meant helping people to understand the deeper meaning of history, the repressive reaction of the nascent British empire to the American colonies, in America, on the one hand, and the resistance of the ancien regime in Europe to change, on the other, which was in fact being overtaken by revolutionary events in France after 1789 when Blake produced Europe. The optimistic tone America A Prophecy represents is evoked in Plate 6 (E53 (Fig. 21.3)). Here we find a string of allusions where biblical eschatological passages combine to evoke that sense of a new age, a new beginning, a sense of being part of a ‘visionary republic’ which is so deeply rooted in American culture, indebted to the millenarianism of English religion in the seventeenth century.

1. The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations; 2. The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up; 3–4. The bones of death, the cov’ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry’d. Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening! 5. Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst; 6. Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field: Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air; 8. Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing, Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years; 10. Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open. And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge; 12. They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream. Singing. 13–14. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night; 15. For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.

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Image: Luke 21: 28 Line 1: Rom 13: 12; Isaiah 21: 11–12 Line 2: Matthew 28: 2; John 20: 5 Lines 3–4: Ezekiel 37: 5, 6 Line 5: Jer. 30: 8 Line 6: Luke 17: 35 Line 8: Isaiah 49: 9 Line 10: Acts 16: 26 Line 12: Genesis 19: 26 Line 13–14: Rev. 6: 12; 9: 2; 21: 23 Line 15: Isaiah 11: 6; 65: 25

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Figure 21.3: William Blake: America A Prophecy, Bentley Copy M, Plate 6, 1793. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

But Blake’s optimism about building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land is tempered by a realistic grasp of the forces ranged against the fulfilment of that hope. As the years went by, and in the light of the way in which revolution in France turned out, Blake came to see that a neat equation of revolution with human good was both naïve and dangerous, and his greater engagement with the less optimistic side of the biblical story shows him wrestling with this. In an image from Jerusalem (pl. 76, Plate 53), we find Blake resorting to the cruel death of Jesus at the hands of an alliance of Rome, the colonising power, and a local elite. In a way which is much influenced by the Gospel of John, the cross is seen not as a moment of defeat but of glory, and a glory which humanity can share. Before the cross stands Albion, the embodiment of Britain, whose redemption Blake wrote about in Jerusalem. Redemption meant, to use Blake’s terms, the annihilation of selfhood. Borrowing imagery which he took from the Pauline letters Blake saw salvation as involving a change in attitude and practice, which means dealing with that mix of the habitual and conventional, and the preservation of that which makes us comfortable, in favour of a position which is altogether more risky and open to others. Such a new outlook Blake summarises as the practice of the forgiveness of sins. The image at the foot of the previous page (pl. 75, Plate 52), which immediately precedes that of the crucified Christ, is based on Revelation 17. Jesus breaks through

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death and hell in the teeth of the aggression of Babylon the Great, the Abomination of Desolation, Religion hid in War, to open eternity in time and space. But Jesus, who acted from ‘impulse not from rules’, impelled by his ‘Poetic Genius, the Spirit of Prophecy’, executed by crucifixion fell foul of the wielders of political power of his day, the hierarchy and the Roman colonial governor, at a time when, as in Blake’s own day, ‘The Beast & the Whore rule without controls’ as he prefaced his marginal comments to Richard Watson’s Apology (E611). Following a long tradition of political interpretation of apocalyptic images, based on Daniel and the Book of Revelation, we find the oppression linked to the wielders of political and economic power of Blake’s day. The biblical vision is applied to contemporary political realities as he depicts the heads of the beast as contemporary sevenfold military, royal, legal and ecclesiastical powers. The Illustrations of the Book of Job are the product of Blake’s last years. The ideas recapitulate familiar themes from Blake’s pre-1800 work, such as the critique of divine monarchy, the emphasis on the divine in the human, and the challenge to convention, which comes through inspiration and vision. In the Illustrations Blake uniquely commented on a complete biblical book, though it is a very distinctive form of biblical commentary, in which the epitome of the subject matter of Job is found in twenty-one images, surrounded by biblical references. Here, rather than images illuminating text, as almost everywhere else in the Blake corpus, words have a subordinate position to the centrally placed image. The twenty-two plates epitomise Blake’s expressed desire to enable the Spectator  to Enter into these Images in his Imagination ‘on the Fiery Chariot of Contemplation of his Contemplative Thought if he could Enter into Noahs Rainbow or into his bosom or could make a Friend & Companion of one of these Images of wonder which always intreats him to leave mortal things as he must know then would he arise from his Grave then would he meet the Lord in the Air & then he would be happy’ (‘Vision of the Last Judgment’, E559–60). Thereby the Spectator is encouraged to make connections with other parts of the Bible, with other images, and with life-experiences. Blake reads the Book of Job as an account of the way vision can ‘cleanse the doors of perception’ of a conventionally religious man (MHH 14, E39). While it is easy to see why some commentators have considered the Illustrations an excuse for Blake to parade his theological interests, I believe we find in the series evidence of a real attempt to make sense of the interpretative problems posed by the book, for example, the relationship between God and Satan. Blake made small changes to the KJV, most of them insignificant, some which may indicate Blake’s increased knowledge of Hebrew and some which are of greater moment. In the first image (Fig. 21.4) we see that Job and his wife are surrounded by their children, in pious pose, with books open on their laps. The musical instruments are on the tree. All seems to be well, but it is a time of spiritual exile for Job and his family. In the final image the books have gone and the instruments are off the tree (cf. Psalm 137: 3–4; ‘By the Waters of Babylon’ (Fogg Museum, 1806, B466). Beneath the image on the left is a quotation from the Book of Job: ‘Thus did Job continually’, which may sound a note of reproach about the habitual, and unreflective, nature of Job’s religion. In the middle of the altar is Blake’s version of words from 2 Corinthians 3: 6: ‘for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life’ and 1 Corinthians 2: 14: ‘they [the things of the Spirit of God] are spiritually discerned’. The words on the altar in Figure 21.5 are from Hebrews 10: 6: ‘In burnt offerings for sin thou hast had no pleasure’ (KJV: ‘In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure.’) Job has moved away from a religion of sacrifice. In an

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Figure 21.4: William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 1, 1825. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Figure 21.5: William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 21, 1825. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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Figure 21.6: William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 11, 1825. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

earlier plate Blake picks up on the contrast between Job who prays for his friends, whilst the friends still continue in their religion of sacrifice (Job 42: 8–10) . Job’s agony elicited one of Blake’s most graphic and disturbing images, seen here in Plate  11 from The Illustrations of the Book of Job (Fig. 21.6). Job’s agony and spiritual journey, and the relationship of God and Satan, offered Blake the opportunity to explore not only the ‘contrary states of the human soul’ but also the contraries in the divinity as we  see in Plate 11 (Fig. 21.6). The terrifying apparition in Job’s nightmare appears, according to the caption, ‘as God’ and now persecutes Job. This being has the characteristics of the divinity seen in previous images but now intertwined with a serpent and with a cloven hoof. The figure points with his right hand towards the tablets of commandments, while below Job, other figures stretch up trying to pull him down into the fiery inferno. In the main caption Blake paraphrases Job 7: 14 which in the KJV reads ‘Then thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions.’ We are not told in the Book of Job the content of Job’s night visions, but Blake exploits the space left by the text in his image. Below it there is a long quotation from Job 19: 22–7 which stays pretty close to the KJV. Blake seems to apply the words ‘Why do ye persecute me as God’ (Job 19: 22) to the terrifying apparition. But in the previous verse in the KJV (Job 19: 21), it is not God to whom Job pleads but his friends, whom he asks to have pity on him. Blake replaces KJV’s ‘Why do ye persecute me as God’ by ‘Why do you persecute me as God’. In the context of the engraving as a whole, it looks like an address to the hybrid being of his nightmare, who ‘as

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Figure 21.7: William Blake: ‘The Garden of Love’ from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1789–94. Copy L. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

God’ is persecuting Job. God and Satan together are both implicated in Job’s persecution, captured in Blake’s image of Job’s nightmare experience by the being which possesses both divine and diabolical characteristics. In this crucial engraving in the Job series we see Job’s agony as he confronts the shortcomings of an understanding of God who rewards righteousness by prosperity and unrighteousness by punishment, and discovers that the neat separation of the world into joy and woe, God and Satan does not do justice to experience. So his experience capped by his night visions brings him face to face with one of the errors taught by ‘Bibles and sacred codes’ as he sees God and Satan intertwined and will come to see that God is not some far enthroned divinity but God with us, the Divine in human. Compared with the later engraving, in the watercolour Hebrew letters are clearly visible. They start with the words that end the commandment to honour father and mother, ‘which the Lord your God giveth thee’ (‫ אלהך נתן לך‬Exodus 20: 12), and then go on to the commands, ‘Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not steal’. So, in the middle of the terrifying vision of judgment is an offer of the divine gift at the very moment Job is made to face up to his failure to keep his obligations. According to ‘The Garden of Love’ (from Songs of Experience, Yale Center, Copy L (Fig. 21.7)), the church now occupies the space of the garden of love, and restriction and death take the place of joy and desire. Over the doors of the church are the ominous words ‘thou shalt not’, echoing words from the Decalogue (Exodus 20: 4, 7, 12–17). Later in the series in Plate 17 Job sees the God who is with us appearing to himself and

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Figure 21.8: William Blake: Illustrations of the Book of Job, Plate 17, 1825. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

his wife (Fig. 21.8). Blake glosses his depiction of the theophany by Job 42: 5 in a slightly emended version of the KJV ‘I have heard (WB omits ‘of’) thee by (WB has ‘with’) the hearing of the ear but now my eye seeth thee’. Once again, as in Plate 11, Blake has used his own imagination to depict what Job sees of God, the tradition of whose existence and demands Job had hitherto accepted on hearsay. This is the moment in the series at which the contents of the books, which we have seen open on the laps of Job and his wife, and the Almighty, earlier in the series, can now be seen by the reader. But the books are situated not in the centrally placed image but around it. From the marginal texts from the Gospel of John we discover that the one whom Job and his wife have seen in the theophany is none other than Christ, the divine in human.

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Picturing the Bible From 1799 to 1805 Blake painted two series of biblical subjects for Thomas Butts (Bindman 1977: 115–31) one set of tempera and one of watercolour. Butts became a great supporter and friend. The pictures chosen here can only give a sample of the range of biblical subjects that Blake painted. The series show Blake’s interests: the visionary and the apocalyptic, for example, focusing on the Book of Revelation. There are other clusters around the birth and infancy of Jesus, Christ and children, the Passion and Resurrection, Christ as the fulfilment of biblical prophecy, and an insistence on the spirit of mercy and forgiveness (Bindman 1977: 125; Butlin 1981 Texts: 336). This remarkable collection of biblical images is probably rivalled only by Rembrandt in its comprehensiveness, stretching as it does from Genesis to Revelation. We fail to do justice to the richness of Blake’s theological contribution unless we take seriously his images. Like Rembrandt before him (though Blake was no enthusiast of the Flemish painter) what we find in so many of his images is a distillation of what Ruskin wrote about, images as a medium whereby ‘you may be able to set down clearly, and usefully, records of such things as cannot be described in words’ (Elements of Drawing, 1 in Cook and Wedderburn 1903–12: 15.13). Blake frequently does this brilliantly. One example must suffice which characterises Blake’s ‘visual exegesis’ (O’Kane 2007). The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins (B480, Plate 54) at first sight offers a simple contrast between the two sets of women reflecting the comparison in the parable. But Blake shows us what a close reader he is of the biblical text. He picks up the distinctive Matthean eschatological symbol of the angelic trumpet from Matthew 24: 31, absent in the versions of the eschatological discourse in Mark 13 and Luke 21 (though it is to be found in 1 Thessalonians 4: 16, which is often thought to be dependent on tradition lying behind the Gospel of Matthew). The contrast at the centre of the image picks up something central to Blake. ‘Contraries’ reflect his life-long struggle with dualism, in which Blake challenged the notion of one state negating another (Jerusalem 10: 7–16). His work sets out to ‘Shew[ing] the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (Songs of Innocence and of Experience, E7, Plate 55). ‘Contraries’ are necessary to Human existence (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 3, E34). This is what we find in this image. On the one hand, there is a degree of homogeneity about the colour and demeanour of the wise virgins, in. In this they are similar to the prim and proper, but ultimately misguided, Comforters, especially in Plates 7 and 10 of Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job. By way of contrast, the foolish virgins are depicted in different and more arresting colours, and in different poses, as they lament their lack of preparedness. The reveille of the last trump, with the Gothic tower and spire suggesting the celestial city, is a wake-up call (Matthew 25: 13) encouraging the viewer to cleanse the doors of perception and comprehend the contrary states of the human soul. So, the image reflects Blake’s determination to show that every person has contrary forces at work in them. Blake inveighed against dualism, but inspired as he was by the Bible, he could not get a form of dualism, namely, that way of seeing things by way of contrasts, out of his intellectual system (Damrosch 1980). Indeed, it became central to his thought. He did, however, reject the way in which in the Bible contrasts were used to negate – holiness over profanity, clean and unclean, God over idols, and elect over reprobate – for these tended to negation rather than embracing contraries. Rather than one quality cancelling

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Figure 21.9: William Blake: Abraham and Isaac, 1799–1800. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

out the other, we find in Blake’s work a dialectic at work in human existence, between energy and reason, and the Prolific and the Devourer (Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 3 and 16, E34 and 40). So, Blake never frees himself from the inspiration of the Bible and its dualistic contrasts but makes of them something different. Indeed, his own artistic work itself encapsulates the attempt to channel the infinite drive of energy into clearly defined, sometimes tiny, images and words, which can together communicate the Poetic Genius. Thus will be ‘Eternity . . . in love with the productions of time’ (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 7; E36). The slaughter in the war with France and the death of children did not go unnoticed by Blake, who found resonances with the story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his son Isaac, as did Wilfred Owen a century or so later. Down the centuries it has been an important story for both Jews and Christians, offering a model of righteous suffering and the willing sacrifice of the son by the Father. But this can mask the terrible nature of the story. This is nowhere better exemplified than in ‘Abraham and Isaac’ (Yale Center for British Art, c. 1799, B57 (Fig. 21.9)), where Abraham’s dilemma and Isaac’s contrasting clarity about the option his agonised father should take is portrayed. The chilling instructions for the burnt offering, symbolised by the knife in Abraham’s left hand, indicates what a gruesome fate was in store for Isaac. The terrible sacrifice of a child in obedience to the dictates of religion particularly disgusted Blake. He regarded Abraham as a Druid, a group which throughout his writings is seen as guilty of child sacrifice (e.g. Jerusalem 27: 30–3, E172; 65: 63, E217). In the Bible this is linked with the worship of Moloch (Lev. 18: 21; 20: 2–5;

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2 Kings 23: 10; Jer. 32: 35), a deity which for Blake was a terrible symbol of the sacrifice of children through war (M37: 20–5, E137–8).

Blake’s Hermeneutics William Blake was mounting his critique of the Bible at the same time as what we now know as historical criticism was emerging, but Blake does not obviously fit into that development, while indicating his sympathy for it in his annotations to Richard Watson’s Apology (E611, Adams 2009). Hans Frei, in his epoch-making book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative has examined the wider developments in biblical hermeneutics in the late eighteenth century. Blake’s reading of the gospels betrays little sign of the influence of emerging historical criticism. In one respect Blake was like H. S. Reimarus, the pioneer of the quest for the historical Jesus (Schweitzer 1911), as he saw Jesus as the leader of an iconoclastic challenge that seemed to fail (‘The Everlasting Gospel’ E523–4), and he seems to have shared the suspicion of miracles held by some of his contemporaries (E617). Crucially, unlike Reimarus, however, Blake did not need to resort to the hermeneutics of suspicion to maintain his view of Jesus as a radical dissenter who ‘died as an unbeliever’. Rather, like so many non-conformist interpreters before and since his day, he read the gospel narratives as realistic portraits of the events surrounding Jesus and found in them the picture of a non-conformist Jesus who offended hierarchy and political authorities and paid the penalty for his non-conformity (we hear echoes of this in ‘The Everlasting Gospel’, E 518–24). Blake’s attitude to the Bible is in one way suspicious. Thus, he seems quite prepared to assert that some of the Hebrew Bible may have been propaganda and he refuses to accept that its contents, or, better, the construal of its contents by church and state, should be regarded as binding on society. He regarded the Bible as a motley collection of often confusing ideas and irreconcilable tensions whose reduction to a theological system or a religion of particular kind of moral virtue had not always influenced for good the fabric of human society. It is important to stress that Blake’s unease with regard to the Bible is rooted not only in the appropriation of it in ecclesiastical and political life but also in the effects of its literal sense. For example, Blake’s explicit and implicit critique of divine monarchy in the Bible depends less on any kind of historical reconstruction than on a reading of the text as its stands, linked, of course, with a keen appreciation of the use made of the Bible by those in power. The Bible provided Blake with the language and intellectual stimuli to extend its themes and create for himself Bible-like myths. His own mythical world was probably created in order to offer a more telling critical perspective on the dominant readings of the Bible in the England of his day. His illuminated books are a continuation of the biblical frame of reference. Put simply: in his myth the prophet-figure on the one hand, and creator/law-giver on the other, vie with each other to illuminate the nature of the distorted fabric of human society and individual personality, and offer a narrative resolution in which an equilibrium is restored. Blake’s ‘Bible-like’ work is part of a deliberate biblical hermeneutic in order to challenge what he perceived to be a dominant and arid literalism and a moralistic religion which quenched the Spirit of Prophecy and the Poetic Genius (cf. All Religions are One, Principle 5, E1). Unlike historical scholarship, Blake was no advocate of the importance of detachment, however. Self-involvement in reading the Bible was crucial for him, even if his

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exegesis means in effect a rewriting of the bible and the rendering of its story in new and (one supposes, he hoped) more accessible forms. He shared Coleridge’s emphasis on the involvement of the interpreting subject, and Coleridge’s words in Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit that ‘in the Bible there is more that finds me than I have experienced in all other books put together’ would surely have struck a chord with Blake. Whether in his depictions of biblical scenes, or in his own complex mythology, the Bible enabled Blake to plumb the depths of ‘what is Grand’ and ‘not too Explicit’ and had a special power to ‘rouze the faculties to act’, ‘addressed’, as it was in Blake’s view, ‘to the Imagination . . . & but mediately to the Understanding or Reason’ (E702). In sum, for Blake the Bible (and day to day that meant the KJV) was ‘The Great Code of Art’. Read aright the Bible might achieve transformation of personal and social lives, but Blake seemed to be offering his own illuminated books as a necessary complement to the Bible, which no longer adequately functioned in the way Blake believed it should. To some extent, Blake’s own works stand in the place of the Bible as an alternative revelatory text (as he put it) to ‘rouze the faculties to act’. While his approach places Blake with the premoderns, in his view of the existential potential of the Bible, the way in which he allows its narrative to frame his own prophecy, and his questions about its capacity to do its job, place him on the side of the moderns. We can see him allowing the biblical text to offer the inspiration for a new poet-prophet’s vocation in ‘London’ from Songs of Experience. It exemplifies Frei’s judgement that the biblical text offered an interpretative space, which one might inhabit to inform one’s judgement. Blake identifies himself with Ezekiel and John but inhabiting the biblical text stimulates new ideas and understanding in which the realities of everyday life of the environment in which the poet-prophet lived and worked offered components of the poet’s mental furniture. The meaning of the prophecies of Ezekiel and John are not left unaffected by the later prophet’s context or the ‘poetic genius’ at work in him. If Blake inhabits the narrative world of the Bible, he re-arranges the furniture of that world in new and creative ways. Ezekiel’s preoccupation with pollution and holiness is left behind reinterpreted, just as John’s Lake of Fire becomes cathartic rather than punitive, without any word of explanation or apology for what he was doing. Blake’s work sits uneasily in the history of the emergence of modern biblical hermeneutics. Blake was opposed to the English Deist tradition about which Frei had much to say, with its emphasis on historical reference and the quest for the intention of the author, and the empiricist tradition in philosophy. John Locke and Francis Bacon (and Isaac Newton) often function as caricatures rather than being fully understood. Blake’s approach to the Bible is not without antecedents. He was part of a tradition of biblical interpretation deeply rooted both in English non-conformity and in aspects of Radical Reformation hermeneutics, which is both humanistic and mystical. It is humanistic in that it presupposes a universal possession of the divine spirit, awareness of which is to varying degrees independent of the ideology of church and state. It is mystical in the sense that it is indebted to the influence of the legacy of the Reformation spiritualists whose work was available in English translation from the seventeenth century onwards. The priority given to the interpreting subject has a long history in late medieval and early modern engagements with the Bible, a tradition of interpretation which ran parallel with the mainstream Reformation position which Frei outlines. Of all the writers on the Bible discussed by Frei, Blake’s position seems to me to be closest to that of Herder who also searched for the ‘poetic spirit’, which those with the required empathy may discern in ancient texts. As a critic of the Bible, Blake too saw himself as the arbiter of the discernment of the true poetic genius,

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in the biblical text or elsewhere. What is more, Blake explicitly states the continuity between his own creative mythology and the apocalyptic symbolism of Revelation. John on Patmos already saw the images and used the myth that Blake himself was later to use: ‘John Saw these things Reveald in Heaven/On Patmos Isle & heard the Souls cry out to be deliverd/He saw the Harlot of the Kings of Earth & saw her Cup/Of fornication food of Orc & Satan pressd from the fruit of Mystery’ (Four Zoas 8: 597–620, E385–6). Blake’s mythical world, inspired as it was by the Bible yields a textual reality which is parallel to, and functions similarly to, the Bible. We saw when we were considering Blake’s visual hermeneutics that he sought to invite the reader or viewer into his imaginative world. Blake believed himself to be in continuity with what he called the ‘spirit of prophecy’ or ‘the poetic genius’. He believed this lay at the basis of all religion and that, as he put it in All Religions are One ‘the Jewish and Christian Testaments are An original derivation from the Poetic Genius’ (E1). Blake entered the world of the Bible, found its ideas inspiring and liberating and returned to his situation convinced that merely speaking in the Bible’s words would not allow its word of life to be heard by his contemporaries. He believed that other strategies – image as well as text pre-eminently – were needed to enable the Word, hidden within the words, to speak. His art, his poetry and his life as an engraver, were all directed to this end. In many ways he was a preacher in word and image who had a grasp of what he thought the Bible was about, which prioritised some elements, like the forgiveness of sins and downplayed others, such as the violence in the Conquest narratives or the notion of divine monarchy. His existential engagement with the Bible, especially the life and teaching of Jesus, represents a distinctive exegetical contribution of this remarkable Christian. We might like to see him explaining in more detail how the fruits of imagination are taken up by reason, which can then build on the ideas generated, as he put it in MHH. Nevertheless, however wild the images and strange the texts, we are confronted by a person who allowed technique to match invention and imagination in a remarkably creative enterprise. In it one finds a kind of praeparatio evangelii for his contemporaries so that they may learn to engage afresh with a Bible which had become a bastion of dogmatic moral virtue and an ancillary to the ideology of a conservative church and state. John Ruskin’s words about his own engagement with the Bible aptly summarise Blake’s also: My good wiseacre readers, I know as many flaws in the book of Genesis as the best of you, but I knew the book before I knew its flaws, while you know the flaws, and never have known the book, nor can know it. (Fors Clavigera, 1874, in Cook and Wedderburn: 28.85) The contents of the Bible were for both an inspiration and an object of criticism. The Bible offered a frame of reference, however much they chaffed against its constraints – how else can one explain Ruskin’s Unto this Last or Blake’s Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion? Blake was a peculiar kind of biblical critic. He lived through some of the defining years of the emergence of modern study, and there are some indications that he may have been aware of certain trends in emerging biblical criticism, but on the whole there is little interest in historical questions. Seeing Blake’s images and reading or hearing his words takes us into a strange visionary world. Blake challenges our tendency to demonise our opponents, to separate out things and people into good and evil, the children of God and the children of the Devil, the good

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God of Jesus and the bad God of the Old Testament, and so on. This is fundamental to everything else, to his religion, his politics and his understanding of human relationships. This remarkable and enigmatic visionary poet and artist still has much to offer us. This man, virtually unknown in his own time, won a devoted admiration from a small circle of friends and admirers, who knew that they had been in a remarkable, but disconcerting, presence. In the legacy of his work he continues to unsettle those of us who engage with his texts and images and follow his lead through that door depicted at the start of Jerusalem in the journey into interpretation with confidence. I often ask myself the question: what have I most learnt from Blake about the interpretation of the Bible? The answer would be: the way in which he used text and image to open up other dimensions of engagement, which a words-centred religion can so easily downplay. The mistake would be to assume that Blake had cracked the way of engaging with the Bible, resulting in an ‘off the shelf’ hermeneutic which we in later generations can apply. There isn’t one. If we simply resort to Blake’s words and images, we shall end up replacing strange texts with even stranger ones. What he does offer us is an example of hermeneutical creativity, which needs to be ‘minted afresh’ in every generation.

Bibliography The images are available on line at The William Blake Archive website (http://www.blakearchive. org/blake/): Songs of Innocence and of Experience; The First Book of Urizen; Europe A Prophecy; America A Prophecy; Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion; Illustrations of the Book of Job; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; ‘Laocöon’; ‘Abraham and Isaac’, Yale Center for British Art; ‘The Flight of Moloch’, from Illustrations to Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, The Butts Set (1815). Blake, William, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Adams, H., Blake’s margins: an interpretive study of the annotations (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2009). Bentley, G. E., Vala; or, The Four Zoas: A facsimile of the manuscript, a transcript of the poem, and a study of its growth and significance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963). Bentley, G. E., Blake Books: Annotated Catalogues of his writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Bentley, G. E., The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Bentley, G. E. (ed.), Blake Records: Documents (1714–1841) concerning the life of William Blake (1757–1827) and his family, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2002). Bindman, D., Blake as an Artist (London: Phaidon, 1977). Bindman, D., William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000). Bindman, D., ‘Blake as painter’, in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, ed. M. Eaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 85–109. Blake, William, Blake: Complete Writings, ed. G. Keynes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). Bloom, H., The anxiety of influence: a theory of poetry 2nd edn (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Burdon, C., The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700–1834 (London: Macmillan, 1997). Burdon, C., ‘William Blake’, The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, ed. A. Hass, E. Jay and D. Jasper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 448–64.

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Butlin, M., The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981). (=B) Carruthers, M., The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Carruthers, M., The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Cook, E. T., and Wedderburn, A. (eds), The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12). Damrosch, L., Symbol and truth in Blake’s myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). Eaves, M. (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Erdman, D. V., ‘Terrible Blake in his Pride: An Essay on The Everlasting Gospel’, in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick W. Pottle, ed. F. W. Hilles and H. Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 331–56. Erdman, D. V. (ed.), Blake and his Bibles (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill, 1990). Erdman, D. V., Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 3rd edn (New York: Dover, 1991). Erdman, D. V. (ed. with J. E. Grant), Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). Erdman, D. V. (ed. with D. K. Moore), The Notebook of William Blake: a photographic and typographic facsimile, rev. edn (New York: Readex Books, 1977). Farrell, M., ‘William Blake and the Bible: reading and writing the law’, Forum, 3 (2006). Fisch, H., The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Frei, H., The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). Frye, N., Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947). Glen, H., Vision and Disenchantment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Goldie, M., ‘Alexander Geddes at the Limits of the Catholic Enlightenment’, The Historical Journal, 53, 1 (2010), pp. 61–86. Goldsmith, S., Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). Hagstrum, J. H., The Sister Arts: the Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958). Hagstrum, J. H., William Blake: Poet and Painter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). Hagstrum, J. H., ‘The Wrath of the Lamb: a study of William Blake’s conversions’, in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. F. Hilles and H. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 321–4. Hagstrum, J. H., ‘Blake and the sister-arts tradition’, in Blake’s Visionary Forms Dramatic, ed. D. V. Erdman and J. E. Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 82–91. Heppner, C., Reading Blake’s Designs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Johnson, M. L. and J. E. Grant (ed.), Blake’s Poetry and Designs (New York: Norton, 2008). LaBelle, J., ‘“Words Graven with an Iron Pen”: The Marginal Texts in Blake’s Job’, in R. Essick (ed.), The Visionary Hand: Essays for the Study of William Blake’s Art and Aesthetics (Santa Monica: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1973), pp. 526–50. Lindberg, B., William Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job (Åbo: Åbo Akademi, 1973). McGann, J. J., ‘The idea of the indeterminate text: Blake’s Bible of Hell and Dr Alexander Geddes’, Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), pp. 303–24. Mitchell, W. J. T., Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Mitchell, W. J. T., Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). O’Hear, N., Contrasting images of the Book of Revelation in late medieval and early modern art: a case study in visual exegesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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O’Kane, M., Painting the text: the artist as biblical interpreter (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007). Paley, M. D., ‘William Blake, the Prince of the Hebrews, and the Woman Clothed With the Sun’, in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes, ed. Morton Paley and Michael Phillips (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973). Paley, M. D., The Apocalypse and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Paley, M. D., The Traveller in the Evening: The Last Works of William Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Parker, D. C., An Introduction to New Testament Manuscripts and their Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Rosso, G. A., ‘History and Apocalypse in Blake’s ‘The Four Zoas’: The Final Night’, in Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods, ed. G. A. Rosso and D. P. Watkins (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990), pp. 173–88. Rosso, G. A., Blake’s Prophetic Workshop: A Study of the Four Zoas (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1993). Rosso, G. A., ‘The Religion of Empire: Blake’s Rahab in its Biblical Contexts’, in Prophetic Character: Essays on William Blake in Honor of John E. Grant, ed. A. S. Gourlay (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 2002), pp. 287–326. Rowland, C., Blake and the Bible (London: Yale University Press, 2010). Ryan, R. M., The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature 1789–1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Schweitzer, A., The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (London: A. & C. Black, 1911). Thompson, E. P., Witness against the beast: William Blake and the moral law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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‘FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM’: PORTRAYING THE BIBLE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY STAINED GLASS Christopher Rogers

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he defining moment in the revival of church ornament and stained glass in the nineteenth century was John Keble’s sermon given at the 1833 Oxford Assize service in St Mary the Virgin’s Church. In the face of creeping secularisation, along with both liberal thinking and moral laxity within the Anglican Church, Keble and other likeminded Oxford theologians, John Henry Newman, Edward Pusey and Richard Frowde, formed the nucleus of a ‘renewal’ movement within the Anglican Church. Between 1833 and 1841 they oversaw the publication of a series of pamphlets known as ‘Tracts for the Times’ which ranged widely over contemporary religious issues. The Tractarians or ‘The Oxford Movement’ helped fuel a religious revival within both the established Church and the country at large. One aspect of this revival was the desire to restore traditional longlost medieval religious practices. This led to an interest in ritualism; in ‘correctly’-built churches and adornments such as vestments, and, of course, stained glass. Of more immediate significance from the architectural viewpoint was the work of ‘The Ecclesiological Society’ founded in 1845 ‘to promote the study of gothic architecture and ecclesiastical antiques’. In the Society’s monthly journal known as ‘The Ecclesiologist’ advice for church builders was provided along with blueprints of acceptable church layouts. As the antithesis of the corruption and ugliness of contemporary society an emphasis was placed on a return to the medieval forms of church architecture fitting for the newly revived liturgies. At its peak in the late 1840s there were some 700 members and its periodicals enjoyed a wide influence over the design of mid nineteenth-century church buildings. Through such publications as ‘A Few Words to Church Builders’ of 1841 the Ecclesiological Society helped rediscover the beauty of Gothic architecture and to return the Church of England to its former piety. To help create a suitably spiritual atmosphere within the new churches, stained glass windows were deemed desirable, and as church building gathered momentum a huge potential market appeared. There had been a strong tradition of stained glass manufacture in medieval England, but the techniques were largely lost at the Reformation while surviving stained glass was subject to further depredations during the English Civil War and Commonwealth. Nevertheless, there were remarkable survivals, such as the thirteenth-century windows in Canterbury and York, and the astonishing collection of late fifteenth-century glass at Fairford in Gloucestershire. However by the end of the eighteenth century, the creation

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of stained glass was at a low ebb. The surviving windows from this period, such as the Radnor window at Salisbury Cathedral, are multi-coloured pictures painted in enamels on large sheets of glass, a substitute for the artist’s canvas. The painter’s art was used to create perspective and chiaroscuro. As the enamel was applied to the outside of the plain glass this led to a substantial darkening and loss of translucency, made worse by later oxidisation. Such is Francis Eginton’s The Conversion of Saint Paul (1799) in St Paul’s Church, Birmingham; the subject matter all muddy brown and difficult to decipher. These ‘picture’ windows were in complete contrast to medieval windows where the subject was generally assembled from small pieces of single-colour glass held together with thin lead strips which had the additional role of outlining the figures. Details such as faces and draperies could then be painted on. The effect, especially in early glass, was two-dimensional, but as the colour was run into the glass, the latter retained its translucency and brilliance. By 1840 such early techniques would appear to have been lost. The nineteenth-century revival of both the manufacture and design of stained glass stems from pioneering work accomplished by Augustus W. N. Pugin. Two years after Keble’s Assize sermon Pugin had written Contrasts: A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the 14th and 15th centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day, Shewing the Present Decay of Taste. This was Pugin’s rejection of the secularisation and materialism of the nineteenth century and proved to be his manifesto for Victorian Medievalism. His second book, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, published in 1841, was a distillation of lectures on architecture that Pugin had given at the newly opened Roman Catholic seminary, Oscott College. Pugin himself had converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1835, six years after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. Now free to worship openly, the Roman Catholic Church required new buildings and suitable church fittings, while the impact of ‘The Ecclesiologist’ ensured that Pugin received substantial commissions from the established Church as well. In all, Pugin is responsible for building and decorating some hundred buildings, forty churches and three cathedrals. St Chad’s in Birmingham and St Mary’s Derby are but two of the fine buildings with which Pugin is associated.1 The challenge faced by Pugin was to replicate medieval glass in his churches. His knowledge of medieval glass was substantial. He had visited Chartres before beginning work on a window for Jesus College, Cambridge, and he was familiar with surviving glass such as that at Great Malvern Priory and Tewkesbury Abbey. The first problem was replicating the colour of the medieval glass. Charles Winston, born in 1814, was a London barrister who devoted much time to the study of glass painting. His immaculate drawings of surviving medieval glass, such as those of Salisbury Cathedral, which he visited in 1849,2 were much admired, but towards the end of his life his interest shifted to the scientific aspects of stained glass, making numerous chemical experiments in an attempt to establish how medieval glass was made. However it was James Hartley at Sunderland who successfully developed glass to Pugin’s satisfaction. The biggest problem was creating a ‘ruby’ red. Eventually the ‘flashed’ ruby technique was developed, whereby clear or lightly tinted glass was passed through a pot of molten red glass to form a thin laminate on the clear glass, which could then be rolled. This provided an uneven texture which ensured 1 2

Saint Giles Cheadle, Staffordshire, is rated as the finest of his commissions. Illustrated in Tim Tatton-Brown and John Crook, Salisbury Cathedral: The Making of a Medieval Masterpiece (London: Scala Publishers Ltd, 2009).

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that the streakiness of medieval glass could be reproduced. Eventually Pugin persuaded his fellow Roman Catholic John Hardman to open up a glass workshop in Birmingham and after 1845 Hardman’s made most of Pugin’s glass.3 Providing suitable designs for the windows was equally important. Pugin produced the design sketches which other artists then worked up into full-size cartoons. Pugin then added the leadlines along with finer details as well as specifying the exact colours to be used. Initially Pugin patronised Thomas Willament to draw the cartoons. He was an established artist who had made heraldic glass for George IV. Pugin then discovered William Wailes. There is no evidence that Wailes actually designed the windows, but Wailes’s cartoons and selection of glass are highly rated. His great west window at Gloucester Cathedral is a fine example of his work; the drawing robust and the choice of colour very bold and effective. The completed cartoons were then dispatched for manufacture to Hardman’s in Birmingham. Herein lay a substantial problem. Since he was living in Ramsgate, Pugin was unable to supervise the finer details and the exact colours; a cause of substantial frustration. Eventually many of the cartoons were created by John Hardman Powell, John Hardman’s nephew and eventually Pugin’s son-in-law. With Powell living close by in Ramsgate the process of fulfilling the window commissions was smoother. Francis Wilson Oliphant (1818–59), another of the artists patronised by Hardman’s, drew some twenty of Pugin’s windows.4 Pugin maintained that the stained glass should be stylistically contemporary with the building itself. Since many of his own churches were ‘Early’ or thirteenth century in inspiration so is the glass. Early glass had medallions set in diapers or single figures under canopies proportional to the size of the window. ‘Early’ figures are somewhat naïve, since the medieval painter had limited understanding of the human form. Pugin succeeded in recreating these two-dimensional figures and clothed them in vestments and draperies of medieval form. Bolton Abbey windows (1853) were a commission for a Church of England grandee, the Duke of Devonshire. There are six pairs of lancets (Fig. 22.1), each containing three quatrefoil medallions in which a scene from the life of Christ is portrayed. Each lancet has an infill of elaborate and geometrical circles, the whole composition united by a rich floral border. The wonderful quatrefoil panels of small pieces of coloured glass, carefully leaded to create the scene, draw heavily from ‘Early’ glass. Pugin’s designs are very convincing, but the glassmaker, possibly J. G. Crace, but certainly not Hardman’s, failed to capture the soft colours he had requested. Furthermore, the fussy background created by the elaborate circles as well as the brilliant colours used in the settings distract from the panels themselves. Small wonder that Pugin is recorded as saying ‘glass painters – who are the greatest plague I have, and will shorten my days’.5 In 1843 Pugin and Wailes provided a window for St Mary the Virgin’s Church in Oxford. The church is ‘Decorated’ with sophisticated window tracery and the stained glass is designed to complement. Each lancet contains a ‘busy’ scene from the life of St Thomas the Apostle played out beneath a complex canopy, above which is a curious buttressed superstructure. Beneath are four panels, one of which portrays Thomas Bartley, to whom 3 4 5

Hardman and Co. were already designing and making ecclesiastical metalwork. The author of a significant book, A Plea for Painted Glass (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1859). Letter to Lord Shrewsbury (1842) in the Victoria and Albert Museum library and quoted in Harrison, Victorian Stained Glass.

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Figure 22.1: A. W. N. Pugin: The Annunciation, Bolton Abbey (1853). Photo: Christopher Rogers. the window is dedicated, and another his father who was the donor. The window is not a huge success. The superstructures rise into a lurid blue sky broken by an uncertain pattern of leadings, while the combination of dark red and brown within the canopies, and the extensive areas of the yellow canopy produce a very subdued effect. In the words of a very critical ‘Ecclesiologist’, ‘the whole effect is dingy’. A second window, a Life of St Mary Magdalene, designed by Pugin and Hardman, was installed four years later and is much more successful. This time the lower panels have been reduced in size so that the equally complex scenes fit beneath huge spire-like canopies which fill the remaining space within the lancets. The figures themselves are flatter and two-dimensional, reminiscent of ‘Early’ glass with the background to the canopies broken into alternating patches of red and blue and the pinnacles white glass. The overall effect is brighter and eye-catching. By the time of Pugin’s early death in 1852 the revival of stained glass manufacture and design was well advanced and owes much to his pioneering work. Furthermore, inspired by the religious revival, he had demonstrated that stained glass was an essential adjunct to a proper religious atmosphere. ‘Nothing contributed in a greater degree to the solemn grandeur of the ancient churches than the varied and modulated light admitted through stained glass windows with which both the lights and the tracery of the various windows are filled.’ In the same year as Pugin’s death, Edward Burne-Jones had sat the matriculation papers for Exeter College, Oxford. On being admitted to the university in January 1853, BurneJones developed an immediate friendship with William Morris. Both men had arrived at Oxford with religious commitment, Burne-Jones being a fervent ‘Tractarian’. By the 1850s the fire that had ignited the Tractarian Movement had burned low and both men

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Figure 22.2: Thirteenth-century glass panel in Merton College Chapel, Oxford (1298–1311). Photo: Christopher Rogers.

were increasingly disillusioned by the current religious apathy. Whatever their religious feelings, the two men were readers of John Ruskin and deeply influenced by The Stones of Venice, published in 1853. They absorbed all things medieval, being especially thrilled with the thirteenth-century glass in Merton College Chapel (Fig. 22.2), a building which had recently been restored by William Butterfield and in which the vibrant fresh colours of the glass were much admired.6 Increasingly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite painters, they rejected the current pietistic and sentimental treatment of religious themes. Furthermore they looked with growing interest to the mysterious world of medieval legend as an antidote to contemporary Victorian secularism. An interest in stained glass in particular seems to have been initiated as a result of a trip to northern France in 1854. Morris, in his essay ‘Shadows of Amiens’ describes the ‘belt of the apse windows rich with sweet mellowed stained glass’. Burne-Jones had met Rossetti in 1857 and very quickly fell within his orbit and it was Rossetti who passed on a commission for a stained glass design for James Powell and Sons of Whitefriars, a small glass-making company which had devoted a large part of their production to developing the manufacture of stained glass windows. The company was a pioneer of technical development and eventually made a lot of glass for Morris and Co. Entitled The Good Shepherd, Burne-Jones’s window bears little relationship to Pugin’s ‘historical’ glass. Christ is shown as a real shepherd with a lost sheep over his shoulder in a dress such as was suitable for walking in the fields while vine-leaves are draped around his hat. The inclusion of the water pot and the loaf may well be deliberate references to the Communion and the figure walks through an exotic landscape. 6

Morris and Burne-Jones also admired the recently repainted chapel roof, the work of John Hungerford Pollen, a collaborator in the Oxford Union mural project.

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Figure 22.3: Burne-Jones: The Death of St Frideswide, Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford (1859). Photo: Christopher Rogers. Ruskin was delighted and admired its ‘tendresse’ and precision as well as commenting on the very fine colours.7 One early commission was for St Andrew’s College at Bradfield which was one of a generation of new Church of England boarding schools; a product of the Christian revival. The colours of the windows in the dining hall are forceful and jewel-like; the compositions very uncompromising. In the left lancet are portrayed Adam and Eve, in the middle the Tower of Babel and in the right-hand lancet Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. In the sexafoil above the lancets is the cross of St Andrew and some fishes, for the college is dedicated to St Andrew who was a fisherman. This cartoon was completed when Burne-Jones was only twenty-four years old. The most significant of the early commissions is the St Frideswide window in Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford (Fig. 22.3). Commissioned in 1859, it is thought to be the best of his early works. It is a very confusing window to read. In the four lancets are sixteen scenes from the life of the eighth-century Saxon saint, Frideswide, whose tomb once stood close by. The scenes are busy with lots of figures and composed of small fragments of highly jewelled glass, with great emphasis placed on a dense network of leading. On first observation the window is a little impenetrable as the scenes are not really separated one from the other, and there is a diminutive border between the glass and the stone mullions. 7

Quoted in Wood, Burne-Jones, 1997.

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Indeed, there are suggestions that the dimensions for the glass as provided to Burne-Jones were too small. There is some awareness of medieval techniques both in the glass making and the design but the movement in the figures; the emphasis on the mundane and closely observed natural and domestic world is the antithesis of the spiritual and serene splendour of Pugin’s windows. One panel, for example, has incorporated a yellow duck and ducklings, while the death of St Frideswide takes place in a homely living room with a kitchen dresser and a water closet, its raised lid teasingly glimpsed through a half-open door. These early windows are very original and distinctive, drawing little from medieval models. There is a sense of human drama, a touch of the mundane, of ordinary people going about their activities in the world around them. They are not sanctimonious and are in stark contrast to the more static and other-worldly windows of Pugin and his contemporaries. Bible stories and church history are told with human realism, perhaps inspired by the Giotto frescoes such as Burne-Jones would have seen in the Arena Chapel in Padua; already a significant icon for the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. In these early windows Burne-Jones was working alone, dictating his own colours; arriving at designs which may have been rather outré, curious in their scale and, most importantly, ‘deliriously rich’ in their colour. These were not windows conceived as an aid to piety, but as an art form in its own right. Some of the figures are uningratiating, hence the argument over the window design for St Columba’s Church in Topcliffe in Yorkshire where William Butterfield had designed a new church for which Burne-Jones was to provide the glass. His handling of the Annunciation scene, with the Virgin Mary clasping the dove to her bosom, was considered outrageous and Butterfield, who was so incensed at Burne-Jones’s intransigent refusal to alter the design, sought another designer for the remaining windows and never used Burne-Jones again. As yet, though, there is little of the Pre-Raphaelite; set stony stare of the eyes, pursed-lips, trim puritanical mouth and lank hair. ‘The Firm’, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co. was established in 1862.8 It is probable that the idea of the company came from William Morris himself who in 1860 had moved to his own new home, The Red House at Upton, a hamlet close to Bexley Heath in Kent. The house, in a loosely Gothic style, was designed for him by his friend, Philip Webb, who had trained as an architect with the Gothicist, George Edmund Street.9 The partners in ‘The Firm’ were to produce designs for furniture and other handicrafts, but stained glass became their most important artistic outlet and a kiln was installed in the basement of 8 Red Lion Square, with George Campsfield as the glass painter. The first of the great commissions which Morris and Co. received came from George Bodley whose acquaintance with members of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood dated back to 1858. In 1861 Bodley was commissioned to build All Saints Church at Selsley, Gloucestershire for the wealthy mill owner, Sir Samuel Marling. Philip Webb was charged with overall design of the glazing, and the partners provided the cartoons. The glass in the rose window, inspired by that already installed in Waltham Abbey, consists of a central rose in which Christ is seated on a rainbow, holding a green orb in his right hand. His left hand is raised in blessing and the inscription IN INITIO is incorporated into the design. Round him circle eight planets and the stars of heaven. The outside circle is composed of eight roundels based on the story of the Creation in Genesis. At the top the Holy Spirit 8 9

And finally wound up in 1940. Morris and Webb had been fellow trainees in the London offices of Street.

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descends in the form of a dove while the story of Creation unfolds in the remaining seven roundels. Webb, Burne-Jones and Morris all contributed designs. Of special merit is Adam naming the Beasts by Webb. In another roundel Adam and Eve picking the Fruit is played out in front of a red lattice fence which Morris had already used in a wallpaper design inspired by a rose trellis at the Red House. The south aisle contains three windows of translucent quarries (pieces of glass cut into regular geometric shapes), each containing a simple daisy. These quarries form the background to three great bands of stained glass showing significant events from the New Testament. Each window contains a central panel under a triangular pediment, with a pair of pendant windows in the outer lights. The ‘band’ layout is very reminiscent of Merton College Chapel, the interior of which has already been mentioned as a formative influence on the pair. The cartoon for Christ Blessing the Children was drawn by Burne-Jones, the Sermon on the Mount by Rossetti and that of Saint Paul preaching at Athens by Morris himself. The supporting panels are crowded with spectators, many of whom are clearly modelled on the partners and their friends. Lying languidly, half listening to St Paul, is the unmistakable figure of Jane Morris elegantly clad in olive green. In Rossetti’s Sermon on the Mount each saint has a name inscribed in the nimbus. So there is ‘S Johannes Dilectus’ and ‘Judas Damnatus’; S Johannes is Algernon Swinburne and S Jacobus, Simeon Solomon. Kneeling demurely in front of Christ is Christina Rosetti as ‘S Maria Mater Dei Virgo’, while Fanny Cornforth appropriately posed as ‘S Maria Magdala Peccatrix’. Judas Damnatus was, in a very significant gesture, a portrayal of the hard-nosed picture dealer, Gambart. In the tracery of each window an angel plays an instrument: a viol, cymbals and a double flute. Here is the first set of Angeli laudantes, an essential element of countless Pre-Raphaelite windows. The five windows in the apse show familiar scenes from the life of Christ. The unifying design for the windows, a canopy and border, was provided by Webb, but the cartoon for each scene was produced by a different partner. The Visitation is by Rossetti, with Elizabeth and Mary both wearing medallions; Byzantine symbols of pregnancy. The Nativity (Plate 56) is by Ford Maddox Brown. Often criticised for being crowded and unsentimental, it is a homely and imaginative rendering of the familiar scene. Mary is wearing a green dress and a woolly hat. Joseph’s tool bag is hanging from a rafter as he cools down a spoonful of soup. The shepherds have brought a lamb and also a basket of eggs. The Holy Dove sits rather incongruously on the roughly hewn cradle. There is nothing reverential in this scene, which is at odds with its conventional rendering. Burne-Jones provided the Resurrection. Christ holds the white flag with a red cross, bursting from the shattered tomb. The drama of the moment is enhanced by the contorted attitude and startled expressions of the four soldiers. One of them, dark-haired and leering, may be interpreted as the devil thwarted by the hope of the Resurrection. William Morris contributed the Ascension, where three kneeling figures stare upwards as Christ’s feet and hem disappear into a cloud from which radiate shafts of glorious light, a familiar medieval rendering of the Ascension. The palette of colours may be limited and the scenes are of variable quality, but rich ruby and blue with the discreet flash of green ensure that the windows sparkle with colour while the many figures ensure a lively interpretation of the familiar stories. Morris also provided The Annunciation in the south window of the chancel (Fig. 22.4). As in the nave, the two panels are set in lightly patterned quarries. The design is based on a Van Eyck altarpiece, but is reduced to an almost naïve simplicity. Mary kneels at a rough-hewn prie-dieu, turning her head towards the angel. She wears a richly

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Figure 22.4: William Morris: The Annunciation, All Saints, Selsley, Glos. (1861). Photo: Christopher Rogers. decorated robe, a forerunner of many magnificent fabrics that would characterise later PreRaphaelite windows. In the other lancet Gabriel mirrors Mary’s pose, his sudden arrival enhanced by a billowing cloak, drawn to suggest rapid movement. The scene once again unfolds before the red lattice fence. Not all elements are successful. Morris never rated his own life-drawing skills and the Holy Dove is poorly drawn and appears stuffed, while the Gabriel’s lily looks wooden and unreal. Middleton Cheney near Banbury possesses a venerable ironstone church where William Buckley, Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford was incumbent for thirty-eight years. Buckley was a friend of both the architect George Gilbert Scott and Edward Burne-Jones and hence the commission for new stained glass. The east window is a classic example of early Morris stained glass (Plate 57). Once again several partners were involved in the creation of the cartoons while Morris’s favoured glass makers, Powell’s, provided the glass. The window conforms to the thirteenth-century tradition of paired figures, here in two rows one above the other. However, unlike Pugin’s two-dimensional figures these are far from conventional, appearing to have been drawn from life and very three-dimensional. Jane Morris may have been the model for St Catherine (identified by the catherine wheels painted onto her underskirt) while Morris himself may have been the model for Ford Maddox Brown’s St Peter. Maddox Brown also drew St John who, with his moustache and lank hair, could well pass as a Victorian gentleman of fashion. The figures are very plausible and highly varied, each pair standing on a carefully drawn field of grass and standing in front of branches of green foliage, some of which are unmistakably oak boughs. The top row in all three lancets contains the massed tribes of Israel. Each has an individually drawn face and is standing in a different pose beneath a banner drawn by Philip Webb, each of

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which has a heraldic device and the name of the tribe. The level of innovation is taken one stage further as some of the banners spill out of the lancet and into the tracery above. At the top of the window Burne-Jones provided a triumphant Adoration of the Lamb. The west window was added in 1877 and reached a new climax of imagination. It is dominated by the Three Holy Children of the Book of Daniel. Here they are, two in green on either side of one in blue, in the fiery furnace. Swirling yellow flames billow round each child who remains untouched by the fire. The window cartoon when exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition of 1877, along with some twenty more of Burne-Jones’s work, created a great stir. The librettist W. S. Gilbert saw the exhibition and described the window as ‘greenery and yallery’. His operetta, Patience, first performed at the Savoy Theatre in 1881 is a satire on the ‘Aesthetic Movement’ of which Burne-Jones had become the principal protagonist and this window is recalled in the lines: A pallid and thin young man, A haggard and lank young man, A greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery, Foot-in-the-grave young man!10 The fourteenth-century church at Bloxham, with its elegant spire, lies in the rolling hill country southwest of Banbury. The east window of this grand church was commissioned from Morris and Co. in 1869. Like its counterpart at Middleton Cheney, the window is composed of pairs of saints, prophets, kings and bishops, all gorgeously robed and set against a rich blue background. This is, in fact a Te Deum window, with an assertion from the Latin creed written underneath each of the pairs. The touch of real imagination is the treatment of the canopies. Instead of the conventional Gothic niche, the canopies are massed buildings, domes and roofs; a medieval cityscape. Although the figures are by different partners, Morris himself produced the overall design for the window and this representation of the ‘Heavenly City’ would not have been unfamiliar from his knowledge of medieval manuscripts. In the uppermost light is another Christ in Majesty. Once again Christ is in half profile and seated on a rainbow; his right hand raised in benediction. He wears a diadem of lilies and roses while behind him is a host of very Pre-Raphaelite angels, their massed folded wings creating a diaper-shaped background. The front row of angels stands ready to wrap a cope around Christ. It is a striking and powerful image. In the south wall of the chancel is a small window, possibly a lepers’ squint by origin. In 1869 Burne-Jones was commissioned to fill this space with an image of St Christopher. The saint, shown here in a billowing flashed ruby tunic strides purposefully through water of the deepest blue. He clutches a staff from which leaves are sprouting. On his shoulder sits the infant Christ, his face is serene and his eyes are closed as if in sleep; his hands resting gently on the saint’s curly locks. It is one of the most personal and intimate images that Burne-Jones produced, and in sharp contrast to the busy Te Deum window opposite. Almost twenty years after Burne-Jones created his St Frideswide window ‘The Firm’ provided three additional windows at Christchurch Cathedral in Oxford. Here are some of the most mature works undertaken by ‘The Firm’ at its zenith. The Vyner window was a memorial to an undergraduate who was murdered by brigands in Albania and was installed in 187211 (Fig. 22.5). Four fine biblical figures: Samuel, King David, St John and Timothy 10 11

W. S. Gilbert, Patience, Act 2. The family also commissioned William Burges to design a memorial church at Skelton on Ure near Ripon.

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Figure 22.5: Burne-Jones: The Vyner Memorial Window, Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford (1872). Photo: Christopher Rogers. occupy the lancets. Each studiously robed figure stands on a terracotta-tiled floor in front of a blue curtain; each head framed in a ruby nimbus. Samuel especially with his windruffled attire appears to have come straight from a Botticelli painting. Beneath the main figure is an intimate scene associated with the life of the figure above. Beneath Samuel is a medallion of Eli instructing the young Samuel, while in another light Timothy stands earnestly at the knee of his mother Eunice. Each is a delicate, carefully composed composition; the two youths in the outer lancets are in short tunics, while King David and St John are clothed in full-length white robes spangled with gold stain, creating the impression of costly fabrics. In two of the upper lights angels play on pipes while other lights are filled with luscious vines and grapes. The cartoons for this window were used a second time at Marlborough College, the school in Wiltshire which William Morris had himself attended. However, the window is only two lancets and therefore much narrower and only the two youths, Samuel and Timothy, are used. The flashed ruby nimbus is missing and the scenes beneath lack the vibrant colours of the Christchurch window. In the Marlborough version, the blue hanging behind the saints is replaced with luscious green foliage dripping with ripe oranges; all very Morris in mood. The overall olive green tones strike a memorable contrast to the kaleidoscope of blues and reds in the surrounding windows. The St Cecilia window in the Lady Chapel dates from 1874. According to legend, when the fleeing St Frideswide was on the verge of capture by her would-be husband, the predatory Aelgar, she prayed to St Cecilia and St Catherine, both of whom had to defend

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her chastity. It is appropriate, therefore, that these two saints should be commemorated in the church dedicated to Frideswide. The St Cecilia window shows the saint, swathed in an elegantly draped white garment playing her ‘attribute’, a portative organ. On either side a blue-winged angel carries a palm branch and is playing a musical instrument. The St Catherine window, in the eastern wall of another chapel, is a similar composition. The saint is portrayed in the central lancet flanked by two companions, one of whom bears the likeness of Edith Lidell, the youngest sister of Alice, and daughter of the Dean, Henry Lidell. She died aged twenty-two in 1876, and this window was commissioned in her memory. Here the small panels beneath the figures show scenes from the life of St Catherine. In one she is shown disputing with philosophers and another shows the saint being led through the wilderness by the Virgin Mary. The final panel is an exquisite portrayal of the body of the martyred saint being gently lowered into her tomb by a band of angels, their blue wings forming a protective canopy over the saint’s body. At the western end of the south aisle is the last of the Morris and Co. windows; a threelancet window showing ‘Spes Caritas Fides’. Unlike the other windows, where white glass is extensively used and the palette restricted largely to blue and ruby, this window glories in richness of strong colour. All three figures are set against backgrounds of greenery; vines ripe with bunches of luscious grapes surround Caritas, while Fides is placed in front of a grove dripping ripe oranges. Spes, in a billowing diaphanous garment, points dramatically heavenward in sharp contrast to the more static Fides carrying her lamp, and maternal Caritas with a child in her arms and two more infants clutching the hem of her robe. Spes, it is thought, is modelled by Mary Zambucco, who, as Burne-Jones’s putative mistress, was the inspiration for a number of his works of that period. Throughout the 1870s there grew a close professional and personal friendship between Edward Burne-Jones and George and Rosalind Howard. The Howards were of aristocratic background, George eventually succeeding to the Earldom of Carlisle, along with two great houses, Castle Howard and Nawarth Castle. Of this friendship Burne-Jones writes ‘Your loving friendship is one of the best things I have in life.’ George was a competent artist himself, and, together with his wife, they proved significant patrons of the PreRaphaelites. They bought the site of 1, Palace Green in Kensington in 186912 and their house became a significant showcase for Burne-Jones and Morris.13 The Howards also commissioned stained glass during this period. At Bampton, Cumberland, near the family seat of Naworth Castle, Philip Webb built his only church, St Martin’s. All the glass in the church is by Burne-Jones, but it is the great east window, installed to commemorate the life of Charles Howard, George’s father, that is especially fine. There are three rows of figures, fifteen individual compositions in all, glowing in rich ruby, blue and even purple. Some of the angels have blue wings, some carry musical instruments and many are carrying scrolls. The outer pair of the lowest row are dressed in magnificent armour, one wearing a helmet which Burne-Jones was to use as a model many times in later glass. In dominant position is a magnificent Good Shepherd, wearing a flashed purple robe, while in the central panel of the lowest layer is an unusual image of ‘the Pelican in her Piety’, an allegorical depiction of both Jesus Christ’s sacrificial love and an image of resurrection. The pelican bends her sinuous neck to feed her young in a nest perched on the twisted 12 13

Designed by Philip Webb. George Howard had purchased several works by Burne-Jones, including the Mirror of Venus and the reception rooms were a showcase of Morris wallpaper and fabric designs.

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Figure 22.6: Morris and Co., 1869: Angeli Laudantes, Lady Chapel window, St Michael’s, Tilehurst. Photo: Christopher Rogers. and bejewelled branches of a tree. There is a prescient feel of the ‘art nouveau’ movement about the pelican’s curved form and the organic structure of the composition. The connection between Burne-Jones and the Howards flourished over many years, with, among many other commissions, stained glass for the newly refurbished chapel at Castle Howard. Here are the four popular scenes from the Christmas story, including a Flight into Egypt. The panels are richly coloured, each one set within a classical canopy topped with a pediment and framed by richly worked columns; all in the fifteenth-century Renaissance style, as if to acknowledge the very non-Gothic setting in which they were placed. Four of the cartoons for these windows were used again as late as 1907 to create a set of new windows in the Epiphany chapel at Winchester Cathedral. A recurrent theme in many of the Morris and Co. windows is that of angels. Perhaps the finest of the Angeli Laudantes is in St Michael’s Church, Tilehurst, near Reading (Fig. 22.6). The building, restored by Street in 1856, is unprepossessing but is the setting for one dazzling Morris and Co. window. The sapphire patterned ground is studded with golden stars, a recurrent medieval device which can be seen, for example, in the great east window of Gloucester Cathedral. Central to the composition is the Virgin and Child. Is this Mary Queen of Heaven? Do the stars draw their inspiration from the title ‘Ave Maris Stella’?14 She is worshipped by five large angels on two levels in the main lights while 14

An ancient hymn in praise of the Virgin Mary; of uncertain age and provenance, but very popular in the Middle Ages.

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three more, reduced to torsos, peer down from the very simple tracery. The five are playing musical instruments including cymbals, a portative organ, a viol and flute. Each has a fine pair of wings either of deep ruby or deep green, and wears a white flowing robe onto which a delicate golden pattern has been carefully painted to represent rich fabric. The languid figures, seemingly suspended in the heavenly firmament, have golden hair and expressionless faces. The angelic theme was taken in a pair of windows for Salisbury Cathedral in 1878. Here Angeli Laudantes and its pendant panel Angeli Minstrantes15 are set in a grisaille of lush green foliage which was designed by William Morris. The red-robed angels, one red-winged, the other blue, carry stringed instruments, probably kitharas. The ‘Angeli Ministrantes’ stride forth each carrying a staff. All four angels wear a diadem of flaming fire which became a characteristic feature of all Burne-Jones’s later representation of angels. The cartoons for these windows were provided by Edward Burne-Jones and were repeated several times,16 not least in the creation of a superb tapestry.17 On display in the Birmingham City Art Gallery is the full-sized cartoon for a Last Judgement. The completed work of 1876 is at Easthampstead, now part of Bracknell, where it forms the east window of the Church of St Michael and St Mary Magdalene. It is a powerful and awesome work. Central to the window is St Michael dressed in fine armour and carrying a set of scales. Beneath him sits the recording angel, a huge book on her knee, flanked by two apprehensive acolytes. In the two flanking lancets, rows of the saved look on as pairs of ruby-winged angels sound the last trump on huge biblical Old Testament horns. A densely leaded band of intense azure blue divides Heaven from Earth. At the clarion call of those biblical horns, the horror-struck living hold their hands to their ears and the awakened dead claw their way from the ground. Above them all in the central roundel is Christ triumphant, his hand raised in blessing. The composition is powerful and the contrasting use of coloured and white glass very subtle. It remains one of Burne-Jones’s most arresting windows. The theme of angels is central to the Days of Creation for Manchester College, a longestablished Unitarian academy which moved to Oxford in 1893. Originating as a set of paintings owned by the collector William Bell, these images had formed the illustrations in Dalziel’s very popular Illustrated Bible Gallery before being adapted as stained glass cartoons.18 Here are the six days of Creation installed in pairs in the three south-facing windows of the chapel (Fig. 22.7). In each window an angel carries a huge globe containing a symbol of the Creation. ‘Aesthetic’ angels surround the globe-bearer, and their wings meet in a haze of ruby. The composition of each window subtly differs as the attendant angels increase in number with the days of the week, but all the angel wear diadems of flowers from which the characteristic flame of fire rises over the forehead. The set is unified by a ’ground’ of thickly interlocking foliage, reminiscent of a Morris wallpaper in which is inserted ‘Elargissez Dieu’, allegedly the favourite motto of James Losh, grandfather of James Arlosh, who, along with his wife Isabella, commissioned the windows in 1896.19 Pevsner described the chapel’s windows as ‘pure joy’; and ‘both the colours and forms are 15 16 17 18 19

Originally there were to have been six lights; only the existing two were completed. Saint Margaret’s Ilkley for example. Now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. And a set of ceramic panels at Llandaff Cathedral. Middleton, A Pre-Raphaelite Jewel.

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Figure 22.7: One of six Days of Creation windows, Manchester College, Oxford (1896). Photo: Christopher Rogers. Burne-Jones at his best’. The north wall of the chapel contains another three windows of which the theme of Christian virtues is illustrated in six dramatic scenes. The panels are richer hued than on the south side, and again, set in densely entwining foliage. The scenes are carefully balanced. Mercy is shown here as Dorcas, the good woman raised from the dead by the Apostle Peter. Compassion is the Good Samaritan. They are visual reversals of the same basic image to create a very pleasing symmetry. Justice is portrayed with sword and scales while Generosity, in the form of St Martin, is a handsome young man accoutred in a suit of armour over which is draped a rich blue cloak (Fig. 22.8). He is wearing a spectacular gilded helmet. In Prophecy, Elijah raises his arms heavenward as a raven flies over his shoulders.20 In all six figures, either the head or the nimbus breaks out of the panel and into the foliage above and a suitable text is written in a panel beneath the image. The death of William Morris in October 1896 was a profound loss for Burne-Jones. He and Morris had been fellow undergraduates and had remained friends and fruitful collaborators for their entire adult lives. In these final years of growing bleakness and personal loss Burne-Jones completed a series of new stained glass commissions, one of which is perhaps the finest he had ever undertaken. St Philip’s church in Birmingham is an uncompromising baroque building designed by Thomas Archer and completed in 1715. As the city grew in importance so the church was remodelled in 1883 with the addition 20

The same image of Elijah is used again in the church at Busbridge in Surrey.

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Figure 22.8: Burne-Jones, Generosity (St Martin of Tours), Manchester College, Oxford (1896). Photo: Christopher Rogers. of an extended apse, a task undertaken in a sympathetic classical manner by J. A. Unwin. Soon after its completion Morris and Co. was commissioned to provide three windows, for which Burne-Jones provided the cartoons. Although Birmingham was his home city, this was not a commission that Burne-Jones relished. As a life-long romantic and medievalist he found baroque St Philip’s contemptible and shocking, only ‘fit for a public library into which they should turn it’.21 Nevertheless he provided cartoons for the three apse windows in 1885. Central to the apse is the Ascension. Basically, it is on two planes, the terrestrial and the celestial. In the terrestrial the disciples are looking upwards. These figures in the lower plane have a robustness about them which suggests they may have been created from real life. They certainly owe much to the studies of Carpaccio and Michelangelo which Burne-Jones had made. The figures in the upper plane are very different; they are serene, emotion-free aesthetic figures, heavenly rather than earthly, while the curved upper section of the window is filled with pink angels. The figure of Christ is drawn forward, looking down, with one hand beckoning, summoning the disciples to heavenly places. The other hand has one finger raised in blessing and indicating his pathway to Heaven. The remaining two windows were installed in 1887. The Nativity window draws heavily from the mood and structure of other Nativity commissions such as the Winchester 21

Letter from Burne-Jones to Mary Gaskell.

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Figure 22.9: Edward Burne-Jones: The Nativity, St Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham (1887). Photo: Christopher Rogers. Epiphany chapel (Fig. 22.9). The window is divided into two planes; the nativity scene in the lower part of the window, and the shepherds in the upper. The cave mouth (rather than a stable) acts as a bridge both separating and uniting the two elements. Mary, in conventional blue, stoops protectively over the infant child, with Joseph, turbaned and in deep red, looking on. In the upper scene, sheep are peacefully grazing on the left while on the right, three startled shepherds dressed in brown, blue and purple gaze upwards. Their hands shield them from the host of pink angels crowded into the curve of the window, and separated from the shepherds by a landscape of dark, angular wintery trees. The Crucifixion window is the most powerful of the three. A massive Christ on a black cross slashes vertically through the entire window with Mary and John on either side, the verticality interrupted by Mary Magdalene on her knees and in orange, almost anchoring the cross to the ground. Christ is not the usual emaciated or suffering figure such as in Grunewald’s Isenheim Crucifixion. Here is Christ, crowned with golden thorns and halo, commending with authority and power his beloved disciple to his mother, Mary. Once again the two scenes are separated, this time by a crepuscular city. However, it is the vertical sweep of banners that catches the eye. Are these the ‘Vexilla Regis’ of Fortunatus’s great hymn, ‘Vexilla regis prodeunt’?22 Here is Christ triumphant in death. The Last Judgement window is framed in the shadowy remoteness of the baptistery, rich 22

Venantius Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers composed the hymn in ad 569.

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colours shining out of darkness (Plate 58). Here too there are two planes. In the upper plane Christ is portrayed in majesty, in robes of silver and gold with his hand raised in blessing. He is surrounded by a host of pink angels, again bursting downwards from the curve of the window. The angels have inert staring faces and between them they hold keys, censors and the ‘Book of Life’; the symbols of the Last Judgement, while linking the two scenes is the angel blowing the great horn; the angel of doom and judgement. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. (1 Corinthians 15: 52) Below, the people peer upwards in fear, trembling and distress. A child clings to its mother’s skirts, a woman holds fast her baby, while in the base of the window the dead prise themselves uncorrupted from the grave. Separating the two planes, the same crepuscular city as seen in the Crucifixion window is being torn apart in some apocalyptical earthquake. However, in the right-hand corner a red-clothed turbaned figure, with his back to the viewer, gazes at the scene. Is it Burne-Jones at the end of his life meditating on our behalf at what is sure to come? The impact of this window is extraordinary. There is a fluency of design enveloping the whole space, neatly and dramatically composed within the simple window. There is a richness and density of colour unlike any other window Burne-Jones had created. He began work on this awesome window in a burst of activity following William Morris’s death in 1896. Dispirited by the ending of a lifetime’s friendship and with his own mortality in mind he was conscious that this would be his last stained glass cartoon. ‘Everything has to finish up some day or other, and I don’t think any time can be more appropriate than now.’23 He received a token £7024 for the cartoon and it might be argued that he wanted this great biblical image to be a valedictory gesture to the city of his birth. This window, Burne-Jones’s masterpiece, illustrates how far the art of stained glass had progressed from Pugin’s exploration of medieval design and technique half a century earlier. Furthermore, as the forerunner of twentieth-century artists such as Chagall and Piper, he ensured that stained glass would become the respected and innovative art form that it is today.

Bibliography Bond, David and Glynis Dear, The Stained Glass Windows of William Morris and his Circle in Hampshire and the Isle of White, Hampshire Papers, 13 (1998). Burne-Jones, Edward, Stained Glass in Birmingham Churches (Birmingham: Carew-Cox and Waters, 1998). Evans, Edward, Christ Church Oxford: Stained Glass (Oxford: Pitkin Guides, 1977). Harrison, Martin, Victorian Stained Glass (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1980). Hill, Rosemary, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2007). Lew, Lawrence, The Pugin Windows of Bolton Priory (Pitkin Publishing, 2009). Lewis, Michael, The Gothic Revival (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002). McCarthy, Fiona, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (London: Faber & Faber, 2011). 23 24

Also from a letter from Burne-Jones to Mary Gaskell. This would pay for little more than the cost of installation.

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Middleton, Alan J., A Pre-Raphaelite Jewel: The Chapel of Harris Manchester College Oxford (Oxford: Harris Manchester College, 2006). Shepherd, Stanley, The Stained Glass of A.W.N. Pugin (Reading: Spire Books, 2009). Wood, Christopher, Burne-Jones (London: Phoenix Illustrated, 1997).

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VAN GOGH: FRAMING A BIBLICAL VISION Daphne Lawson

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incent van Gogh’s relationship to the Bible proved as complex as everything else he undertook in his life. At the heart of Van Gogh’s art in Arles and Saint-Rémy was a dichotomy; as a man whose personality had alienated him from his family and every community he had lived in, he increasingly needed the solace of his Christian faith, but as an avant-garde artist whose art was an extension of his internal world, how was he to express this without resorting to traditional biblical imagery? Van Gogh viewed the painting of religious subjects as a retrograde step; he copied subjects from the Bible, mostly by Rembrandt and Delacroix, but he did not want to create any conventional biblical paintings of his own. Before arriving in Arles in February 1888, he had spent two years working amongst the Parisian avant-garde, where biblical subjects were a taboo to Impressionist artists who painted modern life in Paris and its surroundings. When in Arles, Van Gogh twice tried to paint Christ in the garden of Gethsemane in the July and again in the September of 1888, before Gauguin’s arrival, but both times he scraped the image of Christ off the canvas, writing to his brother Theo that to paint someone as important as Christ without a model was wrong.1 He upbraided the young artist Émile Bernard for sending him copies of his religious paintings to Saint-Rémy, and was vitriolic in his attack on their subject matter, calling them ‘atrocious’ and ‘a setback’ and ‘unhealthy’ and added: ‘after that, would you go back to renewing medieval tapestries for us?’2 Vincent’s reaction to Gauguin’s selfportrait as Christ in his Christ in the Garden of Olives was more telling; he wrote to his brother Theo that he did not admire the work but added: ‘If I remain here, I wouldn’t try to paint Christ in the Garden of Olives, but in fact the Olive Picking as it is still seen today [. . . and that would perhaps make people think of it.]’3 This is the only intimation that Van Gogh’s letters gave us that he was thinking metaphysically about how to tackle biblical subjects. Van Gogh’s upbringing had steeped him in the Protestant religion; his father, Dorus, was a pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church, as was his grandfather. As a young art dealer in his uncle’s firm, Goupil & Cie, Van Gogh already realised that his zealous Protestantism in some way meshed with his feelings about art. He wrote to Theo from Paris: ‘even a fine feeling for the beauties of nature isn’t the 1 2 3

Letter to Theo, Arles; Sunday, 8 or Monday, 9 July 1888 (637). Letter to Émile Bernard, Saint-Rémy; Tuesday, 26 November 1889 (822). Letter to Theo, Saint-Rémy; Tuesday, 19 November 1889 (820).

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same as religious feeling, although I believe the two are closely connected. The same is true of a feeling for art.’4 It was after Van Gogh was dismissed from Goupil’s in April 1876, that, during a period teaching in England that year, he delivered his first sermon in a Wesleyan Methodist chapel in Richmond and had the idea of becoming an evangelical preacher. But after he failed to complete his theological studies in Amsterdam, and was equally disenchanted after three months at a school for Catechists in Brussels, his father found him work as a lay preacher in the bleak mining community of the Borinage in Belgium. It was then that the constant letters to his art dealer brother, Theo, formed the outward manifestation of his increasing fanaticism and became tracts and epistles culminating in outpourings of religious rhetoric. When his contract was not renewed in the Borinage and the local people turned their backs on him, he moved on to Cuesmes, working in rags as an unpaid preacher. Finally, Van Gogh gave in and came back to his parents’ parsonage in Etten, defeated. But although he believed conventional Protestantism had let him down, a sense of religious fervour remained at the core of his being and he poured that same missionary zeal into his decision to become an artist; evangelicalism’s loss became art history’s gain. The content of his continuing letters to Theo then shifted to form the basis of Van Gogh’s artistic manifesto, and it is through these that it is possible to understand the interweaving of biblical metaphor within Van Gogh’s art. He was naturally disposed to metaphors and symbols because the Dutch Calvinist tradition that held the roots of his religion insisted on an iconographic ban that prohibited all images of the holy family. Both Van Gogh’s father and grandfather were not strict Calvinists, but were believers in the more lenient Gronlinger5 branch of the Dutch Reformed Church but Van Gogh’s early religious period was steeped in such hard-line Calvinism that he would have been naturally predisposed towards the symbol. This was characterised by faith and atonement through the death of Christ as a means of salvation and it was this evangelical side that he took to his heart. While he was a Catechist in the Borinage, Van Gogh had begun to draw the hapless miners trudging to and from the pits, and also copied François Millet’s paintings of farm hands who inspired him with their humble labouring rituals. However, most of all it was Millet’s Sower (Fig. 23.1) that Van Gogh copied five times over, as he searched for his artistic voice through Millet’s example, which he believed to be the embodiment of rustic perfection. He desperately wanted to be at one with the harsh, dismal mining community of the Borinage, and Millet’s image of a dark, taciturn figure trudging resolutely past the viewer, preoccupied by his solitary labour, encapsulated perfectly the type of art that Van Gogh wanted to make, recording those who worked close to the earth. Suffering from rejection, failure and a deep religious disenchantment, when he eventually returned to his parents’ home in Etten, he was in a state of emotional crisis. Van Gogh’s refusal to attend his father’s religious service on Christmas Day resulted in acrimony and ejection from the parsonage and at that point he moved to The Hague and began to learn his artistic craft in earnest. During this time, Millet became Van Gogh’s guiding light; an almost saintly figure, 4 5

Letter to Theo, Paris; Friday, 17 September 1875 (49). Tsukasa Kodera, Vincent van Gogh: Christianity versus Nature (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990), p. 19.

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Figure 23.1: François Millet: The Sower, 1850. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Gift of Quincy Adams Shaw though Quincy Adams Shaw Jr and Mrs Marian Shaw Haughton. Inv.17.1485© 2012. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved/© Scala, Florence. and by 1882 he was immersed in Sensier’s biography of Millet6 referring to him as: ‘the religious type. He often uses the expression colliers faith and that expression is a mighty old one.’7 This religious aspect of Millet’s personality would have resonated with Van Gogh particularly because of his recent bruising experiences with the miners of the Borinage. Sensier’s biography emphasises Millet’s religious relationship with The Sower almost as if it was his alter-ego.8 It was, however, a mythical construct which provided the perfect role model for Van Gogh as the pious peasant-painter, but it was a far cry from the reality of Millet’s life of reckless profligacy.9 Through these images of Catholic rural piety, Van Gogh allowed himself to be led back towards a religious belief in God. Millet was almost like a guru to him. His letters to Theo are constantly peppered with homilies from Millet to cheer him in his isolation, largely derived from Sensier’s biography, such as: ‘But I just think about 6

7

8 9

Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life (London: Profile Books Ltd, 2011), p. 428. Judy Sund, ‘The Sower and the Sheaf’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 70, no. 4 (December 1988), p. 665. Ibid. Naifeh and White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life, p. 429.

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what Millet said: I would never do away with suffering for it is often that which makes artists express themselves most vigorously’.10 The parable of the sower, too, had been a chosen favourite of Van Gogh’s from his days of religious zeal. As far back as 1877 when Harry Gladwell, an English friend from Goupil & Cie, had paid Van Gogh a visit during his theological studies in Amsterdam, the parable of the sower was foremost in Van Gogh’s choice of bible readings for the evening.11 Equally, when Van Gogh first arrived in the Borinage, resolutely speaking at the religious meetings in the miners’ forlorn cottages, it was Christ’s parables, including the sower, that he used as the basis of his preaching.12 However, it took Vincent another five years, until he was in Arles in the June of 1888 to appropriate his own Sower. He wrote to Theo of his fear of attempting it: ‘For such a long time it’s been my great desire to do a Sower, but the desires I’ve had for a long time aren’t always achieved. So I’m almost afraid of them.’13 So by the time Van Gogh finally put paint on canvas and appropriated his own Sower, faithfully daring to follow in the footsteps of his hero, he treated Sower in the Setting Sun (Plate 59) like a manifesto painting; it was the culmination of all his recently read colour theory14 combined with his new layered impasto style. He described it both to Bernard and to Theo in detailed terms of its complementary colours; yellow for the top contrasted with violet for the bottom half, and he added that the white trousers of the sower were to ‘rest the eye and distract it . . . that’s what I wanted to say’.15 The same week he was also writing to Bernard, in terms of Christ as ‘that great artist’ and ‘I say it again, – this Christ is more of an artist than the artists.’16 This fusion of Millet, Christ and his own artistic identity lends the painting an almost hallucinatory feel; the golden disc of setting sun behind the sower, the ploughed path leading our eye towards the strangely diminutive figure striding out of the picture space dominated by the magnified disc glowing over the blue-violet earth. It resonated with all the unrealistic possibilities that Van Gogh feverishly hoped for during that summer in Arles before Gauguin’s arrival. Van Gogh had found the Yellow House to rent in early May and soon had the idea of sharing it with a select group of artists and creating from it the Studio of the South. He was making it ready for its use as an ideal artistic commune based on the Japanese cooperatives that he had read about. It was a place, he believed, where vanguard art would flourish and artists would live in perfect harmony, and it was Gauguin who was to be the initiator of this unique collective. Van Gogh wrote to Theo: ‘this would be the beginnings of an association then’17 and then added that Bernard, who intended to visit the Midi, would also be a part of it. He sent an invitation to Gauguin in fulsome terms18 and he waited all summer, but still Gauguin did not arrive. 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18

Letter to Theo, Nuenen; Monday, 13 April 1885 (493). Letter to Theo, Amsterdam; Friday, 7 September 1877 (letter 130). Sund, ‘The Sower and the Sheaf’, The Art Bulletin, p. 664. Letter to Theo, Arles; Thursday, 21 June 1888 (629). Van Gogh had read Charles Blanc’s Grammaire des arts du dessin (Paris: J. Renouard, 1867), see Letter 722. Letter to Bernard, Arles, on or about Tuesday, 19 June 1888 (628). Letter to Bernard, Arles; Wednesday, 27 June 1888 (633). Letter to Theo, Arles, Monday 28 or Tuesday 29 May 1888 (616). Though the actual letter is lost, there is a similar draft in Letter 616.

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Demoralised and apprehensive, in late October, Vincent sent Theo a sketch of a second Sower that he had worked into a painting. He started this much more naturalistic version around the time that he was waiting, on tenterhooks, for Gauguin’s reluctant arrival. The colours were much more muted, the golden setting sun had gone, leaving a small sower in a deserted flat landscape. Gauguin finally arrived in Arles on Tuesday, 23 October after many delays and excuses, and it would seem plausible to suggest that Vincent’s stylistic bravado was at a low ebb at that time and so this second Sower seemed subdued and less significant. But with his third and final Sower (Plate 60) at the end of November, half way through the damp, fractious nine weeks they spent together, Vincent reached new heights of metaphysical painting. Van Gogh’s relationship to the Synthetist19 style of Pont Aven was one of ambivalence. While he obeyed Gauguin’s advice to wash the shine off his impasto, he would return at a later point and restore the painting’s gleam.20 But however resistant he was periodically to the Synthetist aesthetic, in this painting he got the mix right; it was done from memory as Gauguin wanted but had a vitality that transcended the doctrinaire Synthetist style. Van Gogh knew it was good, describing the ‘immense yellow disc for the sun, yellow green sky with pink clouds’ and added confidently: ‘Let’s calmly wait to exhibit until I have around thirty no.30 canvases.’21 Perhaps in order to show how important the work was to him, he painted a smaller version of it straightaway, something he only did when he was pleased with his work.22 The pollarded tree with new shoots splitting the foreground diagonally was clearly a homage to Gauguin’s Vision after the sermon, Jacob wrestling with the Angel, but there the comparison ends. Where Gauguin’s paint is intentionally dull and matt to convey rusticity, Van Gogh’s Sower shimmers in a pink and violet field, the figure so close to the picture plane this time that the frame crops him at the knees, and his agile navy silhouette sways rhythmically as the seed is thrown from his gloved hand. Behind him is the huge sun sunk onto the horizon, swollen to four times the size of the June version. It forms the halo, an aura for the bent head of the sower striding purposefully down his field at the close of day. It has been suggested that Van Gogh saw the sun of the Midi as a symbol of God or Christ; that it had an almost religious metaphysical significance to him, and that he deified it both artistically and spiritually.23 With the halo of the Midi sun completely surrounding the sower’s head, it would surely not be overstating the case to suggest that part of Van Gogh’s attraction to the parable of the sower lay in his view of himself as sower-artist searching for fertile soil in an increasingly hostile environment, even as Gauguin contemplated leaving him alone again. At some level, the dual motifs of the sower and the starry sky were linked together in Van Gogh’s mind; he wrote to Bernard in mid-June from Arles, including both motifs together, in one paragraph, linked to the infinite. He wrote of his childhood memories in 19

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Bernard and Anquetin through the summer of 1887, had developed their cloissoniste imagery before Gauguin, arguably, harnessed their motifs into the Synthetist style in the summer of 1888 in Pont Aven, before he arrived in Arles in October. The driving force of Van Gogh’s SaintRémy style was finding his own painterly relationship to their Synthetist style while still adhering to the tenets of their cutting edge Symbolist aesthetic. Naifeh and White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life, Ch. 15, p. 681. Letter to Theo, Arles, on or about Wednesday, 21 November 1888 (722). D. W. Druick and P. K. Zegers, Van Gogh and Gauguin, the Studio of the South (Chicago: Thames & Hudson, Art Institute of Chicago, 2001), p. 217. Kodera, Vincent van Gogh: Christianity versus Nature, p. 35.

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the countryside and his yearning for ‘the infinite, of which the sower [and] the sheaf are the symbols’.24 And then he asks Bernard the question: But when will I do the starry sky, then, that painting that’s always on my mind? Alas, alas . . . the most beautiful paintings are those one dreams of while smoking a pipe in one’s bed, but which one doesn’t make. But it’s a matter of attacking them nevertheless . . .25 This resolve to attack a starry sky must have stayed with him over the following year and it was only six weeks after he arrived at Saint Paul de Mausole, the asylum where he finally found some peace, that he embarked on it. When Van Gogh moved to the asylum at Saint-Rémy, on 8 May 1889, his intention was to persevere with his own version of Symbolist painting. He appears to have absorbed Gauguin’s liking for the Egyptian style26 and referred to the cypress tree that informed his art during the June of 1889 as ‘like an Egyptian obelisk’.27 He knew of obelisks both from the one in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, and from another standing near the town hall in Arles. The Egyptian meaning of the obelisk as a symbol of the sun god, acting as a link between heaven and earth through the channel of the sun, was something that Van Gogh probably well understood from his interest in ancient Egyptian kings that he described to Theo in a letter from Arles.28 So it is not, perhaps, stretching the point too far to suggest that, for Van Gogh, the obelisk and therefore the cypress, is not only a sign of death as is frequently suggested, but is also a metaphor for the sun, which stands in his mind for the eternal God of the Midi.29 But, technically, it was Van Gogh’s use of Japanese woodcuts as a basis for this new style that he explored at Saint-Rémy, and, in particular, the wave motif which was central to this and had been prevalent in the late Japanese ukiyo-e30 artists, and also in Hokusai’s Manga.31 This calligraphic wave shape was crucial to Van Gogh’s style of 1889, which he adapted into an impasto technique and it is known that he had studied Japanese wave prints extensively.32 When referring to Olive Trees with Alpilles in the Background (Fig. 23.2) a painting done the same week as Starry Night (Plate 61) in the same swirling flowing style, Van Gogh referred to it three months later as: ‘an exaggeration from the point of view of arrangement, outlines accentuated like those in old woodcuts; where these lines are tight and willed there begins the painting, even if it should be exaggerated’.33 Through the style of these old woodcuts he was trying to find an artistic equivalent to 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31

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Letter to Bernard, Arles, on or about 19 June 1888 (628). Ibid. Druick and Zegers, Van Gogh and Gauguin, the Studio of the South, p. 284. Letter to Theo, Saint-Rémy; Tuesday, 25 June 1889 (783). Vojtech Jirat-Wasiutyn´ski, ‘Vincent van Gogh’s Paintings of Olive Trees and Cypresses from St.-Rémy’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 74, no. 4 (December 1993), p. 657. Kodera, Vincent van Gogh: Christianity versus Nature, p. 35. Ukiyo-e translates as ‘floating world’. In Hokusai’s Manga, vol. 7, the Manga was a handbook for Japanese artisans, known to Van Gogh. Siegfried Wichmann, The Japanese Influence on Western Art since 1858 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), p. 132. Letter to Theo, Saint-Rémy; 19 September 1889, cited in Jirat-Wasiutyn´ski, ‘Vincent van Gogh’s Paintings of Olive Trees and Cypresses from St.-Rémy’, p. 654.

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Figure 23.2: Vincent van Gogh: Olive Trees with Alpilles in the Background, 1889. New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Oil on canvas, 28 5/8 x 36cm. Mrs John Hay Whitney. Bequest.581. 1998 © 2012. Digital Image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/© Scala, Florence. the Synthetists, whilst still retaining the qualities of shining facture and impasto that he preferred to use. Van Gogh saw himself as one of Gauguin and Bernard’s group; temporarily indisposed perhaps, but nevertheless essentially one of them, and he was searching to find his own aesthetic that would offer a complementary alternative to theirs. He wrote to Theo, during the two days that he painted Starry Night, of the difference between them and the Impressionist circle, saying: ‘we try to prove that something else quite different exists. Gauguin, Bernard and I will all remain there perhaps and won’t overcome but neither will we be overcome’.34 One of the main disagreements between Van Gogh and Gauguin, during the nine weeks they spent together in Arles, had centred on Gauguin’s insistence on painting from the imagination as opposed to Van Gogh needing the inspiration of the motif; when Van Gogh wrote to his sister Wilhelmina he said that Gauguin had strongly encouraged him to work often from pure imagination.35 34 35

Letter to Theo, Saint-Rémy, around Tuesday, 18 June 1889 (782). Letter to Wilhelmina, Arles; 12 November 1888 (720).

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Plate 51: ‘London’ from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Copy F, 1794. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Plate 53: Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion, Copy E, 76, 1804 to 1820. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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Plate 52: Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion, Copy E, 75, 1804 to 1820. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Plate 54: ‘The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins’, c. 1825. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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Plate 55: William Blake: Title Page from Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Copy L. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Plate 56: Ford Maddox Brown: The Nativity, All Saints, Selsley, Glos. (1861). Photo: Christopher Rogers.

Plate 57: Burne-Jones: The Holy Children, All Saints, Middleton Cheney, Oxon. Photo: Christopher Rogers.

Plate 58: Edward Burne-Jones: The Last Judgement, St Philip’s Cathedral, Birmingham (1897). Photo: Christopher Rogers.

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Plate 59: Vincent van Gogh: Sower in the Setting Sun, 1888, Otterlo, Kroeller-Mueller Museum. Oil on canvas © 2012. DeAgostini Picture Library / © Scala Florence.

Plate 60: Vincent van Gogh: The Sower, 1888, Arles. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). Oil on canvas, 32.5 x 40.3cm 29V/1962. F451.

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Plate 61: Vincent van Gogh: Starry Night, 1889. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.1cm. Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Acc.n. : 472.1941© 2012. Digital Image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/ © Scala Florence.

Plate 62: Vincent van Gogh: Wheatfield with a Reaper, 1889, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). Oil on canvas. 73.2 x 92.7cm 49V/1962. F618.

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Plate 63: Interior of St Michael’s Cathedral, Coventry, 15 November 1940. John Piper, oil on canvas laid on board. Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry. © Coventry Cathedral.

Plate 65: Nativity and Epiphany Crib, figures made by Alma Ramsey-Hosking and structure designed by Anthony Blee, 1962 (restored 2007) against the Baptistery Window. Image © Hosking Houses Trust.

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Plate 64: Sanctuary candlesticks made by Hans Coper against the tapestry designed by Graham Sutherland, 1962. Image © Martin R. Williams.

Plate 66: The Consecration of Coventry Cathedral, 25th May 1962, Terence Cuneo, oil on canvas. Image, Martin R. Williams © Coventry Cathedral.

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Plate 67: The Dragon and the Woman of Revelation 12 from the ‘Trinity Apocalypse’, by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Plate 68: Hans Memling, right-hand panel of triptych of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist. © Musea Brugge and LukasArt in Flanders.

Plate 69: William Blake, Death on a Pale Horse. © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

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Plate 70: J. M. W. Turner, The Angel Standing in the Sun. © Tate, London 2013.

Plate 71: John Martin, The Plains of Heaven. © Tate, London 2013.

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Plate 72: Domenico di Michelino, La Commedia Illumina Firenze (‘The Comedy Illuminates Florence’), 1465, Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence Cathedral.

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With Starry Night, Van Gogh succeeded in doing this but still managed to create something of his own. Previous attempts at pleasing Gauguin in this respect had resulted in subordinating his own style to the Synthetic ideal which resulted in the final, fractious month of Gauguin’s visit to Arles. Only the final Sower, done one month before the debacle of Vincent’s self-mutilation, really married the aims of Synthesism with Van Gogh’s metaphysical use of facture. Six months later, Van Gogh was able to respond in a unique way, and it is arguable that although the departure of Gauguin from Arles was disastrous for Van Gogh personally, as his dream of the Studio of the South collapsed overnight, nevertheless, it was the making of him artistically. But he still remained hopeful that he was part of their artistic clique. Even when Van Gogh heard from Theo in a letter written on 16 June that he had not been included in their Café Volpini Exhibition, whatever hurt he must have felt, his response remained inclusive and he wrote to Theo, on or about 18 June, during the two days he painted Starry night: At last I have a landscape with olive trees and also a new study of a starry sky. Although I haven’t seen the latest canvases either by Gauguin or Bernard, I am fairly sure that these two studies I speak of are comparable in sentiment.36 Starry night, though, was not Van Gogh’s first night-time landscape, it was his second. In Arles, he had painted Starry Night over the Rhone (Fig. 23.3) from the motif at the end of September 1888. He had lugged his painting equipment, in the middle of the night, to a seawall by the Rhone River, and set up his easel by the light of a gas lamp lighting the riverbank. He painted the night sky in an inky navy, and dotted in the gleaming stars of the Great Bear with the seven stars of the Big Dipper accented in sparkling citron.37 But the image is not as naturalistic as it seems, because he transposed the view from the southwestern view of Arles, to the northern hemisphere that he would have remembered as a young man in Holland.38 Why he would have done this remains a mystery; it is possible that Van Gogh chose to paint a northern sky over Arles because it was brighter and more interesting,39 alternatively, it could be argued that the night sky of the north resonated with Van Gogh as a reminder of his earlier evangelical faith. In Amsterdam, on his night walks by the river, he had ‘heard God’s voice under the stars . . . when the stars alone do speak’.40 The religious dimensions of a starry sky were much on Van Gogh’s mind that month. Earlier that September, Van Gogh had attempted to paint his second Gethsemene with Christ situated in front of a starry sky. He had not felt it a success and scraped Christ off earlier in September.41 This time, instead of Christ and the angel, he painted a life-affirming pair of lovers together in the foreground. But inherent in this naturalistic scene was Van Gogh’s driving need for a starry night landscape that would be an expressive vehicle for his faith; the week that he was painting Starry Night over the Rhone, he wrote to Theo: 36 37 38

39 40 41

Letter to Theo, Saint-Rémy, around Tuesday, 18 June 1889 (782). Naifeh and White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life, Ch. 33, p. 650. Charles Witney, ‘The skies of Vincent van Gogh’, Art History, vol. 9, no. 3 (September 1986), p. 355. Ibid. Cited in Naifeh and White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life, Ch. 32, p. 648. In addition to this, Van Gogh had used a starry night background in both his portrait of Eugene Boch, and for Café Terrasse on the Place du Forum, both from September 1888 in Arles.

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Figure 23.3: Vincent van Gogh: Starry Night over the Rhone, Arles, 1888. Paris, Musée D’Orsay. Oil on canvas 72.5 x 92cm. © 2012. Photo © Scala, Florence.

‘That doesn’t stop me having a tremendous need for, shall I say the word – for religion – so I go out at night to paint the stars.’42 It seems clear, therefore, that the scene was set for a possible biblical meaning behind Starry Night when he painted this first one, nine months earlier. There have been many varying opinions on the interpretation of this painting which range from a realistic depiction of the night sky at 4.0 a.m. on 19 June 1889,43 to a private spiritual view of the painting as a vision of the afterlife in another part of the universe,44 to a more recent analysis of the painting as a manifestation of Van Gogh’s temporal lobe epilepsy.45 42 43

44

45

Letter to Theo, Arles, on or about Saturday, 29 September 1888 (691). Albert Boime, ‘Van Gogh’s Starry Night: A History of Matter and a Matter of History’, Arts Magazine, vol. 59 (December 1984), p. 87. Jirat-Wasiutyn´ski, ‘Vincent van Gogh’s Paintings of Olive Trees and Cypresses from St.-Rémy’, The Art Bulletin, p. 660. Naifeh and White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life, Ch. 39, pp. 762–3. Alternative diagnoses of Van Gogh’s affliction include: L. S. Loftus and W. Nielsarnold: ‘Acute intermittent Porphyria’, British Medical Journal, vol. 303 (21–8 December 1991), pp. 1589–91, and K. Redfield Jamison, R. J. Wyatt, ‘Manic Depression’, British Medical Journal, vol. 304 (29 February 1992), p. 557.

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However, the almost hallucinatory, transcendental atmosphere of the painting, given Van Gogh’s propensity for religious zeal, seems to lend itself to a specific biblical text. The spiralling coils of the night sky with the perpetually whirling stars dwarf the tiny hamlet of Saint-Rémy, which lay to the southwest of the asylum, but was not visible between the bars of his cell. The church, though, is unlike Saint Martin in Saint-Rémy, which had a small dome, but is reminiscent of the churches of Van Gogh’s youth, known to him from his childhood in the Brabant in Holland46 and its thin spire rises like a minor key echoing the major orchestration of the reaching cypress, the obelisk. The very tip of the main branch reaches out towards Venus,47 the morning star with its promise of hope and optimism in the pre-dawn light. Meyer Shapiro has argued that the meaning behind this night sky was related to a ‘possible element of apocalyptic fantasy within this work’.48 He suggested that the gigantic coiling cloud and the complex of sun and moon and earth shadow, locked in an eclipse could be reminiscent of the apocalyptic theme from the twelfth Chapter of Revelation where the woman in childbirth has the sun and moon under her feet and is crowned with stars, with a red dragon waiting to devour the child at its moment of birth. But the biblical account of the dragon has no absolute equivalent in Starry Night and thus remains an unlikely source. More recently, the most popular biblical interpretation of it has been as a further manifestation of Van Gogh’s preoccupation with the Bible story of The Agony in the Garden, almost as a further meditation on his Olive Trees.49 Lauren Soth argues that Van Gogh, after scraping Christ off twice from his previous two attempts at painting The Agony in the Garden in July and September of 1888, was unable to achieve the subject without sublimation, and that Starry Night was ‘a natural metaphor of life’.50 What she argues is that Van Gogh was driven by the need to find consolation, initially as an evangelical preacher in the Borinage, and then later in his artistic relationship with Bernard and Gauguin, and that the consoling angel from St Luke’s version of the Agony in the Garden supplied this; the blue of the sky standing for Christ and the yellow standing for the angel. Certainly, consolation was at the heart of this image. On Tuesday, 18 June, while we know he was painting Starry Night, he wrote of himself and Gauguin and Bernard: ‘we’re perhaps not there for one thing or the other, being there to console or to prepare for more consolatory painting’.51 But consolation also applies to the third possible biblical interpretation of the painting, and in the light of recent arguments appertaining to the death of Van Gogh, it is surely time to revisit Loevgren’s Old Testament interpretation of the painting.52 He argues that Van Gogh originally made a naturalistic drawing of the landscape out of his cell window, and then transposed this daylight scene with the Alpilles in the background into a nighttime pen and ink drawing, this time adding the cypress tree, the village and the church. This gave it a mystical atmosphere, no longer in the realms of the real, as this view could 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Lauren Soth, ‘Van Gogh’s Agony’, The Art Bulletin, vol. 68, no. 2 (June 1986), p. 304. Whitney, ‘The skies of Vincent van Gogh’, p. 357. Meyer Shapiro, Vincent van Gogh, New York 1950, p. 100. Soth ‘Van Gogh’s Agony’, p. 312. Ibid. p. 311. Letter to Theo, Saint-Rémy, on or about Tuesday, 18 June 1889 (782). Sven Loevgren, The Genesis of Modernism (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1959), pp. 159–91.

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not be seen from Van Gogh’s cell and is very similar to the finished painted work. The difference is, the night-time pen and ink drawing has the same joining of the sun with the moon, as if they were in eclipse, but only ten stars are shown in the drawing, not eleven. In the painting, as Loevgren points out, the top of the cypress has been reduced in order to make room for an eleventh star,53 and therefore, it can only be assumed that, as the painting evolved, it took on a further symbolic significance which Loevgren believes is the Old Testament story of Joseph and the sun and moon and eleven stars bowing down to him.54 The difference between Loevgren’s Joseph interpretation and Soth’s rereading of Van Gogh’s attempts at painting The Agony in the Garden or Shapiro’s Apocalyptic dragon from Revelations is that, whereas the last two are tragic and rooted in despair, the Joseph story is optimistic and relates to past horrors, but is ultimately a lesson in survival. Van Gogh had every reason to believe that the worst was over. The first six weeks he spent at Saint-Rémy were an outstanding success. His choice of Saint Paul de Mausole was in part because it had been a twelfth-century Augustinian monastery. It was two hours from Arles by train, separated from it by a perilously steep gorge. It functioned as Van Gogh’s alpine retreat, similar to a religious sanctuary; one which had studio space for him as well. It was half empty, with only ten male patients and about twenty female ones. As soon as he arrived on 8 May, Van Gogh felt at peace. He wrote to his sister-in-law, Jo, the following day: ‘the fear, the horror that I had of madness before has already been greatly softened . . . it’s possible that I’ll stay here for quite a long time, never have I been so tranquil as here’.55 He wrote again and again to Theo to reassure him that the cure was working: ‘I assure you that I’m very well here and that for the time being I see no reason at all to come and board in Paris.’56 He then described his room furnishings in terms of solace and comfort, and the other patients and their mutual support and suggests that he will know more about his future by the end of the year: ‘coming back to Paris or anywhere at the moment doesn’t appeal to me at all, I feel that I’m in the right place here’.57 His doctor, Peyron, diagnosed Van Gogh’s condition as epilepsy, and as he became more settled, Van Gogh was allowed to work beyond the asylum walls. It was only when he went into the village of Saint-Rémy on one occasion, which may have brought back associations with Arles, that Vincent returned to the asylum troubled and afraid. However, if Saint-Rémy was a sanctuary for Van Gogh until his first attack in mid July, a month after he painted Starry Night, Arles had been a horror story for him from 23 December 1888, when he severed his left ear lobe and underwent his first attack, through to early May when he checked in to Saint Paul de Mausole. Everything and everyone had deserted him, one way or another by Christmas in Arles. Gauguin left him on Christmas Day, on the first possible train after Van Gogh was safely admitted to Arles hospital, and with him he probably took Theo, on the same train. Theo had briefly come to check on Vincent and could spare less than nine hours. And with Gauguin’s departure, Van Gogh’s dreams of his Studio of the South were in ruins. 53 54 55 56 57

Ibid. p. 185. Genesis 37: 9–11. Letter to Jo van Gogh Bonger, Saint-Rémy; Thursday, 9 May 1889 (772). Letter to Theo, Saint-Rémy, on or about Thursday, 23 May 1889 (776). Ibid.

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But that was only the beginning. Although he was released from Arles hospital on 7 January, and, at this point, had only been kept in while his ear healed, he returned to the Yellow House. His great, staunch friend and companion, the postman Joseph Roulin, who had admitted him to Arles hospital and later, on his release, had stayed with Van Gogh all day to settle him back in to the Yellow House, was being transferred to the Post Office in Marseilles. This was a huge loss to Van Gogh as Roulin was his only real friend in Arles. On 7 January he wrote to Theo: ‘Roulin has been excellent to us, and I dare believe that he’ll remain a staunch friend whom I’ll still need quite often, for he knows the country well.’58 One wonders how much Roulin protected Van Gogh against the hostility of the people of Arles. Does ‘for he knows the country well’59 relate to the Provençal landscape, the geography of Van Gogh’s mind, or the mood of the people of Arles and how to protect Vincent from them? By 21 January, Van Gogh wrote plaintively to Gauguin: Left behind alone on board my little yellow house – as it was perhaps my duty to be the last to remain here anyway – I’m not a little plagued by the friends’ departure. Roulin has had his transfer to Marseilles and has just left . . .60 On 4 February Vincent had a further attack, and on his release from hospital, the people of Arles signed a petition and presented it to the mayor to have the ‘fou roux’61 hospitalised again. Without Roulin to protect him, Van Gogh was at their mercy. The police closed down his beloved house, and this time he was in solitary confinement, without any painting materials or books. He was allowed no pipe or tobacco, no books or even a breath of fresh air. Wave after wave of attacks kept on coming, and he would lie in terrified silence, manacled to the bed, lying in a state of horror in the darkness.62 He wrote to Theo: ‘anyway, here I am, shut up for long days under lock and key and with warders in the isolation cell, without my culpability being proven or even provable’.63 To return to the Genesis story of Joseph, as Loevgren has argued, it is very similar in many respects to the sufferings of Van Gogh in Arles.64 Joseph epitomises the sufferings of the servants of God but is finally raised up by God. He is sold into slavery by his brothers and he is sent far away to Egypt, much as Van Gogh was far from his homeland and his family and, now, with his only Arlesian great friend and support gone, and his dream of the community of artists in the Midi destroyed, his isolation was absolute. His group of artists that he so needed to complete the Yellow House in Arles, had gone ahead and exhibited without telling him at the Café Volpini, during the Exposition Universale of 1889. As Joseph is deceived by Potiphar’s wife, and thrown into prison in Egypt unjustly, this too relates to Vincent’s recent demise in Arles. To Lovgren’s argument, one could add a further dimension; that of Van Gogh’s traumatic relationship to his family, and his longing to reinvent his childhood in Zundert as a time of bucolic simplicity, like the myth of Millet’s rustic homestead in Normandy. In the Genesis story, Joseph asks to be buried in Canaan, and not to leave his bones in Egypt. 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Letter to Theo, Arles; Monday, 7 January 1889 (732). Ibid. Letter to Gauguin, Arles; Monday, 21 January 1889 (739). English translation: ‘red-haired madman’. Naifeh and White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life, p. 730. Letter to Theo, Arles; 19 March 1889 (750). Loevgren, The Genesis of Modernism, p. 186.

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Van Gogh too, visualises his homeland during his first attack just before Christmas in Arles, and he has a hallucination of all the rooms and pathways of his childhood home in Zundert: each plant in the garden, the views round about, the fields, the neighbour the cemetery, the church, our kitchen garden behind – right up to the magpies nest in a tall acacia in the cemetery. That’s because I still have the most primitive memories of all of you.65 His Arles experience had left him abandoned and homesick and this may explain why the depiction of the iconic church in Starry Night has been recognised as from his homeland, most likely the Brabant, and not from the Midi at all.66 Van Gogh felt himself to have been rejected and emotionally abandoned by his family during his years in the north. The reality of the situation was that his behaviour to his family, and most especially his father, Dorus, had been so self-obsessed that it bordered on cruelty. His sister Anna, especially, blamed Van Gogh for his father’s death of a heart attack,67 and finally managed to eject him permanently from his family home. But this reality was not what Van Gogh chose to see. In Joseph’s dream, the sun-moon and eleven stars relate to his vision of how his father, mother and brothers finally acknowledge Joseph’s superiority, after their long rejection of him and bow down to him. Surely, it is arguable that, like Joseph, Van Gogh believed that all would be well in the end and both emotionally and artistically he would be made whole again, finally acknowledged as a success by his estranged family and his new style would flourish. He had been part of the artistic vanguard in Paris before, and it does not seem too far-fetched to interpret the happy ending in Joseph’s dream as Van Gogh’s self-belief that, like Joseph, he will ultimately triumph again. There is one other issue which, in some cases, may have coloured the interpretations of Starry Night, and that relates to Van Gogh’s suicide the following year in July. It has now been suggested that, in fact, Van Gogh may have been shot by a sixteen-year-old boy, René Secrétan, in Auvers.68 This lad liked to dress up in a Wild West outfit, and goaded Van Gogh by following him around and jeering at him. René had managed to get hold of a pistol from the innkeeper in Auvers, and it has been suggested that René or his brother Gaston may have shot Van Gogh by mistake and that he covered up for them. This would explain some of the flaws in the suicide story; the fact that there was never any weapon found, that the paints and the canvas Van Gogh was working on were never found, and that the bullet which killed him two days later, lodged behind his heart, would have been almost impossible to fire at that angle if Vincent had pulled the trigger.69 Superficially, this is irrelevant to any reading of Starry Night one year earlier, except that once the tragic tale of genius, madness and suicide is removed,70 and this point of 65 66 67 68

69 70

Letter to Theo, Arles; Tuesday, 22 January 1889 (741). Soth, ‘Van Gogh’s Agony’, p. 305. Naifeh and White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life, Ch. 23, p. 422. Naifeh and White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life, ‘Appendix: A Note on Vincent’s Fatal Wounding’, p. 872. Ibid. p. 873. Albert Boime, for instance, refers in these terms to Van Gogh at the time of painting Starry Night: ‘Naturally, the circumstances of the picture’s execution were fraught with the deepest personal meaning for the painter. Incarcerated in both mind and spirit, urged on by a longing for

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view is replaced with a schoolboy prank which went horribly wrong, it is possible to reevaluate Van Gogh’s mood when he painted Starry Night; this would explain the size and luminosity of the morning star, mythically linked to future promise, which sits so well with Loevgren’s interpretation. Equally, the sequel to Van Gogh’s Sower was a series on The Reaper and it is possible to suggest that this trope, too, was not initially conceived by Van Gogh pessimistically, although it had become so in his letter to Theo by early September 1889, when he described The Reaper as the opposite of The Sower.71 Van Gogh had drawn reapers throughout his artistic life, from when he was in Nuenen sketching Millet’s labourers, to his Arles paintings of harvest scenes with reapers in the background, and there was no indication from him at those times that these working men were also emblems of mortality. The Reaper series in Saint-Rémy had been started two weeks after Starry Night and on 2 July he described to Theo The Reaper he had painted at the end of June in purely naturalistic terms as: ‘The Wheatfield where there is a little reaper and a big sun, the canvas is all yellow . . .’72 Four days after this letter, Van Gogh went back to Arles, accompanied by a warder, to  pack up some more canvases at the Yellow House. The associative memories of his time in Arles the previous winter, coupled with a letter that arrived the same day from his sister-in-law, Jo, with news that she was pregnant, triggered a huge series of attacks that lasted until the end of August. When the attacks finally subsided, Vincent wrote again to Theo of a September Reaper (Plate 62) that he was painting, derived from an earlier version, but he wrote of it in a totally different metaphysical way. In early September, shaken and battered by his incarceration after six weeks of attacks, this time he described The Reaper as: a vague figure struggling like a devil in the full heat of the day . . . I then saw the image of death in it, in this sense that humanity would be the wheat being reaped. So, if you like, it’s the opposite of that sower I tried before.73 While the myth is perpetuated of Van Gogh as a tragic genius who had the seeds of suicide in his psyche when he arrived at Saint-Rémy, it is easy to forget that, as the refrain goes, ‘it is a long long time from May to September’74 and that when he painted the Sowers, Starry Night and even, initially, The Reaper, Van Gogh was not ill, but recovering at those times and there was no reason to believe that his life would end either tragically, or even as a casual mistake one hot July afternoon in Auvers. But by September, The Reaper, as an image of death ,had replaced the sower-artist of the year before. A week later, Van Gogh copied Delacroix’s dead Christ in the arms of his mother, The Pietà (Fig. 23.4) and gave the Christ figure red hair and his own features. Between the reaching arms of his mother, his body curves gently towards the mouth of the dark cave that threatens to engulf him, a look of pitiful resignation on his still face.

71 72 73 74

both security of life after death and the desire to escape his physical limitations . . .’ Biome: ‘Van Gogh’s Starry Night’, p. 96. Letter to Theo, Saint-Rémy; Thursday, 5 and Friday, 6 September 1889 (800). Letter to Theo, Saint-Rémy; Tuesday, 2 July 1889 (784). Letter to Theo, Saint-Rémy; Thursday, 5 and Friday, 6 September 1889 (800). Kurt Weill ‘September Song’ from the musical, Knickerbocker Holiday, 1938.

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Figure 23.4: Vincent van Gogh: The Pietà (after Delacroix) 1889. Saint-Rémy-deProvence. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). Oil on canvas, 73.2 x 92.7cm 168V/1962. F687.

In his letter to his sister Wilhelmina,75 Van Gogh described Mary as a Mater Dolorosa, that all-encompassing sorrowful mother of consolation. This was a reference to his childhood, where a print of Delaroche’s Mater Dolorosa had hung in his father’s study at Zundert,76 a room he had revisited during his first attack over Christmas in Arles: ‘each room in the house at Zundert, each path, each plant . . .’77 By copying the Delacroix Pietà, Van Gogh completed the circle of his life’s memories and placed himself literally back inside the arms of the Church.

75 76 77

Letter to Wilhelmina, Saint-Rémy; Thursday, 19 September 1889 (804). Judy Sund, Van Gogh (New York: Phaidon, 2002), p. 265. Letter to Theo, Arles; Tuesday, 22 January 1889 (741).

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24

COVENTRY CATHEDRAL: CONCEPT, REASONS AND REALITY Sarah Hosking

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rom at least the time of the Emperor Constantine’s famous dream, the evolving Christian Church has tried to give visual and concrete form and substance to its teachings. Biblical motifs, images and stories were incorporated into architecture, painted on walls, carved into roofs and furniture, and pictured in windows for more than a thousand years until the iconoclasm of the Reformation. It has been claimed that in England, the reformers’ wholesale destruction of the legacy of visual and plastic arts, which continued into the Civil War, inflicted a lasting damage on the national imagination from which it has never recovered. Our national vision absorbed caution in all matters visual, and especially in relation to the established Church. Even within the grandeur of the seventeenthcentury baroque revival, developed to glorify militarism, government and banking as well as the Church, its biblical orientation was severe, based upon the word spoken. Tablets of the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed abound, from the tiny Oare Church in Devon’s Doone Valley, to St Paul’s in London. Not until the Oxford Movement in the nineteenth century were the visual and plastic arts to invade the Church again with opulence and energy – before being once again sidelined by Anglican caution. The commissioning and achievement of Coventry Cathedral in the light of this legacy, and during post-war constraints, was and remains remarkable. This survey of how and why it happened is appropriate for a book about the arts and the Bible because within its pink sandstone structure, it shows us again what a risen Christ might look like. We are given a version of how the four evangelists, as envisaged by St John, might have appeared; similarly, we are shown the supporting angel, visiting Christ in Gethsemane, St Michael in his sandals, the Devil bound, and how angels blow trumpets and fly besides myriad images and suggestions of how the elements of the Christian faith can be recognised. Nationally uncharacteristic, politically unlikely and culturally unforeseen, this is a short account of this cathedral’s creation. The glory of this latter house, shall be greater than the former, saith the Lord of hosts.1

In the aftermath of the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of Coventry Cathedral, how accurate has that quotation proved to be? What fulfilment has there been to the unspoken latter part of the sentence, ‘and in this house will I give peace’? 1

Haggai 2: 9. Quoted by Ian Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, at the consecration of Coventry Cathedral, 25 May 1962.

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Resumé of the Destruction of St Michael’s Cathedral The wartime raid on Coventry and the subsequent cultural, creative response in the Cathedral’s re-building is sometimes compared to Picasso’s mural Guernica (including in contemporary newspaper reports). But the indignation behind the creation of this mural was because the town of Guernica had no involvement in wartime activities; it was purely a civilian target in a beleaguered part of the country, whereas Coventry was involved in wartime industries and was, in this sense, a justified target. For eleven hours during the night of 12 November 1940, 500 German aircraft dropped 543 tons of explosives and incendiaries onto Coventry. Housing, public buildings and industry were all contained within the city centre and the effect was catastrophic; nearly 1,500 people were killed or injured and, amongst the buildings, the Cathedral of St Michael damaged beyond repair. It is now known that the raid was expected, but no warnings were issued because of the need to protect the breaking of the German code, Enigma. A month after the Coventry raid, Bomber Command launched its first deliberate air raid on Manheim. The damage done to Coventry led the Germans to coin the word ‘Coventrate’, meaning to obliterate a city, but by late 1943, there were no less than ten German ‘Coventries’. Unusually for wartime reportage, this raid was used immediately for propaganda, and the cathedral ruin used as a symbol of national defiance. Kenneth Clark had appointed John Piper as an official war artist and he arrived three days later to start a series of paintings that would help establish the place and the event as an icon of the war (Plate 63). He wrote: The ruined cathedral a grey, meal-coloured stack in the foggy close; redder as one came nearer, still hot and wet from fire and water; finally presenting itself as a series of gaunt, red-grey facades, stretching eastwards from the dusty but still erect tower and spire. Outline of the walls against the steamy sky a series of ragged loops. Windows empty, but for the oddly poised fragments of tracery with spikes of blackened glass embedded in them. Walls flaked and pitted, as if they had been under water for a hundred years. Crackle of glass underfoot. Inside the shell of the walls, hardly a trace of woodwork among the tumbled pile of masonry, stuck with rusted iron stays.2

A National Icon of Resurrection The destruction of the cathedral was not entire, amazingly the tower and steeple remained, and the outer walls were intact, so this glorious fragment could be used immediately as a setting for services – photographed as such and used as propaganda (Fig. 24.1). Visually emblematic and romantic in its fragmentation as a deliberate stage set, it was used for events representing civilian courage and military defiance. This, coupled with the nonmilitant, forgiveness statements of the clergy, made Coventry Cathedral the nation’s icon, whereby new life could spring from destruction when once the war was over. There were other key wartime icons: Churchill on the beaches, the King amongst the ruins, both so right and so romantic; but Coventry with its cross made from blackened timbers in the immediate fire aftermath stands, with the photographs of planes taking off to deliver the Marshall Plan, as evidence of reconciliation intentions. 2

John Piper, ‘The Architecture of Destruction’, Architectural Review (July 1941) quoted by Frances Spalding, John Piper, Myfanwy Piper, Lives in Art (Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 181.

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Figure 24.1: Clergy leaving the ruined cathedral after the enthronement of Bishop Neville Gorton, 1940. Image © Martin R. Williams.

A New Cathedral There was an immediate, national determination to rebuild: Giles Gilbert Scott was asked to submit designs. Heavy, traditional, gothicised and placed at right angles across the ruined east end, these were rejected by both the Royal Fine Art Commission and Bishop Gorton in 1947. After reviews and committees, an open competition was launched in 1950. The saga of Coventry Cathedral’s rebuilding is excellently researched and recounted in Louise Campbell’s book Coventry Cathedral. Art and Architecture in post-war Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1996. A briefer version is given in her previous book To Build a Cathedral 1945–1962 (University of Warwick), 1987. All the associated arguments and subsequent arrangements, controversies and collaborations are well described, but after fifty years certain elements of the story achieve alternative significances which can bear review.

Basil Spence in his Time Coventry Cathedral is the result of the personal vision of Basil Spence (knighted in 1960). He recounts this achievement in his 1962 book Phoenix at Coventry: The Building of a Cathedral (London: Geoffrey Bles), and it is an almost chivalric picture of a man who

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envisaged his designated future in wartime, while under fire and witnessing the destruction of a fine church; even the book’s chapter headings ‘The Conception’, ‘The Idea’, ‘The Result’, ‘The Awakening’ etc. imply an inspired search. A child of the Indian Raj, bred for duty and service, Spence trained in his native Scotland at Edinburgh College of Art as an architect during the 1920s. The influence of the Arts and Crafts movement was still apparent in the values of this architectural school, continuing its emphasis on superlative craftsmanship in the face of accelerating industrialisation and the inclusion of artists of different disciplines in design teams – all of which were to influence Spence, and guide him towards accommodating old skills with new materials. His Edinburgh training complete, Spence then, prophetically, worked in the offices of Edwin Lutyens when he started work in 1929/30 on the new Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King in Liverpool. This was one of four new cathedrals built in the UK during the twentieth century, besides a number of new churches and some synagogues and recently mosques. However, the most ubiquitous ecclesiastical premises completed since the Second World War is not these, but church halls, whether as new buildings, extensions or adaptations; this is significant because it relates generally to the Church’s local image, usage and public expectations and will relate to a later part of this chapter.

The Four Other Twentieth-Century English Cathedrals The Victorians built churches and non-conformist chapels in quantity, but only one cathedral: Truro (started 1880). Liverpool commissioned Giles Gilbert Scott to design their cathedral, which took over sixty years to build, and Guildford also built a new cathedral, designed by Edward Maufe and completed in 1966. These three are basically updated Gothic, are severely Anglican, and contrast with the Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King in Liverpool, designed by Edwin Lutyens in 1929/30. Here the builders started the magnificent crypt, a masterpiece of brickwork, but which pushed costs for the entire building out of all possibility. So the decision was made, once the war was over, to start again. In 1959, Frederick Gibberd was commissioned to build the only cathedral that now stands comparison with Coventry. ‘Paddy’s Wigwam’ as the Catholic cathedral is locally known, was commissioned in 1959 and consecrated in 1967. It is not usually included in resumés of post-war church architecture because it is Roman Catholic. But it was created at the same time as Coventry and used several of the same artists. The creation of a single architect, it incorporated some of the best artists of the time and it arose briskly within twenty years of a war in a similarly ravaged city.

Purposes of a Cathedral The prime purpose of a cathedral is that it houses the throne of the bishop. Princes of the Church, attired and addressed as such, still sit in the House of Lords and are therefore a constituent of the government under whom it is prayed each Sunday from the BCP ‘that we may be godly and quietly governed’. Only Iran still includes its unelected clergy in government, but until or unless the Church is disestablished, this role continues. While it houses the bishop’s throne and is the centre of the diocese, the geographical area of ecclesiastical government, a cathedral is administered by the Dean and chapter, and is not under the direct control of the bishop. It must be able to host great assemblies and is expected to be an adornment not only to its host city but also to the nation.

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Cathedrals were built as ‘top of the range’ expressions of the nation’s religion. For those of faith, they were and are for prayer and are themselves a prayer; for others they were and are an expression of power, not quite civic and now sufficiently antiquarian not to incite fear (who today fears excommunication?). Cathedrals have been and some still are, hostels and schools (Glasgow University developed from its Cathedral school), offices and shops, storehouses and refectories, mausoleums and entertainment. But they have almost always been the work of the best and most creative contemporary minds, and have attracted, commissioned, stolen or generally acquired the finest architecture and art available. They are indeed ‘caskets of treasures’ (in Spence’s own words) and it is why cathedrals are the most loved and most often visited public buildings in the land; the only club that exists for its non-members. Coventry Cathedral stands as the last act of such faith in a country and a population the majority of which has, by all accounts, lost the certainty of its Christian faith.

The Construction of Coventry Cathedral The Cathedral is to speak to us and to generations to come of the Majesty, the Eternity and the Glory of God. God, therefore, direct you.3 Basil Spence today represents the inspired, lone artist/architect, the courtier genius who carried his vision as a backpack up the celestial mountain. ‘I found myself absolutely alone and there were few people I could talk to who could understand or help.’4 His undertaking was in spirit similar to the Everest ‘conquest’, which is also seen as one of the last gentlemanly adventures under single leadership before mammoth social changes, computerised calculation and the internet highway arrived. Those architects who today are highest in public awareness work as complex teams with access to huge calculative and engineering facilities, enabling communication and collaboration across global frontiers of place and space. The 1950s have now become a truly foreign country where things were ‘done differently’. Spence’s winning design was the only one that proposed retaining the shell of the old cathedral just as the war had left it. The new guidelines had three clear requirements: The cathedral was to centre on the Eucharist and preaching of the Gospels. The altar was to be inviting and accessible and placed towards the east. There were to be the usual features of a cathedral such as a chapter house etc. Spence was well aware from the beginning that in the commission to build a new Coventry Cathedral this particular chalice of opportunity was laced with poison, embodying difficulties for which he must have been prepared. These included changes within the commissioning committee, conflicting clergy demands, local opposition, national intervention, inconvenient inner-city sites and escalating costs matched by interminable time delays. ‘Little did I realise that I was not to receive a single commission, large or small, for two-and-a-half years, that I was to go almost bankrupt, that a bitter controversy was to rage over the design for the new cathedral.’5 3 4 5

Message from the Bishop and Provost in the opening page of the Competition rules. Basil Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, p. 16. Ibid. p. 21

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While there was some local enthusiasm for the rebuilding, and the Reconstruction Committee supported the scheme, the Labour-controlled Coventry City Council remained solidly against it – which was remarkable, as they were not responsible for the costs. The cathedral was paid for by the War Damage Commission, but it depended on a licence to build, issued by the Minister of Works, who was actually lobbied by the City Council to withhold it. The reasons given for this enduring opposition was that the city needed houses and jobs, not cathedrals. This is not the first time such problems have arisen. Thus speaketh the Lord of Hosts, saying, This people say, The time is not come, the time that the Lord’s house should be built. Then came the word of the Lord by Haggai, the prophet, saying, Is it time for you, O ye, to dwell in your ceiled (panelled) houses, and this house lie waste? . . . Consider your ways. Go into the mountain, and bring the wood, and build the house; and I will take pleasure in it, and I will be glorified, saith the Lord.6 It was not only the cathedral which the City Council opposed, but the Colleges of Art and Technology (at that time separate) which were also subjected to interference and obstructions in their development. Places of worship and education were not in that local government’s policies but, while the elected members were hostile, the officers were not and work on the cathedral started in early 1955. Spence had travelled widely in Europe and was familiar with German and French rebuilt churches, which had established a strategy of integrating art and architecture. Those responsible had achieved a widely established practice of artistic freedom, and believed that it was better to commission artists of the highest ability, maybe without religious faith, rather than artists of lesser ability with religious conviction. This had demonstrated that churches could and did accommodate modern art in their windows, decorations and appointments, vestments and artefacts, and these examples Spence mentally carried back to Coventry.

The Cathedral’s Layout, Appointments and Furnishings Spence would have known the life-sized, copper effigy of Bishop Yeatman-Biggs, still lying in the ravaged old cathedral and holding a model of St Michael’s in his hands as if it is indeed a casket. Perhaps it was this that prompted him to say about his vision for the new one: ‘The Cathedral would be like a plain jewel-casket with many jewels inside: but the biggest and brightest jewel would be the Altar.’7 It was the siting of the altar at the back of the liturgical east end (though the geographic north) of this basilica-based building that caused the most trouble. The public had a notion that a cathedral should look like every English cathedral (apart from Liverpool Catholic Cathedral, see above). Following the conventions of the Roman basilica, they had a long hall with eventually an apse at the east end to contain the holiest site, the altar. This had further developed so a traditional medieval Gothic cathedral was cruciform ‘like a man lying on his back. The nave was his legs placed together, the transepts on either side were his arms outspread. The choir was his body; and the Lady Chapel was his head’.8 6 7 8

Haggai 1: 2–3, 8. Basil Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, p.14. William Golding, The Spire (London: Faber & Faber, 1964), p. 8.

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The mainly Protestant post-war churches rebuilt in Germany tended to site the altar against their eastern wall and in front of an assembled congregation on three sides, while the mainly Catholic churches in France often sited the altar centrally – a pattern also followed by Liverpool’s new Catholic Cathedral: ‘The point, the purpose, the focus of this place is the altar. Because of what happens on this altar again and again – everything is subordinate to it.’9 It is not only religious buildings that have reconsidered their shape in pursuit of twentieth-century circular functionalism; modern theatres have largely abandoned their proscenium arch for a thrust stage or one completely in the round. Hospital wards have also generally reconfigured their long Nightingale wards and one design has been a central ‘spoke’ arrangement, with bedded side wards radiating from a central nursing station. All these have held problems; stages in the round leave the actors exposed and surprise entrances are precluded while ‘spoked’ hospital wards intensify nurse mileage. Perhaps proscenium arches, Nightingale wards and basilican churches have a future after all. At Coventry, the imaginative Bishop, Neville Gorton, advocated a centrally planned cathedral emphasising the altar, but the Reconstruction Committee refused and the public expectation of a Gothic cathedral (with the altar safely at the east end, where it always had been) won the day. The ‘table’ or ‘altar’ had biblical precedent for being treated with opulence and awe. The table and his furniture, and the pure candlesticks . . . and the altar of incense . . . and the cloths of service, and the holy garments for . . . the priest . . . to minister in the priest’s office . . . and the anointing oil, and sweet incense for the holy place . . . 10 Spence therefore offered a cathedral that combined a basilica form with modernised Gothic detailing: a long nave terminating in the altar, no transepts but aisles indicated by the slender, reinforced concrete pillars tapering to their bronze footings and supporting a webbed canopy roof which is (as in St Paul’s dome) independent of the actual roof above it. At the time, these designs disappointed most of the cognoscenti and offended many of the traditionalists, but in retrospect they can equally be acknowledged as showing shrewdness with adventure. This will remain my verdict.

‘Arise therefore, and be doing’ The most famous biblical temple was that supposedly built in the ninth century bc by Solomon on the instruction of his father, David. ‘My son, the Lord be with thee . . . and build the House of the Lord thy God . . . the Lord give thee wisdom and understanding . . . be strong and of good courage; dread not, nor be dismayed . . . I have prepared for the House of the Lord an hundred thousand talents of gold, and an thousand thousand talents of silver; and of brass and iron without weight; . . . timber also and stone have I prepared; and that thou mayest add thereto. Moreover, there are workmen with thee in abundance, hewers and workers of stone and timber, and all manner of cunning men for every manner of work. Of the gold, the silver, and the brass and the iron, there is no number. Arise 9 10

A Cathedral for our Time, guidebook 1967. Exodus 31: 8–10 (KJV).

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therefore, and be doing.’ . . . David also commanded all the princes of Israel to help Solomon his son.11 Solomon’s temple may exist now only as a legend, but this enchanting account of its commission, budget, allocated workmen, start date and political assistance could be applied to Basil Spence in 1951 as he set about a similar undertaking. The artists whom Spence selected were his personal choice; no competitions were held and, while the Reconstruction Committee approved his decisions, these were not committee decisions. He mainly appointed and commissioned his selected artists before the building of the cathedral was even started (which was not until 1955) with the acumen to see that if budgets were cut, whatever other sacrifices were to be made, it would not be these. Spence selected broadly representational artists who were nevertheless not interested in photographic detail, and who could work to a large scale for the public stage. He wanted the best and he got it, irrespective of whether the artists had a conventional faith or not, and in this he was influenced by the influential French magazine L’Art Sacre (1937–4). This publication had set a new model for church commissioning. Whereas France, like England, had hitherto tended to favour the safe and conventional, this now urged a new view that contemporary art of the highest order could be accommodated within the church, God (the clergy and congregation) willing.

Those Not Chosen or ‘the path not taken . . .’ Since the time of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Victorian revamping of churches, British artists had not been prominent in their work for religious institutions. Stanley Spencer is a notable exception with his mammoth 1920s commission for Sandham Chapel, but he was becoming old and ill and died in 1959. David Jones and Cecil Collins were each at this time producing fine religious work but both to a delicate, private scale. Ceri Richards was later to be commissioned by Dean Hussey at Chichester Cathedral but Spence may have considered him to be too similar in his visual poetry to John Piper. Francis Bacon had already produced his triptych, Three Figures at the Foot of the Cross, but this artist’s reputation in general and this work in particular were so visceral and so disturbing that Spence may wisely have decided to leave the paintings safely in the Tate and the artist in Soho. Both Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore had been commissioned to make splendid works for St Margaret’s in Northampton under Walter Hussey, who was shortly to become Dean of Chichester, and so begin a unique period of prestigious church commissioning. Spence had earmarked Sutherland for the tapestry and the only puzzling omission is that of Henry Moore, then at the height of his powers. Though he advised Spence on the appointment of Ralph Beyer, it may have been Moore’s well-known atheism that led to this omission; nevertheless, this case apart, in retrospect Spence’s choices were exemplary. The 1950s/60s is a period now associated with dramatic changes in British art leading to basic design concepts, free of representation and adornment, and ‘hard edge’ abstract painting. The problem was, and remains, that on the whole clergy want art that is accessible and speaks directly to all manner and conditions of people, while the very nature of religious faith involves abstract concepts that can best be expressed by metaphor and abstract expression. Recall the most enigmatic words of the Nicene Creed: 11

1 Chronicles 23: 11–17.

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God of God Light of Light Very God of Very God The problem for an artist seeking to express such abstractions is obvious. (Blake, indeed, might have managed, but he was dead.) Spence appointed John Piper and invited him to return to Coventry, fifteen years after he had made his iconic painting in the immediate aftermath of the bombing.

The Baptistery Window Sunlight is a metaphor for honesty. Light is the ancient name for truthfulness.12 The huge window above the boulder font is at right angles to the colourless transparent glass screen at the entrance. The ten nave windows had by this time (1956/7) been completed with their complex, semi-abstract iconography which encouraged Piper and his colleague, Patrick Reyntiens to think in terms of pure colour, uninterrupted by any symbolism. The window structure was not easy to handle, with what Piper called its cheesegrater structure of mullions, and glass panels interspersed with stone panes, which he felt demanded an abstract solution. However, the Provost and Bishop were still thinking in terms of a dove in the upper part of the window against a nice blue, symbolising the gift of the Holy Spirit in baptism, the centre to be a large sun symbolising Christ and the bottom to signify (in some unspecified way) the response of man to this gift of God. Over the two years (1956–8) of negotiation, the art world in particular and the public generally were becoming aware of the work of the revolutionary work of Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, William De Kooning and Barnet Newman, besides others of the American Expressionist movement. Similarly, French modern stained glass in churches and elsewhere was lavish, contemporary and explosive. Piper and Spence believed that for a major British commission to be weak in comparison would be a disgrace; after all, it was Britain that had won the war only ten years previously. So, with the eventual support of the clergy who had possibly had their fill of arcane symbolism in the nave windows, it was agreed that ‘the Baptistery Window would convey its message solely through colour; it would be colossal, theatrical and uncompromisingly abstract’.13

The West Window Rowan Williams (now former Archbishop of Canterbury) once compared prayer to sunbathing: When you are lying on the beach something is happening, something that has nothing to do with how you feel or how hard you’re trying. You’re not going to get a better tan by screwing up your eyes and concentrating. All you have to do is turn up. And then things change, at their own pace. You simply have to be there where the light can get at you.14 12 13

14

Giles Fraser, The Guardian, 28 July 2012. Frances Spalding, John Piper, Myfanwy Piper, Lives in Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 372. Quoted by Giles Fraser, The Guardian, 28 July 2012.

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This definition of prayer can seem wonderfully relevant when today, as in 1962, one stands on the black marble floor awash in coloured and natural light. John Hutton, who had worked with Spence on the Festival of Britain, had since developed a unique method for large-scale glass engraving using a grinding wheel attached to a flexible drive. Spence commissioned the screen from Hutton in 1952 and it was finally installed in 1961. Seventy feet high, this huge glass screen divides the porch from the nave, and while its 143 panes and three triple-pane sized doors are all cased within a bronze framework of mullions and transoms, it does not feel as if the flight of those trumpeting angels are restricted by them. There are sixty-six larger than life figures, including thirty-nine sedate figures of Old and New Testament saints and prophets in five horizontal transom bands, all being interspersed with plain glass. These five bands of figures are sandwiched between three horizontal bands of twenty-seven ecstatic angels all busily blowing long trumpets; both translucent and transparent, they overlap the mullions and each other and their flight is spread-eagled every which-way, like leggy kids let out of school. Sometimes foreshortened and reminiscent of x-ray photographs, even of the Hiroshima bleached bodies, the drawing is somewhat similar to that of John Piper, in its assured scribbles, blotches, twirls and textures. The angels of the Annunciation and of the Resurrection are both specified but, appropriately enough, given the exactitude needed in the engineering for this screen, there is also the angel of the measuring rod: . . . and there was given me a reed like unto a rod: and the angel stood, saying, Rise, and measure the temple of God, and the altar, and them that worship therein.15 John Hutton died in 1979 and his ashes are buried at the foot of his great screen at Coventry. ‘Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.’16

The Ten Nave Windows It was while he was under anaesthetic for a tooth extraction that Spence had a dream that the side walls of the nave were zigzagged. This idea gave him his opportunity for the ten, tall windows for which he subsequently commissioned the glass. These, five on the east side of the nave dedicated to God, and five on the west side representing Man, have received the least attention amongst the many ‘jewels in the casket’ over the last fifty years. Among possible reasons for this are that they are hidden when one enters the cathedral, as the windows face south and shine towards the high altar, only being seen when one walks back from the altar to the entrance. Also they are hard to see, being seventy feet high and thin with heavy stone transoms and mullions. Furthermore, they are difficult to reproduce in even the largest book, let alone a postcard, but the main reason is that their iconography is complex and arcane. The Christ tapestry, the Baptistery Window, the West Window figures can all be recognised in a flash. They reward attentive scrutiny but even the most cursory passer-by knows that they are there. But with binoculars and a few free hours to study, what do these windows suggest of the condition of man and the nature of God? 15 16

Revelation 11: 1. Matthew 7: 20.

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They do not tell a narrative tale, as does the glass at King’s College in Cambridge. They bear as much relation to biblical narrative as Handel’s Messiah, which takes the theme of the Redemption of Man as expressed in some disconnected passages from the Bible, transforming them into a unity at once accessible and widely popular. These windows are perhaps the most academic of Spence’s commissions. Lawrence Lee (one of the three designers) was head of the department of stained glass at the Royal College of Art in 1951 when Spence asked him, with two of his graduates, Keith New and Geoffrey Clarke, to undertake this massive commission. In 1956 a booklet was published to accompany the display of six of the completed ten windows at the V&A. It surveyed their origin, purpose and iconography. To read it today is to realise that these artists were working in the equivalent of a university environment, that they expected an observant response and they had the confidence to create a new language of semi-abstract symbols. Lawrence Lee recalled that at the time of the commission, the Coventry clergy gave no guidance regarding iconography so the three artists undertook their own researches and used Rudolf Koch’s Book of Signs (published 1930). This is a strange publication of hundreds of powerfully drawn symbols and signs, including variants on the cross, monograms, other Christian signs, the four elements, astronomical and astrological signs, stonemasons’ signs, etc. The result is an amazing abstract energy, combined with post-cubist partabstraction, and expressed in exuberant colour. Today, the cathedral sells only two basic, small postcards of each set of five windows, with no acknowledgement of the makers, no explanation or examination of their iconography, and nothing to suggest that these windows were the major commission for stained glass of the first half of the twentieth century. Impossible to remove, difficult to damage, these extraordinary works are indifferent to indifference, and simply await the attention that is their due.

The Tapestry And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne in sight like unto an emerald . . . And round about the throne were four beasts . . . and the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had the face of a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.17 The tapestry by Graham Sutherland that occupies the whole wall of the liturgical east and geographic north of the cathedral is recognisable to the point of visual exhaustion. Like Constable’s Haywain that is reproduced on endless placemats, or Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik that fills so many shopping centres, these are all wonderful creations debased by the twentieth century’s ability to reproduce, and this familiarity also obscures the originality of this commission. From its inception, Spence had decided on a huge image of Christ on the east end, filling the entire wall and to be visible through the West Window (Fig. 24.2). He invited Graham Sutherland, a powerful and wide-ranging painter and photographer, who could work to a large scale. At Walter Hussey’s invitation, he had done the best- known modern 17

Revelation 4: 2–7.

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Figure 24.2: Graham Sutherland, Two Studies in Charcoal on Paper for the Tapestry ‘Christ in Majesty’, c. 1952. © Sutherland Estate. Crucifixion for St Matthew’s at Northampton. Like Spence’s other commissions, it was made solely on his personal initiative. It was from the start Spence’s intention that this should be a tapestry, the largest ever made, illustrating the vision of Christ in Revelations. Sutherland made the cartoon showing Christ in a mandoria, a shape that is an ancient symbol of two circles intersecting to make an almond shape. It could equally be an egg shape, referring to classical association of gods with the primordial egg or the legendary phoenix burying the burning ashes in an egg. It is a symbol recognisably Christian, used in Byzantine and medieval art and utilised here for the first time in centuries with design originality and painterly panache. There are the four evangelists, in their Revelation guises and the defeat of the Devil by St Michael, the figure of a man between Christ’s colossal feet is life-size and at the bottom is a panel showing Christ crucified. The rainbow around the throne is indeed here like to an emerald with intersections of golden yellow. The cartoon is seven feet high: the tapestry seventy-two feet. The technical problems of its making were long and arduous, and it was eventually woven in Paris. When finished, it weighed a ton and, in the manner of woven cloth, no one could see it until complete, unrolled and hung, just in time for the consecration rehearsals scheduled for April 1962. ‘This trouble, after ten years negotiation, coaxing, worrying and in the end, we hope,

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Figure 24.3: Coventry Cathedral, the Nave, photographed April 1962, before many of the commissioned furnishings were installed. Image © Coventry Cathedral. triumph, cannot dim the sense of achievement that attends all the works in the Cathedral’ (Fig. 24.3).18

St Michael and the Devil During this post-war period the visual and plastic arts were exploding in invention; in the UK, sculpture was still (just) something that was either carved out of stone or modelled up from clay. The Battersea Sculpture Park was becoming established and its exhibitions were going on tour across the country. Those sculptors who had returned from war service and were used to the scale of war machines, their creation and maintenance, who understood weight and welding, metallurgy and machining, were by this time making new works that smashed the conventional codes of sculpture. Constructivist sculpture had arrived. Spence was bold but not provocative, and invited one of the best-known British sculptors, Jacob Epstein, who modelled for bronze casting in the long European tradition. With canons to the left of him and canons to the right of him, Spence answered their objection that he was a Jew with the answer, ‘So was Jesus Christ.’ Epstein had already made the 18

Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, p. 65.

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large Madonna and Child for the Convent in Cavendish Square, London, and this won him the commission at Coventry – the deciding factor being one of scale. Like all the artists commissioned by Spence, he could work large for the national stage and he was then at the height of his reputation. And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world, he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.19 Epstein produced a maquette for the two huge figures, to stand sentinel at the porch to the cathedral and before the Reconstruction Committee had even seen it, started work confidently on the full-scale head of St Michael. ‘Am I going too fast?’ he asked Spence, ‘Look, I am not working for the Committee any more, I am working for myself.’20 Perhaps he sensed he would not live to see the completed work installed, as he died in 1959; in the meantime, he worked on modelling the two huge figures that were then sent away in sections to be cast in bronze, and then left to mature in the open air. The devil was not a dragon, as envisaged by Spence, but a bound man with the tradition horns of the devil; accessible, huge and immutable (Fig. 24.4).

The Tablets of the Word A meeting of the Cathedral Chapter in 1957 agreed that the eight recesses between the nave windows and walls should have some embellishment that would be clearly understandable by the ‘common people’ (a term used repeatedly at this time, since of course banished along with ration books and third-class carriages, to be replaced by the politically correct term, ‘general public’). Spence then persuaded the Chapter to agree in principle to carved inscriptions and symbols and, on the advice of Nicholas Pevsner, (who had defended Spence’s original cathedral designs) introduced them to Ralph Beyer. He was the son of Professor Oscar Beyer, an authority on incised lettering and symbols from (especially) the catacombs in Rome. This enthusiasm was transmuted by his son into modern letterwork, and gave rise to the letterform that is now known as ‘Coventry’. Symbols were also chosen but this proved difficult and one panel was left without. They were carved in Honiton stone and the letters were picked out in chalk white for clarity. Their echoes of the serif with a defiance of the vertical, united with their dignified symbols make them some of the finest hand-cut, large scale lettering in the Western tradition, vying with Trajan’s Column and Eric Gill’s masterpieces (Fig. 24.5).

Chapel of Christ the Servant or the Gethsemane Chapel And he went . . . as he was wont, to the Mount of Olives, and his disciples also followed him . . . and he was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled down, and prayed . . . Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will but mine be done. And there appeared an Angel unto him 19 20

Revelation 12: 7–9. Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, p. 71.

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Figure 24.4: Lady Epstein unveiling the Epstein sculpture of St Michael and the Devil, June 1960. Image: Martin R. Williams © Coventry Cathedral.

Figure 24.5: Design of lettering for Tablets of the Word, Ralph Beyer 1962. Image: Martin R. Williams © Coventry Cathedral.

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from heaven, strengthening him . . . and when he rose from prayer, and was come to his disciples, he found them sleeping for sorrow.21 This small chapel, adjacent to the Lady Chapel, has two mural panels by Steven Sykes, of which the main one is of the ‘strengthening’ Angel. The altar and wrought iron screen, implying the crown of thorns, are by Spence himself. Of all the cathedral commissions, this is the most clearly related to its 1950s period, but is no less delightful for this, and is a welcome, if humbler, feast of pleasure. The two wall panels are cast in cement fondu in reverse relief, and incorporate glass, mirror, cut crystal and gold leaf. It shows the Angel from heaven holding the cup while pointing to heaven in the time-honoured gesture of holiness; the second panel shows the sleeping disciples. Its decorative richness comes from the multiple impressions making patterns like repeating strands of braid. For those of us who went to art school in the early 1960s, this is how we were taught: we wedged our clay, then rolled and slabbed it, creating simplified forms while remembering our life drawing and then impressed it repeatedly for riotous decoration. It is as nostalgic as Mary Quant and the Beatles and reminds us of that naïve time at art school when we all thought we would become giants. Those of us still around fifty years later, while recognising our grander peers, know we are pygmies but we have consorted with giants and that is enough (Fig. 24.6).

Some Small Things This is Spence’s own ironic title for his chapter in Phoenix at Coventry and includes the many commissions he awarded for the lectern, the lights, the seating, the bishop’s throne, the vestments, the processional cross, the font, the door handles, the organ and choir stalls (used for the commission of The War Requiem by Benjamin Britten) and, above all, for the cross and the candlesticks (Plate 64). The artists he commissioned stand as the ablest and best according to the values he had honed. Hans Coper, a refugee from Germany, had become one of England’s most distinguished potters and made the two vast black Manganese sanctuary candlesticks. Geoffrey Clarke was one of the three artists who made the nave windows, but he also designed the altar cross besides other crosses and candlesticks. The floor of the Chapel of Unity, a marble mosaic by Einar Forseth, and the slivers of tall abstract windows by Margaret Traherne, would be the sole glory of any lesser place. And Solomon made all the vessels that pertained unto the House of the Lord . . . the pots, and the shovels, and the basons . . . and all these vessels . . . were of bright brass. The altar of gold, and the table of gold . . . and the candlesticks of pure gold . . . with the flowers and the lamps and the tongs of gold . . . and the bowls and the snuffers and the spoons and the censers of pure gold . . . and the hinges of gold . . . So was ended all the work that king Solomon made for the house of the Lord.22 The smallest and last commission, made after the cathedral opened in May 1962, was for the Christmas and Epiphany Crib (Plate 65). Basil Spence visited my mother, Alma Ramsey-Hosking and, while she disliked church (‘spare me the smell of hassocks’ she used 21 22

Luke 22: 39–45. 1 Kings 7: 45–51 (edited).

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Figure 24.6: The Angel of the Lord: relief sculpture by Stephen Sykes in the Chapel of Gethsemane 1962. Image © Coventry Cathedral.

to say) she was so bowled over by his charm that she readily agreed. She had been a pupil of Henry Moore and was primarily a carver, but these figures were modelled in resin over basic armatures. She made five figures, over three feet tall with crooks at Christmas and gifts at Epiphany to carry, all gloriously dressed as from a High Renaissance nativity, also an ox and a donkey. These were all displayed on a spiralling wooden structure of austere simplicity designed by Spence’s studio. The saga of its forty-five year desecration is told by Pamela Tudor Craig in The Church Times, December 2007; basically, the structure was destroyed and the figures broken, sprayed with car paint and redressed. As inheritor of her copyright, I was able to instigate its complete restoration, rebuilding the structure from the original drawings found in the Spence archives. The issues here pertain to any art displayed in any public place; such items are vulnerable and frequently damaged unless they are like the major commissions at Coventry which are so huge, made of such enduring materials and so immutable, that they stand a chance of survival.

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What Happened Next? and in this house will I give peace23 What happened next is what usually happens; the architect and builders hand it over to those responsible for its jurisdiction and go home and, as one well-known architect said, ‘. . . and you never go back’. Spence did not go home, because the cathedral had become a place of national pride. It was finished and attracting hordes of visitors and while comment was varied, those who endorsed it were winning the day. Henry Russell Hitchcock spoke for thousands when he declared, ‘This is a twentieth century building of assured sumptuousness, handsome in its materials, gorgeous in many of its accessories, and happily symbolic in its broader significance’ (Plate 66).24 However, the then Provost, who had been appointed well into the whole process, had doubts from the beginning whether a cathedral like this would accommodate his own views of its ministry. Spence initially offered to act as an adviser for the cathedral, but after some alterations to the fabric had been made without consulting him, he resigned. Since then, during the intervening fifty years, alterations have been made, other artworks added and the usual clutter attending all public buildings has accumulated. Deans and provosts, bishops and sewing ladies, clerks of works and cleaners have come and gone. How then has the casket of treasures fared?

Issues of Care The current problems at Coventry Cathedral (for problems they are in terms of finance, attendance and reputation) constitute a triple whammy: care, usage and crisis of aesthetic. The curatorship of all ecclesiastical buildings is in the hands of the clergy; they may appoint lay people, architects and advisers as needed, but they hold the power. The professionals are not allowed to make structural alterations or alter or reorder items without a ‘Faculty’ (granted by the several Diocesan Advisory Committees) but this is the only restraint, and though the quality and composition of these committees vary, they are largely cut from similar cloth to the clergy. A survey conducted amongst theological colleges suggests that ordinands are not given any significant training in curatorial care or conservation, and certainly not on modern commissioning. That the responsibility of so great a part of the nation’s heritage is the responsibility of untrained people, however well-meaning, is disturbing.

Problems of Usage I suggested earlier that by far the commonest newly built post-war ecclesiastical premises were church halls. Their popularity shows something of the new social activities of modern congregations: coffee mornings, crafts and painting, talks and table tennis, films, children’s clubs, mums and toddlers, sticking candles into oranges for Candlemas, putting up notices and rearranging those that are there, cleaning silver, polishing brass, mending vestments, making banners – all such activities very properly bind a worshipping 23 24

Haggai 2: 9. Quoted in Christopher Lamb, Reconciling People: Coventry Cathedral’s Story (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2011), p. 27.

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community together. Where there is a church hall, there will be toilets and a kitchen, enabling the very young and the very old, the pregnant and menstruating, the incontinent and the diabetic – not to mention the adult, fit, and healthy! – all to be comfortable. If they are comfortable, they will come and stay to create a church community. Church halls have been neglected in terms of architectural study but, one day, probably some devoted student will produce a monograph on them.25 Those churches that in some way offer the premises for such church hall type activities usually appear to be surviving as a church as well, where the continuing worship of God is a reality. Those that cannot, or do not, offer this provision, risk social loss and subsequent decline. Spence and those who commissioned him simply did not appear to have expected the public to do anything except walk around, pray and contemplate because, in those days, especially in cathedrals, well-behaved congregations and visitors did this, and only this, and then went happily home with a palm cross or a postcard. ‘Visitor experience’ had not been defined, community involvement did not expect plumbing and the disabled were not expected to get around; thus there were, and still are, no public facilities on the main floor of Coventry Cathedral. The ‘church hall’ syndrome was not then ubiquitous and Coventry Cathedral, for all its excellence and drama lacked adequate space or provision for these not unreasonable modern expectations. The result is that community activity with all its paraphernalia is carried on in the noble Chapel of Unity. Its marble mosaic floor is now largely concealed – presumably because those in charge believe that a bored school group is more important in immediate logistics than a dead artist.

Crises of Aesthetic Art styles that depend on austerity and decorative restraint, on abstract balances and subtle manipulations of mass, shape, shadow and angle, tend to lack mass popular appeal; Coventry Cathedral comes into this category. When period styles like Art Deco, Bauhaus, and much post-1930 modern architecture have been used for public buildings, their subsequent custodians have not always treated them sympathetically. The charming and innovative Finsbury Health Centre in London, for instance, designed in 1938 by Bertold Lubetkin, with its wall of glass, and use of concrete and tiling, was for years neglected by the NHS, which allowed its architectural qualities to be obscured. On a larger scale, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, built in 1932 and in use largely unaltered until 2006 was similarly mistreated. Its austere windows were often given baroque ruched curtains, outside awnings and endless prettifying pots and posters – apparently expressing a deep desire on the part of its occupants to render domestic and decorative its elegant and austere theme. However it has now benefited from an imaginative rebuilding, preserving and reinstating its period delights from whole facades to door hinges, while giving it a new auditorium and facilities appropriate for today. When these issues arise in church architecture (as at Coventry), there is a crisis between the vision of the architect and the artists who have contributed, and what both the clergy and the users perceive as their rights and needs. Nowhere does this crisis show more disturbingly than in the fifty years’ usage of Coventry Cathedral. 25

The church hall, as we have come to know it, is an extension of the idea of the village hall, popularised in the late nineteenth century. Among other advocates was May Morris, daughter of William Morris.

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There seems to be amongst the evangelical wing of the Church of England a tacit assumption that distinguished art deserves no more respect than some item offered by a grateful congregation member. Their argument is that if we are all equal in the sight of God, why is that person’s creation better than this person’s effort? Elitism, it is implied, has no place in religion. Over-simplified this may be, but it exists, and in the management of a ‘casket of treasures’ such as Coventry, this view is hardly conducive to its best care.

Solutions and Suggestions Coventry Cathedral has become one of the best-loved modern British buildings, vying for affection with London’s Festival Hall and Stratford Memorial Theatre. The last two have needed radical overhauls and rebuilding which Coventry Cathedral has not so far required, but its crisis of care and limitations of space are pressing. Like other buildings, both private and public, which have dug downwards to avoid altering their overall outline, the Sainsbury Centre at Norwich added new underground galleries to preserve its silhouette intact. Whether this is feasible at Coventry is uncertain, but it would certainly accommodate discreetly the modern needs of its staff, congregation and visitors. The pattern of tourism has altered since the cathedral first opened and it no longer attracts large curious crowds. While it has become familiar, it is not situated in a city that is an obvious tourist venue, but for those with a serious interest in post-war art and architecture, it is a gem. It has an archive of stunning material, which, with the complementary archive of work owned by the Herbert Art Gallery nearby across the piazza, could be displayed as a visual account of how the whole enterprise was achieved. At present, however, this material is not displayed, used, publicised or acknowledged in significant or appropriate ways.

‘And in this house will I give peace’ International peace, for which so many aspects of this cathedral and its treasures expressed desire, has not since been seriously broken (apart from the Falklands conflict). Coventry as a city has suffered economic reversal, but the Colleges of Arts and Technology, thriving in the shadow of this extraordinary cathedral, and similarly opposed by the local politicians, are combined within an established university. And for this particular house of God, regarding the conduct of its affairs, the verdict of peace is still open. Nevertheless, from the huge images of what God, his Son, servants and messengers might look like, to the intricate and myriad visual embodiments of Christian ideals and abstracts, this casket of treasures is of value beyond rubies and the gold of Ophir.

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SACRED POETRY: WATTS AND WESLEY J. R. Watson

Watts the Prophet

I

saac Watts was born in 1674, the year of Milton’s death. In his sacred poetry, he was exploring what it was like to inherit something of the great man’s ambition to write inspired but human religious poetry. This involved a finding of the innermost self, an exploration of the deepest hopes and fears, for which the Bible serves as a source of narratives, symbols, and ways of expressing that self. Watts has Milton in his sights, even as Milton had Homer and Virgil in his, and he saw the role of great Puritan poet, the interpreter of the Bible and the self-discoverer, passing from Milton to himself. Milton was, in the words of Marvell’s poem ‘On Paradise Lost’ printed in the Second Edition of 1674, ‘the Poet blind, yet bold’. He was, as he had prayed to be (III. 35), the modern Tiresias: Just Heav’n thee like Tiresias to requite Rewards with Prophesie thy loss of sight. (‘On Paradise Lost’, 43–4) The gift of prophecy, and its traditional association with blindness, was the entrance into a holy place, forbidden to those with normal sight. Watts longed for it: ‘Give me the chariot’, he cried in ‘The Adventurous Muse’: Give me the Muse whose generous Force Impatient of the Reins Pursues an unattempted Course, Breaks all the Criticks Iron Chains, And bears to Paradise the raptur’d Mind. There Milton dwells; The Mortal sung Themes not presum’d by mortal Tongue; New terrors and new Glories shine In every Page, and flying Scenes Divine Surprize the wond’ring Sense, & draw our Souls along. The ‘unattempted Course’ is a deliberate reference back to ‘Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime’ in the opening paragraph of Paradise Lost (I. 16). Sensibly, however,

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Watts did not write an epic. He was led by other demands. Apart from some poems in Horae Lyricae, his sacred poetry was written in response to the needs of Independent congregations at worship. The result was Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1707, 1709). If the hymns are read in conjunction with the ambitious and aspiring poems of Horae Lyricae (1706, 1709) the tension is evident. Texts have to be provided that are metrically safe, easily understood, and capable of being sung: The Metaphors are generally sunk to the Level of vulgar Capacities. I have aimed at ease of Numbers and Smoothness of Sound, and endeavour’d to make the Sense plain and obvious; if the Verse appears so gentle and flowing as to incur the Censure of Feebleness, I may honestly affirm, that sometimes it cost me labour to make it so: Some of the Beauties of Poetry are neglected, and some wilfully defaced: I have thrown out the Lines that were too sonorous, and giv’n an Allay to the Verse, lest a more exalted Turn of Thought or Language should darken or disturb the Devotion of the plainest Souls. (Preface to Hymns and Spiritual Songs, 1707, pp. viii–ix) This may suggest an uneasy compromise between Watts the prophet-poet and Watts the hymn-writer, but that compromise is at the centre of Watts’s work. It is in this mode that he finds his authentic inner self and gives it expression. Horae Lyricae is evidence of a fiercely ambitious spirit: ‘Give me the Chariot’, he exclaims in ‘The Adventurous Muse’. In his hymn writing he seems to abandon the chariot, but its power is felt in the pressure and tension of the lines, which are giving voice to his inner self, and using the Bible as a source of symbols.1 In ‘Two Happy Rivals, Devotion and the Muse’, in Horae Lyricae, he rejects the traditional subjects of poetry when Religion descends: and with a courteous Hand she beckons me away: I feel mine airy Powers loose from the cumb’rous Clay, And with a joyful haste obey Religion’s high Command. This involves ‘A long Farewel to all below’ To golden Scenes, and flow’ry Fields, To all the Worlds that Fancy builds, And all that Poets know. Watts here means ‘and all that [ordinary] poets know’: he believed that his calling to be a religious poet in the service of his worshipping community (‘the saints’) was a necessary renunciation. He looks at the Bible, but makes a decision: if I were to set up for a Poet, with a Design to exceed all the Modern Writers, I would follow the Advice of Rapin, and read the Prophets Night and Day. I am sure the Composures of the following Book would have been fill’d with much greater Sense, and appear’d with much more agreeable Ornaments, had I derived a larger Portion from the Holy Scriptures. (Preface to Horae Lyricae, p. xii) 1

Here, and in the conclusion to this essay, I acknowledge a substantial debt to Meg Harris Williams, The Vale of Soulmaking. The Post-Kleinian model of the mind (London: Karnac Books, 2005).

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Milton was blind; Watts suffered from ill health for most of his life. Both claimed an exceptional vision. It is this which gives meaning to the often repeated anecdote that Watts complained to his father about the texts sung in the chapel at Southampton, whereupon his father challenged him to do better. He knew that he could do better, and that something better was needed, because this was precisely what his Adventurous Muse was designed to do. If it had had intercourse with the prophets, that vision was to be brought down from the mountain. It was his Moses-like assertion of his self-hood and his ability that made him take up his father’s challenge, and the result is strangely glowing, as it is in the first hymn in Hymns and Spiritual Songs, ‘A New Song to the Lamb that was slain, Rev. 5. 6, 8, 9, 10, 12.’: Behold the glories of the Lamb Amidst his Father’s Throne: Prepare new Honours for his Name, And Songs before unknown. The pride of the young poet in his work is clear: the songs are before unknown, unattempted yet. Watts presents a controlled, ardent representation of the inspired vision of Revelation: Now to the Lamb that once was slain, Be endless Blessings paid; Salvation, Glory, Joy, remain For ever on thy Head. Thou hast redeem’d our Souls with Blood, Hast set the Pris’ners free, Hast made us Kings and Priests to God, And we shall reign with Thee. He had a poor opinion of some of his predecessors. In the Preface to the 1707 Hymns and Spiritual Songs, he described ‘the dull Indifference, the negligent and the thoughtless Air that sits upon the Faces of the Whole Assembly while the Psalm is on their Lips’ (p. iii). The reason for this was not just that the metrical psalms were badly made, but that they failed to articulate the problems that preoccupied himself and his fellow worshippers; his hymns relate the Bible to the human condition, in all its various moods of elation or depression: The most frequent Changes and Tempers of our Spirit, and Conditions of our Life are here copied, and the Breathings of our Piety exprest according to the variety of our Passions; our Love, our Fear, our Hope, our Desire, our Sorrow, our Wonder and our Joy, all refin’d into Devotion, and acting under the Influence and Conduct of the Blessed Spirit; (p. vii) While the hymns appeal to the simplest of human emotions, such as the fear of death, they are nevertheless determinedly set in a pattern of evangelical domination. The fear may be admitted, but it is quickly superseded: Great God, I own thy Sentence just, And Nature must decay, I yield my Body to the Dust, To dwell with Fellow-clay.

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j. r. watson Yet Faith may triumph o’re the Grave, And trample on the Tombs: My Jesus, my Redeemer lives, My God, my Saviour comes. (Hymn VI. ‘Triumph over Death, Job 19. ver. 25, 26, 27’)

The next hymn, ‘The Invitation of the Gospel, Isa. 55. 1, 2, &c’ is ‘soul-reviving’, using imagery of satisfying a person’s hunger. It knows something of the futility and despair that come from an aimless and purposeless life, but its prescription is firm, as firm as the verse that articulates it: Let ev’ry Mortal Ear attend, And ev’ry Heart rejoice, The Trumpet of the Gospel sounds With an inviting Voice. Ho, all ye hungry starving Souls That feed upon the Wind, And vainly strive with Earthly Toys To fill an Empty Mind. Eternal Wisdom has prepar’d A Soul-reviving Feast, And bids your longing Appetites Of every Dainty taste. The second book of Hymns and Spiritual Songs was entitled ‘Composed on Divine Subjects, Conformable to the Word of God’. Watts said that ‘It consists of Hymns whose Form is of meer humane Composure, but I hope the Sense and Materials will always appear Divine’ (p. xi). ‘Meer humane Composure’ seems to admit more understanding of the self, more freedom to explore the human condition, than Book I, ‘Compos’d on the Holy Scriptures’ had done; and in Watts’s own eyes Book II raised questions about the relationship of poetry to devotion, as Horae Lyricae had done. But as Moses made demands on the people of Israel, Watts instructs the reader to ‘enter into a devout Frame’ before reading: If there be any Poems in the Book [the three-part Hymns and Spiritual Songs] that are capable of giving Delight to Persons of a more refin’d Taste and polite Education, they must be sought for only in this Part; but except they lay aside the humour of Criticism, and enter into a devout Frame, every Ode here already despairs of pleasing. I confess my self to have been too often tempted away from the more Spiritual Designs I propos’d, by some gay and flowry Expressions that gratified the Fancy; The bright Images too often prevail’d above the Fire of Divine Affection; and the Light exceeded the Heat: Yet I hope, that in many of them the Reader will find that Devotion dictated the Song, and the Head and Hand were nothing but Interpreters and Secretaries to the Heart . . . (p. xi) As part of their secretarial duty, the head and hand use the Bible to make metaphors such as the soul on pilgrimage: ‘We’re marching thro’ Immanuel’s Ground,/ To a more joyful Sky’ (Hymn XXX, ‘Heavenly Joy on Earth’), or death as the crossing of the Jordan in Hymn LXVI, ‘A Prospect of Heaven makes Death easy’:

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Sweet Fields beyond the swelling Flood Stand drest in living Green: So to the Jews Old Canaan stood, While Jordan roll’d between . . . Could we but climb where Moses stood, And view the Landskip o’re, Not Jordan’s Stream, nor Death’s cold Flood Should fright us from the Shore. Watts’s explanation of his practice includes the argument from biblical poetry, of what he calls ‘Divine Licence’. The passage from the Preface quoted above continues: . . . nor is the Magnificence or Boldness of the Figures comparable to that Divine Licence, which is found in the Eighteenth, and Sixty-Eighth Psalms, several Chapters of Job, and other poetical Parts of Scripture: And in this respect I may hope to escape the reproof of those who pay a Sacred Reverence to the Bible. (pp. xi–xii) The ‘Divine Licence’ is the element in Holy Scripture that Watts was one of the first to recognise, the quality in Hebrew poetry that was later analysed by Robert Lowth, and described by Coleridge as the living educts of the imagination. The comparative freedom of Book II of Hymns and Spiritual Songs makes Watts pause to contemplate the daring of his achievement. His evocation of the Book of Job and the Psalms is a recognition, proud but justified, of his need to follow his muse into the sublime. It was a sublime that appeared to be subservient to the demands of worship, but which was all the more remarkable for its transcendence of those demands. Nowhere is this better shown than in Book III of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, ‘Prepared for the holy Ordinance of the Lord’s Supper’. It begins with a dramatic reconstruction, entitled ‘The Lord’s Supper instituted, 1 Cor. 11. 23, &c.’: ’Twas on that dark, that doleful Night When Powers of Earth and Hell arose Against the Son of God’s Delight, And Friends betray’d him to his Foes; This continues with a return to the close adherence to the biblical text, and so does the next hymn, ‘Communion with Christ, and with Saints; 1 Cor. 10. 16, 17.’: Jesus invites his Saints To meet around his Board; Here pardon’d Rebels sit, and hold Communion with their Lord. 1 Corinthians 10: 16–17 is ‘The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread.’ So Watts shapes this into simple and graceful verse, bringing out the full force of the word ‘communion’: Our heavenly Father calls Christ and his Members one; We the young Children of his Love, And he the first-born Son.

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We are but several Parts Of the same broken Bread; One Body hath its several Limbs, But Jesus is the Head. Here Watts finds himself as dissenter-poet: he is as compelled as any other attender at the Lord’s table, and as filled with the same love and gratitude, but he is the secretary to the meeting as well as the recipient of its grace. The greatest and most famous example of such clarity of understanding and purpose is Book III, Hymn 7, ‘Crucifixion to the World by the Cross of Christ; Gal. 6. 14.’: When I survey the wondrous cross Where the young prince of glory dy’d. The splendour of this lies in Watts’s ability to portray the dreadful possibilities of human cruelty and the destruction of the good. The ‘young prince of glory’ expresses in every word the tragedies of human living: the killing of youth, the humiliation of nobility, the hatred of aspiration. Galatians 6: 14 allows him to formulate the thought and confront the horror. It causes a crisis in his self-hood, comparable to an epiphany or a psychological discovery: gain becomes loss, pride is contemptible. The remainder of the hymn develops this. The figure on the cross is presented to the self-soul in forms that seem to dig deeper and deeper into reasons for a re-thinking of his world-view: See from his head, his hands, his feet, Sorrow and love flow mingled down, Did e’er such love and sorrow meet Or thorns compose so rich a crown. The parts of the body come one after another, making the reader or singer concentrate on the head, then the hands, and then the feet. Watts was thinking here of the medieval Passiontide hymns, ‘ad singula membra Christi patientis rhythmus’, the best known of which is ‘Salve caput cruentatum’ (later Gerhardt’s ‘O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden’). Here he adjusts the tradition to demonstrate the abstracts, sorrow and love, love and sorrow, the two words carrying with them the divine motivation. The chiasmus poses the unanswerable question: which is foremost in the mind of God, sorrow for the evil and cruelty of the world, or love for erring, failed, foolish humanity? In Watts’s hands the Bible phrase ‘crucified unto the world’ has become a key to unlock the meaning of the Passion and death of Jesus Christ. ‘Then am I dead to all the globe,/ And all the globe is dead to me.’ This is the evangelical writer’s expression of total commitment: I have compared it elsewhere to ‘the heady experience of being a mystic’.2 The contemplation of the wondrous cross, the survey of it, which is not just looking but reflecting, ‘demands my soul, my life, my all’. The inner self is revealed, as the dramatic moment gives it expression.

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J. R. Watson, The English Hymn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 170.

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Wesley the Struggler It is this intense experience of complete and ecstatic commitment that links Watts to Wesley. In some ways they seem very different: Watts the dissenter, Wesley the Anglican; Watts the controlled, Wesley the enthusiast; Watts the restrained, Wesley the bold. But beneath these differences is a shared awareness of the Bible as an enabling inspiration. Watts ‘collected’ his hymns from the Holy Scriptures, and prophesied from there: the verses or chapters are the pulpits from which he preached. Wesley referred to Holy Scripture everywhere (Rattenbury famously said that if the Bible were lost, a skilful man might extract much of it from Charles Wesley’s hymns3) and likewise uses it to preach. But he preaches primarily from his own experience: ‘primarily’ because Charles Wesley’s work is so voluminous and varied that it is difficult to generalise; but in his hands the Bible becomes an applied text. The 1738 ‘conversion hymn’, for example, beginning ‘Where shall my wond’ring Soul begin?’, takes well known phrases, the first general, the second specifically quoting, to unlock the door to his new condition: A Slave redeem’d from Death and Sin, A Brand pluck’d from Eternal Fire The redeemed slave is one way of describing himself; the brand from the fire (Zechariah 3: 2) authenticates himself as a successor to the Joshua referred to by Zechariah, the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord. Suddenly a young Anglican clergyman in London in May 1738 has been transformed into an exalted and holy figure from the Hebrew Bible. As so often, however, Wesley has a multiple self: he is the chosen one, ecstatic and prophetic, but also the one who looks around him and sees his fellow human beings in all their degradation: Outcasts of Men, to You I call, Harlots and Publicans, and Thieves! He spreads his arms t’embrace you all; Sinners alone his Grace receives: No Need of Him the Righteous have, He came the Lost to seek and save! The first two lines are an application to the 1730s of the portrayal of Jesus eating with publicans and sinners (Matthew 9: 11, Mark 2: 16, Luke 5: 30). The last two lines are from an adjoining verse (Matthew 9: 13, Mark 2: 17, Luke 5: 32), ‘I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’ The sinners become the lost, ‘For the Son of man is come to save that which was lost’ (Matthew 18: 11, Luke 19:10). With some freedom, Wesley adds the harlots to the tax collectors and thieves, probably because he had seen the recent engravings of Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress but also with a glancing reference to the woman taken in adultery. The couplet refers to the problems of the London on the 1730s: not only prostitution, but also the unfair taxation of Walpole’s government and the sharp rise in crime, especially robbery with violence. Wesley here appropriates the biblical text, much as he does with the work of other

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J. Ernest Rattenbury, The Evangelical Doctrines of Charles Wesley’s Hymns (London: Epworth Press, 1941), p. 48.

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writers, Milton and Watts, Virgil, and Ovid.4 But they are writers to whom he alludes, and whom he imitates. It is the Bible that drives his work. It is seen almost as an obsession at one point, with his Short Hymns on Select Passages of the Holy Scriptures of 1762, which has 1,478 verses or short hymns on phrases from the Old Testament and 870 from the New Testament, including such great hymns as ‘O thou who camest from above’ (from Leviticus 6: 13) or ‘Thou shepherd of Israel and mine’ (The Song of Solomon 1: 7). What a moralist such as Hogarth encouraged him to do was to develop his own responses, search the Bible for the places that helped him to define and understand his own spiritual needs. As S. T. Kimbrough, Jr has written, ‘he personalizes the text so that the experience of the text becomes his own’5. Kimbrough’s valuable essay, while concerned principally with interpretation, stresses the role of the imagination in the way in which Wesley engages with the Bible, in spite of the fact that ‘biblical interpretation has not traditionally or in our time generally allowed imagination, especially poetical imagination, much integrity in the hermeneutical process’.6 What Kimbrough is pointing to is a glorious freedom in Wesley’s poetry. Perhaps the most spectacular example is ‘Wrestling Jacob’, of which Watts said generously that it was ‘worth all the verses he himself had written’.7 It is a dramatic monologue in fourteen verses, based on Genesis 32: 24–32, the mysterious episode of the encounter with the other that fascinated painters such as Rembrandt and Delacroix, the meeting with the terrible and the beautiful, the unknown figure in the darkness. The biblical text describes an ordeal, from which Jacob emerges weaker but stronger, lame but triumphant. Wesley puts himself in the position of a wrestler, solitary, closely grappling with his opponent. He is Jacob-Wesley: he is determined to know the other even in the darkness. He is aware that the opponent knows who he is: I need not tell Thee who I am, My Misery, or Sin declare, Thyself hast call’d me by my Name, Look on Thy Hands, and read it there, But who, I ask Thee, who art Thou, Tell me Thy Name, and tell me now? The Jacob figure is clearly Wesley, the human being, declared (identified) by his misery and sin; but he has been ‘called’ by his opponent. This is where the narrative swerves from the account in Genesis, where the angel asks Jacob his name before changing it to Israel. In the poem, the other knows who he is, because he has been called (‘I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance’ (Matthew 9: 13; Mark 2: 17; Luke 5: 32). But the name is also written on the adversary’s hands, the hands that received the imprint of the nails on the cross. The question posed in the last two lines has already been answered in 4

5

6 7

See J. R. Watson, ‘The Hymns of Charles Wesley and the Poetic Tradition’, in Kenneth G. C. Newport and Ted A. Campbell (eds), Charles Wesley. Life, Literature and Legacy (Peterborough: Epworth Press, 2007), pp. 361–77. S. T. Kimbrough, Jr, ‘Charles Wesley and Biblical Interpretation’ in S. T. Kimbrough, Jr (ed.), Charles Wesley. Poet and Theologian (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992), pp. 106–36 (p. 114). Kimbrough, ‘Charles Wesley and Biblical Interpretation’, p. 114. Minutes of the Methodist Conference, 1788 (the obituary notice for Charles Wesley), Frank Baker, Representative Verse of Charles Wesley (London: Epworth Press, 1962), p. 37.

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hints from the New Testament, but it is repeated more obviously in the next verse: ‘Art Thou the Man that died for me?’ The question is rhetorical, but it sustains the equilibrium of the poem, in which the Jacob-Wesley figure is engaging with the Saviour, trying to come to know him. Wrestling I will not let Thee go Till I Thy Name, Thy Nature Know. The next three verses (5–7) dramatically describe the combat: the sinews unstrung, the grappling arms, the shrinking flesh complaining, the tiredness: My Strength is gone, my Nature dies, I sink beneath Thy weighty Hand, Faint to revive, and fall to rise; I fall, and yet by Faith I stand, I stand, and will not let Thee go, Till I Thy Name, Thy Nature know. Wesley has turned the episode in Genesis into an exercise in the paradoxes of spirituality. In his exploration of the via negativa, he becomes ‘confident in Self-despair’ (verse 8), still urging the other to reveal his name. The revelation comes in a whisper. As the wrestlers are close together and alone (‘they  had no seconds’ as Matthew Henry’s Commentary put it), the confidentiality is assured and welcomed. This is a message for the struggling figure alone. It allows him to believe that In vain I have not wept, and strove, Thy Nature, and Thy Name is LOVE. From this moment on he is able to contemplate the mystery of divine love for which he has struggled, using images that he had used two years previously in ‘Hark how all the Welkin rings’ (better known, sadly, as ‘Hark! the Herald Angels sing’) from Malachi 4: 2: The Sun of Righteousness on Me Hath rose with Healing in his Wings, Wither’d my Nature’s Strength; from Thee My Soul it’s Life and Succour brings, My Help is all laid up above; Thy Nature, and Thy Name is LOVE. The account in Genesis 32 has now had its meaning teased out to the full, as Wesley provides an insight into human behaviour that is unsurpassed in the religious poetry of the eighteenth century. The soul is in darkness, but in that darkness it is close to God; the soul is struggling with its own misery and sin, but that misery and sin has been acknowledged; the soul strives to keep strong, to preserve its proud human self, but is broken down; in the breakdown of the old self comes the new one; and the new self continues on its way, marked for life even as Jacob halted upon his thigh. It is a marvellous anticipation of the processes of self-discovery in the talking cure of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The protagonist is Jacob/Wesley but also Jacob/Wesley/the reader or singer. The figure in the dramatic monologue is not to be contemplated, as might be the case with (say) Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, but assimilated into the reader or singer’s own

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consciousness. Wesley is exploiting the fact that this is a hymn. It means that the reader or singer does not observe, but puts himself or herself in the situation of Jacob/Wesley. There is thus another layer of meaning to this wonderfully complex text, that of a twenty-firstcentury struggler with the problems of self, of sin, of the kind of problem that was central to Greek tragedy, that of hubris, the pride of the self-sufficient Oedipus. The Wesley reader or singer experiences the same process, benignly. He or she undergoes a self-discovery in which the tragedy that strikes Oedipus is transformed into the closeness to the gods that so beautifully informs Oedipus at Colonus.

Wesley and the Human Heart Indeed, what distinguishes Wesley’s use of the Bible from that of other poets is the depth of his psychological understanding. His shorthand for this is the human heart, a word that has a particular and very rich significance for Wesley, as it has for other poets, such as Wordsworth or Yeats (of whom more later). In Wesley’s case it has a particular authenticity from the Bible. When asked by the scribe about the greatest of the commandments, Jesus replied: ‘The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength’ (Mark 12: 30). The heart comes first and is pre-eminent. Jesus may have been quoting from Deuteronomy 10: 12, but his response also has an authenticity that we recognise from our knowledge of human experience. The love of the heart is the first and most necessary step, before we can think of the soul, or the mind, or the strength. Thus Wesley often ends his hymns with a climactic moment: Come quickly, gracious Lord, and take Possession of Thine own; My longing heart vouchsafe to make Thine everlasting throne. (Hymns and Psalms 46)8 At other times he will begin with the heart: My heart is full of Christ, and longs Its glorious matter to declare! (Hymns and Psalms 799) It is not the mind that is full of Christ, but the heart. This hymn is a paraphrase of Psalm 45, which begins ‘My heart is inditing a good matter’, but Charles Wesley’s version takes the first two words and invests them with a new urgency and immediacy. To sing the first two lines is to be invited to participate in a moment in which the soul is full, and needs to express its joy at being so. The whole enthusiastic self opens the hymn, and the word ‘heart’ is used to express the commitment of the whole self. To engage the whole self in the service of God is to encounter the endless flux of spiritual movement that is a familiar part of the daily lives of all who are not saints. As in ‘Wrestling Jacob’, Wesley works out his salvation in fear and trembling. He finds his heart longing for peace and happiness, yet also hard and resistant to goodness and love: 8

Hymns and Psalms (Peterborough: Methodist Publishing House, 1983).

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O Love Divine, how sweet thou art! When shall I find my willing heart All taken up by thee? I thirst, I faint, I die to prove The greatness of redeeming Love, The love of Christ to me! (‘Wesley’s Hymns’, 147)9 Wesley’s ‘willing heart’ is an extraordinarily sensitive indicator of his sensibility. As Jan Kott said of Shakespeare’s plays: ‘The situations are true; I would say super-true.’10 In Wesley’s hymns they centre on the conflict between the good self and the bad self, the authentic experience of the Christian in every generation. The ‘willing heart’ is a far better phrase than ‘longing heart’: it suggests more than a desire, a willing, a gladly accepting heart. Yet two verses further on, Wesley is recognising the counter-force of the human self: God only knows the love of God: O that it now were shed abroad In this poor stony heart! For love I sigh, for love I pine: This only portion, Lord, be mine, Be mine this better part! As the next verse makes clear, ‘the better part’ is a reference to Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus: Wesley longs to be in that position, is willing, but recognises the ‘poor stony heart’ that he carries within himself. The attention of the reader is directed to the ideal and the actual, the aspiration and the reality: ‘For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do’ (Romans 7: 19). The oscillations of feeling are evident, and it is these movements of the heart that convince the reader of Charles Wesley’s familiarity with human experience. We find another example in Richard Baxter, who described his own poems as ‘Heart-Imployment with God and It Self’, and as ‘The Concordant Discord of a Broken healed Heart’ on the title page of his Poetical Fragments (1681). Wesley’s hymns show something of the twists and turns, the joys and sufferings, implied in Baxter’s title. In them are found concord and discord, happiness and the longing, ecstasy and self-examination. The word ‘heart’ is used as a shorthand term for many states of mind. But in one hymn, Wesley takes the heart and examines it more closely. He seems deliberately to concentrate on its changing state, to anatomise his heart as indicator of his feelings. It occurs in every verse except one of an eight-verse hymn, found in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1742): O for a heart to praise my God, A heart from sin set free, A heart that always feels Thy blood So freely spilt for me.

9

10

A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists . . . with a New Supplement (usually known as ‘Wesley’s Hymns’) (Wesleyan Methodist Publishing House, 1876). Jan Kott, Shakespeare our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 14.

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j. r. watson A heart resigned, submissive, meek, My dear Redeemer’s throne, Where only Christ is heard to speak, Where Jesus reigns alone: A humble, lowly, contrite heart, Believing, true, and clean; Which neither life nor death can part From Him that dwells within: A heart in every thought renewed, And full of love divine; Perfect, and right, and pure, and good, A copy, Lord, of Thine. Thy tender heart is still the same, And melts at human woe; Jesus, for Thee distressed I am, I want Thy love to know. My heart, thou know’st can never rest Till Thou create my peace; Till of mine Eden repossest, From self, and sin, I cease. Fruit of Thy gracious lips, on me Bestow that peace unknown, The hidden manna, and the tree Of life, and the white stone. Thy nature, dearest Lord, impart; Come quickly from above, Write Thy new name upon my heart, Thy new, best name of love.

This hymn contains prayer, hope, aspiration, the hope to be like Christ, and also distress and need, restlessness and the consciousness of human woe. In its original printing, the hymn was a meditation on Psalm 51: 10: ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.’ That text in itself is profound in its longing to be clean, and its desire to be renewed; it is also a call for a ‘right spirit’. Implied in all of these desires is the consciousness of their opposites: the speaker knows that his heart is not clean, that it is old and needs renewal, and that the spirit within him is not right. Wesley takes the heart from the psalmist’s verse, and explores it in the same way. His meditation begins with prayer – ‘O for a heart . . .’ – implying that the heart is, at the outset, not free from sin. What it needs is a heart that is conscious of the redemptive power of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. This would provide the conviction that he needs, the knowledge that he is ‘set free’ from sin, and he needs that conviction to be permanent – ‘a heart that always feels Thy blood/ So freely spilt for me.’ That first line, and the whole verse, reach out, stretch out towards an ideal that can come now, after the Fall, only with the knowledge of salvation, the hope of a return to the state of being in a right relationship with God.

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The Old Testament cry of the psalmist has now become the cry of one who has read the gospels of the New Testament and the Epistles of St Paul. The heart that is clean and renewed is the heart that has read of its redemption: the agency is no longer that of the Old Testament God – ‘Create in me a clean heart, O God’, but of the Saviour who freely spilt his blood for mankind. With the availability of that new possibility, one that the psalmist did not have, what kind of a heart would there be? The answer comes in a cluster of adjectives in the next two verses: resigned, submissive, meek, humble, lowly, contrite, believing, true and clean. Every one of these adjectives could have been applied to the heart as an indicator of human feeling, without the New Testament doctrine of gospel-grace. They are the signifiers of a heart that is truly human in its imperfection, for – once again – the implication is that the heart is not resigned but indignant, not submissive but rebellious, not meek but self-assertive, not humble but proud, and so on. They are indicators of the confusions and inchoate impulses that are human, and that Wesley manages to express through the Bible. The heart that is prayed for is not just ‘resigned, submissive, meek’, but ‘My dear Redeemer’s throne’, a heart in which only Christ speaks, and Jesus reigns alone, a heart in which he dwells (‘That Christ may dwell in your heart by faith’, Ephesians 3: 17). This would be a heart that knows that neither death, nor life (Romans 8: 38) can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. In these verses, therefore, Wesley is combining the knowledge of the imperfect human heart, found in the psalmist and in all who wish for a better life, with references to the agency by which that might be achieved. If the heart were filled with the love of Jesus Christ, the Redeemer, then it would indeed be true and clean: not in the sense intended by the psalmist, but in an entirely new sense of being filled with the love that was in Christ. So, in the verse that follows, the heart would be ‘renewed’ in every thought (Psalm 51) but then ‘full of love divine’ (Ephesians 3: 17, 19). This process reaches its climax in the next two lines, in which the heart, if that were the case, would be ‘Perfect, and right, and pure, and good.’ The heart is here a most sensitive indicator of a state of mind that we can all recognise, that uncertainty and restlessness that longs for peace. That peace is described in the penultimate verse as ‘peace unknown’: it is part of the way in which this hymn continually acknowledges the failure to achieve the longed-for peace. The reference is to Revelation 2: 17: ‘To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.’ The tree of life is from the same chapter: ‘To him that overcometh will I give to eat of that tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God’ (verse 7). This verse of the hymn, incorporating these images, is mysterious and beautiful. In Revelation the context is that of a world of imperfection, as the Spirit speaks to the churches in Smyrna and in Pergamos. Here, too, we find ourselves in a world of imperfection, as the human heart longs for the ‘Fruit of thy gracious lips.’ The word ‘fruit’ is from the first line of Paradise Lost: Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast Brought Death into the World, and all our woe . . . It takes us into the world of the first great sin and its consequences, the ‘human woe’ of verse 5, but also into the emblematic trees: the tree of life is in the midst of the paradise

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of God, just as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was in the midst of the Garden of Eden. From Revelation we are whirled back to Genesis, but with the knowledge of all the human history between. The poet longs to be one with ‘him that overcometh’, to receive the hidden manna and the white stone. The mysterious ‘white stone’ has a name on it which only the recipient can know: in this case it is what Wesley calls the ‘new name’: Write thy new name upon my heart, Thy new, best name of love! This is indeed a new commandment, ‘that ye love one another’.

The Rag and Bone Shop In 1937–8, towards the end of his life, W. B. Yeats wrote a remarkable poem called ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’. The ‘circus animals’ are the Irish legends of his earlier poetry, each as it were doing a turn, or making a spectacular impression: The Countess Cathleen, Oisin, Cuchulain. Now in old age, ‘being but a broken man’, the circus animals have deserted him, and he has no way of climbing to such heights: Now that my ladder’s gone I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. He is facing up to the fact that the source of his art is the inner self in all its inchoate, muddled and dirty mess. A rag and bone shop is an apt location for the collection of unwanted scraps that fetch up in a heap of unlovely bits and pieces: it is a symbol for the heart, the untidy accumulation of loves, impulses, hatreds, the anger and remorse of life. We all seek to avoid these: like Yeats, we enjoy constructing circus animals, other emblems of our mind, filling our lives with events and purposes that deflect us from perceiving the realities of our inner self-hood. It is a commonplace that the religious life involves penitence: ‘a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise’ (Psalm 51: 17). In the hymn quoted above, Charles Wesley prays for ‘a humble, lowly, contrite heart’. But Yeats’s recognition is of something more complex than a penitent heart: the irreducible and unavoidable self, usually clothed or covered by some activity or distraction. The same insight is found in Wesley’s hymn from the 1780 A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists in the section ‘Praying for Repentance’. It begins ‘Father of lights, from whom proceeds/ Whate’er thy every creature needs’, and seems in the first verse to be referring to the providence of God, whose goodness ‘feeds the young ravens when they cry’. The second verse gives a sudden twist. It turns attention to the way in which the light of God shines into the dark places of the mind: Since by thy light myself I see Naked, and poor, and void of thee; This is Charles Wesley’s recognition of the equivalent of the rag and bone shop. Yeats finds that perception through old age; Wesley through the light of God. That light does not illuminate and inspire: it throws into relief all the failures and inadequacies of the human soul:

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Thou knowest the baseness of my mind, Wayward, and impotent, and blind! Thou knowest how unsubdued my will, Averse to good, and prone to ill: Thou knowest how wide my passions rove, Not checked by fear, nor charmed by love. Some of this is conventional religious diction (wayward; blind; ‘the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not that I do’, Romans 7: 19). But taken all together, and including the other vocabulary, the verse searches out something more than the conventions of the penitent. It discovers baseness, failure (‘impotent’), rebellion and anger (‘unsubdued my will’), and unchecked passions. The diction of the verse is religious, but not entirely so. The language points to an existential awareness, an anxiety that is the true indicator of a human sensibility. He has an apprehension of himself that is more powerful and disturbing than any confession of his sin. The hymn continues: Fain would I know as known by thee, And feel the indigence I see: Fain would I all my vileness own, And deep beneath the burden groan; Abhor the pride that lurks within, Detest and loathe myself and sin. This is a refusal to avoid the uncomfortable. His prayer is to ‘feel’ the indigence (deficiency, need): he can see it, but not feel it, as the verse spirals downwards to experience his vileness: Ah give me Lord myself to feel! My total misery reveal; Here Wesley is lying down in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. The word ‘foul’ occurs many times in his work, sometimes linked with the adjective ‘self-abhorred’. In ‘Saviour, and can it be’ from Hymns on the Lord’s Supper (1754), he writes ‘I am not worthy, Lord,/ So foul, so self-abhorred’, and although this is a conventional statement of unworthiness at the Holy Communion (‘We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table’), it seems to be more than that, a recognition of the abhorrent within himself. The desire ‘myself to feel’ is the strongest element in Charles Wesley’s verse. His religious behaviour is analysed by himself with a precise and obsessive attention. This is, of course, not uncommon: it has its roots in Puritan spiritual autobiography and selfenquiry. This is responsible for the ‘experimental religion’ that is so much a part of Charles Wesley’s writing: when John Wesley, in the Preface to A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists (1780) described the book as ‘a little body of experimental and practical divinity’ he was recognising the way in which that book pulsated with his brother’s experience. At its worst this leads to the narcissism of nineteenth- and twentieth-century evangelical hymnody, with its egotistical obsession with personal salvation and its clichés of expression. At its best, in Charles Wesley’s hymns, it makes him our contemporary, searching the foul rag and bone shop of the heart for meaning and purpose. ‘Foul’ is Yeats’s word, and it is Wesley’s also:

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j. r. watson Loathsome, and foul, and self-abhorr’d, I sink beneath my sin. (‘Jesus, if still thou art today’, Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1740)

The word ‘foul’ occurs many times in Wesley’s poetry, often linked with ‘self-abhorred’. It is a perception similar to that of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who tasted himself as gall and heartburn: I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me; (‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’) Such experience, in both Hopkins and Wesley, has its origins in their religious culture – in Hopkins’s case in the Spiritual Exercises, in Retreat, and in Confession, in Wesley’s in Puritan self-examination. But in both writers, the intensity of experience takes them out of their culture: they transcend their culture in their humanity. Wesley’s recognition of himself is important. It means that, even as he celebrates the saving love of Christ, which he does throughout his hymnody, he is not guilty of what Jean-Paul Sartre called mauvaise foi, of lying to oneself. It is no coincidence that both Hopkins and Sartre write of taste (Sartre in La Nausée): the self-taste is profoundly unpleasant, as it is in Wesley, who can present the feelings of a sinner, tasting of hell: The sin avenging God His fiery wrath darts in, Adds woe to woe, and load to load, And chastens sin with sin: The pangs of hell I taste, The bitter trembling cup; The arrows in my soul stick fast And drink my spirits up. (‘O throw away thy rod’) The piled up images here testify to the poet’s ability to envisage a state of mind in which his spirits are tortured, stuck fast with barbed arrows, and shrivelled, ‘drunk up’ by the repeated blows to his self-esteem. It is, as it is in Hopkins and Sartre and Yeats, all part of the exploration of the rag and bone shop. His answer to his existential problems is not only to recognise them but to be compassionate about them, to himself and others. He walks through the rag and bone shop of the heart with a lantern of divine love as shown in Jesus Christ. That love was the subject of his ‘conversion’ hymn, ‘Where shall my won’dring soul begin’: O how shall I the goodness tell, Father, which Thou to me hast showed? That I, a child of wrath and hell, I should be called a child of God, Should know, should feel my sins forgiven, Blest with this antepast of heaven! The hymn dwells on the simple word ‘goodness’: through the goodness of God, he is accepted as a ‘child of God’, no longer ‘a child of wrath and hell’. Significantly, the final

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image is of taste, as he feels that this is the ‘antepast’, or foretaste, of heaven itself. It is for him, in 1738, the expression of that moment in which he felt the reality of the divine compassion for the foul and self-abhorred creature that he recognised as himself. Much of the rest of his life was spent in communicating that divine compassion to others, and inviting them to participate in it – ‘Come, sinners, to the gospel feast’ – by preaching and by hymn writing. But its authenticity depends not on the message of salvation so much as Wesley’s ability to convince us of the psychological truth of his condition as a human being like ourselves and of the application of the gospel message of the tender heart to that condition: Thy tender heart is still the same, And melts at human woe; He prays for such a heart for himself, a copy of the divine heart, in ‘God of all power, and truth, and grace’, the hymn ‘The Promise of Sanctification’ printed at the end of John Wesley’s sermon ‘On Christian Perfection’ in 1741: Give me a tender heart, resign’d And pure, and full of faith and love. That human heart would be ‘resign’d’. It is another of those words of multiple meaning that are found everywhere in Wesley’s work, here primarily indicating a resignation, an acceptance of God’s love without question. From this follow purity, and faith, and love. At this moment, cor ad cor loquitur, as Wesley’s heart speaks to the divine heart in his longing for perfection.

Conclusion Wesley and Watts may seem different, but they are united in a force that drives them both. They would probably have called it the Holy Spirit, but that does not help much. The force that drives them is that which drives all other poets when they are being authentic: it is the ‘finding’ of the expression that can bring to light the configurations of the complex self beneath. Meg Harris Williams, who is mentioned in note 1 and whose work has greatly influenced this essay, writes of this as occurring ‘under the aegis of the poetic Muse’: Poets have always seen themselves as inspired by their Muse – and this is not a metaphor only: it is a faithful description of the internal identification with a teaching object or deity.11 Both Watts and Wesley depend upon the Bible to find and express their ‘internal identification’, that partly understood centre of impulses and contradictions without which they would not have written at all. For them it was evidence of Divine Licence, in which was the ‘word of God’. ‘Let us hear the word of God’, which used to precede the reading of the Lessons in the Church of Scotland, was (to use Harris Williams’s phrase) ‘not a metaphor only’. For Watts and Wesley it breathed divine inspiration; it was their symbol-making power. ‘It cannot be taken for granted’, says Harris Williams, ‘as Milton first discovered when he tried to write a sequel to his inspired “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”’; 11

Harris Williams, The Vale of Soulmaking, p. 4.

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and anyone reading either Watts or Wesley will be aware that there are some uninspired hymns and psalms. ‘But when the symbol-making pressure makes itself felt’, she writes, It is the Muse who actually finds the words and puts them in the correct order – the correct order being the order that expresses the nature of the emotional experience. ‘I am but the Secretary’, said Blake: ‘the Authors are in Eternity.’12 Or, as Isaac Watts put it, ‘the Head and Hand were nothing but Interpreters and Secretaries to the Heart’. And, as Wesley said, ‘Where shall my wond’ring Soul begin?’ How can I find words – the words in the correct order – to express the wonder of new birth? The answer for both poets was to find them in the narratives and symbols of the Bible. Their heads and hands were secretaries to something much deeper, Watts’s prophetic power, Wesley’s heart. From the Bible, for Watts, comes the central image of Christ on the Cross, with love and sorrow present in equal measure; from it, for Wesley, comes the practice of the presence of God, even in struggling with the other, and in contemplating the endless shames and aspirations of the human heart. These are the biblical symbols that enable them to put words to the endless contrarieties of the religious life.

12

Ibid.

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THE BIBLE INTERPRETED BY HYMNS Robin Gill

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he focus of my essay is upon the way that the Bible is interpreted and, in turn, shapes modern hymn-books. I will look at examples of the way some of the most widely used British hymn-books in the Anglican and Presbyterian traditions have changed over the last half century in their use of the Bible. I will argue that the changes detected may also reflect a changing religious culture in Britain and more widely in the Western world. They may act as mirrors of radical cultural and religious generational shifts. For many Anglican congregations Hymns Ancient and Modern and The English Hymnal were dominant, but rival, constituents of Anglican worship a generation ago. The 1986 edition The New English Hymnal1 is still popular especially in many Anglican cathedrals, not least because of its musicality and its debt to Ralph Vaughan Williams. In his Preface to the first The English Hymnal edition in 1906 he argued: Where there is congregational singing it is important that familiar melodies should be employed, or at least those which have stood the test of time: therefore the ‘specially composed tune’ – that bane of many a hymnal – has been avoided as far as possible. There are already many hundreds of fine tunes in existence, so many indeed that it is impossible to include more than a small part of them in any one collection. True to his word he used his musical skills to embellish the mostly four-part harmonies of many existing hymn and folk melodies. Doubtless he would have detested much modern hymn writing and, perhaps, even some of the hymns included in the 1986 edition. Hymns Ancient and Modern was first published in 1861, forty years earlier than The English Hymnal. It proved so popular that an appendix was added seven years later, a revised edition was published in 1875, a supplement in 1889 and new editions in 1904 and 1922. However, I shall start my analysis with the widely used 1950 edition, Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised.2 This, in turn, was followed by various supplements and eventually with the current main edition Common Praise in 2000 and the supplementary hymn-book of selected new hymns Sing Praise3 in 2010. Many of the words, tunes and harmonies of Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised are still familiar among elderly congregations across Britain. Once a key component of Choral Matins and Evensong, today Hymns Ancient 1 2 3

The New English Hymnal (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1986). Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1950). Sing Praise (London: Hymns Ancient & Modern, 2010).

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and Modern Revised and Common Praise are more usually part of Sung Eucharist. For many choirs their four-part harmonies, somewhat less difficult than The English Hymnal, act as an important source of continuity. However a number of social factors have combined to make both of these traditional Anglican hymn-books less prevalent at congregational level. Organists retire or die and are not easily replaced by a generation less trained in musical keyboard skills. Kevin Mayhew’s CD accompaniments to its Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New4 offer a ready means of replacement. Songs of Praise on television has popularised the ‘specially composed tune’ for non-churchgoers and churchgoers alike. The work of, say, Graham Kendrick, is no longer widely regarded as ‘the bane of many a hymnal’. Younger, urban and suburban congregations have become more evangelical and/or charismatic, choosing to dispense with pipe organs and choir-led four-part harmonies and opting instead for worship bands and Mission Praise (either in book form or projected onto a screen). In the process, they have found greater affinity with other non-Anglican congregations who have also opted for Mission Praise. A very similar pattern of hymn-book change can be detected among British Presbyterians. The third edition of The Church Hymnary was published in 1973,5 with words, tunes and harmonies familiar from previous editions going back into the nineteenth-century. However, with the formation of the United Reformed Church in 1972, bringing together Presbyterian, Congregational and Churches of Christ congregations, a new URC hymnbook was eventually produced in 1991: Rejoice and Sing.6 Like Common Praise7 in 2000 and The New English Hymnal in 1986, it offered traditional four-part hymns, alongside carefully selected modern hymns, many already known from television. But it did not offer Kevin Mayhew CDs for those lacking an organist or all of the Mission Praise hymns popular among evangelicals/charismatics. As a result congregations in the United Reformed Church, as well as Presbyterians in Scotland, have become just as divided as Anglicans in their adoption of particular hymn-books. Mission Praise, in turn, was first published as Mission England Praise (the product of an evangelistic mission) and then, later the same year, as Mission Praise in 1983. The Forward states its aim as follows: Music unites or divides people at a deep level of their personalities. This is seen in the generation gaps in musical tastes in the secular world and the different music you hear in the various denominations or even groups with the same denomination. In a time of mission and evangelism, it is vital that the power of music to unite Christians is harnessed . . . May it awaken memories, surface a sense of need, convey the story of Jesus, open hearts, help people to express personal faith in him and aid Christian growth. An emphasis upon personal faith and feeling is soon repeated in the Introduction: Never forget the joyfulness of the Christian Gospel, especially in the slower and quieter songs, which should never sound weary or funereal, but should be sung with 4 5

6 7

Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New (Buxhall, Suffolk: Kevin Mayhew, 2000). The Church Hymnary (London: Oxford University Press, 1973) and in addition for the combined Scottish Psalter and Church Hymnary (Edinburgh: R & R Clark, 1973). Rejoice and Sing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Common Praise (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2000).

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an inner knowledge that God is looking at us with love because we are in Christ Jesus. Choirs and other worship leaders should regularly pray that this love will show in their voices and faces. Be open to the use of sequences of songs within an unbroken flow of praise and worship; the shorter choruses are often most effectively used this way and can be repeated several times to encourage a sense of remaining in meditation, or emphasising an important thought. Sometimes worship will naturally become silent for a while.8 Mission Praise, with a mixture of 282 old and new hymns, more than doubled in size in 19909 and then expanded again in both 199910 and 200911 to form Complete Mission Praise with a current total of 1,250 hymns. Once again the emphasis in the Preface to the 2009 edition is on personal faith and feeling: Our prayer for this celebratory twenty-fifth anniversary edition remains that God will continue to use the hymns and songs in this volume to bring people into His life-giving presence, as they express their relationship with Him through words and music. We pray that all who use this book will share in the rich blessings that come through giving their praise and worship to the living God.

Personalism What are the theological and biblical outcomes of these changes? Comparing the hymns included in these different hymn-books, a number of features are particularly distinctive, namely their use of the Psalms; images from Isaiah; the Christmas narratives from Mathew and Luke; and apocalyptic images from Daniel, Mark 13 and Revelation. However, before examining each of these in turn, it is worth noting one very striking difference between Complete Mission Praise and all of the other hymn-books just mentioned. In The New English Hymnal just three of the hymns begin with the word ‘I’: two traditional (‘I bind unto myself today’ and ‘I heard the voice of Jesus say’) and the other by the twentieth-century Quaker, Sydney Carter, where the ‘I’ is Christ (‘I danced in the morning’). In Ancient and Modern Revised, hymns beginning with ‘I’ increase to eight, in Common Praise and Sing Praise to ten, in Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New to seventeen and in Rejoice and Sing to twenty-five. But in Complete Mission Praise 106 hymns begin in this way. Similarly, ‘we’ is at the beginning of eight hymns from The New English Hymnal, ten from Ancient and Modern Revised, eight from Common Praise, twelve from Sing Praise, nineteen from Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New and twenty-four from Rejoice and Sing. In contrast, there are forty-three from Complete Mission Praise. Intense personalism – perhaps even exclusivism – seems to characterise Complete Mission Praise far more than the other hymn-books (even than Rejoice and Sing with its Congregational component). Among its hymns are: ‘I am trusting in You, O God’; ‘I believe in Jesus’; ‘I confess that Jesus Christ is Lord’; ‘I get so excited Lord’; ‘I hear the sound of the army of the Lord . . . the army of the Lord is marching on’; ‘I love the Lord because He heard my voice’; ‘I want to walk with Jesus Christ’; ‘I will enter His gates’; ‘I’m redeemed, yes I am’. In the appendix 8 9 10 11

Mission Praise (Basingstoke: Marshall Morgan & Scott, 1983). Mission Praise (London: Marshall Pickering, 1990). Complete Mission Praise (London: Marshall Pickering, 1999). Complete Mission Praise (London: Collins, 2009).

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to Complete Mission Praise the hymns selected to represent the ‘Christian Life’ are divided into just two sections –‘personal testimony’ and ‘health, healing and deliverance’ –with no mention of social justice or action concerned with world poverty or environmental issues (‘evangelism and mission’, in contrast, are given lengthy attention in another list).

The Psalms For Anglicans and Presbyterians a generation ago, sung psalms were central to public worship. Among Anglicans then, as well as in some cathedrals today, Hymns Ancient and Modern or The English Hymnal was used in combination with both canticles and psalms sung from the Anglican Psalter at Sung Matins and Evensong. These hymn-books also contained a number of Metrical Psalms, that is psalms set to regular four-part hymn tunes (most famously Psalm 23 rendered either in the nineteenth-century by H. W. Baker as ‘The King of my love my Shepherd is’ and set to the J. B. Dykes tune Dominus regit me, or in the seventeenth-century ‘The God of Love my shepherd is’ by George Herbert and set to the common metre tune University College). As a result, every sung Anglican service contained a combination of canticles (some of which were psalms), one or more psalm for the day sung from the Psalter, and often one hymn or more that was in effect a Metrical Psalm. Anglican worship in churches across the country was very psalm-oriented. So was Presbyterian worship. Metrical Psalms formed almost a quarter of the combined Scottish Psalter and Church Hymnary. This tradition has continued in Rejoice and Sing, which devotes some 150 pages to psalms and canticles (representing some 11 per cent of all the sung items that it contains), albeit offering greater and more ecumenical modes and traditions of singing. Rejoice and Sing still has quite a number of Metrical Psalms (for example, now adding William Whittingham’s ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd, I’ll not want’ set to Crimmond). In addition, users are also encouraged to use prose psalms set to Anglican Chants, others use Psalm Tones, and a fourth group associated with Catholic Ecumenism (for example, Joseph Gelineau’s ‘The Lord is my Shepherd; there is nothing I shall want’, with the note rising or falling with each emphasis). Careful explanations are also provided by the editors, for users less familiar with the second, third and fourth modes, about how they should be sung: Music can quite wonderfully irradiate words, not least in the Psalms or other poetic prose sung to what we call (without sectarian significance) ‘Anglican Chant’. In this we enjoy melody and four-part harmony, savour fine prose rolling off our tongues in the natural rhythms of good speech, and have all the range of emphasis and vivid expression which elocutionary English affords, untrammelled by a metrical beat.12 However, Presbyterian or United Reformed Church congregations who use only Complete Mission Praise are likely to find a considerable reduction in the number of psalmbased hymns offered. In all of the other hymn-books, traditional and modern (including Complete Mission Praise), only about 3 per cent of sung items offered are identified in their text as being based upon psalms. All still include more than one version of Psalm 23 (although Complete Mission Praise omits George Herbert’s version). All also have Tate and Brady’s seventeenth-century version of Psalm 34 ‘Through all the changing scenes of life’, Isaac Watts’s version of Psalm 90, ‘O God, our help in ages past’ and William Kethe’s version of Psalm 100, ‘All people that on earth do dwell’. However, Complete Anglican 12

Rejoice and Sing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 959.

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Hymns Old and New and Rejoice and Sing are now unusual for offering a ‘Scriptural Index’. The earliest editions of Mission Praise did do so, but the later editions have discontinued this practice. In other words – and this surely is significant-- a culture of hymn-singing, or even praise-singing, has emerged among charismatic and evangelical congregations that ironically may be less connected directly with the Psalms than Anglican and Presbyterian congregations were in the past. Another way of making this point is to compare different versions of psalms – historic and modern – published in the most recent hymn-books. The first is Tate and Brady’s ‘As pants the hart for cooling streams’ that is contained in all of the hymn-books (except Complete Mission Praise), with Martin Nystrom’s very popular ‘As the deer pants for the water’, written in 1983 and published in Complete Mission Praise, Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New and Sing Praise but not in Rejoice and Sing or Common Praise. The version of Tate and Brady in Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised (and Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New) paraphrases the first verse of Psalm 42 in its first verse, the second verse in its second verse, and the eleventh verse in its third verse. The fourth verse of the hymn then becomes an explicitly Christian doxology unrelated to Psalm 42. Rejoice and Sing contains the same first three verses (albeit in a different order), but it omits this doxology and includes an additional verse that paraphrases the ninth verse of the psalm. This is very much in line with its stated policy of not normally concluding psalms with Christian doxologies.13 The verse that it restores is crucial to understanding this psalm. The end of verse three of the psalm (‘Where is now thy God?), verse nine (‘all thy waves and storms are gone over me’), verse eleven (‘Why hast thou forgotten me?’), and verse thirteen (‘Where is now thy God?’) are all about unrequited love. The writer is ‘athirst for God’ (verse one), but God apparently fails to respond. The final verse in Rejoice and Sing reflects this in a manner that Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised (and Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New) does not: ‘God of my strength, how long shall I, like one forgotten, mourn – forlorn, forsaken, and exposed to my oppressor’s scorn.’ Nystrom’s version, however, is not about unrequited love at all. It paraphrases or perhaps just echoes the first two verses of Psalm 42 only in its first verse. But the chorus is immediately upbeat: ‘You alone are my strength, my shield, to You alone may my spirit yield. You alone are my heart’s desire and I long to worship you.’ Only that final expression ‘I long to worship you’ might hint at less than full confidence in God’s love. The second verse contains bold, positive images – ‘more than gold and silver’, ‘real life giver’ and ‘the apple of my eye’ – only one of which comes from a psalm at all. And the third verse becomes characteristically personalist: ‘you’re my friend and you are my brother’ and ‘I love you . . . more than anything’. This is about mutual love not the disturbing unrequited love of Psalm 42. Despite being an extraordinarily successful and popular hymn – not least because of its fluid and wave-like tune, suggesting running water sought by the thirsty deer – it is actually less based in Psalm 42 than the Tate and Brady version. In short, personalism is preferred to a biblical connection. Sing Praise, while including Nystrom’s version, also has a 1988 hymn ‘As the deer longs for running water’ by Bob Hurd. Based upon both Psalms 42 and 43 it does indeed reflect the theme of unrequited loved. Instead of the refrain ‘I long to worship you’, it has ‘so I long, so I long, so I long for you’. Several of the verses that the cantor sings also have clear references to the unrequited love of the Psalms – especially ‘When shall I see . . . the face 13

Rejoice and Sing, p. 958.

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of God?’ in verse one and ‘Where is God, where is your God? Where, oh where are you?’ in verse three. In line with the advice given in the first edition of Mission Praise that some choruses should be ‘repeated several times to encourage a sense of remaining in meditation, or emphasising an important thought’, a significant number of hymns based upon psalms in Complete Mission Praise focus upon just one or two images from a psalm. Psalm 130 ‘Out of the depths have I called unto thee O Lord’ (De profundis) is reduced simply to ‘O Lord, hear my prayer; come and listen to me’. However the haunting and repetitive tune, jumping an octave from ‘O’ to ‘Lord’ and set in a minor key, may help to convey a sense of ‘out of the depths’. In contrast, Fred Kaan’s ‘Out of our failure to create’ offers a much fuller, albeit interpreted, version of the same psalm in Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New, including an explicit mention of ‘out of the depth’ in its third verse. Again Andy Park’s ‘One thing I ask . . . that I may dwell in Your house, O Lord’ offers little more than a single image from Psalm 84 (‘O how amiable are thy dwellings, thou Lord of hosts’), whereas Isaac Watts’s ubiquitous classic adaption ‘O God, our help in ages past’ follows the psalm much more closely. It is not that Complete Mission Praise ignores the Psalms, but it does at times considerably reduce them.

Isaiah’s Vision in the Temple The extraordinary vision of God in the Temple told in Isaiah 6 has long influenced Christian images, starting with Revelation in the New Testament and continuing in Christian art, sculpture, poetry and indeed hymn writing. The three-fold ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ in Isaiah was soon interpreted by Christians as an expression of the Trinity and still continues as an Old Testament reading for Trinity Sunday in The Common Worship Lectionary: New Revised Standard Version.14 The fourth verse of ‘Let all mortal flesh keep silence’, translated variously from the ancient Liturgy of St James, offers a glimpse of this long tradition, remaining in all of the hymn-books except Complete Mission Praise. However, it is the two early nineteenth-century hymns, ‘Bright the vision that delighted’ written by Bishop Richard Mant and ‘Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!’ by Bishop Reginald Heber, that have most successfully carried Isaiah’s narrative. Of these it is the first that is the most explicit. The first verse of ‘Bright the vision’ locates this clearly as a vision of the prophet and seer [Isaiah]. The second verse introduces the cherubim and seraphim and the third (repeated as a sixth verse) recalls their chant of ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord’. It is one of the most successful and enduring of hymns that transpose a biblical narrative into verse and then interprets it as a continuing feature of Christian worship (verses four and five). Richard Redhead’s tune, rising to a crescendo of two top E flats before returning to a final A major chord, echoes the grandeur of the Temple filled with this transcendent vision. Rejoice and Sing, Common Praise and Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New have all three of the hymns (as does Hymns Ancient and Modern Revised and The New English Hymnal), but Complete Mission Praise has only ‘Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!’ It retains the ecclesiastical English of the original, but immediately follows this hymn with three new ones that make no connection with Isaiah 6 other than the word ‘holy’. The 14

The Common Worship Lectionary: New Revised Standard Version (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 565.

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wording of the first of these new hymns departs from the Trinitarian structure in the first line, offering instead ‘Holy, holy, holy, holy’, but restores this structure in the following verses – with the second verse addressed to ‘Gracious Father’, the third to ‘Precious Jesus’ and the fourth to ‘Holy Spirit’. The next hymn does retain a Trinitarian structure in its first line ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord’, but then confuses it in the following verse: ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus is the Lord’. The final hymn is sung with men and women in canon largely repeating ‘Holy is the Lord’. Constantly repeated phrases without an accompanying narrative are again a feature that strongly distinguishes Complete Mission Praise from the other hymn-books. Hymns or worship songs in this form are readily sung by congregations without using a book and, like ritual repetition elsewhere, are especially conducive to what Durkheim depicted as ‘collective effervescence’. Yet, once again, they tend to loosen the biblical connections made in the other hymn-books.

Matthew and Luke’s Christmas Narrative It is clear from all of the hymn-books that Christmas carols are still popular. Each has an abundance on offer. Indeed, even traditionally minded hymn-books, over time, tend to include carols that might once have been rejected as being too populist and based more upon legend than upon Matthew and Luke’s (very different) Christmas narratives. The New English Hymnal includes ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen’, ‘Silent night! Holy night!’, ‘The first Nowell the angel did say’ and ‘Away in a manger’ – with extra-biblical features of cattle, oxen, a cold winter’s night, and ‘three’ wise men – carols which did not feature in the previous edition of The English Hymnal15 in 1933. Common Praise (along with Complete Mission Praise and Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New) includes ‘We three Kings of Orient are’ and ‘See, amid the winter’s snow’. Complete Mission Praise and Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New both include ‘Ding dong, merrily on high!’ and the latter even includes ‘Good King Wenceslas’ – carols with little or no relationship to the narratives of either Matthew or Luke. Even when carols do adhere more closely to biblical narratives, they have a strong tendency to harmonise Matthew and Luke into a single narrative. To give two examples, ‘Angels, from the realms of glory’ (found in all of the hymn-books except The New English Hymnal) has Lukan angels and shepherds in the first two verses and Matthean sages in the third verse, and ‘O come, all ye faithful’ (which is included in The New English Hymnal) does the same in its third and fourth verses. Whereas many more recent carols resist such harmonisations of the two distinct biblical birth narratives, the older carols still carry them into present-day carol services. Both of these characteristics suggest that hymn-book compilers find it difficult wholly to resist including carols that elide and add extraneous features to biblical birth narratives. The claim often made by churches that modern secular culture has distorted the ‘true’ meaning of Christmas becomes more ambiguous. Churches continue to use hymn-books, knowing that some of their most popular carols foster biblical distortions. Two biblical narratives (themselves not without ambiguities, even contradictions) have been carried and changed in popular culture over time and then incorporated into public worship in the form of carols legitimised by modern hymn-books. The result of this complex interaction is that many churchgoers (let alone non-churchgoers) are now unaware that 15

The English Hymnal (Oxford: Oxford University Press and Mowbray, 1933).

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Matthew does not specify that there were ‘three’ wise men (the number three has been inferred from the gifts) or that Luke does not specify ‘cattle’ or ‘oxen’ (they have been inferred from the ‘manger’). Even when churchgoers hear the Matthew and Luke birth narratives (often interwoven at carol services) they may not notice that Jesus is born in a ‘house’ in the former and in a ‘manger’ only in the latter. Numerous paintings and carvings then reinforce these mistaken perceptions. As result people know that these are genuine features of the biblical narratives.

Apocalyptic Images from Daniel, Mark 13 and Revelation A feature of Mission Praise that distinguishes it from the other hymn-books is that it lists a selection of hymns concerned with ‘The Return of Christ’. Complete Mission Praise (2009) lists thirty-two hymns under this heading. These include Charles Wesley’s ‘Lo! He comes with clouds descending’ from the eighteenth century and L. Hensley’s ‘Thy kingdom come, O God’ from the nineteenth century, but most of the rest are modern and not included in the other modern hymn-books. They contain apocalyptic images from Daniel, Mark 13 and Revelation, as well as an expectation of an imminent parousia characteristic of Paul’s earliest letters. The vagueness of Advent in many traditional Anglican and Reformed congregations has been replaced with more Adventist, even millenarian, convictions. Without doubt this does represent parts of the New Testament accurately – say, Mark compared with John, or 1 Thessalonians compared with 1 John – but it may lead congregations in a decidedly more sectarian direction. Three hymns added to Complete Mission Praise from the earlier Mission Praise illustrate this feature. Each of them builds up from a personalised expression of faith to a climax that envisages the dramatic and imminent return of Christ. Mark Altrogge’s 1982 hymn ‘I want to serve the purpose of God in my generation’ does this very gradually. The first and second verses express a strong desire to serve and to ‘give my life for something that’ll last forever’. The third verse extends this to a desire ‘to see the kingdom of God while I am alive’. However in the fourth and final verse this becomes: ‘I want to see the Lord come again in my generation’. Gerald Coates and Noel Richards’ 1992 hymn ‘Great is the darkness that covers the earth’ expresses a similar final desire, along with bleaker apocalyptic images of darkness contrasted with light. The second verse makes the plea, ‘Help us bring light to the world, that we might speed Your return’. The third verse refers to ‘that final day, when out of the heavens You come . . . Our great commission complete, then face to face we shall meet’. And Carol Owen’s 1997 hymn ‘He is the mighty God’ offers a similar final vision: ‘He’s coming in the clouds and every eye shall see He is the Lord of lords’. One Adventist hymn found in the earlier Mission Praise is also included in Complete Anglican Hymns Old and New and Rejoice and Sing. Written a century ago by the Irish Baptist William Young Fullerton, ‘I cannot tell why He, whom angels worship’ has proved popular because (like Timothy Dudley-Smith’s ‘Lord of the Church’) it is set to the muchloved Londonderry Air. Its first verse relates to Luke’s birth narrative, the second to the cross and the third to ‘the needs and aspirations of east and west’. The fourth verse starts with stating that ‘I cannot tell how all the lands shall worship’, but then it concludes with an eschatological vision: ‘But this I know, the skies will thrill with rapture, and myriad, myriad human voices sing . . . At last the saviour of the world is King’. For traditional Anglican and Presbyterian congregations this may be sung as a conventional Advent hymn, concerned with ‘last things’ that include one’s own inevitable death. They have

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long been familiar with, say, Charles Wesley and John Cennick’s ‘Lo! He comes with clouds descending’ or W. H. Monk’s ‘Hark! A thrilling voice is sounding’. Yet for modern millenarians the combination of ‘rapture’, the certainty of ‘knowing’ and the myriad voices may well convey more sectarian convictions. The titles of a number of the hymns listed in this section of Complete Mission Praise (and contained in the earlier Mission Praise) suggest a similar literalist conviction of certainty and especially of imminence: ‘Christ is surely coming’; ‘I am waiting for the dawning’; ‘I know I’ll see Jesus some day’; ‘Mighty in victory’; ‘Soon, and very soon’; ‘When the Lord in glory comes’; and ‘When the trumpet of the Lord’. The conviction of an imminent apocalypse, which seems to have shaped parts of the earliest Church in New Testament times, is carried forward in a hymn-book adopted (perhaps unwittingly) by many Anglican and Reformed congregations in Britain today. There is, of course, nothing unusual about congregations singing theologically divergent hymns. Hymn-books have long contained hymns originally written for opposing theological movements. A glance at the index of authors in various editions of The English Hymnal and Hymns Ancient and Modern soon confirms that. Notoriously, the original intentions of authors can be overlooked by congregations, allowing, say, Hymns Ancient and Modern to present William Blake’s ‘And did those feet in ancient times walk upon England’s mountains green?’ (sung to Parry’s stately ‘Jerusalem’) as a ‘national’ hymn and for enthusiastic Anglican congregations to sing it as such – ignoring, of course, the ironic question marks at the end of each sentence of the first verse and the exclamation marks of the following verse. Blake, a dissenting, mystical Londoner, has made a quirky candidate for rural, Established Church patriotism. Yet the inclusion of convictions of an imminent apocalypse in a widely used hymn-book might appear as a step beyond this.

The Bible Reinterpreted This brief analysis, limited as it is to a specifically British context, may point to a broader phenomenon. It suggests that hymn-books – long recognised as powerful carriers of biblical images and narratives – in this particular context have changed very significantly over the last three decades. The publication of Mission Praise in 1983 can now be seen as an important marker of change. It has been seen that at the outset its authors intended to  embrace Christians from many different denominations (some of them Adventist) and to foster personal faith and feelings. In his Foreword to Complete Mission Praise (2009) Gavin Reid recalls how the initial idea for Mission Praise came during a car journey on the way to a preliminary meeting for Mission England and a visit of Billy Graham: Christians were in danger of drifting into different camps on hymnody. Some were stalwart supporters of the great traditional hymns. Others, especially the young, were champions of the more contemporary worship music. Quite apart from anything else, it meant jumping around from one sort of hymnbook to another . . . Why not produce a Mission hymnbook that blended the best of the old with the best of the new? That, of course, is exactly what Hymns Ancient and Modern and The English Hymnal intended to do in a previous generation. Some of the old hymns were carried forward but others were dropped (perhaps because they were no longer used) and new hymns were added. That is a process that is surely practised by hymn-book compilers in many different

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ages and cultures. However, with this process of change cultural and theological changes are also likely to occur. The authors of Mission Praise, as has been seen, were well aware that this is so and were frank in the theological changes that they envisaged. Yet they may not have foreseen some of the implications for biblical interpretation that have emerged in this essay. The Psalms remain important in all of the hymn-books analysed here, but it has been seen that some of the modern transpositions have removed uncomfortable features such as unrequited love and loosened connections with the original psalms. The narrative of Isaiah’s transcendent vision in the Temple has been truncated. The birth narratives of Matthew and Luke have also been elided and distorted by the inclusion of older carols into modern hymn-books. And, arguably, Adventist convictions have entered the mainstream of congregational worship.

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THE ART OF UNVEILING: BIBLICAL APOCALYPSE Christopher Burdon

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ithin the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, and even more on their fringes, are wild dreams and visions. Often these contain angelic messengers, ascent or descent between worlds, monsters, overthrow of empires, cosmic catastrophes. The most complete and influential such writing is the last book of the Christian Bible, the Revelation or Apocalypse of John. But John was manifestly drawing on earlier apocalyptic writing in the Hebrew scriptures – particularly from the books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah and Daniel – and he lived in a time when the writing of apocalypses and claims to vision by both Jews and Christians were widespread. Under the names of patriarchs, prophets and sages of the past such as Enoch, Abraham, Ezra or Paul, were inscribed dreams, visions, revelatory dialogues and accounts of heavenly journeys endeavouring to interpret the signs of the times and uncover the purposes of God. Indeed, apocalyptic sayings are heard also from the lips of Jesus in the first three gospels. All this is somewhat embarrassing to those who would like to find in the Bible firm ground for a religious or doctrinal system that is consistently rational, philosophical or moral or that will not unduly disrupt the existing world order. With history and law and liturgy, even with prophecy and poetry, there is greater stability and greater scope for exercising critical judgement. So the place of the Book of Revelation within the New Testament canon was contested for several centuries, while other early Christian apocalyptic writings such as The Shepherd of Hermas were eventually excluded. Seers, spirits and angels do not cooperate very well with bishops or scholars. But to those who cry out for liberation, to those who desire transformative religious experience, to many also who seek certitude about their future or the future of the world, the seer or angelic interpreter may provide inspiration and revelation. So for medieval reformers like Savonarola to preachers of the ‘Great Awakening’ to the grimy coalfield chapels that D. H. Lawrence recalled from his childhood, it was above all the wild Apocalypse that charted the symbolic universe and unveiled the meaning of history. Biblical apocalypses have therefore had a vigorous ‘afterlife’ in both political and liturgical performance. But there are other ways in which the texts are performed. For many artists, poets and musicians, apocalypses have held the greatest appeal of all biblical writings. Some, lured by the often extraordinary vividness of the visions, have attempted actually to represent them, as in the Anglo-Norman illuminated apocalypses or in John Martin’s huge canvases. Others, fascinated by the poetry as well as by the intriguing apocalyptic codes and structures, have attempted to translate the ancient texts into

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different media, as in the music of Hildegard of Bingen or John Tavener. Contemporary story-tellers like Alasdair Gray and Philip Pullman have drawn more promiscuously on the ancient apocalyptic motifs of horror and inter-world travel. And in their great visionary epics, Dante, Milton and Blake spoke as prophets for their own age through imaginative expansions and rewritings of biblical apocalypse. Now if the claims of the apocalyptic seers are being taken seriously, or again if the biblical canon is being accorded its traditional authority, these artistic uses and interpretations run great risks. For the Revelation of John – with which this essay will be principally concerned – opens with a blessing but closes with a curse: Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it; for the time is near . . . I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book; if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away that person’s share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.1 What performance of the text other than a direct oral one can fail to add to or take away from the words of the ‘prophecy’? Any artistic or indeed theological interpretation of this apocalypse must wrestle with its obscurity as well as its surplus of meaning but wrestle too with its self-consciously scriptural authority. Uniquely among apocalypses, this one is not pseudonymous: the seer and scribe names himself and locates himself geographically in relation to the Asian churches for which he is prophet or pastor. Especially in the letters of chapters 2–3, but also in the hymns of praise and in comments in the narrative such as at 13: 18 and 14: 12, the book’s immediate pastoral purpose is evident, however coded. Yet this local prophet introduces his contemporary message as ‘revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place’, made known ‘by sending his angel to his servant John’. The claim may denied by the reader or may be willingly submitted to. But whether the artist sees herself as a critical outsider, or as eavesdropping on what John hears, or as seeing with John’s eyes, or even as actor within the visions, her artistic response has to reckon with this extraordinary claim from a scribe who has passed through the open door into heaven: this is an apocalypse, that is, an unveiling, of what has been hidden in the heavenly world and of what must soon take place on earth. The ‘voice which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.” At once I was in the spirit . . .’ (4: 1–2).

An Open Door Open or half-open doors and windows often suggest a mysterious inner world that is half concealed and half revealed, as in many of Vermeer’s interior scenes. The door ajar adumbrates a proper caution about trespassing further into private or holy territory, a caution about being or claiming to be ‘in the spirit’. Many religious authorities wish to ensure that the door to that unpredictable holy place is closed except to those specially qualified, as in the traditional rabbinic prohibition of interpreting the vision of Ezekiel 1. In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials the ‘subtle knife’ held by the young hero, Will, can enable entry into a multiplicity of different worlds (a deliberate horizontal contrast to the vertical 1

Revelation 1: 3; 22: 18–19.

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dualism of John’s ‘heaven and earth’); yet these incisions are a source of severe danger, the passage into new worlds of the death-dealing spectres. A wise artist or believer, it may be thought, remains within the known world where surely there is ample material for representation, interpretation and action. Yet claims to vision persist, and in our nightly dreams those everyday words and images jostle and float in unfamiliar, perhaps terrifying new worlds. May not the dreams be told, and may not the artist as well as the seer be their mediator? That apocalyptic teacher St Paul writes of ‘a person in Christ [presumably himself] who . . . was caught up to the third heaven . . . and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat’ (2 Corinthians 12: 2–4). But the seer of Patmos goes further, passing through the open door and obediently writing down what he sees and hears. The open door leads to the worship of heaven, to the vision of the Lamb, and to the Lamb’s gradual unsealing of the scroll; in what the seals unleash, beginning with the four horsemen of chapter 6, no horror is spared – as later in what the trumpets and the bowls unleash. At various points John records his amazement or incomprehension, but all is written down in his book, open to the Church, to the empire, and to the artist. Unlike in earlier apocalypses, no prohibition is made of the information’s transmission: quite the reverse (Daniel 12: 4; Revelation 22: 10). The door is open, the book unsealed, and the dangerous visions are set loose to defamiliarise the familiar world. A remarkable flourishing of apocalyptic imagery took place in England in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. No fewer than eighty-three manuscripts survive as examples of what was presumably an even more prolific production of ‘Gothic’ apocalypses. Following the sequence of Revelation’s narrative and accompanying its text are colourful and often literal depictions of the visions and events recounted by John. The images, usually occupying from a quarter to half a folio, are enclosed in frames, like a modern comic strip, and like those strips often also contain short phrases of dialogue or praise. In most examples the scriptural text is also accompanied by commentary, often the respected allegorical commentary of Berengaudus, thus providing the reader with an authoritative interpretation of the strange narrative and images before her. And in half the surviving manuscripts the account of John’s apocalypse is inserted into an account of his life, with the story of his trial, banishment and journey to Patmos preceding his dream and initial vision and then that of his preaching, baptising and wonder-working following the completion of the vision. From the reader – a wealthy and presumably literate private reader, since these elaborate and costly books were not produced for liturgical use – a complex spiritual and intellectual exercise was invited: reading the scriptural text, receiving an official understanding of it from the commentary, seeing it as vision and theatre by viewing the illumination, and incorporating that whole hermeneutical labour into the emulation of the visionary apostle, whereby (in Suzanne Lewis’s words) ‘the author of the Apocalypse became the hero of an interior spiritual experience that could be viewed as exemplary by layperson and cleric alike’.2 How far this formative intention was fulfilled is hard to tell. Then as now, it is likely that on most folios the illumination’s brightness and prominence meant that attention was mainly focussed on image rather than text, let alone commentary. But even if the text is ignored, the reading experience is still a complex one. One may take as an example perhaps the most lavish of these manuscripts, the ‘Trinity Apocalypse’ (of Trinity College, 2

Lewis, Reading Images, p. 36.

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Cambridge) (Plate 67). Here eight initial miniatures over three pages recount the story of John’s preaching and arrest in Ephesus, surrounded by diabolical faces and gestures; his being transported to Rome, where he is tested but unharmed ‘par la grace de deu’; then his banishment by Domitian and shipping to Patmos. Sixty-nine further miniatures recount his apocalypse and a final twenty-two his subsequent life. The bold lines and bright colours in this manuscript are compelling, but the designs are clearly following conventions widespread in other earlier and contemporary versions. Many of the ‘miniatures’ of its central section are actually large, occupying half a page, and many contain narrative progression within a single frame. For instance, on f14r, where the text inscribed is Revelation 12: 13–17, the first miniature shows the dragon with seven heads, the lowermost one pouring out water on the earth, and to the right the woman given wings, then flying away, with birds and trees around her; the second has two panels, one showing the woman seated, surrounded by trees and fed from above by an angel with the Eucharistic Host, and the other showing the dragon descending from the sky, attacked by men with sword, axe, spear, crossbow and arrows, with women standing by. In vivid colour these frames combine close attention to the detail of the text with imagery familiar from medieval spirituality and warfare, ingeniously allowing the reader to gain an immediate sense of the story whilst also inviting her to move around the image, admiring or questioning the detail and verifying or expanding it from the text and/or commentary. So the artist facilitates a kind of sacramental re-enactment of what is seen through the open door; yet one that is incomplete and anagogical, precisely because the literal fulfilment of the visions remains in the future: all is unveiled and potentially even understood, but all is not yet experienced. The frequent depiction of John within the visual frames in this and similar medieval apocalypses reminds us that he is not simply a seer but a participant in the narrative (Plate 68). We do not any more than in the text of Revelation have unmediated access to the heavenly world or to the future judgement or salvation, rather (following the hierarchy of Revelation 1: 1) an unveiling from God to Christ to angel to seer to scholarly or artistic interpreter. Yet it is not quite as neat as this. In the first place, many medieval apocalypses do not show John consistently within the frames of their images. He is in fact absent in nearly a third of those in the Trinity Apocalypse, whilst in others (for example, the ‘Metz’ and ‘Getty’ Apocalypses) he is sometimes shown standing outside the frame or peering in through an aperture. Thus the seer – and potentially the reader/disciple – stands between two worlds, making him according to Lewis ‘a complex transgressive figure’.3 And when we move on two centuries to the work of that highly skilled and innovative draughtsman, Albrecht Dürer, we find images of Revelation where John is usually absent and we are therefore as it were seeing with his eyes – or rather, with those of the heroic Renaissance artist, whose customary monogram is reproduced on each image. Moreover, Dürer’s Apocalypse woodcuts are printed on an entire large page with the scriptural text on the facing page, and since there are only fifteen images of the apocalyptic narrative – compared with, say, the Trinity Apocalypse’s sixty-nine – the degree of detail and comprehensiveness is necessarily diminished, and there is synchronising rather than narrative progression in the visions. Thus the four horsemen (drawn both naturalistically and grotesquely) ride 3

Ibid. pp. 20–1. This is powerfully conveyed in the right-hand or ‘Revelation’ panel of Hans Memling’s altarpiece at St John’s Hospital in Brugge, where the seated seer-scribe dominates the foreground and the rest of the panel has vivid and detailed representations of the events of Revelation 4–12 in a synchronic vision.

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Figure 27.1: Albrecht Dürer, Four Horsemen, © Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 27.2: Albrecht Dürer, Woman and Dragon, © Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 27.3: Jean Duvet, Apocalypse Chapter 9. © Trustees of the British Museum. out all together rather than in four or more successive frames, whilst the woman with sun, moon and stars and the dragon of Revelation 12 are shown side by side upon an ordinary earthly landscape (Figs 27.1 and 27.2). The vertical framing of the woodcuts and their large scale (c. 40 x 28cm) permit Dürer in this picture, as in six others – such as Michael’s battle with the dragon, where again the landscape at the foot of the image is naturalistic and pastoral – to present his apocalypse with a sharp dichotomy between the earthly and heavenly worlds. This contrasts with the more common left-to-right progression in the earlier illuminated manuscripts but could be seen to reflect more faithfully the sharply dualistic cosmology and indeed politics of Revelation.4 Yet Dürer’s unusual combination of familiar terrestrial features with an austere heavenly realm, framed in elegantly structured compositions with expert perspective, lacks something of the chaotic agglomeration and exaggeration in the text of Revelation. That is flamboyantly restored in the unusual Apocalypse series of Jean Duvet (1555) (Fig. 27.3). Duvet’s twenty-three engravings – roughly one for each chapter of Revelation – are filled with often grim faces and bodies, human, animal, angelic and divine, crammed together with a horror vacui and with no space for background or for sky nor any division between earth and heaven, all conveying an oppressive sense of divine purpose.5 For instance, his engraving covering most of Revelation 9 (when the sixth angel blows his trumpet) 4 5

Cf. O’Hear, Contrasting Images, pp. 160–75. See Carey, Apocalypse, pp. 169–78.

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contains an approximation to the ‘twice ten thousand times ten thousand’ cavalry commanded by the four angels, with violent tramplings and killings by the sword of unrepentant humanity, whilst in the similarly crowded engraving covering the latter half of Revelation 19 the vigorous angel standing in the sun presides over the chaotic mêlée of the captured beast, plunging horses, and the birds gorging on the flesh of the warriors. The eye is overwhelmed by the cluttered image, in much the way that John records his being overwhelmed by what he sees and hears. It cannot all be taken in in one viewing or one reading. The ‘unveiling’ of revelation seems to lead to the viewer’s or hearer’s being swathed in further veils, so that vision and knowledge remain imperfect. But John is relieved and enlightened, as was customary in apocalypses, by an angelic interpreter, absent in the free-standing images of Duvet and Dürer (for instance, Revelation 5: 5; 17: 7–18; 19: 9; 21: 9). A similar elucidating and encouraging role is undertaken for Dante the apocalyptic traveller – by Virgil in Inferno and most of Purgatorio, and then by Beatrice – though it is made very clear in Paradiso that complete knowledge such as apocalypses purport to convey cannot be grasped on earth but only by the ascent through virtue and love to participation in the divine. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s Adam is enlightened by the ‘affable archangel’ Raphael and later by Michael, who interpret God’s purposes and reveal both past creation and future history and redemption. And in both these epics, as more obscurely in Blake’s ‘prophecies’ and in the coded language of Daniel 7–12 and Revelation 16–19, there is an unveiling not just of divine action and redemptive energy but also of the negative forces of, variously, human empires, Sin and Death, the corrupt Church, and ‘State Religion’. Biblical apocalypses are iconoclastic and polemical, and it is no surprise that they intrigue and inspire iconoclastic and liberationist poets and artists. Thus whilst Dante’s structured moral universe does not in its totality seem subversive or iconoclastic, the crucial canto XIX of Inferno unveils in the language of John’s Apocalypse Dante’s visceral opposition to the Church’s assuming temporal power. In the eighth circle of hell, he and Virgil encounter the despised simoniac Pope Boniface VIII, whom he boldly addresses: Di voi pastor s’accorse il Vangelista, quando colei che siede sopra l’acque puttaneggiar coi regi a lui fu vista: quella che con le sette teste nacque, e da le diece corna ebbe argomento, fin che virtutue al suo marito piacque. Fatto v’avete dio d’oro e d’argento; e che altro è do voi a l’idolatre, se non ch’elli uno, e voi ne orate cento?6 ‘It was shepherds such as you that the Evangelist had in mind when she that sitteth upon the waters was seen by him committing fornication with the kings: she that was born with the seven heads, and from the ten horns had her strength, so long as virtue pleased her spouse. You have made you a god of gold and silver; and wherein do you differ from the idolaters, save that they worship one, and you a hundred?’ The poet then continues to berate Constantine and his dote (‘donation’) as source of this corruption, the whole apocalyptic passage forming part of Dante the pilgrim’s discovery 6

Inf. XIX. 106–14.

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of his prophetic vocation and of Dante the writer’s political and theological case for the distinct vocations of Church and Empire.7 Milton too deplored Constantine, seeing him with kings and prelates through the ages as an oppressive force destroying human and Christian liberty.8 His Satan – the hero of Paradise Lost, as Percy Shelley noted – is highly ambivalent here, and certainly not devoid of power and royal trappings, but he too can be seen (as by Jackie diSalvo) as a ‘republican hero’ boldly contesting God and his subservient feudal court and nepotistic Messiah.9 Satan’s journey to hell-gates unveils also the monstrous images of his offspring Sin and Death: the first an ‘execrable shape’, a ‘goblin full of wrath’ and ‘grisly terror’.10 And it is the iconoclast Samson who is the hero of Milton’s final drama. Similarly the radically protestant republican Blake celebrates in his early prophecies the recovery of political and sexual liberty by the revolutionary overthrow of oppressive power: ‘Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease.’11 The achievement of liberty becomes much more agonistic and much more psychological in Blake’s later poetry and engraved works, but the smashing of the idols of ‘Religion hid in war’ is still prelude to the apocalyptic transformation of humanity, as at the conclusion of The Four Zoas: Where is the Spectre of prophecy where the delusive Phantom Departed & Urthona rises from the ruinous walls In all his ancient strength to form the golden armour of science For intellectual War. The war of swords departed now The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns.12 The withdrawing of the veil of mystery and the opening of the door to the seer – or to the artist – thus offer the possibility of a liberative and often chaotic process of further unveiling. This process also holds out the heady dream of complete knowledge of the mind of God, that apocalyptic belief which over the centuries has wrought such political and military destruction to those inhabitants of the earth to whom the trumpets and the eagle of Revelation once cried ‘Woe, woe, woe!’ Can the artist, whether in words or music or wood or paint, redeem the apocalyptic imagination from its destructive and fanatical urges?

Violence and Elegance The chaotic agglomeration of information, imagery and horror which Duvet conveys visually is undoubtedly one aspect of Revelation as of many other early apocalypses. Yet this chaos, expressed in a crude and eccentric Greek, is actually contained within a structure of considerable elegance. The series of sevens (churches, seals, trumpets, bowls, probably visions too); the significance of other numbers, like four, six and twelve; the subtle interweaving of Old Testament phrases and motifs without explicit quotation; the heavenly 7

8 9 10 11 12

Cf. Emmerson and Herzman, ‘The Commedia: Apocalypse, Church and Dante’s Conversion’, in Apocalyptic Imagination, pp. 104–44. Cf. the apocalyptic conclusion to his Eikonoklastes (CPW III. 598). For example, PL V. 774–802; cf. DiSalvo, War of Titans, pp. 247–51. PL IV. 666–809. In Marriage of Heaven and Hell and also in America: Erdman, pp. 45, 53. Erdman, Blake, p. 407.

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songs of praise; the seer’s repeated ‘I saw’ and ‘I heard’; the psychological build-up through the horrors of chapters 18 and 19 to the climax of judgement and the liberation of the final vision; all these betoken an author with a keen, indeed mathematical, sense of pattern and coherence. Mathematicians, ‘prophetic’ historians and musicians as well as poets have responded creatively to that elegant frame for the wild visionary experience (or visionary fiction). Moreover, in some of the earliest surviving Christian visual art, namely the mosaics on the apses and arches in Rome and Ravenna, the worshipper at the earthly altar celebrates below (and symbolically within) the colourful solemn symmetry of the worship of the Lamb by the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders. That sense of order expressed in vision, in number, in liturgy and in history is evident in one of the most unusual and influential interpreters of Revelation, Abbot Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202). For this ardent proponent of monasticism, the Apocalypse was ‘the wheel within the wheel . . . the key to the meaning of human history’.13 In contrast to St Augustine’s allegorical understanding of the Apocalypse as charting a way to heaven, long dominant in the West, Joachim aligned John’s visions with events in human and especially Church history and what he held to be the approaching monastic consummation of history. This was achieved in verbal exposition but also in his complex diagrammatic figurae: ingenious numerological symbolism is used to justify his claim that the present world, now in the time of the sixth trumpet, was about to enter the third trinitarian status of the Holy Spirit. So in the figura representing the vision of Revelation 12: 3, a huge dragon fills most of the page, its seven heads identified in the surrounding text as Herod, Nero, Constantius, Muhammad, Mesemoth, Saladin, and a seventh to come. The advent of each of the first six heads, he explains, is followed by a persecution of the Church, whereas the seventh will be followed by the sabbath of history. His figura of the heavenly Jerusalem similarly combines meticulous visual structure, exposition of the scriptural text and reference to the world outside the text – historical, contemporary, eschatological and above all utopian. This ‘prophetic’ and ‘church-historical’ way of reading of Revelation was to prove highly influential among the radical Franciscans of the Middle Ages but also among Protestants of the Reformation and early Enlightenment periods, whose desire for meaning, order and salvation within history was fanned by the numerological patterning of John’s book and by the Joachimite tradition (if not by its monastic emphasis) (Fig. 27.4). Among such interpreters was none other than Isaac Newton, whose elaborate researches into chronology centred on Daniel and Revelation. And two other Cambridge scholars, Joseph Mede (1586–1638) and Newton’s successor, the mathematician William Whiston (1667–1752), both devised carefully structured diagrams outlining the ‘synchronisms’ of the Apocalypse and the progression through human and Church history to the impending seventh trumpet.14 Underlying all of these elegant representations of the apocalyptic narrative is a 13

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E. R. Daniel, ‘Joachim of Fiore: Patterns of History in the Apocalypse’, in Emmerson and McGinn, Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, p. 87; cf. Reeves, Joachim of Fiore, pp. 1–28; Kovacs and Rowland, Revelation, pp. 143, 228–30. Cf. Burdon, Apocalypse in England, pp. 31–65; pls 10 & 11. The structural elegance of the Apocalypse has also attracted musical interpretation: see for instance Handel’s Messiah (1742), Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941), and the oratorios by Franz Schmidt, Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln (1937) and John Tavener, The Apocalypse (1993).

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Figure 27.4: The ‘Synchronisms’ of Joseph Mede’s Clavis Apocalyptica (1627).

profound and ‘Joachimite’ sense of mathematical vision bringing providential order both to the lurid events of the Apocalypse and to the vagaries of human history. A similar sense is present in more brilliant form in Dante’s Commedia, with its narrative of vivid characters and grotesque visions held within a remarkable symmetry of time and space – a ‘divine’ chronology and geography, as it were – and all recounted within a poem of meticulous structure, vocabulary, rhyme and numerical symbolism.15 Joachim (il calavrese abate Giovacchino / di spirito profetico dotato) actually appears as a character in Paradiso canto XII, and the trinitarian theology and symbolism of his figurae is drawn on at least three times in that final volume.16 For Dante too is anticipating a renewal which is not just personal or spiritual but political, albeit culminating in a very different kind of political order from Joachim’s monastic new Jerusalem, and indeed from John’s anticipated destruction of the empire. 15 16

On number, cf. Reynolds, Dante, pp. 147–8. In cantos XIV, XVIII and XXXIII: cf. Reeves, ‘Dante and the Prophetic View of History’, in Grayson, World of Dante, pp. 44–60.

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Paradise Lost too, although drawing its narrative from an imaginative expansion of Genesis rather than Revelation, ends with an exposition of history by Michael that is both tragic and millenarian, culminating in the Messiah’s raising ‘[f]rom the conflagrant mass, purged and refined, / New heavens, new earth . . .’17 Milton’s coded yearning for political liberation – on both an English and a cosmic scale – is contained in an epic which like Dante’s combines monstrous images with an elegance of structure and poetry. Both can be seen as carefully constructed homages to the elegant horror of John’s Apocalypse. Indeed, Milton remarks in his preface to Samson Agonistes ‘Of that sort of dramatic poem which is called tragedy’ that ‘Paraeus commenting on the Revelation, divides the whole book as a tragedy, into acts distinguished each by a chorus of heavenly harpings and song between’.18 But within Paradise Lost as within Revelation, the writer delights in images of monstrosity. In the ‘dungeon horrible’ of Hell, ‘. . . stretched out huge in length the arch-fiend lay / Chained on the burning lake . . .’ In an even more vivid scene on Satan’s return there, his proud account of his doings on earth is greeted by a ‘dismal universal hiss’ as the angels become serpents. And Book II contains the horrific depictions of Hell’s ‘dismal world’, of the monstrous and pornographic Sin and Death, and of Chaos, that ‘dark / Illimitable ocean without bound, / Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, / And time and place are lost . . .’19 The politics of liberty and claims to vision are even more pronounced in Blake’s ‘prophecies’ and epics, composed partly as a respectful but combative response to those of Dante and especially Milton. A combative response also to John of Patmos; for in Blake’s radical rewriting of the dualistic universe the spiritual warfare between good and evil is replaced by a human struggle of the ‘four zoas’ leading through ‘mental fight’ to the free celebration of ‘Divine Humanity’. The apocalyptic and often violent imagery of dragon and beast, of Babylon and Jerusalem, jostles in the apparently disordered cosmos of The Four Zoas and Jerusalem with the forces of the four creatures, who now no longer bow before the transcendent God but engage in energetic struggle to re-form dismembered Albion. But that apparent disorder is expressed (in Milton and Jerusalem as earlier in, say, America and The Book of Urizen) within a ‘biblical’ structure of books and chapters and a narrative teeming with numerical and geographical symbolism. And Blake – perhaps like Dürer before him – implicitly presents himself as the seer, the new John who redeems the pathologies of John’s ancient vision and the corruptions of ‘State Religion’ that have issued from it. So in his picture of the Angel of Revelation Blake pictures himself seated as scribe below the massive angel. And in his own voice he prays and proclaims at the commencement of Jerusalem: Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish’d at me. Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task! To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God. the Human Imagination 17

18

19

PL XII. 547–8; on Milton’s ambivalent millenarianism, cf. De Doctrina Christiana I. 33 (CPW VI. 614–33); J. Cummins, ‘Matter and Apocalyptic Transformations in Paradise Lost’, in Cummins (ed.), Milton and the Ends of Time, pp. 169–83. Cf. his description of the Apocalypse as ‘a high and stately tragedy’ in Reason of ChurchGovernment (CPW I. 815). PL I. 192–210; II. 570–967; X. 504–47.

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O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love: Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life! Guide thou my hand which trembles exceedingly upon the rock of ages . . .20 The attempt to combine elegant composition and violent content can be seen again in some English painting of the Romantic and Victorian periods, when themes from Daniel and Revelation, like the other great apocalyptic story of the deluge, proved popular with both artists and their public (Plates 69 and 70). Leaving aside for a moment Blake’s many visual representations in engravings and paintings of biblical apocalypse, Benjamin West (1738–1820) produced several large paintings of scenes in Revelation, some designed for an aborted project for a royal chapel at Windsor and some for a similarly aborted Revelation Chamber at William Beckford’s extravagant Fonthill Abbey. His three successive versions of the opening of the seals and the four horsemen – all with bodies of men and horses and monstrous forms against menacing clouds – increase in their depiction of apocalyptic horror as they decrease in their compositional coherence. The last version, known as Death on the Pale Horse (1817, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts), impressed John Keats, but the poet was disappointed to find it lacking in ‘intensity’, so that in it ‘we have unpleasantness without any momentous depth of speculation excited, in which to bury its repulsiveness’.21 West’s (or his patrons’) fascination with horror found plenty of subjects in Revelation, the most grotesque being his oil painting from Revelation 13 The Beast Riseth Out of the Sea (1797, coll. Thomas and Margaret McCormick). Here the two beasts are depicted with disturbing colour and extraordinary semi-human naturalism, despite their having seven heads and two horns respectively, with an equally naturalistic sea and pathetic group of women and children in the foreground and fiery clouds above. West’s deliberate composition, with the two beasts, the human group and the clouds roughly occupying one each of the four corners of the canvas and the extraneous heads of the first beast darkly in the centre, is effective in a way completely different from the equally structured but strongly caricatured watercolours by Blake of The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC) or of ‘He Cast him into the Bottomless Pit and Shut him up’ (Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA); different again from Turner’s powerful The Angel standing in the Sun (Tate), where sketchy human figures and the birds of Revelation 19: 17 are dispersed on the fringes of the brilliant vortex from which the angel emerges. The most famous and successful of all nineteenth-century British ‘apocalyptic’ artists, however, was the ambitious John Martin (1789–1854). Martin’s religious and political views were independent and perhaps fluctuating, and it is unclear how far he actually held to the Protestant millennialism which was common in England in his lifetime. But he was certainly consistent throughout his career in his determination to produce an effect of the sublime on the grand scale (in engineering projects as well as in his paintings). Biblical subjects tackled by Martin include the Flood, the fall of Sodom, the death of the first-born and the fall of Nineveh, as well as twenty-four frequently reproduced mezzotints illustrating Paradise Lost. In 1820 appeared his massive oil painting of Belshazzar’s Feast (private collection: 160 x 249cm), depicting in minute detail and mainly in glowering red the vast terraces, with hundreds dining beneath a sinister moon and a Babylonian tower: in the foreground are the king and his retinue and in the very centre Daniel pointing to and interpreting the divine writing 20 21

Jer. 5: 16–23 (Erdman, p. 147). Letter dated 22 December 1817, quoted by Paley, Apocalyptic Sublime, p. 30.

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that shines above the feasters. As with West, but on a much grander scale, the apocalyptic event is shown in a remarkably naturalistic style. And although this is clearly narrative painting it is – like those equally grand oil paintings of miraculous events, the slightly earlier Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon and slightly later Seventh Plague of Egypt – curiously still. Martin’s static human bodies and relatively poor grasp of anatomy, combined with the thinness of the paint, means that he has to rely for effect on size, colour and detailed architectural grandeur. Something of the fear and chaos of biblical apocalypse is lacking. But the apogee of Martin’s work was the three huge paintings from Revelation produced towards the end of his life between 1849 and 1853: The Great Day of his Wrath, The Last Judgement, and The Plains of Heaven (Tate: the largest 196.8 x 325.8cm) (Plate 71). In the first of these, where as at the opening of the sixth seal of Revelation huge mountains and buildings crash into the abyss, with small human figures cowering in the foreground, the predominant colour is red. A duller red also dominates the right side of The Last Judgement, where the damned (including prelates and prostitutes) flee from the judgement of God declared by the angelic trumpet. God himself, in white and surrounded by angels and the twenty-four elders, is seated above, and to the left of the chasm below him are the redeemed (nearly all male, many identified in Martin’s explanation of the painting and including several painters and poets). Here the predominant colour around the mist of the holy city is blue, the colour of salvation which is central also to The Plains of Heaven, a ‘sublime’ Romantic picture of an Edenic landscape of lakes, trees, meadows and mountains with some small female figures reposing in the foreground, but which nevertheless purports to present the ‘new Heaven and a new Earth . . . the holy city, new Jerusalem’.22 The literalism which the artist brings to his work in search of the sublime ironically means that the paintings remain somewhat earthbound: the apocalyptic narrative movement is arrested, and neither the elegant structure nor the violent narrative of Book of Revelation is fully reflected, in the way that Blake and Turner achieve in their more bolder and more symbolic manners. What Martin and much figurative art can struggle to convey is the unnerving movement between discrete or overlapping worlds that is such a significant part of Revelation as of many other apocalypses. It remains to explore how the three great epics of Dante, Milton and Blake represent and contend with that apocalyptic journeying.

Moving between the Worlds The seers of many Jewish apocalypses are also travellers. Enoch, Abraham and Isaiah all ascend into heaven and discover the divine secrets: Enoch is granted a tour of all creation and Abraham a bird’s eye view of earth present and to come. John’s journey in the Christian apocalypse is a simple if strange one, through the open door to dwell in heaven ‘in the spirit’. In the higher realm God is worshipped, the book is unsealed, the trumpets blown and the bowls poured out. Angels descend to bring messages or wage war on earth, and in the judgement the dragon and human sinners are cast into the even lower realm of the bottomless pit and the lake of fire. The cosmology is determinedly vertical, and the direction of events is firmly from above.23 22 23

Cf. Myrone, John Martin, pp. 173–83; Paley, Apocalyptic Sublime, pp. 122–54. O’Hear rightly compares this with Dürer’s ‘complete visual dichotomy between the two worlds, which in turn suggests the gulf that exists between the perfect heavenly realm and the flawed earthly realm’ (Contrasting Images, p. 161).

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In different ways, and from different moral standpoints, Dante, Milton and Blake all undermine this deterministic verticality. The pilgrim’s journey or cammino in the Commedia begins in the ordinary world in a ‘dark wood’ nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita (‘midway in the journey of our life’). He is led across a desert to encounter the interpreter Virgil, who also bears a message from the heavenly Beatrice, and follows him per lo cammino alto e silvestro (‘along the deep and savage way’) across the threshold of hell, descending in his educative journey to the deepest point below earth. Already it is clear that this is a pilgrimage through knowledge and virtue to truth and salvation, and the vertical symbolism is integral to the entire poem. But it is brilliantly complicated in the final canto of the Inferno. Dante and Virgil have descended to the lowest point where stands Lucifer (Lo’mperador del doloroso regno); Dante then feels himself to be ascending again back into Hell, but turning round sees that Lucifer appears upside down, for now their journey is in fact continuing to return on the ‘hidden road’ (cammino ascorso) to the ‘bright world’ of earth and the sight of the stars. The passage between worlds continues in the Purgatorio, when Dante and Virgil emerge on a shore and are transported across the sea with souls of the departed. They are at the foot of a mountain, faced with a steep cliff to climb, but Virgil assures Dante that this mount of Purgatory ‘is such that ever at the beginning below it is toilsome, but the higher one goes the less it wearies’, and similar encouragements are offered by him or by angelic messengers as the climb continues and as Dante feels himself becoming lighter.24 In the last four cantos of Purgatorio a series of apocalyptic visions leads him higher still. Virgil discreetly departs, but Beatrice is seen and now becomes his interpreter, speaking unlike Virgil from the experience of heavenly bliss. The ascent is completed with the sight of the divine chariot and the Christological gryphon (and also of the harlot and the dragon), and Dante is led through further waters ‘renovated even as new trees renewed with foliage, pure and ready to rise to the stars’. And the eternal expanse of the Paradiso that follows is not the end of journeying, for the heavenly life is less one of homage to than of participation in the divine. Not only the cosmological but the moral universe of the Commedia can be seen as more sophisticated than that of Revelation and other biblical apocalypses. The moral and political order on earth are not simply the result of divine command or satanic rebellion; they are the work of human free will, as emphasised in Virgil’s speeches in cantos XVII and XVIII of Purgatorio and particularly in Marco’s earlier speech: . . . se’l mondo presente disvia, / in voi è la cagione, in voi si cheggia (‘if the present world goes astray, in you is the cause, in you let it be sought’: Purg. XVI. 82–3). Accordingly, salvation is not just a divine nor a political victory but a personal quest for human and divine love. Dante the pilgrim is invited on the quest by Virgil as Beatrice’s messenger and receives spiritual encouragement from both Virgil and Beatrice.25 He is not just a visionary narrator like John but a thoroughly human, all-too-human, character. Milton too – that dogged believer in free will and political liberty in an age of theological predestinarianism and political authoritarianism – depicts in Paradise Lost a universe that imaginatively complicates the vertical heaven-earth dualism of Revelation. ‘Dream not of other worlds’, says Raphael to Adam (VIII. 175); yet the poet-narrator presents himself as ‘taught by the heavenly Muse to venture down / The dark descent, and up to reascend’ (III. 19–21). His epic certainly opens with definite verticality, the rebel angels 24 25

Purg. IV. 88–96; cp. VIII. 20–1; XII. 88–96; XV. 25–36. Inf. II. 121–6; Purg. XV. 49–81; XXX. 103–45; Par. I. 103–41.

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‘hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky / With hideous ruin and combustion down / To bottomless perdition’.26 Yet when in Book II the ‘infernal doors’ are opened, a ‘broad and beaten way’ is paved across the abyss, enabling Satan to roam between the worlds – and at his first envious sight of Adam and Eve to anticipate speedy colonial intercourse between their earth and his own realm.27 The same mobility is of course accorded to other spiritual beings, such as Raphael, who ‘sails between worlds and worlds’ to reach Eden, and even more the Son, who travels instantly from heaven to earth and back.28 Such ease of travel might not seem within the reach of humanity, who at the conclusion of the epic ‘through Eden took their solitary way’, yet Raphael’s speech in Book VII has quoted the Father’s intention to create humanity to dwell on earth . . . till by degrees of merit raised They open to themselves at length the way Up hither, under long obedience tried, And earth be changed to heaven, and heaven to earth, One kingdom, joy and union without end.29 The vertical language is not expelled, but Milton’s apocalyptic monism and materialism here go beyond the dualistic cosmology of Revelation and indeed the more ascetic ascent into paradise of the Commedia. He has himself opened up the imaginative passage between world and world. Milton’s admiring but combative successor William Blake radicalises further the apocalyptic journey. In his polemical ars poetica, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, one of the satirical ‘memorable fancies’ has the rebellious young writer descending into what an angel says is ‘the hot burning dungeon’ he is destined for. The way into the abyss is significantly through a church, where are altar and Bible and Aristotle, and then the mill that leads into the horrific abyss; but from that pit the imaginative writer easily escapes, to the angel’s irritation, for the Church’s moralistic ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ are oppressive constructions. In contrast to them, The Marriage proclaims that ‘All deities reside in the human breast’ and that ‘Without Contraries is no progression’. Unlike Milton, Blake is making actual claims to vision, seeing himself dining with Isaiah and Ezekiel and inheriting the mantle of John, in order to redeem through his art the damage that has been wrought by the Bible’s captivity to ‘State Religion’. The elaborate mythology he forges in his prophecies and pictures from about 1793 until his death in 1827 is thus a rewriting of biblical apocalypse.30 Like the Book of Daniel, Blake’s engraved prophecies of the 1790s interpret political events in coded mythological form, with contrary forces such as Orc, Urizen and Los contending with one another. Often too text and design contend on the same page. For instance, on plate 7 of America the revolutionary Orc’s proclamation of liberty is followed by the dragon-like challenge from ‘Albion’s Angel’; yet beneath his menacing words is a scene of pastoral innocence, a lamb resting with children, and above them an overshadowing willow with birds. On the following plate 26 27 28 29 30

PL I. 45–7; cf. Raphael’s account at VI. 856–77. PL II. 883–9; 1024–33; IV. 378–85. PL V. 266–77; X. 90–1, 224. PL VII. 157–61; cf. Michael’s similar prophecy at XII. 537–51. On Blake’s reversal of Revelation’s imagery, see further Burdon, Apocalypse in England, pp. 193–208; see also on Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in ibid. pp. 175–9.

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‘the terror’ Orc responds with defiance: his words are engraved upon a looming cloud, but over that cloud presides his authoritarian enemy, Urizen. The reader must engage dialectically, working with the ‘contraries’, for Blake’s art, like much biblical narrative, is designed (in his own words) to ‘rouse the faculties to act’.31 By the time of his completed engraved epic Jerusalem (1804–20) we have, in place of the hierarchical world of God, angels and humanity, a fluid human world of the ‘four zoas’ working agonistically towards the reconstitution of the ‘Divine Humanity’; in place of heavenly worship, the practice of human forgiveness; in place of a dualistic cosmology with linear time and organised space, a ‘new Jerusalem’ in a new planetary landscape where England, the Holy Land and heaven merge. That fluid landscape and movement between worlds can be found also in some contemporary fiction. Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), a complex ‘life in four books’ of the unassuming hero, told with both irony and political seriousness, moves between the realistic world of 1950s Glasgow and fantasy sections set in Unthank, a grim dystopic city where time and space are unstable and control is by an infernal system. This system involves the recycling of diseased human beings for food in an even more distorted underworld into which Lanark voluntarily descends and engages in argument with scientific controllers. Gray’s verbal and visual art draws on Blake as well as Marx to critique late capitalism, but there is in this apocalyptic journeying through a double hell no evident redemption or closure. Similarly – though written for children – Philip Pullman’s three-volume His Dark Materials (1995–2000) has ‘open doors’ into a multiplicity of worlds. The multiple worlds suggest a Blakean protest against ‘single vision’, and Pullman also has a Blakean animus against religious control: against the authoritarian Church of the novels and its campaign against ‘Dust’ (original sin) is set a rewriting of the ‘Fall’ of Genesis as redemption through knowledge and human love and an account of the pathetic death of the divine ‘Authority’. He draws most explicitly on Blake and Milton but also on older biblical apocalyptic motifs to include in his extended story angelic warfare, the changing of the earth’s surface, and most powerfully the passage of the two young central characters, Lyra and Will, through the world of the dead.32 The varied apocalyptic journeys – Dante’s descent and ascent, Milton’s angels roaming the universe, the fall and redemption of Blake’s Urizen, Lanark’s inhabiting a double underworld, Will’s and Lyra’s harrowing of hell – all invite the reader to suspend disbelief and engage in a morally transformative journey herself. Often polemical and often heretical, these re-writings of biblical tradition bear witness to the abiding creative energy of apocalypse. Analysing the impact of Revelation in the Middle Ages, Suzanne Lewis avers that While awaiting fulfilment at the end of time, the sacred text was ritually enacted again and again through reading its words and picturing its visions. The Apocalypse was a text left unfinished, ending on a jagged edge of unfulfilled expectation.33 For all the claims to definitive or heavenly vision made by the seers, it is perhaps the inevitable incompletion of the biblical apocalypse that attracts and will continue to attract 31

32 33

From letter to Dr Trusler (Erdman, Blake, p. 702); cf. Rowland, Blake and the Bible, esp. pp. 233–42. For example, Northern Lights, pp. 370–5; Amber Spyglass, pp. 30–2, 116–19, 291–338, 432. Lewis, Reading Images, p. 337.

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artists in words or music, paint or stone – wrestling with its visions and its aspirations in bold attempts to represent them, to contest them, or to re-draw them.

Bibliography Burdon, Christopher, The Apocalypse in England: Revelation Unravelling, 1700–1834 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). Carey, Frances (ed.), The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come (London: British Museum Press, 1999). Cummins, Juliet (ed.), Milton and the Ends of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. C. S. Singleton, 3 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989–91). DiSalvo, Jackie, War of Titans: Blake’s Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983). Emmerson, R. K. and R. B. Herzman (eds), The Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). Emmerson, R. K. and B. McGinn (eds), The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). Erdman, David V. (ed.), The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, rev. edn (New York: Doubleday, 1988). Gray, Alasdair, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Edinburgh: Canongate, [1981] 2002). Grayson, C. (ed.), The World of Dante (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). Kovacs, Judith and Christopher Rowland, Revelation, Blackwell Bible Commentaries (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Lewis, Suzanne, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Orgl, S. and J. Goldberg (eds), John Milton (The Oxford Authors) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Milton, John, Complete Prose Works, 7 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–62). Myrone, Martin (ed.), John Martin: Apocalypse (London: Tate Publishing, 2011). O’Hear, Natasha F. H., Contrasting Images of the Book of Revelation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Paley, Morton D., The Apocalyptic Sublime (London: Yale University Press, 1986). Pullman, Philip, Northern Lights (London: Scholastic Press, 1998). Pullman, Philip, The Subtle Knife (London: Scholastic Press, 1998). Pullman, Philip, The Amber Spyglass (London: Scholastic Press, 2001). Reeves, Marjorie, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (London: SPCK, 1976). Reynolds, Barbara, Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006). Rowland, Christopher, Blake and the Bible (London: Yale University Press, 2010). Van der Meer, Frederick, Apocalypse: Visions from the Book of Revelation in Western Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978).

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THE DIVINE COMEDY AS THE WORD OF GOD Patricia Erskine-Hill

Just as Hezekiah cries: In the prime of my life, Must I go through the gates of death And be robbed of the rest Of my years? (Isaiah 8: 10) So Dante starts his poem: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la dritta via era smarrita. (Inferno I. 1) ‘In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.’1

F

ear permeates both passages, together with a sense of unfairness that life is being snatched away just at the moment when it should have reached its zenith. Time is what is being lost and time is the only currency which human beings have. And both Hezekiah and Dante are about to lose all of theirs.2 The whole of the Comedy floats on the slipperiness of time: it is by turns fast-forward and flashback, one minute existing vividly in an imagined future; the next suffering in a fictive past and frequently, in between, positing the ‘then’ as the ‘now’. Although he actually started work on the Comedy in 1307/8 Dante is supposedly experiencing this journey in 1300, the year of the great Jubilee convocation to Rome, when Pope Boniface VIII published the Papal Bull, Antiquorum Fide Relatio, promising full remission of sins ‘di culpa e di pena’,3 or plenary indulgence to all those who came to Rome and fulfilled the conditions he set out. (One William of Ventura spent fifteen days in the city, leaving on Christmas Eve, and provided an insight into the dreadfully crowded 1 2 3

Inferno, I. 1–3, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Hezekiah appears in Paradiso, XX, among the blessed. ‘of guilt and of punishment’.

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conditions, stating that he saw men and women crushed to death in the streets on several occasions.4 Others describe priests standing in front of altars, using rakes to scrape up the great piles of coins thrown down by pilgrims eager to purchase redemption for themselves or their loved ones.) Dantean time ebbs and flows: souls in Hell and in Heaven live in eternity, a neverchanging stasis of torment or bliss, while souls in Purgatory live in a version of ‘real time’, aware of the passing days and years as they expiate their sins and move forward eagerly towards their heavenly goal. The damned question Dante eagerly about the present, which they cannot see: Guido Cavalcanti had actually been dead for some years when the poem was written, but since the fictional date of Dante’s journey was April 1300, he is able to reassure the anxious father, telling him his son is still alive and well.5 The whole of the work stands, like John the Baptist, as a foreshadowing.6 But here we are given the clearest picture of what awaits the unaware sinner, from the torments of Hell to the possibility of salvation for those who repent before death. We see the joyful endurance of the singing multitudes in Purgatory, who know their time will come, and we are dazzled by the brilliance of the saved in Paradise. We can escape damnation and climb onto the bark of salvation, says Dante, if we but heed his warning within the time frame allotted to each of us. Prophesies of exile abound7 throughout the work, though at the time of writing these lines Dante was already in exile8 following an embassy to Pope Boniface in Rome in 1301, after which he was never allowed to return to Florence. Paradiso, of course, contains the famous exilic prophecy of Dante’s great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, with the haunting, lovely lines about the saltiness of other men’s bread and the weary climbing of stairs in other men’s houses.9 All these predictions are safe, of course, because posteventum. But there are two other categories of prediction: rare pre-eventum ones, such as that on the death of Clement V before 132310 (which must have been written before his actual death, in 1314) and those that remain obscure even today, such as, for example, the enigmatic ‘veltro’ or greyhound, born ‘tra feltro e feltro’ (literally: ‘between felt and felt’), which has confounded critics for seven hundred years.11 Is ‘greyhound’ wordplay on the name of Dante’s host and benefactor, Cangrande (literally ‘big dog’)? Or does it presage the second coming of Christ? And there are any number of interpretations for ‘tra feltro e feltro’, too many to list here. Purgatorio XXXIII contains another Delphic prediction about the ‘heir of the eagle’,12 famously encoded as 5–1–513 (these two oracular pronouncements are voiced, respectively, by Virgil and Beatrice, giving them unparalleled weight in 4 5 6

7

8 9 10 11

12 13

Debra Birch, Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), p. 201. Guido died, probably of malaria, in August 1300. ‘I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord”, as said the prophet Isaiah’ (John 1: 23). For example, Inferno VI. 64–72; X. 79–81; XV. 64; Purgatorio XI. 139–41; XIII. 151–4 and many others. Dante was tried and condemned in absentia in January 1302. Paradiso XVII. 58–61. Inferno XIX. 79–84. Inferno I. 100–5. See notes in Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez translation of Inferno (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 38–9. Purgatorio XXXIII. 37. Purgatorio XXXIII. 43.

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the poem). Predictions can go wrong, though, as in canto XXI of Inferno, where there is a reference to ‘Santa’ Zita,14 who was not canonised until 1696.15 If past, present and future time become mixable and mutable, one of the most arresting lines in the entire Comedy is Dante’s own long-distance gaze into a century far ahead of his own, when he vows always to be truthful in his narrative, lest he lose credence amongst those who one day ‘questo tempo chiameranno antico’ (‘will call these times the days of antiquity’).16 Not many poets have the confidence to speak of the immortality of their work: Shakespeare, in the final couplet of the sonnet ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ is the only other who comes to mind: So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Though the anonymous redactor of The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, writing in the third century ad, speaks of Perpetua’s exempla fidei, (‘examples of faith’) which he says ‘will themselves one day be ancient and will prove necessaria (essential) for future generations’.17 Post eventum ‘prophecies’ of exile are a useful literary trope, of course, a framework for the poet’s angry diatribes against Florence, and they are used with great effect throughout. As others have remarked,18 however, it is very surprising that Dante should allow himself any pre-eventum utterances, since he is so very forthright in consigning diviners to eternal damnation in the fourth bolgia of Hell. This is one of the great inconsistencies of the Comedy: how can the author revile fortune-tellers while purporting to tell the future himself? Other instances of the manipulation of time are Dante’s scheduling of his journey, which starts during the evening of Maundy Thursday, and ends at noon on the Wednesday after Easter, 1300. This temporal framing, intended to give verisimilitude to the story, is heavy with biblical symbolism: on the evening of Maundy Thursday Dante finds himself lost in the Dark Wood. At dawn on Good Friday, the day of Christ’s passion, Dante enters the portals of Hell, symbolically dying to sin. At 5 a.m. on Easter Day, the day of Christ’s resurrection, Dante stands on the shores of the island of Purgatory, rising into the realm of the blessed (since all souls who enter this realm will eventually reach Paradise). The final glorious phase of his journey, through Paradise itself, runs from noon on the Wednesday after Easter to sunset on the Thursday, making the entire journey last exactly a week. The imagined timing of this whole imaginative journey is very scrupulously constructed, as is the geography of the three ‘danteworlds’, to use Guy Raffa’s evocative term:19 this lends sinew and fibre to the narrative, as does the meticulously planned layout of the three realms, starting with the location of Hell directly beneath Jerusalem. As the fifteenth-century 14 15

16 17

18

19

Inferno XXI. 38. A deliberate slip? Zita (1212–72) was widely venerated in her hometown of Lucca, and ‘saint’ would be an honorary title for a holy woman. Paradiso XVII 1.18–121. See review by Peter Thornemann, ‘A Mother’s Dreams’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 September 2012, p. 3. Colin Hardie, ‘Cacciaguida’s prophecy in Purgatorio 17’, in Traditio, vol. 19 (New York: Fordham University, 1963), pp. 267–94. Guy Raffa is Associate Professor of French and Italian at the University of Texas, Austin, and creator of the online Dante resource ‘Danteworlds’.

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commentator Cristoforo Landino said, Dante excels at making the unbelievable seem possible, and such very careful and detailed planning is a large part of this. As he does with the temporal, Dante also shadow-boxes with reality in his choice of characters. We see a great panoramic mingling of the ancient and real (i.e. Cato, or indeed Virgil); the ancient and imaginary (Medusa in Inferno IX, or Orestes in Purgatorio XIII); contemporaries whom he knew personally (such as his teacher Brunetto Latini in Inferno XV) and contemporaries he did not meet but knew by repute (Francesca da Rimini, in Inferno V, or Pope Nicholas III in Inferno XIX). For the first-time reader all this is overwhelming, and he or she is very likely to lose the point of the work: the sublime poetry and eternal truths viewed through the kaleidoscopic vision of the poet. That they are illustrated by contemporary figures who mean nothing to us, and also by many mythic or biblical ones which presuppose a far greater knowledge in these areas than most modern readers possess – all this makes the Comedy forbidding to the novice. Yet, for all its ingenuity, this juggling and shadow-boxing with reality and the biblical, with time and place, with the real and the mythic, the Comedy is not less convincing as a manifestation of The Word; rather, it is more so. Just as the Bible uses metaphor and parable, fable and historical fact, the Comedy takes these same tools to expand the imagination of the reader and lead him or her through the story of damnation, redemption and final bliss. For many of the 700 years since it first appeared, Dante Alighieri’s Comedia has been considered by the suggestible to be the product of divine inspiration at the very least, and, by the more credulous, possibly the Word of God. We are told by Boccaccio in his panegyric Life of Dante that fourteenth-century housewives would point to Dante in the street, commenting on his swarthy complexion and curly beard as proof of his trip to Hell – the curls being evidence of singeing in the fiery furnace. Though it could not, and did not attempt to, replace the Bible, the Comedy ‘stood in’ for divine scripture in the minds of many. It was the recognisable human experience of the sublime and the supernatural, ranging from the grossest representation of evil to the unutterably holy. Not only illiterate thirteenth-century peasants, but many later readers have formed their concept of the Christian afterlife from its influence. The idea of divine punishment in Hell, the struggle for self-improvement and perfectibility in Purgatory and indeed the whole concept of Heaven, are, in the minds of many readers, inextricably linked with the Comedy as it has seeped through our culture. The painting by Domenico di Michelino (1417–91), La Commedia Illumina Firenze (Plate 72), is a perfect example of the conflation of Comedy and Bible. In this scene, the figure of Dante stands at centre-stage, holding up the open Comedy in his left hand and gesturing with his right towards the band of sinners to the left of the painting, while Mount Purgatory, surmounted by the Earthly Paradise, rises behind him, an angel guarding its gate. The Duomo and towers of Florence, however, occupy fully one-third of the painting: the renegade son, banished by the city of his birthplace, has returned to bring light to Florence, and to instruct its citizens in their duty. Dante here is prophet and preacher, a figure of immense and quasi-scriptural authority. And this picture is not a free-standing painting, but is painted onto the west wall of Florence cathedral: essentially, a secular painting in a religious building, which is highly unusual in itself. For many in Christian Churches the Bible is still literally ‘the Word of God’, but many modern readers find this difficult to assimilate, or indeed, to accept. Old Testament books such as Leviticus or Numbers are just too far outside our frame of cultural reference, and much of what they propound is abhorrent to succeeding generations. Dante, on the other hand, is ‘one of us’, and the message he sends is unchanged by time. We have free will,

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and we choose the life we lead: read the Comedy and you see laid out before you the consequences of your actions in the clearest possible way. There are no excuses at the end, and a sinner who dies unrepentant gets no second chance. Dante himself is self-proclaimedly proud, lustful and prone to anger, and this makes him human. We can pity, admire and love him: he does not preach perfection. Unlike, say, Pilgrim’s Progress, in which quotations and references from the Bible are stitched into every seam, biblical content is here part of the fabric itself. Endlessly reiterated references to the Bible are unnecessary, because it is the very essence of the work. Total, comfortable familiarity with biblical texts is assumed right from the first page of Inferno: ‘halfway through our life’ (‘nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’, Inferno I. 1) must mean that Dante was thirty-five when he entered the Dark Wood, since self-evidently his contemporaries would know from Psalm 90 that man’s lifespan is threescore years and ten: they did not need it spelled out. In the words of one scholar: Sometimes the poet will quote the Bible or openly draw attention to its relevance; far more often, however, he will allow its presence to go unannounced, relying on the reader to catch the biblical resonance and make something of it.20 Such is the allusion to Hezekiah at the beginning of this essay; Hezekiah who indeed appears among the just in Paradiso XX. There are, of course, innumerable biblical quotations, references and indirect echoes disseminated throughout the work, and many scholars have picked over its bones to find and list them: a somewhat dry occupation, as the whole text is, by its nature, biblical. Often Dante turns to, and then departs from sacred texts, altering them for poetic resonance (for example, the Lord’s prayer, Purgatorio XI. 1–24, vs Matthew 6: 9–13) or to suit his own theology. Psalms appear with great frequency, particularly in Purgatory, and are always quoted in the Latin of the Vulgate; the Lord’s Prayer, however, is given in Italian, modified to terza rima, with a final verse inserted to meet the needs of those souls who recite it here. It is the only prayer found in full and as such is particularly striking. Harold Bloom comments21 that Dante, like Milton, was essentially a sect of one, not as a pilgrim, but as a prophetic poet.22 And it is true that there are numerous unorthodoxies in Dante’s work, starting with his mingling of the divine and the pagan. The very first line of Paradiso invokes ‘La gloria di Colui che tutto move’ (‘the glory of Him who moves all things’), followed a few lines later by an impassioned appeal to Apollo, whose help he seeks in his mighty task. From the early poems in the Vita Nuova, written when he was a young man, the flesh-and-blood Beatrice is represented as both very female and very human and also an incarnation of – Christ? The Virgin? Theology? This has been seen in the past as bordering on sacrilege. And by what right is Cato, a pagan and a suicide, ‘on holy territory’, shepherding the 20

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Peter Hawkins, ‘Dante and the Bible’, in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 120. Harold Bloom, Ruin the sacred truths: poetry and belief from the Bible to the present (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 47. He continues, rather more provocatively, ‘The Comedy, for all its learning, is not deeply involved with the Bible.’

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souls of the saved in Purgatory, when poor Virgil, whose Aeneas supposedly foreshadows Christ’s coming, is condemned to Limbo and denied the sight of God for all eternity? The idea of Limbo as a final resting place for those who were virtuous, but born before the coming of Christ, and for whom the Christian choice was therefore not available, or for the unbaptised innocent, was a construct of the early Church, and long pre-dates the Comedy. Here, however, the whole concept of Limbo is broadened out, with the appearance of some unexpected characters, among them Saladin, the great Muslim warrior who drove the Christians out of the Holy Land (except for the Fortress of Acre). Saladin was aware of Christianity, made a conscious decision to reject it, and caused many Christians to be slaughtered. How can he be a Christian hero? Avicenna and Averroës, also present in Limbo, could not claim ignorance of Christianity and indeed might have been expected among the heretics or the schismatics in hell. The harrowing of Hell, for which there is scant justification in the Bible,23 is altered and enriched in the account put into Virgil’s mouth24 (though admittedly in this Dante is only following medieval tradition, which saw in it a favourite subject for legend and drama). And finally, two pagans, born before the advent of Christ, appear somewhat miraculously in Paradise. One is Trajan, supposedly reincarnated through the prayers of Pope Gregory the Great, who was impressed by his kindness to a poor widow, and Ripheus the Trojan,25 who died alongside Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid, but has no other reason to be among the blessed (and in Paradiso XX. 72 says that he himself cannot account for his presence there!). Dante’s placing even of biblical figures can surprise. Adam, the father of all human sin, sits in Paradise at the left hand of the Virgin, while Eve, vilified in Christian tradition since the Middle Ages as the eternal temptress, the font of original sin and the cause of the fall of Man, sits at the feet of the Virgin. The Bible, then, permeates the whole of the Comedy, whether in orthodox or unorthodox form. Yet, its omnipresence is not simply illustrative: to quote Charles Singleton, Dante chooses to ‘imitate God’s way of writing’. Old Testament figures appear over and over as symbolic personages, unlike those in The Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which is peopled by personified abstractions,26 who act out their eponymous vices and virtues in the plot. The characters who appear in Bunyan’s narrative are themselves personified virtues or states of mind, such as Christian, Evangelist, Pliable, Obstinate, and the Bible is endlessly quoted and annotated. Dante, who is such a central figure in Christian literature today, was certainly not seen as a ‘safe pair of hands’ in his own time. His treatise on empire and the papacy, De Monarchia (in which the papacy comes off very much the worst) was publicly burnt and languished on the list of proscribed books from 1564 until 1881, and he was constantly engaged in a war of attrition against a whole series of popes, starting with Pope Boniface VIII (whom he places prematurely in Hell alongside Nicholas III), followed by Popes Clement V and John XXII. Just two years after his death, in 1327, the Friar Guido Vernani

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The only biblical reference being: ‘By which also He went and preached unto the spirits in prison’, 1 Peter 3: 19–21. Inferno IV. 52–63. Both appear in Paradiso XX, 44 and 68 respectively. For a full discussion on the nature of this symbolism, see D. L. Sayers’ Introduction to The Divine Comedy, 1: Hell (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1959), p. 12.

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made the very serious allegation for the first time that Dante was an averroïst27 in his De Reprobatione Monarchiae. This was a truly momentous charge in the Christian Middle Ages. As Paul Cantor puts it: I cannot overemphasize how daring it was for Dante to refer to Averroës by name in this passage.28 In discussing the Possible Intellect he was dealing with one of the most sensitive and inflammatory subjects in late medieval thought, and to bring up Averroës explicitly in this context was to wave a red flag in the face of Church authorities.29 In spite of this controversy, or perhaps indeed aided by the public attention it brought, the Comedy rapidly took its place as a life-changing work of philosophy, art and religious instruction. It was learned by heart and quoted in the streets; public recitations were commissioned and copies of the manuscript text were eagerly sought and passed from hand to hand. Florence, the city that had banished Dante for life on pain of death – and only rescinded the order in 2008 – conveniently forgot this injustice very soon after his death. Boccaccio was the first paid lecturer on Dante, in 1373–4, and he was paid by none other than the Comune of Florence. In addition to its other qualities, the Comedy became a potent political and artistic symbol. While Petrarch, whose forte was damning with faint praise, belittled Dante’s ‘roughness’ and use of earthy images and language (and of the vernacular language, ‘Italian’, tout court), we have only to consider the number of commentators and exegetes who tackled the Comedy right from the beginning, starting with Dante’s eldest son Jacopo Alighieri: he was followed by nine others in the fourteenth century, and literally dozens in succeeding centuries. Writing in 1405, Filippo Villani, nephew of the more famous chronicler Giovanni, believed that the Comedy was inspired directly by the Holy Spirit, and this attribution of sanctity did nothing to discourage those who saw it as co-equal with the Bible. Politically, Dante was a very useful tool to the city that had exiled him: as Simon Gilson put it: The enduring value of employing Dante in order to promote Florence was not lost on intellectuals linked to the Medici party from the mid-1430s onwards.30 It was not lost, either, on succeeding generations of Florentines, who tried tirelessly to retrieve the poet’s remains from Ravenna, where he died. A tomb was built for him in the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence in 1829, and has remained empty ever since. The treatment of the Earthly Paradise in the final cantos (XXVIII to XXX) of Purgatorio merits a paper of its own. It is a dazzling tapestry of images from Revelation, Ezekiel and the poet’s own imagination: it is every bit as apocalyptic as its biblical sources, a scene of spiritual rebirth through a searing process of purification. Where Ezekiel has usury and 27

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Anthony K. Cassell, ed. and trans., ‘Guido Vernani’s Refutation of the “Monarchia”, Composed by Dante’, in The Monarchia Controversy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), p. 178. ‘Averoís, che ’l gran comento feo’ (Averroës, who wrote the Great Commentary), Inferno IV. 144. Paul A. Cantor, ‘The Uncanonical Dante: The Comedy And Islamic Philosophy’, in Proceedings of the ALSC: II. Dante and the Western Canon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 138–53. Simon Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 97.

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extortion and dishonesty, and the ‘lewd women whom the company shall stone (. . .) with stones, and dispatch (. . .) with swords . . .’31 Dante has totally internalised the experience, the blindingly personal ordeal of seeing head-on all his shortcomings and then enduring the blistering reproof of Beatrice. This is the essence of man-as-fallible-human confronted with the divine. Here, however, is not the language of the Apocalypse, and this searing passage is not intended, as that text is, to deal with Humanity and the World. It is instead a moment of intense personal communication between the poet and his own soul, between the ‘I’ and the presence of Christ. The fabulous imagery of Revelation, with its four and twenty elders, its ‘sea of glass like unto crystal’, its ‘seven lamps of fire burning before the throne’, its four beasts, the lion, the calf, the beast-man and the eagle, all ‘full of eyes before and behind’;32 elements of all this appear in Purgatorio XXIX, but sculpted and changed. The visionary, miraculous, almost hallucinogenic quality is the same, but admission to the Earthly Paradise is a compact between the poet and everything he has ever dreamed of or aspired to, in the form of Beatrice, wholly divine and wholly human. It is an immense, overwhelming thunderclap of, well, self-revelation. In short we have in the Comedy a work that is infused through and through with the Bible, that is written in a ‘biblical’ style, that deals with the life of the Christian soul in a way unprecedented and unequalled in all of Christian literature. It is at times orthodox, at times inventive or downright unorthodox, but its central focus, the salvation of mankind through the coming of Christ, never wavers. Nor does its message, that we all stray, that sin is built into our very DNA; but we have free will, and salvation is a choice we can make, right up to the moment of our death. Or not, as we choose. It is clear that the Comedy was seen and ‘bought’ as the Word of God from its first appearance, and that it has had, and still retains, a pervasive influence on the whole of western literature, and very particularly on the Anglophone world, shaping our conception of Christianity and of the afterlife. At the time of its first diffusion, many did not fully ‘separate’ Dante’s tale from the teachings of the Bible, or indeed from mainstream Christian teaching (in spite of the unorthodoxies which distanced him from the contemporary Church). Nowadays we are fully aware of the seminal importance of the Bible in all aspects of our literature and culture, whether or not we are believers: it is remarkable how the Comedy, written in another language, 700 years ago, for the inhabitants of another culture, is omnipresent not only in our literature, but in our culture as a whole. Consider the enormous effect it has had in the past two centuries since it was first translated into English by Henry Boyd in 1802, right up to the present day. On the simplest level the phrase ‘Dante’s Inferno’ is one of the greatest clichés of our age. It is used, indiscriminately and everywhere, often with no knowledge of who Dante was or indeed what Inferno, in the Dantean sense, means. A quick flick (in 2013) on Google produces, among other delights, ‘Dante’s Inferno (Divine Edition) Playstation 3’ or ‘Dante’s Inferno (GameTrailers.com)’ where the plot is outlined thus: ‘Travel on an epic descent through the nine circles of hell, in Dante’s Inferno. Dante discovers his love Beatrice murdered, and her soul being seduced by Lucifer in to (sic) Hell.’ In much more searching, important ways, however, our understanding of Christianity and literature itself benefits from the influence of the Comedy. While Chaucer mentioned 31 32

Ezekiel 23: 45–7. Revelation 4: 4–8.

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Dante, he has only really been part of our own canon since his ‘rediscovery’ in the nineteenth century33 (when Cary’s translation was swiftly taken up by Coleridge). The Romantic poets (Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Shelley), William Blake, Carlyle (Heroes and Hero Worship), MacDonald (Phantastes, the two Curdie books, At the Back of the North Wind, etc.), Christina Rossetti, to name but a few, were steeped in the Comedy. Even Mrs Gaskell evokes Dante in Mary Barton: Whole families went through a gradual starvation. They only wanted a Dante to record their sufferings.34 In addition to these, the Comedy inspired a whole generation of Pre-Raphaelite painters, such as Holman Hunt, Henry Holiday, John Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and others. Where nineteenth-century British writers were attracted mainly by the vivid images of Inferno, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was more inclined to portray Beatrice and Dante’s meeting by the Arno, imagined scenes of Beatrice with her handmaidens, Dante mourning her death and so on. The beautiful, the ethereal and the wistful appear in their art: from Inferno we have only the story of Paolo and Francesca, and there is no attempt by the Pre-Raphaelites to portray scenes from Purgatorio or Paradiso. Other nineteenthcentury artists did, of course, illustrate the entire trilogy, most notably Paul Gustave Doré and William Blake, the former a faithful monochrome depiction of Dante’s images in every scene, the latter a dreamlike paean to the pervasive sense of movement in the text. And this resonance carries on into the twentieth century, with Joyce’s Stephen Hero (1944), T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland (1922) or the works of C. S. Lewis. Eliot himself said that Dante was the most persistent and deepest influence on his own verse and commented that Dante was a very visual writer. Lewis’s The Great Divorce (1946) in particular, is a paean to free will and almost a parody of the Comedy. It tells in deceptively simple terms a tale of choice: redemption and eternal happiness are within the reach of mankind, but this requires a fundamental re-direction of our focus and attitude. So difficult, so foreign to our natures is this struggle that most often we remain obstinately attached to our familiar, small lives, unable to risk change and growth. The story begins in a ‘long, mean street’ in a grey and cheerless town. The narrator attaches himself to a bus queue and observes without comment the whingeing, nasty, small-time malice of the other people standing there. Eventually a ‘wonderful vehicle, blazing with golden light’ stops to pick up the waiting passengers, and after considerable sniping and wrangling, most of them climb aboard. The bus takes off, flying upwards and upwards towards a blinding light. When it lands, everyone descends, and instantly becomes transparent, ghostly. A group of bright figures approaches, not transparent, but solid, confident, friendly. The grass is shining green, but hard as diamond, and it hurts the feet of the newcomers when they walk on it. Although they are told that if they stay in this beautiful place the grass will become softer and they will become ‘real’ and solid too, yet most of them say it is not worth it, they have no patience with this kind of thing, they know it is all trickery and that things will not improve. So one by one, scared and uncertain, they opt to return to the familiar grey city. The narrator is not immune: 33 34

Inferno published 1805; entire Comedy published 1814. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, a tale of Manchester life (London: Chapman and Hall, 1848), vol. 1, p. 129.

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The sense of danger, which had never been entirely absent since I left the bus, awoke with sharp urgency. I gazed around on the trees, the flowers, and the talking cataract: they had begun to look unbearably sinister. Bright insects darted to and fro. If one of those were to fly into my face, would it not go right through me? If it settled on my head, would it crush me to earth? Terror whispered, ‘This is no place for you.’35 Lions and unicorns leap and gallop in the sunshine; a ‘Scotch’ figure appears and speaks. It is George Macdonald, appearing unbidden to act as Virgilian guide and Teacher to the narrator’s Dante, and he explains that the grey city is Purgatory for those strong enough to leave it, while for those who choose to remain it will be Hell for eternity. The Ghosts who cannot stomach Heaven are not grisly murderers and child molesters, they are the eternally complaining, self-centred ‘grumblers’ who cannot see beyond themselves, who are totally uninterested in the lives of others. There are many meetings between shrill, demanding Ghosts and patient, kind Bright Spirits: all end in defeat, with the Ghosts refusing to accept what they are told. All, that is, except one Ghost, less complacent than the others, with a lizard on his shoulder which pours a stream of negative comment into his ear. After much persuasion, the ghostly soul allows the Angel to kill the lizard, and the metamorphosis of man and beast is instantaneous, wonderful. In another scene a flock of bright Spirits arrives, dancing and scattering flowers, all to honour a lady, ‘Sarah Smith from Golders Green’. She is an amalgam of Matilda, the beautiful lady who dances before the poet in Purgatorio XXVIII: a young woman very much not a traditional part of our edenic folklore.36 and the stern but loving Beatrice, for whom the Comedy is ostensibly written. Lewis tells us of ‘emeralds’ and souls ‘dancing and throwing flowers before her’,37 so that we also think of Leah, who appears in Purgatorio XXVII. The book ends with a loud chorus of birdsong, and a hail of light, solid blocks of light, which rain down on the head of the narrator knocking him into consciousness. And he realises that the birdsong is real, and that the blocks of light are books from his bedside shelf which have fallen on his head and wakened him. In this, of course, is an echo of the ending dream of Pilgrim’s Progress. A prime aspect of The Great Divorce is the way in which it lays out quite complex  theological points regarding the nature of God and His relation to man, of time, of choice, of the pain of choosing salvation over habitual sin, all in extremely simple language. The Comedy is in the background all the way through, however, and not infrequently appears in the foreground, as in the mention of the salvation of Trajan,38 that uniquely Dantean oddity, which sits alongside the unexplained presence of ‘Matilda’, mentioned above. Modern writers continue to absorb, digest and recreate many of Dante’s themes, to analyse and discuss, to reinvent and to find new approaches: writers such as Eric Auerbach, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and of course, Primo Levi, turn repeatedly to the Comedy for inspiration. 35 36 37 38

C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (London: Harper Collins, 2002), p. 58. Stephen Prickett, Words and the Word (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 158. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, p. 119. Ibid. p. 58.

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More cultural Italian than Jew, Levi draws on Inferno XXVI for the chapter ‘Il Canto di Ulisse’ (the Canto of Ulysses) in his searing Holocaust memoir, Se Questo e’ un Uomo (If This is a Man). Here he relates his attempts to teach Pikolo, one of his ‘minders’, to speak Italian by reciting passages from the Comedy. In this grimly autobiographical episode, Levi is Virgil to Pikolo’s Dante, and the Comedy is Levi’s link to his Italian essence and to his humanity. The reader witnesses the writer’s terrible grief at being unable, during this episode in Auschwitz, to remember the final lines of Inferno XXVI, which he feels as a desperate, final loss of his past and his Italian identity. As they make their way to the soup kitchens, by the longest route possible so as to postpone the return to their backbreaking work, Levi begins to recite from Inferno XXVI. Astonishingly, in spite of starvation, cold, pain and fear he is able to quote the original Italian text, to translate it into German, and to follow this with commentary and exegesis. In Inferno Levi finds a material precedent, a way of articulating the horrors of Auschwitz; remembering it, quoting it, teaching it, is his defence as he struggles to save himself from becoming one of the ‘sommersi’,39 the submerged. Among more popular recent works is The Dante Club,40 a clever amalgam of historical figures and fictitious events. In the story, set in 1865 Boston, the real-life American translator, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and his fellow Dante scholars are pursued and threatened by jealous colleagues against a background of ever more gruesome crimes that replicate exactly the punishments in Inferno. Familiarity with the text from which it takes its inspiration is preferable but not essential, and the novel can be read simply as an entertaining mystery tale. The Comedy has informed the literature of the Anglophone world since the early nineteenth century, and continues to do so today, quoted by philosophers and by compilers of computer games; both the scholar and the semi-literate recognise the term ‘Dante’s Inferno’ as do all groups in between. The influence of this work is so diffuse as to have an almost subliminal weight in our modern world. Ask any random passer-by in the street what ‘limbo’ or ‘purgatory’ mean, and they are very likely to answer in terms that Dante would have recognised, because he defined these states for western culture in a way, and with a clarity, poetry and force which no other writer has equalled. Dante has been accepted by many, through the ages, as a sort of spokesman for God, a middleman who has ‘been there, done that’. He shows us the way, and makes clear our choices, some would say, just as the Bible does. In the Comedy, as in the Bible, we find every shade of human emotion: horror, pain, sadness, wistfulness, nostalgia, amusement, laughter, admiration, pity, hope, joy, bliss. In the English-speaking world this range is achieved perhaps only by Shakespeare, but with the difference that the Comedy is astonishingly compressed. In a mere 14,233 lines Dante Alighieri transforms the face of world literature, and, like the Bible, exegetes have not, and probably never will, find answers to all the questions that he poses. As I was finishing this essay, my former university tutor, Corinna Salvadori-Lonergan, told me of a serendipitous moment in the summer of 2011, when she was attending Mass in Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. The officiating priest concluded his sermon with these words: 39

40

See Primo Levi, I Sommersi e I Salvati (Turin: Einaudi, 1986); English 1st edn, The Saved and the Drowned (London: Michael Joseph, 1988). Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club (New York: Random House, 2003).

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Leggete la Bibbia, leggetela con lo stesso rispetto con cui leggete Dante. ‘Read your Bible, read it with the same respect with which you read your Dante.’ It is impossible to imagine a more vivid justification for this whole idea of the biblical Dante than those words, in that cathedral, at the conclusion of Mass, before a mixed lay audience more than 700 years after the poem was written. I rest my case.

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THE MEDIEVAL BIBLE AS LITERATURE Alastair Minnis and A. B. Kraebel

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n 797, Alcuin of York – an influential intellectual both at the court of Charlemagne and in his native Northumbria – wrote a letter to the Bishop of Lindisfarne in which he raised the issue of the Lindisfarne monks’ interest in Germanic tales of pagan heroism. ‘What has Ingeld to do with Christ?’1 Several centuries earlier, the formidable scholar responsible for the Vulgate Latin Bible,2 St Jerome (d. 420), had asked, ‘What has Horace to do with the Psalter? Maro [i.e. Virgil] with the Gospels? Cicero with the Apostle [i.e. St Paul]?’3 Throughout the Middle Ages we find such worries being expressed about the exposure of Christian clerics to secular (usually pagan) literature. Writing before 831, Paschasius Radbertus, Abbot of Corbie, condemns those ‘lovers of secular literature’ who are ‘wont to show off their eloquence’. As a remedy to the ‘Arma virumque of Virgil, flavoured in its Greek brine of fables’, Paschasius offers his commentary on Matthew, which will neither ‘beguile the reader with tragic piety nor weigh him down with the burden of the comic authors’.4 In his Dialogus super auctores, the Benedictine schoolmaster Conrad of Hirsau (c. 1070–c. 1150?) wonders, ‘Why should the young recruit in Christ’s army subject his impressionable mind to the writing of Ovid, in which even though gold may be found among the dung, yet the foulness that clings to the gold defiles the seeker, even though it is the gold he is after?’5 The clear implication is that it is better to restrict oneself to reading Holy Writ, in which only gold may be found, rather than risk such dangerous defilement. In a similar vein, writing in Paris around 1200, Alexander of Villa Dei attacked 1

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Beowulf: An Edition with Relevant Shorter Texts, ed. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 225. See D. A. Bullough, ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, Anglo-Saxon England, 22 (1993), pp. 93–125. When we speak of the Bible in this essay, this is the version to which we refer – the version which was the primary object of study throughout the Middle Ages. Letter 22, to Eustochium, in Sancti Eusebii Hieronymi Epistulae, ed. Isidore Hilberg, CSEL 54–6 (Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1910–18), vol. 1, p. 189. Expositio in Matheo libri XII, ed. Beda Paulus, CCCM 56–8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1984), vol. 1, pp. 233–4. See further H. A. Kelly, Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 57–8. Trans. Alastair Minnis and A. B. Scott with David Wallace, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c.1100–c.1375: The Commentary Tradition, rev. edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 56.

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Orléans – then a major centre for the study of the classical poets – as a ‘pestiferous chair of learning’, which ‘spreads contagion among many. It is not fitting to read what is contrary to the Law’.6 Given these attitudes, we might expect similarly negative readings of St Paul’s words at 2 Timothy 4: 4, ‘They will turn away from listening to the truth and will turn to fables’, with those fabulae being identified as the fictions and lies of the poets. But, when the Benedictine monk Pierre Bersuire (d. 1362) cites that passage at the beginning of his extensive Ovidius moralizatus (Fig. 29.1), he takes the human tendency intimated by Paul as proof of the proposition that ‘often one must use fables, enigmas, and poems so that some moral sense may be extracted from them, and even their very falsehood may be forced to serve the truth’.7 Indeed, Bersuire says, this practice is found in Holy Scripture itself, as evidenced by its references to ‘the trees wishing to elect a king’ (Judges 9: 8), ‘the thistle wishing to give his son a wife’ (4 Kings 14: 9), and ‘the eagle which was alleged to transport the pith of the cedar’ (Ezechiel 17: 3). Bersuire claims that ‘Scripture habitually uses these and similar fables and inventions so that from them some truth may be extracted or deducted.’ And ‘the poets have done exactly the same’; their purpose in inventing fables was to enable ‘men to understand some truth by means of figments of this kind’. It seems that the theologians and the poets have much in common after all – a point which was made by no less an authority than St Augustine of Hippo (d. 430). Augustine identifies a kind of ‘feigning’ in which authors attribute ‘human deeds or sayings . . . to irrational animals and things without sense, in order that, by narratives of this sort which are fictitious but have true significations, they [i.e. the authors] could communicate in a more agreeable manner what they wished to say’.8 As examples he cites Horace and Aesop, in whose works ‘mouse speaks to mouse and weasel to fox, so that by a fictitious narrative a true signification may be assigned’. ‘There is no man so untaught as to think’ those discourses ‘ought to be called lies’, he declares. And such feigning is not limited to secular literature; it features also in the Sacred Scriptures – as (again) in Judges 9: 8ff., the story of the trees going forth to anoint their king. Augustine explains that this is ‘all feigned in order that one may reach what is intended by a narrative which is indeed fictitious but not mendacious since it has a truthful signification’. It is interesting to place this comment alongside one by Conrad of Hirsau. In Conrad’s Dialogus, the ‘Master’ aggressively asks the ‘Pupil’, ‘Do you think that when “heaven and earth shall pass away” [Mark 13: 31] the fables of Aesop will endure?’ The implicit answer is, of course, ‘no’; and, in sharp contrast, ‘the words of the Lord will not pass away’ (Luke 21: 22).9 However, we should extend Conrad’s analysis with the point that, in the here and now, the fables of Aesop and the words of the Lord may be read in similar ways – both can be identified as sharing certain stylistic features, granted that the superior truth of Christian belief must be contrasted with the inferior truth of pagan philosophy and the utter untruth of pagan religion. Elsewhere in this same treatise, Conrad is clearly of the opinion that studying the classics helps to free his pupils from, rather than immersing them in, the vanities of this world. 6 7

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Ecclesiale, ed. and trans. L. R. Lind (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1958), pp. 10 and 65. Reductorium morale, lib. XV: Ovidius moralizatus, prologus, trans. Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory, p. 366. Contra mendacium, xiii. 28, trans. Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory, p. 209. Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory, p. 51.

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Figure 29.1: An Italian copy of Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus; part of a preacher’s miscellany or commonplace book from the first decade of the sixteenth century. This is the opening of Bersuire’s text, beginning with the quotation of 2 Timothy 4: 31–2. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. MS 1081, fol. 99r.

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Returning to Alexander of Villa Dei’s attack on the schools of Orléans, it should be noted that this author’s most successful work, the Doctrinale, is an updated version of the grammatical theory of Donatus and Priscian, freighted with classical lore and composed in leonine hexameters. The masters of Orléans were Alexander’s professional competitors, not his ideological enemies. Likewise, Paschasius Radbertus, in his vita of Abbot Adalard, drew on ‘the king of Latin eloquence’ (i.e. Cicero in De inventione, II.i) to compare Adalard with the ancient painter Zeuxis: just as Zeuxis had to combine the features of various models to depict the peerlessly beautiful Helen of Troy, so too did Adalard combine the characteristics of various saints ‘to reform the image of Christ in himself’.10 So too is Jerome’s juxtaposition of secular and sacred writers notable for the way in which it compares, generically speaking, like with like: what need has a Christian for a pagan rhetorician, when he has the writings of the Christian rhetorician, Paul, or why would he read the poetry of Horace, filled as it is with accounts of false gods, when he has the poetry of David? Neither rhetoric nor poetry is being condemned as such. And Alcuin of York might have taken heart from the fact that several biblical narratives – including the epic contest between Christ and Satan – would be rendered in the same alliterative verse that once had celebrated the heroism of Ingeld. The intricate relationships between the study of the Bible in the Middle Ages and what may be called Christian ‘classicism’11 are too extensive to be treated here at length. Suffice it to highlight a few foundational assumptions. Firstly, just as the Children of Israel ‘despoiled’ the Egyptians of ‘vessels of silver and gold, and very much raiment’ when they set out to seek the Promised Land (Exodus 12: 35–6), so too were Christian teachers justified in taking from pagan antiquity both information (‘most useful precepts concerning morals’) and – even more importantly – scholarly methods (‘liberal disciplines more suited to the uses of truth’).12 In the statement we are drawing on here, Augustine is defending the use of pagan learning and pedagogic procedures in the service of Christian truth. His successors were to speak of theology as the ‘queen of the sciences’, who is rightly served by all the subordinate disciplines. The Oxford Dominican Robert Holcot (c. 1290–1349), for example, compared theology to the image of Queen Esther, who ‘took two maids with her’ when coming before Artaxerxes; ‘upon one of them she leaned, as if for delicateness and overmuch tenderness she were not able to bear up her own body’ (Esther 15: 5–7). Likewise, according to Holcot, theology ‘pretends as though she needs the support, as it were, of the words and methods of the philosophers, their speaking, opposing, responding, proving, and refuting – not out of necessity, but as if for delicateness she uses them as she pleases’.13 10

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Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 217 + 4 index vols (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1841–61), vol. 120, cols 1518c–19c. Subsequent references to this collection of patristic and medieval Latin authors use the abbreviation PL. See David Appleby, ‘“Beautiful on the Cross, Beautiful in His Torments”: The Place of the Body in the Thought of Paschasius Radbertus’, Traditio, 60 (2005), pp. 1–46, esp. pp. 1–14. We use this term in preference to the ambiguous and contested term ‘humanism’, here reserved for the intellectual movement associated with the European ‘Renaissance’ which spanned the period from (roughly) the late fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. De doctrina christiana, II.xl.60, trans. D. W. Robertson, Saint Augustine: On Christian Doctrine (New York: Macmillan, 1958; repr. 1989), p. 75. Super libros Sapientiae (Hagenau, 1494; repr. Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1974), sig. a1v. The Wisdom commentary was composed while Holcot was regent master at Cambridge, c. 1334–6.

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Which brings us to another major assumption. No one spoke of the gifts of alien nations being forced upon an aloof sovereign: here was a ruling body of knowledge (which is what ‘science’ means in this context) that shared many interests and modes of procedure with her subjects. Consider, for example, the modes of expression identified by the grammarians. All of them were used by biblical authors, claims Augustine, and in a way far ‘more abundantly and copiously than those who do not know them and have learned about such expressions elsewhere are able to suppose or believe’.14 That statement of Augustine’s is quoted enthusiastically in the popular Compendium sensus litteralis divinae Scripturae by Peter Auriol, OFM (c. 1280–1322), who goes on to say that all knowledge, whether historical information concerning the deeds of gentiles, or metaphysics, or geometry, or the mechanical arts, or poetry (poetica), or philosophy, is found in Holy Scripture, sculpted in many forms.15 Auriol identifies the ‘poetic’ (alternatively termed the ‘hymnodic’ or ‘decantative’) part of the Bible as comprising the Psalter, Lamentations, and the Song of Songs.16 But he and his contemporaries were alert to the many literary devices which feature throughout Scripture, appearing again and again – ranging from the ‘fables and inventions’ as justified by Bersuire to the parables which Christ himself had used in his public preaching, a fact celebrated not only in biblical exegesis of the Gospels but also in the medieval ‘arts of preaching’ (artes praedicandi). That is to say, the poetic, fictive, or imaginative component of Holy Scripture was not simply one discrete item in a long list of the attributes of the inscribed Word of God. Rather, it permeated Holy Writ, made it what it was, separated it from the discourses characteristic of the inferior ‘sciences’. Here, then, is how we may understand ‘the medieval Bible as literature’. The following pages will attempt to tell a small part of its compelling story. Our point of departure will be a group of commentaries on that ‘hymnodic’ or ‘decantative’ book of the Bible, the Psalter, which were produced in the cathedral school of Rheims in the late eleventh century. The earliest of these would seem to be by Bruno (d. 1101), master of the school of Rheims and, later, founder of the Carthusian Order. Though at one point in his commentary he disparages the ‘useless garrulity’ of the classical poets, nevertheless Bruno treats the Psalter as itself a collection of poems, and he applies to their interpretation the expository techniques that he would have used as a master of the first liberal art, grammatica.17 (Also called litteratura; medieval grammar included not just the mechanics of language but also the interpretation of authoritative texts, especially the classical poets: see Fig. 29.2.)18 Bruno makes the literary qualities of the Psalter clear in his prologue, where he notes that the psalms ‘are composed in a lyric metre’.19 This observation, found 14 15

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De doctrina christiana, III.xxix.40, trans. Robertson, pp. 102–3. Compendium sensus litteralis totius divinae Scripturae, ed. Philibert Deeboeck (Quaracchi: Ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1896), pp. 22–3. Compendium sensus litteralis, ed. Deeboeck, pp. 51–5. For the condemnation of the poets, see PL 152, 1048d. On Bruno as grammar-master, see Kraebel, ‘Grammatica and the Authenticity of the Psalms-Commentary attributed to Bruno the Carthusian’, Mediaeval Studies, 71 (2009), pp. 63–97, at pp. 66–9. As discussed by Martin Irvine, The Making of Textual Culture: ‘Grammatica’ and Literary Theory, 350–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); see too Irvine with David Thomson, ‘Grammatica and Literary Theory’, in Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (eds), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 15–41. PL 152, 638b.

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Figure 29.2: A late twelfth-century French copy of Priscian’s Institutiones, once owned by Jacques de Vitry. In this basic textbook of Latin grammar, a reader has added annotations indicating where Priscian draws his examples from classical poets: this page includes citations of Virgil (‘V’), Lucan (‘L’) and Juvenal (‘I’). The marginal annotations on the top half of the page are thirteenth-century additions. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. MS Marston 67, fol. 14r.

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also in the writing of Jerome, is taken further by one of Bruno’s students, John of Rheims (d. c. 1125), who begins his own Psalter commentary by noting that ‘we are unable to discern this metre’, i.e. in the Latin text of the Psalter, ‘and this because of the translators. For first the Psalter was translated from Hebrew into Greek, and then by St Jerome from Greek into Latin’.20 So, then, the (supposed) original Hebrew metre was occluded as the text was rendered in one different language after the other, and therefore Bruno and John are unable to comment on it. But this does not stop them from finding other poetic qualities in David’s verse: abundant instances of such devices as litotes, antonomasia, aposiopesis, apostrophe and hendiadys are identified.21 Likewise, the idea that the psalms are lyric compositions leads these commentators to treat each psalm as a discrete poetic unit, with its own subject matter and authorial intention.22 These issues – the materia and intentio – are addressed both in general prologues and in prefaces proper to the individual psalms. The commentators’ goal is to recover the meaning intended by the historical author of the psalms, the poet David, whom John describes as first receiving some prophetic insight and then ‘crafting’ that insight ‘into written form, singing his prophecy to the accompaniment of a psaltery’,23 the musical instrument from which the Psalter takes its name. The categories of ‘subject-matter’ and ‘authorial intention’ afford crucial evidence that the exegetes of Rheims were treating the psalms as literature, for these terms commonly are found in the prologues or accessus to commentaries on the classical authors studied in the grammar schools. When John and Bruno wrote, various types of prologues were competing for academic attention.24 One model was based on the rhetorical circumstantiae (what, where, when, why, and by what means?). Another, which derived from ancient commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid (and is sometimes called the ‘Servian’ model), mandated discussion of the life of the poet, the title of his work, the number and order of its books or parts, the nature (qualitas) of the verse, and the author’s intention, all of which led into the textual exposition. But the model which came to dominate (and the influence of which is seen in Bruno’s and John’s Psalter commentaries) had as its distinctive headings: the title (titulus), subject-matter (materia), intention (intentio), method of stylistic and/or didactic treatment (modus agendi/tractandi), usefulness (utilitas), and the part of philosophy to which it pertains (cui parti philosophiae supponitur). The last of these headings offers a clue to the origins of this type of accessus – in late-antique Greek commentaries on philosophical works, such as the commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories by Ammonius, Philoponus, Elias and Simplicius.25 20

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From John’s second preface, edited in Kraebel, ‘John of Rheims and the Psalter-Commentary attributed to Ivo II of Chartres’, Revue bénédictine, 122 (2012), p. 282. For discussion of different examples, see Kraebel, ‘Grammatica and Authenticity’, pp. 70–4 and 78–83; idem, ‘John of Rheims’, n. 75; idem, ‘Prophecy and Poetry in the Psalms-Commentaries of St Bruno and the Pre-Scholastics’, Sacris Erudiri 50 (2011), pp. 413–59, at pp. 452–6; idem, ‘The Place of Allegory in the Psalter-Commentary of Bruno the Carthusian’, Mediaeval Studies, 73 (2011), pp. 207–16, at p. 209. Kraebel, ‘Prophecy and Poetry’, pp. 448–52. Kraebel, ‘John of Rheims’, p. 282. On these prologue types, see R. W. Hunt, ‘The Introductions to the “Artes” in the Twelfth Century’, Studia mediaevalia in honorem R. J. Martin, O.P. (Bruges: De Tempel, 1948), pp. 85–112. The first version of Boethius’s commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge, where the paradigm is used, with Greek equivalents of six of the Latin headings being provided, at once looks back to its pre-history and functioned as a major source for future use. E. A. Quain has argued that ancient

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The fact that a paradigm originally designed for introductions to philosophical texts was being used more widely, is highly significant. As applied in commentaries on Roman law, the ‘automatic’ classification of the pars philosophiae had, as Hermann Kantorowicz has noted, at least ‘the advantage of reminding the budding medieval lawyer that the civil law was more than a jungle of technicalities’.26 As applied in commentaries on secular auctores, the paradigm worked better for some writers than for others.27 The satiric verse of Juvenal, Horace and Persius had obvious moral force, and could easily be said to ‘pertain to ethics’, but the works of the praeceptor amoris, Ovid, fitted less well within this classification. The Heroides were reduced to a collection of exemplary stories which show us what to do and what to avoid, while the Remedia amoris was read as a retraction of the Ars amatoria, that earlier poem which, it was widely believed, caused Ovid to be exiled by the emperor Augustus. But at least such accounts tacitly affirmed that Ovid’s love poetry had ethical valence and was not to be dismissed as socially subversive fiction. Indeed, owing to this sort of recuperation of Ovidian poetry, Jean Leclercq was able to speak of Ovid and Solomon (in the Song of Songs) as the two ‘masters in the art of loving’: one and the same prologue form was used in introducing both the biblical and the classical author, to explain how apparently erotic literature could be read as supporting – or even, as an extended allegory, describing – a properly ordered Christian life.28 The Psalter exegetes of Rheims may have been among the first to use this prologue form when commenting on the writings of sacred auctores.29 Thus applied to biblical texts, all the headings in its paradigm worked perfectly well, though some scholars evidently felt that the pars philosophiae heading did not do justice to the status of their texts. In explaining the pars philosophiae of the Psalter, Bruno adapts the threefold Hellenistic division of philosophy (physics, ethics and logic) to create a scheme that applies specifically to biblical texts (physics, ethics and theoria or contemplation). He then places most of the psalms in the last category, though some, he says (citing the example of Psalm 118, which celebrates those who ‘walk in the law of the Lord’), are more properly classified as pertaining to ethics.30 Roughly a century later, Stephen Langton’s revision of the pars philosophiae rubric is even more extreme. In one version of his commentary on the Song of Songs, Langton (best known for his role in the events which led to the issuing of Magna Carta in 1215) speaks of the relevant ‘part of philosophy or humanity’,31 while in the other version

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rhetoricians were indebted to ancient commentators on the philosophers for their knowledge of the series of headings under discussion here. He believed that Boethius was influenced by contemporaries like Ammonius, and thus the Greek series of terms came to be rendered, and disseminated, in Latin. Quain, ‘The Medieval “Accessus ad auctores”’, Traditio, 3 (1945), pp. 215–64. Studies in the Glossators of the Roman Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 51. For a representative selection of accessus, see Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory, pp. 12–36. Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France: Psycho-Historical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 27–85. As suggested by Gilbert Dahan, Lire la Bible au Moyen Âge: Essais d’Herméneutique Médiévale (Geneva: Droz, 2009), pp. 64 and 76. PL 152, 638b–9a. The Vulgate Ps. 118 is Ps. 119 in the Masoretic text. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 528, fol. 55r.

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he addresses instead the pars vitae32 – the Bible being, of course, the liber vitae,33 far superior to any other book. Regardless, ‘the Book of Life’ and the books of the secular authors were all deemed susceptible to analysis within one and the same accessus system, generally supposed to share many literary values. The way in which the fables of the poets had been assimilated to an ethical poetic made this confluence much easier. If the application of this prologue form to biblical books appears first in the writings of the masters of Rheims, it is taken even further in commentaries of the following generation, especially those associated with the school of Laon. Excellent examples may be found in the work of Gilbert of Poitiers (d. 1154), who went on to teach at Chartres and Paris. Gilbert begins his general preface to the Psalter by identifying systematically its materia, modus, intentio, and titulus; he also notes that ‘individual psalms each have their own subject-matter, mode, end (finis) and title’, and praises the Psalter for being ‘ornamented with different figures of speech’.34 This prologue form is also used at the beginning of Gilbert’s commentary on the Pauline Epistles (see Fig. 29.3).35 By this time it was being applied widely in introductions to many biblical books – and indeed in more general discussions, as when the canon regular Hugh of St Victor (d. 1141) drew on some of its elements to segregate the subject-matter and mode of Sacred Scripture from those of all other writings.36 Though Peter Abelard (d. 1142) famously disparaged the interpretive abilities of the most famous Laonnois master, Anselm, the preface to Abelard’s own commentary on Romans evinces the same hermeneutic habits as those characteristic of exegetes associated with Anselm’s school.37 Abelard, a student of Roscellinus of Compiègne – who himself may have composed a Psalter commentary under the tutelage of Bruno at Rheims38 – begins his prologue by discussing the various intentiones of different biblical books, finally specifying the relationship between the authorial intention of the Gospels and that of the Epistles: 32

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Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 87, fol. 150r. On the two versions of this commentary see Beryl Smalley, ‘Studies on the Commentaries of Cardinal Stephen Langton’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, 5 (1931), pp. 1–220, at pp. 140–4. Cf. Ecclesiasticus 24: 32. The prologue is edited by Maria Fontana, ‘Il commento ai Salmi di Gilberto della Porrée’, Logos, 13 (1930), pp. 284–301, at pp. 284–6. On Gilbert’s unedited Epistles commentary, see Simon Maurice, ‘La glose de l’épître aux Romains de Gilbert de la Porrée’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 52 (1957), pp. 51–80. See Hugh’s De scripturis et scriptoribus sacris, II, trans. Frans van Liere, in Franklin Harkins and Frans van Liere (eds), Interpretation of Scripture: Theory (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 213–30 (p. 214), together with Grover A. Zinn, ‘Hugh of St Victor’s De scripturis et scriptoribus sacris as an Accessus Treatise for the Study of the Bible’, Traditio, 52 (1997), pp. 111–34. Hugh’s student Andrew further developed his master’s interest in the literal sense of scripture, gleaning interpretive insights from the original Hebrew text and from contemporary rabbinic scholars. The most authoritative study of Andrew remains Beryl Smalley’s account in The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 3rd rev. edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), pp. 112–95. On Abelard’s criticism of Laon, see Michael Clanchy and Lesley Smith, ‘Abelard’s Description of the School of Laon: What Might It Tell Us about Early Scholastic Teaching?’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 54 (2010), pp. 1–34. See Constant Mews, ‘Bruno of Rheims and Roscelin of Compiègne on the Psalms’, in Michael W. Herren et al. (eds), Latin Culture in the Eleventh Century (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), vol. 2, pp. 129–52.

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