Chapter 1 Introduction: Can These Dry Bones Live? 1
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Notes CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: CAN THESE DRY BONES LIVE? 1. See my Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker (London, 1985). 2. See further, Robert Morgan with John Barton, Biblical Interpretation (Oxford, 1988), pp. 213-14; James A. Sanders, Canon and Community: A Guide to Canonical Criticism (Philadelphia, 1984). See further, below, Chapter 2, pp. 12-13. 3. 'The novel is the book of life. In this sense, the Bible is a great con fused novel. You may say, it is about God. But it is really about man alive. Adam, Eve, Sarai, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Samuel, David, Bath- Sheba, Ruth, Esther, Solomon, Job, Isaiah, Jesus, Mark, Judas, Paul, Peter: what is it but man alive, from start to finish? Man alive, but not mere bits. Even the Lord is another man alive, in a burning bush, throwing the tablets of stone at Moses' head/ D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters', published posthumously in Phoenix (1936), reprinted in Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (London, 1967), p. 105. One might say that Lawrence's forthright position was made possible by such works as Strauss's Des Leben lesu (1835-6). See below, Chapter 6, pp. 75-84. 4. See Owen Chadwick's study, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975). 5. 'When he was alone, the Twelve and the others who were round him questioned him about the parables. He replied, "To you the secret of the kingdom of God has been given; but to those who are outside everything comes by way of parables, so that (as Scripture says) they may look and look, but see nothing; they may hear and hear, but understand nothing; otherwise they might turn to God and be forgiven."' Mark 4:10-12. See also, below, Chapter 9, p. 129. 6. Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon (London, 1991), p. 1. 7. Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets (1779-81; Oxford, 1955), vol. I, p. 203. John Drury underlines the point in his Critics of the Bible: 1724-1873 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 8-9. 'The authority of the canonical Scriptures remained intact by isolating them, no doubt with all the strength of unconsciousness, from the criticism meted out to their uncanonical neighbours. A thin wall divided the Bible from the acids of criticism.' 8. Andrew Marvell, 'On Mr. Milton's Paradise Lost': ... the Argument Held me a while misdoubting his Intent, That he would mine (for I saw his strong) The sacred Truths to Fable and old Song. (lines 5-8) 131 132 Notes The theme is taken up at length in Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1989). 9. Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, Conn, and London, 1974), p. 8. 10. See, Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern World, trans. John Bowden (London, 1984), p. 395. On Marcion, see below, Chapter 2, pp. 12-13. 11. Collins cites in his footnote Origen, Eusebius, Jerome, Cyril, Chrysostom, Augustine and others, concluding with William Whiston's An Essay Towards Restoring the True Text of the New Testament (1722). Whiston was expelled from Cambridge in 1710 for his Arian views. 12. Anthony Collins, Discourse of the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1724), quoted in Drury, op. cit., pp. 26-7. See further, below, Chapter 2, p. 14. 13. See below, Chapter 3, p. 29. 14. Werner G. Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance (London, 1991), pp. 18-26. 15. As Owen Chadwick has pointed out, Rousseau's palpably false proposition was, and remains, a powerful idea: 'Men are born free but everywhere they are in chains.' Chadwick, op. cit, p. 11. 16. Matthew Arnold, 'Dover Beach', written, 1851; published, 1867; lines 35-7. 17. I agree, substantially, with Valentine Cunningham in the conclusion in his book In the Reading Gaol: Postmodemity, Texts and History (Oxford, 1994), p. 402: '... Biblical logocentricity is already decon- structionist. And in being so, the logocentric is, of course, the great analogue of, and indeed programmer of, the deconstructionist. The (post)modernist is indeed the parasite at the eucharistic feast. But once again, as ever, the logic of parasite-feeding applies. Deconstructionism is not some awful spectre to be banished if possi ble from the Table of the Lord. Theology needs the reminders of deconstruction as much as deconstruction depends on theology's. But, of course, as Derrida is foremost in recognizing, theology has never, ever, not dealt in the aporetic, the desert experience, the via negativa! Cunningham refers specifically to Jacques Derrida, 'Post- Scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices', in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold Coward and Toby Fashay (New York, 1992), pp. 283-323. CHAPTER 2 'MEDIATOR BETWEEN OLD AND NEW WORLD' 1. Matthew Arnold, 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse' (1855), line 85. 2. Thomas McFarland, Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Modalities of Fragmentation (Princeton, NJ, 1987), p. xi. More generally, see McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford, 1969). Notes 133 3. J. J. Winckelmann, 'Gedanke vom mundlichen Vortrag der neueren allgemeinen Geschichte' ('Thoughts for an Oral Lecture on the New Universal History') in Kleine Schriften und Briefe (Weimar, 1960), p. 21. See also Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon (London, 1991), p. 53, and Winckelmann: Writings on Art, ed. David Irwin (London, 1972), p. 61. 4. See above, Chapter 1, p. 7. 5. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination (London, 1981) and Joel Weinsheimer, Philosophical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory (Yale, 1991). The debate, of course, is much broader. See, especially, Frank Kermode, The Classic (London and Cambridge, Mass. 1983), and David Jasper, Readings in the Canon of Scripture (London and New York, 1995). 6. Harold Bloom's book is discussed critically and at length below, Chapter 9. 7. James A. Sanders, Canon and Community (Philadelphia, 1984), p. xv. 8. For a more detailed account of the work of Sanders and Childs, see my Readings in the Canon of Scripture, Chapter 2: 'Trespassing in the Wilderness: New Ventures in Canonical Criticism', pp. 14-27. A useful introduction to the subject is Robert W. Wall and Eugene E. Lemcio (eds), The New Testament as Canon: A Reader in Canonical Criticism (Sheffield, 1992). 9. Brevard S. Childs, 'The Old Testament as Scriptures of the Church', Concordia Theological Monthly, December (1972), pp. 709-22, p. 714. 10. See Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia, 1979), p. 15. 11. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, third edn (London, 1951), p. 390. 12. The literature on the subject is almost endless. Still fundamental is Albert Schweitzer's great study, The Quest of the Historical lesus, trans. W. Montgomery (London, 1910). Also useful as a general intro duction is S. L. Greenslade (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1963). Crucial for an understanding of the eight eenth century is Henning Graf Reventlow, The Authority of the Bible and the Rise of Modern World, trans. John Bowden (London, 1984). Also valuable are John Drury (ed.), Critics of the Bible, 1724-1873 (Cambridge 1989) and the still fascinating and magisterial is Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (Yale, 1974). See also Further Reading. 13. Brevard Childs remarks that 'it is generally acknowledged that the modern study of the subject of the biblical canon was inaugurated by the epoch-making investigation of J. S. Semler'. The New Testament as Canon: An Introduction (Philadelphia, 1985), p. 6. 14. Albert Schweitzer, op. cit., The Quest of the Historical Jesus p. 25. F. C. Baur of Tubingen developed the study of the earliest forms of Christianity, and was the primary object of attack in Matthew Arnold's God and the Bible (1875). See below, Chapter 7. 15. J. S. Semler, Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Kanons (1771), vol. I, quoted in Hans Frei, op. cit., p. 112. 16. See, Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard, 1989), pp. 386-9. 134 Notes 17. Quoted in Richard Unger, Holderlin's Major Poetry (Bloomington, Ind., 1975), p. 21. 18. Ernest Renan, 'L'Avenir religieux des soci£tes modernes', in Oeuvres completes, ed. H. Psichari, vol. I (Paris, 1949), p. 272. See further, Marjorie Reeves and Warwick Gould, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1987), Chap. VI: '"Between Two Worlds": Renan, Sand, and Matthew Arnold', pp. 133-56. 19. S. T. Coleridge, The Friend (1818), ed. Barbara E. Rooke, in Collected Works, vol. 4:1 (Princeton, NJ, 1969), p. 457. 20. S. T. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, in Collected Works, vol. 6 (Princeton, NJ, 1972), p. 31. 21. Ibid. 22. S. T. Coleridge, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (London, 1840), p. 26. 23. S. T. Coleridge, The Friend, p. 457. 24. Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, I, pp. 25-6. It should be noted that the Liturgical Psalter of the Church of England's Alternative Service Book (1980) recommends the exclusion of the last verse of Psalm 137 ('Happy shall he be who takes your little ones: and dashes them against the stones') from liturgical use. No doubt Coleridge would have deeply disapproved of such treatment of the Scriptural canon, however inconvenient or unpleasant. 25. Leslie Tannenbaum, Biblical Tradition in Blake's Early Prophecies: The Great Code of Art (Princeton, 1982), pp. 53-4. 26. See, John Drury (ed.), Critics of the Bible, 1724-1873 (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 103-4. Drury suggests that internal evidence in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) indicates that Blake was familiar with Lowth's Lectures, or at least the scholarship they contain.