Who Narrates the Bible: Reformation Commentary and English Verse Culture

Who Narrates the Bible: Reformation Commentary and English Verse Culture By Raphael S Magarik A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and the Designated Emphases in Jewish Studies and Renaissance and Early Modern Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Victoria Kahn, Chair Professor Joanna M. Picciotto Professor David Marno Professor Robert Alter Spring 2019 Abstract Who Narrates the Bible: Reformation Commentary and English Verse Culture by Raphael S Magarik Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Victoria Kahn, Chair This dissertation argues that early modern scholars invented the idea of the biblical narrator. In Pentateuchal commentaries beginning with Luther and Calvin, the pressures of Protestant theology forced commentators to focus on Moses, whom they imagined as a mediating, human presence within the divinely authored text. In turn, this innovative literary theory shaped how seventeenth century English poets—particularly Lucy Hutchinson, Abraham Cowley, and John Milton—wrote their own biblically themed poems, offering them a new, narratological sophistication. Building on critiques of the modern concept “religion,” by Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and others, I argue that scholarship on the early modern Bible—ranging from Barbara Lewalski’s work on biblical poetics through intellectual histories like Eric Nelson’s and Christopher Hill’s—often implicitly assume that the Bible served early modern readers as an epistemic ground, a source of (in principle) fixed truth. By contrast, I argue that for some readers, the commentarial Bible created a space of uncertainty and sophistication. By spurring them to fictive creation, the Bible helped such readers imagine a world free of grounding, authority, or firm commitments. Drawing on the work of Richard Rorty, I offer an alternative account of literary secularization in the period. Articulating a self- reflexive awareness of contingency that at once is secular and religious, I suggest that early modern theologians and poets created an anti-foundationalist Bible, which demanded not assent or but critical reflection. The first two chapters examine Luther’s and Calvin’s commentaries on Genesis. Both Reformers understood Moses as narrating and mediating the Pentateuch. The narrating Moses helped Luther buttress his views on Church tradition and reconcile his own supplemental commentary with his commitment to Scripture’s simplicity. “Moses” came to name the text’s mediation of itself, which prefigured and authorized Luther’s own preaching. Further, Luther’s Moses is continuous with—and occasionally indistinguishable from—the character-narrators whom his surprisingly inserts into the text, and Luther’s consequently in Genesis numerous instances of free indirect style. Against Deborah Shuger, who sees Renaissance commentary as unconcerned with individual writers, I argue that Luther is deeply invested in Moses, whom he understands primarily in narratological, rather than historical terms. 1 Calvin similarly invests Moses with narratological significance, in part through radicalizing the traditional doctrine of divine accommodation. Rather than taking particular laws or details of the texts as accommodated, Calvin understands the human literary persona of Moses as an accommodation. Further, Calvinist accommodation must always stimulate the reader’s sense of unworthiness and thus announce its own inadequacy. This theology makes Calvin attentive to the Bible’s literary and rhetorical effects, as well as to the consistent gaps between the narrating Moses and the authoring God. These two chapters reframe a longstanding debate over Protestant literalism and the hermeneutic tenability of sola scriptura, arguing that Luther and Calvin, in attempting to find an intra-biblical source for their own commentaries, actual produce a newly mediated biblical text. My third chapter bridges between the dissertation’s commentarial and poetic halves. I read Walter Ralegh’s History of the World as both an attempt to fashion a single, continuous narrative out of a web of commentarial discourse and an early example of biblical fiction. Ralegh’s biblical history weaves multiple narratological layers together, producing a unified narrative that contains its own commentary. But Ralegh also creates an unexpected byproduct: biblical fictions. These verisimilar but explicitly false readings of the Bible remain in the text as entertaining and improving almost-truths. This chapter engages a critical assumption that is the target of the dissertation more broadly: the purported link, in work by Watt and MacKeon, but also Gallagher, Davis, and others, between fiction and secularization. I argue that Ralegh provides an early example of biblical fiction. Not necessarily secularizing, fictionality can arise out of internal, religious dynamics surrounding textual mediation, commentary and narration. Turning to three seventeenth-century, biblically themed poems, I argue that each exploits the Reformation’s new distinction between narrator and author. My fourth chapter shows that Abraham Cowley’s Davideis uses an unreliable narrator to distance Cowley from his defeated Royalism. While I extend scholarship on the tension between the poem’s main text and auto-commentary, I argue critics over-credulously accept the poem’s claim to resolve an essential conflict between poetic fiction and religious truth. I argue that Cowley was not so much responding to a cultural binary as fashioning one for his own purposes: in this case, emphasizing the inertness and fictionality of his poetry. Through readings of Davideis’s transmutation of Cowley’s earlier, failed political epic, I argue that biblical commentary provides Cowley a mediated mode of writing, one that lets him distance himself from his narrator. The commentarial Bible provides a fictional refuge from his political perils. My fifth chapter takes up accommodation and narration in Milton. While previous critics have largely relied upon Milton’s theological treatise to ascertain his views on accommodation, I turn to his polemical prose and the surrounding pamphlet wars. I argue that “accommodation” during the Civil War named the theological-political problem of compromise and coalition. This background helps understand Milton’s distinctively republican and rhetorical model of accommodation. Milton repeatedly emphasizes how political or religious speakers—whether Parliament or Jesus—are not monarchs speaking 2 from on high, but instead characters situated humanly in narrative and responding to circumstances they share with their audience. Paradise Lost purposely dramatizes the narrator’s progressive concession to difficult political circumstances. I thus offer a novel solution to the problem of the poem’s politics, claiming that, through its fallible and beleaguered narrator, the poem dramatizes the oppressive constraints on its own writing. My sixth chapter argues that the creation narrative in Lucy Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder implicitly narrates Hutchinson’s spiritual autobiography of fall and redemption. The poem promises to repent for Hutchinson’s supposed sin in translating Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. Drawing on recent work on Lucretius’s reception, I argue that Hutchinson’s translation would not initially have seemed sinful or problematic. Rather, Order and Disorder reimagines its narrator’s youth as a fall because of the poem’s need to impose a Calvinist life narrative on her biography. The poem stages its narrator’s fall because, within Hutchinson’s experimental Protestant milieu, self-consciousness of one’s fallen depravity offers a privileged epistemological path to religious truth. Arguing against critical characterizations of Order and Disorder’s as simple or plain, I show that Hutchinson actually creates a complex, mediated movement between narrating voice and authorial pattern. While the narrator-author split permits theologians and poets to think of the Bible as a fictive, human text, I argue that this understanding was lost, as a result of the rise of historical criticism and the emergence of religion as a distinct category of human experience. Through critical readings of Samuel Johnson, Erich Auerbach, and Richard Rorty, I argue the category of biblical fiction is often subtly elided precisely when it is apparently being theorized. 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgments ……………… 2 Introduction ……………… 6 Chapter 1 ……………… 34 Chapter 2 ……………… 87 Chapter 3 ……………… 132 Chapter 4 ……………… 195 Chapter 5 ……………… 254 1 Acknowledgements In the most abstract sense, this dissertation argues that the given and the invented relate to each other differently than some people think. In particular, I think, to receive certain important gifts requires one to participate in their creation. The gifts I acknowledge here are of that sort. They obligate me in their stewardship, and I find myself, as Claudia Card writes, “happy to be obliged.” This dissertation continues conversations begun when I was a child, on Saturday morning walks with my father. He first taught me to read the Bible, and ours is my longest-running chevruta. My mother was the first English major I met and remains the most important. It was from her musty old novels and occasionally exasperating book group that I learned what it is to live with literature. Both my parents taught me to do work in which I believe and encouraged me on my precarious,

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