Abstract
Vituperation against apostasy, such as these words from Jeremiah, has been regarded as a repudiation of momentary lapses into fertility cults in Ancient Israel. Yet such criticism is also, Biblical scholars have shown, an expression of the distinguishing feature of Hebrew thinking: it is fundamentally opposed to mythological religions of immanentism. Because of the nature of this opposition, early Hebrew writing is not another mythology, but according to W. F. Albright, may be described as archaic demythologizing.1 Following the thrust of this claim, H. N. Schneidau has argued the provocative thesis that later Biblical periods, too, carry out just as forcefully this opposition to myth and, furthermore, that Western tradition broadly may be distinguished by a characteristic demythologizing inherited from the Bible.2 The impact is immediately obvious, for example, in the first century with St. Paul’s admonition, “Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales,” or again much later when scholars of the Reformation demythologized the past and their own culture in the letter and spirit of Jeremiah and St. Paul.
Like a thief in the disgrace of being caught, so will the House of Israel be: They, their kings, their princes, their priests and their prophets, who say to a piece of wood, “You are my father,” to a stone, “You have begotten me.” Jeremiah 2:26–27
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Notes
Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan: A Historical Analysis of Two Contrasting Faiths (New York: Anchor, 1969), pp. 183–85. Albright refers to Hebrew writing between the thirteenth and the sixth centuries B.C.
Sacred Discontent: The Bible and Western Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977); see especially chap. 1, ‘In Praise of Alienation,’ and chap. 5, ‘The Bible and Literature.’
‘Odysseus’ Scar,’ Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Anchor, 1957), pp. 1–20: “It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand, externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feelings completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little suspense. On the other hand, the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal ... remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background’” (p. 9).
See Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948).
The Jerusalem Bible, ed. Alexander Jones (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), used throughout unless otherwise noted.
Cp. Auerbach on Genesis; the journey of Abraham and Isaac proceeds “like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent, a holding of the breath, a process which has no present, which is inserted, like a blank duration, between what has passed and what lies ahead” (p. 7).
Old Testament Theology, vol. 1, The Theology of Israel’s Historical Traditions, trans. D. M. G. Stalker (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 308.
Auerbach, p. 9; von Rad, p. 316.
Auerbach, p. 9. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1964), pp. 108–9: “In any comprehensive view of the great and small mythological systems out of which the beliefs of mankind have been drawn, the Biblical idea of God must be clearly set apart, as representing a principle nowhere else exclusively affirmed; namely, of the absolute transcendence of divinity.”
Henri Frankfort, ‘The Emancipation of Thought from Myth,’ in Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, by H. and H. A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobsen (Baltimore: Penguin, 1973), pp. 241–44: “The God of the Hebrews is pure being, unqualified, ineffable. He is holy ... all values are ultimately attributes of God alone. Hence all concrete phenomena are devalued.... Nowhere else do we meet this fanatical devaluation of the phenomena of nature and the achievements of man: art, virtue, social order — in view of the unique significance of the divine.... Only a God who transcends every phenomenon, who is not conditioned by any mode of manifestation — only an unqualified God can be the one and only ground of all existence. This conception of God represents so high a degree of abstraction that, in reaching it, the Hebrews seem to have left the realm of mythopoeic thought.”
E.g., see Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Les editions de minuit, 1967).
Auerbach, p. 11.
Biblia sacra cum glossa ordinaria et postilla Nicholai Lyrami, 8 vols. (Paris, London, and Venice, 1590–1603), 2:575AB: “Praegnans facta mulier, vadit ad regem, et dicit: 0 Rex, peril. Et ille: Quid habes? Pregnans (inquit) sum. Peccati mei pullulat fructus, ac cusatorem intrinsecus habeo; in ventre profero proditorem. Si venerit et viderit vir meus, quid dicam? quid loquar? qua[m] excusationem praetendam?”
Ibid., 2: 573–74.
Ibid., 2: 575; Patrologia Latina (Paris, 1852), 113: 571; Patrologia Latina (Paris, 1852), 109: 99.
Justin Martyr, ibid., 2: 581B: “Qui vero post eum nati sunt, non decauit, quoniam David illam duxit uxorem.”
Rabanus, Patrologia Latina, 109: 100: “Sed huic David uxorem abstulit sibique conjunxit, quia videlicet manufortis, quod David dicitur, in carne Redemptor apparens, dum se spiritualiter loqui legem innotuit, per hoc quod juxta litteram tenebatur, hanc Judaico populo extraneam demonstravit sibique conjunxit, quia per se illam praedicare declaravit”; see also: col. 99; Patrologia Latina, 113: 572; Biblia sacra cum glossa ordinaria, 2: 574–76.
The reference is from Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale (1.1890) in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
‘Icones Symbolicae, Philosophies of Symbolism and their Bearing on Art,’ in Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Phaidon Press, 1972), p. 126. Cp. Harry Berger, ‘The Ecology of the Medieval Imagination,’ Centennial Review
(1968):306: the medieval sign is a “copy” which has “a magical ability to focus the reality and bring it into view.”
The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 140.
Cp. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. George Weidenfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 223: mythological thought “does not distinguish the moment of observation and that of interpretation any more than, on observing them, one first registers an interlocutor’s signs and then tries to understand them: when he speaks, the signs expressed carry with them their meaning.” See H. N. Schneidau, ‘The Mythological Consciousness,’ in Sacred Discontent, pp. 50–103.
The opposition of Biblical writing to myth may very well be an important historical locus for recent discussion in literary theory of the difference between the contextualist notion of the work as an object that embodies significance and the post-structuralist claim that it is a system of signifiers that produces meaning; cf. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). Similarly current arguments on the difference of fiction from myth ought to be considered in light of the Biblical opposition: Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 18: “fiction is not myth, for it knows and names itself as fiction. It is not a demystification, it is demystified from the start”; Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 39: “We have to distinguish between myths and fictions. Fictions can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive.... Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sensemaking change. Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change.” Much of this dynamic of difference and change is not a recent discovery; its unacknowledged debt is to Biblical writing.
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Gellrich, J. (1984). On Medieval Interpretation and Mythology. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic — Epic — Tragic. Analecta Husserliana, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6315-3_14
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