Abstract
The bishopric of St. David’s in Wales was always famously poor. There were forty bishops of St. David’s between the beginning of the sixteenth century and the end of the nineteenth, but only half of them stayed put; the rest got themselves translated to more lucrative and less isolated postings.1 Among this illustrious group of eastward-looking bishops of St. David’s was Robert Lowth (1710–87), a New College man who held the professorship of poetry at Oxford for nearly ten years from 1741, before he began his steady rise in the episcopate. Lowth was given the Welsh see in 1766 but hardly had time to unpack before he returned in glory the same year as Bishop of Oxford. He soon showed himself to be one of the most able clerics of his day and a translation to London in 1777 was followed six years later by the offer of the archbishopric of Canterbury, which he actually turned down.2
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Notes
A Dictionary of English Church History, ed. S.L. 011ard & G. Crosse (London, 1912), 535–9.
Memoirs of the Life and Writings of... Robert Lowth (London, 1787).
Robert Lowth, De Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum (Oxford, 1753); trans. as Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (London, 1787) as thirty-four lectures in two volumes; and again in (London, 1847) with notes by J.D. Michaelis, the great German biblical critic. The first English edition of 1787 is used here. This reference is to 1:37.
Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime,trans. J.T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960): first published in 1764 and translated into English in 1799.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757), with a second ed. (London, 1759) including an additional preface and a new “Introduction on Taste”: n.b. the “World’s Classics ed., (Oxford, 1990). His Reflections on the Revolution in France was published in 1790. See also S. Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event ( Hanover, N.H.: Published for Brown University by University Press of New England, 1988 ).
The sublime has once again become a key ingredient of the very latest literary jargon as any search among the titles of new books will easily reveal.
Lowth, Lectures, Lecture 18; and esp. 1:166 and 2:4, 84–7.
Recognition of Lowth’s emphasis on the prophets as poets is made by modern critics such as J.L. Kugel, The Idea of Biblical Poetry ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981 ), 172;
M. Roston, Prophet and Poet: The Bible and the Growth of Romanticism ( London: Faber and Faber, 1965 );
D. Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 ), 2: 59–73.
Lowth, Lectures, 1:307–9.
Ibid., 1:52, 56.
Ibid., 1:68–9.
F. Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), Chap. 4, esp. 98.
The reference is to L.C. Knights, “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?”, in his Explorations (London, 1945), 1–39.
Cf. Edmund Leach, “Why Did Moses Have a Sister?”, in E. Leach and D.A. Aycock, Structuralist Interpretations of Biblical Myth ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983 ).
For a good summary of Mede’s views, see R.G. Clouse, “The Rebirth of Millenarianism,” in Puritans, the Millennium, and the Future of Israel: Puritan Eschatology, 1600–1660, ed. P. Toon ( Cambridge: James Clarke, 1970 ), 56–61.
Most of the secondary work on the Hutchinsonians is concerned with their scientific (and especially geological) views: see H. Metzger, Attraction Universelle et Religion Naturelle (Paris: Herman, 1938), 8, 197;
A.J. Kuhn, “Glory or Gravity: Hutchinson vs. Newton,” Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1961), 303–22;
M. Neve and R. Porter, “Alexander Catcott: Glory and Geology,” British Journal of the History of Science 10 (1977), 37–60;
G.N. Canton, “Revelation and the Cyclical Cosmos of John Hutchinson,” in Images of the Earth, ed. L.J. Jordanova and R. Porter ( Chalfont St Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1979 ), 3–22;
C.B. Wilde, “Hutchinsonianism, Natural Philosophy and Religious Controversy in Eighteenth Century Britain,” History of Science 18 (1980), 1–24;
M.C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans ( London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981 ), 96;
C.B. Wilde, “Matter and Spirit as Natural Symbols in Eighteenth-Century British Natural Philosophy,” British Journal of the History of Science 15 (1982), 99–131.
See also D.S. Katz, “The Hutchinsonians and Hebraic Fundamentalism in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Sceptics, Millenarians and Jews ed. D.S. Katz and J. I. Israel (Leiden: Brill, 1990 ), 237–55;
D.S. Katz, “’Moses’s Principia’: Hutchinsonianism and Newton’s Critics,” in The Books of Nature and Scripture: Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Biblical Criticism in the Netherands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time, ed. James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin ( Dordrecht: Kluwer 1994 ), 201–11.
See generally, [Robert Spearman], An Abstract from the Works of John Hutchinson (2nd ed., London, 1755); and John Hutchinson, The Philosophical and Theological Works,ed. Robert Spearman and Julius Bate (London, 1749).
See also D.S. Katz, “The Phenomenon of PhiloSemitism,” Studies in Church History 29 (1992), 327–61, esp. 327–33.
Spearman, Supplement, i-v.
John Hutchinson, Moses’s Principia. Part II,in Works,ed. Spearman and Bate, 2:79, 264–5 (first published in 1727).
John Hutchinson, Glory or Gravity,in Works,6:7 (first published in 1733–4.)
Spearman], Abstract,148–9.
L. Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (3rd ed., London, 1902), 1: 389–92.
Horace Walpole, Correspondence,ed. W.S. Lewis, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–83), 35:156.
Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1984), 80. Magdalen had been a center of Hebrew studies at Oxford since the Civil War: see D.S. Katz, “The Abendana Brothers and the Christian Hebraists of Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 40 (1989), 28–52.
See, generally, William Jones, Memoirs of the Life, Studies, and Writings of the Right Reverend George Horne (London, 1795); George Horne, Works,ed. William Jones (2nd ed., London, 1818); William Jones, Theological, Philosophical and Miscellaneous Works (London, 1801): 12 Vols. Cf. Kuhn, “Glory or Gravity: Hutchinson vs. Newton.”
W. Walker, The Life and Times of the Rev. John Skinner,2nd ed. (London, 1883), 165.
Samuel Johnson, “Memoirs”, in Samuel Johnson, ed. H. and C. Schneider (New York, 1929), 1:3, 6, 30–1, and 45–6; Samuel Johnson, An English and Hebrew Grammar (London, 1767 ).
Generally, see T.B. Chandler, The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York, 1805), esp. 2,4–5,76–85, 116–23,201–4;
E.E. Beardsley, Life and Correspondence of Samuel Johnson (New York, 1874); T. Hornberger. Beardsley, Life and Correspondence of Samuel Johnson (New York, 1874); T. Hornberger, “Samuel Johnson of Yale and King’s College: A Note on the Relation of Science and Religion in Provincial America,” New England Quarterly 8 (1935), 378–97;
L.S. Meyer, “Doctor Samuel Johnson’s Grammar and Hebrew Psalter,” in Essays on Jewish Life and Thought, ed. J.L. Blau, et al. ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1959 ), 359–74.
S.T. Coleridge, The Notebooks, ed. K. Coburn (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1957—), 3:4401 (March, 1818 ).
See J.L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. 16,94–5,166,199,205, and 257;
P. Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1993), 13–19; E. Barker, The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), esp. page 44, regarding Moonie leader “Miss Kim” who had visions of Swedenborg while still a teenager in Korea.
See R. Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France ( Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968 ).
See generally, P.J. Lineham, “The English Swedenborgians 1770–1840: A Study in the Social Dimensions of Religious Sectarianism” (Ph.D. diss., University of Sussex, 1978), 11. Cf. Lineham, “The Origins of the New Jerusalem Church in the 1780s,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 70 (1988), 109–22.
Emanuel Swedenborg, The True Christian Religion (London: Everyman, 1933), 285–6 (#209).
Swendenborg, The True Christian Religion,334–5 (#278).
Swedenborg, The True Christian Religion,340 (#281). See also M. Idel, “The World of Angels in Human Form,” in Studies in Jewish Mysticism, Philosophy, and Ethical Literature,ed. J. Dan and J. Hacker (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1986), 1–66, esp. 64–6, where Idel argues that Swedenborg’s idea of a homo maximus was closer to kabbalistic ideas than to the Cosmic Man of Jaina. (N.B. Studies in Jewish Mysticism cited immediately above is written in Hebrew.)
See esp. Edward Taylor, Jacob Behmen’s Theosophick Philosophy Unfolded (London, 1691); D. Hirst, Hidden Riches: Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964 ), esp. Chaps 3 and 7; and A. Koyré, La Philosophie de Jacob Boehme ( Paris: J. Vrin, 1929 ).
R. Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789–1820) ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983 );
S. Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993 ).
See also the older standard works on Blake, N. Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947 );
H. Bloom, Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument ( Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959 ).
For some recent objections to the aesthetization of millenarianism, see M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971); J. Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” Oxford Literary Review 6 (1984); and J. Baudrillard, “The Anorexic Ruins,” in Looking Back on the End of the World, ed. D. Kamper and C. Wulf (New York: Simiotext, 1989). Terry Eagleton makes this point about much of eighteenth-century literature in general, when he notes the Romantics’ stress upon the sovereignty and autonomy of the imagination, its splendid remoteness from the merely prosaic matters of feeding one’s children or struggling for political justice. If the “transcendental” nature of the imagination offered a challenge to an anemic rationalism, it could also offer the writer a comforting alternative to history itself: T. Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 20, and generally his The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). See also C. Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 1822–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985 ); and H. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 ).
N. Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature ( New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982 ).
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Katz, D.S. (2001). The Occult Bible: Hebraic Millenarianism in Eighteenth-Century England. In: Force, J.E., Popkin, R.H. (eds) Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, vol 175. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2282-7_8
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