This anthropocentrism of the Bible is a huge part of why people can then include themselves in the narrative without it being problematic. God created the earth to have humans to be worshipped. Jesus came down to earth not to curtail the favor of possums and goats but to appeal to human rationality and die for our sins. The narrative arc of the universe in the Bible is arguably just the narrative arc of humanity (minus possibly the first five days of creation). To address my parenthetical, I say “possibly,” because even when humans aren’t created, there is Jesus chilling in Heaven, and there are the sun and the moon and the stars—why else would we need time and day and night if not for living creatures?—and there are the whales and water creatures over whom God knows he will shortly be telling Adam that he has dominion. Incidentally, Auerbach addresses such Godly knowledge: “…there is no distinction of times since for him everything is simultaneous present, so that—as Augustine once put it—he does not possess foreknowledge but simply knowledge” (p. 158).
Auerbach seems to agree with me, that the very essence of the Bible hinges on humanity: “Nor is there any basis for concern with the unities of time, place, or action, for there is but one place—the world; and but one action—man’s fall and redemption” (p. 158). As Auerbach puts it, the story arc of Creation—>Jesus’s Incarnation and Passion—>the Second Coming and the Last Judgement is a very human-focused one. In Creation, everything was created, but most importantly, humans were created, the only earthly creatures that we know of who can worship God (because of their free will). Christ’s Incarnation and Passion occurred in order to rid humanity of original sin and to let the veil lifted—to let us see God: He became human so that he could save humanity and link us closer with the divine.
Auerbach latches on to this last bit to analyze a French play. In it, Adam and Eve are distinctly human; they fight and fall with rhetoric that’s familiar to us. Similarly, as we discussed in class, the closeness associated with the language of the York Mystery Plays relates to the incarnation of Christ. This is because God has the ability to connect Hugh, St Victor’s “higher life” and “lower life” in the form of Jesus. The story of the Old Testament continues to include the resurrection of Jesus for more than one reason. He is human and divine and rewrites the story of God interacting by humans by adding another chapter to it (the works that were written and compiled as the New Testament). As we saw with the idea of mortal Saints, we are supposed to see ourselves, our humanity, in Jesus. The Incarnation of Jesus showed that humans can continually affect the divine. Humans had to murder Jesus for him to sacrifice himself. The story shifts slightly compared with the Old Testament because we are able to physically interact with him (vs. through words only as in Paradise and the burning bush, etc.). Even in acknowledging the medieval conception of the Old Testament Yahweh as being the face of Jesus, I cannot recall any moment in the Old Testament in which humans physically interacted with God. That physicality, that mortal humanness seems to be the crux here. The Word becomes flesh. And then the Word affects our words.
In the play that Auerbach discusses, this divine grace is encoded at every point in history, because it is part of God’s knowledge. So, when Adam eats the tree of knowledge,
“it is clear that Adam has advance knowledge of all of Christian world history, or at least of Christ’s coming and the redemption from that original sin which he, Adam, has just committed. In the very depth of his despair, he already knows of the grace which will be fulfilled in its time. That grace—albeit a thing of the future, and even of a specific historically identifiable part of the future—is nevertheless included in the present knowledge of any and all times” (p. 157).And, all humans are a part of this future. It is like what Noah says in the York Mystery Play, “our life shall no man longer last / but we alone, is not to lain” (p.24). We are the result of catastrophes like the flood; we are “a living representation of” the success “of Biblical episodes”. This is what Auerbach suggests that medieval plays are trying to convey with his idea of figura :
“The medieval Christian drama falls perfectly within this tradition. Being a living representation of Biblical episodes as contained, with their innately dramatic elements, in the liturgy, it opens its arms invitingly to receive the simple and untutored and to lead them from the concrete, the every day, to the hidden and the true” (p. 155).The flood could’ve been the end of humanity, but instead, through the grace of God, it was the beginning of a new humanity. Through the grace of God this story continues. We saw it with Jesus’s Incarnation. And through the grace of God, we will be judged in the end. So, it truly is one story about how God’s grace interacts with our humanness.
LAJ
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- Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953)
- York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling, ed. Richard Beadle and Pamela King (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
Both Evolution and the story of the Bible are human-centered stories: the whole point of the Myth of Evolution as Lewis describes it is to explain where human beings came from. I grant that it is harder to see Man as the Hero of Evolution, but Man is hardly the Hero of the Bible either, if you think about it. As you say, "Humans had to murder Jesus in order for him to sacrifice himself," but doesn't that make human beings the villains, not the Hero? One could make an argument that the Bible is, in fact, God-centered, not humanity-centered. The story is about what God wants and how humanity keeps messing things up! Dorothy Sayers makes the argument in The Mind of the Maker that it is pointless to argue that language about God is anthropocentric: all language about everything is anthropocentric, we cannot talk about anything except from our human perspective. In her words, we have no other yardstick. Which (to think of it) raises the question of whether would we even be able to understand a story told from God's perspective. (I am not quite sure what to do with this thought!) RFLB
ReplyDeleteHi Professor, I am not sure why the first part of your comment has a contrary tone. I discussed Lewis' explanation of how (Popular) Evolution is not quite so scientific:
Delete"I don’t think that mythologizing the story of Jesus and then wanting to view ourselves in that story is *quite as contradictory* as Lewis thinks popular evolution is. In evolution, Darwin etc. claim natural selection, i.e., the random traits and mutations lead to traits and mutations that stick around because they’re useful. Under that guise, how can we mythologize humans and heroes when really it’s all random?" So, at no point did I say that it is "harder to see Man as the Hero of Evolution."
I did say Popular Evolution, because this is what Lewis himself says: "The central idea of the Myth is what its believers would call 'Evolution' or 'Development' or 'Emergence', just as the central idea in the myth of Adonis is Death and Re-birth. I do not mean that the doctrine of Evolution as held by practising biologists is a Myth. It may be shown, by later biologists, to be a less satisfactory hypothesis than was hoped fifty years ago. But that does not amount to being a Myth. It is a genuine scientific hypothesis. But we must sharply distinguish between Evolution as a biological theorem and popular Evolutionism or Developmentalism which is certainly a Myth" ("The Funeral of a Great Myth" p. 23).
I agree that human language is anthropocentric because it is derived by humans, but that does not necessarily mean we can't tell stories about things/people/aliens/whatever that aren't human. My point is that, even in Auerbach's formulation, which I agree with, the climatic point is Jesus--who is *fully human* and *fully divine*. Thus, in my view, whenever Jesus shows up, it is necessarily also a story about humanity (because of his human part). And, as you've told us in class, medieval people saw Jesus in the Old Testament as well as the New (related to Auerbach's idea of figura). In the painting from class, Jesus is in the burning bush. In Revelation, the face of God that's described as sitting on the throne is Jesus. Other students in class have told me that Jesus, though begotten, existed just as soon as God did; they are both eternal. Thus, Jesus has always existed in some type of form. This form, from what I understand, is the image and likeness of God. Thus, he is always in the form of a human, even while he is fully divine, even if he is not entirely physically human (I'm thinking of how ghosts have the form of humans without the tangible physicality of human flesh--the tangibility I associated with the incarnation).
Your last thought is certainly an interesting one. However, I was making a point about protagonists, not perspective. Plenty of books that I've read have a protagonist or a hero that is not necessarily the POV character (or even the person signalled as POV via free indirect discourse). I agree that language and writing etc. are necessarily from a human perspective, because language is derived from (and also perpetuates) human culture (see Sapir-Wharf hypothesis that I've brought up in a comment on one of Andy's posts). More to the point, I find value in Heidegger's ideas about embodiment and such, which relate form to subjectivity and understanding. I do not believe that I ever contended otherwise in my blog post. Thank you for your comment. I hope I've made it clear that I do not believe my blog post goes against any of the thoughts or questions that you've raised in your comment.
An amendment: instead of Jesus' "human part" (in a parenthetical) I think it's more accurate of me to say his "human nature."
DeleteI will admit also that maybe the ghost isn't the best conception of Jesus in Eternity--I still haven't fully wrapped my head around what Jesus is like when he's not on earth.