The Mirror of History

In his essay on modern biblical scholarship in The Cambridge History of the Bible , Alan Richardson remarks that "a new type of exegesis" appeared during the nineteenth century, "namely one which is based upon sound historical scholarship.... [It was] no longer possible to treat the words of the Bible as timeless truths addressed to the world at large ... since their real meaning cannot be understood apart from their historical context."^[100] This is not, however, true. Renaissance biblical scholarship is no less historical than the Higher Criticism of the nineteenth century. Their historicisms differ in that after the Renaissance biblical research focused on questions of authorship—on the extratextual site of cultural production rather than the cultural milieu implicit in the text. For example, Harper's Bible Dictionary —a fairly standard modern reference work—defines historical criticism as concerned with the "time and place of composition [of a biblical book], the circumstances in which it was produced or written, its author or authors ... how it came to be written, and the audience(s) to which it was addressed"—all basically questions concerning the author or authors.

Renaissance biblical scholarship does not often deal with such issues—to my surprise, since I began this chapter planning to record the emergence of the subject out of the ashes of medieval allegorical exegesis. This project failed because Renaissance biblical scholarship evinces almost no interest in the intentions, motives, or inner life of either the biblical writers or the texts' sacred personae. Subjectivity dissolves into language and culture—that is, into philological and historical analysis.^[101] One almost never finds phrases signaling authorial intention, like "Matthew here attempts to show" or "Luke includes this episode because"—the familiar currency of modern biblical exegesis. Renaissance scholars generally consider the author only as an "authority"—as a passive witness to the events depicted in his narrative and hence the guarantor of its veracity. The author thus pertains to a prefatory note, having no further relevance to the shape of the narrative, which is analyzed as a linguistic and cultural performance.

This lack of interest in the author as a category of explanation corresponds to a lack of interest in either the moral or psychological character of

the narrative personae. The notes in the Critici sacri deal with alabaster pots, linen undergarments, ritual codes, chronologies, flagella, kinship laws, and lexical glosses; they rarely treat personal agency, and then not directly. Christ's final cry of desolation, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"—where one would expect commentators at least to touch upon his sorrow and agony—raises only questions of dialect: is Christ speaking Aramaic or Hebrew?^[102] This disappearance of the subject intensifies in Protestant commentaries since they omit the pious fictions concerning Christ's family and friends with which medieval and Roman Catholic exegetes filled the dark background of New Testament narratives. The little intimacies characteristic of Cornelius à Lapide's Great Commentary —how "Simon and his friends" feasted Christ, while "Martha ministered at this supper ... because she was a neighbour"^[103] —do not occur in Protestant scholarship. In granting analytic priority to the cultural codes marking the text over both characterization and authorial intention, Renaissance biblical commentaries resemble the new historicisms of the late twentieth century, which may help explain the elective affinity these approaches seem to have for early modern studies.

Yet if the philological antiquarianism of biblical exegesis during the Renaissance seems a distant precursor of modern cultural studies, it is also, at least in one respect, crucially different. We can approach this difference by looking in some detail at Grotius's note on the tearing of the veil concealing the Holy of Holies at the moment of Christ's death (Matt. 27:51). After a somewhat technical discussion of the architecture of the Temple, Grotius remarks that one needs to understand the symbolism of the veil itself in order to understand the significance of its tearing. When the author of Hebrews says that the Holy of Holies

is a figure of true things (verorum figura ), namely of the highest heavens, he said nothing new but mentions what would have been known to all Jews, as I shall show by explicit testimonies. Josephus says ... "the third section of the building ... was like the heaven set apart for God." ... Philo, in his life of Moses, [writes] that "the innermost part of the Temple symbolizes the intelligible realm." ... The objects outside this penetralia not obscurely shadowed forth the visible world. For the red of the veil [signified] fire; the linen, earth; the hyacinth, air; the purple, the sea; the seven lamps, the planets.... Therefore it seems fairly clear that the innermost part symbolized the intelligible world.... Philo, almost certainly drawing on ancient traditions, says that the propitiatorium was a symbol of divine mercy. He thought the Cherubim designated God's creative and kingly powers.... Given all this, I think

the significance of the tearing of the veil is not unclear. For it signifies the access opened through the death of Christ—first to Christ himself, and then by his goodness to the saints of the Old and New Covenants—to that invisible heaven which Holy Scriptures call the heaven of heavens, the dwelling place of the Divine Majesty.... For the Romans and other gentiles, however, this miracle would not obscurely signify the atrocity of the crime committed against Christ. In a comedy, Philippides, here speaking about Demetrius, who dared to compare himself to the gods, thus says: "the veil was torn because of his impiety." (6:962–63)

The logic of this passage is curious; it begins by trying to establish what the veil would have signified to the Jews of the first century and also attempting to picture it—to give some sense of its historical reality as an object. But it then seamlessly moves into theology, as though cultural symbolism provided access to the eternal wisdom of God—as though there were no veil between the visible and intelligible worlds. The passage ends with a discussion of how the Roman inhabitants of Judea might have understood the miracle, whose historicity Grotius never questions.

The juxtaposition of cultural hermeneutics and theological essentialism here is jarring, since in the modern academy these are ideologically incompatible.^[104] Yet Grotius does not even seem to distinguish them as separate discourses; the colorless scholarly Latin of the passage flows across apparent discursive boundaries without the slightest hesitation.^[105] Reality is a stylistic effect, and in Grotius the same style serves for miracles and old curtains. The passage pulls one behind the Enlightenment, prior to the moment when the Western intelligentsia turned against their Fathers, shutting up theology from the rest of the respublica litterarum behind bars of irony. The deicidal urges characteristic of modern culture are not emergent here; this passage provides singularly little evidence for encroaching skepticism and secularization; it does not belong to post-Enlightenment narratives.^[106]

The rhetoric of biblical scholarship does not demystify; it demythologizes sacred history. The implications of this particular discursive rendering of the world are perhaps clearest at its origin: Valla's Donation of Constantine , one of the earliest and most brilliant works of cultural analysis. What Valla does, in effect, is identify rhetorical probability with cultural rules and customs. The donation lacks probability because it does not "fit" the cultural logic of the late Roman Empire; it does not square with codes regulating social praxis during that period. The strictly philological

aspect of Valla's argument—his demonstration that this forgery was written in medieval Latin—forms only a part of the Donation , which also examines how power was customarily transferred under the Empire, what ancient peoples wore on ceremonial occasions, how old coins reflect political history, how the whole texture of late antique culture—its rituals, political organization, dress, laws—bears on historical interpretation. In place of the forged donation's mythic background of virgin-eating dragons and miraculous cures, Valla sets the social fabric of fourth-century Rome, a fabric conspicuously lacking in dragons but stocked with leather neck bands, crescent-shaped shoe ornaments, silk diadems, and horse-cloths.^[107] The rhetorical construction of history is thick description, the rendering of cultural artifacts and customs rather than saints and monsters.

Valla's identification of rhetorical probability with the conformity between an event and its cultural milieu—his sense of historical verisimilitude—clarifies the resonance of the biblical commentaries, which seem triumphant rather than anxious about their discovery of the historical embeddedness of scriptural narrative. The demonstration that biblical events belong to a specific culture and are governed by its codes renders them alien, but it also makes them seem real, attaches them to the historical world of late antique bedclothes and Roman provincial government rather than the mythic domain of hagiography, fables, and piae fraudes .

Both Valla's revolutionary essay and Renaissance biblical scholarship, it seems to me, should be viewed as an episode in the conceptual management of diversity, as a way of categorizing and analyzing the unfamiliar—rather, that is, than as a stage in the gradual secularization of Western culture. The commentaries examined in this chapter differ from earlier texts precisely in their handling of the mass of alien and exotic details unearthed by humanist scholarship. The Renaissance inherited two traditional methods of managing diversity. The first and more familiar erases history, subordinating diversity to repetitive pattern, whether exemplary or typological. Augustine's two cities, Protestant ecclesiology, and the moralized history of humanist pedagogy all construct the past as proleptic repetition rather than linear sequence.^[108]

The second method derives from Aristotle's biological works (including the Problems ), which record the almost limitless variety of habitats, social organizations, sexual preferences, morphological structures, and domestic arrangements found in nature. Aristotle's approach is singularly amoral;

he is not interested in animal behavior as evidence of a normative jus naturale or as a model for human society. He simply lists, column after column, the variety and strangeness of things found in nature:

Some animals at first live in water, and by and by change their shape and live out of water.... Furthermore, some animals are stationary, and some move about.... Other creatures adhere at one time to an object and detach themselves from it at other times.... Again, many animals move by walking as well as by swimming.... Some are gregarious, some are solitary.... Again, of these social creatures some submit to a ruler, other are subject to no rule.... And again, both of gregarious and of solitary animals, some are attached to a fixed home and others are nomadic....

Crabs copulate at the front parts of one another, throwing their overlapping opercula to meet one another.... Insects copulate at the hinder end, and the smaller individuals mount the larger; and the smaller individual is the male. The female pushes from underneath her sexual organ into the body of the male above....

Partridges build a nest in two compartments; the male broods on the one and the female on the other. After hatching, each of the parent birds rears its brood. But the male, when he first takes his young out of the nest, treads them.^[109]

In the pseudo-Aristotelian corpus, the fascination with heteroclite multiplicity overwhelms Aristotle's taxonomic method; scientific classification dissolves into rehearsing wonders. A randomly selected passage from On Marvellous Things Heard thus records:

68. They say that the frogs in Cyrene are altogether dumb, and that in Macedonia, in the country of the Emathiotae, the swine have solid hoofs.

69. They say that in Cappadocia there are fertile mules, and in Crete black poplars which yield fruit.

70. They say also that in Seriphos the frogs do not croak; but if they are transferred to another place they croak.

71. Among the Indians, in what is called the Horn, it is stated that there are little fishes, which wander about on the dry land, and run away again into the river.^[110]

Wonder, as Bacon noted, is broken knowledge. The listing of curiosities constructs nature as an assemblage of alien and amoral oddities, unstructured by hierarchical order or the cosmological analogies in which "even

the least thing in the whole world ... serveth to minister rules, canons, and laws, for men."^[111] Nature here is the principle of heterogeneity rather than plenitude.

This is also the method of Montaigne's "On Cannibals" and "Of Custom"; Montaigne simply transposes the rhetoric of Aristotelian biology to the human sciences, fashioning a litany of the variety and strangeness of things found in culture—a textual Wunderkammer .^[112] The methodology in both cases is aggregative and paratactic, an encyclopedic "heaping" of unrelated exotic details. This pack-rat accumulation of curiosities and broken pieces of knowledge characterizes empirical and humanistic studies (in contrast to scholastic philosophy) through the sixteenth century. It is endemic to the topical organization recommended in Renaissance rhetorics; Erasmus, for example, proposes this as a model entry: "remarkable longevity, vigorous old age, old head on young shoulders, remarkable happiness, remarkable memory, sudden change of fortune, sudden death, self-inflicted death, horrible death, monstrous births, remarkable eloquence, remarkable wealth, famous men of humble birth, ... and so on."^[113]

Late Renaissance exegesis treats its materials neither as timeless exempla nor isolated curiosities. The difference is evident in Drusius's little essay, written sometime before 1616, on the pre-Christian Hasidim ("Assideans" in the Authorized Version) mentioned in 1 and 2 Maccabees—a strange and unfamiliar item, if not as luridly foreign as cannibals. Rather than either marveling at or moralizing these mysterious Hasids,^[114] the essay attempts to untangle their relation to the New Testament Pharisees and to the Essenes ("Hessaei" or "Hesseni") described by Philo and Josephus, in order to elucidate how the various sects and factions are genetically or politically interrelated. He locates the strange name within the ideological configurations of intertestamental Judaism (5:339–52).

Drusius treats the Hasids in terms of their placement within a cultural syntax —a system of written and unwritten laws that order items in relation to one another and regulate their interaction. This example, clearly similar to those already discussed, registers a new mode of managing diversity, in which law—or a sort of legal structuralism—replaces heteroclite order and typological pattern. Especially after the middle of the sixteenth century, the philological antiquarianism of earlier Renaissance exegesis modulates into a study of the codes governing social praxis. The commentaries increasingly read unfamiliar detail as participating in a system of rules organizing behavior and discourse in a particular society. To explain something is to discover the culturally specific customs or laws

implicit in its alien morphology. The odd details of the text become vestiges of a cultural logic, which in turn renders them intelligible.

In the second half of his essay, Drusius rejects the possibility that the Essenes are simply the Old Testament Nazerites under a different name. Instead, he hypothesizes that they originated in the second century B.C. when the Sadducee high priest Hyrcanus began a fierce persecution of the Pharisees, driving some of them into the woods and deserts where they formed separate communities, which then split off from those Pharisees who chose to temporize rather than flee (5:339–52). Like most late Renaissance exegetes, Drusius views the laws governing praxis as themselves historicized, thus giving cultural forms both a diachronic and synchronic extension. The organization of biblical society is not immutable, not fixed by Mosaic law. Instead, philological inquiry opens out onto the development and structures of late biblical Judaism; the strange bits of nomenclature with their perplexing variants—Hasids, Hessens, Chasids, Assidians, Hessaes—belong to an unfamiliar yet intelligible historical narrative.

As in Valla's Donation , the historical estrangement of the text itself endows the events it relates with the solidity and actuality of history. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch Hebraist Coccejus thus defends his rabbinic studies on the grounds that the Talmud supplies "confirmation of the account in the Gospels, where there is abundant mention of Jewish custom, law and traditions."^[115] Cultural analysis manages its diverse and strange materials by granting them the plausibility of free-standing form and perspectival space. Yet, as has long been recognized, the mutual entailments of authenticity and estrangement generate the central problematic of Renaissance humanism. The "legal structuralism" of late Renaissance exegesis links this hermeneutic—this mode of handling diversity—to the legal crisis that dominates the respublica litterarum in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^[116]

Law occupies the troubled center of the Renaissance episteme because the past traditionally bears the character of law; it is binding precedent. This understanding of history suffuses the ideological struggles of the Renaissance and consequently its scholarship. Antiquarian erudition is political knowledge and the narrative legitimation of power. The whole point of Coke's ancient constitution or Baronius's Annales depends on the legal, normative force of historical antecedents—the vetustissimus mos . But legal historiography, by treating law as a cultural code, operated precisely to remove its deontological authority; the past can be analyzed in terms of law, but it is not a law for us . Law thus presents the same ambiguity as

Grotius's veil: it is simultaneously a manifestation of divine reason and a cultural artifact.

Law is the characteristic discipline of the late Renaissance, in much the same way that logic is the characteristic discipline of the Middle Ages: it leaves its mark on other fields of inquiry. Law was of course a specialized field but it was also part of the erudite encyclios paideia ; Donald Kelley thus notes that during the Renaissance "the study of law, mainly civil law, provided a major source—perhaps the major source—of secular, higher education for European society as a whole."^[117] A considerable number of Renaissance exegetes had legal training. Grotius and Selden were prominent jurists; Scaliger and Junius studied with Cujas; Beza, Drusius, Heinsius, and Calvin had brushes with the law—generally, then as now, under parental duress. By the late seventeenth century the undergraduate arts curriculum at Oxford frequently required Justinian's Institutes as part of the moral and political knowledge essential for "an accomplished gentleman."^[118]

More important, the duplex sensus of law, its character as both a normative and empirical science, structures the production of knowledge. The characteristic fields of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century scholarship locate themselves around this legal dialectic: Coke's ancient constitution, Hooker's laws of ecclesiastical polity, Hotman's study of feudal tenures, the research undertaken by the Society of Antiquaries, the emergent disciplines of international law and medieval customary law, the revival of Thomist and neo-Stoic theories of the jus naturale , and Daille's study of the Church Fathers. Even outside history and legal studies, one observes the same tendency to view precedent as simultaneously normative and alien. The tension in humanist poetic between the Classical subtext and its rewriting—between the mimetic imperative and the sensitivity to historical distance—is the literary manifestation of the historico-legal problematic that shapes Renaissance inquiry.^[119] The Poetices libri septem of the elder Scaliger, with its unresolved mixture of antiquarian erudition and prescriptive legislation, is an utterly typical product. The Renaissance is also the early modern period; rebirth and rupture exist simultaneously.

As these examples indicate, the pursuit of cultural and textual law leads back to the ancient and medieval sources of Renaissance civilization. Contemporary rewritings of the Renaissance have emphasized the role of imperialism in the production of knowledge. However, colonialist discourse in this period lacks a "clear and exclusive Europe/exotic dichotomy"; it tends rather to assimilate the New World peoples to the traditional bricolage of the Wunderkammer or invariant categories of human nature.^[120] While the museum, with its systematic organization of knowledge, may

have been, as Steven Mullaney suggests, the successor of the Wunderkammer 's heterogeneous exotica, one did not evolve from the other.^[121] Most museums (until recently) housed the creations of dead, white, Indo-European males, not the Wunderkammer 's tribal artifacts. The systematic study of culture during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries does not reflect on tribal peoples: it analyzes its own progenitors and founding texts. The other, the object of cultural investigation, is also one's ancestor.^[122] Humanist scholarship, struggling to "blaze a path through pseudepigrapha and textual errors back to the early, incorrupt church" and Classical civilization, ^[123] is a search for one's real parents, a philological romance. But its own methodology, designed to retrieve the exemplary past from the ravages of time, unearthed alien cultures fixed in time. Yet although unfamiliar, the rediscovered visage remained the face (and law) of the father, remained the matrix of early modern identity. The estrangement of the past did not destroy the longing for it.

Erasmus's Ciceronianus , which insists on the essential rupture between Classical and Renaissance civilization, closes with the curious confession of Erasmus's love for Horace based on a "secret affinity of minds" that obliterates historical distance: "the very thing that delights the reader especially [is] to discover from the language [of the ancient authors] the feelings, the characteristics, the judgment, and the ability of the writer as well as if one had known him for years."^[124] The sharp sense of separation from the past intensifies the pleasures of intimacy—like finding an old friend in a strange city.

The duplicity of the ancestral past during the Renaissance—its double status as mirror and other—constituted it as the site of ideological crisis and therefore also of knowledge. The Renaissance disciplines struggled with the ancestor who is at once normative and unfamiliar, exemplar and foreigner, origin and alien. The respublica litterarum was shaped by the tension between the exemplarity and alteriority of its own origins, not the post-Romantic tension between culture and nature—although maybe "tension" is the wrong word, since it implies an achieved polarization, whereas the distinctive characteristic of the Renaissance episteme lies in its imperfect differentiation of essentialist and historicist method, in the failure to polarize the deontological and empirical senses of law: Grotius's veil again.

We need to grasp this failure not as confusion but as enabling a specific form of knowledge, a form most fully realized at the intersection of legal, historical, and biblical studies—the point of maximal exemplarity and maximal estrangement ... the bloody sacrifice of Christ.