People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture by David Lyle Jeffrey

Abstract

REVIEWS David Lyle Jeffrey, People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Cul­ ture (Grand Rapids MI and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996). xx, 396. $37.00 (U.S.) cloth, $25.00 (U.S.) paper. In the Afterword to Contemporary Literary Theory: A Christian Appraisal, a collection of essays in which contemporary theories are evaluated from a Christian perspective, Leland Ryken observed: “The work that remains to be done is to develop a Christian aesthetic based on principles derived from the Christian critic’s own agenda of interests, including Christian doctrine” (301).1 Few scholars are more qualified to undertake this task than David Jeffrey, FRSC, recently retired from the University of Ottawa. Jeffrey’s publications include The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (1975), Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition (1984), and the editorship of the monumental Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992), all within his specialized field of medieval literature. The range of his interests, however, extends to other periods, as shown by his English Spirituality in the Age of Wesley (1987) or his work on Canadian writers such as Jack Hodgins and Margaret Avison, and it is in part this wide range of interests that qualifies him to undertake his newest book, People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture. Ambitious, written with grace, full of insights and wisdom, this book goes a long way toward fulfilling Ryken’s commission. Jeffrey describes his purpose as “a general historical sketch of the em­ bracing tradition which might serve to clarify its authentically Christian features — and indeed its inauthentically Christian features” (xviii). To establish the “abundance of literary theorizing” (140) connected with the biblical tradition, the scope of his inquiry is broad. The ten chapters move chronologically, first from Hebrew to Christian bibles, then through church fathers such as Jerome and Augustine (who developed a “theoretical basis for the understanding of the language and text of Scripture” [80]) and the Chris­ tianization of England, to the writings of Dante and Chaucer. Additional sections examine Goethe’s Faust, “The Puritan Self” (including Defoe, Cowper and Newton, Coleridge and Arnold), and “Biblicism in America” (from Melville and Hawthorne to Atwood and contemporary southern writers such ESC 24 (June 1998) as O’Connor, Percy, and Berry). This “sketch” opens and closes with chap­ ters on the challenge that literary theory has posed to the established canon, especially literary works and values associated with Christian biblical tra­ dition. Jeffrey is concerned with demonstrating that the term “logocentric tradition,” particularly as used by Harold Bloom, reductively distorts or car­ icatures Christian literary tradition to subvert its central values. For Jeffrey, Christian understanding of language is neither idolatry (“logocentric” ) nor nihilism (deconstruction): “language, even when communicating the Divine Word, is simultaneously both revealing and distorting” (8). A continuing theme in People of the Book is the inescapably ethical qual­ ity of reading literature that originates in the interpretation of Scripture. The centrality of the Bible — the “foundation text” (xiii) for Western lit­ erature and one of the key instruments in the development of literacy — effectively meant that speculations about meaning and reading (including typology and allegory) became part of evolving theories about interpretation and therefore impinged on secular literature as well. In the chapter featuring Goethe’s Faust, Jeffrey extends his skillful analysis to iconographical images, in this case to Goethe’s representation of “the archetypal scholar and faith­ ful reader” (214) as borrowed from Diirer’s rendering of St. Jerome. Jeffrey returns to reading in his final chapter, “Literary Theory and the BrokenHearted Reader,” in which he uses “narratives of repentance” (such as Augustine’s Confessions, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or Singer’s The Penitent) as examples of realistic narratives that the “anti-mimetic” (356) bias of deconstruction has repressed and marginalized. For Jeffrey, the evasion of “the ethical authority of the Bible is repeated in the linguistic nihilism, skeptical relativism and antirealism of literary critics and theorists whose echoing enterprise is designed to evade the moral authority of any other text — but especially that of texts written in the shadow of the Bible” (376). To read a repentance narrative requires a recognition of “the author­ ity of the primary...