Truth Has a Human Face

Abstract

REVIEWERS FROM ROBERT BROWNING'S TIME TO THE PRESENT NOTE THAT A in the Desert (Dramatis Personae, 1864) constitutes his poetic response to Ernest Renan's The Life of]esus (1863).1 After reading Renan's Life, Browning wrote to Isabella Blagden: His admissions & criticisms on John are curious. I make no doubt he imagines himself a fact, with the so must John have done.2 St. John, the gospel that fuels some of Renan's more controversial claims (i.e., that the raising of Lazarus was a hoax3) , alludes to perhaps the central source text for A Death. That Browning equates John and Renan as both stating a with a certain freedom for effect also hints at the primary concern of A Death the nature of truth, especially as focused upon Jesus. When we arrive at inevitable license, we thus glimpse how Browning understands the manner in which John and Renan deal with Jesus, where each author constructs a truth of Jesus according to his individual and particular relation to Jesus' story. Such a construction must occur through language (admissions & criticisms; stating), and so Browning brings into relief language's role in the communication of truth. Aristotle's Categories provides here the basic theoretical paradigm, which most discussions of language in Britain came either to adopt or challenge; but John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1837), bear much more directly upon Browning's own ideas of language. A in the Desert, I propose, suggests how we can see Jesus, figuratively, as the element of language that shifts constantly in relation to the truth, God, that he ultimately qualifies. Jesus, throughout history, functions as the linking, connecting, combinative aspects of language what Aristotle calls predicates, Locke Particles, and Carlyle Metaphors or Symbols that change as each age employs a measure of license in shaping the fact of God manifested to the world by Jesus. Both the Gospel of John and Renan's Life prove quite conscious of this specific quality of language. A in the Desert, as the third link in a chain of texts joined by their concern with John's representation of