Scriptural Allusions Research Articles

Arthur and the Failed Pursuit of Imitatio Christi: Christological Allusion in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King

Both edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene and Alfred, Lord Tennyson in The Idylls of the King depict their Arthurs through extensive Christological and scriptural allusions. Further, despite the wide generic and historical differences between these texts, both authors show that even Arthur falls short of the ideal of Christ. (JRH)

Notes: Scriptural Allusion in Lines 38–39 of the Prologue to Piers Plowman

Notes: Scriptural Allusion in Lines 38–39 of the Prologue to <i>Piers Plowman</i>

A Paradigm for Identifying the Use of Scriptural Allusion in Lemma-Based Exegesis Within the Qumran Library Using 4QpPs&lt;sup&gt;a&lt;/sup&gt; (4Q171) as an Example

A Paradigm for Identifying the Use of Scriptural Allusion in Lemma-Based Exegesis Within the Qumran Library Using 4QpPs&lt;sup&gt;a&lt;/sup&gt; (4Q171) as an Example

Cyril of Alexandria’s Trinitarian Theology of Scripture by Matthew R. Crawford (review)

Reviewed by: Cyril of Alexandria’s Trinitarian Theology of Scripture by Matthew R. Crawford Alexander B. Miller Matthew R. Crawford Cyril of Alexandria’s Trinitarian Theology of Scripture New York: Oxford University Press, 2014 Pp. xi + 290. $125.00. In this monograph Crawford aims to reclaim Cyril’s many scriptural commentaries for theological and historical study by arguing that Scripture has an integral place in a coherent account of Cyril’s (or any modern Trinitarian) theology. In brief, Scripture plays a central role in the Trinity’s relationship to humanity, revealing God and mediating the appropriation of divine life. Crawford frames the facets of revelation and reception of Scripture as an exitus-reditus schema wherein revelation comes from the Father (Chapter Two) through the Son (Chapter Three) and is written in the Spirit (Chapter Four). Conversely, in the Spirit (Chapter Six) one recognizes the Son throughout Scripture (Chapter Five) revealing the Father. Crawford’s method balances close reading with synthesis in order to untangle Cyril’s often perplexing use of scriptural allusions. After identifying the most common allusions, Crawford investigates Cyril’s extended exegesis in light of other patristic commentaries. He then imports Cyril’s explicit interpretation when an allusion is made in another text, allowing occasionally that Cyril may use an “alternative” (119) or more developed—but not contradictory—interpretation in another context. At times, such pleas and “implicit” connections may appear strained, but the patient reader will eventually reap the benefit of Crawford’s mastery of this extensive web. The controversy between Cyril and Nestorius is presented as a debate between pro-Nicene theologies (Chapter Two). Following Marie-Odile Boulnois on Cyril’s Trinitarian theology, Crawford highlights Cyril’s opposition to Nestorius’s Trinitarian cooperation (συνεργία). Short of identity of operation and power (Cyril’s neologisms ταὐτοεργία and ταὐτοσθενής), cooperation suggests tritheism to Cyril. At stake is the claim that the Word’s revelation and the Spirit’s inspiration are capable of revealing the Father. Elsewhere (Chapter Four), Crawford shows that Cyril’s polemic against the insertion of a mediator in the incarnation by Theodore and Nestorius stems from Cyril’s theology of revelation. To flatten the distinction between prophetic inspiration (through active human mediators) and the incarnation denies the fullness of the revelatory mystery of Christ and destroys the unity of Scripture (centered around Christ and the gospels). Crawford resists discussion of exegesis until Chapter Six, and his contribution is subtle. He accepts the scholarly consensus that Cyril’s “spiritual” reading is primarily a christological one, and he also accepts Alexander Kerrigan’s argument that “spiritual” reading generally means reading “in the Spirit.” However, he objects to Kerrigan’s distinction between the historical and spiritual readings based upon the object of “earthly” or “higher” realities, respectively (218). Instead, Crawford distinguishes the levels of reading by the “illumination according to creation” (185) by the Word (the robust combination of natural law, reason, grammar, and natural religion) and “illumination according to redemption” (194) in the Spirit (through baptism in the church). The new emphasis for Crawford [End Page 635] is on the exegete or hearer, not the object. It is a theology rather than a method of exegesis. Furthermore, Crawford situates exegesis within the broader Christian life in Cyril’s thought. Studies of Cyril’s eucharistic theology have recently been augmented by Daniel Keating’s work on Cyril’s baptismal theology as a second means of appropriating divine life, and Crawford adds the reading and preaching of Scripture. For Cyril, the Spirit and the Word remain present in councils and bishops’ preaching via the inheritance of the writings and office of the apostles. Therefore, Crawford sees the written and preached word as means of appropriating the Divine Word. Cyril even interprets references to food as metaphors for reception of Scripture, sometimes without mention of the Eucharist. Yet, Cyril does not use the same terminology of appropriation for Scripture as he does for the Eucharist and baptism. Thus, Crawford rather cautiously suggests that Scripture constitutes “two and a half” or “two means of participation with an asterisk” (179). These advances in the study of Cyril’s exegetical theology are useful, though they raise the new question of how Cyril thought believers might determine...

“Saving Christianity”: The Nephite Fulfillment of Jesus’s Eschatological Prophecies

Third Nephi testifies to the fulfillment of Jesus’s eschatological prophecies, even though Mormon, the prophet-historian who records the remarkable events, was unaware of the content of Jesus’s mortal teachings. He nevertheless recognizes Christ’s postresurrection visit as both the fulfillment of Nephite prophecy and the reenactment of particular episodes of their sacred history by incorporating numerous scriptural allusions into his account. Mormon’s independent witness in which he recounts a day of divine judgment, the coming of the Lord, and the inauguration of the kingdom of God within the timeframe Jesus had prescribed validates Jesus’s prophecies in Galilee and Judea. Despite the ironic incongruity between what was expected and how it was fulfilled, Mormon’s narrative confirms the New Testament’s proclamation and thus serves to save the credibility of Christianity that has long been challenged by the problem of the delayed parousia—that is, that Jesus’s prophecies of an imminent theocratic kingdom seem to have failed. Title

The Sexual Shame of the Chaste: ‘Abortion Miracles’ in Early Medieval Saints’ Lives

The Sexual Shame of the Chaste: ‘Abortion Miracles’ in Early Medieval Saints’ Lives

Sold under Sin: Echoes of Exile in Romans 7.14-25

Although Romans has been heavily mined for scriptural allusions in recent years, the influence of Isaiah 49–50 on Rom 7.14-25 has gone largely unnoticed. Building on Philonenko's work on the allusion to Isa 50.1 in the phrase ‘sold under sin’ (Rom 7.14), this study seeks to identify additional echoes from LXX Isa 49.24–50.2 in Rom 7.14-25 and to interpret Paul's discourse in the light of the sin–exile–restoration paradigm implied by both the source's original context and Paul's own strategic use of Isaiah in his portrayal of the plight of ἐγώ. The identification of these echoes, it is suggested, aids in interpreting the story of ἐγώ by connecting the allusions to Israel'searlyhistory in Rom 7.7-13 to images of the nation'slaterhistory in 7.14-25, thus showing the speaker's plight under sin to be analogous to Israel's own experiences of deception, death, and exile.

Faulkner’s Jewel: Logos and the Word Made Flesh

INTRODUCTION: SEEKING A LIVING WORD From early in William Faulkner's career as a novelist, he wrote as a man troubled by very medium of language itself. Even prior to discovery of his apocryphal Yoknapatawpha County and masterful stories that would, in rapid-fire succession, quickly follow, he troubled by language's potential to remove human beings from necessary dynamism of lived experience. Nevertheless, he also discerned tremendous power of to manifest all that marks species as distinct. That is to say, humankind's dependence on left it precariously balanced between, on one side, disorder of sub-human existence and, on other side, mere lifeless abstraction, cut off from all vitality. (1) In his second novel, Mosquitoes, a work that predates imaginative return to what he called his postage stamp of native [Mississippi] soil, Faulkner explores nature of language that is both perilous and hopeful (Art). The peril is illustrated when narrator of Mosquitoes makes plain temptation toward despair in words: Talk, talk, talk: utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words. It seemed endless, as though it might go on forever. Ideas, thoughts, became mere sounds to be bandied about until they were dead (153). The sentiment is one that Faulkner harbors and which would be crucial throughout his career as a writer--that is, as a man of words: in transferring experience into speech, are prone to rob deeds of their vitality. Within talky narrative of Mosquitoes, (2) however, Faulkner offers his own possible answer--one easily enough discerned, but hardly achieved--in loquacious figure of Dawson Fairchild, a character who maintains a hope that words brought into a happy conjunction produce something that lives (173). The early novel, then, looks toward a new kind of writing that would seek to collapse word and deed, bringing into existence through language a new being that is vital and substantial. (3) Coinciding with this discovery of language's potential a return to his native region, which he would later rename Yoknapatawpha County. In a brief and prolific period, from January 1929 to October 1930, Faulkner published his first three Yoknapatawpha stories, with latter two, The Sound and Fury and As I Lay Dying, proving to be his first true masterpieces. Arguably, it is in these two novels that Faulkner's new conception of language moved to fore, serving as a central theme in each work. That is to say, The Sound and Fury and As I Lay Dying are, in many respects, novels about language and Faulkner's own struggle to produce works of art in line with his new conception of language. And weaving its way through two stories is metaphor of Jesus of Nazareth, who is presented in Christian Bible--particularly Johannine texts (4)--as incarnate utterance of God, divine logos, the Word that was made flesh, and dwelt among humankind (John 1.14). In Faulkner's novels, two characters serving as thematic foils are Quentin Compson in former and Jewel Bundren in latter; taken together, pair exemplifies two novels' contrapuntal relationship, revealing opposite reactions to necessity of human verbality. Understanding, then, each young character's response to humanity's dependence upon language is crucial, for in their attitudes toward words, Faulkner reveals a wrestling with himself, seeking to come to terms with inescapable dependence upon speech that is distinguishing characteristic of humankind. FAULKNER'S CHRIST FIGURES When taking stock of Faulkner's imaginative reserve, one might find Flannery O'Connor's description of American South, with slight modification, to be a strikingly appropriate description of novelist's mind: if not centered on biblical mythology, his imagination inescapably haunted by it. (5) Scriptural allusions are rife within his stories, occasionally even edging their way into works' titles, and Christian Gospels seem to be especially venerated throughout his career. …

Charles W. Chesnutt’s Prodigal Son: Scriptural Allusion and Ethnic Treason in "Uncle Wellington’s Wives"

Charles W. Chesnutt’s Prodigal Son: Scriptural Allusion and Ethnic Treason in "Uncle Wellington’s Wives"

“Ooftish”: Writing, Orality, and the Specter of Yiddish in an Early Poem by Samuel Beckett

This article discusses the 1938 poem “Ooftish,” Beckett's only work to use a Yiddish term. Its title derives from the expressions . The significance of these expressions, and the fact that Beckett only approximates their idiomatic usage, prompts a consideration of foreign-language titles in his early Anglophone poetry; this strategy signifies the deterritorialization of Beckett's English writing and figures the challenge of creating a poetic discourse between the abstractions of thought and the tangibility of experience. That dialectic finds resonance in the poem through a conflict between Jewish and Christian connotations of Scriptural allusion.

&lt;em&gt;Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing&lt;/em&gt;, by Kevin Mills

Reviewed by: Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing James Williams (bio) Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing, by Kevin Mills; pp. 228. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007, $49.50, £43.50. Kevin Mills's Approaching Apocalypse is a long overdue general study of an important subject: the widespread significance of biblical apocalyptic thought to Victorian literature. It is focused most importantly, of course, on Revelation. In his introduction, Mills wisely distances himself from the approach of simply listing and identifying scriptural allusions, instead preferring to explore texts that exemplify "a kind of affinity with the genre," and tracing how some of the concepts and themes that order apocalyptic literature play out across a range of materials (14). His chapters consider, respectively, the hazy border between the human and non-human; the trope of the desert as contrasted with (but paradoxically encountered within) the city; the idea of veiling and unveiling; the apocalyptic conception of time; and what Mills calls the "central margin" of apocalyptic, its self-identification and preoccupation with liminal spaces and states of being (20). The result is eclectic and exciting. Mills states at the outset, a touch apologetically, that the pursuit of deeper, less evidently elective affinities has led him "to produce detailed readings of texts whose relative unfamiliarity may appear to render their selection either arbitrary or even downright contrary" (31). This is in fact one of his study's strengths, with works such as James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night (1847), Florence Nightingale's Cassandra (1852), and Marie Corelli's The Sorrows of Satan (1895) receiving fruitful attention. Having said this, some of Mills's most persuasive and suggestive readings are of texts that would fall within almost any account of the Victorian canon, such as Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) and Jane Eyre (1847). So convincingly, in fact, does Mills make the case for the instrumental presence of Revelation in Charlotte Brontë's novel that he somewhat undermines his claim to eschew direct allusions in favor of less obvious apocalyptic "images and tendencies" (21). In fact, the risk in Mills's approach is not so much that he loses sight of what is central in Victorian literature as that he periodically loses sight of his own theme altogether. Chapter 1, for instance, purports to be about the apocalyptic blurring of the human and non-human (think here of the "living creatures" of Revelation 5:7; of Christ as variously man, lion, and lamb; of the beast of Revelation 13:1; and so on), a trope which Mills sees as inescapably bound up, for the Victorians, with Charles Darwin's re-imagining of natural history. So central, however, is Darwin to Mills's understanding of this theme that much of the chapter is given over to a discussion of the epistemological problems suggested by evolutionary theory and an extended meditation on the "tree of life" metaphor in On the Origin of Species (1859), leading ultimately to some remarks on the nature of metaphor itself and its relation to the analogical methodology of natural science (48). These are related issues, certainly, but for pages at a time the ostensible theme falls into the background. Similarly, much of chapter 2, on the trope of "the desert at the heart of the city" (18), is taken up discussing the literary uses of insomnia in The City of Dreadful Night and the possible literary and scriptural ramifications of sleep. This is not to say that these digressions are failures. On the contrary, they can be read with pleasure and profit: Mills's writing is often at its most lucid, searching, and forthright as he pursues these sidelines, and it is when we feel him pulling himself back to the framework of his argument that he can feel labored. While chapters 3 through 5 stay [End Page 338] much more resolutely on topic, these early divagations are more than merely incidental, pointing to a fundamental aspect of Mills's understanding of Victorian apocalypticism: its rangy connectivity and protean capacity for multiple significations. A phrase in his reading of Christina Rossetti is suggestive in this respect: "the rhetoric of depths appears subject to the kind...

Problemata Heloissae: Heloise's Zeal for the Scriptures

Both the early love letters of Heloise and Abelard, and their later correspondence, are suffused with the biblical text. In these collections, Heloise either refers directly or indirectly to the scriptures in order to sustain her arguments with Abelard, or as in the early love letters particularly, she moves freely in and out of either direct quotation of the scriptural texts or allusion to it, with the ease of any monastic writer of her era. However, it is in the Problemata Heloissae that we find direct evidence of Heloise's approach to the study of Scripture for her community of the Paraclete. The series of forty‐two questions raised in the Problemata reflects concerns with which Heloise had been preoccupied all her life and appear consistently within all her correspondence with Abelard. These concerns stressed the ethical interpretation of the Bible and focused on the struggle to maintain a life of inner integrity in the face of sin, and the meaning of love particularly as expressed by the “freedom of the Gospel.”

American Mordecai: Scriptural Allusion and the Work of Remembering in Lion Gardiner’s “Relation of the Pequot Warres”

Lion Gardiner’s “Relation of the Pequot Warres” is a written account of the Pequot War of 1636–38 and its aftermath, up to the date of the text’s composition in 1660. In it Gardiner makes several scriptural allusions, the most extensive of which is his comparison of the Montauk sachem Wyandanch (Waiandance) to Mordecai, the Jewish hero from the book of Esther. Although there are many early modern Protestant references to Mordecai and the Purim story, as well as New English Puritan descriptions of admirable Native American figures, Gardiner’s typological portrait of Wyandanch is remarkable for its enthusiastic embrace of indigenous alliance, as well as its open criticism of a New English political leadership that failed to recognize Wyandanch’s strategic value. Through the figure of Mordecai, who is both loyal servant and national hero, Gardiner could simultaneously pay tribute to Wyandanch and remind readers of his own role in ensuring the colonies’ survival.

Bishops on the Chair of Pestilence: Ambrosiaster's Polemical Exegesis of Psalm 1.1

This article examines Ambrosiaster's exegesis of Psalm 1 in his quaestio 110, focusing on his strikingly lengthy explanation of the cathedra pestilentiae of Ps 1.1. It locates his interpretation of the cathedra pestilentiae in a particular tradition of Latin anti-heretical scriptural allusion: Cyprian's polemic against rigorists and Optatus of Milevis's denunciation of Donatist antibishops. This illuminates the likely target of this passage as the Donatist antibishop of Rome in the late 370s, Claudian. However, the connections between q. 110 and other quaestiones suggest that Ambrosiaster may also have had the Novatianists in his sights.

The Hebrew Bible as Weapon of Faith in Late Medieval Iberia: Irony, Satire, and Scriptural Allusion in Profiat Duran's Al Tehi ka-Avotekha

The Hebrew Bible as Weapon of Faith in Late Medieval Iberia: Irony, Satire, and Scriptural Allusion in Profiat Duran's Al Tehi ka-Avotekha, 10.1628/094457011796019674, Jahrgang 18 (2011) / Heft 2, 0944-5706 (1868-6788)

The Woman's Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada (review)

Reviewed by: The Woman's Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada Jordan Stouck The Woman's Page: Journalism and Rhetoric in Early Canada. By Janice Fiamengo . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 257 pp. $62, $26.95. How did Canadian women journalists in the late 1800s and early 1900s create public personas when no such female voices had existed before them? What rhetorical tactics did they use to achieve not only a place from which to speak but also a wide-ranging popularity among readers and listeners when women were not yet allowed to vote or officially participate in public life? Janice Fiamengo's The Woman's Page goes some way to answering these questions through her analysis of rhetorical self-fashioning in early Canadian women's journalism, essays, and public performances. I say "some way" without criticism, as one of the most powerful claims in Fiamengo's work is that more such analysis needs to be done, particularly in considering the individual strategies of these women. That said, Fiamengo makes an invaluable start in considering the writings and performances of Agnes Machar, [End Page 191] Sarah Jeanette Duncan, Pauline Johnson, Kit Coleman, Flora MacDonald Denison, and Nellie McClung for how they constructed public personas while carefully balancing the expectations of a diverse public and the reactions of anti-feminist opponents. As the "woman question" surrounding enfranchisement became a topic for public debate, Fiamengo shows how Machar, Duncan, Johnson, Coleman, Denison, and McClung skilfully manipulated public opinion, constructing womanly but also revolutionary and socially influential identities through a series of performative rhetorical postures. Fiamengo explains how Agnes Machar, for instance, wrote articles in the 1890s for a variety of periodicals in which she constructed a radical Christian identity, using scriptural allusion, metaphor, and close analyses to gain moral authority over her audience. In contrast, Sarah Jeannette Duncan used tactics of parody and irony in her early career as a Globe columnist to create a public identity that was unsentimental and unconventional, but nevertheless humorous and widely read. Pauline Johnson's self-fashioning has perhaps received the most previous critical attention, but Fiamengo argues that Johnson was, above all, an effective rhetorician, presenting her cross-cultural Métis heritage in poems and prose pieces (several published in popular magazines and newspapers) as "conciliatory but ... also unsettling" (104). Kit Coleman was immensely popular in her role as women's advice columnist for the Toronto Daily Mail (later the Mail and Empire), where she created an empathetic yet morally-decisive womanly persona. Flora MacDonald Denison's 1909-13 column in the Toronto Sunday World was in large part a forum for her radical feminist views, which she constructed as a holy war led against an apathetic population. Meanwhile, Nellie McClung recast stereotypes in her orations against conservative Manitoba premier Sir Rodmond Roblin, Fiamengo argues, using a structure of humorous engagement and logical argument, then emotional appeals and calls to action to create compelling pro-suffrage speeches. McClung's rhetoric of the "fair deal" for all, regardless of "race, colour and creed" (as well as sex) had lasting impact, making her one of the founders of Canadian equal rights (206). While these writers sometimes overlap in applying metaphors of housecleaning and maternity to the nation, as well as in valuing both religious and secular social commitment, Fiamengo stresses their distinct strategies of self-presentation and the ways in which they forever changed newspaper discourse, forging public roles for women. For readers interested in the development of female voices in early North American periodicals as well as in the history of Canadian journalism, Fiamengo's study offers valuable insights. Her close analyses of the rhetorical tactics used by these women journalists and orators are particularly enlightening and nicely balanced against discussion of the ideological issues of the day. Indeed, as Fiamengo notes, much criticism to date has not only overlooked these and other women journalists [End Page 192] but has been ideologically rather than rhetorically oriented, making the kind of analysis in which she engages even more important. In this spirit of scholarly exploration, I might suggest that the different genres of isolated editorial, ongoing social commentary, public performance, advice column, and political oration...

Commemoration, Representation and Interpretation: Augustine of Hippo’s Depictions of the Martyrs

Recent studies of martyrdom in early Christianity look beyond the traditional perception of martyractaandpassionesas historical documents that can help us to reconstruct the past. While previously these texts had been deemed worthy of attention on account of their proven authenticity or historical veracity, now they are all valued as important sources that have much to tell us about the communities and environments in which they were produced. This approach does not deny the historical value of the sources, but rather it appreciates that they are a special kind of historical document. Texts and sermons about holy men and women never were created as objective accounts. Every textual portrait of a martyr reveals a prior judgement that inscribes meaning and purpose into seemingly meaningless events to present condemned criminals as religious heroes, horrific tortures as divine gifts, and public deaths as cosmic dramas. Consequently, the various methods of representation that were used to construct depictions of the martyrs are significant elements in their own right, whether they are rhetorical devices, scriptural allusions, artistic embellishments or miraculous occurrences. These are the very details that make martyrs; they turn death into martyrdom, and the dead into martyrs.

Melville and Religious Experience: A Response

s ALA 2010—San Francisco Melville and Religious Experience CHAIR: BRIAN YOTHERS, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO Participants in “Melville and Religious Experience” panel at ALA 2010, from left to right: William E. Engel, Jonathan A. Cook, Richard Hardack, Peter Norberg, Brian Yothers. F ew writers have engaged more subtly or more broadly with the subject of religious experience than Melville. On both a cognitive and an affective level, Melville’s work is in dialogue with a staggering range of religious traditions. Panelists were invited to consider the following C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 131 E X T R A C T S questions: How does Melville represent belief, unbelief, and tensions and accommodations between the two? Within the context of American Protestant religious culture, what roles do Calvinism, Arminianism, Unitarianism, or Methodism play in Melville’s art? How does Melville negotiate the relationship between the universal and the particular in his treatment of religious experience ? To what degree is Melville’s representation of religious experience fluid over the course of his career? To what degree does his religious thought remain consistent? The panel illuminated one of the most vexed areas of Melville scholarship: the nature of Melville’s responses to ideas, texts, and individuals associated with multiple religious traditions across his career. Melville’s Miltonic Notion of Providence: A Case Study of Moby-Dick, Chapters 82-83 William E. Engel University of the South M ilton’s Calvinist notion of prevenient grace, fundamental to his epic’s recessed theological armature, became a topic for the most serious kind of jesting in Moby-Dick. I seek to clarify Milton’s ideas about providence (especially that mode of grace that anticipates repentance), and then to indicate the extent to which this theme is appropriated and inscribed in Moby-Dick. Focusing on Melville’s use of the Old Testament, Jonah in particular, I assess Melville’s own brand of serio-comic biblical exegesis, which is indebted to Milton’s idiosyncratic shuffling of doctrines and is consonant with his confident yoking of classical and scriptural allusions. Not only is this seen in Melville’s linking of Perseus and Jonah in the role-call of the first whalers (NN Moby-Dick 361-62), but also in his reference, from the very outset, to the “police officer of the Fates” (NN Moby-Dick 7). Three main passages in Paradise Lost, when seen together, triangulate Milton’s complicated theology, especially where salvation is concerned. The first indicates that some God has created the Elect and will protect them from all inclination to sin owing to “special grace” (PL 2.1030-33). A pronouncement from God the Father describes a “peculiar grace” for those “Elect above the rest” (PL 3.183-84). The last concerns “prevenient Grace” finding its way to Adam and Eve, which “descending had removed / The stony from their hearts” (PL 11.3-5). Milton’s theology is an amalgam of traditional Old Faith Catholicism in the style of Augustine, austere Calvinist doctrine that differentiates between the Elect and the non-Elect (thus abrogating the need for free will), and Arminianism, based on the ideas of the Dutch reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), who broke with the Calvinist mainstream. Melville was 132 L E V I A T H A N A B S T R A C T S reared in the Dutch Reformed church and would have been thoroughly familiar with the main tenets of both Calvin and Arminius. Like his namesake in the Old Testament, Ahab rejects reconciliation, let alone salvation; he is hell-bent on wreaking vengeance and willing to die exercising his will. Whatever else we may think of the albino whale, “cetology is code for theology”; like the Arminian view of God, the whale tests, though does not control, the resolve, will, and faith of its mortal pursuers. Comparative Religion and Competing Orthodoxies in Melville’s Clarel Peter Norberg Saint Joseph’s...

Melville and Religious Experience

s ALA 2010—San Francisco Melville and Religious Experience CHAIR: BRIAN YOTHERS, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO Participants in “Melville and Religious Experience” panel at ALA 2010, from left to right: William E. Engel, Jonathan A. Cook, Richard Hardack, Peter Norberg, Brian Yothers. F ew writers have engaged more subtly or more broadly with the subject of religious experience than Melville. On both a cognitive and an affective level, Melville’s work is in dialogue with a staggering range of religious traditions. Panelists were invited to consider the following C 2010 The Authors Journal compilation C 2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 131 E X T R A C T S questions: How does Melville represent belief, unbelief, and tensions and accommodations between the two? Within the context of American Protestant religious culture, what roles do Calvinism, Arminianism, Unitarianism, or Methodism play in Melville’s art? How does Melville negotiate the relationship between the universal and the particular in his treatment of religious experience ? To what degree is Melville’s representation of religious experience fluid over the course of his career? To what degree does his religious thought remain consistent? The panel illuminated one of the most vexed areas of Melville scholarship: the nature of Melville’s responses to ideas, texts, and individuals associated with multiple religious traditions across his career. Melville’s Miltonic Notion of Providence: A Case Study of Moby-Dick, Chapters 82-83 William E. Engel University of the South M ilton’s Calvinist notion of prevenient grace, fundamental to his epic’s recessed theological armature, became a topic for the most serious kind of jesting in Moby-Dick. I seek to clarify Milton’s ideas about providence (especially that mode of grace that anticipates repentance), and then to indicate the extent to which this theme is appropriated and inscribed in Moby-Dick. Focusing on Melville’s use of the Old Testament, Jonah in particular, I assess Melville’s own brand of serio-comic biblical exegesis, which is indebted to Milton’s idiosyncratic shuffling of doctrines and is consonant with his confident yoking of classical and scriptural allusions. Not only is this seen in Melville’s linking of Perseus and Jonah in the role-call of the first whalers (NN Moby-Dick 361-62), but also in his reference, from the very outset, to the “police officer of the Fates” (NN Moby-Dick 7). Three main passages in Paradise Lost, when seen together, triangulate Milton’s complicated theology, especially where salvation is concerned. The first indicates that some God has created the Elect and will protect them from all inclination to sin owing to “special grace” (PL 2.1030-33). A pronouncement from God the Father describes a “peculiar grace” for those “Elect above the rest” (PL 3.183-84). The last concerns “prevenient Grace” finding its way to Adam and Eve, which “descending had removed / The stony from their hearts” (PL 11.3-5). Milton’s theology is an amalgam of traditional Old Faith Catholicism in the style of Augustine, austere Calvinist doctrine that differentiates between the Elect and the non-Elect (thus abrogating the need for free will), and Arminianism, based on the ideas of the Dutch reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), who broke with the Calvinist mainstream. Melville was 132 L E V I A T H A N A B S T R A C T S reared in the Dutch Reformed church and would have been thoroughly familiar with the main tenets of both Calvin and Arminius. Like his namesake in the Old Testament, Ahab rejects reconciliation, let alone salvation; he is hell-bent on wreaking vengeance and willing to die exercising his will. Whatever else we may think of the albino whale, “cetology is code for theology”; like the Arminian view of God, the whale tests, though does not control, the resolve, will, and faith of its mortal pursuers. Comparative Religion and Competing Orthodoxies in Melville’s Clarel Peter Norberg Saint Joseph’s...

Scriptural Allusions in the Writings of D.W. Winnicott

Scriptural Allusions in the Writings of D.W. Winnicott