Reading Genesis in the Long Eighteenth Century

From Milton to Mary Shelley

Ana M. Acosta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351906555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft

In a reassessment of the long-accepted division between religion and enlightenment, Ana Acosta here traces a tissue of readings and adaptations of Genesis and Scriptural language from Milton through Rousseau to Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. Acosta's interdisciplinary approach places these writers in the broader context of eighteenth-century political theory, biblical criticism, religious studies and utopianism. Acosta's argument is twofold: she establishes the importance of Genesis within utopian thinking, in particular the influential models of Milton and Rousseau; and she demonstrates that the power of these models can be explained neither by traditional religious paradigms nor by those of religion or philosophy. In establishing the relationship between biblical criticism and republican utopias, Acosta makes a solid case that important utopian visions are better understood against the background of Genesis interpretation. This study opens a new perspective on theories of secularization, and as such will interest scholars of religious studies, intellectual history, and philosophy as well as of literary studies.

Chapter 1
Origin Is the Goal: Genesis in the Eighteenth Century

Man creates in a truly grand way only in the beginning; in every domain, only the first step is valid through and through. The ones that follow after are tentative and repentant, spending their time in recuperating plot by plot the territory left behind … The grandeur associated with beginnings is so sure-footed that even the mistakes, because of their novelty, continue to overwhelm us with their beauty.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955)

Navel-Gazing

During the long eighteenth century, the practice of reading Genesis changed dramatically. The field of biblical criticism registered this change in formal terms as it began to argue that scripture was a composite text built out of distinct editorial strands. In 1753, the French physician Jean Astruc became the first exponent of what has since become known as the documentary hypothesis when he identified two different original narratives within the book of Genesis. Published anonymously, Astruc’s Conjectures is an oddity in the work of a man known primarily for his second-hand erudition and theoretical conservatism in the realm of medicine.¹ His manual of obstetrics, for example, widely translated and highly regarded at the time, was also criticized for two reasons: his open admission that he had never himself delivered a child, and a lengthy exegetical digression to explain how Adam and Eve, born without umbilical cords, knew what to do nonetheless during the delivery of Cain, their first-born.² In the apparent eccentricity of his insistence on taking scripture literally as medical evidence, Astruc exemplifies the difficulty of defining Enlightenment in any simple way.³ Although state-of-the-art in its review of contemporary medical science, the guide nevertheless violated two commonplaces of scientific rationalism: the necessity of hands-on experience, and the rejection of the authority of the Bible.

Astruc’s Conjectures poses a similar problem of categorization: although fully cognizant of recent developments in the historical and linguistic methodology of biblical criticism, Astruc continued to adhere to an orthodox understanding of the privileged epistemological status of scripture. Astruc’s hypothesis itself was the most recent solution proposed to explain an old dilemma: the apparent inconsistencies, repetitions, and stylistic differences in the Genesis text.⁴ The kernel of Astruc’s proposition was that Moses composed Genesis out of two original sources, or mémoires. The insight came less from lengthy analysis than from a shift in the interpretative paradigm:

This enterprise was not as difficult as one would have thought. I only had to join together all the places where God is consistently called Elohim: I placed these in one column which I called A, and I regarded them as so many pieces, or if you like, fragments of an original mémoire, here designated by the letter A. I placed next to it, in another column which I call B, all the other places, where God is always given the name of Jehovah, and here I assembled all the pieces, or at least, all the fragments of a second mémoire, B. In doing this, I paid no attention to the chapter divisions of Genesis, or the verse divisions of the chapters, because it is certain that these are recent and arbitrary.⁵

Mémoires A, the Elohim strand, and B, the Yahweh strand, would later be referred to as P (Priestly) and J (according to the German spelling of Yahweh), respectively, following the nineteenth-century German biblical scholars Graf and Wellhausen.⁶ What is most telling about Astruc’s new division of Genesis is not so much that he invented the prototypes of P and J, however, but that by changing the visual appearance of the text, he established that nothing about it was, so to speak, written in stone. Scripture had become malleable: chapter and verse could be dismissed as “recent and arbitrary divisions,” and the formal layout could be radically recast as an unevenly matched pair of columns composed of fragments of text and empty space.

The peculiarity of Astruc’s argument was that he continued to maintain that Moses was the only author of the Pentateuch, even as his methodology assumed layers of rewriting and earlier structures that underlay and superseded the canonical text. On the issue of authorship, in fact, Astruc was quite conservative, observing that it had been all the rage in the previous century to disprove Moses’ authorship, but that he had no such intention.⁷ Hobbes in 1651 and Spinoza in 1670, for example, had questioned Moses’ status, though neither specifically discussed the question of various authors and documents.⁸ In his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), the Oratorian priest Richard Simon had argued that the Hebrew texts were so fraught with inconsistencies, errors of transmission, and other examples of textual corruption that they could not be understood without the interpretative tradition of the Catholic Church. The combination of heterodoxy and piety in Simon’s theory of authorship is almost as fascinating as Astruc’s defense of Moses: he conducted a rigorous philological, syntactic, and grammatical analysis of all of the available translations and original documents, all the while insisting that the Old Testament was not a secular document but was the work of Moses and the Prophets in the capacity of divinely inspired scribes.⁹

Although Astruc’s study is invariably cited as a groundbreaking essay, it is seldom actually read. In-depth discussion of what has become known as the documentary hypothesis began later in the century with more academic and easily definable scholars such as J.C. Eichhorn, whose approach heralded the philological school that would be known as higher biblical criticism.¹⁰ It is too easy to relegate Astruc to a note, as the historian H.G. Reventlow does in his magisterial study of biblical interpretation from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century; for it is through their apparently awkward attempts to reconcile the polarities of eighteenth-century thought that such figures as Astruc remain relevant.¹¹ The documentary hypothesis marked an important change in attitude toward scripture, shifting the burden of interpretation away from a series of recounted events and toward a linguistic text that could be taken apart and examined in layers. In the same way, the study of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament began to be dissociated from the concerns of theology, and the field of theology began to be administratively cut off from the rest of the humanities.¹²

While Simon and others had mobilized what would become known as higher criticism on behalf of theological arguments, Astruc pointed toward the nineteenth-century endeavor to wholly sever biblical philology from theology.¹³ The eminent Scottish Hebraist and Roman Catholic priest Alexander Geddes shows evidence of this growing possibility of separating the Bible from religious faith in his 1780 translation and commentary of the Pentateuch, where he argues that the principles of reason require a radical reassessment of the Old Testament as a basis for belief:

The gospel of Jesus is my religious code: his doctrines are my dearest delight: “his yoke (to me) is easy, and this burden is light:” but this yoke I would not put on; these doctrines I could not admire; that gospel I would not make my law, if Reason, pure Reason, were not my prompter and preceptress. … In the Hebrew scriptures are many beauties, many excellent precepts, much sound morality: and they deserve the attentive perusal of every scholar, every person of curiosity and taste. All those good things I admit, and admire, and would equally admire them in the writings of Plato, Tully, or Marcus Antoninus: but there are other things, in great abundance, which I can neither admire nor admit without renouncing common sense, and superseding reason: a sacrifice which I am not disposed to make, for any writing in the world.¹⁴

Belief in the Old Testament is no longer a priori identical with the belief in God, but neither, evidently, does the secular study of scripture guarantee diminished religiosity. Scripture did not simply disappear as the traditional sense of its authority was revised; instead, it became newly available to different forms of interpretation and appropriation.

Three primary interpretative approaches to scripture can be seen in the eighteenth century, none of which necessarily precludes religious belief. The first approach, now termed biblicism, derives from the traditional Judeo-Christian, typological conception of history, in which each event remains immediately applicable to the present, no matter the spatial and temporal distance involved. Viewed holistically, the Bible generates meaning through the formal resonances of its episodes, characters, and language. The resonances of this structural, thematic, and rhetorical effect equally extend beyond the text itself, encouraging people at any place within history to identify their situations directly with types within scripture. A key example of the literal application of biblical types to the present day can be found in Reformation writers such as Tyndale and Luther, who used scripture to define their schism from the Roman Catholic Church as a new covenant with God on the model of the Old Testament Patriarchs and prophetic figures such as Jonah. If the newly reformed nations perceived themselves as the Israelites, then Papal Rome now became Edom or the whore of Babylon, and Catholicism in general the idolatrous Aaronic religion. As we shall see later, Milton, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, and Shelley employ a prophetic voice to appropriate the same typological structure, but in order to replace, rather than work within, the framework of religious practice and dogma. Biblicism continued in its familiar form as well, but what had been the primary mode of exegesis was for the most part compartmentalized, and it is now referred to generally as fundamentalism.

The other two approaches require the consciousness of the Bible as a document produced out of historical contingency, rather than the typological or biblicist consciousness of scripture as a living text. Following a principle of rationality or common sense, Enlightenment writers as diverse as Geddes and Kant used a selective approach to scripture, choosing to retain what fit their principle and dismissing anything else. The other primary approach is termed “Orientalism,” the study of the biblical languages in concrete geographical and linguistic relationship to Semitic and other ancient cultures. In both of these methods, the Bible is seen to be situated linearly in the remote past of an ongoing history: hence Geddes can now sever the New Testament from the Old, and can dissect the Pentateuch into the parts that are still relevant and those that are archaic; hence Astruc can rearrange the layout and taxonomize the “divine names.” Thus contextualized, the Bible loses its privileged status as a text that stands outside human contingency.¹⁵

As a consequence of this historicist methodological stance, contemporary biblical criticism now accepts that from the beginning of its codification as a text, the Hebrew Bible was subject to rewriting by its redactors, however modestly we assess their creative contribution. The earliest surviving manuscripts, dating from the second-century CE, were compiled in the Masoretic text only between the ninth and eleventh centuries. As a result, errors of transmission, not to mention the enormous changes wrought by myriad translations (both Jewish and Christian), introduced cultural, linguistic, and even gender specificity into the printed versions. At the same time, countless traditions of interpretation have further encircled and influenced the already fraught question of textual transmission. The eighteenth-century material examined here is only one example in a long history of the interplay between scripture and social praxis; however, it also constitutes a crucial moment in that history. To account for the cruces within the first three chapters of Genesis by splitting up their authorship is a symptomatically Enlightenment gesture, but it remains a useful explanation here for two reasons: first, because it continues to frame the discussions of mainstream biblical criticism to this day; second, because it makes visible a fundamental rhetorical effect of the book of Genesis itself. In whatever edition, Genesis confronts the reader with a number of problems that, far from being resolved, continue to resurface, if always under a different guise.

Split Infinities

The first three chapters of Genesis describe the universal origins of humanity through the narrative of the creation, the fall, and exile into the world; the remainder of Genesis is more specifically devoted to ancient Hebrew history and the lives of the Patriarchs within that world. Long before the documentary hypothesis gave it a name, the interpretative crux of these three chapters had been the two significantly different accounts of the creation of mankind. In the first account, we find, “And God said let us make man in our image, after our likeness … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (1:26–27).¹⁶ In the second account, by contrast, Adam is created first, “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (2:7), and Eve is created fourteen verses later. The text reads as follows:

And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. (2:18)

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

And Adam said, This is n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• A Note on Texts and Translations
• Introduction: West of Eden
• 1 Origin Is the Goal: Genesis in the Eighteenth Century
• 2 Dr. Milton’s Guide; or, the Utopia Within
• 3 The Passion of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; or, the Dystopia Within
• 4 Wollstonecraft’s Body Politics; or, Philosophy in the Bedroom
• 5 Frankenstein; or, L’Education des habitantsd’une petite ville au pied des Alpes
• Bibliography
• Index