Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Change and Exchange

Subha Mukherji, Dunstan Roberts, Rebecca Tomlin, George Oppitz-Trotman, Subha Mukherji, Dunstan Roberts, Rebecca Tomlin, George Oppitz-Trotman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030376512
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Placing 'literature' at the centre of Renaissance economic knowledge, this book offers a distinct intervention in the history of early modern epistemology. It is premised on the belief that early modern practices of change and exchange produced a range of epistemic shifts and crises, which, nonetheless, lacked a systematic vocabulary. These essays collectively tap into the imaginative kernel at the core of economic experience, to grasp and give expression to some of its more elusive experiential dimensions. The essays gathered here probe the early modern interface between imaginative and mercantile knowledge, between technologies of change in the field of commerce and transactions in the sphere of cultural production, and between forms of transaction and representation. In the process, they go beyond the specific interrelation of economic life and literary work to bring back into view the thresholds between economics on the one hand, and religious, legal and natural philosophical epistemologies on the other.

Wondrous Exchanges

© The Author(s) 2020

S. Mukherji et al. (eds.)Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern EuropeCrossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature2https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37651-2_9

Begin Abstract

‘Mirifica commutatio’: The Economy of Salvation in Reformation Theology

Torrance Kirby¹

(1)

School of Religious Studies, McGill University, Montreal, PQ, Canada

Torrance Kirby

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

This theme of ‘Change and Exchange’, and of their implicit interrelation, has a deep resonance with theological questions and concerns at the ‘Crossroads of Knowledge’ in the early modern period. ‘Change’ or transformation in the context of sixteenth-century religious culture is frequently construed in a discourse of conversion, understood on occasion as a sudden transformation or reorientation, and alternatively, as a gradual, ongoing process of readjustment of behaviour. Change of religious orientation can be cognitive or habitual, passive or active, and depends upon a whole range of moral ontological assumptions. ‘Exchange’ also holds a significant place in the realm of religious and theological discussion. In the course of his explication of the exercise of the ‘publique offices of Religion’ in the fifth book of his treatise Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie (1597), Richard Hooker remarks that solemn places of worship are purposely designed ‘for mutual conference and as it were commerce to be had between God and us’.¹

For what is the assembling of the Church to learn, but the receiving of Angels descended from above? What to pray, but the sending of Angels upward? His heavenly inspirations and our holy desires are as so many Angels of intercourse and commerce between God and us.²

The notion of religious practice as in some sense modelled upon a mercantile transaction between mortals and divinity—Hooker’s ‘angelic commerce’, as it were—is deeply rooted in Judæo-Christian tradition. In the Book of Genesis we read about God’s covenant with Noah: after his deliverance, Noah built an altar to the Lord:

I will establish my covenant with you, neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.³

Genesis also records a covenant with Abraham with a promise of blessing: ‘I will make of thee a great nation’⁴; Abraham performs a sacrifice and in return receives a promise of land: ‘in the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates’. When Abraham offers to sacrifice Isaac, he is promised the multiplication of his seed ‘as the stars of the heaven’.⁵ There is a further covenant negotiated with Moses whereby Israel is designated ‘a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation; if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine’.⁶ Yahweh instituted a priestly covenant (

brith ha-kehuna) with Aaron and his descendants, and another with David which establishes his kingship and that of his descendants in the united monarchy of Israel.⁷ John the Baptist prophesied a new covenant,⁸ a covenant which Christ later confirms.⁹ The latter covenant, executed in blood, has a sacramental character: ‘this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood’.¹⁰ Does this scriptural covenantal exchange imply change? And are change and exchange somehow mutually implicated? Adherence to such covenants requires a specific orientation of the agents or commercial partners in the angelic commerce; to what extent and in what precise fashion does such exchange presuppose change, transformation, reorientation, conversion?

Economy of Salvation

The scriptural ‘economy of salvation’ may be described as an instance of Charles Taylor’s concept of a ‘moral ontology’. In his book Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Taylor employs the language of Hans-Georg Gadamer in explaining moral ontology as:

…the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand […] To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary.¹¹

The concept of the soul’s transformation through conversion or repentance is implicated in the heavenly commerce—of covenant, contract, treaty, pact, or bond. Moreover, this linkage of ‘change and exchange’ holds considerable significance not only in the biblical narrative, but also in theological reflection upon that narrative. Underlying the covenantal relationship, there is the presupposition of an ‘economy of salvation’. The term oikonomia, which appears in Aristotle’s Politics, refers of course to the regulation of the household (oikia). The entire creation is, by analogy, the household of the creator. How does this divine economy operate? Richard Hooker’s account of the bond uniting creature to creator carries with it an ontological supposition. Addressing the ontology of creation, Hooker observes that:

All other things that are of God have God in them and he them in himself likewise. Yet because their substance and his wholly differs, their coherence and communion either with him or among themselves is in no sort like to that before mentioned. God has his influence into the very essence of all things, without which influence of deity supporting them their utter annihilation could not choose but follow. Of him all things have both received their first being and their continuance to be that which they are. All things are therefore partakers of God, they are his offspring, his influence is in them, and the personal wisdom of God is for that very cause said to excel in nimbleness or agility (Wisdom 7:23), to pierce into all intellectual pure and subtle spirits, to go through all, and to reach to everything which is. Otherwise how should the same wisdom be that which supports (Hebr. 1:3), bears up, and sustains all?¹²

On Hooker’s account, the divine economy is founded upon the love that the Father bears towards the Son through whom, as the Wisdom of God, the eternal Logos, the creation is brought forth.

Again since all things do accordingly love their offspring as themselves are more or less contained in it, he which is thus the only begotten must needs be in this degree the only beloved of the father. He therefore which is in the father by eternal derivation of being and life from him must needs be in him through an eternal affection of love.¹³

Thus, according to the law of the divine economy, God loves the creation as his own possession or property, indeed as himself:

All things which God in their times and seasons has brought forth were eternally and before all times in God as a work unbegun is in the artificer which afterward brings it to effect. Therefore whatsoever we do behold now in this present world, it was enwrapped within the bowels of divine mercy, written in the book of eternal wisdom, and held in the hands of omnipotent power, the first foundations of the world being as yet unlaid.¹⁴

The ontological horizon within which Richard Hooker takes his stand is broadly shared by his contemporaries, both by religious reformers and by adherents to the Council of Trent. Where the reformers and the traditionalists differ is mainly in their understanding of how the economy of salvation operates within this horizon. Despite their broad agreement on the ontological framework of the economy of salvation, there is marked disagreement between them concerning the actual means of salvation. Soteriological disagreement in the sixteenth-century hinges upon interpretation of the precise manner of the communication of divine grace to humanity. Where Luther, Calvin, and their magisterial Protestant adherents insist upon salvation by (1) Christ alone (solus Christus), (2) through grace alone (sola gratia), (3) by means of faith alone (sola fide), (4) revealed in scripture alone (sola scriptura), and (5) ultimately caused from outside history by God’s predestining will alone (soli Deo gloria), the Council of Trent argued a very different position in response. For Tridentine Catholics, salvation depended upon a contrary set of assumptions, namely (1) the necessary mediation of salvation by the Church hierarchical with its intricate medieval apparatus of the sacraments (lex divinitatis), (2) the cooperation of divine grace with human nature in order to bring the faithful to perfection by steps and degrees (gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit), (3) the consequent requirement of good works in addition to faith in order to merit salvation (meritum de condigno), (4) the affirmation of the traditions and teaching authority (magisterium) of the Church as essential to the interpretation of scripture and the continuing definition of saving dogma, and finally (5) the premise that God’s saving purpose presupposed a disposition within the soul capable of re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Change and Exchange: Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe
• Generic Conversions
• Affective Changes
• Wondrous Exchanges
• Back Matter