The Revelation of Imagination: From Homer and the Bible through Virgil and Augustine to Dante

by William Franke

Overview

In The Revelation of Imagination, William Franke attempts to focus on what is enduring and perennial rather than on what is accommodated to the agenda of the moment. Franke’s book offers re-actualized readings of representative texts from the Bible, Homer, and Virgil to Augustine and Dante. The selections are linked together in such a way as to propose a general interpretation of knowledge. They emphasize, moreover, a way of articulating the connection of humanities knowledge with what may, in various senses, be called divine revelation. This includes the sort of inspiration to which poets since Homer have typically laid claim, as well as that proper to the biblical tradition of revealed religion. The Revelation of Imagination invigorates the ongoing discussion about the value of humanities as a source of enduring knowledge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810131828
Publisher:	Northwestern University Press
Publication date:	08/17/2015
Edition description:	1
Pages:	424
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

WILLIAM FRANKE is a professor of comparative literature and religious studies at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and a professor of philosophy and religions at the University of Macao in China.

Read an Excerpt

The Revelation of Imagination

From Homer and the Bible through Virgil and Augustine to Dante

---

By William Franke

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2015 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3182-8

---

CHAPTER 1

Humanities Tradition and the Bible

I. The Bible as Exemplary Humanities Text

Certain distinctive qualities of knowledge in the humanities were understood more profoundly, or at least more intriguingly, in antiquity and the Middle Ages than they are today. This applies particularly to the knowledge conveyed through literary texts. The nature of such knowledge has in some ways been obscured through the scientific approach of modern philology. With the rise of modern empirical science as the dominant paradigm for knowing, texts are taken as specimens for analysis and are dissected according to the will and criteria of a knowing subject considered to be wholly external to them. Previously, it was possible for the text to exercise sovereign authority in determining its own meaning and in interrogating the reader and potentially challenging the reader's insight and very integrity.

Bound up with this sovereignty, the poetic text was capable of assuming a theological aura. This is most evident and explicit in the case of the Bible as paradigmatic text. However, before the secularist turn of culture in modernity, certain other literary texts, too, were attributed a quasi-prophetic authority and revelatory power. They were treated as authoritative sources of an event of truth in a sense that we are now in a position to recover thanks to what can be called the post-secular turn of postmodern culture. Part of my purpose in what follows is to extend from the Bible to the humanities fields and literature more broadly an approach freed from secularist dogmas that reduce texts to inert objects for our examination, thereby exorcizing their authoritative voices and preempting their ability to speak to us and so to structure the encounter with the reader in their own way.

Rather than understanding the humanities as some lesser kind of science, a clumsy application of scientific method to a more recalcitrant sort of material, I propose to understand the whole liberal arts curriculum (which traditionally included the language arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, but also the quantitative sciences of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music) from the point of view of the humanities. Seen from this angle, liberal learning in science and arts alike shows up as driven by the human interests that motivate all search for knowledge. Such knowledge, moreover, as is clearest in the case of the knowledge gained through humanities texts, turns out always to be in some way self-knowledge — a knowing of one's own limits and of one's place in the overall scheme of things. This is what used to be called "wisdom" — or, in the Latin humanist tradition, sapientia.

Taken as reflecting on ourselves, humanities texts are not objects of scientific analysis so much as partners in dialogue. If this is so, their meaning must change over the course of history, for it depends essentially on how they are read by diverse readers who exist in changing historical contexts. Reading is a process of projection, of finding oneself and one's human concerns in the world projected by the text, as well as of mapping the text's concerns onto one's own world of experience. Even if the text, as a sequence of markings, stays literally the same, humanity or the individual reader, the other partner in the dialogue, undergoes continual change. The text's meaning changes, accordingly, with each new interpreter and with each new era of interpretation, and this mobility belongs to its own internal life and structure. The dimension of reading, taken as intrinsic to the text, lends it its dynamism and living significance.

The Bible is arguably the most eminent example of this life-process inherent in a work that is passed down from generation to generation. It embodies the relationship of Israel to its past and to its tradition not as an artifact available for objective analysis but as a partner in dialogue. The Bible, moreover, presents itself as a dialogue between divinity and human beings interpreting their common life as a response to God's calling. There is thus also an explicitly theological frame for the "dialogue" within the Bible between numerous different phases and strata of a people's history. This history extends far beyond biblical times and indeed all the way to our own contemporary world, since in each period the dialogue has to be renewed on the basis of new situations and sensibilities, both within faith communities themselves and in their broader cultural contexts. This history must always be appropriated anew in every age in order to achieve its full meaning. Only so may it truly be said that the Word "became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).

This phrase has specific doctrinal meaning when read in the context of particular confessional communities, such as churches, but it also announces a general interpretive principle: the meaning of tradition is experienced only in its application to life in the present. This application is carried out by countless communities in different contexts and, in the end, also by single individuals. Individuals must appropriate the words of Scripture — make them "flesh" and give them a meaning in terms of their own lives.

As the "Word of God," therefore, the Bible provides a uniquely privileged model for humanities texts, specifically for their establishing a dialogue with the reader, the one to whom they are addressed. The very notion of the book as such — as authoritative, as not just an object among objects, but as circumscribing and transcending them, and as the voice of Truth — is intimately bound up with the example of the Bible and with the influence it has exerted down through the ages. In religious and in secular spheres alike, the Bible is somehow not on a par with other books. And yet the Bible, as a "great book" in this tradition of texts embodying a revelation of truth living in history through reinterpretation in continually changing contexts, is exemplary of what holds for the rest as well: we can and, I submit, should learn to read other great books of imagination as revelatory in a similar sense. This book, proverbially the Book, is absolutely fundamental, not only to religion but also to the whole secular tradition of Western humanities, which it thereby exposes as far from purely secular after all. Divine revelation in the Bible, rather than being lost or denied, is compellingly realized through its endless worldly transmogrifications as interpreted from age to age and across cultures.

Despite its unrivaled authoritativeness, this imposing book, perhaps more than any other, has undergone continuous transformation. In the first place, this is so because the Bible is deeply enmeshed in the process not only of linguistic but also of cultural translation. To begin with just the linguistic level, it is without question the most translated of all books. It has been translated into virtually every written language, as well as being the object of an endless succession of different translations into the same language, as in the case of English.

Translation into English, which has been continuous from Anglo-Saxon times, began to approach familiar forms with the work of William Tyndale in the early sixteenth century. This translation, together with other sixteenth-century translations, like Miles Coverdale's and the Geneva Bible, became the basis for the translation commissioned by King James I of England known as the Authorized Version (1611). Widely accepted as standard, it was at various times revised, and by the nineteenth century, when earlier manuscripts had been discovered and numerous errors of translation detected, a revision was undertaken that produced the Revised Standard Version.

Translation in a cultural sense, more importantly, is constitutive of the ongoing tradition of the Bible. It is, in effect, undertaken already within the Bible itself, signally by Saint Paul, who says that he became all things to all men so that by all means he might save some (1 Corinthians 9:22). Indeed the Bible is not, like science, cast into mathematical language that is the same for all everywhere. The Bible, by its very nature, speaks into the particular situations of individuals and their specific cultures, tailoring its message to what they are ready to receive and understand. This phenomenon is already reflected internally to the work itself again by Paul in his preaching to the Athenians, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.

Paul begins by citing the Greek philosophical conception of God's unknowability as expressed in the inscription TO THE UNKNOWN GOD that he happened to see on an altar in the city as he was being led to the Areopagus by philosophers who were eager to have this "babbler" explain his strange new doctrine. Against their avowed ignorance, Paul proclaims the self-revelation of God in Christ: "Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you" (Acts 17:22ff.). Paul casts his message in terms that answer to and challenge the Greeks' philosophical culture. He works from their admission of the vanity of their search for God, who remains an Unknown to the intellect alone. Shifting the ground out from under them, Paul affirms that the one true God has revealed himself in history — specifically in the messianic event of Jesus the Christ, in his death and resurrection for the salvation of the world. Paul's speech is thus conscious of itself as a humanities text in exactly the sense I have been at pains to define: its meaning depends on and must be adapted to how it can be received and interpreted by its hearers, who change and will continue to change on an ongoing basis into the future.

This outward-reaching, self-transforming character of the Bible is not to be taken for granted. Another "great book" of monotheistic religion, the Qur'an, is characterized precisely by its un translatability. In principle, the message of Islam can be communicated only in Arabic. The Name of God — Allah — cannot be properly spoken in any other language. In the faith tradition it spawned, the Qur'an is held typically to be a purely divine revelation that was given whole and intact to Mohammed without any human mediation. Read in this way, the Qur'an repels attempts to interpret it in terms of its history and to examine its process of formation. It is deemed to be forever unchanging in form and content and is to be learned and recited verbatim, even by students who do not understand Arabic and so cannot interpret its meaning.

The Bible, in contrast, comes to us swaddled in a complicated and fascinating history of composition that needs always to be unraveled and that continues to be woven as the book continues to be interpreted in new historical situations. At the base of it all are the Hebrew Scriptures, the sacred books of Israel, which are themselves a whole library of diverse kinds of literature: [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] means literally "the books." They are traditionally classified as Law, Prophecy, and Writings, and these are only the most general categories into which the Bible's varied component books break down.

All these Scriptures, which to Jesus of Nazareth were sacred, indeed, the Word of God, were taken over by his followers and reinterpreted as alluding to and culminating in the Christ event. This event's beginning with the birth from a virgin was interpreted, for example, as the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14: "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." This interpretation may, however, be erroneous in linguistic terms, since the word "parthenos" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]) or "maiden" in the Greek translation of the Bible, the Septuagint, which is quoted by Matthew 1:22–23, translates Isaiah's Hebrew word " 'almah," which means simply "young girl." Luke 1:27 also calls Mary a virgin, but he too is working from the Septuagint, and so it seems that the whole story might have been generated by a mistranslation.

Yet the issue is not nearly so simple, since the "original" Hebrew text is itself reconstructed from the Masoretic text that dates only from the sixth century A.D. and was finally established by Aaron Ben Asher as late as 925 A.D. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 has shown that the Greek Septuagint (third century B.C.) may occasionally be even closer than the Masoretic text to these more ancient versions of the Hebrew Scriptures. Moreover, many earlier glosses on Isaiah also understood him to be prophesying a virgin birth. There was thus an ancient tradition that formed the basis for the Septuagint translators' understanding " 'almah" to mean "virgin." The term has evidently shifted in meaning over time and may, after all, have originally connoted virginity.

The prophecy of a virgin birth testifies, in any case, to a belief deeply rooted in the early Christian Church that plays itself out in the Christian appropriation of Jewish Scripture. The Christian communities began developing a literature of their own openly centered on Christ, who was interpreted as the foundation stone: "the stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone" (Psalm 118:22). The narratives of the life of Christ — the Gospels — became the core of the New Testament. This is the ensemble of books that are explicitly about the revelation of God in Christ. Together with the Hebrew Scriptures (Tanakh), taken as the Old Testament, they form the Christian Bible.

Jesus in the Gospels steps forth as an interpreter and renewer of the revelation of the Hebrew Scriptures. He affirms continuity with this tradition as the bedrock for his revolutionary message in the Sermon on the Mount: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am come not to destroy, but to fulfill" (Matthew 5:17). But he also, in the same speech and repeatedly, underlines the rupture of his own words with tradition: "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time ... But I say unto you. ..." Precisely this process of reinterpretation from within (practically a form of "immanent critique") constitutes the backbone of biblical tradition. And, in this respect, the Bible provides an especially privileged model for humanities texts, to the extent that they are continually in the process of rewriting themselves. This follows inevitably from their being intrinsically addressed to a reader: they thereby establish a dialogue between the reader's present and what has been handed down from the past.

The far-reaching significance of the Bible's translatability resides in the inexhaustibly productive and re productive potential of this book as a literature that can be lived. It interprets human experience by the light of divine revelation, which is itself in every instance a humanly situated idea with unlimited different possible meanings. This will be demonstrated in different ways by selections from the Bible exemplifying the imaginative genres of myth, epic history, prophecy, apocalyptic, Writings, and Gospel. Each new genre develops creative forms that incorporate and build upon those of its predecessors in progressively constructing the overall revelation through imagination of the "divine Word."

Pursuant to recent revolutions in literary theory, in which the very possibility of meaning has been seen to be generated by the differential nature of the linguistic sign, "revelation" can newly be understood as a poetic no less than a religious category. In some crucial respects, these two types of revelation might well be construed as overlapping or even as coinciding with one another. Rather than considering literary form to be extraneous to religious content and considering the linguistic medium to be purely instrumental to conveying a revelation of transcendent meaning, it has become imperative to apprehend the content of the form and to explore poetic form's own intrinsic capacities and propensities to deliver a revelation that might well be considered to be theological in the sense most pertinent for many types of readers today. This chapter aims, in its own speculative way, to reflect on a constellation of literary genres within the Bible and to demonstrate in new ways their intrinsic aptness for communicating something of what has traditionally been held to be divine revelation.

The ongoing interpretation of human experience through the shifting lens of revelation in tradition is played out in exemplary fashion from the very beginning of the Bible. Genesis proffers an interpretation of the meaning of the cosmos and of humanity's place within it. It does this particularly in the form of myth, the myth of Creation. The significance of this myth is disclosed anew in each succeeding historical period as a result of contact with new situations that bring out relative constants of human experience from novel angles and in new relations.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Revelation of Imagination by William Franke. Copyright © 2015 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
The Approach,
The Argument,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction Involved Knowing: On the 1 Poetic Epistemology of the Humanities,
Chapter 1 Humanities Tradition and the Bible,
Chapter 2 Homer's Musings and the Divine Muse,
Chapter 3 Virgil's Invention of History as Prophecy,
Chapter 4 Augustine's Discovery of Reading as Revelation,
Chapter 5 Dante's Poetics of Revelation,
Conclusion,
Index,

Editorial Reviews

William Franke’s The Revelation of Imagination will be regarded as a threshold event within the Humanities.” —Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guérard Professor in Literaure, Stanford University

"This is one of those rare and wonderful books that reflects a lifetime of learning and thinking. It is at once a powerful mediation upon five literary bulwarks of the Western tradition and a philosophical argument about the meaning of world-shaping literature... The Revelation of Imagination amply demonstrates why Homer, the writers of the Bible, Virgil, Augustine, and Dante have been invaluable and inexhaustible conduits for the revelations of the human imagination. There is not a page where William Franke’s ability to enter into the crafting and language of the work he is discussing does not profoundly enrich one’s appreciation of the text. That he is able to take works and writers of whom so much has been written and yet make the reader feel how much more there is still to say and see, how inexhaustibly open these works are, is testimony to the mastery of his craft." —Wayne Cristaudo, The European Legacy 

"Franke's book is a joy to read. He writes with eloquence, grace, and verve. . .  The Revelation of Imagination is a brilliant study of formative works that should never lose our attention.  Indeed, the book itself  is ‘revelatory.’”—Peter S. Hawkins, Professor of Religion and Literature, Yale Divinity School

“Franke is an eminent scholar . . .  The Revelation of Imagination is every bit the strong scholarly work...The extreme clarity and accessibility of the text, however, open it to a much wider audience than the scholarly academic community. Anyone interested in learning about the great texts Franke treats in the book will find it a wonderful reading guide. Each chapter could be read alone as an aid to understanding a specific text, but taken as a whole they offer a finely woven argument regarding the revelatory nature of great literature. While Franke’s approach is post-secular in that it is open to and encourages finding transcendent meaning in literature, this work is literary rather than religious and would be useful even to those who do not adhere to a faith tradition." —Rachel Dark, Christianity and Literature


"The Revelation of Imagination: From Homer and the Bible through Virgil and Augustine to Dante is a book that will greatly assist any professor who teaches in a humanities or Great Text curriculum, and will enrich the understanding of anyone who wishes to read the classic primary texts that Franke so finely introduces and analyzes. He is lucid writer and a careful scholar (especially impressive is his knowledge of European scholarship on these works). It is a learned work, and belongs on a shelf that includes Auerbach’s Mimesis. The book is well organized into five main chapters of equal length (each long, but every page is justified), and unified in its attention to recurring themes: the human acceptance of limits; the relation between transcendence and human freedom; the relational nature of knowing; and, above all, the idea reflected in the book’s title, that the human poetic imagination can be the site of transcendent revelation. In returning to these themes, the reader of Franke’s book comes away with a sense of the differences and connections among these works, but also a sense of the “wholeness” of the tradition so eloquently discussed in Franke’s conclusion.  The book itself is best read chapter by chapter, with the primary text close at hand. But, upon completion, the book does form a unified whole. It also makes a persuasive case for the way in which classic humanities texts can be reinterpreted and lived anew by a contemporary reader." —Paul Contino, Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Humanities, Pepperdine University

From the Publisher