When Sidney turns in the opening pages of his Defence of Poesy from a survey of those names the ancients “have given unto this now scorned skill” to his wittily phrased and argumentatively crucial endorsement of “the luck or wisdom” by which “we Englishmen have met with the Greeks in calling [the poet] a maker,” he highlights his transition by writing: “which name [a maker], how high and incomparable a title it is, I had rather were known by marking the scope of other sciences than by my partial allegation” (emphasis mine, 98–9). Sidney’s transition creates a passage into what is appropriately the most celebrated and the most controversial portion of the Defence’ s argument: the account of the poet’s golden world, the definition of poetry as “an art of imitation,” the discrimination among three kinds of poets, and the culminating determination both of the main aim or purpose of the human sciences generally and the particular purpose of poetry relative to that main aim (101). As Sidney begins this portion of the argument by considerations of scope, so he returns in this determination three different times to further reflections about scope: first, he offers a defense of “right poets” by virtue of their ability “to delight and to teach,” which he terms “the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed” (103); second, he defines as the aim or purpose of the human sciences generally (“all, one and other”) “this scope—to know, and by knowledge to lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying of his own divine essence” (104); and third, he distinguishes, in a hierarchy of purposes, the divine from other learned men “for having his scope as far beyond any of these as eternity exceedeth a moment” (106, emphasis mine).
In order to organize his discussion of the poet as a “maker” and to justify “his high and incomparable status” by virtue of that title, Sidney has recourse to an oratorical term of art with a long and significant history, the scopus dicendi—Englished here as “scope.” To my knowledge, this is a technical term that has never been glossed by editors of the Defence. It goes without comment even in the best of the contemporary editions, those by Geoffrey Shepherd, Katherine Duncan-Jones, and Forrest G. Robinson.1 Not surprisingly, then, it is a term likewise left unexamined in the voluminous body of contemporary critical commentary, on the assumption, presumably, that Sidney’s critics have understood it to mean what Shepherd suggests when he cites “intellectual scope” as if “scope” denotes “intellectual range.”2 It is my argument that recovering some portion of the term’s history can fix the meaning of the Defence’s vocabulary of “scope” more accurately than Shepherd’s implied definition permits, and make possible, thereby, a clearer understanding of Sidney’s golden world poetics. Moreover, it is my argument that the recovery of that history will enable the restoration of Sidney’s poetics to a newly recognized tradition of hermeneutics that was having a revolutionary impact on practices of reading and writing in sixteenth-century Europe. If Sidney’s success in creating the first definitive version of an English literary criticism derives in great measure, as scholars have long understood, from his extensive knowledge of Italian Renaissance poetics, the distinctiveness of his critical practice is due, in no small part, to the accommodation of that poetics to the new hermeneutic—to those new notions of reading and writing that he acquired from his unexplored connections with the Philippists.3
Interpretation always matters, but an argument about how Sidney himself interpreted texts has particular timeliness in the wake of the recent revival of Edwin Greenlaw’s seemingly outmoded allegorical readings of the Arcadian narratives. Prominent new studies by Blair Worden and Kenneth Borris have returned to the examination of Sidney’s two Arcadias as allegorical romances or epics.4 Whatever the virtues of their particular readings, the appearance of these new allegorizing interpretations of the Arcadias highlights the need for a serious reconsideration of Sidney’s own notions about hermeneutics. Sidney scholarship has much to say about writing, but very little by contrast about reading. In that important regard, it is conspicuously under-theorized in comparison, for example, to Spenser studies where the need to account for allegory has for a long time generated sophisticated, historically and theoretically complex accounts of those hermeneutic principles, those foundational concepts of reading and writing, which reciprocally enable his poetics and the fictions constructed on them.5 Perhaps there is something in the peculiarly self-conscious dynamic of allegory, and its work of saying other than it means, that helps to explain this difference. Perhaps, too, it is the renewed call for the allegorizing of Sidney’s fictions that helps to explain the desirability of raising more explicitly such issues in regard to his strikingly different corpus. For there is allegory, and then there is allegory—and there are good reasons, historically and theoretically, to keep the distinction clear. If to write allegorical fictions means to figure-forth or to embody abstractions, then all literature is allegorical and, as Northrop Frye long ago argued, “all commentary, or the relating of the events of narrative to conceptual terminology, is in one sense allegorical interpretation.”6 In one sense, Frye is both correct and prudent, especially in the implied acknowledgment of our critical need to distinguish other senses—the distinction between allegory and alternative modes of writing and reading that reflect alternative, sometimes contrasting modes of hermeneutic understanding. Sidney scholarship stands in need of that distinction.
Any exploration of the “allegorical” sufficiently rigorous and inclusive to satisfy the demands of analysis would need to take into consideration the discontinuous history of allegorical reading and allegorical writing—from the search for hyponoia (secret meanings) among the ancient students of Homer to the emergence centuries later of the first fully formed allegorical fictions. It would need to distinguish between “allegory” as a rhetorical term in the so-called classical schools of Greece and Rome and its application, as early as Heraclitus, to narrative fictions considered in their entirety, to the important and uneven overlap between the employment of “allegory” as a critical term and related terms like “irony,” “personification,” “symbol,” and “figure.” It would need to distinguish between allegory considered as a genre (a specific category of literature) and allegory as a mode (a particular way of writing or reading narrative); and it would need to accommodate all of these distinctions—and more—within an historically and theoretically sophisticated framework of analysis that comprehended in advance both the necessity of the project (the need for a terminus in the critical quest productive of nominally useful definitions) and its provisionality (there are always rival definitions to consider). Finally, too, any useful approach to allegory would need to avoid those twin monsters, the Scylla of totalization and the Charybdis of essentialism. When all narratives are allegorical, or when all reading becomes pace Paul de Man an allegory of reading, the potential cost to understanding is the elimination of those historically significant boundaries that have distinguished allegory from other narrative kinds. Plutarch scoffs at the folly of grammarians who read Homer allegorically; Luther rages against Origen’s impiety for imposing allegorical fictions on the Bible—and such moments of opposition punctuate meaningfully the history of hermeneutics. By contrast, narrow the boundaries of “allegory” to a single, static definition and the monster that threatens is the Charybdis of essentialism. When only one species of writing is deemed genuinely allegorical, the cost, potentially, is the loss of that rich diversity of narrative kinds that have historically called attention to themselves as allegories. This is not to argue for the impossibility of generic or modal distinctions to characterize allegory. Instead it is to insist upon the necessity of inclusiveness in making those distinctions.7 Navigating the gap between Scylla and Charybdis demands, then, the accommodative skills of an Odysseus.8
My choice of words to denote those skills is deliberate, since “accommodation” stands historically as the rhetorical term par excellence for the activity of making what is strange familiar—what the intellectual journey toward the home of understanding rescues from loss in the quest for meaning. Accommodation seems just the right skill to apply to the interpretation of allegory, since the business of allegorizing always involves the most difficult of hermeneutic journeys—the quest to comprehend a form of “other speaking” (what allegoria means in its Greek original). There is nothing new about insisting upon the otherness of allegory or the self-consciousness by which it traditionally estranges familiar ways of using words into seemingly foreign locutions. As allegory’s best contemporary student, Gordon Teskey begins his own analytical quest in an interrogation of the word’s etymology: “An allegory means something other than what it says and says something other than it means.”9 All interpretation works on a perceived gap between the words and the sense, between what is written and what is intended. Such is the labor of schoolboys, as Cicero wryly notes.10 Allegory works traditionally to exaggerate that hermeneutic gap by widening the division between the word and the sense, the signifier and the signified, into a schism, or what Teskey prefers to call a “rift.” At the level of consciousness, allegory opens a schism “between a life and a mystery, between the real and the ideal, between a literal tale and its moral—which is repaired, or at least concealed, by imagining a hierarchy on which we ascend toward a truth.”11 In the work of creating that “rift,” allegory bestows a double evaluation on the whole project of saying something “other” than what one means. “The former, positive sense of the ‘other’ as a higher, abstract meaning reflects back on a literal narrative that is ‘other’ in a negative sense, one that implies the inability of instrumental meaning entirely to assimilate a realm that it distinguishes as ‘literal’.” For this reason, Teskey argues, allegory is best construed as a form of violence—the necessarily violent activity of “imposing on the intolerable, chaotic otherness of nature a hierarchical order in which objects will appear to have inherent ‘meanings’.”12
Once more, allegory’s estrangement of familiar words in the opening of a “rift” in consciousness is enabled by a complementary estrangement of familiar narrative patterns. The strangeness of allegory depends less on the sometimes marvelous or monstrous character of its materials, which are no more and no less strange than the ordinary stuff of romance, than on the narrative’s persistent violation of our familiar sense of time, place, and the causal connections that traditionally link one part of a story to another. Such strangeness is a provocation to interpretation, to the search for meaning that lies “beyond” the literal narrative. As a result, judged by Aristotelian standards of clarity or coherence, the allegorical narrative is often “badly” constructed, or as Teskey writes, “paratactic, digressive, episodic, and replete with iconographic details that have nothing to do with the story.”13
An example can clarify the point. Consider for instance the difficulty of a cinematic representation of the opening stanzas of Book I of The Faerie Queene. One by one, Spenser introduces a knight pricking on a plain, accompanied by a damsel on her ass, leading in tow a white lamb—all of whom are followed by a dwarf. A cartoonist might comically image the circling legs of the dwarf, lamb, and ass, surrealistically speeding to keep time with the pricking of Red Cross Knight’s stallion, but the realism of the ordinary camera would be utterly frustrated to picture what defies representation. At the moment that the narrative “malfunctions,” as the story refuses even the most minimal literal sense, the necessity of interpretation intervenes: a galloping horse, a donkey, a lamb, and a dwarf cannot travel together in the world precisely as a reminder that holiness and truth and innocence must. Presumably too, we dwarfish readers are simultaneously being reminded to exercise our interpretive legs to keep pace with the allegorical sense.14 Allegorical narratives are traditionally incoherent, operating by means of a strategic disjunction between the signifier and the signified to call attention to the difference between the truths to which they refer (often conceived as a unified body of ideas or ethical or religious principles) and the estranging tools (the discontinuities of time, place, and action) by which they make such references. There is extraordinary variety among readers of allegory about how to conceive the “literal” story, from the fierce rejection of early Christian exegetes who admonish against the Judaizing “letter” that kills—the perils of a literal interpretation of the Old Testament, for instance; to St. Augustine’s adequation of the Bible’s true literal meaning with its spiritual sense; to Thomas Aquinas’s full embracement of the Bible’s literal narrative, and his complementary insistence that spiritual allegorizing is supplemental to it. Amidst this complex history of exegetical redefinitions of the literal, what remains constant from Clement of Alexandria to Aquinas is the location of a “rift” in the text between the sense of the words (read plainly) and the intention of their author (whether conceived in human or divine terms) upon which allegorical interpretation can work.15
To be reminded that the allegorical narrative, no less than the allegorical interpretation of narrative, conventionally makes war against the literal—literal meanings and literal stories—or challenges the sufficiency of the literal by translating it into an adequation of or supplement to the spiritual, is to recall simultaneously that in the broad history of western hermeneutics there have been alternative practices of reading and writing that define themselves as specifically anti-allegorical or pointedly non-allegorical in kind. Early in the Christian era, fourth-century Antioch served as the intellectual home to an historically significant cadre of biblical exegetes who espoused a hermeneutics of “plain reading” in direct opposition to the allegorizing of the Alexandrian fathers. Again in the early modern period, the theological revolution of Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin harnessed much of its intellectual power from the semiological revolution it enacted in biblical hermeneutics. The Reformers’ battle-cry of sola fide derived its meaning from its cry of sola scriptura, and scripture alone became the source of faith when it was read by the “plain sense,” recoverable through an anti-allegorical or designedly non-allegorical hermeneutics. The “plain sense” is never really plain at Antioch or at Wittenberg. The very appeal to “plainness,” to the sufficiency of the letter of the text, is always accompanied by complex assumptions about the nature of meaning and interpretation.16 However, it is valuable to allude to these two historical moments, however briefly, because of their serviceability in counteracting a potential danger in reconstructing the history of an allegorical poetics that sometimes manifests itself even in the best contemporary accounts of the form: the potential of such histories to absorb the history of medieval and early modern poetics into the history of allegory.
Teskey relates a now-familiar story of the impact of Homeric allegorizing on the reading of the Old Testament by Philo Judaeus, and his subsequent influence upon Origen, arguably the first great Christian allegorical exegete. At the conclusion of this history, Teskey makes the claim that: “It is this application to the Bible of an Hellenic exegetical method that produced the Christian tradition of meaning.”17 There can be no question about the seminal influence of Hellenistic exegesis upon Christian interpretation, or its crucial impact on the development of Christian allegorical poetry, or the centuries-long consequences of those developments from Origen to Augustine to Aquinas for the importation of allegorical modes of reading and writing into the western literary tradition. At the same time, Teskey’s claim about the influence of that allegorical exegetical method in producing “the Christian tradition of meaning” is manifestly incautious, both in its far-too-sweeping identification of a factitious unity (there is no such thing as a single “Christian tradition of meaning”) and in its occultation of alternative hermeneutics by which Christian interpreters from Hellenistic Antioch to Reformation Wittenberg sought to clarify the meaning of the scriptures. Teskey’s conflation of the history of Christian hermeneutics with the history of allegorical exegesis stems, at least in part, from his own theoretical predisposition: from his commitment to an allegorizing habit of mind that identifies interpretation of any kind as an act of violence, as warfare in which meaning by definition imposes itself (always through the creation of “rifts” or schisms) upon the ever-intractable stuff of material existence.
If in one sense, then, Teskey’s theoretical predisposition lends itself well to the interpretation of allegory—persuasive as he is about those “rifts” so crucial to the business of allegorizing—in another sense, his suspicious hermeneutics appears less appropriate to those alternative acts of accommodation by which readers and writers in the long history of the Greco-Roman grammatical and rhetorical tradition sought to make the strange familiar, to engage in interpretive journeys by which meaning is rescued from loss through the valuation of such standards as clarity, coherence, economy and decorum. Only if we are willing to declare such journeys impossible from the outset, to deconstruct them suspiciously for evidence of epistemological failure, which the common writer disguises and the extraordinary allegorizing genius (the Dante or the Spenser) admits to vatically and intermittently, does such interpretation recommend itself. This is a willingness that prejudges interpretive issues (issues, for instance, of epistemological authority and linguistic competence) about which an historian of poetics might do better to assume an agnostic attitude—one that includes the possibility of successful quests for meaning—especially when such issues are central to the historical debates at stake.
Conceived broadly, the subject of that history is the alternative hermeneutics, which emerged both early and late in the Christian era to challenge allegorical methods of reading and writing. As Hans Frei has argued, “The preeminence of a literal and historical reading of the most important biblical stories was never wholly lost in western Christendom,” and the eruption of an anti-allegorical rhetoric in Antioch and Wittenberg is illustrative of his argument’s cogency.18 In its widest purview, the necessary background to the history of those eruptions concerns the primarily literary and rhetorical education that came to dominate the Roman west and the Byzantine east in the Hellenistic age and later, and the particular assumptions about textual interpretation conveyed by it. A large body of scholars from H.I. Marrou to George Kennedy have written persuasively about the continuity of that educational tradition, even as they attend to the complexity of its transformations.19 Such a history forms a necessary background to the understanding of these historical challenges to allegorical reading because the principles informing those challenges derive from foundational tenets of the grammatical education, which has its roots in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and its most detailed elaboration in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.
A second reason speaks to the necessity of recovering that historical background as immediately relevant to the primary subject of this study, the emergence of Sidney’s golden world poetics. Recent scholarship by historians of rhetoric has called attention to a remarkable series of transformations in practices of reading and writing over the course of the sixteenth century in which the revival of influential components of the classical rhetorical tradition played a major role. For Kathy Eden, those transformations are an instance of “humanist rehabilitation” of the tradition of interpretatio scripti, a practice of reading whose origins lie in judicial rhetoric. For Peter Mack and Kees Meerhoff, they comprise a dialectically inspired revolution in the art of textual interpretation, fueled once more by the resurgent humanism of the Renaissance. Eden emphasizes distinctively the importance of “accommodation” to this tradition: the emphasis of rhetorically trained exegetes from Plutarch and Augustine to Erasmus and Melanchthon on interpretation as an activity that makes readers at home in the text, encouraging them toward moral or spiritual journeys of their own.20 Mack and Meerhoff concentrate distinctively on the important marriage of dialectics and rhetoric for the development of an integrated theory of reading that attends, at once, to the logical connections among words in “natural” use and their affective force upon readers. Despite these distinctive emphases, there is considerable agreement among Eden, Mack, and Meerhoff about the character of these “new” reading practices in the context of the sixteenth-century’s northern Renaissance—“new” primarily in the sense that they renew, adjust and refine (as acts of accommodation) the hermeneutic practices of an ancient grammatical and rhetorical tradition. Those “new” interpretive practices concern (what until recently) were strikingly modern assumptions about how to read: the importance of examining whole books to recover arguments in their completeness; the need to consider authorial intention, economy of organization and textual/historical context as guides to interpretation; the assumption that language exists to reveal, rather than to conceal meaning; and the usefulness of applying dialectics (logical analysis) to rhetoric (to language in “natural” use).
Beyond the contributions of Eden, Mack, and Meerhoff, I plan to demonstrate that such reading assumptions are crucial to comprehending the development of an early modern poetics in England that stood apart conspicuously and self-consciously from the allegorical tradition. Sidney reconceives the activity of fiction-making in the way that he does because he is a brilliant product of the new hermeneutics that revolutionized the practice of reading and writing in the northern Renaissance. His brilliance consists in the extraordinary synthesizing skill of his critical self-consciousness, in his ability to transform familiar concepts about how poets make meaning by reanimating those concepts according to the principles of the new hermeneutic. If Gordon Teskey is correct in defining allegory as “an incoherent narrative,” which traditionally attends to “the difference between what it refers to and what it refers with,” which operates by means of a strategic disjunction between the signifier and the signified (in the manner of Spenser’s Faerie Queene), then Sidney clearly belongs to an alternative, non-allegorical history of hermeneutics.21 That history can be recovered most usefully by an examination of the lineage of one Sidney’s key critical terms—the scopus dicendi, its roots in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the anti-allegorical exegesis of the Antiochene fathers, and the pointedly non-allegorical hermeneutic of Luther and Melanchthon. In recovering that history, my scope—my main aim or goal—is to target those principles of reading and writing that reciprocally animate Sidney’s Defence.
As a term of art, the scopus dicendi derives from a Greek word, skopos, meaning the aim or mark or target at which an archer shoots his arrow. Like so many rhetorical terms, this one arises first in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, where in the course of arguing that “men deliberate, not about the end, but about the means to the end,” he defines “the aim [skopos] before the deliberative orator” as “that which is expedient.”22 The orator’s scope, then, is that main aim or purpose to which everything else in his speech is directed. The good orator demonstrates by probable reason that a specific aim is realizable, and he does so with a practical goal in mind: to mobilize persuasive arguments about “the things which are expedient in regard to our actions” (1.6.1). Considerations of scope are revealing about Aristotle’s main contribution to the history of rhetoric. He places argumentation at its disciplinary core by establishing a close bond, on the one hand, between rhetoric and dialectic, and on the other, between the rhetorical arts and utility, by virtue of the alliance of those arts with ethics and politics. Having chosen his target, the orator fits himself with suitable arrows for the task at hand. In the first two books of the Rhetoric, Aristotle provides in compact and characteristically systematic form (a tremendously ambitious project this!) a complete list of “the materials from which we must draw our arguments in reference to good and the expedient”(1.6.28). Central to this project is Aristotle’s compilation of rhetorical topoi (the greater and the less, the possible and the impossible) or those “places” in which one discovers the premisses (protaseis) founded on particular opinions that permit the arrow to speed to its target—which render persuasive, that is, the claim advanced by the orator and the evidence cited in support of it.
In the Rhetoric’s long and enormously influential third book, Aristotle turns from matters of proof to matters of style and arrangement in order to highlight those qualities essential to the orator’s success. The emphasis falls squarely on the utility of clarity, correctness, and aptness in speech; the appropriate use of metaphor; the strategic (or economic) arrangement of the work’s parts—all of the resources of language, in short, purposefully mobilized to guide the orator’s arrow. Aristotle’s treatment of figurative language is especially revealing about his stylistic principles. While he emphasizes that “it is metaphor above all that gives perspicuity, pleasure and a foreign air [an air of the strange and the exotic]” to prose and to poetry, he demands consistently that “we must make use of metaphors and epithets that are appropriate” (3.2.9). What is foreign in the figure is placed in service of perspicuous representation, the art of accommodating what is unfamiliar or surprising, often through playfulness, enigma, or disguise, to the familiar task of making meaning clear: “metaphors must not be far-fetched, but we must give names to things that have none by deriving the metaphor from what is akin and of the same kind, so that, as soon as it is uttered, it is clearly seen to be akin” (3.2.12). Metaphors direct the arrow to its target, not opening, but flying across potential gaps or schisms between words and meaning.
As a term of art, scope matters also in Aristotle’s Rhetoric because of the convergence between considerations about the orator’s “end” or “aim” and the significance assigned to intentionality in his theory of reading and writing. Kathy Eden has argued that the “history of rhetorical theory” coincides with the history of collisions between “the competing claims of voluntas [what a writer means to say] and scriptum [what the words say themselves]”—and that collision first achieves systematic theoretical attention in Aristotle.23 Some collisions between voluntas and scriptum are the accidents of changing times or circumstances, which deny to writings in any form the possibility of remaining permanently meaningful. Some collisions are the products of verbal ambiguity. In the face of such accidents, Aristotle turns for the repair of those collisions to considerations of scope—to the author’s final aim, end, or intention as the principal vehicle for rescuing meaning from loss. That intention is discoverable, in turn, by attending to what future grammarians and rhetoricians would call the circumstances of the text—the historical and textual field out of which the document emerged—and to the parts of the individual text considered in relation to the whole. Considerations of scope matter, then, both as a principle for conceiving how rhetorical arguments function and as a guide for reading practices that value meaning achieved through the perspicuous organization of argument and style that render the writer’s intention clear.
As the rhetorical tradition of ancient Greece was transported into Latin rhetoric, Aristotle’s text remained one locus classicus for considerations of scope, even as his terminology was altered. All of the most famous rhetorics of the Roman world follow Aristotle’s practice in giving precedence to proofs over style. Argument matters first in the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium, Cicero’s De Oratore, and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria. The terminology may change, but the strong teleological drive of the rhetorical art remains constant—its drive toward purposeful, causally organized argumentation. The anonymous author of the Ad Herennium argues for utility or expedience as the “end” (finem) of “the orator who gives counsel.”24 By contrast, Cicero’s De Inventione substitutes as the “end” (finem) of deliberative oratory, “both honour and advantage,” adding, characteristically, an even more emphatically ethical aim to Aristotle’s seemingly more practical art.25 When Quintilian later writes about the final aims or ends of the orator, the rhetorical terminology shifts once again in ways that are ultimately consequential for Renaissance rhetorical and dialectical thought. In Book 3 of the Institutio Oratoria, he describes as the “basis” (status) of the speaker’s cause “that point which the orator sees to be the most important for him to make,” noting in the course of his description—with some evident impatience—the diversity of names (constitutionem, quaestionem, caput) imparted historically to this same or similar concept.26 For Quintilian, what the orator “aims” at can just as well be described by another metaphor-turned-techne, the “basis” or status upon which he builds those arguments central to the art of persuading.
Once more, the persistence of that teleological drive of argumentation was accompanied by the enhancement of essential components of Aristotelian hermeneutics. As Kathy Eden has shown, the grammarians and rhetoricians of classical Rome elaborated a complex and coherent program for reading and writing, based importantly on the interpretatio scripti, the interpretation of legal writings associated with laws, wills, contracts and other judicial matters. At the core of that program, she locates expertise in the accommodative arts, including the skillful application of questions about intentionality to the determination of meaning; the careful discrimination of textual and historical circumstances for the analysis of discourse; the principled scrutiny of the parts of the text in relation to the whole; and the rigorous application of standards of decorum and energeia (forcefulness) to the employment and interpretation of language. As a tool for constructing persuasive arguments first in the courtroom, and subsequently in the wider court of public opinion (any and all argumentation in the open forum), hermeneutics carried a distinctive epistemological character—one intimately allied with equity as a standard of evaluation in judicial affairs and one marked by a predisposition in judgments of many sorts to privilege individuating circumstances as the appropriate context for the determination of meaning and value.27
In the Hellenistic period, Aristotle’s skopos remained a key term of art in the Greek rhetorical schools, or so it seems reasonable to suppose, given its long currency. It survived, for instance, in the aesthetic commentaries of Philodemus of Gadara (c. 110BC–40BC), where it proved useful for evaluating the final aim or purpose of poets in pleasing readers through the skillful organization of their literary works.28 It survived, too, across the lines of a fierce disciplinary dispute with important consequences for the history of an anti-allegorical hermeneutics. Skopos recurs as a term of art among two apparently distinct bodies of textual critics: first, among the adepts belonging to the philosophical tradition, from the early Christian allegorist, Origen (185–253c.) to the later neoplatonic commentators, Iamblicus (d.c.330) and Proclus (412c.–485); and second, among the practitioners of the rhetorical tradition, the patristic exegetes and preachers of the Antiochene school—most importantly, Diodore of Tarsus (d.c.392), Theodore of Mopsuestia (350–428c.) and John Chrysostom (c. 347–407c.). To recount the history of an early alternative hermeneutic that marshals traditional rhetorical notions to combat explicitly the perils of allegorizing, it makes sense to turn first to Antioch, and to move afterward by way of comparison and contrast to the Alexandria of Origen and Proclus’s Athens.
Distinctions between Antiochene “literalism” (so-called) and Alexandrian allegorizing are a now-suspect critical commonplace, partly because of loose claims about the foundations of Antiochene exegesis in Judaic studies, and in much greater measure because of the ascription to the Antiochenes of something far too akin to a modern historical sensibility. Recent scholars have reconfigured the familiar distinction between “literalistic” Antioch and allegorizing Alexandria into something both more problematic, by attending to important points of contact between them, and more illuminating, by generating a fresh set of perspectives about how to understand the hermeneutic differences that distinguish them.29 While for theoretical reasons, more or less persuasive according to one’s perspective on the postmodern condition, scholars of the last decade have been eager to narrow the differences between Antioch and Alexandria, there can be no question about the existence of attacks and counterattacks between the two schools. From Eustathius’ early assault against Origen in On the Witch of Endor to the sharp anti-allegorizing commentaries of Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia and John Chrysostom, explicit hermeneutic combat between Antioch and Alexandria was a fact of rhetorical life. The question is how to account for the relationship between Antiochene “literalism” and Alexandrian allegorizing without explaining the fact of that rhetorical combat away.30
For Margaret M. Mitchell in her study of Chrysostom’s Pauline interpretation and, more comprehensively, for Frances Young in her revisionary analysis of patristic hermeneutics, the important distinction between Antioch and Alexandria derives from rival understandings about language and reference. Two contrasting versions of mimesis collide. The Antiochenes practice what Young calls “ikonic” exegesis, as an effort to explicate the “deeper meaning” of a narrative that is assumed to be reflected by or mirrored in “the text taken as a coherent whole.” For them, the Bible is educational literature, and good moral and doctrinal lessons are to be drawn from it, on the principle that scriptural language mirrors, embodies or figures forth its teachings in ways that enable true understanding. By contrast, the Alexandrians engage in “symbolic” interpretation, as an attempt to discover the occult meanings of a text whose words are assumed to be “symbols or tokens,” pointing obliquely to “other realities,” in a work often conceived to be without “narrative, or surface coherence.”31 The Bible is no less educational for the Alexandrians than the Antiochenes, but its deepest spiritual lessons are available only to the adept who are skilled in cracking its secret code, the “rift” (to use Teskey’s term) between sense and intention.
As an explanation for the division between these contrasting assumptions about language and reference, and the contrasting hermeneutic practices derived from them, Young appeals to the institutional conflicts of Hellenistic culture that traditionally pitched grammarians and rhetoricians—on the lower rungs of the educational ladder—against the philosophical elites who occupied its apex. She argues persuasively for associating the Antiochene exegetes with a rhetorical approach to texts, and the rival Alexandrians with the reading practices of the philosophical schools. In the process, Young engineers a wholescale redefinition of Antiochene “literalism.” In place of “literal interpretation” and “historical criticism,” the emphasis falls squarely on Antiochene exegesis as the accommodation of traditional grammatical and rhetorical principles of reading to the analysis of the Bible. Those principles, in turn, are detailed by reference to that primary definitive source for documenting how students in Hellenistic grammar schools were taught to read, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria.32 Among those principles of reading, Young highlights especially: the primacy of close textual analysis, with “methodical” attention to questions of vocabulary and parts of speech; stylistic considerations of word usage, figures of speech, and organization, with regard to aptness or decorum; the reading of whole texts to interpret one part in relation to another; the use of historike, historical facts or received narratives to elucidate meaning; and the exercise of krisis, or moral-thematic analysis, in order to determine the ethical and spiritual import of the work. Such principles should by now seem familiar, drawn as they are from the same conceptual quiver that Aristotle first armed and that Cicero and Quintilian, among others, proceeded to expand and diversify.
All interpretation is likely to represent itself as a rescue operation—an activity that safeguards “true meaning” from misprision—but anti-allegorical criticism is especially prone to self-representations of this variety, both because of its inherent belatedness (its reactive character as a ground-clearing assault against misinterpretation) and because of its rhetoric of conservation (its insistence on its power to preserve the “work itself,” both sensum [what the words say] and voluntas[what the writer means]). The appeal to historike among the Antiochenes—to the realm of events, narrated facts, deeds, and stories—operates in precisely this manner.33 When Diodore of Tarsus clarifies his exegetical principles in the Prologue to his Commentary of the Psalms, he does so by insisting that the application of theoria (of “insight”) to the reading of the Bible rescues the hypokeimenon (the “substance”) of the text, by careful attention to the grounding of moral and spiritual meaning in its historike, in the Bible’s “pure account of … actual event[s] of the past.”34 Allegory is misprision, he insists by contrast, a form of misinterpretation that results when narrative “substance” is discarded.35 Typological reading is justified, because of its conservation of the actuality of events, but Diodore will have nothing to do with interpretations that force “the reader to take one thing for another …, ‘demon’ for abyss, ‘devil’ for dragon, and so on.”36 When Theodore of Mopsuestia takes on “these opponents of mine” who discover in Paul’s reading of Sarah and Hagar a license for interpreting the Bible allegorically, he claims that they “turn it all to the contrary,” transposing the divine scripture into no more than “dreams in the night,” insisting that “Adam is not really Adam, paradise is not paradise, the serpent not the serpent.” The notion that apt interpretation can spring from turning words “to the contrary,” from interrogating the putative “rifts” that divide sense from intention is both alien and disturbing. Moreover, while such interpretations disturb because they “make history [narrative] serve their own ends,” they are ultimately so perilous because they threaten the truth of scripture, since scripture itself preserves “the narrative of actual events.” Like Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore is in the business of rescuing the Bible, defending it against misprision and conserving its veracity.37 That rescue proceeds so often by appeal to historike for reasons at once hermeneutic and theological: hermeneutic, because their rhetorical training predisposes them to interpret histories as coherent, economically organized narratives whose skopos is to reveal rather to conceal meaning; and theological, because their providential perspective leads them to locate the skopos of Christian truth in salvation history, the unfolding story of God’s saving purpose over time.
When Theodore rails against the allegorical interpreters, he fulminates with a polemical thunder that anticipates Martin Luther’s: “They dream up silly fables in their own heads and give their folly the name of allegory,” imperiling in the process the “purpose” (skopos) of the biblical author. By contrast, John Chrysostom’s resistance to allegorizing is more mildly articulated, reminiscent of the more temperate Philip Melanchthon’s. He acknowledges that the Bible contains allegories—while insisting that such allegories explain themselves—and he is explicit about his refusal to be shamed into abandoning God’s Word for the allegorist’s vain imaginations, but he is rarely polemical. What he shares with Theodore most importantly is a commitment to interpreting the scriptures in the context of their Maker’s purpose, a purpose revealed by paying close attention to the moral and doctrinal arguments targeted by the biblical parts within the biblical whole.38
Skopos remains, then, a key term of art among the Antiochenes, and it does so as one sign of the traditional rhetorical character of their hermeneutic practice, and as one indicator of their alliance with Hellenistic readers beyond the walls of Antioch. When their contemporary, Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–79), defends the study of pagan literature in his Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature, he draws upon the same rhetorical tradition to highlight its value for young Christians. As it is the goal of the helmsman to guide his ship through the winds, and the goal of the archer to shoot at his mark, Basil argues, so there is a goal in human life—an end (skopos) purposed by the “artisan”—that the individual “must keep before him in all his words and deeds.”39 That goal is moral and spiritual reformation, and the best literature of the pagans is valued by its utility in realizing at least the moral component of that end. Basil’s emphasis on the moral utility of literary study mirrors, in turn, Plutarch’s earlier defense of literary study, How a Young Man Should Study Poetry. Again, the emphasis falls plainly on the moral utility of reading—and in this instance, such emphasis is accompanied by explicit advice against “perverting” the best of the ancient fictions, Homer’s epics, by discovering “allegories” or “hidden meanings” in them. Plutarch fairly snorts as he adds by way of exclamation: “As if the poet had not interpreted these episodes!” (62).40 Educated properly, the student interprets well not by “inventing plausible misinterpretations for bad passages”—as an allegorist might teach—but by fixing his eye on the authorial target. Literature is “an imitation of character and life,” whose purpose is moral reformation (74).
Basil and Plutarch read fictions in much the same way that the Antiochenes read the Bible, as narratives whose scope of moral reformation requires no allegorical interpretation because no “rift” exists between what the words say and what their authors mean. This is not to argue that rhetorical readers saw interpretation as unnecessary. Whatever Plutarch’s snorting over Homer’s lucidity or Chrysostom’s hyperbolic claims about the self-interpreting powers of the biblical narrative, both are self-conscious, artfully trained readers. It is to argue, instead, that the tools appropriate to interpretation—careful attention to textual and historical context, to organization and argument—are deployed on the assumption that words function to reveal, rather than to conceal meaning, and that the rhetorician’s accommodative skills can succeed in rescuing meaning from loss because they illuminate the coherence between what the words say and what the author intends.
If skopos begins its rhetorical life in Aristotle as a simple metaphor turned techne, a term of art, that term of art has acquired by Basil’s time new and surprisingly expansive metaphorical power. That power is worth noting, in turn, because it anticipates so eloquently the term’s renewed appeal for Melanchthon and his Philippist students. The elder Melanchthon admired Basil’s humility, and found enormously sympathetic Basil’s vision of a cosmos created by the divine maker who is also the divine artist. In a work traditionally conceived to have been written at the end of his life, On the Hexaemeron, Basil pauses during his commentary on Genesis to reflect about God’s pleasure in his own creation:41
‘And God saw that it was good’. It is not to the eyes of God that things made by Him afford pleasure, nor is His approbation of beautiful objects such as it is with us; but, beauty is that which is brought to perfection according to the principle of art and which contributes to the usefulness of its end. He, therefore, who proposed to Himself a clear aim (σκoπov) for His works, having recourse to His own artistic principles, approved them individually as fulfilling His aim. In fact, a hand by itself or an eye alone or any of the members of a statue, lying about separately, would not appear beautiful to one chancing upon them; but, set in their proper place, they exhibit beauty of relationship, scarcely evident formerly, but now easily recognized by the uncultured man. Yet, the artist, even before the combination of the parts knows the beauty of each and approves them individually, directing his judgment to the final aim.
Basil turns exegesis into aesthetic meditation and celebration, piously intended. There is nothing “plain” about his prose, except in its explicit adherence to biblical words as plain guides to biblical sense, and in the explicitness of his rejection of the “dream interpretations” of allegorizing readers.42 Instead, one clause builds periodically upon another in an elegant rhetorical imitation of its argument: the beauty of purposeful organization, both in the universe at large—where it is the very nature of things to combine and relate, to fashion proper and coherent contexts—and in the mind of that Maker who supplies the model for the rhetorical making on display throughout the Hexaemeron.43 Basil’s God operates as the most economical of all rhetoricians because of his divine powers of accommodation: if the world is a well-made oration, it is an oration made well because it is accommodated to human needs.44 Its beauty exists not to give God pleasure, but to provide pleasure to humankind for moral and spiritual ends. Again, the strong teleological drive of the argument denotes the depth of Basil’s debts to the classical rhetorical tradition deriving from Aristotle, as does the decidedly Aristotelian cast of his conception of beauty: only what is useful can be considered beautiful. Basil’s natural theology—bolstered throughout by the vast quantities of natural philosophical learning that he brings to bear upon his exegesis of Genesis—has no need and no room for allegory.45 With a conception of divine purpose manifest both in the created world and in the Bible’s creative Word, the pious response from the person of faith is meditation and celebration—meditation of macrocosmic beauty as inspiration to microcosmic praise. Basil’s skopos, then, is more than Aristotelian: it is a term of art metaphorically expanded into a Christian hermeneutics of praise and persuasion.
Basil of Caesarea was also called Basil the Great, and he earned that appellation among his contemporaries because he conjoined in his life and his works the two main cultural currents of the Hellenistic world, rhetoric and philosophy.46 Basil’s connections with Antioch were enduring. He corresponded both with Libanius, the city’s greatest rhetor, and with Diodore of Tarsus, who made gifts of two of his own books to him.47 Basil’s education, however, took place in Athens, where he absorbed ancient philosophy, particularly that of the platonists, and he later traveled east to Alexandria, where both the memory and the writings of Origen survived.48 Arising from this conjunction of rhetorical and philosophical training, Basil’s “greatness” supplies an especially good vantage from which to make distinctions between the skopos of the Antiochene school and the skopos that organizes the allegorizing practices of the Alexandrian Origen (c. 185–254) and those of the Alexandrian educated Proclus (c. 410–485), a neoplatonist who afterwards made Athens his school. In turn, Basil’s vantage is especially educational because his metaphorical expansion of skopos from a term of art into a principle of Christian hermeneutics anticipates—as a syncresis of the rhetorical and the philosophical—both important aspects of Melanchthon’s oratio sacra and the Philippist poetics of Sidney. For a Christian exegete, the encounter with philosophy did not necessarily entail the embrace of allegory.
No one in the Hellenistic world endows narrative with a more rigorously teleological drive than Origen. For him, exegesis is theology, and theology exegesis, and both activities are determined by a single goal: askesis, the ascent of the individual toward spiritual union with the divine. Accordingly, everywhere in his discussion of “How Divine Scripture Should Be Read and Interpreted”—his fullest exposition of hermeneutics in On First Principles—Origen organizes his arguments according to the familiar, culturally pervasive vocabulary of the skopos of the classical rhetorical tradition.49 When he discusses “the marks of a true understanding of the scriptures,” he does so first by summoning attention to “the aim of the Spirit” who enlightened the prophets and apostles (282); when he explores scriptural “stumbling blocks,” he does so by reference to their “principal aim” of announcing “the connexion that exists among spiritual events” (286); and when he exposes the insufficiency of the body of scripture, its literal significance, he points to “the aim of the divine power” in highlighting that fact (293). Like the Antiochenes later, he attributes a striking unity of design to the Bible, insisting on the meaningfulness of its every word. Like them, he attends to historike—to the narrative of actual events—and to the contexts, philological and historical, that sometimes explain scriptural meaning. An eminent biblical scholar, Origen displays conspicuously his thorough mastery of the grammatical and rhetorical traditions.50
For all that, no one in the Hellenistic world reads biblical narrative with a sharper eye for its incoherence than Origen. Repeatedly he calls attention to its elements of the “absurd and impossible” or what Gordon Teskey would characterize as its “rifts” between sense and intention (294). With an audacity rivaling that of a pagan critic like Celsus, Origen fairly revels in his disclosure of the Bible’s moments of palpable malfunction: its reasoning that is not reasonable, its laws that are not useful, its record of events that are historically not true (294). Such revels are possible, in turn, because narrative discontinuity of this kind is not an accident of composition; instead, it is the chief arrow in the Spirit’s rhetorical quiver, the very means by which the text achieves its purpose. “[C]ertain stumbling-blocks, as it were, and hindrances and impossibilities” are inscribed in the text so that “the more skilful and inquiring readers … may gain a sound conviction of the necessity of seeking in such instances a meaning worthy of God” (285, 287). Inspired by such stumbling blocks to ascend toward spiritual truths, Origen’s most skillful readers surmount the blocks of that sometimes absurd and impossible narrative to apprehend the truth beyond it. The text conceals, rather than reveals meaning—so that meaning will be revealed (the Spirit willing!) beyond rather than through words.
In the radical dualism of Origen’s thought, spirit stands apart from body, spiritual significance from literal meaning—a “rift” in consciousness reflected by a verbal “rift” between sense and intention. Speaking other than what it means, estranging the familiar sense of words, familiar times and places, and familiar patterns of cause and effect, the scripture demands allegorical interpretation. At a moment of especially intense reveling amidst the “impossibilities” of scripture, Origen queries rhetorically: “And who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, ‘planted a paradise eastward in Eden’, and set in it a visible and palpable ‘tree of life’? … I do not think that anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events” (288).51
For all of the real ties that bind Origen to the Antiochenes, his hermeneutic assumptions are fundamentally alien, as evidenced by the contrast between how Origen and the Antiochenes apply skopos as a term of art. When Origen writes about the scriptures’ aim, goal, or mark, he does so by direct reference to the authorial agency of the oft-encrypting Spirit. Comprehending Origen’s Spirit means carrying in hand (as Spenser’s Arthur carries his shield!) an allegorical decoder because spiritual meanings always assume a figural form. By contrast, when Theodore of Mopsuestia comments on the Psalms, he does so by reference to David as their author, who writes as a man (inspired as he may be), living in a particular time and place, with a particular aim or mark at which he directs his bow.52 To recover David’s intention is not to divine an occult truth; instead it is to comprehend, perspicuously in full vision of the relation of his story to the story of salvation history at large, a human experience of value for understanding one’s own place in the providential scheme of things. For Theodore and the Antiochenes, the realm of the non-figural has plenty of room for spiritual meaning.
Basil would have counted himself among those “silly” enough to believe that God planted a paradise eastward in Eden. Like Diodore of Tarsus, the Basil of the Hexaemeron found troubling the transformation of scriptural “substance” into allegorical dream. In fact, he may well have had Origen’s Hexaemeron in mind when he dismisses the assignment of allegorical significance to events like God’s separation of the waters and the firmament: “let us consider water as water,” Basil replies, as exegetical reaction and conservation (52). Basil is a more nimble, stylish, and imaginative reader than the Antiochenes—there is more room for intertextual allusion, more energy in figurative expression and depth in philosophical rumination—but his sense of the authenticity of the scriptural narrative is, again, too pronounced to allow for Origen’s reveling in textual stumbling blocks. Narrative coherence is something he assumes. As the handiwork of God, the world does not need a figural reading in order to reveal spiritual meanings. Consider its origins and ends, in natural philosophical terms, and water itself speaks to godly purposes. Such contrasts notwithstanding, Basil’s metaphorical employment of the vocabulary of skopos is tellingly similar to Origen’s in at least one respect. When he writes about the ultimate aim, purpose or intention of the Genesis story, he consistently identifies Moses’s “words of truth” with “the teachings of the Spirit,” substituting a divine for a human context of authorship, and in that cosmological expansion of scope he addresses those multitudinous correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm of such persistent fascination to him.53
As that cosmological expansion illustrates, Basil was also, like Origen, a student of Plato’s. For all of the real ties, rhetorical and philosophical, between the Hexaemeron and Aristotelianism, the portrait of God as sculptor/artisan, fashioning the cosmos from his own divinely conceived idea, had its origins in Plato’s Timaeus, a favorite among the Cappadocians.54 Some centuries after Plato, Cicero attributed a strikingly similar process of creation to the orator, also by way of analogy between rhetorical labor and the artistry of the sculptor. This brief history has a point beyond noting Basil’s intertextual prowess or syncretic skill. When Basil imparted an expanded metaphorical range to the traditional vocabulary of scope, celebrating God’s making of the cosmos in the familiar vocabulary of rhetorical making, he anticipated a moment of extraordinary importance in the history of poetics. The Hexaemeron signals a sea-change in the conceptualization of narrative. As James A. Coulter has demonstrated in an historically detailed study, among the later neoplatonists of the fourth and fifth centuries, the culturally pervasive vocabulary of skopos returned as the solution to a particular philosophical problem with large aesthetic consequence. Identified with the conscious intention of its author, the skopos guaranteed to the text, in its work of shadowing truths by mysteriously evocative allegorical symbols, what the neoplatonists liked to call a unity amidst multeity. It gave to the world of the text—conceived as a microcosm—an intellectual coherence among its variously related elements.55 As Coulter shows, the neoplatonists engineered a “definitive transference of an already existing complex of ideas to a literary artifact. The consequence of this was a systematic elaboration of the notion that a work of literature organically conceived should also be viewed as a microcosmic organism, and as a corollary, its creator as a microcosmic demiurge.”56 It became possible for the first time, then, to speak of a literary work as a world, and the author as its maker—a history of no small consequence, in the conjunction between the vocabulary of skopos and the concept of the literary microcosm, for Sidney’s golden world poetics.
When Proclus begins his commentary on Plato’s Alcibiades, he moves systematically from an identification of its scope (“the chief purpose and principal object of the whole conversation is the consideration of our being”); to a determination of its status as a microcosm (“as we have said elsewhere about the dialogues, each one must possess what the whole cosmos possesses”); to a précis of its conceptual coherence; to the detailed exegesis, sentence by sentence, often word by word, of those sentences and words in relation to its all-encompassing scope.57 Socrates opens the dialogue by addressing his young lover as “son of Kleinias” (15). In response, Proclus weighs methodically the affective force of this apostrophe in rendering Alcibiades “more accommodating” (15). As a detail of historike, he narrates the father’s achievement of “high repute at the battle of Coronea,” and notes critically the aptness of virtue memorialized to spur similar achievements in the son (15). Such exposition is traditional grammatical fare.
It is when Proclus proceeds to elaborate on the apostrophe’s significance, commenting that Kleinias “is a symbol of the recall of souls to their true father,” and the Pythagorean-inspired “symbol of the turning around of souls to their invisible causes,” that allegorizing crowds from the page the more traditional krisis (moralthematic analysis) of the Hellenistic grammarian (p. 16). When Origen allegorizes the scriptures, he fairly revels in its narrative “stumbling blocks,” finding alternative pathways to the spiritual with an eye to the specificity of the text. When Proclus allegorizes Plato’s dialogues, he is leaping on a trampoline, not vaulting over stumbling blocks—leaping, that is, from secondary textual details (the text is always secondary for the neoplatonist) to that primary unity of philosophical ideas that gives purpose and meaning to the whole.58 The “rifts” of allegorical reading are located first and foremost in images. Images may signify conventionally, as simple markers of meaning, but the preferred mode of symbolic expression from Plotinus to Iamblicus to Proclus is one in which representation occurs through external forms so antithetical to meaning that enigma (for all but the philosophically adept) is the necessary result. (Who but the adept could know that Kleinias is the soul’s invisible cause?) In the gap between what the words say and what the author intends, symbols leap into action to propel the philosophically inspired mind from the multeity of verbal matter to the unity of intellectual scope. Allegory is more than an appropriate reading tool. It is an indispensable one.
It takes no great leap of historical imagination to know how the Antiochenes would have judged the allegorizing of Proclus and the neoplatonists. For reasons both hermeneutic and theological, they would have dismissed it as perilous dream interpretation. Basil’s response, however, would have been more complicated and more revealing.
For a Christian exegete already inclined to accommodate the Timaeus’s demiurge to the characterization of an artisan God and already conversant with the vocabulary of the microcosm, it might well have been possible to assume an analogy between the divine Maker and the maker of fictions, the created world and the created text. Already in the Hexaemeron, the Word who makes the world by scope has oratorical powers at once reflecting and providing a model for human orations, albeit imperfect by comparison. Already too, in Basil’s defense of reading pagan fictions, considerations of divine scope figure heavily in evaluating the appropriate moral “scope” of interpretation. This is not to suggest that Basil had a microcosmic conception of fictions. Rather it is an argument that Basil’s cosmology, however elaborated by analogy, would have left him with no more sympathy for Proclus’s allegorizing than for Origen’s.
Like Origen, Basil attributes the “scope” of scripture to God or the Holy Spirit—as the “demiurge” (to use the platonic and gnostic term) who creates both the world and the Word from his own divine idea. Moses’s words of truth are the teachings of the Spirit. For Origen, the consequence of conceiving of divine authorship in such terms is allegory. The Spirit speaks, at his highest flights, a spiritual—a figural and symbolic—language, whose meanings are veiled. For Basil, divine authorship has no such consequences because divine authorship has been reconceived in more traditional grammatical and rhetorical terms. God’s purpose is perspicuously and beautifully revealed in the multitudinous connections and relations—the contexts—that comprise the Word and the world, and such contexts are interpretable through the exercise of reason, complemented by faith, for the purpose of pious praise and reflection. For Basil, spiritual meaning is invested in and embodied by natural objects, historical events, and scriptural words—meanings that accommodate divine ends to human comprehension within the limits appropriate to its capacity. As the products of God’s economical artistry, things themselves have spiritual significance.
Employed to independent and sometimes contrasting purposes by Origen and the Antiochenes and by Basil and the later neoplatonists, skopos appears to have originated for all in a common tradition of rhetorical education deriving from Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Similar to any term whose meaning alters by the changing circumstances of its use and whose multiple meanings are complicated by large-scale transformations in religious and philosophical perspective, “scope” is one whose history could be retold in several different ways. For a student of early modern allegory like Gordon Teskey, Origen and Proclus would assume far greater prominence in such an account—and properly so. Their achievements in negotiating “stumbling blocks” of narrative analysis and engineering leaps of symbolic interpretation are enabled considerably by the restorative promise of an allegorical scope promising repair for textual “rifts.” Those achievements, in turn, are enormously consequential for understanding the poetic practice of an Edmund Spenser. In Teskey’s history, the Antiochenes would scarcely merit a footnote, and Gregory of Nazianzus—the most philosophically adept among the allegorizing Cappadocians—would prove a more likely subject of study than Basil.
By contrast, the brief history recounted here brings to the center Diodore of Tarsus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, John Chrysostom, and their contemporary, Basil of Caesarea, because of the different goal that orients its scholarship—to recover a tradition of anti-allegorical or sometimes pointedly non-allegorical hermeneutics of importance for understanding Sidney’s poetics. Focusing on a specific body of classical ideas about reading and writing, which originated in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and which were extended in the pseudo-Ciceronian Ad Herennium, Cicero’s De Oratore and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, that history illustrates the power of the rhetorical tradition to animate both the anti-allegorical hermeneutics of Antiochene exegetes like Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, and the less polemical hermeneutics of the pointedly non-allegorical Chrysostom and Basil. It is that same rhetorical tradition, as the next portion of this argument will show, that animates Melanchthon’s oratio sacra, as the first systematic formulation of a Reformation hermeneutic, and that fuels Sidney’s notions about reading and writing in his domestication of Italian Renaissance poetics inside the English context. A more compact and more tidy version of this history might have dispensed with Basil of Caesarea altogether. This one does not, both because of the later Melanchthon’s intensely personal identification with him, and because of the importance of the “greatness” (the complexity) of his response to the hermeneutic questions at issue. In the Hexaemeron’s exuberantly composed synthesis of rhetorical and philosophical traditions, with its explicit pursuit of the perspicuous scope of scripture and its concomitant celebration of the artisan Maker who fashions both world and Word, its accommodation of rival paradigms of reading and writing comprises a telling precedent for the similarly syncretic golden world poetics of Sidney’s Defence of Poesy.
Sidney may well have translated a portion of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, if John Hoskins’s claim is correct that he saw in Henry Wotton’s hands “the two first books Englished by him.”59 It was, of course, “the right virtuous Edward Wotton,” Henry’s half-brother, who accompanied Sidney on his first visit to the imperial court in Vienna, and who endured, too, Pugliano’s lessons in horsemanship so comically recounted in the opening sentences of the Defence (95). There is a point to forging a genealogical connection here, Edward to Henry Wotton, Aristotle’s Rhetoric to the Defence of Poesy, because it was during Sidney’s three-year tour of the Continent (1572–75), and especially during two long stays in Vienna, that he received first-hand the education in Philippist humanism that contributed so significantly to the development of his poetics. His education translated Aristotle’s skopos from a rhetorical term into a vital component of a larger, influential framework of interpretation—a hermeneutic, if you will, at once oratorical and ethical, political and pious. Reading mattered for Sidney’s closest acquaintances because books were powerful. It is well to recall that Sidney’s education was placed chiefly in the hands of Languet, and that Languet’s long life of service to his “magister” (his teacher Melanchthon, as he almost always called him) was the product of a conversion by the book—a chance encounter, “tollelege-style,” with Melanchthon’s Loci communes.
A letter from December of 1575 says much about how the two spent their time together and the character of that primary education undergone by Sidney. Languet reminds him about “how many excellent writers” he studied during the mere “three or four months” he spent in Vienna the previous year, and how “many things” he learned from them “which concern the right ordering of man’s life.”60 Those readings, Languet’s correspondence suggests, included history (Sidney’s progress in the discipline is the frequent subject of Languet’s praise); moral philosophy (since “nothing is more beneficial” than that which “teaches what is right and wrong”); and “Holy Scripture” (since “the knowledge which is most necessary for us is that of our salvation”).61 The hierarchy of the readings—scripture, moral philosophy, and history—speaks to a hierarchy of aims, its rhetorical organization. That Sidney understood his own education in similar terms might best be illustrated by the letter he wrote to Robert Sidney, his younger brother, just as Robert was beginning his own education on the Continent (1578), traveling as Philip had done, in Languet’s care. Sidney organizes his reflections in that letter by reference to Aristotle (this time, the Ethics) and the need for Robert to “have imprinted in your minde” what he calls first “the good ende which everie man doth & ought to bend his greatest actions.” It is one thing to travel “but to travaile or to saie you have travailed”; it is another to travel for the purpose of furnishing “your selfe with … knowledge,” or what he terms “the scope and marke, you meane by your paines to shoote at.”62 Scope, the rhetorical term, assumes ethical implications, and even a distinctive cosmopolitan aura characteristic of Sidney generally, in the association of good judgment (in its “mixed and correlitive knowledge of things”) with wide horizons (“the most excellent waies of worldlie wisdome”). Sidney’s “scope” sounds like a fit target for an Odysseus: at once a goal for the practical traveller, a moral end for ethical journeys, and an intellectual mark of wide-ranging discrimination. Scope is a word whose etymology Sidney knows well, as his elaboration of its latent metaphorical significance indicates: a “scope” is a mark or target one takes pains (studies hard!) to shoot at. It is achieved by skill and learning, not by the accident or privilege of birth.
Sidney has one of his later fictive travelers, the Musidorus of The Old Arcadia, reflect in a similar manner that “well doing was … his scope, from which no faint pleasures could withhold him,” just as he has Philanax admonish the princes in their trial that “strangers have scope to know the customs of a country before they put themselves in it”—the term “scope” loaded in both instances with a strong sense of right reason acquired from the purposeful acquisition of knowledge.63 Or to return from the ethical to the rhetorical, so as to illustrate how quickly the passage between them is made, it is well to recall too Philanax’s summary fulminations against the princes during that same trial: “Shall we doubt so many secret conferences with Gynecia, such feigned favour to the over-soon beguiled Basilius …, lastly such changes and traverses as a quiet poet could scarce fill a poem withal, were directed to any less scope than to this monstrous murder?”64 If murder is the scope or purpose of the princes’ actions (as Philanax rather crudely imagines them), as an event it is simultaneously the rhetorical object of the quiet poet, an additional and characteristically Sidneian extension of that term’s significance to the realm of the literary. This is an extension not unique to Sidney, but one continued in the Sidney circle. In completing Philip’s translation of the Psalms, Mary Sidney opens the volume, with sisterly familiarity and verbal tribute, by announcing that her work “hath no further scope to goe,/nor other purpose but to honor thee.”65 When Fulke Greville looked back several years after Sidney’s death to remember what was most important to “all these creatures of his making,” he remembered that “his intent, and scope” was to turn barren philosophy into pregnant images of life. Both Sidney’s sister and friend knew the terms that counted most.
As a term of art, the scopus dicendi appears in Melanchthon’s rhetorical works in conjunction with his concept of status— a concept that lies right at the heart of his theory of eloquence and his assumptions about interpretation. Together with his attention to the loci communes—textual “commonplaces”—these are the terms that made his work distinctive, that put his distinguishable imprint on the study of oratio in the northern Renaissance.66 Melanchthon was not the first in Renaissance Europe to revive the vocabulary of scopus and status: Erasmus appears to have set the precedent, but it was Melanchthon who developed that vocabulary into a systematic hermeneutic—into a new institutionalized practice of reading and writing.67 As Melanchthon writes in the Elementorum rhetorices libri duo (1531; rev. 1542), the most widely published and most extensively elaborated of his three rhetorical textbooks, “No part of the art [of rhetoric] is more necessary than the precepts dealing with the status of the case, in respect of which, this is first and foremost: in relation to every problem or controversial question we consider what the status is, that is, what is the chief subject of inquiry, the proposition that contains the gist of the matter toward which all arguments are aimed, in other words, the main conclusion.”68 Pursuing the status is what supplies dialectical rigor to rhetorical acts of invention and the work of interpretation. That pursuit, in turn, has as its final goal, the location of what Melanchthon calls the scopus dicendi. Locating the scopus is so important because, “No matter of debate can be comprehended, nothing can be explained, stated or grasped in an orderly fashion, except some proposition be formulated which includes the sum total of the case.”69 (As root and branch, Melanchthon’s “orderly fashion” links rhetorically with Languet’s educational concerns about “right ordering.”)
Melanchthon’s success in demonstrating that vocabulary’s utility for enabling a coherent theory of reading and writing can be measured partly by the influential educators who adapted it as the foundation for their own teaching practice: most important among them, Johann Sturm, the irenic, ecumenically minded rector of the Strasbourg Academy, who numbered among his pupils—the elite of northern Europe, Protestant and Catholic—François Hotman, Peter Martyr, Theodore Beza, and Philip Sidney. It can measured, too, with no small historical irony, by its appeal to his most vociferous enemies, like Matthias Flacius Illyricus, who as the most capable of the exegetes among the Gnesio-Lutherans, reworked Melanchthon’s terminology of the scopus into a psychologically penetrating vehicle for exploring the reader’s experience of the Bible.70 That success is measurable, moreover, by the deployment of the terminology of the scopus in the exegetical writings of John Calvin, by far the most influential among Melanchthon’s rivals. Unlike so many of the Reformers who came before and after, Calvin was strikingly reticent about explaining or espousing his hermeneutic principles: he wrote no rhetorical or dialectical treatises, no textbooks on exegesis, and demonstrated no interest in developing a theory of reading as such.71 It would have been possible in the century’s last decades to discover intermittently in Calvin a hands-on application of scopus to biblical exegesis, but for a comprehensive theory of hermeneutics that explains how and why books of all kinds—secular and sacred—should be read with an eye to the scopus dicendi, it was necessary to turn to Melanchthon.
It is one thing to identify the centrality of these key terms, scope and status, within Melanchthon’s rhetorical thought. It is quite another to consider the aim or purpose that they were designed to serve. Recovering that “scope” matters, in turn, for appreciating the new hermeneutic that Melanchthon helped to devise and disseminate throughout the Protestant north, and that was demonstrably so crucial to Sidney’s education—its comprehensive range (it is a “method” designed for all books), its stunning optimism (its enegetic celebration of Greek and Roman eloquence), and its pervasive urgency (its assumption that the salvation of society and souls depends on such skills).
Giorgio Agamben has argued that “The appearance of a new religion always coincides with a new revelation of language and a new religion means above all a new experience of language.”72 Whatever the merits of that claim about other religious movements in other times and places, there can be no question about its rightness in regard to the Reformation of sixteenth-century Europe. Martin Luther inspired a revolution that was semiological as well as theological. As Samuel James Preus explains in a lucid account of his exegetical thought, the early Luther devised in his exposition of the Psalms a new understanding of the language of the Bible, which both complemented and enabled his new understanding of faith. Preus recovers the process whereby Luther turned to a vocabulary of plain sense as a vehicle for reuniting the Bible’s grammatical and theological significance, and the distinctive character of his linguistic turn from a vision of the scriptures as shadow to a discovery of their character as promise.73 The signs of God are mysterious and shadowy. They require interpretation. By contrast, promises present themselves plainly and demand a choice—the refusal or acceptance of faith.74 In Luther’s vision, as Roland Bainton memorably phrases the point, “One does not chat with the most high. God is a consuming flame.”75
For Luther, then, the reality of God’s Word was God’s action in making himself known to humankind—and this action best characterizes what was new about the Reformation’s “experience of language” (to use Agamben’s phrase). Drawn habitually to the organization of his thought by antinomies—theology and philosophy, faith and works, freedom and bondage, the deus absconditus et revelatus—Luther identified Law and Gospel as the central dialectic pulsing through the Bible, Old Testament as well as New. The Bible’s meaning was its action, its dialectic of words inspiring consciousness of sin and faith in salvation. God’s promise was universal, and it gave to the text its unity (as the narrative of the promise’s unfolding over time), its decorum (a promise implies no desert on the part of the recipient), and its persuasive power (a promise bends the heart toward hope of fulfillment). Like Erasmus, the rhetorically trained Luther identified Christ as the Bible’s scopus dicendi—its main aim, purpose, and target. His exegesis is punctuated frequently by the grammatical and rhetorical terminology of the humanists. However, if for humanist scholars like Erasmus, God could be seen as a type of the Renaissance orator, who unites in himself knowledge and eloquence, and who manifests his concern for mankind by the persuasive power of his Word, for the less philologically and textually oriented Luther, God was better understood as a preacher. What God preached was the terror of the Law and the joy of the Gospel by words whose power was best unleashed by speech.
If Luther was the inspiration for that theological and semantic revolution that we now call the Reformation, then Melanchthon was the first systematic expositor of the character, meaning and consequence of the Word regarded as promise. As Luther’s lieutenant, the task of creating a coherent account of the new theology fell squarely on Melanchthon’s shoulders—and in a Reformed church so centrally committed to authorizing itself on the rightness of its understanding of scripture (sola scriptura!), no small part of Melanchthon’s burden was to devise a practice of reading sufficient to the challenge of the Reformed faith. That challenge is represented most formidably by Luther’s insistence that since the Holy Spirit is the clearest and hence “the simplest writer and adviser in heaven and on earth. That is why his words could have no more than the one simplest meaning which we call the written one, or the literal meaning of the tongue.”76 Luther rejected the traditional medieval vision of scriptural words as mysterious sacramental signs that require grace for understanding (intellectus), and discarded the fourfold method of allegorical interpretation associated with it. As Beryl Smalley and Samuel James Preus have shown, Luther’s recourse to the “letter” of the scriptures emerges less as a break than as punctuation mark at the end of a long history of decline in the authority of allegorical readings of the Bible. The story of exegesis in the late Middle Ages is one of progressively coherent literalism gradually displacing the traditional fourfold method of interpretation—a method so thoroughly constricted by fears among church fathers about subjective allegorizing as to be rendered post-Aquinas, in Smalley’s phrase, an interpretive practice bereft of distinguished practitioners.77 There are precedents, then, for Luther’s turn to the “plain sense” of the Bible from Nicholas of Lyra to Lorenzo Valla—to mention only two of the most prominent exegetes who contributed variously to the cause—but Luther typically acknowledged no ancestors. The Bible taught him to read, not Lyra or Valla or even Augustine.78
As the late Melanchthon constructed a summary account of his own reading principles during the decade of the 1550s, again and again he chose to situate himself in a particular historical tradition. The tradition in which this life-long professor of Greek asked to be seen was Hellenistic and Christian, the world of fourth-century Antioch and its historically significant combat between heretics and true believers, between allegorizers and what Melanchthon clearly understood as pious students of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Melanchthon searched for an early Church father whose authority would be useful in clarifying the principles chiefly at issue in reading the Bible. To that end, he identified an obscure, fourth-century Bishop of Salamis, named Epiphanius, best known, first, for an anti-heretical work, entitled the Panarion and, second, for his vituperative assaults against Chrysostom’s defense of Origen’s theology. Obscure as he might seem, Epiphanius was useful because he espoused the rhetorical hermeneutic of Antioch while maintaining a safe distance from the history of heresy historically associated with that city. In the two sentences of anti-allegorical dicta that Melanchthon quoted on at least seven separate occasions in the 1550s, this praeceptor Germaniae discovered what was clearly dear to his pedagogical heart: a compact statement about the fundamentals of his own reading practice. The quotation is one that Melanchthon copied into books intended as gifts for friends.79 While discoursing on Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, Melanchthon cites Epiphanius approvingly: “Divinus sermo non indiget allegorica interpretatione, sed in propria sententia intelligatur. Indiget autem speculatione et sensu, ut materiae discernantur, et recte accipiantur.” (The divine word [sermo] is not suited to allegorical interpretation, but should be understood in its proper meaning. Instead it should be read by analysis and sense, so that its material arguments may be discerned and rightly received.)80 What matters here, what drew Melanchthon to the citation so frequently, is its economy in encapsulating so perspicuously what it means to read “speculatione et sensu” (by analysis and sense)—its summary character as a statement about interpretation.
Of course, the Bible contains allegories! But the essential reading practices required for biblical interpretation are acquired from rigorous humanistic training in grammar, rhetoric and dialectics, and such practices need to be distinguished from the allegorical, since they are founded on hermeneutic assumptions utterly different in kind. Language exists to reveal, not to conceal meaning: “the benevolent Spirit of God intended this: that he might be understood by all pious people with as little difficulty as possible.”81 Language is available to understanding without the exercise of some special grace. The Word has causative power as a vehicle of saving faith not because of some mysterious grace it carries or contains. Instead, the Word has power because words themselves—in Melanchthon’s view as well as Luther’s—are naturally and inherently powerful. They cause things to happen.82
As Melanchthon unpacks the significance of Epiphanius’s key terms, he focuses first on reading “by analysis” (the Latin translation is speculatione; in the Greek, nominat Theorian). Out of the lexicon of traditional Antiochene anti-allegorical polemic, Melanchthon defines such reading as the “viam docendi” (the way of teaching) of true dialectic—to be distinguished from the garrulous and trifling logic of scholastic philosophy. Here dialectic works on complete texts that are conceptually coherent, as a means of understanding the “totum corpus doctrinae” (the full body of teaching)—not Lombard-wise, on the logic of individual propositions excerpted in mutilated form and transposed into “alienas sententias” (foreign notions). Real dialectic concerns itself with the art of argumentation and persuasion as a whole, with questions of genre; matters of definition, distinction, and consequence, as well as issues of organization—all of those elaborately detailed considerations that avoid “confounding universal doctrine into chaos.” Viewed in these terms, Melanchthon’s dialectic is virtually indistinguishable from grammar and rhetoric—as the art that teaches how to understand the persuasive power of communications of any kind, a convergence of the rhetorical and the dialectical originating in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and newly elaborated in Agricola’s De inventione dialectica.83 Basil-like, it is a convergence, too, representing Melanchthon’s ambition to create a single instrument for procuring knowledge from the harmony of philosophy and rhetoric.84
If Luther left to Melanchthon the challenge of creating a new hermeneutic by which to read the Bible according to its “plain sense,” his answer to that challenge was to recuperate that loosely organized body of principles for reading that originated in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which were elaborated (among others) by Cicero and Quintilian, and which persisted as a powerful influence in the Hellenistic era among rhetorical adepts from the Antiochenes to Basil to Epiphanius. Once more, recuperation assumed textual form in the production and dissemination of three books of rhetoric and three books of logic—with their transformation of loose principles into methodical arts suitable for the training of a new Protestant elite—and the publication of voluminous commentaries on classical and Christian texts, exemplifying how to turn such principles into action.85 Like Erasmus, Luther employed rhetorical terminology in reading the Bible. It was Melanchthon, however, who for the first time insisted that the Bible is rhetoric and must therefore be read in rhetorical (and dialectical) terms—and because of that insistence narrative came to assume a place of critical importance in his reading practice, one which endows the “literal” story with renewed argumentative power and experiential significance. In place of allegoresis, Melanchthon emphasized instead the preeminent significance of the Bible’s use of what he calls histories or examples. One instance can illustrate my point.
All teachers have their prized examples, the stories to which they return time after time in order to illustrate the key principles of their discipline. Melanchthon was no exception. Early and late in his long career as theologian and biblical exegete, natural and moral philosopher, rhetorician and dialectician, he makes extensive reference to the story of Nathan and David. Consider just a few of these references from the theological and exegetical works. In the Loci communes of 1521, David’s repentance is recited to highlight “the design of the Holy Spirit in Scripture,” the action of the redemptive Gospel to “raise up, animate and fill the tottering conscience with … lively promises about Christ.” Its message of mercy is shrouded not in mysterious figures of speech, but instead pictured clearly as “that which the text obviously declares.”86 When Melanchthon published his revised version of the Loci in 1555, David’s repentance illustrates God’s activity “through the external word” that “kindles faith in the heart,” the necessity both to believe the divine promise of salvation and to apply that promise to oneself in recognizing “My sins are forgiven me.”87 A more extensive set of references to the story punctuates Melanchthon’s early critically important commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. “Plain and clear” is the message of David’s repentance, Melanchthon argues, in its exemplary proof “that liberation from sin and death is promised on account of the Liberator who will come.”88 This is a promise that demands more than readerly recognition. It requires active accommodation: “Let us include ourselves individually,” Melanchthon writes, “in these universal statements, and declare that the promised benefits truly pertain to us.”89 Or to cite one additional example from his commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Colossians (1527), Melanchthon refers to David’s rebuke and repentance with an emphasis on the history’s transcendence of ordinary ethical instruction. The scripture exists “not just for the purpose of imitating better moral behaviour,” but to effect real transformation: “a circumcision made without hands—the putting off of the body of the sins of the flesh.”90 In Melanchthon’s reading, the story of Nathan and David is a history or example that pictures to the mind God’s forgiveness of sins (one of the summary meanings of scripture as a whole). It is an exemplary moment of particular power because in its depiction of David’s shame by Nathan’s tale of rebuke, it portrays both the terror of the Law (as David anguishes over sin) and the redemptive agency of the Gospel (as David prays for forgiveness).
Understanding proceeds not just by analysis, but also by receiving the story rightly, by accommodating oneself to the experience of forgiveness embodied by the narrative. As an emotionally charged story, it at once informs the mind and transforms the heart with its lesson of consolation, and both its power to inform and transform derive from the significance attached to commonplaces (loci communes) in Melanchthon’s reading practice. On the one hand, Melanchthon conceives of loci as those logical-foundational principles supplying the unity of the biblical argument—principles, like that of David’s repentance, to which reason will respond in its quest for order and that analysis will uncover in the course of studied investigation. But Melanchthon also conceives of loci as those innate-experiential laws of nature that govern universal human experience—laws, like David’s hunger for repentance, to which human nature responds because of our common need for salvation.91 Biblical loci are logical/rhetorical principles and existential truths—truths grounded in the deepest laws of nature governing human experience. Hence, the extraordinary eloquence of biblical narratives at once to teach and to persuade, to speak to the mind about what reason requires and to address the heart about the realities of its own nature.
When Melanchthon published the expanded version of his Elementorum rhetorices libri duo in 1542, he had recourse to a favorite narrative, one that recurs obsessively in the exegetical writings—the story of Nathan and David—but this time he treats it in the distinctive context of his educational work. In the first modern European textbook designed to teach students the principles of correct reading as an introduction to the knowledge of correct writing, it is fascinating to investigate why and how Melanchthon reads the story of Nathan and David. Again, no effort is made to search for hidden allegories or to derive, scholastic style, logical propositions from the biblical text. Instead, Melanchthon interprets the narrative as an extended example of a commonplace-at-work. It illustrates the oratorical art of demonstrating and amplifying (ad probandum et ad amplicandum) a universal truth from experience, the human need for penitence. Penitence, then, is the commonplace that David’s exemplary history embodies as a doctrine (as doctrina, what is taught and what teaches), a history that simultaneously instructs and moves its audience to virtue as they learn aright how to understand and to receive the textual scopus. Around and about the exemplary history of David, then, circle the terms of an elaborately detailed art of communication.92 What is especially interesting about the history of Nathan and David in this context is its prominence inside a comprehensive rhetorical textbook designed not as an instrument of religious or exegetical education, but instead as a general primer in those arts of communication crucial to the governing class—dialectic and rhetoric. The history of Nathan and David, as Melanchthon’s reading shows, can be studied for its oratorical benefits because it is itself oratorical. The search for scopus belongs equally to the analysis of Paul’s Epistles and the plays of Terence, the Gospel of Matthew and the orations of Demosthenes.
As a professor of Greek at Wittenberg, Melanchthon found himself in any given year lecturing upon a broad array of texts, from Paul’s Romans and Homer’s Iliad to Aristotle’s Organon and Ethics. Typically, Melanchthon also made room for lectures about his favorites among Latin literature, Cicero’s orations or Virgil’s Eclogue s. Move from Melanchthon’s analysis of enthymemes in the Ethics to his identification of status and scopus in Cicero’s Pro Archia or Virgil’s second eclogue, and the continuity of reading strategies is striking. That continuity occasionally has interesting consequences for how Melanchthon reads individual texts—Paul’s Romans, for instance—and those consequences speak volumes about the enormous significance that Melanchthon conferred upon the art of reading itself.
While commenting on Romans, Melanchthon can write about the Bible’s scope in ways that are reminiscent of Erasmus and Luther—as a means of identifying, that is, some main purpose that the whole story of salvation targets, Christological in kind. More often, Melanchthon writes about scopus in ways that particularize the intention of the argument as Paul’s—as the purpose or target, that is, of a particular man writing a particular text. (Arguments interest him more than philological considerations or historical circumstances.) But Melanchthon can write about Paul’s epistles, too, not only as having a particular scope, but also as containing in their own argumentation the scopus of the scriptures as a whole. As he argues, “You will have learned Church history in vain, unless you observe the scope and use of history [nisi historiae scopos et usum] shown by [Paul]. Where he discourses about the abrogation of the law, about sin, about flesh, about spirit … what other thing does he do except bring to light universal Scripture, as by a certain method [ceu methodo quadam, universae scripturae]?”93 Only Paul has the key to unlock the Bible’s meaning, Melanchthon maintains! And Paul has that key only because he knows how to read the scriptures in the right way—by utilizing “a certain method,” employing, that is, the best skills of the Greek and Roman grammatical tradition. What matters here about Melanchthon’s commentary on Paul—what matters that is to an appreciation of the new hermeneutic that Melanchthon devised and disseminated throughout the Protestant north, and that was so crucial to Sidney’s education—is its comprehensiveness (it is a “method” designed for all reading), its optimism (its unqualified admiration for Greek and Roman eloquence), and its urgency (its implicit argument that health of society—even of souls!—depends on such skills).
Some years ago, Paul Oscar Kristeller observed that “Melanchthon, the defender of rhetoric against philosophy, … had more influence on many aspects of Lutheran Germany than Luther himself and … was responsible for the humanistic tradition of the German Protestant schools down to the nineteenth century.”94 Recent scholarship by historians of rhetoric has both confirmed, and in some respects, extended Kristeller’s claims for Melanchthon’s importance to the educational tradition, especially as that tradition made its impact felt on reading and interpretation. Kathy Eden, Peter Mack and Kees Meerhoff have drawn attention to fundamental transformations in reading practices over the course of the sixteenth century in which Melanchthon played a major role. For Eden, those transformations are an instance of “humanist rehabilitation” of the classical tradition of intepretatio scripti, a practice of reading whose origins lie in judicial rhetoric. For Mack and Meerhoff, they comprise a dialectically inspired revolution in the art of textual interpretation.95 In each of their readings, Melanchthon occupies a central role in developing and disseminating key interpretive practices that fostered (what until recently) were some strikingly modern assumptions about how to read: the importance of examining whole books to recover arguments in their completeness; the need to consider authorial intention, textual/historical circumstances, and economy of organization as guides to interpretation; the assumption that language exists to reveal, rather than to conceal meaning; and the usefulness of applying dialectics (logical analysis) to rhetoric (to language in “natural” use).
Whether regarded as a rehabilitation or as a revolution, Melanchthon’s methodical teaching of eloquence reflects what these recent scholars of the history of rhetoric are agreed was a whole new set of ideas about how to read. All are agreed, too, about the significance of what Kathy Eden calls “the profound interaction between rhetoric and hermeneutics” in sixteenth-century Europe, “especially between writing and reading.”96 Eloquence was taught first by Melanchthon and his students through textual analysis, and then through composition or pronunciation—a pedagogical reflection in miniature of that larger history in which the Reformers’ biblical exegesis motivated the creation of new notions first of interpretation, then of composition. What emerges most forcefully from Melanchthon’s ideas about reading is a tremendous confidence about eloquence—in the sacred and secular domains alike—and a striking rigor about the business of interpretation, in his demand that eloquence be mediated and evaluated at every turn by logic.
To the analyses of Eden, Mack, and Meerhoff, I would add, as an argument crucial to the history of poetics in England, the formative impact of that new confident set of assumptions (about reading and writing) on the Defence of Poesy. Developed as an alternative method of interpreting texts inside a culture still swarming with the old-style philological commentaries of the early humanists on the one hand and the remarkably enduring practices of the allegorizing commentators on the other, the new ideas of reading are as essential to Sidney’s poetics as a theory of allegory is to Spenser’s poetry.97 They are key to understanding, in short, how Sidney sought to authorize his claims on behalf of the metamorphic power (remarkably) not of orations, but of fictions.
In 1935 Kenneth Myrick argued that Sidney’s Defence is structured on the model of the classical judicial oration, complete in its seven parts from its witty exordium to its comically hyperbolic conclusio. Other critics have revised (sometimes usefully) Myrick’s account about exactly where Sidney incorporates his narratio, propositio, and divisio, and where, therefore, the main business of confirmation and refutation begins, but there have been few challenges to Myrick’s main argument.98 Some attention has been paid to Sidney’s motives for crafting his Defence as a judicial oration. Geoffrey Shepherd notes, for instance, that Sidney follows the traditional pattern of university disputations by his choice of forms and Arthur Kinney suggests that this display of humanist elocutio was one potent means of whipping Gosson back to school.99 On the other hand, little attention has been given to specific models for Sidney’s judicial oration—and for good reason. Its structure appears so orthodox as to be generic, and would have been readily available from Cicero or any number of his imitators. As several critics note, Sidney would have had English models ready-to-hand for his choice of oratorical structures, including one from an influential figure in the Sidney circle, The Arte of Rhetoric by Thomas Wilson. There is another good reason to resist a search for specific models, oratorical or otherwise, for the Defence. Sidney’s eclecticism is legendary. A shrewd, practiced, and often brilliant syncretizer, Sidney habitually travels across the most disparate critical and philosophical terrains—from Plato to Aristotle, Plutarch to Basil, Landino to Scaliger—in search of the materials that he weaves with metamorphic complexity into the argument of the Defence. Source hunters come to the Defence both certain to find riches, and just as certain to experience frustration by attributing Sidney’s practice (however conceived) to any one source.
While arguments refusing to attribute a single source to the oratorical structure of the Defence seem wise, they are scarcely exhaustive in explaining the significance of Sidney’s choice to organize his work as a judicial oration. Sidney’s choice of form, as always, is a strong indicator of meaning. An oration is the appropriate vehicle for defending poetry because poetry, as Sidney redefines the art, is intimately informed by oratio, by the twin arts of rhetoric and dialectic. By privileging oratorical ideas in this way, especially Melanchthon’s, I do not mean to diminish appreciation for Sidney’s real eclecticism. Quite the opposite is true. For the cosmopolitan Sidney, nurtured in cosmopolitan Vienna among an internationally minded elite of cultured moderates, few things could be more important than to display his wide and stylish learning across a vast array of times, places, and disciplines. What I do mean to argue, however, is that Sidney’s eclecticism was never that of a dilettante. As the most self-conscious and critically aware writer of his generation, he was driven just as tenaciously to organize the eclecticism he so eagerly displayed. What the judicial oration is to the structure of the Defence, Melanchthon’s concepts of reading and writing are to its arguments—the very means by which its critical and philosophical eclecticism achieves purpose through “methodical” arrangement, as well as the source of important matter that Sidney transforms in the alchemy of his wit into major conceptual arguments.100
Sidney foregrounds the oratorical quality of his Defence by a variety of means other than its formal organization. Intrusively, wittily, energetically, the narrative voice of the work repeatedly imitates the spoken discourse of the orator, sustaining the illusion throughout that we are not so much readers of a text, as auditors of a speech. Summoned to defend poor poetry, Sidney is “provoked” not to write “but to say something unto you …” (95, emphasis mine). Challenged to name a poet whose imitations surpass the exemplary stories of the historian, Sidney objects, “yet say I and say again, I speak of the art, and not of the artificer” (111, emphasis mine). By such strategies, his speaking voice maintains a presence and sets a standard by which to value (by contrast) the speaking of others. The historian is devalued as a “tyrant in table talk,” the philosopher ridiculed for “sophistically speaking against subtlety” and for being “so hard of utterance and so misty to be conceived” (105–6). Oratorical standards surface repeatedly to enforce key distinctions. Like good senators, Sidney writes, poets traditionally dress their matter in verse, “not speaking (table talk fashion or like men in a dream) words as they chanceably fall from the mouth, but peizing each syllable of each word by just proportion according to the dignity of the subject” (103). The decorum appropriate to the senatorial oration dignifies the poet’s versification. Orators themselves are sometimes brought forward to add their weight of cultural authority to the value of poetry. Among that list of worthies from “our nearer times” who “not only … read others’ poesies, but … poetise for others’ reading,” Sidney summons the “great orators,” Pontanus (Giovanni Pontano) and Muretus (Marc-Antonie Muret)—the latter, an ecumenically interesting witness for poetry, since this French humanist wrote a defense of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (131).
Sidney can be even more explicit about the close relationship that obtains between poetry and oratory. Toward the conclusion of his pointedly critical digression on the state of English letters, he develops a sustained critique of contemporary diction that expands from a complaint against corruptions of language common to “versifiers” into a more wide-ranging assault against the diction of “prose-printers,” “scholars,” and “preachers” (138–9). He castigates his countrymen for their “courtesan-like painted affectation,” their overuse of “far-fetched [imported] words,” too frequent “coursing of the letter,” and “winter-starved” figures of speech. But when Sidney cites authorities for corrective examples to imitate, it is interesting to note that he turns at this moment not to poets, but to orators: Demosthenes and Cicero (“most worthy to be imitated”) and Cicero’s “great forefathers … in eloquence,” Antonius and Crassus (138–9). He does so, clearly, because Sidney’s standards for evaluating the success of language-use of any kind (poetry or prose, academic or ecclesiastical) are oratorical in origin. Words succeed as they “persuade” and as they “prove,” as they marshall effectively the arts of rhetoric and dialectic for “the uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the mind” (140). With a characteristic lightness of touch, Sidney calls explicit attention to his own argumentative procedures, at first modestly exclaiming that “methinks I deserve to be pounded for straying from Poetry to Oratory,” and then subsequently justifying himself by reminding his readers of the “affinity” these arts possess in this “wordish consideration.” If it is the business of writers—writers of all sorts—to provide for “the right use both of matter and manner” (the traditional res et verba), then oratory is a useful discipline by which to guide and reform the poet’s art, imitation, and exercise (139–40).101
The Defence is organized as a judicial oration; it frequently mimics the voice of the orator; it enlists famous orators, classical and contemporary, as advocates for poetry; and it employs explicitly oratorical standards for the reform of poetic diction. By so doing, the text clearly bears the imprint of Sidney’s humanist training, but that training is more immediately visible on the style and structure of its arguments than on the matter of its poetics. If oratorical practices really matter for understanding the Defence—the new practices of reading and writing that he learned from his education abroad—then it is necessary to demonstrate how they matter in regard to the substance of Sidney’s poetic theory. To begin that examination, it will be helpful to focus again on Sidney’s central argument about the “scope” of poetry—the poet’s making of golden worlds—as an illustration of the hermeneutic skills that he acquired from his oratorical education. Sidney’s critical brilliance is enabled, in no small measure, by the methodical brilliance of his reading skills, and there is no better example of Sidney’s skill in “methodizing” the eclectic matter of his Defence than his treatment at the very center of his golden world poetics of Julius Caesar Scaliger. As the author of the Poetices, the best known of the sixteenth-century Italian treatises on poetry, Scaliger was a figure with whom Sidney was eager to be associated (he refers him by name four times, and always politely). His presence in the Defence lends a cosmopolitan air to the discussion, and sometimes, too, suggestive matter to be reshaped for other purposes. As Sidney reads Scaliger to raid the fashionable Italian master for ideas about poetics, for terminology and conceptual categories, what emerge so clearly are his own distinctive assumptions about writing and reading.
Sidney’s reshaping of Scaliger is particularly instructive in the Defence’s “accommodation” of the Poetices’s first chapter, a discussion of poetry in relation to various, culturally significant disciplines that concludes with the suggestive characterization of the poet as “almost … a second deity.”102 The main aim of Scaliger’s chapter is to distinguish poetry from the traditionally more revered sciences of philosophy, oratory, and history—a discussion that proceeds in terms that must have seemed familiar to Sidney by creating categories among the sciences as distinguishable modes of cultivating language. A branch of learning is a species of discourse, and the various branches of learning can be distinguished by the different ways in which they employ language, the different ends to which language is employed, and the relative value of those ends. Hence, philosophers, orators, historians and poets are first categorized according to the degree of precision each obtains in his employment of words. Philosophers are most precise; orators, less so; historians and poets “employ narration, and use much embellishment.”103 Having grouped historians and poets together, Scaliger then distinguishes the poet from the historian. This is a distinction that he makes, first, by referring to poetic imitation—a bit uncertainly, since poets are said to imitate “actual” and fictitious events—and, subsequently, by appealing to the Horatian dictum that poetry is really to be understood according to its end (finem), “the giving of instruction in pleasurable form.”104 Regrouping somewhat, Scaliger proceeds to define a single end for “philosophical exposition,” “oratory,” and “the drama”—the act of persuasion, a definition that occasions both a digression on poetic eloquence as the means to persuasive effects and a revision of Quintilian’s categories of speaking.105 That discussion concludes when Scaliger suggests that poets differ from philosophers, historians, and the rest because while these others “represent things just as they are, … the poet depicts quite another sort of nature,” and, therefore, is justly called by the Greeks a maker.106
Suggestive as it may have been, Scaliger’s “second deity” passage is a digression from the main discussion about how to categorize the sciences (“while we are on the subject,” he writes), and a digression that leaves uncertain just how the poet’s status as a maker relates either to the business of persuasion or to another main issue at stake, the value of poetry. So what if the poet is a maker of “images more beautiful than life”?107 Scaliger never says, and for a Sidney intellectually disposed to pursue final causes, that silence must have seemed strangely empty. Once more, for a Sidney equally disposed to regard “methodical order” in argument, the whole of this chapter must have seemed as conceptually incoherent as it was imaginatively stimulating. In a gesture of accommodation, then, with a familiar nod toward the fashionable, Sidney proceeds to devour Scaliger’s text and make it wholly his own. What Sidney adds to Scaliger’s discussion of golden worlds is “scope.”
As Sidney sets out to distinguish poetry as an art from other arts, he promises to do so “by marking the scope of other sciences than by my partial allegation” (99). Note the claim to objectivity contained in the promise, as if the appeal to considerations of scope guaranteed a logical rigor to argument superseding the merely “partial”—a prophylactic against, one might say, the Pugliano problem, and the always troubling biases that extend from self-love. He promises, in short, an analysis that accounts for what Melanchthon would call the final aim or mark of each art, considered comprehensively, or what the Defence terms in its very next sentence its “principal object” (99). For example, it is the “scope” of the astronomer “to look upon the stars” and set “down what order Nature hath taken therein” or the scope of the musician “in times [to] tell you which by nature agree, which not” (100). Sidney accommodates, then, a technical term customarily applied by contemporary rhetoricians to individual texts to his discussion of individual arts, and secures in the process an enormous expansion of range and significance for the discussion at hand. For Sidney’s innovation functions paradoxically as a restoration, the gesture of an erudite display of learning. With more than a little cosmopolitan fanfare, as I noted in the Introduction, Sidney constructs the entire frame of his central argument in conspicuous imitation of Aristotle’s treatment of the diverse aims of diverse sciences at the start of The Nicomachean Ethics. What Sidney gains by this act of imitation is both appropriate philosophical rigor and immediate moral purposefulness: the drive of argumentation to a consideration of ends, where the “ending end” of human learning is kept in sight from the start.
Sidney’s addition of “scope” to Scaliger’s argument secures, too, another consequential expansion of meaning and significance for his account of the poet’s making. In place of Scaliger’s ever-shifting and rather incoherently defined categories, Sidney’s attention to the “scope” of the arts permits him to distinguish clearly between those whose “principal object” consists in their dependence on “the works of Nature,” on the one hand—all of the other humane arts, in brief, from astronomy to metaphysics—and the “scope” of the poet, who “lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature” in order to make “things better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature” (100). Sidney’s language is close to Scaliger’s, who writes about the poet’s depiction of “quite another sort of nature.” However, Sidney transforms the Italian’s rather loose, more broadly associative phrase “another sort of nature” into the fully realized metaphor of the poem as a golden world. The context of this transformation is both important and fascinating.
For Sidney’s appeal to the concept of fiction-as-microcosm coincides exactly with that moment of the text in which he introduces the terminology of the scopus dicendi. The concept of the literary work as a microcosm was already present in the history of the term as it was derived from Proclus and the neoplatonists—in fact, the concept is original to the late neoplatonists. It was Sidney, however, who for the first time in early modern Europe explicitly reintroduces the notion of the literary work as a little world, and that reintroduction seems more likely the product of his demonstrable fascination with the vocabulary of scopus than his presumed familiarity with the unpublished theoretical works of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo and the Italian mannerist aestheticians.108 If “scope” was a rhetorical term that came loaded for Sidney with a sense of Aristotelian purposefulness, “scope” was also a term—as Sidney well realized—that could be used in the expansive conceptual sense of the neoplatonists to define the distinctive world of fiction. Adding “scope” to Scaliger’s discussion of the poet’s making of “another sort of nature,” Sidney adds methodically a sense of precision, purposefulness and philosophical range to the discussion that are utterly without anticipation in his source.
Sidney’s predisposition to read methodically—to search for “scope”—is a self-conscious product of his Philippist education, one fraught with significance for understanding the reciprocal enabling of his concepts about writing fictions by his assumptions about how to read. “Scope” is more than a convenient rhetorical vehicle by which to tidy up the decidedly unkempt Scaliger. With its deep history in Aristotelian rhetorical and ethical thought and neoplatonic hermeneutics, “scope” lends layers of conceptual significance to Sidney’s poetics that expand to the core of his defense of poetic making. Put more plainly, Sidney borrows from Philippist oratory not just a term, but also a set of concepts that helps to explain why and how he characterizes the well-made poem as a well-made world.109 As the Defence makes clear, the superiority of the poet’s world to history’s (the explanation for its golden quality) stands “not in the work itself,” but in “that Idea or fore-conceit” represented, counterfeited or figured forth by the poem (101). Conceived in such terms, Sidney’s poetics can be described as “intellectualist” in kind, and because of that orientation, explaining the purposefulness or “scope” of those fictional worlds that Sidney seeks to defend depends in no small measure on understanding how he conceived of “that Idea or fore-conceit” out of which fictions are generated. A great deal of critical discussion has attempted to account for the philosophical origins of Sidney’s Idea, ordinarily taking shape as debate between Aristotelian or neoplatonic poetics, or some syncretically realized position between or distinct from them. That discussion is worth revisiting because it shows how Sidney’s concern for the poet’s “scope” led to the conceptualization of fiction not just as a world, but also as a particular kind of world.
Clearly, Sidney is not easily described as an Aristotelian. For all of the Defence’ s attention to the vocabulary of mimesis, its deep diminishment of the truths to be derived from a slippery world makes small sense out of ordinary claims to induction or empiricism, and hence to the value of that Aristotelian project of locating forms (or ideas) embodied in the material realm. Clearly, too, Sidney is not readily characterized as a neoplatonist. He does not conceive of Ideas as deriving from or participating in some transcendent realm of meaning and value, and he specifically disclaims any source for the poet’s Ideas in divine inspiration.110 What Sidney insists upon, by contrast, is the poet’s possession of the Idea—a possession made “manifest” by his delivering it forth “in such excellency” in the poem’s activity of figuring-forth (101). (As he writes later: “the poet only bringeth his own stuff” [120].) Moreover, the poet’s possession of that “Idea” is interestingly complicated by its identification with the “fore-conceit,” a notion that requires some attention.
John Ulreich has written helpfully about Sidney’s epistemology as a syncretically brilliant compromise between the Aristotelian and the Platonic, showing how “imitation” assumes new meaning in the Defence’s “actual transplanting of … Aristotelian organicism into the fertile soil of Neoplatonic cosmogony.” As it is described by Sidney, the process of poetic imitation can be conceived, Ulreich argues, in Platonic or Aristotelian terms, as an “actualization of matter by form” (the Idea figured-forth through speaking pictures) “or the infusion of form into matter” (speaking pictures figuring-forth the Idea).111 Balanced and scholarly, Ulreich’s depiction of the complex philosophical background of Sidney’s poetics makes good sense of a text whose famous eclecticism refuses easy categorizations. Once more, it is a depiction that helps to situate the Defence in the historical context of the scopus dicendi, as a term of art variously employed. Restated differently, with an eye to the history of the text’s critical terminology, appealing to the syncretism of its philosophical backgrounds can highlight usefully Sidney’s skill in employing the scopu s of the Aristotelian rhetorical tradition, with its regard for the this-worldly activity of demonstrable argument, to the neoplatonically conceived microcosm of the text. In this light, the Defence emerges as an especially skillful synthesis of competing traditions since the force of that scopus is simultaneously to discipline and to give purpose to the world of imagination. Sidney gains the exhilaration and expansiveness of the neoplatonic vision (what zodiacal range!), without sacrificing the clarity or control of Aristotelian standards of demonstrable reason. Aristotle’s scope, at once rhetorical and ethical, shapes a fictional world answerable to the demands of clarity, coherence, economy and decorum—to the full range of those standards of expression most important to the rhetorical tradition extending so variously from Aristotle to Quintilian to Basil to Melanchthon.
A point of considerable importance can be made in relation to this argument. For while it is possible to write meaningfully about Sidney’s debts to neoplatonism, especially in his conception of the fiction as a microcosm, poetry does not shadow forth transcendent realities behind a fictive veil—as an instrument to build cause-ways across that dualistic universe (the phenomenal and the epi-phenomenal) traditionally implied by neoplatonic allegorists. Instead, Ideas are realized by substantive images exemplified paradigmatically as pictures of the poet’s making. The figuring-forth of the Sidneian poet works “substantially” in his depiction of a “perfect picture … of a true and lively knowledge”—knowledge that makes a reality available for the reader (101, 107). I emphasize the important activity of the poem in presenting a “reality” in order to foreground the extraordinary intellectual and affective power that Sidney attributes to the Idea as it is figured forth—the capacity of the poet’s “perfect” pictures to unleash real powers that exist at once in Nature and in the erected wit, and the dramatic metamorphic potential of those Ideas as they are comprehended by the reader.
Sidney does not conceive of writing as allegory because he does not conceive of reality in allegorical terms, an argument best elaborated in regard to Sidney’s own purposefully organized account of the world of poetry. As an epistemic construct, the poet’s golden world is one reliable guide to his epistemological assumptions about the world at large. Or to restate that argument in other terms, Sidney’s golden world is something more than a loosely constructed, rhetorically suggestive metaphor. Instead, as I will show, it is the methodically conceived imitation, counterfeit, and figuration of the Maker’s own prelapsarian creation, the world itself—one that has a maker who works by intention, one that possesses its own natural goodness and power, and one that is constructed according to a specific purpose, aim or scope. Once more, like the macrocosm itself, it is a world in which the maker’s intentions, at once clear and demonstrably coherent, both can and must be recovered by the best hermeneutic means available—by means, that is, of dialectic and rhetoric. Useful, then, as Ulreich’s analysis is in detailing a history to explain the syncretic philosophical provenance of Sidney’s Idea, understanding its eloquent function and philosophical foundation requires that we travel from Aristotle’s Greece beyond Scaliger’s Italy to Renaissance Vienna—to that circle of Philippists from whom Sidney derived his key concepts about how to read and write.
These concepts are key because the Idea of Sidney’s poetics functions as an eloquent device in precisely similar terms to the locus of Philippist oratory. It is “a universal truth” about experience—a representation of virtue or vice—which stands at the foundation of the narrative, generating speaking pictures and providing unity to the whole. It is simultaneously associated, like Melanchthon’s loci, with the author’s intention (voluptas), chief cause (summam causam) or main argument (status dicendi). When Sidney offers examples of these Ideas in the Defence —the chastity of Lucretia, the piety of Aeneas, the courage of Turnus—they are invariably represented as the moral commonplaces of his education, or differently stated, not so much as arguments, but as the seats upon which arguments are built. (The metaphor is Sidney’s, and standard to the rhetoric of commonplaces: poets display to our view “all virtues, vices, and passions so in their own natural seats” [108].) As the world has a Maker, who realizes his intentions by the creative power of the Logos (at once his reason and his Word), so too the Sidneian poet has his aim: to make poetic matter from the conceits of his wit. Since it is the poet’s scopus “to teach and to delight,” his Ideas are always motivated—fraught with intention. It is no surprise, then, consistent with these assumptions about writing, that reading for intention is a strategy that Sidney employs on writers across the disciplines throughout the Defence. Defending Aesop from the charge of lying, Sidney comically diminishes those who would read the fables “for actually true,” instead of considering the intention (the moral purpose) that is their meaning (124). So too, Sidney rescues Erasmus and Agrippa from the charge of mere “playing” in their satiric and parodic works by claiming that they had “another foundation [another moral intention], than the superficial part [the ‘playing’] would promise” (121). He even rescues Plato from Plato by means of intentionality, as he inquires about his “meaning,” arguing craftily that it was Plato’s aim to undo blasphemy in Athens by attacking the abuse, not the right use of poetry (129). In every instance, Sidney assumes that such intentions are readily recoverable by the exercise of good reading skills. They are the province not of the spiritually adept, but rather of the rhetorically informed.
Like the well-made oration, Sidney’s poetic world is governed by laws internal to its organization, and can be read with the same kind of attention to its logical coherence and economy of argumentation. In this respect, too, the logic of the poetic world reflects Sidney’s assumptions about the rational design of the cosmos. Dialectics matters to poetry. Hence, Sidney’s call in his description of the golden world for active readers who will “learn aright why and how that maker made” his poem (101). As an extension of this concept, the Defence offers what to post-romantic audiences is startling advice about how to read poetry well. O.B. Hardison was so startled by the evidence of these logical/analytical demands in a text committed to the celebration of golden worlds of poetry that he hypothesized the existence of two defenses inside the Defence—one romantic, one neo-classical. Hardison was the victim of his own romantic assumptions about world-making. For Sidney, the poetic maker is an image of that divine maker—a maker who shapes the world rationally, by number, measure and order. To test for genuine “poetical sinews,” Sidney suggests putting verse into prose, “and then ask the meaning”; in bad poetry, one verse will “but beget another, without ordering at the first what should be last, which becomes a confused mass of words … barely accompanied with reason” (133).
His sentence is a foreshadowing of Ezra Pound’s dictum that poetry ought to be as well written as prose. The philosopher may have some degree of superiority in “methodical proceeding” (112), Sidney allows, but this does not prevent him from demanding that the poet use the “unflattering glass of reason” to marshal the matter of his work into an “assured rank” (132–3). A demand of this sort is especially revealing about Sidney’s assumptions in regard to how meaning is made. Poetic meaning proceeds from authorial intention (any allegoresis would insist as much also); but poetic meaning, in addition, must be recoverable by reason, since—Sidney clearly assumes—words exist in order to reveal, not to conceal meaning. Once more, when key examples of the poet’s power to teach and delight are supplied—the tales of Agrippa and Nathan—they are cited not as illustrations, but as “proofs” of the forcefulness of poetical invention, proofs that carry real conceptual and affective force with them (114).
Affective force matters also to the Defence’s representation of the poem as a golden world, since, like the loci of the well-made oration, the Ideas figured-forth by Sidney’s poetic world are associated closely and consistently with the power of Nature—the great creating nature of the Maker (natura naturans), not the fallen nature of the postlapsarian world (natura naturata). It is important to stress this cooperation, the fact that the poet “goeth hand in hand with Nature,” because that cooperation secures for the poet’s Ideas a whole separate order of persuasiveness related to, but distinct from their logical power (100). It secures the added dimension of existential affectiveness, the persuasiveness of the Ideas depicted by fictions that derives from their power to speak to the needs of human nature. We respond to fictions—especially to the characters represented by narrative fictions—because we see ourselves mirrored in them, “ourselves” as teleologically considered we naturally are. Such insight suggests, in turn, some key assumptions about what it means for the poet “to deliver forth in such excellency” Ideas just “as he hath imagined them” (101).
Consider for a moment how much power Sidney attributes to nature in the Defence, not just as that great creating force with which the poet walks hand in hand—itself a speaking picture of the cooperation of the maker and his Maker, the human and the divine—but also the power attributed to human nature in its appetite for goodness. The Ideas figured forth by poets have power, Sidney argues repeatedly, because “poetry ever setteth virtue so out in her best colours … that one must needs be enamoured of her” (111). When the reader is made to see Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, the “form of goodness” poetically depicted, “cannot but” be loved (114). So similarly, in his discussion of heroic characters like Cyrus, Turnus, and Achilles, Sidney cites Plato and Cicero’s opinion “that who could see virtue would be wonderfully ravished with the love of her beauty” (119). Poetry has such power to “plant goodness even in the secretest cabinet of our souls” only because of the human appetite for virtue (106). Sidney is not so naive as to think poetry always effective. The tyrant Alexander Pheraeus, as Plutarch relates, was moved to tears by tragedy, but “in despite of himself” continued to perpetrate tragedies (118). The phrase “in despite of himself” makes Sidney’s point for him. Pheraeus acted against his own nature.
The force of poetry’s natural power assumes always the value of clarity. Hence Sidney’s praise for that long list of fictional characters from Homer’s Ulysses to Chaucer’s Pandar, in whom “all virtues, vices, and passions [are] so … laid to the view, that we seem not to hear of them, but clearly to see through them” (108). An imitation of Lucretia exists not to conceal but to reveal her chastity, as a means of “counterfeiting, or figuring forth” what he calls the “beauty of such a virtue” (101–2). Sidney reads the Bible with this expectation of claritas, just as he reads fictions. Like a good student of Philippist exegesis, Sidney cites Christ’s use of “the divine narration of Dives and Lazarus” as proof of divine eloquence: the story presents “the moral commonplaces [the loci communes] of uncharitableness and humbleness” so that they better inhabit “the memory and judgment” (108–9). There is no hint of allegorizing in his language. In fact, when Sidney moves in the next sentences to his consideration of Aesop’s tales and their “pretty allegories,” he represents those fables as “the formal tales of beasts”—accommodating the traditional dark poetics of the allegorical tradition to the standard of claritas enshrined by the new reading practice. As formal tales, their purpose is to illuminate clearly the “forms” of virtue and vice. Aesop is mentioned here, like Christ, as specific counterpoint to the philosopher who “teacheth obscurely” (109).112 Claritas is a particular virtue of the poet by reason of his recourse to energeia (classical rhetorical skills for amplifying arguments) and to speaking pictures—the exemplary narratives and metaphors that permit readers to visualize poetic conceits. The first editions of Melanchthon’s Loci communes included in their titles, it is useful to recall, the words seu hypotyposes—or the speaking pictures.
Like the well-made oration of the Philippist tradition, Sidney’s golden world has in common with the great world of its Maker one more important characteristic. As a world fashioned purposefully, which gives perspicuous representation to ideas of virtue and vice, the poem invites accommodation. Accommodation (becoming at home in the world of the fiction) is a process described doubly, suggesting a necessary cooperation between two ways of finding oneself at home in the work. On the one hand, Sidney writes about the need for readers who actively engage texts for the real benefits to be mined from them, as they analyze “why and how” the work gets made (101). When Sidney recruits Plutarch’s authority for his praise of fictions, he cites his success in teaching “the use to be gathered out of them”—the moral utility of those ideas or conceits that they embody (130). In turn, when he discusses readers who turn to “History looking for truth”—Sidney parodies that search by the hyperbolical claim that they go away from histories “full fraught with falsehood” (124). They would do better to look in poetry for fictions, “where they shall use the narration but as an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention” (124). Readers are advised imaginatively to invent (literally, to reinvent) the making of the poem, to reconstruct the conceptual design of its fictional landscape in order to profit, in the very act of so doing, from its teaching.
Accommodation, in the first instance, sounds mainly like the conceptual activity of adapting the text to the reader’s own needs. But accommodation to the poetic text requires simultaneously something else of equal importance. To make oneself fully at home in the poetic text, to accommodate oneself to the poet’s invention, requires too an affective identification—the wish to become an Aeneas in his pious rescue of Anchises or a Turnus in his courageous stand for honor. The distinctive power of the Sidneian golden world is its power to make acts of identification possible. For the world of the poetic text is golden not because it represents an “earth more lovely,” nor even that it counterfeits more “excellent” kinds of heroes—heroes like Xenophon’s Cyrus—but rather the “golden” eloquence of the fiction is signaled by its power to bestow “a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses” (101).
Like the world, then, a fiction has its own maker (an analogue to the divine Maker), its own laws (the logic internal to its organization), its own natural power (as the representation of Ideas that speak clearly about human nature and human needs), and its own purpose, aim, or scope—its cause for being (to have readers accommodate themselves to the maker’s intention). The golden world of poetry bears one more telling resemblance to the world—at least to the unfallen world of creation—in that it, too, is a supreme example of eloquence-in-action, an instance of words (like the Word) working at the very height of their power. As the very matter out of which Sidney forms his conception of fiction as a well-made world, these are the ideas that transform the Defence’s well-known engagement with Italian poetics into an argument with “scope.” Considered comprehensively, Sidney’s ideas about poetic eloquence, including his several assumptions about reading—his concern with intentionality, clarity, coherence, and the all-important business of accommodation—share the optimism about eloquence that informs Melanchthon’s account of oratory. They include, too, Melanchthon’s tough-minded regard for logic, his insistence that rhetoric be guided by and subjected to analysis of a rigorously dialectical kind. Once more, they suggest an answer to a question that Ulreich’s analysis of the Defence leaves unresolved: How does one explain the authority of Ideas presumed by the textual argument, their authority to carry truth with them? For a theoretician as self-consciously methodical as Sidney, the status of the Idea could hardly have escaped attention. Answering this question can reveal a good deal about the implicit epistemology governing Sidney’s poetics.
Certain key categories of Ideas were for Melanchthon innate. Throughout his career, he refers consistently to those Ideas as notitiae—innate notions inscribed inside the mind at birth by God, as a consequence of mankind’s creation in the image of the deity. They are not evidence of the soul’s preexistence or mystical powers of reminiscence. Instead, they manifest the continuity of the Maker’s love for the beings whom he has made in his own image. Seek out a summary principle that best embodies the central project of Melanchthon’s career and it might be: to reawaken his contemporaries to the knowledge that humankind is created in the image of God. Melanchthon’s natural philosophy best illuminates his understanding of the notitiae.113 In an evangelical revision of Aristotelian anthropology, Liber de anima (1553), he develops a detailed and complex portrait of the mind as a “wise architect,” already furnished by that heavenly architect with the knowledge necessary to honor its creator: innate mathematical understanding (numbers), the capacity to fashion and to comprehend syllogistic reasoning, the fundamentals of geometry and physics, and the foundational tenets of moral philosophical judgment—inclusive in its detail from specific distinctions between good and evil to knowledge about the existence of God and the afterlife.114 The notitiae secure multiple advantages for Melanchthon’s philosophy. Authored by God, they represent a defense against skepticism. Inspired by the doctrines of an unusual Philippist trinity—Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Paul—they secure the legitimacy of exemplary ideas existing inside the mind; the authenticity of those universal essences that the mind abstracts from the particulars of the sensible world; and the goodness of a God who has designed nature as a book from which knowledge about himself can and must be obtained. God’s purposes for Melanchthon, as for that Basil he so admired, are fully accommodated and transparently manifest to the natural capacities of the creatures made to know and love him.
Knowledge of the good becomes in the natural theology of the late Melanchthon an awakening of the good, recalling us to our own natures, and that recall, in turn, highlights the extraordinary importance that his concept of the notitiae accords to learning of all kinds, and especially to the arts. At birth, the notitiae are mere vestiges or obscure notions, which exist below the threshold of consciousness—mere “sparks” of potential knowledge that await illumination. It is the business of the active intellect, by means of its power to invent, order and analyze images, to fan the sparks of those notitiae into flames, to make them conscious possessions of a mind steadily enriched by knowledge both of its own natural treasures and the treasures of the natural world. Knowledge is literally an awakening, a process of taking note of those notitiae scripted by the divine author. The active intellect, then, with a likeness appropriately similar to its Maker, is conceived by Melanchthon as an artist imposing form upon matter, shaping to its divinely appointed end natural powers inside as well as outside the self. In turn, the notitiae are identified as the source of all of the human arts—as those exemplary ideas, moral goods, and certainties about God, which serve simultaneously as the truth obtainable through reason and the power to obtain that truth. The more active the intellect becomes, the more “illustrious” its images of universals, the more closely human nature is fulfilled in its divinely appointed end to know itself and God.115 Such universals, in turn, are characterizable as such, not because of their status as transcendent Ideas emanating from the One and the Good, as the obscure objects of esoteric desire and intellection; they are instead “universal,” because they are the here-and-now commonplaces of human experience, the universally shared truths of reason responding rightly to created nature.
The argument of the Defence assumes both the autonomy of the Idea and its authority (legitimacy). It assumes, too, the “commonplace” status of the poet’s Idea—its availability as a universal principle of moral knowledge. Always when Sidney makes reference to the poet’s figuring forth of specific Ideas of virtue and vice, those Ideas are the familiar tenets of his own moral philosophical education—justice, chastity, piety and the like. They belong to the common fund of human experience, and exist without pretension (philosophical, allegorical, or Spenserian!) to an esoteric status. The Defence assumes much more besides about the nature of Ideas, and those assumptions indicate again Sidney’s profound engagement with Melanchthon’s thought in his Philippist education. Within the Defence’s poetics, it is possible to imagine the poem’s generative Idea (its “stuff’) as the creation of the poet’s own “erected” wit, but Sidney never writes about the poet as the creator of Ideas.116 He comically sneers at neoplatonists who attribute poetic Ideas to inspiration, just as he seems to strip the foundations from an Aristotelian reading of poetic making by his assaults upon the folly of empiricism. The poet, Sidney writes, “doth not learn a conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter for a conceit” (120). The “conceit” is the Idea that the poet possesses; the poet’s “matter” (in turn) is that sensible material with which he “figures forth” or embodies (like creating nature) the “conceit” that is already present.
How then does the wit come into possession of an Idea? And why is the Idea identified from the first in Sidney’s argument with the “fore-conceit”? Maintaining his independence from Plato and Aristotle alike, similar to Melanchthon Sidney conceives of the Idea as innate to that same erected wit as an impression remaining from his Maker inscribed within (hence, innate to) what the Defence calls (in good Philippist fashion) the mind’s own divine essence. When Sidney agrees with those “learned men who have learnedly thought” that “in Nature we know it is well to doe well, and what is well and what is evil,” he does so by appealing to a belief in natural law written in the mind that has the potential to teach individuals, as a body of innate knowledge, truths that extend from basic tenets of moral philosophy to the recognition of the soul’s immortality and the existence of a providential God—exactly the recognition provided, for instance, to his “pagan” Arcadian princes on the eve of their trial and feared death (113). In a sixteenth-century context, most prominent among those “learned men” who espoused a theory of innate ideas as the cornerstone both of moral and natural philosophy was Philip Melanchthon.
Such knowledge is potential because for Sidney as for Melanchthon learning is a process of awakening, one in which Ideas become visible to consciousness as the images of things.117 Forrest G. Robinson argued some years ago on behalf of the visualist epistemology everywhere evident in Sidney’s Defence, the readiness with which his poetics identifies knowing with seeing in his celebration of “the speaking picture of poesy” (107), and the concomitant significance bestowed by that poetics upon image-making. What Sidney’s debts to Melanchthon add to Robinson’s analysis is an understanding about why the poet’s powers of illumination should assume such enormous significance over the course of his argument. At the conclusion of a crucial consideration of the value of poetry relative to the value of history and philosophy, Sidney sounds a note of triumph by attributing to the poet “perfect picture[s],” whose perfection consists in their coupling of the philosopher’s “general notion” with the historian’s “particular example.” His purpose is transparent. Obviously, he is setting his opponents up for the argumentative kill, as he prepares to declare the syncretic superiority of poets who (beyond their rivals) can both teach and move. However, the rhetorical preparations are also revealing about the epistemological assumptions at work.
Proceeding to illustrate his point about how pictures teach more effectively than “wordish description,” Sidney cites as examples the superiority of paintings to instruct “a man that had never seen an elephant or rhinoceros” and visual models to clarify the architecture “of a gorgeous palace” (107). The emphasis falls squarely on the liveliness of visual presentation. But Sidney’s language makes just as clear that the issue at hand is complicated by issues that supersede presentation. Philosophy “replenisheth” the memory “with many infallible grounds of wisdom”—concerning “virtue, vices, matters of public policy or private government,” he concedes (emphasis mine). But the replenishing of memory is not sufficient for obtaining wisdom, Sidney adds; for wisdom is apt to “lie[s] dark before the imaginative and judging power” unless “illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of poetry” (107). Knowledge is better understood as representation than presentation—hence the vocabulary of replenishment, the recourse to a language of concealment (wisdom lies dark) and disclosure (poetry illumines and figures forth). Sidney’s allegorizers make much of that vocabulary of concealment, but misunderstand its place inside the dynamics of disclosure because of their failure to grasp the epistemological assumptions governing his argument.118 Hence, too, the frequent recourse inside the Defence to the vocabulary of the “fore-conceit,” and its distinctive identification with the “Idea.” The “fore-conceit” of Sidney’s poetics comes be-fore, has priority in a double sense, which is revealing about the always important dynamic relationship in his Defence between writing and reading. The fore-conceit has priority both as the model that is prior to the poet’s figuring forth—the Idea of chastity that becomes Lucretia as she achieves visual embodiment, and also as the notion of chastity that is prior to the reader’s consciousness, as the natural seat upon which active virtue is built when the mind is instructed and moved by the Lucretia it sees—“all virtues, vices, and passions so in their own natural seats laid to the view, that we seem not to hear of them, but clearly to see through them” (108). When Sidney writes about “notions” of virtue and vice, he treats them as notitiae (innate ideas), which poetic images are best able to bring to consciousness. Meaning is not something separable from the poem—lodged in some transcendental order of Ideas veiled by textual symbols that require allegorical decoding. Meaning happens in the verbal dynamics of the poem itself, as sparks of truth are fanned into flames of knowledge, as speaking pictures give substance to Ideas innately unknowable apart from their exemplification.
His text puns etymologically, then, in ways that are philosophically telling. Sidney constantly points our attention to what is “notable,” whether that is Plato’s “notable fable of the Atlantic Island” (97)—good poet, that Plato, Sidney wryly notes—or David’s “notable prosopopeias” of the divine (99)—speaking pictures of God’s majesty; or Plutarch’s “notable testimonie of the abominable tyrant Alexander Pheraeus” (118), his heart moved by poetry; or “notable examples” of moral painting “as Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac” (125). (The word “notable” occurs eleven times in the Defence.) There is a point to all this noting of the notable. In his argumentatively central definition of the art, Sidney refers (as a variation upon a theme) to the poet’s making of “notable images of virtues, vices, and what else” (103). Such images should be noted because they derive their authority, power, and necessity from the notitiae within. Such “notions,” in turn, are authoritative because they are inscribed by the divine hand; they are powerful because they recall us to our nature (our Nature as the Maker first made it); and they are necessary, because they enable what Sidney calls architectonike, “the knowledge of a man’s self” (104). Sidney assumes a sort of Chomsky-like “deep grammar” of Ideas inscribed within the mind both animating in their innate potential and reanimated through the agency of images, or (to switch metaphors) an internet of the wit, hard-wired, expansive, cosmopolitan in scope, whose pathways become traceable as notable images—the forcibleness of the poet’s fictions—lead us home, Ulysses-wise, to discover our own natures—to discover why and how that Maker made us.
Sidney’s terminology speaks to the purposefulness of his argument—to his preoccupation with final aims and marks—and to the wisdom of attending carefully to the “scope” of the Defence’s own argument, especially as it relates the distinctive characteristics of fictions conceived as golden worlds, the nature of the poet’s Ideas or fore-conceits, and the urgency of its claims about fiction’s real consequences for its readers. Considerations of scope always point toward that “ending end” of virtuous action, and the real consequences that derive from those acts of accommodation—those moments of readerly identification with fictional narratives—that Sidney and the Philippist rhetorical tradition to which he belongs emphasize so powerfully. Acts of identification matter so profoundly because of the anthropology that underlies the Defence’s critical positions. At the very heart of his enterprise, Sidney transforms the metamorphic art of Philippist oratio (the power of words and the Word to renew the old Adam) into the strangely similar metamorphic art of the poet. That fashionable Italian aesthetician, Scaliger, attends to poetry’s making “of another sort … of nature,” but he could never claim—no more than Plato or Aristotle—that poets make another sort of human being. Let me explain my point by reference to a key passage in Sidney’s argument where he supplies by way of his new hermeneutic—his new reading skills—two “proofs” of the “strange effects of … poetical invention” (115). As Sidney explicates his proof texts, one about Menenius Agrippa and the other about Nathan and David, he transforms “two often remembered” tales into speaking pictures of the preeminent power of poetry (115).
The tales of Agrippa and Nathan are introduced at an especially crucial juncture in the methodically designed economy of Sidney’s argument. They are situated at the climactic moment of the Defence’s demonstration of poetry’s “most excellent work”—the “high argument” of its confirmatio—just before the turn to justify poetry by an examination of its parts (115). So situated, the tales supply summary proofs of the main burden of Sidney’s claim on behalf of the superiority of the poet’s “works”—its effects upon the reader—over those of his chief rivals for cultural authority, the historian and the philosopher. A single standard measures the relative value of the disciplines: the success of each in hitting the “scope,” the ultimate aim or mark of the humane sciences in their pursuit of architectonic knowledge—what Sidney describes alternately as the lifting up of the mind “to the enjoying of his own divine essence” and “the knowledge of man’s self, in the ethic and politique consideration, with the end of well doing and not of well knowing only” (104).119
The tales of Agrippa and Nathan supply an interesting pair of proof texts. One is drawn from classical history, the other from sacred. One illustrates the power of a fable to provide “a perfect reconcilement” in the public domain, as Agrippa’s tale of the belly heals the divisions in Rome’s body politic, when a crowd of hungry and disgruntled plebeians is persuaded to abandon its incipient rebellion against the state. The other fable illustrates the power of feigning in the private sphere, as David is shamed by Nathan’s story of the lamb “as in a glass [to] see his own filthiness,” and reclaim (“as that psalm of mercy well testifieth”) his role as God’s chosen servant (114–15). David’s shame derives from his adultery with Bathsheba and his plot to dispose of her husband. One narrative illustrates the power of a feigned tale over the people, one over the prince.
Paired in this manner, the twin tales seem deliberately chosen in order to illustrate comprehensively, across the domains of pagan and sacred history, public and private life, among the low and the high, the superior effects of poetry’s “most excellent work” in teaching and persuading. As a prelude to his illustrations of that work, in the paragraph immediately preceding, Sidney cites Aristotle’s claim on behalf of poetry’s “conveniency to Nature” as a way of highlighting those strong acts of identification that make readers want to see themselves as Aeneas piously carrying old Anchises on his back or as Turnus heroically preferring death to dishonor (114). But, as the tales of Agrippa and Nathan make clear, Sidney makes more-than-Aristotelian claims about the transformative power of those readerly acts of identification. Readers do not merely identify with virtuous characters. Instead, they are metamorphosed by love of those virtues pictured by such characters. Both “the whole people of Rome” collectively and David individually are brought to an architectonic knowledge of themselves. They are taught fictions that heighten understanding about their natures and that move them by reason of such knowledge to virtuous action (114). In both cases, that architectonic knowledge is metamorphic in character, since knowledge about their real natures (the nature of the body politic’s necessary interdependence of parts, the nature of the self’s dependence on God) sparks change that renders them, paradoxically, both different from their former selves and what they truly are (a whole people, a chosen servant). The works of poetry are “strange effects,” as Sidney writes, precisely because of this metamorphic power (114).120
At its most important moments, in passages like this, the Defence advances arguments on behalf of the preeminence of poetry that are unprecedented in the history of European poetics—if we consider, that is, critical arguments made for what Sidney calls “right poetry,” the fictive products of human imagination. Certainly, no Englishman had ever advanced such claims on behalf of poetry’s metamorphic power. And yet, it is critically important to recognize that such claims are not without precedent in other contexts. Anne Lake Prescott has written persuasively about a long tradition of commentary on the Psalms, descending from Athanasius and Basil among the church fathers and echoed by numbers of contemporary biblical commentaries, Reformed and Catholic, which celebrates similarly metamorphic powers of the Davidic poet; so too, Debora Shuger has argued learnedly for the creation of a tradition of sacred rhetoric in the late sixteenth century, deriving from Augustine’s remaking of classical notions of eloquence, which advances kindred claims for the power of sacred speech to inspire godly transformations in the audience.121 While I acknowledge the importance of their work, neither points to the more specific, more historically and biographically probable origin for Sidney’s metamorphic poetics, the oratorical ideas of Melanchthon.
For in Melanchthon, Sidney found what neither commentators on the Psalms, nor the creators of Shuger’s sacred rhetorics ever interested themselves in: an account of eloquence that bridges the gap between sacred and secular oratory, that so completely naturalizes the operations of rhetorical and dialectical language as to explain how eloquence of all kinds potentially exerts power over readers. That account was something Melanchthon spent a lifetime making: it was integral, not adventitious to his labors. Moreover, such an account presupposed, in order to be called genuinely explanatory, a theory of reading, one that could explain how Agrippa’s tale and Nathan’s story can serve as complementary examples of eloquence.122 Sidney could find in Italy much of the great poetry that inspired his own productions, and much of the theoretical matter that he needed to construct a defense of fiction-making, but for a theory of reading and a sense of the scopus that gives meaning and value to human acts of making, he turned to Vienna and his education by the Philippists.
An account of Sidney’s critical theory has implications for how we read Sidney’s fictions, particularly during the current revival of allegorizing interpretations of his Arcadias. As the implications of my argument suggest, there are good reasons why Sidney, among all the major Renaissance poets, in spite of the potency of his political and pious objectives, is the least topical, the least likely to load his fictions with specific allusions to specific historical persons or events. Hence, the peculiar and distinctive doubleness that surrounds the Sidneian fiction: its deliberately maintained remoteness from history (in its desire to locate those “Ideas” that underwrite experience) and its urgent quest to make contact with history (in its rhetorical movement to impress upon its readers, clearly, coherently, and forcefully, the virtue and necessity of such Ideas). Consider, for a moment, the rhetorical strategy of his friends, Mornay and Languet, as they organize politically charged works like the De veritatis and the Vindiciae contra tyrannos, and the decision both make deliberately to advance what they portray as universalizing philosophical arguments against atheists, on the one hand, and Machiavellians, on the other (rather than, say, party-political assaults on Tridentine Catholics), and it is possible to see just how much contemporary political power Sidney’s compatriots could assume universalizing ideas to contain. The move from topical allegory to speaking pictures of (universal Ideas of) virtue and vice is not a remove from history or politics in such a cultural milieu, but instead the very means by which to effect the most important kind of political-historical transformation: the kind that transforms the way people think. To call The Old and The New Arcadia allegories is not so much a mistake about literary significance (though it is that), it is far more a mistake about their private and political import. Sidney, I assume, would have been pleased by current accommodations of his fiction to the world of Elizabethan politics—this is precisely the right response to the urgency of its making—but Sidney, too, would have been dismayed to have been called an allegorizer—for in confusing his hermeneutic with the allegorical, the reader would have missed from whence those fictions gain their real power: from those very Ideas, rich with contemporary, political-historical significance (Ideas, for instance, about nature, justice, chastity, humility and the like) designed to transform both self and society in our discovery of both why and how their maker made poetry from them.
1 See the Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) and An Apology for Poetry, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970). “Scope” goes unglossed too in Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Robert Kimbrough (Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1983); and Defence of Poesie, Astrophil and Stella, and other Writings, ed. Elizabeth Porges-Watson (London: Dent; Vermont: Tuttle, 1997); and in older standard versions, Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904) and Miscellaneous Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William Gray (New York: AMS Press, 1966; repr. 1829). The exception that proves the rule is found in an abridged version of the Defence, where T.W. Craik glosses the second of the four uses of “scope” (without comment) as “end, aim,” Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Poetry and Prose (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 28. Gavin Alexander follows Craik’s practice in his recent edition, Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 11. “Scope” is used once in the Defence with a different denotation, apparently meaning “freedom” or “license,” when Sidney complains about the “scope” of the “scorning humours” in their attack upon rhyming, p. 121. Not until Shakespeare’s “this man’s art, and that man’s scope” (Sonnet 29), does the OED cite “scope” as denoting “intellectual range.”
2 Shepherd, p. 167, note 25.
3 Kathy Eden’s Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition argues concisely and cogently for a humanist rehabilitation during the sixteenth century of the classical tradition of interpretatio scripti—what she calls “a loosely organized set of rules for interpreting the written materials pertinent to legal cases, such as laws, wills, and contracts,” p. 7. Formulated by Cicero and Quintilian, those rules included: attention to historical and textual context; analysis of complete works with an eye to the “economy” or the persuasive arrangement of the work’s parts; and concern for authorial intention and decorum as touchstones of analysis. Melanchthon emerges from Eden’s study as one especially influential figure in the rehabilitation of the interpretatio scripti and as northern Europe’s “most compelling advocate … for an alliance between rhetorical imitation and biblical hermeneutics,” p. 79. For Peter Mack, the revolution in sixteenth-century reading practices has a shorter, more defined history. Against a tradition of medieval and early humanist commentaries “occupied mainly with explanations of difficult words and constructions, historical background, allusions and mythology,” Mack argues that Rudolf Agricola invented in his remarkably influential De inventione dialectica a new “close reader of texts,” one who combined the dialectical analysis of natural language with strong rhetorical interests in the affective impact of language upon readers [“Rudolf Agricola’s Reading of Literature,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 48 (1985), 23–41, and for an elaboration of that point, Mack’s Renaissance Argument]. Beyond Mack’s analysis, Meerhoff supplies a detailed roadmap for understanding how this “veritable tradition” of new reading practices “developed at a remarkable and incredible speed” through the influence of Melanchthon’s works, “Logic and Eloquence, A Ramusian Revolution?,” (362–3); see also Meerhoff’s “Melanchthon lecteur d’Agricola: rhétorique et analyse textuelle,” in Réforme-Humanisme-Renaissance 16, no. 30 (1990), 5–22 and his “The Significance of Melanchthon’s Rhetoric,” 46–62.
4 Edwin Greenlaw, “Sidney’s Arcadia as an Example of Elizabethan Allegory,” in Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge (Boston: Ginn, 1913), 327–37. Greenlaw argues that since Sidney represents the Arcadia as an heroic poem, and contemporary critical belief held “that the great epics should be regarded as allegories,” then it is “reasonable to infer that the book was thought to conform to the ideas of the time as to the province of this ‘kind’,” p. 327. See Worden, The Sound of Virtue and Kenneth Borris, Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000); see too Borris’s “Elizabethan Allegorical Epics: The Arcadias as Counterparts,” Spenser Studies 13 (1999), 191–222. For a response to Worden’s readings of the Arcadias, see my “Allegory, Poetry, and History,” 82–92. For another recent allegorical reading of the fiction, see Barbara Brumbaugh, “Cecropia and the Church of Antichrist in Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia,” Studies in English Literature 38 (1998), 19–43.
5 For an exception to this claim, see Ferguson’s chapter on the Defence in Trials of Desire, esp. p. 155–62.
6 “Allegory,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. A. Preminger (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), p. 12.
7 Prudentius’s psychomachias achieve representation in an interior locus strikingly at odds with the material world of winning and wasting upon which Langland expends so much visionary energy, but in neither case would it be tempting or useful to challenge the allegorical character of the narrative. On the other hand, no one is likely mistake Tom Jones’s journey from innocence to experience, whatever the allure of Miss Sophie’s muff, for allegory.
8 For a bibliography useful for considering the full range of these issues, see Gordon Teskey’s “Allegory” in The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1990). For Heraclitus’s Homeric Problems (1st century, AD), see Jon Whitman’s Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), p. 36–41, and more broadly helpful, his appendices, “On the History of the Term ‘Allegory’” (263–8) and “On the History of the Term ‘Personification’”(269–72). On the distinction between generic and modal approaches to allegory, see Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964) and Sayre Greenfield, The Ends of Allegory (Newark, NJ: Univ. of Delaware Press; London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1998), p. 48–65. On the distinction between allegory as a rhetorical term and the allegorical narrative in a literary tradition, see Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969). For early practices of allegorical reading, see Homer’s Ancient Readers: The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes, ed. Robert Lamberton and John J. Keaney (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1992). On the vexed question about the beginnings of allegorical narrative, see Gordon Teskey’s argument ascribing that origin to Christian culture, Allegory and Violence, esp. Chapter 2 and the rival arguments of John Alvis—arguing on behalf of a classical allegorical tradition—in Divine Purpose and Heroic Response in Homer and Virgil: The Political Plan of Zeus (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995).
9 Allegory and Violence, p. 6.
10 See De Oratore, 1. 57. 244.
11 Allegory and Violence, p. 2.
12 Allegory and Violence, p. 6, 2.
13 The Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 18.
14 This reading of Spenser’s opening cantos will be familiar to Humphrey Tonkin’s students, and students of his students. It may well have started life as a response to John Upton’s animadversions on the “no small inaccuracies” of the narrative. See The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1932), vol. 1, 176. I am grateful to Colin Burrow for his entry on the Spenser-Sidney List Serve for this latter reference.
15 For a concise account of this variety of interpretations of the literal sense, see Gerald L. Bruns, “Allegory as Radical Interpretation,” in Hermeneutics: Ancient and Modern (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1992), 83–103. See also, Brian Cummings, “Literally Speaking; or the Literal Sense from Augustine to Lacan,” Paragraph 21 (1998), 200–226. Not all contemporary critics would follow Teskey in identifying “rifts” as central to the work of allegorizing. Stephen Barney voices a popular alternative understanding when he writes that “‘dark conceits’ and veiled allegories are not obscure to their audiences, but pretend to be obscure,” Allegories of History, Allegories of Love (Hamden, CN: Archon, 1979), p. 41; Angus Fletcher agrees: “In most cases allegories proceed toward clarity …,” p. 81–2. Maureen Quilligan insists on a sharp distinction between allegoresis (the reading of allegory that assumes a text says something other than it means) and the allegorical narrative itself, whose clarifying commentary is already indicated by the text, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), p. 25–31. The defense of allegory against its Romantic detractors has often led contemporary critics to deflect attention from the cryptic quality of its “other-speaking.” None of these critics would deny, however, the importance of a rhetoric of obscurity to allegorical narratives—to the self-conscious way in which allegory calls attention to its “rifts” in meaning, whether actual or pretended.
16 Hans W. Frei details three main assumptions motivating “literal” reading: that the Bible “referred to and described actual historical occurrences”; that it contains “one cumulative story” to depict “a single world of one temporal sequence”; and that “it must in principle embrace the experience of any present age and reader,” The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), p. 2–3. See too Kathryn E. Tanner’s extension of Frei’s thesis to include a redefinition of the “‘plain sense’ … viewed as a function of communal use: it is the obvious or direct sense of the text according to a usus loquendi established by the community in question,” “Theology and the Plain Sense,” in Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation, ed. Garrett Green (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), p. 63. See also Frei’s defense of literal reading in a contemporary context, “The ‘Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?,” in The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, ed. Frank McConnell (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), p. 36–77. Brevard S. Childs affords a wider historical treatment, “The Sensus Literalis of Scripture: An Ancient and Modern Problem,” in Beiträge zur alttestamentlichen Theologie, ed. Herbert Donner, Robert Hanhart, and Rudolf Smend (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1977), p. 80–87. For a précis of five kinds of “literal” reading current among the early church fathers, see Frances Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), p. 188–9.
17 The Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 19. For a fuller study of this history, see Philip Rollinson, Classical Theories of Allegory and Christian Culture (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1981).
18 In fact, Frei adds, “It actually received new impetus in the era of the Renaissance and the Reformation when it became the regnant mode of biblical reading,” The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, p. 1.
19 H.I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1956), see p. xi–xviii; George A. Kennedy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994): “Classical metarhetoric, as set out in Greek and Latin handbooks from the fourth century B.C. to the end of antiquity, was a standard body of knowledge. Once fully developed, it remained unaltered in its essential features, though constantly revised and often made more detailed by teachers who sought some originality,” p. 6. See too Rudolf Pfeiffer’s account of the “world-wide spread of allegorism”; the agency of Hellenistic Stoic philosophy to its diffusion; and the rise of allegoresis as a hermeneutic practice in conscious opposition to the interpretive practices of Aristarchus and his followers among the Alexandrian grammarians, History of Classical Scholarship From the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 237.
20 See Eden, p. 41–63, 82–5.
21 Allegory and Violence, p. 5, 11.
22 Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric, ed. and trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1958), p. 58–9; 1. 6. 1.
23 Eden, p. 10–11.
24 Rhetorica Ad Herennium, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1954), p. 160–61; 3. 2. 3.
25 De Inventione in De Inventione, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, et Topica, ed. and trans. H.M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1949), p. 324–5; 2. 51. 155–6.
26 The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, ed. and trans. H.E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1920), p. 412–13, 3. 6. 9; p. 408–9, 3. 6. 2. For Quintilian, “These different names, however, all mean the same thing, nor is it of the least importance to students by what special name things are called” (p. 413). For the historian of rhetoric, on the other hand, those different names can be enormously consequential. See Otto Alvin Loeb Dieter’s “Stasis,” for a wide-ranging, suggestive history of this vocabulary (scopus, status, and related terms) from Aristotle to Quintilian, in Speech Monographs 17, no. 4 (1950), 345–69. For a more recent history of the rhetorical tradition that helps to contextualize these terms, see Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990). I am grateful on this topic to Germaine Warkentin for calling my attention to the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, ed. Giorgio Bárberi Squarotti (Torino: Unione typografico torinese, 1961).
27 Aristotle’s terminology in relation to scope shifted, but the target stayed the same: effective argumentation, achieved by means of perspicuous words, decorously and economically deployed. For Roman rhetoricians like Cicero and Quintilian, allegory exists largely as a figure of speech—a potential arrow in the orator’s quiver—one whose use (whether conceived as continued metaphor, on the one hand, or inversion, on the other) is perpetually circumscribed by admonitions against obscurity. In turn, allegorical interpretation, as critiqued by Cicero, emerges as the arbitrary and impious imposition of meaning upon texts by Stoic philosophers who fail to understand either the gods or the right rules of hermeneutic practice. See, for instance, Cicero’s attacks upon “those allegorizing and etymological methods of explaining” mythologies in De natura deorum, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press; London: William Heinemann, 1956), p. 345. Criticism of the impiety of Stoic allegorizing is everywhere complemented by an attack on misguided assumptions about how to read: “A great deal of quite unnecessary trouble was taken first by Zeno, then by Cleanthes and lastly by Chrysippus, to rationalize these purely fanciful myths and explain the reasons for the names by which the various deities are called.” If they had only read with an eye to intention, Cicero makes clear, they would have known such stories to be “purely fanciful” (2. 24. 63–4). Pursue the course of ancient hermeneutics from Aristotle to Quintilian, and the main trajectory of that tradition is pointedly non-allegorical. George A. Kennedy writes: “throughout antiquity allegorical interpretation remains largely a tool of philosophical or religious rhetoric, as well as a technique to rescue the Homeric poems from the strictures of critics …. Plato was opposed to allegorical interpretation of traditional myths as part of education …. Aristotle shows no interest in it either, and it is not a tool of the Alexandrian literary scholars ….” It was the Stoics who “resurrected allegory on a large scale as a way to teach their philosophical views, and it had an important future in the interpretations of neo-Platonists and Christians,” Classical Criticism, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), vol. 1, 86. For a recent review of ancient opposition to allegorizing, see David Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), p. 52–72.
28 See Kennedy, Classical Criticism, p. 216. It appears as a rhetorical standard in the seventh-century Miracles of Artemios, as the purposeful organization of narratives for the celebration of God. See Derek Krueger, Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 70.
29 For a review of current scholarship on the question, see Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in Early Christianity (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999), p. 70–78. On the role of Judaism in Theodore of Mopsuestia’s exegesis, see Frances M. Young, Virtuoso Theology: The Bible and Interpretation (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1993), p. 100–101. On the importance of inspiration to Antiochene exegesis, see Maurice Wiles, “Theodore of Mopsuestia as Representative of the Antiochene School,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. P.R. Ackroyd and C.F. Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), p. 490–91. For the Antiochenes’ approach to history as an interpretive tool, see the balanced assessment in Margaret M. Mitchell’s The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), p. 389–94. For earlier studies reassessing points of contact—and real differences between Antioch and Alexandria—see Jacques Grillet’s “Les exégeses d’Alexandrie et d’Antioche: conflit ou malentendu?,” Récherches de science réligieuse 34 (1947), 257–302, and D.S. Wallace-Hadrill’s ch. 2, “The Interpretation of the Biblical Record,” in Christian Antioch: A Study of Early Christian Thought in the East (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982).
30 When Theodore of Mopsuestia raged that his rivals “dream up silly fables in their own heads and give their folly the name of allegory,” his verbal barb had a hermeneutic point in an historical combat. See Karlfried Froehlich, Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), p. 96. The best single introduction to that combat remains Frances M. Young’s “The Rhetorical Schools and Their Influence on Patristic Exegesis,” in The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick, ed. Rowan Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), p. 182–99, and her more recent and complex refinement of that work in Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, esp. ch. 8, p. 161–85. Clark’s effort to deny—because of her theoretical predisposition—any “real” distinction between Alexandria and Antioch ignores the historical reality of the dispute. For an effort to ground the explanation for those distinctions in theological disputes, see Rowan A. Greer, The Captain of Our Salvation: A Study of the Patristic Exegesis of Hebrews (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1973). For Young’s reading of the theological distinctions motivating the debate, and the Antiochene alternative to the “excessive spiritualizing” of the Origenists in response to Anthropomorphite issues, see “The Fourth Century Reaction Against Allegory,” Studia Patristica 30 (1994), 120–25.
31 Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, p. 162. For a lucid illustration about how another exegete belonging to the Antiochene tradition insists explicitly on meaning as organically embodied by texts, which must be analyzed in their entirety to be understood, see Young’s account of Adrianos’s Isogoge ad sacras scripturas in “The Fourth Century Reaction Against Allegory,” 120–25.
32 See esp. Institutio Oratoria, Bk 1, p. 4–9.
33 When Wiles writes about Theodore of Mopsuestia’s commitment “to see the meaning of scripture in historical terms,” he clarifies the point by adding “not of course in a modern historicist sense but in terms of a divine purpose being worked out in history,” p. 509. Young notes also that although ancient readers from Lucian to Apthonius could and did sometimes insist on making distinctions between true and false stories in an “objective” way, history as a genre “embraced not just past events, but all kinds of other information—geographical, cultural, technical, strategic … and it was supposed to be useful, to explore moral issues. The Antiochenes could not have had the anxiety about history that has bothered modern scholars.” Rather their concerns about plausibility reflected, in greater measure, their commitment to narrative coherence and logic as standards of biblical interpretation, “The Fourth Century Reaction Against Allegory,” 124–5.
34 Froehlich, p. 91.
35 Young, Biblical Exegesis, p. 175.
36 Froehlich, p. 86. For a useful examination of Antiochene interpretation in which careful discriminations are made between allegorical and typological reading, see Robert J. Kepple, “An Analysis of Antiochene Exegesis of Galatians 4: 24–6,” Westminster Theological Journal 39 (Spring 1977), 239–49.
37 In this respect, the Antiochenes are almost wholly unoriginal. Their complaints against allegory—the seemingly arbitrariness of its decodings, its disregard for textual and narrative coherence, its sacrifice of the historical narrative for the occult sense—echo the complaints of other rhetorically trained patristic readers from Arnobius of Sicca, and his student Lactantius—the so-called Christian Cicero—to Firmicus Mater. The Antiochenes are different because they employ their rhetorical principles not to combat pagan religion and its mythologies—so often the subject of allegorical rescue—but rather to attack allegorical interpretations of the scripture. For a detailed history of how a diverse body of early Christian writers sometimes used and sometimes attacked allegorical interpretation, see Jean Pepin’s idiosyncratic but useful, Mythe et allégorie. Les origines grecques et les contestations judéochrétiennes (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1976; 1st edn, 1958). By far, the most detailed and sophisticated of these anti-allegorical critiques is found in Book 5 of Arnobius of Sicca’s The Case Against the Pagans.
38 Froehlich, p. 96. See, too, Theodore’s Commentary on Galatians 4:24, in Minor Epistles of St Paul, ed. H.B. Swete (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1880–82), vol. 1, 72–87. For Chrysostom both acknowledging the presence of biblical allegories and insisting on the clarity with which these texts offer themselves to rhetorical interpretation, see his Interpretatio In Isaiah Prophetam, ch. 5 in Joannis Chrysostomi, Opera Omnia Quae Extant (Paris: Gaume Fratres, 1836) or, more briefly, his defense of Matthew against allegorical interpretation in Homily 16, The Preaching of Chrysostom: Homilies on the Sermon on the Mount, ed. and trans. Jaroslav Pelikan (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967), p. 92.
39 Frederick M. Padelford, trans., in Essays on the Study and Use of Poetry (New York: Henry Holt, 1902), p. 111. For the Greek text, see Saint Basil on the Value of Greek Literature, ed. N.G. Wilson (London: Duckworth, 1975), 8. 14.
40 Padelford, trans., in Essays on the Study and Use of Poetry, p. 62. See Eden’s treatment of Basil’s Address both as advocacy for “an economical reception of the pagan literary tradition” and as “a paradigm of this kind of reception in its reading” of Plutarch’s treatise, p. 46.
41 Sister Agnes Clare Way, trans., in Saint Basil: Exegetic Homilies (Washington, DC: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1963), p. 53. For the Greek text, see Patrologiae Graecae, vol. 29, Homilia 3, ch. 10, 76.
42 Saint Basil: Exegetic Homilies, p. 52.
43 See George L. Kustas, “Saint Basil and the Rhetorical Tradition,” in Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic, ed. Paul Jonathan Fedwick (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981), Part 1, p. 221–80.
44 For Basil and the relationship between economy (oikonomia) and accommodation, see Kustas, p. 223–33. He argues that central to “oikonomia is the notion of accommodation to circumstance, whether in the daily management of an estate, as originally, or in church affairs, or in God’s providential concern …” (227–8). For a wider historical consideration of “economy” as a rhetorical term, see J. Reumann, “Oikonomia as ‘Ethical Accommodation’ in the Fathers, and Its Pagan Backgrounds,” Studia Patristica 3 (1961), 370–79 and Ladislas Orsy, “In Search of the Meaning of Oikonomia: Report on a Convention,” Theological Studies 43 (1982), 312–19.
45 For Basil and Aristotle, see Leo V. Jacks, St. Basil and Greek Literature (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1922), p. 110–11. For Basil’s natural theology, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture: The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1993), esp. “Natural Theology as Apologetics,” p. 22–39, and on Basil’s exegetical practice, his essay “The ‘Spiritual Sense’ of Scripture: The Exegetical Basis for St. Basil’s Doctrine of the Holy Spirit,” in Basil of Caesarea: Christian, Humanist, Ascetic, p. 337–60; and on the Hexaemeron’s aggressively anti-allegorical rhetoric, see Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: Univ. of California Press, 1994), p. 318–50 and the introduction to Basile de Césarée, Sur l’origine de l’homme, trans. Alexis Smets and Michel Van Esbroeck (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1970), p. 83–119. For another perspective on Basil and allegory, see Richard Lim, “The Politics of Interpretation in Basil of Caesarea’s Hexaemeron,” Vigiliae Christianae 44 (1990), 351–70. See too, Frances Young on the belief among the Cappadocians about “the poverty of human language to express the divine reality” coupled paradoxically with faith in “the evocative power of the true metaphor,” a paradox enabled by “the notion of a transcendent God choosing to accommodate the divine self to the limitations of the human condition in the incarnation and eucharist,” Biblical Exegesis, p. 160.
46 See Kustas, p. 223–6.
47 See Lim, 352–3.
48 See Rousseau, p. 82–5.
49 On First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). Additional references are cited in parentheses by page number.
50 On Origen’s interpretive practices, see Young, Biblical Exegesis, esp., “The advent of scholarship,” p. 76–96. See, too, Karen Jo Torjesen, Hermeneutical Procedures and Theological Method in Origen’s Exegesis (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1985); and the still provocative R.P.C. Hanson, Allegory and Event: A Study of the Sources and Significance of Origen’s Interpretation of Scripture (Richmond: John Knox; London: SCM, 1959).
51 Diodore of Tarsus would have answered Origen’s question easily enough: anyone wishing to safeguard the “substance” of scripture must be so “silly.” For Origen, the unity of scripture is conserved by reference to the unity of its spiritual truth. For the Antiochenes, the allegorical pursuit of such unity threatened to become the factitious construct of a perilous imagination, perilous because it denied to scripture’s account of the past a veracity that had to be preserved if the real unity of Bible was to be conserved: its narrative of salvation history. Conceive of truth as “scattered” everywhere through the scriptures, like some fragmentary Osiris whose body Isis must reassemble, and the familiar principles of classical grammatical and rhetorical analysis are rendered secondary to the primary task of allegorical assembly: historike is significant—but only if the events are actual; contextual analysis counts—but only if “a meaning worthy of God” fails to demand altered contexts; economy of design matters—but narrative incoherence matters more (296).
52 For an exposition of Theodore’s reading of the Psalms, see Rowan A. Greer, Theodore of Mopsuestia: Exegete and Theologian (Westminster: Faith Press, 1961).
53 On the Hexaemeron, p. 4–5.
54 See Pelikan, Christianity and Classical Culture, p. 22–39.
55 For skopos among the neoplatonists, see James A. Coulter, The Literary Microcosm: Theories of Interpretation of the Later Neoplatonists (Leiden: Brill, 1976), p. 77–94 and George A. Kennedy, Greek Rhetoric Under Christian Emperors (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), p. 126–32.
56 Coulter, p. 102.
57 Alcibiades I: A Translation and Commentary, trans. William O’Neill (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), p. 6–7. Additional references are cited by page number in parentheses.
58 For an analysis of the status of symbols in neoplatonic commentary and an argument that “the separation of aesthetic from intellective objects of knowledge finds its natural counterpart in the separation of the ‘external’ verbal or visual form from the ‘internal’ significance which the form expresses” (237), see Wesley Trimpi, Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and Its Continuity (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), p. 164–240. Trimpi argues, too, that once a concept of purification becomes the primary objective of prudential wisdom, “any theory of literary decorum becomes impoverished with respect to its cognitive obligations to analyze qualitative experience and to its judicative obligations to guide emotions,” p. 237. It is to the rhetorical tradition that Trimpi points for the recovery of the value of representing experience.
59 John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1935), p. 41.
60 Languet to Sidney, 3 December 1575, in Levy, p. 300.
61 Languet to Sidney, 22 January 1574, in Levy, p. 59.
62 Philip Sidney to Robert Sidney, in Feuillerat, iii, 124.
63 Philip Sidney to Robert Sidney, iii, 124–5; The Old Arcadia, p. 104 and 385.
64 The Old Arcadia, p. 389.
65 The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and The Countess of Pembroke, ed. J.C.A. Rathmell (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1963), p. xxxvi. In Philip’s translation of Psalm 26, he has David “setting Thee [God] for scope,/Of all my trustfull hope ….” See Greville, p. 18. For Mary’s translation of the Psalms, see the now standard edition, The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Michael G. Brennan, and Noel J. Kinnamon (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).
66 For a comprehensive overview of Melanchthon’s rhetorical and dialectical principles, see John R. Schneider’s Philip Melanchthon and his “The Hermeneutics of Commentary: Origins of Melanchthon’s Integration of Dialectic into Rhetoric,” in Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) and the Commentary, ed. Timothy J. Wengert and M. Patrick Graham (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), p. 20–47. My debts to Schneider’s scholarship are apparent throughout. For the distinctiveness of Melanchthon’s terminology, see Eden’s useful chapter on Melanchthon, p. 79–89. See too Timothy J. Wengert’s “Philip Melanchthon’s 1522 Annotations on Romans and the Lutheran Origins of Rhetorical Criticism,” in Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation, ed. Richard A. Muller and John L. Thompson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996), p. 118–40, and Carl Joachim Classen’s scholarly study, Rhetorical Criticism of the New Testament (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000).
67 For Erasmus’s use of scopus, see Manfred Hoffmann’s Rhetoric and Theology, p. 48, 251–2, note 104. For a more speculative reading of scopus in Erasmus, see Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Toronto and London: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1977), p. 72–81. For a lucid account of how Melanchthon’s use of the term differs from that of Erasmus, see Schneider, Philip Melanchthon, p. 94. It is a term used, too, with great frequency by Luther, from 1518—the date of Melanchthon’s arrival in Wittenberg—to 1540. In England, “scope” appeared first as a term of art in an exegetical context: Thomas Cranmer wrote to Henry VIII in August of 1536 defending the “scope [the aim, purpose] and effect” of two recent sermons whose arguments he then detailed, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1846), p. 326. In 1552, Hugh Latimer conjoined the twin vocabulary of status and scopus in a sermon that preaches that “every parable hath certum statum, ‘a certain scope’, to the which we must have a respect …,” “A Sermon Preached … On the Sunday Called Septuagesima, The 14th Day of February,” in Sermons By Hugh Latimer, ed. George Elwes Corrie (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1844), vol. 2, 199. Latimer gave Melanchthon credit for his conversion to the “Word of God”; see his “First Sermon on the Lord’s Prayer,” in Selected Sermons of Hugh Latimer, ed. Allan G. Chester (Charlottesville, VA: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1968), p. 167. In 1553, Thomas Wilson introduced “scope” into the English oratorical vocabulary as he wrote, paraphrasing Melanchthon, “Not onely it is needefull in causes of iudgement, to consider the scope whereunto we must leavell our reasons, and direct our invention: but also we ought in every cause to have a respect unto some one especiall point and chiefe article: that the rather the whole drift of our doinges, may seeme to agree with our first devised purpose,” Arte of Rhetorique, ed. G.H. Mair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909; 1560 edn), p. 86. A close associate of Leicester and his circle, Wilson is clearly one source for Sidney’s domestication of this vocabulary inside English poetics.
68 Sister Mary Joan La Fontaine, A Critical Translation of Philip Melanchthon’s Elementorum rhetorices libri duo (University of Michigan, Ph. D. Dissertation, 1968), p. 115. Melanchthon’s earlier rhetorical treatises are De Rhetorica libri tres (1519) and Institutiones Rhetoricae (1521). For a brief review of those texts and their publication history, see Classen, p. 111–35.
69 Elementorum, p. 115.
70 For Flacius’s reworking of the vocabulary of the scopus in his Clavis scripturae sacrae (1567), see Eden, p. 96–8.
71 John L. Thompson calls Calvin’s “‘theoretical’” pronoucements about biblical interpretation “somewhat scattered” (60), the most important of which consists of a few introductory paragraphs in the preface of his 1539 commentary on Romans, “Calvin as a Biblical Interpreter” in The Cambridge Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), p. 58–73. Among these few pronouncements, in turn, “there is little he says by way of methodology or the theory of interpretation that cannot be traced to others before him,” including Melanchthon, Bullinger and Bucer (71). For a more comprehensive study of Calvin’s exegesis, see Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000).
72 Giorgio Agamben, “Propos …,” Bulletin de l’Association freudienne 2 (1983): 27. Quoted in Gabriel Vahanian, “God and the Utopianism of Language,” in Lacan and Theological Discourse, ed. Edith Wyschogrod, David Crownfield, and Carl A. Raschke (Albany, NY: State Univ. of New York Press, 1989), p. 119.
73 From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969). On Luther’s exegetical principles, see Gerhard Ebeling, Luther: An Introduction to his Thought, trans. R.A. Wilson (London: Collins, 1970) and Jaroslav Pelikan, Luther the Expositor: Introduction to the Reformer’s Exegetical Writings, in Luther’s Works (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1959). For Luther’s exegetical inheritance, see Manfred Schulze’s “Martin Luther and the Church Fathers,” in The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West: From the Carolingians to the Maurists, ed. Irena Backus (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1997), vol. 2, 573–626. For Luther in the context of contemporary exegetical practice, see David C. Steinmetz’s concise overview, “Divided by a Common Past: The Reshaping of the Christian Exegetical Tradition in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27, no. 2 (Spring 1997), 245–64.
74 To call Luther’s theology of the promise new by virtue of its conception of the Word-as-event is not to claim that it is unprecedented. As Rudolf Bultmann indicates in his powerful study of Paul’s epistles, Pauline theology too, in its transformation of the soteriology of the ancient Greek mystery religions and gnostic sects, locates “the salvation-occurrence … in the proclamation of the word,” The Theology of the New Testament, trans. Kendrick Grobel (New York: Scribner, 1970), p. 302. The theology of reconciliation—so important to Paul because the risen Christ makes possible the reborn Christian self—is enabled by the “word of reconciliation” (II Cor. 5:18f.). To recall, in turn, Paul’s importance to this history, is also to remember the fundamental importance of the “fulfillment” narratives so crucial to the history of Christianity—the fulfillment of the Jewish prophecies from the Old Testament in the New, as Christ the Word becomes present in the Incarnation—and, behind Paul, ancient anticipations of that longing for the “presentness” of the divine from the Greek mystery rites. Such longings, motivated as they are by the desire for words that make contact with an ultimate reality, are the enduring, characteristically human products of what Paul Ricoeur might call “the ontological vehemence of semantic aims”—the drive of the reference to make its power felt in the realm of the sense [The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1975), p. 299–300]; or what Kenneth Burke might refer to more simply as the rhetorical concomitants of form (A Rhetoric of Motives[Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press, 1969], p. 65–78). Mornay would call them evidence of natural law. On the performative character of the Reformers’ linguistic assumptions, see Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation, ch. 3.
75 Roland H. Bainton, “The Bible in the Reformation,” in The Cambridge History of the Bible: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1963), vol. 3, 36.
76 Answer to the Hyperchristian, Hyperspiritual, and Hyperlearned Book by Goat Emser in Leipzig (1521) in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1989), p. 78.
77 Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), esp. “The Spiritual Exposition in Decline,” p. 281–355, and Preus, p. 123–49.
78 True to the character of anti-allegorical polemic, he insisted instead on the unique quality of both his inspiration and his conservation of the Bible’s real meaning. Once more, he identified the villain who contaminated Church doctrine by the corruption of biblical interpretation: “Origen played the fool, and led St. Jerome and many others astray with him.” Luther was grammarian enough to believe that corrupt modes of reading make for corrupt theology, and more than sufficiently polemical to push the point. “Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacrifice,” in Selected Writings of Martin Luther, 1523– 26, ed. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967), p. 268.
79 See CR 8, 59.
80 On other occasions, he quotes the same passage, slightly modified, to argue that not all of scripture is to be interpreted allegorically. “De dicto: Sermo Christi habitet etc.” (1550), CR 11, 899–900. See the extended footnote about the variety of Melanchthon’s references to this passage from Epiphanius in Meijering, p. 57.
81 Melanchthons Werke, i. 47. “Immo hoc benignus dei spiritus agebat, ut omnibus piis quanto minimo negotio intelligeretur.” The translation is from Schneider, Philip Melanchthon, p. 179.
82 As Preus writes regarding Luther, “Words … do not, like signs, need some hidden ‘grace’ to be ‘causal’. Words are intrinsically causal: they cause expectation, fear, doubt, hope, or trust, in the one who hears what they say. Not because a concealed grace comes with them, but simply from what they say as ‘naked words’,” From Shadow to Promise, p. 254. Schneider extends this argument to Melanchthon, Philip Melanchthon, p. 227–9. Melanchthon insists: “For God wants to be sought in his Word, not outside of the Word in human imaginings. We do not attribute to words any magical powers, but hold that the will of God cannot be known except through the Word,” Commentary on Romans, trans. Fred Kramer (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1992), p. 287.
83 On Agricola, see Mack’s Renaissance Argument, p. 117–302; for Agricola’s importance to Melanchthon, see Meerhoff, Entre logique et littérature, p. 9–71. Meerhoff’s effort to subordinate all things rhetorical in Melanchthon to dialectics diminishes what seems most important here: the deliberate effort to synthesize one art with the other.
84 So when Epiphanius’s speculatione is glossed in the Chronicon Carionis, its definition is expanded unsurprisingly to “Grammatica et Dialectica, videlicet consideratione phrasis, collatione locorum, definitionibus, distinctionibus, et iusta consequentia in argumentis” (to Grammar and Rhetoric, namely, to a consideration of word-choice, a collation of commonplaces, with definitions, distinctions, and true consequences in arguments) CR 12, 940. Like the world, the Word is fashioned by a divine wisdom organizing all of its parts by number, measure, and order (“numerum, distinctionem, ordinem”), and it is the business of the wise reader to exercise the speculative powers of his mind to discover the logic of its making—to go in search of the Maker’s scope. Reading well requires, too, a careful weighing of the significance of words, by adhering to the sense (“sensum vult adhiberi”) or what Melanchthon identifies as the grounding of those words in “mediocrem experientiam” (ordinary experience) CR 11, 900. Melanchthon’s understanding of the power of oratio sacra, of God’s sacred oratory in the Bible, transcends the category of speculation or intellection. In his mind, no really useful summary of the essential components of right reading could fail to emphasize, too, the emotional and experiential dimension of an encounter with the Word—the blindness of the person, for instance, who never having experienced “magnos dolores” (great sufferings), can have no understanding of the true exercise of faith and hope; or conversely, the power of the experiences recorded by biblical words to teach us “quid significent, Vita, Mors, Dolor, Timor, Consolatio, Laeticia, Fides,” (the meaning of Life, Death, Grief, Fear, Consolation, Happiness, and Faith), CR 12, 940. In Melanchthon’s comprehensive vision of the arts of communication, the purpose of reading is not merely “understanding” correctly, but also “receiving” rightly (affectively integrating into one’s own experience) the meaning expressed. Reading is accommodation. With his understanding of affections as themselves intimately engaged with the process of understanding, Melanchthon belongs, then, to the great Augustinian tradition of Christian rhetoric, and before Augustine, to Aristotle’s line, for whom emotion also played a constitutive role in argument. For a recent study of Melanchthon in relation to the Augustinian tradition, see Michael B. Aune, Philip Melanchthon’s Rhetorical View of Rite and its Implications for Contemporary Ritual Theory (San Francisco: Christian Universities Press, 1994). That rhetorical tradition in the Renaissance at large is best presented in Shuger’s Sacred Rhetoric.
85 Melanchthon’s principles of reading did not exclude allegorical interpretation. Instead, they redefine it, and in the process strip allegoresis of its meaning. More plainly, the new hermeneutic transformed Origen’s unruly agent of spiritual askesis into the safely domesticated servant of perspicuous communication. Melanchthon explicitly allows a role for allegorical interpretations of the Bible in his Rhetoric of 1519 and his Loci communes of 1521—and carefully circumscribes that role in the process. Allegorical interpretations are to be undertaken by the learned, and pursued with an understanding about how allegory functions: it functions didactically as a vehicle for illustrating those commonplaces (loci communes) that secure textual meaning. (See Classen, p. 113–25.) The didactic translation of allegory achieves its clearest statement later in Melanchthon’s career, after the issue of allegorical reading had lost much of its polemical urgency. (In the Loci of 1521, Melanchthon begins with an attack on Origen; in the Loci of 1555, he offers instead a textbook-style articulation of the principles of good rhetorical reading.) In so far as the later Melanchthon concerns himself with allegorical interpretation at all (and even the limited justification for allegorizing the scriptures disappears in the later rhetorics), allegory matters as a “mutilatum enthymema” (a truncated enthymeme). For example, when the Bible enjoins “Do not throw pearls before swine,” it offers “a kind of comparison in which something is indicated yet without the rest of the comparison being expressly stated” (Elementorum, p. 241). What is indicated, always and importantly, are commonplaces of biblical wisdom. Allegory as “other-speaking” is banished, then, in the course of being redefined. It exists in the Bible only as a continued metaphor or truncated enthymeme, subservient to the logic of the loci. Allegory certainly was not dead, but allegorical reading in the style of Origen was rendered superfluous because of those fundamental disagreements about how language communicates meaning that distinguish Melanchthon from exegetes in the allegorical tradition. The notion that the best books reveal rather than conceal meaning by virtue of their perspicacity, coherence, economy and affective power, makes it impossible to read allegorically—to read with the expectation of finding “rifts” between sense and intention—unless, of course, one is reading texts that openly declare themselves to be allegorical.
86 Loci communes (1521), p. 73–4.
87 Loci communes 1555, p. 158–9.
88 Commentary on Romans, p. 16–17.
89 Commentary on Romans, p. 20. Later, Nathan’s rebuke shows how David, confronted by his sins, “felt true and dreadful terrors,” proof that the Law enshrined by scriptural words “accuses, terrifies, and condemns.” See too p. 48, 56, 142, 158.
90 Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, trans. D.C. Parker (Sheffield: Almond Press, 1989), p. 61.
91 Commonplaces are not arguments, nor even the conclusions of arguments; they are those universal truths at the seat of argumentation from which the main logical and rhetorical power of the text stems or what Melanchthon calls concisely the “main points [of every doctrine] which contain the sources and the sum total of the art,” Elementorum, p. 193. The Bible is more than perspicuous. It is also a unified whole, fashioned in all of its parts as illustration of a single argument of salvation.
92 Elementorum, p. 191–4.
93 De studio doctrinae Paul, in CR 11, 38 (1520).
94 See Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, p. 87.
95 See Eden, p. 41–63, 82–5; Mack, “Rudolf Agricola’s Reading,” 23–41; and Meerhoff, “Logic and Eloquence,” 357–74.
96 Eden, p. 102.
97 For a detailed account of “old style” humanist commentaries, with their vast quantities of paraphrase, moral reflection, rhetorical analysis, and copious lexical and historical detail, see Anthony Grafton’s “Renaissance Readers and Ancient Texts,” in Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), p. 23–46. In an English context, E.K.’s prefatory epistle to The Shepheardes Calendar belongs (by way of parody?) far more to this tradition than to the new hermeneutic making its impact felt on Sidney’s Defence.
98 Myrick, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman, p. 46–83. As an exception, see Coogan’s argument that the Defence is structured less formally on the precepts of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, “The Triumph of Reason,” 255–70. For an alternative to Myrick’s account of the text’s oratorical structure, see O.B. Hardison, Jr., “The Two Voices of Sidney’s Apology for Poetry,” English Literary Renaissance 2 (1972), 83–99.
99 Shepherd, p. 46; Kinney, “Parody and Its Implications in Sydney’s Defense of Poesie,” 1–19.
100 Like a good student of Philippist oratio, Thomas Wilson (a Marian exile who studied in Germany) published in the same year as his rhetoric a third edition of a companion logic, with the significant reminder: “Melanchthon liveth and readeth. Therefore there is greate learnyng to bee had, where he is,” The Rule of Reason Conteinying the Arte of Logique, ed. Richard S. Sprague (Northridge, CA: San Fernando Valley State College, 1972), p. 104.
101 It is telling about his primary concerns that Sidney focuses so heavily in this “wordish consideration” on preachers. Like Thomas Wilson, among the first Tudor critics of such “seeming fineness” from the pulpit, and like Melanchthon, who advocated repeatedly for a plain style eloquence among preachers, Sidney calls for a more artfully “natural” (and, thereby, more persuasive) style of speech in God’s church. See Shepherd on Wilson and plain speaking, p. 229.
102 Frederick M. Padelford, Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1905), p. 8.
103 Scaliger, p. 2.
104 “Hic enim finis est medius ad illum ultimum, qui est docendi cum delectatione,” Poetices libri septem (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1964), p. 1.
105 Scaliger, p. 3.
106 Scaliger, p. 7–8.
107 Scaliger, p. 2–3.
108 See Shepherd, p.155–6 and, on mannerism, Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph J.S. Peake (Columbia, SC: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1968), p. 69–100. Sidney’s knowledge about Proclus and Iamblicus may derive from his friend, Mornay, whose Verité de la religion chrestienne (dedicated to Languet and partially translated by Sidney) makes constant reference to them, especially in its first book. Sidney and Mornay were closely connected by 1578. Coincidences are possible, but that Sidney introduces for the first time in early modern Europe an explicit conceptualization of the literary work as microcosm, using the vocabulary (skopos) central to the formulation of that concept by its originators, at the moment that his most important intellectual compatriot is himself immersed in their texts, is just too neat to be an accident.
109 Richard Waswo anticipates my argument by writing: “The fundamental dynamic of Sidney’s defense … seems to proceed much more directly from reformed ways of treating Scripture than from Italian theoretical debates about literature,” Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), p. 228. Waswo has nothing to say, however, about Melanchthon or the oratorical theory underlying his exegetical practice.
110 See Heninger, by contrast, for an extended argument identifying Sidney’s poetics with Aristotle’s, esp. p. 223–307, and my review of Heninger’s Sidney and Spenser in Sidney Newsletter 10, no. 2 (1990), 34–43.
111 “‘The Poets Only Deliver’: Sidney’s Conception of Mimesis,” 83, 79. With Ulreich, then, I support A.C. Hamilton’s argument about the Defence as “closely reasoned and logical in all of its parts,” Sir Philip Sidney, p. 111. See, too, John Hunt’s contention that the coherence of the text is “allusively” created, “Allusive Coherence in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry,” Studies in English Literature 27 (1987), 1–16. Arguments for coherence cut against the grain of much current criticism. See O.B. Hardison’s argument in “The Two Voices of Sidney’s Apology for Poetry” that its incoherence derives from two stages of composition, 83–99. See D.H. Craig on the incoherence of Sidney’s effort to reconcile Plato and Aristotle, “A Hybrid Growth,” 62– 80; and Ronald Levao’s argument that Sidney deliberately and deconstructively sets Aristotle against Plato in “Sidney’s Feigned Apology,” 223–33. For an extension of that position into a position designed to expose the Defence as a treatise against poetry, see Herman’s Squitter-Wits and Muse-Haters. More subtly and persuasively, Skretkowicz stresses its combination of “humour, admonition, logical rigour, [and] whimsical sophistry” in “Sidney’s Defence of Poetry, Henri Estienne, and Huguenot Nationalist Satire,” 3.
112 Sidney treats “allegory” as he treats so many other traditional terms in the Defence (e.g. “imitation”) as the object of his own magical inclusivity: the term’s use fosters the appearance of agreement, while context utterly transforms its meaning. In every case that Sidney writes about allegory, he does so while recalling tales for children—the sort of literature represented by Aesop’s Fables in which stories announce their skopos explicitly; Sidney’s edition of Aesop was that of Joachim Camerarius, another Philippist practicing the new hermeneutic, whose edition was specifically designed for little boys learning to parse their Latin [ Fabulae Aesopicae (Lugduni: Ioan. Tornaesium, 1571)]. When late in his argument, while defending the poet from accusations about lying, Sidney writes about stories as “allegorically and figuratively written,” he can do so innocuously because of the specificity with which he has already characterized the process by which the poet constructs his golden world fictions. By “allegorically,” Sidney means nothing more than that poets figure-forth—give body to—abstractions. Considered in modal terms, therefore, the allegorical is absorbed into the figurative. Considered in historical terms, Sidney’s reference affords a recognition, too, that allegorical writing comprises one tradition of fiction-making, puerile as it may be. (One of Sidney’s few allegorical poems, the “Ister bank” of The Old Arcadia’s third book is decorously adapted to Philisides’s youth—as the sort of poem one gives to children—just as its archaic language is a joke both at Spenser’s expense and the “archaic” mentality of the young, unfallen Philisides. Its clarity of theme—startlingly statemental as it is [see stanza five]—is a patent rejection of allegory’s traditional obscurity.) The concluding conjuration of the Defence that readers “believe with me, that there are many mysteries contained in Poetry, which of purpose were written darkly,” is characteristically witty Sidneian humor at the expense of an allegorical tradition that he has so conspicuously rewritten and diminished (142). Borris makes much of William Temple’s use of the term allegorica fictio in his contemporary analysis of the Defence, but applied as that term is to the stories of Nathan and David and Aesop’s fables, clearly it indicates once more only their figurative status (197). Temple’s Ramistic reading methods are diametrically opposed to anything that we could intelligibly call “allegorical.”
113 For Melanchthon’s concept of the notitiae, see Bellucci, esp. p. 363–96.
114 In the De anima (1553), within an argument designed to show that God made man with rational skills so that an awareness of the deity will shine in him, Melanchthon writes: “Est igitur mens architectatrix sapiens,” (Therefore the mind [of man] is a wise architect) CR 13, 138; he proceeds to point out that: “Architectus cogitans domum, pingit imaginem eius, et de ea iudicat. Tantum propemodum dici potest, cum quaerimus, quid sit noticia. Mirando autem consilio Deus noticias voluit esse imagines, quia in nobis umbras esse voluit significantes aliquid de ipso” (An architect thinking about a house depicts an image of it and judges it. So in a similar sense we can say, when we question it, what perception is. By his wonderful design God wished perceptions to be images, because he wished reflections in us to signify something of himself, CR 13, 145). Once more, this architectonic power of the mind—a reflection in man of the Maker’s power—is the source, Melanchthon argues, of all arts: “Et fontes omnium artium sunt in hac potentia” (And the fountain of all the arts is in this power [of making] CR 13, 138).
115 See Bellucci, quoting from Melanchthon’s Commentarius:“Interea hae ipsae noticiae etiam ratiocinando fiunt illustriores. Mens naturaliter intelliget esse Deum, veritatem esse amandam. Et tamen accedere ratiocinatio potest, qua fiunt hae sententiae illustriores.” (Meanwhile, these notions become more illuminating still because of reasoning [about them]. The mind understands naturally that God exists, that it needs to love the truth. But reasoning that comes to add itself [to this understanding], renders these principles more illuminating), p. 376.
116 In a still-useful article, Leigh DeNeef proposes that Sidney’s “fore-conceit” is the “mediating term” between the Idea and the “textually bodied” conceit, “Rereading Sidney’s Apology,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 10 (1980), 155–91. What DeNeef does not understand is the epistemology that imparts to the “fore-conceit” its mediating role: the science of how-the-mind-comes-to-know, one originating in Melanchthon’s natural philosophy, and one whose vocabulary (see Chapter 3) derives directly from Mornay. By turn, Mack’s central argument about the pious operation of Sidney’s poetics (that Sidney’s “maker” imitates “the method of God, who created matter out of nothing”) misrepresents the epistemological foundations of Sidneian making altogether, p. 37.
117 Liber de anima, in CR 13, 145: “Noticia est mentis actio, qua rem adspicit, quasi formans imaginem rei, quam cogitat. Nec aliud sunt imagines illae seu ideae, nisi actus intelligendi. Nec huius admirandae actionis alia potest tradi illustrior descriptio, quam quod sit formatio imaginis” (The notion is an action of the mind, which sees something, as though forming an image of the thing which it is thinking about. Nor are these images or ideas anything except acts of the person who is thinking. Nor is it possible to give any clearer illustration about this wonderful action than that it is the formation of an image).
118 Annabel Patterson claims that fears about censorship inspired what she represents as the intentionally devised obscurity of the romance’s political expression, “‘Under Pretty Tales’: Intention in Sidney’s Arcadia,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 15, no. 1 (Spring 1982), esp. 6–14. Patterson’s critique of Geron’s fable (OA 9) is a good example of the misreadings that critical assumptions of this kind promote: when the old shepherd tells the story of a swan who lost its voice to Mastix (a bitter satirist whose name means “scourge”), he does so not to warn him “to keep quiet for his own good,” as Patterson asserts (14), but instead to chide his excess in speaking out of a moral self-righteousness to which he has no rightful claim (see The Old Arcadia, p. 79, lines 2–10). Heninger’s distinction between Spenser’s allegorical and Sidney’s exemplary poetics makes good sense; in the former, truth lies “behind the veil of words”; in the latter, it “inheres in the verbal system itself …[;] meaning is inseparable from the poem, integral to it,” p. 274–5.
119 See the Enarrationes Aliquot Librorum Ethicorum Aristotelis in CR 16, 284, note 2, where Melanchthon, writing as a teacher, highlights the conjunction between Aristotle’s concept of architectonic knowledge and the knowledge Christians require “ut cognoscamus Deum” (in order that we know God).
120 For an analysis of this passage in relation to Sidney’s political concerns, see Ferguson, p. 159–65. Her argument that the Defence itself can be read as an allegory, because of the desire to have readers “find themselves figured in [its] images,” mistakes the historical origins of Sidney’s interest in accommodation (p. 156). See also Anne Lake Prescott’s incisive commentary on Sidney’s biblically inspired effort “to turn the reader’s own gaze inward,” in “King David as a ‘Right Poet’: Sidney and the Psalmist,” English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989), no. 2, 131–51. For a parallel argument about the relationship between Sidney and Amyot in their respective representations of Cyrus, see Anthony Miller, p. 267.
121 See Prescott, 131–51, and Debora Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric.
122 As Sidney writes regarding David’s metamorphosis, “the application [was] most divinely true, but the discourse [the oratio] itself feigned” (115).