|
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1980) Chapter Two The Word of God in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
More's role in this grim story reflects his hatred of heresy and his direct engagement in a campaign to eradicate it. He was surely not the sadistic inquisitor of "The Book of Martyrs"--Foxe has |
|
[75] him whipping Bainham
at a tree in his garden--but he was just as surely not the sweet soul
conjured up by those who speak admiringly of More's "hearty, loving
labor for the man's amendment."2 Behind this labor lay a threat
the Lord Chancellor fully endorsed: "to thieves, murderers and
heretics grievous," he wrote in his own epitaph.3 "Now the
spirit of error and lying," More concludes venemously of one Protestant
martyr, "hath taken his wretched soul with him straight from the
shore fire to the fire everlasting. "4 The spiritual violence here
enables us to understand how More's Chelsea--for Erasmus, "Plato's
Academy on a Christian footing"; for R. W. Chambers, "this
small patriarchal, monastic Utopia"--could function, for brief
periods, as a prison house.5 This disturbing fact shatters that careful
separation of public and private to which More himself, as we have seen,
clung as long as he could. The immediate occasion
for this shattering was More's high office--the judicial functions of
the chancellorship and More's determination to use his position to war
against heresy. But the public and private spheres were always interlocked,
even when More himself most struggled to keep them apart: the private
life made possible the public by making it morally bearable; the public
life defined the private by giving it a reason to exist. From William
Roper's early biography to Robert Bolt's Man for All Seasons,
we have been led to picture Chelsea as a kind of ideal suburb--a magical
haven of wit, humanism, and familial tenderness. When, in Roper's superb
account, More, under arrest, bids farewell to his family, he "pulled
the wicket after him and shut them all from him"6 we have passed
poignantly from the enclosed, loving, domestic retreat to the murderous
world of Tudor power. This sense of Chelsea is by no means a mere myth:
More had, I have argued, a stake in building a high wall between his
public en gagements and his private existence. But the intense pressure
of the 1520s and '30s rendered that separation increasingly tenuous:
after all, it was in effect what transpired in the chapel of New Building--that
retreat within a retreat, that place of conscience and solitude--that
led to More's arrest, trial, and execution. At the end, as we have seen,
More's innermost private conscience had become precisely his public
adherence to the known, visible consensus of the Catholic Church. The wicket that
allowed More to pass between carefully demarcated worlds allowed others
to pass as well; if Chelsea was a suburban retreat, it was one to which
the Lord Chancellor brought home pressing business in the person of
the occasional heretical [76] prisoner. To James
Bainham, More's house must have seemed anything but a haven from the
world. As we have tried to grasp the principles governing More's self-fashioning,
so we must turn now to the shaping of the identities of those he so
much loathed. Here again, as
we shall see, identity is achieved at the intersection of an absolute
authority and a demonic Other, but the authority has shifted from the
visible church to the book. This investment of power in the book has,
I hope to demonstrate, important consequences both for self-fashioning
and for the way we read. Neither Bainham's
beliefs nor his ultimate fate are particularly unusual. He had read
works by the English Lutherans, Tyndale, Frith, and Joye and "never
saw any error" in them; he affirmed that "Christ's body is
not chewed with teeth, but received by faith"; he did not believe
in praying to departed saints, thought that Saint Paul would have condemned
the doctrine of purgatory as heretical, doubted the necessity of confession
to a priest, and believed that repentance alone was sufficient for God's
forgiveness. Though More found him a chatterer--"Bainham the jangler,"
he calls him7--the record of his interrogations shows him rather circumspect:
he denied, for example, having said that "he had as lief to pray
to Joan his wife, as to our lady," pleaded ignorance on such issues
as psychopannychism, and was careful to frame most of his answers in
the words of Scripture. What rivets our interest in the case, almost
lost in the great mass of Foxe's famous work, is the critical role taken,
at the height of the drama of abjuration and relapse, by the printed
book. To understand the
role of the book we must understand the drama itself, and the key to
such understanding is a recognition of its dialectical structure: Bainham's
actions after his release were generated directly and systematically
by the constituent elements of the process that led to his abjuration.
That process consisted of a progressive revelation of power, a movement
from the private to the public, from rational discourse to intolerable
pressure, from civil conversation to humiliation and violence. It is
as if we were watching the stripping away of masks from the face of
power: a conversation with Thomas More at Chelsea gave way to imprisonment
within his house, then transfer to the Tower, then interrogations, the
rack and the threat of burning, then the signing of the bill of abjuration
and final public disgrace. This disclosure
of the force that always underlies even the most apparently calm and
benign discourse of the authorities is one of the recurrent motifs in
early Protestant accounts of persecution. Subtle arguments over finely
drawn theological points are taken [77] with the utmost
seriousness by both heretic and inquisitor, as if they were engaged
in an academic disputation, but these are in fact shadow arguments,
as in a ritual or a play, for actual persuasion is out of the question:
the heretic will either abjure for fear of punishment or stand firm
and be punished. Protestant historiography insists that recourse to
violence did not always characterize the Church's relation to dissent;
Augustine and Jerome, Foxe declares, relied only on the strength of
intellect to contend with heresy, and such was their learning and eloquence
that they easily prevailed; "but in their place, there is such
posterity crept in, as which, with mere power and violence, do for the
most part defend that which they cannot judge or discern, when they
are not able to accomplish the matter by learning."8 Protestants described and seem to have experienced the inquisitorial process as a kind of demonic theater; the long scenes of doctrinal debate have to be played out, with each of the actors performing his preordained part, until the inevitable epiphany of "mere power and violence." Thus in the Lollard William Thorpe's account of his examination in 1407, the authorities, interrogating him in detail on each of his heretical positions, become increasingly enraged by his refusal to submit, until the archbishop of Canterbury--"striking with his hand fiercely upon a cupboard"--threatens to have him imprisoned like a thief. When this histrionic outburst fails to break Thorpe's will, the show of violence increases until the heretic takes refuge in silence: "And then, I was rebuked, scorned, and menaced on every side; and yet, after this, divers persons cried upon me to kneel down and submit me: but I stood still, and spake no word. And then there was spoken of me and to me many great words; and J stood, and heard them menace, curse, and scorn me: but J said nothing."9 A long tradition of suffering for the faith lies behind this eloquent silence, a tradition reaching back to Christ's own initial silence before Caiaphas: "And the chief priest arose and said to him: answerest thou nothing? how is it that these bear witness against thee? but Jesus held his peace" (Matt. 26:29-31).10 Caught in a terrifying situation and facing the rage of the great and powerful, the heretic William Thorpe, like the imprisoned Thomas More, found refuge in an identification with Christ: "And the men that stood about Jesus mocked him and smote him and blindfolded him and smote his face" (Luke 22:37-39). This identification lies deeper than literary artifice, pastoral consolation, or religious doctrine, though it partakes of all three; it marks, as we have seen with More, a simultaneous affirmation and effacement of personal identity. |
|
[78] The sense of the
inquisitorial process as theater culminates in a revelation of the ultimate
roles,the truth in which all partial representations find their meaning
and ground. Christ's suffering constitutes more than a powerful similitude
to the suffering of the heretic; it is the latter's underlying reality,
and hence identification is as much somatic as metaphoric. The point
is worth stressing, since the Protestant emphasis on inward grace tends
to obscure the implication of the body and hence to render public behavior
incomprehensible or irrelevant. Christ is present not only in the mind
of William Thorpe but in his situation; to put the matter somewhat differently,
the outward physical compulsion of the authorities is overmastered by
an inward compulsion that is no less physical. We may see this countercompulsion,
this somatic imitation of Christ, most clearly in another account of
a heresy investigation, that of Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, who
led an abortive Lollard rebellion in 1414. Near the close of the interrogation,
one of the inquisitors asked Oldcastle if he would worship images and,
more particularly, the Cross of Christ:
In his Goya-like
gesture, Oldcastle at once identifies himself with Christ on the cross
and carefully avoids either a blasphemous self-exaltation or a celebration
of images. The physical gesture is both an expression of his faith and
a condemnation of the inquisitorial procedure. It is a brilliant piece
of histrionic improvisation, identifying his tormentors with the tormentors
of Christ and transforming his situation into a symbolic reenactment
of the crucifixion. Oldcastle, like
William Thorpe or, indeed, like any individual or group confronting
a hostile institution that possesses vastly superior force, has recourse
to the weapon of the powerless: the [79] seizure of symbolic
initiative. He may be crushed, but his martyrdom will only confirm his
construction of reality, for the very success of the dominant institution
is exposed as a sign not of its rightness but of the power of the Antichrist.
We may argue, of course, that such a symbolic victory is trivial--in
1419, after eluding the authorities for several years, Oldcastle was
"hanged up there by the middle, in chains of iron, and so consumed
alive in the fire"12--but though large numbers of individuals may
be dealt with in this fashion, it is only in a concentration camp that
a monopoly of violence alone is sufficient to control a whole society.
The Catholic Church had neither the will nor the technical means to
create such a world; like all significant and durable human institutions,
it relied for its preservation and reproduction upon a thick network
of symbolic bonds as well as an apparatus of repression. Against the
symbolic initiatives of the heretics, the Church opposed not only violence
but its own powerful symbolism, and yet the final recourse to force
undermined this symbolism even as it seemed to confirm its power. For
each public exercise of violence, each torture and burning, could suggest
to onlookers that the Church ultimately depended not upon its truth
but upon its power. 13 If Foxe's immensely
influential "Book of Martyrs"--more properly, Acts and
Monuments (1563)--dwelt lovingly upon scenes of horror, if it insisted
again and again that beneath the institutions and symbolic language
of the Catholic Church lay "mere power and violence," it was
not because of a private fixation nor even primarily because of the
rhetorical capital in unmerited suffering, but because the revelation
of such violence attacked that consensual unity for which More went
to the scaffold. A consensus held together by threats of torture and
the stake is no consensus at all. Catholic authorities for their own
part denied that they were trying to compel belief and insisted that
the heretic could only return to the Holy Mother Church "purely
and unfeignedly." When a heretic like James Bainham agreed to submit-and it was to obtain such submission that the Church directed all its efforts--he had to declare in the bill of abjuration that he "voluntarily, as a true penitent person" abjured his heresies. The prosecution of heresy then--as is inevitable in the prosecution of thought-crime--combined extreme duress with the insistence on the purely voluntary character of the penitent's act.14 And, to be sure, the prisoner did have a certain grim freedom: he could choose to [80] adamantly insist
that they have no power over the heretic's soul; as Augustine had argued,
credere non potest homo nisi volens, "Man cannot believe
against his will." But Augustine had also written, Quae peior
mors animae quam libertas erroris? "What death is worse for
the soul than the liberty to err?" and this conviction waa trengthened
by the urgent determination to prevent the infection of others. 15 If
power does not extend to the soul, it may be exerised upon the body;
indeed secular power is essentially the abilty to perform certain operations
upon the body: to remove it from one place to another, to confine it,
to cause it extreme pain, to reduce it to ashes. The conviction that
the soul is entirely separate from the body licenses the exercise of
such power, while the exercise of such power helps to produce the conviction
that the soul is entirely separate from the body. For it is preeminently
when the Church is involved in the corporal discipline of an unwilling
subject (as opposed, that is, to a willing penitent) that it invokes
the aid of the secular arm and hence reserves to itself the cure of
the soul, while consigning to the state the punishment of the body.
And it is preeminently when his body is subjected to torment that the
obstinate heretic is most suffused with the conviction that his soul
is inviolable. To this extent the exercise of power-of violence or the
threat of violence, in this world or the next-confirms for both inquisitor
and heretic the separateness and incorporeality of the soul. Michel Foucault has carried this argument to its extreme, claiming that the soul is not, as Christian theology holds, born guilty and punishable, but rather is engendered by the very process of punishment, surveillance, discipline, and constraint.16 If this is too radical a reduction, it is nonetheless clear in a case like James Bainham's that the object of the authorities' inquiry--the state of the heretic's soul--is itself significantly shaped by such inquiries, performed throughout the course of his life from earliest childhood. The individual conscience as a fertile field of knowledge is at least in part the product of a complex operation of power--of watching, training, correcting, questioning, confessing. And in the case of a heretic, the threat of punishment that underlies this operation, always present if only in a veiled, symbolic, or allegorized form, is at last completely realized, for the edification not only of the victim but of the entire community. Hence the publicity of a punishment that in a later age would take place, if at all, in a' dank cellar or behind barbed wire: in the Church's symbolic system, as opposed to the heretic's, the rack [81] and the fire are
at once foretaste and confirmation of those other-worldly tortures that
were sculpted in stone, painted in vivid colors, described in rich rhetorical
detail. "From the short fire to the fire everlasting." The
heretic is enrolled in a virtual theater of torments; early editions
of Foxe's work include a woodcut of Bainham standing on a stage before
the congregation at Paul's cross and holding a faggot of wood and a
candle, symbols of the fate he has averted by means of his penitence.17 This public ceremony
is the climax of a procedure designed to assure that the external performance
of abjuration before the community reflects a sincere inner repentance;
the authorities are by no means only interested in a public show undertaken
to save one's skin. Their object is knowledge of the genuineness of
the heretic's return to the truth, in token whereof Bainham had to swear
an oath to the articles of abjuration and to sign and kiss the book
in which these articles were recorded. It is the cross of power that
it can only know the inner state it has brought into being through outer
gestures; even as it asserts the incorporeality of the soul, it must
accept a physical sign. The act of kissing the book is a sign devised
to assure that the physical has indeed given way to the spiritual, for
the book's physical existence is only the carrier of its incorporeal
meaning, while in the kiss, whose erotic quality seems to contradict
any charge of compulsion, the soul itself is conceived to be present.18 In the month following his release, Bainham reenacted the elements of the process of abjuration, only turning them inside out. 'Where before he had been free in mind while under extreme physical duress, now he was free in body while under extreme mental or spiritual duress. Indeed, Bainham seems to have experienced this condition not as an inner conflict but as an external pressure, weighing upon his conscience: "If I should not return again unto the truth," he said, holding the New Testament in his hand, "this word of God would damn me both body and soul at the day of judgment" (4:702). Instead of the Catholic Church and the state then, God himself and his revealed word threaten Bainham with torments. The close parallel is not accidental, for Bainham conceives of the Catholic Church as a demonic parody of the true church: "there were two churches," he told his inquisitors at the first interrogation, "the church of Christ militant, and the church of Antichrist; and... this church of Antichrist may and doth err; but the church of Christ doth not" (4:699). We have already encountered this conception of a demonic church in More: [82] neither side could
resist invoking it, for it had both powerful doctrinal precedent and
psychic force, but it was dangerously reversible.19 And there was a
danger beyond reversibility: its effect here was to force Bainham to
repeat the actions of his oppressor on himself in order to translate
them from the realm of Antichrist to the realm of Christ militant, to
restore their true significance. Thus he could not
achieve quiet in mind and conscience simply by dismissing the actions
of the Catholic Church as a horrible injustice or even by repenting
inwardly. Since his abjuration had had a public as well as an inner
aspect, so too his return to God would have to be performed publicly.
Had not Christ said, "whosoever shall deny me before men, him will
I also deny before my Father which is in heaven" (Matt. 10:33)?
Bainham had to affirm Christ before men as he had denied him before
men. At first, he "uttered his fall to all his acquaintance,"
but apparently he felt this informal confession--the equivalent of the
early informal interrogation-to be incomplete. He then appeared before
the Protestant congregation, the Brethren, and asked their forgiveness
and God's.20 In the symmetry of Bainham's symbolic acts, this confession
to the group of fellow believers, meeting secretly in the warehouse,
was the equivalent to the formal interrogation in the Tower. As the Tower interrogation
was situated between the relative privacy of More's Chelsea and the
full publicity of Paul's Cross, Bainham's discourse with the heretical
congregation linked his private anguish and his decisive public appearance
at Saint Austin's Church. Indeed the meeting at Bow Lane seems to have
given Bainham the strength to pass from one to the other. Hunted, contacting
each other with code words and covert signs, meeting secretly in warehouses
and private rooms, reading together from prohibited books, the Brethren
seem to have been profoundly energized by their sense of community.
Individually, they could be treated as the madmen and fools that More,
in the optimism of his hatred, called them; together they possessed
the strength to unsettle the immense weight, the vast equilibrium, of
the Catholic establishment. The pages of Foxe and Tyndale are full of
this energy, just as the voluminous controversial writings of More are
haunted by a terrible weariness, by a sense of grinding labor through
sleepless nights. As the name Brethren
suggests, members of the early Protestant groups were charged with intense
familial emotion toward one another: "For so did we not only call
one another," writes Antony Dalaber, "but were in deed one
to the other."21 Dalaber, who as a [83] student at Oxford
in 1528 fell afoul of the clerical authorities, has left a particularly
vivid account of this emotion in an unfinished memoir printed by Foxe.
His natural brother, a "rank Papist" and "the most mortal
enemy that ever I had for the Gospel's sake," is supplanted by
his adopted brothers in Christ whose perils he shares: "Then kneeled
we both down together on our knees, lifting up our hearts and hands
to God, our heavenly Father, ...and then we embraced, and kissed the
one the other, the tears so abundantly flowing out from both our eyes,
that we all bewet both our faces, and scarcely for sorrow could we speak
one to the other; and so he departed from me" (5:423). Dalaber
finds in the movement not only new brothers but a new father, his teacher
John Clark: "He came to me, and took me up in his arms, kissed
me, the tears trickling down from his eyes, and said unto me: ...from
henceforth forever take me for your father, and I will take you for
my son in Christ" (5:427). The fellow believers were thus bound
to each other in passionate rituals of kinship, and the new family was
a bridge between individual experience and the alien, largely Catholic,
public world. It was as a member
of such a group then that Bainham made his confession before the conventicle
in the warehouse in Bow Lane. If this confession, like his earlier informal
expressions of remorse, left him unsatisfied, if the act of repentance
was still incomplete, the support of the group apparently gave him the
immense, reckless courage needed to take the next and decisive step:
the public confession at Saint Austin's, where he testified not to his
brothers and sisters in Christ but to an indifferent and possibly hostile
community. Only in standing before such an audience and "declaring
openly, with weeping tears, that he had denied God" could Bainhamannul
the denial at Paul's Cross and find the release, the "quiet,"
that had eluded him. His model perhaps was Saint Peter, who thrice denied
Christ, wept bitterly at his weakness, and went on to fulfill his calling.
That calling, according to legend, included martyrdom, and it certainly
appears that Bainham sought such a fate. At the least, he must have
known what was likely to happen, but he was compelled to act as he did.22
It is as if only by embracing the stake--as Foxe reports he did at the
end-could he annul the kiss that had confirmed his abjuration. This sense of compulsion in Bainham's behavior may lead one plausibly to Freud's concept of undoing what has been done-"ungeschehenmachen" or, literally, "making unhappened." Undoing, writes Freud, "is, as it were, negative magic, and endeavours, by means of motor symbolism, to 'blow away' not merely the [84] consequences of
some event (or experience or impression) but the event itself."23
Such a notion can help us understand the elements of ritual expiation,
annulment, and above all symmetry at work in the heretic's relapse:
each separate phase of the polluting process of abjuration must be blown
away by a corresponding symbolic act of undoing. But Freud's "negative
magic" is unconscious, a neurotic defense against impulses that
threaten the structures of the conscious mind and hence must be repressed;
to invoke undoing as an explanation rather than an analog seems to me
misleading.24 The dangers of such a reduction are exemplified by a recent
psychohistorical study that, while it does not discuss undoing, does
characterize the Tudor martyrs as "compulsive neurotics" taking
"the self-willed, self-inflicted path of suicide" rather than
the self-preserving path of "cooperation with the magistrates."25 The Reformers'
bitter denials that they were seeking death by refusing to embrace orthodoxy
are dismissed as defensive reductions of guilt. But are there then ever
moments in which a man may legitimately determine, in order to save
his soul, not to cooperate with the magistrates, even if execution is
the certain consequence? Is to be chained to a stake and burned to death
so unmistakably "suicide"? The actions of a man like Bainham
were not neurotic symptoms in the midst of a presumptively sane society,
but symbolic actions fully understood by both friends and enemies and
explicable in terms of a complex theological and political system. This
does not, of course, obviate the possible functioning of "unconscious"
forces, but it does suggest that these forces were organized and given
expression by a fully conscious, public discourse. And this discourse
is manifested most concretely in the case of Bainham and dozens like
him in the crucial significance of the printed book. At Saint Austin's,
it will be recalled, Bainham stood up "with the New Testament in
his hand in English and the Obedience of a Christian Man in his
bosom." It is hard to tell if there is one book here or two, for
"the Obedience of a Christian Man" may refer to Bainham's
inner state or to Tyndale's book of the same name, which Bainham owned
and may have carried next to his heart. The ambiguity here is felicitous,
for Tyndale's manual, which he wrote in exile, probably in Worms, in
1527, is precisely designed to be absorbed: one should not, in principle,
be able to say where the book stops and identity begins. This absorption
of the book at once provides a way of being in the world and shapes
the reader's inner life; Christian obedience is simultaneously a form
of action and an internal state. Such fashioning of action and identity
is [85] essential because
in breaking images, radical Protestants have rejected a central Catholic
mode of generating inward reflection--recall More's advice to meditate
in private "before an altar or some pitiful image of Christ's bitter
passion"--while in abandoning formal auricular confession, they
have rejected the primary Catholic mode of maintaining the obedience
of the Christian man by ordering this inward reflection. Since the momentous
decree of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, Omnis utriusque sexus,
which commanded yearly confession, there had arisen a vast literature
for confessors and penitents detailing a complex methodology for the
examination and formal cleansing of conscience.26 It is this systematic,
institutionalized form of self-scrutiny in the service of discipline
and consolation that caused the young Augustinian monk Martin Luther
such anguish and is violently rejected by virtually every reformer.
"Shrift in the ear," writes Tyndale in the Obedience,
"is verily a work of Satan."27 Because of subsequent
developments, we associate Protestantism with a still more intense self-scrutiny,
the alternately anguished and joyful self-reflection of Bunyan's Grace
Abounding or Fox's Journal. But significantly, among the
early Protestants we find almost no formal autobiography and remarkably
little private, personal testimony.28 The kind of self-consciousness
voiced in these forms, the sense of being set apart from the world and
of taking a stance toward it, the endless, daily discursiveness of later
generations, is only in the process of being shaped, while the traditional
methodology for the examination of conscience and the ritual forgiveness
of sin by virtue of the Church's power of the keys have been bitterly
renounced. There is a powerful ideology of inwardness but few sustained
expressions of inwardness that may stand apart from the hated institutional
structure. What we find then in the early sixteenth century is a crucial
moment of passage from one mode of interiority to another. Tyndale's
Obedience of a Christian Man is located at this liminal moment;
in his book and the others of its type, we may watch the fashioning
of the Protestant discourse of self out of conflicting impulses: rage
against authority and identification with authority, hatred of the father
and ardent longing for union with the father, confidence in oneself
and an anxious sense of weakness and sinfulness, justification and guilt. A spiritual guide,
written by hand for a family or circle of friends, a manuscript patiently
copied for a monastic library, a saint's life lovingly recorded in a
private collection--all of these have a certain innate intimacy and
presence: they possess, in [86] Walter Benjamin's
term, an aura linking them to a ritual function or, at the least, to
a particular, specific human community.29 We are accustomed to believe
that print culture moved away from that presence, lost that aura: after
all, there is no longer the visible sign of the recording hand, the
sense of unique production. Print is, in these terms, a form of depersonalization.
But we must balance this perspective with that afforded by Tyndale's
work: that in the early period of print culture the book could have
a special kind of presence that perhaps no manuscript ever had. For
with the rejection of formal auricular confession and the power of the
keys, works like Tyndale's are, in effect, among the primary sources
of selffashioning. In the symmetry of unmaking and displacement, they
occupy the structural position of the confessional manual, but they
refuse the institutional framework that seems to have controlled the
experience or at least the representation of interiority in the Middle
Ages. That framework insisted that interiority be subordinated to an
intimate verbal transaction, that it be embedded in a ritual of confession
and absolution within the visible fabric of the Church. Tyndale's Obedience
and similar Protestant guides to the inner life have no such end in
view; the printed word does not serve the spoken, but has a kind of
absoluteness, integrity, and finality. Distance from the scribal hand,
production in relatively large quantities, mechanisms of distribution
far distant from the author and printer, refusal of subordination to
a ritualized verbal transaction, the very lack of aura--all that we
may call the abstract ness of the early Protestant printed book-give
it an intensity, a shaping power, an element of compulsion that the
late medieval manuals of confession never had.30 Works like the
Obedience differ as well from the printed or, for that matter,
manuscript accounts of the inner life in the next century. In seventeenth-century
spiritual autobiography, the inner life is represented in outward discourse;
that is, the reader encounters the record of events that have already
transpired, that have been registered and brought from the darkness
within to the clear light of the page. In the early sixteenth century
there is not yet so clearly a fluid, continuous inner voice--a dramatic
monologue--to be recorded. The words on the page in The Obedience
of a Christian Man are aspects of the inner life, awkward and eloquent,
half-formed, coming into existence. These words are not carried out
into the light but are destined for the opposite process: they will
be studied, absorbed, internalized, colored by a thousand personal histories.
It is as if for a brief moment we see the thing itself, not represented
but presented in its original and originating form.
The phenomenon I describe--this presence in the written word of identity--has
its last brilliant flowering in the essays of Montaigne and, by transference
from script back to voice, in the soliloquies of Hamlet, words that
claim not access to the inner life but existence as the inner life.
And the characteristic of these words--as opposed to modern attempts
to record the discourse of interiority--is their public character, the
apparent impersonality of their rhetorical structure, their performative
mode. If the revelation of Hamlet's innermost thoughts is a highly formal
quaestio on the problem of being and nonbeing, delivered in direct address
to an enormous, outdoor, public assembly, we may understand some of
the force of this peculiar convention by recalling works like the Obedience
whose apparently impersonal rhetoric fashioned their readers' most intimate
sense of themselves. James Bainham had
every reason to clutch the Obedience to his bosom as he stood
up at Saint Austin's. He had abjured, but the book spoke directly to
the humiliation, the "fall" as he called it, that he had undergone:
"If any man clean against his heart (but overcome with the weakness
of the flesh), for fear of persecution, have denied, as Peter did, or
have delivered his book, or put it away secretly; let him (if he repent)
come again, and take better hold, and not despair" (143-44). He
was casting himself into the hands of his enemies, but the book told
him that tribulation for righteousness was a blessing, a gift that God
who "worketh backward" only gives to his elect: "If God
promise riches, the way thereto is poverty. Whom he loveth, him he chasteneth:
whom he exalteth, he casteth down: whom he saveth, he damneth first.
He bringeth no man to heaven, except he send him to hell first. If he
promise life, he slayeth first: when he buildeth, he casteth all down
first. He is no patcher; he cannot build on another man's foundation"
(135).31 More's attack seems at its most odious when he charges that
Tyndale's books killed men; the killing was done by the state More served
and in defense of the church More loved. 32 But there is truth in the
charge that the Obedience virtually produced a heretic like Bainham.
He was a creature of the book. The shaping power of the Obedience may be seen as an extreme version of the less drastic but widespread influence exerted in the period by conduct manuals of which the most famous are Machiavelli's Prince (1513) and Castiglione's Courtier (1528). Tyn dale himself may have translated Erasmus's important contribution to the genre, the Enchiridion militis Christiani (1501).33 That the most significant and enduring works of this kind appeared [88] during the first
decades of the sixteenth century suggests the great "unmooring"
that men were experiencing, their sense that fixed positions had somehow
become unstuck, their anxious awareness that the moral landscape was
shifting. "Men live among them selves in such a manner," writes
Luther, "that no consideration is given to the state or household.
who does not see that God is compelled, as it were, to punish, yes,
even to destroy Germany?"34 The complex sources
of this anxiety may be rooted in momentous changes in the material world:
a sharp population increase, the growth of cities, the first stages
of an "agrarian revolution," the rapid expansion of certain
key industries, the realignment of European-wide economic forces.35
These changes were present in varying degrees to the consciousness of
the men of the early sixteenth century; still more present, however,
were shifts in societal definitions of institutions and of the alien,
and it is at the intersection of these two, we have argued, that identity
is fashioned. The Obedience, like virtually all major guides
to conduct in the period, grasps that the shaping of the individual
even at the most intimate level depends both on. the' institutional
mode of secular power and religiouS doctrine and on the communal perception
of the alien and the devilish. Where in his later career More exalts
the existing institution of the Catholic Church and identifies heresy
as the alien force that must be destroyed, Tyndale, for his part, exalts
the monarchy as the essential saving secular institution and defines
the Catholic Church as the demonic other. The immediate occasion of the Obedience was the charge that the Protestants fomented rebellion, a charge fueled by the German Peasant's Revolt of 1525. Tyndale's reply takes the form of that strategy of reversal we have already seen several times and that derives, like so much else, directly from Luther: "it is the bloody doctrine of the pope which causeth disobedience, rebellion, and insurrection"(166). The Catholic Church teaches us from earliest childhood "to kill a Turk, to slay a Jew, to burn an heretic, to fight for the liberties and right of the church, as they call it"; when "we have sucked in such bloody imaginations into the bottom of our hearts, even with our mother's milk"(166), what wonder that we mistakenly think it lawful to fight for the true word of God and hence are lured into disobedience? It is the goal of the Obedience then to free men from their own corrupted imaginations, to restore them to that obedience that Christ himself taught. From the passage
I have just quoted, one might imagine that Tyndale goes on to preach
toleration and mildness. He does [89] nothing of the
kind. He preaches, rather, what one might call a violent obedience.
His work is addressed to a soul conceived as the domain of power, the
point at which all the lines of force in the universe converge. He exhorts
the child to remember that he is the "good and possession"
of his parents; such is the will of God who has "cast thee under
the power and authority of them, to obey and serve them in his stead."
Likewise, the husband's commandments are, to the wife, as God's commandments.
"Sara," Tyndale writes, "before she was married, was
Abraham's sister, and equal with him; but, as soon as she was married,
was in subjection, and became without comparison inferior; for so is
the nature of wedlock, by the ordinance of God" (171). Servants
too must understand that they are the property of their masters,''as
his ox or his horse" (172). And all men must understand that "God
hath made the king in every realm judge over all, and over him is there
no judge." He who judges the king judges God; he who lays hands
on the king lays hands on God; he who resists the king resists God.
If a subject sins, he must be brought to the king's judgment; "if
the king sins, he must be reserved unto the judgment, wrath, and vengeance
of God. And as it is to resist the king, so is it to resist his officer,
which is set, or sent, to execute the king's commandmenf'.' (177). Tyndale obliterates here more than the competing rights of the Church. As Utopia had envisaged the reduction of all men to citizens with the identical language, traditions, customs, and laws, the Obedience reduces all men to the common condition of subjects: this includes dukes and earls, as well as cardinals and bishops. Tyndale's silence in this regard is eloquent in its dismissal of the vast and intricate feudal network of rights and obligations. By contrast, even the Elizabethan Homily on Obedience (1559) is careful to speak of the "high powers, which be set in authority by God" as "God's lieutenants, God's presidents, God's officers, God's commissioners, God's judges."36 Tyndale simply jumps from the power of masters over servants, which he conceives as the ownership of property, to the power of the king over subjects: there is room for the king's officers but not for individuals with independent, divinely or humanly sanctioned claims to power. And he does not shrink before the full implications of his argument: "the king is, in this world, without law; and may at his lust do right or wrong, and shall give accounts but to God only" (178). At Anne Boleyn's urging, Henry VIII read the Obedience and is reported to have said when he had finished it, "This is a book for me and for all kings to read."37 [90] But it would be
a mistake to imagine that Tyndale wrote the Obedience to please
or reassure Henry VIII; two years later the reformer did not hesitate
to write and publish The Practice of Prelates, a work that opposed
the royal divorce and won the king's lasting enmity.38 The extremity,
the violence, of his vision of obedience reflects other motives. As
a rebel against the Catholic Church, Tyndale, like virtually all the
early reformers, needs to see that Church as profoundly disobedient;
he constructs a universe in which all men are locked into a rigid code
of obedience, a code utterly beyond their control or volition, fixed
by God himself, and then observes, angrily and triumphantly, that there
is no place in this universe for the Catholic Church. Any claim the
Church might make for men's obedience is a competitive claim, an attempt
to divert obedience due elsewhere; and the Church compounds this crime
by failing itself to obey its rulers, the temporal princes. Tyndale juxtaposes
then a call for violent disobedience to the Church and a call for absolute
submission to the king. Such is the individual's relation to the great,
patriarchal institutions of the world: one father must be destroyed;
the other exalted to supreme temporal authority. In the individual's
relation to God, the split is resolved by the transformation of rebellion
into proper boldness and of submission into proper observance: "Let
a child have never so merciful a father," Tyndale writes in the
Exposition of I John (1513), "yet if he break his father's commandments,
though he be not under damnation, yet he is ever chid and rebuked and
now and then lashed with the rod: by the reason whereof he is never
bold in his father's presence. But the child that keepeth his father's
commandments is sure of him self and bold in his father's presence to
speak and ask what he will."39 It is precisely in strict obedience
to God that men become "sure of themselves," and this assurance
contrasts with the groveling idolatry Tyndale claims that the Catholic
Church desires from its members. I.. The Obedience
sets out to expose and dismantle those false' practices-superstitious
ceremonies, factitious sacraments, confession, the worship of saints,
monasticism, typology, clerical celibacy, purgatory, indulgences, excommunication--that
constitute the means by which the Church transforms good Christians
into abject idolaters. If some Catholic practices bear a curious resemblance
to true doctrine and observance, it is because they have been cunningly
designed to do so. The preaching of God's word inevitably involves an
attack on the Church's perversion of that word: "It is impossible
to preach Christ, except thou preach against Antichrist" (185).
For though both Christ's teachings and [91] the Catholic Church's
abuses are easy, according to Tyndale, for all to grasp, nevertheless,
as the contemporary embodiment of Antichrist, the Church has the uncanny
power to simulate certain aspects of authentic Christian faith, to construct
a holy mask sufficiently convincing to deceive the unenlightened, to
perform as in a theater the truth that it should actually embody. This
histrionic power is one of the marks of Antichrist and a Source of his
enduring power: "his nature is (when he is uttered and overcome
with the word of God) to go out of the play for a season and to disguise
himself, and then to come in again with a new name and a new raiment."40
Such masquerading is, of course, antithetical to the true nature of
God, for "Christ is not hypocrite" who "playeth a part
in a play and representeth a person of state which he is not." He "is always that his name signifieth: he is ever a saver."41 The Obedience must strip away the Antichrist's mask, but the task is difficult, for the Church is a vast, devious, international conspiracy, with tentacles reaching everywhere from the poorest hamlets to the council chambers of the great: "In every parish have they spies, and in every great man's house, and in every tavern and alehouse. And through confession know they all secrets, so that no man may open his mouth to rebuke whatsoever they do, but that he shall be shortly made a heretic. In all councils is one of them; yea, the most part and chief rulers of the councils are of them: but of their council is no man" (191). All classes have been dupes and victims of the Church, from the peasant who believes that a few mumbled Latin verses will make his corn grow better to the gentleman who must support an army of clerical drones. The false shepherds do not overlook a shred of the fleece: "The parson sheareth, the vicar shaveth, the parish priest polleth, the friar scrapeth, and the pardoner pareth; we lack but a butcher to pull off the skin" (238). And the greatest dupes are the kings, "nothing now-a-days, but even hangmen unto the pope and bishops, to kill whomsoever they condemn without any more ado" (242). What begins as a doctrine of obedience ends as ruthless critiIcism: it is as if the former makes the latter possible, by assuring a firm ground on which to stand, boundaries within which to contain violent anger. The more rigid, harsh, and absolute the law of obedience, the more far-reaching and daring the attack on the. corruptions of authority. Having exalted fathers to the status of domestic gods, Tyndale can turn around and write, of the churchmen: "And when they cry, "Fathers, fathers," remember that it were the fathers that blinded and robbed the whole world, and brought us into this captivity, wherein these enforce to keep [92] us still. Furthermore,
as they of the old time are fathers to us, so shall these foul monsters
be fathers to them that come after us; and the hypocrites that follow
us will cry of these and of their doings, "Fathers, fathers,"
as these cry "Fathers, fathers," of them that are past"
(324). Having similarly exalted kings, Tyndale can attack them as either
tyrants or mere shadows; combining both charges, and with a sly glance
at Henry's title "Defender of the Faith" he can urge them
not to let the pope any longer make them so drunk with vain names and
other baubles, ''as it were puppetry for children," that they will
bankrupt their realms and murder their people "for defending of
our holy father's tyranny" (204-5). For all his vehemence, however,
Tyndale's attack is bounded by the order that enables it to exist: he
will denounce the Church and expose kings and emperors as corrupt tools,
he will long for God to come like a thief in the night and destroy the
great ones of the earth, but he will not exhort the people to act for
themselves. He is no Thomas Miintzer at the head of a revolutionary
party; the commons are urged to take patience and suffer the abuses
under which they groan. Violent anger has been released only, it seems,
to be swallowed up again. But not completely. Historians frequently divide early Protestants into conservatives and radicals, with Tyndale placed squarely among the former, as a preacher of passive obedience.42 But such a distinction, though virtually inevitable, may be misleading, for even in the Obedience's opening catalogue of ineluctable authorities, there is a subtle yet highly significant shift when we reach "The Obedience of Subjects unto Kings, Princes, and Rulers." We expect a further discourse on obedience; we hear instead of the necessity of submission. And there is a great difference, as James Bainham could testify. For there are certain extreme situations in which a man must disobey the king, even as the king is exhorted to disobey the pope and to break those vows which were unlawful to begin with. These are situations in which a man has been commanded to perform an action or express a belief directly contrary to the law of God and the faith of Christ. Such cases compel dissent, though the individual so compelled must at the same time bear patiently and without resistance the full punishment meted out by the authority he has disobeyed. He must, that is, act as James Bainham acted. The Obedience, as More quickly pointed out, is in fact a guide to disobedience of church and state.43 Such disobedience is not, of course, a rejection of the principle of authority but is obedience to a higher authority at whose command all lesser restraints fall away: "Jacob robbed Laban his [93] uncle; Moses robbed
the Egyptians; and Abraham is about to slay and burn his own son; and
all are holy works, because they are wrought in faith at God's commandments.
To steal, rob, and murder are no holy works before worldly people, but
unto them that have their trust in God: they are holy when God commandeth
them."44 Thomas More was not alone in expressing horror at the
queasy possibilities opened by this view. In the absence of a visible
church, how is a man to be sure of his position-sure enough, that is,
to take the far less spectacular but still drastic steps that led a
man like Bainham to the stake? There did not exist in the early sixteenth
century, after all, a coherent ideology of dissent: the medieval past
bore witness to innumerable conspiracies, rebellions, jacqueries, heresies,
millennial outbursts, but provided no principle of negation. If the
movements led by Wycliffe and Hus offered the glimmerings of such an
ideology, these movements were certainly not sufficient by themselves
to sustain disobedience; the Obedience scarcely alludes to the
Lollards, and it would take Foxe's massive rewriting of history in the
middle decades of the sixteenth century to establish a "tradition"
of resistance to illegitimate spiritual authority. Tyndale does not
seek to set up a vanguard party that will make the necessary decisions
nor to ally himself with a discontented social class or status group;
such developments, insofar as they happen at all, begin considerably
later in the century and do not assume clear form until the following
century .45 What Tyndale seeks is rather a principle powerful enough
to uphold individuals in daring acts of dissent against overwhelming
spiritual and political authority and to sustain these individuals during
the sufferings that would follow such acts. For Tyndale, this principle is found in the other book James Bainham held in his hand at Saint Austin's Church: the Bible, freed of the Church's false hermeneutics, translated into the vernacular, printed in quantities large enough for all men to possess or at least have access to a copy. The vernacular Bible, to which Tyndale devoted his life, was one of the principles of the earlier heretical movements, but neither technology nor the individual conscience had been fully prepared; now it was possible to put into the hands of literate and at least make accessible to illiterate believers an infallible rule by which to judge the words and deeds of those who set themselves up as absolute authorities: "Forasmuch now as thou partly seest the falsehood of our prelates, how all their study is to deceive us and to keep us in darkness, to sit as gods in our consciences, and handle us at their pleasure, and to |
|
[94] lead us whither
they lust; therefore I read thee, get thee to God's word, and thereby
try all doctrine, and against that receive nothing" (324). "Get
thee to God's word": so Tyndale voices that fetishism of Scripture
preached by all of the early Protestants. More, defending
the position of the Catholic Church, argued that we are bound "not
only to believe against our own reason the points that God shewed us
in Scripture; but also that God teacheth his church without Scripture
against our own mind also."46 We are bound, Tyndale countered,
"to look in the Scripture, whether our fathers have done right
or wrong, and ought to believe nothing without a reason of the Scripture
and authority of God's word" A reader who took
this counsel to heart and looked into the English New Testament of 1525
could learn almost the whole of the heretical creed from the prologue
and glosses. Following Luther, Tyndale dwells on man's utter worthlessness,
the bondage of his will: "The devil is our lord, and our ruler,
our head, governor, our prince, yea, and our god. And our will is locked
and knit faster unto the will of the devil, than could an hundred thousand
chains bind a man unto a post. ...Whatsoever we do, think, or imagine,
is abominable in the sight of God."47 This depravity is not the
consequence of the observable behavior of particular individuals but
rather the condition of existence; a human fetus is equally abominable:
"By nature, through the fall of Adam, are we the children of wrath,
heirs of the vengeance of God by birth, yea, and from our conception.
And we have our fellowship with the damned devils, under the power of
darkness and rule of Satan, while we are yet in our mother's wombs.
...And as an adder, a toad, or a snake, is hated of man, not for the
evil that it hath done, but for the poison that is in it, and hurt which
it cannot but do: so are we hated of God, for that natural poison, which
is conceived and born with us, before we do any outward evil" (14). This vision of human loathsomeness is proclaimed, of course, only to be redeemed by the glad tidings: Christ "hath fought with sin, with death, and the devil, and overcome them; whereby all men that were in bondage to sin, wounded with death, overcome of the devil, are, without their own merits or deservings, loosed, justified, restored to life and saved, brought to liberty and reconciled unto the favour of God, and set at one with him again" (9). Man has been driven to desperation by the law in order to be saved by the gospel; hearing and believing this news, a Christian "cannot but be glad, and laugh from the low bottom of his heart" (9). This joyful redemption comes only through man's faith in [95]
When he turned
from this prologue to the text itself, the reader found ample confirmation
of the Reformer's doctrines. More likened Tyndale's translation to "poisoned
bread" and counted over a thousand "faults" in it; he
was surely correct in pointing out the Lutheran intent behind the use
of "congregation" instead of "church," "love"
instead of "charity," "senior" instead of "priest,"
"knowledge" instead of "confession," and so on.48
And the subversiveness of the translation was heightened by the simple
fact that charges like More's could be so plausibly reversed and the
Vulgate exposed as a partisan, par:tial translation, slanted to favor
the interests of the Catholic Church. The Success of this reversal may
be gauged by the decree of the Council of Trent, dated 8 April 1546,
which ordains that "the Vulgate approved through long usage during
so many centuries be held authentic in public lectures, disputations,
preachings and exposition, and that nobody dare or presume to reject
it under any pretext."49 An unspoken assumption over centuries
that the Vulgate was the authentic version is one thing; a decree to
that effect is quite another. The Protestant
translators had forced the Church into the declaration that the "authentic"
version was to be preferred in all instances to the original. By contrast,
Tyndale could, in the prologue to the 1525 New Testament, exhort "those
that are better seen in the tongues than I, and that have better gifts
of grace, to interpret the sense of the Scripture" to mend the
translation wherever necessary. 50 The printing of
the English New Testament in 1525 marked for men like Bainham a turning
point in human history: God once more spoke directly to men. "The
truth of holy Scripture," Bainham declared at his first interrogation,
"was never, these eight hundred years past, so plainly and expressly
declared unto the people, as it hath been within these six years"
(698). Bainham himself had no need of a vernacular translation to understand
Scripture; according to Foxe, he was learned in both Latin and Greek.
The issue then is not his own personal access to the Bible; a text in
English and in print rather than script are for the Reformers keys to
the repossession of God's word by the Christian people. The vernacular
wrests the Bible from the hands of the priests, and the printing press
assures that this liberation of the word is irreversible. For manuscript
copies of the New Testament alone, even copies prepared by a competent
scriptorium, were necessarily [96] time-consuming to make and hence both costly and scarce. By seizing and destroying such manuscripts, the authorities could seriously impede the dissemination of God's word. But printed books were quite another matter. When in 1529 More
went to Antwerp with his friend Cuthbert Tunstall, the bishop of London,
the latter bought up and burned as many copies of Tyndale's New Testament
and other heretical works as he could find, but this was a pre-Gutenberg
strategy. The money Tunstall spent for the books only helped Tyndale
to hasten the production of the second edition of his translation, which
appeared in 1534.51 The word of God
in the age of mechanical reproduction--fifty thousand copies by the
time of Tyndale's death--has anew, direct force: "All mercy that
is shewed there is a promise unto thee, if thou turn to God. And all
vengeance and wrath shewed there is threatened to thee, if thou be stubborn
and resist. And this learning and comfort shalt thou evermore find in
the plain text and literal sense."52 "The plain text and literal
sense": translation is not the imposition of an intermediary between
God's word and man but just the opposite--the tearing aside of a veil
of deceit in order to present the text in full immediacy. If God's word
was to be experienced by more than a handful of clerks as an unmediated
address to the soul, then the language of the Bible could only be the
vernacular. Even for a man well trained in Latin, the English Scriptures
spoke to the heart in a way the Vulgate never could; the vernacular
was the unself-conscious language of the inner man.53 Bainham's interrogators
offered him the embrace of the Holy Mother Church--"the bosom of
his mother was open for him" (700), they told him. The Reformers
offered a different intimacy, the intimacy not of the institution, imaged
as the nurturing female body, but of the book, imaged, in terms displaced
from that body, as self, food, and protection: "As thou readest,"
Tyndale writes in the Prologue to Genesis, "think that every syllable
pertaineth to thine own self, and suck out the pith of the Scripture,
and arm thyself against all assaults."54 The power of the
English Bible was at its height precisely in the years when copies were
publicly burned by the authorities, when readers put their lives in
danger to read it. 55 By their opposition to vernacular translation,
by seeing to it that not a single English Bible had been produced since
the invention of printing, the Catholic authorities in England vastly
heightened the impact of Tyndale's work. Only those who had been brought
up to think of the Bible as a Latin work could experience the full shock
of the voice of God speaking to them in English from its pages. Add
to [97] this the threat
of persecution, and the effect must have seemed ove!powering, almost
irresistible, This is surely one of the reasons why, during a brief
period, Protestantism in England could survive and spread without any
significant institutional framework, on the force of the word. When
Tyndale writes of arming oneself with the syllables of Scripture or
Bainham speaks of his fear that this word of God--pointing to the book
in his hand--would damn him, we must take them at very close to the
literal meaning: the printed English New Testament is, above all, a
form of power, It is invested with the ability to control, guide, discipline,
console, exalt, and punish that the Church had arrogated to itself for
centuries. And lest this be thought inflated rhetoric, let us recall
that James Bainham simply could not live with the pain of what he took
to be his betrayal of the book; he preferred death. Bainham is by no
means unique. Of the numerous comparable instances, we may recall Latimer's
moving account of Thomas Bilney, who had abjured in 1527 and done public
penance--"borne his faggot"--at Paul's Cross. Upon his return
to Cambridge, Bilney "had such conflict within himself" that
his friends were afraid to leave him by himself; day and night they
attempted to comfort him, but no comfort would serve. "As for the
comfortable places in Scripture, to bring them unto him it was as though
a man would run him through the heart with a sword."56 After two
years of such pain, he went to Norfolk, began again to preach Lutheran
teachings, and was arrested as a relapsed heretic, According to Foxe,
while awaiting execution Bilney thrust his hand into the flame of a
candle, recalling as he did so a passage from Isaiah: "When thou
walkest in the fire, it shall not burn thee, and the flame shall not
kindle upon thee, for I am the Lord thy God, the holy One of Israel."5?
Where the Scripture had literally tormented Bilney after abjuration,
it now shields him from agony. At the end, as More relates, Bilney was
taken "and Tyndale's books with him too, and both two burned together,"
with "more profit unto his soul," More adds, than had he "lived
longer and after died in his bed."58 These and other
testimonials to the magical power of the Word are the extreme expressions
of a far more pervasive influence that would make the English Bible,
when its dissemination became a matter of national policy, by far the
single most significant book in the language. Access to the Bible was
a decisive force behind the extraordinary spread of literacy to the
masses, so that by the middle of the seventeenth century perhaps as
many as 60 percent of men in the larger towns of the South and at least
30 percent in the country as a whole could read.59 By royal command,
reiterated in a [98] proclamation in 1541, "Bibles containing the Old and New Testament in the English tongue" were "to be fixed and set up openly in every of the said parish churches" so that "every of the King's majesty's loving subjects" might read in the Scriptures.60 Immediately after the proclamation, William Malden tells us, "divers poor men in the town of Chelmsford in the county of Essex ...brought the New Testament of Jesus Christ, and on Sundays did sit reading in [the] lower end of the Church, and many would flock about them to hear the reading."61 Indeed, interest was sufficiently popular and intense for a 1538 Declaration to warn the unlearned against engaging in biblical exegesis "in your open Taverns or Alehouses," an admonition, as one scholar notes, no doubt honored more in the breach.62 Over two hundred editions of the Holy Scriptures were produced between 1521 and 1600, 480 between 1601 and 1700; by the early eighteenth century, well over 500,000 copies of the Bible, by conservative estimate, had been printed. Tyndale had unleashed an immense force. This force receives
its supreme literary tribute more than a century after Tyndale's death
in the works of Bunyan. According to Grace Abounding, particular
biblical passages had an obsessional force in Bunyan's life, hammering
at his mind, striking him across the face, pursuing him relentlessly:
"Now about a week or fortnight after this, I was much followed
by this scripture, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have
you, Luk. 22,31. And sometimes it would sound so loud within me, yea,
and as it were call so strongly after me, that once above all the rest,
I turned my head over my shoulder, thinking verily that some man had
behind me called to me. ..."63 Texts "tear and rend"
his soul, "touch" him, "seize" him, "fall like
a hot thunder-bolt" upon his conscience; "and even the consoling
visitations have something violent about them: "And as I was thus
before the Lord, that Scripture fastned on my heart, O man, great is
thy Faith, Matt. 15.28, even as if one hadclapt me on the back"
(65). A massive cultural investment of power in the book culminates
in this uncanny, uncontrollable presence. That it is Bunyan, imprisoned for preaching without the permission of the authorities, who testifies to this presence reminds us that once they had displaced Catholicism, the Protestants had to reinforce and control the power of God's word with more obviously physical punishments and with the whole apparatus of patriarchal family, church, school, and state. But in the first years the povver was almost uniquely present in the book itself. "The Lord began to work for his Church," writes Foxe, "not with sword and [99] target to subdue
His exalted adversary, but with printing, writing and reading How many
printing presses there be in the world, so many blockhouses there be
against the high castle of St Angelo, so that either the pope must abolish
knowledge and printing or printing at length will root him out."64 The Bible has displaced
the consensus fidelium as the principle of intelligibility and
the justification of all action: "Without God's word do nothing"
(330).65 The authority of God's word is assured by the inner experience
of God's word; the true interpretation of Scripture is made possible
by the feeling faith of the believer.66 More, like all Catholic apologists,
argued that we are bound "to give diligent hearing, firm credence,
and faithful obedience to the Church of Christ concerning the sense
and understanding of holy Scripture, not doubting but since he hath
commanded his sheep to be fed, he hath provided for them wholesome meat
and true doctrine."67 If we waver in this acceptance of the Church's
hermeneutic authority, we will be plunged into uncertainty and doubt,
for how else can we know that the Scripture comes from God? Tyndale's
most eloquent and radical reply to this question came three years after
the Obedience, in his Answer to Sir Thomas More's Dialogue: "Who
taught the eagles to spy out their prey? Even so the children of God
spy out their Father; and Christ's elect spy out their Lord, and trace
out the paths of his feet, and follow; yea, though he go upon the plain
and liquid water, which will receive no step, and yet there they find
out his foot."68 In response, More tried, with several jokes, to
dissipate the force of this vision and, more seriously, to expose its
violence; the Scripture is the heretics' prey, "to spoil and kill
and devour i as they list, even by the special inspiration of God. "69
But Tyndale fully intended the violence of his metaphors; a Christian
does not need elaborate training to understand God's word; he seizes
upon it, by instinct, for his very survival. Tyndale thus is
able to reject the mediation of the Church and its tradition; the individual
has sufficient means within his own con science to grasp the truth of
God's word as revealed in Scripture. In response to this challenge,
Catholic apologists tend to affirm an increasingly external authority,
but it is important to 'note that the sharp opposition which thus emerged
is historically misleading. [100] With the 1525 translation
of the New Testament and the 1530 translation of the Pentateuch--the
first five books of the Old Testament--Tyndale took what he felt were
the essential steps toward this seizure that he, of course, conceived
as the triumph of God's word. But even in 1525 he recognized that a
reading alone, without any instruction as to how to read the Bible,
might not be sufficient. Most of his subsequent writings may be understood
as attempts to provide such instruction and to clear away impediments;
for Tyndale all human enterprises rest ultimately on the fate of reading.
Thus, in its long concluding sections, the Obedience turns from
an analysis of the responsibilities of rulers and subjects to an attack
on the four-fold method of scriptural inter pretation, an attack mounted
in the name of what Tyndale calls "the literal sense." Tyndale's
notion of the literal sense by no means amounts to a coherent theory
of interpretation; more often than not it is merely a stick to beat
a reading he dislikes. But it reflected and no doubt strengthened certain
tendencies that proved immensely influential not only in the reading
of Scripture but in the reading and writing of imaginative literature
in this period and beyond. In the first place, and perhaps most important,
Tyndale's "literal sense" is the expression of a powerful
confidence: it is easy to understand Scripture, its meaning lies directly
in front of us, competing interpretations are perverse mystifications.
There is no need of advanced degrees, the mastery of difficult languages,
the juggling of arcane symbolisms, prodigious memory, an expensive library;
the truth is as accessible to a shoemaker as to a theologian, perhaps
more accessible, for the latter has been poisoned by popish sophistry. Secondly, the stress on the literal sense means that one should avoid, wherever possible, looking behind the words of the Scripture for some hidden, mystical meaning. Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 3, "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life," do not refer to the literal and spiritual sense of Scripture, but to the contrast of the law and the gospel. There is no division between the literal and spiritual sense, for "God is a Spirit"; "His literal sense is spiritual, and all his words are spiritual" (309). To understand the significance of Tyndale's position here, we can compare it to Erasmus's discussion of Scripture in the Enchiridion. The whole Bible, he writes, including the Gospel, has both a flesh and a spirit, and it is our task to despise the former and search out the latter. The "plain sense" is worthless; only the "mystery" deserves our reverent attention. Indeed if you take at face value the stories of Adam formed of moist clay or Eve plucked out of the rib, or the [101] talking serpent,
you might just as well "sing of the image of clay made by Prometheus,
or of fire stolen from heaven by subtlety and put into the image to
give life to the clay. "70 And if Erasmus thus struggles rather
poignantly with the palpably fictional appearance of certain books of
the Bible, with the disturbing resemblance to pagan myths of origin,
he struggles equally with the purely historical appearance of other
books: "What difference is there whether thou read the book of
Kings or of the Judges in the Old Testament, or else the history of
Titus Livyus, so thou have respect to the allegory nere nother [i.e.,
if you look at the veiled meaning in neither]? For in the one, that
is to say Titus Livyus, be many things which would amend the common
manners; in the other be some things, yea, ungodly as they seem at the
first looking on, which also if they be understood superficially should
hurt good manners" (147). The solution to the problem is to discard
"the rind or outer part" of Scripture and nourish oneself
on the allegory. One cannot uncover
these mysteries by means of one's Own mind, but only by a "known
and certain craft" which is taught in works like the Pseudo-Dionysius's
De divinus nominibus. Erasmus may have preached a simple "philosophy
of Christ," available to fools and wise men alike, but the place
to acquire this philosophy was clearly not the literal sense of the
Bible. By contrast, Tyndale insists, as we have seen, that the most readily accessible sense of Scripture is always the heart of the meaning: "There is no story nor gest, seem it never so simple or so vile unto the world, but that thou shalt find therein spirit and life and edifying in the literal sense" (319). Even he is forced to acknowledge that the Scripture uses "proverbs, similitudes, riddles, or allegories, as all other speeches do.," but the meaning of these devices "is ever the literal sense" (304). From the examples he proceeds to give, it appears that by the "literal sense" here Tyndale means a clear, moral lesson or principle of faith that is openly stated elsewhere in the Bible. Allegorical interpretation is permissible if it is a self-conscious and provisional process, with no inherent claim to truth: "allegories are no sense of the Scripture, but free things besides the Scripture, and altogether in the liberty of the Spirit" (305). By themselves, "allegories prove nothing" and can make no more claim upon our faith than any fiction: "if I could not prove with an open text that which the allegory doth express, then were the allegory a thing to be jested at, and of no greater value than a tale of Robin Hood" (306). Allegory, along with the related forms of similitude, example, and figure, are not used to express a dark mystery but rather to heighten the effect upon the [102] reader, for such
indirect or metaphorical speech "doth print a thing much deeper
in the wits of a man than doth a plain speaking, and leaveth behind
him as it were a sting to prick him forward, and to awake him withal"
(306). The third major
effect of Tyndale's insistence on the "literal sense" follows
directly from this view: an emphasis on the rhetorical nature of Scripture.
Nowhere is the influence of humanism on the early Protestants clearer.
The Bible is not a vast network of occult signs but a divine work of
persuasion, designed to strengthen the reader's faith and to deter him
from evil. Thus, for example, the reader should concern himself less
with the ultimate, abstract significance of a word than with its function
in a particular, highly specific context: " A serpent figureth
Christ in one place, and the devil in another; and a lion doth likewise"
(208). The
meaning of key words is established not by institutional definition
but by the reader's grasp of context: "if this word congregation
were a more general term than this word church, it hurteth not, for
the circumstance doth ever declare what thing is meant thereby."
More replies that if this is so, Tyndale may translate any word as he
wishes: "For so he may translate the world into a football if he
join therewith certain circumstances, and say this round rolling football
that men walk upon and ships sail upon, in the people whereof there
is no rest nor stability, and so forth a great long tale; with such
circumstances he might as I say make any word understand in as it like
himself, whatsoever the word before signified of itself."71 In the controversial
works this argument leads only to a reaffirmation of familiar positions:
for Tyndale, a willingness to have his translation improved upon by
others, provided they submit themselves to God's word; for More, a conviction
that "good Christian men," perceiving the heretical intent
of the translation, should "abhor and burn up his books and likers
of them with them."72 But the effect on the translation itself
of Tyndale's interest in "circumstance" and in rhetorical
power is more significant; it is reflected in the clarity of the narrative,
its impressive coherence, its commitment to the constant engaging of
the reader's ready understanding:
[103]
Tyndale's interest
in "circumstance" is reflected still more closely in his conviction
that the reader must be sensitive to the natural order of a text, even
one that does not tell a story, and must not jumble the beginning and
the end. God's word cannot be cut and spliced; to do so, indeed, can
be dangerous, as Tyndale, fol lowing Luther, explains in the Prologue
to Romans. The "unquiet, busy, and high-climbing" spirit that
rushes to chapters 9-11 of Paul's epistle in the hope of understanding
predestination runs the risk of falling into despair. Only when the
reader has fully experienced the meaning of the first seven chapters
is he ready for the eighth, which, in turn, is the necessary introduction
to those that follow: "After that, when thou art come to the eighth
chapter, and art under the cross and suffering of tribulation, the necessity
of predestination will wax sweet, and thou shalt well feel how precious
a thing it is. For except thou have born the cross of adversity and
temptation, and hast felt thyself brought unto the very brim of desperation,
yea, and unto hell-gates, thou canst never meddle; with the sentence
of predestination without thine own harm, and without secret wrath and
grudging inwardly against God; for otherwise it shall not be possible
for thee to think that God is righteous and just."74 The order
of the reading experience is all important; the chapters have been arranged
rhetorically to produce essential psychological effects which are at
the same time doctrinal truths.
There is a kind of historicity and narrativity built into the experience
of faith through the act of reading: by following the text in its proper
sequence, the reader reenacts in his own spirit the passage from the
Old Testament to the New, from the law that kills to God's free gift
of grace. This sense of necessary
sequence marks much of Tyndale's prose and distinguishes it sharply
from More's. The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, as More acknowledges
in responding to his enemies, is almost unreadable; the brethren, he
writes in the Apology, complain that his work is too long" and
therefore tedious to read." More justifies this elaphantine text
on the paradoxical ground that many of his readers would grow weary
in the attempt to read a long book, "and therefore have I taken
the more pain upon every chapter, to the intent that they shall not
need to read over any chapter but one, and that it shall not force greatly
which one throughout all the book." There is no need to read the
book through or to read its chapters in sequence; More's goal rather
is to compile an encyclopedia of antiheretical arguments, but a strange
kind of encyclopedia, since its ultimate aim is to be unnecessary, unread:
"Now he that will therefqre read anyone chapter, either at adventure,
or else some chosen piece in which himself had weened [i.e., thought]
that his evangelical father Tyndale had said wonderful well, ...when
he shall in that chapter as I am sure he shall, find his holy prophet
plainly proved a fool, he may be soon eased of any further labor. For
then hath he good cause to cast him quite off, and never meddle more
with him, and then shall he never need to read more of my book neither,
and so shall he make it short enough."75 It is crucially
important for More to demolish the texts of the Reformers, while not
crucially important to put his own text in their place. Hence the odd
sense of the disposability of More's discourse; his work longs to disappear,
to cede place to multiple voices, to tradition and ultimately to the
institution as the living expression of the Christian consensus. More's
commitment to the disappearance of his text paradoxically commits him
to an endless text. He cannot allow his controversial works to possess
form, because form would grant to the heretics a narrative coherence,
a "free-standing" perspective that More denies. If More's controversial
writings want to be absorbed back into the community, Tyndale's can
perhaps be thought to cede place too, but only to another, superior,
and finally irreducible text. Where in More the text must always give
way to the institution that lies behind it and controls interpretation,
in Tyndale the text [105] strives to establish
itself beyond interpretation as the personal history of the individual
reader: "Then go to and read the stories of the Bible for thy learning
and comfort, and see every thing practised before thine eyes; for according
to those ensamples shall it go with thee and all men until the world's
end."76 The rhetorical force of the Bible depends upon the reader's
grasp of the stories in their full narrative power and upon the presentness
of the language. Where the first Wycliffite translation had striven
for the literal sense in an almost totemic way--that is, preserving
the Latin word order at the expense of English syntax--Tyndale follows
Wycliffe's disciple, John Purvey, in the attempt to render Scripture
in what the latter called "open" English.77 The more "open"
the text, the less dependent upon an institutional interpretation. More himself, we
should add, did not object to the rhetorical force of Tyndale's translation,
nor did he or the clerical authorities oppose on principle an English
Bible. But approval of such a project, they argued, would have to wait
until the heresy was crushed and the authority of the Church reaffirmed.
Tyndale's Bible was hateful to More not because it was in English but
because its "false" translations and its glosses lured men
to their destruction, while Tyndale himself watched from the safety
of the Continent. After all, unlike many of those who were shaped by
The Obedience of a Christian Man, Tyndale did not passively suffer the
consequences of disobedience; at every point in his career when his
views threatened to bring down upon him the rage of authority, he chose
to move in search of less constraining, less menacing circumstances
where he could pursue his work. In 1523, running afoul of his clerical
superiors in Little Sod bury where, on leaving the university, he had
gone to teach, Tyndale did not simply submit. "When I came before
the chancellor [of the Gloucestershire diocese]," he bitterly recalls,
"he threatened me grievously, and reviled me, and rated me as though
I had been a dog." In the midst of this humiliation, Tyndale remembered
that the bishop of London had been praised for his learning: "Then
thought I, if I might come to this man's service, I were happy. And
so I gat me to London."78 And when the bishop of London, More's
friend Tunstall, refused to help, Tyndale betook himself into exile,
from whence he flooded England with his words and the words of Scripture.
How did he reconcile his social ethic and his actions? The answer seems
to lie in his reply to Cromwell's agent, Stephen Vaughan, who tried
to persuade him to return to England, submit himself "to the obedience
and good order of the world," and trust in the king's mercy. "I assure you," Vaughan reports Tyndale as saying, "if it would stand with the King's most gracious pleasure to grant only a bare text of the Scripture to be put forth among his people, like as is put forth among the subjects of the Emperor in these parts, and of other Christian princes, be it of the translation of what person soever shall please his Majesty, I shall immediately make faithful promise never to write more, nor abide two days in these parts after the same; but immediately to repair into his realm, and there most humbly submit myself at the feet of his Royal Majesty, offering my body to suffer what pain or torture, yea, what death his Grace will so that this be obtained."79 The mission of putting forth the Scripture in the vernacular has priority over everything else in his life including his social ethic; let such a translation freely circulate and he will in effect, cease to exist. He will fall silent, he will die. And in a sense his own life, as something autonomous, something he possessed, had already ceased to exist. It had been fully absorbed in his great project. According to a plausible if suspiciously prophetic account in Foxe, Tyndale first expressed that project at the height of an argument with a learned divine who had declared, "We were better to be without God's laws than the Pope's." Tyndale replied, "I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou doest."Bo The words are strikingly reminiscent of the hope Erasmus expressed in 1516 in the Paraclesis, the preface to his Greek and Latin edition of the New Testament: "I disagree very much with those who are unwilling that Holy Scripture, translated into the vulgar tongue be read by the uneducated. ...I would that even the lowliest women read the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles. And I would that they were translate~ into all languages so that they could be read and understood not only by Scots and Irish but also by Turks and Saracens. ...Would that, as a result, the farmer sing some portion of them at the plow, the weaver hum some parts of them to the movement of his shuttle, the traveller lighten the weariness of the journey with stories of this kind!"8l Tyndale may indeed have conceived his project from this vision of Erasmus; have we not just witnessed the way a man's whole sense of himself may be shaped by another's words? But we must also note the vast difference between Erasmus's "Would that" and Tyndale's "I will cause," a difference compounded of the intertwining conflicts between generations, tem peraments, and cultures. What Erasmus is willing to express as a wish, Tyndale puts as his personal mission. [107] The mission is
conceived in anger and rebellion and expressed with a considerable sense
of self-importance. "I defy the Pope, and all his laws," the
obscure, powerless country priest grandly declares, and the inflated
sense of personal significance carries over to the vaunt that follows.
We may glimpse this egotism throughout his subsequent career, in his
stinging attacks on the character and competence of his fellow workers
William Roy and George Joye, in his increasing defensiveness about the
validity of his own translation; but, significantly, all of its manifestations
are closely related to his mission as translator. Though he insists
on the interiority of faith, we have at the end of his work very little
sense of his presence, of personal suffering and redemption. The most
intimate anecdote in his writings is the account of his unsuccessful
attempt to acquire Tunstall's patronage for the long labor of translation.
Tyndale published the 1525 New Testament anonymously and claims that
he would have continued this practice-for Christ "exhorteth men
(Matt. 6) to do their good deeds secretly"--had he not been compelled
to distinguish his own work from the scurrilous work of his former associate
Roye.82 Unlike Luther, Tyndale never gives us a sense of inner depth,
of the powerful imprint of his own experience, of the effect of others
upon his consciousness; what he gives us is a voice, the voice of the
English Bible. Our sense of supreme eloquence in English is still largely
derived from Tyndale--attempts at sublimity in our language tend to
be imitations, most often unconscious and frequently inept, of the style
of the English Bible--and he seems to have accomplished this remarkable
achievement by transforming Tyndale's is a life lived as a project. When, in a letter of advice and comfort to John Frith, he reflects on his own career, he thinks exclusively of his relationship to God's Word: "I call God to record against the day we shall appear before our Lord Jesus, to give a reckoning of our doings, that I never altered one syllable of God's Word against my conscience, nor would this day, if all that is in the earth, whether it be pleasure, honour, or riches, might be given me."83 Having made this assertion and disturbed perhaps by its element of pride, he follows, a few sentences later, with an unconvincing expression of humility: "God hath made me evil favoured in this world, and without grace in the sight of men, speechless and rude, dull and slow-witted." This little exercise in self-denigration does not matter; his ego is fully realized in the work as translator. It is of this work that he still thinks at the close of his life. |
|
[108] In 1535 Tyndale,
who was living with an English merchant in Antwerp, was lured from the
safety of his house by one Henry Phillips, a treacherous Englishman
who claimed to be a fellow Protestant, and betrayed into the hands of
the Catholic authorities.84 Accused of heresy, Tyndale was imprisoned
for over a year, awaiting his trial, at Vilvorde Castle, near Brussels.
From this period of imprisonment, there survives a Latin letter he wrote
to the governor of the castle; the prisoner requests warmer clothes,
but, above all, he continues, "I beg and beseech your clemency
to be urgent with the commissary, that he will kindly permit me to have
my Hebrew Bible, Hebrew Grammar, and Hebrew Dictionary, that I may pass
my time in that study."85 As Bainham seems to have thought of himself
as Saint Peter, Tyndale quite possibly is thinking here of Saint Paul,
who asked, in his second epistle to Timothy, for his "cloak. ..and
the books, but specially the parchment" (2 Tim. 4:13). It is not known
if Tyndale's request for books was granted. In August, 1536, he was
convicted of heresy and degraded from the priesthood. The ceremony of
degradation recalls those theatrical rites of undoing with which this
chapter began: the bishops sat on a high platform either in church or
in the town square, and the priest condemned to be unhallowed was led,
dressed in clerical vestments, before them. He was made to kneel. "His
hands were scraped with a knife or a piece of glass, as a symbol of
the loss of the anointing oil; the bread and the wine were placed in
his hands and then taken away; and lastly his vestments were stripped
from him one by one, and he was clothed in the garments of a layman."86
Tyndale was then turned over to the secular authorities, who condemned
him to be strangled and burned. The sentence was carried out in October
1536. It must, I think, have been to the need for a vernacular Bible,
for which he labored all his adult life, that Tyndale was referring
when at the stake he cried with a fervent zeal and a loud voice, "Lord,
open the King of England's eyes!"87 More and Tyndale were profoundly divided. More's literary interests were despised by Tyndale; the Catholic Church loved by the one was regarded by the other as the very Antichrist; the cultic observances More prized as an integral part of his communion with the body of Christendom seemed to Tyndale a vicious fraud. Tyndale's English Bible appeared to More a cunning piece of heretical propaganda, the attack on purgatory a satanic device to torment poor souls, the doctrine of justification by faith alone a mere cloak for worldly transgressions. Tyndale thought More a [109] cruel and venal
politician who had sold his services to the highest bidder; More thought
Tyndale an immoral madman. There can scarcely be any doubt that More
would have worked actively to bring about the execution of Tyndale as
he had worked actively to bring about his capture; there is little question
that Tyndale would have celebrated More's execution as a blow struck
against an agent of the Antichrist. With his famous genius for friendships,
and brilliant wit, his complex balance between council chamber and cloister,
law court and scholar's study, Parliament and family, More's life seems
richer and fuller than Tyndale's, wholly given over to the single-minded
pursuit of the English Scripture. But eleven months after Tyndale's
death, the English Bible-- essentially Tyndale's Bible--was legally
authorized in an England whose king had been declared Supreme Head of
the national church. For all the violent
division, however, there are certain significant similarities between
More and Tyndale. Though he was comfortable with ceremony and defended
it in print, the heart of More's faith was not ritual practice but a
spirit of communion that manifested itself at once in inner assurance
and a virtuous life. For his part, Tyndale, though deeply influenced
by Luther, was never completely at home in Lutheran theology and, it
has been argued, in the course of his career moved steadily away from
it. He did not, to be sure, soften his hatred of the Catholic Church,
but his increasing commitment to the law, to morality as the fulfillment
of the contract between God and man, led him surprisingly close to the
position of Catholics like More or Colet.88 The movement may be illustrated
by a characteristic example of the changes Tyndale made between the
Prologue to the 1525 New Testament and 1530 revision of that prologue
printed separately as The Pathway to the Scripture. Men of right
faith, he writes, "have delectation in the law (notwithstanding
that they cannot fulfill it [as they would] for their weakness); and
they abhor whatsoever the law forbiddeth, though they cannot [always]
avoid it."89 The words in brackets were added in 1531 and radically
change the meaning: the first version More would have abhorred as heretical,
the second he might almost himself have written. The link here between
the two enemies, Catholic and Reformer, is humanism. More, to be sure,
came to feel very uneasy about his own and Erasmus's early works, while
Tyndale harshly condemns "al1 the moral virtue of Aristotle, Plato,
and Socrates" as pride abominable to God. All the same, both men
continue throughout their careers to be deeply influenced by the Christian
humanists' [110] preoccupation with
right living. "It is better to will the good than to know the truth,"
Petrarch had written,90 and this conviction makes itself felt even in
the midst of intense theological controversies. At the same time,
More and Tyndale share certain ambiguous feelings about even virtuous
and moral living in the world. This is easier to see in More, with his
sense of the way good men may be manipulated and his still deeper sense--Augustinian
in character--of a fundamental chasm between the city of man and the
city of God. This chasm makes even the most virtuous man fulfilling
his duties to the best of his ability seem like an actor on a stage,
lifelike but nevertheless at a fundamental distance from reality. Tyndale
seems far removed from this sensibility; but, in fact, no sooner has
he woven his hierarchy of authorities, each ordained by God and standing
in the place of God, than he begins to unravel it again, until it vanishes
altogether: "In Christ there is neither father nor son, neither
master nor servant, neither husband nor wife, neither king nor subject:
but the father is the son's self, and the son the father's own self;
and the king is the subject's own self, and the subject is the king's
own self; and so forth. I am thou thyself, and thou are I myself, and
can be no nearer of kin" (Obedience, 296). Of course, such
a total collapse of identity is only "in Christ"; in the temporal
world, the distinctions still hold. But this neat resolution is more
apparent than real, because, after all, Christ and the temporal world
are not simple opposites. Christ had a historical reality, on which
Tyndale insists; we pray to him, and try to fulfill his commands in
this world; the man who thinks that his order and the world's order
are entirely separate and distinct is foolish or evil or both. What
then is the relationship be tween the utterly sanctified roles--father,
master, king--and the obliteration of these roles? Precisely none. At
times, social identities seem as fixed and inflexible as granite; at
times, they shimmer like a mirage. This ambiguity
deepens when we consider the complex dialectic of external manifestation
and inner conviction in Tyndale, a dialectic already glimpsed in the
story of Bainham. On the one hand, all that matters is the justifying
faith; on the other, that faith inevitably and irresistibly blossoms
in works in the world. The absence of such works is a clear sign that
the faith is merely feigned or imagined, but by themselves works are
worthless, no matter how virtuous they may appear in the world's eyes.
To be sure, most often in Protestant writings, these "works"
divide themselves into two quite different categories: the works of
the hypocrites tend to be cultic observances--prodigious numbers of
Ave [111] Marias recited
or candles burned or fasts undertaken--while the works of the elect
tend to be acts of kindness or generosity or compassion. But the distinction
is by no means absolute or reliable; Tyndale goes out of his way to
condemn the classical moral virtues when pursued for their own sake
and to assert that actions which seem worthless or evil in the world's
eyes--even robbery and murder--may in fact be the fulfillment of God's
commandments and the manifestation of true faith. This position,
which horrified More, paradoxically provides the setting for the deepest
link between himself and Tyndale, for it drives Tyndale to an intense
need for something external to himself in which he could totally merge
his identity. We have already seen how More was drawn to such a merger,
which he characteristically conceived as an identification with an institution
or consensus. Tyndale, of course, defied the existing church, reviled
monasticism, and ridiculed Utopia, but he committed himself with
passionate totalism to God's Word as manifested in the Bible. Human actions by
themselves are always problematical; they must constantly be referred
to an inner state that must, nonetheless, be experienced as the irresistible
operation of a force outside the self, indeed alien to the self. The
man of faith is seized, destroyed, and made new by God's Word. He gives
up his resistance, his irony, his sense of his own shaping powers, and
experiences instead the absolute certainty of a total commitment, a
binding, irrevocable For Tyndale, the
Mosaic law, with the exception of certain cultic practices, formed the
very core of this covenant which the New Testament enabled man to fulfill.
And this contract was equally binding on God and man: all scriptural
promises, Tyndale writes in the prologue to the 1534 Pentateuch, "include
a convenant: that is, God bindeth himself to fulfill that mercy unto
thee only if thou wilt endeavour thyself to keep his laws."91 The
Bible then is the point of absolute, unwavering contact between God
and man, the written assurance that God will not be arbitrary, the guarantee
that human destiny is not ruled merely by chance, cunning, or force.
It provides for Tyndale what the Church provides for More: not simply
a point of vantage but a means to absorb the ambiguities of identity,
the individual's mingled egotism and self loathing, into a larger, redeeming
certainty. For More, to be sure, the assurance rests in an institution,
while for Tyndale it rests in a sacred text illuminated by faith, but
both achieve guaranteed access to a truth that lies beyond indi"vidual
or social construction, beyond doubt or rebellion. The spiritual violence
that marks this achievement in both More [112] and Tyndale no
doubt reflects the harsh temper of the age and the conviction that the
immortal souls of thousands of fellow Christians hung in the balance,
but it may also be viewed in the context of the urgent need to discipline
certain impulses highly characteristic of each of them. The appeal of
the total institution to More is in direct proportion to all the elements
in his personality and career that pull against such an institution:
his complex subversive irony, his sense of role-playing, his playful
imagination. These elements are not crushed in More's later career,
but they are split and reorganized, transformed and absorbed so that
it takes a scholarly effort to recognize the author of Utopia in the
author of the Confutation. There is no comparable shift in Tyndale,
and C. S. Lewis can even speak of "the beautiful, cheerful integration"
of his world.92 But though it is quite true that Tyndale utterly denies
the medieval distinction between religion and secular life that continued
to haunt More, Tyndale's rebelliousness, rejection of institutions,
and fierce independence exist more in nervous alliance than cheerful
integration with his affirmation of the absolute authority of the Bible.
If he seems at moments to set himself against the whole established
order of things, if he exalts "sure feeling" over "historical
faith," if he asserts that "the kingdom of heaven is within
us,"93 he is saved from the most disturbing and radical implications
of such positions by his s ense
of the inflexible and external compulsion of the law, the absolute otherness
of God's word. He is saved too
from the imagination. For just as More charged that the Protestants
had fashioned an unreal church out of their own fevered imagination,
Tyndale characteristically reverses the charge and asserts that at the
heart of the Catholic Church--which at first seems too alien and external
to man--there is nothing else than man's own imagination idolatrously
worshiped. The same Church that forbids laymen to read Scripture in
their own language permits them to read "Robin Hood, and Bevis
of Hampton, Hercules, Hector, and Troilus, with a thousand histories
and fables of love and wantonness, and of ribaldry, as filthy as heart
can think."94 The same Church that conspires against the saving
faith of Christ enjoins its members "to build an abbey of thine
own imagination, trusting to be saved by the feigned works of hypocrites."95
The Church is comfortable with such corruptions, since its own essence
is fiction. As soon as they acquired worldly power, the spirituality
"gave themselves only unto poetry, and shut up the Scripture."96
The mass, penance, confessions to a priest, purgatory, indulgences,
all are works of the human imagination, [113] tricked out to
appear divine. Thus in choosing More, the pope and his agents "did
well to choose a poet to be their defender."97 But ultimately,
all the mummery and poetry will be brought low, for nothing, Tyndale
writes in the Obedience, "bringeth the wrath of God so soon and
so sore on a man, as the idolatry of his own imagination" (292). To a reader who
believes, as I do, that all religious practices and beliefs are the
product of the human imagination, these charges have a melancholy and
desperate sound. It is as if the great crisis in the Church had forced
into the consciousness of Catholics and Protestants alike the wrenching
possibility that their theological system was a fictional construction;
that the whole, vast edifice of church and state rested on certain imaginary
postulates; that social hierarchy, the distribution of property, sexual
and political order bore no guaranteed corresondence to the actual structure
of the cosmos. "God is not man's imagination," Tyndale declared,
but there was a time when such a declaration would have seemed unnecessary
and absurd. To be sure, this is spoken against the Catholics; it is
their faith that is damnable idolatry, just as More charged that it
was the Protestant church that was to be found only Only by destroying
the other will one assure the absolute reality and necessity of the
order to which one has submitted oneself and hence fully justify this
submission. Tyndale in the Obedience and elsewhere saw the existing
church as a conspiracy of the rich against the poor, the educated against
the ignorant, the priestly caste against the laymen. More in Utopia
saw the existing state as organized, respectable robbery, "a kind
of conspiracy of the rich, who are aiming at their own interests under
the name and title of the commonwealth." Between them, they undermined
the two great pillars of the European social order from feudal times,
exposing their pretensions to divine sanction as mere ideology, ridiculing
their attempts at mystification, insisting on their human origin and
their material interests. If we stand back for a moment from the fierce
quarrel between More and Tyndale and view them together, they suggest
a radical and momentous social crisis: the disintegration of the stable
world order, the desacramentalization of church and state, the subversive
perception of the role of the mind, and specifically the imagination,
in the creation of oppressive institutions. Sharing these perceptions,
a God-haunted revolutionary like Thomas Muntzer will respond [114] by attempting to destroy both church and state, to liberate men from their oppressors and usher in the millennium; More and Tyndale, on the contrary, both search ever more insistently for a new basis of control, more powerful and total than the one they have helped to undermine. They seek to order their own lives and with them the physical and spiritual lives of all men. They struggle, in the words of Saint Paul, to cast down "imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God" and to bring "into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ" (2 Cor. 10:3-5). Both More and Tyndale die in the attempt. |
|
[268] [Notes to] Chapter Two 1. John Foxe, Acts
and Monuments 4: 7021. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments 4:702. The account
of Bainham's martyrdom occurs on pages 697-706. On Foxe's book, see
William Haller, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe's
"Book of Martyrs" [269] Notes to Pages
78-82 [270] [271] [272] [273] Notes to Pages
94-96 [274] Notes to Pages
97-99 [275] Notes to Pages
99-110 [276] [277] |