Truth Has a Human Face

Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?

--John 18.38

Many reviewers from Robert Browning's time to the present note that "A Death in the Desert" (Dramatis Personae, 1864) constitutes his poetic response to Ernest Renan's The Life of Jesus (1863). ¹ After reading Renan's Life, Browning wrote to Isabella Blagden: "His admissions & criticisms on St. John are curious. I make no doubt he imagines himself stating a fact, with the inevitable license--so must John have done." ² "St. John," the gospel that fuels some of Renan's more controversial claims (i.e., that the raising of Lazarus was a hoax ³ ), alludes to perhaps the central source text for "A Death." That Browning equates John and Renan as both "stating a fact" with a certain freedom for effect also hints at the primary concern of "A Death"--the nature of truth, especially as focused upon Jesus. When we arrive at "inevitable license," we thus glimpse how Browning understands the manner in which John and Renan deal with Jesus, where each author constructs a truth of Jesus according to his individual and particular relation to Jesus' story. Such a construction must occur through language ("admissions & criticisms"; "stating"), and so Browning brings into relief language's role in the communication of truth. Aristotle's Categories provides here the basic theoretical paradigm, which most discussions of language in Britain came either to adopt or challenge; but John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1837), bear much more directly upon Browning's own ideas of language. "A Death in the Desert," I propose, suggests how we can see Jesus, figuratively, as the element of language that shifts constantly in relation to the truth, "God," that he ultimately qualifies. Jesus, throughout history, functions as the linking, connecting, combinative aspects of language--what Aristotle calls predicates, Locke Particles, and Carlyle Metaphors or Symbols--that change as each age employs a measure of "license" in shaping the "fact" of God manifested to the world by Jesus. Both the Gospel of John and Renan's Life prove quite conscious of this specific quality of language. "A Death in the Desert," as the third link in a chain of texts joined by their concern with John's representation of Jesus, makes that quality crucial to belief in Jesus, in "that Life and Death . . . which . . . Is, here and now." ⁴

For Browning's contemporary reviewers, as mentioned already, "A Death"s' links to Renan were no secret. The June 4, 1864 issue of The Athenaeum observed that Browning's poem "embodies the death of St. John in the Desert, and has the piquancy of making the beloved apostle reply with last words, in far-off ghostly tones, which come, weirdly impressive, from the cave in the wilderness, to the French-man's 'Life of Jesus.'" ⁵ Gerald Massey, in The Quarterly Review of July 1865, felt that "A Death" offered an important response to Renan and the Higher Criticism of the Bible: "We should greatly regret if the poem failed to be made known far and wide. After M. Renan's 'Life of Jesus,' and the prelections of the Strasbourg school of theological thought, it should be welcome as it is worthy" (Litzinger and Smalley, pp. 271-272). Renan caused enough of a stir, therefore, not only for Browning to "reply" in poetry, but for reviewers to appreciate the significance of that response with regard to Renan's controversial "admissions & criticisms." ⁶

In the twentieth century, both William O. Raymond and E. S. Shaffer have explored more extensively the relation between "A Death" and Renan's Life. Raymond characterizes Browning as hostile to Renan and Higher Criticism: "His attitude towards Higher Criticism, with what he conceived to be its rationalistic interpretation of Christianity, was one of clearly marked antagonism"; furthermore, "A Death in the Desert is Browning's most direct rejoinder to the attack made upon the historical basis of Christianity by the critics of...