The Christian Hebraism of John Donne: Written with the Fingers of Man's Hand

FOUR. The Literal Sense: Moralized Grammar

111 FOUR The Literal Sense Moralized Grammar Grammar has the duplicity, and sometimes the advantage, of keeping some of its best secrets to itself. Not by the perilous byways of syntax only: the inflections of single verbs can, and should, give pause for thought. —Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation Sermon and Context In his religious treatise The Obedience of a Christen Man (1528) (see fig. 6), William Tyndale devotes a section to “The Four Senses of the Scripture.” In a passage considered to be “a most seminal and original contribution to English hermeneutics” (Janel Mueller, “Introduction” 19), Tyndale sets out his exegetical agenda: Thou shalt understonde therefore that the scripture hath but one sence, which is the literall sence. And that literall sence is the rote 112 The Christian Hebraism of John Donne and grounde of all and the ancre that never fayleth where onto yf thou cleve thou canst never erre or goo out of the waye. And if thou leve the literall sence, thou canst not but goo out of the waye. Never the later the scripture useth proverbes / similitudes / redels or allegories as all other speaches doo / but that which the proverbe / similitude / redell or allegory signifieth is ever the literall sence which thou must seke out diligently (cxxix[v]–cxxx[r]). Complementing his work as the first English translator of the Bible to rely on the original Hebrew text,1 Tyndale constructs an interpretive dichotomy that enforces both religious and hermeneutic parameters. Thus he strives to reclaim the “literall sence” from the Pope (who, he has previously claimed, “hath taken it cleane awaye and hath made it his possession”; cxxix[v]), and then subsequently to redeem it by effectively subsuming under it all the nonliteral senses. Yet the reader of Tyndale’s passage is left somewhat confused as to the nature of the “literall sence” that concomitantly is signified by “proverbs, similitudes, riddles and allegories.” How does one clarify the opacity—or the “possible strangeness” (Richardson 93)—of this seeming equivalence between the literal and the figurative? How does one understand, by extension, Donne’s statement in his 1624 Easter sermon (on Apocalypse 20:6) “that in many places of Scripture, a figurative sense is the literall sense” (Sermons 6:62)? Finally, how does one propose an exegetical method for realizing Stephen Greenblatt’s rhetorically oriented explanation that “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....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 reader” (100–02)? In answer, it is instructive to look at another exegetical manifesto , namely that written by Abraham Ibn Ezra. For whether cited from the Hebrew original2 or from Latin translations generated by European scholars,3 Ibn Ezra’s commentaries on the Hebrew Bible comprised a significant resource for sixteenth and early Fig. 6. Title page of William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man (1535). Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Manuscript call no. RB 42270. 114 The Christian Hebraism of John Donne seventeenth century English biblical translators and commentators (see fig. 7).4 In the explanation of his exegetical method in the “Introduction” to his Commentaries on the Torah [Pentateuch],5 he writes, This is Abraham the poet’s Seifer Ha-Yashar, Bound by cords of grammar. The eyes of reason will find it fit, Happy are those who adhere to it. ........ The fifth method, My commentary on it is founded, Correct is this method, Before God, That of him alone I am in awe, I will not show favoritism in [interpreting] the Torah, I will search the grammar of every word with all my might, Afterwards I will explain it as I see right. (Commentaries on the Pentateuch 1–10) In the prefatory rhymed prayer6 Ibn Ezra terms his book Seifer Ha-Yashar, “The Book of the Straight [Path],” so named because the Hebrew term yashar, “straight” is a synonym for peshat, or the literal meaning of the text.7 By utilizing metaphors that conjointly underline the need for restraint and clear thinking, he vividly sets out his method of biblical commentary as based on grammar and reason. In the subsequent cited passage he marks out two major...