Mimesis (12 page)

A tragic figure from such a background, a hero of such weakness, who yet derives the highest force from his very weakness, such a to and fro of the pendulum, is incompatible with the sublime style of classical antique literature. But the nature and the scene of the conflict also fall entirely outside the domain of classical antiquity. Viewed superficially, the thing is a police action and its consequences; it takes place entirely among everyday men and women of the common people; anything of the sort could be thought of in antique terms only as farce or comedy. Yet why is it neither of these? Why does it arouse in us the most serious and most significant sympathy? Because it portrays something which neither the poets nor the historians of antiquity
ever set out to portray: the birth of a spiritual movement in the depths of the common people, from within the everyday occurrences of contemporary life, which thus assumes an importance it could never have assumed in antique literature. What we witness is the awakening of “a new heart and a new spirit.” All this applies not only to Peter’s denial but also to every other occurrence which is related in the New Testament. Every one of them is concerned with the same question, the same conflict with which every human being is basically confronted and which therefore remains infinite and eternally pending. It sets man’s whole world astir—whereas the entanglements of fate and passion which Greco-Roman antiquity knows, always directly concern simply the individual, the one person involved in them. It is only by virtue of the most general relations, that is, by virtue of the fact that we too are human beings and thus are subject to fate and passion, that we experience “fear and pity.” But Peter and the other characters in the New Testament are caught in a universal movement of the depths which at first remains almost entirely below the surface and only very gradually—the Acts of the Apostles show the beginnings of this development—emerges into the foreground of history, but which even now, from the beginning, lays claim to being limitless and the direct concern of everybody, and which absorbs all merely personal conflicts into itself. What we see here is a world which on the one hand is entirely real, average, identifiable as to place, time, and circumstances, but which on the other hand is shaken in its very foundations, is transforming and renewing itself before our eyes. For the New Testament authors who are their contemporaries, these occurrences on the plane of everyday life assume the importance of world-revolutionary events, as later on they will for everyone. They reveal their identity as a movement, a historically active dynamism, through the fact that time and again the impact of Jesus’ teachings, personality, and fate upon this and that individual is described. While the aims upon which the movement is centered can as yet be neither clearly grasped nor expressed (it is after all one of its essential characteristics that it does not lend itself to simple definitions and explanations), its effects are already described in numerous examples of its driving dynamism, its surging hither and thither among the people—something which, as pure fact, no Greek or Roman writer would ever have thought of treating in comparably elaborate detail. A Greek or Roman writer describes a popular movement only as reaction to a specific practical complex of events—as Thucydides for instance describes
the Athenians’ attitude toward the project of an expedition to Sicily; the movement is characterized as a whole—as approving, disapproving, undecided, or perhaps tumultuous—just as the observer sees it, looking, as it were, from above; but it could not possibly occur that reactions so various among so many individuals of the common people should be made a major subject of literary treatment. What considerable portions of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles describe, what Paul’s Epistles also often reflect, is unmistakably the beginning of a deep subsurface movement, the unfolding of historical forces. For this, it is essential that great numbers of random persons should make their appearance; for it is not possible to bring to life such historical forces in their surging action except by reference to numerous random persons—the term random being here employed to designate people from all classes, occupations, walks of life, people, that is, who owe their place in the account exclusively to the fact that the historical movement engulfs them as it were accidentally, so that they are obliged to react to it in one way or another.

It goes without saying that the stylistic convention of antiquity fails here, for the reaction of the casually involved person can only be presented with the highest seriousness. The random fisherman or publican or rich youth, the random Samaritan or adulteress, come from their random everyday circumstances to be immediately confronted with the personality of Jesus; and the reaction of an individual in such a moment is necessarily a matter of profound seriousness, and very often tragic. The antique stylistic rule according to which realistic imitation, the description of random everyday life, could only be comic (or at best idyllic), is therefore incompatible with the representation of historical forces as soon as such a representation undertakes to render things concretely; for this procedure entails entering into the random everyday depths of popular life, as well as readiness to take seriously whatever is encountered there; and inversely the rule of style can operate only in cases where the writer abandons any attempt to make historical forces concrete or feels no need to do so. It goes without saying that, in the New Testament writings, any raising of historical forces to the level of consciousness is totally “unscientific”: it clings to the concrete and fails to progress to a systematization of experience in new concepts. Yet there is to be observed a spontaneous generation of categories which apply to epochs as well as to states of the inner life and which are much more pliable and dynamic than the categories of Greco-Roman historians. For example, there is the distinction of eras, the era of law
or of sin and the era of grace, faith, and justice; there are the concepts of “love,” “power,” “spirit,” and the like; and even such abstract and static concepts as that of justice have assumed a dialectic mobility (Romans 3: 21ff.) which renews them completely. Connected with this is everything concerned with inner rebirth and change—the words sin, death, justice, and so on, coming to express not merely action, event, and quality, but phases of an intrahistorical transformation. To be sure, in all this we must not forget that the transformation is here one whose course progresses to somewhere outside of history, to the end of time or to the coincidence of all times, in other words upward, and does not, like the scientific concepts of evolutionary history, remain on the horizontal plane of historical events. That is a decisive difference; and yet, whatever kind of movement it may be which the New Testament writings introduced into phenomenal observation, the essential point is this: the deep subsurface layers, which were static for the observers of classical antiquity, began to move.

In this view of things there is no room for ethical and rhetorical standards in the sense of the ancients. An occurrence like Peter’s denial cannot be fitted into a system of judgments which operates with static categories, if for no other reason than the tremendous “pendulation” in the heart of one specific individual; and with the advent of an attitude which seeks justification not in works but in faith, the ethicism of the ancients has lost its supreme rank. And in regard to rhetoric the situation is the same. Surely, the New Testament writings are extremely effective; the tradition of the prophets and the Psalms is alive in them, and in some of them—those written by authors of more or less pronounced Hellenistic culture—we can trace the use of Greek figures of speech. But the spirit of rhetoric—a spirit which classified subjects in
genera
, and invested every subject with a specific form of style as the one garment becoming it in virtue of its nature—could not extend its dominion to them for the simple reason that their subject would not fit into any of the known genres. A scene like Peter’s denial fits into no antique genre. It is too serious for comedy, too contemporary and everyday for tragedy, politically too insignificant for history—and the form which was given it is one of such immediacy that its like does not exist in the literature of antiquity. This can be judged by a symptom which at first glance may seem insignificant: the use of direct discourse. The maid says: And thou also wast with Jesus of Nazareth! He answers: I know not, neither understand I what thou sayest. Then the maid says to the bystanders: This is one of them.
And, Peter repeating his denial, the bystanders speak up: Surely thou art one of them, for thou art a Galilean by thy speech!—I do not believe that there is a single passage in an antique historian where direct discourse is employed in this fashion in a brief, direct dialogue. Dialogues with few participants are rare in their writings; at best they appear in anecdotal biography, and there the function they serve is almost always to lead up to famous pregnant retorts, whose importance lies not in their realistically concrete content but in their rhetorical and ethical impact—the sort of thing which later on, in the theory of the thirteenth-century Italian novella, was called a
bel parlare
. The celebrated anecdotes of Croesus and Solon may serve as examples. Generally speaking, direct discourse is restricted in the antique historians to great continuous speeches delivered in the Senate or before a popular assembly or a gathering of soldiers, in which connection the reader may remember what we said above in regard to Percennius’ speech. But here—in the scene of Peter’s denial—the dramatic tension of the moment when the actors stand face to face has been given a salience and immediacy compared with which the dialogue (stichomythy) of antique tragedy appears highly stylized. Comedy, satire, and the like may not properly be adduced for purposes of comparison; but in them too one would have to look hard to find anything of similar immediacy. In the Gospels, however, one encounters numerous face-to-face dialogues. I hope that this symptom, the use of direct discourse in living dialogue, suffices to characterize, for our purposes, the relation of the writings of the New Testament to classical rhetoric, so that I need not go further into the general problem, which has often been discussed. (I refer to Norden’s book on the art of prose in antiquity, mentioned above.)

In the last analysis the differences in style between the writings of antiquity and early Christianity are conditioned by the fact that they were composed from a different point of view and for different people. Different as Petronius and Tacitus may be in a great many respects, they have the same viewpoint—they look down from above. Tacitus writes from a vantage point which surveys the fullness of events and transactions; he classifies and judges them as a man of the highest rank and the highest culture. That he does not fall into the dry and unvisualized, is due not only to his genius but to the incomparably successful cultivation of the visual, of the sensory, throughout antiquity. But the audience of his equals for whom he wrote demanded that the visual and sensory element respect the limits of what a long
tradition had settled as good taste—in which connection we may note that there are to be found in him symptoms of a change in taste, a change in the direction of greater stress on the somber and gruesome, but this is a point we shall have to take up again in a different context. Petronius too looks from above at the world he depicts. His book is a product of the highest culture, and he expects his readers to have such a high level of social and literary culture that they will perceive, without doubt or hesitation, every shade of social blundering and of vulgarity in language and taste. However coarse and grotesque the subject matter may be, its treatment reveals no trace of the crude humor of a popular farce. Scenes like that of the dinner guest’s reply or the quarrel between Trimalchio and Fortunata exhibit, it is true, the basest and commonest ideas, but they do so with such refined cross-purposes, with such an array of sociological and psychological presuppositions, as no popular audience could tolerate. And the vulgarity of language is not designed to arouse laughter in a large crowd but is rather a piquant condiment for the palate of a social and literary elite accustomed to viewing things from above with epicurean composure. It may perhaps be compared with the small talk of the hotel manager Aimé and similar characters in Proust’s novel of Things Past; but such comparisons with works of modern realism are never quite to the point, because the latter contain far more in the way of serious problems. So Petronius too writes from above, for the class of the highly cultured—a class which at the time of the early emperors may have been quite large but which melted away later. On the other hand, the story of Peter’s denial, and generally almost the entire body of New Testament writings, is written from within the emergent growths and directly for everyman. Here we have neither survey and rational disposition, nor artistic purpose. The visual and sensory as it appears here is no conscious imitation and hence is rarely completely realized. It appears because it is attached to the events which are to be related, because it is revealed in the demeanor and speech of profoundly stirred individuals and no effort need be devoted to the task of elaborating it. Even Tacitus, with his conscious endeavor to condense and summarize, describes human individuals in their outer appearance and inner existence, gives detailed portrayals of given situations. The author of the Gospel according to Saint Mark has no viewpoint which would permit him to present a factual, objective portrait of, let us say, the character of Peter. He is at the core of what goes on; he observes and relates only what matters in relation to Christ’s presence and
mission; and in the present case it does not even occur to him to tell us how the incident ended, that is, how Peter got away. Tacitus and Petronius endeavor to give us a sensory impression, the former of historical occurrences, the latter of a specific stratum of society, and in doing so they respect the limits of a specific aesthetic tradition. The author of the Gospel according to Saint Mark has no such purpose and knows no such tradition. Without any effort on his part, as it were, and purely through the inner movement of what he relates, the story becomes visually concrete. And the story speaks to everybody; everybody is urged and indeed required to take sides for or against it. Even ignoring it implies taking sides. To be sure, for a time its effectiveness was hampered by practical obstacles. For a time the language as well as the religious and social premises of the message restricted it to Jewish circles. Yet the negative reaction which it aroused in Jerusalem, both among the Jewish leaders and among the majority of the people, forced the movement to embark upon the tremendous venture of missionary work among the Gentiles, which was characteristically begun by a member of the Jewish diaspora, the Apostle Paul. With that, an adaptation of the message to the preconceptions of a far wider audience, its detachment from the special preconceptions of the Jewish world, became a necessity and was effected by a method rooted in Jewish tradition but now applied with incomparably greater boldness, the method of revisional interpretation. The Old Testament was played down as popular history and as the code of the Jewish people and assumed the appearance of a series of “figures,” that is of prophetic announcements and anticipations of the coming of Jesus and the concomitant events. We have briefly discussed these matters in our first chapter. The total content of the sacred writings was placed in an exegetic context which often removed the thing told very far from its sensory base, in that the reader or listener was forced to turn his attention away from the sensory occurrence and toward its meaning. This implied the danger that the visual element of the occurrences might succumb under the dense texture of meanings. Let one example stand for many: It is a visually dramatic occurrence that God made Eve, the first woman, from Adam’s rib while Adam lay asleep; so too is it that a soldier pierced Jesus’ side, as he hung dead on the cross, so that blood and water flowed out. But when these two occurrences are exegetically interrelated in the doctrine that Adam’s sleep is a figure of Christ’s death-sleep; that, as from the wound in Adam’s side mankind’s primordial mother after the flesh, Eve, was
born, so from the wound in Christ’s side was born the mother of all men after the spirit, the Church (blood and water are sacramental symbols)—then the sensory occurrence pales before the power of the figural meaning. What is perceived by the hearer or reader or even, in the plastic and graphic arts, by the spectator, is weak as a sensory impression, and all one’s interest is directed toward the context of meanings. In comparison, the Greco-Roman specimens of realistic presentation are, though less serious and fraught with problems and far more limited in their conception of historical movement, nevertheless perfectly integrated in their sensory substance. They do not know the antagonism between sensory appearance and meaning, an antagonism which permeates the early, and indeed the whole, Christian view of reality.