Читать книгу The Typological Imaginary - Kathleen Biddick - Страница 8
ОглавлениеIntroduction: Typology Never Lets Go
This study grapples with an unsettling historiographical problem: how to study the history of Jewish-Christian relations without reiterating the temporal practices through which early Christians, a heterogeneous group, fabricated an identity (“Christian-ness”) both distinct from and superseding that of neighboring Jewish communities. These Christian temporal practices insisted on identitary time, by which I mean the assumption that time can be culturally identical with itself. Early Christians straightened out the unfolding of temporality (with its gaps and vicissitudes) into a theological timeline fantastically based on two distinct but related notions. First, they posited a present (“this is now”) exclusively as a Christian present. They cut off a Jewish “that was then” from a Christian “this is now.” They also imagined a specific direction to Christian time. They believed that the Christian new time—a “this is now”—superseded a “that was then” of Israel. Such a temporal logic also enabled early Christians to divide up a shared scriptural tradition. Christians subsumed the Hebrew Bible into an “Old Testament” and conceived of this Old Testament as a text anterior to their New Testament. “Christian-ness” was thus affirmed by the repetitive cutting off of the old Jewish time from the new Christian time. Even though Christians shared literary genres and rhetorical conventions with pagan and Jewish contemporaries, their notion of supersession came to distinguish their reading and writing.1 This book explores the stakes of this temporal model of Christian supersession.
The purported “secularization” of modernity, I contend here, has never overtaken this core Christian conception of supersession. Supersessionary thinking and notions of modernity are closely bound, and, I would argue, shape even the very terms of current debate among medievalists over the existence or nonexistence of antisemitism in the Middle Ages. At stake for me in this book is the belief that we cannot change the grounds of our historical narratives or ethically transform encounters with our neighbors unless we acknowledge and engage with the temporal fantasies and their supportive practices at the core of such “Christian-ness.” Supersessionary notions, I posit, have rigidly bound the contexts in which Christians have encountered Jews, then and now. I term this captivating bundle of supersessionary fantasies about temporality the Christian typological imaginary. What follows analyzes the material vicissitudes of this Christian reduction of temporality into a binary of past and present. Put another way, by what technological means did “Christian-ness” fabricate itself and at what cost? And how does repetition of the Christian temporal imaginary fantastically shape historical contexts of encounter?
I explore supersessionary thinking from the relatively unfamiliar vantage point of the graphic technologies used in medieval texts and print sources from theological polemics to maps, trial transcripts, and universal histories. I seek to question how graphic technologies both embody and materialize supersessionary fantasies of cutting off the old Israel from the new Christian church. My study is thus also an intervention in cultural histories of technology, since it poses the relations of embodiment to disembodiment at the technological heart of imaginary fantasies. Repetition of such supersessionary practices (albeit unrecognized) extends even to contemporary psychoanalytic and postcolonial texts. I argue that even these self-critical approaches reflect the persistence of supersessionary thinking, even as they propose alternative ways of thinking about memory and temporality. Crucial to my study is the ethical and historical challenge of unbinding the typological imaginary, not to disavow theological difference between Christians and Jews, but rather to open up encounter to less constrained, less deadening historiographical habits of mind.
I do not need to emphasize that this book is less about documenting a record of Jewish-Christian relations than about imagining ways of thinking of new and rich temporalities that are not bound to the rigidity of supersession. Indeed, the book is about the risk of thinking about “unhistorical” temporalities—ones not about divisions between then and now, but about passages, thresholds, gaps, intervals, in-betweenness.2 These unhistorical temporalities that do not use time as a utilitarian resource to ground identity are temporalities that can never be one.
Typology Never Lets Go
Let me exemplify the key terms of my argument through scrutiny of a graphic artifact. Figure 1 reproduces a page from the earliest printed version (1480/81) of the medieval textbook version of the Bible known as the Glossa ordinaria. By the time printers set the type, manuscript versions of the Glossa ordinaria had already been circulating in this standardized layout for over three hundred years. Beryl Smalley, the pioneer explorer of the Bible as a medieval schoolbook, reminds us that the Glossa had an afterlife well into the Counter-Reformation.3 Later in this introduction, I shall have more to say about the formal innovations worked out in the mid-twelfth century for graphic presentation of the Bible textbook. For now, I simply wish to draw attention to the center block of the page figured here.
Figure 1. Genesis 17, Biblio cum glossa ordinaria Walafrida Strabonis (Strassburg, 1480), p. C. Courtesy of the Rare Books Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations.
Twelfth-century scribes and later printers reserved this space for the biblical text, in this example, verses from Genesis 17, in which God makes a covenant with Abraham. Another text, called the interlinear gloss, hovers above the Bible verses. For medieval students, this gloss worked like an exegetical grid. It coordinated key terms and figures selected from the text of the Old Testament with what Christian exegetes considered to be their figural fulfillment in key terms and figures of the New Testament. We can see, for example, that over the words of the Old Testament announcing the covenant of God with Israel in the lower right-hand corner of the text block—hoc est pactum meum quod observabitis inter me et vos et semen tuum post te (this is my pact which you will observe between me and you and your seed after you), the interlinear gloss inscribed the supersession of this covenant: circuncisio vetustatis est depositio (the old circumcision is deposed) and coordinated the figure of Abraham with Christ as his figural fulfillment. These interlinear glosses, given their privileged placement directly over the Old Testament text, functioned as pedagogical maps to what is known as medieval typology or figural thinking.
Christian typology posits the theological supersession of the Christian Church over Israel. Christians believed that the New Testament superseded the Hebrew Bible and redefined it as the Old Testament. Exegetically it maps the figures of the Old Testament onto their fulfillment in the New Testament. Since the Glossa ordinaria was developed as a schoolbook—indeed, in 1179, Pope Alexander III ruled that the Bible should not be taught without the Gloss—it had the effect of standardizing the kind of typological thinking expressed in the interlinear gloss. This is not to deny changing interpretative traditions, or other textbooks subsequent to the Glossa ordinaria, or even radical disagreement about the value of glossing in the twelfth century. Smalley has rehearsed these debates in her indispensable work The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, and more recently Philippe Buc has elaborated on them in his L’Ambiguïté du livre. For my purposes it is precisely the mundane power of textbook typology in such mechanical graphic layouts that is interesting. All the more so, since, as we shall now see, typological thinking continues to lure contemporary critical theorists, especially in their efforts to rethink historicism.
Scholars have regarded typological (also known as figural) thinking as one of the great achievements of late antique and medieval scriptural exegesis.4 In his essay “Figura,” written in Istanbul in 1944, Erich Auerbach traced the development of a specifically Christian form of figural thinking out of the recognition that “The Old Testament, both as a whole and in its more important details, is a concrete historical prefiguration of the Gospel” (44). He valued figural thinking because it supposed two events, Old and New, as historical—the historical Moses is a promise of the historical Christ who fulfills the figure of Moses. He contrasted the richness of such figural thinking with what he saw as the modern view of historical development: “whereas in the modern view the event is always self-sufficient and secure, in the figural interpretation the fact is subordinated to an interpretation which is fully secured to begin with: the event is enacted according to the ideal model which is a prototype situated in the future and thus far only promised” (59). As Auerbach formulated his study of figural thinking, a circle of French scholars around the Jesuit Henri de Lubac were also reviving medieval figural thinking as a resource for interpreting the Bible. De Lubac considered the relationship between the two Testaments as primary to exegesis and bemoaned historians who spent “vast storehouses of learning in vain” (224) because they failed to attend to the discontinuities between the Old and New Testaments: “the history of revelation also offers the spectacle of discontinuity that has no equal” (234). Both Auerbach and de Lubac insist on the supersession of the New Testament over the Hebrew Bible as central and distinctive to early Christian exegesis (in contrast to contemporary pagan and Jewish strands of figural thinking) and agree that Christian typology provided a productive and open-ended framework for interpretation.
This scholarly rejuvenation of medieval exegetical studies in the 1940s and 1950s profoundly influenced postmodern theoretical debates forty years later. Hayden White and Fredric Jameson, in particular, used Auerbach’s vision of medieval figural thinking to champion new forms of historicism. Like Auerbach and de Lubac, White and Jameson envision figural thinking as a way of escaping from modernist notions of history based on rigid chronologies, notions of progress, and other forms of ahistorical thinking. Jameson’s famous dictum—“always historicize”—is based on and draws its power from a figural move. Medieval figural thinking becomes with Jameson the figure of promise that his historicism fulfills. Yet, the richness of figural thinking so advocated by Auerbach, de Lubac, White, and Jameson constitutes for other scholars its unsettling historical problem. Michael Signer, for example, has concentrated on the interlinear glosses of the Pentateuch, as standardized in the Glossa ordinaria, because of their wide dissemination in the schoolbook. He argues that these glosses need to be apprehended as an institutionalized medium promoting anti-Judaism in the twelfth century. The close and repetitive graphic coordination of the names of Old Testament prophets with those who supersede them in the New Testament, coupled with their negative rhetoric of supersession, rendered the interlinear gloss as a form of graphic and rhetorical substitution for the Old Testament verses over which it was inscribed.
Jeffrey Librett, whose work considers the effects of Christian typological practices on Jewish-Christian dialogue, focuses on the figural process of doubling so cherished by Auerbach. Librett agrees with Auerbach that the distinctive aspect of Christian figural thinking is the supersessionary fabrication of texts of the Hebrew Bible into the Old Testament so that it (the Old Testament) might stand as prefiguration to the fulfillment of the New Testament. This supersessionary move produces Jews as the figures for the literal truth of Christians. However, it is never that simple, as Librett carefully shows. The fulfillment of a figure, say the Incarnation as the fulfillment of the Mosaic Law, can always also itself become prefiguration, in this case the Incarnation as prefiguration of the Last Judgment. Thus at the core of figural thinking is the fact that it is impossible to move from the event to its fulfillment without passing through doubleness. By this Librett means that figure and letter are both real and possible and that they therefore are always doubled and consequently can also be self-reversing. In other words, there is nothing to guarantee the irreversibility of figural thinking except the theological notion of supersession. Without the fantasy of supersession the figure of the Christian is always possibly the truth of the Jew. To forestall such a disturbing (to Christians) indistinction, normative Christian typological thinking binds itself to supersession. I am going to use the term the “Christian typological imaginary” to indicate those bundles of fantasies that bind “Christian-ness” to supersessionary notions. This imaginary must always work to ward off the shattering threat of typological reversibility. Indeed, the fantasy of supersession may be regarded as constitutive of the Christian unconscious, if we define the unconscious “as the locus of psychic activity whereby a human being becomes a ‘subject’ by metabolizing its existential dependency on institutions that are in turn sustained by acts of foundation, preservation, and augmentation.”5
At this juncture it should be briefly noted that debates over Christian figural thinking are not confined to the academy. The Catholic Church continues to grapple with the question of how to think about a theology of the “Old Testament” that is not grounded in supersession.6 Recent papal endeavors to open up Christian-Jewish relations show the difficulty of rethinking typology. In an address to the Jewish community of Mainz on November 17, 1980, Pope John Paul reemphasized that the “Old Covenant” had never been revoked by God. In 1985 a Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews had the following to say about typology:
From the unity of the divine plan derives the problem of the relations between the Old and New Testaments. The Church already from apostolic times (cf. 1 Cor. 10: 11; Heb. 10: 1) and then constantly in tradition resolved this problem by means of typology, which emphasizes the primordial value that the Old Testament must have in the Christian view. Typology however makes many people uneasy and is perhaps the sign of a problem unresolved. (224)
Nevertheless, in spite of good efforts, typology troubles Catholic catechisms, notably the recently authorized Catechism of the Catholic Church (United States Catholic Conference 1994). The catechism presents a typological understanding of the relations of the Jewish and Christian covenants. For instance, on the question of the constitution of the Bible, it asserts: “All Sacred Scripture is but one book, and that one book of Christ, because all divine Scripture speaks of Christ, and all divine Scripture is fulfilled in Christ” (141). Vatican studies have tried to exit typology by imagining both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament as anti-types for the coming or return of the Messiah. This strand of eschatology is actually reminiscent of medieval expectations of a third age which envisioned a new hybrid chosen people (commingled of Christians and Jews) who would replace contemporary Christians as the chosen people. In a recent study of such millenarian thought, medieval historian Robert E. Lerner has characterized this vision developed by Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202) as a more benign “path not taken” in the formation of Europe as a persecuting society. Yet such a path, Lerner observes, aggravates typology by adding the notion of progress to supersession: “As the first theorist of incremental progress in the West (and probably anywhere), Joachim spoke in terms of steady betterment extending into the future.”7 The Old Testament scholar Joseph Blenkinsopp takes the measure of the problem when he comments that “we [Christians] are as yet nowhere close to knowing how to write an Old Testament theology.”8
Does the debate on typological thinking rehearsed so far seem to repeat, yet again, some version of the story of “timeless” enmity between Christians and Jews, even as scholars are working so hard to rethink these relations past and present? For example, late antique scholars now argue for the “twin birth” of rabbinical Judaism and Christianity and view the religions as siblings, thus sidestepping the question of theological imaginaries. Scholars of the medieval diaspora reject monolithic understandings of religious and ethnic essence and eschew accusatory historical modes of describing medieval Jewish-Christian relations. They attempt to cultivate complex understandings of local differences as solutions to particular cultural problems that are never one-sided.
This book begins with the intuition that such hopeful new historical models of Jewish-Christian coemergence and coexistence will not shift the ground of analysis unless they are accompanied by a thorough working through of the fantasy of supersession, or what I am calling the Christian typological imaginary. I will thus be making a cautionary argument in these pages about this promising new work.
The Typological Imaginary at Work
Let me open my argument with a reading of some current works of medieval scholarship that seek to rethink the historiography of Jewish-Christian relations. I wish to show how they stop short of being transformative, since they remain at what Eric Santner has called “the level of... mapping of more complex symbolic processes” (29) without reference to the repetitive and machine-like aspects of the Christian typological imaginary. As psychoanalysis teaches us, unconscious mental activity is not organized around systems of meanings, beliefs, purposes, or epistemologies, but rather around a kernel that is not assimilable to biology or history (which is not to say that the kernel is a-natural or ahistorical). My reading suggests that the typological imaginary has persisted in these studies in spite of themselves. Only a questioning of the typological imaginary in tandem with such studies can be, I believe, transformative.
Medieval historians have mostly modeled the study of medieval Jewish-Christian relations at the symbolic level as a question of self and other and concomitant processes of inclusion and exclusion. Robert Moore’s influential book, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987), remains paradigmatic.9 He claims that newly emergent clerical elites in late twelfth-century Europe, notably university scholars and administrators, secured their power by constructing and policing new forms of outcastness. Jews became the Other for these medieval Christians. A strong reading of Moore (one that he himself has offered) argues that antisemitism is constitutive of the very formation of Europe. In so claiming, Moore conflates medieval bureaucratic networks with fantasy, failing to realize that they are not historically identical. Moore provides his readers with a bleak but paradoxically comforting historical narrative. He offers a temporal origin and a bureaucratic structure for antisemitism without raising any questions about the group pleasures being forged in the emerging networks of bureaucratic elites he traces. How does fantasy work to organize such bureaucracies in mechanical, repetitive ways? Since the bureaucratic networks are historically dynamic, so too, unhistorically, is the work of fantasy. Moore’s thesis does not allow historians to think together these clerical, bureaucratic networks and the question of pleasure. Separating functionalism from fantasy, as Moore does, protects historians from thinking about the unhistorical, that which is troubling because it cannot be contained by the history of bureaucratic networks alone.
Moore’s conflations have strongly shaped subsequent historiography. Through the 1990s medievalists responded both creatively and anxiously to Moore’s paradigm of persecution.10 Gavin Langmuir and Anna Sapir Abulafia have looked more carefully at clerical strategies for “christianizing” reason as clerics redrew the boundaries between the rational and the irrational over the twelfth century. They are interested in how intellectuals innovated the media of textbooks, polemics, preaching, and visual display in order to map onto Christendom newly conceived forms of universalism. Hermeneutically, these clerics began to imagine Jews as the irrational effect of their rationalizing programs. For Langmuir, the transformations over the twelfth century mark a move from anti-Judaism to antisemitism, that is, from epistemological to ontological categories. Abulafia, who views her work as a critical extension and also a significant rethinking of Langmuir, avoids such binaries. Her analysis comes close to conceiving the problem as one of repetition, although she does not articulate that process explicitly. Jeremy Cohen, in an elaboration of his earlier study The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (1982), and in dialogue with the work of Amos Funkenstein’s Perceptions of Jewish History, traces the hermeneutic history of the textualized Jew in theological discourses and also detects a turning point in twelfth-century treatises. As Christian clerics subsequently mobilized their imperfect (at best) knowledge of the Talmud, they claimed that the Talmud disqualified medieval Jews as faithful witnesses to the Hebrew Scriptures. “Talmud” Jews could not be regarded as biblical Jews. Therefore, they argued that the Augustinian contract, which protected Jews as witnesses of the incomplete nature of redemption, need not be extended to such false “Talmud Jews,” as medieval Jews came to be imagined.11
In spite of their different emphases, the narratives of Langmuir, Abulafia, and Cohen converge with Moore’s timing of a significant downturn in medieval Jewish-Christian relations. They diverge mostly in their rhetorical ambivalence about explicitly labeling such transformation over the twelfth century as “antisemitic” (Langmuir), or as a radically deepened, more virulent form of “anti-Jewish” intolerance (Abulafia, Cohen, and also Gilbert Dahan). What is of interest to my argument is how their ambivalent struggles rehearse the very indeterminateness of typological thinking: does ontology supersede epistemology; does antisemitism supersede anti-Judaism? The anxious strategies to periodize or not to periodize Jewish-Christian relations are, I argue, an anxiety about the supersessionary fantasy at the core of the typological imaginary. Julia Lupton reminds us of its pervasive effect on historical periodization: typological thinking, she writes, is one of the “foundational principles of modern periodization per se, and thus must be dialectically engaged rather than simply rejected or replaced.”12
A younger generation of medieval scholars, writing in the mid-1990s, turned to local studies as a way of questioning Moore’s thesis.13 David Nirenberg, in his award-winning book Communities of Violence, takes Moore to task for constructing a “structural” tale of antisemitism cast as a teleological inevitability rooted in the collective European unconsciousness. He seeks to refute “the widespread notion that we can best understand intolerance by stressing the fundamental continuity between collective systems of thought across historical time.” To counteract such teleology, he advocates the study of historical agency. Agency for Nirenberg is an ontological category, meaning that it grounds the “local” and thus enables Nirenberg to assume the local as an empirical given of geography and not as a cultural construct. The local forms the backdrop for his study of how Christians, Jews, and Muslims engaged in processes of barter and negotiation and how their choices shaped the local relations of violence and tolerance. He carefully circumscribes his research synchronically and thus does not analyze the reasons why relations did change and murderously so. So constructed, his study paradoxically produces its own ahistorical category, that of agency, analogous to the ahistorical category of antisemitism of which he accuses Moore and other so-called structuralists. What if both historic agency and local context are, indeed, discursive (then and now) and therefore subject to the binding of fantasy? How does leaving untouched the unhistoricity of fantasy trouble the arguments of both Moore and Nirenberg?
Miri Rubin is also very cautious about the Moore thesis in her discussion of the vicissitudes of host desecration narratives. She, too, foregrounds agency, context, and choice, but also implies a story of periodization not dissimilar to those of Moore and Cohen. The host desecration narrative, according to Rubin, is a “new” story that emerges over the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries and marks a transformation in how Christians came to regard the mission of the Jews. Their witness was no longer one of reminder of the incompleteness of redemption, but rather “of witness [that] was worked through his [the Jew’s] death, the erasure of the doubt and danger he represented.” Thus, murderous Christian narratives directed against Jews gain momentum through dissemination of these stories and their visual representation. The occasions when Christians chose not to act on such fantasies provide Rubin with her rare but redemptive proof that antisemitism is not historically essential or teleological. Choice functions for Rubin, too, as the ontological given of the historical subject. The repetitive pressures that fantasy exerted on agency at the visual and narrative edges of host desecration stories remain an unconsidered question in Gentile Narratives.
Perhaps the most ambivalent of the recent studies is that by Sara Lipton—Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée. 14 Her study of the powerful and disturbing depiction of Jews in these manuscripts of the early thirteenth century argues with Moore over the level of consciousness ascribed to such portrayals. On one page Lipton faults Moore for imputing too much consciousness to clerical elites in the process of producing denigrating stereotypes of Jews; on the next, she remarks that he has imputed too little consciousness to this process. Her careful construction of the provenance of these manuscripts also raises the question of agency. Lipton begins to acknowledge the discursive possibilities of agency when she observes that “the resonances of the new semantic practices were not always confined to the illustrated page or the spoken word.”
These recent studies are persuasive in their questioning of an ahistorical notion of antisemitism as a way of understanding the history of Jewish-Christian relations. At the same time, they also show the limits of relying on ontological notions of historical agency without considering fantasy and pleasure. My own study seeks to embrace the paradox of material network and fantasy. What follows does rely on psychoanalysis, not for the purpose of reintroducing some timeless notion of antisemitism, but to interrogate psychoanalytic thinking, too, for its own investments in the typological imaginary, even as psychoanalytic theory offers us ways of imagining new ways of relating, or what Eric Santner has called an ethics of singularity. My study is thus a percussive one in that it seeks to loosen the sediments and accretions of rigid fantasies that hold “Christian-ness” captive.
Mise-en-Page and the Foreskin
The crucial point of all this so far is that figural or typological thinking has at its core a fantasy of supersession that historians need to work through in order to transform the way we think about Jewish-Christian relations then and now. This book takes the typological imaginary as its central problem. It does so, however, not through the means of already well-studied texts of medieval exegesis and polemic against the Jews. Instead, I focus on the machine-like repetitions, the automaticity at the typological core of the Christian unconscious. From the moment in his epistles that he transferred the cut of circumcision to an inscription on the heart, Paul constituted typological thinking with and through graphic technologies with their attendant questions of legibility. In his new theology of circumcision, the circumcision of the heart, Paul severed a Christian “now” from a Jewish “then.” As he wrote in Romans 2: 28–29, “For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise not of men but of God.”
Typology and graphic technology are thus closely bound, and, I shall argue, historically constitutive of each other. There exists, however, no history of their imbrication. Such a history would be one precondition for working through the Christian fantasy of supersession. In advocating the transfer of circumcision from the cut foreskin to the inscribed heart, Paul incorporated fleshly excision into a space of inscription. In fabricating the heart as a space of inscription, Paul also inaugurated the typologization of the graphic machine, in that the act of cutting the foreskin becomes the figure for Christian inscription, or graphic technologies. Graphic technologies are thus the chief evidentiary source of my study.
Let me now exemplify what I mean by graphic technologies by returning us to the page of the Glossa ordinaria that opened this introduction. The standardized layout of the page illustrated in Figure 1 marked a major transition in Christian graphic technology in the mid-twelfth century. The concept of the page as a modular unit for the graphic organization of textual presentation emerged at that time as scribes and scholars devised a standardized layout for this schoolbook. No component of these textbooks—the Bible text, the interlinear gloss, or the marginal glosses—was itself an innovation. Indeed, each element has a complicated genealogy in early medieval biblical scholarship. What interests me for my study of the typological imaginary is how the page fabricated as a modular unit came to organize Bible text and glosses graphically and subordinate them to itself.
Christopher de Hamel has carefully analyzed the crucial scribal experiments involved in producing the standardized, modular form for the pages of the Glossa.15 Whereas once the Bible text had been the chief organizing vector for scribes, who wrote the text out first and, then, organized the glossing around it, scribes in the mid-twelfth century began to conceive of the page as the unit of graphic organization. We can observe them laying out each page first according to a repetitive rationalized grid of lines and margins by pricking and ruling parchment from margin to margin, leaf after leaf. The Bible text itself no longer determined the scribal vicissitudes of the page. Instead, the repetitive mise-en-page graphically organized the inscription of text and commentaries: “Sometime after the middle of the twelfth century, apparently in the 1160s, a complete change occurred in the layout of northern French glossed books. The ruling was drawn closer together and was written right across the written area” (24). For each page these formal graphic changes produced an exemplary text of forty lines of gloss in the left and right hand margins with twenty lines of biblical text written on alternate lines in the center. Scribes wrote the interlinear gloss between the lines of the central biblical text.16 As Ivan Illich has observed (and as Figure 1 from a printed Glossa ordinaria depicts): “the textual patterning of the book page had such a strong hold on the imagination that Gutenberg and his pupils did what they could to make its essentials survive into the age of print.”17 Not surprisingly, as the page was transformed graphically so was the concept of the Bible as book transformed materially. According to de Hamel, by the second half of the twelfth century owners came to think of glossed books of the Bible not as a collection, or assemblage, of books, but as a corpus, albeit in multivolume form. The Bible thus came to be imagined as a sequenced entity.18 The changing material notions of the Bible as a bookish artifact could only intensify typological operations.19
The fabrication of the page as a modular unit by means of a repetitive, graphic process (the pricking and uniform ruling across the surface of the page) transformed typological thinking from within. The interface, the page, and the fantasy, the typological imaginary, shared the graphic technology of ruling and repetition. As we have already observed, the interlinear gloss juxtaposed the names of New Testament fulfillment onto the names of the figures of the Old Testament text. The graphic organization worked as a visual as well as a rhetorical mode of substitution. The modular framework of a unified and unifying page format rendered typological thinking as an image, that is, as a kind of diagram placed in the central field of the page in which the biblical text is inscribed.
It is possible to imagine the newly conceived interface, the mise-en-page in the Glossa ordinaria, as a little machine. Precisely and repetitiously it rotates the littera back onto the figura and begins to produce typological effects mechanically at the level of the graphic. The rhetoric of typology is subjected to the mechanicity of a graphic form. The layout of the glossed Bible rationalizes textual organization and thus renders typology, once an argument about reference, now also a representation. The modular page works as a kind of typological viewing device: anticipating the device illustrated by Dürer, in which the artist draws a female nude by looking through a transparent screen squared by threads that correspond to the gridded page on which he is drawing.20 Analogously the biblical scholar views the Old Testament through the viewing device of the new mise-en-page, which enables him to map the typological imaginary onto the Old Testament.
Within a quarter century of the stabilized graphic form of the Glossa, we find the central space of such pricked and ruled pages “built over” by an elaborate and disturbingly innovative illustrative program in manuscripts that have been dubbed Bibles moralisées. This genre evacuated the Bible text and in its emptied central space substituted a new graphic program of illuminated roundels. Sara Lipton has exhaustively studied the earliest illustrated examples of the Bible moralisée (Vienna, ÖNB 2554; Vienna, ÖNB 1179).21 These two luxury manuscripts were produced in Capetian court circles between 1208 and the 1220, over a period marked by important royal and papal legislation about Jews as well as the incorporation of the university at Paris.22 Their visual program is obsessed with Jews, who are depicted in 39.7 percent of the roundels and are mentioned by name in 15.7 percent of the adjacent commentary texts. The painstaking research of John Lowden has shown how their designers, like those scribes of the Glossa ordinaria, regarded the page as a unit. The eight medallions, which occupy the central area designed for the biblical text in the Glossa ordinaria, were planned and illuminated before the addition of biblical text and moralizing commentary in the right and left margins. In a comparison of biblical text and commentary for the Book of Ruth in seven extant Bibles moraliseés, Lowden has shown that the biblical passages, paraphrases, show an “undergraduate” knowledge of the Bible and that most of its moralizing paraphrases depart from the textbook version of the Glossa ordinaria.23
My chief concern is with the formal graphic level exemplified by folio 3v, taken from the purportedly earliest version of the Bible moralisée (Vienna, ÖNB 2554) and reproduced in Figure 2. The commentary, translated from the medieval French by Gerald Guest, reads as follows:
3vA
Here Noah plants his vine and drinks the wine from which he gets drunk (Gen 9: 20–21).
3va
That Noah planted the vine and drank the wine, which he himself planted, signifies Jesus Christ, who planted the Jews and drank from the wine at the Passion.
3vB
Here Noah sleeps, and one of his children uncovers him, and the others are ashamed and cover him (Gen 9: 21–23).
3vb
That one of the brothers uncovered him and the others cover him signifies the Jews who uncovered the shame of Jesus Christ and the Christians who covered him.
3vC
Here the pagans make the Tower of Babel, against the commandment of God, and God strikes them down and turns their work to nothing (Gen 11:4–9).
3vc
That the pagans began the tower of Babel against God’s commandment signifies the astronomers and the dialecticians who make false proofs against the will of Jesus Christ, and He turns their work to nothing and blinds them and strikes them.
3vD
Here the pagans come and throw Abraham and another into the fire, and God saves Abraham because of his good faith, and the other was put back and was burned.
3vd
That Abraham was in the fire and God saved him because of his good faith signifies those who are in the fire of the world, in covetousness and lust, and God saves them because of their strong faith, and he who was put back signifies those who remain in mortal sin and are burned.
The lining and pricking of the page is readily visible and the reader can see that the illuminations are the first layer to be laid down over the gridded page. Scribes inserted the commentary at a later stage in the graphic process. The concatenation of roundels relies on the alteration and repetition of interlinear gloss and Bible text already familiar from the Glossa ordinaria (which textbook was familiar to the designers of the Bible moralisée). I have chosen this particular folio page to consider at greater length because it contains the first mention of Abraham, who indexes the covenant of circumcision, even though the Bible moralisée skips over Genesis 17 and any direct reference to the covenant between God and Abraham. The specter of covenant anxiously haunts the composition of folio 3v, especially in the concerns about genital uncovering and the same and “new” knowledge foregrounded there. Roundel 3vB depicts the story of the sons of Noah, one of whom uncovers the genitals of Noah as he sleeps in a drunken stupor. His brothers, who feel ashamed at the sight, cover him. This story is then glossed by roundel 3vb, which depicts a scene in which Jews are unwinding the loincloth of the crucified Christ. They point at what they have exposed. The commentary to this roundel shifts the key of shame. In the roundel above, it was the two sons of Noah who were ashamed. In the lower roundel it is the “shame of Jesus” that the Jews see and the Christians cover. This shame or scandal that the Jews are scrutinizing is the circumcised penis of Christ. This scandalous knowledge of the cut of the foreskin is transposed in the lower roundel (3vC), which links the destruction of the Tower of Babel with folio 3vc, in which Jesus smites the emergent “university” men of the twelfth century, the dialecticians and the astronomers. The ensemble of roundels enables the scaling up and down of questions of shame from the register of sexual knowledge to learned knowledge. Most important, as Sara Lipton has already compellingly argued, the visual and textual commentary cut off and cut out contemporary Jews from their relationship to the Old Law.
Figure 2. Bible moralisée, Vienna, ÖNB 2554. By permission of Österreichische Nationalbibliotek Vienna.
What has transpired graphically in these “moralized Bibles” resonates with observations made by Walter Benjamin in his study of later baroque allegory. He noted the tendency for allegorical writing to become visual and for history to become part of its setting or script. When this happened, he argued, history becomes a ruin.24 I think we can find a prehistory of this repetitive baroque process as the Glossa ordinaria mutated into moralized Bibles. The graphic machine of the mise-en-page rendered ruinous the Bible verses that occupied the central area of the glossed page. Not surprisingly, we find this ruined space invaded by the extensive visual programs of the Bibles moralisées. They mistake stereotype for typology. In other words in the twelfth century, typology, as a supersessionary epistemological process, becomes a graphic stereotype. Should we then interpret this new graphic operation just described as yet another example of the intensification of anti-Judaic feelings of the kind detected by medieval scholars who have studied theological polemic of the twelfth century?
This book poses anew the very terms of the question. It explores how graphics repetitiously enact the cut of the foreskin at the same time that graphic processes insist on the legibility of the circumcision of the heart. The collision of cutting and inscribing takes place not only in the rhetorical realm of identification (and therefore desire for self and other), where inclusion or exclusion is at stake, but also in the insistent realm of the mechanical, arbitrary in its principle. Such graphic mechanicity repeatedly reminds us that the foreskin is the disturbing remnant at the heart of Christian typology. Cutting into the surface of the page with pricking and ruling is in fact a repetitious graphic effort to ground Christian typology. The graphic technologies provide media through which fantasies organize the pleasures of the Christian typological imaginary.
I attempt to intervene in the typological imaginary in order to reopen this gap between typology and inscription once collapsed by Paul. Repetitions are the clues that I track. Chapter 1 shows how graphic technologies, in the form of scientific diagrams, begin to insinuate themselves even into polemical tracts in the twelfth century. I study how the scientific diagrams that interrupted the text of the widely disseminated polemic of Petrus Alfonsi cut graphic boundaries between Christian reason and Jewish unreason. These borders of reason and unreason also come to be drawn graphically on contemporary mappaemundi. Such realms of unreason do not disappear in the chastened spaces of the purportedly more scientific maps of the Ptolemaic tradition printed in the later fifteenth century. A careful study of the ways in which early printers exploited the modular mise-en-page to develop front matter (indexes) and back matter (re-presentation of medieval “marvels” literature) for their editions of Ptolemy actually links them with the medieval graphic tradition of mappaemundi. The repetition of such graphic projects graphed Jewish stereotypes in the always already failed project of materializing the foreskin that Christian supersession graphically supersedes.
In Chapter 2 I take up the well-established textbook genre of the medieval universal history. These histories conceived temporality in terms of six or seven ages of salvation history and used the holy city of Jerusalem as a kind of navel that bound together the vision of temporality. I show how the mechanicity of printing the well-established genre of medieval universal histories broke up and rendered incoherent the carefully delineated time lines used to illustrate universal histories. The graphic organization of the Nuremberg Chronicle, printed in 1493, exemplifies this process. I examine how the dissemination of so-called “realistic” city views in printed versions of universal history increasingly fragmented the time lines. By the time of the publication of the grandiose Chronicle, even Jerusalem, the “navel” of the universal history, had been excised from its customary central and binding place in the genre. Once Jerusalem had been cut out, supersessionary fantasies reorganized identifications both among Christians and between Christians and Jews. Out of the exploded temporality of the universal history falls graphic debris in the form of repeatedly featured woodcuts of fetishized historical synagogue furniture and aggressive renditions of “Talmud” Jews being burned to death in pogroms.
The third chapter takes up the problems of Christian graphic technologies at the level of the archive and architectural space. It relates an exemplary reading of Albrecht Altdorfer’s 1519 etching of the interior of the synagogue at Regensburg, drawn just before its destruction, to the famous trial of Baruch the Jew transcribed in Bishop Fournier’s trial register (1320). The carefully regulated transcripts of inquisitorial trials (their graphic supplement) expressed a graphic crisis regarding the legibility of baptism as the circumcision of the heart. Christians framed their anxieties in terms of questions about the sacramental efficacy of baptism for Jews.25 How could inquisitors “read” the converted, baptized hearts of circumcised Jews?26 The trial transcripts provided ways of forging further links in the chain of graphic repetition, thus disseminating the fantasy of graphic efficacy. The chapter raises questions about the aggressive and paradoxical Christian use of graphics to erase Jewish communities temporally in a fantasy-ridden effort to have them materialize as typological matter. It also shows that Christians not only sought to reoccupy the community space of the Jews that they had destroyed, but that they also sought to occupy that space metaphorically through graphic repetition. This is the graphic story of a Christian hermeneutic circle—how the corpus mysticum (the church on earth) becomes the fidelis synagoga (faithful synagogue). The chapter concludes, perhaps unexpectedly, with Foucault. It ponders how his efforts to rethink temporality and history foundered on the typological imaginary and uses that foundering as a way, once again, to intervene in the typological imaginary.
Typology never lets go; its repetitions, as I have already suggested, haunt some psychoanalytic approaches as well as compelling postcolonial histories that are attempting to rethink temporality without supersession in its theological or secular modalities. In Chapters 4 and 5 I return to the foreskin, the fantasized remnant of the Christian typological imaginary, in order to question the Lacanian argument that there can be no “pre-modern” uncanny. What supersessionary fantasies are at stake in the Lacanian claim that the uncanny is only constitutive of the modern? I argue that these Lacanian arguments mistake the uncanny for the foreskin. They cannot think that within the phallus there lodges the temporal kernel of the circumcised foreskin, of a temporality which is not one. I argue that the foreskin is the “unhistorical” (not ahistorical) remainder of the uncanny that is the unassimilable temporality that exceeds their Lacanian periodization of the uncanny. Chapter 4 opens with a discussion of the recent debate over lachrymose history in medieval studies. In 1928, Salo Wittmayer Baron, the first scholar to hold an academic chair in Jewish history and culture, labeled those nineteenth-century studies by Jewish scholars, which emphasized the desolate history of persecution of medieval Jews, as misleading “lachrymose history” or “Jammergeschichte,” his more abjecting designation of such history. Subsequently a younger generation of post-Holocaust medieval scholars has taken up his crusade against lachrymose history because of its perceived tendency to render antisemitism as some inevitable, ahistoric aspect of the Christian unconscious. This chapter on lachrymose history looks into the unconscious of lachrymose history in two ways. First, it examines the history of repressing medieval Ashkenazi lamentation in the Reform liturgy crafted by Jewish scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums. It then reads Moses and Monotheism (a belated text of that movement) for the return of repressed lamentation through the history of circumcision recounted by Sigmund Freud. I read Moses and Monotheism, in which Freud designates circumcision as “uncanny,” through his well-known essay on the uncanny published two decades earlier. My reading of Freud shows that circumcision poses the question of a temporality that is not one and that the historicist appeal to periodization cannot answer such a question. Indeed, typology’s work is to deny the very existence of such a question even as it repetitiously seeks to materialize the foreskin. Chapter 5 examines how the supersessionary afterlife of graphic excision of the Jews haunts sophisticated postcolonial efforts to rethink historiographical periodization. In an acclaimed postcolonial ethnography, In an Antique Land, by Amitav Ghosh, I study the surfacing of circumcision as a problem in the text which returns my study once again to the challenges of working through the fantasy of supersession even in postcolonial studies.
