Odysseus's Scar
[The Difference Between Hebraic and Greek Writing]
(This
essay is taken from the first entry in Eric Auerbach's Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard
R. Trask, and first printed by Princeton University Press in 1953.
Auerbach wrote the book while in exile during World War II, in Istanbul, between
1942 and 1945.)
READERS of the Odyssey
will remember the well-prepared and touching scene in book
19,
when
Odysseus has at last come home, the scene in which the old housekeeper Euryclea,
who had been his nurse, recognizes him by a scar on his thigh. The stranger has
won Penelope’s good will; at his request she tells the housekeeper to wash his
feet, which, in all old stories, is the first duty of hospitality toward a tired
traveler. Euryclea busies herself fetching water and mixing cold with hot,
meanwhile speaking sadly of her absent master, who is probably of the same age
as the guest, and who perhaps, like the guest, is even now wandering somewhere,
a stranger; and she remarks how astonishingly like him the guest looks.
Meanwhile Odysseus, remembering his scar, moves back out of the light; he knows
that, despite his efforts to hide his identity, Euryclea will now recognize him,
but he wants at least to keep Penelope in ignorance. No sooner has the old woman
touched the scar than, in her joyous surprise, she lets Odysseus’ foot drop
into the basin; the water spills over, she is about to cry out her joy; Odysseus
restrains her with whispered threats and endearments; she recovers herself and
conceals her emotion. Penelope, whose attention Athena’s foresight had
diverted from the incident, has observed nothing.
All this is scrupulously extemalized and narrated in leisurely fashion. The two women express their feelings in copious direct discourse. Feelings though they are, with only a slight admixture of the most general considerations upon human destiny, the syntactical connection between part and part is perfectly clear, no contour is blurred. There is also room and time for orderly, perfectly well-articulated, uniformly illuminated descriptions of implements, ministrations, and gestures; even in the dramatic moment of recognition, Homer does not omit to tell the reader that it is with his right hand that Odysseus takes the old woman by the throat to keep her from speaking, at the same time that he draws her closer to him with his left. Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear-wholly expressed, orderly even in their ardor--are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved.
In
my account of the incident I have so far passed over a whole series of verses
which interrupt it in the middle. There are more than seventy of these
Verses—while to the incident itself some forty are devoted before the
interruption and some forty after it. The interruption, which comes just at the
point when the housekeeper recognizes the scar—that is, at the moment of
crisis—describes the origin of the scar, a hunting accident which occurred in
Odysseus’ boyhood, at a boar hunt, during the time of his visit to his
grandfather Autolycus. This first affords an opportunity to inform the reader
about Autolycus, his house, the precise degree of the kinship, his character,
and, no less exhaustively than touchingly, his behavior after the birth of his
grandson; then follows the visit of Odysseus, now grown to be a youth; the
exchange of greetings, the banquet with which he is welcomed, sleep and waking,
the early start for the hunt, the tracking of the beast, the struggle,
Odysseus’ being wounded by the boar’s tusk, his recovery, his return to
Ithaca, his parents’ anxious questions—all is narrated, again with such a
complete externalization of all the elements of the story and of their
interconnections as to leave nothing in obscurity. Not until then does the
narrator return to Penelope’s chamber, not until then, the digression having
run its course, does Euryclea, who had recognized the scar before the digression
began, let Odysseus’ foot fall back into the basin.
The
first thought of a modern reader—that this is a device to increase
suspense—is, if not wholly wrong, at least not the essential explanation of
this Homeric procedure. For the element of suspense is very slight in the
Homeric poems; nothing in their entire style is calculated to keep the reader or
hearer breathless. The digressions are not meant to keep the reader in suspense,
but rather to relax the tension. And this frequently occurs, as in the passage
before us. The broadly narrated, charming, and subtly fashioned story of the
hunt, with all its elegance and self-sufficiency, its wealth of idyllic
pictures, seeks to win the reader over wholly to itself as long as he is hearing
it, to make him forget what had just taken place during the foot-washing. But an
episode that will increase suspense by retarding the action must be so
constructed that it will not fill the present entirely, will not put the crisis,
whose resolution is being awaited, entirely out of the reader’s mind, and
thereby destroy the mood of suspense; the crisis and the suspense must continue,
must remain vibrant in the background. But Homer—and to this we shall have to
return later—knows no background. What he narrates is for the time being the
only present, and fills both
the
stage and the reader’s mind completely. So it is with the passage before us.
When the young Euryclea (vv. 401ff) sets the infant Odysseus on his
grandfather Autolycus’ lap after the banquet, the aged Euryclea, who a few
lines earlier had touched the wanderer’s foot, has entirely vanished from the
stage and from the reader’s mind.
Goethe
and Schiller, who, though not referring to this particular episode, exchanged
letters in April
1797 on the
subject of “the retarding element” in the Homeric poems in general, put it
in direct opposition to the element of suspense—the latter word is not used,
but is clearly implied when the “retarding” procedure is opposed, as
something proper to epic, to tragic procedure (letters of April 19,
21, and 22).
The “retarding
element,” the “going back and forth” by means of episodes, seems to me,
too, in the Homeric poems, to be opposed to any tensional and suspensive
striving toward a goal, and doubtless Schiller is right in regard to Homer when
he says that what he gives us is “simply the quiet existence and operation of
things in accordance with their natures”; Homer’s goal is “already present
in every point of his progress” But both Schiller and Goethe raise Homer’s
procedure to the level of a law for epic poetry in general, and Schiller’s
words quoted above are meant to be universally binding upon the epic poet, in
contradistinction from the tragic. Yet in both modern arid ancient times, there
are important epic works which are composed throughout with no “retarding
element” in this sense but, on the contrary, with suspense throughout, and
which perpetually “rob us of our emotional freedom”—which power Schiller
will grant only to the tragic poet. And besides it seems to me undemonstrable
and improbable that this procedure of Homeric poetry was directed by aesthetic
considerations or even by an aesthetic feeling of the sort postulated by Goethe
and Schiller. The effect, to be sure, is precisely that which they describe, and
is, furthermore, the actual source of the conception of epic which they
themselves hold, and with them all writers decisively influenced by classical
antiquity. But the true cause of the impression of “retardation” appears to
me to lie elsewhere—namely, in the need of the Homeric style to leave nothing
which it mentions half in darkness and unexternalized.
The
excursus upon the origin of Odysseus’ scar is not basically different from the
many passages in which a newly introduced character, or even a newly appearing
object or implement, though it be in the thick of a battle, is described as to
its nature and origin; or in which, upon the appearance of a god, we are told
where he last was, what he
was doing there, and by what road he reached the scene; indeed, even the Homeric
epithets seem to me in the final analysis to be traceable to the same need for
an externalization of phenomena in terms perceptible to the senses. Here is the
scar, which comes up in the course of the narrative; and Homer’s feeling
simply will not permit him to see it appear out of the darkness of an
unilluminated past; it must be set in full light, and with it a portion of the
hero’s boyhood— just as, in the Iliad, when the first ship is already
burning and the Myrmidons finally arm that they may hasten to help, there is
still time not only for the wonderful simile of the wolf, not only for the order
of the Myrmidon host, but also for a detailed account of the ancestry of several
subordinate leaders (16, vv. 155).
To be
sure, the aesthetic effect thus produced was soon noticed and thereafter
consciously sought; but the more original cause must have lain in the basic im-pulse
of the Homeric style: to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form,
visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial
and temporal relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other
treatment: here too nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed. With the utmost
fullness, with an orderliness which even passion does not disturb, Homer’s
personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others,
they speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it. Much that
is terrible takes place in the Homeric poems, but it seldom takes place
wordlessly: Polyphemus talks to Odysseus; Odysseus talks to the suitors when he
begins to kill them; Hector and Achilles talk at length, before battle and
after; and no speech is so filled with anger or scorn that the particles which
express logical and grammatical connections are lacking or out of place. This
last observation is true, of course, not only of speeches but of the
presentation in general. The separate elements of a phenomenon are most clearly
placed in relation to one another; a large number of conjunctions, adverbs,
particles, and other syntactical tools, all clearly circumscribed and delicately
differentiated in meaning, delimit persons, things, and portions of incidents in
respect to one another, and at the same time bring them together in a continuous
and ever flexible connection; like the separate phenomena themselves, their
relationships—their temporal, local, causal, final, consecutive, comparative,
concessive, antithetical, and conditional limitations—are brought to light in
perfect fullness; so that a continuous rhythmic procession of phenomena passes
by, and never is there a form left
fragmentary or half-illuminated, never a lacuna, never a gap, never a glimpse of
unplumbed depths.
And
this procession of phenomena takes place in the foreground— that is, in a
local and temporal present which is absolute. One might think that the many
interpolations, the frequent moving back and forth, would create a sort of
perspective in time and place; but the Homeric style never gives any such
impression. The way in which any impression of perspective is avoided can be
clearly observed in the procedure for introducing episodes, a syntactical
construction with which every reader of Homer is familiar; it is used in the
passage we are considering, but can also be found in cases when the episodes are
much shorter. To the word scar (v. 393) there is first attached a relative
clause (“which once long ago a boar .
. ."), which
enlarges into a voluminous syntactical parenthesis; into this an independent
sentence unexpectedly intrudes (v. 396: “A god himself gave him .
. .“), which
quietly disentangles itself from syntactical subordination, until, with verse
399, an equally free syntactical treatment of the new content begins a new
present which continues unchallenged until, with verse 467 (“The old woman now
touched it...”), the scene which had been broken off is resumed. To be sure,
in the case of such long episodes as the one we are considering, a purely
syntactical connection with the principal theme would hardly have been possible;
but a connection with it through perspective would have been all the easier had
the content been arranged with that end in view; if, that is, the entire story
of the scar had been presented as a recollection which awakens in Odysseus’
mind at this particular moment. It would have been perfectly easy to do; the
story of the scar had only to be inserted two verses earlier, at the first
mention of the word scar, where the motifs “Odysseus” and “recollection”
were already at hand. But any such subjectivistic-perspectivistic procedure,
creating a foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the
depths of the past, is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style
knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective
present. And so the excursus does not begin until two lines later, when Euryclea
has discovered the scar—the possibility for a perspectivistic connection no
longer exists, and the story of the wound becomes an independent and exclusive
present.
The
genius of the Homeric style becomes even more apparent when it is compared with
an equally ancient and equally epic style from a different world of forms. I
shall attempt this comparison with the account of
the sacrifice of Isaac, a homogeneous narrative produced by the so-called
Elohist. The King James version translates the opening as follows (Genesis 22:
1):
“And it
came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said to him,
Abraham! and he said, Behold, here I am.” Even this opening startles us when
we come to it from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We are not told. The
reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one
place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come
from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or
depths. Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. He
does not come, like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethiopians, where he has been
enjoying a sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his reasons for
tempting Abraham so terribly. He has not, like Zeus, discussed them in set
speeches with other gods gathered in council; nor have the deliberations in his
own heart been presented to us; unexpected and mysterious, he enters the scene
from some unknown height or depth and calls: Abraham! It will at once be said
that this is to be explained by the
particular concept of God which the Jews held and which was wholly different
from that of the Greeks. True enough—but this constitutes no objection. For
how is the Jewish concept of God to be explained? Even their earlier God of the
desert was not fixed in form and content, and was alone; his lack of form, his
lack of local habitation, his singleness, was in the end not only maintained but
developed even further in competition with the comparatively far more manifest
gods of the surrounding Near Eastern world. The concept of God held by the Jews
is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing
things.
This
becomes still clearer if we now turn to the other person in the dialogue, to
Abraham. Where is he? We do not know. He says, indeed: Here I am—but the
Hebrew word means only something like “behold me,” and in any case is not
meant to indicate the actual place where Abraham is, but a moral position in
respect to God, who has called to him—Here am I awaiting thy command. Where he
is actually, whether in Beersheba or elsewhere, whether indoors or in the open
air, is not stated; it does not interest the narrator, the reader is not
informed; and what Abraham was doing when God called to him is left in the same
obscurity. To realize the difference, consider Hermes’ visit to Calypso, for
example, where command, journey, arrival and reception of the visitor, situation
and occupation of the person visited, are
set forth in many verses; and even on occasions when gods appear suddenly and
briefly, whether to help one of their favorites or to deceive or destroy some
mortal whom they hate, their bodily forms, and usually the manner of their
coming and going, are given in detail. Here, however, God appears without bodily
form (yet he “appears”), coming from some unspecified place—we only hear
his voice, and that utters nothing but a name, a name without an adjective,
without a descriptive epithet for the person spoken to, such as is the rule in
every Homeric address; and of Abraham too nothing is made perceptible except the
words in which he answers God: Hinne-ni, Behold me here—with which, to
be sure, a most touching gesture expressive of obedience and readiness is
suggested, but it is left to the reader to visualize it. Moreover the two
speakers are not on the same level: if we conceive of Abraham in the foreground,
where it might be possible to picture him as prostrate or kneeling or bowing
with outspread arms or gazing upward, God is not there too: Abraham’s words
and gestures are directed toward the depths of the picture or upward, but in any
case the undetermined, dark place from which the voice comes to him is not in
the foreground.
After
this opening, God gives his command, and the story itself begins: everyone knows
it; it unrolls with no episodes in a few independent sentences whose syntactical
connection is of the most rudimentary sort. In this atmosphere it is unthinkable
that an implement, a landscape through which the travelers passed, the
servingmen, or the ass, should be described, that their origin or descent or
material or appearance or usefulness should be set forth in terms of praise;
they do not even admit an adjective: they are serving-men, ass, wood, and knife,
and nothing else, without an epithet; they are there to serve the end which God
has commanded; what in other respects they were, are, or will be, remains in
darkness. A journey is made, because God has designated the place where the
sacrifice is to be performed; but we are told nothing about the journey except
that it took three days, and even that we are told in a mysterious way: Abraham
and his followers rose “early in the morning” and “went unto” the place
of which God had told him; on the third day he lifted up his eyes and saw the
place from afar. That gesture is the only gesture, is indeed the only occurrence
during the whole journey, of which we are told; and though its motivation lies
in the fact that the place is elevated, its uniqueness still heightens the
impression that the journey took place through a vacuum; it is as if, while he
traveled on, Abraham had
looked neither to the right nor to the left, had suppressed any sign of life in
his followers and himself save only their footfalls.
Thus
the journey is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the
contingent, a holding of the breath, a process which has no present, which is
inserted, like a blank duration, between what has passed and what lies ahead,
and which yet is measured: three days! Three such days positively demand the
symbolic interpretation which they later received. They began “early in the
morning.” But at what time on the third day did Abraham lift up his eyes and
see his goal? The text says nothing on the subject. Obviously not “late in the
evening,” for it seems that there was still time enough to climb the mountain
and make the sacrifice. So “early in the morning” is given, not as an
indication of time, but for the sake of its ethical significance; it is intended
to express the resolution, the promptness, the punctual obedience of the sorely
tried Abraham. Bitter to him is the early morning in which he saddles his ass,
calls his serving-men and his son Isaac, and sets out; but he obeys, he walks on
until the third day, then lifts up his eyes and sees the place. Whence he comes,
we do not know, hut the goal is clearly stated: Jeruel in the land of Moriah.
V/hat place this is meant to indicate is not clear—”Moriah” especially may
be a later correction of some other word. But in any case the goal was given,
and in any case it is a matter of some sacred spot which was to receive a
particular consecration by being connected with Abraham s sacrifice. Just as
little as “early in the morning” serves as a temporal indication does
“Jeruel in the land of Moriah” serve as a geographical indication; and in
both cases alike, the complementary indication is not given, for we know as
little of the hour at which Abraham lifted up his eyes as we do of the place
from which he set forth—Jeruel is significant not so much as the goal of an
earthly journey, in its geographical relation to other places, as through its
special election, through its relation to God, who designated it as the scene of
the act, and therefore it must be named.
In
the narrative itself, a third chief character appears: Isaac. While God and
Abraham, the serving-men, the ass, and the implements are simply named, without
mention of any qualities or any other sort of definition, Isaac once receives an
appositive; God says, “Take Isaac, thine only son, whom thou lovest.” But
this is not a characterization of Isaac as a person, apart from his relation to
his father and apart from the story; he may be handsome or ugly, intelligent or
stupid, tall or short, pleasant or unpleasant—we are not told. Only what we
need to know
about him as a personage in the action, here and now, is illuminated, so that it
may become apparent how terrible Abraham’s temptation is, and that God is
fully aware of it. By this example of the contrary, we see the significance of
the descriptive adjectives and digressions of the Homeric poems; with their
indications of the earlier and as it were absolute existence of the persons
described, they prevent the reader from concentrating exclusively on a present
crisis; even when the most terrible things are occurring, they prevent the
establishment of an overwhelming suspense. But here, in the story of Abraham’s
sacrifice, the overwhelming suspense is present; what Schiller makes the goal of
the tragic poet—to rob us of our emotional freedom, to turn our intellectual
and spiritual powers (Schiller says “our activity”) in one direction, to
concentrate them there—is effected in this Biblical narrative, which certainly
deserves the epithet epic.
We
find the same contrast if we compare the two uses of direct discourse. The
personages speak in the Bible story too; but their speech does not serve, as
does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts—on the contrary, it
serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed. God gives his command in
direct discourse, but he leaves his motives and his purpose unexpressed;
Abraham, receiving the command, says nothing and does what he has been told to
do. The conversation between Abraham and Isaac on the way to the place of
sacrifice is only an interruption of the heavy silence and makes it all the more
burdensome. The two of them, Isaac carrying the wood and Abraham with fire and a
knife, “went together.” Hesitantly, Isaac ventures to ask about the ram, and
Abraham gives the well-known answer. Then the text repeats: “So they went both
of them together.” Everything remains unexpressed.
It
would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these
two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand, externalized,
uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place,
connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and
feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with
very little of suspense. On the other hand, the externalization of only so much
of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left
in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what
lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for
interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by
the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated
with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that
extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and “fraught with
background.”
I
will discuss this term in some detail, lest it be misunderstood. I said above
that the Homeric style was “of the foreground” because, despite much going
back and forth, it yet causes what is momentarily being narrated to give the
impression that it is the only present, pure and without perspective. A
consideration of the Elohistic text teaches us that our term is capable of a
broader and deeper application. It shows that even the separate personages can
be represented as possessing “background”; God is always so represented in
the Bible, for he is not comprehensible in his presence, as is Zeus; it is
always only “something” of him that appears, he always extends into depths.
But even the human beings in the Biblical stories have greater depths of time,
fate, and consciousness than do the human beings in Homer; although they are
nearly always caught up in an event engaging all their faculties, they are not
so entirely immersed in its present that they do not remain continually
conscious of what has happened to them earlier and elsewhere; their thoughts and
feelings have more layers, are more entangled. Abraham’s actions are explained
not only by what is happening to him at the moment, nor yet only by his
character (as Achilles’ actions by his courage and his pride, and Odysseus’
by his versatility and foresightedness), but by his previous history; he
remembers, he is constantly conscious of, what God has promised him and what God
has already accomplished for him—his soul is torn between desperate rebellion
and hopeful expectation; his silent obedience is multilayered, has background.
Such a problematic psychological situation as this is impossible for any of the
Homeric heroes, whose destiny is clearly defined and who wake every morning as
if it were the first day of their lives: their emotions, though strong, are
simple and find expression instantly.
How
fraught with background, in comparison, are characters like Saul and David! How
entangled and stratified are such human relations as those between David and
Absalom, between David and Joab! Any such “background” quality of the
psychological situation as that which the story of Absalom’s death and its
sequel (II Samuel 18 and
19, by the
so-called Jahvist) rather suggests than expresses, is unthinkable in Homer. Here
we are confronted not merely with the psychological processes of characters
whose depth of background is veritably abysmal, but with a purely geographical
background too. For David is
absent from the battlefield; but the influence of his will and his feelings
continues to operate, they affect even Joab in his rebellion and disregard for
the consequences of his actions; in the magnificent scene with the two
messengers, both the physical and psychological background is fully manifest,
though the latter is never expressed. With this, compare, for example, how
Achilles, who sends Patroclus first to scout and then into battle, loses almost
all “presentness so long as he is not physically present. But the most
important thing is the “multilayeredness” of the individual character; this
is hardly to be met with in Homer, or at most in the form of a conscious
hesitation between two possible courses of action; otherwise, in Homer, the
complexity of the psychological life is shown only in the succession and
alternation of emotions; whereas the Jewish writers are able to express the
simultaneous existence of various layers of consciousness and the conflict
between them.
The
Homeric poems, then, though their intellectual, linguistic, and above all
syntactical culture appears to be so much more highly developed, are yet
comparatively simple in their picture of human beings; and no less so in their
relation to the real life which they describe in general. Delight in physical
existence is everything to them, and their highest aim is to make that delight
perceptible to us. Between battles and passions, adventures and perils, they
show us hunts, banquets, palaces and shepherds’ cots, athletic contests and
washing days—in order that we may see the heroes in their ordinary life, and
seeing them so, may take pleasure in their manner of enjoying their savory
present, a present which sends strong roots down into social usages, landscape,
and daily life. And thus they bewitch us and ingratiate themselves to us until
we live with them in the reality of their lives; so long as we are reading or
hearing the poems, it does not matter whether we know that all this is only
legend, “make-believe.” The oft-repeated reproach that Homer is a liar takes
nothing from his effectiveness, he does not need to base his story on historical
reality, his reality is powerful enough in itself; it ensnares us, weaving its
web around us, and that suffices him. And this “real” world into which we
are lured, exists for itself, contains nothing but itself; the Homeric poems
conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning. Homer
can be analyzed, as we have essayed to do here, but he cannot be interpreted.
Later allegorizing trends have tried their arts of interpretation upon him, but
to no avail. He resists any such treatment; the interpretations are forced and
foreign, they do not crystallize into a unified doctrine.
The general considerations which occasionally occur (in our episode, for
example, v.
360:
that in
misfortune men age quickly) reveal a calm acceptance of the basic facts of human
existence, but with no compulsion to brood over them, still less any passionate
impulse either to rebel against them or to embrace them in an ecstasy of
submission.
It
is all very different in the Biblical stories. Their aim is not to bewitch the
senses, and if nevertheless they produce lively sensory effects, it is only
because the moral, religious, and psychological phenomena which are their sole
concern are made concrete in the sensible matter of life. But their religious
intent involves an absolute claim to historical truth. The story of Abraham and
Isaac is not better established than the story of Odysseus, Penelope, and
Euryclea; both are legendary. But the Biblical narrator, the Elohist, had to
believe in the objective truth of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice—the
existence of the sacred ordinances of life rested upon the truth of this and
similar stories. He had to believe in it passionately; or else (as many
rationalistic interpreters believed and perhaps still believe) he had to be a
conscious liar—no harmless liar like Homer, who lied to give pleasure, but a
political liar with a definite end in view, lying in the interest of a claim to
absolute authority.
To
me, the rationalistic interpretation seems psychologically absurd; but even if
we take it into consideration, the relation of the Elohist to the truth of his
story still remains a far more passionate and definite one than is Homer’s
relation. The Biblical narrator was obliged to write exactly what his belief in
the truth of the tradition (or, from the rationalistic standpoint, his interest
in the truth of it) demanded of him—in either case, his freedom in creative or
representative imagination was severely limited; his activity was perforce
reduced to composing an effective version of the pious tradition. What he
produced, then, was not primarily oriented toward “realism” (if he succeeded
in being realistic, it was merely a means, not an end); it was oriented toward
truth. Woe to the man who did not believe it! One can perfectly well entertain
historical doubts on the subject of the Trojan War or of Odysseus’ wanderings,
and still, when reading Homer, feel precisely the effects he sought to produce;
but without believing in Abraham’s sacrifice, it is impossible to put the
narrative of it to the use for which it was written. Indeed, we must go even
further. The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far more urgent than
Homer’s, it is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims. The world of the
Scripture stories is not satisfied with
claiming to be a historically true reality—it insists that it is the only real
world, is destined for autocracy. All other scenes, issues, and ordinances have
no right to appear independently of it, and it is promised that all of them, the
history of all mankind, will be given their
due place within its frame, will be subordinated to it. The Scripture stories do
not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that
they may please us and enchant us—they seek to subject us, and
if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels.
Let no one object that this goes too far, that not the stories, but the religious doctrine, raises the claim to absolute authority; because the stories are not, like Homer’s, simply narrated “reality.” Doctrine and promise are incarnate in them and inseparable from them; for that very reason they are fraught with “background” and mysterious, containing a second, concealed meaning. In the story of Isaac, it is not only God’s intervention at the beginning and the end, but even the factual and psychological elements which come between, that are mysterious, merely touched upon, fraught with background; and therefore they require subtle investigation and interpretation, they demand them. Since so much in the story is dark and incomplete, and since the reader knows that God is a hidden God, his effort to interpret it constantly finds something new to feed upon. Doctrine and the search for enlightenment are inextricably connected with the physical side of the narrative—the latter being more than simple “reality”; indeed they are in constant danger of losing their own reality, as very soon happened when interpretation reached such proportions that the real vanished.
If the text of the
Biblical narrative, then, is so greatly in need of
interpretation on the basis of its own content, its claim to absolute
authority forces it still further in the same direction. Far from
seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours,
it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world,
feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history. This
becomes increasingly difficult the further our historical environment is removed
from that of the Biblical books; and if these nevertheless maintain their claim
to absolute authority, it is inevitable that they themselves be adapted through
interpretative transformation. This was
for a long time comparatively easy; as late as the European
Middle Ages it was possible to represent Biblical events as ordinary
phenomena of contemporary life, the methods of interpretation themselves
forming the basis for such a treatment. But when, through too great a change in
environment and through the awakening of a critical consciousness,
this becomes impossible, the Biblical claim to absolute authority is
jeopardized; the method of interpretation is scorned and rejected, the Biblical
stories become ancient legends, and the doctrine they had contained, now
dissevered from them, becomes a disembodied image.
As
a result of this claim to absolute authority, the method of interpretation
spread to traditions other than the Jewish. The Homeric poems present a definite
complex of events whose boundaries in space and time are clearly delimited;
before it, beside it, and after it, other complexes of events, which do not
depend upon it, can be conceived without conflict and without difficulty. The
Old Testament, on the other hand, presents universal history: it begins with the
beginning of time, with the creation of the world, and will end with the Last
Days, the fulfilling of the Covenant, with which the world will come to an end.
Everything else that happens in the world can only be conceived as an element in
this sequence; into it everything that is known about the world, or at least
everything that touches upon the history of the Jews, must be fitted as an
ingredient of the divine plan; and as this too became possible only by
interpreting the new material as it poured in, the need for interpretation
reaches out beyond the original Jewish-Israelitish realm of reality—for
example to Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Roman history; interpretation in a
determined direction becomes a general method of comprehending reality; the new
and strange world which now comes into view and which, in the form in which it
presents itself, proves to be wholly unutilizable within the Jewish religious
frame, must be so interpreted that it can find a place there. But this process
nearly always also reacts upon the frame, which requires enlarging and
modifying. The most striking piece of interpretation of this sort occurred in
the first century of the Christian era, in consequence of Paul’s mission to
the Gentiles: Paul and the Church Fathers reinterpreted the entire Jewish
tradition as a succession of figures prognosticating the appearance of Christ,
and assigned the Roman Empire its proper place in the divine plan of salvation.
Thus while, on the one hand, the reality of the Old Testament presents itself as
complete truth with a claim to sole authority, on the other hand that very claim
forces it to a constant interpretative change in its own content; for millennia
it undergoes an incessant and active development with the life of man in Europe.
The
claim of the Old Testament stories to represent universal history, their
insistent relation—a relation constantly redefined by conflicts—to a
single and hidden God, who yet shows himself and who
guides universal history by promise and exaction, gives these stories
an entirely different perspective from any the Homeric poems can possess.
As a composition, the Old Testament is incomparably less unified than the
Homeric poems, it is more obviously pieced together—but the various components
all belong to one concept of universal history
and its interpretation. If certain elements survived which did
not immediately fit in, interpretation took care of them; and so the
reader is at every moment aware of the universal religio-historical perspective
which gives the individual stories their general meaning and purpose. The
greater the separateness and horizontal disconnection of the stories and groups
of stories in relation to one another, compared
with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the stronger is their general
vertical connection, which holds them all together and which is entirely
lacking in Homer. Each of the great figures of the Old Testament, from Adam to
the prophets, embodies a moment of this vertical connection. God chose and
formed these men to the end of embodying
his essence and will—yet choice and formation do not coincide,
for the latter proceeds gradually, historically, during the earthly life
of him upon whom the choice has fallen. How the process is accomplished,
what terrible trials such a formation inflicts, can be seen from our story of
Abraham’s sacrifice. Herein lies the reason why the great figures of the Old
Testament are so much more fully developed, so much more fraught with their own
biographical past, so much more distinct as individuals, than are the Homeric
heroes. Achilles and Odysseus are
splendidly described in many wel-lordered words, epithets cling to them, their
emotions are constantly displayed in their words and deeds—but they have no
development, and their life-histories are clearly set forth once and for all. So
little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that
most of them—Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles—appear to be of an age fixed from
the very first. Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many
events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development,
shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was
when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But
what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of
his blessing and the old man whose favorite son has been torn to pieces by a
wild beast!—between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord’s
jealousy, and the old king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the
Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not!
The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is is more of an
individual than the young man; for it is only during the course of an eventful
life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history
of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation
undergone by those whom God has chosen to be examples. Fraught with their
development, sometimes even aged to the verge of dissolution, they show a
distinct stamp of individuality entirely foreign to the Homeric heroes. Time can
touch the latter only outwardly, and even that change is brought to our
observation as little as possible; whereas the stern hand of God is ever upon
.the Old Testament figures; he has not only made them once and for all and
chosen them, but he continues to work upon them, bends them and kneads them,
and, without destroying them in essence, produces from them forms which their
youth gave no grounds for anticipating. The objection that the biographical
element of the Old Testament often springs from the combination of several
legendary personages does not apply; for this combination is a part of the
development of the text. And how much wider is the pendulum swing of their lives
than that of the Homeric heroes! For they are bearers of the divine will, and
yet they are fallible, subject to misfortune and humiliation—and in the midst
of misfortune and in their humiliation their acts and words reveal the
transcendent majesty of God. There is hardly one of them who does not, like
Adam, undergo the deepest humiliation—and hardly one who is not deemed worthy
of God’s personal intervention and personal inspiration. Humiliation and
elevation go far deeper and far higher than in Homer, and they belong basically
together. The poor beggar Odysseus is only masquerading, but Adam is really cast
down, Jacob really a refugee, Joseph really in the pit and then a slave to be
bought and sold. But their greatness, rising out of humiliation, is almost
superhuman and an image of God’s greatness. The reader clearly feels how the
extent of the pendulum’s swing is connected with the intensity of the personal
history—precisely the most extreme circumstances, in which we are immeasurably
forsaken and in despair, or immeasurably joyous and exalted, give us, if we
survive them, a personal stamp which is recognized as the product of a rich
existence, a rich development. And very often, indeed generally, this element of
development gives the Old Testament stories a historical character, even when
the subject is purely legendary and traditional.
Homer
remains within the legendary with all his material, whereas the
material of the Old Testament comes closer and closer to history as the
narrative proceeds; in the stories of David the historical report predominates.
Here too, much that is legendary still remains, as for example the story of
David and Goliath; but much—and the most essential—consists in things which
the narrators knew from their own experience or from firsthand testimony. Now
the difference between legend and history is in most cases easily perceived by a
reasonably experienced reader. It is a difficult matter, requiring careful
historical and philological training, to distinguish the true from the synthetic
or the biased in a historical presentation; but it is easy to separate the
historical from the legendary in general. Their structure is different. Even
where the legendary does not immediately betray itself by elements of the
miraculdus, by the repetition of well-known standard motives, typical patterns
and themes, through neglect of clear details of time and place, and the like, it
is generally quickly recognizable by its composition. It runs far too smoothly.
All cross-currents, all friction, all that is casual, secondary to the main
events and themes, everything unresolved, truncated, and uncertain, which
confuses the clear progress of the action and the simple orientation of the
actors, has disappeared. The historical event which we witness, or learn from
the testimony of those who witnessed it, runs much more variously,
contradictorily, and confusedly; not until it has produced results in a definite
domain are we able, with their help, to classify it to a certain extent; and how
often the order to which we think we have attained becomes doubtful again, how
often we ask ourselves if the data before us have not led us to a far too simple
classification of the original events! Legend arranges its material in a simple
and straightforward way; it detaches it from its contemporary historical
context, so that the latter will not confuse it; it knows only clearly outlined
men who act from few and simple motives and the continuity of whose feelings and
actions remains uninterrupted. In the legends of martyrs, for example, a
stiff-necked and fanatical persecutor stands over against an equally
stiff-necked and fanatical victim; and a situation so complicated—that is to
say, so real and historical—as that in which the “persecutor” Pliny finds
himself in his celebrated letter to Trajan on the subject of the Christians, is
unfit for legend. And that is still a comparatively simple case. Let the reader
think of the history which we are ourselves witnessing; anyone who, for example,
evaluates the behavior of individual men and groups of men at the time of the
rise of National Socialism in Germany, or the behavior of individual peoples and
states before and during the last war, will feel how difficult it is to
represent historical themes in general, and how unfit they are for legend; the
historical comprises a great number of contradictory motives in each individual,
a hesitation and ambiguous groping on the part of groups; only seldom (as in the
last war) does a more or less plain situation, comparatively simple to describe,
arise, and even such a situation is subject to division below the surface, is
indeed almost constantly in danger of losing its simplicity; and the motives of
all the interested parties are so complex that the slogans of propaganda can be
composed only through the crudest simplification—with the result that friend
and foe alike can often employ the same ones. To write history is so difficult
that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.
It
is clear that a large part of the life of David as given in the Bible contains
history and not legend. In Absalom’s rebellion, for example, or in the scenes
from David’s last days, the contradictions and crossing of motives both in
individuals and in the general action have become so concrete that it is
impossible to doubt the historicity of the information conveyed. Now the men who
composed the historical parts are often the same who edited the older legends
too; their peculiar religious concept of man in history, which we have attempted
to describe above, in no way led them to a legendary simplification of events;
and so it is only natural that, in the legendary passages of the Old Testament,
historical structure is frequently discernible—of course, not in the sense
that the traditions are examined as to their credibility according to the
methods of scientific criticism; but simply to the extent that the tendency to a
smoothing down and harmonizing of events, to a simplification of motives, to a
static definition of characters which avoids conflict, vacillation, and
development, such as are natural to legendary structure, does not predominate in
the Old Testament world of legend. Abraham, Jacob, or even Moses produces a more
concrete, direct, and historical impression than the figures of the Homeric
world—not because they are better described in terms of sense (the contrary is
the case) but because the confused, contradictory multiplicity of events, the
psychological and factual cross-purposes, which true history reveals, have not
disappeared in the representation but still remain clearly perceptible. In the
stories of David, the legendary, which only later scientific criticism makes
recognizable as such, imperceptibly passes into the historical; and even in the
legendary, the problem of the classification and interpretation of human history
is already passionately
apprehended—a problem which later shatters the framework of historical
composition and completely overruns it with prophecy; thus the Old Testament, in
so far as it is concerned with human events, ranges through all three domains:
legend, historical reporting, and interpretative historical theology.
Connected
with the matters just discussed is the fact that the Greek text seems more
limited and more static in respect to the circle of personages involved in the
action and to their political activity. In the recognition scene with which we
began, there appears, aside from Odysseus and Penelope, the housekeeper Euryclea,
a slave whom Odysseus’ father Laertes had bought long before. She, like the
swineherd Eumaeus, has spent her life in the service of Laertes’ family; like
Eumaeus, she is closely connected with their fate, she loves them and shares
their interests and feelings. But she has no life of her own, no feelings of her
own; she has only the life and feelings of her master. Eumaeus too, though he
still remembers that he was born a freeman and indeed of a noble house (he was
stolen as a boy), has, not only in fact but also in his own feeling, no longer a
life of his own, he is entirely involved in the life of his masters. Yet these
two characters are the only ones whom Homer brings to life who do not belong to
the ruling class. Thus we become conscious of the fact that in the Homeric poems
life is enacted only among the ruling class—others appear only in the role of
servants to that class. The ruling class is still so strongly patriarchal, and
still itself so involved in the daily activities of domestic life, that one is
sometimes likely to forget their rank. But they are unmistakably a sort of
feudal aristocracy, whose men divide their lives between war, hunting,
marketplace councils, and feasting, while the women supervise the maids in the
house. As a social picture, this world is completely stable; wars take place
only between different groups of the ruling class; nothing ever pushes up from
below. In the early stories of the Old Testament the patriarchal condition is
dominant too, but since the people involved are individual nomadic or
half-nomadic tribal leaders, the social picture gives a much less stable
impression; class distinctions are not felt. As soon as the people completely
emerges—that is, after the exodus from Egypt—its activity is always
discernible, it is often in ferment, it frequently intervenes in events not only
as a whole but also in separate groups and through the medium of separate
individuals who come forward; the origins of prophecy seem to lie in the
irrepressible politico-religious spontaneity of the people. We receive the
impression that the movements emerging from
the depths of the people of Israel-Judah must have been of a wholly different
nature from those even of the later ancient democracies—of a different nature
and far more elemental.
With
the more profound historicity and the more profound social activity of the Old
Testament text, there is connected yet another important distinction from Homer:
namely, that a different conception of the elevated style and of the sublime is
to be found here. Homer, of course, is not afraid to let the realism of daily
life enter into the sublime and tragic; our episode of the scar is an example,
we see how the quietly depicted, domestic scene of the foot-washing is
incorporated into the pathetic and sublime action of Odysseus’ home-coming.
From the rule of the separation of styles which was later almost universally
accepted and which specified that the realistic depiction of daily life was
incompatible with the sublime and had a place only in comedy or, carefully
stylized, in idyl—from any such rule Homer is still far removed. And yet he is
closer to it than is the Old Testament. For the great and sublime events in the
Homeric poems take place far more exclusively and unmistakably among the members
of a ruling class; and these are far more untouched in their heroic elevation
than are the Old Testament figures, who can fall much lower in dignity
(consider, for example, Adam, Noah, David, Job); and finally, domestic realism,
the representation of daily life, remains in Homer in the peaceful realm of the
idyllic, whereas, from the very first, in the Old Testament stories, the
sublime, tragic, and problematic take shape precisely in the domestic and
commonplace: scenes such as those between Cain and Abel, between Noah and his
sons, between Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, between Rebekah, Jacob, and Esau, and
so on, are inconceivable in the Homeric style. The entirely different ways of
developing conflicts are enough to account for this. In the Old Testament
stories the peace of daily life in the house, in the fields, and among the
flocks, is undermined by jealousy over election and the promise of a blessing,
and complications arise which would be utterly incomprehensible to the Homeric
heroes. The latter must have palpable and clearly expressible reasons for their
conflicts and enmities, and these work themselves out in free battles; whereas,
with the former, the perpetually smoldering jealousy and the connection between
the domestic and the spiritual, between the paternal blessing and the divine
blessing, lead to daily life being permeated with the stuff of conflict, often
with poison. The sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the
everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only
actually unseparated but basically inseparable.
We
have compared these two texts, and, with them, the two kinds of style they
embody, in order to reach a starting point for an investigation
into the literary representation of reality in European culture. The two styles,
in their opposition, represent basic types: on the one
hand fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted
connection, free expression, all events in the foreground, displaying
unmistakable meanings, few elements of historical development and of
psychological perspective; on the other hand, certain parts brought into high
relief, others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the
unexpressed, “background” quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for
interpretation, universal-historical claims,
development of the concept of the historically becoming, and pre
occupation with the problematic.
Homer’s
realism is, of course, not to be equated with classical-antique realism in
general; for the separation of styles, which did not
develop until later, permitted no such leisurely and externalized
description of everyday happenings; in tragedy especially there was no
room for it; furthermore, Greek culture very soon encountered the
phenomena of historical becoming and of the “multilayeredness” of
the human problem, and dealt with them in its fashion; in Roman
realism, finally, new and native concepts are added. We shall go into
these later changes in the antique representation of reality when the occasion
arises; on the whole, despite them, the basic tendencies of the Homeric style,
which we have attempted to work out, remained effective and determinant down
into late antiquity.
Since
we are using the two styles, the Homeric and the Old Testament, as starting
points, we have taken them as finished products, as they appear in the texts; we
have disregarded everything that pertains to
their origins, and thus have left untouched the question whether
their peculiarities were theirs from the beginning or are to be referred
wholly or in part to foreign influences. Within the limits of our purpose, a
consideration of this question is not necessary; for it is in their full
development, which they reached in early times, that the two styles exercised
their determining influence upon the representation of reality in European
literature.
When the housekeeper Euryclea discovers the scar on Odysseus' leg and thus recognizes him when no one else knows who the stranger is the action is externalized and narrated in leisurely fashion. The events are clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear -- wholly expressed, orderly even in their ardor -- are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved.
The element of suspense is very slight in the Homeric poems. The digressions are not meant to keep the reader in suspense, but rather to relax the tension. Homer knows no background. What he narrates is for the time being the only present, and fills both the stage and reader's mind completely.
The "retarding element," the "going back and forth" by means of episodes, seems too, in the Homeric poems, to be opposed to any tensional and suspensive striving toward a goal, and doubtless Schiller was right in regard to Homer when he said that what he gives us is "simply the quiet existence and operation of things in accordance with their natures." Schiller's words are meant to be universally binding upon the epic poet, in contradistinction from the tragic. Suspense throughout is meant to "rob us of our emotional freedom."
But Auerbach disagrees that such is the case with all epics with regard to retardation -- which Schiller, as far as the absence of "emotional freedom," will grant only the tragic poets. For Auerbach, the true cause of the impression of retardation appears to lie elsewhere -- namely, in the need of the Homeric style to leave nothing which it mentions half in darkness and unexternalized.
The basic impulse of the Homeric style was to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. This procession of phenomena takes place in the foreground, that is, in a local and temporal present which is absolute. Any such subjectivistic-perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past, is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.
The incident with Odysseus he compares to the test of Abraham with regard to the sacrifice of Isaac. When God speaks to Abraham and he then answers, where are the two speakers? The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things, which lies at the heart of the comparison of the two stories. Abraham's answer to God, "Here I am "(more like "behold me" [Hinne-ni]) is not meant to indicate the actual place where Abraham is, but a moral position in respect to God, who has called to him. Moreover, the two speakers are not on the same level: if we conceive of Abraham in the foreground, God is not there too in the foreground.
We are told nothing of the journey except that it took three days. Even the place is ambiguous -- "Jeruel in the land of Moriah" -- only has significance as a geographical place since it has special relation to God as designating the scene of the act, though it must not really be named.
In the story of Abraham's sacrifice, the overwhelming suspense is present to rob us of our emotional freedom, to turn our intellectual and spiritual powers in once direction, to concentrate them there. Unlike Homer, to externalize thoughts, on the contrary, this serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed. Homer gives us the immediate present, pure and without perspective. The most important thing in the Abraham story is the "multi-layerdness" of the individual character; this is hardly to be met with in Homer, or at most in the form of a conscious hesitation between two possible courses of action; otherwise, in Homer, the complexity of the psychological life is shown only in the succession and alternation of emotions; whereas the Jewish writers are able to express the simultaneous existence of various layers of consciousness and the conflict between them.
The Homeric poems, then, though their intellectual, linguistic, and above all syntactical culture appears to be so much more highly developed, are yet comparatively simple in their picture of human beings. Delight in physical existence is everything to them. They conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning.
But the Biblical narrator, the Elohist, had to
believe in the objective truth of the story of Abraham's sacrifice -- the
existence of the sacred ordinances of life rested upon the truth of this and
similar stories. The Bible
narrator was obliged to write exactly what his belief in the truth of the
tradition demanded of him -- in either case, his freedom in creative or
representative imagination was severely limited; his activity was perforce
reduced to composing an effective version of the pious tradition.
What he produced, then, was not primarily oriented toward
"realism"; it was oriented toward "truth."
[Note: Speiser doesn't readily agree that the story is entirely the
work of the Elohist; he sees J's hand in the story because of the
characterization. It may have
been that a redactor changed the name of the God to "Elohim" --
certainly, God is later referred to "Yahweh" within the story.
At the least, there may be an imposition of E upon J or vice versa by
some later redactor.]
The Bible's claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer's, it is tyrannical -- it excludes all other claims. The Scripture stories do not, like Homer's, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us -- they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels. Doctrine and promise are incarnate in them and inseparable from them; for that very reason they are fraught with "background" and mysterious, containing a second, concealed meaning.
In the story of Isaac, it is not only God's
intervention at the beginning and the end, but even the factual and
psychological elements which come between, that are mysterious, merely touched
upon, fraught with background; and therefore they require subtle investigation
and interpretation. Far from
seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours,
it seeks to overcome our reality.
Different Styles: Greek and Hebrew:
The Homeric poems present a definite complex of events whose boundaries in space and time are clearly delimited; before it, beside it, and after it, other complexes of events, which do not depend upon it, can be conceived without conflict and without difficulty. Interpretation in a determined direction becomes a general method of comprehending reality. But this process nearly always also reacts upon the frame, which requires enlarging and modifying.
In the Old Testament, if certain elements survived which did not immediately fit in, interpretation took care of them. And so the reader is at every moment aware of the universal religio-historical perspective which gives the individual stories their general meaning and purpose. The greater the separateness and horizontal disconnection of the stories and groups of stories in relation to one another, compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the stronger is their general vertical connection, which holds them all together and which is entirely lacking in Homer.
The Old Testament writer has not only made them once and for all and chosen them, but he continues to work upon them, bends them and kneads them, and, without destroying them in essence, produces from them forms which their youth gave no grounds for anticipating. And in the characterization, there is hardly one of them who does not, like Adam, undergo the deepest humiliation.
It is easy to separate the historical from the legendary in general. Their structure is different. Even where the legendary does not immediately betray itself by elements of the miraculous, by the repetition of well-known standard motives, typical patterns and themes, through neglect of clear details of time and place, and the like, it is generally quickly recognizable by its composition. It runs far too smoothly.
The historical event which we witness, or learn from the testimony of those who witnessed it, runs much more variously, contradictorily, and confusedly; not until it has produced results in a definite domain are we able, with their help, to classify it to a certain extent. Legend arranges its material in a simple and straightforward way; it detaches it from its contemporary historical context, so that the latter will not confuse it. The Old Testament, in so far as it is concerned with human events, ranges through all three domains: legend, historical reporting, and interpretative historical theology.
In the Homeric poems life is enacted only among the ruling class -- others appear only in the role of servants to that class. As a social picture, this world is completely stable; wars take place only between different groups of the ruling class; nothing ever pushes up from below. The world is firmly patriarchal. In the early stories of the Old Testament the patriarchal condition is dominant too, but, given the nomadic existence, the social picture gives a much less stable impression; class distinctions are not felt.
So too the Old Testament has a different conception of the elevated style and of the sublime that is found there. Homer, of course, is not afraid to let the realism of daily life enter into the sublime and tragic -- a later classical tradition would not do so. Yet he is closer to it than is the Old Testament. For the great and sublime events in the Homeric poems take place far more exclusively and unmistakably among the members of a ruling class. In the Old Testament figures can fall much lower in dignity (consider, for example, Adam, Noah, David, Job). In the Old Testament stories, the sublime, tragic, and problematic take shape precisely in the domestic and commonplace.
The sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only actually un-separated but basically inseparable.
The two styles, in their opposition, represent basic types: on the one hand fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events in the foreground, displaying unmistakable meanings, few elements of historical development and of psychological perspective; on the other hand, certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, "background" quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation, universal-historical claims, development of the concept of the historically becoming, and preoccupation with the problematic.
Homer's realism is, of course, not to be equated with classical-antique realism in general; for the separation of styles, which did not develop until later, permitted no such leisurely and externalized description of everyday happenings; in tragedy especially there was no room for it.