Biblical Style

the principle of mixed styles makes its way into the writings of the Fathers from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The true heart of the Christian doctrine — Incarnation and Passion — was totally incompatible with the principle of the separation of styles.

Auerbach argues that biblical style is constitutively defined by the mixing of high and low registers, a formal necessity dictated by the doctrine of Incarnation itself.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis

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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.

Auerbach identifies the absolute claim to historical truth as the defining feature that separates biblical narrative style from the pleasurable fiction of Homeric epic.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis

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it portrays something which neither the poets nor the historians of antiquity ever set out to portray: the birth of a spiritual movement in the depths of the common people, from within the everyday occurrences of contemporary life

Auerbach demonstrates that biblical style uniquely dignifies common life as the vehicle of spiritual transformation, a capacity radically alien to classical elevated style.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953thesis

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extraordinary protagonists, for example, of his serious or tragic narratives, who speak and are described in a language replete with Biblical overtones — not demigods, kings, noblemen, warriors … but also the ignominious, the disinherited, the criminal, and the outcast

Abrams shows Wordsworth consciously deploying biblical stylistic logic — the elevation of the lowly and outcast to tragic dignity — as a subversion of Neoclassic hierarchical decorum.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting

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if an occurrence like the sacrifice of Isaac is interpreted as prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ … then a connection is established between two events which are linked neither temporally nor causally

Auerbach's analysis of figural interpretation reveals how biblical style organizes temporal reality vertically through divine providence rather than through horizontal narrative causality.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting

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one, written by a nomophýlax, is modelled on the Book of Job and Lamentations; another … opens with a quotation from the Psalms lamenting Jerusalem, but continues to relate the last hours of the Emperor in thoroughly popular style and vernacular language

Alexiou documents how medieval Greek lament writers drew on biblical stylistic models alongside classical ones, producing a multi-register synthesis in which scriptural forms inflect vernacular performance.

Alexiou, Margaret, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 1974supporting

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Throughout his career, Rembrandt was a painter of impressive religious images. Biblical scenes were one of his stocks in trade. He became famous for them. In some, he included himself as one of the characters in the scene.

Stein notes Rembrandt's sustained engagement with biblical imagery as a vehicle for self-portraiture, suggesting how biblical representational conventions mediate the individuation process in visual art.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998aside

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This is the crucial characteristic which sets Augustine wholly outside the style of his age … he feels and directly presents human life, and it lives before our eyes.

Auerbach identifies Augustine's living dramatic presentation of human interiority as a stylistic inheritance from the Judaeo-Christian tradition that sets him apart from the rhetorical conventions of late antiquity.

Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953aside

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