bibliocentrism. It is evidence rather of renewed primary engagement with the
actual foundation of Western intellectual culture, evidence that Scripture
continued to occupy a unique ontological as well as hermeneutic status in
humanistic, university discourse beyond the high Middle Ages well into the
time of the Reformation. I do not mean that theipse verbumof Scripture
is everywhere obtrusively present in phrasing or citation as we mightfind
it in the early monastic writings,^18 or over the centuries in the Scripture-
saturated writings of suchfigures as Bernard of Clairvaux, Jeremy Taylor,
John Bunyan, and John Milton. I refer rather to the presuppositional and
teleologicalframeworkeven in such disparate scientists as Robert Boyle,
Isaac Newton, and Henri Poincarré, or in philosophers such as John Locke,
Blaise Pascal, Soren Kierkegaard, and Jacques Maritain, in poets such as
William Cowper, Goethe, Charlotte Bronte, the Brownings, T. S. Eliot, and
Paul Claudel, not to mention the presuppositions of legal thinkers such as
Henri de Bracton, Sir Edward Coke, F. W. Maitland, and Sir William
Blackstone. Yet here again, even a thumbnail list can be revelatory, for
those who know these works, of the character of formation in the human-
ities as we know them.^19
In all of these authors, biblical allusion and plenitude of biblical idiom is a
reflex of something deeper. In areas of study as diverse as theology, science,
mathematics, poetry, and law, in the Western tradition the Bible became what
a Platonist might call the‘intelligible object’but I would prefer to call rather an
ontological objectof intellectual reflection—invisible but present, and pro-
vidingfirst principles—even when the immediate epistemological object is
apparently something else.^20 In fact, the presence of Scripture as ontological
object often can be felt even when the Bible or biblical tradition is being
explicitlychallenged, as it is, for example, in the opening scenes of Goethe’s
Faust. Though Goethe’s theological challenge to the authority of both Scrip-
ture and tradition is explicit, in fact the text of Scripture remains critically
‘present’throughout his great Romantic drama in one allusion after another.
As with all similar attempts, literary and pseudo-theological, it is of the highest
order of tribute to Scripture’s living presence as ontological object that all
Goethe’s ambitions boil down to a wish not merely to translate but rather
rewrite the Bible.^21 The same sort of thing, but here in respect of more overt
autobiography, might be said of Rousseau’sConfessions, a kind of rascal’s
(^18) Cf. Wilken,Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 26.
(^19) On the legal writers, see D. Seaborne Davies,The Bible in English Law(London: Jewish
Historical Society of England, 1954), 3–23.
(^20) C. D. Broad,The Mind and its Place in Nature(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1925),
141ff., defines an ontological object as‘the real or existing object of an act of knowledge as
distinct from the epistemological object’, its‘object envisioned’, whether veridical or illusory.
(^21) Jeffrey,People of the Book, 255–9.
Scripture in theStudiumand the Rise of the Humanities 171