Apple blossoms: Bible values in secular literature

Abstract

This study seeks to determine the Bible's influence on secular literature. It is a work in rhetoric, literary history and criticism, language, and the Bible. The questions on which it turns are: (1) What role does the Bible play in secular literature? (2) How does literature, modern British and American in particular, reflect its mythological and ethical Judeo-Christian heritage? The answers to these questions have led to the discovery that Bible values--literal and moral--are the very axes upon which all rhetoric turns. Literal Bible values are the Word's myths, archetypes, and language; and moral Bible values are the Ten Commandments and the Eleventh Commandment of Love. This study demonstrates both the direction and the manner in which these values pervade, and propel, secular literature (non-fiction and belles lettres). It also shows how the domain of rhetoric (Man, Language, Knowledge, Art, & Self) is concretely informed and directed by Bible values, literal and moral, and how the Word, or God, is visibly working in the very structures of language and even rhetoric. The scholarship emphasizes the work of Charles Hampden-Turner (social sciences, philosophy, and theology), Richard M. Weaver and Wayne Booth (rhetoric) and Northrop Frye (literary criticism), though others are incorporated as appropriate. The criticism is rhetorical and focuses on many of the great works of English and American literature, highlighting Chaucer, Milton, Yeats, and Hemingway, among others. As Augustine's interpretation of the Bible lies at the root of our mythological conditioning, and thus all our secular literature, his teachings on the nature of rhetoric and on how to achieve maximum effects are also incorporated. In addition, the great classical and modern rhetoricians have profoundly influenced the definitions, processes, and figuration of the issues treated. And the Bible's teachings on these issues, as well as its literal and moral values, are embedded in the text to maximize the medium as the message. Some of the issues treated are: the vocabulary of Meta-Rhetoric with extended definitions of the verbal universe, cultural orbit, knowledge, language, rhetoric, man, and self; the clarification of our cultural assumptions, or dogmas of Modernism, in order to see beyond them; the Bible's Great Archetypes working in the verbal universe: God As Logos and The Personality and Career of Satan; the Divine impulse in linguistic and rhetorical structures, including a kerygmatic reconstruction of the "original" language; and an interpretation of God's Biblical message to Man as delivered through secular literature. Also included is a chart--Bible Values in Secular Literature--picturing the axiology of rhetoric. This chart visualizes what the whole study is about: Bible values, literal and moral, radiating from the core of the verbal universe (the Word) into the cultural orbit to create Knowledge and Art through the medium of secular literature (the word).