O pilgrims, who go thinking of absent things, do ye come from lands so far as your appearance seems to show? For ye weep not when ye pass through the midst of the dolorous city, like people who seem not to understand its heaviness. If you will wait and hear, surely, my heart tells me, you will depart afterward in tears. Florence has lost its Beatrice, and the words that man can speak of her have power to make others weep. The episode of a certain gentle lady whom he saw looking compassionately upon him from a window, and whom he took pleasure in seeing and thinking of, comes in like a discordant note to mar the lyric purity of these last pages of grief. Some have conjectured that this was Gemma Donati, whom he afterward married; others see in her only the symbol of philosophy. Whoever she was, wife or symbol or passing fancy, this interlude in his mourning lasted but a short time. In a vision he saw Beatrice in the same crimson dress she had worn at their first meeting; and as the memories of a life-time rushed over him her love entered his breast once more, there to set up its everlasting rest. And then, after the final sonnet of the book, exalted by the consciousness of his own genius, he exclaims in words of prophetic beauty: After this sonnet a wonderful vision appeared to me, in which I saw things which made me resolve to speak no more of this blessed one until I might more worthily treat of her. And to come to that I study as much as I can, as she knows truly. So that, if it be the pleasure of Him through whom all things live that my life be spared for some years, I hope to say of her that which never yet has been spoken of any woman. And then may it please Him who is Sire of courtesy that my soul may be able to go to see the glory of its lady, that is of that blessed Beatrice, who gloriously beholds the face of Him qui est per omnia saecula benedictus. With the death of Beatrice and Dante's despairing grief the "New Life" ends. The days of childhood and youth are past. The man is about to enter on that stormy and troublous career the story of which, with its bitter sense of injustice and its sorrow almost unto death, together with a new hope and love, this time, however, the love of God, is told in that "poem of the earth and air," the "Divine Comedy." L. Oscar Kuhns. ART. IV. THE RECENT CRITICAL ATTACK ON GALATIANS. ALTHOUGH the main trunk of the Tübingen hypothesis has for years shown increasing signs of deep decay, its branches have but recently dropped the ripest fruits of the tree. Amid the general ruin which the theory attempted to inflict on the New Testament, five books at least remained unharmed. Romans, First and Second Corinthians, and Galatians represented the Pauline theology, and were admitted to have been written by Paul; while the Apocalypse, written by John, was the sole representative of the theology of the primitive apostles. All the other New Testament writings were held to be post-apostolic and exhibited more or less fully the tendency toward a reconciliation between the adherents of Paulinism and Petrinism, the two belligerent camps into which it was supposed that early Christianity was divided prior to their union in the old Catholic Church. This long-continued strife it was, according to the theory, which determined the form and suggested the contents of all early Christian literature. When, from within the Tübingen school itself, Ritschl demonstrated that it was only in the very earliest period of Paul's activity that any serious difference of opinion existed between the Pauline and the primitive apostolic views of the relation of the Christian convert to the Mosaic law, there was no longer any foundation for the Tübingen theory. Within the decreasing number of those who were still controlled in their theolog ical opinions by the fundamental principles of the Tübingenites there sprang up a disposition to relax somewhat of the severity with which Baur had applied his hypothesis, and to admit the Pauline origin of some of the minor epistles, while in the newer critical school there arose practical unanimity in favor of the restoration to the canon of the majority of the books of the New Testament. With the Apocalypse, indeed, it did not fare so well; and what was regarded by the Tübingen school as one of the unquestionable monuments of the apostolic age has quite recently even fallen into the disfavor of being attributed to a Jewish rather than a Christian origin. But with very few exceptions, among whom Bruno Bauer was the most distin guished, there was no disposition to subject the four principal Pauline letters to a critical investigation. It was universally admitted without question that they were the genuine productions of Paul's pen. The attack upon the genuineness of these epistles was opened in 1878 by the Dutch theologian Allard Pierson, in a work on The Sermon on the Mount, and other Synoptic Fragments.* His assault was directed toward Galatians. He questioned whether the genuineness of this epistle is so axiomatic that criticism must admit it without doubt, and declared that the Paul of that epistle was an incredible personality and that Galatians, as we have it, is certainly no monument of the earliest Christianity. Pierson was followed, in 1882, by his Amsterdam colleague, Professor A. D. Loman, in a series of investigations whose object was to demonstrate the spuriousness of all four of the principal Pauline epistles. In 1886 Pierson again appeared in the field, supported by his colleague Naber, the philologist, against all four of the principal Pauline epistles, in their united work entitled Verisimilia (Amsterdam, 1886). In 1888 the Bernese theologian, Rudolf Steck,† came out in an elaborate work against the genuineness of the four principal epistles, directing his arguments chiefly, however, against Galatians, but, contrary to most of the critics, giving large credence to the accounts of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles. His work was before the public but a few months when Professor van Manen, of Leyden, took up the cudgel against his arguments, although he supported his conclusions, with some exceptions in which he criticises Steck as too conservative. He thinks it an error to allow the Acts any historical trustworthiness or even to regard Paul as an historical reality. Having thus denied the historical value of all professed New Testament utterances relative to Paul and primitive Christianity, he thinks he is now on the sure road to a correct understanding of the course of events in the first fifty or sixty years after Christ. In less than a year after these remarkable conclusions of Van Manen another Dutch theologian, Daniel Völter, of Amsterdam, had published a work § * De Bergrede, en andere synoptische Fragmenten. Amsterdam, 1878. + Der Galaterbrief nach seiner Echtheit untersucht nebst kritischen Bemerkungen zu den paulinischen Hauptbriefen. Berlin, 1888. * See Protestantische Kirchenzeitung, 1889, Nos. 27, 28. § Die Komposition der paulinischen Hauptbriefe. I. Der Römer und Galaterbrief. Tübingen, 1890. in which he denied altogether the genuineness of Galatians, and, while ascribing a germ of Romans to Paul, made its present form the result of the work of numerous redactors. Thus a considerable literature in the interest of this most radical criticism has sprung up within very recent years. It will be observed that outside of Steck in Switzerland all the supporters of the new view are Hollanders. In Germany it has met with general opposition. The conservatives have largely ignored it; the newer critical school, the Ritschlians, and the few lone adherents of the Tübingen theory have discredited and demolished it. Nor has it gained universal credence even in its native land. Kuyper, among the conservatives, and Holsten, one of the wheel horses of the Tübingen school, have strenuously opposed it, not to mention others. The movement has attracted wider attention than the similar utterances of Bruno Bauer in 1850, because the times are more ripe for such views and because they are expressed with none of the bitterness apparent in Bauer's works and with an appearance of scholarly calm unknown to that iconoclast. In the main, too, the present criticism holds, contrary to Bruno Bauer, to the historicity of the person of Jesus Christ, and is thus less offensive. But in many respects it merely reforges the arguments of its scornful predecessor. As briefly as possible we shall now take up the arguments of Steck against the genuineness of Galatians and weigh them, confining ourselves to Steck, because he has developed the arguments more fully than any other, and to Galatians, because this is acknowledged to be the key to the situation.* Steck finds his first real difficulty in the fact that the commentators and critics are not able to agree upon the circumstances under which the epistle was written. It is to him uncertain whether the readers were the inhabitants of the old mountainous Galatia or of the territories of Laconia and Pisidia, which belonged to the Roman province of Galatia. He is in doubt as Those desiring to find a fuller refutation of Steck are referred to Johannes Gloël, Die Jüngste Kritik des Galaterbriefes; Völter, Die Komposition der paulinischen Hauptbriefe; Van Manen, in the Protestantische Kirchenzeitung, 1889, Nos. 27, 28; and to articles by Holsten in the Prot. Kirchenzeitung, 1889, Nos. 15, 16, 17, 20, 22, 26; A. Kappeller, in the Theologische Zeitschrift aus der Schweiz, 1889, I Heft; Hilgenfeld, in Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie, xxxii, 1889, I Heft; Schm(ledel) in Literarisches Centralblatt, 1888, No. 50; Holtzmann, Theolog. Jahresbericht, 8 Band, 1 Abtheilung; and Weiffenbach, Theologische Literaturzeitung, 1889, No. 11. to the time when, and the place from which, the letter was written and what was the nature of the error which the apostle felt called upon to oppose." *It must be admitted that in some cases a knowledge of the object and circumstances under which a writing is produced might determine its authorship with greater certainty. But at the most our inability to discover these things would but leave us in doubt. It could not have the effect of forbidding a supposed authorship. And here we have a first instance of what so often occurs in Steck's criticism, namely, a disposition to make the most of a difficulty. For in reality there is practical unanimity with regard to the circumstances under which Galatians was written. The next argument, and one upon which Steck places more reliance, is that Galatians betrays a literary dependence upon other New Testament writings, especially Romans and the two Corinthian letters. The inequalities of style and the gaps in the train of thought suggest that many of the passages are brought from a foreign source and woven into the epistle, notwithstanding that they do not fit the purpose of the writer. Especially does this appear in the principal part of the letter (chaps. iii, 1– iv, 7), where the thoughts are borrowed from Romans. It is impossible that the author of Romans should be the author of Galatians, especially as the latter exhibits a far more advanced Paulinism than the former. The law is less prized in Galatians than in Romans, and heathenism is placed upon an essential equality with Judaism, whereas in Romans Judaism is declared to have the advantage. Galatians has therefore advanced farther from Judaism than has Romans, and hence could not have preceded the latter in time of composition.† Let us consider these item by item. And first, it is very easy to assert literary dependence between two documents, but it is equally precarious to depend upon an argument drawn from that source. In many cases such dependence can be as well explained on the supposition that an author's powers of expression and thought are limited. That Galatians and Romans treat of the same general subjects is universally conceded. Steck argues that in Romans we find in full what is produced in Galatians only in outline. It is incredible to him that the outline should have been made prior to the elaborated *Der Galaterbrief, etc., pp. 24-50. + lbid., pp. 50-78. |