The Word's Dispersion: Two Letters and a Parchment in Browning's Poetry

Extract

Scientific and hermeneutic studies, which held the attention of Robert Browning7's contemporaries who were sensitive to Christology, made Scripture and the “book of nature” seem even more inscrutable. A prominent theme in many Browning poems, “How very hard it is to be / A Christian” (Easter-Day, lines 1–2), pertains not only to behavior but also to the influence of spoken, written, or printed discourse on historical and canonical matters. In Karshish's epistle to Abib, Cleon's letter to Protus, and multiple analyses of a parchment concerning St. John's death, Christianity appears not just a religious and cultural phenomenon, but a changing philological and interpretive one affected by “the ineptitude of the time, / And the penman's prejudice” (Christmas-Eve 871–72). For Victorians and later readers, anxious about being on the brink of a post-Christian age and therefore inclined to idealize their ancestors' religious confidence, Browning's portraits of Christianity's first century are a chance to review inherited discursive practices. He represents Christianity's vocal and textual foundations to accentuate “hermeneutics, … how poets find authority and means to communicate in written language and how readers derive meaning from poetic texts … or an event qua text.” (Peterson 363). Browning is less troubled by “higher” or “lower” critics, attuned to the perils of logocentrism, than by nervous religious and literary disciples who understand his poetics no better than they adapt to the altered theological climate.