The Prophet's Four-Part Pattern

George P. Landow

In addition, the Victorian sage adopts not only the general tone and stance of the Old Testament prophet but also the quadripartite pattern with which the prophet usually presents his message. According to Scott, who presents the orthodox view of his subject, the prophets of the Old Testament first called attention to their audience's present grievous condition and often listed individual instances of suffering. Second, they pointed out that such suffering resulted directly from their listeners' neglecting -- falling away from -- God's law. Third, they promised further, indeed deepened, miseries if their listeners failed to return to the fold; and fourth, they completed the prophetic pattern by offering visions of bliss that their listeners would realize if they returned to the ways of God. Many of these visions took the form of predictions of divine vengeance upon the irreligious heathen, who having served as God's agent for punishing the wayward Israelites would in future serve as an informing example of punishing wrath. For example, the Book of Isaiah "opens with sharp rebukes of the people for their idolatry and iniquity, and denunciations of divine vengeance upon them; but intermixed with encouraging intimations of mercy, and predictions of Christ. Afterwards follow various prophecies of judgments about to be executed on several nations, as well as on Judah; through all of which the reader is led to expect future deliverances and glorious times to the church of God.

This prophetic pattern of interpretation, attack upon the audience (or those in authority), warning, and visionary promise, provides the single most important influence of the Bible upon the writings of the original Victorian sages, for it gives rise to many, though not all, of the devices that make up this characteristically Victorian genre. Biblical prophecy -- and contemporary understanding of biblical prophecy -- also provide the ultimate source of the discontinuous, episodic structures found in this genre and perhaps also of the audience's willingness to accept them.

Theories of biblical prophecy therefore seem to have had much the same effect upon notions of literary structure that theories of the sublime had upon notions of aesthetics: In the same way that the apparent disorder of sublimity allowed Augustan critics to compensate for the restrictions and omissions of neoclassical conceptions of beauty, biblical prophecy allowed them to had acceptable forms of literary organization outside the neoclassical canon. According to Campegius Vitringa's Typus Doctrinae Propheticae (1708), which appeared in John Gill's popular Bible commentary, prophecies often

admit of resumptions, repetitions of sayings, and retrograde leaps and skips, or scattered or detached pieces . . . which are inserted into the text, for the sake of illustrating this or that part of the prophecy.... To these may also be rightly referred the excursions and digressions, in which the prophets, whilst they really have before their eyes some object of more remote time, suddenly leave it, and by way of excursion turn themselves to men of their own time, or the next; that from the subject of their prophecy, they may admonish, exhort and convince them.

Vitringa might be describing Past and Present, The Stones of Venice, or works by twentieth-century sages.

In addition to Old Testament prophecy, two other biblical traditions have a major effect upon this literary form -- New Testament apocalyptics and typological exegetics. Carlyle and Ruskin draw heavily upon typological exegesis in their characteristic works. Nonetheless, their writing as sages derives far more importantly from late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century attitudes toward Old Testament prophecy. Although scriptural typology accounts for both the sage's general attitude toward interpretation and the meaning of specific passages, Old Testament prophecy is directly responsible for the overall nature of this literary form as well as for many of its crucial characteristics, such as the sage's contentious attitude toward his audience, his alternation of satire and vision, and his use of discontinuous literary structure.

Last modified 2000