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djeter
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“Saint Paul’s teaching is inseparable from his experience. He was not simply called, as were the other Apostles; he was converted; he was the first great convert chosen to carry afar the name of Christ, and his teaching mission is the extraordinary flowering of that even more extraordinary moment – his interior conversion.” Reading selections from a Jacques Maritain classic, “The Living Thoughts of Saint Paul”. Maritain provides profuse scriptural quotes
As for the painting…
At the beginning of this post I am showing you a reproduction of an oil painting, produced by a Valentin de Boulogne dated roughly around 1600. The painting is entitled “Saint Paul Writing His Epistles.” The apostle is sitting at a desk, with quill in hand which he dips into an inkwell, surrounded by books, manuscripts, and a note book, all of which he consults in composing his letter. The picture was produced approximately 150 years after the publication of the Gutenberg Bible. It is an unmistakable example of a reproduction of the media situation as it presented itself around 1600. Paul is a writer, who compares different texts–one of them being a printed text (presumably the Hebrew Bible)–in order to produce his own text.
This is how the typographic imagination, a thoroughly literary, text-centered imagination, conceived of the composition of the Pauline letters: texts grow out of other texts! The only concession to the ancient setting is a scroll in the right corner of the table. It requires a strenuous act of historical imagination to remember that the Paul of the first century did not write but dictate his letters, that all his writings, including the most intricate theological argumentations in Galatians and Romans, were mentally composed, and that large segments of his arguments are structured in keeping with the conventions of Hellenistic-Jewish rhetoric.
The painting succeeded in displacing Paul’s oral, rhetorical, scribal culture with the exclusively literary, textual, typographical media culture of the 16th century, and it did so around the same time when rhetoric was eliminated from the curriculum at most European universities. It’s the painting that is on the cover of Michael J. Gorman’s book, Reading Paul – which is a great book BTW.
So be careful of what you look at! I guess a 21st century painting would have him working on a computer…
dj
“Saint Paul’s teaching is inseparable from his experience. He was not simply called, as were the other Apostles; he was converted; he was the first great convert chosen to carry afar the name of Christ, and his teaching mission is the extraordinary flowering of that even more extraordinary moment – his interior conversion.” Reading selections from a Jacques Maritain classic, “The Living Thoughts of Saint Paul”. Maritain provides profuse scriptural quotes
As for the painting…
At the beginning of this post I am showing you a reproduction of an oil painting, produced by a Valentin de Boulogne dated roughly around 1600. The painting is entitled “Saint Paul Writing His Epistles.” The apostle is sitting at a desk, with quill in hand which he dips into an inkwell, surrounded by books, manuscripts, and a note book, all of which he consults in composing his letter. The picture was produced approximately 150 years after the publication of the Gutenberg Bible. It is an unmistakable example of a reproduction of the media situation as it presented itself around 1600. Paul is a writer, who compares different texts–one of them being a printed text (presumably the Hebrew Bible)–in order to produce his own text.
This is how the typographic imagination, a thoroughly literary, text-centered imagination, conceived of the composition of the Pauline letters: texts grow out of other texts! The only concession to the ancient setting is a scroll in the right corner of the table. It requires a strenuous act of historical imagination to remember that the Paul of the first century did not write but dictate his letters, that all his writings, including the most intricate theological argumentations in Galatians and Romans, were mentally composed, and that large segments of his arguments are structured in keeping with the conventions of Hellenistic-Jewish rhetoric.
The painting succeeded in displacing Paul’s oral, rhetorical, scribal culture with the exclusively literary, textual, typographical media culture of the 16th century, and it did so around the same time when rhetoric was eliminated from the curriculum at most European universities. It’s the painting that is on the cover of Michael J. Gorman’s book, Reading Paul – which is a great book BTW.
So be careful of what you look at! I guess a 21st century painting would have him working on a computer…
dj