David J. Davis - Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

The revelation goes on; it is their witness and yet their witness to an original source which forms the revelation.

(Richard Swinburne, Revelation)

The ceiling of the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford boasts an early baroque painting of Truth descending from heaven. Truth brings the light of understanding to the Arts and Sciences, which are personified as Muses. Completed in 1668 by London artist Robert Streater, the Sheldonians ceiling celebrated both the completion of the new theatre and the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. The traditional notion of truth as a gift from God, as a form of divine revelation, aligned very nicely with the reaffirmation of the divine right of kings in Caroline England. The painting also highlights the epistemic importance placed upon such revelation, which most people considered to be the ultimate source for all human science and philosophy. Thus, a contemporary poetic encomium of the painting explained that Truth disperse(s) abroad the enemies of understanding, Envy Rapine and Brutality. Like the sun, it is difficult (and dangerous) to look directly upon truth, but it provides light to everything else: So bright Truth seems obscurd to us below, / But every figure yields the brighter shew.

Compared to much of the art of the eighteenth century, Streaters painting presents a very different way of thinking about Truth. The work of artists like Joseph Wright of Derby often depicted the light of Truth (or discovery) pouring out from a distinctly terrestrial source. Truth, via divine revelation, was a religious experience in that it involved the communion between God and human beings. It was also an epistemic experience that expanded human understanding, giving insight that could not have been obtained otherwise.

The idea for this book began with a curiosity. I found myself mentally glossing over a popular phrase that Protestant commentators used to describe the biblical prophets experiences of divine revelation, which were often described in terms of being ravished, rapt, or rapt up in the Spirit. I knew that similar language was present in the sensual poetry of the period as well as accounts of contemplative devotion. As I explored the popularity of such language, I began to wonder if this was more than a rhetorical turn-of-phrase, if there was a more robust discourse of divine revelation. Not only did the language appear in an unusual number of different (and different kinds of) texts, but it also possessed a commonly understood meaning about the physical and metaphysical experience that someone had when they were believed to have encountered God. Taken together, the examples present what the philosopher Owen Barfield once described as a collective representation of late medieval and early modern English culture and thought. For Barfield, collective representations were commonly held ways of understanding and explaining human experiences, consisting of individual perceptions as well as preconceived ideas, biases, and beliefs that contribute to our making sense (and meaning) of our perceptions. Barfield explained, Like the words of a language are common to the members of a society, collective representations are transmitted from one generation to another, developing and changing only gradually in the process. Barfield believed that, at a fundamental level, collective representations provided the primary means through which human beings experience the world. While an individuals sense perception is theirs alone, the ways that we understand and make meaning out of our perceptions is most often done through shared representations about reality (even if the meaning we are making challenges those representations). Barfields idea of collective representations is helpful in understanding how accounts of divine experiences corresponded, in many respects, with one another over a long period of English history. As we will see in the following chapters, the ways that late medieval and early modern English people understood the experience of divine revelation was built around certain textual and pictorial signs, which provided important discursive markers in identifying divine revelation. These signs not only supported certain presuppositions about how humans interacted with God, but also provided important means of legitimizing and delimiting what was and what was not considered to be an experience of God.