Devil: Hieroglyphic personification of personification ~
kwaw said:
The Bodet version of the Bacvs pattern is very similar to the Vieville; while retaining a similar form our Vandenborre however has become what Kaplan describes as 'a patchwork of eyes and faces.' A phrase that brings to mind the trope of the face maker or by its technical rhetorical term Prosopopoeia:
From Greek prosōpopoiiā : prosōpon, face, mask, dramatic character (pros-, pros- + ōpon, face, from ōps, ōp-, eye) + poiein, to make...
... the Greek rhetorical term for a trope consisting either of the personification of some non‐human being or idea, or of the representation of an imaginary, dead, or absent person as alive and capable of speech and hearing, as in an apostrophe.*
Against the fourfold methods of interpretation of the Fathers and of considering biblical figures in terms of rhetorical tropes were (and are) those who advocate(d) scripture should be taken in a stritly literal sense only:
quote:
"Men mistake by turning plain literal words
into tropes and figures. By this kind of learning
they disembowel religion, and present us with the
gospel as hieroglyphical and as dead as
an Egyptian mummy. The gospel, as the Lord
Jesus left it, was a word quick and powerful and
sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing
even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit,
and of the joints and marrow, discerning the
thoughts and intents of the heart : that is to
say, it was a body of doctrine animated with grand
motives, with the dignity of its author, the horror
of its penalties, the united efforts of justice and
love, displayed in the death of the cross, and
the immediate bestowment of heaven after death.
But by the help of a certain art called Rhetoric,
this body is killed for the sake of being embalmed.
Jesus is a metaphorical God, hell is an eastern allegory,
the devil is a prosopopeia, the atonement
is a thing called a metonymy, the wicked are annihilated,
and the virtuous sleep without dreaming
till the heavens are no more. There can be no
better canon of interpretation, than that which an
amiable prelate has given us : scripture is to be
taken in that sense, in which the common people,
who heard it at first, took it. Assuredly the common
people neyer thought of these senses!
Miscellaneous works of Robert Robinson: 1807