Tuesday, October 3, 2023

Antonine Du Pinet (1510-1584) on “Woman” in Revelation 12

  

Apc 12.1: woman robed with the sun

 

The interpretation of the woman as a symbol of the church went back to Victorinus of Poetovio and was a commonplace among Western commentators. Joachim of Fiore, Lambert, and Meyer all adopted it, even though Lambert, following Rupert of Deutz, admitted the Marial interpretation as a possibility. Du Pinet naturally followed the majority in the general interpretation of the symbol but had already added his own details in 1539. Alone of the Protestant commentators, he asserts that the church is the wife of the Lord and that the marriage was concluded by the blood of Jesus Christ, so that all those who place their hope in anyone or anything other than Go violate that marriage. The 1543 addition is in fact a development of Meyer’s exegesis, which considered that the apostolic church was apply compared to a woman—fragile, small, and sterile by nature, she is made powerful and fecund with multiple offspring by her spouse, Christ, Du Pinet paraphrased Meyer, but added two further reasons to justify the aptness of the comparison between the apostolic church and a woman. The church was aptly compared to a woman because the church’s head is Christ in the same way that a woman’s head is her husband (1 Cor. 11.3; Eph. 5.24) and because the church is in mystic union with Christ through faith, just as a woman is joined to her husband.

 

In 1539, du Pinet insisted on the church’s direct dependence on God, and on God only. I n1543, by a not very original recourse to the metaphor of the Christian marriage, he specified the relationship that should obtain between Christ and his church. She could be totally dependent on him, and any power that she has, be it spiritual or physical, must be due to him alone. As well as warning his readers against the papacy, du Pinet thus also aimed to teach them the basic norms of the Chrisitan marriage as he conceived it. The addition had little or nothing to do with the biblical text; du Pinet simply used the text as a springboard for moralizing about the nature of the church and the Christian marriage.

 

Apc 12.4: the dragon stood in front of the woman

 

In 1539, du Pinet had already basically adopted the exegesis of Bede (PL 93:166), who interpreted stood to mean “attempt to put out the faith in Christ which the faithful have in their hearts.” Lambert’s exegesis took up both the aspects of his interpretation of the woman as the church and as Mary. The dragon, for Lambert, wanted to stifle the word of God, but also, more specifically, he tried to prevent the birth of Jesus or to make sure that he would be killed by Herod after his birth. Eyer took over Bede’s exegesis but devoted only one sentence to the interpretation of stood. Du Pinet’s exegesis of the word in 1539 ran to a paragraph stating that Satan’s sole aim was the destruction of Jesus Christ and his Word, and that he brought his aim about in various ways by tyrannizing the faithful, by making them doubt the Word, and by distracting them. However, whatever persecutions the church has to bear, it will carry on, giving birth to the truth faithful and the aid of its ministers, he concluded.

 

As it stood in 1539, du Pinet’s exegesis was no more than a paraphrase of Bede. In 1543, he suppressed this interpretation and wrote a new one, adding to it an interpretation of 12.5: and the woman gave birth, which, as we saw, he included in his comments on 12.4 in 1539.

 

The basic exegesis remained unaltered. What changed was the tone. In 1543, Satan’s threat to the church and its faithful was portrayed in extremely vivid terms, and the church’s successful delivery of the “new man” was seen as all the more heroic. Satan tried to “murder and annihilate” the church’s offspring. He “stalked” the church, his jaws wide open, making sure that all her fruit—that is, God’s Word—was stillborn. If any God of God came to be announced, Satan would immediately eat it, thus murdering those who were weak in faith. He murdered not only by the sword but also by promise of earthly rewards, such as benefices, bishoprics, and so on. Du Pinet compares Satan to a crocodile that sweeps up with his tail everything he want to devour, but, more important, he gives Satan an identity: There is no doubt that the dragon of Apc 12 is the papacy of du Pinet’s time. Similarly, the church, whose exact identity had been left open in 1539, was now implicitly defined as the Protestant church. It alone had God’s support to fashion Christ in the hearts of the faithful and so to produce the “new man” who could bring about the destruction of the dragon. All in all, du Pinet’s comments on Apc 12.4-5 triple in length between 1539 and 1543. Like the addition in Apc. 12.1, this one too has very little to do with explaining the text. What du Pinet very consciously set out to do was to apply the biblical text in his own time and religious situation. (Irena Backus, Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg [Oxford Studies in Historical Theology; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 46-47)

 

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