Jacob and Esau and the iconoclasm of merit.(Critical essay)

John E. Curran Jr., Jacob and Esau and the Iconoclasm of Merit

This article contends that the mid-Tudor interlude Jacob and Esau, long known to have a Protestant slant, promotes a Calvinistic doctrine of election consonant with Edwardian theology and that in doing so it also enacts a rare kind of iconoclastic drama. The play invalidates the very discriminations between the brothers it seems to encourage us to make. This building up only to break down the differences between the elect and the reprobate proves God's judgments to be unresponsive to human merits and utterly inscrutable, even as it prompts the audience to beware of the limits of perception and the dangers of appearances.

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The mid-Tudor biblical interlude The History of Jacob and Esau, notable for its advanced humanist structure and movement away from allegory toward realism, has given commentators much cause to disagree. Its authorship is in dispute, with Nicholas Udall and William Hunnis the most prevalent candidates, (1) as is its date of composition, which, since it might fall within either the Edwardian or Marian reign, could tell us much about the play's intended meaning. (2) Moreover, while the play commonly has been read as influenced by Protestant doctrines of election, scholars have been at odds as to how far and how seriously it pushes a specifically Calvinist message. (3) About one thing, however, readers seem to be largely unanimous: the playwright, in rendering the story of the younger brother's crafty seizure of the elder's birthright and blessing (Gen. 25-7), goes well beyond the Bible in casting the elect Jacob as pious and innocent and the reprobate Esau as wicked and blameworthy. (4) What I suggest here, however, is that seeing such a clear delineation between the brothers in terms of their moral goodness and their claims for our sympathy runs the danger of missing the subtlety of the play's true theological lesson. In fact, as I hope to show, this varnishing of Jacob and tarring of Esau is only superficial, and we are invited by a number of important clues to recognize it as such. Viewing the elect as deserving and the reprobate as undeserving is a trap into which we all too easily can fall; the play, in effect, not only sets this trap for us but also prepares a way out of it in letting us see how mistaken we are to identify God's favor with human merit. By making the relative goodness of Jacob and Esau more complicated than it at first seems, the playwright promotes an essentially Calvinistic stance on predestination and its workings. In a manner underwritten by a basic Calvinism, consonant with mainstream Edwardian theology, the play illustrates the predestination argument that God's judgments, made before the beginning of time, are in no way dependent on human deserts and are consequently wholly inscrutable.

In this, the play also sets forth another element of Edwardian Protestantism: iconoclasm. For Michael O'Connell, the play lacks a hard-pressed didacticism and exhibits little interest in the question of the dramatic representation of sacred material. While noting its obviously Protestant sensibility, he sees the play as a throwback to the mystery cycles wherein there is little worry over the propriety of portraying the Bible dramatically--a license soon to be phased out in England by far stricter attitudes about the Bible as theater. (5) But Jacob and Esau does engage the issue of iconoclasm and this not merely by self-protectively using its Calvinist doctrinal message to lend a popish medium Protestant credentials. (6) Rather, the play parlays this message into a commentary about this medium, a commentary with a distinctly iconoclastic bent. In a manner much along the lines of Huston Diehl's model of an iconoclastic Protestant dramaturgy, Jacob and Esau is a spectacle that actually encourages uneasiness and self-consciousness about the act of seeing. We are led to catch ourselves in the act of relying overmuch on our own perceptions and thus to recall our ultimate dependency on "what is absent, promised, or invisible." (7) In fact, this particular specimen, though Diehl does not mention it, realizes to an extraordinary degree the iconoclastic potential that, as she theorizes, the drama can hold and does so in a way that she does not much discuss. Here a Protestant drama stimulates our iconoclastic sensors by invoking and reinvoking a specific theological doctrine that we can apply to our experience as audience. In absorbing the doctrine, in this case regarding predestination and human merits, we are coached to scrutinize both how and what we see. In the course of constantly driving home its predestination theology, the play alerts us to the dangers of perception by instigating our tendency as an audience to judge the relative merits of the actions of dramatic characters and then exposing this tendency as gravely flawed. In reminding us that we are inadequate, incorrigible adjudicators of human deservings, the play sets off the pitfalls of drama itself; for we cannot trust our perceptions, and dramatic representation is bound to mislead us into trying to exercise them. Jacob and Esau is iconoclastic, then, because in an indirect though effective way it prompts us to realize what the characters cannot do, what we the audience cannot do, and what the drama cannot do. Thus my reading, though informed by Edwardian theology, hinges not much on whether the play belongs to Edwardian or Marian conditions and is not concerned with its possible topicality. In particular I detect little in the play of that strain, such as we find in Lusty luventus and other Protestant interludes calling for a break from evil antecedents, which aligns Esau with corrupt papist conservatism. (8) The point here is rather that we commit a papistical, even idolatrous error when we make such a discrimination about Esau, for we place far too much trust in the powers of human movements including our own faculties. After all, it is, as John Hooper said, expounding on the first commandment, a "kind of idolatry" whenever we have "confidence and trust in the power of the flesh." (9) Jacob and Esau issues not so much a topical statement against popery as a Protestant warning to us to withhold our fallen judgments about human merit.

Mid-Tudor Protestantism often may have fallen short of John Calvin's explicitness in affirming that predestination was as absolute for the reprobate as it was for the elect; however, English theologians are mostly consistent with Continental influences such as Martin Bucer, Henry Bullinger, and Calvin himself in ascribing the machinery of election solely to God's preordained will and in admonishing us to refrain from questioning whether God thus unfairly was condemning the damned. (10) The story of Jacob and Esau naturally became a prime case study for the doctrine of election, Protestants having taken their cue from Paul in Romans 9:11-6. As the Geneva Bible of 1560 has it,

 
  For yer the children were borne, & when they had nether done good, 
  nor euil (that the purpose of God might remaine according to 
  election not by workes, but by him that calleth), 
  It was said vnto her, The elder shal serue the yonger. 
  As it is written, I haue loued Iacob, & haue hated Esau. 
  What shal we say then? Is there vnrighteousnes with God? 
  God forbid. 
  For he saith to Moses, I will haue mercie on him, to whome I wil 
  shewe mecie: and will haue compassion on him, on whome I wil haue 
  compassion. 
  So then it is not in him that willeth, nor in him that runeth, but in 
  God that sheweth mercie. (11)