‘I remembered the saying’ (Tobit 2:6) Recognising Emotions in Scripture with Tobit and Eve

Abstract

This experimental paper is methodologically Christian, in the sense that it is structured as a Christian mimesis of how a scriptural saint cited scripture. However, the choice of subject matter commits it to engaging with the post-Enlightenment secular context, and principles of exegetical, historical, and theological analysis anchor it within wider scholarly debates. Concretely, the paper takes the scriptural portrayal of Tobit’s recognition of his own emotion in scripture as a paradigm or type for one way of encountering scripture today. The first part examines a vignette of Tobit remembering a scriptural text about grief at a moment when he experiences intense grief. The second, longer part explores the transition to the post-Enlightenment context by performing and interrogating an act of recognising in scripture an emotion that has only been theorised since the 18th century, namely ‘disgust,’ which I ‘recognise’ in the scriptural narrative of Eve’s Temptation in Genesis 3. The purpose of the mimetic reception and the scholarly interrogation of it is not to replicate or critique Tobit’s example, but to allow it to be inhabited in a way that can remain meaningful from a Christian perspective without closing our eyes to the real challenges of modernity and, lest it be forgotten, of being human. This is offered simply as one exhibit in a potentially capacious gallery of attempts to learn from the scriptures and the saints how to inhabit scripture in the modern world.