Vico’s Ring
289
state that «Spinoza […] not only ruled out Moses as the author of the
Penta-
teuch
, but attributed its composition to the entire Hebrew people […]. In a
similar vein Vico claimed that the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
were not written hy
Homer himself, who in fact had never even existed […]» (Id.,
The Rehabiliation
of Myth
, cit., p. 219).
601
Vico makes two other explicit refences to Moses in
Scienza nuova
1744:
in § 465: «[…] St. Jerome holds […] that the Book of Job, which is older than
the books of Moses, was composed in heroic verse […]»; in § 585: «Moreover,
Homer himself, as often as he mentions the heroes by name in his two po-
ems, adds the fixed epithet “king”. In striking harmony with this is the golden
passage in
Genesis
in which Moses, enumerating the descendents of Esau, calls
them all kings […]». In both instances, the great antiquity of the Pentateuch is
affirmed, as corollary to the great antiquity of the Homeric material. In all
three paragraphs, however, mention of Moses has merely an incidental char-
acter from which no conclusions can be drawn with respect to analogies be-
tween Homer and Moses either in terms of authorship or existence. L. Amo-
roso commented: «[…] a parte un paio di confronti di carattere occasionale e
marginale fra Omero e Mosè [§§ 464 (465), 585, 794], non si parla di
quest’ultimo come sublime poeta […] ([…] apart from a couple of compari-
sons of an incidental and marginal character, the latter is not spoken of as a
sublime poet […])» (Id.,
Mosè fu un poeta teologo?
,
cit., p. 217; see
ibid.
, pp. 213-
217, for Vico’s earlier preoccupation with Moses). Amoroso also speaks of
Vico, in
Scienza nuova
1744, in terms of «un arretramento di Vico di fronte alla
possibilità di applicare alla Bibbia l’ermeneutica da lui elaborata per la mitolo-
gia greco-romana (a distancing by Vico from the possibility of applying to the
Bible, the hermeneutics that he developed for Greek-Roman mythology)»
(
ibid.
, p. 218). On the more general subject of “Vico and the Bible”, see G.
Mazzotta,
The New Map of the World
, cit., pp. 234-255.
602
The mere juxtaposition of Homer and Moses, in itself, therefore, does
not imply a more fundamental commonality, such as Lucci reads into it:
«L’accostamento fra i poemi omerici e il
Pentateuco
è esplicito in
Sn44
, III, 794.
[…] La congruenza tra i presupposti della
Scienza nuova
e quelli delle opere
spinoziane, va al di là dell’esplicita presa di distanza da parte di Vico (The
Homeric poems and the
Pentateuch
are explicitly brought together in
Sn44
, III,
794. […] The congruence of the presuppositions of
Scienza nuova
with those of
Spinoza’s works supersedes the explicit distancing on Vico’s part)» (Id.,
Vico
lettore e interprete dei poemi omerici nella Scienza nuova (1744)
, cit., p. 46, footnote 1).
603
G. Mazzotta,
The New Map of the World
, cit., p. 159.