Note: numbers divided by a slash within brackets, such as "[111/112]", indicate the page numbers of the original Routledge print edition. They have been included for readers wishing to cite the print rather than the internet version of the book.
the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights....
And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased and bare up the ark, and it was lifted above the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth, and the ark went upon the face of the waters.
And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle and beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that wash dry land , died.
And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.
And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days. [Genesis, ch. 8; [134/135] ]
ike God s drowning the Egyptian host in the Red Sea, the Deluge offers a definite, unmistakable instance of divine punishment, and the ark that preserved Noah and his family offers a similarly
unmistakable install e of divine protection. This connection between preserving the good and destroying the evil provides a structure that recurs frequently in biblical history. As Patrick Fairbairn, the great nineteenth-century student of hermeneutics, explains in The Typology of Scripture,
This principle of salvation with destruction, which found such a striking exemplification in the deluge, has been continually appearing anew in the history of God s dealings among men. It appeared, for example, at the period of Israel's redemption from Egypt, when a way of escape was opened for the people of God by the overthrow of Pharaoh and his host; and again at the end of the return from Babylon, when the destruction of the enemy and the oppressor broke asunder the bands with which the children of the covenant were held captive. But it is in New Testament times, and in collection with the work of Christ, that the higher manifestation of the principle appears. . . . In Christ, however, the very foundations of evil from the first were struck at, and nothing is left for a second beginning to the cause of iniquity. ["Noah and the Deluge"]
The Genesis narrative of the Flood, which thus contains one of the central principles of history, also functions typologically in several ways. First of all, this instance of divine punishment serves as a type of later ones. Indeed, according to John Keble, who was one of the founders of the Oxford Movement, "Even if our Lord had not told us. . . we should scarce have failed to perceive how nearly we are concerned in this fearful picture. The history of the world before the Flood is but too nearly a type and shadow of our own history, and our own condition in God's sight ("As it was in the days of Noah," Sermons, vol. 4). Keble of course takes the title of his sermon from Luke 17: 26-7, which provides scriptural sanction for thus taking the Deluge typologically:
P>And as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.
[not in print edition] John Martin. The Deluge. 1834. Oil on canvas. 66 x 102 inches. This painting of Noah's flood is one of several that he did on the subject of floods destroying guilty human being, including The Delivery of Israel out of Eygpt (1825), The Destruction of Pharoah's Host (1830), Sodom and Gomorrah (1832), and The Destruction of Tyre(1840)
[135/136] With such biblical sanction or authentication for typological readings exegetes easily found other prefigurative elements in the Genesis story. Fairbairn, for example, explained that Noah himself "was the type, but no more than the type, of Him who was to come -- in whom the righteousness of God should be perfected" ("The New World and its Inheritors"). In addition, the ark, that obvious vessel of salvation serves as a type of the Church of Christ. Therefore, says J. C. Ryle, the great Evangelical Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, in his commentary on Luke 17: 26-3 7, "We must come out from the world and be separate. . . . We must flee to the ark like Noah" (Expository Thoughts on the Gospels). The first Epistle of St Peter 3: 21 also taught Christians to take the Deluge as a type of Baptism, and High Church Anglicans, such as Isaac Williams, often emphasize this particular typological reading but by far the most common eighteenth- and nineteenth-century one is that the ark is a type of the Church of Christ. As Thomas Scott's immensely popular Bible commentary, which was found in many English and American Protestant homes, joyfully exclaims:
Happy they, who are part of Christ's family, and safe with him in the ark! They may look forward without dismay, rejoice in the assurance, that they shall triumph, when a deluge of fire shall encircle the visible creation. But, unless we dare to be singular, and renounce the favour, and venture the scorn and hatred of the world: unless we are willing to exercise self-denial and diligence; we can find no admission into this ark. And, even in the ark, while in this world, we shall need faith and patience, and have much to try them. [commentary on Genesis 5: 17-24]
Furthermore, as Bible commentators explain, since the Church of Christ is the mystical body of Him, or Christ Mystical, the ark serves doubly as such a divinely intended prefiguration -- first as a type of the Church and second as a type of Christ Himself. Both these ideas appear as commonplaces of Evangelical hymnody. For example, "On the Commencement of Hostilities in America," one of John Newton's Olney Hymns, opens:
The gath'ring clouds, with aspect dark,
A rising storm presage;
Oh! to be hid within the ark,
And sheltered from its rage! [136/137]
In contrast other of Newton's influential hymns use this figure as a means of poetic resolution. "The Hiding-Place" thus begins with the speaker pointing to "the gloomy gath'ring cloud,/ Hanging o'er a sinful land" and warns that "Times of trouble" are upon us. Immediately, however, this hymn reassures the believer that no matter how bad the earthly situation becomes, "they who love his name" have nothing at all to fear. The hymn closes by having Christ Himself use this figure of the ark to comfort those he loves:
You have only to repose
On my wisdom, love, and care;
When my wrath consumed my foes,
Mercy shall my children spare;
While they perish in the flood,
You that bear my holy mark,
Sprinkled with atoning blood,
Shall be safe within the ark.
This pattern of introducing all initial unquiet and insecurity which is then resolved by the appearance of the ark appears in yet another of Newton's hymns, "Rest for Weary Souls," in which the speaker first describes his weakness, sinfulness, and consequent spiritual misery. The third of four stanzas then introduces the type of the ark:
In the ark the weary dove
Found a welcome resting-place;
Thus my spirit longs to prove
Rest in Christ, the ark of grace:
Tempest-toss'd I long have been,
And the flood increases fast;
Open, Lord, and take me in
Till the storm be overpast.
The concluding stanza, which resolves the conflict posed by the hymn, moves ahead to that time the believer finds himself secure In Christ, and, rejoicing in the "wondrous change" he experiences when His Saviour soothes his "troubled mind," he addresses his former fellow sufferers and invites them to join him in the ark: [137/138]
You that weary are like me,
Hearken to the gospel call;
To the ark for refuge flee,
Jesus will receive you all
The ark, which is a type of both Christ and His Church, long offered Christians a paradigm, therefore, of the way that God could preserve them from the Deluge of this world, and the Deluge, offered a figure for a wide range of fearful things and events one wished to escape -- divine punishment, one's own sinfulness, an oppressive world, and so on. As John Ruskin reminded his Victorian readers in the chapter on "Torcello" in The Stones of Venice, "in the minds of all early Christians the Church itself was most frequently symbolized under the image of a ship, of which the bishop was the pilot." Ruskin, who is engaged in explaining how Venice had its beginnings on those outlying islands settled by refugees from the mainland, next instructs his reader to 'consider the force which this symbol would assume in the imaginations of men' to whom the spiritual Church had become an ark of refuge in the midst of a destruction hardly less terrible than that
from which the eight souls were saved of old, a destruction in which the wrath of man had become as broad as the earth and as merciless as the sea, and who saw the actual and literal edifice of the Church raised up, itself like an ark in the midst of the waters.
Therefore, says Ruskin, who tries to convince his contemporaries that Venice stands as a type and warning for Victorian England, if one wishes to 'learn in what spirit it was that the dominion of Venice was begun, and in what strength she went forth conquering and to conquer," one should not seek in her arsenals, armies, and palaces. Rather, one must climb to where the Bishop of Torcello used centuries before, to sit,
and then, looking as the pilot did of old along the marble ribs of the goodly temple-ship, let him repeople its veined deck with the shadows of its dead mariners, and strive to feel in himself the strength of heart that was kindled within them.
Their reliance on God, their faith, says Ruskin, make the Venetians [138/139] great -- and when they fell away from that faith, they left the ark and were destroyed. If England, he warns in the very first paragraph of The Stones of Venice, neglects to learn from the example of its predecessors, his nation and his people 'may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.'
Unfortunately, even at the time that Ruskin was writing The Stones of Venice, he was beginning that long, painful process which resulted, finally, in his abandonment of his childhood faith. The man, in other words, who had so emphasized that societies could only survive by making the worship of God their ark, found, soon enough, that he could find no God, and no ark. Before acquiring a much qualified belief more than a decade later, he joined that company of "melancholy Brothers" whom James Thomson described in The City of Dreadful Night "battling in black floods without an ark" (sec. 14). Such "melancholy Brothers," who find themselves in the condition of castaways, represent one of the two major transformations the Deluge-figure receives -- the disappearance of the ark. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, those who, like Wordsworth, retain their Christian belief employ the scriptural type in its old sense. In The Excursion, for example, the poet has one of his characters assert that at the baptismal font the child is
received
Into the second ark, Christ's church, with trust
That he, from wrath redeemed, therein shall float
Over the billows of this troublesome world
To the fair land of everlasting life. [bk 5, 11. 281-5]
Last modified 7 May 2005