RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Abraham.
Abraham A Sancta Clara
especially where matters of a religious nature are concerned, will be denied only by those who judge the remote past by the conditions of the present. The Indians and the Gauls for centuries handed on their religious conceptions by means of oral tradition; and it is very possible that the authors of the documents of Genesis had records from very ancient, even pre-Mosaic, time. The possibility once admitted, that a faithful tradition concerning Abraham may have been preserved to the time when the documents of Genesis originated, the last reason for considering him a product of later Israelitic fancy, is removed.
No one of the three sources which are pieced together in the present Genesis can be fully reconstructed. The document P must 4. Impos- have contained much more material sibility of than the sum total of all the excerpts Fully Re- from it. The source E appears first construct- with certainty in chapter xx. ; and J, ing the especially for Abraham's later years, Sources, is preserved only in fragments. There is thus no means of knowing all that the sources originally contained; and, furthermore, many passages of Genesis can be assigned with certainty neither to one nor another of the sources. Hence the accuracy and completeness of our knowledge of Abraham's history is dependent on the fidelity and good judgment with which the compiler of Genesis has done his work; and in attempting to delineate the true story of Abraham's life it is an imperative duty to weigh carefully the possibility and probability of each detail.
(A. KoHLERf.)
The historicity of the personal as distinguished from the tribal Abraham is still held by a wide though perhaps narrowing circle of scholars. In the above article the difficulties are too lightly treated. The embarrassing question of Abraham's date is disposed of (§ 1) by the assumption that it can not have been later than 1900 b.c. But Gen. xiv., by its Babylonian synchronism, puts it in the twenty-third century B.C., at least one thousand years before Moses, and fifteen hundred years before the generally accepted date of Abraham's first biographer. Moreover, practically nothing is known of the history of his descendants until the era of Moses. When we seek for at least a substantial personality amid the vagueness, inconsistencies, and contradictions direct or inferential, that mark the several accounts, we are thrown back upon the fact of the persistent general tradition, which evidently had a very early origin, and to which great weight should in fairness be attached. J. F. M.
Bibliography: Besides the histories of Israel and commentaries on Genesis, consult W. J. Deane, Abraham : His Life and Times, London, 1886; H. C. Tomkins, Abraham and His Age, ib. 1897; C. H. Cornill, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, Leipsic, 1898, Eng. transl., Chicago, 1898; P. Dornstetter, Abraham ; Studien ilber die Anf tinge des hebraischen Volkes, Freiburg, 1902. For the extra-Biblical traditions: G. Weil, Biblische Legenden der Muselmanner, Frankfort, 1845; H. Beer, Leben Abrahams, nach Auffassung der jiidischen Sage, Leipsic, 1859; T. P. Hughes, Dictionary of Islam, pp. 4-7, London, 1896 (gives Abraham passages in the Koran); B. W Bacon, Abraham the Heir of Yahweh, in the New World, vol. viii. (1899); JE, i. 83-92.
ABRAHAM, APOCALYPSE OF. See Pseudepigrapha, Old Testament, II., 21.
ABRAHAM A SANCTA CLARA : Monastic name by which a famous German preacher, Ulrich Megerle, is usually known; b. at Kreenheinstetten (20 m. n. of Constance), Baden, July 2, 1644; d. in Vienna Dec. 1, 1709. He was the son of an innkeeper, and received his education from the Jesuits at Ingolstadt and from the Benedictines at Salzburg. In 1662 he entered the order of the barefooted Augustinians, and rose to positions of authority, becoming prior of his house, provincial, and definitor. After 1668 or 1669, with the exception of seven years (1682-89) spent at Graz, he was attached to the Augustinian Church in Vienna. He was primarily a preacher, and his first published works were reprints of sermons. His definite literary activity dates from the plague of 1679, which called forth three small books; but these, as well as similar occasional writings — such as Auf, auf, ihr Christen (1683), inspired by the danger of the Turkish invasion and imitated by Schiller in the Capuchin's address in Wallensteins Lager, viii.; Gack Gack (1685), a book for pilgrims; Heilsames Gemisch-Gemasch (1704) — are of comparatively slight importance. His principal work, Judas, der Erz-Schelm (4 parts, 1686-95), is an imaginary biography of the betrayer of Christ, written from the standpoint of a satirical preacher. About the same time he wrote a compendium of moral theology, Grammatica religiosa (1691) in which the more dignified Latin precludes the characteristic pungent flavor of his vernacular works.
Abraham represents the Catholicism of his age not in its noblest, but in its most usual form. He is fanatical, eager to make converts, intolerant; constant in praise of the Jesuits, full of the bitterest reproaches against Protestants and Jews. He has the most childish notions of science; but he makes very skilful use of his scanty equipment of learning. He has a perfect command of every rhetorical artifice, and knows how to play upon the feelings of his hearers, to appeal to their weaknesses, and to call up vivid pictures before their minds, not disdaining to raise a laugh. Satire is his strongest weapon; and he is a direct inheritor of the old German satiric tradition. He exercises the functions of a critic with the fearlessness of a mendicant friar; neither his audience, nor the court, nor his brethren of the clergy are spared. The burlesque manner which he uses in treating the most serious subjects was popular in the fifteenth century, and may have suited that age; but it was out of place in the second half of the seventeenth. The force of the contrast becomes apparent when it is remembered that Abraham was appointed court preacher in 1677, sixteen years after the same title had been conferred on a Bossuet. It is only fair, however, to recall what the general level of education was in Roman Catholic Germany at the time, and to see in Abraham rather a popular entertainer than a preacher.
A complete edition of his works in twenty-one volumes was published at Passau and Lindau
Abraham Ecchellensis Abrasax