The liberal syncretists of Renaissance neo-Platonism would not, however, have been so rigid in
distinguishing between Time and Yahweh; indeed the allegorical assimilation of one to the other would
have been a natural and easy one for all but the most rigid Renaissance Hebraists.
In de Vere's punning Neo-Platonic system of cosmic identifications -- the secret language revealed in
his own writings -- "truth" meant "me": “Now time, and truth,” he writes to Robert Cecil in 1602, “have
unmasked all difficulties…finis coronat opus, and then everything will be laid open, every doubt resolved
into a plain sense” (Fowler 653
7
).
In the letter, as in the
narrative poem, truth functions as a
cryptic metaphor for the first person
pronoun. Time, and de Vere,
have unmasked all difficulties. In Lucrece "truth” --
de Vere --
is the
accusative subject revealed --
unmasked --
by time's glorious action, just as,
in the marked passage in
Micah, God will, in the eschatological end time, bring the prophet, condemned to obscurity for his own
sins, forward into the light.
7
The 1602 Danvers Escheat letter to Robert Cecil.
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