We're beginning a new academic year in our neck of the woods, so this sure was timely. What worries me is that young people have combined a "just in time" approach to knowledge with an internal standard of learning we might call "just enough." Having the patience to explicate (ex-plicare, to separate pressed leaves into separate sheets) is not something that comes naturally to them as their attention flits from this to that. It saddens me that the quality of their attention suffers, but it worries me that placing an interpretative frame (usually race, class, gender) over some bit of information takes less time, and is a path of lesser resistance, than the work of coming to grips with a mass of various details. It sounds like Nabokov had the patience and the passion for mucking about in the details of fiction, and for we who still have brains wired to read slowly and patiently, he remains a hero for that. Thanks, DBH.
Obviously anecdotal, but it seems to me that the moderns who are literalists (modernalists? Really, probably just fundamentalists) are thoroughly beset by this mindset on an almost phenomenological level. It saturates their ethics, politics, homiletics, social interactions. It's the core orientation of the fundamentalist, a severe presentist, essentially Calvinist gymnobiblism as applied to the world, in which there are no hidden "letters," only the chosen can see the world for what it is in its simple unidimensionality.
Don't we ourselves in our historical present recreate allegorical meaning inspired by ancient allegorical truths. For example watching baseball or going fishing. Also, need it be confined to text or classical mediums; the current interest in AI and personal avatars.... what's going on there, really?
I think poems often encourage this kind of premodern reading. This is perhaps one of the virtues of poetry. And possibly also one of the reasons poetry tends to be at odds with the contemporary ethos.
Please forgive me in advance for the length of this comment but the best I can do in response is to post what I think are applicable quotes, passages I have indeed bandied about for years now as a way of making much the same point as you are making here.
"Homer could write of his culture as an integrity of heroes, demi-gods, and divinities whose communication with men expressed those actions and maxims of conduct which summarized his culture and became guides not only to the later Periclean Greeks, but also to the entire occidental civilization which followed. If we recall the various attributes which his gods symbolized, or rather which they were, we become familiar with the motivations of the Greek race and the ideals to which they aspired. These ideals and motivations were not abstractions but the dramatic characters of a struggle expressing the integration of the individual and society. The lack of such integrity, the dislocation between myth and religious metaphysic, and the consequent disparity of fact and spirit are the central problems of the modern artist, whether he try to gather all modern ideologies into an epical summation, or sing the briefest and most personal lyric. In Greek culture, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides progressively demonstrated what T.S. Eliot has termed the 'disassociation of sensibility'. Plato and Aristotle finally abstracted their national myths in dialectic and category; the very title of Lucretius' epical poem, On the Nature of Things, becomes indicative of the transformation."
-Kimon Friar, "Myth and Metaphysics"
"Deeply moved yesterday reading Achilles' speech to Priam. Astonishment: this line is so firm and at the same time so sensitive, a vibrating chord. Deeply moved also by the lofty art Homer has impregnated for others, and which was there, as I read, a harmonious sound. Moreover, in Homer everything meshes, the whole world is a woof of organic 'umbilical cords'; the earthly, the heavenly world, animals, plants, elements, hearts of men, good, evil, death, life--that ripen, vanish, and flower again. The mechanism of the gods performs nothing supernatural, nothing ex machina; it retains coherence, nothing else."
-George Seferis, "A Poet's Journal"
'There is a nice example of that to which Vico points as well as the continuing difficulty and even impossibility for the modern or postmodern reader to enter into that at which he points. Homer states that "kai sphin Dios ombros aexei" (Zeus's raincloud increases them [the wine grapes]). Robert Fitzgerald translates that half-line as "ripen in heaven's rain," which completely misses the mythological character of Homer's formula; the translation is completely naturalistic. Robert Fagles seeks to preserve the mythological character in his rendering, "swelled by the rains of Zeus,"' but his translation allows the modern to read the half-line on his own terms. It is Alexander Pope, however, who best captures the quality of a Zeus-infused world: "And Jove descends in each prolific shower.''^" In the Homeric half-line, the divinity and the force of nature are one. The rain is not an act of god; it is god. It is not merely that Zeus is the sky, but that Zeus both is the sky and is the rain, and insofar as the rain fattens the grapes, Zeus is the grapes, too. The difficulty of translating that half-line is an indicator of what is "beyond our power." The problem is not a new one. Already by the time of Aristotle, "Zeus" had become mere metaphor. When Aristotle says "Zeus rains"—and Aristotle does use the term "Zeus rains""— it is clear that he means, "the sky rains," as translated in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, "A difficulty presents itself: why should not nature work, not for the sake of something, nor because it is better so, but just because as the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of necessity?" Aristotle does not even pause to explain that when one says "Zeus rains," one understands "the sky rains." That transition is assumed. At some stage, there had been what Vico calls "Sympathetic Nature." By the time of Aristotle, that worldview had come to an end, at least among the literate. By the time of Vico—at least in the Western European sphere—that worldview had come to an end even among the illiterate. Vico points to a je ne sais quoi. Like him, the modern and postmodern reader sees that at which he points, but also knows not what.'
-Jeffrey Dirk Wilson, "Vico's Metaphysics of Poetic Wisdom"
Modern minds are absorbed into scientific categorizations, it seems or obviously so. First, fiction or non-fiction. Next, genre subcategorizations. Kafka, accordingly, would be cross-categorized as a nerve breaking fiction hitting at a psycho-therapeutic module tale intersecting at a horror fantasy of imaginary entomology to be transferrable. If no one understands, that will be no one's fault, but only the writer's. Literally confusing or allegorically disturbing, otherwise. People, that's a literature! Oops, the audience is missing.
Bible alike. Oh, ancients thought in this way, how interesting to learn for us! Flip flopped is a pancake over a stove top, the saucepan is for the catch ready. St. Augustin flipped Bible pages or not in what way, who knows? May be able to be absorbed fully if one tries to be spiritual with maximum efforts literally. Allegorically drawn down, otherwise? Only by maximum inclinations toward the time-crossover, the road can be occupied with historical consciousness, thus appreciated.
This is not my junk words shop. Take it please literally. What more to say? People, struggle yourselves into Literature! Suffer to read! A good audience are there over centuries backward. Pull them out to read our time.
The central point is that scripture was not written as a historical account, nor even as a theological text. Essentially scripture is not even a text - but a doorway to enter and meet God. It is a fountain of spiritual strength and hope and joy.
But even if one wishes to use scripture as a theological text one should consider the whole of it, and indeed consider it under the light of Christ’s character. Always keeping in mind Christ’s teaching that the truth is discerned by its fruit (and the greatest fruit is of course repentance). I find it amazing when people take a single sentence, and even a single world, and build complex theories on it, pretentious castles built on a small pile of sand. But I like it when some theologians use scripture like a paint box for making visible some insight of theirs. On the other hand, the fact that after two millennia of Christianity some would still use scripture as a literal and encyclopedic text is, well, depressing. The higher up in the institutional ladder the more people seem to behave as if Christ is not around. Perhaps the world’s salvation and universal atonement is not a process that takes place in historical time.
“He also made an absolute demand that “idea” should be translated into existence (being and doing), which is exactly what his contemporaries, in his opinion, failed to do: “Most systematizers stand in the same relation to their systems as the man who builds a great castle and lives in an adjoining shack; they do not live in their great systematic structure. But in spiritual matters this will always be a crucial objection. Metaphorically speaking, a person’s ideas must be the building he lives in–otherwise there is something terribly wrong.”” (Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard by Soren Kierkegaard (Plough Publishing House, 2014).)
Firstly, I would like to thank you for your excellent book That All Shall Be Saved. It was a monumental step on my journey into the inner life of the Holy Trinity. It helped me see love for what it really is, without qualifications or excuses.
Now, onto the above article. I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but is it possible that our modern understanding of "literal" already crept into St. Thomas' exegesis? I'm wondering this because he defends the slaughter of the Canaanites as morally acceptable (in the Summa?). I doubt that he would be willing to defend such moral horrors if he were not absolutely convinced that the factual reading of the text is essential.
Is there some level of historical accuracy that is required to preserve even the allegorical meaning? For example, if Israel was never in exile in Egypt, would this compromise the integrity of spiritual truth? Asked another way, should the Book of Mormon be dismissed because it is fiction masquerading as history, or because its spiritual meaning is poor?
I was thinking about this issue recently, with Lambeth 2022 wrapping up and with the banal reactionary response of the ACNA/GAFCON crew. Specifically, it occurred to me that GAFCON's insistence on the "plain sense of Scripture" as the standard of orthodoxy on matters of sex, gender, and marriage both a.) confuses the literal and the moral senses of Scripture and b.) conflates the meaning of the literal sense with transhistorical truth. (Unsurprisingly, McDermott is one of those ACNA/GAFCON folks, for the record.)
Are there ever two who don't diverge at some point in their understanding or interpretation of almost anything religious or not? I remember sitting in the pews and contemplating the range of divergent understandings of what was going on and what it meant and what was literal, what figurative etc. Indeed I've thought many time there are as many theologies as there are people. Ambiguity seems to me to often, maybe more often than not, be a form of precision. The whole of what I know, admittedly very little, has never struck me as being adherent to some objective truth or other with the possible exception of the physical sciences although even those continue to bend off in previously unsuspected ways.
That’s literally the best thing I’ve read this evening.
David, I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but you are one of the writers who makes me feel I can experience that sometimes.
We're beginning a new academic year in our neck of the woods, so this sure was timely. What worries me is that young people have combined a "just in time" approach to knowledge with an internal standard of learning we might call "just enough." Having the patience to explicate (ex-plicare, to separate pressed leaves into separate sheets) is not something that comes naturally to them as their attention flits from this to that. It saddens me that the quality of their attention suffers, but it worries me that placing an interpretative frame (usually race, class, gender) over some bit of information takes less time, and is a path of lesser resistance, than the work of coming to grips with a mass of various details. It sounds like Nabokov had the patience and the passion for mucking about in the details of fiction, and for we who still have brains wired to read slowly and patiently, he remains a hero for that. Thanks, DBH.
Obviously anecdotal, but it seems to me that the moderns who are literalists (modernalists? Really, probably just fundamentalists) are thoroughly beset by this mindset on an almost phenomenological level. It saturates their ethics, politics, homiletics, social interactions. It's the core orientation of the fundamentalist, a severe presentist, essentially Calvinist gymnobiblism as applied to the world, in which there are no hidden "letters," only the chosen can see the world for what it is in its simple unidimensionality.
Don't we ourselves in our historical present recreate allegorical meaning inspired by ancient allegorical truths. For example watching baseball or going fishing. Also, need it be confined to text or classical mediums; the current interest in AI and personal avatars.... what's going on there, really?
I think poems often encourage this kind of premodern reading. This is perhaps one of the virtues of poetry. And possibly also one of the reasons poetry tends to be at odds with the contemporary ethos.
Please forgive me in advance for the length of this comment but the best I can do in response is to post what I think are applicable quotes, passages I have indeed bandied about for years now as a way of making much the same point as you are making here.
"Homer could write of his culture as an integrity of heroes, demi-gods, and divinities whose communication with men expressed those actions and maxims of conduct which summarized his culture and became guides not only to the later Periclean Greeks, but also to the entire occidental civilization which followed. If we recall the various attributes which his gods symbolized, or rather which they were, we become familiar with the motivations of the Greek race and the ideals to which they aspired. These ideals and motivations were not abstractions but the dramatic characters of a struggle expressing the integration of the individual and society. The lack of such integrity, the dislocation between myth and religious metaphysic, and the consequent disparity of fact and spirit are the central problems of the modern artist, whether he try to gather all modern ideologies into an epical summation, or sing the briefest and most personal lyric. In Greek culture, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides progressively demonstrated what T.S. Eliot has termed the 'disassociation of sensibility'. Plato and Aristotle finally abstracted their national myths in dialectic and category; the very title of Lucretius' epical poem, On the Nature of Things, becomes indicative of the transformation."
-Kimon Friar, "Myth and Metaphysics"
"Deeply moved yesterday reading Achilles' speech to Priam. Astonishment: this line is so firm and at the same time so sensitive, a vibrating chord. Deeply moved also by the lofty art Homer has impregnated for others, and which was there, as I read, a harmonious sound. Moreover, in Homer everything meshes, the whole world is a woof of organic 'umbilical cords'; the earthly, the heavenly world, animals, plants, elements, hearts of men, good, evil, death, life--that ripen, vanish, and flower again. The mechanism of the gods performs nothing supernatural, nothing ex machina; it retains coherence, nothing else."
-George Seferis, "A Poet's Journal"
'There is a nice example of that to which Vico points as well as the continuing difficulty and even impossibility for the modern or postmodern reader to enter into that at which he points. Homer states that "kai sphin Dios ombros aexei" (Zeus's raincloud increases them [the wine grapes]). Robert Fitzgerald translates that half-line as "ripen in heaven's rain," which completely misses the mythological character of Homer's formula; the translation is completely naturalistic. Robert Fagles seeks to preserve the mythological character in his rendering, "swelled by the rains of Zeus,"' but his translation allows the modern to read the half-line on his own terms. It is Alexander Pope, however, who best captures the quality of a Zeus-infused world: "And Jove descends in each prolific shower.''^" In the Homeric half-line, the divinity and the force of nature are one. The rain is not an act of god; it is god. It is not merely that Zeus is the sky, but that Zeus both is the sky and is the rain, and insofar as the rain fattens the grapes, Zeus is the grapes, too. The difficulty of translating that half-line is an indicator of what is "beyond our power." The problem is not a new one. Already by the time of Aristotle, "Zeus" had become mere metaphor. When Aristotle says "Zeus rains"—and Aristotle does use the term "Zeus rains""— it is clear that he means, "the sky rains," as translated in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, "A difficulty presents itself: why should not nature work, not for the sake of something, nor because it is better so, but just because as the sky rains, not in order to make the corn grow, but of necessity?" Aristotle does not even pause to explain that when one says "Zeus rains," one understands "the sky rains." That transition is assumed. At some stage, there had been what Vico calls "Sympathetic Nature." By the time of Aristotle, that worldview had come to an end, at least among the literate. By the time of Vico—at least in the Western European sphere—that worldview had come to an end even among the illiterate. Vico points to a je ne sais quoi. Like him, the modern and postmodern reader sees that at which he points, but also knows not what.'
-Jeffrey Dirk Wilson, "Vico's Metaphysics of Poetic Wisdom"
Modern minds are absorbed into scientific categorizations, it seems or obviously so. First, fiction or non-fiction. Next, genre subcategorizations. Kafka, accordingly, would be cross-categorized as a nerve breaking fiction hitting at a psycho-therapeutic module tale intersecting at a horror fantasy of imaginary entomology to be transferrable. If no one understands, that will be no one's fault, but only the writer's. Literally confusing or allegorically disturbing, otherwise. People, that's a literature! Oops, the audience is missing.
Bible alike. Oh, ancients thought in this way, how interesting to learn for us! Flip flopped is a pancake over a stove top, the saucepan is for the catch ready. St. Augustin flipped Bible pages or not in what way, who knows? May be able to be absorbed fully if one tries to be spiritual with maximum efforts literally. Allegorically drawn down, otherwise? Only by maximum inclinations toward the time-crossover, the road can be occupied with historical consciousness, thus appreciated.
This is not my junk words shop. Take it please literally. What more to say? People, struggle yourselves into Literature! Suffer to read! A good audience are there over centuries backward. Pull them out to read our time.
The central point is that scripture was not written as a historical account, nor even as a theological text. Essentially scripture is not even a text - but a doorway to enter and meet God. It is a fountain of spiritual strength and hope and joy.
But even if one wishes to use scripture as a theological text one should consider the whole of it, and indeed consider it under the light of Christ’s character. Always keeping in mind Christ’s teaching that the truth is discerned by its fruit (and the greatest fruit is of course repentance). I find it amazing when people take a single sentence, and even a single world, and build complex theories on it, pretentious castles built on a small pile of sand. But I like it when some theologians use scripture like a paint box for making visible some insight of theirs. On the other hand, the fact that after two millennia of Christianity some would still use scripture as a literal and encyclopedic text is, well, depressing. The higher up in the institutional ladder the more people seem to behave as if Christ is not around. Perhaps the world’s salvation and universal atonement is not a process that takes place in historical time.
“He also made an absolute demand that “idea” should be translated into existence (being and doing), which is exactly what his contemporaries, in his opinion, failed to do: “Most systematizers stand in the same relation to their systems as the man who builds a great castle and lives in an adjoining shack; they do not live in their great systematic structure. But in spiritual matters this will always be a crucial objection. Metaphorically speaking, a person’s ideas must be the building he lives in–otherwise there is something terribly wrong.”” (Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard by Soren Kierkegaard (Plough Publishing House, 2014).)
Dear Dr. Hart!
Firstly, I would like to thank you for your excellent book That All Shall Be Saved. It was a monumental step on my journey into the inner life of the Holy Trinity. It helped me see love for what it really is, without qualifications or excuses.
Now, onto the above article. I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but is it possible that our modern understanding of "literal" already crept into St. Thomas' exegesis? I'm wondering this because he defends the slaughter of the Canaanites as morally acceptable (in the Summa?). I doubt that he would be willing to defend such moral horrors if he were not absolutely convinced that the factual reading of the text is essential.
Thank you for all of your input.
Sincerely,
Gregory
Thanks, this does remind me of Illich again.
'A transformation possibly as profound, but enormously sadder than the changeover from
singing lines on the vineyard-like parchment into a mirror of mental ordinatio is now underway.
The mode of presentation, the place-less anomaly in which the screen image appears, its timeless
speed - all make it very difficult to ask students to accompany their teacher in the struggle for the
author's meaning. Not only in linguistics, but in literature too, students are trained to forgo
anything that would formerly have been called reading. Instead, they glory in lightning-like
receptions of messages, and in their ability to trace, manage, and reformat these strings. Some who
come to my classes are so far removed from traditional intercourse with a book that they want to
identify their scrolling through icons on a screen with the stroll on a pagus of cowhide!
http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1991_text_and_university.PDF
Is there some level of historical accuracy that is required to preserve even the allegorical meaning? For example, if Israel was never in exile in Egypt, would this compromise the integrity of spiritual truth? Asked another way, should the Book of Mormon be dismissed because it is fiction masquerading as history, or because its spiritual meaning is poor?
Simply put: this is amazing. Inspiring, encouraging, and empowering. I love what it reclaims for the texts and what it offers me as a reader.
I was thinking about this issue recently, with Lambeth 2022 wrapping up and with the banal reactionary response of the ACNA/GAFCON crew. Specifically, it occurred to me that GAFCON's insistence on the "plain sense of Scripture" as the standard of orthodoxy on matters of sex, gender, and marriage both a.) confuses the literal and the moral senses of Scripture and b.) conflates the meaning of the literal sense with transhistorical truth. (Unsurprisingly, McDermott is one of those ACNA/GAFCON folks, for the record.)
Are there ever two who don't diverge at some point in their understanding or interpretation of almost anything religious or not? I remember sitting in the pews and contemplating the range of divergent understandings of what was going on and what it meant and what was literal, what figurative etc. Indeed I've thought many time there are as many theologies as there are people. Ambiguity seems to me to often, maybe more often than not, be a form of precision. The whole of what I know, admittedly very little, has never struck me as being adherent to some objective truth or other with the possible exception of the physical sciences although even those continue to bend off in previously unsuspected ways.