On Fri, 25 May 2007 17:50:53 -0400
David Wilson-Okamura <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Bible as literature = a book to interpret
> Bible as theology = a book to obey
How can I interpret a story I cannot read unless I suspend belief in it,
How can I obey a law I cannot interpret unless I believe I can read it?
The biblical faith asks for subscription not to a creed, but a promise; its
words exist to create faith in their on-going and future efficacy, and it
defines faith as an "I- believe" that is identical with an "I-hope-to-know."
For doubting Thomas, seeing is believing, but for the author of Hebrews,
belief is the substance of things unseeen. Belief, then, is 'anachronic' to
revelation:
Everbody who believes in the Son of GOd
has this testiomony inside him;
and anyone who will not believe God
is making God out to be a liar,
because he has not trusted
the testimony God has given about his Son.
(1 John 5:10, Jersualem Bible trans.)
As a result of this anachronistic structure, history in the Bible is never
merely 'past history,' however factual or circumstantially related; it is
always a prophetic earnest in which God has disclosed some part of his
continuing will, and is therefore also an installment upon what God is yet
to do.
The kind of prevenient comprehension required by faith is a subscription to
the yet-to-be-manifested meaningfulness of _the_ word. It is precisely this
kind of faith that the reader of a literary text also requires, but a
successful reading ultimately dispels such an expectation by fulfilling it.
The temporality belonging to literary words runs in a direction the reverse
of prophetic, becuase it is determined by the delays in understanding and
registration, the dilation of comprehension, and the belatedness of the
word's coming, not into event, but into meaning. The hiatus between what is
said, and what is _being_ said, between the positing of the sign and
depositing of its significance, is really allegorical: meaning develops in
the "meantime"--i.e., in the mediatorial interval between cognition and
re-cognition. The first line of Racine's _Phédre_ is "Le dessein en est
pris," but such a "dessein" is reallly the telos of the work, and we do not
realize the line's implications until we have finished studying the play.
As the etymology of word "design" might be wrested to mean, there is a
point where the literary form closes off its signs, "de-disngs" them as it
were. It does this by making some claim upon them that suggests their
autonomy as a whole, or as an "autotelic" unity.
When the story ends, it ends 'ever after,' just as it began 'once upon a
time.' According to this convention, the story-pattern crosses into time
and out of it at aligned points. Insofar as the Bible is kept in a
concerned or participating relation with the culture receiving it as
canonic, the Bible does not want to end ever after, however clerar it is
that the canon itself is closed. It is precisely this premature foreclosure
of the purposiveness of a text which Jesus is made to condemn in his
conflict with the Synagogue. He sasy that the Synagoge has it Moses and its
Law, and implies that, in its open-ended faith-relation with God, it has
broken faith by regarding Moses and the Law as the full realization of God's
intentions, particularly his intentions towards Israel. This short-sighted
and pre-emptive converson of a promise into a possession has blinded Israel
to the sign of the future that Jesus is before it, and also blinds it to the
Messiah, towards whiom Israel has ceased to address its real and proper
expectation.
Most literary interpretation--this side of anagogy, at least--must err with
the Synagogue. The critic has his Moses and his Law. His/her criticism
aims at possesing some totality or other presumed to be present in the text,
a totality in which he/she is confident and intuits the presence of, but
with which he/she and his/her audience, and, in a sense, the work itself,
are as yet unfamiliar.
God says Let there be light, and there is light and the sun is never named,
and similarly, Let us make man in our image and crown him with glory and
there is Scripture. But nobody says "Let there be God," and the provisional
"Call me Ishmael" of _Moby Dick_ is hardly the "Call me Yahweh" -- the
unyielding "I am that I am" -- of Exodus 3. Spenser says let there be
Archimago, and there is an anxious or wishful or doubtful dream and a
fictionalized Una and Lillith and Duessa and the dual Helen of romance and
therefore there is Literature. Milton's God says I have begot in my own
image and there is a displeased Satan and the sun-chariot of a divine and
schismatic rival and the epic games of the war in heaven and of epic and
therefore there is again Literature. -- Jim N.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr. David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [log in to unmask]
> English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
> East Carolina University Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
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