You say, "there
is no such thing as a literal or single meaning to the
text". I take this as half jest, because if there is no literal
meaning to
written human language, why even post us your email?
partly because i'm not god and not even writing in god's name.
partly because i hope there's more to what i say than any single
"literal" meaning.
on another level, one you might appreciate, all efforts at human
communication are an act of hope.
On the serious side, who ever said
that human language had to have a single
meaning? Or further, that just because a text has several levels of
reading
that the text itself has no objective meaning?
i'm with you on the first, you lose me on the second. unless i
misunderstand the meaning of objective (as i think you misunderstood the
meaning of antisemitism), it means that there is one "true"
meaning that is external to the reader, and shared by all those who are
not blinded by their partiality. correct me if i'm wrong.
More seriously: I see that
there is some lack of understanding of what is
meant by an objective sense. I use the word objective in reference to
the
meaning of the text as the quality which determines the understanding
of
the text in the same, if not exactly, nearly so, sense in which the
human
author intended to convey;
so you wd amend my definition by adding that the "objective"
meaning is the one "intended" by the author. as i
suggessted above, any author with really impt things to say cannot reduce
it to words that do not have layers of meaning, some of which he or she
may intend without knowing what they are. i imagine that one of the
greatest thrills for a poet (or a historian) is to have someone notice
connections and meanings to the text that he or she had not been aware
of.
now obviously if someone reads a poem intended to create understanding
and peace btwn people as a call to war and hatred, then the author may
have a gripe. (i believe dostoyevsky addressed this in his
"parable of the grand inquisitor"). but that's more a matter of
intent than a matter of objective meaning.
or if there was any failing on his
part in
languague skills, at least that which the rules of grammer would
construe
the text to say.
you assume that our insufficiency with words is a correctable failing on
our part and not from the inherent insufficiency of language to
communicate experience or wisdom precisely. with words we are
artists, not scientists.
I see no reason whatsoever to
define objective meaning in
a religious text differently, since whether it be religious or not,
inspired or not, a human still wrote it; and the dominate opinion
among
Chrisitans and Jews is that humans wrote the books of the
Bible.
well, most jews think god wrote the torah, and muslims believe that allah
dictated the koran to muhammed. but i'll grant you your
point. it just seems to me to argue in the opposite
direction. if god is something beyond our ability to image, even to
conceive, why would writing about him be anything but a limited effort to
point the ways to understand, or enter into a relationship with
him? the finger that points is not the moon to which it
points.
I do not understand what you mean
by fundamentalists: my experience of the
term with a definitve non pejoritive usage relates to the rise of
the
fundamentalist movement among southern baptists et al. at the turn of
the
last century based on a book whose title went something like
"The
Fundamentals of Christianity" and which was a movement directed
against the
then popular trend in religious circles known as Modernism. As such, I
do
not see that this term "fundamentalist" has anything to do with
the
Lollards, the medieval Rabbis or the Scholastics.
fundamentalists argue for the "literal" meaning of
scripture. i used the term in a larger sense to describe a position
that holds that there is a single "objective" meaning to
scripture which we can determine. fundamentalists have a very
limited exegetical discourse because they pursue the fiction that they're
not interpreting, they're just explaining the literal meaning.
catholics have a highly developed exegetical discourse because they are
arguing that through the magisterium they have developed the proper way
to interpret the texts, and that the integrity of the one true and
apostolic church is proof that this is true. correct me if i'm
wrong.
>i must say that the notion of
an exegetical science that renders
>"objective" readings of sacred texts strikes me as a
theological version of
>the kind of (newtonian) physics-envy that we find among some of the
social
>"sciences" (pyschology, economics, sociology).
In a post-Cartesian world, shaped by the notion that nothing known
outside
the empirical method of research is scientific, I can understand why
you
should say that. But the empiracle method is not the only method of
research, there is also the forensic method [human testimony] and others
I
imagine that I am not familiar with; nor is there any necesity to say
that
knowledge and a discipline of knowledge must have a presupposed
defined
methodology, as if we need a method to certify the truth of what we
know--this is a theoretical construct of the Empirical movement in
western
philosophy (17th-18th C.) and it defies human experience, since we hold
as
true so much that has no methodologic presuppositions for its
acquitistion.
good point. science in this period had theology envy, altho i'd
take those threads back to the aristotelian devts of the 12 and 13th cn,
and their impact on latin as a "scientific" language whose
favorite word was "esse" -- the equivalent of the mathematical
" = " .
In the Medieval world: among
such authors as commented on the Sententiarum
Quatuor Libri of Peter Lombard, the study of the sacred page was
called
theology or sacred doctrine and this was held to be the highest for
of
science [scientia] which term was used in the sense we use
"knowledge".
This study was considered able to arrive at an objective understanding
of
the text because the notion of objectivity was the meaning intended by
the
author,
which, if we are dealing with scripture, for peter lombard was...?
and thus the discipline of theology
proceeded on the supposition of
objectivity that must be held when using human language in
general.
i understand your point. and it may be fine to talk about peter
lombard's beliefs in "objective interpretation of scripture",
but to invoke this idea as a valid goal today, after we have seen what
such notions produce (medieval attempts to enforce the "objective
meaning" on dissenters, with their modern fundamentalist versions of
coercive purity), strikes me as deeply problematic.
>>I was using theological in
the objective sense, again. Of course if a
>>group takes a certain stance against the mainstream, and
theologizes it,
>>you can call it theological motivation; but in medieval
terms,
>>theological motivations originate with God, and that is how
I was using
>>the term.
>
>xnty started out as a group that took a certain stance against
the
>mainstream. why do you think that such groups take such
stands? why do
You are presupposing that the phenomenon of Christianity is something
that
can be studied under a generic classification of religious movements,
or
that inasmuch as it can it can be explained; this already says much
about
how you are approaching the phenomenon
philosophically.
i am, and it certainly does say much about me and about most if not all
the professional historians on this or any list. one of the basic
rules of the trade is, no special pleading. i apply the same
standards to all the religions and religious texts that i study, mine and
others. if you want to exclude xnty from the historical method by
claiming a singularity (probably, if i am right, the doctrine of the
incarnation), that's fine. but i expect better theology than
history from such efforts. i'll treat the results as primary
documents about contemporary beliefs, not secondary ones of historical
analysis.
>you think it is later
"theologized" (whatever that means) rather than done
>by people who believe they are inspired by god?
We can't discuss that question until we resolve in what sense we are
using
objective in reference to religion.
i'm not sure why, even given your definition. please explain.
>as for what the mainstream
>is, how can a xn argue that majoritarian decisions decide the nature
of god
>and what he wants from his human creation? doesn't jesus
explicitly tell
If by "majoritarian" you are refering to the comment I made
regarding 13
centuries until the Lollards came along; I was not making it on the
presupposition that the majority is right; but rather that if 13
centuries
have allowed equally many the opportunity to study a text,
you are aware that we have church canons forbidding the study of the
bible by laity. you are aware that what we have in our
documentation is a highly "sifted" sample, representative
primarily of a narrow range of disagreement within the elite xn
community. we have bits of evidence that there were radically
different readings of scripture, some wildly popular at earlier times...
we just have them in the brief denunciations of the clerics whose
"objective exegesis" was offended by their dissenting
ones. as blake says, "both read the bible day and night, where
they read black, i read white."
then it seems
decidely unreasonable to presuppose that someone or group can come
along
and find its objective meaning (I use objective here in the same sense
as
above).
is this not a version of the argument that the papacy made against
luther? the objections to the catholic hierarchical reading of scripture
predate the emergence of imperial xnty, and accompany it at all
stages. invoking a systematically skewed documentary collection as
evidence of the "majoritarian position" is, at least to my
mind, deeply a-historical.
>his disciples that most people
will despise them? and how can we judge
>what the mainstream is in a period like the MA, when the
overwhelming
>majority of texts comes from people who not only claim to represent
the
>mainstream, but will engage in crusade and inquisition to eliminate
rivals?
>
Well, this thread began with my comments on Gow's statement that there is
a
objective exegesis of the Bible that supports the thesis the the
Roman
Pontiff is the Antichrist,
he never said anything of the sort. he never uses the word
"objective" in the entire article. he was making the same
point about these dissenters that i am about peter lombard... ie that
they believed that their interpretation was what scripture
"really" meant.
and now you say that the
credibility of medieval
Catholics is somehow impaired by the crusades and inquisition.
of course i do. wd you argue that the literary products of an
institution capable of mobilizing and institutionalizing such engines of
religious coercion and thought control shouldn't be treated with
deep skepticism? if you mean, do i look to the medieval catholic
writers -- here theologians -- as a reliable guide to what people then
believed? no. they are not credible witnesses, altho they are definitely
witnesses and witnesses that tell us a great deal despite their
own efforts. as reliable guides to what we can or should believe about
god and humanity, about what the bible says? i'll judge that with
each one.
but i can tell you that a medieval catholic who finds it legitimate to
use coercion to force people to either adhere to his
"objective" exegesis, or suffer torture and death, is not high
on my list of spiritual guides, nor, i suspect a good guide to the
meaning of scripture. they are, however, witnesses to the
exegetical creativity of people faced with a text that does not
necessarily say what they want. do i think they are insincere, that
they knowingly distort the text? -- rarely. i think they genuinely
believe that they have extracted the "objective" meaning of the
text.
I must say
that I find this sort of comment very often on the streets when talking
to
fundamentalists, in the proper sense, and that in this forum I do not
know
what to say in response.
the fundamentalists you are talking to are by and large saying those
things because they oppose catholicism (and probably consider the pope an
agent of antichrist). that's not my case. but the case
against inquisitorial religious attitudes is at the core of modernity and
civil society, and honest historical investigation, and i think you shd
expect to find a mistrust of claims to a monopoly on religious truth on a
list like this. i for one try hard to understand how true believers
in god who accept the NT as holy scripture can come up with
justifications for inquisition and slaughter of xnty's
"enemies". i don't limit xns or xnty to these questions,
nor do i exclude jews and muslims from them (altho no other religion
calls for loving your enemy). but anyone who wishes to pretend that these
developments are aberrations that have nothing to do with "true
xnty" and then start talking about the objective meaning of the
texts as if there were such a thing and they had a handle on it, then i
do feel i have to speak up.
i think it's impt for "true believers" in a religion (whichever
that might be) to understand the justifiable nervousness of those not
sharing these beliefs about how such believers might behave were they to
gain the power to coerce. eg, wd the papacy, now one of the worlds
great voices for religious freedom and human rights, change its tune were
it, heaven forbid, to regain the kind of coercive power it had in the
middle ages? or wd the fundamentalists, who today get indignant about
religious persecution of xns around the world, were they to take
political power, look like 14th catholics, or 17th protestants?
in a study of tolerance in the reformation era, one historian noted that
tolerance was a loser's creed. with the advent of constitutional
govts, tolerance became a winner's creed for the first time in xn
history, and with this, the modern era began. i'm all for it.
of course, the price is, historically, religious indifference. the
"modern" is tolerant partly because he or she cd care less if
you believe in god, or the trinity, or whatever. being both
passionate and tolerant -- there's the rub, there's the modern challenge
to the believer. and i think the solution lies, among other things,
in a kind of exegetical modesty that i do not sense in invocations of
"objective truth."
If I have offended
you have not
by daring to act like another
Cyrano without the poetic finesse,
no comment
I ask your pardon,
granted but not needed.
but it was not out of malice or
personal vendetta
never thought it was
but simply for the sake of a
fruitful academic exchange on an
important area of current historical research; which exchange would
be
beneficial to the likes of me, who stands among you professors and
scholars
on this list, like a student, perhaps of the kind you'd wouldn't want
in
your classes,
i'd love students as lively as you in my class.
since I appreciate a lively
exchange and have, since my
father was himself a university prof, little fear of engaging in
them,
truly less than I ought to have as a Franciscan; and if my determination
to
continue the discussion and defend myself has borne ill, I ask your
pardon.
no need. but let me ask you something. how do you explain the
role of franciscans in the inquisition?
Sincerely in Christ,
Br. Alexis Bugnolo
sincerely,
richard landes
