A Theology Of Reading

The Hermeneutics Of Love

Alan Jacobs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429982224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

If the whole of the Christian life is to be governed by the "law of love"—the twofold love of God and one's neighbor—what might it mean to read lovingly? That is the question that drives this unique book. Through theological reflection interspersed with readings of literary texts (Shakespeare and Cervantes, Nabokov and Nicholson Baker, George Eliot and W. H. Auden and Dickens), Jacobs pursues an elusive quarry: the charitable reader.

CONTEXTS AND OBSTACLES

We care whether love is or is not altogether forbidden to us, whether we may not altogether be incapable of it, of admitting it into our world. We wonder whether we may always go mad between the equal efforts and terrors at once of rejecting and of accepting love.

—Stanley Cavell (Disowning, 72)

The Law of Love and Interpretation

When asked by a scribe to name the greatest of the commandments, Jesus complies by citing two injunctions, one from Deuteronomy (6:5) and one from Leviticus (19:18): "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself' (Mt. 22:37-40, RSV). But he then goes on to make the greater, and more startling, claim that upon these commandments "depend all the law and the prophets." That the one identified by the Christian Church as incarnate Love speaks these words compels our closest attention to them.¹ To say that "all the law and the prophets" "depend" upon these two commandments—or this twofold commandment—is to say that the multitude of ordinances and exhortations in the Old Testament presuppose the love that Jesus enjoins. No one can meet the demands of the Law who does not achieve such love; conversely, those who achieve such love will, like the psalmist, "delight in [God's] statutes" and find themselves "consumed with longing for [God's] ordinances at all times" (Ps. 119:16, 20).

Moreover, since the ordinances of the law cover the whole range of human interactions with one another and with God, it follows that there can be no realm of distinctively human activity in which Jesus' great twofold commandment is not operative. As Kierkegaard says, "There are only a few acts which human language specifically and narrowly calls works of love, but heaven is such that no act can be pleasing there unless it is an act of love" (Works 20). And those Christians who regularly pray that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven should hope to see, in the life of one who loves God and her neighbor, that love manifested in her work and her leisure, in her caregiving and her worship. We need not shy away from evaluating any everyday pursuit according to what the fourteenth-century English theologian Richard Rolle (along with many others) calls "the law of love." "That you may love [Jesus Christ] truly," says Rolle, "understand that his love is proved in three areas of your life—in your thinking, in your talking, and in your manner of working" (159). This division should be of particular interest to people engaged in academic pursuits, because our thinking (including reading) and talking (including writing) pretty much are our "manner of working." How might we begin to consider academic tasks in light of this "law of love"?

To consider the problem more specifically: My work, as a teacher and scholar of literature, is largely occupied with the interpretation of texts. What would interpretation governed by the law of love look like? This is a question that has all too rarely been considered; but it is raised by Augustine in his treatise On Christian Doctrine (De Doctrina Christiana). Near the end of the first book, Augustine sums up the argument he has been making by specifically linking Jesus' great double commandment with Paul's elaboration of its two facets in Romans: "It is to be understood that the plenitude and the end of the Law and of all the sacred Scriptures is the love of a Being [i.e., God] which is to be enjoyed and of a being [i.e., our neighbor] that can share that enjoyment with us" (30). He then applies this insight to the interpretation of the Scriptures for the purpose of edifying the faithful (the word Doctrina in this context means, primarily, "teaching"): "Whoever, therefore, thinks that he understands the divine Scriptures or any part of them in such a way that it [i.e., his interpretation] does not build the double love of God and of our neighbor does not understand [the Scriptures] at all. Whoever finds a lesson there useful to the building of charity, even though he has not said what the author may be shown to have intended in that place, has not been deceived, nor is he lying in any way."² This is an astonishing statement—hardly less astonishing, in its way, than the twofold commandment itself—but what does it mean? What would interpretation governed by the law of love look like? Strangely, Augustine does not say One must presume that he sought to meet the charitable imperative in his own exegetical work, but it is surely legitimate to ask what, specifically, makes Augustine's interpretations charitable, and how they might be distinguished from uncharitable interpretations.

Moreover, Christian theology has neglected Augustine's provocative statement; there are, to my knowledge, no thorough accounts of loving interpretation. This failure is surprising, not only because so few Augustinian hints have remained untaken in the course of the centuries, but also because it seems so obvious, once Augustine points it out, that Christian interpreters—and I refer not just to interpreters of Scripture but to interpreters of any and every kind of text—are just as obliged to conduct their work according to the principles of Christian charity as any other workers. An account of the hermeneutics of love is one of the great unwritten chapters in the history of Christian theology.³

Though Augustine makes his suggestion about loving interpretation in the context of Biblical exegesis and exposition, I will consider other kinds of texts in the context of agape—as my opening treatment of Shakespeare may indicate. Of course, certain circumstances are relevant to every experience of reading; for instance, our education (in the broadest sense: Bildimg, one might say) is always at work whenever we read. To persons who claim that their understanding of Scripture comes from God alone and not from mere humans, Augustine replies that God didn't teach them the letters of the alphabet (On Christian Doctrine 4). But as we consider the reading of specific kinds of texts— legal, literary, scriptural—we find varying conditions in effect. One may compare the reading of Scripture with the reading of a novel, or a legal document, and find many common hermeneutical conditions, but these different kinds of works make different kinds of claims upon their readers, and these differences must be acknowledged and understood. That said, the more important thing to note is this: The universal applicability of Jesus' twofold commandment makes Augustine's charitable imperative just as relevant to the interpretation of epic poems or national constitutions as it is to the reading of Holy Scripture. This is a point that Gerhard Ebeling almost reaches, but not quite: "A theological theory of language ... is not relevant solely to the language of theology, that is, to the problem of formulating adequate theological concepts and judgments. The tasks of a theological theory of language of course include this, and yet it is not exclusively concerned with theological language, as a particular specialist language." So far so good: But Ebeling immediately continues, "Its principal relevance is to the language of faith. For this provides theology with its object, and poses its task" (186-187). That a "theological theory of language" should be concerned with faith as well as with theology per se is certainly true, indeed is unarguable. But does not theology have an interest in language even if it isn't the language of faith? Is there not a theological stake in language about money, or eros, or architecture? Ebeling is precisely right when he says that "the one thing that is true is love. To base a doctrine of language on this statement is to move towards a theological theory of language" (180). But only if we understand this love of God and neighbor as the first requirement in the reading of any text can we fulfill "the law of love" in our thinking, our talking, and our manner of working.⁴

Of course, it is not as though the Church has failed to reflect on the place of non-Christian literature in the Christian life. To the contrary, much patristic (and later) thought is thoroughly occupied with the question of how to use the poems and stories, as well as the philosophy, of the pagan world. In this sense literature is subsumed under Tertullian's famous question: "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?"—though it was St. Jerome who shaped the question in specifically literary terms: "What has Horace to do with the Psalter? Or Virgil with the Gospel? Or Cicero with the Aposde?"⁵ (Jerome's pairings are nicely genre-specific: first lyric poetry, then heroic narrative, then forensic rhetoric.) For those theologians who would utterly renounce the use of pagan literature, Jerome provides the rationale: "We should not drink at the same time from the cup of Christ and the cup of demons." But, as David Lyle Jeffrey rightly demonstrates, Jerome also, and with greater emphasis, provides a thorough justification for the reading and use of the pagan writers: He quotes Paul's assertion that "all things are clean to the clean" (Tit. 1:15) and provides a detailed account of the ways in which Christian readers can despoil the literary Egyptians of their precious gold (Jeffrey 76-78).

In practice, the chief means by which this gold was laid hold of was allegory. As Jeffrey shows, Jerome uses an allegorical interpretation of a passage from Scripture—the disturbing provision in Deuteronomy (21:10-13) that a woman taken captive in warfare may be ritually purifled, shaved, and washed, and then taken as a wife—to explain how pagan literature may be made worthy of Christian use. But it was also common to employ allegorical interpretation of the pagan texts themselves in order to extract Christian meanings from them, as when Clement of Alexandria explicates the scene in the Odyssey in which Odysseus escapes the song of the Sirens, who are figured here as sin and error: "Sail past their music and leave it behind you, for it will bring about your death. But if you will, you can be the victor over the powers of destruction. Tied to the wood [of the cross], you shall be freed from destruction. The Logos of God will be your pilot, and the Holy Spirit [pneuma, wind] will bring you to anchor in the harbor of heaven."⁶ A subtler version of the same tendency may be seen in Thomas Aquinas's appropriations of Aristotle, "the Philosopher," whom Thomas can often make to hold—at least by implication—specifically Christian positions. As David Knowles neatly put it, Thomas had "no hesitation in extending [Aristotle's] thought, in filling gaps within it and interpreting it in accord with Christian teaching" (257).

Such creative interpretations were often necessary, given the recurrent hostility toward pagan thought among many Christians. Thomas himself worked in a time when the works of Aristotle were almost always at risk of being placed under some local, or perhaps universal, interdict. Often, only what Jeffrey calls "an unabashedly ideological appropriation of the [pagan] text" (72) was possible. But such uses of non-Christian literature can scarcely be accommodated to what I am calling a hermeneutics of love. There are two chief reasons for this, reasons that I hope will become clear as my argument progresses.

The first is that, as my patristic quotations show, the Christian appropriation of pagan literature was understood to occur in the context of spiritual warfare: One can in good conscience spoil the Egyptians because they are the cruel enemies of the people of Israel. In Jeffrey's terms, the "secular scripture" that becomes a "beautiful captive" is a prisoner of war and, therefore, someone toward whom we do not have the obligations we have toward our neighbors. The captured pagan woman presumably is not asked whether she wants to marry. Given the uncertain cultural position of Christianity in its early centuries, this combative attitude may be comprehensible. But the hermeneutics of love requires that books and authors, however alien to the beliefs and practices of the Christian life, be understood and treated as neighbors: "Neighbour is what philosophers would call the other" (Kierkegaard, Works 37).

The second reason involves hermeneutical method: The allegorical approaches of the Fathers, and the "gap-filling" of Thomas, risk the erasure of difference. The function of allegory, in this context, is to isolate the gold of identity (the points at which Christian and pagan understandings can be made to converge) and to dispose of the dross of difference (all those elements that cannot be reconciled with Christian understanding). And yet, as we shall see repeatedly in this study, the preservation of difference is absolutely central to a hermeneutics of love. I am to love my neighbor as myself, but this is a challenge precisely because the neighbor is not. myself. As John Milbank says, fundamental to "Christianity is . . . (in aspiration and faintly traceable actuality) something like 'die peaceful transmission of difference,' or 'differences in a continuous harmony'" (Theology 417); but without the preservation of difference there can be neither transmission nor harmony.

Love and Error

It will immediately be objected by some that this notion of charitable interpretation is intolerably mushy, replacing a substantive concern for objectivity, or at least accuracy and fidelity, with a warm flow of sentimentality. Much of this book will be devoted to correcting such unfortunate assumptions about the nature of love—by, for instance, showing how a genuinely Christian notion of love requires among other things a deep commitment to discriminating judgment—but for now let me just say this, by way of provocation. It is likely that those most quick to object will be theologians whose training encourages them to think of the chief task of hermeneutics as the avoidance of error. Avoiding error is a good thing, but it is probably not central to hermeneutics. As Hans-Georg Gadamer rightly says, "The legal historian . . . has his 'methods' of avoiding mistakes, and in such matters I agree entirely with the legal historian. But the hermeneutics interest of the philosopher begins precisely when error has been successfully avoided" (xxxiii).

Gadamer also provides the necessary theological context for understanding this fear of error: "Theological hermeneutics, as Dilthey showed, developed from the reformers' defense of their own understanding of Scripture against the attack of the Tridentine theologians and their appeal to the indispensability of tradition" (174). The Reformers found themselves obliged by their polemical situation to show that they could specify a set of reliable safeguards against error—safeguards which would serve a similar liminal function to the concept of "tradition" in the Roman Catholic Church—and this need to provide safeguards and eliminate error came to dominate the hermeneutical tradition for the next several centuries. The chief goal of theological hermeneutics naturally, then, comes to be associated more closely with "getting it right" than with a deepening of understanding or a growing in love. Thus theological hermeneutics inevitably becomes what Gerald Bruns—speaking specifically of Spinoza's claim to be interested not in the "truth" of the Biblical text but rather in its "meaning"—calls "Cartesian hermeneutics, or the allegory of suspicion, in which the text comes under the control of the reader as disengaged rational subject, unresponsive except to its own self-certitude. . . . The motive of Cartesian hermeneutics is to preserve alienation as a condition of freedom from the text" (149). A century and a half after Spinoza, Hegel would point out that the "demand for neutrality has generally no other meaning but that [the interpreter] is to act in expounding [the texts he interprets] as if he were dead" (quoted in Bruns 150).

Gadamer's (or rather Dilthey's) point about the historical origins of the discipline of hermeneutics helps to explain why people would make "alienation from the text" a positive good. In this context one can see more clearly why the early Reformers, though thoroughly Augustinian in so many other respects, found little use for the Augustinian emphasis on charity as the chief imperative for and most reliable guide to interpretation. Faced with claims from their Catholic counterparts that, lacking a commitment to tradition, they had no constraints upon their interpretive activity, they could scarcely appeal to a hermeneutic that shows little interest in safeguarding readers from error.

For, indeed, Augustine appears—in the passage I have been referring to, if not elsewhere—to disregard the problem of error. In order to explain his attitude toward error in De Doctrina, I must first note that Augustine is rather uncertain about the terminology he wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude
• 1 Contexts and Obstacles
• INTERLUDE A: THE ILLUMINATI
• INTERLUDE B: TRANSFER OF CHARISMA
• INTERLUDE C: QUIXOTIC READING
• INTERLUDE D: TWO CHARITABLE READERS
• Postlude
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index