Except when the true ecclesiastical canons are their topic, people who use the word canon usually have in mind quite practical issues. They may, for example, be stating that there is for students of literature a list of books or authors certified by tradition or by an institution as worthy of intensive study and required reading for all who may aspire to professional standing within that institution. Or they may be disputing the constitution of the canon, or even the right of the institution to certify it. And now the issues grow more theoretical. For some maintain that the very concept of “literature” as a way of discriminating between more and less privileged texts is an illicit one; so, a fortiori, further discriminations between texts that have thus been set apart must also be improper.
There are arguments of this kind now actively in progress in the humanities, and especially in literary criticism, but it is presumably acknowledged by all parties that the analogy which permits them to speak of secular canons is an imperfect one. The ecclesiastical canons are, allowing for a small measure of sectarian variation, fixed; and their fixity, however come by, is a matter of principle or doctrine. Secular canons need to be more permeable; new works are occasionally added, old works, now held to have been neglected, are revived and inserted; now and again something may be excluded. Still, even allowing for these differences, the concept of a secular canon has real force, and may even be necessary to the preservation of our disciplines. However, that is not my present subject. I want rather to see if laymen have anything to learn from listening in to a current dispute over the true character of the ecclesiastical canon, on the ideas of which their own notions of canonicity are founded.
I shall not attempt to give a detailed account of what is inevitably a complicated matter, or to provide a history of the whole contention. It will be quite enough, I think, to explain the nature of the differences between the champions of the two parties that now oppose each other. What is called “canonical criticism” can fairly be represented by Brevard S. Childs of Yale, and the most powerful enemy of this new style is James Barr of Oxford.
Childs, in his Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (1979), says that the Bible should be treated as a “collection with parameters” (p. 40). That is, of course, the old way of treating it; but Childs says that the traditional concept of canon, weakened already by the Reformation, suffered progressive collapse under the pressure of the historical criticism that has flourished over the past two centuries. Attention was diverted from the wholeness of the Bible and directed instead to the study of individual books and segments. To criticism of this kind the canon was interesting, if at all, because of the peculiar, historically irrelevant, and inevitably misleading way it was put together. No time or energy was left for what came to be seen as a merely pious or archaic study of this fortuitously assembled collection as a unity, as the singular Bible that evolved out of the plural biblia.
Consequently, says Childs, there is a “long-established tension between the canon and criticism” (meaning the “traditio-historical” variety so long dominant). He wishes to reduce this tension; he will try “to understand the Old Testament as canonical scripture [that is, to see it as a literary and presumably theological unit, ‘with fixed parameters’] and yet to make full and consistent use of the historical-critical tools” (p. 45). He is not, that is to say, proposing a primitivistic return to the prehistorical mode of criticism, which could afford to treat the canon as all of a piece, and divinely instituted exactly as it was; for proper attention to the integrity of the canon need not preclude historical study of the interaction between the developing corpus and the community as it changes through history. It is important to Childs that the canon was the product of many successive decisions, not of some belated and extrinsic act of validation. The history of the formation of the canon is important. Nevertheless, the canon as it is, in its full, valid form, ought, in his opinion, to be the prime object of attention.
Perhaps one can best illustrate the desired interplay between this kind of history and this kind of canonical criticism by citing the well-known demonstration by James A. Sanders, in his pioneering book Torah and Canon (1972), that the intrusion of Deuteronomy between Numbers and Joshua decisively affected the tradition and gave a new cast to subsequent understanding of the Jewish Bible as a whole. Similar observations have been made, though with less confidence, concerning the decision to put St. John after St. Luke, thus dividing the two-part work Luke and Acts.
The suggestion, then, is that historical and canonical criticism can live together and cooperate. But priority is still to be accorded to the canon. That, however, is a decision unacceptable in principle to historians who think the canon a late and arbitrary imposition with no bearing on the true (that is, the original) import of its members. Hence the tension Childs seeks to resolve. On the one hand it is necessary to maintain that the canon is not just an opaque wrapping that must be seen through or removed if one is to get at the contents and achieve a true sense of each of them. On the other, it has to be acknowledged that the constituents of the canon have their own histories, and that all the work devoted to the recovery of their original pre-canonical sense has not been entirely wasted.
It can of course be said that in canonical books there are words addressed to an original situation that are intended to have relevance also to later ones, and later ones that derive from, or relate more or less directly to, earlier ones, so that for some purposes at least it is only sensible to think of the canon as a whole. Moreover, the preservation of old writings and the habit of venerating them happen not primarily because they are witnesses to a merely historical state of affairs, but because that state of affairs has consuming relevance to later times; so that it is their capacity to be applied, and the practice of applying them to situations other than the historical circumstances of their origin, that saves them. In a closed canon this position is generalized, and the entire body of scripture is endowed with a potential of perpetual and prophetic applicability. Before closure it was possible to obtain this necessary modern application by rewriting or adding to the body of sacred texts, but as soon as you have an enclosed canon you can no longer do that, and indeed the unalterability of the words becomes an essential aspect of its sacredness. Henceforth all interpretation, all modernization, has to be in the form of commentary. Indeed this sequence of events is in a way repeated, since there accumulates an Oral Torah which acquires its own kind of canonicity when it is written down: and so forth. Thus in the Jewish tradition the Torah is always accompanied by its shadow, the commentary that will presumably go on forever; and yet they are thought of together as the Torah, a syzygy of that which is fixed and that which changes in time.
Such considerations do not appear to be part of Childs’s case, but he does argue that the formation of the canon was a decisive moment in the history of Jewish religion; for after that moment it was possible for Israel, no longer possessed of a Temple cult, to define itself instead in terms of a book. Its existence made possible all succeeding “actualizations” of the religion. And by minimizing the importance of the canon, historical criticism has destroyed or damaged our ability to understand the process by which scriptures which were once of temporally restricted significance became one Scripture, normative for a community throughout its history.
Behind Barr’s objections to Childs there is a wholly different idea of what it is to read a book, especially a book that claims or seems to claim the property of historical reference. To Barr it appears obvious not only that the individual books are much more important than the enclosure into which they were eventually herded, but also that what the books are about is much more important than the books. It is not the canon that gives the books their authority; it is the events and persons the books report. Indeed the habit of venerating writing for what it is, and for its relation with other writing that has got between the same covers, strikes him as simply dishonest, and he says so with impressive vigor. His book, Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority and Criticism (1983), is indeed an exceptionally strong polemic against the position taken by Childs, and against Childs himself as its leading exponent.
Barr thinks it worth notice that the interesting persons represented in the Bible got along perfectly well without a canon. Those of the New Testament, happy with their oral kerygma, were quite unaware that they were writing books that would later be made canonical. Childs had argued for a connection between the self-identity of a church and its possession of a precisely limited canon; Barr declares this connection to be illusory. How much difference, he asks, would it make to the Roman Catholic church if the book of Wisdom were struck out of the canon, and how much to the Protestant churches if they had to admit it (pp. 41–42)? Barr maintains that the extreme canonical position—that sixty-six books are inspired and nothing else is—has no scriptural support; and indeed he finds offensive the implication that there are no truths outside them, when on any sane view there are. And he points out, correctly, that to privilege books by establishing them in a canon is to confer great and in his opinion undeserved advantages upon them; for example they belong automatically—whatever their intrinsic quality—to a class above the Confessions of St. Augustine. Success in these matters is determined simply by getting inside; Jude is in and Augustine isn’t; as with the Order of the Garter there’s no damned nonsense about merit. Serious scholars should avoid such foolishness.
In any case it makes little sense, Barr believes, to speak of the Old Testament having a canon at all. The textbooks, with some support from the Talmud, will tell you it was established at the council held at Jamnia toward the end of the first century of the present era. Barr inclines to the view that if anything at all happened at Jamnia it had nothing to do with canons; perhaps there were “academic discussions about legal questions” (p. 56). Moreover, he is suspicious of the so-called “Alexandrian canon,” the larger canon that makes up the Greek version of the Jewish Bible. It was merely the Torah plus a number of other books. In any case, if one is really looking for the true source of authority in Judaism one will have to admit that it is not identifiable with scripture but with Torah and Talmud together; so that even if a canon were fixed at Jamnia or anywhere else, “this was a less important and less decisive fact than would seem natural to those who have seen the notion of the canon through the glass of the Calvinistic Reformation” (p. 61). It will be seen that Barr has little use for canons in general. They are, if taken seriously, impediments to the real business of history.
However, his strongest objections to Childs arise less from disagreements about the history of the canon than from the claim that “canon and criticism” can be put to work as partners. This is tantamount to saying that truth and falsehood can be yoked and plough together. And the difference between Childs and Barr now presents itself in this manner: for Childs the final meaning—the meaning established by the formation of a canon—is the true one; but for Barr the true meaning is the original meaning, to be ascertained as far as possible by progressive historical research. Here, then, is the root of this matter: the argument is between “objective” history and a hermeneutic approach to truth.
According to Barr, “canonical” criticism entails a “decontextualization” (the stripping away, he means, of the real historical context) comparable to that effected by midrash—which updates by adaptive commentary the text that time has made obscure or apparently irrelevant—or the selfishly limited interpretative techniques used by the Qumram community, techniques which applied scripture exclusively to the modern moment of the sect (p. 80). Such decontextualization entails falsehood. Truth lies in the historical method; it is therefore dependent upon scholarly methods and techniques discovered in the past couple of hundred years. Barr allows that its discovery was belated, but holds that it has nevertheless its basis in “an ultimate datum of faith” (p. 101). These methods give us access to the important persons and events described in the books of the Bible; and to be interested in them is to be interested in the truth. But scholars whose training has been oriented toward hermeneutics, especially in the adulterated versions of the German originals he says are current in the United States, are not interested in the truth. He blows them all away with an epigram: “The final criterion for theology cannot be relevance; it can only be truth” (p. 118).
This is the position expounded by Barr in a long and acrimonious appendix. That the “final” meaning can be the true one he rejects on instinct. That “appropriation” or application is inseparable from understanding, that the most learned and conscientious historian is still restricted by his own historical situation, a situation of which he cannot be so fully conscious as to transcend it by an effort of will and intellect—these are just the arguments Barr most deplores. He says there are grounds for thinking “this philosophy”—attributed to Bultmann and his epigoni—“a wrong one” (p. 143), but he does not, at any rate in this book, say what those grounds are. It was presumably enough to notice that the consequences of behaving as if this philosophy were a right one are absurd and repellent. What, for instance, is one to make of a way of doing biblical scholarship that treats Amos as of no more importance than his redactors? Or, more generally, that regards the Bible as a “separate cognitive zone” (p. 168)? The position is so ridiculous as to require no confutation.
Whether or not Barr is right about the absurdity of this view of the canon, he is surely wrong to call it a twentieth-century innovation. For example, it is stated dogmatically by Milton’s Jesus in Paradise Regained, and would have seemed familiar to all who defined curiositas as the quest for useless knowledge, meaning knowledge not conducive to salvation: a very large number of people over a very long period. However, that is not the important issue, which I take to be, inevitably, hermeneutic. Barr asserts that it is untrue to claim that understanding and application are simultaneous; but that is the belief of the opposite party. Strong in the conviction that common sense supports only his own view, Barr simply denounces theirs. But there is more to be said.
One could reasonably say that some modern criticism is “holistic” and “appropriative”; which of course is not to say that these are exclusively modern qualities. Indeed such criticism bears an obvious resemblance to some ancient modes of interpretation. It is rather important to understand this, though it is equally important to take account of the differences between old and new. Probably the most important (as this dispute demonstrates) is that the modern variety has a strong antithetical relation to the tradition of “objective” historical scholarship which it wishes to modify or oppose. Childs of course knows that very well, and Barr accordingly scolds him for his ambivalence toward historical criticism; but it would surely, even on his view, be a worse error to forget or ignore that kind of criticism altogether and really write like the Qumram sectaries.
That there are rote denunciations of historical criticism by persons unqualified to make them, as Barr alleges, may well be true. There are always people around who think it would be a good thing to abolish the past. Barr remarks, and plausibly, that Rudolf Bultmann, the godfather of hermeneutics as understood by most American theologians, would have been disgusted by such facile condemnations of the sort of work on which he spent so much of his life. Evidently Barr thinks better of that side of Bultmann’s work than he does of the hermeneutics. In fact Bultmann cannot have thought of the two as quite so easily separated; indeed the relationship between his historical work and his hermeneutics, like the argument between Childs and Barr, is inescapably a hermeneutic issue, and one that already has a very long history.
The problem declared itself, and was duly discussed, as soon as the historical criticism of the New Testament began with the work of Semler and Michaelis in the eighteenth century. Michaelis saw that to subject the separate books of the Bible to historical analysis implied the view that the canon was not uniformly inspired. He did not think this change of attitude harmful to religion; indeed he tried—by historical research!—to establish which books were truly inspired and which were not. But the consequences for later scholarship were very great, and the inferences drawn were different. Scholars were able to behave as if inspiration were none of their business, and the tensions between history and faith, reflected sometimes in controversy between historian and theologian, and sometimes within one man who aspired to be both, became a permanent problem.
Almost a century before Barr we find Wilhelm Wrede confidently stating that objective scholarship has no concern with the canon. It must simply seek “to recover the actual state of affairs”; what theology makes of the results is another business altogether. The vocation of the scholar calls for complete disinterest: “He must be able to distinguish his own thinking from that alien to it, modern ideas from those of the past; he must be able to prevent his own view, however dear, from exerting any influence on the object of research, to hold it, so to speak, in suspension. For he only wishes to discover how things really were.” The words echo Ranke, and the practice of historical scholarship continues to do so. Wrede expressly asserts the consequences of this doctrine for the canon when he says that the New Testament writings are not to be understood “from the point of view of a subsequent experience with which they originally had nothing whatever to do” (my italics). There must be no difference between the ways in which one treats canonical and noncanonical documents. The assembly into a canon of certain favored documents is at best evidence for the quite obsolete presuppositions or desires of canon-makers, trapped in their own historical moment; and the assumption is that by using modern historical methods the scientific scholar is exempted from any such historical limitation, and may make direct contact with the past as it really was.1
That there can be no distinction between sacred and secular hermeneutics—that biblical texts are susceptible to exactly the same treatment as any other ancient documents—was early declared to be a rule in biblical interpretation. But it is a position easier to assert than to maintain. If you treat the sacred book exactly like any other you must ask, for example, what was the nature of the now blurred original? What were the local constraints, the historical needs, the intentions of the human author? These are matters for the historian. The theologian, on the other hand, will have to consider the canonical New Testament as the source of his interest and the object of his inquiries, the very donnée of his religion. Yet the historians are, for the most part, clerics, and wish to reconcile with their scientific historical project the religious foreunderstanding they possess as Christian preachers. And even if these theologians are not historians they can scarcely dare to ignore the extent and import of centuries of historical research and speculation.
Such was the dilemma of Rudolf Bultmann. He was an eminent practitioner of that branch of historical inquiry known as form-criticism. He believed that the historical was the only scientific method of research. But as a theologian, working in the shadow of Barthian existentialism, he needed to reconcile his practice as a historian with the assumption that faith was immediate, modern, and personal. He summed up his attitude thus: “Historical and theological exegesis stand in a relationship that does not lend itself to analysis, because genuine historical exegesis rests on an existential confrontation with history and therefore coincides with theological exegesis.”2
Bultmann was therefore, it seems, committed to these opinions: (1) that “the interpretation of biblical writings is subject to exactly the same conditions of understanding as any other literature,” a view he shared with many precursors; (2) that their interpretation depended upon foreunderstandings between the reader and the text. There has to be previous acquaintance with the material—an understanding not acquired directly from the text in question, a presupposition. But what is presupposed is, at least in part, a relation between the interpreter and God. Bultmann’s foreunderstanding of biblical texts is therefore unavoidably theological, as of course it would not be if he were reading a secular text or indeed uncanonical religious writings. He seems, by a very tortuous route, to have got himself back into something like the position of Augustine; and the formula he uses to get out of that position will not convince everybody.
The effect of such foreunderstanding as Bultmann speaks of is an easy one to illustrate. A Jew may share with a Christian the presupposition that he is concerned with the question of God, and the presupposition that the Old Testament bears on that question. But their concerns are shaped by different notions of the truth; the Jew will not think the Christian correct in his interpretation of the Jewish Bible because he reads it in the light of assumptions concerning the New Testament. A Christian—St. Augustine for example—will hold that the faithful must read the Old Testament as typological, as containing latent truths the Jews have obstinately ignored. Foreunderstandings are obviously different for different religions, and they will be different again for the nonbeliever; but it is these foreunderstandings that determine the application which, for example in Gadamer, who uses the above illustration, determines meaning.3 Of course foreunderstanding is not foreknowledge. It implies a certain provisionality in one’s approach to a text, and the text will modify it; Bultmann is of course fully aware of that. But it remains clear enough that historical self-understanding (such as we get from dialogue with other people or with profane books) is, in his theology, a wholly different matter from the eschatological understanding of faith.
How then can it be that historical inquiry into sacred books should use methods identical with those proper for profane texts? Are the latter also to be read in some eschatological sense? The answer seems to be that the methods must in practice differ. There is a truth, Gadamer observes in the course of his remarks on Bultmann, which is a revealedness revealed historically to subjects historically situated; and this truth is not eternal. Bultmann wants truth to be what is understood within the existential possibilities of the interpreter, but also wants the historical facts to have a status independent of such considerations; to claim that the two positions are one is to claim more than common sense will allow. The “tension” spoken of by Childs is not so easily eliminated.
Gadamer also speaks of the “tensions” between historical study and hermeneutics. The historian is always after something behind the text. “He seeks in the text what the text is not, of itself, seeking to provide [evidence, for instance, of a pre-redactional state, direct testimony as to events and persons]…. He will always go back behind [the texts] and the meaning they express [which he will not regard as the inherently true meaning] to enquire into the reality of which they are the involuntary [scil. ‘perhaps distorted’?] expression. Texts are set beside all the other historical material available, i.e., beside the so-called relics of the past.” But the critic is interested in the text and its meaning. Hence the tensions, which of late—indeed for a long time—have been masked by the fact that literary criticism has allowed itself to be regarded as “an ancillary discipline to history.”4 (Note that for Gadamer it is the historical method that violates the intention of the text, whereas in recognitive hermeneutics it is held that the intention of the author, the sole donor of meaning, is the victim of the sophistries of Gadamer and his like.)
For Gadamer the only way to reconcile the two practices of history and criticism is to insist on the integrative role of application. And he makes in this connection a point of unusual interest. Both historian and critic assume, whether consciously or not, a need to relate individual text to a total context. The historian’s foreunderstanding impels him to apply the individual text to a total historical situation (or, as Barr would probably say, to the true historical context). The critic’s foreunderstanding makes him try to understand the text in the unity of its meaning, its total textual context (which will certainly entail intertextual relations limited only by the boundaries of a canon, if at all). In either case a prior supposition determines the application. Each such supposition has its own history and its own “situatedness.” Each presupposes some sort of totality to which it must find its relation. Nobody, that is, will read only and exactly what is there. And of course nobody will ever again read exactly as Barr or Gadamer or anyone else reads.
Gadamer likes to say that he is only describing things as they are, merely saying what is the case or the truth of the matter (though since he thinks that truth is not eternal this leaves room for disagreement from the standpoints of different foreunderstandings than his, which is precisely part of the truth he is telling). And in the present instance it does appear that he is stating the facts of the matter—that either side of the Barr-Childs argument makes a large assumption about the context of its observations on texts. Gadamer, as he often rightly remarks, is not hostile to historical research, and he denies that he is opening the door to arbitrary interpretation, a common charge against him. But his view of what happens in historical research would not be acceptable to Barr. “It is part of real understanding … that we regain concepts of an historical past in such a way that they include our own comprehension of them.… There is no such thing … as a point outside history from which the identity of a problem can be conceived without the vicissitudes of the various attempts to solve it.”5 Moreover, he might add that the presupposition that one is free of presuppositions is the consequence of many former presuppositions, which are themselves a proper study for historians, who had better look out for their own.
Neither of our combatants shows much interest in Gadamer, but since I have brought him in as an adjudicator I had better say that on the whole Childs fares better in his judgment than Barr. Not that Barr would mind; for Gadamer belongs to a tradition of hermeneutics of which Barr would say, with E. D. Hirsch, that it has simply gone off in the wrong direction, taking the scenic route via Heidegger instead of the direct Schleiermachian road. Barr has stayed on that road, preferring the objective or recognitive highway, which is why he sounds like Wrede, and why he has so little time for the canon. The Bible is an unintegrated collection of biblia. Considered as a whole, it has no special claim on the attention of the historian. I don’t think Barr ever says anything quite so confident—he seems clear that Christians have to treat the Bible, the book as assembled, differently from other books, as possessing authority—but as a man with an authoritative vocation to study history he need not, in his vocation, be disturbed by that belief.
And so it happens that Childs fares better with Gadamer. He might suffer criticism for presupposing that one particular historical act of application, namely the establishment of the canon, should be so privileged, but he could plausibly reply that the canon was not only the product of many former acts of application but the culmination of all that preceded it, and the foundation of all that were to follow; so that even in purely historical terms it is privileged.
Nevertheless, this assertion of privilege also proceeds from certain presuppositions. In forms less qualified than Childs’s own but still related to his procedures, one might say that confidence in the integrity of the canon stems from a partly occult assumption that might for short be called magical. And something similar can be said of Barr. For the sake of clarity I will restate the character of the opposition between our champions in a crude and extreme manner. One party would really prefer to have the original documents, or perhaps even any oral predecessors, than the canonical texts. This, the Barr party, may be said to have a nostalgia for the pre-text, for the persons and events behind the books. Here is a touch of magic, the magical power of narrative as it is described in the opening words of Adam Bede: one may see in a drop of ink that which will “reveal to any chance comer far-reaching views of the past.” Emulating “the Egyptian sorcerer,” the author says that “with this drop of ink at the end of my pen” she “will show you the roomy workshop of Mr. Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder, in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.”
Persons and events will thus be made available to the reader, as if by magic. The other party is in general willing to use the history of the texts and their redactions, but only as prehistory of the text itself, a text that is fixed and calls for interpretation affirming its coherence and plenitude, with internal relations one can only with difficulty avoid describing as organic, and a complexity-in-unity inviting us to think of it as a world in itself. One side treats the text as a difficult means of access to historical truths which belong to the whole context of history; the other treats history as a precursor of a text which constitutes its own context. Each depends upon a magical presupposition.
It might be possible to argue for a third view. What about treating the canon as a stage in tradition, and then considering it as an intertextual system only to the degree that it imposes its own measure of intertextuality? This would entail that one did not treat it as rigidly bounded, as confining the attention of serious interpreters to the “inside” books—rejecting, that is, the “fixed parameters” of Childs, but without denying a measure of canonical privilege. Such an approach would be congenial and familiar to secular critics, who cannot in any case have a canon of absolute authority and fixity, and who tend to behave as if a loose notion of canonicity were an accurate reflection of the way things are, at any rate for the present, in professional circles. But it is perfectly plain, even from this proposal for compromise, that neither the Childs party nor the Barr party could accept it, for it violates theological and historiographic beliefs on both sides. It is, moreover, much weaker magic: on the one hand it cannot make historical persons live again, or even show them as they were; and on the other it forfeits the advantages of that organic wholeness which is the concomitant of all doctrines of plenary inspiration. As a via media it simply won’t do. Its rationality cannot compensate for the loss of magic.
Let me qualify the rather vague and possibly offensive term magic. In Wilhelm Meister Goethe says Hamlet is like a tree, each part of it there for, and by means of, all the others. Five hundred years earlier a Kabbalist said this of the Torah: “Just as a tree consists of branches and leaves, bark, sap and roots, each one of which components can be termed tree, there being no substantial difference between them, you will also find that the Torah contains many things, and all form a single Torah and a tree, without difference between them.… It is necessary to know that the whole is one unity.” Thus Moses de Leon, perhaps the author of the main part of the Zohar, as quoted by Gershom Scholem.6 Moses and Goethe seem to be saying very much the same kind of thing; certainly they have hit upon the same figure. We should be wrong, however, to make too much of the resemblance. The context of Goethe’s remark is that of Romantic organicism and Naturphilosophie, of the philosophical and scientific proposals which interested him in his moment; and without some consideration of them as well as of more literary contexts we shall scarcely grasp the full quality of his saying about Hamlet. The beautiful excesses, if so we think them, of Kabbalistic commentary belong, despite the similarity of the figures, to a different world. One might get some measure of the difference by comparing the context provided for one by the scholarship of Scholem with that provided by the scholarship of M. H. Abrams toward the understanding of nineteenth-century organicism. The idea of the work as organism is ancient and powerful, but we do not suppose that it serves exactly the same purpose whenever it recurs; it will have a difference enforced by its position within a contemporary structure of belief (though that is yet another if less definite holistic notion). Potent critical myths may sleep and be rediscovered, but they do not return to just the same place. The Kabbalah had its organicism, and so did Romantic thought; we have legacies from both, though the latter is still the one that is more continuous with our own presuppositions, which may explain why most of us would think the Kabbalah the more “magical” of the two.
It is worth dwelling for a moment on these differences. To the Kabbalist, and even to the Talmudist, the text may be said to be coextensive with the world, and coeval with it; it is indeed, like ritual, out of time. Thus it does not prevent the kinds of problems that scientific philology was invented to solve, any more than it needs to adapt an idealist philosophy. There are no redactions, no contradictions, no errors even, that cannot be explained or explained away in terms of the text itself; there is perfect unity and inexhaustible sense. The closure of the text is obviously of great importance, whatever historians may say of its fortuity; it stimulated and governed commentary, and the commentary became part of the world of the text, an Oral Torah that articulated what had been there, latent, from the creation. For Torah was present on that occasion, though Torah is also called midrash of Torah. The application of the sacred text to all later times is only a continuation of a process that began when everything began, so that there is no divorce between application and understanding; the meaning is the meaning of both the original and the latest accepted interpretation. The tradition is continuous, and however novel the explanations they were part of a transhistorical whole; Scholem says of the ideas of Isaac Luria that “for all their glaring novelty” they were “not regarded as a break with traditional authority.”7 It was Luria who thought of the Torah as having 600,000 faces, each turned to only one of the 600,000 at Sinai. The officially fixed text could indeed generate any number of interpretations; individual letters and their numerical values have secret senses, new insights arise from the alteration of vowels within the consonantal stems; every conceivable device may be used to get at the white fire behind the black fire of the Torah. It is there to be read, but—wrapped in secrecy. Some say that the Israelites at Sinai heard only the first or the first two commandments before being awed into deafness by the divine voice, so that the rest were known only in the accommodated forms provided by Moses; or even that they heard only the first of God’s word, “I,” anoki, or perhaps only the first consonant, the aleph, so that the prophets continually explicate that hugely pregnant but silent consonant.8 It is, to recall a line of Stevens, a world of words to the end of it; a world of written words, and of letters and the spaces between them.
Compared with all this, our way of talking about the world of a poem, or of the creative act of imagination—and in so far as we still do so we are harking back to Goethe—sounds self-consciously figurative and feeble. For here is the extremest and most magical form of application; the text becomes a type of its interpretations; it is prophetic of all futures and all readers, since in principle it contains them; its truth is concealed and revealed in words that constitute the world. The later organicism dealt in analogy rather than identity. Moreover, it grew up alongside the new historical philology, which was radically opposed to it. Out of that strife was born modern hermeneutics. As we have seen, the struggle continues; it is now a struggle between weaker, less confident varieties of magic, the canonical and the historical.
More precisely, it can be said that the new hermeneutics came into existence when historical criticism (begun as a secular activity and so not at the outset troubled by questions of faith) began to be applied to the scriptures. And each of them—history and hermeneutics, or by extension Barr and Childs—is the shadow of the other. The title of founder of modern hermeneutics is usually given to Schleiermacher, who was also a major New Testament historical critic. He believed in a universal hermeneutic but also said that “a continuing preoccupation with the New Testament canon which was not motivated by one’s own interest in Christianity could only be directed against the canon.”9 This must mean that if you really treated it as you would any other ancient document you would be forced to dismantle it; therefore it must be given special treatment. The wish to resolve such difficulties gave rise to ever more subtle hermeneutic formulations, defenses against the dismantling historian. It is not really possible to understand them outside that context. Dilthey was a pupil of Ranke. Heidegger took on the entire opposing tradition, and made the world hermeneutic. Yet to speak of the anti-objectivist hermeneutics in this way is to study them historically, as Gadamer does. One approach becomes the shadow of the other. Whenever we think about writing history we face problems that are best thought of hermeneutically; whenever we think of understanding and application, or of the developing notion of the hermeneutic circle, we are obliged to take account of history.
We cannot escape this double, nor should we wish to, wherever our sympathies lie in such disputes as that between Barr and Childs. It does seem that we have to recognize that all historical knowledge has to be understood with an understanding that includes not only the facts, the events and persons, but our own limited comprehension of them; and that we must see that those conditioned understandings themselves have a history which confirms that, like all understandings, they are likely to prove transient. This does not mean we should not believe and act upon our understandings, a point neatly made by D. C. Hoy in his book The Critical Circle:10 the belief that my belief will be shown to be wrong does not invalidate my belief. The view that there are no eternal truths does not entail that there is no truth.
The revival or redevelopment of canonical criticism, remote as it is from the Jewish variety or indeed from that of the early Church, mild and concessive as it is, strenuously opposed as it is by the historian, seems to me to be a matter of more than local interest. It has some bearing upon secular literary criticism. I cannot at this late moment enter into this tricky and rather fashionable subject, but it may be worth saying this much. The great modernist critics (and authors; sometimes they were the same persons) were inclined to holism. Eliot, for instance, had quite a magical view of the literary canon, though he thoughtfully provided for the possibility of adding to it. The New Criticism believed at least in the autonomy of works of art and explored their latent internal relations. Opposition came from literary historians; or it might come from Marxists, or from all who believe that to confer upon some works the special status implied by their description as literature is false in itself. Deconstruction, perhaps oddly, has its canon, and to some practitioners it seems that only great works, which are great because they have already deconstructed themselves, are worth deconstructing. But whether some version of the canon is endorsed, or whether all canons are anathematized, we can detect in each of the combatants presuppositions of which they may be largely unconscious. Their struggles are not unlike those of Childs and Barr, each side having to hear the other speak in order to complete its own argument; for example, orthodox literary history, thought by its practitioners to be the most natural and sensible thing in the world, has its own mythology of period, its own magical plot of history, regarded as beyond criticism. Finally, the argument between the theologians seems to illustrate a more general problem: history struggles with its hermeneutic shadow; hermeneutics with simple history. There is magic in both, and magic is no longer a powerful preservative, so that all we can be sure of is that the terms of the argument will change once again, and it will seem to no one that either party has laid a hand on what might be called the truth. At any rate, that is the truth as I happen to see it at the moment.