Briefly Noted

Benedict XVI’s letter Verbum Domini refers to “darkpassages” of the Old Testament that contradict the ethical teachings,monotheistic claims, or assertions about the afterlife presented in theGospels. In his new book Dark Passages of the Bible, Matthew J. ­Ramage,assistant professor of theo­logy and biblical studies at Benedictine College,shows how these passages can be illumined by historical-critical exegesis andthe light cast by the revelation of Christ.

In keeping with the subtitle, ­Ramage divides most priorthought on this question into two groups, which Benedict XVI calls “Method A”(patristic and medieval exegesis) and “Method B” (historical-criticalexegesis). Many Christian readers of the Old Testament today slip into a MethodA hermeneutic without knowing it. For example, rather than allowing for thepolytheism apparent in early Jewish writings, they impose fully developedChristian readings onto the mentions of other gods.

Ramage argues, by contrast, that God started the Israelitesat a slow pace, gradually constructing a divine pedagogy that would inch them­closer and closer to monotheism by the time of Christ. And it waseffective, because they alone ended up with monotheistic beliefs among thepagan faiths with which they were in contact. When we just stick to MethodA exegesis, we often forget the amazing fact that Israel was able to studytheir often ambiguous Scriptures over the course of four thousand years andarrive at the conclusion that “There is no God but Yahweh.”

This is where the historical-critical Method B exegesis hasbeen valuable: It has led us to a deeper and more profound understanding ofScripture in the form of what Benedict calls “Method C” exegesis, whichsyncretizes the theological parts of Method A and the scientific parts ofMethod B into one comprehensive model. After all, anybody can invent aspiritual, Method A interpretation of a text, but Benedict and Ramage agreewith Thomas Aquinas that the best spiritual interpretations are those whichfirst fully consider the literal sense.

Ramage helpfully addresses the questions this synthesisnaturally raises. If a sacred text can be literally incorrect about topics onwhich it claims to speak authoritatively, how can its words be trustworthy? DarkPassages sets out to raise the reader’s awareness of how to use the Biblein ways that are not so cut and dried. The Method C reader appreciates myth orauthorial overreach where they exist, and always reads the biblical wordtheologically, as an encounter with the divine Word. Method C goes beyond asimple, formulaic answer to problematic Bible passages, as does Ramage’s book.

—Andrew Jacob Cuff is a Ph.D. student in Church historyat the Catholic University of America.

Name names!” This demand is not the prerogative solely ofparanoid regimes. Naming is an essential means of ­understanding. The author ofGenesis knew this: Adam’s naming of the animals in the Garden was the act ofdominion and mastery afforded to him by the Lord. Aristotle knew this: Logicalworks are a lesson in knowing ­reality correctly through definitions. And Hegeladmonished modern philosophy to relearn this when in his ­Phenomenologyhe identified Geist with language.

Peter Sloterdijk practices naming to supreme effect in hisnewest work, Philosophical Temperaments. ­Sloterdijk, familiar toGermans but new to Anglophone readers, is best known for his masterwork, Critiqueof Cynical Reason, where he offers an alternative return to Enlightenmentrationality sans the naive progressivism so soundly defeated by the twentiethcentury. One responds to the Enlightenment’s rationalistic failures not withpostmodern cynicism and despair but with a healthy, comical, “kynical”materialism: Truth was in the body all along! To use Sloterdijk’s example, whenPlato talks of ethereal ideas, the philosopher Diogenes picks his nose.

Each chapter in Philosophical Temperaments offers anintroduction to some seminal thinker in Western philosophy and centers itaround a new name for him. Plato is known as the philosophorum pater,the founder of that “pious rationalism” that is Western metaphysics. Aristotleis the original “athlete of conceptual categories,” pioneering and completingthe discipline of logic that cuts reality appropriately for knowledge. As“God’s prosecutor,” Augustine launches an “antinarcissistic inquisition”deconstructing human self-protections against the grace of God. Pascal, the“melancholy Christian mathematician,” is balanced out by Leibniz, the “Sun Kingof thought.” Hegel, the “thinker of maturity,” boldly delineates the “finitepillars of the infinite,” as Wittgenstein, the “magical hermit,” writes singlesentences in social seclusion that conjure up the meaning of the world.

One need not endorse ­Sloterdijk’s project, or accept thisbook’s “alternative history of philosophy,” to profit from these reflections.His renaming is by no means a final incantation but rather another way tounlock the doors of philosophy, which for him “must present itself, first as away of thinking, and then as a way of life.”

—Bonaventure Chapman, O.P., is studying for thepriesthood with the Dominican friars of the Province of St. Joseph.