The Hermeneutics of Love

The suspicion did cross my mind that Alan Jacobs is not playing fair. If, as he has done, you write a book titled A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, you might seem to be saying that any reader who does not love the book has not understood it. But I know, as do the readers of his marvelous essays in these pages, that Alan Jacobs is an eminently fair-minded person. So I think he would allow that it is possible to understand his book and yet not like it very much, never mind love it. Fortunately, I do not have to worry about that possibility since I like the book very much, and urge others to read it, lovingly. It is just out from Westview (186 pages, $18 paper).

Reading with love entails risks, according to Jacobs, including the risk of not being in command of the text. At several points, he quotes Iris Murdoch: “Coherence is not necessarily good, and one must question its cost. Better sometimes to remain confused.” And Murdoch again: “Art and morals are one . . . . Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” Although Jacobs enters into lively exchange with the usual mandarins of contemporary criticism-Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum, Jacques Derrida, John Milbank, et al.-every page is under the long shadow of Augustine, who explained in De Doctrina Christiana that love of God and neighbor is required to understand Scripture. Augustine makes the remarkable claim that “Whoever finds a lesson in the text that is 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.” What we would ordinarily call a misinterpretation may be a “right” interpretation if it serves love, which is, according to Scripture, both God’s purpose and being.

In sharpest contrast is a Cartesian hermeneutics that requires a distancing or alienation from the text. Here the posture is one of neutrality and devotion to objectivity. Jacobs finds merit in Hegel’s observation that the demand for neutrality generally means that the interpreter of a text should expound its meaning as if he, the interpreter, were dead. Hans-Georg Gadamer (who recently died at age 102) argued that the notion of objectivity had its roots in the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century. The Reformers had to defend their own interpretation of the Bible, Gadamer noted, and were up against Catholic theologians who appealed to the indispensability of tradition. Jacobs, a Protestant, writes: “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.” That may be a bit harsh, but I expect there is a good deal to it. It must be added that there were also Catholic interpreters who used Scripture and tradition in order to win an argument. The difference is between using, even exploiting, the text and serving the text in love. Between the reader and the text, it is a matter of who submits to whom.

A Hard Saying

My problem with parts of Jacobs’ argument may have something to do with the fact that this office receives hundreds and hundreds of books for review. New stacks grow faster than old ones can be-always judiciously!-whittled down. I expect we give more attention to books than any comparable journal in the world. (Yes, you’re right: there is no publication that is really comparable, but modesty excuses the figure of speech.) Yet we can review or even briefly note but a small fraction of all the books received. Little wonder that Jacobs induces a sense of guilt: “Charity demands that we extend the gift of love to all books, and receive the gift of love when it is offered to us…. There is no single form that either the giving or the receiving takes, and moreover there is no inconsistency in having certain favorite books while seeking to love all other books in the way appropriate to them…. We may indeed use books—it is right and proper that we do so—but we must use them in the way that Augustine counsels, which is to say, a way that recognizes their value as parts of God’s world and that therefore loves them in an ordinate manner.”

That is a hard saying for book review editors, and maybe Jacobs did not have editors in mind. Even for the editor, however, Jacobs leaves some outs. We do try to love them all “in the way appropriate to them” and in a manner that is “ordinate.” Appropriately and ordinately, most get tossed after a brief examination. Not without a touch of sadness, however. Some are simply not pertinent to our interests (making a billion in the market or getting right with God through aerobics), while many are simply bad books, meaning they are impossibly wrongheaded or impossibly dull, or both. Yet one is aware that even a bad book is somebody’s pride, joy, and proffered contribution to making the world a much better place. Always in my mind is the image of the author incensed by our godlike arrogance in consigning his book to the bin destined for the Strand, a store around the corner that advertises its offering of eight miles of lost books. It is a sadness, but it cannot be helped. True, we frequently publish comment on really bad books, but that is usually in cases where misguided editors elsewhere give them favorable notice, thus potentially misleading the unwary reader. Does that sound arrogant? It probably is. Arrogance is endemic to this business, and it is a wonder that Damon Linker, who has primary responsibility for books in this shop, has not succumbed, to date.

A Final Homecoming

But I wander from Alan Jacobs’ argument. The person he draws on, perhaps more than any other, is the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, whose books, mainly published by the University of Texas Press, are not as well known here as they deserve to be. Bakhtin can at times sound like the trendiest of postmodernists, the kind I examined a while back in an essay on George Steiner and Paul Fiddes (“The End of Endings,” FT, August/September 2001). But, as we shall see, there is a critical difference with Bakhtin. Here, for example, is a suggestive passage:

There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all) —they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue. At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense, boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of the dialogue’s subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in renewed form (in a new context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival.

That may sound a lot like the never ending, never resolved, and never resolvable “conversation” that is the model of interpretation espoused by such as Richard Rorty or Stanley Fish. There is a crucial difference, however. Bakhtin is a Christian. Eschatology provides the comic, viz., happy, ending. Jacobs writes, “For Bakhtin, God is the Father who waits patiently but hopefully for the world’s prodigal meanings to return to Him and receive His blessing. Bakhtin implicitly invites us as readers to wait in patient hope for that consummation, and to participate, at first proleptically and then fully, in the ‘homecoming festival.’” The thought of all prodigal meanings returning for the Father’s blessing is fetching, although it would seem that some prodigals never return, persisting to the end in being, quite simply and damningly, wrong. One may, by stretching hope, envision the universal salvation of personal signifiers, but only after they have repented of what they wrongly signified.

Bakhtin’s thought is formed by Orthodox faith and piety, which is centered in theosis, or deification, the redeeming work by which we are restored not only in the image of God but into the very Trinitarian life of God. This is our deepest need and our destiny. The open-ended dialogue of meanings is held together by a “constant unity of answerability,” and is in this way a dialogue of faithfulness. Against Descartes and even against Plato, the dialogue of faithfulness denies our self-sufficiency, says Jacobs. I’m not sure that is fair to Descartes, who underscores an infinite openness to infinity, or to Plato’s understanding of self-transcendence in devotion to the ideas, but Jacobs is on firm ground when he elects the pitifully misguided Ralph Waldo Emerson as his foil. “It is not the office of a man to receive gifts,” declared Emerson. “How dare you give them? We wish to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.” How dare the giver of gifts assume that we are somehow deficient?

Jacobs introduces the phrase “Quixotic reading,” by which he means the practice of looking into a book or poem and seeing only the reflection of oneself. Once again, I wonder if this is not unfair to Don Quixote, who was undoubtedly deluded but whose delusions opened him to worlds within worlds not contained by unbridled egotism. Here too, Emerson is the man whom Jacobs more fairly skewers. “Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense,” Emerson pontificated, “for the utmost in due time becomes the outmost—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment…. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” For Emerson, Jacobs observes, “Even works of genius cannot truly be gifts to us: they are merely our own possessions returned to their rightful owner.” History and anything else outside the self, declared Emerson, “is an impertinence and an injury, if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue and parable of my being and becoming.” Now that is egotism, and egoism, of a very low order, and the negation of the hermeneutics of love and faithfulness.

The Fear of Being Deceived

The opposite of the hermeneutics of love is, of course, the hermeneutics of suspicion, and here Nietzsche is the mad master. According to Nietzsche, the happy person is absolutely self-sufficient, and self-sufficiency is the goal of lifelong struggle. Hell is indeed, as Sartre declared, other people. Every other person is an adversary and Nietzsche’s stated goal is “not to cleave to another person, though he be the one you love most— every person is a prison, also a nook and corner.” More than that, contact with others is defilement. “Solitude is with us a virtue: it is a sublime urge and inclination for cleanliness which sees that all contact between man and man—’in society —must inevitably be unclean. All community makes somehow, somewhere, sometime—’common.'” It follows that “every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.” The sentiment is echoed by the eternally adolescent Emerson: “To be great is to be misunderstood.” (As your fifteen-year-old may have said just yesterday.) The drivenly despairing Nietzsche is often contrasted with the buoyantly exuberant Emerson, but what Jacobs says of the former applies as well to the latter: he is torn “between contempt for all those beneath him and desire for their understanding and approval.” Except Emerson was a showman, while Nietzsche let the tearing go all the way, severing the self into madness.

Nietzsche’s later thought was driven by fear, writes Jacobs. “Above all else he fears being deceived in faith, hope, and love—after all, all three states of mind open one to deception-and would rather suffer anything than the humiliation of being fooled. This may be said to be the very origin of the hermeneutics of suspicion, the adolescent fear of being caught believing in that which others have ceased to believe in.” Nietzsche is often praised for the daring of his thought, says Jacobs, but the daring of his thought may be the product of the excruciating timidity of his way of living. Jacobs’ reading of Nietzsche, Emerson, and other masters of self-sufficiency is incisive and devastating, but is it loving? Will their meanings, too, have a place in the “homecoming festival”? Will they, like the prodigal son, return to receive the Father’s blessing?

People Must Be Amused

The hermeneutics of love, it seems, extends to every text and author. It is, says Jacobs, both “flexible and responsible.” “It will have universal obligations but highly particular forms of attention. This is the road to justice, or, as the Bible would have it, to shalom.” I am not so sure. The hermeneutics of love, says Jacobs, has a game-like quality, and here he makes charming use of Gradgrind and Sleary in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times:

I would like to think that writing a book like this one-that is, making an academic case for governing interpretation by the law of love— bears some analogy to running a circus. To those who would label the project naive, childish, frivolous, foolish, the ringmaster can do little more than simply shrug and continue the game. Indeed, this is the best form of argument available to the circus-owner or the advocate of charitable interpretation. To Gradgrind’s Benthamite arguments, Sleary has no response except to continue the circus’ performances, and merely to say, as he does more than once, “People mutht be amuthed”–which is not an argument but a kind of imperative declaration: Sleary politely refuses to enter the dialectical arena where Gradgrind brandishes his Benthamite weaponry, but instead contents himself with a) doing something else and b) proclaiming that he is doing something else. “People mutht be amuthed” bears the whole content of Sleary’s kerygma.

Yes, but Alan Jacobs’ kerygma is proclaimed in “making an academic case” that, of necessity, enters “the dialectical arena.” As Sleary’s circus includes the animals and the acts of his choosing, so also Jacobs’ hermeneutical game includes and excludes, and the burden of his book is to explain who is in and who is out, and why. And that, too, is of necessity. Iris Murdoch is right: “Coherence is not necessarily good, and one must question its cost. Better sometimes to remain confused.” With Mikhail Bakhtin one may, in light of the Eschaton, suspend final judgment, even at the cost of incoherence, in the hope that all prodigal meanings will return to receive the Father’s blessing. But that is a hope directed toward the future. Along the way, here and now, decisions must be made about meanings that are, in fact, prodigal. Recognizing that does not mean that one has succumbed to the Reformer’s obsession with “getting it right” or to a Cartesian obsession with self-sufficiency. Discernment and decision are tasks of love, knowing that love can never be separated from justice. The hermeneutics of love indeed leads to a deepening of understanding, including a deepened understanding of why some meanings are wrong. Remembering always that our discernments and judgments are conditioned by the knowledge that “now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know even as I am known.” We can and should be open to a final surprise when prodigal meanings return, without fudging for a moment the fact that they were prodigal. That they were prodigal makes it possible for them to re-turn—to turn back to the truth that they turned from.

The book is A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, and I recommend reading it, lovingly. Even as I have read it, trusting in the assurance of St. Augustine: “Whoever finds a lesson in the text that is 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.”