![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Oct. 18th, 2007 01:20 pmCharles Augustine Briggs, a 19th-century pioneer of modern biblical scholarship, declared that by sweeping away the “rubbish” of centuries of biblical interpretation, modern scholars would finally “recover the real Bible.” Professor Kugel admires the audacity and genius of scholars like Briggs, but he believes that in their contempt for the “rubbish” of ancient interpretation, modern scholars have let the “real Bible” elude them. They have been left, instead, with “the raw material that made up the Bible.”
Orthodox Judaism as existentialism? I have noticed that a surprising number of Christians back into Grand Inquisitor land, when their arguments get exhausted.
Although I guess it isn't necessarily existentialism. Perhaps he really thinks this specific group of interpreters, rather than their ancestors, read the right God through the wrong texts. But if you can do that, why not through any text? Through the world? Presumably that's the contradiction he doesn't want to face: if error->truth, why that error only? I sometimes think my Episcopalian upbringing must have been a nail through the shoe, not the foot; Gore Vidal says somewhere that Episcopalians find talk about God impolite. I guess that was my sense of it, on Sundays: here's where we say these particular things, then sing these other ones, and now there are some strange stories, and now we listen to the priest tell some wry anecdotes and exhort us to be a little nicer, and it's meaningful that we do all this but no one quite remembers why, and now there's coffee cake. Whereas with Catholic school, and what experience I've had with these new-style Christian cultists...
Kugel has got me wondering this: has a story been told where a Protestant type decides to seek truth, finds his way blocked by a greedy and powerful Catholic authority, defeats this authority, who, dying, reveals that he has told, guarded, exploited these lies only because he has seen the truth behind them, and it is [awful/nothing/not worth knowing], and his demiurgency was for the protection of others from this fatal discovery, and the Protestant listens but goes forward into _________? Because I feel this story has been told, I just can't think where. The handling of Ivan in general? The Wizard of Oz and Oedipus Rex wander close; Julie suggests Miss Lonelyhearts, though that's not quite what Shrike's up to, and also Wise Blood, which I've not finished. Maybe Shelley, actually, at least as viewed by De Quincey. Maybe Cities of the Plain, The Blood Oranges, "Old Mortality"? None quite exactly. Maybe history.
Orthodox Judaism as existentialism? I have noticed that a surprising number of Christians back into Grand Inquisitor land, when their arguments get exhausted.
Although I guess it isn't necessarily existentialism. Perhaps he really thinks this specific group of interpreters, rather than their ancestors, read the right God through the wrong texts. But if you can do that, why not through any text? Through the world? Presumably that's the contradiction he doesn't want to face: if error->truth, why that error only? I sometimes think my Episcopalian upbringing must have been a nail through the shoe, not the foot; Gore Vidal says somewhere that Episcopalians find talk about God impolite. I guess that was my sense of it, on Sundays: here's where we say these particular things, then sing these other ones, and now there are some strange stories, and now we listen to the priest tell some wry anecdotes and exhort us to be a little nicer, and it's meaningful that we do all this but no one quite remembers why, and now there's coffee cake. Whereas with Catholic school, and what experience I've had with these new-style Christian cultists...
Kugel has got me wondering this: has a story been told where a Protestant type decides to seek truth, finds his way blocked by a greedy and powerful Catholic authority, defeats this authority, who, dying, reveals that he has told, guarded, exploited these lies only because he has seen the truth behind them, and it is [awful/nothing/not worth knowing], and his demiurgency was for the protection of others from this fatal discovery, and the Protestant listens but goes forward into _________? Because I feel this story has been told, I just can't think where. The handling of Ivan in general? The Wizard of Oz and Oedipus Rex wander close; Julie suggests Miss Lonelyhearts, though that's not quite what Shrike's up to, and also Wise Blood, which I've not finished. Maybe Shelley, actually, at least as viewed by De Quincey. Maybe Cities of the Plain, The Blood Oranges, "Old Mortality"? None quite exactly. Maybe history.
