The last lines of Qohelet (Ecclesiastes, aka “The Teacher”) are those of an editor, who advises us to value the straightforward words of a single wise person far more than all the many books produced by the scholars and seekers in the world; he laments: “of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Eccl. 12:12).
One single reliable authority can surpass a mass of experts? If only! If only such authority existed.
For the purposes of this little rant there is no reason to try to justify the unjustifiable. So let me state at the outset that I will go ahead and join prophecy to wisdom. My vision is for Biblical Studies.
When the history of the present era of Scholarship on Biblical Literature is written, one hundred, or two hundred years from now, it will likely be seen as an era of exhaustion. This is the era of criticism’s exhaustion. And of the exhausted critic.
Dominated by the exhaustive literature review, the exhaustive review of evidence, the exhaustive survey of theories, perspectives and interpretations, scholarship today puts the greatest and most elite scholars to work with great energy cataloging, compiling and critiquing … their own contribution to the subject of study. The bibliography and annotations are an art form unto themselves. Year by year, there is an endless parade of published work on subjects that interest Biblical Scholars… while the subjects themselves vanish in a fog of vague words about the published scholarship. No one has time to read any body else deeply, because there are too many conversation partners. And the primary sources are not read deeply, closely, or creatively enough.
We are examiners of interpretations. We splice and winnow and classify, anxious to include all, to miss nothing, to note precedent. We cannot proceed with any interpretation apart from the examination of other interpreters. We map carefully the entire landscape of critical discussion, and only then stake our own place in the field, often defining it by the slimmest and most subtle differences of discourse.
Acrobats of research, we ascend mountains of books, great edifices of commentary, surmounting the work of others by means of the slenderest toe holds and hand holds of criticism, on virtual cracks, muscling our way past overhanging cliffs of redundant reviews of reviews of reviews of evidence, determined to contribute but with no real sense of what needs doing. We climb it because it is there.
If this were all, it would be enough, but it is far from all. Having exhausted traditional areas of interpretation, Biblical Studies defines new fields, which are much more difficult to exhaust, such as the theoretically limitless project of Wirkungsgeschichte. Everything and anything can be subjected to Wirkungsgeschichte. It is endless. After the canonical, there is the pericanonical, heterocanonical, apocryphal, novelistic, polemic, heresiological, apologetic, historical…. there is art and architecture, music and graffiti, artifacts and locations, flim, television, the internet, text messages… there is no boundary. The scholar cannot relax, because ars longa vita breva.
Book after book is published. Yet, all literary art is dead. The scholar apologizes, as if for a fart, after a moment of levity is emitted into print. A well turned phrase is buried beneath a jumbled pile of shallow annotations. There are only a couple of poets, and they are writing about narrow, technical things.
Consider, as well, that greatest of achievements itself. The Bibliography. The longest, greatest bibliography — howsoever long or great — if it be on a specialized area of research, it resembles nothing so much as a chronicle of oblivion.
Why are we not more wary of publishing?
For each of us, in the end, after all, there is no ars, there is only breva vita. In this life there is limited energy available for scientific investigation — and family, friends, food, actual art, and everything else too. At journey’s end you must leave your learning behind you. It is useful to remember this, young scholar. There is no time for idle questions. Make sure your questions are interesting enough that the answers will matter after you are dead and gone. And all the usual advice about style applies too.
Dr. Baldwin,
Two things by way of preamble…
First off, I love this particular blog of yours…it’s a regular source of joy and inspiration for me in my travels through the profane world of strategy consulting.
Second, as recovering academic, at one time or another, I’ve felt all these same things about the state of my discipline (History of Christian and Jewish Exegesis). It’s part of why I left the academy, although there were other reasons, too.
With that out of the way, I’ll get to my thoughts on and response to this post, which (along with your follow up post) are wonderful: thought-provoking, insightful, acerbic in just the right measure, and truthful to the point that they are somewhat uncomfortable to read.
My first thought is that the state we academics, scholars, and critics find ourselves in is not the end-point of some lamentable and linear progression, but rather the low-point of an oft-repeated cycle from original thought to (with apologies to Bernie McGinn, but in my defense I am using quote marks) “scholasticism”, i.e., the routinization of original thought into prescribed, prescripted, almost bureaucratic modes of expression that privilege adherence to convention over originality, or ars (as you so poetically put it).
If you look back through the history of Western thought, you’ll see this cycle play itself out over and over again, and not just in the academy, but in poetry, painting, sculpture, philosophy, music, even warfare, with long periods of rather dull, uninspiring output being rent in two by figures whose accomplishments are astonishing, not only in comparison to their peers, but in terms of our own experiences and outlook: Blake, Eriugena, Rothko, Montaigne, Luther, Schiele, Wittgenstein, Rodin, Flaubert, Napoleon, Whitman, Kant, Paul of Tarsus, Meister Eckhardt, Proust, Maimonides, Caravaggio, Marcus Aurelius, Hume, Joseph Cornell, and our most beloved master, JZ Smith, whose academically unimpeachable work also manages to somehow sing as soulfully as poetry.
Which is all to say that we are most definitely not in some dead end today–the very idea that we could be the dead end of history still smacks of the egotism of more post-modern approaches to scholarship you take to task in this post. Rather, as I see it, we’re in a trough, and a very low point of that trough at that; and we’ll be here until some luminary emerges whose work pierces the veil of our bureaucratic, bibliographic, bean-counting approach to studying the sacred texts of our traditions. Once that happens, assuming we live long enough to witness it, maybe some of us recovering academics will dust off our Liddell-Scotts and Dennistons and get back in the game. Or maybe we’ll continue, like the elder Wittgenstein, to tend our gardens until the spirit moves us to speak from the margins and and call our former colleagues away from their bean counting bibliographic bureaucracies and back to poetry…then again, maybe we won’t…because life is indeed short!
But no matter what happens to the study of ancient Christian texts, one of these days, trough or no trough, we need to figure out a way to talk about all of this (and a few other things) face-to-face, with nothing but a neat Macallan 25 between us.
Your friend of the breast,
Dr. Shepley
Thanks for this Brilliant reply Shepley. Wasn’t sure anyone would ever actually read this piece let alone find it inspiring.