Ahab Beckons.

Sacred and Secular Scriptures

A Catholic Approach to Literature

Nicholas Boyle

University of Notre Dame Press, $22.50, 299 pp.

Nicholas Boyle, a professor of German language and literature at Cambridge University, may not be a familiar name in North American intellectual circles, but he should be. While his multivolume biography-in-progress of Goethe is magisterial, it is likely to be read only by specialists. Boyle's new book, Sacred and Secular Scriptures, provides a broader canvas--one might say a mural of epic proportions--on which he paints a narrative that includes a survey of the post-Reformation crisis of biblical interpretation, a Catholic literary aesthetic, and a series of close readings of classic works by writers such as Pascal, Jane Austen, Herman Melville, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

Originally delivered as the Erasmus Lectures at the University of Notre Dame, Sacred and Secular Scriptures is a hugely ambitious work, but it never comes across as strained or overreaching. In the preface, Boyle suggests that individual readers may want to skip sections that prove uninteresting--or, to be frank, too daunting. The obvious candidate for a pass would be part 1, the analytical history of modern approaches to biblical interpretation, which takes in such heavyweights as Herder, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Hans Frei, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas.

Boyle isn't being coy about this. The other two parts--the attempt to formulate a Catholic theory of literature and the readings of individual masterpieces--are easily worth the price of the book. Still, the rewards of reading the book as a whole are plentiful, and Boyle's exquisite prose style and habit of pausing occasionally to summarize make even the most clotted stretches of Germanic thought clear. As a storyteller he never lets the reader forget how much has been at stake, theologically and culturally, in the struggle to understand the meaning and authority of Scripture.

Boyle credits the Dominican theologian Marie-Dominique Chenu with planting the seed for the present volume. In a 1969 essay, "Literature as the 'Site' of Theology," written in the wake of Vatican II, Chenu argued that Catholic theology had drifted into abstract, propositional thought and urgently needed to recover its roots in the Scriptures. By engaging the concreteness of biblical narrative and poetry, Chenu believed, the church would reestablish a connection with culture. In short, the Bible serves "a divinely ordained mediation between human culture and divine truth."

Boyle notes that the Bible is not only made up of such literary forms as narrative, lyric, and epigram, but has also mingled with secular literary texts down the centuries. Following Chenu's lead, Boyle believes that a sustained effort to discern the boundaries between divine revelation and its echoes in the mysteries and epiphanies of great literature will help the church recover spiritual balance. A self-professed Christian humanist, Boyle seeks to address the biblical culture wars, staking out a position between the extremes of reductionism and fundamentalism.

The context in which this discernment must take place is the post-Reformation world. The subjectivist and ahistorical approach to the Bible taken by the Reformers such as Calvin led to what Boyle calls "bibliolatry," borrowing a term coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Protestantism was thus ill-equipped to respond to the crises that it had spawned. Paradoxically, the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura set in motion a process of secularization. Included were the attempt in the eighteenth century to develop a purely natural religion, detached from the specificity of revelation, and the rise of radical historicism, the notion that Scripture should only be understood within the immediate circumstances of its composition.

Boyle's survey in part 1, from Herder to Levinas, traces a series of attempts to achieve a synthesis that might heal the breach between subjectivist piety and scientific knowledge. In the writings of the twentieth-century Jewish philosopher Levinas he finds a compelling definition of revelation as a condition of "authorlessness." The Bible is the result of "multiple authorship, the collective handing on of a collective tradition, the processes of translation and commentary and redaction."

Boyle is generous to those whose theories he recounts (including Jewish traditions of scriptural interpretation), but he believes that the most persuasive solution to the conflict between naive bibliolatry and deconstructive historicism is the Catholic approach to biblical study, which he calls a "historical hermeneutic." The church is a community guided by the Holy Spirit, interpreting Scripture through tradition, a process he calls "confluent exegesis." Historicism has a place in Catholic biblical exegesis, Boyle asserts, but it must be balanced by a "hermeneutic of revelation," an approach based on the belief that sacred Scripture remains above all the story of God's redemptive entry into history.

While Boyle's conclusions may not be groundbreaking, his own synthesis is masterful. He does break new ground when he applies his insights to the relationship between the divine revelation of the sacred Scripture and the lesser, but no less real revelations of literature. In part 2 he writes of the "spectrum of writtenness." At the secular end of the spectrum is "orality," literature that is an extension of the voice of an individual author. At the sacred end is Scripture, "pure writtenness, the extreme case of the autonomy of the written word."

Literature "is a language free of instrumental purpose, and it seeks to tell the truth." Insofar as all literature is a form of fiction, Boyle notes, it presents itself as "authorless." The lie at the heart of literature is the notion that "these words are not being spun out of my mind, they tell the truth."

Boyle holds that the act of representation--the fictive re-presentation of the world in works of literary art--is the "secular analogue of the redemption. Representation is the moral reality of redemption projected into the secular realm of pleasure." What is represented in a work of fiction--the characters in a novel, say, or the persona uttering a poem--must be "loved enough" to matter, just as every human being is loved and redeemed by God.

Secular literature, though, can be traced to an individual author. This is both its glory and its limitation. The poet or novelist is open to a thoroughgoing historical and sociocultural critique in a manner that is not appropriate to the authorlessness of biblical revelation. In other words, on the spectrum of writtenness, an author is closer to pure orality, the utterance of a single person shaped by historical contingencies. Much of the tension in literature, Boyle notes, comes from the author's awareness of the gap.

Boyle's interpretations of individual works in part 3 build on this analysis. Each reading is rich and multilayered. In extending his thoughts about literature as prayer, a simultaneous recognition of limits and desire to transcend them, he sheds light on many master-pieces that are traditionally considered flawed. But he demonstrates how these flaws--the fragmentary Pensees of Pascal, the enigmatic Faust of Goethe (with its strange alternate endings), the problematic moralism at the heart of Mansfield Park--are strengths, not weaknesses.

Secular literature, in aspiring toward the condition of revelation, can foreshadow it. In both recognizing its limits and yearning to transcend them, Boyle concludes, literature attains the status of prayer.

Sacred and Secular Scriptures is a work that deserves to be called seminal. But that designation will ultimately be dependent on how widely the seeds of thoughts in its pages are scattered and take root in the intellectual community. Here's hoping.

Gregory Wolfe is editor of Image. He also directs the MFA in the creative writing program at Seattle Pacific University.