The Sacred Texts

 I am remembering why I like Walter Kaufmann so much. 

In his essays in Existentialism, Religion, and Death, Kaufmann applies the daring and untried exegetical method of simply believing that people may have actually meant what they said. 

Kierkegaard may really have been what we would now call a religious fundamentalist. 

Dostoevsky may actually have been the "radical authoritarian" who counseled absolute obedience to czarist autocracy that he appears to be. 

Heidegger may actually have been making some surprisingly familiar and banal observations from behind his impregnable phalanx of jargon and "bizarre locutions" (as Kaufmann calls them). 

And then, of course, in his most bold and "heretical" hermeneutic move of all, Kaufmann dares to apply this same strategy to sacred texts. 

He suggests: perhaps Jesus really meant that stuff he said about Gehenna and the gnashing of teeth too, and not just that stuff about love that we now find it convenient to quote. 

He says: maybe the Bhagavad Gita really does endorse the way of the sword because the world is an illusion. 

Etc.

Some attack this method of reading as literal-minded and unimaginative. They believe themselves entitled to "rescue" the authors and texts through wielding the scalpel of friendly "interpretation." 

But Kaufmann rightly points out that this is no "rescue" at all, but a mutilation. He calls it the "Judas-kiss" of scholarship, and observes that it is an infinitely greater disrespect to the texts than simply taking their viewpoint seriously and disagreeing with it. 

Time and again in these essays, he rails against the intellectual dishonesty involved in first sifting a text for pearls that align with one's own worldview, reinterpreting the rest, and then lifting up the end result as proof that one's own current position has been anticipated. 

Under this approach, every text merely becomes a mirror. In order to make Jesus, the Buddha, Kierkegaard, or whomever acceptable to contemporary values, we dig into them and recover a liberal Jesus, a "humanist" Kierkegaard, the Buddha of "wellness" and "self-care." 

We hack and hew at the text until it resembles what we already knew we wanted to find there. Then, we dare to proclaim the result as the "true" primeval tradition that we have just reconstructed. 

The people who least claim to be practicing this method are often the ones who are doing it the most. The "neo-orthodox" Barthians in divinity school, who sneered at "liberal theology," were in fact often straightforward practitioners of it. 

They had to be. They, too, were modern enlightened people in the academy with basically humanistic values. In order to make a first century prophet compatible with their actual beliefs, they too had to practice selective hewings and interpretations. 

People in seminary would often frame this, to the extent they were conscious of doing it, as the only way to avoid the pitfalls of fundamentalism. It must either be: "The Gospels say all that stuff about love, so I'm right;" or "The Gospels say all that stuff about Gehenna, so you're right." 

What they could not accept—indeed, what seemed scarcely thinkable to them—was the possibility of a third option: "The Gospels say all that stuff about Gehenna, but they're wrong." 

And so on down the list. 

Maybe the Gita really says that stuff about war and killing, but it's wrong. 

Maybe Kierkegaard really meant it about the teleological suspension of the ethical, but he's wrong. 

Maybe Dostoevsky really meant it about czarism, but we don't have to agree. 

Maybe Heidegger really was a Nazi. 

In divinity school, all of this would have been heresy. Not just the method as applied to the religious texts, but to these philosophers as well. In entering seminary, I was entering the den of the hewers and the "interpreters." The same scalpel-treatment they gave to the Gospels, they likewise insisted on applying to the holy trinity of Kierkegaard, Dostoevesky, Heidegger.

These men too—for some reason—had achieved the status of holy texts; and so all the unattractive things that they evidently said and believed had to be interpreted away. 

A very strange thing happened, after all, in mid-20th century intellectual culture. We saw the rise of a doctrine of "humanism" that was in many ways just the old liberalism, and which grew up as a logical response to the horrors of totalitarianism, war, and genocide. 

But strangely, instead of celebrating the authors who actually proclaimed this worldview, people chose as their intellectual heroes of the age writers who actually had endorsed religious and political totalisms of precisely the sort the new humanism rejected. 

People said: "T.S. Eliot prophesied our modern doom! Yeats saw it coming! Dostoevsky! Kierkegaard! Heidegger!" Each was hailed in turn as the prophet who had something to say to our era, as humanity nursed our wounds from the war and barbarity of the previous decades. 

These were all rather odd picks for the role. Every one of them had embraced the institutions and ideologies that anticipated or participated in the new totalitarianism—whether in the form of religious obscurantism or ultra-authoritarian politics. 

Meanwhile, the writers who had actually held out against the trend and embodied the new humanism from the beginning—Camus or Koestler or Orwell, say—never seemed to have academic seminars devoted to them. 

Perhaps because there was so much less to "interpret." They were already too obviously on the side of humanism. They didn't need the academic scalpel in order to hew their texts into a more humanistic-looking shape. 

Why—Kaufmann seems to be asking in so many words—couldn't we just say that we disagree with Kierkegaard—while admitting him all the time to be a witty satirist and critic of his age? Why can't we just say we are not so impressed with Heidegger?; that Dostoevsky, for all his genius as a novelist, held politics that are not our own?; and so forth. 

I've never understood why liberals lived through a war and genocide in the 1940s that showed as plainly as anything could the inhumanity that illiberal ideologies fostered—and then immediately started flagellating themselves and holding up religious reactionaries as if they were the ones who had seen it all coming. 

The religious reactionaries were the ones who caused it, people!

And now, the same is happening today. The various "post-liberals" over at the American Conservative and such have been egging on Trump and the new nationalism at every turn. And I'm sure, when it's all behind us, and liberal humanism has triumphed again, they will wash their hands of all this—and blame us for it. 

They will say: the hollowness of modern liberalism caused Trump (conveniently ignoring the fact that they were gleeful participants in the whole slide into neo-fascist barbarity). 

And many liberals will believe them. We'll probably have academic seminars devoted to "rescuing" the texts of Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule someday; finding "anticipations" and "prophecies" of some "humanism" that was never there; while the true humanists of our era will be forgotten. 

Back in my early twenties, I didn't quite know all this yet. I signed up for divinity school in the vague hope that the theologians would have something to teach me. 

I thought: maybe they will give me a "reading" or an "interpretation" that I suddenly find convincing—something that will convince me that what appears to be unsavory in all these religious traditions and "holy" reactionary texts is not actually there. 

I thought: maybe Paul Tillich will actually rescue Christianity for a modern age, as soon as I read him!

I thought: maybe there is something to this Heidegger fellow—since everyone around me seems to think there is!

But before I even got to reading Tillich—indeed, before the first semester of divinity school had even started—I found Kaufmann's Critique of Religion and Philosophy at a used bookstore somewhere. I realized by a few pages in that Kaufmann was right. I wouldn't find in the theologians what I was seeking. 

No matter how many "readings" and "interpretations" they applied, they wouldn't actually be able to convince me to ignore the evidence of my senses. When I saw Gehenna in the text, I would know it was there. And no amount of pedantry and prolixity would convince me otherwise. 

I learned more than this from Kaufmann too. I learned that perhaps the theologians were not all so obscure and impenetrable and prolix because they had such profound and complex truths to relate. I realized that perhaps they wrote this way because in fact—like the "intellectual" in E.E. Cummings's poem—they "had nothing whatever to say." 

Kaufmann observes at one point that if Heidegger had reduced his text to a straightforward relation of his actual ideas, Being and Time would have shrunk to about a quarter of its size. 

He observes that Heidegger—when he is about to have to justify one of his most questionable assertions—often procrastinates. He says: "this point will be explored in a later volume." 

And then—Kaufmann notes—these volumes would never appear. They might as well "be entitled a wraith's progress," to quote another E.E. Cummings poem. 

Perhaps the theologians and philosophers retreat so often into this miasma of obscurity because there is in fact no way to accomplish what they set out to accomplish. 

And so, I learned from Kaufmann that all the oracles are dumb or cheat

    Because they have no secret to express;

  That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain

  Because there is no light beyond the curtain; as James Thomson (a.k.a Bysshe Vanolis) once put it. 

Perhaps, if I had not read Kaufmann when I did, I might not have known all this so soon. Perhaps I would have made it through some Tillich or Barth or Heidegger before I learned this lesson. As it was, Kaufmann saved me some time.