Life and history

Front matter

COffiRIGHT DEPOSIT.

LYNN HAROLD HOUGH

BY

Contents

PAGE I THE APPROACH TO LIFE THROUGH HISTORY . IS

II THE RELATION BETWEEN RESEARCH AND IN- TERPRETATION 40

III THE UNIVERSITY AND THE REPUBLIC . . 59

II The Relation Between Research And Interpretation

ONLY a man of miraculous optimism can be entirely enthusiastic about the history of the interpretation of the Bible. In fact, there is a touch of something sinister about the whole history of interpretation as regards literature and movements and people. Again and again interpretation has come into new significance because of the practical necessity of making an author mean something which is just the opposite of what he has said. Greek moral ideas developed beyond the standards of Hesiod and Homer. The Greek thinkers faced the practical dilemma involved in possessing an ethical life which had quite outrun the sanctions of the authoritative Greek religion. It was necessary either to discredit the religion or to read the new ethical ideals into a literature which did not inculcate them. The second alternative was chosen. Of course the process of facing these dilemmas [40]

may have been subconscious, and the man who began the use of allegory to read meaning into ancient documents may have been a man of vigorous enough belief in his religion to have persuaded himself that the ideas ought to be found in the literature and therefore they must be there. It is hardly possible, however, to believe that some of the Greek philosophers who justified the allegorical method of relieving the strain caused by certain passages in Hesiod and Homer were so naive.

The situation involving this problem assumed an acute form in the mind of Philo. He accepted much of the Greek thought. He was a loyal Jew. How could he make a bridge between Plato and Moses? Obviously allegory was the only method. And so Philo, with the simplest sincerity, builds his structure of allegory in order to harmonize what he thought as a Greek with what he believed as a Jew. Without critically analyzing his own processes it came to pass that he did not ask what an author meant. He asked what he wanted him to mean. A tyrannous subjectivity was on the throne of his mind. The right approach to the examination of the Christian interpretation of the Bible is through the intellectual world of Philo, for Philo furnished the intellectual background most sympathetic to the mental life and needs of the school of Alexandria. Clement and Origen and the other typical Alexandrians were Greeks in philosophy and Christians by personal conviction, as Philo had been a Greek in philosophy and a Jew by personal conviction. So they faced the same sort of problem. Only in their case it took this form: How were they to harmonize their Greek philosophic thinking with their Christian convictions? Once again allegory formed the bridge. The outstanding characteristic of this type of exegesis may be briefly described as:

I. INTERPRETATION WITHOUT RESEARCH

Even if a man did have personal resources of erudition and certain interests connected with the manuscripts which conveyed the Biblical material — as did Origen — these did not become dominant in his interpretation. In the typical Alexandrian when it came to exegesis the approach was not historical. It was transcendental.

We need to see clearly the implicit logic in the minds of the men who fastened allegory upon [42]

the interpretation of the Bible. First, they believed in a mechanically infallible literature. Second, they believed that which had no relation or a contradictory relation to that which was explicitly stated in that literature. Therefore, allegory alone made it possible to do homage to the literature and at the same time to be perfectly loyal to their own unfolding mental life. To them, again unconsciously, what a man brought to a passage of Scripture was infinitely more important than what he found there, and the inherent difficulties of the Scriptures, the clash of various points of view and of contending opinions, met with the same easy solution. Whenever you met a problem allegory gave you wings. The belief in a manifold sense in Scripture was a natural corollary and development of the idea. It all involved a Bible created by the interpreter, for the principles of interpretation allowed him cleverly to inject his own views into the book he was interpreting. Even the vagaries of Gnosticism did not check this method, for Gnosticism was not met by a new exegesis but by the authority of a churchly tradition. The real check on erratic interpretation was not a closer study of the Bible but a reference of the whole matter to ecclesiastical authority. This was the method which was inherited by the Middle Ages. It ran riot through the Middle Ages and faced serious danger only with the Renaissance and the approach of the Reformation.

Two or three facts ought to be in our minds in regard to this method. Firsts it was used in so many cases by men of deep spiritual intuition and experience that very often their insight was right when their exegesis was wrong. It was often true that a particular passage was tortured to teach a meaning of which that particular passage was completely innocent, but a meaning involving something true and important in itself and something actually belonging to the general position of the Bible, indeed a meaning elsewhere specifically asserted. Second, the deeper spirit of the Bible often possessed these allegorical interpreters. Their years of patient brooding over the Bible had not been in vain. A depth, a richness, had come to them from the Bible and it diffused itself in their writings. Even what is valueless from the standpoint of scientific exegesis is often rich in spiritual suggestion. Third, the continuity of noble and creative Christian experience in the church did much to fill the writings of the [44]

allegorical interpreters with Christian significance even when they are quite without exegetical significance. Even when they cannot tell us how to use the Bible they often can tell us how to enter and how to develop in the kingdom of God.

II. RESEARCH AS A CHECK ON INTERPRETATION

The allegorical method had not an absolutely unchallenged right of way, however. The school of Antioch, notably in the person of Theodore of Mopsuestia, stood for a grammatical and historical interpretation. In place of the fanciful and bewildering imaginative flights of a figurative exegesis we have here a sane and sober and straightforward approach to the Bible. In the preaching of Chrysostom the method of the school receives its noblest expression. But the church at large did not take the Antioch method seriously. To begin with, the school did not produce men of gigantic stature to perpetuate its type of activity. Then its severely critical type of mind did not express either the temper of the age or the passion of the gospel. In the men of Antioch you see already emerging the problem, to become acute centuries later, how to preserve evangelical passion in the midst of an intellectual temper, cool and critical in its appraisal.

Augustine united a powerful mind with amazing instruments for close and discriminating thought, with a passionate intensity of religious life. But the allegorical method received no serious antagonism from him. In fact, he helped to fasten it upon the church.

With the approach of the Reformation we come upon a mood encouraging to research. On the humanistic side the tendency was to go back to Greece to find out what beauty meant, and this was paralleled by a tendency to go back to the beginning of Christianity and its literature to find out what religion meant. Erasmus was the prophet and priest of the new movement as applied to the Bible. The huge fabric of ecclesiastical dogma, especially with respect to the papacy, was put to the test of research. The Bible began to speak with something like its natural voice. Of course the movement was uneven and inconsistent, and one kind of subjectivity fought against another. The kind of subjectivity which was antagonistic to the papacy enjoyed a research which brought to light facts which were [46]

uncomfortable for those who advocated papal supremacy, and a new dogmatism began to read its tenets into passages never meant to teach them. Calvin, in some respects a prince of expositors, illustrates this mixture of a clear-cut historic method with willingness to be guided by the presuppositions of his own theory. On the whole, however, a new mood has come. You are no longer in the world of Peter Lombard or Thomas Aquinas. Research has lifted its head. The past has spoken. The reign of utterly fanciful allegory comes to an end.

III. RESEARCH AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR INTER- PRETATION

The dogmatism of the period when Protestantism degenerated into a scholasticism of its own was sure to provoke a reaction. Then the intellectual life of the world was not at a standstill. The birth of modern science became its youth, its adolescence, and then the time of its mature powers. And now we come upon the period of the really scientific study of the Bible. And its keynote is history rather than interpretation. The brilliant processes of analysis by which the

[4.7]

composite authorship of the Hexateuch was brought to light, the unearthing of the Isaiah of the Exile, the placing of the whole Bible in a new light as the result of the study of cognate religious and contemporaneous history represent outstanding features of the new age. Here again we come upon subjectivity even where we least expect it, and the modern scholar has sometimes found it as hard to be just to a fact which did not fit in with his conception of evolution as applied to the Bible as some medieval writer found it hard to be just to a fact which did not exactly fit the philosophy of Aristotle. Sometimes we have reasoned in a circle. A passage has been declared to be of a late date because those ideas were not current at an earlier. Then, that settled, we have marshaled all the evidence to prove that these ideas were late because they nowhere appeared in early documents. A man cannot empty his mind even in scientific research. And it is usually the next generation which discovers just how powerful his presuppositions were.

In the main, however, it may be said that the

latter part of the nineteenth century came nearer

to achieving objectivity in Bible study than had

any earlier period. At least in many conspicuous instances it attained an entire freedom from prejudice in favor of tradition.

As to the results of all this research and analysis, it is fair to say that there has been no synthesis. We have had a scientific study of the BibHcal documents. We have had the most painstaking and microscopic research. We have not had an interpretation gathering the million details of the new method into some genuine and authentic totality. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that nobody knows what the new Bible is like because nobody has seen it. Each expert hurries timorously to his own department when you speak of organizing into a general view the results of the last half century's activity. It is an age of specialized research rather than of interpretation in large relations. But many wistful eyes are looking forward to the day when, to paraphrase the words of Matthew Arnold, we shall "see the Bible steadily and see it whole."

TV. RESEARCH AS A PREPARATION FOR INTERPRETATION

In the meantime thoughtful preachers have been confronted by a difficult situation. They have had to preach (though some cynics have applied to them the famous utterance "I do not see the necessity"), and they have felt that they were dealing with materials so much in solution that their perplexity was constant. Some men took refuge in a dark and angry obscurantism. They condemned research and analysis and all their works. Some took to practical activities as a means of avoiding thought. They dealt with Christianity as a program rather than as a religious experience. The profoundest spirits have sought sources of certainty which left criticism free because it could not touch their position. Schleiermacher was a pioneer in an attitude which found certainty in religious experience itself. Coleridge made it compelling in England. Robert William Dale of Birmingham popularized it in "The Living Christ and the Four Gospels." Essentially the position amounted to this: The Christian religion is a fact of the inner life which authenticates its own necessary materials. The Tractarian movement tried to meet the situation as Gnosticism was met in the second century by the authority of the church. The philosophic movement represented by Pragmatism, the activism of Eucken, the dynamic theories of Berg- [50]

son, and the basic views of the personal idealists, have made easier a triumphant and enthusiastic assurance on the part of interpreters of the Christian religion while the problems of the Bible are still open. The mental sifting caused by all these processes has resulted in an increasing consciousness that research is, by its very nature, a preparation for the ultimate task of interpretation, and that the spot where research and a living experience meet is the spot where the work must be done.

V. SOME SUGGESTIONS AS TO THE CHABACTERIS- TICS OF THE INTERPRETER

(a) The interpreter must be a man with a cosmopolitan intellectual outlook. The very essence of interpretation is the thinking of things together; thinking them into totality. And the man who does this must have a mind responsive to all the variety which characterizes the elements which make up his problem. The work of the interpreter is done at the spot where many departments of specialized activity meet. The work of the specialist in detailed research is of very great importance, but it would be a tragic result if the training of our time produced a type of incarnate microscopes incapable of seeing things in large relations. The tendency of some contemporary scholars to rush to cover, the moment anybody suggests relating what is done in their department to the results in any other department, is rather discouraging. There is a type of mind the result of very involved and intricate training, which thrives on a double- entry bookkeeping of the results of minute investigation, but is incapable of actual thought and is restless in the presence of ideas. All this is said not to depreciate the fullest technical mastery of details, it is to emphasize the relative and preparatory significance of this very important work. Its results come to the true interpreter as data. The harvests of manifold departments are brought to his table, and with all of these he does his constructive work.

(b) The interpreter must have a synthetic type of mind. Just because interpretation is synthesis the interpreter must be a man who by temperament, by training, and by intellectual sympathy fuses various materials into an organism. He must have that passion for totality which characterized Hegel; a passion checked [52]

and guided by many a wise restraint, but, for all that, always at work. He knows that in truth there is no such a thing as an isolated fact. Every fact is a part of a delicate and intricate organism of reality, and the capacity to follow the subtle relations of facts until they are seen in their articulated significance is fundamentally important for the interpreter. Some powerful scientists as they have moved along the lines of working hypotheses have liked to call the means by which they progressed "scientific imagination." Whatever we call it, this power of the mind to project itself, to visualize distant situations and realize the intricacy and actual quality of distant experiences, to reconstruct not merely the form but the life of the mastodon from the few bones which research has brought, is the very essence of the interpreter's power.

(c) The interpreter must have a candor constantly on its guard against a host of invading dishonesties. The eye must not be allowed to see the thing as the eye likes the look. At this point the synthetic mind must be constantly on its guard. The work of Bauer and the Tubingen school is an effective illustration of the danger at this point. The thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of Hegel overran the candor of the Tubingen school many and many a time. In fact we may be tempted to say that the synthetic mind cannot be an objective mind. To set such limits to mental activity, however, would be flatly to contradict the fundamental postulates of evolution. If we are to develop mentally it must be along just such lines as the combination of honest subjective interests with remorseless candor. To say that a mind must be empty in order to be independent is not to place a very flattering estimate upon human powers. The interpreter will be helped in this kind of honesty by a hopeful interest in the facts which do not fit into his synthesis. He will like them when he comes to understand them. The facts which fit represent present achievement in building up an organism of interpretation. The facts which refuse have all the promise of the future in them. They are full of the romance of the days to come. Some later synthesis will find a place for them and so the work of the interpreter will go on.

(d) The interpreter must be alive. His task

is expression in the terms of life and he himself

must thrill with its energies. Past and present

meet in the hot activity of his mind. I use that word "hot" deliberately. There are some chemical reactions you camiot get without heat and interpretation is one of them. A man cannot interpret what is foreign to him. You cannot ask that a man whose heart has never been torn by life's confusions and contradictions and tragedies interpret the literature which has come out of those very confusions. There are stages in the study of the Bible when you must ask a man, Can you observe and classify with patient industry? There are stages where you must ask, Have you thought deeply, and do you bring the instruments of a full and responsive mind? But there comes a time when you must ask, Have you lived? Have you bared your hfe to the impact of the rude, terrible reahties of experience? Academic life is often embryonic, and there is many a man busy about his task who has never uttered that first poignant cry when the breath of reality cut itself into lungs unused to air.

The insight of life itself will throw light on many a dark place. A man's exegesis will palpitate with life if he brings an actual experience of life to it. An important corollary will be a new power of expression. The interpreter must be a master of live, haunting, compelling words.

The solemn and stolid commonplaceness of some exegesis, reminding one of Holmes's lines to a Katydid,

*'Thou mindest me of gentle folk. Old gentle folk are they, Thou sayest an undisputed thing In such a solemn way,"

is the natural result of inner vacuity. The grip of live phrases will follow the activity of a vital manliood in the work of interpretation.

(e) Last of all, we must face the fact that the literature which we call the Bible is the creation of a powerful and passionate religious experience and can never be interpreted adequately apart from such an experience. One is willing to admit, to be sure, that the book of Ecclesiastes is not the expression of any very delicate and lofty spirituality. But the Bible as a whole may be adequately described as centuries of intense religious experience made poignantly articulate. Now a man without the slightest personal interest in these things may do the most important sort of work in research. He may have a distinguished career in deft and powerful analysis of literary [56]

materials. But the last and the genuinely interpreting word about the Bible must be said by the man who has its secret in his own heart. Albiecht Ritschl used to declare — and he had no particular enthusiasm for traditional views — that the theologian must do his work within the Christian community. He must have the insight which comes from participation in the essential meaning of the life of the community. The interpreter, at any rate, must have this qualification. That passionate afflatus which created the literature must make its pulsation felt in the life of the man who interprets it.

In some such fashion as this, gratefully accepting all the garnered results coming from every field of research, relentlessly candid in recognizing every disconcerting fact, working at the place where the departments meet, bringing to his task a living experience and a synthetic mind, the interpreter may organize the results of the last fifty years of activity and the genuine deposit which comes out of an older past into a totality which will have a most far-reaching significance in contemporary life.

The principles which we have been discussing in respect of the Bible are applicable to every field where there is need for research and for interpretation. Against two dangers we should constantly be on our guard. On the one hand there is the tendency to indulge in hasty and unwarranted generalizations, which is the constant temptation of the impatient mind. Here we must insist on the most patient and painstaking and thoroughgoing investigation. On the other hand there is the tendency to treat research as an end in itself, and to refuse to lift the question as to the significance of the material so patiently gathered. It is possible for a man to be keen and alert in the search for microscopic facts, and mentally dull and sluggish whenever you ask that these facts be related to the actual meaning and movement of life. Here we must insist that the larger work of appraisal must be done, and our universities must offer the training which will produce men capable of doing it. Research alone produces a catalogue of imrelated facts. Interpretation alone produces a subjective dogmatism. Together they produce the solid structure of a scientific appraisal of life.

ni

"Doth not Wisdom cry: Counsel is mine^ and sound knowledge: I am understanding; I have might. By me kings reign.

And princes decree justice.

By me princes rule.

And nobles, even all the judges of the earth." Proverbs VIII. 1, 15, 16,

THE university always remembers. It guards the shrine of the past. The great university always dreams. It throws the glory of the possible over the grim lines of the actual. The productive university always hopes. It creates a luminous future by expecting it and out of the expectation releasing forces which turn hopes into achievements. It is as honest as life, as frank as the hardest and ugliest facts, as tender as the most radiant idealism, as glad as; youth and as wise as age. It is the contemporary expression of that Wisdom whose words claiming counsel and sound knowledge and.under standing are a perpetual challenge to the aspiration of men. It still offers the materials for government and for justice. It is the reflective mind of the world applied to the experience of life.

When the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the rise of the universities of Paris, of Oxford and of Cambridge, and all that intellectual movement which resulted in so many institutions of learning at last, an influence was released in the life of Europe, which was to be felt in every human relationship. With the coming of the Renaissance new elements were added and the meaning of the older world was poured rich and fragrant into the life of adolescent Europe. The Reformation completed the circle and the world went back to Israel to learn what righteousness meant as it went back to Greece to learn the meaning of beauty and to Rome to learn the meaning of law. Then came the industrial Revolution. The factory and the university did not seem to belong together and even to-day the problem of their existence in the same world is far from solved. But a new world was made by the industrial revolution with which the university must deal and which at last it must master. [60]

The same eighteenth century which saw the coming of the industrial revolution saw that political cataclysm in France, the founding of our own Republic, the collapse of the theories of the benevolent despots, and the beginning of a more real political liberty in the world. In a new fashion the university found itself confronted by democracy. Then came the birth of modern science. The nineteenth century saw its flower and those vast generalizations in the name of science which form the background of the world in which the contemporary man lives. The industrial revolution began to move apace and the human problem of labor and all its relationships became an object of university investigation. Sometimes the distant chimes of the old disciplines seemed dim and low enough in the midst of all the bustling intensity of the newer subjects. The university, in other words, was a mirror held up to the changing life of the world. It was more than that. It was an inspirer and a leader and a molder in the midst of turbulent and changing days.

So it was in Europe. And all the while the new continent was developing. Its first colleges paid profound tribute to the ethical and religious sanctions. Indeed they were the thrones of moral and religious leadership. They turned the conscience and the spirit into syllogisms. They represented piety regnant in the realm of the mind.

Life moved hot and tempestuous in the new world. Liberty became more than a watchword. It kindled and burned and became a passion. The men who would not tolerate subservience to a human George III were quite unwilling to recognize a glorified George III on the throne of the universe. And so the intellectual life of America began to reveal definite sympathies with the critical scepticism which had swept so powerfully over the life of France. America has always been a pragmatic country, however, and the preachers of the saddlebags managed so skillfully to preach the potency of a really democratic God that the typical American life was little moved by the questioning of a mind like that of Ethan Allen. There was a continent to be tamed, not to say exploited. There were thousands of practical problems to be faced. And as time went on even New England was not able to push into the newer parts of the country an intellectual inspiration which moved as [62]

rapidly as the currents of settlement perpetually; passing westward. The practical mind was in the saddle and it left the trained mind far behind. The whole story is told in a sentence. John Quincy Adams ceased to be the typical American. The typical American became Andrew Jackson. Still life moved rapidly. The South had its own fine flower of gracious life, built alas and alack, like that of Athens of the fifth century on the foundation of slavery. The civilization of the North and that of the South not only used different watchwords, but each had its own foundation. And in the very nature of things the two could not continue side by side. The inevitable conflict came. The University of popular life had not proven as incapable as men of finely trained mind might have supposed. To be sure it was an Adams of the stately old tradition who held England steady during the hardest days. But the untutored prairies had wrought their own miracle, and it was Lincoln who saved the nation as an organism of unified life. All the while learning of course languished. There were earnest readers of good books. There were careful and painstaking students. There were men who knew the meaning of actual scholarship.

There were institutions where the lamp of learning burned. But the trained mind was not the dominant mind. The shrewd sagacity produced by the rude vigor of all the struggles of practical life was the quality most prized. The common school answered to recognized necessities. The university was an ornament rather than an essential feature of the national life.

But the Republic could not avoid the challenge which came from comparison. It did possess real intellectual curiosity. It did feel the pangs of mental hunger. Schools multiplied. Colleges increased. The eastern universities developed a notable intellectual tradition. The state universities of the middle and farther west began to lift their heads, and to produce productive scholars and men of genuine erudition. Perhaps it was inevitable that in a country where the immediate return has always been wonderfully alluring the type of scholarship which was most mathematical in its structure and demanded hard mentality rather than delicate taste would make a masterful appeal. During these days Oxford was shedding its subtle fragrance and offering its fair bloom to the world. Matthew [64]

Arnold was the typical Oxford man, and when he came to America he saw quickly that the things by which he lived had never very deeply entered into American life. The seminar was doing its deft work in Germany and the young American scholar took to the specialized type of investigation which it represented with eagerness. It offered immediate returns for industry. It did not demand a full and gracious and varied intellectual life. So the specialized technical scholar rather than the finely disciplined humanist became the typical product of the American university. In a way all this was wholesome. The day of carelessness had passed. Young scholars took infinite pains, and if most of their work lacked in ripeness and richness, at least they were laying solid foundations in accurate and carefully classified knowledge. Then came the World War. Life was turned into an amazing organism for the scientific manufacture of death. The mind of civilization was applied to the task of destruction. In the midst of all the fury some things kept emerging. With a shudder men realized that the most pretentious intellectual structure in the world had been turned into a fortress of conscienceless absolutism. The very fever which burned in men's blood, as they organized the whole of their nations' resources into instruments of destruction, kept its pulse beat to the desperate unabated faith that civilization could fight its way through the mire and emerge. In multitudes of lives a new idealism appeared. Things should no longer be in the saddle. They should no longer ride mankind. All nations should be organized about principles which would produce a free and potential life for the whole world. The new structure was to make science the servant of morals and the slave of brotherhood. America kindled at last. And the flame of its idealism glowed like a new sunrise even on the older life of Europe. Then came the bitter and cruel days of reaction at the close of the war. The inflated currency of verbal idealism produced its own havoc. And the days of cynicism and hard misanthropy settled heavily upon multitudes of men. It is in this situation that the contemporary American university must do its work. What is the contribution which it will be able to make? What is the leadership which it offers? And what are the possible heights of service to which it may rise? 166}