Edited by Richard J. Bautch and Jean-François Racine
Introduction
There are distinct challenges
involved in articulating a hermeneutics of biblical aesthetics in the
twenty-first century. Beauty and the Bible: Toward a Hermeneutics of Biblical
Aesthetics is conceived as a response to three such challenges. First, the turn
to subjectivity in the philosophy of the Enlightenment must be addressed in
terms of its impact on the notion of beauty, biblical and otherwise. Immanuel
Kant’s Critique of Judgment, for example, is crucial background for
understanding modern aesthetic concepts like sublimity and for engaging
approaches to the text, such as reader response, that are informed by critical
theory. Critical theory in general has decentered aesthetics and highlighted
the subject’s role in the determination of beauty. These developments are
traced back to Kant and his impact on modern thought.
A second challenge relates to
context, the aggregate of historical factors that prevent us from ever again
conceiving of “art for art’s sake.” The composition of each biblical book,
along with the history of its reception, is fraught with the minutiae of
politics, economics, gender, and global interdependencies. These factors can
create a context that is morally ambiguous with evidence of inequity,
exploitation, and even atrocity. How does beauty function in such
circumstances? Although there are many possibilities, lest beauty become the
veneer that conceals all manner of inconvenient truths, it should be viewed
through the lenses of new historicism, postcolonialism, and similar hermeneutics
of suspicion. Such approaches attend to ideologies that may mark the biblical
texts and their interpretation.
The pendulum’s swing signals a
third challenge, to approach the biblical text postcritically. Increasingly,
there are readers of the Bible with eyes wide open but looking beyond the
learning of philosophers or critical the[1]orists.
Such reading may sidestep the epistemological turn made by Kant in order to
recover a concept of beauty said to be more relevant to the ancient mind. A
postcritical reading seeks, among other things, an under-standing of the nature
of beauty that is grounded in semantics and the language of the text. With this
type of reading, beauty’s power of attraction provides the grounds for
aesthetic theology.
In short, a volume on contemporary biblical
aesthetics with the requisite breadth and depth will delve into modern
philosophy, contextual criticism, and the postcritical return to beauty’s
intrinsic qualities. While these three perspectives are quite different and not
to be harmonized, exploring them concurrently in this volume serves each in
turn and produces a study with intriguing methodological tensions. These are
the type of tensions that can be profitably explored for the insights they may
yield. Beauty and the Bible: Toward a Hermeneutics of Biblical Aesthetics is
designed to serve a wide readership, with each reader resonating with one or
perhaps two of the challenges indicated above. Additionally, readers may have
an unanticipated and uncanny engagement with that “other” approach to biblical
beauty that they might otherwise discount. These essays offer new perspectives
on beauty in the Bible and a range of hermeneutical tools to advance the study
of aesthetics.
In its complement of essays on
beauty in the Bible, this book introduces readers to modern philosophy, to
contextual criticism, and to the postcritical return to beauty. Modern
philosophy informs “The Potential of the Category of Sublime for Reading the
Episodes of the Stilling of the Storm (Luke 8:22–25) and of the Transfiguration
(Luke 9:28–36),” by Jean[1]François Racine.
After reviewing the association of the sublime and terror in Western thought,
this essay reads the stories of the calming of the storm and the
transfiguration in Luke as prompting an experience of the sub[1]lime. “The Sublime
Art of Prophetic Seeing and the Word in the Book of Jeremiah,” by Mark
Brummitt, continues in this vein. Brummitt considers the proliferation of
meanings in Jeremiah’s words and body as an instance of the sublime. He finds
resonance of this phenomenon in the British painter Francis Bacon (1908–1992),
whose work serves as a lens to look at Jeremiah. The role of subjectivity in
critical theory is at the center of “Perceiving Beauty in Mark 5:21–43,” by Antonio
PortalatÃn. This essay turns to Wolfgang Iser’s theory of reading as an
aesthetic response to highlight the pleasurable aspects of reading the story of
the hemorrhaging woman and the resurrection of Jairus’s daughter in the fifth
chapter of Mark.
David Penchansky’s essay,
“Beauty, Power, and Attraction: Aesthetics and the Hebrew Bible,” serves as a
primer on contextual criticism. Pen chansky examines the vocabulary of beauty
in the Hebrew Bible and uses the test cases of Rachel and David to investigate
further the relationship between beauty and power. Embedded in Penchansky’s
analysis is the presupposition that texts, particularly old, sacred texts that
have passed through many hands and many communities, are sites of conflict.
Rather than looking for a particular objective meaning, a reading should
uncover the conflicts, contradictions, and places of dissonance within a text.
Paired with Penchansky’s essay is an empirical study, “Yachin and Boaz in Jerusalem
and Rome” by Richard Bautch. This essay deals with the columns Yachin and Boaz
in the Solomonic Temple, curiously described in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles.
Bautch first looks at how these columns were rearticulated in Christian
architecture and argues that what made the Solomonic columns especially
attractive to artists of the Renaissance was that the two pillars reflected
aesthetic and political dimensions of the society that created them. A broader
conclusion is that history provides multiple examples of a leader seeking
political gain by associating himself with a stunning architectural feature
from the temple of Solomon.
Jo-Ann Brant’s postcritical
reading of beauty in the Gospel of John identifies an aesthetic dimension to
Johannine theology and Christology. Such an aesthetic, she indicates, is
essential to the Johannine notion of glory and revelation. Moreover, as an
aesthetic object, the Gospel of John is not simply an account of what happened
but a work of art that imparts a sense of divine beauty by means of the beauty
of the prose. That is, the biblical writer seems to understand that God’s glory
is perceivable to the physical senses and not simply the mind’s eye. Brant’s
essay is informed by the thought of Simone Weil and Han Urs von Balthasar.
The final essay, by Peter
Spitaler, serves as an epilogue to the volume. Responding to all the essays,
Spitaler highlights common themes and motifs in the various biblical narratives
and underscores hermeneutical insights that are shared by the contributors.
Without imposing unity, Spitaler synthesizes the studies in this collection by
focusing on three aspects: the historical, social, and cultural boundedness of
beauty constructs; the subjective dimension in the perception of beauty; and
the relationships between the beautiful and the sublime. Spitaler concludes
with suggestions for further research on beauty, Bible, method, and
hermeneutics. The collection of essays as a whole underscores the significance
of aesthetics and related considerations for the ancient writers of sacred
texts and for individuals and communities who read them today with modern and
postmodern sensibilities.
These explorations into the
aesthetic qualities of seven discrete biblical texts signal a fresh,
interdisciplinary understanding of scripture. More than ever, beauty is in the
eyes of the beholder to suggest great diversity in the field of aesthetics and
new challenges for readers of the Bible. Moreover, Beauty and the Bible: Toward
a Hermeneutics of Biblical Aesthetics catalogs the plurality of methods
currently in use to elaborate and comment on beauty in the biblical text. The
diversity reflected on these pages parallels that of the volume’s contributors
in the aggregate. That is, while two of the authors are from the continental
United States, five come from other cultural contexts that include the
Caribbean, continental Europe, French-speaking Canada, and Great Britain. Amid
this diversity, there has been an abiding center: many of these essays were
conceived within a working group on hermeneutics that meets as part of the
international meeting of the Catholic Biblical Association of America. In
sessions from 2008 to 2010, the group considered and critiqued one another’s
studies on biblical aesthetics, and the project developed into Beauty and the
Bible: Toward a Hermeneutics of Biblical Aesthetics.
The editors acknowledge and
express gratitude to the Catholic Biblical Association of America for its
support of this project. We also thank the editors at Semeia Studies, Jennifer
Koosed and Gerald West, along with the editorial staff at the Society of
Biblical Literature, especially Kathie Klein, Bob Buller, and Leigh Andersen.
We thank as well our research assistant, Peter Claver Ajer, for his work on the
indices. Finally, we dedicate this volume to Gina Hens-Piazza and David
Penchansky. For many years Gina and David led the study of hermeneutics within
the Catholic Biblical Association of America by convening the group that meets
annually at the international meeting. In this role, they were among the first
to conceive and articulate a synthesis between biblical studies and critical
theory. Their leadership advanced the study of biblical hermeneutics at a
critical time in its development, and under their influence an entire cohort of
scholars came to approach the biblical text with methodological savvy and a
concomitant desire to be of service, to the world and to communities of faith.
In the field of hermeneutics, the legacy of Gina and David is a thing of
beauty.
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