How should we take this, Michael? I’m inclined to say it’s an attractive but invalid mode of interpretation. It goes beyond the project of reading allegorically, which can be done in a much more careful and convincing manner. Isn’t the way that Maimonides reads allegorically better?

The way Gregory reads he is half noting the obvious content of the allegory and half creating new significance through special treatment of signs in the text, in order to generate his own allegory about Church and Heretics. It’s attractive, because of the way that the text becomes rich with unforeseen meanings that can be woven together into his contemporary allegory, but I think it’s important to filter between esoteric but valid readings and esoteric and invalid readings. Otherwise, you end up with what Derrida recommends, the text “opened up” to all self-interested readings.

Foucault argues/indicates that one of the shifts into modernity involved the gradual popular acceptance and realization that names (family names, place names, the traditional names of animals and substances) were only conventional signs, not somehow essential signifiers(“true names”). Umberto Eco plays with this kind of pre-Enlightenment orientation toward signs in The Island of the Day Before. Both Plato and Aristotle devote numerous arguments to combating false reasonings from names themselves (e.g., dogfish and the names fathers give their sons), which seems to show that this is an original and perennial human error.

Anyways, wasn’t this tendency the worst aspect of medieval interpretation, as something that robbed interpretations of their analytic accuracy and polluted the authentic allegorical texts with external elements? Spinoza was correcting this tendency by asserting that some phrases must only be read idiomatically, which seems right:

Now they scatter dust to heaven upon their heads. What should we understand by dust except things of the earth? What is designated by the head, except that which is our principle part, namely the mind? What is meant by heaven except the command spoken by heaven?

On the other hand, the interpretations are very charming, and they bring out an element that is hard for people to read today: the notion that the three friends are somehow heretical seducers. But what if this is not a good interpretation, in the same way that Borges’ allegory of the three Judases is not a good interpretation? Then its cleverity is itself heretical, right? Or is that not right?

huh huh, huh huh, he said “cleverity.” Huh huh.

But Philip Rieff writes ‘cleverity’! Philip Rieff.

It’s a perfectly cromulent word!

Jess, back me up here.

He does, somewhere, use that word. He may be the only one who uses it, though. I don’t think “cromulent” is legit either. Rieff also appropriates this word for his own uses. My other favorite Rieff word is “banausic.”

No, see, the intriguing thing is that Moss may have crossed the line from Simpsons reference to actual usage here.

See also.

A Simpsons reference embiggens any conversation.

Ah, I see. And to think I was unhappy for not having heard of it.

Jess, it’s in SO/SO:MLAtD, in a particularly intense passage that ends with “death camps”. I think he’s making an extremely obscure distinction with that word, like he doesn’t mean cleverness, he means cleverity.

Has everyone seen Jess’ review in New Pantagruel?
http://www.newpantagruel.com/2006/06/sacred_ordersoc.php

… and they closed! Check this out:

Ours can largely be summed up as a localist, decentralist, anarcho-Christian and authentically conservative approach to politics and culture. As we have written previously, we believe that to suffer one’s place and one’s people in the particularity of its and their needs is the only true basis for finding love, friendship, and an authentic, meaningful life. This is nothing less than the key to the pursuit of Christian holiness, which is the whole of the Christian adventure: to live in love with the frailty and limits of one’s existence, suffering the places, customs, rites, joys, and sorrows of the people who are in close relation to you by family, friendship, and community—all in service of the truth, goodness, and beauty that is best experienced directly. The discipline of place teaches that it is more than enough to care skillfully and lovingly for one’s own little circle, and this is the model for the good life, not the limitless jurisdiction of the ego, granted by a doctrine of choice, that is ever seeking its own fulfillment, pleasure, and satiation.

Since this thread has degenerated into a free-for-all: Nate, why don’t you move this blog to Wordpress?

Yes, I was bummed when they closed up shop. You have to respect the way they went out, though (and speaking of made-up words):

“…The New Pantagruel has, essentially, argued itself out of existence. This is a good thing. In the end, we are pessimistic romantics. We believe life is eucatastrophic: a joyous catastrophe.”

Mr Method,

(to wrench the thread out of its free-for-all), thanks for your thoughtful comments; I’m sorry to answer so late.

You said: How should we take this, Michael? I’m inclined to say it’s an attractive but invalid mode of interpretation. It goes beyond the project of reading allegorically, which can be done in a much more careful and convincing manner.

In order to make sense of this kind of reading we have to keep in mind the presuppositions of medieval exegesis. They assumed 1) that the author of the Bible was the Holy Spirit, even though he used men as instruments; 2) that every part of the Bible was therefore the Word of God; 3) the Bible made in a sense one complete book, so that different “books” spoke to or interpreted each other; 4) and that, furthermore, every part must be laden with eternal and weighty significance.

Given these principles they came up with the “fourfold sense” theory, in which every part of the Bible had (at least) four meanings, the literal, the allegorical, the anagogical, and the moral. In addition to what a given passage meant on the surface (which, they sometimes recognized, may have been the only meaning intended by the human author), it was always legitimate and indeed necessary to ask what the passage was saying about Christ, about the Church, about the individual Christian soul.

What’s important to keep in mind then is that a valid reading in one sense may not be a valid reading in another, and we need to keep them straight. So in the literal sense Job’s friends were not heretical seducers (in the literal sense that role might belong to Job’s wife) but really sincere friends, although misguided, arrogant, and presumptuous. But in the anagogical sense, where Job obviously stands for the Church (what else would?), the interpretation Gregory suggests is a fairly obvious one. Reading the same passage in the moral sense, where Job would stand for the soul in via, still in the spiritual struggle of life which is our common lot, then the friends might be given a psychological interpretation instead.

The point is that as long as we admit the necessity of there being these different layers of meaning in the text, we can be fine with apparently conflicting interpretations, so long as we’re clear what sense we’re dealing with. And if the structures of these layers are kept distinct and clear, standards emerge by which to judge some interpretations heretical and others orthodox.

Whether you admit this is a valid way to read the text at all depends of course on what sort of text you think it is. If you deny the inspiration of the scriptures then the literal sense (which may have allegories of its own, e.g. parables) may be the only valid sense. Because of this, kindhearted attempts to read the pagan poets allegorically really were invalid and mistaken—they wanted to somehow make those dirty or violent stories acceptable by sticking cleaned-up “messages” under the surface. On the other hand, medieval poets themselves consciously wrote with this distinction of senses in mind for their own work. For instance Dante in his well-known Letter to Can Grande says that the Divine Commedy should be interpreted in all four senses. And Tasso gave his Gerusalem Liberata allegorical readings as well, though apparently only after he’d written the story—because good books ought to have these multiple layers of meaning.

Anyway, lots more could be said on this but I don’t have time now. This however also struck me: Foucault argues/indicates that one of the shifts into modernity involved the gradual popular acceptance and realization that names (family names, place names, the traditional names of animals and substances) were only conventional signs, not somehow essential signifiers(“true names”).

I wonder how Foucault means “modernity” of if he’s aware that this insight, that names are signifiers ad libitum and not essentially, is very well-attested as common knowledge in medieval logics and grammars. To call the opposite notion “Pre-Enlightenment” (to speak of the Enlightenment at all) is in itself revealing of a lot of prejudices (I’m not saying that they’re yours, mind) and myths stemming from the figures of the “Enlightenment” themselves and without historical foundation. A lot of what modernity thinks of as quintessentially modern was in fact invented in the Middle Ages.

I’m having a little trouble getting a unified picture of this one level (let alone any others). Does the allegorical reading of a narrative give a narrative? Or are we supposed to see in Job’s friends a series of still pictures of types of heretics, or the signs by which we know heretics? I guess this is a question I have about allegories in general. Can an allegorical narrative be reformed after having been dissolved into its signifying elements?

The OED online, for the record, does not admit that either cleverity or cromulent are words. I have to admit, in my heart of hearts, I was rooting for cromulent. Thanks Moss! That was an officially awesome contribution and totally made my day.

Philip Rieff:

[writing about Marcel Duchamp’s Being Given]…There is a fourth figure, conspicuous in his absence, the artist himself, the dead creator of this transparently deadly work of art, which, however lightly we begin to look into it, ends in ours complicity in its being an abomination of darkest desolation brilliantly lit. This fictive technological light and plastic green landscape are the abomination of the desolation conceiving our third world in a work of art. In its own cleverity, this tableau is terrible as a proleptic pleasantry of which the inartistic version is the death camps.

It’s funny, because as it turns this is a critical passage in a very strange, disconnected work.

For the record, I’m not claiming that cleverity “is” a good word. It turns out I just absorbed it from Rieff, who made it up, the way that Nietzsche made up the word “moraline”.

Michael, your description of “fourfold” sense was fascinating, and I want to respond to it at length when I get some time. One thing: I think you skipped over the explanation of allegorical reading, as it seems that the Gregory was actually an anagogical reading? I also wonder about Patrick Findler’s question, if I understand it properly.

Oops. That’s what I get for internetting at work. Keep one eye over your shoulder, then your reading eye blinks, and you make up what you missed in the interim.

For what it’s worth, Joseph, I’m also interested in your questions. (But Michael’s busy.) And I thought Reiff was pretty obnoxious, when I tried him (Mind of a Moralist, didn’t get too far in it).

Monadology does not accept cite tags, I take it.

I’m leaving for work now, but briefly:

sometimes the medieval exegetes spoke as if there was a twofold sense, the literal and the spiritual or allegorical; then, when they wanted to be more specific, the spiritual sense was further subdivided into three parts, and then “allegorical” took on a more specialized meaning compared to the others. Sorry for being unclear.

Finally: in the present work Gregory usually goes over the same passage several times, first according to one sense and then according to another, although he’s not completely systematic. This passage was excerpted from the longer and more complete commentary on Job 3.

Patrick,

Triumph of the Therapeutic is easier to read, because it’s more daring (it’s still written in dense weird sociological jargon, though). Sacred Order/Social Order: My Life in the Deathworks is a self-described “jeremiad”. That’s the progression: every twenty years he wrote a book, and they got progressively more angry and personal. Mind of the Moralist is a great book on Freud, because it’s a *grounded* analysis — it tries to analyze Freud and his life and establish what Freud actually said, rather than to merely analyze his system and give it back unchanged. Rieff’s chief life accomplishment is to show that Freud is profoundly important, beyond the immediate influence of his work, *for culture*.

Great, I always like book recommendations. My public library doesn’t have a copy of Triumph of the Therapeutic, but it’s for situation like this that I pay my local university library for a card.