State of the question

This section can be brief because, as Alan Jacobs rightly says, few people today consider the reading of non-biblical texts to be a theologically significant activity.Footnote ⁷ Accordingly, there is little current literature on the topic. That said, it is certainly worth noting that there is substantial historical precedent within other periods – not least in the early Christian centuries – for this sort of reading. The formative years for the Christian tradition witnessed some calls for believers entirely to eschew reading any non-biblical texts, on the grounds that there were only outright conflicts between Athens and Jerusalem, and thus non-biblical texts could not be genuinely edifying. For the most part, however, strident, categorical refusals of engagement gave way to efforts to see points of resonance or even significant correspondences between these two bodies of literature.Footnote ⁸ Examples of this can be found in both Latin and Greek writing.Footnote ⁹ For instance, in his Confessions, Augustine lamented the way he had read Vergil as a schoolboy, having such sympathy for the Aeneid's Dido, while at the same time failing to see that his own estrangement from God was a far more substantial problem. Yet major portions of Confessions can be read as a Christian representation of the Latin epic: Augustine's text contains literary signals that he intends to rework Vergil's with a view towards demonstrating that the only true patria is being with God (rather than residing in any earthly city), and that the journey that is more consequential than any other is the one whereby the soul locates and comes to reside in its spiritual home.Footnote ¹⁰ In the correspondence of Jerome, there is also some encouragement to engage discerningly with classical literary works.Footnote ¹¹ And there is an address by Basil of Caesarea to school-aged children on how to read Greek poetry and prose towards a Christian end.Footnote ¹² The present essay does not present a comprehensive reading of this literature, but the constructive position it develops makes reference to Basil's address, which is the most developed and explicit of the texts mentioned here in offering principles for this kind of reading.Footnote ¹³

Though there are few recent treatments of our topic, Alan Jacobs’ A Theology of Reading is the most important current constructive work to deal with it.Footnote ¹⁴ Jacobs draws from Augustine a strong argument that theological allegiance definitely should influence how readers understand all texts, both biblical and non-biblical.Footnote ¹⁵ Augustine sees the dominical command to love God and neighbour as utterly comprehensive in scope, including every pursuit to which one might put one's hand, and thus as not excluding textual interpretation. As Jacobs sees it, the obligation to love one's neighbour implies certain things about how to treat one's human neighbours, but by extension it also has entailments for how we interact with texts, the expression in writing of another person's thoughts and feelings. Jesus’ command requires that readers attend closely to the actual voice of texts they are engaging. They must listen to them in an effort to discern what they have to offer: not in a spirit of suspicion, which assumes the sufficiency of the self, but with a view towards attending to the other. It is on precisely this basis that Jacobs opposes what he refers to as allegory, meaning the attempt to interpret texts that evidently are not Christian as if they were somehow offering up a message that is Christian in content.Footnote ¹⁶ This is incompatible, for Jacobs, with his hermeneutic of love because the allegorical method risks the erasure of differences – including the difference between ourselves and the others we are supposed to love.Footnote ¹⁷ Jacobs’ argument that theological convictions should not be set aside in reading literary texts is compelling. And the question he raises about the patristic precedent for how to do this is serious enough that it deserves a full response in what follows.

Reading non-privileged signs

This brings the discussion to the point of developing a constructive position on theological reading of non-scriptural texts. The view proposed below presupposes a construal of the biblical text that is commonplace within the Christian tradition. That is, it takes for granted that the Bible is a set of signs that direct the attention of the reader toward the triune God. Or, to gloss the matter in closely related terms, the texts are not fundamentally about themselves; they signify or indicate the being and act of the Christian God. In looking back and reflecting on a comprehensive history of biblical interpretation, David Tracy rightly comments, ‘For Christianity is not a religion of the book, yet the book plays a central role in Christian self-understanding. Christianity, in more explicitly hermeneutical terms, is a religion of a revelatory event’, and certain texts signify or point readers toward this event.Footnote ¹⁸ The sequence of words that constitute the Old and New Testaments, the two-testament canon of scripture, are signifiers to the event by which God makes himself present in the person of Jesus Christ. It is Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, present and active in the power of the Spirit, who is signified or testified to by the written words of the Bible.Footnote ¹⁹

That the text is essentially concerned with what it signifies, as opposed to the words representing the final terminus of readerly effort, means that there is something outside the text that the reader accesses by means of it; yet this does not mean that interpretation is simply a matter of establishing the referent of biblical signifiers. To claim that the Bible is a set of signs is not the same as asserting that its meaning is reducible to its reference. The Bible brings its readers into relation with what it signifies; however, it relates readers in various ways to this subject matter, for instance, by saying things about it, by expressing wishes with respect to it, by communicating mandates to the reader on behalf of the one whom the text signifies, and so on.

Since the religious vision arising from the Bible is comprehensive in scope, such theological convictions form a framework within which all of the reader's other convictions find their proper place. A genuine commitment to comprehensiveness does not mean merely that what the Bible has to say about God relates in some way to every other subject, so that the two discrete domains should be correlated with one another in various ways, whereby some sort of conversation between the text and the full range of human knowledge is always possible in principle, even if its form cannot be predicted in advance.Footnote ²⁰ To set biblical conceptions alongside the claims of various disciplines is different from treating the Bible as an encompassing framework within which to engage all issues. Erich Auerbach is correct in observing that the Bible presents a view of the world that calls for readers to situate themselves and their beliefs inside its purview. Scripture, he says,

The present essay concentrates on just the sort of material that Auerbach says ‘poured in’ from beyond the reaches of a fundamentally Jewish frame of reference. This includes texts such as those of Homer, which is so different from the Bible, not seeking to have readers find themselves in the world of his poetry, but asking us to ‘forget our own reality for a few hours’.Footnote ²² What does it mean to read these works in light of the Bible?

The necessity of absorption, rather than correlation, leads to a further refinement of the previously stated view of the Bible. The Bible is not only a set of signs pointing the reader to God; it is a privileged collection of signs, which is to say that whatever other genuine signs there are must be read in relation to it. Whatever else signifies what the biblical signs do must speak in harmony with the prophets and apostles, and be understood with reference to the framework they establish with their words. For example, the created order can serve as a non-privileged sign. In Basil's homilies on the text of Genesis, various aspects of the natural order point beyond themselves to their transcendent ground in the God who created the world. Basil does not limit himself to repeating only exactly what the text says about how the world was created by God. He goes beyond this and seeks to do something more ambitious by ‘shaping patterns of attention’ to the created order,Footnote ²³ ones that recognise the fundamental difference between God and the world, while at the same time displaying alertness to how its reality attests to the one who formed it and continues to preserve its order in the present. Taking as his point of departure that God speaks to the world and produces living creatures ‘of every kind’ (Gen 1:24, NRSV), Basil observes that the reproduction of natural kinds within the world is a sign of the care of God and his role in providing order to the process of reproduction.Footnote ²⁴ The present point is simply to establish the meaning of the category of non-privileged signs and to offer a modest amount of illustration, not to delimit in any definitive way what does or does not count as a non-privileged sign.

Later in this section, it will prove possible to ask directly whether non-biblical literary works qualify as non-privileged signs. Clearly, though, they do at least have a semiotic function: they say something, and they can say something about matters of transcendence. How so? It is too much to say that every piece of literary art must necessarily express the religion of the artist. This is not only because some art expresses secular concerns, but also because, even if ‘religion’ refers to a person's life becoming fixed on something that functions as an ultimate unifying concern, it is not clear that all lives have such a single unifying centre.Footnote ²⁵ Some lives are marked by a range of concerns that shift from time to time, remain finally fragmented and are not held together by a single focus that sets everything in perspective and continues to function in that way for an extended period of time.Footnote ²⁶ Thus, not every literary work expresses religion in this straightforward way. Yet, for every literary text, there is always what Nicholas Wolterstorff calls a ‘world behind the work’, of which the work is itself an expression.Footnote ²⁷ The world behind the literary work refers to ‘that complex of the artist's beliefs and goals, convictions and concerns, which play a role in accounting for the existence and character of the work’.Footnote ²⁸ These can relate to rather minor matters, or they can concern issues of ultimate significance, in which case the piece of literature expresses a full-blown worldview.Footnote ²⁹ It is often the case, therefore, that the religion of the author, or the author's particular version of secularism, has a central role in the world the text portrays.Footnote ³⁰ In the Odyssey, for instance, Homer is not attempting to claim that a real human being named Odysseus at some point in the past actually did all the things that the epic relates. The poem, however, does express the beliefs and convictions of the poet, central to which is the vision of virtue that Odysseus embodies in his life. The text has a religious dimension, in a loose sense, insofar as it suggests where a human being should stand in relation to different versions of transcendence. The work intimates that Odysseus belongs with his human wife, rather than with a divine consort, and that his particular virtues, chief among which is craftiness, are a form of specifically human excellence, which would have almost no meaning for a divine being who does not also have the inherent limitations of a human person.Footnote ³¹ Odysseus ought to be wily and determined, but the life of an immortal is just not his, and he should accept this restriction.

If such texts make claims as a function of the world behind the work, and even make claims about matters more ultimate than merely mundane affairs, can they be taken to speak of issues that are specifically Christian? Is it legitimate to see them as speaking of the triune God and of faithful human response to him? Can the category of non-privileged signs properly apply to them? Of course, there are two logically possible answers: no and yes. Both of these responses have precedent in the early centuries of the Christian tradition, as mentioned above. It is possible to reject the possibility that non-biblical literary texts have something to say about the Christian God. The basis for taking this line is simply the prima facie differences in material content between the canonical texts and literary texts that are different from the Bible. To be sure, if the two bodies of writing are not identical in what they say, then there is at least a danger of a one-sided assimilation of Christian scripture to alien texts or vice versa. But this risk is more a result of hasty or sloppy reading than a problem that will certainly and of necessity occur by the nature of the case. If there are differences between these texts, it is necessary for a careful reader to register them. Thus, the other option, first recognising genuine similarities between non-Christian material and normatively Christian texts, and then recontextualising these echoes of the Bible in light of the Bible, is a more compelling approach.Footnote ³² Basil stresses that Christians should utilise everything that can aid the Christian life so as to maximise that contribution: ‘Our hopes lead us forward to a more distant time, and everything we do is by way of preparation for the other life (καὶ πρὸς ἑτέρου βίου παρασκευὴν ἅπαντα πράττομεν). Whatever, therefore, contributes to that life, we say must be loved and pursued with all our strength’.Footnote ³³

Reading a non-biblical text in light of the Bible, and thus as a collection of non-privileged signs, means following three steps. First, it requires working through the non-biblical text in order to differentiate between what in it is similar to the content of the Bible and what is substantially different. Second, it requires rejecting the material that is genuinely opposed to what is in the Bible. On the one hand, Basil describes the presentation of Christian truths by non-scriptural literary material as a way of seeing these truths ‘in shadows and reflections’ (ἐν σκιαῖς τισι καὶ κατόπτροις).Footnote ³⁴ These indirect presentations of truth have value even if they are not the most definitive way in which a reader may learn them. But, on the other hand, content that does not fall into this category cannot be appropriated by the Christian reader. It must be repudiated. Third, reading these texts theologically requires adapting the appropriated material so that it fits more fully into a Christian framework. Basil comments, ‘At the very outset, therefore, we should examine each of the branches of knowledge and adapt it to our end, according to the Doric proverb, “bringing the stone to the line”’.Footnote ³⁵ Some contemporary scholars of Basil's text find fault with him for not reading Greek classic texts ‘straight’, or for putting his own misleading spin on how literary characters model virtues that seem worthy of Christian imitation.Footnote ³⁶ It is, though, the very essence of his mode of interpretation to see how non-biblical material can, in its own way, represent biblical teaching, even while the two bodies of literature are clearly and obviously not identical – as he is well aware. This is not a matter of taking arbitrary liberties with texts, but of situating content deemed useful within a biblical framework, which is taken to be completely comprehensive in its scope.Footnote ³⁷ In sum, then, the three steps are: sorting, rejecting and appropriating (together with recontextualisation).

These steps are logically separable from each other, even if they are not chronologically separable or easy to distinguish in practice; but for present purposes, it is crucial to note how the first step contrasts with the subsequent two. On the one hand, the initial moment is about coming to terms with the literary text and comparing it to the standard of a Christian theological framework, thereby deciding which aspects of the non-biblical text chime in with the overall thrust of the Bible. This requires reading the non-biblical text as a work with its own integrity and purpose, for without doing that it would not be possible to make valid comparisons. On the other hand, the second two moments pertain to the dialectic of rejection and appropriation, which builds on the comparative work. The second and third steps reject what is incompatible with Christian theology and situate only what can actually be incorporated within its scope. The contrast between the second two steps and the first regards making a judgement on the basis of an established theological framework and integrating within it just what has the potential to come inside it. Each of the three steps is important, but the next section will consider stages two and three together in dealing with the problem of allegorical reading identified by Jacobs, as well as making explicit how this grouping puts a specifically modern twist on the procedure that Basil recommends.

Before answering objections, suppose we briefly consider how this proposal might work, starting with a negative example and moving on to a positive one. The idea is not at all to say with Joseph Campbell that a diverse range of literary characters – say, Prometheus, Aeneas and even Jesus – all embody the constituent elements of a universal interpretive category such as ‘hero’, according to which the hero is one who separates himself from everyday life, undergoes an initiation into a realm that is in some sense supernatural, and then returns to the world in order to induct others into the mysterious domain from which he has just returned.Footnote ³⁸ This interpretive category of hero is generic in content, for it does not reflect the particularities of the stories of Prometheus, Aeneas or Jesus, even as it encompasses them all within its scope. This is not what theological reading of non-biblical texts is about, because ‘hero’ is a universal trope that runs through a group of examples, not something specifically theological.

Theological reading of literary works involves, instead, seeing the Christian God in particular as the one to whom textual signifiers point. For instance, in the novel Lord of the Flies, the character Simon bears a number of rather striking resemblances to Jesus Christ: he looks vaguely like Jesus, he sometimes seeks out moments of solitude, he has a confrontation with a symbol of evil in his conversation with the head of a slaughtered pig that has been impaled on a stick, and he is murdered when he attempts to bring a true message to the members of his community.Footnote ³⁹ Of course, differences between Simon and Jesus remain, but Simon cannot but bring Jesus to mind. A reader would not ultimately need a hermeneutical framework that is theological in any significant respect to note these intertextual connections: they are there for any reader to notice. What theological reading of literary works does is to construe the literary signs as non-privileged pointers to God, thereby ensuring that what is signified is materially theological, and holding at bay a generic hermeneutic that would otherwise preclude efforts to discern content of theological value across a variety of literary texts.Footnote ⁴⁰ This is not to say that a generic hermeneutic should be excluded, but only that a theological reading must also be afforded scope to operate.

Response to objections

It remains now to respond to the two objections cited earlier. First, is Jacobs rightly worried that what is being proposed here, which takes its cue from Basil and others, is allegorical reading in the sense that it finds a meaning in texts other than what careful, attentive, respectful reading would actually discover? If what is wrong with Campbell's way of interpreting spiritual heroes is that his way of understanding Jesus mutes the distinctives with which the New Testament presents him, then is it not the case that the theological reading proposed here is guilty of much the same: a muffling of the particular voice that one ought to be able to hear by attending to non-scriptural literary texts, which are forced by this way of reading them to articulate a specifically Christian message?

The model developed above does not involve making texts say what they do not mean (the focus of Jacobs’ worry). The distinction between different phases of reading should make this clear. As spelled out in the previous section, the first phase of interpretation calls for readers to come to terms with the literary work and to make a judgement about which of its elements are similar to, and which are different from, the overall arc of the biblical narrative. This is a matter of understanding the nature of the world behind the work and assessing it in relation to the Bible. What are the author's beliefs, convictions and concerns as these receive expression in the non-biblical text? Seeing the world behind the work as accurately as possible necessitates reading passages of the work in their own context and in their own integrity. When readers do this, they cannot help but see where non-biblical texts stand in marked contrast to the texts of the biblical canon, as Barth recognised:

The next part of the reading process, rejecting and appropriating (which I group together for the sake of convenience), is not about understanding the world behind the work. It is rather about how to understand the world of the work from a Christian vantage point. In other words, the question here is not what the texts say; it is what to make of what they say. At this point, understanding them in a Christian way concentrates on the place their subject matter could have within a Christian theological framework. In this way, the idea is not that non-biblical texts are assimilated; rather, a distinction is made between assimilation and appropriation, such that these texts are never assimilated, because the later phases of interpretation, whether in the mode of rejection or appropriation, make no claim about textual meaning. The focus of interpretive energy has shifted decisively in stages two and three in a way that works against the possibility of distortion of meaning in a way that is similar to Freud's reading of religion, which he compares to the way an adult understands the figurative language of a stork delivering a newborn baby to its parents.Footnote ⁴² Adults know how children really are produced and understand such expressions accordingly: they make sense of the reference to the stork by situating the claim within an outlook that reflects the basics of human biology. So also the later stages of interpretation in the model being articulated here concern themselves with how a reader whose viewpoint has definite intellectual structure (namely, that of Christian theology) might process textual claims from her point of view.

Distinguishing stages in this way may raise questions about whether the first, ‘sorting’, stage of interpretation receives an exemption from the requirement of comprehensiveness. Theological beliefs and convictions may have a modest role in determining what a literary text says: perhaps, à la Jacobs, they may motivate this phase of the interpretive process by prompting a reader to listen to and thus in some sense love one's neighbour. But theological commitment does not do here what it does in the later phases, where it governs the process of appropriation. It can operate differently at different stages, while still being genuinely operative from beginning to end. It is truly operative both when due effort is made to see what the non-privileged signs are, as well as when going on to explore how they ultimately signify what they do. Thus no aspect of the interpretive process is an exception to the rule of comprehensiveness.

This understanding of appropriation provides a basis for responding to Jacobs’ worry about the dangers of what he calls allegorical reading. In fact, what is being proposed here as echoing Basil's approach is not allegory at all; it corresponds rather to what Frances Young calls ‘mimetic reading’.Footnote ⁴³ Specifically, it is a form of mimesis in that it deals with figures in Greek literature as representing Christians and the virtues that they ought to embody in their lives. More specifically, much of it is an ‘ikonic’ version of mimesis (as opposed to symbolic mimesis, which Basil uses in other contexts), which attends to larger scale and more substantial resemblances between the textual signifier in Greek literature and the corresponding quality in Christian thought.Footnote ⁴⁴ For instance, Basil mentions the example of Socrates not reacting with violence to a man who assaulted him: this approximates or resembles Christian teaching about forgiveness.Footnote ⁴⁵ As Young rightly notes, any reading strategy that seeks out the mimetic potential in a text is bound to underscore whatever similarities exist and to downplay or elide differences.Footnote ⁴⁶ What is being proposed here is a retrieval of ikonic mimesis that takes its cue from Basil, but that is not identical with his approach. While the Cappadocian is certainly not unaware of how the Greek literature differs from the Christian Bible, the present proposal posits a firmer in-principle distinction between interpretive stages, wherein the first ascertains what a text says and assesses it from a Christian point of view (‘sorting’), while the subsequent stages appropriate what they can and reject what they must (‘making one's own’).Footnote ⁴⁷

With this clarification of ‘allegory’ in place, it is possible to deal more briefly with the second objection: whether the proposed theological reading of non-scriptural texts qualifies as natural theology. For Barth, natural theology refers to any attempt to know God apart from the divine self-disclosure that Jesus Christ alone provides.Footnote ⁴⁸ Because for Barth there is actually no other path to knowledge of God than this one, attempts to travel some other route inevitably devolve into idolatry. If the position detailed above seems to correspond to this description of natural theology, it is because the act of engaging with non-scriptural literary texts is not obviously and directly christological. The whole nature of the problem is to reflect upon what is happening when readers engage with texts other than the privileged signs to be found in the Bible itself – the text that explicitly points its readers to Jesus Christ. Yet if it is true that the literary works in question are not obviously and directly christological, reading them theologically nevertheless means interpreting them in light of the christology that the Bible itself generates. Reading non-biblical texts theologically thus operates on the basis of what might be called a reflected christology. Non-biblical literary texts thus shine more like the moon than the sun, but they nevertheless do shine.Footnote ⁴⁹ Because there is christology in place here, this is not an example of natural theology.