A. The Challenges of Adopting an Eschatological Epistemology: Anticipating the Via Media with Louis-Marie Chauvet and D. L. Jeffrey

Foundational theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet helps us think in depth about the normative implications of an eschatological epistemology that is tied to a critically realist ontology. One might say that Chauvet operates within such a framework, for he asserts that something absolute, beyond our symbolic nexus, makes itself known to us but that this belief is always necessarily undergirded by faith. For Chauvet, we cannot rationally deduce what goes beyond human signification, for our vision is always already “given” in the world in which this system is constitutive of human perception. He thus promotes a way to truth that is “inseparable from us,”Footnote ¹⁵ thinking the entire corporeal realm as an “arch-sacramental” medium of grace, understanding that divine revelation only ever expresses itself in the mediating spaces of our historically, ethically, and symbolically constituted and constituting embodiment. Chauvet accordingly resists any theological approach to human signification that construes it wholly in terms of its lack, while also resisting any assumption of a natural capacity in the sign to signify reality, for both of these approaches fail to appreciate humanity's essential constitution inside the medium of language.

Chauvet also warns his audience that understanding human signification as an arch-sacramental medium of grace is a difficult position to hold. Appealing to Martin Heidegger's philosophical stance that any presence we encounter within the system of signification always operates in tandem with absence—that is, its constant withdrawal, or what we might call its “otherness”Footnote ¹⁶—Chauvet describes the signifying nexus as the space where “the real” never reveals itself to us in any measurable way. It is simply where the real as we encounter it is always unfolding for us, as we continually order it within our operative epistemological frameworks. Chauvet points out that our recognizing the real's absence, as well as language's mastery over us, is troubling. We are thus tempted to secure our position within the system in various ways. However, because the sign and its signified never have an easy link available to the human subject, Chauvet warns us that imagining that we can approximate any “fixed” nature, even of this withdrawal, easily renders our theories idols of speculation.Footnote ¹⁷

Thus, Chauvet highlights the thorough difficulty of our taking up an eschatological epistemology; he also identifies the spiritual danger of our refusing to do so in quests for fixed understanding of signification's relationship with the absolute. To consider further Chauvet's suggestion that the latter tendency is an idolatrous one, we may turn to the work of literary theorist and Christian theologian David Lyle Jeffrey. In People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture,Footnote ¹⁸ Jeffrey specifically investigates the epistemic movement toward fixity in the sphere of interpretation. On one end of the interpretive spectrum, literary critic Harold Bloom posits logocentrism, the idolatry of language, which Bloom identifies with the practices of many Gnostics, Jews, and Christians. For Bloom, logocentrists are those who believe in univocal meaning available in language, ascribing to language a “‘plenitude’ of meaning” which is “totally overdetermined.”Footnote ¹⁹ At the opposite end of the spectrum, Bloom posits “linguistic nihilism,” a deconstructionist view that only “sees in language a ‘dearth of meaning’ and ‘absolute randomness.’”Footnote ²⁰ Bloom portrays these poles as irreconcilable in any way, hospitable to one another only as host and parasite. In this figuration of host and parasite, Jeffrey identifies a “symbiosis unto death,”Footnote ²¹ pointing out that Bloom, in accepting these extremes as diametrically opposed and seeking no means for their rectification, is also caught up in this death-dealing symbiosis.

For Jeffrey, the problem with idolatrous logocentrists, nihilistic deconstructionists, and cynical observers like Bloom is that each is searching for means to control or locate truth in language. On Chauvet's terms, in all three cases interpreters have tried to “fix” the relationship between truth and signification, failing to appreciate humanity's constitution inside language as a medium of grace. Hence, logocentrists claim to have arrived at finality of meaning, while deconstructionists recognize this impossibility but react by claiming that no lasting meaning can be found via the signifying matrix.Footnote ²² Meanwhile, others like Bloom are content to act only as pessimistic onlookers, declaring that there is no way for the poles to converge. Jeffrey thus offers a vision of our spiritual culpability when our theological constructions facilitate the “symbiosis unto death” of Bloom's paradigm, resulting from an idolatrous desire to control truth in a language that always refers beyond itself to truth it cannot contain.

In his response, Jeffrey points out that a theory conceiving interpretation as an offering to God “cannot responsibly be formulated from either polar view about the nature and properties of language. . . either idolizing language (logocentrism) or repudiating it as useful means to understanding (nihilism).”Footnote ²³ Therefore, argues Jeffrey, in the realm of human signification Christians ought to inhabit a via media between these extremes; the believer ought to seek the enduring connections of immanence and transcendence, temporality and eternality, by submitting interpretive acts to God. Moreover, Jeffrey notes that this via media is more faithful to the actual work of prominent Jewish and Christian hermeneuts in history, few of whom “would have been content to be described as ‘logocentrist.’”Footnote ²⁴ While these theorists acknowledge the reality of an ultimate Logos, they have also affirmed that human language is unable to contain God's truth in more than a splintered fashion. Jeffrey explains, “In both ancient Jewish and modern Christian poets, what remains at the center is not the word but the person; words are but a means of centering, philology but a love of words transcended by a higher love.”Footnote ²⁵ For these thinkers, words—even in Scripture—function primarily as a means for leading humans into personal relationship with each other and with God's Logos.

B. The Via Media's Practical Implications: Gleanings from Dante Alighieri and Mayra Rivera for Interreligious Learning

Jeffrey notes that Dante Alighieri, one of the Christian writers he upholds as being faithful to the via media wherein one submits interpretative acts to God, “suggests in his discussion of the polysemous language of his Commedia. . . [that] practicality is of the essence in such a theory of poetry.”Footnote ²⁶ This is to say, in the via media, interpretation and speech will lead to a certain kind of behavior, producing Christoform relationship with God and others. The work of William Franke allows us to look more closely at Dante's investigation of this ethical responsibility through his protagonist's adventures in the Divine Comedy. In particular, Franke explores what he entitles “Dante's Hermeneutic Rite of Passage,”Footnote ²⁷ which occurs in Inferno IX while Dante (the protagonist in the poem) is being led through Hell by the poet Virgil.

Franke explains that Canto IX begins with the progress of Dante and Virgil being impeded by “obstacles [that] crop up in their communication with one another, hermeneutic obstacles.”Footnote ²⁸ Dante seems to write with a didactic purpose, for the interpretive problematic extends beyond Dante-protagonist's journey to include the reader of the Inferno. Franke identifies the import of this inclusion in what he calls “the poem's most imperious hermeneutic injunction,”Footnote ²⁹ which is addressed to the reader at the beginning of the canto: “O you who have sound intellects,” says Dante, “Look at the doctrine which hides itself/ Beneath the veil of the strange verses” (Inferno IX. 61–63).Footnote ³⁰ Franke notes that this directive in the text interrupts the dramatic build-up of the narrative, effectively drawing the reader away from the literal action of the story and into the posture of one peering through the dense surface of a poem, into its depths of potential meaning.Footnote ³¹ Thus, the reader may understand one of the didactic purposes of Dante's work in Inferno IX as urging us to read carefully, remembering to seek out the wisdom that potentially “hides itself beneath the veil of strange verses.”Footnote ³²

Franke also notes that this imperative given to the reader is coupled with one immediately previous in the poem, which Virgil gives to Dante: “Turn yourself around and cover your eyes;/ for if the Gorgon should appear and you see it,/ never more would you return above” (Inferno IX. 55–60).Footnote ³³ Franke comments upon the significance of the pairing of these verses with the directive given to the reader, explaining that the same dangers face both Dante-protagonist and the reader: Dante will literally be petrified if he gazes directly at the Gorgon rather than “turning away and suffering various sorts of mediation figuring the detour of interpretive procedures.”Footnote ³⁴ In the same manner, if the reader were to choose the direct gaze of literal reading—tempting in its apparent ease—over the complicated maneuverings of interpretive awareness, “the poem would become the tombstone of mere writing as dead-end-in-itself.” There would be “no hermeneutic access to the doctrine beneath the veil of the verses and hence no progress beyond the ‘scritta morta.’”Footnote ³⁵

Offering further insight into the nature of “scritta morta,” Franke cites John Freccero's consideration of the Gorgon's function in the Inferno. Freccero argues that the Gorgon's threat is one that “constitutes for Dante a temptation to return narcissistically and nostalgically to his past,” instead of moving forward through the difficulties of the underworld.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, for Dante to give in to this temptation would leave him no longer capable of progress, for “the love involved would be terminal and idolatrous, refusing to pass beyond into the infinite love of Christian caritas, toward which the trajectory of the Commedia. . . is directed.”Footnote ³⁷ Dante-writer thus suggests that self-indulgence and clinging to the past are interconnected with the love of literalism and are antithetical to the forward-looking posture of caritas, the self-offering love of God in Christ that Christians are called to imitate.

Drawing from Franke's insights, the Christian interested in inhabiting the interpretive via media finds Dante highlighting the practical difficulty of adopting an eschatological epistemology. That epistemology warrants an ongoing movement, ever peering beyond the surface of texts in the forward-looking posture of Christ-like love, oriented beyond the self toward God and neighbor, and beyond previously-discovered truths toward new ones. Such a reading will be challenging because the interpreter must willingly suspend control in order to deal with what is indirect, working to find the meanings that do not present themselves on the literal, surface level. Though difficult, Dante asserts that this movement is necessary for our passage beyond narcissism into love of God and others.

Franke reads Dante's work through a Heideggerian lens akin to Chauvet's, situating it “within a tradition of existential and hermeneutic (and metaphysical!) philosophy that calls to mind the dependence of being on knowing, that is, the interpenetration of the two.”Footnote ³⁸ For Franke, Dante's “apotheosis of interpretation” is closely connected to this Heideggerian framework, particularly in Dante's emphasis on the interpretive process “involv[ing] one's whole way of being,” making interpreting “ontologically consequential.”Footnote ³⁹ Franke explains:

Franke thus helps us see how we might reside in the via media, as does Dante: neither positing in language a logocentric fullness of revelation nor a vacuum of meaning that springs from unavoidable subjectivity in interpretation. Instead, Dante's vision has a trajectory extending beyond human understanding of the linguistic sign into the transformative pursuit of God's way for our seeing. Essentially, this pursuit demands a certain way of life, for the “choice does not lie between sense and nonsense,” as Jeffrey says of Dante's interpretive framework. “Rather, it lies more profoundly between life and death (Deut 30:19), truth and denial of truth (Rom 1:25).”Footnote ⁴¹ In the interpretive posture and process, one has the opportunity to embody the outward, self-transcending Christoform movement of caritas, “the motion of the soul toward enjoyment of God for his own sake and the enjoyment of one's neighbor for the sake of God.”Footnote ⁴² In this fashion, the interpretive act is not deified but rather becomes an avenue for relationship with God and neighbor.

Jeffrey convincingly argues that entering into a caritic relationship with one's neighbor warrants resisting any hermeneutic tendency to situate “transcendence against immanence, [the] eternal against time-locked sense,”Footnote ⁴³ because it does not facilitate spiritually responsible interpretation. In The Touch of Transcendence: A Postcolonial Theology of God,Footnote ⁴⁴ Mayra Rivera identifies one such tendency as tied to dichotomitizing moves undergirding reductive readings of the “other.” Rivera points out that, in long-standing epistemic binaries, certain qualities, things, or persons considered less powerful (for instance: materiality, dependence, Woman, or Nature) have been defined as the negative image of those attributed power (immateriality, independence, Man, God); thus, the former is “confined within fixed boundaries,” as the object of that which is capable of transcendence.Footnote ⁴⁵ For Rivera, we most readily suppress the transcendence of others when we “deny the influences that others have” upon us, refusing “the vulnerability of intimate connections, interdependence, and mutuality.”Footnote ⁴⁶

From the via media perspective, to refuse the “vulnerability of intimate connection” with other human beings (or material reality) is to deny the Christoform movement of caritas. In such a posture, we ought to strive not to situate “others” within fixed boundaries but rather to recognize their status as neighbors: persons with whom we are interconnected and who are capable of mediating the transcendent. This recognition should compel us to read our religious neighbor's sacred works with the conviction that we may truly learn from them, rather than refusing the vulnerability of mutuality by dominating their texts with our exegetical schemas. And, returning to Clooney's insights, such a hermeneutic will surely require from us an intimacy with the text, an imaginative move, wherein readers suspend interpretive frameworks and submit to its “provisional authority”Footnote ⁴⁷ as a medium for interpreting experience.

In the second primary section of this essay I will take up the via media ethical imperative of agenda-emptying love to expound upon Clooney's notion of “reading through” the foreign religious text imaginatively. Chauvet warns that this agenda-emptying posture will be difficult to adopt because it means resisting the intense, idolatrous temptation to fix upon some speculative understanding of how the truth is revealed. Dante further cautions us that our idolatrous tendencies become manifest in the stagnation of literal, finalized, or self-imposed readings, all of which highlight our proclivity to distort some imaginative understanding of the truth as it is revealed. With Dante's warning in mind, I endeavor to consider how one might read through the foreign religious text with imaginative surrender that is truly loving; that is, I will argue, with surrender that does not fail to honor the self-other distinction.

A. Resources for Adverbial Interreligious Reading in Alan Jacobs's Hermeneutics of Love

In A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love, Jacobs establishes how one might interpret fictional works in a manner that demonstrates caritas, framing his discussion with the Christian tradition's “greatest commandment,” issued by Christ in Matt 22:37–39: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all of your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’. . . And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (NRSV). Thematizing a hermeneutic of caritas, Jacobs asserts that loving persons should attend not only to persons but also to texts as neighbors, arguing that “the hermeneutics of love requires that books and authors, however alien to the beliefs and practices of Christian life, be understood and treated as neighbors.”Footnote ⁵⁸

For this task, Jacobs suggests that the movement of charitable interpretation ought to be that of a Christ-like kenosis, a claim he bases on Paul's urging in Phil 2:5–7: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be exploited, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (NRSV). In this way Jacobs argues that Christ shows us how to approach not only “others” but also alien texts as neighbors: with loving kenosis, relinquishing privilege in order to serve. Jacobs is careful to point out that this kenotic activity ought not amount to a desire to annihilate the self, for in becoming man, Christ did not eliminate his identity as divine. Rather, Christ renounced the rights of equality with God, shedding the ostensible prerogatives of lordship in order to take on the form of a servant. Jacobs draws a connection between this kind of self-emptying and Mikhail Bakhtin's “I-for-myself”/“I-for-another” ethical and aesthetic standard, which Bakhtin works out in Toward a Philosophy of the Act.

Jacob's use of Bahktin on this point bears close examination. The prominence of the mysterious power of self-sacrifice in the Christian economy of salvation has led to various theological construals of Christ's self-sacrificing movement, or kenosis, as a tendency toward a state hardly distinguishable from self-annihilation. Such doctrines have been rightly identified as dangerous misreadings used as weapons of domination, bolstering the oppression of groups like women, children, slaves, disenfranchised workers, and non-Christian peoples urged to imitate Christ in self-emptying submission to the colonizing master. Jacobs joins this school of ethical critique, only pointing to a different type of danger that might accompany an understanding of Christ's kenosis as a tendency toward self-annihilation, the imitation of which could lead to hermeneutic distortion in imaginative reading. I will extend his insights to include a distinct account of the alternative, which might be called a “generous kenosis of self-offering.” I believe that this type of self-giving should be understood as a crucial desideratum for Christians interested in inhabiting the via media—in this instance, for taking up comparative theological readership in loving surrender.

B. Mikhail Bakhtin's “I-for-myself”/“I-for-another” Ethic of Interpretation in Comparative Theological Readership

Jacobs believes that Bakhtin's framework serves as an apt means for imagining kenotic self-sacrifice without irresponsibly equating it with self-annihilation. When Bakhtin “refers to ‘I-for-myself,’” Jacobs explains, “he does not mean ‘living for oneself’ but rather ‘living from within oneself.’”Footnote ⁵⁹ In this schema, living for oneself means “selfishness, egotism; it involves treating others as objects and oneself as the only subject.”Footnote ⁶⁰ As Rivera points out, such a perspective fixes the other in rigid boundaries, taking no interest in the neighbor's transcendent potential but rather is content to deny the vulnerability of mutuality. Jacobs also speaks to more subtle dangers of mutuality, endemic in the reader misunderstanding an “I-for-another” principle in a tendency toward self-annihilation. Drawing upon Jacob's insights, one can see how imaginative readership demonstrates the impossibility of actual self-annihilation when interpreting, for one always reads from a perspective shaped by distinct experience and a particular understanding of reality. The assumption of self-annihilation in interpretation will, instead, very likely lead to one finding the self too much in the other. Jacob's reading of Vladimir Nabakov's novel Pale Fire shows how this might occur.

Jacobs describes how Nabakov's protagonist, Kinbote, finds similarities between himself and a poem and so becomes convinced that the poem is written about him. Jacobs explains that Kinbote thus unwittingly seeks mastery over the text by superimposing himself onto it, “absorb[ing] it into his own being.”Footnote ⁶¹ For Rivera, this consuming of the text is a trait of what Catherine Keller calls “the separative self,” wherein the subject (here, Kinbote) controverts his dependence on the object (the poem) “only by subduing and possessing the Other” so as to feel “truly in possession of [him]self.”Footnote ⁶² As a result of his superimposition, Kinbote dominates the poem and wipes out the encounter with the text on its own terms, thus eliminating any genuine communication between himself and the text.

On the other hand, the “I-for-myself”/“I-for-another” standard constitutes “authentic living,” the “answerable act” wherein one fully recognizes one's individuality as well as others’ while affirming mutuality and interconnection; this awareness includes acknowledging one's responsibility in the face of the Other and “act[ing] upon it — whether in conversation with a friend or in reading a novel,” Jacobs explains. “Here we see one of the first appearances of that characteristic Bakhtinian notion of an ‘open unity,’ of that which coheres without being fixed, schematized, or finalized.”Footnote ⁶³ Thus, Jacobs warns readers to be humble in interpreting texts, wary of an easy “I-for-another” practice. Such over-ease will lead us to eliminate difference, forcing connection by making the text more accessible to our own interpretive frameworks. Thinking responsibly in terms of “I-for-myself/I-for-another” means striving not to find myself in the other, but rather to appreciate that which makes the Other not me, seeing myself as interrelated to the neighbor in an open unity of conversational answerability.

Of course, this appreciation warrants one cultivating an appropriate sense of one's own self-identity as well. Jacobs finds this action is modeled in Christ's kenosis, which calls for “an ascetic self-discipline that does not eradicate the self but chastens it.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In other words, a Christian should retain his sense of selfFootnote ⁶⁵ in the face of others so as to chasten it, making it more like Christ's, the one who did not even consider equality with God a “thing to be grasped.” Jacobs's explanation aligns with one of the central tenets of comparative reading that Clooney sets forth: to fruitfully engage in comparison does not mean that one must abandon pre-held convictions, but rather, the comparativist should read with confidence “about the possibility of being intelligently faithful to tradition even while seeking fresh understanding outside that tradition.”Footnote ⁶⁶ This conviction is not equivalent to self-annihilation but rather self-chastening: taking the Christoform posture of a servant, we cease to assert preemptive epistemological rights over our religious neighbors and thus should expect to be surprised—and even informed—by the epistemic assertions about transcendent reality that we find in the neighboring text. What will remain consistent is our devotion to God in Christ.

Moreover, in Bakhtin's “I-for-another” terms, we can expect that a self-affirming yet caritic posture will render surprise in the neighboring text productive of imaginative delight in it. This fondness may be understood as that of philia, the love of friendship, which will occur when we grow fond of a particular text in a particular way. Arriving at philia for the text will result from our erotic searching for and appreciation of the beauty and truth we find unique to the text. For example, in his reading of Desika, Clooney finds himself appreciating the loveliness of Desika's work, developing a philia-like love for the “new ideas, images, affective energies, and persons to be encountered and imitated” that he would not have discovered had he not read Desika.Footnote ⁶⁷ Philia for the text will be tied to a healthy proclivity towards surprise, which allows us to receive the text as a gift; it may be spurred by the import of sociality in comparative practice, revealing our desire to become friends with religious neighbors as conversation partners.

If we extend Bakhtin's “open yet ‘constant unit of answerability’” to our neighbors, then “in return we receive from them the gift of their otherness, the ‘outsidesness’ that makes it possible for us to understand and to achieve ‘self-activity,’ ‘answerability,’ the ‘incarnated deed.’”Footnote ⁶⁸ It is vital, then, that we acknowledge the philia aspect of reading alongside that of caritas on the via media. This love, Cooke points out, is not free of eros, but contains “an element [of] genuine affection for another. Such amorous desire flows from perception of the beloved as almost irresistibly attractive and is rooted in human creatureliness and the incompleteness of isolated existing.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Such an intermingling of loves leaves us in a position of surrender before the neighbor; but, this sacrificial posture should be understood as an emptying of interpretive agenda and a grasp for self-security by way of dominance over the other. It is not the self-annihilating emptying of desire, for in the embrace of our creatureliness, it is good that we desire an enhanced connection with the neighbor, honoring the gifts both of us may offer one another in the reciprocal delights of philia.

In summary, loving surrender merits our formulating a generous kenosis of self-offering rather than self-annihilation, which would lead to false readings of the text. Generous kenosis in interpretation will be of utmost importance for an eschatological epistemology of seeking, privileging a way of life motivated by obedience to God's Great Commandment rather than expectation of self-advancement. This renders comparative theological interpretation another practice in deliberate vulnerability, with one's own religious identity important as a medium for kenotic interaction with the neighbor. Employing Bakhtinian “I-for-myself/I-for-another” terms, this vulnerability takes shape when comparative interpreters strive to retain an “open unity” with the religious neighbor in the ongoing conversation characteristic of travelers on the via media.