The great majority of the irreligious are not liberated from religious behavior, from theologies, and mythologies. They sometimes stagger under a whole magico-religious paraphernalia, which, however, has degenerated to the point of caricature and hence is hard to recognize for what it is.

—Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane

I sometimes find myself wondering at which point in the history of modernity secular literature, in particular poetry, became elevated into the realm of sanctity. Nathan A. Scott, Jr., writes (in The Wild Prayer of Longing) that it is the poet—he means Theodore Roethke—who provides a new possibility of “conceiving the world to be a truly sacramental reality.” Heidegger had said the same of Hölderlin: his poetry was “a temple without a shrine” and his mission was “to name the holy.” Speaking of the “transcendent scene” enacted between Cordelia and King Lear in the fourth act of Shakespeare’s play, G. Wilson Knight adds, “From the travail of nature the immortal thing is born; time has given birth to that which is timeless.” We recall Carlyle’s claim that Shakespeare was the priest of “the Universal Church of the Future and of all times.” These are particularly rapturous comments, but more sober critics often say the same kind of thing. James Baird (in Ishmael) tells us that Moby Dick is “the supreme example of the artistic creator engaged in the act of making new symbols to replace the ‘lost’ symbols of Protestant Christianity.”

The watershed is, I suppose, Matthew Arnold’s 1880 essay, “The Study of Poetry.” There poetry is formally invested with religious honors and responsibilities. “The future of poetry,” Arnold declares, “is immense, because in poetry where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay.” The biblical language in the passage is notable. Arnold, a habitual self-quoter, is here repeating something he had written earlier (in an introduction to a popular work titled The Hundred Greatest Men). But Arnold is not the only one who found the sentence worth repeating. It has been echoed by critics again and again over the years and finally enshrined as the epigraph to I. A. Richards’s Science and Poetry (1926), one of the seminal works of the New Criticism. Richards shows little interest in the transcendental as such, but in a world given over to science and positivism, poetry is for him the respository of all those psychological needs and interests which had once been expressed by such terms as soul, spirit, morality, God, and the rest. ‘“Tradition,” he writes, “is weakening.” Poetry is what will “take the place of the old order.” Arnold in “The Study of Poetry” had spoken more explicitly of the new religious task of poetry:

More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.

Lionel Trilling, commenting on these words of Arnold, remarks that “never, perhaps, has such a tremendous burden been placed on secular poetry,” and he goes on to express a number of reservations. But not everyone has been so cautious.

For close on a hundred years, poets, critics, and educators have consciously or unconsciously been purveying this doctrine. It is part of the grand secular religion of the 19th century, of a piece with Gothic railway stations and townhalls with dreaming spires. But while fashions in building have changed, the underlying assumption about the sacred task of poetry has remained. In Structuralist Poetics, an important recent book, Jonathan Culler wistfully remarks that “if we did not revere the literary work quite so much we might enjoy it rather more.” Matthew Arnold had his doubts about Chaucer who, he thought, lacked “high seriousness.” He need not have worried. Through the work of the typologists and the archetypologists, The Canterbury Tales have been duly beatified. “The Miller’s Tale,” hitherto thought of as a brilliant and bawdy fabliau, is now revered as a sacred text containing mysterious intimations of the Trinity, the Christian doctrine of salvation, and other high matters.

Trilling’s question is therefore in place. Can such a tremendous burden be placed on secular poetry? Or is it not apparent that the assumption that the poet is a holy man and the text a sacred text creates expectations of infallibility that a normal poetic text is not meant to sustàin? Milton, I suppose, was the first to apply the Puritan doctrine of election and special calling to the poet (meaning himself) and to claim that, like Isaiah, his lips had been touched by the Seraphim with sacred fire from the altar. But he was near enough to the source to make such claims seem natural. His writings do have a biblical resonance.¹ Blake too is near the source. He tells us in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that he dined and exchanged notes with the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel; and in fact his “Jerusalem” lyric has become a hymn of the Church. But what about Moby Dick, “The Miller’s Tale,” Ulysses, and the novels of Fielding? They may have a touch of “high seriousness” but they have a great deal of low seriousness as well. Can those texts sustain the burden of holiness?

It is not only a matter of vatic poets, but of vatic critics also. In fact the two go together. Some recent criticism of Blake is really a response to his poetry viewed as revelation. It accords to its “apocalyptic humanism” an absoluteness of faith which does not fall far short of Blake’s own. We are invited to view his work as a coherent, saving vision. Similarly, Heidegger’s sense of himself as a critic is not so very different from Hölderlin’s sense of himself as a poet. The inspired interpreter stands on a mountain apart (like Moses receiving the tablets) in profound communication with the poet.

Who then authorizes the vatic critic? Presumably it is something like the work of the “holy spirit” in Protestant theology. The internal evidence of the spirit responds to the spirit speaking to us from the text:

We feel a divine energy living and breathing in it—an energy by which we are drawn and animated to obey it, willingly indeed and knowingly, but more vividly and effectually than could be done by human will and knowledge.

This is John Calvin speaking of the Holy Scriptures. But it is not so very different from Wallace Stevens speaking of the “supreme fictions” whereby the poet creates the world. “Poetry is a revelation in words by means of the words.” Receiving these words in wonder and thankfulness, we are helped to live our lives. This is close to modern critical orthodoxy. It is not the only approach to poetry possible today (there are also those who in reaction to this emphasize the absurdity and meaninglessness of poetic fictions or who invite us to see painting as merely the art of doodling), but it is still one of the most respected approaches. For Harold Bloom, the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth is truly a form of revelation: “Like Abraham, Wordsworth is the patriarch of a Covenant, made in the latter case between phenomenal appearance and the human heart.” The biblical analogy, constant in Bloom’s criticism, is not intended to give an air of authority to the poets he deals with by suggesting that they echo some earlier, more authentic mode of revelation; he suggests, rather, that in Wordsworth or Blake the Hebrew and Christian myths attain for the first time their fullness of expression. The kingdom is here, so to speak, fulfilled. One senses something similar in the work of Northrop Frye. The Anatomy of Criticism is in the tradition of dogmatic theology, except that the field surveyed is now that of “all literature,” sacred and secular alike.

This stance, which is implicit in so much modern criticism, involves two major problems which I believe have not yet found their solution. The first is the problem of the canon. Who determines which texts are sacred? The sacred texts of the Church were given. Calvin did not have to feel around with a Geiger counter to find where the divine energy lived and breathed. It was of the nature of sacred texts to have divine energy in them. It is not the critic who establishes this—he merely releases the significance through interpretations, making manifest what is already known to be there. The new critic of the new secular revelation, on the other hand, does not only have this particular hermeneutic task, he also must through his rhetoric persuade us that the work of Hölderlin, or Wordsworth, or Blake belongs to the canon; there are other critics who will seek to persuade us otherwise.

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But in the absence of any external authority, are we not inevitably forced back upon a purely individual judgment and a purely subjective preference? Arnold addressed himself precisely to this problem. For him, the true critic is the man who, above all, manages to escape the “personal estimate.” He is the canonizer. The critic does not express likes and dislikes: he determines, through his moral authority, what is a “classic” and what is not a “classic.” This is in a sense the primary function of the critic: he decides what is the best that has been thought and said in the world and thereby defines the borders of the new secular scriptures.

It is an audacious claim, and today most of us would smile at it, yet it is amazing how long and how powerfully Arnold’s judgments have acted on the reading public. Arnold decided that Wordsworth was a primary source of divine energy; but his writings were not all sacred, and so Arnold set about to separate the wheat from the chaff. His anthology of Wordsworth’s poetry is still the basic “canonical” text of that poet. Moving with a boldness which has never been surpassed through the whole body of English literature, he decided that Shakespeare and Milton are “poetical classics”; Dryden and Pope are not; Gray is a little bit like the books of Ezra and Nehemiah—“he is the scantiest and frailest of our classics, but he is a classic.” Burns, like Chaucer, just sadly misses inclusion. They must both be relegated to the Apocrypha. We are to read them, of course, but only, so Arnold tells us, to help us admire by contrast the accent of high seriousness in the true classics.

Arnold is somewhat like the rabbis in the Talmud trying to decide whether Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs “render the hands unclean” (a curious regulation intended to protect sacred scrolls from damage). As a matter of fact they were more hesitant about some of their decisions than Arnold was about his. He had an infallible means of testing the authentic classic: his so-called “touchstones,” a dozen or so passages of incontestable excellence drawn from the Greek, Italian, and English poets. Apply these lines to any new text that comes your way—rather in the manner of a tuning-fork—and you will discover “infallibly” (the word is his) whether it belongs to the category of the “truly excellent.” But, alas, Arnold’s touchstones are his own—unmistakably his own—they have that plangent elegiac note that he loved. “Absent thee from felicity awhile,/And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/To tell my story”—this is Shakespeare wonderfully anticipating Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” It is great poetry all right, but each one of us can find his own different touchstone in Hamlet and with the help of it presumably construct his own canon. So where are we?

Though Arnold’s great ambition to define the boundary of the truly excellent may seem to us laughably Victorian, the fact is that it is still with us. It is not so many years since F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition sought to establish the canon of the English novel. He decided that only six novelists really “rendered the hands unclean.” Once we approach literature with the devoutness of Leavis, to whom criticism is a strenuous scholastic exercise, the question of the canon arises inevitably. The volumes of Scrutiny from 1932-53 bear witness to the ongoing and unremitting endeavor to identify the saving word on which it is proper to meditate day and night. Donne and Herbert are in; Shelley is out; Tennyson scarcely exists. Though one may remember that Dr. Johnson, too, made categorical judgments, he never pretended that they were more than the preferences of a man of good sense, writing at a certain moment in cultural history and subject to certain confessed prejudices. The implicit claims of Arnold, Leavis, and Harold Bloom are different.

The second problem is bound up with the first. It is the problem of the determination of meaning. The Church not only established a canon of sacred texts, it also established a chain of authorized interpreters. For implicit in the notion of a sacred text is the conviction that it has an ongoing meaning for our lives. In fact its meaning is inexhaustible. The sacred text is one which is fluid with possibility, ever capable of being given new life and significance, by means of interpretation. The test of the new meanings is their felt relevance to the new situation. The ancient rabbis expressed this by saying that every new interpretation still to be discovered by devout scholars in times to come was literally given as part of the original revelation at Sinai. Guaranteeing this ongoing revelation in Judaism is the doctrine of an Oral Law vested in the rabbis which provides the context within which the primary, written revelation may operate. Without it, all we have is literary archeology, a text frozen in the past.

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Now, modern hermeneutics takes a similar stand with regard to poetry. The theoretician Hans Georg Gadamer, for example, argues that “the winning of the true sense contained in a text or artistic work never comes to an end. It is an infinite process.” The function of the interpreter is to complete the hermeneutic circle; without him there is no definable sacred core of meaning residing “objectively” within the text.² Harold Bloom makes even more radical claims for the reader. There are, it would seem, no meanings as such within the text. The meaning is a function of antithetical relations among texts and between texts and readers. The reader, or the new poet reading the old poem, is thus the crucial determinant of meaning. The original poet himself has no role. This is oddly like the notion of an Oral Law mysteriously preserving and indeed establishing meaning from age to age. We do not go to Moses to tell us what he meant in the Torah; even if he were to get through to us from the other world we would ignore him; we go to Akiba, or whoever happens at any particular moment of history to be sitting in Akiba’s seat.

But is such an expanding or dynamic process, whereby new “strong readings” (as Bloom calls them) take the place of weak or superseded meanings, conceivable when there is no felt authority behind the new reading other than the intensity of conviction of a self-appointed judge and reader? As E.D. Hirsch has pointed out in relation to Gadamer’s thesis, the concept of an ongoing tradition which determines meaning is untenable in a world of literary criticism which knows no “hierarchy of judges” and no “papal-like authority.” In these circumstances, a fluid and progressive revelation of meaning means no meaning at all.

The most impressive attempt to resolve this particular difficulty is, I think, still that of T. S. Eliot in his essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920). It is impressive for the same reason that it is, for most of us, unacceptable. “No poet, no artist of any art,” he says, “has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” The past modifies the present, and the present modifies the past. As each new work comes on the scene, “the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered.” Meaning is therefore never finalized. Older passages are continually changing as we bring them into vital relation to ourselves—which is exactly what happens to the passages from earlier poets embedded in Eliot’s own work; it is an exercise in ongoing reinterpretation.

We may think that this is something like the hermeneutic doctrine of Gadamer or Bloom or like the total freedom of interpretation which Jan Kott gives to the producer of a Shakespeare play—he is invited to treat the text merely as a peg on which his own new play is to hang. This, however, is not quite the case. The key words for Eliot are “order” and “tradition.” He himself is an authorized reader and judge not just because he feels himself to be so, or because he has been appointed professor in some school of literature, but because he is part of what he conceives to be the “tradition.” He invokes a pseudo-catholic notion of a church of readers and poets—an elite, existing beyond time and possessing, like the Church, a mystic and transcendent authority. “The literature of a country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” Every reader of Eliot knows what are the constituents of that order. It is High Church, Tory, with a spicing of Dante and the classics—in fact, in spite of his disavowals, it is a very personal, indeed idiosyncratic, selection. There are no Romantics, no Milton, and few modern novelists except Fitzgerald. But for Eliot the “tradition” has a firm, objective status: it exists as surely as the Church exists. Eliot, we may say, is a “Catholic”; Gadamer and Heidegger are “Protestants”—all that they have to rely on is the internal evidence of the holy spirit. But they are at one in seeking to relate existentially to a text which is assumed to be sacred and therefore eternally significant and adaptable to changing circumstances.

What has happened is that the notion of sacrality has been absurdly misapplied to the field of secular writing. As a result, to use the words of Mircea Eliade printed at the beginning of this article, it has “degenerated to the point of caricature.” Jan Kott seems to have no respect for the original text of Shakespeare. He treats it merely as a “scenario”—a focus for the exercise of the producer’s art. And yet, paradoxically, his approach too is the result of regarding Shakespeare as sacred writ; it is just that the Oral Law has totally displaced the Written Law. Such shadowy power is given to the original “revelation” that it becomes in effect the father of an infinite multitude of new revelations. The same assumption can give rise to W. K. Wimsatt’s very different position in The Verbal Icon (1954). The focus of devotion there is the poem, the whole poem, and nothing but the poem. Such insistence on the autonomy of the poem, and such faithfulness to the received text as the repository of all significance is, we may say, an example of the Written Law superseding and displacing the Oral Law. Wimsatt is a kind of Sadducee, but like Kott he grounds his doctrine in the special absoluteness of the world of art. We take our shoes from off our feet, for we stand on holy ground.

The French Symbolists are probably the most extreme examples of this attitude. In Rimbaud and Mallarmé we encounter the actual worship of the book. “Typography,” we are told in one introduction to Mallarmé, “becomes a rite.” Nothing of the mechanics of the page can be left to chance, since the “Book” is a “spiritual instrument.” No jot or tittle indeed shall pass away from the text of the poet till all be fulfilled. This is the “magico-religious paraphernalia” of which Eliade speaks, and it still weighs down on the priests of the new secular religion of art when they believe they have emancipated themselves from the benighted world of medieval piety. The modern literary scene abounds in numerologists, hunters after notarikons and gematrias, who occupy themselves in the counting of words and lines, multiplying and dividing them in the attempt to arrive at the hidden significance of the letter. They are kabbalists of the new secular dispensation, and the esteem in which they are held in academic circles is a further sign of how much modern man still evidently requires the mystery of a sacred text. And if he can no longer find his gratification in the sacred texts of the Church or Synagogue, he will bow down elsewhere and give sacred honors to the phantoms of his own invention.

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There is an interesting aspect of this development which has gone largely unnoticed. Ironically, at the same time as the hierophantic assumptions were gaining ground in the criticism of poetry in the 19th century, the opposite process was taking place in Bible criticism. Earlier on, as Elinor S. Shaffer has recently noted, there was a certain symbiosis of the two—“an intricate relationship between critica sacra and critica profana” in Schelling, Herder, Coleridge, and others. Their aim was to find and cultivate the common ground between poetry and the Bible, in particular a single and unifying myth of history. But as the century proceeded, we witness, if I am not mistaken, a kind of changing of the guard, a reciprocal transvaluation of values. The Tübingen school of Bible critics did not respond to the imaginative glow of the text, but sought to reduce it, to view it in its human, contingent character. Matthew Arnold complained of this. The basis of the Wellhausen school (still critical orthodoxy to this day) was “scientific” and historical after the manner of the German philologist Humboldt. The text for the purposes of such critics was anything but sacred.

What interests me at this moment is not the results gained by this method but rather the existential posture of the critics concerned, their situation vis-à-vis the text. They are above all at pains to distance themselves from it; their posture is reductive. Their object is to see the Word shorn of its aura of sanctity, to locate it in a human, historical context where it is subject to all manner of error, inaccuracy, and inconsistency. Criticism is a light which shows up whatever is human, archaic, and faulty in the mechanism of the text. Thus, Klaus Koch, in The Growth of the Bible, defines biblical “literary criticism” as

the analysis of the biblical books from the standpoint of lack of continuity, duplications, inconsistencies, and different linguistic usage, with the object of discovering what the individual writers and redactors contributed to a text and also its time and place of origin.

The angle of scrutiny is historical; there is no question here of seeing the books of the Bible as “having a simultaneous existence and composing a simultaneous order”—as Eliot said of English poetry. Form-criticism, as practiced by Herman Gunkel and Sigmund Mowinckel, is informed with a keener aesthetic awareness, but here again its object is to break down the text into literary units so as to examine the particular historical setting, the so-called Sitz im Leben of this or that fragment of the biblical text. The ultimate aim is the reconstruction of an ancient scene—the exact opposite, we may add, of what Jan Kott seeks to do with Shakespeare.

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Let me try to illustrate the different postures of the biblical critic and the literary critic in the secular field today, by focusing for a moment on two well-known passages, the ending of King Lear and the ending of Job.

For many generations, when the Shakespearean canon was not regarded as sacred writ, Nahum Tate’s version of King Lear was preferred to Shakespeare’s. There Cordelia does not die; she is married off to Edgar and Lear himself survives. This version held the stage from 1681 to 1823. During that period the play invariably had a happy ending. Since then the true text has been restored but it has become a less popular play on the stage. Dr. Johnson defended the Tate version. We may also note that Shakespeare’s source, The True Chronicle History of King Leir, has a happy ending and that Tolstoy preferred it to Shakespeare. He found Cordelia’s murder atrocious and unnecessary.

Now I am not trying to argue that King Lear ought to have a happy ending; I am trying to point out the absolute and transcendent value which critics place on the ending’ as it is. Critical argument is totally committed to it. How perfect, how inevitable, how necessary it is. How unthinkable any other ending would be. The shocking death of Cordelia is viewed as a Platonic idea—it is laid up in heaven. It is not merely a human construction that Shakespeare tried out, but it is a final truth. If tomorrow someone working in the public-record office in London should come up with the true and original ending of King Lear bearing Shakespeare’s undoubted autograph and containing a different outcome from the one we have, we should all begin to look rather foolish. (Such things are not inconceivable: Dickens wrote two different and opposite conclusions for Great Expectations.) We have simply left ourselves no line of retreat. The reasons critics have given for justifying the ending are so different as to cancel one another out. One has said that it is a Christian ending; another has said it is a logical outcome of the pagan fatalism of the play; a third has said oracularly that “the persons die into love.” But all concur that the work is absolutely and inevitably right, and they say this because it is a sacred text, canonized in its transcendent nature.

Let us observe by contrast the total absence of commitment to the integrity of the text which characterizes the Bible critics of Job. A majority nowadays regards the happy ending as non-original and non-accurate. Just as Tate thought that Lear ought to have ended like Job, so there are Bible scholars who feel that Job ought to end like Lear, and they are ready with scientific tests (but also with simple prejudgments) to prove that the happy ending and also a great part of the in-between chapters are no part of the original composition. Volz and Bäumgartel hold that only one or two dialogues of Job and his friends and only one monologue belong to the original composition. The speeches of God out of the whirlwind are not original, nor is the narrative frame. This is the reductive method. Otto Eissfeldt, in his Introduction to the Old Testament (1934), is alone in defending almost all the text, including the happy ending, as the work of a single author who synthesized preexisting elements into a whole. But even he does not defend the authenticity of the Elihu speeches.

It would appear, therefore, that while Shakespeare has been elevated to the category of the sacred, the Bible has been reduced to the level of the non-sacred. This, however, is not quite true. Even those who vote against the happy ending of Job have a certain reverence for the received text. Were they not psychologically bound to it they would not be spending their lives scrutinizing it and searching out its inconsistencies. If it is so barbarous, unoriginal, and so full of human error, why is it so important? Even the Protestant reductive scholars of the Bible seem to see it in some obscure fashion as sacred writ. They listen to the weekly reading in the Church with all due reverence. The text may be the work of pious bunglers, the images may be banal (“Edom is my washpot”), but God has chosen it for His own good reasons to bring salvation to mankind. That is the nature of a sacred text.

By contrast, the assumption of sanctity with regard to a work of human imagination is one that leads to impossible contradictions. Here transcendent value, not having a transcendent point of reference on which to establish itself, must be rooted in the critical evaluation process itself. The discovery of the image pattern, of the myth structure, of the verbal nexus, and above all of unity, must confirm and validate the transcendent value of the writing, for there are no other available criteria whereby that value may be confirmed.

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Where then do we go from here? There is evidently no way back to the old, simple distinction between the secular and the sacred. But it might be suggested that at this point the two fields have something to learn—or rather, relearn—from each other. The study of poetry has obviously gained enormously in richness and depth from sacred hermeneutics, in the sense, particularly, of the unity of the work of art. But now the time has come to regain something of the distance, the philological and historical bias, the awareness of the merely human which inform so much modern Bible criticism. This would help to create a saner balance, for instance, in the present study of Blake. Bible criticism, for its part, might relearn something of the more reverent, more integrative attitude to poetic texts which has been cultivated in the modern period by critics of Dante, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth. It would then be in a position to attend more closely to images, to ironic contrasts, echo-structures, and other patterns of analogy in the manner recently counseled by Robert Alter (“A Literary Approach to the Bible,” COMMENTARY, December 1975). Such attention could reveal surprising configurations of meaning in biblical texts which had hitherto been treated as a tangle of different sources and “documents.”

But in the end it is not just a matter of methods and techniques; it is a matter of how we view the status of literature and the status of criticism. Are the novel, the poem, the drama simply human speech like other kinds of human speech, only patterned and intensified for particular situations and purposes? Is the poet a man speaking to men, or is he, as Joyce says in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (a novel which actually dramatizes the transvaluation of sacred symbols into secular norms)—“a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life”? Is the novelist a man with a social role as normal as that of the tax-collector, though more bountiful in supplying us with happiness and self-understanding, or is he that man of mystery and terror of whom Coleridge warns in the closing lines of Kubla. Khan—

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of paradise?

Ultimately, we have to make our choice. There will be practical implications. If the poet is a dervish, art becomes a cult. Anti-Semitic incitement (as in the Oberammergau Passion Play) is privileged because it is art; similarly, nudity on the stage. But if art is a normal function of society, presumably it will be subject (as in Shakespeare’s day) to the same norms that obtain elsewhere. It will enjoy no special immunity.

There will also be no canon. In fact, the whole notion of a canon of literature may prove to be a will-o’-the-wisp, a false notion imported from the realm of the sacral. There are books which please, charm, touch our finer natures. They may work for one group of men and not for others, for one generation but not for the next. There is no magic line that divides them from other books. Who shall say which is the dividing line between journalism and literature? Defoe, expert in both, could not have said—he would probably have been surprised at the question. The structuralists may help redress the balance, for they speak less of the charm and beauty of art and more of the language of signs that is common to all human speech. The grammar of a poem, they say, is not at bottom different from other kinds of grammar. Is then all human speech poetry? Perhaps it is. Perhaps that is the real mystery—man as a maker of signs, an inventor of symbols. The first man seeing the first sunrise and naming it was creating metaphor. Which is a little like what the talmudic rabbis tell us. Psalm 92, they say, was the first poem uttered by the first man on the first morning of his life. The occasion created the poem as much as the words. The test will then be pragmatic. If it lives for us it is a true sign. But occasions change; sunrises, happily, do not. Other signs move out of our lives as the things signified cease to matter to us. They take the poems with them.

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Is there, then, a special status for sacred writ? Is not that, too, simply a language of signs like other human speech? Indeed it is. To speak of the Jewish tradition (which is not entirely irrelevant, since this is where the notion of a sacred text evidently began in the West), the rabbis were emphatic in declaring that “the Torah speaks in the language of men.” This is a more basic and far-reaching notion than is usually thought. Sacredness does not imply a special ontological category of writing; it is not really a literary quality at all. It is more a matter of a contract between the reader and the text. The essential terms of this contract are practical. The text claims for itself a certain historical validity—this, as Erich Auerbach has pointed out, is basic to the biblical mode of narration—while the reader for his part says, in effect, “I will accept and I will obey.”

Historical validity takes us back to a further rabbinic principle, namely that “Scripture never departs from its literal sense.” It remains rooted in the historical circumstances of its composition. From this point of view, Torah (that is, the Hebrew word which comes nearest to the notion of a sacred text) resists complete interiorization. Torah is not, as the more radical followers of Rudolf Bultmann would say, a matter of the Word unfolding within us, of which the text is merely a kind of gloss. On the contrary, the Word validates itself in the historical present as it does in the past. The text remains alive because the kind of history that it celebrates remains with us. Put very simply, biblical poems are aids to memory. “And it shall come to pass, when many evils and troubles have befallen them, that this poem shall testify before them as a witness, for it shall not be forgotten out of the mouths of their seed” (Deuteronomy 31:21). Present occasions are linked with past occasions—this is the true hermeneutic circle of interpretation. The test of the so-called canon is from that point of view essentially pragmatic.

The other side of the contract likewise belongs to the extra-literary dimension. Texts are sacred because they command and because we assent to their commands. This is something which makes Torah both more and less than secular art. The first eighteen chapters of Leviticus are not great art; probably they are not art at all. They would not pass Arnold’s test for inclusion in the classics. But they are, as C.S. Lewis once put it, “remorselessly and continuously sacred.” And that is because they manifestly command. If in discussions of “The Bible as Literature” we tend to hear more about Isaiah than about Leviticus (Arnold prepared a reading text of Isaiah for schools), this is a sign that in the “changing of the guard” that I have described, that secularization of attitudes which belonged originally to the realm of sacred literature, some essential determinant has been lost.

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In fact, biblical hermeneutics was only partially adopted by the secular critics and philosophers of the 19th century from Coleridge onward. They stressed the richness, the unity, the “high seriousness” of their chosen literary texts. Poems and other works of art became “creative,” “revelatory,” eternally “meaningful.” But they did not and could not command.

Torah is ultimately the voice of command. This constitutes its phenomenological uniqueness. Perhaps it was the loss of this dimension in Christianity which opened the way for the confusion between the Bible and secular art. The essential feature of the contract was missing; what was left was the pathos, the sublimity. Milton was “smit with the love of sacred song.” If we are smit with the love of Milton, we are in much the same case as he was, and we may value Paradise Lost accordingly. But Paradise Lost does not command. It remains to that extent a human document, immensely rich and immensely moving, but a human document nevertheless; it makes no absolute claims.

Hamlet too does not command. Shakespeare may point in that direction when he has his hero say:

And thy commandment all alone shall live.
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter.

This is a great and moving sentence, my own “touchstone” from Hamlet. But the point is that the ghost of Hamlet’s father does not command even the most devout Shakespeareans among us. More than that, he does not even command Hamlet himself. He proves to be an ambiguous and misleading ghost, a phantom indeed; and Hamlet ends by seeking out his own wavering and uncertain path to the life of dialogue. He has no external guide. In this sense, the play is not only about a man facing his task; it is about the limitations of secular art itself, about the desires that it awakens in us, but which it is ultimately, of itself, unable to gratify.

¹ I recall as a boy in Sheffield hearing from a local street-car driver—a devout ex-Presbyterian who had passed through Unitarianism to the religion of humanity—that he met regularly with a group of like-minded workingmen on a Sunday morning to read aloud a book or two of Paradise Lost. The great sonorous lines of Milton evidently consoled and sustained them in just the way that Arnold had said. There must be worse ways of spending Sunday morning in a world where the official symbols and texts of the Church no longer hold sway.

² It is generally recognized that these notions originated in Bible studies. See Wallace Martin, “The Hermeneutic Circle and the Art of Interpretation,” Comparative Literature, XXIV, p. 100.