Seeing What is There in Spite of Ourselves

http://jhj.sagepub.comHistorical Jesus

Journal for the Study of the

DOI: 10.1177/1476869006064870 2006; 4; 127 Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus

John C. Poirier Crossan, and Robert Frost on Faces in Deep Wells

Seeing What is There in Spite of Ourselves: George Tyrrell, John Dominic

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SEEING WHAT IS THERE IN SPITE OF OURSELVES:

GEORGE TYRRELL, JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN, AND

ROBERT FROST ON FACES IN DEEP WELLS

John C. Poirier

Franklin, OH, USA

ABSTRACT

John Dominic Crossan recently used Robert Frosts poem For Once, Then, Some-

thing to illustrate (and partially refute) the familiar charge that historical Jesus

scholars have seen a reflection of their own faces looking down into the depths of a

well rather than any sort of purchase on the historical Jesus. In so doing, Crossan

has misunderstood both Frosts poem and the intention behind the original well-

gazer metaphor as coined by George Tyrrell. Although there is little indication that

Crossan has applied his newly honed interactivism at any point in his work, the

problems with the epistemology that he renders are too great to ignore. This article

also notes problems with epistemologies advanced by other historical Jesus

scholars.

Key words: critical realism, John Dominic Crossan, epistemology, Robert Frost,

historical Jesus, interactivism, George Tyrrell

This article is about John Dominic Crossan misreading a Robert Frost poem

through the lens of a George Tyrrell metaphor, but it is also about much more,

of course, and the importance of the issues it raises go beyond what the topic of

reading a modern poem might suggest. Many readers will already have guessed

that the historical Jesus lies at the center of this imagined three-way conversa-

tion, as the metaphor in question is that of gazing into a well, with Tyrrells use

of that metaphor being one of the most celebrated lines in historical Jesus

studies: The Christ that [Adolf] Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen

centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reection of a liberal Protestant face,

seen at the bottom of a deep well.1 As I hope to show, the way scholars press

1. George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Crossroads (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1909), p. 49. (In popular accounts, this metaphor is sometimes wrongly attributed to the better

known Albert Schweitzer. E.g., see William E. Phipps, Was Jesus Married? The Distortion of Sexuality in the Christian Tradition [New York: Harper & Row, 1970], p. 4.) Tyrrells slight is in some way a general apologetic for Catholic theology. As John Ratt writes (with reference to

Alfred Loisys context), to the contemporary Catholic public, which knew little of the Lutheran

orthodoxy of Berlin that Harnack had challenged, and even less about consistent eschatology,

Journal for the Study of the

Historical Jesus

Vol. 4.2 pp. 127-138

DOI: 10.1177/1476869006064870

2006 SAGE Publications

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128 Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus

this metaphor more often than not reects their own epistemologies, even when

they borrow that metaphor in the name of someone else. This is especially notice-

able in Crossans application of that metaphor, which uses a Frost poem for its

form, Tyrrells judgment for its undertext, but Crossans own non-Frostian and

non-Tyrrellian epistemology for its context and meaning.

Tyrrell, Crossan and Frost all apply the image of gazing into a well to basic

epistemological issues, but that is where the similarity ends. Tyrrell and Frost dif-

fer in the success they attribute to the act of peering beyond the surface of the

water. Tyrrells well gazer, as a gure for Harnack and company, sees nothing

beyond the reection of his own face. (That is, he sees nothing of the true his-

torical Jesus but rather renders Jesus in his own image.) Frosts well gazer, on

the other hand, is more cautious in his claim but successful (albeit marginally)

in his attempt to see something more of the depths. Yet Tyrrell and Frost share

an important element that sets them apart from Crossan: they intend to limit the

analogue to their well gazer to a particular person or group, while Crossan uses

the well gazer to describe what he considers a universal condition.2 Crossan

brings Frost and Tyrrell together in an intriguing way, but he does not recognize

how radically their epistemological stances differ from his own. Failing to grasp

the message of Frosts poem, he misrepresents Frosts well gazer as suffering

the same setback as Tyrrells narcissistic Harnack, and he misrepresents both

Frosts and Tyrrells well gazers as the victims of a universal limitation.3

I turn now to a brief analysis of Crossans discussion.

Harnack was Protestantism (Three Modernists: Alfred Loisy, George Tyrrell, William L. Sullivan [New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967], p. 85).

2. Hal Childs misconstrues Tyrrells words in the same way as Crossan, summarizing

Tyrrells famous slight as a judgment on the problem of subjectivity in general, and claiming

that it is seemingly borrow[ed] from Schweitzers insight. Childs seems to be misled by the

possibility of using the deep well as a gure for a Heideggerian-Jungian view of subjectivity as

a process of mirroring: In [the Heideggerian scheme] we see the structure of deep-subjectivity,

the ontological nature of the reection at the bottom of the well, and source of the multiple

images of Jesus (The Myth of the Historical Jesus and the Evolution of Consciousness[SBLDS, 179; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2000], pp. 15, 148). The well metaphor also appears in

ibid., pp. 221-22.

3. Donald L. Denton notes that Crossans reconstructed Jesus seems rather too relevant

for Crossans theological and social views, and that this has always raised suspicions that in

his portrait of Jesus Crossan is (as Harnack and the nineteenth-century liberals were so accused

by George Tyrell [sic]) actually seeing his own face at the bottom of a deep well (Histori-ography and Hermeneutics in Jesus Studies: An Examination of the Work of John Dominic Crossan and Ben F. Meyer [JSHJSup; JSNTSup, 262; London: T&T Clark, 2004], p. 11). The clearest reason for this judgment is perhaps the frequency with which Crossan breaks his own

methodological strictures in order to arrive at the conclusions he wants. Marius Reiser writes,

In his appendix of sources, all the judgment sayings I have treated are designated as non-

authentic, even though (with the exception of Luke 13.1-5) they are all included within Crossans


Poirier Seeing What Is There in Spite of Ourselves 129

Crossan on Frost and Tyrrell

Crossans The Birth of Christianity is (as he billed it) the logical follow-up to his The Historical Jesus.4 As such, one might have expected a certain amount of backtracking in the former, but the reader may be surprised at just how much the

historical Jesus remains a live topic throughout most of the book. This is partly

because Crossan takes the opportunity to respond to his detractors, and partly

because he tries to organize the transition neatly. This way of doing things pays

dividends, as Crossan shows some of his working assumptions more clearly in

The Birth of Christianity than in his earlier book, particularly with regard to the possibility of studying the historical Jesus. Crossan guides the reader between the extremes of totalizing skepticism and credulity, seeking in this connection a

happy medium, not between the hermeneutics of suspicion and of trust (as in

how one reads primary sources), but between alternative views on how the em-

beddedness of the interpreter within the world encumbers the task of objective

interpretation.

Crossan uses Frost at this point, quoting the rst ten lines from For Once,

Then, Something. The poem opens on a personal history of failed attempts to

see what lies beneath the surface of the water: Always wrong to the light, so

never seeing / Deeper down in the well than where the water / Gives me back in

a shining surface picture / Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike (ll. 2-5).

But suddenly the poem describes a partial success: Once, when trying with chin

against a well-curb, / I discerned / a something white, uncertain, / Some-

thing more of the depthsand then I lost it (ll. 7-10).5 The spur that sets Crossan

rst stratum. One of them, the saying about acknowledging our not acknowledging Jesus (Luke

12.8-9), is supported by four independent witnesses; two other logia have independent

witnesses each. According to his own methodical principle, Crossan can only set aside these

sayings after thorough discussion, but such a discussion appears nowhere in the book (Jesusand Judgment: The Eschatological Proclamation in Its Jewish Context [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977], p. 4). Larry W. Hurtado points out that Crossans 1988 claim that both sapiential and

apocalyptic interpretations of Jesus existed from the beginning (and that it is problematic to

establish one as prior to the other) conicts with his attempt to establish the priority of the

former in The Historical Jesus (A Taxonomy of Recent Historical-Jesus Work, in William E. Arnal and Michel Desjardins [eds.], Whose Historical Jesus? [Studies in Christianity andJudaism, 7; Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997], pp. 272-95, esp. 291 n. 101).

See John Dominic Crossan, Divine Immediacy and Human Immediacy: Towards a New First

Principle in Historical Jesus Research, Semeia 44 (1988), pp. 121-40 (124). 4. James D.G. Dunn appropriately characterizes The Birth of Christianity as supplying,

as it were, the footnotes lacking in [Crossans] Historical Jesus (Jesus Remembered: Christi-anity in the Making [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003], p. 470).

5. For Once, Then, Something was published in Harpers Magazine in July 1920, and was republished in the book New Hampshire (New York: Holt, 1923). Edward J. Ingebretsen



on this parenthesis is the oft-repeated charge that historical Jesus researchers

are simply looking down a deep well and seeing their own reections from

below.6 Crossan counters that this is a rather cheap gibe thrown about without

much self-criticism, that it can be used too conveniently against just about any

reconstruction, and that those who repeat the taunt so readily must never have

looked down a deep well or heeded Emily Dickinsons warning that mystery

pervades a well!7

My difculty with Crossans discussion appears in the synthesizing position

he adopts in place of totalizing the subjective or objective elements of interpre-

tation. He wonders about the something white, uncertain in l. 9 of Frosts

poem: I would ask, Crossan writes, if the poets face is white, how did it see through the picture of itself a something white that was also beyond the

picture? Maybe what it saw was its own face so strangely different that it did not recognize it.8 (In other words, Crossan thinks that what I referred to as a partial success is only a delusion.) Although Crossans analysis of Frosts poem

is problematic, we shall, for the moment, accept it for the sake of getting at his

main point: according to Crossan, the reason for asking how one distinguishes

between the whiteness beyond the picture and the whiteness of the poets own

face is that this suggests a third image not given but provoked by Frosts sec-

ond image. That third image represents a position that Crossan calls inter-

activism:

The past and present must interact with one another, each changing and challenging the

other, and the ideal is an absolutely fair and equal reaction between one another. Back

to the well: you cannot see the surface without simultaneously seeing, disturbing, and

distorting your own face; you cannot see your own face without simultaneously seeing,

disturbing, and distorting the surface. It is the third image begging to be recognized

behind the two overt ones in Frosts poem. What the poet saw was his own face so

strangely different that he did not recognize it as such. It was, indeed, something

white and something more of the depths. But it was not beyond the picture or

even through the picture. It was the picture itself changed utterly. That is the

dialectic of interactivism and, as distinct from either narcissism or positivism, it is

both possible and necessary.9

argues that water was a site of revelation in Frosts poetry [I]ts presence in Going for

Water, Directive, even Kitty Hawk, signals some sort of limited epiphanic moment

(Robert Frosts Star in a Stone Boat: A Grammar of Belief [San Francisco: Catholic Scholars Press, 1994], p. 203 n. 25).

6. John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 41.

7. Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, p. 41 (quoting Emily Dickinson, Poems: Including Variant Readings Critically Compared with All Known Manuscripts [ed. Thomas Herbert Johnson; 3 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955], III, p. 970 [no. 1400]).

8. Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, p. 42, original italics. 9. Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, p. 42. On Crossans interactivism, see Denton,

Historiography and Hermeneutics in Jesus Studies, pp. 74-78.



Crossan is here twisting Frost for the sake of his own argument: his omission

of the last ve lines in the poem hides the fact that it ends with its own wonder-

ing about that something white: What was that whiteness? / Truth? A pebble

of quartz? For once, then, something (ll. 14b-15).10 If the poets face were a

possible source of the whiteness, one doubts that the thought of something as

punctiliar as a quartz pebble would have oated through his mind. And does not

the reference to trying with chin against a well-curb in l. 7 suggest that the

poet has purposely removed as much of his face from the frame of view as

possible, and that that very maneuver is what allowed him this privileged view beyond the surface picture? This would suggest that the poet caught his

glimpse of truth in that part of the view not shielded by his own darkling sil-

houette. (Frosts poem seems to be based on a real experience, and in a real

experience of looking down a well on a sunny day, ones face is typically swal-

lowed up by a shadow: whatever its color, it does not look white. This is espe-

cially true of the kneeling position that Frosts well gazer adopts, in which little

sunlight reaches ones own face.) There is neither warrant nor provision for

asserting that What the poet saw was his own face so strangely different that he

did not recognize it as such.11

Wrongly supposing that the poets vision was obscured by his own reec-

tion, Crossan infers an epistemological lesson in line with the interactivism that

he outlines: you cannot see the surface without simultaneously seeing, disturbing,

and distorting your own face; you cannot see your own face without simultane-

ously seeing, disturbing, and distorting the surface. (One might say that Crossan

does illustrate a certain kind of interactivism, but that he does so by working its distorting effect on Frost rather than by showing Frosts agreement with it.) Even

if the poets face had been the source of the whiteness (as it was not), ll. 11-14

(not given by Crossan) could have alerted us to the mistake of making the act of

10. Although the last ve lines of the poem tell against Crossans interpretation, I take his

omission of those lines to be innocent.

11. John Talbot, calling attention to the fact that For Once, Then, Something was the

only poem Frost wrote in a classical meter, ties its use of phalaecean hendecasyllabics to the

work of Catullus and Tennyson, both of whom used this meter for ripostes to critics. Talbot sug-

gests that Frost did the same, and that Others taunt me is a reference to his critics (Robert

Frosts Hendecasyllabics and Roman Rebuttals, International Journal of the Classical Tradi-tion 10.1 [Summer 2003], pp. 73-84). As Talbot writes, The association of Catullus with hen-decasyllabics would mean little if Frost did not know Catullus; but the New Englanders deep

affection for the Roman poet is one of the best-established facts of his life (ibid., p. 77). Some

recent critics think that Frost relates a bleaker epistemology than either Talbot or I nd in this

poeme.g., Ingebretsen cites this poem as an example of Frosts best epistemological poetry

(Robert Frosts Star in a Stone Boat, p. 56), but he reads it differently: Frost profoundly distrusted the human [ability] to see beyond the surface of things into Something more of the

depths (Robert Frosts Hendecasyllabics and Roman Rebuttals, p. 6). I cannot agree with

Ingebretsens interpretation, which seems too much inuenced by recent epistemological trends.



gazing itself the source of disturbing and distorting: Frost writes of a drop of

water that ripples the water and erases the whiteness, that [b]lurred it, blotted it

out (l. 14a). In other words, Frosts poem is a poor example for the epistemol-

ogy that Crossan wants to promote.

Subject and Object in Interpretation

Crossan uses narcissism and positivism for the positions that I have referred

to as totalizing skepticism and credulity. The former (conveyed in ll. 3b-6 of

Frosts poem) is a possible delusion while the latter (conveyed in ll. 8-10) is an

impossible illusion.12 Crossans interactivism is a postmodernist strategy. (He

cheerfully wears the label: interactivism is the way he understand[s] postmod-

ernism.) According to its terms, past and present must interact with one another, each changing and challenging the other, and the ideal is an absolutely fair and equal reaction between one another.13 The careful reader might wonder whether the italicized words represent the only available conceptual scheme

wise to the problems of totalizing the subjective or the objective poles of the

reading process. To say that the present can change the past is to suggest that the past per se is not static, waiting only to be deciphered by a perfectly unstony heart. The suggestion is that the past is like modeling clay. A more rigorist,

traditional approach would have set past in quotation marks, to signify ones

understanding of the past rather than the past itself. But we live in a day of post-modernist expectations, and it is not uncommon for sentiments like those of

Crossan to be taken literallythat the past really can change, so that the truth of a matter is really (ontologically) unsettled.14 It must be said that Crossan pro-

vides no example (other than in his misreading of Frost) of how to apply this

interactivism. As Donald L. Denton observes, Crossan is short on drawing speci-

c consequences of his interactivism for his own historical work.15

It seems that the most practical result of this interactivism, for Crossan, is a certain

inevitable plurality in understandings of the historical Jesus. But the extent of this

plurality is not clear. At times Crossan seems to express it as a general plurality that

relativizes all historical results, along with all understandings of the historical Jesus and

of the Christ of faith that are built upon those understandings. But in other contexts

12. Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, p. 41. 13. Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, p. 42, emphasis added. 14. Miroslav Volf notes that some are not eager to embrace a distinction between what

is true and what is made to function as true (Theology, Meaning and Power: A Conversa-

tion with George Lindbeck on Theology and the Nature of Christian Difference, in Timothy R.

Phillips and Dennis L. Okholm [eds.], The Nature of Confession: Evangelicals and Postliberals in Conversation [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996], pp. 45-66 [60]).

15. Denton, Historiography and Hermeneutics in Jesus Studies, pp. 75-76.



Crossan seems to be referring simply to the fact that history can never be done once

and for all. Each new generation must do history anew, because each generation will

be interacting with the historical object from a new historical location.16

The language of Crossans paragraph, and his appeal to postmodernism,

suggest that he intends just such a dynamic, even if the bulk of his historical

research presupposes a more traditional understanding of subjectobject relations.

Crossan has clearly misread Frost, but the suggestion that interactivism

represents a sort of inevitable medium between the totalizing of the subjective

and that of the objective is a more serious problem. Is there not a totally differ-

ent way of mediating between these positions than the solution Crossan gives?

The language of changing and challenging the past is certainly problematic, the

more so when it is offered, without any real argument, as the only responsible way to approach the past. Its appearance in a work dedicated to reconstructing

the historical Jesus might also seem a bit surprising: in light of Crossans insis-

tence that the historical Jesus can be reconstructed to a worthwhile degree, one

wonders why he uses this language at all. (With this criticism I am touching on

a duplicity that mars virtually all of Crossans writings, a duplicity noted by

many of his detractors but one that he himself seems unable to recognize.17 Hal

Childs notes that all of Crossans methodological musings are plagued by a

split ontology.18) My guess is that he wants to be postmodern yet work as a

traditional historian, and that the attempt to combine the two creates a tension in

16. Denton, Historiography and Hermeneutics in Jesus Studies, p. 75. 17. The Birth of Christianity is not the rst book in which Crossan promoted conicting

conceptual schemes. He has sought to combine a linguistical ontology with traditional historical

method throughout his many contributions to historical Jesus studies. Childs has rightly taken

Crossan to task for this inconsistency: [E]ven though [Crossans] early work emphasized liter-

ary and structuralist interpretation, seemingly against traditional historical criticism, his own

interpretations were always dependent upon a condence in the secure results of a historical

critical analysis of the Jesus tradition They are mutually exclusive because they each take

incompatible views of the ontological nature of the subject-object relationship (Childs, TheMyth of the Historical Jesus and the Evolution of Consciousness, p. 39). Although Childss book appeared in 2000, it unfortunately does not refer to The Birth of Christianity. Denton dis-cusses this problem as it appears in one of Crossans early works: [T]he hermeneutic involved

in the interpretation seems to have little if any bearing on the formulation of the presumed

historiography. Crossan formulates a structuralist hermeneutic, which as we have seen usually

brackets the question of history in relation to the interpretation of the text, because language is

seen as a closed, self-referential system. Any reference to historical persons or events is impos-

ing an illegitimate extra-linguistic referent onto language. Crossan even goes beyond typical

structuralist claims in adopting an ontology that connes reality to language, a move usually

characteristic of some post-structuralists But Crossans historiography seems impervious to

these hermeneutical and ontological moves, and continues to operate on the assumption that

what is sought is a real historical, extra-linguistic referent, the authentic words of the real his-

torical Jesus of Nazareth (Denton, Historiography and Hermeneutics in Jesus Studies, p. 40). 18. Childs, The Myth of the Historical Jesus and the Evolution of Consciousness, p. 40.



his methodological rhetoric.19 Still, one wonders how Crossan can so easily pass

over the conceit of methodologically minimizing or circumscribing the subjective in an effort to nd the objective truth of a given matter. While the committed

narcissist will dismiss every attempt at objectivity as being ultimately unnali-

zable (as if that makes a difference),20 the traditional historian will simply

confess the tentative and probabilistic nature of any account he or she can give,

and go on from there. We should also question whether any proposed dissolu-

tion of the subjectobject dynamic should be conceded on the grounds of the

rather empty anti-Cartesian rhetoric that characterizes many recent accounts of

interpretation.21 The history of human self-awareness does not suggest that we should buy into the tired claim that Descartes invented the subjectobject dichotomy, or that such a dichotomy did not characterize pre-Enlightenment

rationality. Those who would dissolve this dichotomy must rst explain why we

should regard it as neither grammatically nor conceptually necessary.22

19. The logical merits of this so-called interactivism must be judged separately from

Crossans application of that theory, since he really does not apply it. As Denton writes,

Crossans more recent historiography seems unaffected by the stated hermeneutic (Histori-ography and Hermeneutics in Jesus Studies, p. 76). If following Crossan implies applying the interactivist methodology he outlines, therefore, it can only be on the basis of Do as I say, and

not as I do.

20. On the ill-advised argument from non-nal objectivity, see John C. Poirier, Some

Detracting Considerations for Reader-Response Theory, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 62 (2000), pp. 250-63.

21. One of Childss most constant refrains is that the dichotomizing of the object and

subject that has been so ready-to-hand in modern conceptualizations of knowledge is a product

of our Cartesian heritage, as if a subject/object dualism did not characterize pre-Cartesian

thinking. According to Childs, [t]he myth of objectivity has its roots in Cartesian meta-

physics and the legacy of historical positivism (The Myth of the Historical Jesus and the Evolu-tion of Consciousness, p. 59). Childs never considers that a dichotomizing of subject and object might always have been natural and obvious instead of just a way of categorizing reality

during the three hundred years since Descartes (ibid., p. 105). As Arthur O. Lovejoy noted

long ago: [E]pistemological dualismis no accidental or articial product of seventeenth-

century metaphysics, no sophistication of speculative minds; it is simply the account which

man, grown capable of holding a number of facts together in a single view and drawing what

seem plain inferences from them, will normally give of the situation in which he nds himself

when he is engaged in what he calls knowing. From these roots the same conclusions would,

in all probability, perennially grow again, though Descartes were not only dethroned but

forgotten, and his works and those of all his contemporaries and successors up to the present,

were destroyedunless the philosophers of our own or some subsequent day are really able to

provide an alternative interpretation of the same facts of experiencenot merely of some, but

of all of themso clear and cogent that all men of intelligence shall see that it supersedes and

abrogates this natural dualism (The Revolt Against Dualism: An Inquiry Concerning the Exis-tence of Ideas [La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1930], p. 24).

22. E.g., one might ask how Descartess dichotomizing of subject and object differs from



It is interesting that Crossan should see a correlation between his interactiv-

ism and the approach that N.T. Wright calls critical realism.23 It should be

noted that this correlation holds only at a very general level, as interactivism (as

spelled out by Crossan) really has more points of contact with other forms of

critical realism than it does with Wrights form. Many undoubtedly think rst of

Ben Meyer when they read the words critical realism, so it is worth noting the

sizeable difference between what Wright calls critical realism and what Meyer

meant by that term. Whereas Wrights critical realism amounts to little more

than a general order to steer clear of naive realism and idealism, Meyer (follow-

ing Bernard Lonergan) had outlined an epistemology in which subjectivity itself

provides an authentic purchase on objective reality.24 Thus, while Crossan

approves of the basic goal of Wrights version of critical realism, his own

method (in its stated form) lines up more specically with what Meyers version

of critical realism tries to do with objectivity and subjectivity. But there is also a

big difference between Crossans and Meyers methods.

The general principle behind Crossans interactivism was elucidated long

ago by Karl Heussi, who regarded the past as something shaped by the historian

that of Origen in the third century. See Henri Crouzel, Origen: The Life and Thought of the First Great Theologian (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), p. 117.

23. Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, p. 42. 24. According to Meyer, Objectivity is not a matter of keeping subjectivity from inter-

ference with seeing what is there and not seeing what is not. It is a matter, rather, of bringing

subjectivity to full ower, i.e., to the point of cognitional self-transcendence (Objectivity and

Subjectivity in Historical Criticism of the Gospels, in David L. Dungan [ed.], The Interrela-tions of the Gospels: A Symposium led by M. . Boismard, W. R. Farmer, F. Neirynck, Jeru-salem 1984 [BETL, 95; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990], pp. 546-60, esp. 559)at the heart of critical realism is the theorem that the way to objectivity is through the subject, operating well (idem, Reality and Illusion in New Testament Scholarship: A Primer in Critical Realist Hermeneutics [Collegeville, MN: Michael Glazier, 1994], p. 3, original italics). See N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), pp. 31-46. Wright writes that the only access we have toreality lies along the spiralling path of appropri-ate dialogue or conversation between the knower and the thing known (ibid., p. 35 [emphasisoriginal]). See also Dunn, Jesus Remembered, pp. 110-11. On the various forms of Critical Realism, see Denton, Historiography and Hermeneutics in Jesus Studies, pp. 210-25. Denton writes, Lonergans [critical realism] is not in any sense a via media between extremes, but is rather off the axis, as it were, upon which naive realism and idealism are the poles, the axis

of picture thinking (ibid., p. 222). As Denton explains, the change from Meyer to Wright is

much more than a watering down: [Wrights] epistemological extremes are presented as

strawpersons, and [his version of critical realism] is offered in such a way that almost anyone

who utilizes historical method in New Testament studies would claim to be a critical realist.

Few in todays epistemological climate would deny that knowledge is ultimately fallible and

provisional, or that there is a certain reciprocity between the knower and the known object

What began with Lonergan as a deliberate and specic cognitional theory has become in Wright

an epistemological posture that is somewhat diffuse and diluted (ibid., pp. 219-20).



rather than as something staticand by this he apparently refers to the onto-

logical rather than the merely historiographic past.25 The similarity to Crossans

language of changing and challenging the past is clear. Lonergan and Meyer

appreciate Heussis attempt to offer an alternative to positivism, and they even

award it with the label of perspectivism (which they also apply to their own

position), but they also see some glaring problems with this idealist-tinged

theory of history.26

[Heussis] error lay in locating the root of historical perspectivism in a conception

of the structures of historical happening as indeterminate and subject to variation with

the passage of time. This would make the past comparable to the standing of poets

and novelists, which rises or falls in accord with the many contingencies of ongoing lit-

erary history. Lonergan afrmed Heussis main point (perspectivism), but corrected

its cognitional-theoretical explanation. The early twentieth-century error was not the

assumption that the structures of the past were xed, but the failure to realize that these

same structures were too rich and complex to be recovered except in approximate

fashion. The past is xed, Lonergan asserted; its intelligible structures are unequivo-

cal. But the past that is so xed and unequivocal is the enormously, almost boundlessly

complex past that historians know only in the most incomplete way. What is it, then,

that gives rise to perspectivism? The answer must be: incomplete, approximate know-

ledge of the past.27

While I wholeheartedly agree with Lonergans and Meyers case against

Heussi, I would suggest that their own position is not entirely convincing. It

must be said, for example, that parts of their argument28 derive more momentum

from the slipperiness of key terms than from logical necessity. Dening sub-

jectivity as including the operations of cognition (experience, understanding,

and judgment) might seem like an honorable concession, but those operations

do not represent the subjectivist moments targeted in the standard attempt to

rein in the inherent subjectivism of interpretation. If subjectivity, as a term,

necessarily includes both the negative elements that interfere with objective

interpretation and the cognitional elements that work to lter out those negative elements, then we should trade subjectivity for a pair of more precise, analyti-

cally useful terms. It would be better simply to limit subjectivity to its usual

connotation. One must also question Meyers claim that the ontological home

of truth is the subject.29 This claim fails to hold up on two counts, since it seems

to imply that the (epistemic) subject can be the node of an ontic moment (which

25. See Karl Heussi, Die Krisis des Historismus (Tbingen: MohrSiebeck, 1932), pp. 55-56, 67.

26. Meyer, Reality and Illusion in New Testament Scholarship, p. 128. 27. Meyer, Reality and Illusion in New Testament Scholarship, p. 129. 28. The singular argument seems more appropriate, given that Meyer tries very hard not

to supplement Lonergans line of reasoning.

29. Meyer, Objectivity and Subjectivity in Historical Criticism of the Gospels, p. 557.



causes problems for the idea that ontic and epistemic moments are totally dif-

ferent, opening the door to all the types of idealism that critical realism is

supposed to avoid), and, through that confusion, it also seems to imply that truth

itself (and not just knowledge of the truth) is epistemic rather than ontic. A further problem with the Lonergan/Meyer approach is that these cognitional

operations are not as wholly subjectivist as Longeran and Meyer represent them

to be. Thought in general is an alloy of objective data and subjective interfer-

ences. A great company of critics reminds us every day that a 100 percent

objective thought is an impossible ideal, but it is just as impossible to have a

thought from which the furniture of the objective world is completely absent.

Cognitional operations consist of an interplay between subjective and objective

moments, and that observation essentially returns us to the default position of

saying (contra Lonergan and Meyer) that the best way to achieve a purchase on

reality is to minimize the subjective element in interpretation (taking subjec-

tive here in the way that is usually meant). Meyer recoils at this suggestion, but

he does not justify his reaction with a conceptually coherent argument.

A return to Frosts poem might be instructive at this point. A more sensitive

reading of Frost nds a different epistemological conclusion than that which

Crossan attributes to him. That conclusion, I believe, illustrates a needful caveat

for doing history: attention to method allows us to catch glimpses of reality(even at the bottom of a deep well). While there is such a thing as interference caused by the act of interpreting, there are methods for minimizing that to a

degree that makes history possible. At the same time, however, there is no

guarantee that history will give up its secrets, and the difculty of not turning the object of ones respect into a mirror image of oneself is admittedly noisome.

This is not to deny that there are universal limitations. But it is to deny that these limitations form a hermetic seal around reality.

Conclusion

The image of gazing into a well and seeing ones own reection can be applied

to more than one epistemology. How it might be applied depends in part on the

success of the imagined well gazer and on whether that success (or lack thereof)

is attributed to universal or strictly local factors. If the well gazers efforts to see

beneath the surface of the water are eternally beset by the reectiveness of the

water, so that nothing the well gazer does to resituate his or her vantage point

will reduce the interfering effect of the waters surface enough to allow even a

glimpse of what lies at the bottom, the image will be suitable for a pure and

universally prevailing type of narcissism. But if the well gazer has a means of

penetrating beyond the reection but lacks the judgment, knowledge to do so, or

good faith, the image might t with a case in which a particular person or group



(viz. Tyrrells Harnackians) have done a rather poor job of discerning a true

historical moment from a mass of literary and historical data. Then again, we

might imagine a well gazer who chances upon a means of reducing the interfer-

ence of the reective image, thereby engaging the true historical object (if only

episodically). This last image represents a historical epistemology amenable to

Frosts more hopeful epistemology. It also represents the commonsense approach

of most historians, in which critical methods help to establish a purchase on

objective reality (if only episodically).30 As far as I can see, this is a tried and

true method, and nothing in either Crossans interactivism or Meyers critical

realism legitimately detracts from it.

30. Childs contends that ancient historians did not strive for objectivity the way modern

scholars often do: In Hellenistic antiquity, history writing became concerned with making a

distinction between fact and fable, or myth. This concern for objectivity was primarily inter-

ested in resisting the temptation to atter, but did not diminish the importance of interpreta-

tion or even instruction in historical narratives (The Myth of the Historical Jesus and the Evolution of Consciousness, p. 60). Against Childss view of how things were in late antiquity, consider Lucians prescription: As to the facts themselves, he should not assemble them at

random, but only after much laborious and painstaking investigation. He should for preference

be an eyewitness, but, if not, listen to those who tell the more impartial story, those whom one

would suppose least likely to subtract from the facts or add to them out of favour or malice.

When this happens let him show shrewdness and skill in putting together the more credible

story. When he has collected all or most of the facts let him rst make them into a series of

notes, a body of material as yet with no beauty or continuity. Then, after arranging them into

order, let him give it beauty and enhance it with the charms of expression, gure, and rhythm

(De historia conscribenda 47-48 [trans. K. Kilburn (8 vols.; LCL; London: Heinemann, 1959), VI, pp. 60-61]).


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Seeing What is There in Spite of Ourselves