Literary Revelations: On William Franke and the Bible

Over the past half-century, literary approaches reinvigorated biblical studies. They did not reject the regnant source criticism, but they did reject its worst tendency to treat the Bible—and especially the Pentateuch—as a document sutured together from fraying scraps of mismatched source material. Too many source critics forgot the intricate skill involved in making a patchwork quilt. They ignored the Bible’s often sophisticated literary art, the ways its final redactors or editors crafted patterns and juxtapositions, subtle or bold: chiastic and parallel structures, ellipses and ironies, puns and wordplay, type scenes and type characters. Even when rival source traditions seem to be in play, such as the pro- and anti-monarchy sources some critics discern in the Books of Samuel, they often introduce compelling tensions into the received text.

Many scholars played a part in this literary renaissance within biblical studies, but Robert Alter is preeminent among them in the English-speaking world. If a poll were taken, Alter would probably receive many a vote for greatest living humanities scholar given his work in this domain, which culminated in a decades-in-the-making translation of and commentary on the Hebrew Bible but started with his 1981 classic The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic Books).[1] The first chapter of that book, originally published as a one-off article in Commentary Magazine, takes up the narrative of Tamar and Judah in Genesis 38, which source critics frequently treated as a tell-tale insertion, alien and awkward, into the surrounding Joseph Cycle. In a trenchant close reading, Alter shows how anyone open to approaching Genesis as a coherent literary text will note thematic resonances. The story of Tamar tricking Judah follows fast on the story of Judah and his brothers tricking Jacob with the bloodied garment: “Judah with Tamar after Judah with his brothers is an exemplary narrative instance of the deceiver deceived.” Furthermore, Judah’s sexual license is a “pointed contrast” with Potiphar’s wife’s attempted seduction of Joseph in Genesis 39. “A tale of exposure through sexual incontinence” is immediately juxtaposed with “a tale of seeming defeat and ultimate triumph through sexual continence.” From this literary perspective, the insertion no longer looked alien or awkward but rich with significance.[2]

These literary approaches stimulated the study of the Bible as a world classic, as a “core humanities text,” but they also provided new resources for scriptural theologians. In short, literary studies helped deepen theology. But can it work the other way around? What might the revelatory power of the Bible say about the power of literature broadly? This is the provocative question that William Franke, a Vanderbilt-based philosopher, theologian, and scholar of comparative literature, raises in his 2017 study A Theology of Literature: The Bible as Revelation in the Tradition of the Humanities, published by Wipf and Stock’s Cascade imprint.[3] Franke does not simply use the theological as a lens to understand the literary. He makes the more precise claim that the two inevitably involve each other. Theology needs the fecund richness of poetry, of figurative language (metaphor, analogy, simile, etc.), if it is to evoke the transcendent God and ultimate realities. And the very fecundity of figurative language raises metaphysical questions. The relationship between the two is what the contemporary philosopher William Desmond calls a “metaxological” one—they cannot be separated, nor can they be synthesized without remainder.[4] Since theology and poetry are in a mutually constitutive relationship, one cannot close the “between” via which they continually intermediate. Franke explains:

Formerly, the discourses of literature and theology could be held apart and distinguished in clear, uncontaminated terms. But it has become more and more difficult not to see the quintessentially literary modes such as metaphor and narrative as always already implicated in any theological pronouncement, whether descriptive or prescriptive, dogmatic or speculative. On the other side of the equation, it has also become more difficult not to see the infinite openness of poetic language as a dimension that calls for interpretation in theological terms. Its endlessly malleable figurative and rhetorical means are all too well-adapted for intimating about the unfathomable origins and inscrutable ends of the world and of life as a whole.

Franke’s closing sentence gets at a crucial paradox. On the one hand, poetic language is “endlessly malleable,” but on the other hand it can only offer intimations of the ultimate, of “unfathomable origins and inscrutable ends.” In his other studies, and especially in his tour-de-force A Philosophy of the Unsayable (Notre Dame, 2014), Franke explores this paradox, showing how language reaches out in ever-new ways toward what will always evade or transcend determinate wording: God, love, death. The greatest poets, the greatest adepts of language, seek vistas in the hinterlands of the sayable from which they can gesture at what lies beyond.[5]

A Theology of Literature adroitly demonstrates how this is true of the poets of the Bible. Franke’s study is organized around the disclosive affordances of various genres within the Bible: creation myth, epic, prophecy, apocalypse, psalm, parable, love poem, wisdom narrative, gospel. The chapters on Genesis and Exodus contain many suggestive insights, but they are somewhat tentative as they carefully navigate the source criticism. We get a few tantalizing lines on the burning bush, for instance, but no commentary on the divine name that God gives to Moses (which would seem like rich material for Franke). Franke gains momentum, however, when he turns to more explicitly poetic forms within the Bible. Writing of how the prophets speak in the voice of God, Franke remarks:

How could God speak in any one finite voice except provisionally and poetically? Poetry achieves an indeterminacy of language that opens upon infinity. This does not exclude precision and concreteness: on the contrary, these qualities are necessary, and in any case highly conducive, to poetic expression. Still, all determinate, literal meaning in poetry is but a gesture beyond itself towards a meaning that is metaphorical, or open and infinite. Literal meaning is not denied but is transfigured into another, an unbounded register of significance.

In the Book of Job, God’s sublime poetry breaks open the reasoning of both Job and his interlocutors. The voice from the whirlwind draws them into awe at the unfathomable transcendence of His ways: “The answer to the questions raised by Job is given only in poetry as a vision of the sublime nature and awesomeness of the creation, not in any precepts or principles that human reason can grasp.” Writing of the Song of Songs, Franke stresses that language is not disembodied. The extremes of sensory experience, which themselves demand but also frustrate poetic wording, intimate in their own way a transcending excess. Hence, to the scandal of some pious readers, erotic yearning and passion can be mystically charged. Franke endorses the creative and profound allegorical approaches to the Song of Songs over the centuries while also insisting on its phenomenological and poetic attentiveness to the sensual.

So far it might sound like Franke is continually stretching beyond this world in a sort of mystical poetics. But that is not the case: the encounter with the transcendent unsettles and changes the world and our place in it. This is another paradox that Franke’s study emphasizes as central to the Bible. Consider once more the prophets, who speak the sublime poetry of God to complacent monarchs and complacent peoples, calling them away from idolatry and back to right worship, yes, but also to care for the widow, orphan, and stranger. The prophets chastise but also offer hope, and at times joy, amidst the tribulations of the world. The Bible has its images of spiritual ascent (most often partial ascent to the mountaintop rather than into the heavens) but the emphasis falls more often on God’s theophanies, on the divine breaking into and transfiguring this world. This is, of course, the heart of Christian scripture, of Jesus as God incarnate. The transformative encounter with Jesus Christ is with the unfathomably transcendent but also the intimately, tangibly present: “The Gospel witnesses to the power of Jesus to transform human lives and give them a new meaning.” The parables of Christ figuratively narrate transcendent realities, but they also “induce the auditor to make a judgment on himself—or herself.”

To read the Bible as revelation, Franke suggests, is to allow the Bible to read us.[6] In this regard its revelation is living and ongoing, addressing the challenges and promises of each reader, culture, and age: “The Bible, by its very nature, speaks into the particular historical situations of individuals and their specific cultures, tailoring its message to what they are ready to receive and understand.” But this calls for receptive reading, for a disposition that is open to insights, wisdom, and self-knowledge.

Franke mentions the traditional four senses of scripture but does not dwell on confessional reading practices, such as lectio divina, that cultivate such receptivity. Perhaps this is because, while he writes A Theology of Literature at least partly for synagogue and church, he nonetheless still writes from within the humanities classroom where he has pursued his vocation as a teacher and scholar. Franke rues how critical, skeptical, or at least unreceptive reading practices within the university limit the transformative power of all literature, greatly contributing to the perceived irrelevance of the humanities. Franke joins a growing number of humanities scholars with a wide range of religious and political commitments in calling for a more receptive reading of literature, one that is not uncritical but which allows for an open exchange between reader and text in which literature can challenge, teach, and inspire: “Taken as reflecting on ourselves, humanities texts are not objects of scientific analysis so much as partners in dialogue.”[7] Humanities texts should help us understand the human condition and how to negotiate ultimate things. Franke holds that all literature is revelatory in the degree to which it affords such insight. The Bible, in the West and well beyond, has long been central to this quest for wisdom. As Franke so aptly shows, its various literary genres address the reader. They compel self-examination, ethical commitment, wonder, and existential reflection. In these regards, even as biblical literacy and religious affiliation plummet, the Bible remains “an unsurpassable model of the revelatory potential of literary art” for Franke, one that can still help renew the humanities broadly. [8]

Franke’s insistence on the open-ended, “limitless” revelatory possibilities of the biblical text may bristle believers who hold to a more univocal hermeneutic, who, for instance, rivet the meaning of biblical texts to a reconstructed authorial intent. Such readers may well dismiss Franke as “postmodern.” This label fits him in one sense. For Franke is not only the heir of the formally attentive literary approaches of Robert Alter, whom he cites frequently, which hold the continental philosophy-inspired literary theory of the 80s and 90s at a certain remove and operate with a staid notion of what a literary approach involves. He is also heir to the literary approaches to the Bible that do not shy away from theoretical and philosophical questioning, and that share a lively sense of linguistic equivocity and plenitude, such as the essays found in the seminal 1990 collection The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory (Basil Blackwell), edited by Regina Schwartz.[9] As he notes in the opening pages of A Theology of Literature, his postmodernism is not one of negative “devolutions and deconstructions,” of reducing language to a negative indeterminacy, of meaning to a mere projection or construct. The text is not a maze for Franke from which there is no escape. For him linguistic meaning in general and poetry in particular cannot be pinned down once and for all. This is not only due to intractable ambiguities and slippages, however, but also because of excessive richness and possibility. Franke is particularly interested in language that evokes an even more excessive beyond—the superabundance of experience, reality, and their transcendent origin.

Franke presents his postmodern affinities as at least in part a retrieval of premodern approaches to the Bible. In his Confessions, after all, Augustine claims that exegetes can follow the divine command in Genesis to proliferate by multiplying fruitful readings of Scripture. Likewise, there is an old tradition of seeing the Bible as addressed to each reader. But these premodern approaches always had some regulative ideal, some way of sorting the interpretative wheat from the chaff. Franke may seem to be wide open by comparison. Yet there seem to be limits, even if they usually remain implicit. For one, Franke seems to celebrate not the multiplicity of meaning tout court as much as the multiplicity of plausible meanings that try to make good sense of the text. More importantly, Franke claims that a central theme of the Bible from its early verses onward is the danger of impetuous willing on the part of humans, which tends to harm Creation and others. This suggests, along with Franke’s insistence on letting oneself be read by the Bible, that one should be on guard against readings of the Bible—all too common in religious history—that are self-serving, self-aggrandizing, or reject its other-centered ethos for exploitative or vicious ends.

Franke is perhaps the most important contemporary scholar and theoretician of apophaticism, of the via negativa. Indeed, Franke would also deserve votes for the greatest living humanist in the hypothetical poll mentioned above. Yet, as Franke acknowledges, his sense of the unsayable, of what cannot be conceptualized, is closely linked to a sense of excess—the linguistic excess that the unsayable calls forth in failed but fecund attempts at saying but also the transcendent excess that is unsayable. Thus, while his approach is apophatic, he finds himself in the vicinity of a certain poetic metaphysics of excess as practiced by a contemporary philosopher like Desmond, a contemporary theologian like Catherine Pickstock, or, at perhaps a further remove in terms of both theoretical stance and time, to Eric Voegelin, whom he cites in A Theology of Literature.[10] As Voegelin lays out in the first volume of Order and History (LSU, 1956), he seeks to trace throughout history major human attempts to achieve some orientation, some order, vis-à-vis “God and man, world and society.” This orientation is achieved in significant part via symbols more-or-less adequate to the always excessive ultimate realities and to the concrete and always-challenging particulars of time and place. Franke’s account of the world-disclosing, revelatory capacity of literary forms, therefore, bears some resemblance to Voegelin’s history of orders.[11] Both find the Bible preeminently compelling as it seeks to evoke a divinity that is both radically transcendent and peculiarly intimate.

NOTES:

[1] Other important literary studies of the Bible from this period include Alter’s The Art of Biblical Poetry (Basic Books, 1985), Shimon Bar-Efrat’s Narrative Art in the Bible (Sheffield, 1989), and J. P. Fokkelman’s Reading Biblical Narrative: A Practical Guide (Deo, 1999). See also the influential collection The Literary Guide to the Bible (Harvard, 1987), edited by Alter and Frank Kermode. This is a thumbnail sketch of the rise of literary approaches in the late twentieth century. There are important forerunners in early twentieth-century biblical theology and canonical approaches to Scripture. Brevard Childs is an important figure within biblical studies. Erich Auerbach and Northrop Frye are crucial figures within literary studies. Paul Ricœur is a key figure within philosophy.

[2] There are, of course, sophisticated approaches to the formation of the Hebrew Bible that attend to literary and historical contexts, such as David M. Carr’s study of ancient scribal practices in Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (Oxford, 2008). Carr himself uses the quilting metaphor at times with a strong sense of the skill involved.

[3] This book adapts, revises, and expands the discussion of the Bible in Franke’s much longer study The Revelation of Imagination: From Homer and the Bible through Virgil and Augustine to Dante (Northwestern, 2015).

[4] On Desmond’s metaxology, see The William Desmond Reader, edited by Christopher Ben Simpson (SUNY, 2012).

[5] A good entry point to Franke’s thought is his freely available entry “Poetry, Prophecy, and Theological Revelation” in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion: https://oxfordre.com/religion/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-205.

[6] For a suggestive and nuanced phenomenological account of being read by the biblical text, see Jean-Louis Chrétien, Under the Gaze of the Bible (Fordham, 2014), translated by John Marson Dunaway.

[7] On the “poetic epistemology of the humanities,” see also the introduction to Franke’s The Revelation of Imagination.

[8] Franke’s non-exclusive notion of revelation also offers rich resources for religious dialogue and comparative approaches. Franke has a remarkable range as a scholar that spans both Western and Eastern traditions. See his Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions without Borders (SUNY, 2018) and On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (Notre Dame, 2020). Franke would rightly argue that the humanities classroom of the secular Western university should not foreclose big questions about the meaning of life and the sacred. But he would also rightly suggest that the non-confessional classroom should approach philosophical or religious texts from other traditions—say, the Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads, or the Heart Sutra—with the same openness to wisdom and reflection with which one might approach the Bible (while also avoiding a simple imposition of Western categories upon them).

[9] Alter contributes to Schwartz’s collection, but Schwartz also faces the tension between these two broad camps head-on in her introduction to The Book and the Text.

[10] On Desmond and Franke, see Franke’s afterword to A Heart of Flesh: William Desmond and the Bible, edited by Steven Knepper (Cascade, 2023), where he states, “I have pursued my project of a poetics of revelation under the sign of ‘negative’ or ‘apophatic theology,’ but the turn I give to this concept—for me a (non)concept—turns it toward the more positively phenomenological sort of revelation that is Desmond’s characteristic focus and forte.” Franke discusses Pickstock’s writings in A Philosophy of the Unsayable.

[11] Note the Voegelian resonance in this formulation in Franke’s On the Universality of What Is Not: “Since the higher powers cannot be grasped or represented in any absolute or even adequate form, all social embodiments of them are subject to critique. It is necessary not only to represent transcendent powers, but also to acknowledge their transcendence of representation altogether—of the human power to know and name.”

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