Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PUBLISHER
The Centre for Biblical Studies of the Babe-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Stelian TOFAN (Babe-Bolyai University Cluj, Faculty of Orthodox Theology)
EDITORIAL BOARD
Gyrgy BENYIK (Catholic Theological Institute, Szeged)
Ioan CHIRIL (Babe-Bolyai University Cluj, Faculty of Orthodox Theology)
Erik EYNIKEL (Radboud University Nijmegen, Faculty of Theology)
Marius FURTUN (Babe-Bolyai University Cluj, Faculty of Greek Catholic Theology)
Hans KLEIN (Lucian Blaga University Sibiu, Faculty of Lutheran Theology)
Lehel LSZAI (Babe-Bolyai University Cluj, Faculty of Reformed Theology)
Ulrich LUZ (University of Bern, Faculty of Old Catholic and Protestant Theology)
Tobias NICKLAS (University of Regensburg, Faculty of Catholic Theology)
Sorin MARIAN (Babe-Bolyai University Cluj, Faculty of Greek Catholic Theology)
Jnos MOLNR (Babe-Bolyai University Cluj, Faculty of Reformed Theology)
Zoltn OLH (Roman Catholic Theological Institute, Alba Iulia)
Joseph VERHEYDEN (Catholic University of Leuven, Faculty of Theology)
Korinna ZAMFIR (Babe-Bolyai University Cluj, Faculty of Roman Catholic Theology)
ADVISORY BOARD
Old Testament:
Jrg JEREMIAS (Philipp University Marburg, Faculty of Protestant Theology)
Ed NOORT (University of Groningen, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies)
Martti NISSINEN (University of Helsinki, Faculty of Theology)
Walter DIETRICH (University of Bern, Faculty of Old Catholic and Protestant Theology)
New Testament:
Reimund BIERINGER (Catholic University of Leuven, Faculty of Theology)
Joannis KARAVIDOPOULOS (University of Thessaloniki, Faculty of Theology)
David MOESSNER (University of Dubuque, Dubuque, IA)
Armand PUIG I TRRECH (Faculty of Theology of Catalonia, Barcelona)
Gerd THEIEN (Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, Faculty of Theology)
Urs VON ARX (University of Bern, Faculty of Old Catholic and Protestant Theology)
LAYOUT EDITOR
Hilda MARCZINK
EDITORIAL OFFICE
Universitii 7-9
400091 Cluj-Napoca
Phone: + 40 264 450184
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ISSN 1584-7624
BABE-BOLYAI UNIVERSITY
Centre for Biblical Studies
SACRA SCRIPTA
Year X, 2012/2
Cluj-Napoca
CONTENTS
ESSAYS
Robert D. MILLER II : The Song of Songs: A Plea for an Aesthetic Reading..... 113
Hans KLEIN: Paulus als Apostel, Prophet und Lehrer in seinen unumstrittenen
Briefen (Homologoumena) ................................................................................ 120
Csaba BALOGH: Schpfung und Geburt: Anthropologische Begrifflichkeit
in Psalm 139,13-16
147
Gerd THEIEN: Das Leiden und Sterben des historischen Jesus und
deren Transformation in der Passionsgeschichte.............................................
177
Korinna ZAMFIR: Once More about the Origins and Background of the
New Testament Episkopos...
202
111
3
4
Thus, E. ASSIS, Flashes of Fire: A Literary Analysis of the Song of Songs, Library of the Hebrew
Bible/Old Testament Studies 503, T & T Clark, New York, 2008; P. HUNT, Poetry in the Song of
Songs: A Literary Analysis, Peter Lang, Frankfurt, 2008.
A. MARIASELVAM, The Song of Songs and Ancient Tamil Love Poems, Pontifical Biblical
Institute, Rome, 1988, 2832, 5052.
D. LOMBARD, Le Cantique des Cantiques (3,65,1), in Semiotique & Bible 66, (1992), 4552.
S. FISCHER, Das Hohelied Salomos zwischen Poesie und Erzhlung, Forschungen zum Alten
Testament 72, Mohr Siebeck, Tubingen, 2010, 1920 and passim.
Y. ZAKOVITCH, Shir Ha-Shirim, Mikra LeIsrael - A Biblical Commentary for Israel, Magnes
Press, Jerusalem, 1992.
J. C. EXUM and D. J. A. CLINES, New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible, JSOTSup 143,
Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield, 1993, 12.
I. ARMSTRONG, Radical Aesthetic, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000, 3032.
ROBERT D. MILLER II
10
11
12
13
14
15
ARMSTRONG, Radical Aesthetic, 3, 29, and passim; A. C. DANTO, The Future of Aesthetics, in
F. HALSALL, J. JANSEN and T. OCONNOR (eds.), Rediscovering Aethetics, Stanford, 2009, 105.
The details of this decline and rise are beyond the scope of this essay and are explained well by
Armstrong.
A. STIBBS, Can you (almost) read a poem backwards and view a painting upside down?
Restoring Aesthetics to Poetry Teaching, in Journal of Aesthetic Education 34, (2000), 41.
D. MATRAVERS, Art, Expression and Emotion, in B. GAUT and D. M. LOPES (eds.), The
Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, London, 22005, 45253.
C. KUL-WANT, Introducing Aesthetics, Totem Books, New York, 2003, 7374, 168; D.
WHEWELL, Aestheticism, in A Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd ed., Blackwell Companions to
Philosophy 3, Malden, MA, 2009, 129.
M. PATON, Schiller (Johann Christoph) Friedrich von, in A Companion to Aesthetics,
Blackwell Companions to Philosophy 3, Malden, MA, 22009, 517. See, i.a., Wassily Kandinskys
criticism of Pater in his 1910 Concerning the Spiritual in Art .
MATRAVERS, Art, 453.
V. SESEMANN, Aesthetics, trans. M. DRUNGA, On the Boundary of Two Worlds 8, New York,
2007, 75.
D. B. SONESON, Aesthetic Response to Lyric Poetry, in Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching
German 24 (1991) 34; italics added. Cf. SESEMANN, Aesthetics, 76.
114
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
STIBBS, Can you (almost) read?, 4243; G. SIRCELLO, Beauty and Anti-Beauty in Literature
and its Criticism, in Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16, (1991), 109.
STIBBS, Can you (almost) read?, 43. Sesemann holds that aesthetic content is always
indissolubly tied to its form, although this is by no means universally held; Sesemann,
Aesthetics, 77.
SIRCELLO, Beauty, 109.
MATRAVERS, Art, 45354.
C. LALO, The Aesthetic Analysis of a Word of Art: An Essay on the Structure and Superstructure
of Poetry, in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 7, (1949), 275.
SESEMANN, Aesthetics, 153; LALO, Aesthetic Analysis, 27778.
STIBBS, Can you (almost) read?, 45.
STIBBS, Can you (almost) read?, 46; J. L. MURSELL, Aesthetic Analysis of Poetry, in J. L.
MURSELL (ed.), Education for Musical Growth, Boston, 1948, 323.
SESEMANN, Aesthetics, 24, 153, 157; SIRCELLO, Beauty, 109.
J. D. CAVALLARO, Poetry, Myths, and Aesthetics, in English Journal 72 (1983), 28.
SIRCELLO, Beauty, 109.
SESEMANN, Aesthetics, 24.
115
ROBERT D. MILLER II
less closely its sound is connected mentally with its meaning, and the more
attention will be paid to its audible phonology.28
The aesthetic experience of the poem involves apprehending all of these
elements combining to produce the overall significance.29 No single element
dominates the others.30 And repeated readings or discreet examinations of the Song
will reveal subtle recesses and previously unrecognized meanings. 31
But is this, then, simply reader-response criticism?32 Or some modified form
of both reader- and text-centered synchronic criticism, akin to Jan Fokkelmans
dialogue of the text with the reader who, if reading sensitively will find what is
always already in the text?33 Thirty years ago, Francis Landy explored the Song for
structural unity [that] corresponds to and expresses outwardly the unity of action
i.e. the union of lovers, and also to the fusion through metaphor of the lovers and
the world,34 and then used the theories of Jungian and Freudian psychology to
explain the reader's construction of meaning in the text.35
Yes and no. It is true that the text as object is not completed, but only
finished in its aesthetic apprehension.36 Appreciation is a personal and relative
matter.37 As for Jan Fokkelman, the aesthetic approach differs from strict readerresponse (and from Landy) in that it holds some reader attitudes (like pure
observation) will be less able to apprehend the significance that is nevertheless
dependent on apprehension.38 The first person mode used by the Song in particular
invites a personal mode of engagement with the content of the work such that the
ideal engagement involves some level of identification on the part of the listener or
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
SESEMANN, Aesthetics, 22. Certain words, such as the Songs various terms for love (and
death), would not be deprived of their emotional value by any amount of familiarity.
STIBBS, Can you (almost) read?, 44; MURSELL, Aesthetic Analysis, 321; SIRCELLO, Beauty,
106; SIRCELLO, Love and Beauty, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1988, 225 n. 33.
MATRAVERS, Art, 454.
J. COULSON and P. TEMES, How to Read a Poem, in J. COULSON and P. TEMES (eds.), Modern
American Poetry, Chicago, 2002, 5.
Cf. E. V. MCKNIGHT, Reader-Response Criticism, in S. L. MCKENZIE and S. R. HAYNES (eds.),
To Each Its Own Meaning, Louisville, 1993, 197219.
J. P. FOKKELMAN, Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel, Van Gorcum, Assen, 1981,
2.2, 419.
F. LANDY, Paradoxes of Paradise, Bible and Literature Series 7, Almond Press, Sheffield, 1983,
39.
LANDY, Paradoxes, 63114.
SESEMANN, Aesthetics, 36.
R. CORBIN, The Aesthetic Experiencing of a Poem, in The English Journal 46 (1957) 566;
SIRCELLO, Beauty, 107, 110.
SESEMANN, Aesthetics, 54; Sircello, Beauty, 110.
116
reader.39 Yet aesthetic criticism insists on attention to the verbal incarnation that
allows the reader to experience and feel.40 And unlike pure reader-response or even
text-centered synchronic criticisms (e.g., New Criticism), aesthetic criticism
includes a concern for the authors own intention to provoke certain effects. 41 For
the very identity of the affective response depends on the identity of the intentional
object.42 Were the ancient audiences of the Song, real or implied, experienced
with the symbols at play in the text, or were these, like the lexical hapax legomena,
intentionally opaque?43
An aesthetic reading of the Song of Songs will affirm with Ellen Davis that
there are a plethora of possible readings of the Song, but not that there are no
right and wrong interpretations.44 On the one hand, the reader-dependedness of
the Song read aesthetically speaks against some limiting interpretations, and it is
here that an aesthetic reading has theological importance. For example, can we say
so readily with Linafelt that the Song has no characters because it is not narrative
or drama,45 when the use of the first person immediately places the reader into the
role of a character or at least demands the reader mentally flesh out the mysterious
narrator/singer into a dramatic character?46 Or that the Song is not theology and
not philosophy,47 when the meaning of the Song cannot be separated from the
use of the book by its audiences, both those original audiences for whom sex and
spirituality may not have been disparate realities, and the twenty centuries of
traditional reading that we arrogantly dismiss as sheer distortion of the text, while
ourselves misunderstanding the nature of text, confusing meaning with authorial
intent?48
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
117
ROBERT D. MILLER II
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
engage with factors at the basis of our cognitive inheritance, see P. CROWTHER, Artistic
Creativity, in F. HALSALL, J. JANSEN, and T. OCONNOR (eds.), Rediscovering Aethetics,
Stanford, 2009, 141.
D. J. A. CLINES, Why is there a Song of Songs and what does it do to you if you read it? in Jian
Dao 1, (1994), 327; repr. in D. J. A. CLINES (ed.), Interested Parties, JSOTSup 205, Sheffield,
1995, 94121; also R. BOER, The Second Coming: Repetition and Insatiable Desire in the Song
of Songs, in Biblical Interpretation 8, (2000), 276300, esp. p. 297.
WALSH, Exquisite Desire, 107.
R. FRY, Vision and Design, Chatto & Windus, London, 1920, 15.
WALSH, Exquisite Desire, 7475, 7879.
STIBBS, Can you (almost) read?, 46.
F. LANDY, The Song of Songs and the Garden of Eden, in JBL 98, (1979), 514.
WALSH, Exquisite Desire, 80.
R. BOER, Keeping it Literal: The Economy of the Song of Songs, in Journal of Hebrew
Scripture 7.6, (2009): 23; NISSINEN, Song of Songs, 194, 213.
BOER, Keeping it Literal, 7.
118
metonymic axis and read the terms on their own.58 In this reading, the Song is
about a fertile, fecund world (which itself challenges modern readings that see in
the Song the non-reproductive sex of industrialized societies).59 For Boer and for
Hagedorn, this is an idealized pastoral world, economically productive, without
human toil (e.g., Song 2:4, 10, 13).60 This can only be added to the Song as return
to Eden or Song as reversal of Genesis 3 long argued by Lys, Krinetski, Landy,
Trible, and others.61 This interpretive thread has great theological promise not only
for biblical interpretation but for the theology of sexuality as a whole (one might
initially compare John Damascenes comments on marriage in Exposition on the
Orthodox Faith, 4.24). But the interpretations of Lys, Krinetski, Landy, Trible, et
alia neglected the aesthetic element of the effect on the reader of this return to
Eden. The reader is invited to this fruit banquet (Song 5:1), with, as Boer shows,
the fruits of love read onto the body of the earth as much as onto the beloved. If,
then, the earth or creation itself is the fruit of love, the Song draws us to ask,
Whose?62 As Linafelt affirms, These questions are generated by the
metaphorical language of the poetry, but they are not answered.63
Robert D. MILLER II
The Catholic University of America
Washington, DC 20064, USA
58
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60
61
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63
119