I read with interest your collection of commentaries by Jewish students and my colleague Jonathan Levin on studying the Bible in the core curriculum. The variety of experiences of people with differing degrees of commitment to a religious tradition was illuminating. I was disappointed, however, that no one addressed what has made teaching biblical materials so unsatisfactory to me, and why I believe none of the Bible ought to be part of the College's universally required Literature Humanities (Lit Hum).

I do not belong to any institutionalized religious group, although my intellectual/cultural background includes strong influences of Protestant Christianity (so I am probably now in a minority among teachers and students at Columbia). My first difficulty with biblical material (from either testament) is that in Lit Hum it is pre-selected. If any work in Lit Hum is to be taught incompletely, the choice of selections should be left entirely to the individual instructor. Otherwise an interpretive orthodoxy has already been enforced. This difficulty, of course, applies to all texts, and I regret that Lit Hum increasingly seems modeled on USA Today with the equivalent of sound bites for Herodotus and Cervantes, for example.

My more specific difficulty is that a sacred text, one that some people believe undeniably offers fundamental spiritual revelations, presents matter for teaching different from any non-sacred text (leave aside the problem that in most classes biblical materials are sacred to some students and not to others). A sacred text usually possesses aesthetic qualities, beautiful complexities of form and the like, but it is distorted if those qualities are detached from or made to supersede its other, nonliterary functions. What makes such a text sacred is that it is always and essentially more than, always distinct from, "literature." "Form" and "artistry" are functionally different in sacred and in literary texts.

My views of the sacred owe much to William Blake, a deeply religious Protestant who asserted that all bibles and "sacred codes" have served to pervert genuine spirituality. For him, every institutionalization of authentic religious experience falsifies its validity, because such experience is the primary source of human individualizing. He urges us, therefore, to reconstruct fundamental concepts of what constitutes a good society so that its institutions may dynamically support, instead of restrict and cripple, the limitless diversity of human capacities for creative spiritual experience. This perspective makes for difficulties in teaching sacred texts to those who accept them as sacred, but it facilitates the teaching of literary works such as The Divine Comedy or The Golden Ass. Dante was certainly a devout Catholic, and, some say that his poem even influenced developing theological conceptions of purgatory. His poem, like Apuleius's novel, or Augustine's Confessions, reports intense religious experience.

But The Divine Comedy is not a sacred text. What one seeks to bring out in discussing the poem in class are those qualities which have continued to make it a work fascinating to so many intelligent people of various, even antagonistic, spiritual and social persuasions, including passionate atheists. I believe that Shelley was correct in identifying how a work such as The Divine Comedy could so fascinate. Shelley's argument, now familiarized through its schematic vulgarization by deconstructionist critics, is that Dante's poem contains within itself a refutation of the very doctrines and ideas it was popularly seen, for good reason, as promulgating. This integrating self-contradiction is what keeps The Divine Comedy perpetually vital, simultaneously exciting and disturbing, but vital as a literary text, not a sacred one. Only such understanding of the difference between the sacred and the literary enables us to explain the strange but undeniable fact that great imaginative works often stay and live longer than the religions or cultures which fostered them.

I hope this description of my difficulties with biblical materials will justify my dislike for some of your commentators referring to Lit Hum as a course of "Great Books." I realize the students imitate those faculty who today ostentatiously praise Lit Hum, but when I first taught Lit Hum forty years ago under the aegis of Mark Van Doren and Moses Hadas, they adamantly condemned descriptions of it as a "great books" course. To canonize a book as "great," and then to require its reading because it is so defined, enforces an orthodoxy equivalent to that implicit in any group's acceptance of a text as sacred. "Great Books" were taught at the University of Chicago under the leadership of Mortimer Adler, whose secularized religiosity was scorned at Columbia. We prided ourselves on teaching, not the "great books" then and now being offered at every third-rate college across the country, but "Literature Humanities," a collection of texts interesting to those who volunteered to teach the course. Two features distinguished our course. We took the texts straight up. We made students read them without the deceptive support of "informative" lectures or readings about cultural and historical "background." That makes sense when, as is the case with the Iliad, the literature's vitality has outlasted its culture's. What was learned about culture and history came through the immediate experience of the literary work in itself. Forty years of classroom experience have confirmed my belief that this is one of the best ways to introduce students to cultures alien in time or space or social formations. But only if--and this was the second distinguishing feature of our course--every independent Lit Hum section struggled with each book in its own idiosyncratic fashion. All sections read at the same time, the same book--not a great book--but a book stimulative of productive debates about human experience. Such a provocative work needed to be discussed diversely in small, separate sections, because we were dedicated to denying any imposed orthodoxy of response, including our own. Lit Hum was structured to resist all pressures to institutionalize hegemonic modes of interpretation, pressures that in recent years have increased in both number and intensity.

Karl Kroeber
Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature

Comments?