Authority and Freedom

On Jed Perl and the Bible

Welcome, new readers. Excited to share my new podcast conversation with Reason Magazine Editor-at-Large Nick Gillespie, in which we cover everything from Nick’s vision for postmodern libertarianism to the fundamental importance of experimental art, the ambiguous legacy of David Foster Wallace, and how to practice empathy in grocery stores. My previous conversation featuring Brown University Professor turned inaugural president of Heterodox Academy, John Tomasi, can be found here. John Tomasi is an inspiring soul and also a former teacher. Also, thrilled to share the good news that I am the 2022 recipient of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities.

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I’m late to the game, but Jed Perl is a terrific writer and thinker. I recently started his classic Authority and Freedom, in preparation for his new book, reviewed here.

Perl argues that works of art are most compelling not for what they represent in terms of subject matter, but for the way that they navigate the tension between tradition (authority) and invention (freedom) at the formal level. I found something like Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian (order) and Dionysian (intoxication) in Perl’s work, but Perl’s argument feels more fresh, more comprehensive and contemporary in its range, and is also more readable than The Birth of Tragedy.

Perl describes art as being relevant not because it tells us something directly about the world, but because, in its self-absorption with the question of how to respond to the artistic tradition, to convention, and precedent, it shines a spotlight on one of life’s most fundamental questions.

In reading Perl, I found myself revisiting the question of whether the Bible is, or can or should be viewed as a work of art.

Perl’s thesis provides a good frame for considering that, whatever the Bible is up to in terms of social goals, it is also a book (or set of books) about storytelling, about creation, and about their intertwinement. “In the beginning” announces not just the birth of the world, but also the birth of the story of the world.

How does one begin without precedent, without a model for beginning? This may be the great aesthetic mystery of monotheism, in which God opposes not other gods, but, instead, chaos itself, the abstract force of non-creation.

Creation ex-nihilo would be a doctrine of invention free of the weight of tradition. Yet Creation ex-nihilo is itself a doctrine that opposes a prior doctrine, the doctrine of creation of something from something. So the story of ex nihilo creation is not itself quite ex nihilo. In any case, Genesis is too opaque to reduce to a single metaphysical doctrine. And were it only a doctrinal text, one would have to ask why it is presented in a poetic manner, rather than in the form of a chain of logical statements.

The Bible is a work that aspires to be new while also acknowledging the conventions that precede it. This alone makes it a work of art. The fact that the Biblical text obscures the convention of beginning with a battle between gods, or that it refuses to derive its heroes from gods, but instead suggests all human beings are imbued with a divine image, make it inventive.

It is easy to lose sight of the inventiveness of Biblical monotheism and the accompanying tale of the people that comes to embrace it as core to the covenant. Now, the Bible has become synonymous with tradition itself, with gravitas, with ancient beliefs.

Encountering our cherished ancient sources as sources not only of authority, but as sources that themselves grapple with the tension between authority and freedom, is one strategy by which we can make them feel contemporary.

While possibly heretical (to some), it is even worth meditating on the idea that God, the consummate creator, is not a Being who only invents, but a Being whose invention is itself always also an interrogation of tradition. Neither the static model of an ever-changing Platonic God, nor the historicist progressive theology of Hegelian dialects captures what makes the Bible awesome. Neither trans-historical truth, nor purely temporal truth, are represented therein, but rather—when viewed artistically—the interplay between the Biblical Author as constrained and the Biblical author as free.

To borrow from Wittgenstein, because there is no private language, God cannot write the Bible only for God. God needs an audience, but as soon as God addresses an audience, God must respond to the history of all previous attempts to bring heaven down to earth. God must become not just a writer of The Book, but also, as it were, a reader of all its prequels. The mystics knew this. Which is why they portray God in heaven not simply writing the Torah, but studying it.