A Conversation with Professor Mitchell and Dean Rosengarten: Their Thoughts on Faith, Love, Academia and Marriage
Richard Rosengarten is the Dean and Associate Professor of Religion and Literature in the Divinity School, where he pursues his interests in genres of narrative (especially the novel), in hermeneutics, literary theory, and aesthetics. His book, Henry Fielding and the Narration of Providence: Divine Design and the Incursions of Evil, argues that the eighteenth-century English novel engages broader theological questions about the security of classic notions of providential intervention in a post-Newtonian universe. He is currently completing a book on Flannery O’Connor’s fiction under the title The Catholic Sophocles.
Margaret Mitchell is a Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature in the Divinity School. Her research and teaching span a range of topics in New Testament and early Christian writings. She is the author of many works, including Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation: An Exegetical Investigation of the Language and Composition of 1 Corinthians, The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation, and editor with Frances M. Young of The Cambridge History of Christianity, Volume 1 (Origins to Constantine).
Warren Malueg-Lattimore: Paul wrote in a letter to the church in Corinth: “…we know that ‘all of us possess knowledge.’ Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” One thing that can arise, for anyone, is that knowledge can ‘puff’ one up. At a university like this, many times students leave their respective high schools and when they come here, they become more intimately aware of ignorance – both their own and that of others. For example, students who take [Margaret Mitchell’s] “Introduction to New Testament” begin to find new and profound ways to delve deeper into scripture and upon returning to their home church they may think, “Oh, I’ve already done this. I know the scholarship. I know where the passage is going” and so it can make things a little… It gets you in this spirit where you feel you know more. So, how do you, especially in a divinity school, keep pushing yourself toward knowledge but away from arrogance?
Dean Rosengarten: The chief academic sin is the sin of arrogance. It’s a very serious matter and one that always should be in play in our work. I would say two things about it. One is that if one reads, for instance, Augustine’s Confessions through – if you read the whole text – you find that Augustine will say at the end, in those last books, that even though he has found God and has found peace, he still doesn’t have answers to the questions he started out with. But he’s at rest with God... So, the counsel in Augustine is, to a kind of humility born of faith, that we can pursue these questions and we must pursue these questions. But we must be at peace with the fact that our answers are never what we would like them to be. The other way to address this is with an ironic perspective. My all time favorite example of this is from Henry Fielding. He has the narrator remark in "Tom Jones” that “there are a set of religious or rather moral writers who say that virtue is the certain road to happiness and vice to misery in this world a very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, to which we have but one objection -- namely, that it is not true.” It seems to me that the capacity to identify cherished truths and really scrutinize them is very, very important for all of us, but I think especially for people in the academic world.
Professor Mitchell: The first thing, of course, I would say is that any sentence needs to be read in context and that 8:1 is followed right by 8:2. Paul says, “If anyone thinks they know something, they do yet know just as it is necessary to know.” And then, of course, there’s a grand contradiction in this chapter, which must be understood as a careful rhetorical statement by Paul. The sentence you quoted says, “We know that we all possess knowledge.” But in 8:7, he says, “But knowledge is not in everybody!” So even here, in 1 Corinthians 8, Paul is playing with several different things. One is: Who really has knowledge? Second is: What matters in knowledge? Which direction does it go? In matters religious, for Paul, it is more important that you be known by God than that you know God. Also in 1 Corinthians 13:12, “Then I shall know, just as I have been known”. For Paul, knowledge is eschatological. As such, all knowledge is a limiting condition, because it’s all seeing “through that glass darkly.” But he also does think that there are various kinds of knowledge and that you can know something. And [in 1 Corinthians 8:1f.], he’s talking about knowing the fact that idols don’t exist, and what that knowledge is. He does recognize, the problem of superiority in knowledge. I do, too; let me just say a quick thing about that. The first thing that I should say in relation to all of these kinds of questions is that I am not a role model. I am someone who teaches New Testament and ancient Christianity who is herself continually confronted with her ignorance because the field that I teach in is just a massive andbroad field. Every time I pick up the text I see something I didn’t see before. I don’t know why I didn’t see before, but I didn’t see it before. Historical knowledge is continually just expanding at a rate so much greater than my own knowledge, and I’m hugely aware of that. Now in terms of the knowledge that we do have, I am reminded of Chrysostom’s great image for this – that being puffed up with knowledge is like having a tumor. He describes elsewhere that people who are ‘puffed up’, for him, are tumors on the body of Christ… sort of the outsized bicep, or a tumor in the pancreas. But the proper response is not to avoid knowledge. After all, as academics, as professors, our knowledge is not just for ourselves, or an end in itself, but is to be for the benefit of new knowledge. Right? I mean, I teach doctoral students. You don’t get a degree if you don’t produce an original contribution to knowledge. Hence, our knowledge should be a resource from which further knowledge can continually be built… One of the best pieces of advice that I ever got on teaching was when I went off to teach high school after college. My college advisor, whom I loved dearly and thought was the smartest person in the world, said to me, “Whatever else you do, don’t present your students with a world that is completed.” Maybe that is what being “puffed up” with your own knowledge does.
R: The only thing that I would add, which I think is a great defining value of the University of Chicago, is the emphasis here on reading really worthwhile texts as both acknowledgement of this problem and one answer to it. A really great text will slap your arrogance in the face if you truly engage it. You read it and feel like you can encapsulate it and guess what, you can’t. When you teach, if you are honest, you are always open to that experience. I’m going to be teaching Samuel Johnson in the spring and it’s probably the fifth or sixth time I’ve taught Samuel Johnson. I love Samuel Johnson. I will be surprised by what I learn in teaching Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare in the spring and every time that happens, that’s a very good thing.
M: …a good point to bring in this relationship between the historical critical and other forms of reading the Bible is that, I think you’ve heard me Warren in [Introduction to the New Testament] I will often say, “people are interpreting the Bible right now in Mitchell hospital in the emergency room.” They’re doing so without benefit of knowing whether Paul wrote 1 Corinthians in 51 or 53 CE. And they are interpreting it in genuine and powerful ways. My series of interpretive moves with the text never exhausts the meaning of the text for any time, let alone for the time in which I’m currently situated. What I think my work is to establish is clear ground rules and forms of argumentation for what a good historical critical argument about this text looks like. One thing that always strikes me, especially in a text about what love is, for one thing is that you may be deeply misled if you think that the way you interpret a text about love is through other words. People are interpreting those texts through actions and lives. Those are forms of Biblical interpretation that… can’t be left out of that equation. That’s not necessarily the work of any class that I teach, but the way I teach need not leave that unacknowledged.
Human beings are not just ideas and they have to live and breathe and cope and religions have understood that for a long time.
W: Inside “Criterion” Anne Knafl writes, “Besides my marriage, graduate school at the U of C is thegreatest commitment I’ve made in my life. Like my marriage it has fundamentally changed the way I see and relate to the world.” Can you say the same thing? Has marriage been one of your greatest challenges? Has it changed, narrowed, or opened the way you understand love, both through marriage itself and through your children?
I’m one of the few, the proud, the geeks!
M: The University of Chicago has been our intellectual home and Hyde Park our family home for over twenty-five years, and it has shaped us as people tremendously. It’s a community and it’s a way of inhabiting the world. I mean, it’s shot through us in so many ways. I think that you know, I, I’m one of the few, the proud, the geeks! I believe in the vision of this university as a community of the mind where you’re only as good as your next idea. Although, boy, that’s hard to live. Sometimes you’d like to rest on your laurels for fifteen seconds. But it doesn’t work that way. You have to be sharp and you have to be up on your game, because you want to be and you want the people around you to be. Now where love comes in: I think for me love and attention go together, that love is where you put focus. There are a lot of things distracting us in this world, but love is where you put your focus. I think that as a scholar, that requisite ability to focus on a particular thing is crucially important, and taking all of your mind, and all of your concentration, I think love is like that. I think that love is focusing on another person, or persons, and giving them the full attention that you have to give.
R: I have a slightly different angle on this, in the sense that the way our children play into my life on a very practical level is that their world, worlds, are not my world in a number of different ways. In the sense that, when I come home from work after being an administrator, or when I pick up one of them after school in the middle of the afternoon, they’ve been in a different place than I’ve been in and they want to tell me about that place. And I want to go there with them. That’s been a real gift of perspective on what it’s like to have an absorbing job. You know, I love having an absorbing job. I wouldn’t have it otherwise. But, I love having kids who very easily and naturally, and straightforwardly, remind me that there are other things going on, and those things are at least as important, if not more so, and so there’s a certain gift involved in that. I really like what you say about attention and love and the close connection between them… But, this business of attention and calling you to attention is a real gift of kids, and I’m very lucky to have had it, because it would be easy not to have that call to attention. I think I would actually be worse at my job if I didn’t have it and that’s been a great gift… just a great gift. Fielding really understood that. Fielding loved marriage, he cared a lot about it. He lost his wife when he was relatively young, and it wounded him deeply. But he wasn’t romantic about marriage life. He just thought that the precious capacity of benevolence was probably best enshrined in family life. I don’t know whether he was right about that or not. I can think of other forms of community that probably can, many of them religious. But that he recognized that is I think the thing that fuels his fiction in a fundamental way. If you as a reader don’t buy into that in some way you have a harder time understanding what he’s doing because the drive to marriage is not by any means just a physical consummation for him. It’s a very deep, but very practical kind of bond. I would say that I side with Fielding on that. I think that’s been a pretty, pretty, important formative influence for me.
I believe in the vision of this university as a community of the mind where you’re only as good as your next idea. Although, boy, that’s hard to live.
M: I think it would be impossible to talk about love and about what it is in our lives without talking about family, without talking about home. Love is really anchored in home in some really, really deep ways… I mean, one thing that’s really curious is of course that the academic life is a life of artificial communities made possible in certain moments in time. But then students graduate, they move on. The ‘now’ is a transitory ‘now’ even though it’s a vital and a wonderful ‘now’. Rick and I are really aware right now that we have seven more years before our girls are living outside of the house. So, in many ways, at the same time as we’re sort of mid-career and our lives at the University are bursting with activity, our home-life is its own nuclear reactor of intense proportions – and for these next seven years, especially! It is not that our family’s going to disintegrate when Nora and Katie are off in college (a permanent community!), but this is a time when the home life that we have is so, just, crucially important in terms of rooting us in the world. On good days, I think, it works well! [R: Oh yeah. I think it works well.] And on the whole. I mean the best advice for anybody is to marry well, and to have splendid kids! [R: Hear, hear! {{affirmative response}}]. Though you know, our kids are pretty amazing, and parenting them is a real joy. And it keeps us from being puffed up!