Writing and reading the canons.(Literature)

CANONS DON'T suddenly appear. They evolve. Their evolution influences how we write and read them. There's a chicken-and-egg scenario here. What comes first, a canonical text or its ideology and aesthetic? If we believe in divinity and inspiration, we can say the shape of a canon, and what a canon shapes, is divinely inspired. But we also need to account for human determination and discernment. We determine what characteristics canons have, whether we write or read them. We discern which texts ought to be included or excluded. This process of giving forms and attaching meanings to idea and art applies to the sacred canon, and to the novels once thought essential to the curriculum (the secular canon, that elephant in the room).

The existence of the secular canon, and its relationship with the meta-narrative, is contended. Are authors still writing with an eye towards it? Are we still canonising their literature? Can the novel that interrogates the meta-narrative still be canonical? The answer to all these questions is yes. This article offers four reflections: on the construction of divinity in the sacred canon, written to represent classical metaphysics; on the construction of humanity in the secular canon, written to interrogate classical metaphysics; on Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, a novel that simultaneously represents and interrogates classical metaphysics in a canonical way; and, on the resilience of the secular canon in an age where some read novels instead of scripture and some go to book club instead of church.

CANONICAL DIVINITY

THERE ARE THREE SETS of books in the Jewish canon: Torah (Pentateuch), Nevi'im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). Tradition ascribes divine authorship to the Torah, through Moses, but many scholars believe different communities compiled it over a long period. Those who finalised the Jewish canon, somewhere between the exile and the first century BCE, excluded apocryphal texts they didn't consider to be divinely inspired. The principal difference between the Jewish canon and what Christians once called the Old Testament is that some Christian traditions accept the Apocrypha as canonical while others take the Jewish view.

The first thing to notice about the Christian canon is its acceptance of the Jewish canon--especially the Jewish revelation of God's nature and manner of dealing with creation--as the precondition on which its further revelation depends. The second thing to notice is the evolutionary process, similar to that of the Jewish canon, through which Christian canonisers decided, from a variety of competing texts, what texts authentically represented their Christology. Here's another chicken-and-egg scenario. What comes first, canonical Christology or the texts that represent it?

The shaping of the Christian canon was a hermeneutical struggle among various Jewish and Gentile communities to represent their personal experience of Jesus the man or their historical understanding of the Christ event. From the breadth of Christian writings, we know that emerging Christology ranged from the orthodox, as orthodoxy came to be defined, to the heterodox, as heterodoxy came to be defined. Looking at the four canonical gospels, the Christologically-related Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) had an easy passage into the canon while the passage of the Fourth Gospel (John) was more difficult.

The Gnostic gospels were excluded from the canon because of their heterodox Christology, and for literary reasons as well since there's a fundamental relationship between aesthetic and ideology. Compared with other writings, canonical scripture functions as great literature as well as sound theology. Non-canonical writings function as another kind of literature altogether, regardless of the ideas they represent. Comparisons are odious but they're still made when shaping canons. In the sacred canon, there are literary as well as theological reasons for including the Gospel of Luke and excluding the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. In the secular canon, there are literary as well as philosophical reasons for including Mansfield Park and excluding The Da Vinci Code.