Elizabeth Costello полностью

There are, if she is to guess from the block of black-garbed young people behind her, some two hundred degrees in the humanities to be handed out. But first it is the turn of Blanche, the sole honorary graduand. She is introduced to the assembly. Clad in the scarlet gown of a doctor, a teacher, she stands before them, hands clasped, while the university orator reads out the record of a life's achievements. Then she is led to the Chancellor's seat. She bends a knee, and the deed is done. Long applause. Sister Bridget Costello, Bride of Christ and Doctor of Letters, who by her life and works has restored lustre, for a while, to the name of missionary.

She takes her place at the lectern. Time for her to say her piece, Bridget, Blanche.

'Chancellor,' she says, 'respected members of the University:

'You honour me here this morning, and I gratefully acknowledge the honour, which I accept on behalf not of myself but of those scores of people who for the past half-century have dedicated their labour and their love to the children of Marianhill and through those little ones to Our Lord.

'The form in which you have chosen to honour us is the form you are most easy with, the award of an academic degree, specifically what you call a doctorate in litterae humaniores, humane letters or, more loosely, the humanities. At the risk of telling you things you know better than I, I would like to use this opportunity to say something about the humanities, about their history and their present situation; also something about humanity. What I have to say may be relevant, I humbly hope, to the situation in which you as servants of the humanities find yourself, in Africa but in the wider world too, namely an embattled situation.

'We must sometimes be cruel to be kind, so let me begin by reminding you that it was not the university that gave birth to what we today call the humanities but what, to be more historically accurate, I will henceforth call the studia humanitatis or humane studies, studies in man and the nature of man, as distinct from studia divinitatis, studies pertaining to the divine. The university did not give birth to humane studies, nor, when the university eventually accepted humane studies in its scholarly ambit, did it provide a particularly nurturing home to them. On the contrary, the university embraced humane studies only in an arid, narrowed form. That narrowed form was textual scholarship; the history of humane studies in the university from the fifteenth century onwards is so tightly bound up with the history of textual scholarship that they may as well be called the same thing.

'Since I do not have all morning (your Dean asked me to limit myself to fifteen minutes at the utmost – "at the utmost" are his own words), I will say what I want to say without the step-by-step reasoning and the historical evidence to which you, as a gathering of students and scholars, are entitled.

'Textual scholarship, I would want to say if I had more time, was the living breath of humane studies while humane studies were what we can properly call a movement in history, namely the humanist movement. But it did not take long for the living breath in textual scholarship to be snuffed out. The story of textual scholarship since then has been the story of one effort after another to resuscitate that life, in vain.

'The text for the sake of which textual scholarship was invented was the Bible. Textual scholars saw themselves as servants in the recovery of the true message of the Bible, specifically the true teaching of Jesus. The figure they employed to describe their work was the figure of rebirth or resurrection. The reader of the New Testament was to encounter face to face for the first time the risen, reborn Christ, Christus renascens, obscured no longer by a veil of scholastic gloss and commentary. It was with this goal in mind that scholars taught themselves first Greek, then Hebrew, then (later) other languages of the Near East. Textual scholarship meant, first, the recovery of the true text, then the true translation of that text; and true translation turned out to be inseparable from true interpretation, just as true interpretation turned out to be inseparable from true understanding of the cultural and historical matrix from which the text had emerged. That is how linguistic studies, literary studies (as studies in interpretation), cultural studies and historical studies – the studies that form the core of the so-called humanities – came to be bound up together.

'Why, you may justly ask, call this constellation of studies devoted to the recovery of the true word of the Lord studia humcmitatis? Asking this question will, it turns out, be much the same as asking, Why did the studia humanitatis come into flower only in the fifteenth century of our dispensation and not hundreds of years earlier?