Free The Ritual of New Creation by Norman Finkelstein Page B

interpretation is its own truth, though it cannot find its own truth except through the anteriority of the text it must interpret.
Bloom's Gnostic revision of Jewish commentary finally leads to what is for me the most significant question posed by his work: what does the appropriation of religious categories for secular and humanistic purposes indicate about the current state of literary culture? Mileur touches upon this problem when he analyzes Bloom's treatment of authoritative religious texts as "poetry," considering such treatment as "a synecdoche for that privileged vantage point from which beliefs are depersonalized into humanistic values." If such is the case, then "literary humanism covertly draws on the resources of religion in order to enforce the primacy of humanistic 'values' over religious beliefs and to separate value from belief and attach it to reason." 68 In the main I think Mileur is correct here: Bloom is obviously

 

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a secular humanist rather than a believer, though whether a "Gnostic" humanist values reason any more than normative belief remains an open question. To be sure, Bloom turns religion into poetry, but he is equally guilty of turning poetry into religion. His promiscuous application of the revisionary ratios indicates that, in his reading method and choice of texts, he seeks to determine neither religious belief nor humanistic values; what matters for Bloom is willful choice, the personal authority that comes from "crossing over," and much less the final position where one comes to rest.
Caught between his nostalgic longing for authority and his remorseless education in the ways in which authority undermines and negates itself, Bloom chooses to celebrate the hard-won victories of the pneuma (the Gnostic "spark" or soul), though he cannot help but mourn the fact that the uncovering of such victories depends upon the endless examination of the fallen, created self in a literary history that is of the Demiurge's making. Bloom is right to insist on the strength of ancient paradigms: he is his own best example of the way in which a modern, secular humanist seeks, like a Kabbalist, to raise the sparks of the shattered vessels. The sparks consist of nothing less than the texts Bloom interpretsremember, "From our perspective, religion is spilled poetry." Literature has experienced a breaking of the vessels; it must be raised up out of it fallen or spilled religious condition. That this is in itself a profoundly religious process reveals the inescapable double bind in which Bloom is caught; and I would further argue that in this predicament he is an excellent representative of modern literary culture.
A sage is one who knows, but more importantly, a sage is also one who remembers. Although he would probably deny it, Bloom longs for the impossible act of tikkun that would restore the entire textual cosmos, an act of criticism above and beyond the mere gestures toward tikkun he finds in individual texts. We may say then that Bloom remembers forward, and that is what we must expect of our sages as we wander toward what appears to be a post-literate world. Scholem speaks of the messianic idea in Judaism as constantly moving between the restorative and the utopian. I celebrate and mourn the work of Harold Bloom, which is caught forever in that heart-breaking dialectic.

 

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Chapter 3
Gershom Scholem and Literary Criticism
Why, given the eclectic nature of today's literary studies, does Gershom Scholem have so few readers? Or, to phrase the question more precisely, why have so few critics attempted to make use of Scholem's work? The fact that he deals with a difficult and esoteric subject can hardly serve as a reason: difficult and esoteric voices in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and political science have a siren-like effect on the present generation of readers. Indeed, as a widely acknowledged monument of both historiography and philology, Scholem's work should naturally attract not