2. Utopia as an Ideal Type
2.5. Using an ideal type to read utopia in the Bible
Most scholars investigating utopia as literature or as an impulse link it to classical Greek works such as Plato’s Laws and The Republic (this link is made explicit in Thomas More’s Utopia), and to the Bible. 169 The obvious anachronism of seeing utopian themes in the Bible is simply that the utopian convention or genre was not invented as such until Utopia, and it seems as
Menard’s fragmentary Quixote. Darko Suvin calls the idea that a text changes its meaning when it is chronologically displaced the ‘“The Pierre Menard’ syndrome or law” in Suvin, “Theses on Dystopia 2001,” 190. T.S. Eliot advocates the periodical reappraisal of a cultural canon, due to perspective changes: “What we observe is partly the same scene, but in a different and more distant perspective; there are new and strange objects in the foreground, to be drawn accurately in proportion to the more familiar ones which now approach the horizon, where all but the most eminent become invisible to the naked eye.” T.S. Eliot, Points of View (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), 11.
168 This is not usually considered to be prohibitively problematic, for example by those reading Bible as utopia: Steven Schweitzer, Reading Utopia in Chronicles (T & T Clark International, 2009). Boer, Novel Histories. Aichele and Pippin, Violence, Utopia, and the Kingdom of God.
169 Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, 33. Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Boer, Novel Histories, 122. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, 65. Mohawk, Utopian Legacies. Vita Fortunati, “The Metamorphosis of the Apocalyptic Myth: From Utopia to Science Fiction,” in Utopias and the Millennium, ed.
Stephen Bann and Krishan Kumar (London: Reaktion, 1993), 82.
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though the Bible cannot be utopia proper. Many scholars find ways to avoid this anachronism, for example by referring to utopian material in the Bible, such as the Garden of Eden, as proto-utopias that have had an influence on the modern genre of utopia. The notion of paradise, according to Manuel & Manuel, is a
“prolegomenon and perennial accompaniment to utopia” and the “deepest archaeological layer of Western Utopia”.170
Kumar, too, sees modern literary utopias as to some degree indebted to images from the Bible. The transformations the images of the utopian genre undergo are noted, and he proposes to differentiate between the modern genre of utopia and its literary roots:
[The modern utopia] inherits classical and Christian forms and themes, but it transforms them into a distinctive novelty, a distinctive literary genre carrying a distinctive social philosophy.171
Kumar provides a statement on the anachronism of reading Bible as utopia.
He says that “there is not, properly speaking, either a classical or a Christian utopia.”172
There is a distinct linearity in the image drawn from archaeology which the Manuels employ and in these statements by Kumar: biblical ideas of paradise, heaven, and similar notions have had an influence on modern utopia, which, however, is distinct from its forebears. In this linear approach only a unilateral influence appears to be possible. The Bible influences utopia, but utopia is barred from being comparable to the Bible, because of its “distinctive novelty”
(Kumar) and its invention in the year 1516.
I want to challenge the notion of simple linearity of influence, but I also agree with Roland Boer, who, similar to Kumar, states that a genre such as utopia has “cultural precursors”.173 Boer speaks of a risk when interpreting biblical books as utopia, the risk of “making eternal a genre whose features are tied to the specific socio-political context in which they have arisen.”174 There is indeed a risk of doing just that. However, this flexible approach does not rely on
170 Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World, 33.
171 Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia, 3.
172 Ibid.
173 Boer, Novel Histories, 122.
174 Ibid.
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strict genre definitions. It acknowledges that there are dissimilarities alongside the family resemblances.
The reader or interpreter of a text plays a crucial role in giving it meaning.
The contemporary reader brings modern or even postmodern175 ideas to any text, with little regard for where exactly each text is located on a linear chronological timeline.
An approach that seems to bridge the gap between the linear-chronological approach of unilateral influence and the Borgesian approach of mutual influence even of a 21st century text on the Bible, is expressed by John C. Mohawk.
Although he agrees that utopian movements arise in specific contexts, he argues against regarding utopian thought and utopian movements as isolated occurrences tied to a specific context. He sees utopian movements as entering cultural memory – the “fabric of culture”176 – even after their peak of popularity has passed: “In fact, elements of utopian ideology born in one age and context are known to persist and may be pursued by future generations in completely different contexts.”177
Although this is not a completely a-chronistic or non-linear approach, it is more open to claiming that mutual influences are possible, because the “fabric of culture”, which a reader will draw upon, contains both consciousness of 21st century popular culture and (more or less) knowledge of biblical texts. By entering the “fabric of culture”, the thought enters a public domain beyond linearity of theorists, historians, or literary critics. Utopian images may be re-appropriated in different times by different readers, and a utopian story (proto-utopian or (proto-utopian) may not remain safely in its supposed specific past context but can be transmitted into a different context. Utopian images in the Bible,
175 Scholars prefer using different terms, such as “late modernity”, “reflexive modernity”,
“second modernity”, or “late capitalism” to describe the contemporary era. Terminology will be different depending on whose theories one chooses to work with. It should be acknowledged that theories and categories are not eternal and that there is a move away from dual categories: “The
‘secularization of secularity’ demonstrates the end of the ‘either-or’ conceptual framework of classical modernity and the emergence of the ‘both-and’ which Beck sees as the leitmotif of reflexive modernization.” Simon Speck, “Ulrich Beck’s ‘Reflecting Faith’: Individualization, Religion and the Desecularization of Reflexive Modernity,” Sociology 47, no. 1 (February 1, 2013): 162, doi:10.1177/0038038512448564.
176 Mohawk, Utopian Legacies, 3.
177 Ibid.
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then, seem to be doubly likely to be transmitted and re-appropriated in very different contexts by a variety of readers.178
With an ideal type that relies on family resemblance rather than being preoccupied with linear influences, and drawing on Borges’ “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” and “Kafka and His Precursors”, the answer to whether there is utopia proper in the Bible is that there is utopia in the Bible, if we can see it there. Seeing the images there, does not make the “genre eternal”,179 it just puts them into a useful hypothetical dialogue with other utopian images.