Lost in (politically correct) translation: the challenge of biblical #hierarchy

Sometimes, a change in the translation of just a few Scriptural words can attest a potential cultural shift of incalculable importance.  In the case I am about to discuss the change doesn’t simply ‘attest’ the shift, it can guide us to a deeper sense of its significance – of what may really be at stake. 

I have in mind the translation of verses 3-8 of Psalm 8.  So, here are the verses.  I place the crucial words in bold.  First, we have the Revised Standard Version (RSV):

                When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,

                The moon and the stars which thou hast established;

                What is man that thou art mindful of him,

                And the son of man that thou dost care for him?

                Yet thou hast made him little less than God,

                And dost crown him with glory and honour.

                Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;

                Thou hast put all things under his feet,

                All sheep and oxen,

                And also the beasts of the field.

Now here are the same verses in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV, anglicized):

                When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

                The moon and the stars that you have established;

                What are human beings that you are mindful of them,

                Mortals that you care for them?

                Yet you have made them a little lower than God.

                And crowned them with glory and honour.

                You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;

                You have put all things under their feet,

                All sheep and oxen,

                And also the beasts of the field.

Were we to bring these changes to the attention of the translators, we would no doubt be told that the underlying issue here is a tension between a desire to uphold the poetic qualities of the text (surely no question which scores higher on that count), and the requirements of ‘politically correct language’.  We just have to make a ‘literary’ sacrifice in deference to contemporary political sensibilities.  At all events, it’s only a matter of language.

Actually, I disagree.  Or, at least, I can agree with such an analysis only once it is admitted that the term ‘political correctness’, as used here, masks an issue of enormous substance – an issue that is revealingly swept under the carpet by its relegation to the category of ‘language alone’.

We need to wake up to what that issue is – in short, to what is actually at stake in the ‘linguistic’ substitutions of the NRSV.

For me personally, this was brought home recently, when I read an excellent text by the French writer and aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.  Here is the relevant passage:

For lack of an effective method of thought (my emphasis), we have lost our grasp of Humanity founded upon Man, and slid towards that anthill which is founded upon the sum of individuals.

What could we offer against the religion of the State or the religion of the Masses? (Exupéry is writing against the background of WWII totalitarianism.)  What had become of our great image of Man born of God?  It was scarcely recognizable through a vocabulary drained of its substance.

Little by little, forgetting Man, we limited our ethical concerns to the problems of the individual.  We required of each man that he wrong no other.  Of each stone (of a metaphorical cathedral) that it wrong no other.  And certainly, when they are lying jumbled in a field they do each other no wrong.  But they are wronging the cathedral which they could have created, and which, in return, would have created their significance.

We continued to preach the equality of men.  But having forgotten Man, we no longer understood anything of what we were saying ….

How apposite, I reflected, in relation to the NRSV’s mangling of Psalm 8!  ‘Having forgotten Man, we no longer understand anything of what we are saying!’

In other words, for St Exupery, ‘Man’ is not just the complementary term to ‘woman’; it encompasses what is common to both terms, ‘man’ and ‘woman’, and – by the same mysterious property of encompassment – a human ‘essence’ that is common to each and every individual of whatever gender.  The NRSV has lost what anthropologists have called the property of encompassment, that of speaking in personal terms of humanity in general.  ‘Man’, is not just ‘people in general’, but ‘the human being’: not, in other words, a mass in of individuals, but a collective human agent.  On the other hand, the NRSV gains, as our writer puts it, ‘that each man wrong no other’ – the equality of all, that is, including the equality of man and woman.  In short, we have strongly asserted individual ‘rights’, but at the cost of excluding from our ‘ethical concern’ whatever transcends the human individual in the direction of a potential collective dimension of the human. This, broadly, is what we achieve through the pronominal substitutions of the NRSV!  And it is no merely verbal change.

So, what is the alternative, implied by the authentic Psalm 8 and Saint-Exupéry’s text?  What is that ‘effective method of thought’ of which he speaks – that ‘method of thought’, whose loss from paradigmatic instance of our Psalm 8, as I have argued, underlies not just the substitution of prose for poetry, but the emptying out of much of the Psalm’s religious meaning?

If you asked Exupéry (sadly, now long deceased!), he would say Catholic Christianity.  This is made clear by references in the same text (Flight to Arras).  From the perspective of Christianity with its penchant for teleological exegesis, the most obvious – and probably important – loss to religious sense entailed by the adoption of the NRSV’s correct language is the prefiguration of Christ as the fulfilment of ‘man’ and the ‘son of man’ in his relationship to God.  From a teleological and typological perspective, ‘human beings’ just doesn’t cut it – while ‘mortals’ is more suggestive of the world of Homer and Pindar!  

But, actually, that ‘effective method of thought’ is not just Christianity (though Christianity happens to be a good instance of it).  It is hierarchy as defined by Louis Dumont and important recent studies in social anthropology.  This is a properly religious phenomenon, rather than a specifically Christian one, and its progressive evacuation from contemporary secular culture places an enormous obstacle in the way of our appreciation of any religious world view – not to mention Christianity or the text of Psalm 8.  In other words, before the secular world can understand ‘Christ’, it needs to understand ‘Man’. 

Here, I would suggest, the social anthropology of Dumont and his disciplines can do something to help – if not to bridge the epistemic gap, then at least to assist us in identifying those strands of our developing cultural scene that present would-be Christian apologists with their greatest ideological challenge.  It can be helpful, after all, to know one’s enemies!

What, then, does Dumontian social anthropology understand – and contemporary secular thinking utterly abjure – when it uses the term ‘hierarchy’?

Conveniently, for present purposes, Dumont famously explains his notion of hierarchy through precisely the instance we have just been discussing in relation to Psalm 8: namely, the opposition – the ‘hierarchical’ opposition – man:woman’.  The opposition is hierarchical, he argues, because, while, at one level (a hierarchically lower one), the terms are opposites, at another (a hierarchically higher one), the term ‘man’ encompasses and subsumes the term ‘women’.  In other words, at a hierarchically higher level of meaning, ‘man’ means ‘man:woman’.  Thus, if we want to refer to the human creature in its generality, we say ‘man’; whereas we reserve the term ‘woman’ for contexts in which we want to foreground her differences from ‘man’.  ‘Man’, as the encompassing term, is, therefore, in Dumont’s parlance, the ‘superior’ term of the hierarchical opposition, while ‘woman’ is the inferior.

For hierarchical cultures, such as the world of the Old Testament and the New, this understanding of hierarchical encompassment is far from being merely verbal.  St Paul, I would suspect, really does think of ‘man’ as being the human being in its generality (as before God); whereas ‘woman’ is ‘man’ (i.e. the human in its generality) plus what differentiates us, i.e. the sexual reproductive bits!  Nowadays, of course, we think of the sexual reproductive function as divided between man and woman.  St Paul’s culture seems to have thought of the reproductive function as given later, and on top of, the human essence, or as a kind of supplement to it.  This is signified, I take it, by the story of Eve being drawn out of Adam’s side.  What is excluded by this order of generation – very importantly, I think for the Judaic and Christian religion – is the possibility of sacralising sexual difference, as the source of our (human) being.  This would presumably be the implication, for St Paul, of reversing that order, and making Adam emerge from Eve’s womb!

Hierarchical oppositions tend to occur, not in isolation, but in nested chains, where the superior term at the lower level becomes the inferior term at the higher.  Dumont’s examples of this tend to be taken from the Indian caste system, which happens to be the object of his ethnographic studies.  But we find an excellent Christian example of the same thing in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians:

But I want you to understand that Christ is head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife, and God is the head of Christ.

The language of head and body is a classic give-away so far as hierarchy is concerned.  What we find in this passage is the distinction of different hierarchical levels, each of which demonstrates an analogical pattern.  In other words, what Christ is to man, at the higher level, man is to his wife, at the lower.  ‘Man’ is the superior term at the lower level, where opposed to woman, but at the higher, where ‘man’ encompasses and subsumes ‘woman’, becomes the inferior term in of hierarchically higher-level opposition that places him in relation to Christ.

Relationships of this kind are not just a feature of the kind of societies we think of as particularly hierarchical or ‘patriarchal’, but of religious cultures and societies pretty much everywhere, as has been brilliantly demonstrated by the recent work of ‘Dumontian’ social anthropologists focussing indigenous groups we might be tempted to think of as relatively more egalitarian such as in Melanesia.  Moreover, the language of hierarchy and encompassment is by no means exclusive to the professed followers of Dumont, but emerges in a surprisingly wide range of anthropological work, such as that of Marilyn Strathern.

Granted all this, then, how, as Christian apologists, are we to respond?

Other related blogs:

ANGELA SAINI: HOW MEN CAME TO RULE

MATERIAL GIRLS: WHY CULTURE MATTERS FOR FEMINIST REALITY