Interview with Francis X. Clooney: Being Confronted by Texts

Yesterday I was reading up a bit on Max Müller in the context of late-antique Buddhist-Christian exchange via Hellenistic culture. Müller was the Oxford professor of comparative philology who directed the Sacred Books of the East, a monumental 50-volume set of English translations. He also has the distinction of being the first to give the Gifford Lectures at Glasgow (1888-1892). 

While reading up on Müller, I remembered the first time I'd heard of his work, which was during an interview I had of  the Jesuit priest and comparative theologian Francis X. Clooney (Harvard University). That was at a time when I was just starting my PhD at KU Leuven in 2019. I remember that I had to catch Clooney in his hotel lobby near the Leuven train station early on a Saturday morning. He'd been in town for the defense of a doctoral dissertation and it was the only moment he and I could find to meet up to conduct the interview for KU Leuven's Theology Research News. 

Turns out it was worth crawling out of bed and biking to the other side of town early on a muggy May morning! 

That's because it turned out to be a really quite illuminating interview. Some of the points he made have stuck with me ever since as further reinforcing the idea that the basis of good theology is spending time--lots of time (he suggested seven years, though my editor removed that from the article I think!)--with the sources you're working with, and understanding them accurately and therefore sympathetically (if also necessarily critically), before really saying much about them. It's very much the same approach that had drawn me to St. John's College (Annapolis) years before, and has in many ways undergirded my own approach to reading ancient texts.

Anyway, spending 7 years with a text before putting pen to paper is a luxury I can't really afford at this point in my career (I'd rather publish than perish). But the approach and state of mind are absolutely something that I always try to keep alive, and something I try to inspire my colleagues and students with.

Here's a bit of the interview from near the end. Answering one of my questions about a book he'd just published at the time of the interview (Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics: Why and How Deep Learning Still Matters, University of Virginia Press, 2019) he gave his motivation for writing the book thus: 

I respond to the idea that reading texts is too elitist or too narrow, or at least somehow not representative of the admittedly large part of life that is lived outside of texts. I begin by addressing the question of why we read, or ought to read, these texts in the first place. Based on several specific Hindu ritual texts, I argue that if you study a text properly and carefully, you can, in fact, understand it, even if it is stemming from a foreign system and you understand it imperfectly. Reading such a text opens up a whole new world of learning, well beyond the text itself. Every text exists within in a context of other texts. Reading a text is therefore an important way of being drawn into a whole new world.

It is a fact too often overlooked that much of traditional learning—and this is true of almost every traditional human culture—has taken place in a paradigm that consists first of being instructed by a so-called Great Tradition, and second of confronting the truths of that Great Tradition....

To read what comes before and after that, check out my entire interview with Francis X. Clooney here. It's well worth the few minutes it takes to read.

And to learn more about Clooney, see his faculty page here.

Photo: Francis X. Clooney. Photo from the Harvard Divinity School, by Kris Snibbe, Harvard Gazette.