UPPSALA, SCHOOL OF EXEGESIS. — A school of Lutheran exegesis that emerged during and after the last world war, led by Ivan Engnell of the University of U., which, owing to the singular fascination of its central "message," continues to increase its international influence, despite the even severe criticisms to which it has been subjected. Its most complete and most up-to-date expression is the biblical dictionary Svenskt Bibliiskt Uppslagsverk (2 vols., Gävle 1948 and 1952).
With much emphasis the exegetical school of U. professes itself "realistic," and even "unprejudiced." Abandoning "modern European interpretation," it wishes to return to the simple ancient-Oriental facts. It considers the historical-critical school of Wellhausen (v.) enemy number one, repeatedly condemned as "evolutionistic," launched as it was by the Hegelian W. Vatke (1806-82); this school would have disastrously led everything astray in biblical exegesis, introducing a modern conception of the "book," binding the observed facts to an aprioristic system of values, at the head of which was placed the "ethical monotheism of the prophets," mixing exegesis with "anachronistic" phantasmagorias, which have no foundation prior to the 19th century. Besides Wellhausen, his critic H. Gunkel must also be "de-Westernized," since he still describes the literary genres (v.) of the Old Testament too much "according to a typically Western conception of the book" (I, col. 558).
I. Engnell strives to arrive at an Orientalist exegesis of the Bible, and on this point he extols the merits of the comparativist school of religions of W. Bousset and H. Gressmann, although, since it too has not always respected the special character of ancient-Oriental religion, it does not escape from the ranks of the enemies of the "revolution against evolutionism" (II, col. 888). To arrive, according to Engnell, at a realistic exegesis, that is, one that strives to read the sacred texts in the manner of the first hearers or readers, accurate philological analysis is not enough. One must make utterly clear to oneself the conception of the book of that time, still accompanied by oral tradition, which could even serve to correct the book; this is not a tradition of the common people, but of specialists, in the temples: oral and written tradition, in the East, was born in the temple, as a "booklet" or "legend" read or performed during a rite. Besides the philological analysis of the text and of the "forms" or genres, one must also carry out the analysis of the "history of ideas" and that of the "religious history" of that world, believed to be homogeneous, ancient-Oriental: the ancient East as a unity of cultural morphology is the fundamental concept of Uppsala hermeneutics.
The exegetical school of U. arrives at this concept by noting the existence of remarkable similarities among all the components of that most religious cultural sphere, for example, between Egypt of the Old Kingdom and Mesopotamia of the 3rd millennium B.C. But in interpreting those similarities it uses an intuitive method, not the causal one that seems obvious to us, which proceeds by admitting prehistoric "contacts," such as commercial relations, on the occasion of which culture or an equivalent stimulus would have spread. If the convergences are numerous in quantity or stand out in quality at several points, one might think that both similar cultures derive, as daughters of the same mother, from a more remote culture in time. If such convergences occur for certain elementary things among peoples in similar conditions of life (for example, in irrigated fields), one may think that human nature in equal conditions produces similar things, and after very extensive research conducted with rigorous method on the facts that establish such relations, one may attempt the sketch of the true "cultural history."
Engnell, however, arrives at his conception more through a vivid intuition starting from all the archaeological and philological material remaining from the ancient East than through a causal path. He calls four sciences to his aid: history of religion, which gathers a vast material; religious sociology, which deals with the social structures corresponding to certain "types" of religion; religious psychology, which with its experiments or its analyses examines the typical relations between religion and life; the last is the most important: religious phenomenology, which describes religious phenomena, among which also the "ideas" in themselves, without paying attention to relations of origin, to consequences, to evaluations. Engnell's intuition thus reaches a very simple content of the whole ancient-Oriental religion, called "the real idea." The king of the ancient East has religious significance, that is, he is the protagonist of the greatest rite: the renewal of fertile life at the New Year. On that occasion, in a liturgy in 5 acts, the king implores and effects abundance and blessing from heaven: the death of the old corrupted life is enacted with the dramatic representation of the death and resurrection of the god (Tammūz); the creation of the world is recited or represented scenically, with a ritual combat in which primordial monsters and their retinue are defeated: the present enemies; to obtain fertility the rite of the sacred marriage is performed; the gods are led in triumphal procession, which signifies the triumph of the risen god. Around this rite, according to Engnell, the whole ancient-Oriental life revolves: secondary is the "myth," born from the "text" of this rite, secondary the feasts in the course of the year (they repeat some particular trait of the New Year rite), secondary the social functions of the divinized king, for example, the works he does to promote the well-being of the people, his judgments, the war against enemies; everything reflects the ritual action celebrated at the New Year. Literature, whether written or oral, with all its genres: tales of stories and of history, hymns, lamentations, are derivatives of that great rite of the divinized king; in which rite the exegetical school of U. places the origin of laws, of religious conceptions, of the original prophetism of Israel (visionaries who see the destinies fixed at the New Year, and secondarily during the year), even of the messianic faith: the hope in the king who will bring the total renewal of life. However, Engnell concedes that there was in Israel an "anti-Canaanite" movement, during which the rites and the position of the king were theologized first by the priests (already in the "Tetrateuch," the first work of "traditional" history in Israel: Gen., Ex., Lev., Num.) and then, more radically, in the unitary work of the "Deuteronomist" (all the historical books from Deuteronomy through Kings inclusive), in which there are not infrequently passages unfavorable to the king, and finally, with even more vehemence, in the prophetic books, with their stubborn anti-monarchical struggle, and in the work of the Chronicler, while many psalms still evoke the original "schema" of the New Year rite. In the other works of the Old Testament the rite and the corresponding ideology of the divinized king are found in the "disintegrated" stage. The task of biblical hermeneutics is to recompose and reintegrate it, with all the means of modern science, first of all philological and archaeological, of the ancient East.
One must recognize the considerable merits of the exegetical school of U., which usefully invites us to deepen the science of the ancient East: also according to the Divino afflante Spiritu (v.), one must immerse oneself in the knowledge of the things of the East, to the point of not running the risk of falling into a merely European interpretation. It must also be praised for having reintroduced into the discussion of the problem of the Pentateuch (v.) and of the other biblical books the concept of "oral tradition," and for having shown that a stable "redaction" of some text is possible even using only oral means.
On the other hand, it is not permissible to associate oneself with the partial positivism or skepticism of the school. Ethnography, even prehistoric ethnography, proceeding by the causal path indicated above, has elaborated a logic which, with moderate confidence, can be employed. In treating the concept of primitive monotheism, for example, Engnell (II, col. 889) labels Fr. W. Schmidt an "a priorist," without granting him the merit of having established a method and gathered concrete data for cultural history, which present a probability or certainty far superior to that of the special and extremely difficult problem of primitive monotheism.
That almost universal ritualism, extended to the entire culture of the Old and even of the New Testament, appears to be based on a great exaggeration. The "reintegration" of the schema in texts in which it would be very "disintegrated" can lend itself to incredible arbitrariness. This demonstrates that a logical defect has been committed. The reintegration of a substantially pagan rite into the Bible cannot be the aim and end of exegesis, whose interpretation one wishes to remove from the analogy of faith, practiced since the times prescribed in the history of exegesis. Nor can one, in principle, reduce the ancient East to a "pan-ritic" expression of the solemn rite of the New Year. That rite is indeed a most important center; but God stands at the center of creation in every sense. Therefore the total importance attributed to that rite must be denied, on account of which the school, although it desires it, does not sufficiently evaluate the differences among the individual peoples, periods, texts, and remnants of the ancient East. For anyone who takes account of all those differences, the unitary intuition of the exegetical school of Uppsala is not necessary; there are many other autonomous components of religious, civil, and social life.
Although it calls itself "unprejudiced," the exegetical school of Uppsala is really Lutheran in nature. Engnell ought to concede that he, like Luther, wishes to carry out his own "reform" of modern exegesis, reacting against modern German idealism, which has infiltrated exegesis, in a manner not entirely dissimilar from that with which Luther reacted against the "Greek element" introduced especially through Christian Aristotelianism. Like Luther, Engnell too underwent some "conversion experience," that is, of the very simple reality of the rite of the divinized king at the New Year, once which is admitted, exegesis is easily justified as impregnated with Oriental reality; whoever does not admit it, on the other hand, is accused of introducing gnoseological and metaphysical principles which Engnell calls "a prioristic" and which all the orientalist works of such exegetes will never justify, lacking the "intuitive" and "ritualistic" faith which for him constitutes the sole organon lepiticon of exegetical reality. Engnell's exegesis thus has the advantage of a strong faith in a simplifying message of a moving rite, which explains its success, but it must make one cautious because of the danger that a "revolution" always entails, which, while bringing much good, at some point does not respect the dignity of human reason. Much more than Engnell does, one must acknowledge the analogy of faith in Scripture and tradition, and the history of exegesis must not be considered a mere succession of the errors of human reason.
Predecessors of the exegetical school of Uppsala were the Myth and ritual school (S. H. Hooke and others) in England, as well as S. Mowinckel in Oslo and others in Scandinavia, who refer everything, especially the Psalms, to a naturistic social ritual centered on the king.