On Sampling and Scripture

The front matter of my Vulgate for pleasure-reading—the Colunga-Turrado edition from the Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos series—includes a selection of Magisterial documents relating to Sacred Scripture. One section includes the responses and declarations of the Pontifical Biblical Commission (or, as it was once known, “the Pontifical Commission on Biblical Things,” Pontifica Commissio de Re Biblica), instituted by Pope Leo XIII on October 30, 1902. A number of the early responses are considered infamous in exegetical circles for their rejection of historical-critical methods of exegesis; such methods later received an allowance in Pope Pius XII’s Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943).

Amidst the more famous responses, such as “On the Mosaic Authorship of the Pentateuch” (1906), and “On the Historical Character of the First Three Chapters of Genesis” (1909), I noticed one I hadn’t heard of before, the very first response given by the Commission, which I translate below (Latin original here):

Regarding Implicit Citations Contained in Sacred Scripture

(February 13, 1905)

Acta Sanctae Sedis 37 (1904-1905), p. 666

When, in order to have a directive norm for those studying Sacred Scripture, the following question was proposed to the Pontifical Commission on Biblical Things, namely:

Whether, in order to clarify the difficulties which occur in some texts of Sacred Scripture, which are seen to refer to historical facts, it is permitted for the Catholic exegete to assert that one is dealing, in these [texts], with tacit or implicit citations of documents written by an un-inspired author, all of whose assertions the inspired author by no means intends to approve or make his own, which, therefore, cannot be held to be immune from error?

The aforesaid Commission, in response, decreed:

Negative, except in the case in which, the sense and judgment of the Church being preserved, it is proved by solid arguments: 1) that the sacred writer has truly cited the sayings or documents of another; and 2) that he did not approve or make them his own, wherefore it is lawfully decreed that he did not speak in his own name.

What interested me about this response is how it relates to the modern idea of the “remix” or “mashup.” I recently read Lawrence Lessig’s Remix, which discusses this concept and how remix creators should be legally protected from copyright strikes. What Lessig has in mind is something like the music sampling, as used (most prominently) in hip-hop music. Typically, in sampling, the source of the sample, or citation, is obvious. Think of how Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” sampled the bass line of the David Bowie and Queen collaboration “Under Pressure,” or how M.C. Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This” sampled the riff of Rick James’ “Super Freak.” Theoretically, a musical sample need not be so obvious: Lessig gives the example of a sampler plucking out the particular playing of a single chord in a unique orchestral recording—quite subtle, if used on its own. A short enough sample, or a heavy enough layering of samples, can make it hard to pick out sources. So it is in the album Paul’s Boutique, by the Beastie Boys and the Dust Brothers, or in the work of Lessig’s particular favorite, the mash-up artist Girl Talk. Such heavy sampling is often done without copyright clearance (thus being a form of “plunderphonics,” to use John Oswald’s term).

But what I am focused on here is not the copyright issues, but the concept of sampling or citation in itself. As I said, in modern sampling or mash-ups, the original source is often quite easily distinguishable. This is because modern audio technology makes it very easy to sample, not just the rhythm or melody of chords, but the original recording itself.

Sampling need not be so obvious, though: one can sample the structure of the word, the script, and not just the performance itself. This has long been the case in music: classical music has often sample folk melodies, such as the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts” found in Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, or most of the melodies from Johannes Brahms’ Hungarian Dances. A particular favorite of mine is Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus, based on a melody best-known for its pairing with the hymn, “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say.” These are clear-cut examples: others are less so. Did Antonin Dvořák actually sample the melodies of African-American spirituals in Symphony No. 9, or was he simply inspired by their rhythm and melodical tendencies, as in his Slavonic Dances? Even in the cases where melodical samplings are obvious, there is still an abstraction here compared to modern digital sampling. It is easier to incorporate a textual citation (and I consider sheet music a text) than a recorded citation, a performance: it is easier to make the former one’s own.

And, of course, citations like this go far beyond music. Visual art can cite and sample, sometimes by including literal copies of an entire artwork (Van Gogh included miniatures of some of his portraits in his Bedroom at Arles), sometimes by incorporating fragments of a work, or color schemes, or shapes and framing (as in some of Kehinde Wiley’s paintings, replicating the stance and arrangement of famous portraits, often regal or noble). And, in text, sampling is even more prevalent. Think of the poets’ proverb: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” (This is T.S. Eliot’s version, though many others have their own spin on it, often applying to artists in general, not just poets in particular.)

Text is (typically) clearly structured and laid out; it is easy to dissect, to cut up, sometimes literally, as William S. Burroughs did. A clear example is seen in Raymond Queneau’s A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems: ten sonnets with each line printed on separate strips, and each line having the same ending rhyme, so that any fourteen lines, from any source sonnet, can be rearranged into a new sonnet, with the title of the work giving the possible number of permutations (10¹⁴). Most textual sampling is more judicious, though, with the writer writing much of his own material, and then garnishing it with select quotations; even if the quotations are more integral to the core of the work, it is typical for the majority of the writing to be original to the writer.

Yet even this “original” writing is not free from sampling. Every writer unknowingly samples as he writes: as he reads and listens to those around him, his mind unwittingly snips phrases and sayings and hides them away in the treasure-house of the mind. When he pulls them out later, in the course of his writing, he often doesn’t even know he’s doing it. Unconscious plagiarism is commonplace. And when we broaden beyond mere identical strings of words to structures, to arrangements of phrases, the borrowing becomes even more frequent.

But is sampling—voluntary or involuntary—merely plagiarization, a copying of another’s work and claiming it as one’s own? Absolutely not.

When the “mature poet steals,” he is not doing so in order to pawn off stolen goods. He is no mere forger. (Though some would even argue that forgery can be artistic and original: see the interesting discussions in Byung-Chul Han’s Shanzai: Deconstruction in Chinese.) Where a mature artist steals a jewel, he does so to put it in his own setting; even if he stole the setting as well, by selecting those two distinct pieces and joining them together, he has made his own piece of art. That selection is itself an artistic process. That is why Francis Palgrave’s Golden Treasury is more than just a pile of stolen poems: it is a curated treasury, and that curation is itself an original work. (Whether Palgrave’s curation was good or not is a separate issue.)

The citing artist is thus making the citation part of his work. If the citation is clearly framed, he could be using it as a counterpoint, and not necessarily part of his own view; if the citation is subtler, maybe even unwitting, then the citer is often making it his own.

Thus, after this journey of a thousand steps, we are back to the stodgy Vatican document with which I began. For the question that was asked of the Commission was—reworded—this: “When the sacred author cites, do the words become his own, or do they remain another’s?” The Commission declares that the presumption should be, “The words are his own”: “owned until proven quoted.” The sacred authors were men: we do not believe in dictated inspiration, the Holy Spirit whispering the exact words in the author’s ear, as He does with chant in many icons of St. Gregory the Great. We believe in dual authorship: Scripture is truly God-inspired and God-written, but it was written by (or through, as Scripture itself often says) the human authors as well. These men wrote in their own, distinct ways (hence why Julius Wellhausen and his descendants have some rationale for their attempts to divide up the Pentateuch by various author); they used their own wits to write. This means that, like all writers, they will have some citations, voluntary or involuntary. The Book of Proverbs, for instance, has many passages that are startlingly close to an ancient Egyptian work, the Instruction of Amenemope (c. 13^th-11^th centuries BC). Did the sacred author (traditionally Solomon) knowingly copy down parts of this text, thinking them worthy of Godly wisdom? Or did these old proverbs he’d heard in his youth hide in his mind and come forth when he began to write out proverbs of his own?

The Commission says that citations can only be considered as citations proper if they are 1) directly known to be the words of another and 2) set in contradistinction by the sacred author. Nietzsche says, “God is dead.” My citation makes it clear that the words belong to another (#1); but have I made the contradistinction clear? The Commission said that “it must be proved...that [the author] did not approve or make them his own (sua facere).” An unwitting citation is a case where the author “makes them his own”; if he declares the author that he’s citing from, then we should generally assume the words have not “been made his own.” Yet that is not enough to exempt them from inerrancy: if the sacred author cites without disapproving, then the citations are covered under inerrancy. Jude’s Epistle references some apocryphal work discussing a debate between Michael the Archangel and the devil over the body of Moses (v. 9): though St. Jude is clearly citing someone else (“Michael the archangel...said”), thus fulfilling #1, and, since the citation is distinct, I would say he is clearly not making the words his own (#2.2), yet there is no indication that he disapproves (#2.1); thus, per the Commission’s criteria, it seems this quotation would still fall under inerrancy.

(Interestingly, scholars aren’t sure which apocryphal book Jude is citing: Origen said he was quoting the Assumption of Moses, but we only have a partial Latin translation of the work. Other scholars think he is conflating or misremembering episodes from the Apocalypse of Moses, the Book of Enoch, or Zechariah 3.)

To try to wrap all this up, I think the Commission’s response translated above is a recognition of the ubiquity of sampling, of citation, in artistry. (And Scripture is a collection of sacred artworks.) The artist often so merges the sample—frequently through unwittingness—into his work that he truly “makes it his own”: the sample becomes part of his own artwork. Even a clear, distinct sample, though, is not because of that a negation of artistry. The Commission says that if the author does not clearly disapprove of a sample, then it is such a part of the artwork that it acquires the work’s inerrancy. Inerrancy is what the Commission is focused on, so, if a sample is distinct and disapproved, then the sample in itself is not inerrant. Yet that does not exempt it from being part of the artwork. The disapproval itself is incorporated into the work; the oppositional structure is part of the artist’s artistry. The manifesto of the ungodly men in Wis 2 is part of the artwork; it is included so that it can be refuted: “Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them, and they did not know the secret purposes of God, nor hope for the wages of holiness, nor discern the prize for blameless souls” (Wis 2:21-22 RSV-CE). A similar case is found in the friends’ speeches in the Book of Job; so, too, is the nihilism found in much of the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Sampling is not always approval, but sampling is always artistry, in the secular as in the Scriptural.

 

Note: Fr. E.F. Sutcliffe's English translations of the early responses of the Pontifical Biblical Commission can be found at Catholic Apologetics Information. 

Text ©2024 Brandon P. Otto.  Licensed via CC BY-NC.  Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the author.