Donal Revell reviews Eric Hoffman’s Come and See – A Verse Interpretation of the Gospel of John.
St. John proclaims his holy Gospel to all believers, and to unbelievers so that they may become believers, and yet he begins by speaking of God in terms higher than anyone had ever used before. —Meister Eckhart
There is indeed an altitude to the Gospel of John, an air rarified almost to the point of opacity, that makes discussion, much less evaluation, of any “translation” haphazard at best and hapless at the worst. John’s is the Gospel of faith’s mystery, the chronicle of a music more than of a ministry. And what is the chronicle of any music but its sound already disappearing into the opacities of air? As George Herbert said of church music, “I in you without a body move.” How and what does one translate without a body? Eric Hoffman proposes the only credible method: the lyric. Lyric, at home in the ephemeral and evanescent, can follow where scholarship would only stumble and exegesis merely misconstrue. In his introduction to Come and See, Hoffman asserts that “what Jesus represents above all else to humanity is their capacity to recognize that eternal life already exists.” Lyric must always begin with what is already there; and lyric continues only via the persistence of a question: what is there to do? As the issue in John’s Gospel is eternal life, the there is mysterious, and all modes of conduct therefore without precedent or fixed pattern. Only lyric suffices. Sufficient unto the lyric is the occasion thereof. If Hoffman is to succeed, he must somehow manage to be both mystified and sure. We comprehend what we believe, not what we know. Lyric is incalculable and thus competent to those regions of unlikeness in which believing makes new sounds. Please note that I say “new” and not “better.” Ever since Psalms, gratuitousness has been the lyric’s major key. It was again Meister Eckhart who, when asked “Why are you doing that?” replied “I do it because I do it.”
