Jonathan A.C. Brown Quote

When a work becomes canonical its internal order and logic are guaranteed by the collective will of the canonical community. Its consonance with the known truths and reality outside the text is similarly committed to. What Frank Kermode referred to as the Principle of Complementarity is the willed assumption of the community that has invested value and meaning in a text that the text must make sense within itself and against its extratextual surroundings.9 It cannot suffer from senseless internal contradictions. It cannot clash with what is known to be true outside the text. What the biblical scholar Moshe Halbertal termed the Principle of Charity is the willingness of a canonical community to read its texts in the best possible light and in a way that defuses or elides contradictions with truth or order.

Jonathan A.C. Brown

When a work becomes canonical its internal order and logic are guaranteed by the collective will of the canonical community. Its consonance with the known truths and reality outside the text is similarly committed to. What Frank Kermode referred to as the Principle of Complementarity is the willed assumption of the community that has invested value and meaning in a text that the text must make sense within itself and against its extratextual surroundings.9 It cannot suffer from senseless internal contradictions. It cannot clash with what is known to be true outside the text. What the biblical scholar Moshe Halbertal termed the Principle of Charity is the willingness of a canonical community to read its texts in the best possible light and in a way that defuses or elides contradictions with truth or order.

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About Jonathan A.C. Brown

Jonathan Andrew Cleveland Brown, born August 7, 1977, is a university academic and American scholar of Islamic studies. Since 2012, he has served as an associate professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He holds the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University.
Brown is an advisor to the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, where he formerly served as Director of Research.