Faith & Spirit Quote by Howard Nemerov

Nemerov’s compliment is barbed: he praises the Bible the way a novelist might praise a myth outline. “Nice” lands with a poet’s dry understatement, instantly reframing scripture not as a ledger of events but as a brilliantly economical text engineered for retelling. The sly pivot is “doesn’t give you too many facts.” In a culture that often treats the Bible as a forensic document, Nemerov points to its artful refusal to satisfy the modern appetite for data. That restraint isn’t a flaw; it’s a narrative technology.

“Two an a half lines” (the slipshod phrasing feels intentionally conversational) emphasizes how little raw material some foundational stories actually provide. Genesis, the Nativity, the Passion: scenes we picture in cinematic detail, despite the source offering spare stage directions. Nemerov’s subtext is that interpretation isn’t an unfortunate side effect of scripture; it’s the point. The text creates a vacancy that communities, artists, and institutions rush to occupy.

The last clause twists the knife: “a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.” Freedom sounds benign until you hear the quiet implication of power. Whoever gets to “elaborate” gets to steer doctrine, morality, and social norms. Mid-century poets like Nemerov, suspicious of grand certainties, understood how stories gain authority not by overwhelming us with evidence but by inviting us to participate in their completion. The Bible’s endurance, he suggests, is partly an aesthetic achievement: strategic ambiguity that keeps generating meaning, and keeps being claimed as history.