Laudator Temporis Acti

Rafaele Torella, "Pratyabhijñā and Philology," Journal of the American Oriental Society 133.4 (October-December, 2013), pp. 705-713 (at 706):

Spiritual experience is poured into a complex śāstric text, and to understand it we must turn primarily to textual tools or, to use a word perhaps no longer very popular in the contemporary American academy, to philology. Years ago, invited to deliver an Infinity Lecture at the University of Hawaii, I received a warning from my host, Prof. Arindam Chakrabarti, about not being too philological in my exposition (“You must understand, we are in a Philosophy Department”). The next day I started my lecture with a praise of philology, understood in the highest sense as a discipline that, by using paleographic, linguistic, historical, and hermeneutic tools, aims at establishing and understanding a text, (re-)placing it within its contemporary cultural parameters. As a rhetorical device to counteract the common identification of philology with something very boring, old, dusty, ugly, etc., I asked the audience whether they had ever seen the so-called Primavera (Spring) by Botticelli. Well, recent studies have shown that that beautiful and sensual young girl surrounded by flowers in the center of the painting in actual fact represents Philologia—the whole scene coming from Martianus Capella’s De Nuptiis Mercurii and Philologiae, a work very highly praised at the court of Lorenzo il Magnifico. In it, we meet Apollo giving advice to his brother Mercury, tired at last of his bachelor status: “Leave Goddesses aside and marry Philologia instead; she is human, agreed, but among humans she is the closest to the stars.”

Id. (at 707):

I am well aware that making emendations and corrections to manuscripts is a widespread practice nowadays, perhaps even too widespread. Our ancestors aptly called the highest case of textual criticism divinatio. However, the question is “Can everybody afford divinationes?” Behind any bold emendation lies the unspoken belief: “If I cannot understand a passage, it is because the passage is corrupt.” A very risky statement, indeed . . . I remember one of my students, many years ago, whose translation into Italian of the Spandapradīpikā by Bhāgavata Utpala contained an impressive amount of corrections to the edited text: whenever he did not understand the text (which happened frequently due to his being a rather poor Sanskritist) he corrected the not-always-easy text to adapt it to his imperfect understanding. Unflinching self-consciousness and self-criticism—in other words a precise awareness of his limits—would be of substantial help to the emendor by making him at least more cautious in his job.