What Are We Doing Here? Page 8

  Language changes, and language conserves itself. We human beings are the language makers, of course, but efforts like these to change it respond to an awareness that in very important ways language creates us. At best we try to suppress demeaning words because they are powerful—they effect the ways in which people are perceived and also their perceptions of themselves. We are seeing now that there are those who react to the use of such words as an assertion of power, something to be admired, something to be reclaimed. In other words, while a slur has no intrinsic meaning—think of the thousands of slurs coined for and by the hundreds of ethnic groups that make up this country—its power lies in the fact that where it is used an individual will not be considered in his or her own right, that the traits attributed to a disfavored group will be applied to her, dismissing out of hand her claims to respect, her circumstances, her achievements, which are in any case seen to be compromised by race or gender. It seems that we have, in this country at this time, an experience of disempowerment in a significant part of the population, and that the old despotisms of disparagement and abuse are reasserting their claims because they have retained the power of old injustices, no matter how far society may have moved in a better direction. The schoolyard wisdom is wrong. Words can be very like sticks and stones—crude weapons that are always ready to hand. The use of them requires no skill at all.

  I mention this to make the point that, as present experience illustrates with painful clarity, we are profoundly enmeshed in language. Slurs have their power because we all acknowledge the kind of meaning they have, in the very fact of our recoiling from their use. So they live on.

  What has crude, assaultive language to do with the odd assortment of pagans and pagan deities whose names, after millennia, haunt our calendar? What have either of these to do with the fact that there are words and concepts that do indeed fade out of use, despite the fact that we might sometimes feel the lack of them? Language is a universe. Its elements are truly various—given, to use a favorite word of mine. They act eccentrically in time. They elude generalization.

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  I have been thinking about the phrase “the divine.” I cannot remember the last time I heard it in the context of religion. It is not synonymous with “the sacred,” or “the holy,” certainly not with “the spiritual.” It is different from all these in that it refers directly to God, or, in the Latin of pagan antiquity, to a god. If we suppose that it has become rare because our vision of ultimate reality no longer centers on a divine being, this is an epochal change, certainly. We in the West tend to imagine that changes in our thinking are advances of some kind, or are at least made inevitable in consequence of cultural or material evolution. In the most horrifying period of recent Western history, when Europe might well have been entering a new dark age, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that his was “a world come of age,” which must be offered a “religionless Christianity.” I take him to have meant, or at least to have been exploring the idea, that for Christianity to survive in modern culture, it must be relieved of its burden of ritual and myth. Bonhoeffer was a brilliant writer and an exemplary man. But it is difficult to understand how he could have seen collective maturity in a civilization then giving itself over to the myths and cults of an imagined primitivity and to the active rehabilitation of Norse barbarism.

  In any case, this interpretation of modern culture as qualitatively changed by a new maturity outlasted the bizarre mutations that might seem to have challenged it, and will outlast them again, no doubt, since we have no reason at all to assume that they will not reemerge in one form or another, or are not reemerging now. If the West has an enduring faith in any one idea, it is that the West advances, that is to say, that it matures in the direction of enlightenment, with all this entails in terms of the loss of illusion and the rejection of error. We stigmatize what we feel we must reject, and this discourages a reappraisal.

  As we do this, we build the thinking of an earlier period into our understanding of the world, when by the logic of our assumptions we should be as scrupulously aware of the potential for error in conclusions drawn fifty or a hundred years ago as of those drawn a thousand years ago. The errors of the long modern period might seem subtler to our eye than those of earlier centuries, but there is no reason to assume that they are less consequential.

  What is myth, after all? It is narrative that conveys a kind of truth by nonliteral means. This is a definition meant to exclude the influence of a common second sense of the word, that a myth is unreal, untrue. Setting this aside for the moment, I will suggest that the primary meaning of the word myth as it has been applied to Christianity would be: those elements of the religion that it has in common with other religions. The ascendant West was ill at ease with the resemblance of its religion to non-Western religions. In its likeness to them Christianity must be primitive. Therefore these elements were to be eliminated to conform Christianity to the worldview of a mature civilization. If myth, or mythos, were really thought of as a higher, more complex articulation of truth that is in principle available to being restated in other terms, then there is nothing about it to embarrass or offend the rational mind. If it is the “truth” it proposes that is rejected, this is another issue entirely, in which myth as such is not implicated. Rather, the religion itself is tacitly called into question.

  “The divine,” divinitas, is a concept for which pagan Rome had a word Christianity could adopt without modification. To speak of the divinity of Christ has always meant not that he was a sacred or holy or spiritual man, though these things were true of him, but that he, uniquely, participated in the nature of God altogether, that he was God. And that he is God, since this is not the kind of statement that admits of a true past tense. The Incarnation, the Trinity—these are names for things in which divinity as Christianity has long understood it is expressed and very tentatively described. It should not scandalize us people of the third millennium when language that reaches toward the essentially true departs from the standards of comprehensibility we would apply to experience—acknowledging, of course, that our experience is a brilliant translation of the infinite and volatile complexities of Being itself into a world and universe that, remarkably or providentially, seem to lie within our grasp. Science before the twentieth century supported the assumption that reason was, as the physicists say, flat, that like the laws of nature its rules were the same everywhere and in all circumstances, and that whatever they could not countenance was an error, a primitive survival, a mystification. Then along came quantum physics, relativity, a theory of cosmic origins, and science ever since has been continuously at work at a new poetry, trying to capture something of the startling elegance, novel to our eyes, that eventuates in everything that is. Crucially assisted by dark matter, of course, which seems to hold the heavens together and about which little else can at present be said. Only grant that a great, creating holiness is at the center of it all, and one must arrive at something like the extraordinary language in which the ancients invested their perceptions. For the ancients the great, creative holiness was the intuition, the conception, that forced their language so far beyond the limits of the commonplace. Science departed from its origins in religion not so very long ago. If these two great thought systems are not now once again reaching a place of convergence, the fault lies with religion, which, in a fit of defensive panic, has abandoned its profoundest insights and has never reclaimed them.

  In the book of Acts, Paul, speaking to the Athenians, quotes one of their own poets, perhaps Epimenides, in invoking the God “in Whom we live and move and have our being.” He recognized that behind all the idolatry there was a metaphysics. Christianity, as it spread into the world, seems to have assumed this. It adopts the generic word for God in the pagan languages, Deus in Latin, God or Gott in Germanic northern Europe. Whatever error might be liable to come with the use of a word associated for many centuries with Venus or Neptune, Thor or Woden, this did not weigh against a consensus about the reality of the divine acr
oss these very different cultures.

  There is a precedent for this in the Bible itself. The first verse of Genesis reads “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” The word god translates very precisely the Hebrew Elohim, a plural form of a generic word for God or gods, angels or powers, in the Semitic languages of the ancient Near East. The name given to Moses at the burning bush, the Tetragrammaton, modifies Elohim in the second creation narrative, but in the first, the word appears without a modifier. A respectful reading might see this as reflecting an understanding of the emergence of Being as the act of a divine power whose reality is a human intuition as broadly shared as the affinity of languages will allow the text to express. El is the name of the god at the head of the Canaanite pantheon. The God of the Bible is called El in some poetic contexts. Many scholars see this as evidence of syncretism, or of a polytheism lurking behind the declared monotheism of the Hebrew Bible.

  But the analogy to our own use of the word god should suggest otherwise. The controversy between science and religion comes down to a familiar question: Is there a god? That is, is there an intentional power expressed in the existence of things? If the character of this power were to be modified by the name and the traditions surrounding any particular deity, this would not change either the question or the answer, nor would the metaphysical implications of the answer be fundamentally different either way. If Babylonian Marduk is at the center of Being, heavens and earth are to be thought of as made from the corpse of a great serpent and humankind is an afterthought, tolerated for its usefulness in building temples and offering sacrifices. If the god the scholars call Yahweh is at the center, his creation is good, humankind bears his image and is the object of his deep attention and his care. These are great differences with profound implications, yet secondary in significance to that more basic question, whether there is a god, whether reality in itself is or is not of a kind to require an affirmative answer. I do not mean to imply that any sufficient proof can ever be adduced on one side or the other of the question, only that one or the other must be true and must always have been true.

  Many of the religious among us have abandoned the divine as a concept, attempting to find a compromise position, which, in the nature of the case, doesn’t exist. Anthropologists can speak as fluently as theologians of the sacred or the holy or the spiritual, taking them to be an artifact of culture if nothing else. For these scholars, patterns of behavior are sufficient proof that the terms are appropriate. The divine, by comparison, is a phrase that asserts the existence of a god or gods—that is, of a mode of Being not conjured from human fear or hope but prior to and independent of humankind, and profoundly efficacious, to be understood by tentative analogy to human consciousness, which it utterly transcends. The divine is understood to confer sanctity. It is acknowledged in the authority of the sacred but cannot be, so to speak, captured by it. All the temples to Zeus and all the statues of him were not to be taken for Zeus himself.

  Say that this understanding of the divine was very broadly shared in the ancient world. Are these grounds for treating it as myth in any invidious sense? The modern West passed through its period of triumphalism, which has not ended yet, relegating all that was not modern or Western to the status of error, however pretty or interesting it might be in particular instances. Through most of this period, till well into the twentieth century, science rejected what much of antiquity knew, which is that the universe had a beginning. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks in Hesiod’s Theogony, and the ancient Hebrews each tell the tale very differently, which suggests that it arose not from mutual influence but from the independent intuition of an original act or moment somehow still palpable after the billions of years that had already passed before the ancients began their speculations. These ancestors are not at all remote from us in cosmic time, of course, and the physical world we see, if we wander a little distance from its pavements and enclosures, is for all purposes the same world. We reasoned ourselves away from the perception of it as emergent at the same time that we began to think of our own ancient text as mythic in a pejorative sense. Our best minds knew less about reality than Moses would have told them.

  This tendency toward dismissiveness persists. It seized the rhetorical high ground perhaps two hundred years ago and has never relinquished it. The anxiety it inspires in some quarters has yielded a literalism that is brutally disrespectful of the text. Among nonliteralists it has produced an evasiveness that shies away from the text, and from theological tradition as well. In many cases what is intended as resistance to literalism tacitly concedes the legitimacy of literalism because sophisticated assumptions about the ancient and the mythic make reductionist readings seem inevitable. The new atheists, claiming the authority of science, go on about the old man with a white beard seated on a cloud, or they chuckle and scold at the thought of an imaginary friend. The response among the pious has been in some cases to put Adam on a dinosaur, proposing a science of their own. There is little to choose between the two. In both cases there is a radical rejection of the language of the sublime, that is, of the divine. In neither case is there any conception of the beautiful. Say what one will about religion through the millennia, it has yielded a great bounty of art in every kind. When King Solomon set about building the great Temple in Jerusalem where the Lord would put his name, he brought in foreign craftsmen who built something very like the temples of their own gods. Presumably, to the eye of Solomon and all Israel, in its sacred architecture pagan culture could and did evoke holiness and sublimity of a kind appropriate to the Temple of the God of Israel. This is the kind of thing that is regularly seen as evidence of syncretism and interpreted as evidence that the whole of the religion of Israel came together piecemeal from surrounding influences. There is an impulse to debunk in academic writing that is so long established as to be unconscious in many instances. The impulse is only more persistent because it is now taken to be the tone and substance of disinterested scholarship, a correction against the biases of traditional piety that need not concern itself with biases of its own. And the fact is that Israel lived in a swarming world surrounded by cultural kindred absorbed in their own rituals and myths. They lived in history, like any other people.

  But every argument for syncretism can also be taken as evidence that Israel saw a true sense of the sacred in the surrounding cultures—not in the particulars of their beliefs and practices but in the more primary fact that they had an intuition of the divine that did indeed bear some analogy to Israel’s. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul says this about pagans and their religions:

  What can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles. (I:19–23)

  God has shown himself to mankind plainly in his creation. The pagans know God, but their knowledge of him is warped and distracted by idolatry, worship of the creature rather than the creator. So the main point is established clearly here that behind all the passionate differences and all the polemics there is, in however fragmentary a form, a shared and true perception of the divine. Time forbids the citing of numerous texts to the same effect to be found in the Hebrew Bible, a natural consequence of its monotheism. The Athenians ask Paul to tell them something new and he responds by telling them something timeless. He says, God himself “gives to all men life and breath and everything.” And he quotes from another Greek poet, Aratus, who says of God: “For we are indeed his offspring.” Seen in this light, the similarities between Israelite and other religions should seem unembarrassed, a recognition and acknowledgment, not proof of cult
ural or textual pilfering. Above all, there should be no disparagement of implied claims of the religion of Abraham and Moses to immediate and original knowledge of God when all knowledge of God, insofar as it retains some character of truth, must be immediate and original—God has shown it to humankind in the things that have been made.

  Let us say that there are grounds for speaking of the divine as mythic. It structures and characterizes reality, in the way of myth. It asserts the existence of a Being or beings aloof from time who bear some likeness to humankind. It implants concepts like virtue and transgression so deeply in reality that reality responds to them as part of its own fabric. It is like myth in that it has scale. It refers to duration no human will ever experience. It refers to eternity, thinking past the extreme finitude of birth and death.

  And it considers the heavens. God only knows what night looked like when the last lamp went out in Babylon or Jerusalem or in Calvin’s mountainous Geneva, and the great host of stars, innumerable as the sands of the sea, claimed its place in the firmament. On the one hand, since Galileo people have worked with passionate diligence to understand and observe the heavens, and what a sight they are. We have looked into Melvillean nurseries, and glimpsed the births of stars that came into being many millions of years ago, an odd privilege of our relation to space and time. We do these things that are the unimaginable realizations of antiquity’s old longing, and there is scarcely a poem or a prayer by way of celebration. “It moves us not—great God, I’d rather be a pagan.” That is Wordsworth, of course, who need not have wished for more than to be a Christian or a Jew in a place and time where the revelatory character of creation was acknowledged. But he is right, all in all. It is the absence of divinity that dehumanizes nature. There is nothing paradoxical in this thought.