IN TRYING TO DECIDE whether or not to answer one of the large majority of comments in my moderation file that doesn't get posted, I went back to a post I did earlier this year where I linked to a speech given by Adam Morris, the main character in the old BBC 6 part series, The Glittering Prizes. In it the author used what is purported to be a quote by old Bertrand Russell saying that if it would assure eternal bliss for the survivors it would be morally justified to kill all of the Jews, the character referencing it in haranguing a tiny audience of elderly Jewish people for their hatred of Arabs. Along the way, it being an upper-class, college-credentialed Brit milieu in which the thing was written and produced, of course they had to slam religion in general, the Jewish conception of God as elucidated in the Jewish (and by implication, Christian) scriptures as the most blood thirsty and evil entity in all of human history.
In listening to it yesterday it struck me that what was on display was the typically superficial and uninformed, unthinking reading of the Scriptures that is typical of modernism, in which everything is supposed to be taken as if it were a modern political tract or modern history of something instead of something that is to be read with the highest degree of criticism, discovery of flaws and contradictions, trying to figure out what you are to think of the troublesome texts and to come to something far beyond a common-sense, "literal meaning" of what you've just read. I'm sure it would offend those who have what they consider to be a sophisticate's dismissive view of the Scripture and the religion that is an attempt to apply scripture that I think theirs is, actually, an incredibly unsophisticated, simplistic and uniformed view of the whole thing. Not to mention the view required of conformists to a particularly elitist and snobbish clique. There's not much about it that is smart, it takes some of the most basic questions that a child would have about the Scriptures, gives a pat answer to them and stops at that. There's a reason so many atheists will proudly say they had it all figured out when they were nine, or 12 or even 23. Heaven help me if I'd stopped at my understanding of the world when I was 46.
I would say that even for modern political tracts modern history or even scientific paper, reading it as if the meaning of what you're reading gives you anything like a complete or objective view of reality - the standards with which such things are supposed to be produced, is a delusional practice. Nothing that anything any of us writes is free of the fact that they are written out of our previous thinking, the limits of our knowledge, our own life experience and the unconsidered expectations we have - and that's not when they are consciously written to support some theme or agenda. Any responsible reader reads EVERYTHING asking what those are, including not only modern novels such as the one The Glittering Prizes was based on but modern history, science, political and legal document which is by habit and custom to be taken as an attempt at objective reality.
That great philosopher and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel famously said,
As a report about revelation the Bible itself is a midrash
an interpretation. I take that to be an assertion that the Bible is what it certainly is, a collection of humanly produced documents, as such it contains all of the certain biases, inadequacies, flaws and mistakes that any human being will produce and that, at most, it can only be an approximation of the complete truth. In some places it might be very close, in others anything from a distorted reflection to an echo or a shadow or a false conception imposed on and amidst the what comes closer to the truth. I will say that even the Bible itself doesn't claim it is the exclusive such document which attempts to come to a view of reality. God, in the Hebrew Bible says that he has made covenants with other peoples and even the animals, who would have to have had their own view of reality. Even that formerly notably arrogant and exclusive entity, the Roman Catholic Church has come round in the Second Vatican Council to admitting that other religions, even those which are not officially in line with the Jewish-Christian monotheistic tradition have truth in them.
It may have troubled me once that there were four gospels (or more) that purported to be accounts of Jesus, what he did and what he said and, more important, what it meant but I think that multiplicity with its several major and many minor discrepancies produces a more useful and valid conception of what we can never really produce, an absolute and accurate and full picture of what gave rise to Christianity, the person who Jesus was, his nature, the relationship of the Redeemer to the Creator and the Sanctifier (to use a feminist expression of the human conception of God as a trinity of persons, one of many such possible and valid conceptions of it).
None of us is capable of encompassing the entirety of much of anything except our own experience and our experience cannot be all encompassing. In asking whether or not some computer algorithm that can predict the most efficient form of protein folding but which no human being could contain in their own memory and put to use really is "understanding" I was riffing off of something I wrote a long time ago about the eight dimensional figure that a large team of mathematicians using many computers linked together came up with. I remember when I read that if printed out on paper the mathematical description would cover Manhattan was when I realized that the idea that any human mind could encompass such a thing was absurd and so wondered at anyone believing that they had understanding of it - not to mention how anyone could check it reliably in the way of old fashioned mathematical proof. If that's true for one eight-dimensional figure, which may not exist anywhere in reality, it is literally infinitely true for God.
And that is the problem with the utilitarian concept that we could ever calculate "the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people" in determining what we are to do as an ersatz, scientific, mathematical replacement for revealed morality. There is no human capacity for determining what that is in any one generation, there is no way to know if, once, as Russell asserted all the Jews were exterminated if the remnant, or a very large number of them, may sense the horror of what they did and that it would forever haunt them, as it should. And what kind of people would they be if they forgot what they did in all of its evil and all of its depravity as a means of producing the happiness of the surviving population, something which Hitler promised the Aryans they'd get by the various extermination programs he undertook, from the disabled to the Jews, the Slaves, the Roma, etc. It is something that Darwin explicitly said would be gotten for the survivors if through passive negligence the poor died off in large numbers - he got that idea from the depraved parson Thomas Malthus - and through active means, his enthusiasm for British imperialism wiping out native Peoples, to be replaced by Brits as he believed happened in North America, Australia, Tasmania and elsewhere.
So, no, it doesn't much trouble me that there is no one picture of Jesus in the Bible and that the figure of Moses is unproven in archeology or in the records kept by other civilizations in the Mediterranean East. I am, perhaps, a bit out of keeping with the up and came, already old-fashioned modernist view of such things that "Moses was a myth." because I doubt anyone would come up with such a radical view of reality, unprecedented in so many aspects, except for a single prophet speaking out of their experience of revelation. Whether or not the entire setting that The Law and its being given is accurate, that central conception of Justice and of the God who insists on that Justice in response to human experience and depravity is why I believe there was such a person through whom that Law was given, though I don't believe that there necessarily was as large a population of runaway slaves or that their eventual domination of a part of Palestine happened through the bloody conquest described after Exodus in the canon.
Nor do I think that utilitarianism or Darwinism are anything like a replacement for it, they are the negation of morality, not a more scientific and mathematically secure articulation of it.
Maybe I'll try to concentrate on Heschel this next year. I wish I'd gotten started on this when I was a teenager but, no, I had to get distracted by modernist bull shit, stupidly believing it was a more reliable guide. It isn't, no more than a literalist, fundamentalist or Magisterial view of the Scripture would be. One of Heschel's conclusions that I value the most is that God would appear to favor a pluralistic understanding of religion.
One of my favorite lines is the atheist who claims "I"ve READ the Bible!"
ReplyDeleteYeah, and I've read a mechanical engineering text on internal combustion, where the description of the process gets down to the molecular level. That doesn't mean I understood it, because I have no training in mechanical engineering. Much as Richard Dawkins has no training in genetics, but thinks he's identified the "selfish gene." I don't think Dawkins even claims to have read the Bible; he just claims expertise because he's British.
Nice work if you can get it.
Everything comes with a context. The high praise for the importance of "The Iliad" in Western culture came out of a deep study and a century or so of scholarship focussed on ancient Greece. It isn't considered all that important by generations who can't place it in its historical context. I think it is important; but it's not important on its own.
Consider the sequoias, which we all think should be preserved (or most of us think so, anyway). We think them important because of Romanticism; because Wordsworth and Shelley taught us to look at nature in a way unique in human history, a way we can't shake off now (or if we do, we do it for mercantile reasons, which are profoundly anti-Romantic). We may say they are important ecologically (i.e., "scientifically") but that argument is rooted in the naturalism of Thoreau, who was in turn a product of American Romanticism, running some 50 years behind Britain at the time but still caught up on the revolution in human thought Romanticism started (and which hasn't finished yet).
Context, as Forster said, is all.
So you have "read" the Bible? Have you read "Ulysses"? "Remembrance of Things Past"? "Moby Dick"? You can't read any of them correctly out of context, as things intelligible to you because you can read. Reading is interpretation. If you read "Beowulf," do you understand it as Tolkien interpreted it? Do you understand it at all? ( explain the hero to my students by comparing him to Batman: an ordinary human with extraordinary abilities, mostly arising from his will, and nothing else. That's how I teach them to "read" "Beowulf." Do you understand the Wife of Bath's tale if you don't understand something about 14th century England? How do you even understand the trip to Canterbury, without context?
But you've "read" the Bible.
Feh. Children read primers, read "Dick and Jane" stories (in my day). They get from them what their teachers tell them to get. GB Shaw was a famous autodidact; yet he wasn't all the well educated, and it showed in his plays and his polemics. He read; he didn't necessarily understand.
(cont'd)
ReplyDeleteEducation is not a matter of guiding you to the "right" conclusions. It is, properly, a matter of guiding you away from the conclusions you want to jump to, the ones easiest at hand, the ones so simple you don't have to think twice about them. To properly read anything, the Bible included, you have to be educated into it. Which is not to say "brainwashed" into it. There are plenty of Biblical scholars who are atheists, or seem like 'virtual' atheists, especially in contrast to the Bible-thumpers who have "read" the Bible, too. But "reading" is an interpretive task; and if you haven't studied interpretation, if you don't read yourself as you simultaneously read any written work, if you don't have the faintest glimmer of background knowledge to apply to the work in question, you can't "read" it at all.
I have an Edward Gorey book at my elbow as I type. If I don't understand Gothic tropes and 19th century novels, do I understand Gorey? I may read the book; but without that background knowledge, I'm just reading at it. I'm not understand a thing about it.
People who tell me they have "read" the Bible are telling me they are ignorant, and they are happy in their ignorance. I'm not impressed by such willfull displays of failure.