Those who know me know my background is literature, not science. This is an essay gathering my thoughts around the insights of a literary approach to interpretation.
Why deal with the Bible as literature in Origins Theology? Basically, what truly distinguishes theologies of origins is neither the evidence of science, nor the testimony of scripture, but what we believe scripture is saying to us. And that comes from the kind of literature we think scripture is.
There is probably no better guide to a literary approach to the Bible than the late Northrop Frye http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Frye. Frye won international acclaim for his pioneering work in literary criticism. He was, by no means, the first literary critic, but he was the first to develop a theory of literary criticism, which he elucidated in his magnum opus Anatomy of Criticism. He was especially interested in the Bible, not only as literature in its own right, but also in the way it had impacted English literature as a whole. It was always his ambition to apply to the Bible the principles of literary criticism which he had developed. To that end he developed and taught the very popular Bible and English Literature undergrad class at Victoria College, University of Toronto, for 30 years. Eventually, he gathered the essentials of his thought into two volumes: The Great Code: The Bible and English Literature and Words of Power.
Early in The Great Code, Frye refers to the work of Giambattista Vico. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Vico
Vico was an early theorist on human civilizations. According to Wikipedia,
Relying on a complex etymology, Vico argues in the Scienza Nuova that civilization develops in a recurring cycle (ricorso) of three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human. Each age exhibits distinct political and social features and can be characterized by master tropes or figures of language.
The divine phase
In all the great civilizations of antiquity, the first creative literature is poetry. Writing was used earlier for mundane tasks such as keeping records of inventories, taxes collected, deeds and contracts. But literature as an art first appears as poetry. And from India to Greece the pre-eminent poetic form was the mythological epic. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the Enuma Elish and the story of Gilgamesh, the Iliad and Odyssey---these were not the only literature of the time, but these enshrined the characters, the events, the images and concepts repeated ad infinitum in other poetry and other works of art. The epics supremely, both reflected and shaped a worldview. The chief protagonists of the epic myths were deities, hence, Vico refers to this phase as divine. Indeed, the original sense of the Greek term mythos was a story about the gods.
There are many ways in which we can characterize this worldview, but one of its most prominent features is that it presents the world as an experience of metaphor. By this I do not mean that the literature used a lot of metaphors, but rather that the world itself and its contents were held to be metaphors. It is a worldview that is simultaneously aware of the world of sense and the world of spirit and sees each as implicit in the other. The gods of paganism, for example, are natural metaphors. Ra is the sun and the sun is Ra. Heaven and earth are a dual vision of the same reality; the affairs of heaven are lived out as well in the affairs of earth and vice versa. A war between nations is also a war in heaven between their respective deities. And the quarrels of the Greek gods are lived in the history of the Greeks. Even in the lesser realm of daily common life, the world of nature is a world of spirits. A tree is not just a tree; it is also a spiritual being, a dryad.
This dual vision had a focal point in the king who was also the chief god of the nation. The king as god was a concept that endured from ancient times into the Roman empire.
The noble (aka heroic) phase
The paradigm shift that leads into this phase originates in early Greek philosophical literature. Contrary to epic poetry, this is prose literature in the style of Platos Symposium. In such works the parameters of logic and deduction were generated and the art form of the argument developed. Non-fiction prose literature of the next millennium and more produces philosophy, apologetics and systematic theology. A quintessential feature of such literature is abstraction.
In the divine phase, the spiritual world is experienced in the concrete particularity of the physical world. In this phase, the spiritual world is experienced as an ideal abstracted from the concrete particularity of the world of sense. The connection between the ideal form and the concrete particular is one of shared essence. To know the essence of a thing is to know what it really is; but no particular thing is a perfect or complete instance of its essence. The essence has to be deduced by abstraction from the many imperfect physical exemplars of it. So the metaphorical experience of the divine worldview gives way to a view characterized by metonymy. A physical being is not a spiritual being. But it can stand for and point to a spiritual reality beyond itself.
This concept of the world of sense as representative of, though not identical to, the world of metaphysics gives rise to a fiction in which the figure of allegory becomes prominent. The characters and events in a story stand for and represent ideals and concepts. The protagonists are not the gods themselves, but ideal humans. We get the literature of the heroic quest, of the knight-seeking the Holy Grail, of the dragon-slayer, of the hidden but rightful king to be revealed in due time. From these aspects of the literature, Vico calls this phase noble or "heroic".
The human phase
The modern worldview begins with the premise that common sense is to be valued. We may not appreciate today what a paradigm shift that once was. But for those in ancient and medieval civilizations common not only meant not rare; it also meant not noble. And what was not noble was of no interest to those who were. If anything, it was to be despised, not valued. So making the common a focus of literary attention signals a real change of direction. This is the same sort of shift that moved the political order from the divine right of kings to democracy.
In this worldview, empirical description becomes the mode of discourse. To describe the physical properties of a tree is to provide complete information about the tree. No notice is taken of its spiritual aspect, as in the first or metaphorical view. No inquiry is made into its metaphysical essence as in the second or metonymical view. The tree is a physical entity and to know its physical properties is all that is necessary.
But this discourse of empirical description ought not to be confused with the naïve realism that accepts phenomena without question. Following the lead of Francis Bacon, the third phase empiricist understands that nature holds secrets we are unaware of at first glance. We need to investigate nature to discover the true description of reality. So modernism is inevitably wedded to science and scientific method.
But what is most notable about this third phase is the absence of any sense of metaphysical or spiritual reality. The world of phenomena, which was a metaphor in early civilization, and a guide to what lay beyond it in second phase thought, now takes the forefront and nothing is presumed to lie behind it. Or if something does, it is assumed to be inaccessible and therefore of no interest to the empirical investigator. So this phase is rightly labeled human.
A fourth phase?
Is post-modernism taking us into a fourth phase? If so, we can only begin to discern its characteristics.
The Bible
The Bible itself is primarily literature of the first or metaphoric phase. The chief theme of Old Testament literature is the mighty works of Yahweh. Although we have great human characters in the Bible, such as Abraham, Moses, David and Elijah, the principal actor throughout is Yahweh himself. Hebrew literature, especially the psalms, is filled with ritual recounting of the mighty acts of Yahweh both in creation and on behalf of Israel. The ritual worship of Israel and Judah, notably the great feasts of Passover, Sukkoth and Pentecost, as well as the later additions of Purim and Hanukah, recall and re-enact those works.
Apocalyptic literature such as that found in Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation is built around the metaphorical concept of As above, so below and serves to strengthen the persecuted with a vision of what is happening in heaven and therefore is, or soon will be, happening on earth. Dreams and visions, such as those of Joseph, Elijah and Daniel serve the same purpose.
In many ways, Yahweh resembles the gods of polytheism more than the monotheistic abstraction of the philosophers. He has, for example, a name. He visits earth frequently, sometimes in human guise, as he does with Abraham. Yahweh is active, dynamic, passionate, and displays human emotions such as jealousy, sorrow and regret. Yahweh is depicted as Israels husband, wedded to the people and the land, just as the gods of the nations were seen as wedded to their land and people.
But while the Bible is unquestionably written from within the mythological/metaphorical world view, it also subverts that worldview. Yahweh, as Israels only God, is not, like pagan gods, a metaphor of anything in creation. He transcends his creation. Nor does Israel or Judah ever develop a cult of the god-king. The king is chosen, anointed and commissioned by Yahweh, but is not metaphorically Yahweh himself.
The New Testament is a bit of a hybrid, continuing much of the tradition of the Old Testament, but also showing elements of the second phase literature. Explicit allegory, practically non-existent in the Old Testament, appears in the parables and also in New Testament interpretations of the Old Testament e.g. Pauls identification of Sarah and Hagar with Promise and Law. Pauls epistles often contain logical argumentation using analogies and allegories. The whole of the letter to the Hebrews applies a second-phase interpretive model to the priest and sacrificial system of Israel as pointing to Christ and his perfect sacrifice.
Early and medieval Christian theology
What is meant by second phase interpretive model? While the bible itself, particularly the Old Testament, and to some extent the New, was written assuming the mythical/metaphorical or divine worldview, early Christian theology was developed in terms of the philosophies of the second phase. No one can doubt the impact of Platonism and later Aristotelianism on Christian theology. What becomes of the Bible and the God of the Bible in second phase thinking?
First, Yahweh is identified as the Absolute of the philosophers and given some of the attributes of the Absolute. This was no mean feat. The Greek philosophers seem to have quietly dropped belief in the Homeric gods. In the Church, Marcion advocated dropping Yahweh and the Old Testament in favour of the God of Jesus Christ, whom he could in no way identify with the God of Israel. The Church declared this unorthodox and decreed that Yahweh was indeed God.
Yet there are many contrasts between the Absolute and Yahweh. The Absolute is impersonal, Yahweh is personal. He has a name. The Absolute is passionless and always at rest; Yahweh is passionatenow loving, now angry, now sorrowfuland active. The Absolute is sought by all, but seeks out none. Yahweh seeks out his chosen, makes a covenant with them and acts on their behalf. Even when they break the covenant, he pursues them with both judgment and forgiving mercy.
The Church chose to retain elements of both God as Absolute and God as Yahweh as equally true of God, holding the contrasts in dynamic tension with each other. Similarly, it chose dynamic tension or paradox in describing the essence of God as a triune being, three in One, and the dual nature of Christrejecting that he was only human, only divine, now one, now the other, partly each, human in the flesh and divine in the spirit, or something in between, a demigod more than human but less than divine. Instead it affirmed his full humanity and his full divinity in one person.
Another outcome of second phase interpretation is the doctrine of original sin. In the metonymic worldview, the concrete material world is necessarily a fallen world, an imperfect representation of the ideal perfection of the heavenly world. It can be a signpost of that perfection, but always misses the mark and falls short of reaching it.
As for scripture, following the second phase thinking that truth lies in the essence to be deduced from the concrete particular, the texts become a treasure house of allegorical images, especially of Christ, the Church and the sacraments. This does not mean that early and medieval theologians denied the factuality of most of scripture, but that they did not see this as important to the significance of the text. To get to the root of revelation, one had to come to grips with what an object or event meant allegorically, as an image of salvation. It was trivially factual that the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. But what gave that event meaning was that it represented baptism. In short, just as in second phase thinking, the concrete world was held to stand for and symbolize a metaphysical world which transcends it, the scriptures were held to stand for and symbolize something beyond the text. To know only the literal meaning was not to know the scriptures.
...to be continued
Why deal with the Bible as literature in Origins Theology? Basically, what truly distinguishes theologies of origins is neither the evidence of science, nor the testimony of scripture, but what we believe scripture is saying to us. And that comes from the kind of literature we think scripture is.
There is probably no better guide to a literary approach to the Bible than the late Northrop Frye http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Frye. Frye won international acclaim for his pioneering work in literary criticism. He was, by no means, the first literary critic, but he was the first to develop a theory of literary criticism, which he elucidated in his magnum opus Anatomy of Criticism. He was especially interested in the Bible, not only as literature in its own right, but also in the way it had impacted English literature as a whole. It was always his ambition to apply to the Bible the principles of literary criticism which he had developed. To that end he developed and taught the very popular Bible and English Literature undergrad class at Victoria College, University of Toronto, for 30 years. Eventually, he gathered the essentials of his thought into two volumes: The Great Code: The Bible and English Literature and Words of Power.
Early in The Great Code, Frye refers to the work of Giambattista Vico. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Vico
Vico was an early theorist on human civilizations. According to Wikipedia,
Relying on a complex etymology, Vico argues in the Scienza Nuova that civilization develops in a recurring cycle (ricorso) of three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human. Each age exhibits distinct political and social features and can be characterized by master tropes or figures of language.
The divine phase
In all the great civilizations of antiquity, the first creative literature is poetry. Writing was used earlier for mundane tasks such as keeping records of inventories, taxes collected, deeds and contracts. But literature as an art first appears as poetry. And from India to Greece the pre-eminent poetic form was the mythological epic. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the Enuma Elish and the story of Gilgamesh, the Iliad and Odyssey---these were not the only literature of the time, but these enshrined the characters, the events, the images and concepts repeated ad infinitum in other poetry and other works of art. The epics supremely, both reflected and shaped a worldview. The chief protagonists of the epic myths were deities, hence, Vico refers to this phase as divine. Indeed, the original sense of the Greek term mythos was a story about the gods.
There are many ways in which we can characterize this worldview, but one of its most prominent features is that it presents the world as an experience of metaphor. By this I do not mean that the literature used a lot of metaphors, but rather that the world itself and its contents were held to be metaphors. It is a worldview that is simultaneously aware of the world of sense and the world of spirit and sees each as implicit in the other. The gods of paganism, for example, are natural metaphors. Ra is the sun and the sun is Ra. Heaven and earth are a dual vision of the same reality; the affairs of heaven are lived out as well in the affairs of earth and vice versa. A war between nations is also a war in heaven between their respective deities. And the quarrels of the Greek gods are lived in the history of the Greeks. Even in the lesser realm of daily common life, the world of nature is a world of spirits. A tree is not just a tree; it is also a spiritual being, a dryad.
This dual vision had a focal point in the king who was also the chief god of the nation. The king as god was a concept that endured from ancient times into the Roman empire.
The noble (aka heroic) phase
The paradigm shift that leads into this phase originates in early Greek philosophical literature. Contrary to epic poetry, this is prose literature in the style of Platos Symposium. In such works the parameters of logic and deduction were generated and the art form of the argument developed. Non-fiction prose literature of the next millennium and more produces philosophy, apologetics and systematic theology. A quintessential feature of such literature is abstraction.
In the divine phase, the spiritual world is experienced in the concrete particularity of the physical world. In this phase, the spiritual world is experienced as an ideal abstracted from the concrete particularity of the world of sense. The connection between the ideal form and the concrete particular is one of shared essence. To know the essence of a thing is to know what it really is; but no particular thing is a perfect or complete instance of its essence. The essence has to be deduced by abstraction from the many imperfect physical exemplars of it. So the metaphorical experience of the divine worldview gives way to a view characterized by metonymy. A physical being is not a spiritual being. But it can stand for and point to a spiritual reality beyond itself.
This concept of the world of sense as representative of, though not identical to, the world of metaphysics gives rise to a fiction in which the figure of allegory becomes prominent. The characters and events in a story stand for and represent ideals and concepts. The protagonists are not the gods themselves, but ideal humans. We get the literature of the heroic quest, of the knight-seeking the Holy Grail, of the dragon-slayer, of the hidden but rightful king to be revealed in due time. From these aspects of the literature, Vico calls this phase noble or "heroic".
The human phase
The modern worldview begins with the premise that common sense is to be valued. We may not appreciate today what a paradigm shift that once was. But for those in ancient and medieval civilizations common not only meant not rare; it also meant not noble. And what was not noble was of no interest to those who were. If anything, it was to be despised, not valued. So making the common a focus of literary attention signals a real change of direction. This is the same sort of shift that moved the political order from the divine right of kings to democracy.
In this worldview, empirical description becomes the mode of discourse. To describe the physical properties of a tree is to provide complete information about the tree. No notice is taken of its spiritual aspect, as in the first or metaphorical view. No inquiry is made into its metaphysical essence as in the second or metonymical view. The tree is a physical entity and to know its physical properties is all that is necessary.
But this discourse of empirical description ought not to be confused with the naïve realism that accepts phenomena without question. Following the lead of Francis Bacon, the third phase empiricist understands that nature holds secrets we are unaware of at first glance. We need to investigate nature to discover the true description of reality. So modernism is inevitably wedded to science and scientific method.
But what is most notable about this third phase is the absence of any sense of metaphysical or spiritual reality. The world of phenomena, which was a metaphor in early civilization, and a guide to what lay beyond it in second phase thought, now takes the forefront and nothing is presumed to lie behind it. Or if something does, it is assumed to be inaccessible and therefore of no interest to the empirical investigator. So this phase is rightly labeled human.
A fourth phase?
Is post-modernism taking us into a fourth phase? If so, we can only begin to discern its characteristics.
The Bible
The Bible itself is primarily literature of the first or metaphoric phase. The chief theme of Old Testament literature is the mighty works of Yahweh. Although we have great human characters in the Bible, such as Abraham, Moses, David and Elijah, the principal actor throughout is Yahweh himself. Hebrew literature, especially the psalms, is filled with ritual recounting of the mighty acts of Yahweh both in creation and on behalf of Israel. The ritual worship of Israel and Judah, notably the great feasts of Passover, Sukkoth and Pentecost, as well as the later additions of Purim and Hanukah, recall and re-enact those works.
Apocalyptic literature such as that found in Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation is built around the metaphorical concept of As above, so below and serves to strengthen the persecuted with a vision of what is happening in heaven and therefore is, or soon will be, happening on earth. Dreams and visions, such as those of Joseph, Elijah and Daniel serve the same purpose.
In many ways, Yahweh resembles the gods of polytheism more than the monotheistic abstraction of the philosophers. He has, for example, a name. He visits earth frequently, sometimes in human guise, as he does with Abraham. Yahweh is active, dynamic, passionate, and displays human emotions such as jealousy, sorrow and regret. Yahweh is depicted as Israels husband, wedded to the people and the land, just as the gods of the nations were seen as wedded to their land and people.
But while the Bible is unquestionably written from within the mythological/metaphorical world view, it also subverts that worldview. Yahweh, as Israels only God, is not, like pagan gods, a metaphor of anything in creation. He transcends his creation. Nor does Israel or Judah ever develop a cult of the god-king. The king is chosen, anointed and commissioned by Yahweh, but is not metaphorically Yahweh himself.
The New Testament is a bit of a hybrid, continuing much of the tradition of the Old Testament, but also showing elements of the second phase literature. Explicit allegory, practically non-existent in the Old Testament, appears in the parables and also in New Testament interpretations of the Old Testament e.g. Pauls identification of Sarah and Hagar with Promise and Law. Pauls epistles often contain logical argumentation using analogies and allegories. The whole of the letter to the Hebrews applies a second-phase interpretive model to the priest and sacrificial system of Israel as pointing to Christ and his perfect sacrifice.
Early and medieval Christian theology
What is meant by second phase interpretive model? While the bible itself, particularly the Old Testament, and to some extent the New, was written assuming the mythical/metaphorical or divine worldview, early Christian theology was developed in terms of the philosophies of the second phase. No one can doubt the impact of Platonism and later Aristotelianism on Christian theology. What becomes of the Bible and the God of the Bible in second phase thinking?
First, Yahweh is identified as the Absolute of the philosophers and given some of the attributes of the Absolute. This was no mean feat. The Greek philosophers seem to have quietly dropped belief in the Homeric gods. In the Church, Marcion advocated dropping Yahweh and the Old Testament in favour of the God of Jesus Christ, whom he could in no way identify with the God of Israel. The Church declared this unorthodox and decreed that Yahweh was indeed God.
Yet there are many contrasts between the Absolute and Yahweh. The Absolute is impersonal, Yahweh is personal. He has a name. The Absolute is passionless and always at rest; Yahweh is passionatenow loving, now angry, now sorrowfuland active. The Absolute is sought by all, but seeks out none. Yahweh seeks out his chosen, makes a covenant with them and acts on their behalf. Even when they break the covenant, he pursues them with both judgment and forgiving mercy.
The Church chose to retain elements of both God as Absolute and God as Yahweh as equally true of God, holding the contrasts in dynamic tension with each other. Similarly, it chose dynamic tension or paradox in describing the essence of God as a triune being, three in One, and the dual nature of Christrejecting that he was only human, only divine, now one, now the other, partly each, human in the flesh and divine in the spirit, or something in between, a demigod more than human but less than divine. Instead it affirmed his full humanity and his full divinity in one person.
Another outcome of second phase interpretation is the doctrine of original sin. In the metonymic worldview, the concrete material world is necessarily a fallen world, an imperfect representation of the ideal perfection of the heavenly world. It can be a signpost of that perfection, but always misses the mark and falls short of reaching it.
As for scripture, following the second phase thinking that truth lies in the essence to be deduced from the concrete particular, the texts become a treasure house of allegorical images, especially of Christ, the Church and the sacraments. This does not mean that early and medieval theologians denied the factuality of most of scripture, but that they did not see this as important to the significance of the text. To get to the root of revelation, one had to come to grips with what an object or event meant allegorically, as an image of salvation. It was trivially factual that the Israelites crossed the Red Sea. But what gave that event meaning was that it represented baptism. In short, just as in second phase thinking, the concrete world was held to stand for and symbolize a metaphysical world which transcends it, the scriptures were held to stand for and symbolize something beyond the text. To know only the literal meaning was not to know the scriptures.
...to be continued
