Gospel & Universe ♒️ The Currents of Sumer

Currents of History

Bottéro’s History & Agnosticism - Currents

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Bottéro’s History & Agnosticism

Before getting into the more detailed arguments of this chapter, I'd like to make a few general point about Jean Bottéro, agnosticism, and religious history.

Bottéro is an expert philologist and Assyriologist, which means that he can see deeply into the long forgotten languages of Mesopotamia — that is, into Sumerian and into the early Semitic languages beginning with Akkadian and its two variants, Babylonian and Assyrian. Yet Bottéro sees himself less as a philologist than as a historian. He sees philology as the basis of understanding texts, and he sees history as a much wider and deeper attempt to get at what these texts mean in the larger currents of time and human existence.

In this sense Bottéro’s history operates like agnosticism. Both see philosophies and religions as currents in time. These currents may be river currents that eventually reach the sea. Or they may be ocean currents, which shift their massive and diffuse waters in streams so powerful that anyone diving in those depths is swept from continent to continent. The agnostic and the historian swim on the edges of the currents, observing how diffusion is possible — that is, how parts of a stream enter or leave a different stream; how a stream takes over another stream or how it dwindles over time. They try to see the larger pattern of currents and they try to avoid getting stuck in (or stuck on) one of the currents to the exclusion of others.

Bottéro makes this point in Babylone et la Bible (1994), where he says that there are two ways of seeing early religion — one in terms of history, the other in terms of belief. These two ways aren’t mutually exclusive, yet in terms of how we adhere to what we consider truth, we generally pick one way or the other. While historians want to know what really happened, believers have a different aim:

[…] les croyents […] en lisant ces documents du passé de leur foi, y cherchent et y trouvent, par une lecture, non pas purement rationnelle et « critique », mais d'abord religieuse et dévote, des aliments pour leur religiosité. Les deux lectures sont conciliables, fût-ce dans la même personne; mais il est clair que, en tant qu'historien, j'ai choisi la première et je m'y suis toujours tenu.

[…] believers […] in reading these documents from the past of their faith, search there and find there, by a reading not purely rational and ‘critical’ but first and foremost religious and devote, nourishment for their religiosity. The two readings are reconcilable, even in the same person, but it’s clear that, as a historian, I chose the first and have always held to it.

Bottéro’s point that history and religion can be reconciled on a personal level is fascinating to agnostics. One can believe and yet hold more closely, more permanently, to critical thinking and doubt. Agnostics would add that because history diverges from literal or doctrinal religion, the reconciliation is at best a metaphoric one for those who haven’t devoted themselves to the primacy of belief. The rational self can make friends with the part of the mind that can take a metaphor, and then see in it a more abstract, a finer truth, finer even than the ones that it might ever see with the human eye. Like historians, agnostics can enter into this finer truth, feel it, and believe it in the moment, yet they inevitably return to a position slightly outside it. In this way they don’t lose what they consider to be the deeper thread of truth: the ever-receding, ever-elusive larger picture. They suspect they’ll never understand this larger picture, but they don’t see it as futile to try. To borrow from Byron, others may tire from swimming in the sea of thought, yet those who continue to ask questions are by definition swimmers.

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Currents

Just as the historian attempts to see with a larger view all currents of time flowing with their causes and their effects, so agnostics attempt to see the flowing currents of meaning, be they religious or scientific. Agnostics don’t dedicate themselves to one religion or philosophy because the currents of both appear so gigantic and so changeable. Even if they do momentarily believe in one, or even if they reject another, they always come back to the notion that all currents are part of a larger picture. And in this picture, each person believes according to their own particular point of view.

L'historien, comme tel, n'intervient pas directement dans les croyances: il se contente d'établir, avec les mêmes moyens et dans le même propos qu'un juge d'instruction, les données réelles et connaissables sur lesquelles les croyances sont établies. La foi et la crédulité allant souvent de compagnie, il arrive que l'historien, par aventure, dépoussière les données à quoi la foi s'applique de tous les sédiments que la crédulité y a superposés. Mais il n'a rien à faire, de soi, avec cette foi : qu'il la partage, l'ignore ou la combatte, ce n'est jamais en tant qu'historien; lui, il fournit à tous le canevas du passé authentique, et chacun, après lui, contemple ce passé comme il l'entend.

The historian, as such, doesn’t intervene directly in beliefs: he contents himself to establish, with the same means and aims as the magistrate, the given and understandable realities upon which beliefs are established. Faith and credulity often going together, it so happens that the historian, by chance, sweeps away the dust from the givens that credulity has superimposed onto faith. But he doesn’t have anything to do, himself, with this faith. Whether or not he shares it, ignores it, or fights it, it’s never as a historian. Instead, he provides everyone with a canvas of the authentic past, which they contemplate according to their own understanding.

Both the agnostic and the historian see particular systems of human thought as flowing into larger systems and larger designs, just as streams flow into rivers, seas, clouds, and rain. There’s no end to this extension of systems, for the stratosphere opens out into vistas of the the Milky Way, the constellation of Aquarius, etc. The agnostic sees this big picture — from brook to Corona Borealis — as Doubt & Mystery, while the historian sees it as Change & Time.  

The currents of religion, flowing in the greater currents of history & geography, time & space, are hard to fix, to make stand still, as Heraclitus observed so many centuries ago. Nor can we tell what schools of fish there are down there, deep in the watery depths. Perhaps there are as many schools of thought as there are schools of fish. Perhaps some fish are confused or distracted and end up leaving their school to join another. Or perhaps they feel the dwindling richness of the current they’re in, and decide to join a school that rides a different current to a watery Land of Plenty.

We can’t even be sure that the great currents of the ocean will continue to flow. Perhaps a meteor will split the cradle of the ocean bed and all its salty miracles will go flying into outer space. Perhaps two thousand nuclear bombs will extinguish all chance of life within it. Or perhaps the Gulf Stream will stop, global warming having stalled the icy engines of the north. We’re simply too minute, too transient a life-form to say what will happen. Or to say what it all means.

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And yet we do know that the earliest currents of human civilization — math & writing, cities & laws, temples & armies, creation stories & Flood narratives — seem to have come down to us in the double waterways of the Tigris & Euphrates.

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Next: ♒️ The Whore

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