Gospel & Universe ♒️ The Currents of Sumer

Grace: The Most Positive Sum

Grace I: The Afterlife - Grace II: The Here and Now - Types of Grace

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In regard to theological doctrines about such things as Grace, I take an agnostic view, by which I mean that I see them in terms of speculation, psychology, and poetry, not in terms of revelation or spiritual truths. This doesn’t mean, however, that Grace isn’t true.

On this page I’ll divide Grace into two basic categories: 1. an afterlife Grace, whereby our limited physical selves are given a divine Grace which allows us to continue our existence into the afterlife; and 2. a Grace that can be experienced while we’re living.

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Grace I: The Afterlife

There are two basic scenarios in regard to afterlife forgiveness or Grace. In the first of these, when we die, we’ll find out that we are in fact graced with an eternal soul. In this case, the final score is Grace 1, Grave 0. In this case we will live out the final lines from John Donne’s famous sonnet, “Death Be Not Proud: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.” In the second scenario, we won’t find out whether or not Grace exists, because the concept of Grace that we thought with our human brains will be buried in the grave, where the neurons go back to their primal elements amid the worms. In this case, the final score is Grave 1, Grace 0.

The agnostic score for this is: Grace 1, Grave 0 or Grave 1, Grace 0. Agnostics refuse to call this a final score, insisting rather on the rhetorical question of Ecclesiastes 3:21: “Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”

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Grace II: The Here and Now

In the meantime — that is, before the unknowable scenario of the afterlife — Grace can be seen in at least two ways, both of which have at least ten billion shades of Grace among them:

1. the belief in a specific religious paradigm of Grace, and

2. the non-doctrinal experience of Grace, for instance, an artistic or aesthetic appreciation of Grace.

1. We can make a calculated jump into believing in the unknown — that is, into what is unknown in the physics of this world, but known in scripture or mystical poetry. This poetry might be that of Christian mystics like Teresa de Ávila, Sufis like Rumi or Hafiz, or bhakti poets like Andal, who writes (like Saint Teresa) that God is her lover, and that Krishna (like Christ) “put mistakes in the tomb like cotton that in the fire will burn away into the dust.”

The 15th century poet Kabir is an interesting case here, since he straddles the line between doctrinal and non-doctrinal experiences of Grace. In the following poem, Kabir uses multiple religions, yet he insists that what he’s getting at is beyond these religions. It’s more primal, more elemental; it’s closer than beside you; it’s deeper within you than your own breath:

2. Kabir intimates that Grace can exist in a purely experiential sense, that it doesn’t need a particular doctrine to defines its operation or its position within a theological superstructure. We can feel free from sin, and we can feel a love so great that it might be called cosmic, without having a belief that this Grace is something particular to one mode of theology or philosophy. It’s phenomenological, not doctrinal or categorical. It can’t be captured and contained within the boundaries of a confession of faith or a narrative of theology, and certainly not within a doctrine to which we must comply.

We might even see Grace in a poetic or aesthetic sense. As an agnostic I’d argue that this option has the advantage of being transparent: we jump from what we know into what we speculate, into what we self-consciously re-create in our imaginations, just as we re-create the meaning of a flower, a poem, or a work of art in our heads. This is no mean thing, as a close look at a painting like Hacker’s Annunciation suggests:

We don’t have to believe in the Virgin Birth to appreciate this beauty, nor do we have to have had a vision similar to the one the painter may have had when he saw those dark eyes and that angel swooping in from behind. We don’t have to believe that God gave miraculous birth to a Saviour who collects all our sins and turns our hells into heavens. Nor do we need to have had the feeling that we are blessed in a sacred union with the greatest Power in the universe, perhaps as the notes of Krishna’s flute dance across the green fields and into the ears of his milkmaids.

Agnostics aren’t in any way against such things happening, or against the idea that the Grace of eternal life might await us. Why would anyone be against such a miraculous thing happening? Yet the jump into this certainty is a hard one for agnostics, as it is for many other people of a practical or realistic philosophical bent. For some, it’s more natural to experience something like Grace, and to keep this something vague. Perhaps we see it in a work of art, in a kind act, in a personal sacrifice, in a deep love, or in any number of good things that suggest a way out of the things we associate with sin: violence, hatred, deceit, darkness, etc. For some of us, it’s easier to see Grace in terms of an aesthetic or poetic vision that’s right in front of our eyes.

This second, secular type of Grace (which it feels strange to capitalize) is an odd one, and often overlaps with the traditional doctrinal type. Hard agnostics might argue that it’s the only type of Grace that exists, and that those who think they’ve found a sure metaphysical liberation from sin, one that is — in a strangely scientific way, verifiable and repeatable — are in fact feeling a sense of liberty beneath, deep inside them, yet they then describe this ineffable sense of liberty and freedom in terms of a received, yet more superficial, vocabulary or set of images. These words and images may have a vast body of scripture and exegesis behind them, yet they are nevertheless based on speculation, and remain forever distant from the experience they profess to describe.

In Adonais, his 1821 elegy to Keats, Shelley concludes with a fusion of traditional religion and alternative mysticism that leans heavily on Neoplatonism. In so doing he at once asserts an imaginary scenario of eternity as well as the impossibility of understanding or expressing this eternity:

Soft agnostics see in Shelley’s very articulate Neoplatonic view of ineffability the chance that the One and Heaven are just names for a greater architecture that remains, like the flowers and words, unable to get at the ineffable Reality, Totality, or Infinity of the universe.

The soft agnostic doesn’t see the point in keeping the two types of Grace distinct. A permeable or translucent border between the two allows for the possibility of crossover, overlap, interpenetration, and ambiguity. The hard agnostic, on the other hand, stresses that the border is similar to the absolute border of 1. the atheist, for whom the material side is all that matters, and 2. the gnostic, for whom the occult spiritual side is all that matters. Yet the hard agnostic may run into difficulties in allowing such a zero-sum view: just as the skeptical side can subsume the theistic side, so the reverse can happen. The theist can turn the tables, asserting that even agnostics will see the religious truth one day, when they’re ready. The theist can press agnostics on this point, repeating back to them their paradoxical belief that they can never be sure.

Regardless of whether we take a soft agnostic or hard agnostic view of Grace, it’s hard not to notice that while Grace is often couched in terms of reverence or the sacred, it often slides away from doctrine in order to place the experiencer by themselves in a state of beauty, in a secular beatitude, in a moment of perception of wholeness, in a flowing river of pure being amid the chaos of life. One example of this can be seen in a short poem by Dasimayya, who worships Ramanatha (“Rama’s Lord” or Shiva):

Ramanatha, who can know the beauty / of the Hovering one, / who’s made Himself form / and of space / the colours?

Despite Dasimayya’s political advocacy for Shiva in his real life, his poem ends up focusing not on a doctrine or symbol pointing to Shiva, but rather on the beauty one might find in the most basic elements of form, space, and colour.

The Shaivite might argue that this form and space is the invisible spiritual energy or reality of Shiva, yet they would then have to contend with what is perhaps the most powerful force in Hinduism: the tendency to see one god in terms of an ultimate Infinity that subsumes all gods. They’d have to deal not only with Vaishnavites (or Vaishnavas), who manage to subsume ten divine incarnations (one of them Krishna) into one cosmic Vishnu, but also with the Advaita Vedanta non-dualists, who argue that even the most powerful god is a pale reflection, like Rome’s azure sky and the poetry that “are weak / The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.”

In this context, there’s a good reason that Rig Veda 10.129 is referred to so often. When the poet says that only the god in the highest heaven knows where the universe came from, and then adds, “Or perhaps he doesn't know,” the notion here is that whatever Power or God one imagines, our imaginations are too limited to get at the concept of Infinity, which stretches from before 13.8 billion years ago, and beyond sextillions of parsecs. Gospel in this sense is as large as the universe, and then some.

The Grace of Beauty & Infinity can also be found in the commonplace and minute, as in Section 41 of Whitman’s Song of Myself:

I heard what was said of the universe, / Heard it and heard it of several thousand years; / It is middling well as far as it goes -- but is that all?

Magnifying and applying come I, / Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters, / Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah, / Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson, / Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha, […] Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more, / Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days, / (They bore mites as for unfledg'd birds who have now to rise and fly and sing for themselves, / Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself, bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see, […] Not objecting to special revelations, considering a curl of smoke or a hair on the back of my hand just as curious as any revelation, / Lads ahold of fire-engines and hook-and-ladder ropes no less to me than the gods of the antique wars, / Minding their voices peal through the crash of destruction, / Their brawny limbs passing safe over charr'd laths, their white foreheads whole and unhurt out of the flames; […]

We can also find a mysticism in beauty, as in Keats’ abstract notion that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." The interplay or ambiguity between metaphysical and physical beauty is evident in the Yogavāsiṣṭha, a long poem attributed to Valmiki. In stark contrast to Ram’s dejection in Chapter 1 (and in anticipation of Ram’s enlightenment in Chapter 6), Queen Chundalai in Chapter 5 tells us that she has “risen above this world which is form but formless, real but without reality”;

the radiance in my body is but the reflection of the refulgent peace within. I have realized That God is the essential nature of all; being the atom of atoms; the whole without creation or destruction. That is why my body is radiant. I have no joy in the object of the senses, yet do I partake of the Bliss and happiness of beauty. (trans. Rishi Singh Gherwal)

Here, the larger context is religious or doctrinal, with an emphasis on the non-dual ontology of Advaita Vedanta. Yet the narrator notes “that true realization […] is a certainty beyond explanation,” a point immediately illustrated when Beauty becomes a state of Grace in which everything is God. It thus becomes hard, even unnecessary, to find a doctrine that can supersede this experience. What need does Queen Chundalai have for doctrine when she already lives the bliss of infinity?

When I said above that there are ten billion shades of Grace among and between doctrinal and non-doctrinal Grace, I meant it literally: there are as many shades as there are people. And each person can fall in one or more categories, which is another way of saying that the categories can easily overlap. One person can feel both types, or can feel them in any degree, combination, or order. For instance, poets and mystics may be prompted by whatever religion happens to have dominated in their corner of the world, and hence their experience may take the tint of a particular religious description, yet the core of their experience doesn’t necessarily take a specific religious form.

Poetic or aesthetic Grace seems to be what Keats had in mind when he wrote his famous “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” Making a visual tour of the pagan vessel, he notes how the dancers are moving yet frozen in time. The beauty of the marble urn, whose “silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity,” will remain “a friend to man,” even “When old age shall this generation waste.” This beauty isn’t a mere adornment or passing pleasure; it gains the status of a felt mystical aesthetic, urging us to see that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

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None of the two positions — 1. belief in a specific religious paradigm of Grace, 2. non-doctrinal experience of Grace — is better than another, and there is no definitive separation between them. While conservative religious people insist on strict limits, and on norms that accord with these limits, agnostics are more likely to argue for overlap, eclecticism, and ecumenicalism. Narrowing Grace down to one religion robs the other religions of their liberating depths, which is hardly a gracious way to proceed.

I’m reminded here of Wendy Doniger’s title for one of her studies in Hindu narrative, Other People’s Myths; The Cave of Echoes. What some find sacred is to others mere myth, and what some think of as mere myth is sacred to others. Why not drop the illusion that we’re in a position to make the distinction between the two? Why keep pretending that we can say who is the greatest saviour, Christ or Krishna? Who knows who has the deepest grasp on truth, Solomon or Shankara?

I’m also reminded of a paragraph from Doniger’s book, Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities. In it, she writes about using complex biblical and Greek texts to illuminate the difficulties of Indian texts, which is the inverse of what I suggest we do by using complex Mesopotamian texts to illuminate the difficulties we find in the Bible:

The inclusion of these Western texts thus serves a kind of psychological or epistemological purpose: it helps us to understand how we understand the Indian texts. But it is meant to serve an ontological purpose as well: to help us understand the actual problem set by the Indian texts. For our understanding of the Indian ideas is greatly enhanced when we reflect on the insights provided by some of our own sages who have thought long and deep about these same problems.

Doniger and Enns share a common trait here, in that they see religious writings not as guides to dogma, but as deeply problematic texts that one must question and come to terms with. While Doniger primarily uses the Yogavāsiṣṭha in Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities, one could say more widely that the foundational texts of the Vedas and the Bible are both diverse collections that contain problems or challenges deriving from their subtleties and ambiguities, complex structures, and theological contexts. These problems demand sensitivity and interpretive skill, if we are to probe their depth, rather than gloss over their difficulties so that we can walk away with a clear point of view.

On the next page I’ll explore another situation in which a positive sum approach can be taken, this time by emphasizing poetic ambiguity in biblical and Mesopotamian notions of sin and Grace.

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Next: Myths of Sin & Divinity

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