Gospel & Universe ♒️ The Currents of Sumer
Myths of Sin & Divinity
Poetry & Ambiguity - Seven Types of Ambiguity - Bottéro: Before Original Sin - The Archaeology of Mystery
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On this page I’ll argue that an appreciation of poetic ambiguity and Near Eastern diversity can deepen our understanding of sin and Grace, just as looking at early Near Eastern ideas about astronomy, creation, and death can deepen our understanding of later biblical and Classical ideas. My agenda here is again ecumenical: I hope that the powerful Christian notions of sin and Grace can be seen as part of the human condition, and not just as part of the biblical tradition. Another way of putting this would be to say that the biblical tradition is part of the human tradition, a point which would be easier to see if religious leaders would give us a break from dogma and exclusivity.
First, however, I’ll clarify what I mean by poetic ambiguity.
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Poetry & Ambiguity
Enns argues that in order to attain a deeper understanding of the Bible we should learn to appreciate ambiguity as well as diversity and ancientness. Throughout this chapter I’ve conflated ancientness and diversity in my notion that the biblical tradition can be contextualized within the more ancient diversity of the Mesopotamian tradition. In terms of ambiguity, I’ll pick up here on Enns’ idea that the Bible is not a simple guide book. It doesn’t hand us fixed biblical meanings or dogmas, either historically or epistemologically. I’ll add to this that it’s therefore helpful to bring in poetic theory, for in the realm of ambiguity poetry has no equal.
In The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1981), Northrop Frye writes:
Perhaps the myths of the Bible should be read poetically, just as we read Homer and the Gilgamesh epic poetically. Certainly the poetic parts of the Bible are genuinely poetic in a way that the historical parts are not historical. And if we ask why the Biblical myths are closer to being poetic than to being history, Aristotle's principle, which I have referred to so constantly in my criticism, will supply an answer, up to a point. History makes particular statements, and is therefore subject to external criteria of truth and falsehood; poetry makes no particular statements and is not so subject.
Poetry offers a radically insightful mode of understanding, for it encourages ambiguity and breaks from orthodox or logocentric rationality. These ambiguities and breaks can be seen in a limited expression — as in Hamlet’s country beyond whose bourn no traveller returns. Here death is seen in an odd way, as some strange country, rather than in the more common way, as an abstract state or heavenly realm. Poetic ambiguities and breaks can also be seen in larger texts and schools of thought, as in perchance to dream. Here, the spiritual ‘dream-country’ may exist or it may not exist. For instance, we may see it in Dante’s Divine Comedy, where the spiritual pilgrim climbs up from the depths of Hell to the heights of Heaven, finally to realize that God’s glory is beyond all metaphor. Conversely, in Sartre’s Nausea the spiritual ‘dream-country’ doesn’t exist. The protagonist realizes that he’s utterly alone. Even the Romantic notion that Nature can give us a spiritual connection doesn’t work: the tree next to him is an alien thing, one that he can’t even begin to describe. While Dante and Sartre have different conceptions about the meaning of life, they both agree that reality lies beyond human language. The metaphors that they hold out, in the guise of providing their readers with a fixed meaning, crumble before our eyes.
What I’m suggesting here is that we see religions the way poets see images, metaphors, and other linguistic structures: they may clash or fuse, yet it’s our mind’s ability to understand these dynamics which constitutes insight. Moreover, it’s in our mind’s ability to create these connections, to go from an otherwise diverse, even contradictory set of images or ideas to a paradoxical, rich, ambiguous understanding of the underlying connections between them.
Heraclitus was right when he said — in his metaphor, the river of change — that nothing stays the same. And Frye is right to remind us that history, unlike poetry, is about this world of facts that change. We can’t ignore this, but we can watch and learn from the way things change, and from the way one meaning slides into the next, from the multiple and creative ways in which meanings clash, slide, go out of focus, come into focus, go out of vogue, come back into vogue, break apart, and fuse. My larger point here is that we can see how this watching and learning operates both on a micro scale (for instance how one Shakespearean sonnet alters from the previous one in the larger sequence) and on a macro scale (for instance how one theological system from Israel alters from the previous one from Sumer). We can also see that while they are different theological systems, they flow in the same river bed.
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Seven Types of Ambiguity
One of the most famous Modern books on poetry is William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). Empson notes that his “seven types, so far as they are not merely a convenient framework, are intended as stages of advancing logical disorder.” This may partly be why those who want to attain truth are loathe to enter the increasingly murky realm of poetry, yet it may also be why a poetic approach might be helpful in trying to understand the Bible, which is complex, ancient, multidimensional, and diverse.
In the following passage, Empson discusses 1. the reason behind ambiguity as well as 2. the fear one might have about it — that it leads to the endless psychological depths of the sub-conscious (Freud and Jung were breaking ground in Empson’s day). Below the passage, I’ll suggest that both points can be extended from the micro level (of an ambiguous sentence) to the macro level (of the massive ambiguities involved in overlapping civilizational and religious systems):
[…] what often happens when a piece of writing is felt to offer hidden riches is that one phrase after another lights up and appears as the heart of it; one part after another catches fire, so that you walk about with the thing for several days. To go through the experience in question is then slower, not quicker, than the less inspiriting process of reading an analysis of it; and the fact that we can sometimes grasp a complex meaning quickly as a whole does not prove that a radically different mode of thought (an intrusion of the lower depths) is there to be feared.
[In progress]
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Bottéro: Before Original Sin
All of the above suggests an increasingly complex realm of metaphor and double meanings. Grasping this complexity is particularly helpful when it comes to the diverse realms of myth and religion, which are on full display in eclectic texts like the Bible or the Vedas. A grasp of poetic complexity is also helpful in coming to terms with concepts like sin and grace, which aren’t easily understood according to traditional logic or history.
In “Original Sin” (a section in Birth of God), Bottéro translates a Mesopotamian poem about sin and divinity, and provides arguments about myth and about the ambiguous nature of religious expression. I include the following long quote from “Original Sin” because 1. it makes my point about the utility of looking to the ancient Mesopotamian context in order to diversify our religious vision, 2. it provides us with a translation of a little-known text which may affect our views on the Bible’s view of original sin and on the quasi-divine nature of humans (I’ve put this poem in bold below), 3. it comments insightfully on ambiguity and early myth, 4. it locates Enki (Ea) once again in a role which is similar to that of Christ, and 5. because it comes from an author who is — unlike me! — intimately knowledgeable about the Ancient World.
Il faut donc renoncer à toute historicité du récit de la Création et du « Paradis », et chercher ailleurs. Un de mes vieux maîtres disait souvent que l'on ne connaît pas sa maison tant que l'on n'en sort pas. Mettons donc seulement un instant le nez dehors, et, pour demeurer dans le lieu et le milieu naturel de la Bible, le Proche-Orient antique, jetons un regard sur la vaste littérature religieuse de l'ancienne Mésopotamie. Voici quelques versets tirés d'un long récit fameux des origines du Monde et des hommes (Poème du Supersage):
It’s therefore necessary to renounce historical claims for the Creation myth and for Paradise, and to look elsewhere. One of my old teachers used to say that you only know your house when you go outside it. Let’s therefore stick our noses outside for a moment, and, finding ourselves in the general environs of the Bible, the ancient Near East, let’s project our vision over the vast religious literature of ancient Mesopotamia. Here are some verses taken from a famous long account of the origins of the world and man (Poem of the Super Sage):
Le dieu Enki ouvrit alors la bouche / Et s'adressa aux Grands-dieux : / « On immolera un dieu... / Et à sa chair et son sang / La déesse Nintu mélangera de l'argile : / Ainsi seront associés du dieu et de l'homme / Réunis dans l'argile (du prototype humain)… »
Et la suite raconte comment ce propos se trouve exécuté aussitôt, point par point, donnant naissance à l'espèce humaine.
The god Enki opened his mouth and addressed the great gods: “We will sacrifice a god … / And into his flesh and his blood / The goddess Nintu will mix in clay: / Thus god and man will be related / Reunited in the clay (of the prototypical human) …”
And the rest tells how this proposition finds itself executed right away, point by point, giving birth to the human species.
Bien que, d'après le contexte et le style, le fait — en l'occurrence la création de l'Homme — nous y soit exposé par manière d'histoire, personne au monde ne songerait sérieusement à tenir ce récit pour une relation proprement historique. Au-delà du mot à mot narratif, on y verra plutôt un enseignement plus profond, et d'un autre ordre, que l'on comprend sans peine pour peu qu'on le lise comme il faut le lire : l'auteur nous y explique bel et bien comment, en dépit de notre corps « argileux » : misérable et caduc, nous avons d'origine en nous quelque chose de supérieur à notre matière, quelque chose, en somme, de « divin ». Ce récit n'est pas une histoire, c'est ce que l'on appelle un mythe.
Thus, following the context and style, the fact — in regard to the creation of man — is exposed to us in a historical way, so that no one in the world would seriously dream of taking this account for a proper historical account. Beyond a word-for-word narrative, we find rather a teaching that is deeper and of a different order, a teaching that one can understand easily, if, that is, we read as we ought to: the author indeed explains how, despite our body of clay, miserable and perishable as it is, we nevertheless have in our origin something greater than our physical matter; something, in sum, divine. This account isn’t a history, it’s what we call myth.
Un mythe est un récit forgé pour répondre aux grandes questions que les hommes se sont toujours posées quand ils réfléchissent à leurs origines, aux raisons d'être et aux destins de notre univers et de notre race, aux grands phénomènes énigmatiques qui s'y présentent à nous de toutes parts.
A myth is an account created to respond to the big questions that men have always asked themselves when they reflect on their origins, on the reasons for their being and for the destinies of our universe and our race, and on the great enigmatic phenomena that surrounds us on every side.
[In progress]
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Next: The Archaeology of Mystery
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