Gospel & Universe 🪐 Preface
P. O.V. 2: Literature
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While I haven’t found a scientific or religious philosophy that supplies a satisfactory explanation for the mystery of our existence, I find that literature is a pretty good stand-in for meaning. Literature reflects multiple aspects of reality, even when they’re oppositional or contradictory. It can be realistic, moral, amoral, immoral, fantastic, and idealistic. Its realistic and fantastic scenarios lead toward answers, truths, tangents, ambiguities, doubts, and disbelief. It runs the gamut of philosophical scenarios.
Literature resembles agnosticism in its interpretive method and its aims: both hold definitive interpretation at bay, so as to appreciate the myriad possibilities, mysteries, dichotomies, and ambiguities. In this sense ambiguity is key to both: literary critics appreciate writing that can be seen in different ways; likewise, agnostics appreciate philosophies and religions which interpret reality in different ways. Interpretations don’t cancel each other out as much as they enrich each other. Literature and agnosticism are largely appreciative in nature, seeking what can be gained rather than what’s deficient. I go into this positive-sum view in greater detail in A Positive-Sum Philosophy.
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Literature is the broad category that includes drama, which Hamlet calls “the mirror up to nature” that shows “virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” Hamlet dramatizes many aspects of life — love, friendship, murder, death, religion, etc. — yet the play is a theatrical instance of literature, which remains a larger category, including poetry, the short story, and the novel. While drama is a huge category, especially if we include film and TV, literature reaches deeper into the past, deeper into the ambiguities of poetry, and deeper into the condensed worlds of the short story and the extended explorations of the novel and epic.
The epic is especially important in terms of agnosticism, since it aims at a larger view of reality, complete with love, struggle, and the quest for meaning. For instance, in Hamlet when the bodies pile up on the stage at the end of the play, the machinations of the evil king come to a spectacular end. Thoughts about wasted love, fratricide, a mother betrayed, and the country beyond whose borne no traveller returns remain with us, resonating with our deeper thoughts. Yet in the epic the hero doesn’t just think about the country beyond whose borne; he travels to it, and then comes back to tell us all about it.
The epic hero gives us the type of information that is impossible to give, yet which religions give to us nevertheless. For instance, in Gilgamesh, the first great epic in world literature, the hero seeks his friend in the dust and then on an island where the survivor of the great Flood lives with his wife (Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh, Noah in The Bible). In the famous Greek epic, The Odyssey, the hero travels to the grim world below to speak to the great warrior Achilles and the seer Tiresias. In the Roman Aeneid, the hero Aeneis travels to the city of the dead and sees his ruined love, Dido. In The Divine Comedy, Dante mixes the Classic and Christian world into a cosmic panorama of Earth, Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Dante’s vision is wide here yet it also reflects the Medieval notion that what really matters is the afterlife, while the other epics integrate the theme of the afterlife more closely into a vision of human life as it’s lived in the here and now.
In all cases, the epic authors try to convey to us the import of our loves, our struggles, and our desire for meaning. While Byron and Joyce turn the epic on its head (much as existentialism does to religious philosophy), they nevertheless keep the notion of a wider vision, one that includes a journey thorugh life with all its paradoxes and ambiguities. In this sense, epic literature is less like a particular religion than it is like all religions, and then some. By which I mean 1) that it’s global and 2) that it also encompasses the profane as well as the sacred — from the journeys of Gilgamesh a thousand years before Odysseus, to the rambling 1904 pub-crawl of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses.
Religions and philosophies change their natures, yet constantly try to give us the truth, which is a thing that agnostics italicize, in order to indicate that whatever truth they give, and however convinced they are about this truth, agnostics believe that it’s most probably contingent, tentative, provisional, and conditional. Literature on the other hand doesn’t have this specific aim of truth, or at least, doesn’t have it exclusively. Instead, it aims to reflect, like Hamlet’s mirror, or to explore, without the goal of a final, essentialist, sacred truth.
Yet even here literature is slippery, like agnosticism. It does sometimes aim to find a sacred truth and to bring everything together. Yet literature also sometimes aims to break things apart, to see how we live our lives in a fragmented world. It aims to sometimes arrive at and sometimes to avoid, sometimes to hold in balance and sometimes to watch the teeter totter go up and down, or watch the colours on a spectrum shift from magenta to purple.
Having studied literature for the last 45 years, I’ve come to believe that all writing is, like all people, a product of specific places and times. Whether people consider writings to be sacred or profane, they’re products of particular locations and sense impressions, and of the flow of particular human experiences over the eighty-odd years of their lives. Hindus, Christians, & Muslims may believe that their scriptures came down to us from the highest heavens, yet I doubt it. Yet I also suspect that my doubt is a product of my own experience, my own time & space, and it therefore doesn't constitute any sort of absolute truth.
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Next: 🪐 P.O.V. 3: Fault Lines
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