Gospel & Universe ♒️ The Currents of Sumer
The Archaeology of Mystery
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In the religious world of both Enns and Bottéro there are mysteries that holy texts aren’t — contrary to what dogmas assert — trying to clear up as much as they are trying to explore, expand, imply, probe, dissect, and render accessible to our feelings. In the tradition of many great thinkers and mystics, Enns and Bottéro urge us to look closely at holy texts, and also to look through, around, and behind the language of these texts — which is often aggressively assertive — to the more malleable and open questions and spiritual quests that they then inspire.
The religious traditions in the Classical Near East tend to start off with a sense of certainty, as if the writers of these texts were taught by an English teacher who tells his students that you shouldn’t write, “I think Shakespeare is saying…” but rather, “Shakespeare is saying…” How different it might have all been, for instance, if the second version of Creation in the Old Testament started with, “And the prophet dreamed that God created Adam from dust…”
Gilgamesh’s words to Enkidu provide an inverse example. After having a dream about a mountain falling on him, Gilgamesh tells Enkidu that he then dreamed he was saved by drinking the water of “one whose grace and beauty are greater than the beauty of the world.” If the author wrote in a more assertive way, the ideas would take on a more doctrinal sense: “We will all be saved, pulled from the falling mountain, by one whose grace and beauty are greater than the beauty of the world.”
As a result of a very affirmative writing style, we in the Western religions are used to beginnings which are affirmations or assertions of Grand Truth. Yet if we cast our vision further east to India (and later, westward, to early Greece) we see that early Hinduism and early Daoism took a very different approach. In the poetry of the early Rg Veda — composed from the mid-2nd millennium BC — there are numerous creation myths. The Rg Veda’s diverse verses invite us to explore many versions, and don’t give us the sense that we must believe in one of them to the exclusion of others. One famous verse even says that only the god in the highest heavens knows how Creation occurred. But then the poet adds that even this god may not know.
With such a beginning in the Vedas, it’s no wonder that for the next three and a half thousand years saddhus, sannyasins, and yogis set off into the mountains and caves in search of their own experience of truth. Not that they didn’t refer back to the Vedas or to the other mystical and philosophical works of Hinduism that developed along the way (along with superstition, caste exclusivity, Buddhist rebellion against caste, etc.). It’s just that the religious quest wasn’t about following a doctrinal set of ideas. It was about exploring the soul and the universe to become one with the deepest reality, however mysterious and ineffable that might be.
And of course the Hindus weren’t alone in doing this. Mystics of all stripes went into their own mountains and deserts, cities and deltas. Yet in many cases these seekers had to contend with doctrines and dogmas which they had to accept, they couldn’t test, and they had to submit to before they could explore in an open personal way. While the Hindu or Daoist stared up into the sky and wondered what it was all about, the seeker in Western religions was told what it was all about and then had to struggle to allow himself to see what it was all about, despite, around, or notwithstanding what they were told.
If we had been told, as we are now told by scholars like Enns & Bottéro, that our early religious texts are there to throw out mysteries, and that they are part of a process of discovering what these mysteries might be, our spiritual journeys may not have led us further to truth, but at least they would have been our journeys and not the straight and often literal paths laid out to us by leaders in the church, synagogue, or mosque. As it was, however, we had to wait for writers like Luther, Rumi, Erasmus, or Enns so that we could both see those buildings and also see through them to everything that lay deeper within. And/or, we had to wait for writers like the Indologist Sir William Jones, or for Assyriologists like George Smith and Bottéro, so that we might see through, around, and before them, in order to see what lay within and beyond.
In this sense being a believer isn’t to accept a pre-programmed Biblical, Vedic, or Qur’anic package. Rather, it’s a struggle, like the one Kierkegaard writes about in Fear and Trembling. For the Danish philosopher of religion, you don’t just become a Christian by simplifying the complexity of belief and by boiling the Bible down to a credo or a confession of faith. Instead, you become one by struggling with the deepest and most thorny questions, by facing the void and watching a dim light slip into your heart.
In this sense it’s not so different from being an agnostic, except that for the agnostic the light slips into your heart and continues into the void. You wait in the dark, to see if it comes back.
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