spiritual lingo and god as literary character

God with his tool in his great big shed

Though I'm meant to be avoiding the subject of George Pell, I was quite amused by these musings.

Now, to add something to my comments on spirituality written elsewhere. One of my pet peeves is the use of spirituality lingo to castigate or demean those thinkers who don't demonstrate much interest in said lingo. For example, I recall being infuriated years ago when I read a literary critic comparing one of my favorite writers, Stendhal, to Lev Tolstoy. He claimed that the 'spiritual dimension' to Tolstoy's work gave it a depth which Stendhal's work lacked. The lack of any developed argument behind this claim angered me perhaps more than the claim itself. In any case, Stendhal's low key approach to the emotional storms of his characters creates resonances for me that are powerfully moving, and if he lacks anything in comparison to Tolstoy it has nothing to do with the 'spiritual dimension', IMHO.

A similar claim was made more recently on a radio program in which Peter Singer and Raymond Gaita were compared as prominent Oz philosophers, and wouldn't you know that Singer's non-belief made his moral philosophy just too 'thin' and coldly rational for these experts. Again no elaboration on such a questionable claim. No mention of a predisposition to find people of faith magically possessed of a deeper, richer more comprehensive view of the world.

To mark my continuing interest in faith-based belief, a friend has bought me a book. It's called God: a biography, by Jack Miles. Of course this gift was given me in the spirit of irony, and I looked forward to finding plenty of irony in the book (the author's streetwise-sounding name seconded the promise), but on the contrary it's a tome that takes itself all too seriously.

Still, the first thirty pages or so are fascinating. Miles comes from a tradition of secular Bible scholarship, and it's impossible so far to be sure about where he stands in terms of faith. I doubt if I'll be any surer by the end of the book, and that's certainly not my way, I have to nail my colours to the mast from the outset. Yet there are some advantages to Miles's method. People of faith are going to find less to object to, probably, than they'd find in the work of an avowed non-believer, and will be drawn into wondering about the inconsistencies and oddities of this God character, while the non-believer will find here plenty of fresh ammunition for the good fight.

He spends the first pages explaining and justifying how he's going to approach the issue. He claims that the Bible is generally regarded as literature by everyone, regardless of whether they see it as the revealed world of God, and that one key to great literature (he uses Hamlet as an example) is that their characters are felt to live beyond the pages of the text, so that these characters' characters, so to speak, can be analysed as fruitfully as if they're real people. This is an odd argument it seems to me - after all, we don't see too many bios of Hamlet, Don Quixote or Huck Finn on our shelves. And of course Miles stops well short of describing the Bible (or, strictly speaking, the Tanakh, for he's using the Hebrew Bible as his text) as fiction.

Be that as it may, he has chosen to write a biography of a character in literature, using that literature, and nothing beyond it, to get a handle on the character and his activities. This, though is a more slippery task than he acknowledges it to be, and it seems to me he gets in trouble right from the beginning. Naturally he begins with the creation of the earth, and notes that God appears to be talking to himself, since he's the only one present (though there is a narrator, a conundrum largely passed over). The first words, 'let there be light' are, incidentally, more brief and less commanding in the original Hebrew. Miles suggests that he's more like a worker talking to himself about what he's doing while he does it.

It's a blokes and sheds kind of thing. When a bloke's in his shed, he's in another world - he might have a wife and five kids but you'd never be able to infer this from watching him work. Similarly, in watching God in the throes of creation, we're unable to infer anything about his family background, and we're told nothing, either by God or by the narrator. To quote Miles:

The text speaks of God as masculine and singular. And if this God has a private life or even, as we might say, a divine social life among other Gods, he isn't admitting us to it. He seems to be entirely alone, not only without a spouse but also without a brother, a friend, a servant, or even a mythical animal.

Seems is an important word here. From our perspective, as his creations (according to this literary work), God is sole creator, but we have no way of knowing whether, when he retreats from us back into heaven, he has a goddess wife and lots of godly kids, or brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts. His creative acts make monotheism a reasonable response from a human perspective, but his singleness can't be inferred with certainty from the Tanakh, at least not from the early verses of Genesis.

Anyhow, an intriguing work so far, but, I would argue, not a biography. Rather it's a piece of literary criticism or analysis, with particular attention to the development of the most important character in the literary work, even if he remains in the background most of the time. As such, it dispenses with the essential question, whether God exists, and focuses on his possible motives and the development of his character within the literary work that's most concerned with him. As I have an honours degree in English literature, this approach is very familiar to me, and I've already received much pabulum from the first pages. I don't even mind the slightly false promise of the title. If it gets people in....

more vulnerable thoughts

Cees Nooteboom


My reading this morning of the rather more congenial Cees Nooteboom has brought me back again to this idea, expressed rather differently by Headmaster Hawkes, that we inevitably become alienated from some of our cultural mythologies (while in the process of creating or establishing new ones). Hawkes described it as a society coming to have 'only a nominal understanding of its own faith', but Nooteboom's reflections are naturally more elusive, and more penetrating.

Nooteboom is looking at some sculptured sandstone figures in Aragon, and his reflections are worth quoting at length:

...the images of Creation, of Eve emerging from Adam's rib, of original sin and the expulsion from paradise, of monsters and taunters and of Cain the farmer and Abel the shepherd, the eternal panopticon to which we are becoming progressively blind, until our dwindling knowledge reaches the point where the whole show means as little to us as a symposium of Greek gods.
The ever accelerating mutations of progress have eroded the idea behind these images, leaving no more than a fable that you may or may not have heard. During my journey these thoughts have to be pondered over and over again. This is not intended as an exercise in nostalgia, but such encounters always lead to confrontation, something collides with something else, the definite past is still present in the stones, its age alone is enough to lend it gravity. But what does a thing mean when it has dropped out of its meaning, when it no longer means what it meant? Does that leave simply art, which is both accessible and not accessible? Or is it the very confrontation, the realization that you do not recognize the ideas of your own kind, that makes you so sure that one day your own thoughts too will fail to be understood? In that case what have I been looking for during all my travels? Perhaps it is the thrill of danger that such musings inspire, the sensation of the carpet being pulled out from under you, the desperate diachrony of those who venture further into the past than is good for them, not because they want it back so as to reinstate it the way fundamentalists do - quite the contrary, it is 'because they', as Ortega y Gasset says, 'love the past for its own sake', that which has ended and yet will never end because it lives on in the present.

I'm not sure that I love Christianity for its own sake, but I can certainly testify to the idea that it has ended and yet will never end in me. Perhaps I'm in love with the struggle with it, or at least captivated by this struggle. Most of my secular friends just find the issue boring and irrelevant, and I often envy them. I'm still not sure, and perhaps never will be, whether my bemusement and irritation with the world of faith is something I've chosen or something that has chosen me.

man of glibness

Dr Tim Hawkes, PA*, headmaster of The King's School, Paramatta

As I've said, I don't intend this to be a conversation with George Pell anymore, but I'm still tempted. Just looking at references to Pell on google (looking for my own blog actually, but it's slipped off the radar), I find enough material there for a lifetime's blogging. Trouble is, I find enough material everywhere for a lifetime's blogging.

What I want to reflect on is a lifetime of bemusement over faith-based belief systems. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they're all equally foreign, whether in their moderate or fundamentalist forms.

I'm very grateful to be living in a secular state, a more secular state than the USA, because faith-based belief systems can be quite frightening. Many believers are looking for converts and bemoaning their lack of political power. I feel it's part of my duty to keep their hands off those reins.

It's not hard to find examples of scary believers, but here's one, via Barista or Road to Surfdom, can't remember which.

Tim Hawkes is a headmaster (no, not a new-fangled 'Principal') of a prestigious Sydney school. To judge from the photo on the SMH site, he has a born-to-rule snoot about him, which I admit raises a desire for disdain. He has chosen to write a piece on a pot-boiler called The Da Vinci Code, or perhaps rather on the film (tenth-rate, by all accounts) based on it, since that's just been released.

Unsurprisingly, Hawkes is given to magisterial pronouncements. Here's one that caught my eye - and was in fact intended to, since it stood alone in its own spaced para:

In a society made vulnerable through only a nominal understanding of its own faith, it would appear that many who read The Da Vinci Code are questioning their Sunday School instruction.

A revealing sentence, suggesting that those who question their Sunday School instruction do so because they're 'vulnerable'. Clearly, to Hawkes, it would be better to be 'invulnerable' and not to question. A very loaded term indeed, this 'vulnerable'. Of course, given the choice between vulnerability and faith, I know what I'd choose, but really there's no either/or. Hawkes chooses not to face the fact that for many in our society faith is not an issue, and Sunday School, for better or worse, is a long-forgotten institution. Whether or not this makes us more 'vulnerable' (to what I wonder? To thinking perhaps?) is probably a matter of faith.

Hawkes is fond of using that most chilling of words in his religion, 'heretical'. I swear I could whiff the scorching flesh and hear the screams as I read his scornful dismissals of the 'discredited' non-Biblical texts that the novel/film relied on. He based his dismissal on nothing more than that they were written at a later date than the 'accepted' gospels. The fact is, though, that there's no evidence that any of the texts were eye-witness accounts of the life of Jesus, and we have no real way of knowing that any account of Jesus' life is more accurate than any other. Certainly we can't take temporal closeness to the events of the life as a reliable guide to accuracy - ask any investigating officer.

A much more amusing piece of silliness occurs when Hawkes takes issue with a 'factual error' in the book/novel relating to Jesus' divinity:

Among his errors are [the statement that]... - Jesus was not God: The very earliest Christian writings declare with absolute constancy and consistency that Jesus was considered God, even in his own lifetime.

Hawkes appears to overlook the fact that no amount of declarations of a person's 'godness' by members of his particular cult actually makes that person a god, but be that as it may, the 'absolute constancy' of the declarations is surely questionable. Having read a version of the Bible myself recently, I recall being struck by how little Jesus' divinity was mentioned, if at all. However, that needs further investigation. I'm deeply suspcious, though, of Hawkes' absolutism. His whole presentation is full of shallow self-confidence. A man to be kept well clear of the reins.

*Pompous Arsehole

the not so strange case of the Bible

from the Vulgate Bible, Italy, 14th C - something to do with St Jerome

I've decided to resurrect this blog, for the purpose of ruminating on belief and non-belief in a less combative way. I was going to start a new blog, with an appropriately neutral title - Reflections of a Non-believer, or something like. To be honest, George Pell doesn't strike me as a sufficiently interesting person to address myself to, but I think I'll continue with this form after all, for the conservative catholic church is a kind of opposite pole that attracts me in some kind of repulsive way, and Pell is as worthy a symbol of this pole as anyone, I suppose. But mostly I won't bother with addressing Pell, or the catholic church, directly.

Not so long ago I read a book called Testament, a modernised version of the Bible, sans chapters and verses, and claiming to leave the boring bits out. It left out a few controversial and cruel passages too, but there was enough cruelty left in, especially in the Old Testament, to leave a sceptical reader wondering how such a book could be the basis of a religion which has claimed, at least in recent times, to promote universal love. Allow me to descend to the glibness of remarking that if you want to be cured of religion, read the Bible.

While blogging on Testament, I occasionally received comments from believers. One, a priest, suggested that the Bible should be read slowly and its detail mined carefully and lovingly. This is fair comment, but it could just as well be applied to many avowedly secular texts. As an English literature graduate, I know how rewarding, and pleasurable, such detailed analysis and reflection can be - Emily Dickinson's poetry (secular or not) being particularly worth pondering in this way.

However, if the priest was hoping that, by a slow and painstaking reading and rereading of the text, I might come to some enlightened belief, then his hope was in vain. For their are some fairly obvious facts that can't be turned from - and I prefer to call them facts, rather than beliefs. One is the fact that the Bible was written by men, not by a god. Some 'sacred writings' were written by women, too, of course, but unsurprisingly they didn't make it into the team that was finally selected. Believers will of course claim that god wrote the Bible through these men, but that's a matter of faith.

The other fact is that, as a historical document, the Bible has been found to be more or less entirely unreliable. This isn't at all surprising, given that history, the modern discipline, was not really a concept for the Bible's authors and their contemporaries. Texts were written then to promote and to idealise particular cultures and their beliefs, and their destiny. To engender pride and cohesion. It's just as well, really, that the books are full of exaggerations, distortions and falsehoods, for many of the tales told don't reflect well on the depicted god.

While reading Testament, I occasionally researched other versions of the stories that most struck me in other translations and modernisations of the Bible online. Naturally, a source I often turned to was the Skeptic's Annotated Bible - not a separate translation, but a relentless expose of the absurdities, cruelties and inconsistencies to be found in the King James Version. One moderate Christian commentator questioned my reference to the SAB, which he dismissed as 'a bit of a joke'. Of course the SAB is often hilarious, but it isn't so easily dismissed (and in any case, such a dismissive wave of the hand doesn't constitute an argument). To me, it performs a very important function, in that it's a constant reminder of the human nature of the text, so patently parochial, vindictive, fearful, amoral and at times savage, so historically and culturally circumscribed that the idea of its standing as a testament for all peoples and all times seems, to this reader at least, hilarious in its inappropriateness. On the other hand, maybe it is more appropriate than some non-believers would be prepared to admit, for maybe we are at every age and within every culture, a parochial, vindictive, fearful, amoral and savage lot. And maybe, within all that selfish blinkeredness there's also a striving towards something transcendent, or at least better. And the Bible offers that too of course, but I'd be wary of the devil in the detail. We can find much better ways to be better than by following the Bible.