Future, Present, & Past:



Speculative
~~ Giving itself latitude and leisure to take any premise or inquiry to its furthest associative conclusion.
Critical~~ Ready to apply, to itself and its object, the canons of reason, evidence, style, and ethics, up to their limits.
Traditional~~ At home and at large in the ecosystem of practice and memory that radically nourishes the whole person.

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Friday, April 2, 2010

Theology between speech and song


(This post is in part a reflection on some points made by John Burnett at his blog here).

I've mentioned before that I'm a musician. Not a great one; I play keyboard well enough to comp my way through some jazz standards and to have played in a few rock bands (you wouldn't have heard of us); and I can sing. My vocal music has been mostly choral (I had too little stamina and too many inhibitions to be a lead singer, though I liked to chime in in the background), and now that I'm not in a band anymore, I sing mainly in the car, and in choir of my Episcopal parish. This, as you might imagine, is a little bit of a shift in style (the style of my Anglo-Catholic parish is more Thomas Tallis than "praise songs"). (I still get my rock'n'roll in the car.)

On Good Friday, I had been asked to sing in my parish's passion narrative. Specifically, I was asked to sing the part of Jesus, which turns out to be a somewhat important role. Happily, I did not choke up (thanks to good coaching and timely advice by the woman who has hitherto sung the part--"just remember," she told me, "it's all a conversation between you and Pilate, or you and Caiaphas, you you and whoever"), and my somewhat softer voice turned out to be an asset (you don't really want a strident Jesus).

This experience, and that of singing regularly in a liturgical setting generally, has helped to crystallize a few reflections (still quite tentaive) I've had for a while about music and theology.

Once upon a time, as our contemporary demythology would have it, it was possible for a Christian believer to declare their faith in a more or less unproblematic way. "Ascending into Heaven," for instance, or for that matter, "rising again on the third day" were not especially challenging notions in a culture that imagined heaven as a place to which one could ascend, and which took miracles for granted.

Hmmm. Well, I have my doubts about this scenario. The idea that the Resurrection was somehow easy to swallow by the credulous age of Cicero, Virgil, and Seneca, of Hillel, Gamaliel, and Akiva, to say nothing of that reluctant enthusiast St. Paul, strikes me as, shall we say, a bit of an over-simplicifation. I didn't really need N.T. Wright to convince me of this, but it's nice to have his solid, sane and magisterial scholarship to remind us that death has always been seen as the great irreversible, no less to the first century A.D. world than to today's. Likewise, whatever undoubtedly separates ancient cosmology from our own, and notwithstanding both the verb "ascended" and various artistic depictions of the Ascension, I am unconvinced that the faith of the ancient church included a heaven that could be reached if one traveled perpendicularly to the earth's surface far enough--at least, if we are talking about the saints whose experience informed the creedal definitions.

Still, one has to admit that those stories and declarations exist-- "On the third day he rose again...He ascended into Heaven..." "the communion of saints, the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting..." And of course, it's not unlikely that many people did believe in a Heaven spatially located "up there;" not just because it's intuitively "obvious" to our embodied minds, but because it seems that a number of people still do.

I'm not going to turn this blog into a pulpit. But I want to make a suggestion about how Christian doctrine, or indeed religious doctrine in general, can be apprehended in a way that offers a high road around certain easy (too easy) objections that are often made against it. My approach may raise as many difficulties as it solves, but I think these new difficulties are more interesting and more profitable.

I start with the hypotheses, first, that the best guide to the meaning of a religious tradition is not the overt statement of belief, but the patterns of worship--the liturgies--that shape the life of individual and community; and secondly that those liturgies which are most conservative will best manifest the formative intuitions of the traditions in question.

The liturgical traditions that best preserve their antique practices--Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Orthodox Judaism--are also, and not coincidentally, the most
sung liturgies. To this day the one Jewish rite of passage that every gentile knows the name of, the occasion that marks the entry of the young Jew into the adult community, requires the careful learning and recitation of scripture not as a memorized text alone but as enshrined in a melody that may be more than two millennia old.

This could simply mean that religious traditions, inherently conservative, tend to keep their forms; if it was sung back in the olden days, and no Zwingli or Henry VIII has come along in the meantime, it's likely to still be sung today. This is true so far as it goes, but more is involved than resistance to change. In fact it is well known that liturgical forms do change. But until the Reformation, the sung or chanted character of all scriptural texts was a given. And when one actually pays attention to the character of this recitation, one notes something.

Given any text at all to read, one is immediately faced choices, choices about speed, volume, emphasis, tone, emotion; choices that multiply with every word. To speak aloud even a single written sentence is not an innocent act; with every syllable, one construes the silent text into a heard experience. And this transformation always imbues the written word with something not on the page. A reading can be "dramatic" or wooden, seamless or awkward, inspiring or confusing; but it is never "just the text." This is not, n.b., a function of bad readers. There are plenty of bad readers--readers whose voice rises and falls in pitch, crescendos and dies to a whisper; readers whose emotions spill over; readers who can't resist the extra pause before what they see as the poignant moment or the punchline; who can't, in short, avoid telling you what text "means" in their manner of reading it. The great irony is that those readers who are the most "boring"--the most monotone, the least "inspiring"--are the closest to the ancient practice of chant--minus, of course, most of the beauty of the form. What a chanted text gives you is--ideally--the text minus the interpreting ego of the reader; for the multitude of possibilities of tone of voice, chant gives a single, clear tone. ("Ideally," I said; of course the more the cantor concentrates on technique or "effect," the more the ego intrudes. A chanted scriptural text is not an operatic recitative.)

The Bible (as it currently stands) is
meant to be sung. A look at the Hebrew text confirms this-- the Masoretic text includes both vowel points and te'amim or cantillation marks (though a kosher Torah scroll for synagogue use omits these [thanks to John Burnett for setting me straight on this matter]). In the case of the New Testament the case is more complex; there is no single canonical text, no similarly universal tradition of cantillation, and no single set of melodies; but the ancient liturgical practice in both east and west, and continuous to this day in many traditions, is certainly the chanting of all texts with the exception of the homily (and for all I know, even this sometimes).

Having now spent a good while in the choir singing a lot of liturgical material, especially the psalms, I have noticed something about how music impacts the reception of texts. Bypassing the ego of the singer, the chanted text also largely bypasses those of the listeners. When I am singing a text about, say, the resurrection of the dead, I am never concerned to ask "what is the resurrection supposed to be like?" The questions of the "literal" ramifications of a sung text do not arise. This is very different from reading a text, listening to it be read. Unless one is simply swept along in a narrative, the questions "did that actually happen?", or "what did that really look like?" inevitably arise. But this is not the case when one sings or hears music. One can ask if a story is true, but no one asks if this is a true song.

The sung text is addressed, as it were, to a different faculty of the soul than is the spoken text. The Bible was not intended by the peoples that produced it to be evaluated in terms of historical or scientific veracity; and far less in terms of "futural" accuracy or indeed of rules for living. (There are some elements of all of these in the original textual strata of the Bible, the so-called J, E, D, and P texts and their hypothetical cousins; but even in those cases--and I must emphasize how speculative all reconstructions of the "original text" are--I am convinced that the ancients never meant just what a modern literalist would mean by the questions "is that how it really happened?" or "when will this happen?" or indeed "is that, then, how I must live?") The Bible as chanted--which is to say, the Bible read as the text we have asks to be read--is not primarily aimed at the parts of the human person that makes those evaluations. This doesn't mean that music is a sneaky way for Biblical fundamentalism to get past the mind's bullshit detectors. Rather, it means that those who shaped the Biblical text in its current form were not fundamentalists.


Well, then, what is the Bible? For a long time I took pleasure and relief (after being raised in a more or less biblical literalist household) in realizing that the Bible was a sort of "library," i.e., not a single book but a collection of disparate material from many eras. In this I am pretty much a died-in-the-wool subscriber to the "Documentary Hypothesis" in its loosest form. I think there is little real question that the Bible as we have it was "edited together" as a process, the very last phase of which happened probably as a response to the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem. Although I remain cheerfully agnostic about any particular accounts of this process and especially about attempts to reconstruct the "sources," the basic notion that something like these sources existed once and were used to make the text we now have cannot, I think, withstand serious question.

With that caveat, however, I have to say that the Bible is meant by its final editors as a whole, as one story. And that is really what the Bible is: a story. A story, moreover, that has been extremely carefully shaped, down to the level of the letter sometimes and certainly to the words. What makes the Biblical story different--and to its detractors, pernicious--is that it's a story that invites you inside, that asks you to see yourself as living within it in some sense.

But in what sense? Did I not just say, or imply, that the Bible is neither a book of cosmology, nor of history, nor of foretellings, nor or rules of conduct? And if it's not these, then how exactly am I supposed to "live" it?

One "enters", consciously participates, in the Biblical story, in the sort of manner I have already tried to indicate with regard to poetry: by metalepsis. But lest this sound like some esoteric and/or question-begging answer, let me rephrase it. As I have mentioned earlier, metalepsis (which just means "participation") happens in liturgy. The liturgical setting and enactment is what makes possible the present-tense living in the story; the cyclical nature of the liturgy is how one gets a sense of the story as being a whole, and not a set of discrete parts labeled "the message for us today." In short, you don't get liturgy on a one-time basis, you have to swim there; but outside of the liturgy, the sung liturgy, you don't get Christian scripture "as it understands itself" at all.

I do not know enough about the Vedas, the Sutras, the Qur'an, or other scriptures, though I would not be astonished to learn that something like this is true of them as well; i.e., that they too are not primarily, and certainly not solely, intended for the mental faculty that asks, "is that what the camera would have recorded?" My suspicion is that they too must be "entered into" in a way that is very different from simply coming at them with questions.

Questions of historical truth and falsity are not irrelevant; the human faculties which ask after this are, after all, part of the human being, and the Biblical message is about the whole person. "How is the resurrection of the dead supposed to be possible?" has a meaning, but only within the story. And I'm rather strongly suggesting that one can't tell the story from the outside at all, and that one can't tell it from within, in any way but song.

This rather hyperbolic claim is not one for which I am sure I want to go all the way to the wall, but I am putting it in this admittedly provocative form, precisely to highlight the potential problems. I'm willing to face up to the difficult questions that follow--hopefully in dialogue--but I don't think anything is served by hiding how difficult they are. In short, am I really suggesting that the critique made by the intellectual faculties (those that do ask "did it really happen that way?") simply can't touch the Biblical story because-- well, because that sort of discourse doesn't sing? No. In fact I'd say that the discursive intellect does "sing," albeit in a different register; the texts of the creeds for instance are sculpted by and for the intellect as well; but then they were made also to be sung. Theology is a dialogue of singing and speech.

Even this blog post, one will note, is read, and not sung; it is thinking reflection upon experience of a different order. One steps in and out of music. But the intuition of wisdom is that this stepping in and out happens according to a deeper music.

16 comments:

  1. this comment (in two parts because of length) sent in via email by John Burnett:

    (part 1)
    Torah scrolls may not be pointed with either vowel or chant marks. They must be consonantal only. The points are considered "commentary" (as is even reading out loud); the Text must be provided without commentary; and then it's the job of the cantor and the rabbi and so forth to supply the various levels of comment. But the Text is to be the Text only.

    But regarding whether the ancients ever meant what modern literalists are asking about when they say "is that how it really happened?"-- kindly read Gn 6.19-20: "of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark...; they shall be male and female. Of fowls after their kind, and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee."

    Got the picture?-- each of every of all. No exceptions!

    And then v 22: "Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he." --says it twice for emphasis. And believe me, this book has been read by lawyers! So now read Gn 7.2,5: "Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.... And Noah did according unto all that the LORD commanded him."

    Even if you argue that God changed his mind, Noah could't have followed both commandments-- either he took two, or he took seven. Oh, I suppose you could say that he added the extra animals later. But nothing in the Text really supports that, and in any case, how do you divide "seven" by "male and female"?

    The observation of such contradictions, which turn out to be quite consistent in pattern throughout the Torah, was of course the founding insight of the documentary hypothesis in the first place. And the fact that there's a clear-cut pattern means there's something very important in the hypothesis. But even after we've decomposed the Text to its putative original pieces, we have to go back and admit that the Text we have is the one that the final writer/editor, who wasn't stupid at all, left us. And other considerations have forced us to see, beyond the documentary hypothesis, that he intended the contradictions to be seen. The Bible is not just an example of "primitive literature"; in fact it's composition is very subtle. But one effect of the contradiction in the Noah story, for example-- if we take the Text seriously-- is that, In the Text as we have it, it's not even possible to ask the kinds of questions that fundamentalists insist are important today: "is that how it really happened?" etc.

    The strategy is quite brilliant, really: by planting a few contradictions, the editor simply blocks the way to "literalism" and forces the interpretation onto another level.
    (cont'd)

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  2. (cont'd)

    (part II, from John Burnett):

    So, yes: "those who shaped the Biblical text in its current form were not fundamentalists."

    But were they literalists? The Bible (at least the OT anyway) is a Text, which means that it can be commented on, letter by letter. So actually it is meant to be taken "literally", in the literal meaning of that word: It is actually meant to be studied, even on the level of the letters. (Others kinds of writing in Judaism do not allow comment on the letter; they are not "texts" even though they're written down and codified, because they belong to the "oral" tradition. 'Textuality' and 'orality' refer to textual status, not to physical form. Christianity does not have a Text in this formal sense.) But you're right to emphasize the liturgical singing/hearing of the Text. Singing is not just a "decoration", but an essential dimension of the Text (but not, interestingly, of the lesser texts). It's tempting to say that all readings of all texts ultimately converge on, and find their final fulfillment in the public, liturgical singing of the Text. But maybe i won't go any further with that, because it might need further thought.

    As for Jesus (or anybody else) "ascending to heaven", we are photo-literalists about this because we are actually quite ignorant of the Text-- and this means, of its cross-references and self-referentiality-- which again means, of the thought-world both behind and in the Bible. To wit: "ascended to heaven" is another way of saying "was enthroned at God's right hand" (and often these phrases are paired anyway: but we separate them as though they meant different things; whereas the Biblical writers thought them rather synonymous). Modern literalism would save itself a lot of trouble if it were better informed about the letters and words of the Text!

    Peter Enns, the evangelical biblical scholar whose refusal of fundamentalist interpretations on biblical grounds caused a great uproar a couple years ago, has some very interesting short videos on http://biologos.org that you might be interested in.

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  3. "One can ask if a story is true, but no one asks if this is a true song."

    An excellent Strategy. Nietzsche seems to concur:

    1. Zarathustra, Part I, 7; On Reading and Writing:

    "I would believe only in a god who could dance."

    2. Zarathustra, Part II, 4; On Priests:

    "They would have to sing better songs for me to learn to have faith in their Redeemer: and his disciples would have to look more redeemed."

    3. Ecce Homo, Zarathuustra, Section 1:

    "Perhaps the whole of Zarathustra may be reckoned as music..."

    Belief? What belief? We are singing for the sake of joy!

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  4. a further comment from John Burnett:

    your point that

    "what the Bible is: a story. A story, moreover, that has been extremely carefully shaped, down to the level of the letter sometimes and certainly to the words."

    is also key. But I disagree that

    "What makes the Biblical story different--and to its detractors, pernicious--is that it's a story that invites you inside, that asks you to see yourself as living within it in some sense."

    -- all stories do that; that's why we tell them, and it's what's helpful when we listen to them.

    "One "enters", consciously participates, in the Biblical story, in the sort of manner I have already tried to indicate with regard to poetry: by metalepsis. But lest this sound like some esoteric and/or question-begging answer, let me rephrase it. As I havementioned earlier, metalepsis (which just means "participation")"

    we participate in all stories, in one way or another; but the participation which is liturgy is particular.

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  5. To John:

    Thanks for these extensive comments. I agree with you re. the Noah flood story. Whatever the origins of these pieces (I'm pretty comfortable agreeing that they are from different traditions originally), the instructions about "two of every kind" and then "seven" of every "clean" kind just do not admit of any "literal" resolution that a serious person can admit to. We are then left with a choice: either the editors of the text were dunderheads and didn't notice the contradiction, or they were perfectly comfortable with it. I would go further and argue, like you, that it is part of their intention precisely to make the fundamentalist move unavailable--to force us to "live in" the story in a different way than just straightforwardly pretending we are Noah, for instance. (because such pretense would still run into the contradiction--did God mean "two" or "seven"?)

    Regarding story and participation, you're quite right to say that all story invites us to "live in it." But few narratives of real sweep make the kind of existential claims that the Bible makes. There are a few examples in western poetry that claim to be articulating a vision in which the reader's life is actually included already, and these really attain their combination of plausibility and audacity by annexing themselves in some fashion to the Bible (I am thinking of Dante, or Milton, or Blake, for instance).

    In any case, I ought to have been more nuanced in the way I delineated the Biblical claim from other literary claims. I do think that the Bible in one sense claims to be a story of a different order. But that claim only makes sense in the context of liturgical participation. And this rather marks the difference between the Bible and, say, Ulysses or The Watchmen, or even a spectacle like Wagner's Ring cycle (though one could argue that Wagner imagined this as a kind of para-liturgy). There is a whole cultural mechanism of transmission and reception for the Bible that was assumed from the beginning (and I really do think this--the Bible attained its current form with liturgy in mind), and outside of this, one can read the Bible, but only by wresting it out of the only context in which it has meaning.

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  6. Joe,

    no philosopher has taught me more about the Bible than Nietzsche; and I have often pondered his deep intuitions about the common roots of philosophy and music. While I would not go so far as to jettison any and all assertoric force from philosophy (or religion), I would argue that "belief" or "faith" is a far more nuanced--and less "propositional"--than the (modern) "literalist" assumes (as John points out, there is an ancient "literalism" which means something more along the lines of "attention to the letter," which I suspect Plato also intended). The relation between propositional truth and participation is (I hold) a problem to be wrestled with, one posed by the tradition rather than summarily answered by a swift imperative like "just believe."

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  7. Beautiful posting, Skholiast. Two thoughts:

    In an Adorno-inflected vein, one might ask if the sung text participates in the logic of immersion preempting analysis. Put another way, by living inside a story that you sing participatively, the propositional logic of the text drops away--though not, if I read you right, as mere spectator emotion (and with the easy manipulations of the participant this emotionality might carry with it--which is not to say that manipulations are not still possible in this context).

    But what really interests me is how combining this aspect of your posting with your points about "planted contradictions" furthers the "insider" nature of the biblical text--that it's a meaningful story when lived from the inside. The contradictions function as a textual excess not unlike Barthes' reality effect, which paradoxically make that world that much more real (though in a non-propositional way) by wearing their framed artifice on their sleeve. Except here it's an "unreality effect" because the excess undermines rather than amplifies, pulling the participant into another order for it to still "work." Tertullian's "I believe because it is absurd" comes to mind here for me.

    But what concerns me about this logic is that any well-composed story (as John hints in his reply) is one that can be lived inside. If the biblical narrative is meant to be lived from the inside, what criteria can be used that establish it as the worthiest story? Why not rival narratives? And what distinguishes this self-validating "insiderness" from propaganda? I don't mean this in a vicious way. It's just a genuine concern for me. I hear a lot of Christians (and Buddhists, and...) argue that you have to live inside their story to find out if it's true. But I suspect that one can find oneself in any number of narratives that "sing" when one lives inside them. Is there any "outside" to which one can appeal to value one over another? (For me, the difficulty of this question is what makes me much more drawn to the process of empirical science--a narrative of its own with loads of problems of its own, but at least one with public verifiability and built-in revisability at the level of the signififier, etc.--than to religious textual authorities.)

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  8. Part 1 of 2 part response to Alf:

    yes, as you write, "by living inside a story that you sing participatively, the propositional logic of the text drops away--though not, if I read you right, as mere spectator emotion..." In fact I would venture that one of the great flaws of much of what passes for liturgy today is precisely the making of the congregation into spectators. I have a guess that this has something to do with the broader cultural developments that arose with the shift from theatre to movies, but certainly the roots go further back, and in any case it is not a question of some simple causality. Another travesty, which your words also touch upon, is the reduction of spiritual experience to emotional experience, a fundamental mistake which has already become plague-like in its spread in American religion and I suspect around the world.

    However, you also write: "...and with the easy manipulations of the participant this emotionality might carry with it--which is not to say that manipulations are not still possible in this context." Here too, you are correct. There is certainly a kind of manipulation that can happen, and the most obvious is what you touch on in your question, "what distinguishes this self-validating "insiderness" from propaganda?"

    No question--many different traditions claim you have to know them "from the inside." To some on the outside, this sounds creepily like "just drink the kool-aid and you'll see." While I actually don't hold that you have to live inside to "find out if it's true"-- such "finding out" is more part of a realization that one is inside-- I do see the inherently emic character of a tradition under the rubric of empiricism. There is an important sense in which you have to be inside to see what a traditionmeans, and lacking this, there are real limits to how far one is competent to venture an opinion.

    (This need not stop us, in part because we can have recourse to the setting we claim to share with a given tradition, and in part because we have a kind of duty to ourselves in any case. E.g., I am resolutely opposed to female circumcision, for instance, and I can't really feel the force of any intra-cultural arguments for it, in terms of "what it means" and how it functions in a way of life I do not share.My opposition is indeed critiquable via categories like colonialism or western privilege, but this is a case when I believe my access to a deeper strata, even (at the risk of "essentialilzing" to something like a general human bodily experience of sexuality--this, even after all due caveats about cultural mediation have been factored in. Can I demonstrate this? No. All I can say is that at a certain point "justification comes to an end.")

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  9. Part 2 of 2:

    To really engage with the other, one must oneself engage, i.e., engage as oneself. Pretending to have shed all one's preconceptions and prejudices only impairs the encounter. On the other hand, to really engage with another tradition is also always to take the risk of conversion. If one isn't taking that risk, I'm willing to say that one isn't really engaging.

    Obviously this is to put the situation quite starkly and to court paradox. But even here, a truly thoughtful person can walk a line; When Michael Ruse had his weird "Kuhnian" moment in the Creation Museum (I mentioned it earlier), realizing in some small way what is must be like to believe the earth was only 6,000 years old and why this mattered, he wasn't turned from his scathing attacks on Intelligent Design and Creationism, but it gave him a vision of what it is like to be a creationist.

    When I talk about metalepsis, I mean the ability to move in and out of such "worlds." I don't mean to imply that this is a simple matter; obviously all sorts of problems arise when considering experiences that, after all, change one. And yet I hold that there is a sense in which entrance and egress is possible. Such a notion seems to presuppose that there is a kind of meta-world through which such movement transpires. Philosophy is never done with the problematic between the One and the Many. So to your question of what separates a "self-validating story" from propaganda, I'd tentatively venture that from any such story, to be "true" on the inside, must also in some sense be "true" from the outside, although it may not be possible to evaluate this truth. I said before that there might be a kind of "connotative" validity to the Hopi elder's claim to be "helping the sun across the sky" (in Jung's story), despite what I would say is its denotative falsehood. This connotative truth needs to be understood "from inside;" but the claim that there is connotative truth is denotative. In this sense I would say that there is "no connotation without denotation" (which is not the same as saying that connotation reduces to (or can be "analyzed into") denotation, though I think there is a certain kinship here to an intuition at the heart of early analytic philosophy, e.g. logical atomism--in particular Wittgenstein's mystical variety). The appeal to revisable, empirical science has a significant role here, though of course it is also a tradition with its own inside.

    To the Buddhist or the Christian who claim that one must live in their world to see if they are true, I say that to the degree that they are true in the same sense, then one can make one's way from one world to the other. (This isn't about "translating" one in terms of the other, -- finding "equivalent terms" in one vocabulary for what the other vocabulary already says-- but rather of "translating oneself," so to speak--seeing to what extent one can be inhabit one world as a citizen of the other; of how subtly one's status as tourist shades off into "going native," and so on. Can one be a Christian in a Buddhist context, or vice-versa? Far from requiring that Buddhism and Christianity must be "saying the same thing," this investigation is far easier to the extent that Buddhism and Christianity are talking about different things. Sorting out the degree to which this is the case is one of the tasks of our time.

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  10. Excellent post. "One can ask if a story is true, but no one asks if this is a true song": one of the best philosophical epigrams I've heard in a long time. Nietzsche would approve.

    These questions are big issues wrt the Qur'an. Traditionally it is sung and recited in a heavily melodic way; puritanical Wahhabi reformers associate music with intoxication, and wish it to be recited in a monotone instead.

    I would say of the Pali suttas that they are definitely made to be entered into in a certain way: writing them down was an afterthought, many centuries after they were composed. They were supposed to be memorized, and therefore internalized; they are deliberately repetitive for the sake of easy memorization, like the chorus of a pop song. I'm not sure what melodies attached to them in ancient times (we may never know), but my understanding is they have always had some sort of melody, though a somewhat drab and repetitive one - basically chant.

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  11. I have mixed reactions to this very interesting post.

    From the textual perspective I think the hodgepodge of texts sewn together to make the New Testament are the least lyrical of any spiritual text that I have any familiarity with. The Greek is often quite poor and almost always being written by a non-native to the language. Only with the astonishing achievement of Jerome's Vulgata does it become a literary masterpiece. I think the King James Bible rivals in English what Jerome did in Latin.

    Not that I don't agree that early Christianity was a liturgical worship. I just doubt that the New Testament had much of a role in that until later. Of course, the New Testament, as such, didn't exist until later anyway.

    On the deeper, more relevant point about the importance of participation in understanding an experience like Religion I am mostly in agreement but take a radically different attitude. I would like to say "so you're in Love, good for you!" and leave it at that. But the blindness of participation, like the blindness of any great emotion is exactly what makes lovers and religious people so dangerous. They are inclined to think that they alone(and those with whom they participate) know what this experience is all about. That's cute and harmless, mostly, when it's about love but when the stakes are as high as the "salvation" of a people or an immortal soul this impulse tends toward the tyrannical.

    Any belief that feels the need to proselytize is inherently colonial. I agree with the Dalia Lama on this. I don't think that is always bad. I believe in vaccination and would like to bar people from public places who don't. My defense of that position is not liturgical.

    En-chantment is, well, enchanting but it has been used as often by terribly evil people like the Nazis or whatever competing liturgical tradition against whom one is at war as it has by "the one true church".

    While I'm not going to defend the new atheists I think you've got to admit they have a point. They go too far in trying to attack religion from the outside, which can't be done. But religions can't be given carte blanche just because we're not qualified to criticize them. Religions overreach any time they can, if history is to be our guide. Covering up a crime is a crime, even if you're the pope. Maybe you see that differently if you are on the "inside" of that belief system. Perhaps there is a "song" in which that all makes sense. I say let the caged bird sing.

    I would also like to agree that literal belief in the resurrection was no easy thing to sell in the classical world. I would go so far as to say that the ability for educated reasonable people to hold literal fundamentalist beliefs is more a product of Christian history than a precursor.

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  12. Just catching up with some of these comments.
    Thanks to Amod, for the corroboration re. Muslim scripture and the Pali canon. The use of melody or chant as a mnemonic aid is certainly a part of this; I would simply add, to clarify, that among the ancients, memory was a lived experience, a mode of interacting with landscape, architecture, story, and so on. This, I take it, is part of what is meant by "internalizing".

    to dy0genes: a lot of my remarks re. the indispensable liturgical context for scripture are directed not at the attackers of fundamentalism (though it may be pertinent there) but precisely at (1) fundamentalists, who have cut themselves off from the whole way of understanding the texts they so prize, and (2) impoverished liturgical traditions (which I am sorry to say includes just about everyone else), who have reduced liturgy to mood-setting and emotional effects and aesthetics. (I would forgive you if you got the impression just now that I believe that everyone is wrong but me!)

    Re. the text of the N.T., I must defer to those whose Greek is more advanced than my own stammering of "alpha, beta, gamma...." Certainly it was likely composed mostly by those whose first language was Aramaic (my understanding is that esp. Revelation abounds in Hebraicisms which render the koine very difficult to read in places). At the same time, a good deal of scholarship suggests that (1) many of the N.T. books, even the pastoral letters, were carefully composed, at least in terms of overall structure; (2) that some of the principles of this composition were liturgical, e.g., dictated by the Jewish festal cycle; and (3) that the entire N.T. was at some stage itself meant to be a structured whole and to complete the (newly-reframed) canonical Bible. I am aware of course that "a good deal of scholarship" can be found for most positions and that trends come and go; my three points are numbered according to my impression of least- to most-controversial. My authorities for (2) are Michael Goulder and Mark Goodacre (Goulder suggests that the synoptic Gospels were written as lectionaries; Goodacre is somewhat skeptical). For (3), I'd point first to Duane Christensen and the NT research on http://bibal.net/ . Some of this will figure in future posts, eventually....

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  13. Skholiast, I know how subtle and nuanced your thinking is. My critique was not really addressed to you but to a straw man "believer", a fundamentalist not as skilled at metalepsis as you are. If I had to restrain myself to only addressing what I think are your actual opinions I would be restricted to little more than praise--What fun would that be?

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  14. dy0genes--
    "If I had to restrain myself to only addressing what I think are your actual opinions I would be restricted to little more than praise--What fun would that be?"

    Please, not that. One of us thinking how right I am is more than enough!

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  15. Apologies for the late comment. I'm struck by your argument in this post. And though I'm an atheist, it seems to me to be essentially true (to the extent I can know anything about, that is), and over the years I've moved further and further away from the strident anti-religion position in part because I think it misses the point.

    But my main reason for commenting is to ask if you've read Gabriel Josipovici's book The Book of God. It's a beautiful book in which he makes an argument not unlike what you say here. I can't say much more about it here just now, but I wanted to pass that on. He also discusses the Bible in the first few essays in his collection Singer on the Shore.

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  16. Hi Richard,

    I do know Josipovici's work-- my former professor Bernard Harrison is a friend of his and recommended him to me; I own The Book of God but it has been some time since I read in it carefully, and I have not seen Singer. In fact I had forgotten (or missed) the resonance between Josipovici's argument and my own on this matter; now I will have to go and re-read. Thank you for this.

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