The Greeks believed the Iliad. They cited Homer to settle all sorts of disputes, both legal and moral. The poets were in touch with matters beyond mortal ken. The rhapsode, as Ion claimed, was inspired, and so spoke the moving word, supported prescribed beliefs, and incited proper action. Plato was apparently of the opinion that Homer’s poetry was self-validating; that is, its “poetic” power convinced its listeners of its truth. It did not require letters of recommendation. It did not need to wear the halo of tradition, or become oracular (and therefore ambiguous), or furnish a list of its past successes. And of course that made it dangerous. What it said was unclear, and equally secure from rebuttal or test, but its emotional appeal easily overwhelmed reason. In short, it was a sacred text.
Even now, though examined and exposed and explained, sophistries have their charm, like roués, and continue to seduce. Imperfect arguments are often more persuasive than perfectly sound ones. Sad, we may say, but true. Yet it is human ignorance that permits many a millionaire to make his millions, and many a tyrant to prosper, too, and reelects politicians rotten at core, pulp, skin, stem, seed, and juice.
I don’t want to sound like the gun lobby, but was it poetry that was at fault here? Was Homer a Mussolini eager to bomb Abyssinia? A Bush burning to free Iraq? Or was his poetry used for such purposes by the unscrupulous, who sought to employ Homer’s charm, his genius, his moving language, his cultural vision to win over already-tipsy souls to some completely personal plan and policy? Plato’s objection to the poets was really a condemnation of his society—a society of people eager to have their fears at the same time provoked and calmed, their greed promised figs and pigs, their stupidity praised, their bigotry encouraged, their failures extolled as achievement, their hatred allowed, indeed furnished, a helpless object. In short, a society like any other.
Nor could Second Isaiah, as “he” is now called, have any idea to what low aims, profitable schemes, and sentimental dreams his beautiful language would be put to praising.
In any case, the devas have been busy, whether in the guise of Gabriel in his shiny togs, or the serpent in his slithers, because revelation is as common as the cold, and the word of God, on and in and from so many tongues, has become a Babel.
Yet each book, to be a proper revelation, and worthy of the trust of the faithful, and in order to sustain itself, and preserve its message, must claim certainty, exclusiveness, a single unwavering interpretation, and an authority which remains total and undiminished. That’s why so many such texts are books made of many books, which allows the sacred to enlarge its territory and cope with changing times without admitting any limitation, weakness, or unclarity.
Surrounding the book, guarding and profiting, are the priests, its professional readers and propounders, as well as institutions like the Church, which outlast mortal time, and serve as material centers for the sacred teaching.
Surrounding the surrounders is a society that supports both the book and its holy men; is ruled and blessed by them; defines its members in terms of the book’s beliefs, the religion’s rites, its preferences in morals, food, and dress; and is structured according to the values it places on its several sorts of people, and its attitudes toward life.
The Aztecs offered hearts still warm with blood and the cover of the chest to Huitzilopochtli, their god of war.
Books about the book, about the readers of the book and preachers of the word, about the institution based upon its truths, emerge from semi-inspired pens, and soon are semi-sacred, making similar claims and requiring similar protections. But the one rule to remember is: The sacred text is actually an enemy of every other. It is the monotext that makes even sycophantic and adoring volumes obsolete and unnecessary.
Particularly dangerous are those “friends” of the God-like work, who offer to explain the Word, to interpret it; because in short order the monotext is a polytext again, and it is being read anagogically or allegorically or metaphorically or symbolically, and there is no longer one message, but many, and sects and cults and other divisions appear in the once-closed ranks of the faithful until the Faith becomes faiths, and is thus destroyed.
Paradoxically, dogmas in a plural world often make common cause, because they all fear the same things. An attack on any sacred text, even of an enemy, endangers their own. Heresy needs to be punished and heretics extirpated. Between different, even warring, religions, there are many silent and secret connections.
Logically, if any scripture is the word of God, and if God is all-seeing, all-hearing, all-speaking, all-knowing, all-willing, all-powerful, all-good, and all-over, then his revelation should be plain, clear, unalterable, and complete. It should need no interpretation. Those who believe otherwise than the Glorious Gift are wrong, wrong in the worst way, because any contrary opinion constitutes a denial of the One True Text. And if the word of God is false on any point, however trivial, God is fatally impugned.
Of course, that’s what theologians are for—the spin doctors of the sacred. They explain how three can be one, and one, three; how wine becomes blood; how we rise as we died from the dead on the last day; how a good God and his evil creation are compatible; how sin is transmitted in the semen; how God’s son was conceived by a virgin; why reason is useless in matters of faith; and why the infidel should be slain, and heretics burned alive, and converts created by the threat of the sword.
Sacred texts are not accepted as sacred simply on the seerer’s say-so, although the history of revelation offers examples of some pretty thin claims. Sincerity and conviction on the prophet’s part are standard, and sometimes the text is supported by miracles and other extraordinary occurrences which give its contention credence. But sacred texts are held against the believer’s heart because they offer him something. If they demand, they also deliver. They make rules and hand out prizes and penalties. They put people in their proper places and teach them the duties and satisfactions of their station. They create the concept of sin, which could not exist without religion. And then provide methods of redemption, and salvation. Above all, sacred texts supply the illusions which suit the powers that be, and calm the fears of the general population. That heart-eating god of war, Huitzilopochtli, was said to maintain a realm of delight to which fallen warriors were taken, finally, for a good time. The manipulative nature of Valhalla myths is obvious, as are so many others.
The guardians of the sacred stand to gain a great deal, as well. Not only are the sacred books in their charge, and for that they have the esteem of the people, but they enjoy the protection and bounty of the system, often much wealth and considerable power.
Sacred books are often signs of revolt against other sacred books, especially when the administrators of the holy become corrupt or when they support social policies increasingly felt to be burdensome and mistaken. Such was the case with the founder of Sikhism. Nanak was a disillusioned Hindu, disgusted by the caste system and the Brahman priesthood. He was also a poet and the follower of Kabir, another poet. Many of their songs were later gathered into a kind of hymnal, which became the sacred book of the Sikhs. As political and religious leaders, poets rarely have such luck. Despite being the offspring of a poet, the Sikhs became fierce warriors, and some sold their services to the internationalized city of Shanghai as police.
In the United States, a democracy of demonology has occurred, and splinter groups splinter both weekdays and weekends, as Christianity is numbered, weighed, and divided. For instance, Mrs. Alma White founded the Pillar of Fire, whose headquarters became located in Zarephath, New Jersey. Already blessed, and the wife of a Methodist preacher, Alma received a second blessing in Kentucky. Her sect stresses holiness, and is fundamentalist, therefore literalist, and premillenarian.
The phenomenon of speaking in unknown tongues, very popular in America, is pure Borges. Here, the sacred text is delivered in a language no one knows, the language of God Himself, perhaps. Usually, revelations come packaged in the newspapers of the region, so this is a switch.
I
n Plato’s day, priests, poets, philosophers, and politicians were competing to be the most authoritative voice in Greek society. The poets pretty thoroughly lost out, but they continued through the centuries to claim many characteristics of the sacred texts for their own. In particular, they often insisted on inspiration as an explanation for the excellence of their poetry, and insisted that poetry was a way of reaching and expressing and persuading people of the truth. They shared with sacred texts the belief that the truth existed in a certain inspired set of words, through which, from the gods into the poet, and from the poem to the people, revelation flew like a frightened bird.
They also maintained that the choice, order, and music of their language should not be altered by jot or tittle. It was, as the commandments were, to be considered carved. Like the law on the secular side, and revelation on the other, the poet’s wording must not be reworked or reworded, not a rhyme redesigned, not a meter altered. And as religious belief in the West shattered into sects, and lost credibility at least among the educated, the Romantic poets took upon themselves the seer’s role again, and made a religion of art. It was no longer the church that represented God, but the mural in the cathedral.
Michael Angelo left a proof
On the Sistine Chapel roof,
Where but half-awakened Adam
Can disturb globe-trotting Madam
Till her bowels are in heat,
Proof that there’s a purpose set
Before the secret working mind:
Profane perfection of mankind.
It is Yeats’s indecorous diction that demonstrates the change, and the cocky attitude of someone like Lawrence.
Stand up, but not for Jesus!
It’s a little late for that.
Stand up for justice and a jolly life.
I’ll hold your hat.
After all, it wasn’t Muhammad alone who enjoyed trances, nor Euclid, despite the poem, who looked on Beauty bare. Blake and Yeats had visions, and Merrill owned a Ouija board that could versify.
Around the freshly elected poets/prophets rallied the professors, priestly in their mien and mission, which was to explain, protect, and serve the divinity in art, provide themselves with a career, and an opportunity to discover and talk about the Truth the way the schoolmen had—by reading books and releasing their revelations. This Truth was not the province of science, which only told us how the world worked; it was the same Truth that religion had once revealed: the Truth about life. But art, and especially literature, did so by means of quite different sorts of myth—the myth of Anna Karenina or the brothers Karamazov—in the way in which such novels represented life, they uncovered life’s meaning.
Just as religion’s perks and privileges had drawn many to it who had no more interest in the spiritual world than the whale in Jonah, but were nevertheless required to swallow hard, so art as a unique form of knowledge had great allure for those who found exegesis easier than experiment, and tenure more comfortable than the rigors of exploration.
Sacred books are as dangerous as snakes, but what makes them particularly poisonous is their sophistical methods of argument, and consequent abandonment of reason, their rejection of testing and debate, and their implicit disparagement of experience, since they, not life as lived, contain all that really needs to be known.
The wannabe works of the writers employed rhetoric, sophistry, and example no less artfully than the preacher or the politician, and persuaded their readers by methods no logician could countenance. They were particularly good at cozying up to their audience, encouraging identification, and suggesting that, yes, David Copperfield’s story was their history, too.
Sociology, psychology, history, morality, philosophical understanding, all were lifted out of poems, plays, and novels, like cans from a cupboard. Balzac undertook to laugh and cry at the entire human comedy. Novels fattened in scope and detail as they became swollen with philosophical pretension. The lives of the poets resembled the lives of the saints: promise, purity, suffering, genius, and martyrdom. After all, what was the point of reading literature, other than to pass the time till death arrived, unless it was to learn about living? Why were they written, if not for this? And the critics were there to declare which works were sacred and which weren’t, and to set forth what each really meant: anagogically, allegorically, metaphorically, symbolically.
It may be that the Browning Circle, the Bobby Burns, the Henry James, and the James Joyce societies do not have quite the weight or the historical interest that the Rosicrucians or Knights Templar have. And it may be that the disgrace which befalls Henry when it is learned that he disparaged Jews is not in a class with the slanders put about by Philip the Fair concerning the Templars because he wanted their wealth; but the fact that a book may be traduced because its author is a parlor bigot (or bigot of a bigger kind), or that ill-writ works like those of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser are esteemed as literature because they rake muck pretty well, suggests the sanctimonious, if not sacred, atmosphere in which they dwell.
And so it came to pass that poets, playwrights, and novelists became the enemies of God because they had their genius, were inspired, revealed the truth in rhymes and stories, and invented icons, like Hamlet and Madame Bovary, around whom thought revolved as around a complex living human being.
Adjuration
1. What gets into people? God wondered. He wondered only as an exercise, because He knew, knew everything perfectly well. Fantasies get into people—fictions—falsehoods that avoid prosecution by calling themselves myths. All these celestial scriveners blowing their verbal bugles through prophets from here to Tibet and back to Toledo … they get into them. Fantasies cannot be refuted. We may tire of them; they may lose their charm, effectiveness, or purpose, but you cannot bruise a cloud, only wait until it blows over. The fact is that there are people who will believe anything. The Mormons “believe” that immediately following His Resurrection, Jesus paid a visit to the Indians of America. If you can believe in the Resurrection, the visit to America should be a snap. Speaking of Indians, there are people who believe there are real Mohicans in Cooper’s novel concerning the last of them.
Irenaeus says Papias says Jesus said, “The days will come, in which vines shall grow, each having ten thousand branches, and in each branch ten thousand twigs, and in each twig ten thousand shoots, and in each one of the shoots ten thousand clusters, and in every one of the custers ten thousand grapes, and every grape when pressed will give two hundred gallons of wine.” This is the kind of promise one wants the next millennium to fulfill.
2. It is also said that when the Buddha was born, the music of the angels filled the air, the earth quaked, causing streams of water to pour down for his bath. Four great kings, from the four quarters of the earth, and a company of divine beings, paid homage to him. Baby Jesus was only worth three magi, a cow, and a star.
3. Such goings-on, God thought, when only round vast empty dark were the four words written. Did no one find themselves troubled by the contradictions among all these truths, or about the secular profits the sacred has tended to amass, or the wars holiness has hosted, or the crimes which have been committed in some god’s name, or the ignorance and inhibiting conformity which sacred texts impose on their believers?
4. Poets and the followers of poets are relatively innocent of monetary gain. They often praise war, but they do not foment it. They are occasionally guilty of De Sades of one sort or other, but they do not burn, hang, crucify, imprison, or mutilate people, and rarely recommend these practices. “Smite the Philistines!” is, for them, a mostly metaphoric exclamation. Yet if truth be at the heart of their success, then it is difficult to explain Milton’s greatness in company with Dante’s, or Goethe’s with Sophocles’, since their worldviews differ so widely. The moralities that we may feel are implicit in Henry James and then in D. H. Lawrence do not lend themselves to harmonious resolution. Perhaps Shakespeare’s are the only sacred texts. But from these plays can we draw one scheme, on
e plan, one way of life, even a single prophecy?
5. But perhaps the opposition between the secular sacredness of art and the spiritually sacred works of religion that I have been harping on is only an apparent and not a real one. To be sure, our material world worships things, and builds temples to objects, not to ideas or aspirations anymore, but these errors are to be attributed to our terrible times, just as the awful consequences of belief lie in the believers—in how they believe, not in what. “Love my God, or die” is not a commandment.
But efforts to reach the underlying One, or Tao, beneath all religious doctrines, or to penetrate to the ultimate Logos of Literature, if not Art itself, have been no more successful than efforts to reach the center of the earth: in dreams, in descriptions that make mystical mush, in simplifications so silly astral projections seem serious.
6. Learning what the four great words were, an ant exclaimed, “The universe is a bit more hilly than round,” and “No universe is any larger than an area an ant can scurry across” and “It can’t be dark because the sun is warming the piece of banana I’m crawling on” and “It can’t be empty because I’m here and so is the banana.” Whereupon God said, “Not for long.” And put his foot down. Alas, there were more ants, exactly like the smart aleck. Then God said testily, “The universe is vast because even I’ve not yet got to the bottom of it, and it is empty because the amount of blank dark space is so great it makes an ant of matter, and it is dark because suns are infrequent, and it is round because Albert called it curved, and it is very very vast because then anything can claim it is the center, as an ant may, or man.”
7. Anyone who remembers God’s former vow of silence may think now that He has not kept it. But removing such worries is what theologians are for. When God decided to keep quiet, He meant only to ration His outbursts of creation. He could speak all He liked so long as he avoided anything ex cathedra.
A Temple of Texts: Essays Page 39
