The Great Code The Bible and Literature
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Highlights
teaching course, and I had to move to more solid ground. I examined similar courses in other universities, and found that — location: 63
It begins where time begins, with the creation of the world; it ends where time ends, with the Apocalypse, and it surveys human history in between, — location: 79
That unifying principle, for a critic, would have co be one of shape rather chan meaning; or, more accurately, no book can have a coherent meaning unless there is some coherence in its shape. So the course turned into a presentation of a unified structure of narrative and imagery in the Bible, and chis forms the core of the present book. — location: 83
But then all my books have really been teachers’ manuals, concerned more with establishing perspectives than with adding specifically to knowledge. — location: 117
He is rather someone who attempts to re-create the subject in the student’s mind, and his strategy in doing this is first of all to get the student to recognize what he already potentially knows, which includes breaking up the powers of repression in his mind that keep him from knowing what he knows. — location: 125
The assonances between words of similar reference (e.g., “God” and “good” in English), the standard rhymes, the words of multiple meanings that allow for puns, are all accidents, or, as philologists like to say, “pure” coincidences; yet they make up a texture that enters into the mental processes of all native speakers of the language, whether they are writers or not. — location: 325
According to Vico, there are three ages in a cycle of history: a mythical age, or age of gods; a heroic age, or age of an aristocracy; and an age of the people, after which there comes a ricorso or return that starts the whole process over again. Each age produces its own kind of langage, giving us three types of verbal expression that Vico calls, respectively, the poetic, the heroic or noble, and the vulgar, and which I shall call the hieroglyphic, the hieratic, and the demotic. — location: 345
All words in this phase of language are concrete: there are no true verbal abstractions. Onians’ monumental study of Homer’s vocabulary, Origins of European Thought, shows how intensely physical are such conceptions as soul, mind, time, courage, emotion, or thought, in the Homeric poems. — location: 373
With Plato we enter a different phase of language, one chat is “hieratic,” partly in the sense of being produced by an intellectual elite. I am speaking here not of ordinary language but of the culturally ascendant language, a language chat, at the time or later, is accorded a special authority by its society. In chis second phase language is more individualized, and words become primarily the outward expression of inner thoughts or ideas. Subject and object are becoming more consistently separated, and “reflection,” with its overtones oflooking into a mirror, moves into the verbal foreground. The intellectual operations of the mind become distinguishable from the emotional operations; hence abstraction becomes possible, and the sense chat there are valid and invalid ways of chinking, a sense which is co a degree independent of our feelings, develops into the concepcion of logic. — location: 386
The basis of expression here is moving from the metaphorical, with its sense of identity oflife or power or energy between man and nature (“chis is chat”), co a relationship chat is rather metonymic (“chis is puc for chat”). Specifically, — location: 395
The first phase of language, being founded on the metaphor, is inherently, as Vico says, “poetic”; the second phase, which is Plato’s, retreats from the poetic into the dialectical, a world of thought separate from and in some respects superior to the physical world of nature. — location: 407
Plato’s interest in mathematics is consistent with his use of language, for there are obvious metonymic features in mathematics. In Euclidean geometry, for example, the drawn line, which necessarily has some breadth, is “put for” the ideal or conceptual line that is length without breadth; similarly with the conception of abstract number apart from a number of things. One feels that some of the pre-Socratics and atomic philosophers, such as Anaxagoras or Democritus, were moving more directly from metaphor toward what we should think of as science, from gods to the operations of nature, and that Plato turns away from this direction, toward a transcendent world rather than an objective one. — location: 418
This is a conception of a unity of consciousness or reason, suggested by the fact that properly constructed verbal sequences seem to have an inherent power of compelling assent. In Stoicism, and in Christianity in a different way from the beginning, the conception of logos acquires both a religious and a political dimension: it is seen as a possible means of uniting human society both spiritually and temporally. — location: 432
We spoke of a verbal magic in the metaphorical phase, arising from a sense of an energy common to words and things, though embodied and controlled in words. In the metonymic phase this sense of verbal magic is sublimated into a quasi-magic inherent in sequence or linear ordering. — location: 473
This third phase of language begins roughly in the sixteenth century, where it accompanies certain tendencies in the Renaissance and Reformation, and attains cultural ascendancy in the eighteenth. In English literature it begins theoretically with Francis Bacon, and effectively with Locke. Here we start with a clear separation of subject and object, in which the subject exposes itself, in sense experience, to the impact of an objective world. The objective world is the order of nature; thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection. Continuous prose is still employed, but all deductive procedures are increasingly subordinated to a primary inductive and fact-gathering process. — location: 505
Similarly the word kairos, which came co mean a crucial moment in time, originally meant the notch of an arrow. What chis means from the critical point of view is chat while Homer’s conceptions would not have been metaphorical co him (when he uses a figure of speech it is usually a simile), they have co be metaphorical co us. As we chink of words, it is only metaphor chat can express in language the sense of an energy common co subject and object. The central expression of metaphor is the “god,” the being who, as sun-god, war-god, sea-god, or whatever, identifies a form of personality with an aspect of nature. — location: 376
The operations of the human mind are also controlled by words of power, formulas chat become a focus of mental activity. Prose in chis phase is discontinuous, a series of gnarled epigrammatic and oracular statements chat are not co be argued about but muse be accepted and pondered, their power absorbed by a disciple or reader. Pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus or Pythagoras seem co have been essentially oral teachers or gurus; and what has survived from them consists mainly of discontinuous aphorisms with a cosmological reference, like the “all things flow” of Heraclitus. — location: 381
Its controlling figure, then, is a kind of simile: a true verbal structure is one that is like what it describes. In this phase we return to a direct relation between the order of nature and the order of words, as in the metaphorical phase, but with a sharp and consistent distinction between the two. This involves a reaction against the transcendental perspective of the second phase, and extreme forms of third-phase thinking demonstrate the “impossibility of metaphysics,” or declare that all religious questions are unmeamng. — location: 517
The problem of illusion and reality therefore becomes a central one in third-phase language. — location: 538
In the first, or metaphorical, phase of language, the unifying element of verbal expression is the “god,” or personal nature-spirit. In the second phase the conception of a transcendent “God” moves into the center of the order of words. In the third phase the criterion of reality is the source of sense experience in the order of nature, where “God” is not to be found, and where “gods” are no longer believed in. — location: 561
That is, we might come closer to what is meant in the Bible by the word “God” if we understood it as a verb, and not a verb of simple asserted existence but a verb implying a process accomplishing itself. This would involve trying to think our way back to a conception of language in which words were words of power, conveying primarily the sense of forces and energies rather than analogues of physical bodies. — location: 604
The Biblical terms usually rendered “word,” including the logos of the Gospel of John, are solidly rooted in the metaphorical phase of language, where the word was an element of creative power. According to Genesis 1:4, “God said, Let there be light; and there was light.” That is, the word was the creative agent that brought the thing into being. This is usually thought of as characteristically Hebrew in approach, although in Heraclitus the term logos is also essentially metaphorical, and still expresses a unity of human consciousness and physical phenomena. In the metonymic phase logos takes on rather the meaning of an analogical use of words to convey the sense of a rational order. This order is thought of as antecedent to both consciousness and nature. Philo and the author of John combine the two traditions, and John’s “In the beginning was the logos” is a New Testament commentary on the opening of Genesis, identifying the original creative word with Christ. — location: 611
He rejects “das Wort,” and traverses the whole cycle of language as outlined above, passing through the second-phase “der Sinn,” and emerging finally with” die That,” the event or existential reality that words describe at secondhand. At that point Faust begins to fall into the power of Mephistopheles, the spirit of denial. — location: 625
But the nearest to the purely metaphorical conception is perhaps the word “spirit,” which, with its overtones of “breath,” expresses the unifying principle of life that gives man a participating energy with nature. — location: 638
In proportion as metonymic thinking and its monotheistic God developed, man came to be thought of as a single “soul” and a body, related by the metaphor of” in.” — location: 639
In the third phase the conception associated with consciousness modulates from “soul” to “mind,” and the relation with the bodily world of nature, including one’s own body, becomes more horizontal. By this time the “mind” has become firmly located in the head, and consciousness is in fact often thought of as a function of the brain. — location: 646
The bigger the objective world becomes, the smaller in range and significance the subjective world seems. — location: 683
It is not really possible, however, to separate the two meanings. The “subject” is subjected to the objective world, and not only subjected but almost crushed under it, like Atlas. Perhaps something of this sense lurks also in that very curious word “understanding,” along with what the understanding stands under: that is, traditionally, “substance,” which sounds like another form of the same word. — location: 689
It means rather that man is a child of the word as well as a child of nature, and that, just as he is conditioned by nature and finds his conception of necessity in it, so the first thing he finds in the community of the word is the charter of his freedom. — location: 704
The first phase oflanguage, as Vico indicates, is inherently poetic: it is contemporary with a stage of society in which the main source of culturally inherited knowledge is the poet, as Homer was for Greek culture. It has been recognized from earliest times that the primary social function of the poet is connected with something very ancient and primitive in society and in society’s use of words. — location: 707
As the critics of the god Thoth, the inventor of writing, remark in Plato’s Phaedrus, the ability to record has a lot more to do with forgetting than with remembering: with keeping the past in the past, instead of continuously recreating it in the present. — location: 714
chat it is the primary function of literature, more particularly of poetry, co keep re-creating the first or metaphorical phase of language during the domination of the later phases, co keep presenting it co us as a mode oflanguage chat we muse never be allowed co underestimate, much less lose sight of. — location: 723
We remarked chat Homer’s language is metaphorical co us, if not necessarily co him. In his poetry the distinction between figured and literal language hardly exists, apart from the special rhetorical showcase of the epic simile already mentioned. With the second phase, metaphor becomes one of the recognized figures of speech; but it is not until the coming of a different concepcion of language chat a tension arises between figurative and what is called “literal” meaning, and poetry begins co become a conscious and deliberate use of figures. In the third phase chis tension is often very sharp. A demotic descriptive writer will tend co avoid as many figures of speech as he can, on the ground chat they are “merely verbal” and interfere with the transparency of description. Similarly, we speak of metaphors as being “just” or “only” metaphors when we become aware of ocher possible verbal formulations of what they convey, as with the “sunrise” and “sunset” mentioned above. — location: 726
We suggested chat demotic habits of language have always been with us, and it would be easy co assume chat poetry, however ancient, is still a later development out of an original demotic speech. It is very difficult for many twentieth-century minds co believe chat poetry is genuinely primitive, and not an artificial way of decorating and distorting ordinary “prose.” — location: 734
We have co eradicate from our minds the notion of confused earlier anthropomorphic views out of which such metaphors have” developed.” The images are radically metaphorical: chis is the only way in which language can convey the sense of the presence of a numinous personality in the world, and chat is where we stop. — location: 744
However impressive the achievement of Christian poets, poets as a whole seem co find it easier co deal with “pagan” gods, because gods are, as explained, ready-made metaphors, and go into poetry with the minimum of adjustment. — location: 748
In Blake the Classical and ocher gods are regarded as projections of aspects of the human imagination, and these he cries co portray, in their unprojecced forms, as Ore and Urizen and the rest. — location: 753
In che second phase, poetry normally does chis by allegory, as in Dance, where a metaphorical narrative runs parallel with a conceptual one but defers co it. — location: 759
In the third phase, literature adapts itself mainly through what is usually called realism, adopting categories of probability and plausibility as rhetorical devices. — location: 762
Poetry, chen, keeps alive the metaphorical use of language and its habits of chinking in the identity relations suggested by the “chis is chat” structure of metaphor. — location: 766
And yet the release of metaphorical language from magic into poetry is an immense emancipation of chat language. Magic demands prescribed formulas chat cannot be varied by a syllable, whereas novelty and uniqueness are essential co poetry. Poetry does not really lose its magical power thereby, but merely transfers it from an action on nature co an action on the reader or hearer. — location: 770
Unity, or rather unification, of language is for them the appropriate way of responding co a transcendental form of being. — location: 777
This is metonymic writing and thinking on its very highest level, where both sides of the analogy are given equal weight. It is a level sometimes reached also by Augustine, whose systematic presentations of doctrine are balanced against the emphasis on experience in the Confessions. — location: 784
The origins of the Bible are in the first metaphorical phase of language, but much of the Bible is contemporary with the secondphase separation of the dialectical from the poetic, as its metonymic “God” in particular indicates. — location: 800
Biblical Hebrew is an almost obsessively concrete language, and while there are a few abstract terms like “nature” in the New Testament, they hardly affect what is still a metaphorical structure. — location: 806
Between Cicero and the Renaissance the orator became the symbol of an educational ideal of versatility and fluency in the use of language, which made the orator to some degree the successor of the poet in the earlier phase as the teacher of his society, the encyclopedic repository of its traditional knowledge. But the predominance of the oratorical ideal was still useful to poets, because the training of the orator was largely a training in the kind of rhetorical and figured language that poets also use. Hence oratory at its best is really a combination of metaphorical or poetic and “existential” idioms: it uses all the figures of speech, but within a context of concern and direct address that poetry as such does not employ. — location: 813
When such oratory pretends to be, or thinks it is, rational, it adopts a highly characteristic shuffle derived from a desire to reach certain conclusions in advance, whatever the evidence suggests. There is a good deal of this kind of anti-language in religious writing also, where it takes the tone that Hegel calls edifying, emotional resonance without content. There are also rhetorical features that express the author’s social slant or bias: these can be very pervasive when the bias is unconscious. — location: 836
In ordinary language we think of a real subject and a real object with a more tenuous interaction between them. In figurative language the reality of subject and object is what becomes tenuous, and the interaction comes into the foreground as the reality that identifies the two. In ordinary language, words are simply understood; in concerned address a much more comprehensive response from all aspects of the personality is called for. — location: 848
Kerygma is a mode of rhetoric, though it is rhetoric of a special kind. It is, like all rhetoric, a mixture of the metaphorical and the “existential” or concerned but, unlike practically all other forms of rhetoric, it is not an argument disguised by figuration. It is the vehicle of what is traditionally called revelation, — location: 858
In the metaphorical phase of language, where there is as yet little sense of deductive inference or abstraction, most verbal narratives cake some form of story. In a story the propelling force is the link between personalities and events, and chis link is typically formed by the actions of gods, who, as we said, are the representative metaphors of chis phase of language. In the metonymic phase, verbal structures still have narratives and have still co be read in sequence, by turning over a series of pages co the end. But the typical narrative form of chis phase is conceptual, or what is normally called an argument. — location: 875
Mythical, in this secondary sense, therefore means the opposite of “not really true”: it means being charged with a special seriousness and importance. Sacred stories illustrate a specific social concern; — location: 908
First, some sense of a canon relates them to one another: a myth takes its place in a mythology, an interconnected group of myths, whereas folktales remain nomadic, traveling over the world and interchanging their themes and motifs. — location: 921
We may notice chat Samson’s name resembles early Semitic words for the sun, and chat his story cells of a supernaturally powerful hero associated with the burning of crops, who eventually falls into a dark prison-house in the west. That the story shows structural or narrative analogies co the kind of story chat might be suggested by the passage of the sun across the sky is true, and no storyteller worth his keep would cry co eliminate such analogies. But co say chat the Samson stories “derive from” a solar myth or chat a solar myth “lies behind” them is co say more chan anyone — location: 943
What follows is chat mythical structures continue co give shape co the metaphors and rhetoric of later types of structure. The Samson stories are of a very different type from chat of any conceivable life of Napoleon, but the solar elements in them are still metaphorical and rhetorical elements. — location: 950
Mythology is not a datum but a factum of human existence: it belongs co the world of culture and civilization chat man has made and still inhabits. As a god is a metaphor identifying a personality and an element of nature, solar myths or scar myths or vegetation myths may suggest something of a primitive form of science. But the real interest of myth is co draw a circumference around a human community and look inward coward chat community, not co inquire into the operations of nature. Naturally it will draw elements from nature, just as creative design in painting or sculpture would do. But mythology is not a direct response co the natural environment; it is pare of the imaginative insulation chat separates us from chat environment. — location: 985
But while progress may be a relevant concepcion in many areas of human life, the arcs, in Hazlicc’s phrase, are not progressive, and mythology belongs co the arcs. — location: 1003
A century ago, many scholars, influenced partly by a naive identifying of evolution with progress, assumed chat mythological chinking was an early form of conceptual chinking. This of course led immediately co the discovery chat it was very bad conceptual chinking. — location: 1007
At the same time mythology, because of its sacrosanct nature, is likely co persist in a society in inorganic ways, and so come co make assertions or assumptions about the order of nature chat conflict with what the actual observation of chat order suggests. When chis happens, the mythological explanation has co be replaced by a scientific one. We saw earlier chat Copernicus now symbolizes for us the replacing of mythological by scientific conceptions of space, and Darwin the replacing of mythological by scientific conceptions of time. But the accidents of a mythological tradition are not real mythology, the central line of which is re-created in every age by the poets. — location: 1012
History makes particular statements, and is therefore subject to external criteria of truth and falsehood; poetry makes no particular statements and is not so subject. Poetry expresses the universal in the event, the aspect of the event that makes it an example of the kind of thing that is always happening. In our language, the universal in the history is what is conveyed by the mythos, the shape of the historical narrative. A myth is designed not to describe a specific situation but to contain it in a way that does not restrict its significance to that one situation. Its truth is inside its structure, not outside. — location: 1187
There are and remain two aspects of myth: one is its story-structure, which attaches it to literature, the other is its social function as concerned know ledge, what it is important for a society to know. We now have to consider this second aspect of myth, remembering that just as the poetic aspect had already developed toward literature by Biblical times, so the functional aspect had developed toward historical and political thought. — location: 1208
It is sometimes said that the reason for the Bible’s oblique approach to history is that what we call history is Weltgeschichte, whereas the Bible is interested in Heilsgeschichte, in the history of God’s actions in the world and man’s relation to them. To give an illustration of what is meant here: Dante’s Commedia presents a Paradiso above our own world, an Inferno below it, and two other worlds on the surface of this earth. On one side of the earth is thirteenth-century Italy, busily producing Weltgeschichte; on the other is the mountain of purgatory, where souls are grouped solely in relation to the eternal world above them, and where the only historical “event” is the passing of a soul into that world. — location: 1211
Mircea Eliade tells us that for many societies all events in time are regarded as repetitions of mythical archetypal events that took place before time began, or what Australian indigenes call the eternal dream time. — location: 1231
A serious human life, no matter what “religion” is invoked, can hardly begin until we see an element of illusion in what is really there, and something real in fantasies about what might be there instead. At chat point the imaginative and the concerned begin co unite. — location: 1268
The primary function of mythology is to face inward toward the concerns of the society that possesses it-which is why science, which faces outward toward the operations of nature itself, is a late cultural development. — location: 1283
We notice too that the Bible is full of explicit metaphors, of the this-is-that, or A -is-B type. Such metaphors are profoundly illogical, if not anti-logical: they assert that two things are the same thing while remaining two different things, which is absurd. — location: 1332
At chat point we are back co a world in which Sc. Patrick illustrates the doctrine of the Trinity by a shamrock, a use of concrete paradox chat enlightens the mind by paralyzing the discursive reason, like the koan of Zen Buddhism. The doctrines may be “more” chan metaphors: the point is chat they can be stated only in a metaphorical chis-is-chat form. — location: 1359
Here any such predication as “is,” “is like,” “reminds me of,” “suggests to me,” or whatever, would, besides ruining the little poem, greatly weaken the metaphorical power of simply putting together the two images. — location: 1382
Our attention as we read is thus going simultaneously in two directions, outward to the conventional or remembered meaning, inward to the specific contextual meaning. In some verbal structures there comes a point at which we realize that the dictionary meanings are forming a second pattern parallel to the words. This is a sign that what we are reading is descriptive in intention: the verbal structure reproduces in its terms the body of phenomena it is describing, and a comparison between the two is implied throughout. At other times there seems to be no such secondary structure of meaning outside the words, and this in turn is a sign that what we are reading is “literary,” which means provisionally a verbal structure existing for its own sake. — location: 1389
Mere unfamiliarity with the referents, which can be overcome by further study, is secondary. Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading. — location: 1410
In examining a literary structure in particular, our attention is directed mainly to the interrelationships among the words themselves. Figures of speech thus become one of the chief objects of attention, because all figures of speech emphasize the centripetal and interrelating aspects of words. — location: 1412
The principle involved here applies co all books, but applies with considerable force to the Bible because the Bible is so deeply rooted in the characteristics of words and of language. The centripetal aspect of a verbal structure is its primary aspect, because the only thing chat words can do with any real precision or accuracy is hang together. Accuracy of description in language is not possible beyond a certain point: the most faithfully descriptive account of anything will always turn away from what it describes into its own self-contained grammatical fictions of subject and predicate and object. — location: 1454
This primary meaning, which arises simply from the interconnection of the words, is the metaphorical meaning. There are various secondary meanings, derived from the centrifugal perspective, that may take the form of concepts, predications, propositions, or a sequence of historical or biographical events, and that are always subordinate to the metaphorical meaning. — location: 1477
We may compare it to the study of a music score, where we can turn to any part without regard to sequential performance. The term “structure,” which we have used so often, is a metaphor from architecture, and may be misleading when we are speaking of narrative, which is not a simultaneous structure but a movement in time. — location: 1505
poetry as a secondary verbal imitation of action: makes universal statements and is not subject to “truth” poetry as a secondary verbal imitation of thought: expresses the universal forms of thought and is not subject to ""truth” — location: 1553
but the principle underlying it, that mythical thinking is universal or poetic thinking, and is to predicative thought as narrative myth is to history, is of primary and permanent significance. — location: 1575
The polytheistic gods, we suggested, are metaphors begotten of man’s close association with nature and his sense chat nature has a life and energy identifiable with his own. Local deities-the nymphs, fauns, and satyrs of a later mythology—are pare of the sense of natura naturans, the “paganism” chat is the instinctive belief of the pagan us or peasant who is closest to such a nature and farthest from the centers of social development. — location: 1605
But there are also many beautiful and eloquent passages in the Bible, like the one beginning “Consider the lilies” in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6: 28), that indicate a profound sensitivity to the power and beauty of natura naturans. What the Bible condemns is only what it calls idolatry: the feeling of the numinous, of divine presence, may be experienced in or through nature, but should not be ascribed to nature. That puts man in the grip of an external power, which, as he has projected it from himself, means that he is enslaving himself to it. Nature is a fellow creature of man, and there are no gods in it: the gods that have been found in it are all devils, and for his knowledge of God man has to turn to the human and verbal world first. — location: 1615
Such an earth-mother is the most easily understood image of natura naturans, and she acquires its moral ambivalence. As the womb of all forms of life, she has a cherishing and nourishing aspect; as the tomb of all forms of life, she has a menacing and sinister aspect; as the manifestation of an unending cycle of life and death, she has an inscrutable and elusive aspect. Hence she is often a diva triformis, a goddess of a threefold form of some kind, usually birth, death, and renewal in time; or heaven, earth, and hell in space. — location: 1623
The cycle presided over by the earth-mother of natura naturans is, in Plato’s phrase, the cycle of the different, the life that emerges being always different from the life that gave birth to it. Hence the emphasis on renewal and the obliterating of the past. Eventually, as society becomes more complex, mythology expands toward the conception of natura naturata, nature as a structure or system; and the symbolism of cyclical movement shifts to the sky. This is because the sky illustrates rather the cycle of the same, it being clearly the same sun that comes up the next morning, the same moon that returns from the dark. Such a cycle suggests planning and intelligence rather than mysterious power, and as this sense begins to dominate mythology the supreme god comes to be thought of increasingly as a sky-father. — location: 1640
In this development from rJatura naturans to natura naturata there is a curious analogy to the shift in the critical process we have traced from participating in a narrative movement in time to studying a structure that is spread out before us in space. If we “freeze” a myth, we said, we get a single metaphor-complex; if we “freeze” an entire mythology, we get a cosmology. — location: 1671
This concepcion of two levels, a level of time and space and a level of”ecernicy” above it, turns on the meaning of”resurreccion” in the New Testament as a vertical ascent from a world of death to a world of life. Resurrection is thus not renewal or rebirth or revival or restoration: all these words mean a new cycle of time, and are in the lase analysis the opposite of resurrection. — location: 1691
The genuine work which is founded on the human need for food and shelter moves in the direction of transforming nature into a world with a human shape, meaning, and function. The animal world is transformed into a pastoral environment of flocks and herds; the vegetable world, into a cultivated land of harvests and vintages and gardens; the mineral world, into cities and buildings and highways. There is a creative element in such work, because the mere need for food and shelter, in itself, would not have got far beyond gathering roots and hiding in caves. The world of work is also an expression of desire as well as of need: what man really wanes is what the positive and productive work he does shows chat he wanes. — location: 1707
man’s transformation of nature into a humanized pastoral, cultivated, civilized world there is, of course, a good deal of exploitation, waste, and wanton destruction. Perhaps our religious traditions have encouraged us to regard nature as a limitless field of exploitation; certainly the growing sense of alienation from nature that accompanied the rise of modern science did. From Copernicus onward, man seemed increasingly to have only an accidental relation to the spatial world of the stars, where conscious life has not so far been found, and to the temporal world of evolution, in which man is a late and perhaps an intrusive development. As the sheer size of scientific time and space expanded so hugely, the traditional view of creation began to look paranoid, a complacent and unwarranted illusion on man’s part that everything had been created for him. — location: 1742
Before modern times, there had been a sense of correspondence or affinity between man and nature, of which the most imaginative expression was perhaps the doctrine of the microcosm, the assumption that man contains an epitome of the whole of reality, being half spirit and half physical substance. This conception of correspondence was closely associated with magic, because it provided a basis for divination, for examining natural phenomena in terms of a supposed connection with the patterns of human destiny. The most important form of such divination is astrology, and astrology is based on a conception of coincidence, which is, as Jung says, a synchronic and acausal conception. — location: 1749
Perhaps they are so prominent there because by the time this book was written, seven was the number of days in the week and of the planets, and twelve the number of months in the year and of the signs of the Zodiac. Hence these numbers would suggest, more than others, a world where time and space have become the same thing. — location: 1761
The upper level of man’s relation with nature is the one assigned to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, where man lived only on the fruits of trees and in which all animals were domestic pets to be given names (Genesis 2: 16, 20). This world has disappeared, and with the “fall” of Adam and Eve man descended into the indifferent and alien nature that we see around us now, where he was forced to work. But there is an element in work, we saw, that is an image of the world man has lost and has still to regain. — location: 1773
The real world is beyond time, but can be reached only by a process that goes on in time. As Eliot says, only through time time is conquered. — location: 1791
It is our only real contact with the so-called “Jesus of history,” and from chis point of view it makes good sense to call the Bible and the person of Christ by the same name. It makes even better sense to identify them metaphorically. This is a concepcion of identity chat goes far beyond “juxtaposition,” because there are no longer two things, but one thing in two aspects. — location: 1799
The New Testament, in short, claims to be, among other things, the key to the Old Testament, the explanation of what the Old Testament really means. — location: 1825
The general principle of interpretation is traditionally given as “In the Old Testament the New Testament is concealed; in the New Testament the Old Testament is revealed.” Everything that happens in the Old Testament is a “type” or adumbration of something that happens in the New Testament, and the whole subject is therefore called typology, though it is typology in a special sense. — location: 1827
Typology is a figure of speech that moves in time: the type exists in the past and the anti type in the present, or the type exists in the present and the anti type in the future. — location: 1855
leads to, is a theory of history, or more accurately of historical process: an assumption that there is some meaning and point to history, and that sooner or later some event or events will occur which will indicate what that meaning or point is, and so become an antitype of what has happened previously. Our modern confidence in historical process, our belief that despite apparent confusion, even chaos, in human events, nevertheless those events are going somewhere and indicating something, is probably a legacy of Biblical typology: — location: 1857
The literary critic’s answer, at least, would be that they are writing in continuous prose, and continuous prose is a way of arranging words so bound up with causality that we can hardly have one without the other. Almost any simple prose statement (“The man opened the door”) will show the link between the subject-predicate-object arrangement of prose and what we think of as a movement from cause to effect. — location: 1866
The backward movement reminds us of, and is not impossibly connected with, Plato’s view of knowledge as anamnesis or recollection, the recognizing of the new as something identifiable with the old. An exposition founded on causality, however, is likely for the sake of greater clarity to reverse this movement again, and proceed forward from cause to effect. — location: 1873
Causality, however, is based on reason, observation, and knowledge, and therefore relates fundamentally to the past, on the principle that the past is all that we genuinely or systematically know. Typology relates to the future, and is consequently related primarily to faith, hope, and vision. — location: 1880
The mere attempt to repeat a past experience will lead only to disillusionment, but there is another kind of repetition which is the Christian antithesis (or complement) of Platonic recollection, and which finds its focus in the Biblical promise: “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21: 5). Kierkegaard’s “repetition” is certainly derived from, and to my mind is identifiable with, the forward-moving typological thinking of the Bible. — location: 1888
The metaphorical kernel of this is the experience of waking up from a dream, as when Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus speaks of history as a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. When we wake up from sleep, one world is simply abolished and replaced by another. This suggests a clue to the origin of typology: it is essentially a revolutionary form of thought — location: 1897
and rhetoric. We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling “life is a dream” becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it. — location: 1900
Causality develops with second-phase, or metonymic, writing: its first-phase, or metaphorical, counterpart is the tendency on the part of many societies to see their myths as archetypal events in a distant past (Mircea Eliade’s in illo tempore), of which events in ordinary life, more particularly ritual events, are repetitions. What we are calling typology is a specialized form of the repeatability of myth, discussed earlier: it carries on the primitive perspective but reverses its significance. — location: 1923
Social freedom, however essential, is general and approximate; real freedom is something that only the individual can experience. The individual grows out of society like a plant out of its soil; but he does not break away from it. — location: 1987
Even more significant for our immediate context is that Jesus’ claim that he was a real king, though of a spiritual kingdom “not of this world,” while at the same time behaving like a servant and identifying himself with “the least” of others (Matthew 25:40), is intended among other things to resolve the master-slave dialectic on which the whole of human history turns. History symbolically ends at the point at which master and servant become the same person, and represent the same thing. — location: 2076
This is the same metaphor, but the metaphor is turned inside out. Instead of an individual finding his fulfillment within a social body, however sacrosanct, the metaphor is reversed from a metaphor of integration into a wholly decentralized one, in which the total body is complete within each individual. — location: 2265
I see a sequence of seven main phases: creation, revolution or exodus (Israel in Egypt), law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel, and apocalypse. Five of these phases have their center of gravity in the Old Testament and two in the New. Each phase is not an improvement on its predecessor but a wider perspective on it. That is, this sequence of phases is another aspect of Biblical typology, each phase being a type of the one following it and an antitype of the one preceding it. — location: 2315
The maleness of God seems to be connected with the Bible’s resistance to the notion of a containing cycle of fate or inevitability as the highest category that our minds can conceive. All such cycles are suggested by nature, and are contained within nature—which is why it is so easy to think of nature as Mother Nature. But as long as we remain within her cycle we are unborn embryos. — location: 2342
If we look at the imagery of Paradise Lost, we can see how subtly and delicately Milton has associated the body of the garden of Eden with the body of Eve; Adam is associated rather with the lower sky. The maleness of God seems to be connected with the Bible’s resistance to the notion of a containing cycle of fate or inevitability as the highest category that our minds can conceive. All such cycles are suggested by nature, and are contained within nature—which is why it is so easy to think of nature as Mother Nature. But as long as we remain within her cycle we are unborn embryos. — location: 2340
From this point of view we can see how important it is that the first word of the Bible is “beginning.” Nature itself suggests no beginning: it exists in an indefinite dimension of time and space. Human life is a continuum that we join at birth and drop off at death. But, because we begin and end, we insist that beginnings and endings must be much more deeply built into the reality of things than the universe around us suggests, and we shape our myths accordingly. We have previously noted how tenaciously Christianity clung to the notion of a finite beginning and end in time and space, as part of the emphasis it gave to the eternal and infinite beyond it. — location: 2352
We get a little closer to this question when we realize that the central metaphor underlying “beginning” is not really birth at all. It is rather the moment of waking from sleep, when one world disappears and another comes into being. This is still contained within a cycle: we know that at the end of the day we shall return to the world of sleep, but in the meantime there is a sense of self-transcendence, of a consciousness getting “up” from an unreal into a real, or at least more real, world. This sense of awakening into a greater degree of reality is expressed by Heraclitus, in an aphorism referred to earlier, as a passing from a world where everyone has his own “logos” into a world where there is a common “logos.” Genesis presents the Creation as a sudden coming into being of a world through articulate speech (another aspect of logos), conscious perception, light and stability. Something like this metaphor of awakening may be the real reason for the emphasis on “days,” and such recurring phrases as “And the evening and the morning were the first day,” even before the day as we know it was established with the creating of the sun. The fact that this phrase starts with the evening, too, follows the rhythm of awakening. — location: 2359
Man becomes ashamed of his body and performs his sexual acts in secret: certain features of that body, such as the fact that in most climates he needs clothing and consequently is the world’s only naked animal, indicate a uniquely alienated relation to his environment. — location: 2387
It is with the “fall” that the legal metaphor begins that persists all through the Bible, of human life as subject to a trial and judgment, with prosecutors and defenders. In this metaphor Jesus is the counsel for the defense, and the primary accuser is Satan the diabolos, a word from which our word devil comes, and which originally included a sense of the person opposed to one in a lawsuit. — location: 2399
So chaos and darkness can be thought of in two ways. They may be thought of as enemies of God outside his creation; but they are dialectically incorporated into creation, and are creatures of God as well. The second is the view taken in the Book of Job; the first is the more usual view of the prophets. But the prophets also suggest that God is above such distinctions as those that the knowledge of good and evil provides: — location: 2413
Perhaps, then, the sense of alienation traditionally attached to the fall may be latent in the original creation too, with its recurrent darkness and its stability menaced by the sea and other images of chaos (see Job 38: 11). — location: 2417
When we turn to human creative power, we see that there is a quality in it better called re-creation, a transforming of the chaos within our ordinary experience of nature. — location: 2445
Milton, for example, defines education as the attempt to repair the fall of Adam by regaining the true know ledge of God. — location: 2461
of a conspiracy, so to speak, of Classical and Biblical tendencies. The conception of “natural law” was developed to establish a link between human law and the so-called laws of nature, but that belongs to the history of Western thought — location: 2597
We spoke of the Greek sense of social contract, most obviously present at the end of the Oresteia, in which the gods, or at least the goddess of wisdom, are shown as endorsing a justice that extends over both moral and natural orders. At the heart of this justice is the sense of nemesis, the tendency in nature to recover its balance after an act of human aggression. — location: 2603
Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children’s play, or as a manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in “playing” chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfillment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for. — location: 2713
The A V speaks of this wisdom as “rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth” (8:31), but this is feeble compared to the tremendous Vulgate phraseludens in orbe terrarum, playing over all the earth. Here we finally see the real form of wisdom in human life as the philosophia or love of wisdom that is creative and not simply erudite. We see too how the primitive form of wisdom, using past experience as a balancing pole for walking the tightrope of life, finally grows, through incessant discipline and practice, into the final freedom of movement where, in Yeats’s phrase, we can no longer tell the dancer from the dance. — location: 2719
For prophecy is the individualizing of the revolutionary impulse, as wisdom is the individualizing of the law, and is geared to the future as wisdom is to the past. — location: 2727
Tolerance for creative minds as potentially prophetic, even without ready-made standards and certainly without any belief in their infallibility, seems to be a mark of the most mature societies. In the modern world, therefore, what corresponds to prophetic authority is the growth of what we called earlier a cultural pluralism, where, for example, a scientist or historian or artist may find that his subject has its own inner authority, that he makes discoveries within it that may conflict with social concern, and that he owes a loyalty to that authority even in the face of social opposition. — location: 2781
Prophecy in the Bible is a comprehensive view of the human situation, surveying it from creation to final deliverance, and it is a view which marks the extent of what in other contexts we could call the creative imagination. It incorporates the perspective of wisdom but enlarges it. The wise man thinks of the human situation as a kind of horizontal line, formed by precedent and tradition and extended by prudence: the prophet sees man in a state of alienation caused by his own distractions, at the bottom of aU-shaped curve. — location: 2786
The prophet’s present moment is an alienated prodigal son, a moment that has broken away from its own identity in the past but may return to that identity in the future. We can see from this that the Book of Job, though it is classed with wisdom literature and includes a eulogy of wisdom, cannot be understood by the canons of wisdom alone, but needs the help of the prophetic perspective. — location: 2794
Sin is rather a matter of trying to block the activity of God, and it always results in some curtailing of human freedom, whether of oneself or of one’s neighbor. — location: 2820
In the “kingdom” the eternal and infinite are not time and space made endless (they are endless already) but are the now and the here made real, an actual present and an actual presence. Time vanishes in Jesus’ “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58); space vanishes when we are told, in an aphorism previously referred to, that the kingdom isentos hymon (Luke 17:21), which may mean among you or in you, but in either case means here, not there. — location: 2829
The revolutionary thrust of the Exodus is also preserved, and Jesus often speaks of”faith” as though it gave the individual as much effective power as the Exodus gave the whole society of Israel. Such faith clearly includes a power of action informed by a vision transcending time and space. — location: 2836
As an allegory of the wise man’s mind, the Republic is a powerful vision; as an ideal social order, it would be a fantastic tyranny. — location: 2850
What primarily distinguishes Christianity (and Judaism) from most Oriental religions, it seems to me, is this revolutionary and prophetic element of confrontation with society. This element gives meaning and shape to history by presenting it with a dialectical challenge. From this point of view, the root of evil in human life cannot be adequately described as ignorance, or the cure for it correctly described as enlightenment. The record of human cruelty and folly is too hideous for anything but the sense of a corrupted will to come near to a diagnosis. Hence Jesus was not simply the compassionate Jesus as Buddha was the compassionate Buddha. His work, though it includes the teaching of ways of enlightenment, does not stop there, but goes through a martyrdom and a descent into death. Two implications here are of especial importance for our present purpose. One, a specifically historical situation is latent in any “enlightenment”: man has to fight his way out of history and not simply awaken from it. Two, the ability to absorb a complete individual is, so far, beyond the capacity of any society, including those that call themselves Christian. — location: 2878
The Greek word for revelation,apocalypsis, has the metaphorical sense of uncovering or taking a lid off, and similarly the word for truth, aletheia, begins with a negative particle which suggests that truth was originally thought of as also a kind of unveiling, a removal of the curtains offorgetfulness in the mind. — location: 2925
The panoramic apocalypse gives way, at the end, to a second apocalypse that, ideally, begins in the reader’s mind as soon as he has finished reading, a vision that passes through the legalized vision of ordeals and trials and judgments and comes out into a second life. In this second life the creator-creature, divine-human antithetical tension has ceased to exist, and the sense of the transcendent person and the split of subject and object no longer limit our vision. After the “last judgment,” the law loses its last hold on us, which is the hold of the legal vision that ends there. — location: 2973
Milton suggests that the ultimate authority in the Christian religion is what he calls the Word of God in the heart, which is superior even to the Bible itself, because for Milton this “heart” belongs not to the subjective reader but to the Holy Spirit. That is, the reader completes the visionary operation of the Bible by throwing out the subjective fallacy along with the objective one. The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared. — location: 2980
This is not given in Genesis, but we should keep in mind the fact that no image is inherently good or bad, apocalyptic or demonic: which it is depends on the context. Because of its role in the Eden story, the serpent is usually a sinister image in the Biblical tradition; but it could also be a symbol of genuine wisdom (Matthew 10: 16) or of healing (Numbers 21:9), just as it was in Greek mythology. — location: 3165
The cross of Christ, like the Red Sea, is both a demonic image and an image of salvation, depending on the point of view from which it is regarded. As an image of what man does to God, it is purely demonic, and it is said in Deuteronomy 21:23 that “he that is hanged (on a tree} is accursed of God.” Paul refers to this passage (Galatians 3: 13) in a way that associates it not simply with the Crucifixion, but with Christ as the universal scapegoat ofhuman sin, of which more later. Perhaps the association of hanging on a tree with a divine curse may, as Blake suggests, point to a metaphorical extension of the imagery of the trees of Eden. Adam before his fall would have been metaphorically himself a tree of life; similarly, Adam after his fall would be attached to the tree of frustrated sex he chose instead-bound down upon the stems of vegetation, as Blake says. This may be one reason that the cursing of a barren fig tree is associated with Jesus (Matthew 21: 19). A modulation of the same image, by way of a Greek pun on anthropos and anatrope, gives us the image of man as an “inverted tree,” his hair corresponding to the roots. — location: 3196
In the Gospels harvest and vintage are frequently used as symbols of the apocalypse, and the Eucharist rite, identifying the bread and wine of the vegetable world with the body and blood of the animal world, and both with the body of Christ, is established at the beginning of the Passion (Matthew 26:26-29 and elsewhere). — location: 3278
Urban imagery in the Bible is easier to explain if we take the human category itself first. We have suggested that pastoral, agricultural, and urban life represent the apocalyptic or idealized transformations of the animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds respectively into environments with a human shape and meaning. What is the apocalyptic or idealized image for human life itself? As soon as we ask this, we are thrown back on the royal metaphor. It is impossible to think of an ideal human life except as an alternation of individual and social life, as equally a belonging and an escape. However, human imagery, like Greek nouns, has a dual as well as a singular and a plural, a sexual as well as an individual and a social form, and this affords a means of reconciling the two. The individual member of the royal metaphor, the invisible king, is related to the social member, the kingdom he rules, as a bridegroom to a bride. The sexual union of man and woman, which is symbolically an identifying of two bodies as one flesh, becomes the image for the full metaphorical relationship of God and man. — location: 3294
The typical healing act of Jesus is the casting of”devils” out of the bodies of those possessed by them. As each body is a temple of God (I Corinthians 3: 16), and as all of us are born with devils in the possession of it, the casting out of devils is symbolically the same act as cleansing the temple. The process is completed in the apocalypse: the author of Revelation is emphatic that there is no temple in the new Jerusalem, as the body of Christ has replaced it (Revelation 21:22). The final consummation of Bridegroom and Bride is thus a total mingling of bodies, and is no longer symbolized, as Blake remarked, by “a pompous high priest entering by a secret place.” — location: 3358
For Christianity this was an indication that a central sacred place could no longer exist. The Messiah himself was a wanderer (Luke 9: 58), and Christianity was not centered symbolically on Jerusalem as Judaism was, even though Jesus accepted the centering on a temporary basis (John 4:20ff.). Later the headquarters of Christianity was Rome, but, very typically of Christianity, what became sacrosanct about Rome was the administration. The diffusion of Christianity is symbolically connected with the progress of man back to the garden of Eden and the wandering but guided pastoral world of the twentythird Psalm, and its type is the figure, frequent in the Psalms, of referring to the temple as the “tabernacle,” the portable temple of the wilderness. — location: 3399
Man in his present state cannot live in fire, but, as with water, there is a fire of life and a fire of death. The fire of life burns without burning up: there is light and heat but no pain or destruction. This fire appears in the burning bush of Exodus 3:2, — location: 3454
The chariot of fire in which Elijah went up to heaven is metaphorically his own transformed body, however the original narrator thought of it, and is a rising movement corresponding to the fire descending from God to his altar on Carmel (I Kings 18:38). Similarly, a fire rises on the altar in the temple in response to a fire descending from God (II Chronicles 7: 1). As late as Eliot’s “Little Gidding” we have the same imagery: descending fire from the flames of the Holy Spirit and ascending fire on the funeral pyre of Hercules, set over against a demonic parody of fire bombs falling in London and fires breaking out of the streets in response. Blake also borrows Elijah’s chariot of fire for building Jerusalem, which is seen by John of Patmos as a city glowing with gold and gems-in other words, a city burning in the fire of life. — location: 3466
It is interesting that Paul, although he gives one of the clearest descriptions of Antichrist, runs counter to the general tendency to associate false gods with human rulers. He tends to think that the most formidable enemies of God and man alike are thestoicheia tou kosmou, the powers of nature, whenever they are taken by man to be, not creatures of God and therefore fellow creatures of himself, but to be charged with numinous and mysterious power independent of man. When they are assigned this power, they invariably become enslaving agents, inspiring beliefs, derived from the permanence of the natural order, about cyclical fatality and the like. This leads to the mindless observance of rituals out of superstition, or the inorganic persistence of obsolete customs out of habit, along with a vague anxiety that breaking with them will lead to disaster: — location: 3499
Consequently it is a waste of time to attack human societies, however hostile, because they derive their real strength from demonic forces that would have no power if power were not conceded to them by human ignorance: For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (Ephesians 6: 12) — location: 3508
Man made the wheel, and when he interprets the stars as constituting a wheel of fate or of fortune, he is projecting something he has made on something he has not made, and this is when idolatry really becomes dangerous. For in due course he becomes assimilated to his projection: becomes what he beholds, as Blake says, or, as the Psalmist says, “They that make them [idols} are like unto them” (Psalm 115:8). — location: 3519
We tend to think of the first table as a hierarchy of being, which is what it became in later Western thought. This hierarchy is the basis of the famous “chain of being” polarized by form and matter, which lasted from early Greek times until the eighteenth century at least. But in its apocalyptic context it is not a hierarchy but a vision of plenitude, in which everything is equal because identical with everything else. Such a world cannot be perceived, or even comprehended theoretically, by what is usually called the ego: we have described it as the way reality looks after the ego has disappeared. — location: 3523
The apocalyptic vtston, in which the body of Christ is the metaphor holding together all categories of being in an identity, presents us with a world in which there is only one knower, for whom there is nothing outside of or objective to that knower, hence nothing dead or insensible. This knower is also the real consciousness in each of us. In the center of our table is the identification of the body and blood of the animal world, and the bread and wine that are the human forms of the vegetable kingdom, with the body of Christ. This identification forms the basis of the Eucharist rite instituted by Jesus at the Last Supper. — location: 3542
Suzuki speaks of it as “an infinite mutual fusion or penetration of all things, each with its individuality yet with something universal in it.” As he goes on to speak of the “transparent and luminous” quality of this kind of vision, of its annihilating of space and time as we know them, of the disappearance of shadows (see Song of Songs 2: 17) in a world where everything shines by its own light, I find myself reminded more and more strongly of the Book of Revelation and of similar forms of vision in the Prophets and the Gospels. — location: 3567
We follow a “way” or direction until we reach the state of innocence symbolized by the sheep in the twenty-third Psalm, where we are back to wandering, but where wandering no longer means being lost. There are two senses in which the word “imperfect” is used: in one sense it is that which falls short of perfection; in another it is that which is not finished but continuously active, as in the tense system of verbs in most languages. It is in the latter sense that “the imperfect is our paradise,” as Wallace Stevens says, a world that may change as much as our own, but where change is no longer dominated by the single direction toward nothingness and death. — location: 3573
The entire Bible, viewed as a “divine comedy,” is contained within aU-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation. In between, the story of Israel is told as a series of declines into the power of heathen kingdoms, Egypt, Philistia, Babylon, Syria, Rome, each followed by a rise into a brief moment of relative independence. The same Unarrative is found outside the historical sections also, in the account of the disasters and restoration of Job and in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son. — location: 3585
This is a sequence of mythoi, only indirectly of historical events, and our first step is to realize that all the high points and all the low points are metaphorically related to one another. That is, the garden of Eden, the Promised Land, Jerusalem, and Mount Zion are interchangeable synonyms for the home of the soul, and in Christian imagery they are all identical, in their “spiritual” form (which we remember means metaphorically, whatever else it may also mean), with the kingdom of God spoken of by Jesus. Similarly, Egypt, Babylon, and Rome are all spiritually the same place, and the Pharaoh of the Exodus, Nebuchadnezzar, Antiochus Epiphanes, and Nero are spiritually the same person. And the deliverers of IsraelAbraham, Moses and Joshua, the judges, David, and Solomon—are all prototypes of the Messiah or final deliverer. — location: 3617
Moses dies just outside the Promised Land, which in Christian typology signifies the inability of the law alone to redeem man, and the Promised Land is conquered by Joshua. The hidden link here is that Jesus and Joshua are the same word, hence when the Virgin Mary is told to call her child Jesus or Joshua, the typological meaning is that the reign of the law is over, and the assault on the Promised Land has begun (Matthew 1: 21). — location: 3645
The quest of Christ can be thought of as a cycle, because, however important for man, it involved no essential change in the divine nature itself. The nearest suggestion of such a change is the liturgical metaphor that places Christ in the middle of the Trinity before his quest and on the right after it. There is also a demonic cycle caused, not by an impersonal fate, but by the fate deliberately generated out of the pride and folly of ambitious conquerors. — location: 3699
In the Gospel the emphasis naturally falls on the end of all cyclical movements and the coming of a final separation between apocalyptic and demonic worlds. — location: 3727
This image of a Messianic figure flanked by two others has a type in Zechariah 4, where two olive trees, identified with the spiritual and temporal leaders of the return from Babylon-Zerubbabel of the line of David and Joshua the high priest-are portrayed as flanking a candlestick. This image has a demonic parody in the Crucifixion, with Jesus crucified between two thieves. In Revelation 11 the calamities of the last days include the martyrdom of two “witnesses” (“witness” is the literal meaning of”martyr”) who are identified with the symbolic olive trees of Zechariah and apparently with Moses and Elijah as well: — location: 3776
In later literature the theme is carried much farther back: if we look at the fifth book of Paradise Lost, for instance, we see an archetype of the jealousy of an older son, Lucifer or Satan, at the preference shown to the younger Christ. — location: 3808
With the Romantic movement there comes a large-scale renewal of sympathy for these rejected but at least quasi-tragic Biblical figures, who may be sent into exile and yet are in another context the rightful heirs. Cain, Ishmael, Esau, Saul, even Lucifer himself, are all romantic heroes. The significance of this has tO do partly the change in outline of the mythological universe derived from ·the Bible by Western culture, which will occupy us in a later part of this study. It is possible too that the theme of the rejected rightful heir is linked to a nostalgia for aristocracy, not so much for itself as for representing some kind of glamour or splendor that has vanished from human life. Certainly Byron, who owed much of his popularity tO his combination of aristocratic rank and melancholy attitude, portrays in his Vision of Judgment a Lucifer who is an icily polite aristocrat: the younger son, Christ, naturally does not appear, but he is running what is clearly a much more bourgeois establishment, where such inmates as George III feel at home. — location: 3829
The central expression of human energy is the creative work that transforms the amorphous natural environment into the pastoral, cultivated, civilized world of human shape and meaning. The other side of this is the struggle against the enemy, who has two aspects. The enemy is, first, the human enemy encountered in warfare, and, second, the unshaped and chaotic element in nature, usually symbolized as some kind of monster or beast of prey, and identified with drought, floods, and natural sterility of all kinds. The hero of most human traditions is not the worker but the leader against the human enemy, and no ancient king felt that his record was adequate unless he was portrayed with his foot on the necks of cowed and beaten enemies, most of them prisoners. The second enemy was more mysterious and powerful, usually to be propitiated with sacrifices. But there remained the hope that some hero would prove strong enough to tackle him too. Thus the Athenians were forced to send tributes of youths and maidens to feed the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth, until the great hero Theseus went to Crete, descended into the labyrinth, and killed the monster at its heart. — location: 3930
As a myth of renewal, its general shape is clear enough: the hero is the reviving power of spring and the monster and old king the outgrown forces of apathy and impotence in a symbolic winter. It is an easy step from here to a creation myth, and there are many myths in which the creation takes the form of killing some amorphous monster or power of darkness. They belong to a family of myths older than the Bible, and are incorporated into the Old Testament as a form of poetic imagery. We have already noticed that a dragon-killing story like that of the Akkadian Enuma elish lies close behind the Genesis creation of the “firmament” out of the chaos of the deep. In the Old Testament this dragon that symbolizes the original chaos is usually called either Rahab or Leviathan. — location: 3951
The creation results from the dragon’s death because the dragon is death, and to kill death is to bring to life. In contrast to many other mythological systems, in the Bible the dragon seems to be a consistently sinister image. This is not only because of its antisocial habits of breathing fire and eating virgins, but because, of all sinister animals, it has the unique advantage of not existing, and so admirably symbolizes the paradox of evil, which is a powerful and positive force in our present mixture of things in time, but which by itself is pure negation or non-being. The author of Revelation calls him “the beast that was, and is not, and yet is” (17:8; “is” translates the Greek parestai, with its overtones of”continuing for the time being”; see v. 10). — location: 3957
The text of the last phrase is not beyond dispute, but the symbolic theme is clear: in the “Day of the Lord” the leviathan, the devouring monster who swallows everything, will himself be swallowed: a reversal of perspective we encountered earlier, for example in harvest and vintage imagery. Metaphorically, a monster in the seais the sea; hence the landing of the leviathan is much the same thing as the abolition of the sea of death in Revelation 21: 1 already glanced at. Now ifleviathan and Rahab are also Babylon and Egypt, it follows that Israel in Egypt, or the Jews in captivity in Babylon, have already been swallowed by the monster, and are living inside his belly: — location: 3992
But what is true of Israel in Egypt is typologically true of the human situation generally. All of us are born, and live our natural lives, within the leviathan’s belly. In the political aspect of the leviathan, we live in subjection to secular powers that may become at any time actively hostile to everything except their own aggressiveness, the leviathan being “king over all the children of pride” <Job 41:34). Cosmologically, the leviathan is the element of chaos within creation: that is, it is creation as we see it now, the world of time and space that extends away from us indefinitely, the limitless expanse that is the most secure and impregnable of all prisons. — location: 3999
If we turn, however, to the sea monster that is metaphorically the sea, we remember what we said earlier, that in one dimension of the Deluge story the Deluge has never receded, and we still live in a submarine world of reality. — location: 4031
We can now, perhaps, understand why there should be so much about fishing in the Gospels, and why Jesus himself should be so often associated in later legend with a fish or dolphin. The identification of Jesus with a fish has been traditionally assisted by an acronym: the initial letters of “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour” in Greek spell out the word ichthys, fish. In any case the theme of redemption out of water follows in the sequence that includes the story of Noah’s ark, the crossing of the Red Sea by the Israelites, the symbolism of baptism in which the person baptized is separated into a mortal part that symbolically drowns and an immortal part that escapes, and such occasional uses of the image as the cry to God from the depths of the waters in Psalm 69. The figure of the wise teacher or culture hero as fish goes back to the undoubtedly ancient myth ofOannes in Babylonian legend. — location: 4032
Further, if the monster that swallows us is metaphorically death, then the hero who comes to deliver us from the body of this death (the phrasing is from Romans 7: 24) has to be absorbed in the world of death-that is, he has to die. Even the St. George plays make a point of this, as in these plays St. George usually dies along with the dragon, and has to be brought to life by a “doctor.” In the story of Jesus there is a scapegoat theme, already referred to, in which the hero is driven from his society into a world of demons. We suggested that originally the scapegoat rite may have been an offering to the demons; and in the gospel story too sin and death are symbolically transferred by the hero to the demonic world, hence the Resurrection, including the harrowing of hell of later legend, effects a total separation of the world of life from the world of death. — location: 4040
separate, seems very arbitrary at first, but it makes its own kind of sense. The books from Genesis to Esther are concerned with history, law, and ritual; those from Job to Malachi with poetry, prophecy, and wisdom. In this sequence Job occupies the place of a poetic and prophetic Genesis. It is again a U-shaped story: Job, like Adam, falls into a world of suffering and exile, “repents” (i.e., goes through ametanoia or metamorphosis of consciousness), and is restored to his original state, with interest. — location: 4065
The books from Genesis to Esther are concerned with history, law, and ritual; those from Job to Malachi with poetry, prophecy, and wisdom. In this sequence Job occupies the place of a poetic and prophetic Genesis. It is again a U-shaped story: Job, like Adam, falls into a world of suffering and exile, “repents” (i.e., goes through ametanoia or metamorphosis of consciousness), and is restored to his original state, with interest. — location: 4066
Job is “righteous in his own eyes” (32: 1) only from the point of view of his friends: he is not protesting innocence but saying that there is a vast disproportion between what has happened to him and anything he could conceivably have done. — location: 4078
The case against Job is simply that he lives in a world in which a good deal of power is held by Satan. Job, like the good Samaritan in Jesus’ parable, comes from the country of an Erbfeind of Israel (assuming that Uz is in Edom), and, however genuine his piety, he is, like Israel in Egypt, in a world exposed to an arbitrary process of nature and fortune. If a soldier is asked why he kills people who have done him no harm, or a terrorist why he kills innocent people with his bombs, they can always reply that war has been declared, and there are no innocent people in an enemy country during a war. The answer is psychotic, but it is the answer that humanity has given to every act of aggression in history. And Job lives in enemy territory, in the embrace of heathen and Satanic power which is symbolically the belly of the leviathan, the endless extent of time and space. — location: 4098
Elihu, who is young, has yet to speak: they are the continuing cycle of the voice oflaw and wisdom. Job lets Elihu’s speech go by without comment on either its cocksureness or its genuine if not altogether original eloquence. He has heard it all before: it is all true, and all nonsense. He is waiting for a different kind of voice altogether. And suddenly, out of the whirlwind, it comes. — location: 4112
We remember that Job himself was groping toward a realization that no causal explanation of his alienated plight was possible. In a sense God is speaking out of Job’s own consciousness here: any causal explanation takes us back to a First Cause, that is, the creation. The rhetorical questions really mean, then, in this context: don’t look along the line of causes to the creation: there is no answer there, and no help there. How Job got into his position is less important than how he is to get out of it; and it is only because he was not a participant in creation that he can be delivered from the chaos and darkness within it. God’s speech, if we are right about its general meaning, makes no sense without the vision of Behemoth and Leviathan at the end, which is the key to it. The fact that God can point out these monsters to Job means that Job is outside them, and no longer under their power. — location: 4125
“I abhor myself” and “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth thee” (42: 5-6). The first statement seems to mean primarily that what we should call Job’s egocentric perception has disappeared along with its objective counterpart, the leviathan. The second one, even though it continues to use the first personal pronoun, makes the shattering claim to a direct vision of God that the Bible, even in the New Testament, is usually very cautious about expressing. — location: 4146
But Job seems to have gone the entire circuit of the Bible’s narrative, from creation and fall through the plagues of Egypt, the sayings of the fathers transmitting law and wisdom, the flash of prophetic insight that breaks the chain of wisdom, and on to the final vision of presence and the knowledge that in the midst of death we are in life. — location: 4153
We have somewhat expanded our earlier remark that the Book of Job, though classified as wisdom literature, needs the prophetic perspective to understand it. Job follows, not the horizontal line of precedent and prudence, but the U-shaped progression of original prosperity, descent to humiliation, and return. The prophetic element in the book is thus connected with its narrative shape. This in turn reminds us of the Bible’s concern for narrative or mythos generally, which may be fictional, as here or in the parables of Jesus, or closer to the historical categories vaguely called “non-fiction.” The emphasis on narrative, and the fact that the entire Bible is enclosed in a narrative framework, distinguishes the Bible from a good many other sacred books. The Buddhist sutras employ relatively little narrative, and the Koran consists of revelations gathered up after Mohammed’s death and arranged in order oflength, with no discernible narrative principle in their sequence. The narrative framework of the Bible is a part of its emphasis on the shape of history and the specific collision with temporal movement that its revelation is assumed to make. In a sense, therefore, the deliverance of Job is a deliverance from his own story, the movement in time that is transcended when we have no further need of time. Much the same thing would be true of the relation of Jesus to the Passion narrative, which is the kernel of the Gospels. The inference for the reader seems to be that the angel of time that man clings to until daybreak (Genesis 32:36) is both an enemy and an ally, a power that both enlightens and cripples, and disappears only when all that can be experienced has been experienced. — location: 4155
But the Bible is not what people whose taste in style differs from mine would call an “authored” book at all: authorship is of too little importance in the composition of the Bible for such conceptions as “inspiration” to have any real function. The word “author” is used only for convenience, and should really be kept in quotation marks. — location: 4246
It is in a sense more primitive than either, and descends from the primitive habit of regarding everything sacred as secret, to be communicated only orally. In this process the “author” is the first person who delivered the secret, and he is a legendary figure lost in the mists o”f time. Occult literature is closely related to this tradition. — location: 4284
Once we have got rid of the fetish of individual authorship, and recognize that we are in a more objective world, we can see many unities of a different kind. Homeric criticism has passed through a similar development. First it was unquestioned that a man named Homer wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey; then the poems were torn into fragments by analytical critics; and now scholarship is back to the notion of a “Homer.” But this new “Homer” is not a man but a metaphor for the fact that once more we read both poems as unities. — location: 4320
We have now two critical principles to go on with. One is that the Bible, in its linguistic conventions, is very close to the conventions of the spoken word and the oral tradition. The other is that, ideally, every sentence in it is a kind of linguistic monad. From one point of view the Bible is as unified and continuous as Dante, which is how we have been looking at it hitherto; from another point of view it is as epiphanic and discontinuous as Rimbaud. — location: 4374
The unit ofBiblical verse, parallelism, is of this returning kind. It is a unit of two (more rarely three) members, of which the second completes the rhythm but often adds little if anything to the sense. It is an admirable rhythm for conveying the feeling of a dialogue initiated by God, which the reader completes simply by repetition: — location: 4385
A writer of modern demotic or descriptive prose, if he is a good writer, will be as simple as his subject matter allows him to be: that is the simplicity of equality, where the writer puts himself on a level with his reader, appeals to evidence and reason, and avoids the kind of obscurity that creates a barrier. The simplicity of the Bible is the simplicity of majesty, not of equality, much less of naivete: its simplicity expresses the voice of authority. — location: 4417
Continuous or descriptive prose has a democratic authority: it professes to be a delegate of experiment, evidence, or logic. More traditional kinds of authority are expressed in a discontinuous prose of aphorisms or oracles in which every sentence is surrounded by silence. The Greek philosophers before Plato-Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Anaximander-uttered their sayings and stopped. It was for the disciple to ponder and meditate, not to argue or question as he might with the more linear Socrates. — location: 4446
In poetry recited to a listening audience a great deal of repetition is needed that a reader does not need. The Old English poem Beowulf contains a long recapitulation of a previous narrative, because it is close to and is reflecting the conventions of oral literature. In Shakespeare, too, near the end of a play we sometimes have a summarizing speech of a kind that a theater audience would find helpful. Then again, music, which also addresses a listening audience, is capable of a degree of repetition that a reader would find intolerable. We do not want the singer of ada capo aria merely to say “Now I go back to the beginning and do it all over again,” although that is all that his score would say. In listening we demand that a certain rhythmical period be filled out, regardless of the repetition involved. — location: 4473
Traditionally, the Bible speaks with the voice of God and through the voice of man. Its rhetoric is thus polarized between the oracular, the authoritative, and the repetitive on the one hand, and the more immediate and familiar on the other. The more poetic, repetitive, and metaphorical the texture, the more the sense of external authority surrounds it; the closer the texture comes to continuous prose, the greater the sense of the human and familiar. — location: 4485
Jesus remarks to Nicodemus (John 3:8) that those who are born of the Spirit are like the wind, in that no one can tell whence it comes or where it goes. How does one present the life of a man who was so obviously one of those born of the Spirit? A continuous biography, such as would be appropriate for someone existing continuously on our own level, would be out of the question: a series of mysterious apparitions by some kind of disembodied phantom would be equally so. The gospel writers solve this problem by the device sometimes called “pericope,” the short discontinuous unit — location: 4509
Jesus appears in a certain context or situation that leads up to a crucial act, such as a miraculous healing, or to a crucial saying, such as a parable or moral pronouncement. Hence the Gospels are, as one scholar says of Mark, a sequence of discontinuous epiphanies. — location: 4514
In Chapter I we saw that the rhetorical style of the Bible was oratorical, a combination of the poetically figured and the concerned, of imaginative and existential appeal. Like Orpheus, it combines poetic with magical influence, — location: 4520
This, we feel, is the kind of thing music is all about, the kind of thing it exists to say. The work we hear is now coming to us from within its context, which is the totality of musical experience; and the authority of that total context reinforces the individual authority of the composer. Similarly in literature, where I have devoted much of my critical life to attempting to suggest what context within literature individual works of literature belong to. It is the voice of drama itself that we hear in Shakespeare or Sophocles, and the sense of a totality of dramatic experience, of what drama exists to set forth, looms closely behind them. — location: 4536
Returning to the Bible, we soon come to understand the importance of a critical principle we may call resonance. Through resonance a particular statement in a particular context acquires a universal significance. Thus the tremendous vision of a blood-soaked deity treading the winepress alone in Isaiah 63 is one that has haunted us ever since with its terrible beauty; through “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” it entered the American consciousness, and a title such as “The Grapes of Wrath” testifies to its continuing power. — location: 4551
Such resonance would be impossible without, first, an original context, and, second, a power of expanding away from that context. The unity of context that we have been exploring in the Bible, then, is there as a foundation for its real structure. The Bible includes an immense variety of material, and the unifying forces that hold it together cannot be the rigid forces of doctrinal consistency or logic, which would soon collapse under cultural stress, but the more flexible ones of imaginative unity, which is founded on metaphor. — location: 4564
Blake would say that he never intended such statements to be true of ordinary experience: they are precisely what they are said to be, auguries of innocence, statements about an ideal or paradisal world where it would in fact be true that men who abuse animals are no longer loved or admired. This conception of an augury of innocence is a useful one in responding to the discontinuous and aphoristic style of the Bible. We said earlier that while certain provisions about executions and war are made in the Old Testament law, the flat commandment “Thou shalt not kill” is the place where we hear the voice of authority most clearly. It is less important as a law than as a vision of an ideal world in which people do not, perhaps even cannot, kill. Similarly, many of Jesus’ exhortations are evocations of a world very different from the one we live in, so that we may find them unpractical or exaggerated as guides to practice. They are not guides to practice directly, however, but parts of a vision — location: 4591
neighbor: if we say that love cannot be commanded, we are speaking out of a different order of existence. — location: 4600
The vision is based on the commandments to love God and one’s neighbor: if we say that love cannot be commanded, we are speaking out of a different order of existence. — location: 4599
What I think it means is that we have to turn again to the traditional but still neglected theory of”polysemous” meaning. One of the commonest experiences in reading is the sense of further discoveries to be made within the same structure of words. The feeling is approximately “there is more to be got out of this,” or we may say, of something we particularly admire, that every time we read it we get something new out of it. This “something new” is not necessarily something we have overlooked before, but may come rather from a new context in our experience. The implication is that when we start to read, some kind of dialectical process begins to unfold, so that any given understanding of what we read is one of a series of phases or stages of comprehension. — location: 4610
What is implied is a single process growing in subtlety and comprehensiveness, not different senses, but different intensities or wider contexts of a continuous sense, unfolding like a plant out of a seed. — location: 4635
What Hegel means by dialectic is not anything reducible to a patented formula, like the “thesisantithesis-synthesis” one so often attached to him, nor can it be anything predictive. It is a much more complex operation of a form of understanding combining with its own otherness or opposite, in a way that negates itself and yet passes through that negation into a new stage, preserving its essence in a broader context, and abandoning the one just completed like the chrysalis of a butterfly or a crustacean’s outgrown shell. — location: 4652
But Old Testament history, for Dante, differs from all other history in that it was intended by God to be a type or symbol of what was clearly revealed by the coming of Christ. Hence our understanding of the historical event expands, by virtue of its context, into an understanding of that event as a type of redemption of the world by Christ, who led mankind out of slavery just as Moses led Israel out of slavery in Egypt. Even so, understanding the relation of the Exodus to the work of Christ is of little use unless we apply it to our own lives, and thereby reach a condition in which those lives can be transformed into the analogy or imitation of Christ known as the Christian life. This takes us into the moral level, — location: 4658
The literal level, hearing the Word and seeing the text, is at the center of the activity of sense experience, the foundation of all knowledge. The allegorical level is at the center of the contemplative reason which sees the world around it as objective, and hence as a type or image concealing what the reason can interpret. The moral, or third, level — location: 4667
At each stage of Dante’s scheme the understanding of the Bible forms the center of an entire mode of human activity. The literal level, hearing the Word and seeing the text, is at the center of the activity of sense experience, the foundation of all knowledge. The allegorical level is at the center of the contemplative reason which sees the world around it as objective, and hence as a type or image concealing what the reason can interpret. The moral, or third, level is that of the faith that transcends and yet also fulfills the reason, and the anagogic level is at the center of the beatific vision that fulfills faith. — location: 4666
A philosopher, like Hegel, would most naturally start this polysemous expansion with the concept, and end with absolute knowledge. A literary critic might well do something closer to what I briefly attempted myself in the Anatomy of Criticism: start with a “symbol,” or unit of poetic expression, and end with a verbal universe in which the symbol has become a monad, though one that interpenetrates with all the other monads. Dante starts with a verse taken to some extent at random from the Bible, and ends with the whole medieval structure of faith and vision. In summarizing and concluding this part of our study, our present procedure would be closer to Dante’s, but would start on a different basis of literal meaning, and would avoid his subordination of words to non-verbal “realities.” — location: 4694
Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that “freezes” into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality of logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world. We also traced a sequence of manifestations of this reality, each one a stage more explicit than its predecessor. First is the creation, not the natural environment with — location: 4703
its alienating chaos but the ordered structure that the mind perceives in it. Next comes the revolutionary vision of human life as a casting off of tyranny and exploitation. Next is the ceremonial, moral, judicial code that keeps a society together. Next is the wisdom or sense of integrated continuous life which grows out of this, and next the prophecy or imaginative vision of man as somewhere between his original and his ultimate identity. Gospel and apocalypse speak of a present that no longer finds its meaning in the future, as in the New Testament’s view of the Old Testament, but is a present moment around which past and future revolve. — location: 4707
The agility of language in chasing red herrings has caused some religious traditions to make a cult of the wordless, even to the point of writing books by the score about the utter inadequacy of words to convey genuine experience. All this is right so far as it goes, but it is a futile maneuver to retreat from words into some body language of gesture or similar forms of implied understanding that short-circuits the verbal. The wise woman appeals to the primitive impulse of consciousness to connect with reality which is often released by the simplest modes of language, such as metaphor. But, being wise, she knows that a transformation of consciousness and a transformation of language can never be separated. — location: 4732
Second, we have often noted, both in this book and elsewhere, the long-standing connection between the written book and the arts of magic, and the way that the poetic impulse seems to begin in the renunciation of magic or, at least, of its practical aims. Without his books, says Caliban, Prospero would be as much of a sot as I am. We referred earlier to the critics of the god Thoth, the inventor of writing according to Plato’sPhaedrus, and their fear that his art would greatly weaken the function of memory in society. What these critics did not realize was that the written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination. The phrase that Elizabethan critics took from Horace, “ut pictura poesis,” that poetry is a speaking picture, refers primarily to this quality of voluntary fantasy in writing and reading. — location: 4760
It points to it because it grows out of that world, not because it regards it as establishing criteria for itself. — location: 4774
The next turn of the dialectic brings us back to what we have been calling the royal metaphor, and which it is now perhaps time to think of also as something more like a real universal, the sense of the individuals of every class, including man, as forming one body, which is less a concept than an axiom of behavior. Whether we think it is true or not matters little, in actual life: there, it is the determination to make it true, to live as though individual and class were an identity, that is important. — location: 4786
Two considerations arise about this word. First (a point to which I have often reverted), there seem to be two levels of faith, the level of professed faith-what we say we believe, think we believe, believe we believe-and the level of what our actions show that we believe. Professed belief is essentially a statement of loyalty or adherence to a specific community. To profess a faith identifies us as Unitarians or Trotskyists or Taoists or Shiite Muslims or whatever. Beyond this is the principle that all one’s positive acts express one’s real beliefs. In very highly integrated people the professed and the actual belief would be much the same thing, and the fact that they are usually not quite the same thing is not necessarily a sign of hypocrisy, merely of human weakness or the inadequacy of theory. Even Paul says that his actions do not always accord with his own precepts. — location: 4795
The mind seems to want to expand, to move from the closed fortresses of believer and skeptic to the community of vision. — location: 4819
All such questions are usually presented simply as extensions of belief, and in such forms as What comes after? or What lies beyond? These are metaphors from time and space respectively: language still clutches its accustomed metaphors, even when they seem clearly not to apply. What speaks across death, in this perspective, is usually the promise or threat of an afterlife in heaven or hell, where something like the ego survives in something like unending time, and in something like a place. — location: 4826
Paul speaks of a moment of enlightenment (II Corinthians 12) in which two things are remarkable. First, the sense of a solid ego dissolved so completely that he can hardly say whether the experience happened to him or to someone else-”je est un autre,” as Rimbaud says. He even apologizes for “boasting” in speaking about his experience as though it were his own. Second, he is not sure whether he was “in” or “out of” his body, or whether such distinctions really applied at all. He feels a certain reluctance in stressing the experience, mainly, no doubt, because of his strong revolutionary slant: he wants the world as a whole to wake up, and individual enlightenment is useful chiefly because it may be contagious, which it cannot be if it is incommunicable. He heard, according tO the AV, “unspeakable words” (arreta rhemata), “not lawful for a man tO utter.” The experience, however, seems to be of a new language, which he heard and to some extent understood, but cannot translate into the categories of ordinary language. The emphasis seems to fall on his inability to make it intelligible, rather than on his being forbidden to do so. Yet one may dimly glimpse something of the conditions under which such a language might be spoken, and we conclude with two suggestions about it. In the first place, although the “Word of God” is described in the New Testament as a two-edged sword that cuts and divides (Hebrews 4: 12 and elsewhere), this can hardly mean in such a context a Hegelian dialectic like the one we have been dealing with, in which every statement implies its own opposite. What it ultimately divides is rather the world ofJife and the world of death, and this can be accomplished only by a language that escapes from argument and refutation. The language used in the Bible is, in short, the language of love, which, as Paul reminds us in a passage even more luminous than the one quoted above (I Corinthians 13:8), is likely to outlast most forms of communication. — location: 4832
An enemy deprived me of life, took away my strength, then soaked me in water, then took me out again and put me in the sun, where I soon lost all my hair. The answer is “book,” specifically a Bible codex. The riddle obliquely describes the method of preparing a codex in the writer’s day, and seems to be referring also to the shearing of Samson in Judges 16:17-22. The normal human reaction to a great cultural achievement like the Bible is to do with it what the Philistines did to Samson: reduce it to impotence, then lock it in a mill to grind our aggressions and prejudices. But perhaps its hair, like Samson’s, could grow again even there. — location: 4873