Sacred Text and Inspiration

Dispelling the 'Bolt from the Blue' Illusion

THIS might well be considered a loosely connected pars dua to my earlier piece on revelation—and I have already decided that there must be a third, to round things off, after Nicholas’ characteristically insightful reflections pushed me to think things through a little more comprehensively. Whilst the focus in the first was more broadly concerned with traditions and their borders (and I will return to that in the final part) this middle piece will hone in specifically on what is, in most cases, the central resource of any religious tradition: namely, the sacred text.

In trying to reflect on a sacred text through a critical lens, one often runs up against a troubling resistance. An overwhelming number of religious communities—and not even just fundamentalists—approach scholarship seeking to examine the foundations of the text, the historical development and alterations, the multiplicity of interpretations and receptions in various cultures, with an at best prickly guardedness. I was reminded of this all-too-familiar bias recently when listening to a set of expositional homilies on the Book of Daniel. At one point the speaker vowed to rebut of all the scholarly scepticism regarding the legitimacy of the various prophecies in that text: the result was sadly less than promised, producing little in the way of a direct engagement with actual scholarship, so much as mere loose, dismissive allusions to critical scepticism. Particularly unfortunate—and telling—was that their main line of argument was founded on a positively outrageous false dichotomy, asserting that if this particular prophecy (Dan. 10-12) was illegitmate, then we must conclude that God does not exist. The Bible was the Word of God, so he said, and if we truly believed that then the acceptance of any data which threatened its impeccable authority would be a tantamount to an abandonment of the faith.

It is this kind of attitude that seems tragically pervasive in such discussions within religious communities. Some weak rationale gave way to a vague yet deeply menacing threat. Weak rationale for those who had already made a prior commitment, and wished only to shore up the security with any old flimsy justification; and then a threat to those who might dare venture to ask a few more questions, to frighten them by foreboding the complete dissolution of their very personal, and very intimate, religion, something of immense emotional import in their lives. I do not wish to exaggerate, but these are the kinds of techniques we see employed in abusive and manipulative relationships and cults. It was also infuriating to hear the same old smear that these communities often direct at scholars: namely, that they are all atheists. The sense of paranoia leads to a quickly assumed victimhood. If a scholar presents evidence contrary to their own interpretation of the text, then the scholar must be an atheist (read: ‘enemy’) and, in some way or another, ‘out to get them’—thereby rendering their position inherently untrustworthy. A lightly-sprinkled persecution complex, to be frank.

And yet, in spite of all the badmouthing of these ‘atheist’ scholars, whenever the scholarship suddenly seems to report something that reinforces their beliefs (a faint stele inscription at an archeological dig, a discovery of ancient canonical codices, even a re-dating of a certain Shroud), all such scepticism flies out the window as the data are wrought violently from context and paraded with a distinctly unscientific caution. Suddenly the very same methods yield results that are perfectly reliable—indeed, so much so, that the discovery must be a great red-faced embarrassment to those ‘atheists’ who unearthed it. It is here that the distinctly low threshold of critical thinking needed to justify a pre-established belief becomes especially apparent.

So, whenever we begin discussing a sacred text in the vein of higher criticism, we must (and I fear academics are not best disposed to this vital step) commence not with a brutally insensitive wielding of facts, but a gentle and loving reassurance that, no, in spite of what you might be told by those with a lot to lose at the hands of the Truth, you will not see your religion collapse into a pitiable heap before your eyes should you simply engage the scholarship with an open mind. With this established, we can begin to move away from fundamentalism with the introduction of some basic hermeneutical principles.

First: every text has a history and a context. Every text was, if not written, at least ‘received’ by a human being embodied within a particular point in time, subjected to particular conditions, with a particular psychology, life experience, and system of belief, all of which invariably influenced that reception. Any objections to this can be referred to the previous post: even insofar as a text exists in something as foundational as language, it already exists in a human context, because not a letter of the Qur’an, Torah, Bible, Vedas, etc. can have any meaning except through the etymologies, morphologies, pragmatics, and phonetics of the words by which they are constituted. Even something as basic as the consistent Basmala, describing Allah as ‘most gracious’ (ar-raḥmān) and ‘most merciful’ (ar-raḥīm), it is quite obviously conveying something about Him by drawing upon the meanings of these Arabic words as they have been utilised throughout pre-Islamic history, utilisations which necessarily changed as different languages and dialects (such as the conglomerate of Old South Arabian) interacted, bleeding into one another across civilisations and history. The Greek term agápē remains the central form of Christian love, and yet its appearance in the New Testament (1 Cor. 13:1-7, 1 Jn. 4:8, 16) is irrepealably indebted to Homer’s use of a cognate in the Odyssey (IV.17; XXIII.214) centuries before. Homer and the other first users of the term thereby contribute irrevocably to Christianity, and yet are surely not considered as a canonical authors. Where is the border drawn? And, in the Torah, the theological import of the story of Cain and Abel (Gen. 4:1-18) changes completely under the etymological development of the word ‘āwōn, uttered as Cain responds to God’s post-fratricide sanctions. In Ancient Hebrew, its meaning was simply that of ‘punishment’, and yet came later to mean ‘crime’ or even ‘sin’; thereby transforming Cain from unrepentant killer to remorseful sinner.¹

These exercises are pedantic, but only to demonstrate something that is so self-evident it should go without saying. To try and conceive of a text which uses words entirely uninfluenced by the whole gamut of human designation, predication, and interpretation is to conceive of a blank sheet of paper.² Whether or not you think that a sacred text is written by a human or ‘written’ by God (even if that means the crudest, most cartoonish image of a quill invisibly floating above a parchment), the simple fact that it exists within intelligible language—and so, the reason it is written at all—already banishes even the faintest notion that sacred texts exist in a kind of insular vacuum, untainted by the annals of conditioned history. So even a claim as considerable as that made by most Muslims, asserting that the Qur’an is a direct, unmediated, and unambiguous communication directly from Allah must surely cede the obvious fact that it exists within human language, and is perceived by the faculties of human comprehension. It is not that interpretation is merely an option for an incidentally ambiguous text; it is necessary for the comprehension of language itself. Not to mention that the Qur’an, to speak more specifically, has hardly failed to avail itself of tafsīr from its earliest appearance, as ‘even in the time of Muhammad, the apostle and prophet of Islam, the revelation he had received needed exegesis.’³ It is ultimately a rather Kantian problem: the noumenal essence of revelation (so to speak) must always assume phenomenal adornments when it is communicated. No matter the sanctity of the language assumed (Arabic, Hebrew, Sanskrit, etc.), semantic nudity is not a possibility.

Further, to hone our focus to an even more microsopic, elemental level: what we can call the text’s ‘meaning’ is a complex supervening on (to be very literal) small blotches of ink on vellum or etches on pottery shards; graphemes organised in conjunction with other graphemes, creating meaning by their difference, and often bearing associated phonemes that allow oral communication in a similar fashion. The sorting process by which the human mind distinguishes one grapheme from another (say, ‘m’ from ‘n’) is just the same as how it would distinguish objects in the world, such as a black street light from a tall slender man in a black coat. Sometimes this is easy, and sometimes it is difficult, but the process in general is one of mental disinction for the sake of establishing semantic coherence. Derrida’s most infamous phrase (and you must leave it in the French, so as to prevent further misinterpretation)—‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’⁴—is getting at exactly this. We are constantly engaged in a negotiation with the text, employing the difference between certain units of language and others in order to derive a semantic value we only later mistake for something obviously or evidently ‘present’ to us. The letters ‘G’ ‘o’ and ‘d’ come together to make an intelligible word only insofar as those letters are different from one another, and because those letters are also different from all others of all different languages, and indeed even all other objects in the world. We always draw upon something other than the (unit of) text at hand in order to have it cohere, and so by extension any ‘border’ which we want to place around the text is easily problematised. There is no point at which we can identify a self-sufficient, fixed textual identity, something we can make perfect sense of without further context—at least, that is, not beyond an ultimately preliminary level. As such, the sacred text cannot speak directly on its own terms. As Derrida avers, ‘We are dispossessed of the coveted presence in the gesture of language by which we attempt to seize it’.⁵

There are many more considerations to be made with regard to the sacred text, detailing the long and typically protean history of canonical inclusion and exclusion, or the astoundingly variegated ambit of interpretations as texts are received in different epochs. Any historical study does fairly well to disabuse us of those silly notions of ‘perfect preservation’—as though the Holy Spirit or a similar angelic acolyte may have safely guided the codices of the canon through history; perhaps whisking them away from the falling timber of an Alexandrian housefire, or safely concealing them from the persecutory hands of a new, iconoclastic religious movement. But whilst these are useful to delve into to persuade a fundamentalist, they are common knowledge for one disabused of those unsubstantiated convictions, and so we will move past them for now.

What, then, does all this actually mean for religious revelation? Well, as is a repeated refrain of mine, what it certainly doesn’t do is incur semantic relativism. That is a beleagured canard levelled by conservative critics at postmodernism, and not a remotely accurate one—actually teetering on intellectual dishonesty. The foregoing does not preclude all claims of textual inspiration, or authority, or even inerrancy, so long as we take stock of its implications and so freely abandon unhelpful modern conceptions of those claims. Just as I argued previously that we must interrogate and ultimately deconstruct (with appropriate reverence, retaining the importance of difference) the borders that divide traditional revelation from the world to which it is communicated, so too must we apply similar scrutiny to the division between a textual revelation and the rest of the world, especially if that text is chauvinistically claimed to be solely ‘authoritative’, ‘inspired’, ‘final’, ‘absolute’, ‘inerrant’, or the like. But, once we have asked the important question—where does supposedly infallible text end and the terribly errant world begin? In which proverbial sand might this line be drawn?—we can start to turn to the more interesting question of what to do with the answer.

To quickly reiterate the claim I made in the first post: if revelation is to have any value whatsoever, it must renege on all claims to any radical exclusivism, and concede that it is absolutely and totally implicated within the conditioned field of creation, whence it derives the entirety of its means of communication. Put simpler: everything is revelation, and what we specifically call ‘revelation’ in a religious milieu—in this case, the sacred text of a given tradition—is not some foreign bolt from the blue, but a lucid disclosure of what everything truly is: the ‘Real’, you might say (al-Haqq, Brahman, Dao). All the world is, at least latently, God, and so any aspect of the world that conforms to its inner nature with a real honesty will be one that reveals its own divinity. This is no different when it comes to the written text. There is a silent habit derived from the constant separation of the text from the rest of the world which seems to forget that it is precisely that: a part of the world. It is a real, tangible object that can be picked up and felt, composed by the manufacturing hands of human beings, interpreted—as I say above—by means of human language and concepts, involving a constant engagement with that which is typically considered ‘beyond’ its canonical borders. As such, the text is, like every other part of the world, an aspect of reality that may either reveal or obscure its own Divine nature. To avoid a mere repetition of that earlier thesis, we can move toward a fuller conception of what it would actually mean to engage preliminary borders—a direction that will find its terminus⁶ in my final post in this (again, loosely-connected) ‘series’.

Perhaps first and best to note is that although I seem to be performing a rather bathetic relegation in describing religious difference as ‘preliminary’, I hope to give the opposite impression: I think (contrary to certain perennialists) religion itself is nothing but its difference, as difference is precisely what the immanent, conditioned world is. Describing tradition, text, and indeed all religion as ‘preliminary’ does nothing to suggest that it must be washed away in some holistic bromide. This is simply an impossibility: there is no way of taking leave of this preliminary stage, no vantage sub specie aeternitatis that might be assumed in order to piously (read: ‘snootily’) look down on all those who persist in lowly disagreement. The ‘preliminary’ is what creation itself is, the description of our contingent, conditioned existence. That is, after all, why we do apophatic theology: because of our inability to speak properly about our Referent, and our visceral, palpable acknowledgement of the embodied and intellectual reality of living at and with the limit of the intelligible—at the ‘edge of words’ as Rowan Williams has put it.⁷ So we must first strike down any notion of somehow drawing back the curtain and peering ‘behind’ the différance which defines text and tradition alike—this would, in an instance of horsehoe theory, actually return us to the very exclusivist position we are critiquing, by absurdly claiming a knowledge of the transcendent through a purely immanent epistemic apparatus.

So, where is the middle ground? Not in essentialising immanent difference, nor taking flight of it altogether, but in engaging it in the form of life that most readily opens the way for divine revelation. When we come to the religious text, the best place to situate this kind of life is in exegesis. There is a way of ‘living’ in the text, in the same way that one ‘lives’ in a tradition; and what that is surely opposed to is any sort of stultifying, inert, fundamentalist reification of Scripture. Anything which prompts us to forget our impotence to ‘read the transcendent’ is to be unswervingly avoided. And, I might suggest, that just as in the Chan tradition one may still the mind by meditating on cause and condition (S: hetu-pratyaya, M: yinyuan),⁸ we might similarly find that our exegetical relationships to the sacred text can benefit greatly by a meditation on its mutable and constantly developing material and hermeneutic history: hence why I have such an affinity for critical scholarship, and lament the way it has been consistently snubbed by believers paranoid about its supposedly destructive effects.

To reiterate the above, exegesis is what we do when we read a sacred text, not something we might avail ourselves of incidentally. An exegetical disposition toward the text—one which probes borders in curiosity and even pushes right through them, discovering them to be hidden doors—is not a bourgeois frill, something to be undertaken on the outskirts of a tradition alone, by ivory-tower belletristes possessed of a superfluous profusion of erudition. If, to reiterate my claim, religion is nothing but its difference, then exegesis should define a relationship to the text that acknowledges this difference and seeks to both accept and augment it in a revelatory manner, always looking to open new possibilites to reveal the infinite divine depth already present but as yet only minimally disclosed.

But this should also not be mistaken for a call for sheer spontaneity or innovation for innovation’s sake. I find the approach of Hindu custom fairly instructive here. Generally speaking, in eastern religions an exegesis of a canonical text—a bhāṣya, ‘commentary’—is not lauded for its creativity, but for its fidelity to the canon. Put bluntly, ‘Theological originality is a fault. The theologian’s enterprise is a preservative one, consisting in the elucidation of received ideas in a systematic manner’.⁹ In the specific case of Hinduism, to remain within an orthodox (āstika) tradition (sampradāya), one is obliged to square their unique theologies with Śruti and, depending on your tradition, Smṛti. Hence why we see three distinct Vedantic viewpoints in Ādi Śaṅkara (c. 700-c. 750), Rāmānuja (1077-c.1157), and Madhvācārya (c. 1199-c. 1278), despite all three claiming to be perfectly faithful to the Upaniṣads and Brahma Sūtras.

We see an interplay of unity and difference here; we do not merely skirt around the world in search of God in something superficially new—because what would that be except a spiritual consumerism?—but rather we plumb the depths of a single text and tradition, the accumulation of our ancestors’ wisdom, in just the same way that in meditation we reduce our focus to a single mantra, or humbly and simply count our breaths. We focus on one canon, and from that focus, difference naturally arises. It is in this way—this attitude of non-essentialising fidelity to a tradition and text—that we can take seriously the reality of différance without succumbing to an unmoored anarchy, which surely has its end in nihilism. It is in this vein that we produce readings that are genuinely new, and so might subsequently shape and usher in the form of future tradition, a newfound depth of revelation.

Perhaps—if I can be allowed a dash of thematic continuity with the previous post—we can see such exegetical novelty best exemplified in the ‘struggle’ and ‘wrestle’ (see Gen. 32:24-32) with the protean borders of Jewish identity. Any familiar with the venerable tradition of Rabbinic midrash will immediately see the association: the page bearing the Torah passage in question is embroidered in multiple layers of interpretive remarks, almost as a kind of palimpsest, where stacked lines of marginalia emanate concentrically from the original text, with authors expanding on or even directly contradicting the last commentary. This is surely a microcosm of how a tradition should develop in relation to its text.

Hence why I would promote readings that explore their freedom to ‘wrestle’ with the canon; which typically means those that are allegorical or mystical in nature. The Song of Songs, for instance, is already a text which has endured a considerable amount of ‘wrestling’ in its history; Jews of antiquity incessantly debated whether it belonged in the canon due to its erotic and so ‘possibl[y] secular’¹⁰ nature. In light of this backdrop, we then see three later Christian commentators—Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Bernard of Clairvaux—read the text in deeply symbolic, allegorical, and mystical fashions, depicting nuptial consummation as disclosure of divine secrets,¹¹ or swiping past the poor prophetic snoggers of Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah to pine instead for ‘the kiss of the mouth’¹² of Jesus, or perhaps pontificating a while on the ‘milk of the divine breasts’.¹³ These kinds of interpretations might well scandalise the average contemporary reader of the Bible, in the same way that Ibn’ al-Farid’s, Rumi’s, or Ibn’ Arabi’s erotic Sufi poetry might scandalise modern readers of the Qur’an, but it is precisely in their freedom to wrestle with the text rather than be weighed heavy by an ostensibly ‘literal’ meaning (which, once more, is only ever a surface illusion that dissolves when we analyse the composition and history of the text) that allows them to produce something even more revelatory, and so even more faithful to their tradition, than the drier readings of the past.

The sacred text can be shifted and altered to give a better or worse reflection of the Light that resides within all things. There is a way of reading any sacred text which does not illumine but thoroughly clouds God’s presence within it, and that is typically one that seeks to idolatrously cling to certain units of an ever changing, ever differing world, as if they bore the same immutability, eternality, and unconditionedness of God. It is far better, as in the examples given, to adopt a technicolour coat; to relinquish the illusion of a singular, monochrome, ‘literal’ reading and so let the play of différance—I might prefer ‘līlā’—unfurl in its own manner, opening ourselves up onto the grace of revelation rather than staunchly insisting on ascertaining it on our own terms.

Again, I insist that this is not an attitude that produces mere fringe readings, but constitutes central dogmatic developments in a tradition. At the Council of Nicaea we see an exegetical transformation that exemplifies just this transition. Passages central to the dispute—such as Pr. 8:22, Is. 1:2, Ps. 45, Phl. 2—were debated over precisely because they gave ostensibly conflicting stances, disrupting any ‘literal’ answer to the Christological question at hand. And yet, negotiations with and new interpretations of the canonical text allowed for an Athanasian victory that now sits pretty in our creeds, professed across the globe each Sunday. If today we read a verse like Jn. 14:28 (‘The Father is greater than I’) and wonder how consubstantiality might be defended, the reason we can meaningfully respond to the query is because of a novel interpretation provided by Gregory, one that almost ‘bends around’ the text, as it were, claiming that

the Father was known wholly and perfectly to the Son, because the Father’s ousia was wholly communicated to the Son; the revealer, the incarnate Son, therefore possessed perfect knowledge of the Father, as no creature could; and so, for the creature, knowing God perfectly meant not grasping the concept of the divine ousia but living the life of the Son in faith and love.¹⁴

In light of this reading—one certainly less than obvious at the time, and demanding a real exegetical and theological ingenuity—Christianity has never been the same; suddenly Nicaean consubstantiality is not merely a bizarre failure of Neoplatonic metaphysics, but a brilliant revelation of just how creation should live in order to find union with its Creator.

Ultimately, I believe I am describing nothing but what religion is, though in this case specifically in relation to a sacred text: a manner of living in the world that orients us toward and reveals Ultimate Reality. The standard separation of the text from the world—and subsequently any ‘low’ or ‘high’ approaches to it, seeing it as either merely a repository of ancient wisdom or a direct disclosure from the Almighty—is one that may happily be deconstructed by an alteration in our metaphysics. Any real wisdom, any real familiarity with the Good, must necessarily be from God, precisely because God is not some sequestered cosmic autocrat who occasionally beams down a vacuum-sealed book like Kubrick’s obelisk,¹⁵ but the very Being of all beings, that which is known as we come to know ourselves. If revelation is anything at all, it is precisely what its etymology suggests: an uncovering of something always already true, something known ‘in a glass darkly’ (1 Cor. 13:12) yet clarified by our encounters with these ‘inspired’ sources, lived in the pattern of an established and ever-developing tradition, wrestling with their written resources as we reverently read them. It becomes apparent that only an ultimate dualism—the most obviously untenable of all metaphysical pictures—can allow us to set God and the world against each other like competing athletes, and so dispose us to a category error that attempts to shove the text ‘upward’, as far into the transcendent empyrean as we can manage it. This ensures that we presume a faithful reading of the text is one that simply reinforces this wilful delusion of its ‘transcendent’ nature, to ossify, essentialise, and isolate it from the rest of the conditioned world. All this, I contend, is wholly contrary to what should typify the religious attitude to the sacred book. What we must strive to do instead is come to see it as an ‘opening’ (al-Fātiḥa, as the first Surah of the Qur’an is entitled) onto an absolutely universal Creator, the ‘Most High over all the earth’ (Ps. 97:9); a small, historical glimpse into the immortal Source whence we came, and to which we are surely headed.

1. Julio Trebolle Barrera, The Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible: An Introduction to the History of the Bible, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), 64.

2. Which, if it did exist, would actually be a very sophisticated reflection on God and the limits of language. But not much use for doing religion.

3. Fred Leemhuis, ‘Origins and Early Development of the tafsīr Tradition’, Approaches to the History of the Interpretation of the Qur’an, ed. Andrew Rippin (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013), 13.

4. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 172.

5. Ibid., 153.

6. Although, as I hope to show, the word ‘terminus’ is entirely inappropriate here.

7. Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

8. Master Sheng-Yen, Hoofprint of the Ox: Principles of the Chan Buddhist Path as Taught by a Modern Chinese Master, with Dan Stevenson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 84.

9. C. J. Bartley, The Theology of Rāmānuja (Oxon: Routledge, 2013), 4.

10. Berrera, Jewish Bible and Christian Bible, 154.

11. Origen, The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson (New York: Newman Press, 1956), 275.

12. Bernard of Clairvaux, Commentary on the Song of Songs, e-text arranged by Darrell Wright (2008), chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.themathesontrust.org/papers/christianity/StBernard-SongOfSongsall.pdf., 6.

13. Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs, trans. Richard A. Norris Jr. (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), 37.

14. Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2001), 208. We might also note John Henry Newman’s interesting (yet historically inaccurate, as Williams points out) characterisation of Arius as a heretic primarily through fundamentalist exegesis—suspiciously resembling the Protestant evangelical biblicism of Newman’s and our time. As Williams summarises: ‘Allegorism is necessary for spiritual religion. […] [Arianism] is the forerunner of stolid Evangelicalism, Erastian worldliness (‘carnal, self-indulgent religion’), and—by 1874, anyway—the new style of university theology. What unifies these diverse distortions of Catholic truth is their common rejection of mystical and symbolic readings of the world in general and Scripture in particular; they are all doomed to remain at the level of surface reality’ (Ibid., 5).

15. Not that this (or any) analogy could be rendered to picture just how bizarre the claim of radical textual exclusivism actually is. In fact, reading a text as thoroughly shocking and subversive as the 102nd Surah’s blunt and brief repudiation of our obsession with material wealth, or the same in James 5:1-6, may truly feel like coming up against something almost alien in contrast to our worldly sensibilities and inclinations; an obelisk amidst the apes. But, as I insisted in my piece on Christ and historicity, this radical otherworldliness on an ethical level does not constitute the ontological absurdity claimed here: that is, that the unconditioned/transcendent could possibly remain so when it manifests in the conditioned/immanent.