Sensus Plenior I

On gods and mortals

As a species, we learned to tell stories about the gods long before it ever occurred to us to tell stories about ourselves. And, even when we first learned how to tell our own tales, we still at first could do so only by speaking of ourselves as mortals living out the brief spans of our lives in the presence of the immortals, under their benevolent or baleful gazes. It was a very long time indeed before we began to realize that we had tales to tell from which the gods might be absent, or at least within which they could remain safely hidden, without rendering the narratives incoherent. Until that moment (which no doubt lasted a great many centuries), the only “histories” of which we were conscious were accounts of events that had happened in some time beyond time, before and outside and above the passing hours by which our days are measured: in illo tempore, as Eliade liked to say, or “once upon a time”—or really, it might be more accurate to say, not in “time” (tempus, chronos) at all, but rather in that “age” (aevum, aion) that lies in the interval between time and eternity. And even then, well after it had become conceivable for us to undertake “histories” in the sense in which we use the term now—records of our remembered adventures in ordinary time—still our most natural narrative idiom for making sense of our place in the world remained myth. It was, in a sense, the gods who first taught us to speak of ourselves as the paradoxical or divided beings we are, at once placed within nature but also somehow set apart from it. They called to us out of the world’s high and hidden places, and our response to that call was, for us, the beginning of self-knowledge. They also taught us how, eventually, to inhabit history on our own terms, by allowing us progressively to appropriate for ourselves the narrative significance that once belonged exclusively to them, and gradually to dispense with the mediatory role they had long occupied between us and the highest mystery of being. All of this was the fruit of that immemorial commerce of identities that once long ago existed between them and us—between, that is, anthropomorphic deities and theomorphic human beings. And, frankly, it is only so long as we remember the communion we enjoyed with them in illo tempore that our histories have any real meaning at all; it is only so long as we remember those myths that we can take full account of what it is that makes us human.

We have to be cautious here, however. We should never allow ourselves to distort those memories by retrospectively imposing upon that mythic past the wisdom we later acquired from it. We should never let ourselves forget that the earliest strata of human mythologies, in every culture and among every people, come from a time not only before recorded history, but before historical consciousness as such, and that in fact such consciousness could never have evolved but for those mythologies. The stories that formed human nature during the long ages of its first emergence from the wider and deeper realm of cosmic nature that we share with all other creatures, but from which we are now seemingly irrevocably estranged, took shape in a kind of shared dream-time, a timeless time in which the immediate experience of reality and the fables we told about reality could not yet be clearly delineated from one another. Hence the inexhaustible power and evocativeness of those myths for later generations—so long, that is, as they have never been burdened with any single “meaning,” or assigned any single, invariable dogmatic significance. They simply are what they are: dream-narratives composed from dream-images, emanating from a realm that is itself a state of collective dreaming. They belong to a pre-moral and even pre-religious reality. The gods are present there, true, but much in the same way as trees and animals are present, inhabiting a world not yet divided between the sacred and the profane, the fantastic and the concrete, the divine and the natural.

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Why am I going on about this here? Chiefly because certain recent events have had me thinking about the nature of biblical allegory.

A few weeks back, there was a small seismic shudder in one of the obscurer districts of social media when someone of a fundamentalist bent discovered, excerpted, and sent about in a tweet a rather banal observation I had made in the past, in a letter to the chief editor of the website for the “Theopolis Institute” to the effect that, in the Hebrew Bible, there is no single depiction of God, and that in many of the earliest stories found there the figures of El (or Elohim) and YHVH (the latter especially) are not only not particularly benign, but in fact quite monstrous. That editor, you see, had responded to my book That All Shall Be Saved in part by pointing out that the God of the Old Testament is not the morally impeccable “Good Beyond Being” that the book presumes. In reply, I was explaining to him that I am not a fundamentalist, that the ancient church (like the Apostle Paul) read such texts allegorically for a reason, and that the alternative to allegory in the earliest church for any attentive reader would have been Marcionism. Now, mine was hardly a novel or even controversial observation; in fact, the damning quotation in question was a roughly verbatim recollection of a passage from Josef Ratzinger. Nonetheless, this led to accusations that I was preaching Marcionism (even though it had been precisely Marcionism that I had been waving menacingly before the editor’s nose as the only logical alternative to the allegories I favored). Had our twitterer read on, he would have found that the passage he had extracted from my letter was followed there by three lavishly explanatory paragraphs that should have allayed any doubts on this score:

Judaism (as we know it today) and Christianity came into existence in much the same period of Graeco-Roman culture, and both reflect the religious thinking of their time. Neither was ever literalist in the way you apparently are. The only ancient Christian figure whom we can reliably say to have read the Bible in the manner of modern fundamentalists was Marcion of Sinope. He exhibited far greater insight than modern fundamentalists, however, in that he concluded that the God described in the Hebrew Bible—if taken in the mythic terms provided there—is often something of a monster and hence must obviously not be the Christian God. Happily, his literalism was an aberration. 

Much of the Judaism of the first century, like the Christianity of the apostolic age, presumed that a spiritual or allegorical reading of the Hebrew texts was the correct one. Philo of Alexandria was a perfectly faithful Jewish intellectual of his age, as was Paul, and both rarely interpreted scripture in any but allegorical ways. Even when, in the New Testament, the history of God’s dealings with Israel is united to the saving work of Christ—as in Acts or Hebrews—it is in the thoroughly reinterpreted and intenerated form that one finds also in the book of Wisdom (a worked audibly echoed in Romans, incidentally).

In short, you want me to account for myself in a way answerable to the hermeneutical practices of communities gestated within a religion born in the sixteenth century. But those practices are at once superstitious and deeply bizarre. They are not Christian in any meaningful way. They are not Jewish either, as it happens. They are a late Protestant invention, and a deeply silly one. From Paul through the high Middle Ages, only the spiritual reading of the Old Testament was accorded doctrinal or theological authority. In that tradition, even “literal” exegesis was not the sort of literalism you seem to presume. Not to read the Bible in the proper manner is not to read it as the Bible at all; scripture is in-spired, that is, only when read “spiritually.”

Alas, all of this passed unnoticed or unremarked by our twitterer. The initial tweet, moreover, was soon re-tweeted by the professionally appalled Edward Feser, who—being a Thomist—is of course mostly unaware of the actual contents of the Bible, and so assumed I was simply slandering God out of some fancy desire to—I don’t know—go to hell. A younger, even more earnestly excitable Thomist named Patrick Taylor O’Neill picked it up as well, in the process proclaiming it a scandal that any ostensible Christian could have dared to say such things. No doubt he meant well; and it was gallant of him to defend God’s honor with so much righteous indignation. But then he rather spoiled the effect by proceeding to argue that the God of Christ had in fact literally ordered genocides in the past, and that this is quite all right, you see, because “God is not a moral agent.” That, of course, is a fatuous (and, incidentally, evil) argument; but Thomists will be Thomists. Needless to say, it is true that, if God is God, then God is not some deliberating agent bound to some higher set of moral criteria; but that is only because God is the Good as such, and is therefore moral agency as such, incapable of willing any evil end, proximate or ultimate, and certainly incapable of commanding evil deeds from rational beings. (But we can leave that for another time.) This led to an engagement between O’Neill online with the rather more formidable Jordan Wood. It was not an equal contest and O’Neill (or his vestiges) soon had to retreat.

What was oddest about the episode, however, was O’Neill’s insistence that any historical statements found in scripture—even if they should be as simple as “Jesus then went into the region of...”—must be taken to be true in the most factual sense, for otherwise God would have to be accounted a deceiver.

Again, as I have said, he is a Thomist; and in my experience no one of that tribe has any very impressive familiarity with scripture; but even a Thomist should be expected to know that the Bible contradicts its own historical claims on hundreds of occasions. At the very least, one might hope that he would be aware of the inconsistencies among the four gospels—beginning, in fact, with the infancy narratives. According to Matthew, for instance, Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great (who died in 4 BCE, or 1 BCE at the latest); according to Luke, Jesus was born during the governorship of Quirinius in Syria (which commenced in 6 or 7 CE). Both claims cannot be true; at least one of them is historically false. And that is only the first of over a hundred historical discrepancies in the gospels alone (including the reported day of the crucifixion). Then, of course, there are the contradictions between Acts and Paul’s own account of certain of the events recounted there. And so on. But, since God is not the direct author of any of these texts, one really need not conclude that he is to blame for the mangled details (unless one harbors an understanding of divine inspiration so simplistic as to verge on the infantile).

In any event, the whole tiny tempest soon subsided back into its teacup. It was all a little too silly to worry about for long. But something else that the controversy had stirred up—seemingly minor, but to my mind more important than the actual debate itself—happened to catch my attention. In one of the online exchanges, someone who was quite comfortable with the ancient traditions of allegorical exegesis, and largely unperturbed by my shocking assertion that commanding the extermination of whole peoples is a damned peculiar way for a good God to behave, nonetheless gently upbraided me for perhaps exaggerating the moral capriciousness of the YHVH of the Eden narrative. Why, he wondered, had I suggested that YHVH in the story had lied to Adam about the nature of the tree of knowledge, or that the snake had told Eve the truth?

The answer, as it happens, is that this is explicitly what the text of Genesis says, and that it is only by virtue of our long-cultivated habit of not seeing what is plainly written on the page that any of us can fail to notice it. But in this case my critic was not some Thomist scriptural illiterate; rather, it was someone who had actually read the Bible, and on more than one occasion; and still he had never managed to see what is actually written there. I realized then that even when we grant the wisdom and necessity of patristic allegory as a method, there is something in us that cannot quite let go of the notion that what such allegory derives from the mythic material should in some sense be morally continuous with the narratives themselves. We still resist seeing the myths as myths. And this is a great pity, not simply because it encourages a defective understanding of the relation of spiritual readings to the texts they interpret, but also (much more crucially) because it impoverishes those texts, by robbing them of the grandeur, beauty, naiveté, and blessed idiocy of the mythic.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with interpreting the Eden narrative as the story of a good God betrayed by a sinful humanity, and of the first transgression of divine law, and of the first diabolical temptation of the race, and of the loss of human innocence, and of the hubris of human beings seeking to become gods, and so forth. But to mistake that reading for an account of what the story itself was originally saying is not only to fall into anachronism; it is to lose sight of the tale’s boundless fecundity. A Freudian reading would be neither any more false nor any more true to its narrative. At its most basic, the tale has absolutely nothing to do with a good God, or even with a single God as such, or a sinful humanity, or with the devil, or with a primordial transgression, or with the loss of innocence, or with nascent humankind’s attempt to seize hold of divinity, or with any sort of transgression at all in any moral sense. Rather, it is a fairly typical, very ancient, still rather folkloric myth of the Just So variety: this is the tale, O my Best Beloved, of why no one has a chance at immortality, and of why we must toil to sow and reap, and of why women must suffer so in giving birth, and (lest we forget) of how the snake lost his feet. At the purely diegetic level, the early chapters of Genesis are no more—but also no less—inspired, divine, illuminating, wise, or true than any other collection of ancient myths, imperfectly but lovingly edited. It is only within the act of reading specific to certain communities of interpretation, like the synagogue and the church, that it is in any sense “inspired” scripture. The Eden narrative is no more—and, again, no less—a revelation of God than is Gilgamesh or the poetic Edda. And therein lies its glory and power.

Perhaps I should elucidate, however. I should mention here, though, before sounding any dissonant notes, that much of what I will say in the second part of this article may strike certain ears as irreverent. It should not, and if it does this is only because we have been so thoroughly trained to revere the sacred narratives in which these myths were later wrapped that, when those wrappings are taken away, we find it distinctly uncomfortable to notice, let alone acknowledge, how great an abyss separates the ethos of those narratives from the ethos of the myths they have absorbed into themselves.

(To be continued…)