…a divinely
inspired story is not necessarily history.
Raymond E. Brown
…aquí estamos totalmente sujetos al gobierno de los
espíritus; de los seres invisibles de la peor calidad; los espíritus triviales,
de almas satánicas, porque todo lo que hacen es hacer mal en Puerto Rico.
Pedro Albizu Campos
We must conceive
discourse as a violence which we do to things, or in any case as a practice
which we impose on them.
Michael Foucualt
Theology
in Mythology as History:
Methodological
Presumptions & Theoretical Framework
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| Image credit: Costco apologizes for labeling Bibles as fiction: http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?id=9334298 |
What do historians
and theologians study? Popular conception and simple etymology have made us
believe they study the past and God. Yet, neither the past nor God can be placed on a test tube to be dissected, observed and examined
following the scientific method.[1]
The former –can be established– does not exist, whilst the latter –as most
mystics have claimed– is the whole of Reality
itself.[2]
It begs the question; how does one study the relationship between something
that is nonexistent and something that is Everything. The answer? One does not.
We must accept the
honest presumption that since, technically speaking, the past does not exist, historians don’t study the past. Historians construct artificial
interpretations of past truths based upon the literature developed in a
determinate context. This is not scientific but literary achievement. Theologians
confront a similar disjunctive. From the presumption that establishes God as the source of all Reality, theologians are forced to
accept the impossibility of absorbing the whole Truth. Hence, we also study literature. We study a literature that
has been culturally attributed a special standing; texts in which humanity has
documented their experiences regarding spirituality, both material and transcendent.
Nonetheless these documents are also limited by the subjectivity and ever ephemeral
nature of language.
For the classical
linguist, of course, each language is a system whose unity is always
reconstituted. But this unity is not comparable to any other. It is open to the
most radical grafting, open to deformations, transformations, expropriation, to
a certain a-nomie and de-regulation. So much so that the gesture –here, once
again, I am calling it writing [écriture],
even though it can remain purely oral,
vocal, and musical: rhythmic or prosodic– that seeks to affect
monolanguage, the one that one has without having it, is always multiple. It
dreams of leaving there marks that recall that entirely other language, in
short, that degree zero-minus-one of memory.[3]
We must be very
humble when sustaining we have discovered or conceived a definite truth, for
any attempt to construct the TRUTH or REALITY through language is fictional and
artificial. This is not to say that historical and theological construction
efforts will always render a false
conclusion, but that the result of them, even when considered truthful, is always a humanly created/constructed symbol or discourse
of the ultimate TRUTH.[4]
Just as History is a magnificent symbol of the past, but is not the past; Scripture
is a powerful symbol of God, but is
not God, for it is of human
construction.[5]
Thus, the elevation of scripture to the stature of God might be considered a dangerous act of idolatry. Moreover, an
attitude of this nature exacerbates theology’s potential to become dictatorial
and oppressive because when we downplay the socially and semantically heterogeneous
debates within the Bible, or Holy Scripture in other cultures, the attempt to
forcibly harmonize its content could lead us to coerce our communities into
homogeny and destruct their identity’s present relationship with spiritual
truths and the diversity within themselves.
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| Image credit: Autor desconocido |
In past centuries theology,
allegedly originating from the one God Him/Herself or God’s only word, has
shown a tendency to project itself as imperial, systematic and all-knowing. The
formula being: One God = One Truth.[6]
This is an assertion that has become vastly reproached in the last century. We
wish to insert ourselves in the contemporary debate about how history and
theology, as deconstructing and constructing tools of an absent –in the case of
History– and overwhelming –in the case of Theology– reality, affect our
self-perception and our will to act. In Hegelian language; are we objects preserving an imposed tradition
or active subjects creating our
reality? Should we wait the never coming tides of History or create them? Part of our effort in this investigation is
to distance the power of theology’s discourse from its imperial traditions of
cultural, social, and mental colonization; that is, from absorbing and
assimilating the reader. Theology, as History, should be a constant deconstruction-construction
effort, eliminating the absolute Truth from our proposal and offering new
truths. Gossman states that “evidence –texts, documents, artifacts– is by
definition a sign, and it signifies within a system of signs”.[7]
In that sense, even exegesis is a hermeneutical process.
For instance; there
has been great debate amongst scholars in the last decades about what aspects
of Jesus’ life or Jesus’ sayings should be considered “historical” and which
should be considered “fictional” or later church developments.[8]
While this debate has certainly been useful and illuminating, what this modernist conception of historical reconstruction has not emphasized is
that all text pertaining to the past are in fact historical. This assertion
should not be understood as an affirmation that all the information provided in
ancient texts, particularly the gospels and other Christian sources, is one
hundred per cent accurate and scientifically acceptable or proveable. What we mean to state is that these texts provide us
with a close appreciation; an understanding of how the communities that
produced these texts perceived Jesus, Jesus’ message, and their immediate
context. Subsequently, the mentality constructed
in these texts, while not representing absolute
reality, is just as historical and
important as the “facts” surrounding the “concrete” Jesus –as ideological
founder–, and provides us with real literary
conceptions subject to historical and semantic interpretation.
We view history not
as scientific ‘fact’, but as an artistic literary composition developed from a very
limited and subjective spectrum of evidence. It is not our intention to search
for the absolute TRUTH, but to deconstruct and create literary truths through the imagination and visualization tools of
historical perspective. We hope these tools will, in turn, provide us the
opportunity to reinterpret present realities and institutions. Our construction
parts from texts, not from past realities, which are by logic and definition unexperienceable. Texts depict how past
authors have stated their absorption, understanding, and interpretation of
reality, but not reality itself in all its heterogeneous and divergent quality.
In that sense, whenever we employ common language phrases as “Jesus said” or
“Paul did”, these should not be understood as claims of literal fact, but
interpreted as “According to scripture” or “as perceived by the text producing
community” or “as conceived by the author and/or textual evidence” “Jesus said…”.
It is not our desire to confirm or deny whether or not Jesus said determined
words or phrases, but to explore how he was understood, perceived, and appreciated
by the writing communities in their guidelines to imitate him regarding
political–religious authorities. Hence, scripture’s authority is relegated to
the realm of the reader’s subjectivity; what in theological language we call faith.
Moreover, we sustain
that texts –inside and outside the canon– don’t just have an exegetical
context. They also have a hermeneutical tradition (mostly based on
translations) that affects our deconstructions and presumptions regarding their
attributed meanings. It is our intention to challenge some of the established
exegetical and hermeneutical notions that have resisted so many Bible revisions
and, instead, offer Scripture as a tool of resistance against unjust State
imposition. For, in the present, the Truth does not necessarily reside on
whether or not past events in fact happened, or if they were properly recorded,
but on how the texts created in ancient times affect our significations and
praxis regarding our communities and God(dess) today. We embrace this literary
reality because we are convinced humanity will not provoke necessary
socio–political changes unless new truths are expressed and grasped through the
language of myths, symbols, and spirituality.
[1] We believe that,
methodically speaking, science
represents a standardized myth; a standardized approach to reality that is
imperial by definition and most times inapplicable to cultural–artistic
expression.
[2] For an exhaustive
analysis on the phenomenology of mysticism and mystical literature see Juan
Martín Velasco, El fenómeno místico:
Estudio Comparado. Editorial Trotta,
S.A., 2da ed. Madrid, 2003. For English, see Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism. Oneworld Publications.
Oxford, 1999.
[3] Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other Or the Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford University Press, 1998, p.65. The
emphasis is ours.
[4] “We must conceive
discourse as a violence which we do to things, or in any case as a practice
which we impose on them”. Michael Foucualt, “The Order of Discourse”, in Michael
J. Shapiro, ed., Language and Politics.
New York, New York University Press, 1984, p. 2.
“The greatest
mystics, however –Ruysbroeck, St. John of the Cross, and St. Teresa herself in
her last stages–distinguish clearly between the ineffable Reality which they perceive and the image under which
they describe it. Again and again they tell us with Dionysius and Eckhart, that
the Object of their contemplation “hath
no image”: or with St. John of the Cross that “the soul can never attain to
the height of the divine union, so far as it is possible in this life, through
the medium of any forms or figures”.
Therefore the attempt which has sometimes been made to identify mysticism with
such forms and figures –with visions, voices, “supernatural favours” and other
abnormal phenomena– is clearly wrong”. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism. Oneworld Publications. Oxford, 1999, p.79. The emphasis
is ours.
[5] I use a simple
illustration to explain this phenomenon to my students. A painter of great
skill may create an outstanding self-portrait. Yet the content of that portrait
is not really him or her. That portrait symbolically and artificially
represents a limited portion of reality, but is not reality itself. The
portrait is abundantly useful for future generations who will study his or her
context, technique, life and artistic movement, but it is, notwithstanding;
creation. In relation to the Past, History is thus what a prosthetic leg is to
a person who has lost a limb; though not real, a useful substitute.
[6] This formula is not
to be regarded as an ancient and abandoned presumption. Even though this
fundamentalist approach to the Bible is not popular amongst academic circles,
most contemporary Christian communities still claim scriptural infallibility.
The formula being, more explicitly; One God = One Book = One Truth.
[7] Lionel Gossman,
“History and Literature: Representation or Signification”, in Roberts Canary
and Henry Kosicki eds., The Writing of
History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding. Madison, The University
of Wisconsin Press, 1978, p. 32.
[8] “Both fictionalized
history and the historical novel have been nurtured from the fissures and
cracks of this legitimate indetermination”. Carlos Pabón, Nación post-mortem… p. 156. The author speaks of the fissures between
the realms of story and history.
