First things first, the Winter 2019 issue of Walking the Worlds is available! My essay, “Making Holiday in the West: Speculative Eschatology in Ancient Egyptian Mortuary Literature” is included. It explores the themes of skeptical religion and speculative realism as they apply to Ancient Egyptian texts which expressed varying degrees of skepticism regarding the afterlife. Go support Walking the Worlds and get yourself a copy!
Next, I’d like to tell you two brief stories. The first is found in the Jewish Talmud–a collection of discussions and arguments pertaining to Jewish practices from the First and Second Centuries CE. It is the foundational text of the Jewish oral Torah, or oral law, which runs parallel to the written Torah (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) and helps explain and supplement it. The story goes like this: one day, a non-Jew approached Rabbi Shammai and asked him to convert him on the condition that the Rabbi only teach him the written Torah and not the oral Torah. Rabbi Shammai became very angry and chased the gentile away. The next day, he goes to Rabbi Hillel with the same request. Rabbi Hillel eagerly accepts the challenge, but advises the gentile that he needs to learn the Hebrew alphabet first. So he sets him up with aleph, bet, gimel, dalet, etc. and then sends him home. The next day, the prospective convert arrives and Hillel has reversed the order of the alphabet, saying that tav is aleph, shin is bet, etc. The student complains and says “But this is completely different from what you said yesterday!” to which Rabbi Hillel responds “But how would you know that unless I were here to tell you that?”
The second story comes from the Christian book of Acts, a book that tells of the activities of the Apostles after the death of Jesus of Nazareth. In the book of Acts, a disciple, Phillip, is traveling down the road when an angel tells him to go stand by a cart owned by Queen of Ethiopia. While he is there, he overhears a eunuch reading from the book of Isaiah. Phillip asks the eunuch: “Do you understand what you are reading?” The eunuch responds: “How can I, unless someone explains it to me?” Phillip hops into the cart, reviews the passages from Isaiah with the eunuch, explains that it is a prophecy about Jesus, and then later baptizes the eunuch.
These two stories have often been interpreted by their respective traditions as examples of why authority within their organization is important. The Rabbi knows more about the Torah than you do, and the Priest knows more about Jesus’ death and resurrection. But on a much deeper level, they are illustrating a very important epistemic reality–our personal experience with something, particularly a text from a previous age, is not enough to overcome the distance of time. In a much broader context, the appeal is being made that personal experience is insufficient to articulate the world we inhabit.
John Beckett argues for a theology of personal experience in Ascendant II, in an essay aptly titled “The Theology of Personal Experience.” This brief blog post will not be a sufficient response to the essay, though I intend to write such a response and hopefully generate a dialogue about the benefits and limits of our personal experiences. In lieu of a full and proper response to the essay, I will be addressing two points in a related blog post of Beckett’s. The focus of the post is not entirely on formulating a theology of personal experience, and is itself refuting the idea of divine jealousy, but I find his points about experience and gnosis relevant to his essay and my work as a theological skeptic.
First: “Your experience is valid, but your description of it may not be accurate” and second: the process of learning to articulate experience through discernment.
The first point is something I agree with one-hundred percent, though I typically shorthand it to “The world exists regardless of your experience of it.” My phrasing is not identical or synonymous with Beckett’s, to be fair. But the spirit of the two are very sympathetic to one another. Essentially, nobody is questioning that you experienced some phenomenon; however, one’s immediate explanation of it should be treated with caution. We can never have an absolute accounting of the facts on hand, and so we can never have an absolute answer to what it was we encountered. So our explanation of the experience will always be incomplete, and, by extension, it is reasonable to assume that some explanations will always be better than others. It is likely that many of our explanations will fall in the latter part. Better explanations exist, we just don’t yet know they exist.
The second point is one I find intriguing and hope to spend more time with. Beckett’s process of discernment is the accumulation personal experiences to help explain a phenomenal experience better. It is a process whereby we continuously reengage with the phenomena in question so that we can gain more and more first-hand knowledge. And while I am inclined to agree that this is a necessary process in knowledge-generation, I do not see it as sufficient.
To borrow Beckett’s example of the unknown camel, if you have never heard of a camel before and you encountered one in the desert and were asked what it was called, you would be forgiven for coming up with something like “sand horse”. It is, after all, sort of horse-like, and it’s in the sand. But to put the process of discernment into action, we must engage with the sand-horse again and again and again. And thought we may learn much about it including its mating rituals, its social habits, water usage, hauling efficiency, etc. no amount of interaction with the camel will tell us that it is called a camel. We must hear this word from others.
Why is this important? Language is a shorthand that societies use to describe the myriad and infinite nuances of communal experience. At a certain level, the vocabulary that forms the absolute minimum substrate of a given language is largely arbitrary, and the rules that govern language can be seen as a construct, and so, as the deconstructionists might say, do words even really mean anything? On an abstract, Aristotelean level, no, words individually do not actually have any causally essential relation to their meaning. HOWEVER, in order for societies to communicate and coexist, there needs to be a certain level of mutual intelligibility between communicants. This is achieved by a society generally accepting that words and concepts have generally-accepted meaning, even if they fail to capture the infinite nuance of the thing they’re describing. Language is a shorthand. But it’s a remarkably good shorthand.
Rabbi Hillel and the Apostle Phillip both understood that in order for their religious traditions to survive, there needed to be a generally understood definition of what the received tradition meant. This means using shared language to discuss difficult abstracted concepts. Camel instead of Sand-horse. For Hillel and Phillip both, this was in the context of the immediate aftermath of the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE. For the Jews, they needed to figure out how to keep their religion going without a temple for sacrifices and a priesthood for performing the sacrifices. For the Christians, the nascent Jerusalem community was scattered and the rest of the Jesus Movement had to figure out how to keep their scattered communities together. It was the authoritative transmission of tradition and interpretation that kept them alive.
Very pertinent to this discussion is the favorite gotcha of the Atheist: “Would a child come to know God on their own if nobody ever told them about him?” In the context of a theology of personal experience, this is even more relevant. And it is most relevant in the context of religious traditions based on the ancient pre-Christian gods and traditions for which there is no extant contiguous transmission. In an alternate history where the Greek and Roman classics were never reinvigorated in the Renaissance and nobody ever learned to decipher hieroglyphics, would contemporary Hellenes and Kemetics exist? This isn’t a lazy question. It’s a heavy question, and we see it unfold every time new discoveries or new texts are discovered, because our understanding of that time changes with each of those discoveries. Yet not a single Hellenist or Kemetic or other contemporary pagan has prophetically warned us of the impending new knowledge. We are dependent to a very extreme degree on textual transmission. We are a nascent Rabbinic Judaism or Apostolic Christianity without a Hillel or Phillip.
What this implies is that, while gnostic revelation through personally experiential theology is an important part of the praxis of polytheist religion, it is not a sufficient bedrock for the theory of it–its theology. But without a lineage of sages or priests to transmit the wisdom of the past, we are left only with the tools of textual analysis and synthesis to illustrate theological truth from historic facts. Disregarding the texts in favor of personal discernment is akin to converting to Christianity but developing your entire theology through prayer. Contemporary Polytheism without the ancient texts is like Christianity without the Bible. It simply doesn’t make any sense.
The alternative is, of course, to acknowledge that there are two very different religious traditions emerging. On the one hand is a religious tradition centered on personal experience, borrowing heavily from New Age concepts and postmodernism for its justification, but essentially birthing a new religion from whole cloth in the 20th and 21st Centuries. On the other hand is a religious tradition attempting to reinvigorate the traditions of the ancient pre-Christian civilizations as best they can in the modern age, utilizing a variety of justifications and methods to do so. Both of these are fine. If one finds fulfillment in one but not the other, then pursue it! But as long as we are using terms like Pagan and Polytheist interchangeably to describe both of these religious traditions, it will be hard to tease out the boundaries of each. Further compounding this problem is the tendency for people on both sides to share concepts and definitions. Whether this divide is permanent or temporary remains to be seen, and nobody can see how it will ultimately turn out. Regardless, the Paganism/Polytheism of the 2020’s will look very different from its antecedents in the 1970’s and 80’s. As Polytheism grows and develops, it will be the dialectic that continues to shape it, not our individual experiences of it.