Truth Needs Tending

In my last post, I described how “we must rely on the old that we know (or think we know) in addition to the new.  Jesus recognizes this when he speaks of the scribe and a store of knowledge new and old.  He also recognizes, however, (in an extension of the ‘wine’ analogy) how people are apt to prefer the old.  We want to be able to rely on what we think we know.”  Our original task in sorting this matter out must be found by us in our notions of the very origins of our existence.

Adam (in a pristine original state that is idiotically considered by many theologians to be “sinlessness”) is placed in the Garden to tend it.  The man has tasks to perform, and it would be cheap convenience on our part for us to imagine that he would not have had to learn things and to remember things, or to imagine that he would not have felt either frustration or temptation to indulge negative thoughts.  Eve, we must remember, shared Adam’s original state, and yet it must be conceded that she thought negative things about God before ever she ate of the tree.  As I (and I’m sure many others before me) have written, if Adam had reached out to intercept Eve’s imprudent grasp, the woman’s state at that moment could not be described honestly as “sinlessness.”

Mankind (if not viewed through an imposed lens of manipulative theology) has always been mankind.  God, when he observes that it is not good for the man to be alone (though provided the opportunity for communion with his Maker), is not recorded as noting that Adam’s character has changed.  The question of Adam’s original moral state (less than perfect though created by a morally perfect God) is no different from—and indistinguishable in insolubility from—the very question of how a God who encompasses all can create something apart from himself.  We are things in ourselves, and we are not God.  That is how it is.

To return, then, to the matter of how “we must rely on the old that we know (or think we know) in addition to the new”—is really nothing more than to return to the ancient philosopher’s notion of discovering the basis of our thought-lives.  Christianity, unfortunately, has forfeit the opportunity to find such grounding in the “genesis” of its theology.  The belief system espoused by Jesus, on the other hand, begins with stories.  Jesus emphasizes the lessons of the stories, not their particulars.  A seed, for example, that falls to the ground and dies is a seed that is dead.  The “seed” that Jesus is referencing is a matter for consideration, not an actuality to be analyzed.

There are two important lessons to be gleaned from the grounding of Jesus’ teachings in the ancient stories.  The first is a simple one, yet it frames the second lesson and ought to undergird all of our thoughts.  This is the lesson of Adam at first in the Garden, going about his duties.  Anything he thought he learned he might misremember, and anything he thought he knew he might in fact have fashioned to his tastes, rendering it more or less untruthful.  Adam’s chief task is the task that is ever and always ours: the tending of truth.  Truth needs tending.  “Truth” that is thought by us to be held by us, understood by us, unquestioned by us—such “Truth” is the altar of an idol-god, if not the god itself.

The second lesson that must come from the grounding of Jesus’ teachings in the ancient stories is found, as I mentioned above, in the essential thrust in the stories themselves and how Jesus uses them.  A story tells a lesson—a story is not a compendium of ancillary facts.  Indeed, in the larger sense, truth as we might understand it can consist of no more than lessons that we might misunderstand couched in contexts and complexities that we might also misunderstand.  The paring-back of any lesson to its kernel—and the continual examination of that kernel from every vantage-point available—is always our duty.

The manifestation of the opposite of this duty is found—lamentably—in much of Christian theology.  A powerful imagery—and a powerful warning against our infatuation with the things of this world—is found in the Temptation-accounts’ quoting of the devil declaring that the kingdoms of this world have been given to him.  The imagery and the warning, however, are all that exist in the story, and yet some theologians will use the Temptation-accounts (varying though they be in the manuscripts) as treatises on the stature of the devil.  “The earth is the Lord’s” is an eternal strain in the belief system that Jesus espouses, and he enjoins his followers to glean simple lessons from a Creation that reflects the benevolence of God.  Give a theologian (or worse yet, a theocrat) a chance, however, and that person might use the devil’s self-described mastery of the world as an excuse to demand that every wholesome objection to theological tyranny is a work of the devil.  And all because the devil’s claim to ownership of the kingdoms of the world—a claim directed by the universe’s greatest liar at a physically-depleted Jesus—is not countered (or is ignored) by Jesus in the story?

We are always trying to impose meaning on our lives.  This, at least in part, explains why we will make up stories (not always a bad thing) and why we will impose our own meanings on existing stories (a somewhat more problematic thing.)  Please note that I referred to our trying to “impose” meaning on our lives, not to “find” meaning.  This is one of the most important things that I find myself trying clumsily to impart through “roused, readied, reaped.”  “Roused” in our lives can often be a most disagreeable thing.  What I have considered all along is the disciples being roused by Jesus in the garden.  To be “roused” (though our immediate experience might be something or some things rising in ourselves) is to have a set of conditions imposed from without.

What we tend to do in response to being “roused” is usually described, however, in misleading terms.  We “respond”, and so feel ourselves to be the subjects of imposition.  This, however, is one of the greatest types of self-delusion.  When we respond to a set of stimuli, we are in reality responding to a constructed (however hastily-constructed or poorly-constructed) conception of our making.  We collect stimuli and impose meaning on them.  This type of scenario is merely a miniature of our overall response (I use “response” somewhat ironically) to existence itself.  Existence is imposed on us, and we impose ourselves on existence.  It is with a correspondingly sardonic approach that we must address our perpetual protestations that we are merely trying to “find meaning” in our lives.  Balderdash.  We are trying to paste meaning on our lives.  We encounter meaning in our lives inadvertently, and usually (think Jesus in the Gospels) when we have placed our lives aside.

The experiential cycles of “roused, readied, reaped”—long or short, overlapping or seemingly all-consuming, beginning in our lives before we are ever aware of them—are misleading even in the use of “experiential” to describe them.  We do not merely “experience” the cycles—we respond to them, and then we experience the responses, which set off new cycles, and so on.  Unsurprisingly, we throw off into every available tangent our own expressions—our own impositions—of meaning.  To be in this tumble of confusion is what it is to be an imperfect being in the state of, well, being.  We would do well to consider what it is to be a sentient being that exists.  Our mere physical state would be no more—and no more dishonorable—than that of a stone.  Our ability to be sense-receptors would not equate to us being thinking entities.  It must be—as though a purely clinical analysis could be applied—our ability to extract meaning from stimuli that would establish us as sentient beings.

Yet we will allow that stimuli—the information-sources that frame a scenario for our consideration—must be less than (or other than) the scenario itself, and so are limited.  Similarly, our ability to extract meaning is limited.  If we are not God, it would seem inescapable that any experience of sentience available to us is bound to the phenomenon of seizing on a conception of imperfect warrant and overlooking that imperfection.  Our thoughts are the cousins of lies, and the truth itself is a more distant relation—if indeed any of our thoughts are of—shall we say—uncontested parentage.

These musings are not particularly profound, yet if our thought-lives are similarly un-profound, then we should expect that elevated teachings directed at us must be teachings that we address (if in good conscience) in the most basic and unassuming vein.  A snake spoke to Eve in the Garden.  Snakes don’t speak.  The account doesn’t say that the snake is the devil.  What the snake in the account does say is the sort of thing that Eve—indeed any of us—might say to ourselves.  Indeed, what the snake in the account does say is the sort of thing that any of us might entertain and then—in the ancient human fashion—feign (and ultimately delude ourselves) to be the mere imposition of reality.  If the snake didn’t say what was said to Eve, then something else would.

What matters is that Eve ate of the tree, that she stood there moments before intending evilly to eat from the tree, that she stood there moments before that wickedly defaming God in her conversation with the snake, and that in every moment of her existence before that the shared Adam’s desire for creaturely companionship when God was right there all along.  And we are going to devote volumes of theology to a snake?

Moreover, of course, the effectual Christian snake-worship of centering on the narrative of the supposed momentary Fall has allowed for endless churnings-out of snake-oil theologies, while the morally-fatal disease of pretending to be a respondent to, rather than a participant in, the teaching process of Jesus is left unattended.  As I wrote in the previous post, to have “ears to hear” is to always hear anew, a necessary practice that we can attend to only when we understand that “understanding” something can mean only lurching from one partial apprehension to another.

And we must understand that each “understanding” is attended inevitably by some element of imposed meaning attributable to us.  With this we must contend.  I no more than anyone else have a perfect formula for this, but here at least I can present an example.  The snake in the supposed Fall narrative serves as a device.  The “enmity” part that follows has no more immediate substance than a “Just So” story to explain humanity’s discomfort with snakes.  In the tower of Babel story, by contrast, there is an explicit reference to humanity wishing to make a name for themselves and not be scattered over the earth.  To whom is this name to be broadcast—or at least is such a name to be specific to a centered locality on earth?  The only truly sentient beings on Earth in the biblical conception were humans—supernatural beings would not be tied to a terrestrial realm, and the greatest way for humanity to create a name for themselves would be for humanity to fill the earth with accomplishments.

It seems that the “name” part of the tower of Babel story—not merely furthering the narrative—is a description of humanity’s perennial imposition of meaning on surrounding circumstances.  As is ever our tendency, the people after the Flood say the Earth—containing only themselves and the rescued species on its surface—was populated by innumerable sentient other-beings.  Such is how we impose meaning on our existence, now as ever.  Such is what happens when we forget that truth needs tending, and instead we let degraded truth, and partial truths, lead to untruths.