Following close on yesterday’s post, I ran across something in the Rig Veda which reminds me of something I wrote before about Augustine and the problem of credulity. This is the last stanza of the Hymn of Creation, RV x.129:
Iyam vistrshtir yata ababhuva/ yadi va dadhe yadi va na/ yo asya adhyaksha parame vyoman/ so anga veda yadi va na veda.
“Whence came about this creation, whether he made it or not, he who is its surveyor in the utmost heaven, he alone knows – or else he doesn’t.”
What Augustine reminds us is true for each of us as individuals, that we don’t know where we came from, the RV claims is true for us collectively as well. We weren’t there when the universe came into being. It’s here now, though, so we have to believe it got here somehow. Does that mean need to take it on faith? Or have any belief about it at all?
The scriptural religions all seem to think so. Most of them, at one point or another, make a big deal about how they’re filling in the gaps in what we know about the beginning of time. I think that’s a way of fetishizing the evidentiary quality of written texts, which offer what must have been (at the time of their introduction) an exciting and unprecedented tool for looking into the past. If a written text can tell you your great grandfather’s name, why can’t it tell you where the world came from? And why not with the same degree of reliability?
This telescopic quality of the written document was enough of a commonplace by the time of Muhammad that the Qur’an struggles to disclaim dependence on documentary evidence. Its early audience assumes just such a dependence, describing Muhammad’s warnings as “asatir al-awalin” – usually translated “tales of the ancients,” though “inscriptions of the ancients” would be more accurate. Later critics accused him of borrowing from other scriptures, particularly the bible and the torah – a trend in Qur’anic criticism that continues today, sometimes in more a polemic than a scholarly vein. Writing, once the technology of revelation, has become a disenchanting alternative to it.
Secular modernity, fully acclimated to this disenchanted view of the written tradition, purports not to need answers to the sort of question which the RV characterizes as unanswerable. That’s a bit of a shell game. A Hans Blumenberg points out in The Genesis of the Copernican World, we grow more confident in the face of such questions by undoing their unanswerability. After Copernicus, the next great cosmological dislocation decenters us in time as well as space: we now see that the universe, far from orbiting around us, isn’t even contemporary with us. When we look over distance, we also look back in time. We do the impossible, seeing back before our own (individual, species) existence. We compensate ourselves for our exile from the center of the universe by reimagining ourselves as the RV’s surveyor in the utmost heaven.