The Braided River: Toward a New Pluralism in the Human Narrative (Part 1)

A few weeks ago I found myself in a conversation about religious history that started with a narrow question—what does the word Hades mean in the Book of Revelation, and did the author distinguish it from the lake of fire—and within a few exchanges had opened onto something much larger. The narrow question has a clean enough answer. Hades in Revelation operates as the Greek equivalent of Sheol, a temporary holding state for the dead; the lake of fire is the eschatological terminus, the second death, into which Hades itself is finally consigned. The author of Revelation, working in a Second Temple Jewish apocalyptic register, kept the two ideas separate on purpose, and the climactic moment of chapter 20 (in which Death and Hades give up their dead and are then thrown into the lake of fire themselves) is the strongest internal evidence of the distinction. So far, so philological.

But the larger thing the question opened onto was this: the entire conceptual apparatus that Revelation is deploying, namely, the cosmic dualism, the periodized eschatology, the named archangels, the bound rebellious powers, the final fire that purges and renews, is not native to the Hebrew Bible. It is the product of a long synthesis that absorbed, among other things, the Enochic Watchers tradition of the late Second Temple period, the angelological and eschatological frameworks that entered Jewish thought during and after the Persian exile (themselves the product of Zoroastrian developments built on Indo-Iranian and ultimately Proto-Indo-European religious materials), Greek philosophical and mythological vocabulary acquired during the Hellenistic period, and a Mesopotamian background that reaches back through Genesis to materials older than Israel itself. By the time the author of Revelation sits down to write, the inheritance is already six or seven layers deep, with each layer reshaping what came before and being reshaped in turn.

This isn't a debunking observation. It's not meant to expose Revelation as somehow fraudulent or to suggest that its theology is merely cobbled together from foreign sources. Every religious tradition is constituted by inheritance, and the inheritance is always more layered than the tradition's self-understanding allows. The interesting question isn't whether Revelation is "really" Jewish or Persian or Greek, because it is all of these and none of them, in the way that a child belongs to a family without being reducible to any single ancestor. The interesting question is what it means to take seriously the historical depth and the cultural multiplicity of any religious or philosophical tradition we inherit, and what follows for the truth-claims that such traditions characteristically make. In other words, we often like to typify things by identity (e.g., “this is a Jewish belief” or “this is Christian theology”) or otherwise ascribe to times, places, people, and even movements. We individualize, isolate, and then say “this is X” or “that is Y” by way of simplifying reference in a way that obfuscates and obscures continuity or shared origins. It makes artificial difference, and from that difference, discord.

I've come to think of this through the image of a braided river, as opposed to the arborescent or rhizomatic diagrams of the past. A tree of religious traditions, with clean branchings from a single trunk, is the picture most traditions present of themselves and the picture popular history often endorses. It is a comforting picture because it suggests purity at the origin and divergence as a later complication. The picture doesn't survive serious historical scrutiny. What we actually find when we examine the formation of any tradition is something more like a river system in which currents merge, separate, rejoin downstream, and carry sediment from sources far upstream that the current itself has no memory of carrying. The braids stay partly distinct even as they flow together. The water at any given point contains contributions from streams whose own confluences happened thousands of years and thousands of miles upstream. It is all the same water; it flows in and out of its courses, rejoining, splitting again, before being washed to the same great reservoir of humanity as the rest. 

This is true of Christianity, which is what I'm going to be working with most directly in the posts to follow (and because it is, insofar as I have one, my own native religious background), but the point generalizes. It is true of Judaism, of Islam, of the Vedic traditions and their Hindu descendants, of Buddhism, of Daoism, of Zoroastrianism itself. It is true of supposedly secular intellectual traditions—philosophy, the natural sciences, the soft sciences, political ideologies, art, literature, you name it—whose self-presentations as the products of pure rational inquiry often obscure the deep cultural and religious materials they carry forward in displaced form. Every tradition, every mode of inquiry, every strain of human endeavor is a braided river, and the practice of mistaking one's own braided river for a single pristine stream is one of the most common errors in the human handling of inherited thought.

The series I'm beginning here is going to do two things. The first eight posts or so will trace specific cases, pieces of the inheritance that Western religious thought, and modern Western philosophy along with its Christian substrate in particular, carries without quite acknowledging. The Watchers and their descendants in 1 Enoch. The lake of fire and its Persian-period genealogy. The Indo-Iranian inversion of daēva and deva that underlies, at great remove, the structure of cosmic dualism that Christianity received. The composite origins of Yahweh from the merger of a southern storm-god with a Canaanite high god. The Hellenistic synthesis that produced the philosophical vocabulary of patristic theology. The continuing accretions of Roman, Germanic, Celtic, and Renaissance materials that shape what modern believers experience as straightforward Christian doctrine. The aim in these posts is not to argue against Christianity or against religious commitment generally. The aim is to show, with enough specific examples that the cumulative case becomes hard to dismiss, that the tradition is in fact what the historical record shows it to be:  multiply sourced, continually transformed, never "pure" or "original." That we owe our intellectual heritage not to single discrete ancestors (or, to abandon an unintentional genetic metaphor, antecessors) but instead to a great, globe-spanning interconnectedness that we obscure by our over-reliance on indexical language and "discrete" categories and descriptors.

The later posts will then take up what follows philosophically from this empirical picture. If religious traditions are braided rivers all the way down, then claims to universal truth made on behalf of any one tradition become difficult to sustain in the strong form they have often taken. This is not, I will want to argue, a slide into relativism or into the dismissive conclusion that all religious claims are equally arbitrary cultural constructions. The hermeneutic tradition in modern philosophy (Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Gadamer, Ricoeur) has developed a more careful position that takes seriously both the situated character of all human inquiry and the genuine possibility of understanding across difference. The position holds that all truth-seeking is interpretive, that interpretation is always interpretation-from-somewhere, and that the alternative to the impossible view-from-nowhere is not the abandonment of truth but the cultivation of situated dialogue. I will be arguing for a version of this position as the most honest available response to what the historical record actually shows.  But more than making an argument about method or epistemology or even metaphysics, I want to investigate something more primal. If, as I propose, the story of humanity is one story told in a billion different voices, there is an essential unity there that I think we can hold to, a common thread, that will enable us to see past the artificiality of division. I also think this can scale beyond religion, beyond philosophy, beyond ideology, to the very core of what it means to be human itself.

And so, in the last posts of the series, I want to take up what this means for the harder question of shared life among people who do not share a tradition or a metaphysical foundation, who are not part of the same language-family or historical ethnic group. This is where the project has become personal for me. The recognition of difference can be liberating, the conviction that one's own tradition is one inheritance among many, that the other person's tradition is also a real and serious inheritance, can open a way of engaging across difference that exclusivism forecloses. But the recognition can also feel like despair, especially in moments when political and social conflict makes difference feel catastrophic and the possibility of dialogue feels foreclosed, that we are foreordained to existential conflict for which the price of a false peace will be the blood of our neighbors. I want to argue that the despair is not the only available response, and that the philosophical position I'm working toward provides resources for something more like hope, that out of the multiplicity can arise not dissension, not conflict, not striving, but mutual effort to disparate goals in the service of a shared unity and value.

That is the destination, anyway. The path runs through specific cases first, then through philosophical reflection on what the cases imply, then to the practical and personal stakes. I hope I will be writing roughly one to two posts a week, as time permits, with about thirteen posts in total. The series will spiral rather than march, each concrete case will open onto the larger argument, the larger argument will return us to new concrete cases at higher levels of generality, and the philosophical and personal threads will weave through the historical material rather than waiting for separate treatment at the end.

In the next post, we'll begin with one of the strangest and most consequential pieces of the inheritance—the story of the Watchers, the rebellious angels who descended on Mount Hermon, fathered the giants, and were bound in the valleys of the earth to await final judgment. It is a story that almost no contemporary Christian would identify as Christian. It is also a story that almost all contemporary Christian theology presupposes. It is the background radiation of so many different beliefs, inherited, modified, forgotten, and reworked over the ages that the shape of the original work has been lost among the countless hands that have refigured its surface. Working out how that can be is the work of the next post.