studying the ANE culture through Walton
Jan. 31st, 2016 11:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vlionA major question I have is how to bridge incommensurable worldviews. Of particular relevance to me is the worldview of the ancient Near East (otherwise known as the period the Christian Old Testament came together).
Currently I am working through a few books by John Walton - http://www.amazon.com/John-H.-Walton/e/B001IGOV8C. I don't mind saying: this is hard material, and requires some genuine mind-bending for me.
Of particular note are these ideas that I've gleaned so far:
- supernatural/natural divisions did not exist in the minds of the time
- detailed ontologies and taxonomies were not a thing in that time and place.
- the world was flat, and the sky was flat, and the mountains supported the sky: the Great Waters were outside this. This of course was how the world was.
It's unclear to me whether religion existed as a category we would today understand as religion. Based on my reading of AskHistorians on Reddit (professors, grad students moderate and require sourced answers), it would seem that religion was closer to government in the West today; part of the weft and woof of the way things were ruled; deity was part and parcel of how the world worked.
Some random conversations with a Hindu chap on twitter suggest that this might be closer to Hindu thought than not. The Enlightenment and Greek ideations lay heavy on any attempt to bridge these gaps of ontological metaphysic.
There are further ideas here regarding what qualified as truth that I can't grasp yet. I am going to have to soak, deeply, in these books to be able to grasp them and then communicate them.
It's my thought that a similar (and smaller) gap exists between people who understand a technology and people who don't. And, for that matter, deeply rural people in the West and, say, lifelong urban dwellers in NYC.
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Date: 2016-02-01 08:31 am (UTC)This reminds me of Fr Stephen Freeman's essay (or, really, compiled series of posts) on Christianity in a One-Storey Universe, though I'm not sure how close the connection is - it may be merely tangential.
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Date: 2016-03-08 07:27 am (UTC)In the ANE non-Hebraic universe , the gods were in the universe; the materials of the universe had functions and aspects to them; the deities were associated with those things. Where the universe itself came from was less of a topic of myth. But in the Hebraic worldview, God stood outside: he created the universe; he exists without the universe, contra the ANE typical gods, which existed inside of it.
It's the case that the Friar has his finger on the earlier-than-rationalist viewpoint though: all things were motivated by deity in both worldviews - the "super"natural was present constantly; that it wasn't measurable didn't mean it didn't exist in the natural. We might interpret that frame of reference as superstition, but I think it's deeper and more profound than that: the ontology of how the world was set up, the epistomology of what constituted truth shifted dramatically, to the point of nigh-incommesurability.
Personally, I'm not at all persuaded that the One House is the *correct* viewpoint; we rapidly wander off into the old Radical Reformation/Liturgical conversation of symbols and their connection to the symbolized; I'd like to not go there. :) It is the case, of course, that in either a Radical Reformation/Liturgical viewpoint, the solid Biblical viewpoint is that "the unseen realm exists and has real and regular effect".