Avivah and Camille

And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. Genesis 1:4  NASB

Separated– Great thinkers struggle with great problems. Not surprisingly, great thinkers often struggle with the same great problems because the really great problems have been the same for Man in all the ages.  So when you read astute, insightful thoughts of great thinkers, you shouldn’t be surprised that you hear the same concerns even if the resulting solutions are strikingly different.  Take, for example, these two women:  Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg and Camille Paglia.

The really great problem is unity and diversity.  Heidegger wrote about it (Identity and Difference).  So did Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kant.  But we will look at the thinking of two brilliant women.  First Camille:

“. . . nature remains the supreme moral problem.”[1]

Why would she say this?  Ah, because “Civilized man conceals from himself the extent of his subordination to nature.  The grandeur of culture, the consolation of religion absorb his attention and win his faith.  But let nature shrug, and all is in ruin.”[2]

What is the result?  “Science is a method of logical analysis of nature’s operations.  It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature’s forces, and their frequent predictability. But science is always playing catch-up ball.  Nature breaks its own rules whenever it wants.  Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt.  Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic might can be pushed back and defeated.  Name and person are part of the west’s quest for form.  The west insists on the discrete identity of objects. To name is to know; to know is to control. . . . the west’s greatness arises form this delusional certitude. Far Eastern culture has never striven against nature in this way.  Compliance, not confrontation is its rule.”[3]

For Camille, Nature (capital N) is the realm of chthonic presence—fluid, chaotic, devouring, uncontrollable.  It is the primal sea of Egyptian mythology and the decadent violence of Hollywood. It is paganin the deepest sense—something that asserts itself without regard to the pitiful efforts of men.  It is the supreme moral problem because the chthonic tsunami has no regard whatsoever for ethics.  Everyone and everything dies.

“Historiography’s most glaring error has been its assertion that Judeo-Christianity defeated paganism.  Paganism has survived in the thousand forms of sex, art, and now modern media. Christianity has made adjustment after adjustment, ingeniously absorbing its opposition (as during the Italian Renaissance) and diluting its dogma to change with changing times.  But a critical point has been reached.  With the rebirth of the gods in the massive idolatries of popular culture, with the eruption of sex and violence into every corner of the ubiquitous mass media, Judeo-Christianity is facing its most serious challenge since Europe’s confrontation with Islam in the Middle Ages. The latent paganism of western culture has burst forth again in all its daemonic vitality.”[4]

A crisis is upon us.  Not a crisis of politics or ideology.  All ideologies are versions of Man’s puny efforts to control the world.  No, the crisis we face is the resurgence of deep paganism—the world gone mad where chaos reigns once again.

Would you be surprised if I told you that the Bible addresses this great problem?

“The main question facing man from now on will be precisely this quest for a foundation of being, for ‘one thing only which is certain and indubitable.’  Man sets off on a journey in which no form of solid assurance of reality and sanity accompanies him.  In Descartes’ vision of this radical anxiety, the ultimate dread is of madness, the fear of waking from a self-deceptive dream world . . . The instability, the tendency of the world to change, to wear out, to fall apart, will lead the descendants of Adam to beliefs and rituals whose common aim is to make the world strong and solid again.  Mircea Eliade narrates many such rituals of renewal, which reenact creation, the original encounter of God and the world, and thus ‘repair’ or ‘fix’ the world.”[5]

Religion is an attempt to “fix” the world.  That is why it fails.  It is the human effort to recapture a time when there was only unity—a time when God was alone.  And that will never happen again.

“In the act of creation, there is perhaps inevitable sadness, as the work works itself loose from the vision.”[6]

When God created, He separated, and when He separated, He introduced into creation itself the split of order and disorder, stability and chaos, identity and difference.  Bādal, the Hebrew verb “to separate, divide” is now an essential part of the world.

Camille sees this as an inevitable, unavoidable ontological tension.  We can pretend the world is under our control, but we will awake from this self-induced sovereignty psychosis when Nature comes calling with all her awful fury.  Avivah offers another way.

“There is a provisional quality to the reality of the world, a rofef ambivalence about meaning, which no fearful utterance of God can shock man into crystalizing.  The world, until Sinai, awaits its true creation; man feels the question hanging over him, nothing is solid in his consciousness until some essential point of equilibrium is discovered.”[7]

Torah is the answer to chaos.  Torah is not rules of behavior, codes of conformity and religious instruction.  All of those are merely manifestations of the attempt to control.  Torah is a statement about the fulcrum point of the universe. It is the one essential that harnesses Nature.  Torah is the answer to the question, “Why is the world such a mess?”  That answer is not “people have sinned.”  That answer is “God left the meaning of the world in the hands of men, and gave a path to follow.”

“To be able to stand ‘face to face’ (Deuteronomy 5:4) with the God who alone exists and whose anokiemerges from a vast silence is to take that immensity of the anoki immediately within oneself.”[8]  Torah is the re-establishment of unity in a world of chaos. But this does not mean the Bible ignores the chthonic character of Nature.  Avivah comments:

“Noah, like ‘every faithful man,’ prays to be saved from the ‘rushing mighty waters’—the expression combines shetef with mayim rabbim to communicate the undifferentiated dumb violence of the world just outside the prison of the ark.”[9]

If you thought you needed to be Torah observant so that God would accept you, you were wrong.  If you thought you needed to be Torah observant so that you could demonstrate your affiliation with the coming Kingdom, you were wrong.  If you thought that Torah obedience would save you from God’s judgment of the world, you were wrong.  And if you thought you didn’t need to be Torah observant so that you could rely totally on grace, you were wrong.  Torah isn’t about what you do. It’s about who you are—reconnected to the one, great God of unity.

You can follow Camille into the chthonic abyss and assert the insanity of it all.  Or you can follow Avivah and Moses, admit the chthonic character of a world gone mad, and absorb the One Alone as your identity.  The Bible gives us a personal account of the formation of meaning in life—Isaac.

“Isaac . . . lives his life within the parameters of the abyss, and survives for posterity as the realization of this possibility—total nihilation, the burnt offering, the knowledge of ‘it would have been better for man never to have been created.’  This is the Tohu, the Nothingness of which Isaiah speaks [Isaiah 45:19], and which ultimately he rejects (45:18): ‘He did not create it [the world] a waste [tohu]; but formed it for habitation.’  The absurdity, the inhuman waste of the world of Tohu, ruled by the Greek ‘moira,’ the malevolent gods of fate, necessity and silence, is countered by the denegation of lo tohu.  Rashi’s comment spells out the existential force of this denegation; against the meta-silence of Tohu—in which human acts are gratuitous, have no effect—God gives Torah, which is founded in the promise of justice.  ‘Great reward’ is the affirmation at the heart of darkness.”[10]

Topical Index: unity, diversity, identity, alone, pagan, Avivah Zornberg, Camille Paglia, separate, bādal, Genesis 1:4

[1]Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson, p. 1.

[2]Ibid., p. 1.

[3]Ibid., p. 5.

[4]Ibid., p. 25.

[5]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. 26.

[6]Ibid., p. 20.

[7]Ibid., p. 27.

[8]Ibid., p. 32.

[9]Ibid., p. 49.

[10]Ibid., p. 132.