The Book of Genesis Chapter 11
1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
In the Bible's Tower of Babel story, the still-monolingual human race --doubtlessly dominated by patriarchal males-- decides to build a (phallic?) tower up to heaven. The Lord is not amused, and so he destroys their command-and-control capacity by infusing different and mutually unintelligible languages into the men. End of the Tower.
One way to read this story is to hear it as a warning about inherent limitations. Although created in the divine image and likeness, men are not God. We are limited by our nature. This is something all conservatives agree on, that the fundamental block to utopia is the nature of man (as well as the conditions of life on planet Earth). No matter how god-like we become, we are not gods. With very little tempting, we turn beastly. And, if you expand your horizons, the nature of the planet itself provides a larger limit: scarce resources and contingent events.
Contemporary liberalism seems to me to want to correct the Biblical story: to re-create a common language so that the project of tower-building can be completed. Because liberalism really recognizes few limits to human intellect and, above all, to human will.
3 comments:
Liberalism could build a tower unto the heaven, and indeed perhaps had built such a tower. The difficulty is that the tower had to be strictly formalistic (bohu), and agreement to agree that all substantive questions must be endlessly defer'd or fore-gotten within the tower.
For instance, the Lutheran divines immediately began removing Luther's doctrine of the Atonement from their contributions to the tower (Gustav Aulen, Christus Victor). Anglicans use Anglican "Catholicity" to remove Calvinist doctrine from their "church" (»we were never a "Reformation" or "Protestant" communion, as is definitely proved by Elizabeth's preference for episcopacy and aversion to Puritans«) and to remove Thomist doctrine and other RC things (»Celtic Christianity [sc the corn doll paganism enthused for by Robert Graves] is much older than Roman Catholicism, which is therefore false.«). Since Calvin includes "biblicism," the Bible as a "paper pope" can also be suppress'd in substantive terms. The result of the non-Calvinist plus non-Thomist, non-RC essence of Anglican Christianity is a formalist tower was more or less complete before J.S. Mill was even a twinkling in the eye of his "sexless angels" parentage.
Whether "conservative" RCs wish to look into their ecclesiality's own aversion to Aquinas I leave to them, though I will note that the Summa theologiae seems to have been reserved for the inner path out of the world, and brought into the world, sort-of, only under the dire emergency of Nietzschean genealogy.
Sam Rayburn is the ultimate liberal theologian: "in order to get along we must all go along with whatever" yet probably the Anglican formalist tower is more conveniently Babylonian than is the atheistic "secular" tower, since atheism makes God far more conspicuous than Anglican Christianity does. Decorous rites and lingo that support morals and a clergy that is either amusing (Rev. Collins) or edifying and mildly world-denying (edward Ferrars) throws more obscurity on God than Darwinian methodological insistence and Marxist militancy.
But yhwh enhances (cohen-founds. js1101 BLL pour oil into) the formalisms by bringing out their implicit substantiveness (Genesis 11:7, 9). And the formalistic masons cease building their tower PDQ! feigning incomprehension and even "hate" of their neighbours' constructions. Who knew that every tower builder would turn out to be a Manchurian Mason!?
In our own day, however, the tower of Western civilization isn't really abandon'd and left to decay, but is sort-of re-built in negative terms from desublimation and critical theory.
Hobbes perhaps allow'd a certain amount of tower building unto the heaven if a substantive agreement on a negative summom bonum were affirm'd: all Selfs agree that the worst eventuality is violent death. Today all Selfs 'honestly' agree that the worst eventuality is repression and sublimation or-and death by "racism, sexism and homophobia (class division and 'slave revolt in morality')". If this social contrast is truly substantive or essential, then perhaps yhwh won't interfere with the desublimational liberalism's building a tower of steps up into the heaven.
I wonder what Babylonians want a climber to discover when he reaches the top of the tower. That all Heaven's in a rage because a single Robin (Goodfellow) redbreast's in a cage? (Blake, auguries of innocence)
"Puck" (etymologically an [ego] inflater) sc also colourer, valuer (cf Francis Bacon, the colours of good and evil) js6320 PhWk, whence Arabic fiqh. But this colouring involves wavering, turning (js6328 PhWQ) and occurs by blowing (js6315 PhWCh), where air or spirit or breath is the element of Shem, whose colour is red.
In any case, the old habit of caging women (Nietzsche BGE ¶237) seems unnecessary and indeed worsening. Better is the cage of Gelassenheit, in which the heart is restricted from containing wastelands by hating (cf ¶87), preferring instead to pass by interpretational spiriting that is without reverence in its selfing and thus cannot truly be loved.
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