Time, epiphany and Protestantism, Pt. I

[Dave Monroe]

... as I've been pulling books off the shelves (not to mention hair out
of scalps), I thought this might be of interest to anyone working on the
topic of time, epiphany, and/or Protestantism in Pynchon.  Some selected
citations from "A Slip in Time Saves Nine: Prestigious Origins Again,"
by Jonathan Z. Smith (U of Chicago), in Chronotypes: The Construction of
Time, ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP,
1991), pp. 67-76.  Please bear with, as I want to do Smith's argument
some justice, and I think some here might find it useful, though it
might not be evident 'til further on down.  Ladies and gentlemen ...

... the study of religion ... has tended to represent the work of
religion with respect to time in a simple geometry.  You know the drill:
circles and lines.... This geometry has often been extended into a
highly valenced taxonomy: the familiar dualisms of "myth" and history,"
of "archaic" and "modern," of "closed" and "open," and other variations
of the same.  (67)

The development of this duality occured at a quite specific moment
within the academy.  In the mid-nineteenth century, European thought
underwent a revolution with respect to time comparable to the revolution
with respect to space that resulted from the Age of Exploration (or
better, teh Age of Reconnaissance) ... (67)

The initial ... moment in the temporal revolution was the series of
geological and paleontological discoveries and arguments that culminated
in the notion of the antiquity of humankind as a natural species ....
The second moment ... was the discovery of the antiquity of humankind as
a recognizable and familiar cultural species.... Israel and Greece were
not, as had been hitherto thought, the foundations of Western
civilization.  They were later, secondary, perhaps even derivative
cultures.  (68)

At the forefront of this second moment ... was a group of German
scholars who came to be known as the Pan-Babylonian school.  Among their
many claims ... was one that, curioulsy, has survived criticism: their
insitence that the essential Weltanschauung (a term largely popularized
by the school) of the ancient Near East ... was based on an uncommon
faith in the cyclical order of the heavenly bodies and an imperative to
harmonize earthly affairs with this order.... the "Babylonian" pattern.
Brought down to earth and expressed in teh language of the alternation
of seasons ... it was called teh "Canaanite" pattern.  If the cycle was
stretched into an ellipse and then a line, and focued on human rather
than "cosmic" or "natural" activities, it was termed the "Israelite"
pattern.  The first two patterns, the school maintained, were
relentlessly cyclical ....  The Israelite pattern, by contrast, was
linear ... (68-9)

... such mythology [does not] exist in any ... genre of Near Eastern
literature.  (69)

Why, then, has the putative distinction had such success?  Surely not
because it enables the interpretative enterprise, but rather because it
fulfills anideological role.  The prime use of the construct has been to
protect the Bible from the enterprise of comparison, whether
genealogical or ontological, and tehn, by extension, to protect Judasim
and especially Christinity from the effects of the comparison of
religions, to insulate "us" from "them."   Thus the familiar
formulations: neither israle nor Christianity "borrrowed" fro its
environment; they are "historic" rather than "mythic" religions; "God
Acts in History."  (69-70)

Decoded, tehse various characterizations reduce to a set of insistent
dualities ....  to state the opposition in its bluntest form, we are
human, they are not.  (70)

First ... it is long overdue that we set aside teh notion of "natue
mythology" that is at teh heart of the mischievous distinction bewteen
"mythic" (i.e. cyclical) cults and "historical" religions.  Such a
notion is based on the old, inadequate idea of myth as bad science.
(70-1)

As we have come to learn, myths are not about nature.  They are not best
understood as "primitive" attempts to explain natural phenomena.  Myths
often think with natural objects; they are never about them.  Their
focus is not on the genealogy of things but on the topography of
relationships.  This has been put most bluntly by C. Levi-Strauss ...
(71)

Second, the specific category of "dying and rising" gods ...  can no
longer be sustained.  In every case that has been proposed, it has
become clear that the deities so names have died and are mourned by
their cults; their is no account of their rising until late texts from
the Christian era.... the distinction proposed between such deities as
"mythic" and the Christian myth as "historical" collapses.  (71)

... this difference can no longer be expressed as a matter of circles
and lines, by the old duality of myth and history.  (72)

... meaning is identified as singularly teleologica--conceived either as
giving a directionality to or as a "breaking in" on a lineal temporal
movement. What is being asserted is that repetition is inherently
meaningless ... repetition is the realm of the habitual.  Meaning is to
be identified with the singular ... with the epiphanic.  (72)

[epiphanies yet, anyone?  read on ...]