Time, epiphany and Protestantism, Pt. II

[Dave Monroe]

... further 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.  Again, might
well be of interest, in re: time, epiphany and Protestantism in Pynchon
(or otherwise) ...

To continue ...

The limiting case ... within the field of religious studies is most
certainly the theoretical position adumbrated by Adolf Jensen and other
members of the Frobenius School (e.g., W.F. Otto).  Jensen claims that
all truth, meaning, an value are to be located in what he terms a primal
moment of ontic "seizure" (Ergriffenheit), a "revelation," a 'direct
cognition of the essence of living reality." (72)

Note well the argument.  Extraordinary privilege and priority i given to
naked experience.  Jensen locates all meaning in a prelinguistic, highly
individual, originary moment of "seizure" that is sui generis.  All
socialization of this moment, from linguistic expression to repetition,
destroys spontaneity, impoverishes meaning, and is, ultimately, mere
habit.  (72)

One does not have to go far to discern the governing premise of this
sort of theory.  It is the Protestant principle of individuation, of
unmediated and spontaneous revelation run rampant.  (72-3)

... two figures often juxtaposed to each other in teh matter of teh
distinction betwen sacred and profane--Eliade and Durkheim. (73)

In Eliade, space and time are conceives as parallel with respect to the
difference betyween the sacred and the profane.  In both cases, the
profane is "homogeneous" and lacks "reality."  Because of this, it is
the realm of the "meaningless."  (73)

At time he speaks of the "manifestation" of the sacred that
"ontologically found the world." ... as an ontological power that, in a
highly dramatic fashion, breaks into the profane and "displays itself."
... a language of "irruptions" ... thsoe fundamental reevlations that
Eliade describes with words built on the root phaino: hierophanies,
kratophanies, epiphanies. The human stance in the face of such a
"display" is silence.  (73)

But with Eliade, all is not passivity and dualism.  It is a paradox that
the sacrd should manifest itself in the profane ... that there should be
a kenotic incarnation.... there is human activity as well.  The
experience of the sacred is "infinitely recoverable an infinitely
repeatable."  Repetition is creativity.  (73-4)

If Jensen offers an essentially Protestant model, Eliade may be seen as
attempting to rewrite it as a Catholic-Orthodox one--with an assist from
a combination of Platonic and Indic metaphysics.  The notion of the
paradox of the kenotic incarnation is central, allowing Eliade to
venture a sacramental interpretation of human action.  Repetition as
'same" might well be meaningless; but he insists on another possibility:
repetition as a recovery of originality, expressed either as a naked
(prelingual) experience or as the human symbolization of an initial act
that has the capacity to "point" beyoind itself. (74)

... Durkheim clearly supplies the anthropological dimension so notably
despised in Jensen and realtivized in Eliade ... (74)

An essentially spatial distinction--the sacred is that which may not be
touched by the profane--is converted into a temporal one ... builds on
Mauss's study of the seasonal variations of the Eskimo, and
distinguished everyday time from festival time ... (74)

The price of the description of the "effervescent" festal experience of
the sacred--where communication is reduced to the ecstatic "piercing
cry, a veritable yel, 'yrrsh! yrrsh! yrrsh!'"--is the reduction of the
everyday time of profanity to an inhumane level, bereft of all of the
characteristics that distinguish, for Durkheim, humankind from the realm
of the animal.  It is a time of social "dispersion," almost wholly given
up to "economic activity," where life is "uniform, langushing and
dull."  (75)

[the "piercing cry" citation, by the way, seems to be a trans. from M.
Mauss and H. Beuchat, though I'm not clear if it is Smith's or
Durkheim's.  Intriguing, nonetheless ...]

... in Durkheim, narticulate affective experience is still what
validates the sacred, what gives it its sense of difference over against
the sameness of the profane.  The only element that prevents this fom
collapsing into the Protestant model is the priority of the social over
the individual.  (75)

What is lacking in all three of these modulations of essentially the
same model is a sufficient appreciation of the mundane.  Each exhibits a
failure to recognize that, within the domain of ritual, "God lives in
the details" rather than in high moments of drama.  Ritual stands in a
parallel relationship to ordinariness, not in opposition to it.  (75)

I have deliberately employed the term "Protestant," for it is
Protestantism, and in Protestantism alone, that one finds teh systematic
articulation of the model of the "circle and line" in curious
combination with a strong affirmation of "breakthrough." (76)

Both the cyclical and linear models of time employed ... under the
influence of the Protestant myth reduce "difference" to a discourse of
the "same."  The cyclical model does so by insisting on a notion of
repetition that is held to be either inherently meaningless (as in
Metzger) or meaningful because it is wholly congruent with its exemplar,
that is to say because it lacks difference (as inEliade).  The linear
model does so by reducing history to a succession of meaningless events,
identical to one to the other unless interrupted by or directed toward a
supramundane telos.  By viewing the sacred as "other" and the profane as
teh "same," the bulk of studies in religion have eliminated the complex
middle gropund of thought about "difference" where myth and ritual live.
(76)

... so, well, there you go.  Suggestive, to say the least, I'd think ...