Turning Signs

Language is a very difficult thing to put into words.

— Voltaire

It is obvious enough that translation into another language can change the meaning of a text, despite the best efforts of the translator to be “faithful” to the original. But even the copying process which has brought most ancient scriptures to their readers in the original language can change the original text. Continue reading Transmission and gospel

In his ‘Afterword’ to the Nag Hammadi Library (Robinson 1988, 547), Richard Smith gives this account of Harold Bloom’s hermeneutic theory:

Bloom’s argument is that literary influence always proceeds by ‘a deliberately perverse misreading … an act of creative correction, of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism whose purpose is to clear away the precursor so as to open a space for oneself.’

Continue reading Writing wrongs

Some sayings in the Gospel of Thomas appear ‘cryptic’ at first – that is, difficult to decode, which serves to remind us that the message is coded.

Jesus said, ‘Blessed is the lion that a person will eat and the lion will become human. And anathema is the person whom a lion will eat and the lion will become human.’

— Thomas 7 (5G)

Continue reading The lion code

Interpretations at any level are selective processes, and conscious selection is grounded in natural selection. Continue reading The fountain of youth

Walt Whitman, addressing ‘Workmen and Workwomen’, has this to say about sacred texts: Continue reading Shedding leaving reading returning

In one version of his essay on ‘The Fixation of Belief’ (see Chapter 7), Peirce suggested that religious authority, or rather the ‘decay’ of its influence, prepares the ground for the emergence of dialogue, or ‘fermentation of ideas,’ where reasoning carries more weight than anyone’s authority. Continue reading Composting religions

If the natural world is ‘the primary scripture’ (Berry 1988, 105), the quality of our presence on this planet depends on how we read the earth and practice what it preaches. As for our reading of the secondary scriptures, our judgments of their relative worth are worthless; what counts is the practice our reading determines, the turning of the symbols we are. Continue reading Turning the Dharma wheel

All messages are coded, and that includes scientific and scriptural texts as well as everyday communications in ordinary language. Use of a symbolic code both amplifies and ambiguates (or polyverts) the meaning of the sign. Michael Polanyi explains: Continue reading Risky symbols