Assumptions are useful in narratives but can be treacherous; damagingly so in religion.
Not everything is ever spelled out in full. As readers or listeners we accept, at least for now, that a story does not need to set out for us every detail of what it is about. Some elements – things or actions or ideas, hinted at to a greater or lesser extent – can be assumed. In the interest of pressing on or saving time, they are silently understood, swiftly taken as read: they are nuggets of reference jointly recognised by writer and reader and accepted as useful shorthand material. This acceptance is the case even where those shared assumptions, working as signifiers, entail magisterial beliefs or those which are widely held, or sacred imagery.
This underlies the fact that assumptions have power. They are short cuts which can skew arguments, memories and statements of fact. They can harbour bias or foment prejudice. They underpin the narratives of collective unconscious the contents of which Jung taught us to identify as ‘culture-driven archetypes.’ As revelatory drivers they can be potent. They operate even when we would prefer or expect them to be secret.
We see assumptions – short cuts to archetypes – as particularly useful in at least three realms of human experience: philosophy, art and religion.
In the case of philosophy, there is so much that is relevant to consider, from the immaterialism of Bishop Berkeley to the epistemology of Immanuel Kant and then on to the theories of Jacques Derrida and their opponents. (Here, it will be only too apparent that this post is being written without the benefit of any formal training in structuralism, semiotics, the distinction between the signifier and the signified or their correlation etc etc). For hundreds of years, philosophers – and artists – have tried to come to terms with what it means to be real, and how we can handle the meaninglessness that confronts us every day. Alluding necessarily entails things taken as read, but is it always safe to do so?
The arts and literature are particularly adept at hinting at things not immediately obvious at the surface, let alone clear. The consumer, auditor, viewer, reader is made to co-operate with the artist in assuming that some components of the narrative are so potentially obvious that they can be taken as read. The fact that Mr Collins is a twit is not stipulated by Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice; all she has to do is set out the evidence. Paintings by J M W Turner and, after him, the impressionists sketch smoke or steam without finding it necessary to depict machinery or architecture – ostensibly the picture’s subject – in any detail. In modern film culture, the slithery sound of a saxophone solo riff signals lust. That master of English prose, Evelyn Waugh, in a long paragraph in Brideshead Revisited manages to describe a fatal avalanche in a snowy landscape without anywhere using the word ‘cold.’
There are covert messages such as these in many famous works of art, balancing disclosure with artful reticence. They take it that we can recognise sly indicators when we meet up with them, particularly in the realms of metaphor and allusion.
This kind of shorthand becomes a problem if and when in practice we fail to recognise, in any given case, where we are along the spectrum that extends from non-literality all the way to realism and actuality. It is important to bear in mind that this spectrum does not function mechanically to quantify or measure the degree to which the object can be understood as real. As I have noted elsewhere, the storyteller does not find it necessary to submit her or his narrative to any tests of believability we might insist on applying as a precondition of our auditing of it: s/he simply assumes that we the auditors have a basic understanding of, and are hospitable to, appropriate registers of narrative. To restate the obvious phrase, we simply are to take it as read and let the narrator get on with it.
In this, as is so often the case, Shakespeare is the master: the lyrical statement “This is Illyria, lady” (Twelfth Night, Act 1 Scene 2) invokes all that can be imagined and assumed about a strange realm in a single line.
This presupposition is most clearly seen in traditional drama, from Euripides to Punch and Judy shows where there is no space or time available for detailed exposition and it is assumed that the audience have a basic level of understanding what is being enacted. Whether or not of the Punch puppets are ‘real’ presents no problem for children watching them; they readily accept that what they are witnessing, and learning about, is a dramatized and enjoyable, and even scary, version of the powerful truths sewn into the real world fabric of the fears and joys of everyday family life.
Which brings us to religion.
If we have belief, what are we bidden to assume? Religions are complex accumulations of code, and great blocks of meaning, doctrine or reference.
Some basic assumptions are ubiquitously common in religious scripture, messages, doctrine and practice: the status and contribution of women, for example; the existence and the actions of a spirit world; the awfulness of death and the desirability of eternal life; the God Person wielding active verbs; Christianity’s unique and central claim.
It is not always possible to stop and challenge any of these assumptions when we encounter them. They are so firmly embedded in their hosts’ theology that dismantling any of them seems at first sight to be unthinkable; blasphemous, even. Nevertheless, it is now open to us at least to unpack and examine them and we are, if we so wish, free to pursue such enquiries to see wherever they might lead.
If left too long, assumptions shift their meaning and surreptitiously decay. They need frequent review. This is particularly the case where, like a receding tide, the cultural ocean we live in, and which shapes our thinking, reveals something on the beach we do not need any more.
Women
Throughout history and in most cultures women have been assumed to be inferior to men. Nowhere is this paradigm more evident than in the Bible. Out of numerous examples, one particular assumption stands out: St Paul’s notorious statement, “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence” (1 Timothy 2:12) which has often been used to justify many an offence, and is probably more quoted than what appears to be the counterpart aphorism, “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies” (Proverbs 31:10) Statements like these could not have been included in the canon were it not for an underlying assumption current at the time, but not so acceptable now.
Shakespeare, writing in 1606, provides a sly two-edged comment complimenting one woman but noting her value to men: “Bring forth men-children only/For thy undaunted mettle should compose/Nothing but males” (Macbeth 1:5) The force of a statement like this one in the mouth of an anti-hero depends on what relevant attitude the audience is assumed to hold both individually and collectively.
To remain useful, reliable and apt, assumptions cannot function if they are not subject to frequent review.
God
The underlying assumption in the People of the Book is that God is masculine. We are to treat Him therefore as we would any good but demanding father. His maleness dictates what attributes or roles we must readily and routinely subscribe to Him: Master, Lord, King. The principle behaviour we must adopt towards Him, therefore, is obedience. He rules; we obey. When we misbehave, He is Angry. When we do wrong, He punishes us.
The main corollary of this is presumably that God being that, and we being this, we stand in need of go-betweens. This role, whether it be exercised by Moses, the Prophet or Jesus Christ, is primarily one of intercession. Who, it is assumed, is particularly well equipped to plead for forgiveness and mercy?
To answer this question is to recall that as well as fulfilling the intercession role religions have a mission to explain.
Western Christianity has at least one obvious candidate for this explanatory role, reinforced by frequent invocation. At one level down, as it were, Catholicism’s devotion of the Virgin Mary usefully functions as a kind of anti-assumption: a counterweight to divine maleness, continually reminding us of the feminine element in our worship.
But it is a given that this element is still inferior: the BVM is a second-order being who intercedes for us with the King of Heaven, not as a Co-Redemptor but a supplicant; one that is very much alive and accessible to believers but still emphatically female. The assumption, rooted in a certain age-old view of women, is that the BVM represents a singularly effective and proper court of appeal permitted to fill what amounts to a gender-specific gap in the divine offering.
Spirit world
Around the globe, it is probable that most people believe in the existence of a spirit world, parallel to this one, with the will and power to affect things on earth. This belief, challenged by the Enlightenment but never left behind, makes demands. It shades into concepts of the divine and of an afterlife, and thence to beliefs about morality and ethics.
What are we meant to assume about this parallel location? Is it ‘good’ or ’bad’ over there? Do we have any power to affect it? This line of questioning is as true of Taoism as much as it is of the Judeo-Christian belief system: the Tao Te Ching poses the relevant question as “If heaven and earth cannot make things eternal how is it possible for man?” (Ch 23) but in doing so assumes that there is another world ‘out there’ but within the same morality frame of reference as ours has.
Death and resurrection
Over the past few centuries, attitudes to death, at least in the West, have changed. The medieval idea reflected the fatalism engendered by all too high death rates and, before the development of medicine, the seemingly capricious nature of health and its vulnerabilities. Before the modern age, and its ever-growing arsenal of diagnostic tools and science-based treatments, health was assumed to be subject to, and dependent on, behaviour in this world and the here and now. To be sick was to be guilty.
That assumption changed over time as our knowledge expanded and attitudes changed. They had to. Previous ages meditated on death in ways that we no longer think proper or useful, let alone acceptable. Spreading noise-suppressing straw in the street in front of a house where someone is dying was a trivial example. Some Latin cultures have long mummified cadavers in underground galleries visited by family members once a year.
Such features of public piety, as alien to us as Bishop Fox’s tomb in Winchester Cathedral, depicting the great man as a rotting corpse, show how far we in the West have travelled in the cultural domestication of death. It would be inconceivable to construct such a monument now, so discreet and bland the underlying assumptions about death, and the fear of death, have become.
God as Person
In almost all religious systems there is, to a greater or lesser extent, a degree to which the divine is perceived as an entity separate from humankind and encountered as such. The variation stretches all the way from the object of primitive idol worship, to the divinity that is intensely felt as ‘God with me’, right through to the sort of contemplative non-realistic theism that accepts that “the Tao is elusive and intangible” (Tao Te Ching Ch 21). For the People of the Book, this gradation of access ranges from, say, the presence and solidity of the negotiating God of Genesis 18 and the stigmata of Padre Pio right through to the mystical Sufism tradition of Islam.
Despite all this multiform, one basic assumption underlies almost all such constructs: the idea that the divine has a distinct personality (or a set of them) with whom we choose (or not) to interact.
The most obvious manifestation of this personality is encapsulated, basically enough, by its ubiquitous use of the active voice for verbs. A phrase such as ‘God said’ invites us to respond to an entity ‘over against’ which we act or speak in some way. Rather, in almost all religious discourse, it is that we are compelled to acknowledge not only the very existence of the interlocutor, let alone its otherness and potentiality. Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “the mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.”
The obvious objection to all this is that it amounts to mere pantheism: the notion that “God” and nature (or the universe) are one. But why should we assume that this is a problem? As an epistemological concept it has been around for centuries. It would not alarm the devotee of any of the great Eastern faiths which accept that, in our terms, both logical and mythical, God is ‘no thing.’
I want to suggest that this amounts to a clearing of the ground on which it is possible to build an argument for faith that does not depend on any anthropomorphic assumption or confabulation, still less subscription to a body of prescriptive doctrine deploying it.
Questions
Once we allow ourselves to visualise what might be the consequences of breaking free from the concept of ever being able to define the divine, the landscape broadens ineluctably. All sorts of things suddenly become possible. Two or three of these immediately become clear. I merely pose them as questions for which there are answers that I do not propose to examine here.
The first possibility is that at a stroke, re-examining assumptions embedded in religious belief opens new vistas and perspectives. Challenging assumptions allows us to look at events or characteristics in new ways.
This can be painful. Why, for example, do we take it as read that Mary was a virgin when the relevant verse of the Old Testament, apparently foreshadowing her (Is 7:14) is more correctly translated as ‘young woman’ (Almah)? Doesn’t this mean that the whole Mariolatry edifice, based on the idea that she is or was not human, completely falls at a stroke?
Similarly why should we share St Paul’s foundational assumptions about life and death? They enable him to build a credal superstructure of doctrine based on the premise that death is a horror from which, under certain circumstances, we are entitled to escape into eternal life, or try to. This belief both reinforces and derives support from the notion that, as death is understood to be God’s punishment we have incurred by our Original Sin, our central obligation must be to strive to have this punishment annulled: “propitiation for our sins.”
To put it plainly, this whole concept of redemption vis-à-vis a demanding deity whom we must placate in order to win freedom from death the ultimate negative stands or falls on the assumption that life is a reward for which we bargain with an entity disposed, or not, to grant it. What kind of God is that?
The question becomes acute, of course, in any attitude we might adopt about the Passion and the Crucifixion. The idea that God chose to allow Jesus to be put to death because of our sinfulness is hard to disentangle from the mightiest pillars of the Christian faith. In terms of that faith, we are instructed to assume that this, Paul’s core idea is the correct one. If we dare to query this, we risk injuring what we have been taught. If so, then this is a prime example of an important assumption turning out to be a third rail: a potential source of injury for anybody who gets this far.
“All talk about God staggers under impossible difficulties.” (Karen Armstrong A history of God, 1993 p8) “ I suspect that there is no straight answer to this particular problem, but only provisional statements that are all we can hope for, for now. If so, then it is correct to recall that even verified assumptions mutate, die, and are replaced by other ones. That is a natural progression: “The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.” [To be continued]
The serene light 