Hildegarde

Well, I walked right into it, so I shouldn’t be surprised.

First, let me  note that the idea that adhering to reason and logic must mean rejecting the supernatural is a very new one.  It first crops up in the 18th century, and it only becomes automatic in the last sixty or seventy years.

And it still isn’t monolithically automatic even in the West.

When I say the Rig Veda–as far as I’ve read it–rejects reason and logic even as an assumption, I don’t mean it has supernatural elements. 

I mean that it will first relate the creation story as something that comes out of the waters and out of which the gods themselves came.  Then it will relate it as a birth out of one of the gods it just said didn’t exist before the creation at all.  Then there will be a few more, with elements that contradict these two–and all of them wll be presented as “what actually  happened.”

But all of them could not have actually happened.  If one of them  happened, then the rest are by definition untrue, because each of them has elements that cannot be true AT THE SAME TIME as elements in the other stories.

As far as I can tell by the notes and introductions, no attempt was ever made to rationalize these contradictions until Western scholars came in and tried to “make sense” of it, because “making sense” is what we do.

Note the difference here between this and Genesis.  There are two creation accounts in Genesis, one detailed (Adam, Ever, etc) and o ne general (“created them male and female”).  But except for the most tendentious eye, there’s nothing contradictory here.  One is the detailed story, the other is just a note of the event.  In the first case we get the play by play.  In the second we’re just told, well, God created everything, and he created human beings, and they were both male and female.

Or take the case of the set of  hymns I was just reading, the ones  to the God Viruna. 

Viruna is a god closer in nature to gods as we have understood them in the West.  He is a sky god who looks down on men and women and punishes them for their misdeeds–although the misdeeds seem to be things like not doing the ritual right, and the notes point out that prayers asking to be “free of sin” are asking only to be free of the punishment for sin, not to be made righteous or somehow cleansed, as in the Christian tradition.

And all of that would be fine except for this:  sometime between the writing of these hymns and the coming of the British to India, Vicuna pretty much ceased to exist.  His powers and duties were transferred to Siva and Vishnu.  People just stopped praying to him.

As far as I can tell, no explanation for this was ever offered anywhere in the Hindu religious tradition–and, to this day, no explanation is felt to be needed. 

I can’t imagine a Western religious tradition that would put up with something like this–or a Western religious congregation that would, either.  We would demand to know what happened to the god, why he wasn’t operating any more, where these other gods who took his place came from and why they took his place–and on and on and on in the cascade of rational questions that come from the assumption that it is an absolute necessity that even our religions “make sense.”

And, if our religions don’t make sense–if we find that they are contradictory and irrational on the level of internal logic–we assume that that is proof that they must be untrue.  That is why some secularist organizations spend so much time trying to find and prove contradictions in the Bible.

Western fiction has this same quality, even when it references God or the gods, or supernatural events, or nonexistent space colonies or Hobbit and Elf societies somewhere on earth.

Conventionally real or wholly imaginary, we insist that the elements of our fictional worlds make sense.  The internal logic must cohere.  If  your hero is an orphan found abandoned on a mountaintop on page 6 and the middle of seven brothers growing up happily in a large extended family on page 247, you’d better have a solid, rational and plausible explanation for that before the book is over. 

Western readers aren’t going to put up with “both of those things are equally true at the same time and if you don’t get it,  well, that’s why they’re called mysteries.”

In fact, I think the closest we ever got to that kind of non-explanation was in the Catholic explanation of how the Eucharist could be both bread and wine and the real body and blood of Jesus Christ at the same time. 

The explanation required the use of a set of ideas about the nature of the material world that started with Aristotle and depended on him.  Maybe it’s not entirely a coincidence that what came right before the Reformation was the discarding of just those assumptions by Renaissance scientists with new ideas about the nature of the physical world.

To this day, Catholic explanations about how the Eucharist can be botn bread and wine and body and blood are solidly Aristotelian, through Thomas Aquinas.  They have to be.  Without those categories and assumptions,  it is impossible to make the doctrine make sense.

As to music and art–I don’t know enough about either in any technical sense to address this directly.

But I will note something that I think is more important to my argument than whether Jackson Pollock’s paintings use reason or logic, or whether a Bach sonata does.

No matter how patently illogical or even objectively irrational a work of art may be, it will be accompanied by reams of prose–reviews, explications, textbook sections–that determinedly and sometimes incessantly try to make it make sense. 

These efforts are sometimes good and sometimes bad.  They’re successful and unsuccessful.

They all speak to the Western need to impose logic and order on everything,

It doesn’t matter, either, that sometimes when we try to impose logic and reason we end up imposing bad logic and worse reason.

It’s the imperative–make it logical!  make it rational!–that matters, because not every culture has it.

I think that may be why my first attempt to explain this didn’t entirely succeed.

We’re use to the “must fit logic and reason” imperative that we are to it the way a fish is said to be about water–

It is so much a given, we don’t even know it’s there.

Oh, and as an afternote?

I’m with Mique.  I love Pollock.