The Great Flood - with Susan Wise Bauer

Among the aspirations of high medieval theologians and philosophers was to develop an account of the relations between faith and reason. At some point, rational knowledge ended and the content of faith stepped in to provide a complete account of the nature of things. The two fit together somehow. The problem was that no one could agree on exactly how they did.

The 18th and 19th centuries, in an England on the cusp of establishing itself as an imperial power, witnessed a new attempt to reconcile faith and reason. This time around a mainly Protestant endeavour, the meaning of the terms changed accordingly. Before faith and reason had quite clearly been associated with mental faculties. Reason analyzed the world of human experience; faith relied on God's entry into the world of human experience, revelation, and regarded everything beyond it. Now Protestant attempts to make sense of the relationship tended subsume into the category of faith those literal truths of Scripture, in which a person placed their faith. The category of reason, correspondingly, meant scientific rationality, or careful observation, testing, and study of the natural world.

The change had immediate, practical significance. Medieval scholars were unlikely to think, for example, traveling to the Holy Land and digging around for evidences of Kings David or Solomon would serve much purpose. English adventurers, on the other hand, believed faith would only be strengthened by digging up the Holy Land, and the rest of Ancient Mesopotamia besides.

So what do you think happened when the archaeological evidence failed to make a clear and unambiguous case for the contents of Scripture?

If nothing else, Christian naivete about the nature of the biblical texts was challenged, head on. Protestants had placed their faith in a particular understanding of the way faith and reason related, which badly backfired. Where reason stands for careful observation, testing, and study of the natural world, the biblical texts were read as if they provided a literal, natural historical account from the moment the world was called into existence. The careful observation of the natural world, however, failed to bear out the many of the literal claims of the biblical stories.

Words on a page do not natural scientific evidence make.

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Ancient stories of a great flood covering the whole earth, destroying everything save only a very few, will help illuminate those concerns I think guides the writings of Susan Wise Bauer. Our ingrained sensitivities to scientific implausibilities predisposes us to dismissing the stories of the biblical Noah, or his Babylonian counterpart Atrahasis, either as fiction or myth, but certainly as completely unfounded. The scientific evidence for such an event is so sketchy as to be barely visible, while alternative explanations like minor flooding events malign the plain meaning of the text. In such circumstances, it seems best to set aside the need to demonstrate that a correspondence between religious texts and the geological record actually exists.

That is to say, our ingrained scientific sensitivities also lends us toward ironing out the creases and folds that mar the collection of evidence at our disposal. The simplest explanation, we assume, is usually the best. We want a nice flat account, beginning here and ending there, with an easy, smooth progression. The flood narratives are interruptions, inconveniences, stories we want quickly to set aside so we can move on to more serious matters of investigation. Bauer observes, however, 'The historian cannot ignore the Great Flood; it is the closest thing to a universal story that the human race possesses.' Textual references to the great event come from around the world, found among almost every ancient people group, numbering well into the hundreds.

But what, then, does one do with them? If I follow Bauer's rationale aright, and that means setting aside simplistic assertions to the effect of 'if the text says it happened, it happened', we have to instead question what flood narratives illuminates in the ancient world.

Bauer presents a line of interpretation that holds ancient peoples were scared of the seas. It makes some sense to cast fears of a vast untamable, merciless force, which the seas can undoubtedly be on stormy days, into the cosmological role of Destroyer, and perhaps even Cleanser. The gods of the plains and mountains get cast in the corollary roles of Sustainer and Orderer; they bring calm to whatever storms may plague the community, be they natural or social or otherwise.

It is more likely, in my estimation, Bauer is on a surer footing where she suggests, 'Surely it is not a coincidence that the creation stories of so many countries begin with chaotic waters which must recede so that man can begin his existence on dry land.' Though, even here, I wonder if she goes far enough. Lacking what later philosophers termed a conceptually pure language, it may be that ancient thinkers used water as a visual metaphor for the absolute formlessness, or nothingness, of reality prior to the creation of the world. Water appears in ancient creation myths: the first verses in the Genesis attest to such, as do Ancient Egyptian and Native American mythologies. Water figures into the Qur'anic account of creation, and also ancient Chinese descriptions of qi, the life-force moving through all things.

Wondering about absolute formlessness might seem a pointless intellectual extravagance for beings, like ourselves, who have only ever known things as a multiplicity of forms. But how the ultimate relationship between form and formlessness is described will directly contribute to how the divine and the human relate, how human beings relate among themselves, and whether some human beings are justified in parading about like gods among their fellows. In other words, it gets at fundamental questions of ethics.

So, if you had to describe to someone else what absolute formlessness was like, what better visual example to use is there than water?