What is a Holy Book, a Scripture, or a Sacred Text? Between the Koran, Wole Soyinka and Immanuel Kant: Sociological and Literary Perspectives

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                        

                                                                     

                                       What is a Holy Book, a Scripture, or a Sacred Text?

                                           Between the Koran, Wole Soyinka and Immanuel Kant

                                                      Sociological and Literary Perspectives

                                                            Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                      Compcros

                                                 Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

                                       Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge

                                                                        Abstract

An exploration of the nature of sacred texts, in general, and religious scripture, in particular, using examples from religious and secular literature from various cultures, viewed through the lens of literary interpretation.

The challenges represented by Koran burning may provoke questions on the nature of sacred texts, questions that may be responded to in spiritual/metaphysical terms, in sociological terms, in literary terms, from the perspective of those who hold those texts as sacred and those who do not, among perhaps other perspectives.

Sacred Texts as a Social Consensus

In sociological terms, a sacred text may be seen simply as a text that a person or group understands as sacred. That perception may be shared between  those who identify with the belief system within which the book is integrated as well as those who do not identify with it. 

One can appreciate the sacredness of a text even if one does not identify with or belong to the larger body of belief, the religion to which the text belongs. On the other hand, other people may see the same text as not being sacred or are indifferent to such claims about the text.

Semantic Range and Literary Power as Central to Sacred Texts

Sacred texts are often a primary means through which religions are constituted, religions developing around them.What qualities define such foundational sacred texts across religions, those texts founding a religion or which it's believers see as primary?

Are there characteristics shared by the Koran, the Bible, the Gita, the Yoruba Orisa tradition  Ese Ifa,  the Holy Books of Thelema by Aleister Crowley, In the Light of Truth of the Grail Message by Abd Ru Shin, for example, the last two being the central sacred texts of religions emerging in the 20th century?

Sacred texts constituting the foundational scriptures of a religion are often characterized by profundity, beauty and simplicity.

Their profundity emerges from addressing issues of the most fundamental value to most people, issues which integrate and go beyond the daily business of living to penetrate into ultimate questions about the significance of existence.

Their beauty is demonstrated in the manner these ideas are projected. There is an emphasis on styles of using language which privilege emotional evocation and imagistic force through the use of verbal music. 

These qualities powerfully conjure an imaginative universe representing the world view built by the sacred text. A world the listener or reader is invited to enter into.

Entry into that imaginative world and acceptance of its coordinates as compelling identification and shaping of one's life according to its values and living accordingly, makes one a practitioner of the religion constructed by that text.

That world is imaginative, not  in terms of whether or not it exists apart from the universe of the text but because a primary method of communicating that world is to shape it through words in a manner that makes immediate what is not actually visible.

This is a fundamental description of literary technique, in this instance, in terms of how ideas of spiritual, non-visible reality are constructed by what people come to accept as religious texts.

These imaginative techniques combine beauty of expression with simplicity of expression, making their evocative power, their imaginative force, their conjuration of a unique reality, accessible to a broad range of people across a broad spectrum of levels of  knowledge, qualities readily translatable in various languages in which the text is rendered.

Without this combination of profundity, beauty and simplicity, I wonder how a text can attain the status of the founding scripture of a religion.

   The Koranic Sura al Nur

A striking example of this combination of profundity, beauty and simplicity is Sura al Nur, from the Koran, from which the following lines may be rendered in English-

''Allah is light

the light of the heavens and the earth

 a blaze shining through a lamp

a lamp hidden within a rock

a shining star

a lamp lit by an olive tree  neither of the east nor of the west

Allah brings to his light whom He wills

Light upon light''

Simple, commonplace but very powerful images are employed in those lines to evoke far reaching impressions, themselves suggesting far ranging ideas.

Images of light, amplified through identification with the light of  a star, associative reverberations further increased  by correlation with the picture of a rock, within which is a lamp, a lamp lit by an oil from a mysterious tree.

Physical, cognitive and spiritual illumination, as suggested by the image of light, is focused through the domestic familiarity of a lamp and projected in terms of the spatial elevation and suggestive force of the remote distance of stars, this conjunction of the domestic and the celestial further conjoined in the image of a rock, an image between distance, since most human beings dont live in rocks, and familiarity, since rocks are terrestrial, unlike the stars.

The entire sequence is presented in a rhythmic combination, consummated in the repetitive force of the closing lines, consummating the initiating idea of this light as being a divine light pervading all existence, the transcendental space of the heavens and the immediacies of  earth.

    Wole Soyinka's Image of Egrets Flying into the Setting Sun in A Shuttle in  the  Crypt

Compare those lines with another sequence from a different text, using the imagery of light, in relation to the celestial bodies-

''A choir of egrets, servers at the day's recessional,  on aisles fading to the infinite"

Another wonderfully beautiful line, from Woke Soyinka's A Shuttle in Crypt, evoking the image of egrets flying in formation towards the setting sun, ''the day's recessional'', their ranks of white suggesting choir attendants and mass servers at a Christian Mass.

To better appreciate this image, it would be helpful to be acquainted with the appearance of uniformed  Christian choirs and uniformed Mass servers in church, as the Mass servers file towards the altar, passing by aisles leading towards the altar, the entire image fused with the idea of infinity into which the aisles are visualised as moving towards, infinity itself correlated, with the setting sun, "the day's recessional", the day receding into darkness.

This is a very evocatively powerful image, transforming a commonplace sight into something glorious, something numinous, something both holy and beyond the boundaries of the material universe, dramatizing an everyday natural occurrence as the expression of a sacred ritual, elevating the conventional, space  and time bound performance of the Christian Mass to a cosmic plane through identifying it with naturally occurring events, the setting sun into the direction of which a flock of egrets is flying, thereby evoking the essence of the theology of the Mass as the enactment of a ritual of cosmic proportions, unifying the human and the divine, spirit and matter.

      Convergences and Divergences between the Koranic and the  Soyinka Texts 

The Koranic text does something similar, in a different way, as familiar images, domestic and celestial, become projections of divine illumination.

A central difference between both poetic forms, however, is that the Soyinka lines require an acquaintance with a specialized visual universe, that of the Christian church and Mass, while that of the Koran does not require acquaintance with anything beyond the data of everyday perception in order to appreciate.

Universality of Literary Power Across Foundational Religious Texts 

Examples like this recur in the foundational, originating sacred texts of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba origin Orisa spirituality and others.

Reading the Bible, for example this quality of imaginative power operating through readily accessible images defines a good number of it's most powerful sections, from the Psalms, to Proverbs to the Gospels.

Non-Foundational Spiritual Literature

Some non-foundational texts in various spiritualities may also demonstrate such qualities.

    Wole Soyinka's The Seven Signposts 

An example of this is Wole Soyinka's The Seven Signposts, a seven stanza poem the contemporary Nigerian writer composed in response to the claim that classical African spiritualities have no scriptures, as he describes the genesis of the poem in The Credo of Being and Nothingness where it was first published.

The poem is not a foundational to any religion because it does not have such broad based recognition. It is one of my own sacred texts, though, and for me, is foundational, being the best short account of the spirituality known to me.

The following lines exemplify the poem's projection of profundity, beauty and simplicity:

" Obatala fulfills. Purity, love, transparency of heart. Stoical strength. Luminous truth. Man is imperfect;man strives towards perfection. Yet even the imperfect may find interior harmony with nature. Spirit overcomes blemish-be it of mind or body. Oh, peace that giveth understanding, possess our human heart".

Soyinka wonderfully distills vast, divergent but correlative realms of reference in relation to the Orisha deity Obatala, clearly and forcefully demonstrating the universal significance of  this deity conception as speaking to the loftiest human aspirations across space and time.

The tension between aspiration and fulfillment, between the vision of perfection and the reality of imperfection, is vividly dramatized through the concise force of those lines, lines in which a range of learning is distilled for it's essential values while the sources of this learning are unreferenced in the name of immediacy of communication. 

Secular Sacred Texts

A text generally understood as secular may also have sacred significance for some people, demonstrating, in various ways qualities defining religious texts.

One of such for me is philosopher Immanuel Kant's closing meditation on self and cosmos, temporality and infinity, in his Critique of Practical Reason.

Translated into English, it begins-

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and ever renewed admiration and awe, the more often and the more steadily  they are reflected upon, the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me".

Those lines are sublime in conjuncting the two great polarities of the cosmos as understood by humanity, the inner world of the self and the outer, material universe, the latter projected in terms of one of it's grandest expressions, the stars poised in majesty above the earth, this polarity conjoined in terms of intensifications of consciousness inspired by keen sensitivity to these aspects of existence uniquely dramatizing the wonder of being.

Relationship Between Literary Creativity and Belief in Divine Inspiration 

What is the relationship between artistic skill and the divine inspiration to which religious sacred texts are often attributed?

Inspiration, an enhancement of the mind's creative abilities, facilitates the integrations of words, images and ideas. Inspiration occurs at various degrees of depth and impact on the mind. It may be spectacular, described as an encounter with a spiritual entity, as in Muhammad's account of his encounter with the angel Gabriel, or  undramatic, closer to the Biblical, " the still small voice".

It may occur across both overtly religious and secular writing. The sources of inspiration are partly traceable to the internal  workings of the human mind in relation to the experience of the person experiencing it and yet not so readily accountable in it's totality.

Are religious texts divine structures? Do they embody the direct voice of the divine?

I see them as a combination of human aspiration and creative powers at times wholesome and at other times not wholesome, as evident from inhuman sections of various foundational sacred texts.

Can the divine communicate in human terms without passing through the human mind? In doing so, would the communication not be shaped by the character of that mind and the character, strengths and limitations of it's expressive powers?

I understand the Kantian passage opened by the quote above to be an inspired text. Inspired by whom or what? 

Inspired by the confluence of Kant's sensitivity to the aspects of existence he describes, by his breadth of study and depth of reflection and by his skill as a writer, all these enabled by the mysterious power of life he celebrates in the passage following those opening lines.

Does that power of life demonstrate a creative intelligence fundamental to Kant's inspiration as religious texts claim for their own inspiration?

I don't know.

Can the Composition of Sacred Literature be Cultivated?

Can sacred verbal composition be cultivated, studied and practised?

I think so and various methods through which the inspiration that fires them may be cultivated can be studied and choices made as to which to adopt or an effort made to cultivate one's own methods or nurturing inspiration.

How does such a view relate to the idea of the uncircumscribed freedom of the divine in deciding whom to grant such inspiration to?

Muhammad catalyzed or opened himself to inspiration through intense and consistent prayer.

If he had not so prayed, would he have received the inspiration?

Various literary composers also receive inspiration without ascribing it to the divine.

The first thing is to act. Everything else is secondary.