Harvard Divinity School

The Paradox in Writing on Religion

Author(s): Daniel Gold
Source: The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 83, No. 3 (Jul., 1990), pp. 321-332
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Harvard Divinity School
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1509878
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HTR 83:3 (1990) 321-32

THE PARADOX IN WRITINGON RELIGION

Daniel Gold
Cornell University

Paradox, a subject that has intrigued philosophers and scientists since an-
cient times, not long ago also captured the attention of many literary critics
and historians of religion. A key analytic term among the old New Critics,
paradox-along with irony and ambiguity-was for decades taken as central
to poetic language, the force of which was understood to derive from the
play of multiple, often contradictory meanings.1 In history of religions, a
concept of paradox was essential in the monumental work of Mircea Eliade,
who repeatedly pointed to the power of conjoined opposites in myth.2 To
many scholars in both fields, these paradoxes of poetry and myth have by
now become passe-taken for granted, perhaps, but no longer topics for
furtherexploration. They gain new significance, however, with the increasing
interest in the critical study of academic writing over the last few years.3
For despite the hard-minded academic stance found in much contemporary

'See, for example, Cleanth Brooks, "Paradox and Literature," the first essay in his impor-
tant The Well-Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947). For a critique of Brooks's
approach as "monism" by one of his influential contemporaries see R. S. Crane, "The Critical
Monism of Cleanth Brooks," in R. S. Crane, ed., Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952) 83-107; for modern reflections on the New
Critical project see Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker,eds., Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). The importance of paradoxical language as a
general concept in New Criticism also led to renewed attention to the use of paradox as a
literary figure during the Renaissance: see Rosalie L. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
2Mircea Eliade, "Mephistopheles and the Androgyne, or 'The Mystery of the Whole'," in
Mephistopheles and the Androgyne: Studies in Religious Myth and Symbol (New York: Sheed
and Ward, 1958) 78-124.
3See James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986); George E. Marcus and
Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Movement in the
Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and Hayden White, The Content
322 HARVARDTHEOLOGICALREVIEW

religio-historical writing, the paradoxes familiar from religion and literature

still often come into play, indeed, sometimes to explore striking contradic-
tions that are posed in the fashion of paradoxes from science.
The paradoxes of the sciences and humanities have at least as many
differences among them as they have similarities. Literally a statement that
is "beyond" (wrapd)"belief' (66da), paradox in its most general sense pre-
sents an apparent truth that stands counter to reasonable expectations. But
the truths as well as the expectations of the sciences and of the humanities
usually present themselves in different guises. The former state truths as
facts and derive expectations from tight logical arguments; the latter often
recognize truth in meaningful experience and derive expectations from
conventional rational categories that are not always coherent among them-
selves. Paradox, in questioning the familiar, may cause these different realms
of knowledge to grow in different ways. In natural science, an apparent
paradox can prompt the reformulation of categories that once were taken as
grounded in hard facts, leading to a new consensus about the nature of
material reality. In religion and literature, by contrast, paradoxes may be
understood to reflect truths lying beyond the categorical intellect, subjec-
tive realities to be realized by individuals. Thus, the history of science
shows us how paradox can expand the realm of the rational, with unavoidable
anomalies stemming from old formulations leading to continually new
discovery.4 But in religion and literature,paradoxical contradictions deriving
from the clash of rational categories are usually resolved through a shift
into experience, either spiritual or aesthetic.
Although the paradoxes of both religion and literature thus differ quali-
tatively from those of science, they also contrast with each other. The

of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1987).
4Mathematics, offering clear logical contradictions, probably presents the most striking
illustrations. For example, the perplexing realization that infinite sets may include one an-
other-musn't the part be smaller than the whole?-has led to specialized mathematical
theory for infinite sets (for a fuller but still nontechnical account see Nicholas L. Falletta, The
Paradoxicon [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983] 61-69). Set theory itself, moreover, needed
to be totally rethought in the wake of Russell's paradox: what is the status of "the set of all
sets that do not contain themselves as members" (Falletta, Paradoxicon, 16-19)? In phi-
losophy of science, the dynamics through which scientific anomalies lead to new knowledge
have offered some of the liveliest debates over the last decades, with Kuhn and Popper
presenting contrasting positions (see Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolu-
tions [2d ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970] and Karl R. Popper, Conjectures
and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1963]). For a review of the debate see Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and
the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
 DANIEL GOLD 323

experiences they elicit are given alternative values and reached through
different means. Religious traditions, in addition to the mythic conjunctions
of opposites elaborated by Eliade, offer mysterious formulations of dogma
(e.g., the Trinity) and enigmatic utterances of holy persons (e.g., Zen koans).
In all these cases, paradox compresses stark contradictions into a compact
form that confounds the finite mind, opening it, perhaps, to a glimpse of
existential truths it does not normally encompass. Leading to realities taken
to lie beyond the reach of ordinary human rationality, paradox in a broad
sense appears to be a vital characteristic of much religious language.5 The
paradox that has been said to be crucial to much literary expression is at
once more mundane and more complex. As in "most of the language of
religion" writes the New Critic Cleanth Brooks, "almost any insight impor-
tant enough to warrant a great poem" must be stated in paradoxical terms.6
But here the paradox is reflected not in an astounding contradiction, but in
the intricate structureof a poem, with its parts in carefully balanced tension
and its language carrying double meanings. Thus in Donne's "The Canoni-
zation" Brooks sees "profane love [treated] as if it were divine love,"7 a
paradox that presents itself in ambiguous images like "the world" (renounced
by the entranced lover as by the hermit) and "death" (which can refer to
orgasm, too). Moreover, says Brooks, Donne "takes both love and religion
seriously,"8 and the poem makes sense from both, apparently contradictory,
angles. The aesthetic power of a work of literature from this perspective,
then, derives from its capacity to make us realize how apparently contra-
dictory realities can simultaneously be true; the more complexly it does
this, the more powerful it is.

5Suzuki, Ramsey, and Smart present different types of paradoxical religious language (see
D. T. Suzuki, "Reason and Intuition in Buddhist Philosophy," in Charles A. Moore, ed.,
Essays in East-West Philosophy: An Attempt at World Philosophical Synthesis [Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1951] 17-48; Ian Ramsey and Ninian Smart, "Paradox in Reli-
gion," Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 33 [1959] 195-232). De Cusa's De Docta
Ignorantia (in John Patrick Dolan, ed., Unity and Reform: Selected Writings of Nicholas de
Cusa [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962] 55-98) presents a classical dis-
cussion of religious paradox from Western tradition; Robert Lawrence Slater (Paradox and
Nirvana: A Study of Religious Ultimates with Special Reference to Burmese Buddhism [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1951]) discusses the roles of paradox in Theravada Buddhism.
The philosophy of paradoxhas been expounded by Howard A. Slater (The Pertinence of Paradox:
The Dialectics of Reason-in-Existence [New York: Humanities Press, 1968]); a useful over-
view and bibliography has been provided by Michiko Yusa, "Paradox and Riddles," Ency-
clopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987).
6Brooks, Well-Wrought Urn, 17-18. For paradoxes in religious language Brooks looks to
the Gospels: "He who would save his life must lose it"; and "The last shall be first."
7Ibid., 11.
8Ibid.
324 HARVARDTHEOLOGICALREVIEW

Religio-historical literature presents its own version of this aesthetic of

paradox, illustrated nicely in Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty'sSiva: The Erotic
Ascetic.9 A modem classic on Hindu mythology, this work takes the an-
thropological structuralismof Levi-Strauss to the high civilization of India.
As in much academic writing, O'Flaherty'sbook starts from a paradoxical
situation that piques our scientific curiosity, an anomaly that does not
conform to our rational expectations: how can an ascetic also be erotic? In
attempting to resolve this paradox, we presume, the writer will eventually
expand for us the realm of the rational. Yet in doing so she also shows us
that the complex figure of Siva is rooted in the irrational depths of the
Hindu religious imagination. What the writer presents in the guise of a
scientific paradox in fact derives from the paradoxical religious mysteries
of her human subjects.
This translation of religious to scientific paradox is, I will argue, broadly
evident in much writing on religion that poses a startling problem. The
beauty of O'Flaherty'swork, however, lies in its intricate structure of myth
and explanation, which affects the reader through complex literary paradox.
On the one hand, we have the vivid portrayal of myth in all its suggestive,
irrationaldetail; on the other, we have a convincing structuralistexplanation.
Each of these two basic sides of the literary paradox seems to have a
reality of its own, and each holds our attention. The work grows more
complex as we see both the many contradictions within these two worlds
and their interrelationships. Like the paradox of sacred and profane love
found in Donne's poem, the asceticism and eroticism of Siva's world plays
with ambiguous images of sex, renunciation, and death. The complexity of
the explanation reflects the complexity of the narrative, showing us in
detailed outline how some recurring motifs are primarily erotic, some as-
cetic, and some serve primarily to mediate between the two. And so that
we do not lose sight of the connection between the narrativeand explanatory
poles of the work, the mythic stories are keyed with marginal notes to the
explanatory outline. Thus, the rational explanation of religious life can result
in an extended literary paradox-one that is able to transpose the para-
doxical religious sensibilities of religious subjects to an aesthetic dimension
more easily accessible to readers.
The central tension between spiritual and mundane realities that forms
the basis for literary paradox in O'Flaherty's work is found in different
forms in much religio-historical writing. If not as artful or consciously
ambiguous as lyric poetry, the use of mundane rational terms to discuss

9Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Siva: The Erotic Ascetic (New York: Oxford University Press,
1981; first published as Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva [London: Oxford
University Press, 1973]).
 DANIEL GOLD 325

alluring religious mysteries easily leads to ironic images and situational

tensions that might catch the eye of a New Critic. In their analyses, histo-
rians of religion will frequently juxtapose factors of society, psychology,
and economics with the power of religious values in human life. And in
their descriptions of the interplay between spiritual ideals and material
realities, between ascetic aims and psychotic drives, they will typically give
pivotal roles to both the religious imagination and physical causes. Much
of the aesthetic power of writing in the history of religions becomes gen-
erated from the dialectic between these two apparently distinct realities.
Excitement is sparked as readers begin to recognize potent connections
between what seem to be opposite and separately grounded poles of exist-
ence.
This common religio-historical aesthetic works more forcefully to the
extent that the contrast between poles is sharp-the religious forces deep
and the mundane explanations cogent. In synchronic studies of myth from
Eliade to O'Flahertythe adventures of superhumanbeings have been brought
together with structuralexplanations grounded in various mundane realities:
logical, social, and natural.10But in addition to mythic figures, religious
traditions also involve human actors who exist in a historical arena. Here
the polarities of literary paradox often appear as irrational human religious
behavior and inevitable factual event. History of religions written against
this aesthetic axis recalls less a delicately balanced lyric poem than a high
drama, with tragically flawed individuals and twists of historical fate.
Today, as students of comparative religion pay increasing attention to
the specific human contexts of their materials, an understanding of the
aesthetics of paradox in historical tradition may be particularly important,
both to incorporate in our own work and to appreciate in others'. It is thus
on the writing of historically contextualized paradox that I focus here. It
will be explored through an examination of examples from Judaism, a
tradition that often demonstrates a visible interplay of religious life with
historical event. Certainly, the evident impact of outside forces on the
tradition they study seems to have made scholars of Judaism particularly
active in investigating the dynamic between religious vision and historical
circumstance. Occasionally, moreover, they write explicitly about their in-
terest in "the interplay between events and ideas"1 or the historical in-

O00'Flahertygives some existential dimensions to the logical and social bases of mythic
contradiction stressed by Levi-Strauss (see his Structural Anthropology [New York: Basic
Books, 1963]). Eliade's logic of natural symbols in myth is fully enunciated in his Patterns
of Comparative Religion (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958).
11JacobNeusner, Method and Meaning in Ancient Judiasm (1st series; BJS 10; Chico, CA:
Scholars Press, 1979) 101.
326 HARVARDTHEOLOGICALREVIEW

congruities of religious situations.12 But in the same way that light has
been thrown on Western traditions, including Judaism,13by Eliade's syn-
thetic, Indian-oriented principles, so the principles of writing employed by
these more historically minded scholars might vivify the study of traditions
too often portrayed as static and eternal.
Gershom Scholem, R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, and Jacob Neusner are three
eminent scholars who have written about the converging tensions among
history, myth, and law in Judaism. Scholem and Werblowsky have studied
Jewish mysticism, though concentrating on different aspects; Neusner's
research has focused on early rabbinic materials. All have been influential
not only in Jewish studies but also in the humanistic study of religion.
Approaching common problems, each presents different materials and dif-
ferent personal insights. Yet despite their diversity, a similar dynamic is
evident in the methods of them all. Each draws us into a situation that runs
counter to our conventional expectations, revealing both its historical and
its religious meanings. Having added force to his presentation by showing
us the power of the irrational, each then comes to a rational conclusion of
his own.
The late Gershom Scholem, the acknowledged pioneer in the study of
Jewish mysticism, has left an oeuvre characterized by his biographer as a
"history of irrationalism"in Judaism.'4 Scholem's 1937 essay "Redemption
through Sin," prefiguring much of his later research, clearly reveals his
attraction to the workings of paradox in religious tradition.'5 From its
striking title to its concluding words ("a faith full of paradox"), the article
revels in the power of religious contradictions. Indeed, the apparently
paradoxical behavior sympathetically described by Scholem becomes for
him the basis of a compelling, if not entirely convincing, argument about
the movement of Jewish history.16
"Redemptionthrough Sin" describes the aftermathof the messianic move-
ment around Sabbatai Zevi, the seventeenth-century Turkish Jew who even-
tually apostatized to Islam. Widespread and long outliving the messiah's
apostasy, the Sabbatian movement possessed a vitality embarrassing to
mainline nineteenth-century Jewish historians.17 In contrast to these

12JonathanZ. Smith, "A Pearl of Great Price and a Cargo of Yams," HR 16 (1976) 1-16;
see esp. p. 2.
'3Jonathan Z. Smith, "Earth and Gods," JR 49 (1969) 103-27.
14David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (2d ed.; Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
15GershomScholem, "Redemption through Sin" in idem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism
(New York: Schocken, 1971; first published in Hebrew, 1937).
6See Biale, Gershom Scholem, 7-8.
'7Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Zevi: The Mystical Messiah (trans. R. J. Z. Werblowsky;
 DANIEL GOLD 327

scholars, Scholem attributes the impelling force of Sabbatianism to pro-

found human religious needs. Sabbatian piety for Scholem thus stems le-
gitimately from Jewish tradition, but it is given shape by outward historical
circumstances and in turn lays the ground for Judaism's further encounters
with the outside secular world.
This dialectic between religious and historical forces appears in much of
Scholem's work, sometimes richly detailed,18 or, as here, very neat. First
we see the religio-historicaldynamics laying the groundworkfor Sabbatianism.
The hard historical reality of the Jews' exile from Spain is reflected in a
powerful Kabbalistic theology of exile; the religious forces themselves gain
momentum as this esoteric theology becomes popularized, thus enhancing
the role it gives to the messiah's personality; history again intercedes with
violent anti-semitic uprisings in Poland; messianic hopes thus quickened,
Sabbatai Zevi appears. A great wave of messianism then rises throughout
Jewry, broken only by the messiah's "totally unexpected conversion."19Now
"a contradictionappear[s] between the two levels of the dramaof redemption,
that of the subjective experience of the individual on the one hand, and that
of the objective historical facts on the other."20In describing the different
ways in which the Sabbatians attempted to resolve this contradiction,
Scholem continues to give weight to both the powerful subjective experi-
ence of the believers' liberation from Jewish law and the more objective
informing forces of historical circumstance.
In its grandeur, Scholem's vision of this internal dialectic within Judaism
sometimes seems to blind him to other relevant truths. Especially contro-
versial has been the role he gives to radical Sabbatianism in the emergence
of the "Jewish enlightenment," the embracing by many European Jews of
Western secular culture. His explanation of the "Marranic"21origins of
radical Sabbatianism is certainly cogent, giving a social-historical founda-
tion for a difficult act of faith. Since many Sabbatians were Marranos, Jews
who converted to Christianityto escape the inquisition, they could especially
identify with the messiah's apostasy. Some could, moreover, be driven to
imitate the messiah's acts themselves-outwardly apostatizing while inwardly
participating in the new liberated age. But even though Scholem manages
to trace pioneer Jewish secularizers to old Sabbatian families, the Jewish

Bollingen Series 93; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973) 78-86; Heinrich Graetz,
The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays (trans. and ed. Ismar Schorsch; New York:
Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1975) 169.
18Scholem, Sabbatai Zevi.
19Scholem, "Redemption through Sin," 88.
20Ibid.
21Ibid., 95.
328 HARVARDTHEOLOGICALREVIEW

enlightenment is understood by many scholars to emerge as well from a

number of other factors beyond Sabbatian rebellion against orthodoxy.22
The vision presented by Werblowsky in Joseph Karo: Lawyer and Mystic
is less grand and thus less controversial, but it is no less striking.23From
the tensions between the collective religious imagination and historical
circumstance of a nation seen in Scholem we move to the tensions between
the mystical life and personal circumstances of an individual. Now we see
concrete realities as elements no longer of a great historical drama, but of
the very ordinary world of a particular sixteenth-century rabbi, with his
disappointments, lusts, and rivalries. At the same time, because of Karo's
evident humanity, Werblowsky can also draw on the psychology of religion
to give him some universal dimensions. Moreover, Karo's position in his
community gives Werblowsky something to say about the specific dynam-
ics of mysticism and law in Jewish tradition.
The aesthetic of Werblowsky's work plays upon this dual tension of
mystical and legal tradition in Judaism and inner and worldly life in general.
Like Scholem, Werblowsky begins by showing us a paradox. By day Karo
was a master legist, whose compendia of Jewish law were long normative
for scholars and laymen alike; but at night Karo listened to a maggid, an
angelic voice that visited him regularly and whose messages he recorded.
Werblowsky's work is essentially a study of the collected messages of the
maggid-of Karo's spiritual diary-interpreted in the author's contempo-
rary kabbalistic milieu. The basic literary tension of the work, then, derives
from a juxtaposition of the petty and the sublime as we see Karo's mun-
dane and egoistic concerns become foci for exuberant cosmological specu-
lation: Karo's third wife had borne him no sons-because she possessed the
reincarnated soul of a man;24 Karo was convinced that his life on earth
would end in martyrdom, but imagined a grand apotheosis, enthronement,
and banquet in heaven.25 In a number of places throughout the book, this
central dynamic of inner and outer life is widened by comparisons with
other traditions. Yet through the details of Karo's life as an eminent jurist
the more culture-specific polarity of mystical and legal tradition in Judaism
is also kept in view.
Readers are thus led to new realizations about the problems of both
Jewish tradition and the psychology of religion addressed in the book.
Those uninitiated into medieval Judaism will first of all begin to understand

22Biale, Gershom Scholem, 87-88.

23R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, Joseph Karo: Lawyer and Mystic (2d ed.; Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1977; first publ. at Oxford, 1962).
24Ibid., 245-46.
25Ibid., 129-30.
 DANIEL GOLD 329

the complementarity between its mystical and legal traditions, or at least

the ways in which mystical and legal personalities often co-existed in
medieval rabbis. Those more concerned with the psychology of religion
will be just as interested in Werblowsky's specific conclusions about the
role of the maggid in dissociating these personalities in Karo.
The tensions in tradition treated by Scholem and Werblowsky find new
dimensions in Neusner's analytic work on the Mishna. Scholem showed us
the historical dynamics of tradition following the expulsion of the Jews
from Spain. In the life of Karo, who flourished in the more immediate
aftermath of the expulsion, Werblowsky presents the relationship between
mysticism and legalism that would endure in rabbinic Judaism. Neusner
shows us the dynamic of tradition following an even greater catastrophe-
the destruction of the Second Temple in Jersusalem in 70 CE. But in
contrast to Scholem and Werblowsky, who examine the development of
mysticism, Neusner focuses on the response of tradition that gives birth to
the classical rabbinic legal heritage.
The paradox to which Neusner continually points is the text of the Mishna
itself in its historical context. Though finally redacted after the destruction
of the temple and the extinction of its cult, the Mishna deals in good part
with the minutiae of temple ritual. If the Mishna does not deal with the
concrete realities of its contemporarysetting, what then are its contemporary
religious meanings? To answer this question Neusner works both historically
and structurally.
Through distinguishing strata of the Mishna dating from before the wars
with Rome, between the wars, and after them, Neusner, like Scholem, lets
us see the religious issues alive in different historical periods. In the case
of the Mishna, however, we are often struck less by the blow-by-blow
impact of historical events on religious consciousness than by the continu-
ities of concern that transcend historical catastrophe: we see a tradition
focused on temple worship transformed through the generations to deal
with new, anthropocentric religious realities.26
The eventual religious meanings of the Mishna for its final redactors
emerge from close textual analyses. Understood in their contemporary con-
text, deeper structures of the text give highly detailed and often picayune
legal injunctions pointed psychological import. The Mishna's system of
purities maintains links to temple ritual, but now offers humans a way to
imbue their everyday lives with conscious order;27similarly, the syntax of
the Mishna's formulaic language reveals both an internal world of order

26JacobNeusner, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1981) 45-166.
27Neusner, Method and Meaning, 122-31.
330 HARVARDTHEOLOGICALREVIEW

and balance and, more importantly, the individual's role in creating this
ordered world.28 Though Neusner's analyses are deliberately framed in a
specific historical context, they also consciously raise issues of general
import in the history of religions.29 Moreover, their rhetoric of the small,
external, detailed particular set against large, inward, systematic meaning is
often readily applicable to other textual traditions.
Though stress here has been laid on the way in which the works of three
writers on Judaism affect the reader as literature, neither do the writers
present themselves as creative artists nor do the works read like literary
texts. In all cases, we find ourselves reading explicit scholarly arguments.
In these works, then, aesthetic experience, which derives from conscious
understanding of the links between religious and mundane realities, is
mediated through the intellect. The interplay between aesthetic and intellec-
tual dimensions occurs at several levels: from the basic contradictions
apparent in the materials treated, through the complex human situations to
which these lead, to the details of narration.
At the most basic level, the intellectual and aesthetic aspects of the
works are linked through the basic paradoxes they present, which both
pique our scientific curiosity and elicit an experiential response. On the one
hand, the conceptual knowledge we find in the explanation of a paradox
derives its weight from the vivid description of the paradox itself: under-
standing Karo's maggid is important because Karo himself was such an
eminent lawyer; knowing the more inward religious meanings of Mishna
becomes vital just because we do not see the point of its extended detailed
prescriptions. On the other hand, a rational interpretationof a paradox may
let us empathize more closely with its apparently bizarre religious con-
tradictions: when we are aware of the inner meanings of the Mishna's
casuistry for those who pursued it, we may be able better to sense some-
thing of its religious value.
The religious contradictions evident in all these situations, moreover,
have manifold implications, generating human problems of both intellectual
and dramatic complexity. A full treatment of these problems thus entails a
depiction of the different human dramas to which they lead as well as an
analysis of how these dramas came about. Different types of human situ-
ations, we then discover, present their own dramatic complications: in the
aftermath of Sabbatai's apostasy, the historical dialectic of the Sabbatian
movement appears increasingly ironic; as we understand the different ways
in which Karo's maggid intervenes in his life, we see an involved psycho-

28Neusner, Judaism, 173.

29Ibid., 134.
 DANIEL GOLD 331

logical melodrama. Even the Mishna's extended treatments of mundane law

have developed in good part because people really do encounter moral
problems in everyday life. Presenting an involved argument may thus also
entail recounting an intricate human story.
The power of both intellectual argument and literary aesthetic finally
depend on detailed description. For the arguments, details provide ground-
ing in definite fact; for the aesthetic, details offer concrete images with
which the imagination can play. Thus, in providing us with specific in-
formation about the maggid's revelations concerning the androgynous soul
of Karo's wife, Werblowsky both makes his suggestions about the psy-
chological aspects of Karo's maggid believable and presents the psycho-
logical and religious dimensions of his material in a starkly suggestive
conjunction. Neusner, moreover, writes explicitly of the reader's experience
of his own frequent method of extracting large meanings from extended
legal descriptions. Those for whom the intricacies of the law do not
eventually exert their fascination, we are told, will at least have the ex-
perience of the dentist's chair: it may hurt for a while but it's worth it in
the end.30 If the particulars do not present the fascinans, then, they should
nevertheless cause some tremendum. In either case, providing bases for
aesthetic experience as well as intellectual argument, the detailed description
serves as a linchpin between the literary and scholarly aspects of the writing.
With their evident bipolarity, the examples from Judaic tradition pre-
sented here nicely demonstrate some of the ways in which the interplay of
paradoxes from religion, science, and literature can lead to a characteristic
dynamic of writing about religion. Yet, as suggested at the outset of this
paper, the historical dimension evident in these examples is not crucial to
that dynamic. The paradoxes of myth most familiar to historians of religion
have usually been treated synchronically, either in broad, comparative di-
mensions31or in a complex cultural world.32Many materials, moreover, even
when not approachedthrough specific religious paradoxes, nevertheless allow
for a powerful literary tension between concrete visible data and the mys-
teries of religious imagination. What does the imagery of monastic writings
tell us about the passions of monastic life?33 What are the relationships
between doctrinal form and meditation practice?34 There are many ways,

30Ibid., 47.
31E.g., Eliade, Mephistopheles and the Androgyne.
32E.g., O'Flaherty, Siva.
33CarolineWalker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle
Ages (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982).
34Steven T. Katz, Mysticism and Religious Traditions (New York: Oxford University Press,
1983).
332 HARVARDTHEOLOGICALREVIEW

then, in which the religious imagination can be juxtaposed to more mun-

dane, or at least more familiar, realities. Nevertheless, many scholars inter-
ested in religion often do follow a common dynamic in their writing. Pre-
senting a religious contradiction as a scholarly problem, they generate the
poles of a literary tension in their work-one that translates their subjects'
religious experience into readers' aesthetic experience.
Stated in these terms, ours is indeed an unusual occupation. It has de-
rived in good part, I think, from the peculiar way in which religionists
come together as a community in the contemporary academy. Concentrating
in diverse world areas and having different theoretical-not to speak of
metaphysical-perspectives, what brings scholars identifying themselves as
religionists together seems to be largely a common fascination for the
materials of religion. Perhaps the only academic attitude they share is a
reluctance completely to reduce the subject of their discourse to some other
frame of reference. Yes, religionists reduce others' experience to their own
terms when they talk about it and may attribute certain aspects of it to hard
social-scientific causes. But they also want somehow to maintain the inde-
pendence of a sphere of religious behavior that moves according to its own
imperatives. As in any field, this independence is crucial if the study of
religion is to maintain (or in this case establish) itself as a discipline.
Nevertheless, religion as object of study presents its own problems of re-
duction. For, as scholars, we want a rational explanation; but, fascinated by
our materials, we do not want totally to lose the allure of the irrational. We
want a science of religion that has science and religion, too.
This, then, seems to be the fundamental paradox in writing on religion.
A problem in our materials strikes us as paradoxical, leading us on an
investigation undertaken in a spirit akin to scientific inquiry. But the para-
dox in its own terms derives from a religious mystery, which we also want
somehow to represent. For if all that religionists have in common is a
fascination with the materials of religion, our success as religionists de-
pends on our ability to convey in our writing our subject's appeal to us. We
thus often end up recreating something of the mystery we see through a
writing that itself contains the opposites of mundane and mysterious that
continually confront us. Professionally as well as personally, then, the at-
traction of scientific inquiry and the desire to share a vision of fascinating
materials may both be genuine for many of us-just as love and religion
may both have been serious for Donne. As a result, creative discovery in
history of religions often goes hand in hand with a kind of creative writing.