Den brinnande busken

För att bara kort återgå till denne John Doyle, vars jakt efter ett ”elohimitiskt etos” just har refererats. Måste bara citera några punkter ur en artikel han publicerat under den ganska tilltalande rubriken ”Genesis 1 as creatorly praxis”:

• The creative interval. A work of creation doesn’t take shape instantaneously (as the Greeks would have it), nor is it a continuous unfolding without beginning or end (as in Eastern traditions). In Genesis 1 the work begins on day one and ends on day six – a delimited duration in time set aside specifically for creating.
• The formless void. It’s not a chaos to be avoided (as in Greek and pagan traditions), but rather an opening, a place of pure potential. The creator immerses himself in the void and shapes a creation from inside it. Postmodernists like Derrida and Badiou and Zizek have been rehabilitating the void as a creative space.
• In the midst. The Genesis 1 Creator doesn’t stand apart from the creation like some perfect Deist. Neither does he give birth to a creation that is essentially an emanation of himself, like a pagan sky father or earth mother. Instead he jumps into the void, rolls his sleeves up, and sets to work.
• Separate and name. Repeatedly the Creator speaks the name of something (light, seas, heavens, etc.) and separates it from that which it is not (light from darkness, waters above from waters below, etc.). This systematic conceptual-linguistic method has always guided Western thought, even if it is presently derided as the result of the modern mind’s overdeveloped left hemisphere.

  /…/

• Creation as a real possibility. The idea of consciously shaping something that wouldn’t have come into being without intelligence and imagination and will, something that wouldn’t have evolved on its own: this is a distinctly Biblical idea. It’s been with us from the beginning, and it’s served us well over the millennia.
• Image and likeness. It’s certainly consistent with the flow of Genesis 1 to assert that man too is a creator, that the “image and likeness” manifests itself in our ability (both genetic and learned) to emulate God’s creative ethos as demonstrated in Genesis 1.

Här finns en tydlighet, i och med kontrastrandet mot framför allt det grekiska. Samtidigt förloras, kan jag känna, en massa andra aspekter om Genesis 1 bara ska betraktas som en beskrivning av en ”konstnärlig teknik”. Är det förresten inte en smula självmotsägande att betona skapandet av världen som ett avgränsat projekt med början och slut, samtidigt som man betonar att hela Genesis 1 är en ”praxis för skapande” som i någon mening upprepas ständigt, i stort och smått?
Dessutom tycks John Doyles läsning åtminstone riskera att spä på moderna myter om en homogen ”judeo-kristen” civilisation, där såväl skillnader mellan Genesis-läsningar som paralleller med andra traditioner osynliggörs. Vad tycker ni andra?

Kanske kan man fundera kring olika innebörder i verbet ”skapa” med hjälp av följande passage i Hannah Arendts The Human Condition:

Greek and Latin, unlike the modern languages, contain two altogether different and yet interrelated words with which to designate the verb ‘to act’. To the two Greek verbs archein (‘to begin’, ‘to lead’, finally ‘to rule’) and prattein (‘to pass through’, ‘to achieve’, ‘to finish’) correspond the two Latin verbs agere (‘to set into motion’, ‘to lead’) and gerere (whose original meaning is ‘to bear’). Here it seems as though each action were divided into two parts, the beginning made by a single person and the achievement in which many join by ‘bearing’ and ‘finishing’ the enterprise /…/ In both cases the word that originally designates only the second part of the action, its achievement – prattein and gerere – became the accepted word for action in general, whereas the words designating the beginning of action became specialized in meaning, at least in political language.

/ Rasmus