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saves, or knowledge of Brahman?is restored to its practical status, once again woven in with the entire array of reading and writing strategies we have been considering throughout. |
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While a certain kind of honesty might seem to compel us to a choice, the affirmation of one claim and the denial of the other, the complex dialectical process of learning a new tradition and returning then, afterwards, to one's own in a series of acts of rereading, is not adequately comprehended by the reduction of theological truths to competing claims; though we may make them out to be claims, they subsist more complexly and richly within their broader traditional contexts, and now within the at least equally complex comparative context. Rather than seeing the field of comparison as a battleground where truth is under attack, or a courtroom where judgments can be swiftly passed, it is necessary to approach the issues of theological truth in a way attuned to the findings marked out in Chapter 3, and earlier in this chapter: though not reducible to their textual representations, theological truths occur only through their textual forms, and there is no other path of access to them. |
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Such truths therefore make their claim on us first of all as theological readers, whose comprehension will depend in large part on the kind of readers we turn out to behow skilled, rigorous, attentive to context, careful in our derivation of truths from their scriptural roots. As theological truths which are argued, analyzed, compared and contrasted with other truth, they are rewritten in increasingly demanding forms, available only to the person who has worked them through in great detail and with great patience. The conflicts that most directly strike the person who has not been reading carefully are not necessarily those which concern the person who is engaged in reading. The apparent contest of juxtaposed claims is just the kind of sensationalization the comparativist learns to avoid, as he or she acquires a sense of the necessarily complex origins of even the simplest experiments in the comparing of truths, and the necessity of a patient commitment to read back and forth between those truths without premature claims regarding either one or both of them. Even in comparison, therefore, the apprehension of truth retains its elitist dimension. |
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