starting a book

I finally decided on a book to read - Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Examplary Minds (2002) by Harold Bloom. 

Yesterday I decided (kind of on the spur of the moment, although there were particular things I needed to do in the near future) that I was going to go out. I knew that I was going to be on the train and waiting around for fairly lengthy periods of time, so I wanted to take a book with me. I looked at the selection I have on my shelf that are my 'to be read' books in order, but I had that feeling of.....in theory, yes, these are the books - and the first one is the book - I want to read next/ first, but, when the moment comes, I'm not so sure. 

I was just not that excited about any of those first 15 or so 'to be read' books that I keep on the shelf above my desk, so I looked at all my other books. I think the deciding factor - against the ostensible TBR books and for the book I actually chose - is scope. This is one of Bloom's book - like The Western Canon (1994) - that encompasses pretty much the whole of human cultural history. So, there's scope, and with Bloom there is also always depth. 

side note: I was thinking just now that, actually, I could have taken my kindle with me and then had a range of books to choose from and not have to carry the weight of a book....so I got out my kindle and had a look at it...and all the books have gone. my library is empty. These days I read the kindle books on my kindle desktop app, and that still has all my kindle books in it. still....why aren't they on my kindle? 

Bloom is fascinating on religion. It's kind of a secondary area of expertise of his, which flows from his literary interests. He's written a few books about religion and the Bible (specifically the King James Bible) and often refers to Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah, gnosticism and other religious ideas, in his work. Among the genii, in Genius, are the Yahwist (the writer of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible), the Apostle Paul, and Muhammad. He makes this astonishing (and true) observation about Muhammad and the Qur'an:

No one else in human religious history has given us a text in which God alone is the speaker. 

For Christians and Jews, this is true of the Bible, but in a slightly different way. It's still literally true - the New Testament says that 'all scripture is God breathed' (NIV) or 'inspired by God' (NASB, KJV and a lot of the more literal interpretations). But the idea is that God worked through humans to write it, so, from a human point of view, especially at the time it was written, there is a sense in which it is the work of human beings. That it was written by hundreds of different authors, from all different walks of life, over a period of thousands of years, makes it all the more impressive that it forms not just a coherent text, but a work of great literary value and aesthetic power, as well as being regarded as the very word of God by people of faith. 

Muslims also believe in the Bible in a sense. They believe in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) but they believe that it was later corrupted so that it's no longer reliable. Similarly, they believe in the gospel, but they don't believe that the books called gospels by Christians (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) are a faithful representation of the gospel or that the message preached by the apostle Paul (as the gospel) is faithful to the true gospel. My understanding is that they believe the gospel was made known by divine revelation to Jesus, but has since been lost. But they also believe in the book of Psalms, and it seems like, of all the three aspects or parts of the Bible they recognise, this is the one they regard as most authentic and uncorrupted. So, if you were trying to engage in some kind of inter-faith dialogue, this may be a good place to turn. But there's so many interesting areas of overlap between the Qur'an and the Old Testament. I've listened to teaching from the Qur'an about figures and events from the Old Testament and the message is very conversant with Christian teaching about the Old Testament. In some ways it's better (the Islamic teaching on the Old Testament, I mean)....it's kind of earthy and practical - really looking at the life and experience of figures in the Bible (like Moses, for example) and relating it to our life and experience - including spiritual experience. 

But, getting back to the point - yes - while the Bible is written in all different formats and in a direct sense, was written down by humans, while, in a higher sense, it is fully God's expression, the Qur'an is more directly an expression of God as it is. Muslims believe that the Qur'an was dictated from God by the angel Gabriel to Muhammad, so the words were literally spoken by God. That's why the words - the actual words in the original Arabic - are so important to Muslims and are used in prayer and other religious activities. Even in teaching about the Qur'an and Islam, although the speaker may teach in English or whatever other language the audience recognises, they will begin by reading the main passage out fully in Arabic, and they will frequently refer to the Arabic wording and its meaning during their teaching - because the Qur'an in Arabic is the real thing - the Qur'an in its pure and real form - and a translation is more on the level of a paraphrase. 

For Christians though, the Bible in translation is regarded as the very word of God. This might seem problematic, but on reflection it's no more problematic - it's a similar kind of mystery - to the coincidence of human free-will and God's sovereignty. God is in absolute control. Nothing happens that God doesn't either allow or cause. But humans have absolute freewill. That seems like a contradiction, but a lot of the time, when something seems like a contradiction, it's simply because we don't understand it. We can't conceive of how it can be true, but our understanding is limited. It's actually arrogant on our part when we think that, just because something doesn't make sense to us, that it doesn't make sense and can't be true. In modern science, quantum physics has forced us to accept that. 

I didn't get that much of the book read. I got up to page 36. One of Bloom's main interests in this book is the influence of genius on itself - like, how did Shakespeare's writing of each of his plays contribute to his growth as a writer and lead to later works? So, with that question, he facilitates a movement away from viewing scriptural books, like the Bible and the Qur'an, through the prism of spirituality to viewing them as literary creations by an author(s). After all, that's what he's interested in - literary creation by human authors. 

anyway, it's good to be started on a book.