Hermes and Hermeneutics
January 29, 2012
Rev. Paul Beckel
First UU Church of Wausau ~ www.uuwausau.org

CHILDREN’S FOCUS    Spectacles, by Ellen Raskin        
[Little Iris is resistant to the idea of getting glasses. But she keeps misunderstanding what she sees, and eventually realizes she needs ‘em. Essentially the book is a series of images of what Iris thinks she sees (funny fuzzy forms) alternating with what is really in front of her.]

REFLECTIONS
Hermes was the original double agent. He was half god, half nymph. (His father was Zeus and mother Maia was a nymph—a minor nature deity, very down to earth.) So Hermes took advantage of his status as neither this nor that (and both at once) and he became the god of boundaries, and all that transgresses boundaries.

He was god of the threshold, the in and out, the crossing over place. The first threshold he crossed was when he came out of the cave where his mother was hiding (she was, naturally, fearful of jealous Hera). Hermes crawled out on the very day he was born and started having adventures (if you watch The Family Guy, Hermes is kind of like Stewie—more than a little precocious).

He was very resourceful. He made a lyre out of a tortoise shell. His half-brother Apollo had some cattle nearby. Hermes stole and slaughtered some and used cattle intestines to string the tortoise shell into a lyre.

There were 11 major gods in the Olympic Pantheon, so Hermes divided the cattle meat into 12 portions—one for each of the major gods—thereby creating a place for himself among them. He was a trickster. Instead of trying to overthrow the others, he sought reciprocity with them, but certainly not by groveling.

Well, his brother Apollo wasn’t impressed. Apollo called Hermes a thief and demanded a hearing before Zeus. Apollo was known for many things but at this point of the story let’s focus on his association with Reason—for his arrows of Truth that always went straight to the center of reality. So Apollo was not about to concede anything to this young upstart. Apollo knew what had happened (he was the god of prophecy, he could even see into the future). But Hermes had been very tricky with the cattle and some evidence seemed to be in his favor. The story is told a couple of ways: either Hermes taught the cattle to walk backward or he pulled out each of their hooves and turned the hooves around and put them back on the cattle before driving them off... in any case Hermes found a way to cover their tracks and his own.

So Truth was not on his side, but in his appeal before Zeus Hermes came up with such stories and wonderful rhetoric and wit that Zeus simply could not find Hermes at fault. Zeus told the two of them to work things out among themselves.

==
What does this all mean? Well, perhaps it’s that reality or truth (represented by Apollo) is ultimately no more compelling than language and perspective (as represented by Hermes). This is a profound statement about the limits of knowledge—reality cannot be known separately from our own perspective. Even Zeus would not judge between them.

For me the story brings to mind 3 great entities: the world, the self, and the relationship between these two.

Some people focus on or try to conceive of a pure world of objective reality. They imagine that reason or scripture can point us to an Absolute Truth. Or that their own observations and measurements can uncover a capital T Truth.

Others despair of our ever knowing anything objectively. They say that reality doesn’t even exist except as subjective illusion ... that we create and live in a world of our own imaginations.

I’m a fan of the in-between. Rather than pining away for an unreachable absolute truth (nd this can be done in the name of science just as well as in the name of religion or philosophy or politics)... Rather than looking down at the world as a specimen—as if I’m so separate and objective that my act of observation is neutral and has no impact.

And rather than (at the opposite extreme) rather than despairing at the relativity of subjective values and therefore disassociating from the world...because it’s not real anyway.

I think the richness of life is to be discovered in the relationship between self and reality. Of these three entities or spaces on which we can focus, the in-between is the most uncomfortable, the most ambiguous, creative, and significant.

It’s an ok place to hang out. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh speaks reverently of “interbeing”—the inevitable state of existence of all being, which is a state of connection-among-all-being.

The German philosopher of hermeneutics Hans-Georg Gadamer spoke of the “fusion of horizons“ – the fertile space where the boundaries of one being meet with and interpenetrate the boundaries of another.

So what is hermeneutics (other than perhaps an unnecessarily big word)? It’s the study of the process of interpretation—the methods by which we determine what things mean.

In religion, interpretation has been an issue for a long time with the ambiguity around interpretation of scriptural texts. Over time, the field has grown increasingly complex as it has expanded beyond the translation of words and into the processes and cultural and linguistic contexts in which words are used.

Learning for example what it has meant in different times and places to tell particular kinds of stories ...and then how the changing context in which we hear each story irrevocably changes their meaning.

It’s no surprise that gods like Hermes are found within conversations like this—or Jesus, who is argued to have been both human and divine (like so many characters that have emerged within various cultures). We adore them; we resonate with them, because they represent something universal that we can’t quite capture in words: our being here, in-between.

Our being interpreters—and not necessarily choosing that role but finding that it is ours. We are interpreters of divine will, the Word we carry in our flesh. We are messengers of the gods, bearers of the powers and perspectives of the ancestors and the collected wisdom of the ages, all of which we bobble on our way. And as messengers, going back and forth with nothing but the loosely woven net of language in which to carry this awkward load ...

back and forth with nothing but the loosely woven net of language in which to carry this awkward load we feel anxious about what might happen to our precious cargo ... we feel vulnerable to the dissatisfaction of those who send and receive ... and all we can do sometimes is to laugh or cry: “Don’t kill the messenger!”

==
Our human attempts to find meaning have varied over the course of history, and our methods keep growing, layer upon layer. We keep adding new media to interpret, and commentaries upon commentaries upon commentaries...each one complicating the last ... each one step further removing us from the original—if there ever was an original.

Let’s take for example the interpretation of Hebrew scripture. At one point in the development of these texts, scholars (who were convinced that a story or prophecy that arose before their own time was the inerrant objective truth presented by God...but who couldn’t make sense of it as it was told or written) ...well, they added more story to tie everything together. I find myself doing the same thing when I watch the TV series Lost, or when I read the children’s books, A Series of Unfortunate Events. Even if you aren’t familiar with these specific works, I’m guessing that you’ve had that experience: when you’re slowly given pieces of a story and on its face it’s mysterious, it doesn’t tie together ... but somewhere in your mind you’re furiously constructing and reconstructing additional plot lines.

We do this because we’re so determined that it must make sense that we crank out increasingly preposterous back-stories and potential conclusions. This is just one of the joys and beauties of fiction.

I know I do this each time I re-read “Spectacles.” Each time I look a little closer at the fuzzy pictures ... then at the high def pictures ... and I flip back and forth, and smile when I grasp some additional nuance, some closer approximation of getting it.

Hermeneutics is the study of how we get it, and the limits to getting it, and the contextual frames that are always adding new layers of meaning each time we try to get it.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the Roman version of Hermes is the god Mercury, who, even if you don’t know of him in myth, you might easily envision as slippery, unpredictable, possibly even dangerous.

But that’s a form of divinity I can embrace! Even if in the very act of embracing He slips away from me.

Oliver Wendell Holmes put it this way: “A word is not a crystal transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought.”

“A word is not a crystal transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought.”

Like Iris, I need spectacles. I need frames and lenses. What’s an iris anyway without a lens and pupil and retina and optic nerve and brain and still more layers and intermediaries that I cannot name. I need all of these pieces in order to see. But once I have all of these pieces assembled, they affect what I see. Even as they clarify, they shape and thereby distort my view of the world.

==
Hermes had the vision of an inventor. He pieced together hybrids. He is one of several who are credited with inventing fire—this power that can knock us down even tho it is immaterial and more of a transient event than a thing we can point at and say this is what it IS.

(He also invented metaphor, and gave that power to Aesop, who in turn told a story on Hermes:

A traveler—Hermes was god of travelers because they cross boundaries—a traveler prayed for safety on his way and vowed to Hermes that he would share half of anything he found on his journey. The traveler comes across a big bag of dates and almonds, and eats them all, but fulfills his vow by giving Hermes the pits of the dates and the shells of the almonds. It’s a perfect story for Hermes, who was a trickster himself.)

==
Well, anyway, you’ll be happy to know that after Zeus told Apollo and Hermes to work things out on their own, they did so. Apollo, despite himself, was starting to like Hermes. And when he heard the music of the tortoise-shell lyre, well he was shaken. He wanted more of that. So Apollo got the lyre and he gave Hermes his golden rod. (In a later story Hermes came upon a couple of snakes fighting and he thrust the rod in-between them [of course] and they twined themselves on the rod to become the symbol of medicine. So in-between may be a place of some tension but it is also clearly a place of healing balance.)

Apollo also gave Hermes a couple of jobs. Hermes became messenger of the gods, the go-between. And he became the escort for those headed to Hades, the underworld. Hermes was one of the few who were allowed to return from Hades (and to go back and forth between the worlds). Hermes even brought treasures back from the depths of Hades, and set these next to the things of this world to help us see the equality of both and the beauty and power in their juxtaposition.

And here comes a great juxtaposition: There is a female god too who carries a golden rod sometimes topped with a figure 8. She too is a messenger of the gods, and like Hermes she’s often represented with wings. And this is today’s winner of the magic serendipity prize—her name is Iris! Obviously there is some deep connection where the horizons (of however many themes I’m talking about today) where these collide – and there Iris blooms.

==
I have only scratched the surface of these depths, of course. Not that we need to get into all of the abstractions of hermeneutic philosophy, but there are a number of relevant contemporary questions I’ve been pondering that I want to pursue in the coming weeks...all of which relate to what we know and what we mean.

So keep your eyes on your Circuit Writer—it’s coming out this week. In coming Sundays we’ll explore 3 things that tend to skew meaning:

1)    doctrine and presuppositions such as those that cause people to reject biological evolution because they have a competing story that will not budge
2)    commercial and other interests that prepackage interpretations for us; and
3)    the fascinating distortions of perhaps everything we see these days in print or on a glowing rectangle—due to digital editing, or the photoshop-ization of reality ... and how this affects our ability to trust—affecting not only our trust in others but even trust in our own perceptions.

Finally at the end of February I’m going to try to wrap up with a look at whether it is ever ethical to intervene-in and intentionally influence another person’s perspective or values or sense of meaning and purpose.

Is it ok to offer guidance to one another with stories (or with our own versions of the facts)? Or—as we hover, here, in between—do we just need to let everyone make up their own minds?

SENDING SONG             Winds be Still            #83