Building Religions 16: Interpreting Scripture, part 2

Let's say that you've decided that your fictional religion doesn't adhere to literal interpretations of its scripture, or at least that it doesn't only read its texts in a literal way. Your alternative is the allegorical approach, which takes the text as the starting point for moral, theological, or eschatological statements. If you do, you can open up a whole new range of options for yourself, as well as introducing new complications to the matter of interpretation.


Before getting into what forms this approach can take, it's worth spending some time thinking about why it would arise to begin with. As I've said before, one of the qualities of scripture is that it tends to be fixed once it's been accepted by its community. There can be disagreements about which documents to take as authoritative, and some sects might introduce scriptures that aren't accepted by their co-religionists, but no one is going to rewrite a text that's already part of the canon. For the community, this has the benefit of assuring the continuity and stability of the tradition; it also means that people are bound to a work that is, by its nature as a written work, finite.

Eventually, someone is going to pose a question that the text can't answer directly. It's not a problem if no one expects it to do so: you can imagine a religious society that's trying to work out the morality of cloning, for example, and not bringing scripture into the conversation at all because it's never addressed explicitly. Because scripture tends to be seen as a total work—something that incorporates a complete view of the cosmos—it's not so easy to accept that it cannot provide all the answers. That's where the work of allegorical interpretation begins. It fills in the gaps and offers the possibility of finding infinite meaning in finite text.

To someone outside of the religion, the system can appear arbitrary. Why are some passages read literally, while others are taken metaphorically? How do people decide what those metaphors refer to, and how do they make their case for their interpretation? If you're creating your own religion, you don't need to develop a full hermeneutical method to go with it, but you should at least have some general parameters.

Let's work with a basic example:

The Yainagi people of Sarasa have one collection of sacred texts, The Transcriptions of the Pillar. They were originally inscribed in their entirety on a stone monument deep in the equatorial deserts, but have since been copied into books to make them available in Yainagi communities. The Transcriptions describe the creation of the world, the passing of laws from the Creator to the people, and the Yainagi's role in a future struggle between the Creator's three children. The scriptures are believed to have been written by the Creator herself, and thus to be a perfect translation of the divine mandate.

A situation like this leads to a pair of fundamental interpretations, assumptions from which other interpretations will develop. First, that the Creator would not give the Yainagi a work that did not cover every aspect of their lives, whether at the time when the Transcriptions were written, in the present day, or in the future. Second, that no part of the Transcriptions is in error, is unnecessary, or is without meaning. The first assumption derives from the text itself, in which the Creator promises to be a just and eternal guide to her people. The second emerges from the first: because the Creator is just, she would not deceive her followers with error; because she is a guide, she would not lead them anywhere but where they need to go.

You might notice a certain circularity at work here. Any interpretation of the text as a whole is based on the understanding of individual passages, but those passages are themselves interpreted according to an understanding of the entire text. To put it more generally (because this is a rule that doesn't just apply to this one example), the meaning of a sacred text is created out of interpretations of its parts, but those interpretations are constrained by an understanding of what the text is thought to mean.

Back to the Yainagi. What do they do when they're given access to cloning technology and have to decide whether to accept it? If they're like a real-world religious community, they look for points of comparison. They might decide that the Transcriptions' prohibitions against incest are close enough to provide an answer, ruling that both incest and cloning go against the Creator's decree that parenthood is primarily a way to forge alliances between different families. On the other hand, they might notice that the Transcriptions are quite forgiving when it comes to the subject of unmarried mothers, who are allowed to declare the desert spirits as the fathers of their children if no one else comes forward. A clone could, in that case, be acceptable as a child of the desert.

This is probably the simplest kind of allegorical interpretation, the kind that asks, "What's it like?" and looks for an answer within the text. It doesn't mean that those answers will always be easy to find, nor that the community will agree completely to the eventual solution. The more that's at stake—religiously, politically, economically, and so on—the more deeply and thoroughly supporters of different answers will investigate the problem. They'll build up their own arguments and look for mistakes in their opponents'. If they're working in a religion with a lengthy tradition of interpretation and commentary, they'll hunt for precedents among the sages of the past and rally those works to their side.

Again, to an outsider, some parts of these debates might make it look like the interpreters are obsessing over trivialities. To insiders, they're parts of a larger conversation that could change the whole course of society. If you're writing a story or building a world for a game, that sense of urgency for insiders is where to focus your attention: what conflict is the interpretation intended to resolve? What's at stake for the supporters of each interpretation? What could happen that would change the terms of the debate completely?

(Yes, there's more to come)