Problems of Understanding

Author(s): J. L. Mehta
Source: Philosophy East and West , Jan., 1989, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 3-12
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/1398877

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

University of Hawai'i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Philosophy East and West

This content downloaded from

130.243.57.230 on Thu, 18 Jun 2020 15:51:30 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
J. L. Mehta Problems of understanding

The subject given to me for this occasion is a pleasant reminder of the course
given here jointly by Professor John Carman and myself, first in 1969 and
then repeated several times in subsequent years. As a student of philosophy
I had long been under the spell of Martin Heidegger's thought and then of
Hans Gadamer's writings on philosophical hermeneutics and the debate
generated by the publication of his Wahrheit und Methode in 1960. What I
found exciting in all this was the concern, not with the art and method of
interpretation, that is, hermeneutics in the traditional sense, but with the philo-
sophical implications of the process of understanding: what does it mean to
understand something or someone; what happens, from the point of view of
truth, when understanding occurs; the forms and sources of understanding;
how tradition is built up and sustained by continuous reinterpretation of the
past in the perspective of our present. In that course we sought to apply these
insights to a concrete inquiry and to test how far they illumined the historical
process of the encounter between India and the Western world of ideas, the
process which began with Hegel in Europe, following the rise of Western
Oriental scholarship, and with Rammohan Roy in India. Questions of the
following sort engaged us: How and under what presuppositions did Hegel
appropriate within his system the pioneering Indological knowledge com-
municated to the Western world by scholars like Williams Jones and Thomas
Colebrooke? What were the intellectual forces that shaped the religious
thinking and modernizing ventures of Rammohan Roy, sometimes called the
father of modern India? What was the contribution of the Serampore mis-
sionaries in the modernizing process, and how far did their own religious
prejudgments affect their understanding of Indian religious life? What, gener-
ally, were the enabling as well as the limiting conditions under which Western
scholars, poets, and culture critics-fired by the vision of an Oriental
Renaissance, Christian missionaries, and agents of the Imperial power-
functioned in their understanding of the Indian cultural and religious situa-
tion? What, similarly, were the preconditions under which Indian intel-
lectuals, reformers, men of letters, and politicians appropriated modern
Western ideas in their social, political, legal, and religious thinking? To
what degree has the mind of the modern intellectual in India been shaped
by currents of religious and secular thought flowing from the West? To what
extent and in what manner does the Indian intellectual, who has learnt the in-
escapability of participating in the dominant Western civilization of today,
feel obligated not only to participate in the heritage of his own tradition but
to feel at home in it? There is, above all, the question of language: How far

EDITOR'S NOTE: This lecture was presented by Professor Mehta at Harvard University on June 13,
1988, shortly before his death. It was an address before the 1988 Summer Institute on "Teaching
Comparative Courses: Exploring Thematic Approaches to the Study of Religion," sponsored by
the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This content downloaded from

130.243.57.230 on Thu, 18 Jun 2020 15:51:30 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
4 Mehta

must the thinking Indian allow himself to be dominated by the Engl

guage, the very embodiment of what was until recently an alien culture?
happens when he lets the "speculative instruments" embodied in one
own languages, of his native tongue, with its own special metaphors,
and symbolism, take over?
For me personally, these questions were not just abstract problems per
ing to the academic pursuit called comparative religion-though I conf
personal fascination with Western letters for their own sake-but pa
continuing effort at self-understanding, which in my view constitutes t
religious process. A certain degree of alienation, opacity, and bafflem
sense of resistant otherness, prompts the effort to understand, and
therefore always an other for its object, be it the otherness into which p
elements of my own tradition have lapsed, be it the ways of living and t
ing belonging to alien religious and cultural traditions. Now, that in me
enables me to get a hold on this "other" is not so much my explicitly
lated beliefs as it is the total horizon which determines my thinking
which my implicitly held judgments, my prejudgments or prejudi
preunderstanding in short, are a crucial part. The attempt to underst
other thus brings me up against another total cultural horizon which I se
enter on the basis of my own historically constituted horizon. Whet
the forgotten past of my own traditional heritage or the otherness o
ferent religious tradition, in each case I am thrown back upon myse
reexamination of my own preconceptions, to an awareness of my ow
udices and their restrictive influence on my thinking. This to-and-fr
ment between myself and the other, between my present and the herita
my past, is also part of what is known as "the circle of understanding,"
leads to a deepening and widening of my own self-awareness throu
corrective circularity of understanding. Thus, a certain interfusion of d
horizons takes place and otherness is overcome, to some degree, be
myself and the other, between the past and the present.
In the context of interreligious relations, it seems to me, the inte
activity of understanding must itself be understood as part of, and
nate to, a wider whole encompassing the human person as a thinking, fe
and acting being, in ways governed in some measure by the sight pro
him by his religious tradition. And it must itself be viewed and practice
religious activity, not for the sake of mastery but as a form of mutualit
self-subordination. So regarded, and only so, will it shed the arrogan
often marks the enterprise of understanding the other, when toget
slides into an objectification of the other, and other is "comprehende
in one's grasp, from a vantage point of superiority, and eventually m
We adopt such an attitude when we view the heritage of our own pa
cally and cynically, as a reminder of outgrown childhood, and when
upon others and their cumulative traditions as objects serving the high e

This content downloaded from

130.243.57.230 on Thu, 18 Jun 2020 15:51:30 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
5

scholarly research and the accumulation of a methodologically secure body of

knowledge about them.
A question often discussed in philosophical hermeneutics is whether it is
possible to understand an author better than he understood himself; that is,
precisely what, in fact, understanding him means. With a sovereign confi-
dence characteristic of the Enlightenment, Kant took it for granted that in the
realm of thought this happens quite frequently. For Schleiermacher it is the
main purpose and meaning of understanding: the critic and interpreter makes
explicit much that the creative writer spontaneously achieved, much that
escaped and overflowed his conscious intention. In the name of science and
reason, a mode of understanding thus arises in which the other is reduced and
devalued through the practice of such a "hermeneutics of suspicion," as
Ricoeur calls it. Instead of saying that we understand an author, as a person,
better than he understood himself, we should perhaps say that the matter he
wrote about, the Sache, may be understood, if not better, at most in a newer
light than it was earlier, by subsequent thinkers. In the case of sacred texts,
however, we cannot disregard the fact that these texts are the products of
a way of life adopted by an entire people and in turn have inspired and
nourished their faith, that the texts here play a crucial role within the context
of a whole way of being, living, and thinking. Understanding what is said in a
text, thus, cannot be dissociated from the life that is lived under the inspira-
tion that the text has provided, and continues to provide, in the life of a
people. When the scholarly work on a text is done we must annul the objec-
tification and put the text back within the personal context where it belongs.
From this perspective a sacred text ceases to be just a verbal icon, an object to
be brought within our conceptual grasp, for it has been effective in the destiny
of people without awaiting the results of scholarly labour, and will presum-
ably continue to be so irrespective of what the scholar discovers. The un-
known and the unspoken speaks through it, the unspeakable announces itself
through it. It nourishes, stimulates, and provokes the attempt to understand
without ever fully yielding its secret to such attempts. An element of mystery
remains, as it does when we seek to understand a person as a person, not
seeking control over him but being with him, who is as ineluctably a mystery
as anyone we love can be.
Our understanding of our own religious past and that of others depends
largely on how we view our situatedness in the present, politically, culturally,
and religiously, on our perception of our movement into the future. Follow-
ing the law of circularity, we in turn comprehend and judge the world of our
present in terms of our understanding of our religious and cultural tradition.
One may be so firmly in the grip of the present secularized, scientized, and
technified world as to reject one's religious tradition altogether and identify
oneself with modernity. One may judge it as the only and inevitable way to go
and welcome it as an advance into a bright future, yet also experience the

This content downloaded from

130.243.57.230 on Thu, 18 Jun 2020 15:51:30 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
6 Mehta

need to bring the resources of one's religious tradition to bear on this tim
crisis, even to go so far as to insist that only the resources of one's particu
religious tradition can satisfy that need. One may reject the ideology
secularized life in favor of a new medievalism, or seek to go further b
the past and regain the lost innocence of a more pristine way of life. I
case we have a different framework of prejudgments and anticipations, wi
which our understanding of ourselves and of others will operate. The
meneutic situation" in which we all find ourselves at the present tim
strange amalgam of a sense of greater riches at our disposal than ever
in history, an unheard-of freedom born of the opening up of new possibil
and yet a gnawing experience of vacuity and absence, of something irretri
ably lost, a whole dimension of living missing from our disenchanted
From its position of dominance and affluence, the West reaches back
own religious past and out to more tradition-bound cultures in order
rich, supplement, and appropriate from them, within its own cultural con
whatever suits its own religious needs. A developing country like Indi
the same, in its own way and according to its needs, though the mo
understanding and the regions of its operation in each case vary accord
the difference in the two perspectives. In my own experience, for exam
have found this double movement of understanding, out to the othe
back to oneself, operative most of the time. I seek to understand the West
attending to its philosophical tradition, including the more subversive
critical moments in it, and to its literary, scientific, and religious-humani
currents of thought and sensibility, in that order. For self-understan
reach back again to the religious texts of my own tradition, seeking to
out of the immediacy of just living out of it, in its language, reflec
appropriating it from the perspective of my participation in the "worl
lization" of the present. I must also admit that in this task of reinterp
and reappropriation I find Western scholarly work on ancient Indian t
fascinating interest, both because it sometimes scratches and irritates
forces me to give shape to my reflection, and also because it enables m
achieve a certain distance from what is mine, by virtue of the differe
language, idiom, and scholarly protocol. I am thus enabled to gain a fre
of understanding which would not otherwise be available to me. Also,
convinced that we in the Orient-the "Orient" of the West's imaginati
coinage, against which it has defined its own identity-can come back
ourselves at this moment in history only by passing through the We
pilgrimage to our own selfhood, and being mediated by this passage th
the West.

It is important, I am suggesting, to become self-conscious of the presup-

positions and motivations operative in our attempt to understand the other
and to see and spell out, for oneself and the other, that these are constitutive
elements of the understanding we achieve at any moment. No method, no

This content downloaded from

130.243.57.230 on Thu, 18 Jun 2020 15:51:30 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
7

suprahistorical or transcendental point of view, is available that can lift us out

of this circle of understanding and of our finitude. Most of what goes on in our
academic work, and in the discipline which goes into the making of a scholar,
is a form of Herrschaftswissen, of understanding as an instrument of the will-
to-power. It is a noble expression of such will, so long as it does not give rise
to a whole system of discourse, to use Michel Foucault's terminology, which is
meant to entrap and dominate other human groups, whether they belong to
other traditions or to the excluded other in one's own. Scholarship, individual
or institutionalized, like other forms of mastery, is inseparable from civilized
living, and it is better to work out our repressions in acquiring mastery over a
"field of knowledge" than over fellow human beings. It remains, however, a
mode of sublimation, resting on repression and resistance to the universal
religious command to look within oneself. It is the highest form of sublima-
tion, perhaps, but it is all the more insidious when abused as an instrument
of mastery over other people. As a form of sublimation, the dedication to
scholarship points to the still remaining task of self-knowledge. It invites
us, should we do so, to ask why and in the name of what I am engaged in this
scholarly enterprise-as an individual, or as representative of an institution
or a community, a culture, or a civilization-to ask what it is in me that
generates this motion and this passion. The question of motivation cannot be
evaded, at any of the levels just mentioned. The wisdom literature of the
world, the so-called philosophia perennis and Scripture everywhere, the com-
munity of saints the world over, are all at one in insisting upon the return to
awareness of self as the culmination of all knowledge, involving the leap from
one way of knowing to another.
The novel feature of the world in which we live today, whatever may be the
religious tradition to which we belong, is that we are all inextricably caught up
in what Heidegger has called "world civilization," a process which has spread
out from its origin in the West, of which the roots go back to the Greek-
Christian foundations of Western civilization, and of which the fruits are
manifest in modern science and technology. This last is not merely a neutral
instrument at our disposal but represents a mode of knowing, having its foun-
dations in the philosophy of the West, which gives mastery over everything
that is by objectifying it. In this sense, at least, Hegel's famous dictum has
proved true, the assertion that "The history of the world travels from East to
West, for Europe is absolutely the end of history, Asia the beginning," though
one may wonder whether it is really "the Sun of self-consciousness, which
diffuses a nobler brilliance [than the physical sun]" that has finally arisen in
the land of the setting sun. We are living and participating in a "world civil-
ization" in which we seek to fill the emptiness within us by doing something
"meaningful," but in which thinking men and women all over the world are
for once united in their perception of some indefinable peril confronting us,
a peril that threatens not only our existence but, what is more important, be-

This content downloaded from

130.243.57.230 on Thu, 18 Jun 2020 15:51:30 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
8 Mehta

cause beyond all measures of control, our human substance itself. This
phenomenon has made it all the more evident that we must recall a
understand in a new fashion, the resources that our different religious tr
tions hold in reserve for us, beyond all motivations of self-insistence, ma
over others, or the concern for saving "others." There are indications that
enterprise of understanding is taking a form appropriate to the new
that envelops humankind, especially in that part of the cultural world
where the threat has arisen in the first place. The nurture of this new fo
quires, first, that if we at all make it our business to study the texts
have shaped other religious traditions, we must do it with reference t
to what degree and extent, they matter now to the people concerned,
far such study shapes our relations, not to other "religions" but to peo
longing to these other traditions. No amount of scholarship of "othe
gions" is going to help, if it does not in the end enable us to live with
others, to live together with them like children at play. In the second
I will just mention a moral principle beautifully formulated by the p
opher Kant, that our duty towards others is to give them happiness
towards ourselves it is self-perfection-not the other way round. Reli
this would mean, I suppose, that understanding others should not b
the satisfaction of curiosity inspired by a sense of wonder, or a me
extending our power over them, or the detached contemplation of
phenomenon, or even the spell exercised and the love inspired by the
and the different. Understanding others must culminate in self-un
standing, as an acting on oneself but letting the other be, and in tha
of compassion be an understanding of the other, not in the sense o
intellectual operation performed on him. Understanding then would
pilgrimage toward oneself, others being the tirthas, the sacred plac
passes through on one's way to the final destination.
The wayfaring of an individual through the limited span of his lif
people through history, or of humankind itself into the unfore
future-these too are pilgrimages. And I suggest that, from a certain p
tive, they are pilgrimages toward Scripture. At the beginning of each
great religious traditions stands a body of writings, or orally transmitted
of words, which sends off the tradition on its voyage in time. It is autho
for participants in that tradition in the sense of providing them with a l
which illumines and gives meaning to their lives; with a medium th
which they experience and understand life, reality, and truth; with a mea
in terms of which they judge between good and bad, right and wron
and false; with the very terms in which they understand themselv
others. In the second place, traditions are constituted by a continuous
of interpretation and reinterpretation of Scripture and by the accumulati
a body of sacred literature which defines or redefines, enlarges or na
the scope and authority of Scripture. The encounter with other tra

This content downloaded from

130.243.57.230 on Thu, 18 Jun 2020 15:51:30 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
9

plays a significant role in this process, introducing, as at the present time in

history, a kind of self-examination and self-criticism in each of the major
traditions, which is somewhat new to each of them. None of these traditions is
a monolith; each has conflicting elements within its structure, giving to it its
own unique dynamism; each has gone through, and responded to, the crises
and contingencies of the factitious turns and events of history; each moves
into the uncertainties of the future; and for none of them is their present
completely transparent to them.
The community of faith to which Scripture, or rather the Scriptural process,
gives rise is a "community of speech," a Sprachgemeinschaft. Such a com-
munity may seek to enlarge the area of its own manner of speaking in a vari-
ety of ways, such as mastering the alien mode of speaking and subsuming it
under one's own. This might be called the Hegelian method of Aufhebung,
understanding for purposes of mastery, religious and linguistic absolutism.
This approach has generated in the West, during the past two centuries, much
of what Edward Said calls "the discourse of Orientalism." During recent
years, however, there has been talk of "religious pluralism" as a fact not to be
wished away, and some kind of acceptance of it, even if it be with unspoken
reservations. At its best, understanding here is often for the sake of learning
from the other, enriching in this way the resources of one's own speech, but
also sometimes out of sheer love for the other, and for the sake of a world of
mystery and delight to which the new linguistic magic casements give access.
This is pure reaching out to the other, which does not seek either to enslave
him, or to change him, or to save him, but which finds joy in the beauty of his
otherness; it is like learning a new language and gaining access to the new
world it opens up. But a language, though one may use it as an instrument to
serve one purpose or another, is something more, a house, a home to be lived
in as one's own, to be claimed by it in turn, however temporarily.
One "speech community" understands another, I make bold to say, to the
extent to which it learns to live in the same "house of words" as the other.
This is not just a question of scholarship nor, to use an expression much in
favor these days, of "dialogue." This has mostly been an ill-disguised mono-
logue in which one partner is bilingual and the other (the initiator of the
dialogue) knows or is at home in only one language, his own mother tongue.
The conversation therefore takes place in the latter's mother tongue, and the
poor bilingual traveller between two worlds, but not he alone, has already lost
the dialogical battle before the exchange actually takes place. It is worth
pondering on the kind of understanding that happens here. My mother ton-
gue is, say, Hindi and my second linguistic home is English. While having a
dialogue with X, whose mother tongue is English, I can understand him but
he understands me only insofar as I am a guest in his house and answer back in
his own terms. It does not make a big difference in this state of affairs if X has
taken a few courses in Hindi in his home country or spent a couple of years in

This content downloaded from

130.243.57.230 on Thu, 18 Jun 2020 15:51:30 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
10 Mehta

north India. What he sees in my speech is his own mirror image, re

back to him in my words, an image enframed in a suitably exotic and "n
context. For those who have not become immune to this kind of d
situation, either because they have made "dialogue" into a professio
because they have some other axe to grind than mutual understandi
ligious encounters of this type are apt to leave us ruffled; they activ
sensitivity to the partner's talk as a kind of attack rather than a reachin
they aggravate my sense of my religious identity, and leave us furth
than before the dialogue took place. The affirmation, or flaunting
identity in terms of his religious tradition by my partner in such a dial
the exclusion of what binds us as human beings, provokes a similar r
in me, often to my shock and sorrow in retrospect. My religious identit
secret transaction between me and my God; I win it by wrestling w
angel, by submitting to the voice of my tradition, by eventually los
identity in favor of what my heart is set on, of what claims my
something that transcends and annuls my little "I," that gives me s
and wholeness. A dialogue can succeed only to the extent that the p
forget all about their specific religious identities for the moment and co
with each other like two wayfarers who are thrown together for a
companions on the same pilgrimage. What sort of dialogue takes plac
them; who speaks here, in what language?
Although I am not so sure now about the direct applicability of phi
cal hermeneutics to the question of interreligious understanding, let me
tion one or two of the insights which still appear to me as valuable.
standing a text, a person, or oneself involves in its fullness, Hans G
said, three moments: initial comprehension, explication or interpr
and application. To understand a text I must go beyond the genera
make of it on a first reading by explicating or interpreting it for myself
it means something to me now, says something to me, and this inv
application to my present situation, its translation into my present l
as I speak it now. "We do not really understand and explicate a text,
philosophical or literary, legal or scriptural, so long as we take it on
historical document and do not translate it so that it speaks to us
present concrete situation, so long, in other words, as it is not applie
historical point where we stand, here and now." In the matter of in
gious understanding, the crucial problem of translating what he says int
I would say it is bound to arise. To the extent that each rises to the occa
back and forth movement is generated, which movement then itself beg
be in control of the conversation. In every dialogue, we can therefore sa
"each speaker plays a language game of his own to begin with, and
thenticity of the dialogue depends upon the extent to which they g
surrender themselves to the sway of a language game that encompass
both." Understanding, in this sense of a game in which we ourselve

This content downloaded from

130.243.57.230 on Thu, 18 Jun 2020 15:51:30 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
11

some point played, takes on the character of a historical happening, the crea-
tive moment in the continuity of a tradition.
The principal value of philosophical hermeneutics seems to me to lie in
clarifying the nature of self-understanding rather than in the understanding of
others. Along with the philosophical debate it has generated and with the new
developments in semiotics, poetics, and text-theory, it is now an essential
supplement to the classical conception of philological scholarship and the
reading of texts. Here also I will remark only that I am often instructed but
sometimes shocked by the difference between the way a Western scholar
reads texts which have shaped my tradition and the way I read them. But that
is another, and long, story. Setting aside for the moment learned and bookish
models for religious understanding, I would like to suggest the model of a
pilgrimage as more appropriate and helpful. Imagine a group of people, rich
and poor, of various classes, coming from different cultural regions of the
country, speaking different languages, not necessarily belonging to an identi-
cal religious sect, coming together at the starting point of the pilgrimage and
venturing forth together on a perilous journey on foot to a common destina-
tion, to a major ttrtha in India up in the Himalayas. They come together and
walk and live together for a while, a week or a month, and will go their
separate ways again when the pilgrimage is over. They are not learned men
and women, though a man of learning and pious living may be among them,
going his own lonely way, sometimes giving them the benefit of a religious
discourse. But of one thing we may be sure. There is no one there to say
"halt!" to them because the "gegenwartige Stand der Forschung" in regard to
the origin of this sacred place and its significance does not permit "us, Indo-
logical scholars in the Western world, to arrive at any certain conclusion" or
to say, "We are uncertain even about this custom of pilgrimage in India, on
which matter several universities-Paris, Heidelberg, Oxford and Harvard
among them-are at this very moment engaged in a long-term project of
research." Unaware of such profundities, the pilgrims walk merrily on, listen-
ing sometimes to the tales told by passing holy men, sometimes confiding to
each other the story of their lives, and sometimes praying, much of the time in
playful exchanges and fun among themselves. The difference in the languages
they speak, as in other things, hardly prevents them from making themselves
understood. Recognizing and respecting these differences, they yet arrive at
an understanding which goes deeper than words. Many of them are there
because they wished to undertake the pilgrimage once before they die, to
understand and experience the meaning of their lives and of what remains to
give completion to their pilgrimage through life, to be able to give the
very name of a pilgrimage to their lives. However great their achievements
may have been down below-or however little-this last act fills up a lack,
for without it, dying would be a breaking off rather than a fulfillment. What
is understanding among people worth if it does not take place in full aware-

This content downloaded from

130.243.57.230 on Thu, 18 Jun 2020 15:51:30 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
12 Mehta

ness of our common mortality, common yet beckoning to each of us to m

alone, in the privacy of our solitary pilgrimages?
The ordinary pilgrim, with little to boast of by way of letters, has yet
words that inspire him and give him the strength and the courage to vent
forth on his arduous wayfaring, and carry him on to its conclusion: a hym
divine name, a promise he once made to the bearer of that name. One
ters, "Shiva!" and the other says, "Govinda!" and, caring little about
difference, they understand each other and are with each other. It is
Scripture from which these words come, words of faith which have n
set them off on this particular pilgrimage, but transformed their lives in
pilgrimage. To begin with, as they set out, they hardly understand what t
words "mean." It is the wayfaring, the toil of the steps taken along their
that gives meaning both to these words and to their lives, to Scripture its
Their Scripture gives meaning to the pilgrimage, and the latter in turn tr
forms a shadowy mass of words into a source of meaning in life, of which
the whole purpose may be seen to lie in discovering at last what that Scrip
means in relation to the life to which it has given such fullness of me
Not until living itself is transformed into a pilgrimage, which is nothing
living in the face of death-one's own-does Scripture disclose its sove
majesty, become truly Scripture. We scholars play around with words
them, maneuver them, and torture them, do things to them. But our pilg
age through words is no pilgrimage until words begin to do things to
become the Word by which we live. Then Scripture begins to disclo
meaning, the meaning of our life and, with luck, the unity of these s
meaning as the end of our quest.
Scriptures of different religious traditions differ, yes, but if regarded
the perspective of the remark I threw out in passing earlier, that l
pilgrimage towards Scripture, that difference may yet be seen to shrink
mere inconvenience. For, like all pilgrimages, like life itself, all Scr
transcends itself, cancels and empties itself into the disclosure of a dimen
in which there is neither the toil of understanding, nor words, nor wayf

This content downloaded from

130.243.57.230 on Thu, 18 Jun 2020 15:51:30 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms