aith as one predicated of divine revelation.
The texts themselves provide certain clues to the cultural environment from which they emerged. Further, at this late date they provide great fodder for interpretative rivalries that go to the experience of spirituality that commentators bring to the texts they investigate. Yet along the line of spiritual literature of the Judaeo-Christian tradition can be discerned a definite and persistent nexus of the pain of human experience and the means by which human beings seem to teach beyond the immediate impact of that experience and toward a level of spiritual comfort.
To infer a connection between human pain and spiritual writing is simply to note that the latter is the intelligent, sensitive being's way of coping with or otherwise coming to terms with the former. The impulse toward making meaning and significance out of a flood of content and experience is the psychological provenance of written communication in general and spiritual writing in particular. According to Max Weber, who studied the origins and development of various religious traditions, overarching the creative human enterprise, including but not limited to written communication, is the tendency toward making the universe increasingly thinkable. We shall see hereafter that spiritual thinkability is a special category and that sacred scripture is a projection of this quality. But either secular or spiritual writing presupposes the rational faculty in the writer, which precedes the organization and reduction of thought to written or otherwise abstracted form. It is, indeed, the presumption of a tendency toward rationality that engages Weber's exploration of meaning in general and the basic social structure that provides a frame in which meanings can be explained. Rationality, also translated as rationalism by Weber's translators into English, is a concept that is central to Weber's explanation of how virtually all so...