The mystery revealed/4 - Knowing how to be masters of listening to understand darkness and open ways to the future.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire on 23/04/2022
"Three things you must not do: appease your companion in the hour of his anger; try to comfort him while his dead is lying in front of him; wanting to see him in the act of his weakness".
Shimon Ben Elazar, Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers, IV,18)
The first dream of the Babylonian king as interpreted by Daniel reveals essential dimensions of the prophecy, such as the word seen and then spoken.
«In the second year of his reign, Nebuchadnezzar had dreams; his mind was troubled and he could not sleep. So the king summoned the magicians, enchanters, sorcerers and astrologers to tell him what he had dreamed. When they came in and stood before the king, he said to them, “I have had a dream that troubles me and I want to know what it means"» (The Book of Daniel 2,1-3). A great king, a foreign king, idolatrous, has a dream that disturbs him a lot and seeks exegetes of his dream.
The stories in the Book of Daniel overlap in many places with the equally splendid ones in the cycle of Joseph in Egypt. Daniel is the narrative and theological brother of Joseph. It is probable that whoever wrote the Book of Daniel used the story in Genesis s a score, although we do not know when the legend of Daniel began to circulate at least in oral form. They are both masters of dreams, and they are so in a different way from the technical experts of their foreign kings. An essential aspect of prophecy is hidden in this diversity.
The Bible experienced the charm of Chaldean culture and the science of dreams. It is likely that the story of this dream is a reworking of a Babylonian story about the last Chaldean king Nabonidus - some Babylonian fragments of one of his dreams have been found in the caves of Qumran. The Bible did not completely repudiate Babylonian scientific culture. The decisive operation that the biblical authors did with the legacy of Babylonian dream science was to distinguish it from prophecy. And as they tried to say what was wrong with those ancient arts, they understood better what their prophecy was.
«Then the astrologers answered the king, “May the king live forever! Tell your servants the dream, and we will interpret it.” The king replied to the astrologers, “This is what I have firmly decided: If you do not tell me what my dream was and interpret it, I will have you cut into pieces and your houses turned into piles of rubble"». (Daniel 2,4-5). The text, in verse 4, tells us that the Chaldeans addressed the king "in Aramaic": from here until chapter 7, the Book of Daniel is no longer written in Hebrew, but in Aramaic.
A first twist, which breaks the parallel with Joseph and the dream of the pharaoh (Genesis 41), here Nebuchadnezzar is not only asking for the interpretation of his dream; he wants his sages to reveal the dream to him as well. The king's request is at the very least bizarre, and appears so to the Chaldeans as well: «Once more they replied, “Let the king tell his servants the dream, and we will interpret it"» (Daniel 2,7). As we will soon see, the king had not forgotten his dream. He then uses this non-information to make a selection to understand the quality of his experts, whom he seems to trust very little (Daniel 2,8-9). If, in fact, the king had recounted his dream, the Babylonian culture possessed sophisticated manuals of màntica, handbooks where every dream was broken down into its essential elements, codified over the centuries. An advanced technique that would have produced an explanation without the need for any divine intervention.
With this strange request, the Book of Daniel creates a narrative expedient to express how insufficient technique can be for certain types of dreams. It also seems that the king realizes that his dream is no ordinary dream, where the technicians could do a good job; this dream required skills that the king doubted were present among his dream advisors. Thus, the writer creates a dramatic space for the eruption on the scene of something else entirely: prophecy. «The astrologers answered the king, “There is no one on earth who can do what the king asks... This made the king so angry and furious that he ordered the execution of all the wise men of Babylon» (Daniel 2,10-12). Kings (once upon a time) were like this. Herodotus (Stories, III, 74-79) reports of the killing of the court magicians at the hands of Darius. Proof that the relationship between the ancient kings and their sages and magicians had always been delicate, because, thanks to the enchanting power of the latter, it was not rare for sovereigns to experience such a strong fascination with it, that it easily exposed them to manipulation – a phenomenon that is still present.
And here Daniel interferes: «So the decree was issued to put the wise men to death, and men were sent to look for Daniel and his friends to put them to death. When Arioch, the commander of the king’s guard, had gone out to put to death the wise men of Babylon, Daniel spoke to him with wisdom and tact» (Daniel 2,13-14). Daniel returns to the scene showing the virtues that have always characterized him so far, prudence and relational wisdom, which allow him to obtain the benevolence of his interlocutors and rulers. Essential virtues in every exile and in every war, from which a "remnant" can be saved if Daniel's kind and nonviolent wisdom prevails over Samson's warfare (Judges 16,30).
From Arioch's reply, Daniel understands the gravity of the situation and, as he had done in the case of the contaminated food, he immediately acts to find a solution - reveal the dream and the interpretation to the king. The characters of the Bible (including Jesus) act out of the dramatic circumstances in which they find themselves, not to show off special effects. The first thing Daniel does is go back to his companions: «Then Daniel returned to his house and explained the matter to his friends Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah. He urged them to plead for mercy from the God of heaven concerning this mystery» (Daniel 2,17-18). We do not know why the author chose to place Daniel's gift of vision within a community of young friends. We do not know, but it is nice that the first theophany of this book takes place within the company of a group, a praying community. The Bible is a continuous dialogue between singular and plural voices, between a God who loves crowded places and the same God who loves the small-infinite space of a listening heart. The "we" and the "I" represent the two beats of the rhythm of biblical humanism, even if, when we enter the field of prophecy, the "we" finds itself between two "I's" that precede and follow it. Inspiration happens within a person (I), it is revealed and understood within the community (we), and it becomes a word through the person who announces it (I): «During the night the mystery was revealed to Daniel in a vision» (Daniel 2,19).
The Book of Daniel is a late text of the Old Testament, and hence it inherited all the great prophetic tradition. There is something essential in the "mystery revealed" to Daniel, however. The prophets are men of the word, the only ones who can say "oracle of the Lord" and then open the quotation marks. They are beggars of words that are not their own, that they learn to distinguish from their own; they are masters of hearing. Word is the other name of a prophet. With Daniel, however, we understand that in a prophecy the word (dabàr) is preceded by the vision (hazòn) which reveals a mystery (raz) which is then spoken by the word. With some prophets, this passage remains implicit; with others, we can clearly identify it: in the Book of Daniel, it is both explicit and central. In prophecy (biblical, religious and secular) the spoken word comes after a spiritual event where the prophet, first, sees, then the vision opens up a mystery to him (the message that he must announce), and finally he speaks offering that mystery revealed to the people.
It should not surprise us then that the prophets see the word: «The word that Isaiah the son of Amoz saw» (Isaiah 2,1), or «The words of Amos… which he saw concerning Israel» (Amos 1,1). The spiritual event happens, and in its spring moment, it is pre-verbal. The prophet sees it before it becomes a spoken word. Those who observe it also call this first vision a "word" ("the word that Isaiah saw "), but if the prophet had had to speak in that primordial vision, he would have remained mute, or he would have wept. The body of the prophet is the place in which that vision becomes word; and since the body speaks of time, space and history, between the vision and the word there is in fact time, space and history. And when that vision comes out of the mouth and body of the prophet it is no longer the white light that the prophet saw: but a light that has already been coloured by the prophet's humanity, by his space, by his time, by the spaces and places of history. When born, prophecy is pure vision that envelops a mystery; it is mythos. Then the logos is generated, and only when the mystery is revealed-embodied in the body, in time and in space can it become speech.
There are a few important consequences derive from this. On the one hand, biblical revelation does not coincide with his word and is greater. We have the word of the event; we do not have the event itself. This is why in the terrible times, when words, even biblical ones, all become mute; in order to speak again we need to return to the mystery contained by the vision, to the event that had spoken those words that did not exhaust it. This holds true for the Bible and for our own life. After an illness, a mourning, a Golgotha, that in a single moment has worn out and aged all our words leaving us speechless, in order to start a discourse again we must go back to the events that founded our words, and on those naked non-words (a voice, an encounter, a light) try to rise again. The Bible did not make an idol of itself because it guarded the non-verbal mystery that founded it and then re-founded it again every day. When we forget the unspoken mystery behind the word, Scripture loses its depth, and we imprison God within his words and reduce him to a banal deity. However, it is no less serious to forget that there is a silent mystery even behind our own words and that of others, and that the ugliest words we have spoken to each other can be saved by those unspoken ones because they are unspoken.
Furthermore, if we only receive "coloured light" from the prophets, the readers of the Bible and every recipient of prophecy (including that special form of prophecy that is art) will be precluded from the white light. This is the mystery-not-revealed of the prophets; it is the secret of the prophets that is unrevealed because it cannot be revealed. Even if those who listen to the prophets can very easily confuse the coloured light with white light, thus forgetting about history and the limits of space and time: this is how prophets become idols. To Daniel the mystery of another man's dream (the king) was revealed during one of his own dreams. While dreaming he understood the mystery of someone else's dream. We can only understand the great dreams of others if we make an effort to dream as well. In times of famine of dreams, too many mysteries remain undiscovered due to the famine of dreamers.
