James
E. Faulconer (DRAFT C 25
March 1998)
The historicity of scripture is important to
most Christians and, especially, to Latter-day Saints. Christians disagree
among themselves about how to understand scriptural history, but few deny that,
in some important sense, Christian scripture is historical. However, given the
challenges to scriptural history, challenges that are especially strong for
Latter-day Saints who take the Book of Mormon to be historical, what are we to
make of the claim that scriptures are history? Given those challenges, is it possible
to understand scripture as literal history? The answer to that question C positive, I will argue C lies in answering the question of what we
mean by history.
The way that academic historians have thought
of history since the beginning of modernism (about 1500) is not the only way to
think about it.[2]
However, since the eighteenth century, but especially in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, those approaching the Bible and, therefore, also
Latter-day Saint scripture, have used some variation of the academic
understanding of history as their entre into the question of scriptural
historicity. We understand scriptural interpretation to be a subset of
scholarly historical understanding, but the science of history has raised and
continues to raise a variety of questions about the historicity of scriptural
accounts. For the Bible, some of those questions have been resolved to the
satisfaction of believers and others remain questions. Given the unique
character of the Book of Mormon, work on defending its historicity has been
much less decisive. As a result, believers, especially Latter-day Saints, find
ourselves having to answer the question of to what degree our scriptural
accounts are historical.
In general, scholars, even believing ones,
have been more or less skeptical of the historical character of scripture.
However, believers (scholars and otherwise) have felt it necessary to defend
the historicity of scripture with the historian=s scholarly tools, for most Christians believe that the religious
claims of Christianity cannot be completely separated from its historical
claims, and we think that we have no way of understanding those claims except
via the tools of historical scholarship. For example, few have been willing
completely to give up the historicity of Jesus=s life and, particularly, the historicity of his death. Even those who
deny the physical character of the resurrection usually tie the idea of
resurrection to a historical event, such as an experience of the first
Apostles. We seem faced with two options for understanding scripture: On the
one hand, we can accept some variety of the academic historians= approach to scripture. We may opt for the
more Aliberal@ approach of people such as Raymond Brown or we may prefer the more Aconservative@ approach of Christian literalists, but we agree that scripture is
historical. Believers have generally sought to show that the scriptures are
accurate histories, to some degree, and they have accepted some version of the
canons of historical scholarship as the canons for understanding the
historicity of scripture.[3]
A common alternative is to escape the
problems created by accepting those canons by arguing that the scriptures are
not essentially historical. On this view, rather than being accurate
descriptions of historical events, the scriptures are writings that may often
look like history and, in fact, may have historical elements, but they are
really about something other than the events portrayed in them. These believers
often argue that scriptures are not about history, but about another reality,
such as a reality of archetypical meanings. Given the problems of establishing
the historicity of scripture, such believers want to reject that historicity
but retain the truth of scripture: scriptures are not about historical truth,
they are about religious truth, these people argue. Thus, according to them,
though scripture takes the guise of history, it is actually about something
else, such as a transcendent or archetypical reality.[4]
Most Christian believers find this
ahistorical resolution of the problem of scriptural historicity unacceptable,
and this is doubly true for Latter-day Saint believers. For example, most
Latter-day Saints find it difficult to explain and accept the Book of Mormon=s account of itself and Joseph Smith=s account of its origin if it isn=t substantially a historical document rather
than an embodiment of a- or trans-historical truth. Most Latter-day Saints feel
that if the Book of Mormon isn=t substantially historical, then much of its text C the narrative, major portion C is irrelevant to its meaning for us, and it
is difficult to see how to avoid accusing Joseph Smith of fraud.
Perhaps one way to avoid that charge would be
to understand the production of the Book of Mormon as the creation of myth, in
the positive sense of that word, namely a discourse that purports to give the
structure of reality. As will be apparent, I am sympathetic to that
understanding. Nevertheless, I think it is flawed because, as usually argued,
it gives up too much. Such an explanation gives up the claim of peculiar and
unique truth C a truth inseparable from historical truth C that most Christians and (even more) most
Latter-day Saints take to be essential to their religion and their religious
experience. The historicity of origins has been an essential element of
biblical religion from the beginning. To understand any of those religions only
in terms of myth changes them and the religious experience within them to such
a degree that it is not clear how those who take the mythic view can claim that
they are Christians or Latter-day Saints or Jews.
For Latter-day Saints the problem of the
mythic understanding of scripture is even more severe. For it is difficult to
understand such things as the hefting of the gold plates and the testimony of
the various witnesses and the visits of the Angel Moroni if they are only part
of the construction of a myth.[5]
Myth-makers account for their myths as things they have received (cf. Lyotard
31-32). To that degree Joseph Smith=s account could be construed as mythic. However, myth makers do not
consciously create the kinds of detailed, first-person accounts of that
reception that Joseph Smith gives. Myth makers have received the story of
someone who received the sacred objects. They have not themselves received the
objects. Thus, if we explain Latter-day Saint scripture by saying that Joseph
Smith was making myth rather than reporting historical experiences, it
is still difficult to avoid coming to the conclusion that not only was he
making myth, he was also committing fraud. The phenomenon of myth-making and
the phenomenon of the origins of the LDS Church are not consonant with each
other.
However, I believe that there is a more
difficult problem. Beside the existential and phenomenological problems of the
myth-making understanding of scripture, there is a theoretical problem: those
who argue that the authors of scripture are myth-makers assume, with the
apologists and the academics, that the canons of academic history are the
canons of history. They do not consider the possibility that there are other
ways of understanding history and that, on one of those understandings,
scripture is historical, literally so.
As a result of such problems, believers find
it necessary to insist on the historical character of scripture, though doing
so is sometimes rationally difficult; historical scholarship seldom lines up
with our understanding of scripture as well as most believers would like it to.
We can take various positions on the historicity of scripture, but if we are to
think about that historicity, we must ask ourselves what the word history
can mean, and which of its possible meanings we can most accurately apply to
scripture. I argue that our discomfort with the various alternative attempts to
deal with the historicity of scripture results from using a concept of history
that is inappropriate to scripture. As a result, though I believe that the
historical part of scripture is genuinely historical, I do not think the canons
of historical scholarship will be much help to us in understanding scripture as
history. We must reconsider what history is.
The discussion of history and its meaning,
and (especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) the discussion of
the historicity of scripture, have been an important part of modern
intellectual history. Much of the contemporary discussion of these issues owes
its form and content to those earlier debates.[6]
However, though the terms premodern and modern are not unproblematic,[7]
I believe that the understanding of history held by premoderns is quite
different from our own, that it is a plausible understanding of history, and
that a contemporary re-thinking of it gives us a better way to understand
scripture than does a modern understanding. Consequently, a brief comparison of
modern and premodern history can serve as a starting point for thinking about
alternative conceptions of history.[8]
Perhaps the first thing to be said about the
difference between modern and premodern history is that modern history takes
narratives and the events they describe to be separable from each other, but
premodern history does not. The distinction is not an obvious one. In fact,
even if we understand that distinction conceptually, we do not find it easy to
think about scripture except by using the modern distinction. Though, in its
origins, the separation of event and narrative is an academic distinction, it has
become so Aobvious,@ so Anatural,@ that we have difficulty understanding the distinction or reading
scripture in any other way. It seems inescapably true to us that there are two
things, the event itself and what one can truthfully say about that event. But
premodern thinking does not have that distinction, at least not in the way that
modern history does.
To give an account of an event is to speak
meaningfully of that event. For example, AThe cat sat on the mat@ is meaningful, but it doesn=t say much. Though we can understand it lexically and syntactically,
unless that sentence is correlated to an event in some way (whether negatively
or positively), it lacks fullness of meaning. If I say, AThe cat sat on the mat@ as a description of a particular event, then
I find that event meaningful, and the meaning of the sentence is a presentation
of a meaning of the event. Without such presentations, explicitly put into
language or not, there are no events. Events without meaning are strictly
inconceivable; as events, events are meaningful. Modernism=s mistake was to think that the meaning of
sentences and the events they describe is explained merely referentially.
Modernism assumes that the truth of the sentence is a function of its reference
to a particular event, but reference is not enough to explain the meaning of
events. It isn=t necessarily that reference is impossible.
After all, we do speak of things in the world, and attempts to do away
completely with talk about things in the world are self-refuting (if there are
such attempts).[9] The
modernist mistake is not necessarily in thinking that meaning requires
reference, but in thinking that reference is sufficient to explain meaning as
truth. There is meaning, but it always goes beyond what one can account for
merely referentially.[10]
The connection between a word and the thing
it refers toCin other words, meaningful referenceCexists only in an act of reference,
but no theory of reference can give an account of that act. Among other things,
a theory of reference cannot account for the particular thing to which the
meaning-act points or for the fact that it does so point in this case. Language
theories can tell us how words relate to each other (in an Aendless chain of signification@ to use a phrase from Jacques Derrida), but
given the infinite variety of possible references in any particular act of
meaning, language theories cannot fully account for the success of acts in
which we talk about things in the world.
Most theories mark this inability by
mentioning the importance of context, but such a remark makes the Derridean
point, for context does not name something to which we can refer, though at
first glance it may seem to. Each reference to a context is made possible by
another context which is, itself, not referred to.[11]
One cannot refer to context as such; context is beyond reference, though
essential to it. This means that the invocation of context in a theory of
reference shows that, besides whatever the theory proposes to explain meaning,
something more is needed. What I mean in a putative referential act, such as
the description of an historical event, is not completely decided by the sign
system (such as a natural language) that I use to make that reference or by any
theory of such sign systems. It is always also decided by Asomething more.@
We may try to specify what that something
more is by mentioning the speaker=s intent, the particular audience she addresses, the history of the
language, the social relations in force at the time of the event, and all of
the other Athings@ to which rhetoric attends, including the relation of the referential
object to the person making the reference (which begs the question of
reference). However, though we can talk about context, about what else reference
requires, there seems to be no possible science or theory of context. Beside
that, the act of reference (which must, as an act, include both the object of
reference and the particular, existent thing that corresponds to that object),
exists within the system of signs in which the reference occurs. Thus, the
referential act is not a simple connection of two autonomous things, the thing
to which I refer and the reference.[12]
We cannot leave language behind, even in our putative reference to what is
outside language.
We must use language to speak of what is
beyond language. Nevertheless, we necessarily say what is, strictly speaking,
impossible too say, namely, that talk about the world and the things in the
world always involves something more than language. Something more than/other
than language, something that cannot be said directly, accounts for any
successful talk about things. Contrary to a common American (mis)interpretation
of Derrida, the point is not that there are only texts, but that, though we
can deal with only texts and text analogues, there is necessarily something
more than any text.[13]
Ironically, modernism rather than Derrida insists that there is nothing other
than the text: by assuming that, in principle, it is possible, or at least
desirable, for human beings to give a final, complete description of the world,
modernism makes an identity of its ultimate text and the world described by
that text. In contrast, Derrida denies the possibility of that identification.
Something always remains beyond the text, beyond explanation, something that
explains the text in question but is not explained by that text.
The empiricism of modernism (not the only
kind of empiricism) imitates the Sophists of classical Greece, for it pins its
hopes for understanding on a supposed ability to fix the connections between
ideas and words, on the one hand, and things on the other. However, as
Catherine Pickstock notes (19), it is not only impossible to achieve fixity in
that connection, it is dishonest to seek for it: Ahuman life is always in the midst of things; the clarity of empiricist
conclusions is an illusion fostered by the falsely isolated and inert nature of
its artificial findings.@ In contrast, Athe
genuine >fixity= parodied by the sophists can be attained only in the unshakeable
conviction of a certain way of life.@ In other words, the alternative to the fixity of ideas is fixity of
character, the fixity of a lived life, a fixity that cannot be reduced to a
fixed connection between ideas and things. By ignoring that alternative, when
modernism discovers that it cannot nail things down as it wishes, that
crucifixion is no more appropriate for ideas and values than it is for human
beings, it concludes that nihilism is the only alternative.[14]
For history as for any other discipline, the
question that a non-modern understanding of signs and reference raises is, AWhat else is involved in producing the >text= of our understanding of history?@ According to what we choose, we will get different ways of
understanding history. And, though we can and must adjudicate between the
various ways of understanding history, there is no way to do so Apurely,@ in other words, without referring to such things as various
authorities; our goals and traditions; social, scholastic, and other
conventions; social relations; and so on. In other words, as Friedrich
Nietzsche saw clearly (AUse and Disadvantages@), we must take into account the lives and ways of life into which such
histories enter. We cannot name, once-and-for-all, what the Awhat else@ of language or even of an individual language act is. Contrary to the
expectations of the Enlightenment, we have no Archimedean point from which we can
leverage our decision for or against a particular understanding of the world,
much less of history. It is important to note, however, that the consequence of
the absence of such a risk-free leverage- or standpoint does not result in
absolute relativity and, therefore, in the meaninglessness of our decisions.
That relativist consequence would follow only if, contrary to fact, we have
only two options: mathematical certainty or absolute relativity.[15]
Philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, among the ancients, and Hannah
Arendt, in this century, have offered other options. However, we need not know
the work of these philosophers to see that we can break the horns of the
dilemma with other options. The necessity of faith (though not necessarily
religious faith) shows that there are more than those two options.[16]
Since the eighteenth
century, both those who criticize scripture as history and those who defend it
have assumed the modernist understanding of the connection between history and
meaning, though usually only implicitly. I argue that, in spite of themselves,
eighteenth-century biblical critics (who, as previously mentioned, laid the
groundwork for the discussion of biblical interpretation for the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, as well as much in literary criticism) give up the Bible
as a sacred textCeven those who wish to defend it as such. They assume that there is a
universal, language-free view available to them (at least in principle) and
that the scriptures should accurately refer to or depict that universal view.[17]
They assume that events exist prior to and independent of the meanings of those
events, and that the better a historical text is, the more it accurately
describes the event. By agreeing to the modernist assumption about how meaning
is fixed, even defenders of the Bible conflate historical understanding with an
accurate, referential description of events. They assume that meaning, biblical
or otherwise, is essentially referential/representative and that only a
rational method can give us understanding of historical texts, such as the
Bible. By making the question of biblical truth C biblical literalness C a merely referential question (in other words, by understanding
meaning via a referential theory and by applying that understanding to
scripture), both the religious and the critics of religion turn religion into a
set of beliefs to which one assents because one takes them to be referentially
valid. But to paraphrase James, the devils also refer, and tremble (2:19).
In contrast, premodern thinkers take the
Bible, not as an accurate reference to either history or another reality
(though they do not deny that we can speak of the world), but as the incarnation
(or enactment) of a symbolic ordering.[18]
Work in the anthropology of religion, such as that of Mircea Eliade, suggests
that we misunderstand religion when we understand it as essentially a set of
beliefs.[19] In contrast, when we see what such
anthropological work shows us, we discover that religion is an ordering of the
world in and through symbols. Beliefs are consequent on that ordering, not
constitutive of it. Thus, a Catholic, a Southern Baptist, and a Latter-day
Saint differ from one another, not so much because they hold different beliefs
(though they do), but because they are involved in different ways of ordering
the world symbolically (though, given that they are all Christians, there is
considerable overlap in the orderings manifest in their lives). The most
obvious place to find symbolic ordering is in the rituals of religions and in
their sacred objects, though symbolic ordering also encompasses more ordinary
aspects of life, including such things as peculiar idioms and patterns of
deferenceCand assertions of belief. Especially in
religion, systems and sets of beliefs are part of the orders in question, but
they are not foundational to those orders. To be religious, therefore, is not
to assent to particular propositions or assertions, though that assent follows
from the fact that one is religious. Instead, to be religious is to recognize C to reverence C the sacred and to live in a world of which the contents, including beliefs,
are ordered by the sacred.[20]
For the religious, the sacred is the ordering principle, the Aform@ of the world, to use a term important to Plato, Aristotle, and all of
medieval philosophy.[21]
For premodern thought, both religious and nonreligious, the real is primarily Aformal.@ There not only can be, but must be, a variety of manifestations of
what I here call form, but each is an instance of the Asame thing.@ The form of something is the real manifesting itself in the world. For
religious premoderns, the sacred is the real manifest in the symbolic order of
things C it is the form not just of individual things
but of things as a whole C and religion gives us that form/order.
It is important to note that rational
ordering and symbolic ordering are not necessarily at odds with one another.
Within a symbolic order, rational discourse is one of the forms in which the
real is manifest. It is, therefore, not opposed to symbolic ordering, but a
possible part of any symbolic order. In contrast, in a rational ordering,
symbolic discourse cannot be made an instance of reason, except as a parasitic
form of reference, in other words, as ambiguous or Apoetic@ speech.[22] As a
result, though within a symbolic ordering there is no necessary opposition
between the rational and the symbolic, that opposition may be necessary to a
rational order.[23]
Living as we do in an age when modernism is
the common sense for perhaps most human beings (at least those under the sway
of progress and its Euro-American manifestation), when we are asked to talk or
think about religion, we usually do so as if religion were one of several
regions of life. On this view, there are many regions of my life: the world of
work, the political world, the family, the world of morality, the academic and
scholarly world, the economic region, the world of leisure, and so on. Religion
is one of these regions of our lives, and some people=s lives may have no such region. Though we
engage in activities that involve the various regions of our lives, we assume
that each is, strictly speaking, separate from the others, though possibly
overlapping; in themselves, each region is on an equal footing with the others,
and each region is differentiated in value from any other only by my valuing of
it, in other words by my interests, desires, or needs.[24]
In contrast, for the premodern, religion is not
one of several possible regions of my life. Instead, it is the field within which
any other regions or aspects are marked out and related to each other. Religion
is that which makes regions possible and which gives the world as a whole
unity, order, and meaning in and through symbols. To use Platonic language,
religion reveals the Aform@ of the world. On this view, we can still
speak of regions of human endeavor and interest, but ultimately those regions,
such as economics or morality or the political, get their meaning in themselves
and in their relations to each other, as well as their relative weight and
importance from religion rather than from our valuing.
If we understand religion this way, then I
think we must conclude that the religious and the critics of religion
implicitly agreed to give up the Bible as a sacred text when they agreed to
take it as a referential text like any other referential text rather than as a
symbolically ordering one. For to understand the Bible by means of a
referential theory is to take it as a manifestation of one region of human
experience among others. It is to take it as something on a conceptual and
ontological par with other of its regions, rather than as something
incomparable because it is a revelation of what gives meaning to any possible
region of life. For moderns, religion is a region of life; for pre-moderns, it
is the form of life, the way in which life is enacted. The eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century interest in reading the Bible with the methods that one
would use to read any other book was, implicitly, a recognition that the Bible was
no longer the text about human existence, but one of many texts, each
referring to or describing more or less accurately a different dimension or
region of human reality.
The disagreement between Catholicism and the
Reformation over the nature of symbols is one locus of this difference between
symbolic ordering and reference. The doctrine of transubstantiation is the most
obvious instance of this difference in the understanding of symbols. Because
those outside the Roman Catholic tradition do not accept that doctrine, they
also often reject the idea that symbols are incarnations rather than mere
references. However, one need not accept transubstantiation, at least not as it
is usually understood, to accept that symbols are incarnations. As the word transubstantiation
implies, the problem with the doctrine for those who are not Roman Catholics is
that it requires one to believe that the substance of the Eucharist has become,
essentially and substantially, the actual flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. Such
an understanding of the Eucharist is the consequence, on the one hand, of
believing that symbols are incarnations, and, on the other, of having an
Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics of substance and, therefore, a commensurate
explanation of what it means for a symbol to be an incarnation.[25]
However, one could believe that symbols are
incarnations without accepting an Aristotelian metaphysics of substance and the
explanations of incarnation that follow from it. The tight connection between
the two ideas is only an historical one. Those who accepted the first of these
ideas but not the second would not hold to the doctrine of transubstantiation
in the dogmatic sense. Even Catholics have other alternatives for understanding
the doctrine of transubstantiation, nonThomist, Augustinian ones, for example.
Jean-Luc Marion explains the Eucharist, neither as a mere Aperceptible medium for a wholly intellectual
or representational process@ (166-7), nor as Aan imposture of idolatry@ by which Athe
community would seek to place >God= at its disposition like a thing@ (164), but as an incarnation of the
eucharistic gift (171-2), as a temporalizing memorial, a physical memorial that
orders the present and, in doing so, grants the future: AThe Eucharist anticipates what we will be,
will see, will love: figura nostra, the figure of what we will be, but
above all ourselves, facing the gift that we cannot yet welcome, so, in the
strict sense, that we cannot yet figure it@ (174). Thus, Marion argues that the bread and wine (or water for
Latter-day Saints) are incarnations of Christ without arguing that they become,
in substance, his body and blood; he argues for transubstantiation without
arguing for that which most of us associate with transubstantiation and which
we find religiously and philosophically objectionable. Marion does so with an
understanding similar to that we see in Eliade and others: symbols are
incarnate orderings of our world.
One way to understand Marion=s point better is to consider that early
Christians also did not take the Eucharist as a mere reminder, but as a
corporate (in other words, an embodied, incarnate) act, part of or a
focal point of a way of life. For early Christians, the Eucharist is something
the Church does and becomes rather than merely something by which one
signifies and recalls. To remember the sacrifice of Jesus is to take
part in a community and the life of that community. It is to incarnate the
divine community and to become incarnate in it, not merely to recall a
past event. (If the Sacrament were merely a matter of recall, one could
effectively perform the sacramental ritual by passing out slips of paper on
which was written, ARemember
Christ and your relation to him@Cor even with an E-mail message to that effect or a note in one=s tackle box.) For early Christians and,
presumably, for contemporary ones, to partake in the elements of the Eucharist
is to be and become somethingCto be made something (Aincarnated@ as something)
in and through ritualCnot
merely to recall a past event (See Dix 29ff. and 78ff.). Of course, one cannot
become what one must with recalling that past event at some times, but the
point stands that the ritual=s function cannot be understood only in terms of recollection. Marion=s point about how the Eucharist temporalizesCincarnatesCis similar.
In contrast, the Reformation understanding of
symbols breaks the incarnans of the symbol, the material of the symbol,
from the incarnatum, that which is manifest in the symbol. In doing so,
it makes the relation of symbol and what it manifests a matter of reference.[26]
Rejecting the Reformation, Catholicism continues to insist that the incarnans
and the incarnatum cannot be separated: the incarnans is more
than something that helps us think about the incarnatum. Certainly one
need not be a Catholic to think that this insistence has something valuable to
say. The issue is not one of Catholics versus Protestants, especially for those
like ourselves who are neither. The point is that, contrary to modernist
understanding, religions do not take symbols merely to be referential; they
understand them as something more (even when their theologies deny that they
do, as in much Protestantism). Contemporary philosophical arguments about
meaning and reference point in the direction of a need for something more. The
anthropology of religions suggests that we must understand that religion
requires more than referentially valid beliefs. The Catholic tradition has
called this something more incarnation, a term that I adopt as
informative, though I will supplement that term with another, enactment.
To be incarnate is to be, materially, a manifestation of, an instance
of, what is, supposedly, only referred to. On this way of thinking, the symbol is
what it incarnates (or what Ain-forms@ it, if we use Platonic language) rather than
merely a representation of or reference to it. To use the language of
Aristotle, to be incarnate is to en-act (the literal meaning of actual
is Aenacted@) that to which we might think the thing refers.
In the Catholic tradition, the Eucharist and
a crucifix are both sacred and symbolic objects because they are each a
material enactment C an
incarnation C of Christ rather than only a reminder of
him. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, as officially explained,
assumes that in the case of the Eucharist the incarnation of Christ in the
sacramental symbols means that the bread and wine of the Sacrament become the
actual, physical flesh and blood of Christ. That is what incarnation must mean
if one holds to a classical understanding of substance. I argue that the
assumption of classical substances is philosophically as well as theologically
unnecessary. Thus, the dogma of transubstantiation, as justified Thomistically,
is a logical and historical error: we can understand symbols, including the
Sacrament, as incarnations without the traditional doctrine of
transubstantiality C as
Catholics also assume in the case of other symbols, such as the crucifix, which
are incarnations, but not transubstantiations in the traditional sense. Based
on this possibility, I argue further that we can understand scripture as an
incarnation or enactment of history rather than a representation of it.
However, though the Catholic tradition gives
us some purchase on understanding what it means to speak of scripture as
incarnation, it is insufficient. We must go further, for though the medieval
Catholic tradition shows how to understand the sacrament and other rituals as
well as ritual objects as incarnations, it fails to attend fully to scripture.
The Reformation reverses this problem, giving attention to scripture but,
rejecting the understanding of ritual and sacrament as incarnation. And this is
true even though the Reformation and Christian humanism also speak of the Bible
as an incarnation of Christ, as Erasmus does in speaking of the text as the
body of Christ.[27] In
spite of what might appear to be incarnational language in Reformation works,
we can see the shift from enacted incarnation to representation in the
seventeenth-century debates over theater (a debate between written text C representation C and enactment). As Richard Helgerson says:
Where print fixes the author and frees the reader, performance does the
reverse. It frees the performer and fixes C transfixes C the
audience. Performance allows the self a Protean adaptability, but skillfully
managed, it overwhelms its audience, rendering it captive to impressions that
defy interpretation. For over a millennium the Western community of Christian
believers was held in at least a semblance of unity, despite theological
difference and hierarchical schism, by the power of ritual performance, only to
disintegrate into countless mutually hostile churches when the printed word
replaced performed ritual as the primary source of authority. (6)
One could make many points from this
observation, from points about the importance of the temple to an explanation
of why priesthood authority, something enacted rather than spoken or written
down, loses its importance in Reformation belief. However, for our purposes,
the point is that the rise of Protestantism involved a shift from scripture as
incarnation (enacted presentation) to scripture as written re-presentation.
Having rejected the enactment of incarnation,
the Reformation finds itself in trouble when it tries to preserve the sacred
character of scripture, even though it insists on that. By the eighteenth
century, the Reformation relies on referential theories of meaning, with the
consequence that scripture, too, loses its sacred character. Writing cannot do
the work that the Reformation places on its back; it always falls short of
re-presenting its object.[28]
Though individual Protestants and Protestant churches may think of scripture
otherwise, in principle it ceases to be sacred.[29]
For the Reformation, scripture refers to what is sacred, but it is not itself a
manifestation of what is sacred. This is because the Reformation gives up the
possibility of understanding symbols as incarnations and replaces the
incarnational understanding of symbols with the modern theory of reference that
comes to the fore.
Thus, the key to the alternative
understanding of history that I think saves us from the dilemma of academic
history, on the one hand, and ahistory, on the other, is to understand the
scriptures as incarnational: the scriptures are literal history, but their
history is incarnational rather than representational. But the question of
what it means to speak of incarnation remains.
To better understand what it means to say
that a symbol (and, therefore, also a religious text) is an incarnation,
consider an example from the contemporary Belgian philosopher, Paul Moyaert:
When Moyaert=s father died, he inherited his father=s cup. The cup, which he uses for his coffee
every morning, has a surplus value. It cannot be reduced to instrumental
values. For example, it cannot be reduced to an instrument for helping Moyaert
recall his father. If it were, such a perspective would make the cup, as
symbol, only a means for having a particular mental attitude, such as
contemplative recollection or psychological reverence for his father. That kind
of understanding of the cup will not do. Among other things, it robs the cup of
its symbolic value by making it possible that anything, even something
that Moyaert chose arbitrarily, could serve the same purpose. If a symbol were
only something for creating a mental attitude, then Moyaert could choose a
pebble from the street in front of his own house to remind him of his father, but
it is no coincidence that symbols do not come into being in such an arbitrary
fashion. They are not mere keepsakes (and even the keepsake is rarely, if ever,
arbitrary or merely subjective).
The cup is not just a tool for recollecting; the
surplus value of the cup comes from the fact that Moyaert=s father touched it. Thus, its character as a
symbol is a matter of contiguity rather than representation or instrumentality.
When Moyaert uses the cup, however, it isn=t that, by doing so, he touches his father in absentia. The cup
isn=t a substitute for his father Canother reason that it isn=t essentially a reminder. Though the cup can
remind him, often Moyaert uses it without explicitly recalling his father.
Instead, the cup is a symbol of Moyaert=s father because it does something for Moyaert in spite of himself:
even when he isn=t thinking of his father, the cup demands
Moyaert=s reverence; it connects Moyaert to his
father even when Moyaert isn=t conscious of his father. In a small way, the cup gives a symbolic
order to Moyaert=s world, an order that relates him to his
father and to the rest of the world, an order that cannot be reduced to his
intentions to recall his father. It as if the cup remembers Moyaert=s father for Moyaert.[30]
Thus, not only does the cup not refer to or
even represent Moyaert=s
father, it does not take his place. In a very real sense, it takes Moyaert=s place rather than his father=s. In that sense, Moyaert is willing to grant something like but not
identical to consciousnessCwithin the symbolic orderCto his father=s cup.
This approaches what we see described in anthropological encounters with,
so-called, Aprimitive@ religions: symbols are objects that do something in spite of my
intentions; they do something that we otherwise could attribute only to human
beings. In this sense, religion is magicalCthough we must avoid equating magic with naive or bad science.[31]
The cup is an incarnation rather than a reference; it gives a symbolic
order to Moyaert=s world rather than a rational one, and the
cup gives order by embodying that order in the lived world that it orders.
It is important to emphasize that this resultCthat symbols operate in a Amagical@ wayCis because the reverence that characterizes
life in a symbolic ordering is not a matter of consciousness. Of course
conscious reverence for the sacred is possible. However, one could not have the
mental attitude of reverence without already being in a symbolic ordering, an
ordering that gives one the possibility of reverence, at least partly by giving
objects that demand reverence. The symbolic order gives objects as objects of
reverence, so to be within the symbolic order is to be reverent, to
attend to the sacred, whether or not one is explicitly conscious of and
attentive to that order. For to be within a symbolic ordering is to be ordered
by, to have the world ordered by, that symbolic ordering. The objects and
possibilities of the world, especially but not only ritual objects and
possibilities, are related to each other in and through the fact that they
manifest the ordering of the symbolic; the symbolic ordering gives them their
place and their relations in the world, and it makes possible our
understanding. And in ritual acts, one=s own body, as well as the objects to which one attends, are loci for
such incarnations of the symbolic. Symbolic relations do not come from mental
acts and attitudes; they make acts and attitudes, such as conscious reverence,
possible.
One way to state my thesis is to say that
scripture is incarnation and religion is sacred ordering. Thus, difficulties
occur when, with the onset of modernism, scripture becomes, like any other
book, something that is understood merely referentially, and religion ceases to
be thought of as the ordering power of the world and becomes one sphere
of interest among many, a sphere that must be ordered by something else. For
modernism, that Asomething else@ is reason, though for Christian premoderns, it is the incarnate DivineCand this difference in the ordering Aprinciple@ produces the chasm (and the common antipathy) between the two.
We see a symptom of this loss of symbolic
ordering in Descartes=s Discourse
on Method for Rightly Conducting the Reason (1637). In the Discourse,
Descartes tells us that he needs something by which to adjudicate between the
various plausible opinions he learned in the schools. Finding nothing, he takes
up the method of geometry, namely formal reason. In addition, Descartes
obviously confines religion to the region of morals. He not only speaks of the
moral truths of his country and Catholicism (truths that he accepts as
provisionalCpart III &1), he also mentions the truths of faith (III &6). Nevertheless, Descartes does no more than
mention the truths of faith. Rather than being that which orders the regions of
our lives, for Descartes, religion is one region of human life among other
possible regions, a region that can be ignored or set to the side as one goes
about laying a foundation for the understanding the world and its various
regions.[32]
Descartes find himself in a chaos in which nothing can be known or trusted
(part I). Prior to the Reformation, the Church had given the world its order,
but that order has failed for Descartes. Thus, something other than religion
must order life as a whole, including religion. For Descartes, religion has
ceased to give order to the world and has become one of its regions. His
project in the Discourse (and in the Meditations on First Philosophy)
is to allow reason to order life by giving us the method for
conducting/ordering reason, in other words by showing us that reason can order
itself.[33]
That Descartes believes we need a
method for ordering reason is evidence that the symbolic ordering no longer has
force: Descartes confuses our means for dealing with the various regions of
existence, namely reason, for the ordering authority of the world. He makes it
clear that he has settled on a method for conducting reason and finding truth
because he has no way of choosing between the various opinions of his
predecessors (II &4):
finding nothing that orders reason, Descartes must give a rational method for
ordering it. Yet the necessity of grounding reason in itself would never have
occurred to an ancient Greek or a medieval Christian, Jew, or Moslem because,
whatever the many differences between them, for each, the exercise of reason
occurs within an ordering that is prior to and fundamental to reason.[34]
Whether φύσις or Divine creation, reason has a ground
that is, on a modern view, nonrational. Even those thinkers, such as the
Averroists, for whom the truths of reason and the truths of faith are
ultimately commensurable do not assume that something is true because it is
rational. Instead, something is rational because it is true. For such premodern
thinkers, reason=s being is granted by the symbolic ordering,
even if the rational order and the symbolic order are ultimately identical.
Thus, for those in the centuries before modernism, there had been means
for adjudicating between various plausible opinions. For Christians, the Church
provided that means and, therefore, order came to the world through it.
Descartes=s inability to adjudicate between differing
opinions and his subsequent search for a method shows us that, by Descartes=s time, a radical shift has already taken
place, a shift away from an understanding that finds the use of reason within
what is given by a symbolic ordering. Prior to modernism, the world had been
given order by the Divine and reason was a tool for dealing with and in that
order, though not itself the source of order. However, the loss of the Divine
as a ground left reason and the world without moorings and, so, required
something like the four-part rational method that Descartes prescribes (II &&7-10).
This loss of the Divine as ground shows up in
the difference between modern and premodern understandings of certainty. Prior
to modernism, Christian certainty was the certainty of salvation, a certainty given
by the life of faith. Thus, though Christians had certainty, that certainty did
not include a complete apprehension of the rational (in other words, of the
mind of God). With modernism the ground shifts: since certainty is no longer
given, it must be achieved; one must have a method for gaining certainty.
Since, as we see in Descartes, the method is itself a rational method, the
rational is thought of as self-revealing. Based on the biblical teaching that
humans are made in God=s
image (Genesis 1:26), human reason is rethought and at least implicitly modeled
on the mind of God, a mind that has become, strictly speaking, capable of only
purely theoretic understanding. As a result, modernism assumes that the use of
the proper method, a self-grounding method, will lead one to the complete
capture, the complete apprehension, of the rational (which, though no longer
identical to the mind of God continues to be thought in the same terms: for
example, as self-revealing and atemporal). This shift changes the meaning of
everything C the rational, certainty, method, knowledge C in such a way that the premodern
understanding becomes inaccessible to thought, incomprehensible, at best naive
and primitive.[35]
One way to see the difference between a
modern and a premodern understanding of religion is to focus on the question of
signs. In LDS scripture, the Lord says to Adam:
Behold, all things have their likeness, and all things are created and
made to bear record of me, both things which are temporal, and things which are
spiritual; things which are in the heavens above, and things which are on the
earth, and things which are in the earth, and things which are under the earth,
both above and beneath: all things bear record of me. (Moses 6:63)
We often read this passage and similar ones
as if it speaks of signs referentially. However, there are problems with that
view. The understanding that this citation exemplifies was a common one among
ancient thinkers, including Augustine, so consider his reflection on signs and
on the claim in question. On one obvious reading, Augustine is said to argue
that signs are essentially referential. The referential character of signs
seems difficult to avoid in Christian Doctrine 1.2 and 2, where
Augustine seems to give a standard, modern theory of signs, a referential
theory. However, it is important to notice that in Augustine=s discussion God is not a thing and we cannot
refer to him (1.5). Nevertheless, all things, particularly corporeal things,
point to God (1.6). It follows that all things point to God, but not
referentially. In addition, Augustine explicitly compares the Incarnation with
speech (1.13), but the Incarnation cannot be understood as a merely referential
event. Thus, though every thing is a sign, the final object of signs,
which makes all other signs possible as signs, is no thing, and cannot be
referred to. The consequence is that, for Augustine (and I think also for the
scriptural passage in question), we cannot understand signs merely
referentially; referential theories of signs are only partial theories.
Something more is needed, namely God.
Notice also that, according to traditional
Christian doctrine, after the Fall, human beings are unable to see God
directly, a thought often expressed for Latter-day Saints in the idea that we
cannot see God Awith natural eyes.@[36] From this comes the traditional Christian
view that language, veiling and obscuring as it may be in some sense, is not
only a consequence of the Fall, it is a blessing. Language gives human beings
our only access to the Divine, which otherwise would blind us. If, as modernism
suggests, the words that refer to God and divine things were mere signs, tools
for thinking about something else, just tools for referring to something
else, then for them to function as signs we would also have to have direct
access to the referent, to God, which is impossible. Merely referential signs
require that what they refer to be available to the person who understands
them.
Consider a simple sign, my driver=s license. My license has a name, a number,
and a picture. They each refer to me and together they represent me. To
understand this reference and representation C for any one of them or all of them as a group to function as a sign C a person taking my license as a sign must
have access not only to these signs, but also to that to which they refer. In
principle, a person must be able to encounter me independent of those signs. He
or she must be able to see, hear, or touch me independent of my license.
Without that, the license cannot refer to me because the merely referential
sign is a substitute for the thing signified, the license is a substitute for
my person. Imagine a case in which someone says, AThis license has a referent, but the picture isn=t the picture of the person it refers to, the
number isn=t that person=s number, and the name on it isn=t the referent=s
name.@ No one would take the person=s claim seriously. As merely references,
signs function only if that to which they refer is also independently
accessible to those who read them.
If we understand symbols as a kind of
referential sign, then we understand signs of God as substitutes for him and,
therefore, we assume implicitly that we have direct access to him. However,
signs of God do not work that way, for if they refer, they do so across a chasm
with Anothing available@ on the other side. Of course, religious
people will deny that nothing is available on the other side, but that makes
my point rather than contradicts it. The religious can see and listen to and be
commanded by something to which the religious symbol refers, not because it
refers in the same way that an ordinary sign does (in other words to something
public, something that anyone can see or hear independent of the sign), but
because, being enlightened by the Divine rather than fundamentally by reason,
they see the Aother side@ in and through the symbol.[37]
Though there are a variety of positions among
premodern thinkers regarding signs, I think we can characterize them as
generally taking the words of scripture not to be merely referential signs of a
divine reality (though they may have what we could call a referential
component). Instead of referring to the divine as do ordinary signs, the words
of scripture are an embodiment of the divine, an incarnation; they embody the
divine order of that to which, on a modern view, they seem only to refer.[38]
Thus, according to Carol Harrison, in spite of the homonymy, instead of
translating Augustine=s word
signum as Asign,@ we should understand it to mean sacramentum,
itself a translation of mysterion: what is secret or hidden (85 and
203). And we must remember that the mysterion is not just temporarily
hidden. It is hidden in principle; in other words, it is invisible to human or Anatural@ eyes; we see it only by revelation.
On such thinking, the visibleCthe elements and objects of the created
world, the history of the world, our lives togetherCbears (incarnates, enacts) rather than refers
to spiritual reality. It bears and enacts it as depth and richnessCas mystery in the strict, positive sense of
that word, Aa secret@Cjust as the human body bears and enacts the depth and richness and
mystery of the person. For a Jew, a Christian, or a Moslem, the full history of
the world is necessarily a history understood under the order of divine
creation. Thus, strictly speaking, the actual, literal history of the world is
invisible except as the symbolic ordering of creation embodies and
reveals it. Any other history is an abstraction from that literal history. For
the religions of the Bible and Koran, scripture is an important incarnation of
the divine ordering (as are also ordinance, priesthood authority, tradition,
and so on). Scripture embodies what would otherwise be invisible to us, what is
in itself unrepresentable because it is excessive of reference. Scripture
embodies and bodies forth the divine ordering of the world and its events.
For premoderns, that embodiment is history, literal history, not the accurate
reference to and description of events that have no order or meaning other than
the chronology of time and the relations of reason.[39]
For Christians, the Incarnation of Christ is
the perfect instance of the conjunction of factum and sacramentum:
Christ is neither a representation of divine reality nor a reference to it. He
is not something given to help us recall Divinity.[40]
He is that divine reality perceptible to human beings. As such, he is
also the perfect analogy for scripture: AIn the case of Scripture, the visible, created, temporal order cannot
simply be shunned as an ambiguous, misleading imitation of a spiritual truth
which is better grasped by the mind. Rather, . . . Scripture is the >incarnate= form of the Christian revelation@ (Harrison 81). Similarly, New Testament statements about the Church
being the body of Christ suggest that one encounters Christ in the
Church. The Church is an incarnation of Christ, not a simple signifier of or
reference to himCan incarnation in the sense I have discussed
earlier, namely something that materially manifests or enacts a symbolic
ordering, here, that of Christ.
Though this language of incarnation, as in
speaking of the Church as the incarnation of Christ, is scriptural (1
Corinthians 12:27, Ephesians 4:12), it strikes Latter-day Saints as odd. It is
sufficiently odd for an LDS audience that we assume it to be, perhaps,
metaphorical or a matter of simile: we want to say, Athe Church is like the body of Christ,@ though that is not a particularly
informative clause. The problem is that, given standard English usage, we think
of incarnation as an event in which something that is without a body becomes
manifest in something embodied. Therefore, we speak of that event as Athe incarnation of x, y, or z,@ where the variables stand for the unembodied
thing in question. Since Christ is embodied, it is not clear how he could
become incarnate in the Church. In fact, according to our standard usage, to
say that he does suggests that he is not already incarnate himself.[41]
No surprise that we are confused by talk of the Church being the body of
Christ, or by this discussion of scripture as incarnation.
However, consider that Joseph Smith says, AThere is no such thing as immaterial
matter. All spirit is matter@ (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith
301). According to his teachings, my body is not the incarnation of something
non-bodily, for the spirit is also incarnate. In fact, in reference to bodies,
there are no non-incarnate things.[42]
This suggests that we cannot understand incarnation as something unembodied
becoming embodied. What, then, can we mean by incarnation?
Our common usage and the history of thought
about incarnation make it difficult for us to think of incarnation in terms
consonant with the Prophet=s teaching. His teaching flies in the face of that usage and history.
Nevertheless I do not think we are faced with an insurmountable difficulty. We
must think carefully about embodiment. We must ask what it means to say that we
Ahave@ a body, given that we cannot mean that something unembodied possesses
or inhabits something embodied and we do not explain that usage when we speak
of one kind of body (a spirit body) possessing another (a physical body).[43]
Though this is not as simple as it first might seem (thinking otherwise than
our usual prejudgments and understandings is often difficult, even when we know
they are wrong), there are philosophers, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology
of Perception), who may help us begin to do this thinking. Put broadly,
Merleau-Ponty argues that to be embodied is to inhabit (to Aenact,@ if you will) a world in a particular way:[44]
AWe must . . . avoid saying that our
body is in space, or in time. It inhabits space and time@ (139); ATo be a body is to be tied to a certain world@ (148). Taking off from Merleau-Ponty=s insight, perhaps we can say that the body
is one=s attitude (in the literal sense C Afittedness; disposition; posture@ C rather than in mentalistic terms) and
attitudinizing in the world. The body is the position one takes in the world,
where position refers not only to a spatio-temporal position that we can
fix by specifying a series of coordinates, but also to one=s relations to other things, persons, and so
on, one=s orientation. We have a body like we have an
idea or a fear, not as a possession, but as the way in which I project myself
in living and in relating to others and other things (174 fn 1).
Given this thinking about incarnation, we can
expand it to think about incarnation in general: to speak of something as an
incarnation is not to say that something else, something nonmaterial,
has come to be material in it. It is to say that a particular attitude, a
particular way of being situated in and among the things there are comes to be
manifest, enacted, in it. Of course, to be situated in the world in a
particular way is always, necessarily, also to be situated with regard to what
there is. There is no Apure,
unembodied@ enactment or presentation. In a strictly
scientific attitude (an attitude that scientists need not take except when they
are explicitly doing science, an attitude that is not the same as their mental
attitude or personal beliefs) there is no relation to God. The scientific
region, the region in which one investigates bodies using the assumptions,
methods, and background of science is necessarily godless.[45]
Scientific objects, themselves Aimpoverished@ or
abstracted objects, incarnate the work and understanding of that region. Other
objects incarnate other regions and orderings. (Moyaert=s discussion of symbols C see page 19 C is a discussion of symbols as incarnations.) Thus, to say that the
Church is an incarnation of Christ is to say that in the Church one finds
oneself situated and oriented in the world in a way given by Christ toward
things revealed by Christ as they are revealed by him C a world that Christ has enacted and that
enacts its relation to him as Creator. Similarly, to say that scripture or an
ordinance is an incarnation is to say that, in the material existence of these
things C as scripture and ordinance rather than as
abstracted to merely so-called objective qualities C we are given an orientation in the world:
relations to things, meanings and values of things, the existence and
nonexistence of things.
As incarnations in a symbolic ordering,
symbols are opaque beings rather than signs with multiple reference. The use of
the word incarnation to describe the being of entities that give
symbolic order is not accidental, for signs are like the living, enacting body,
as Augustine explicitly says in Christian Doctrine 1.13: AHow did He come except that >the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us?= It is as when we speak.@ The opacity of the living human body, the
density and richness that, in principle, cannot be made transparent, means that
no one, final description of a human being is possible. This opacity need not
be something arcane or complex. Seeing it and understanding it does not require
great erudition, on the one hand, or mumbo-jumbo, on the other. For example,
the opacity of living persons, an opacity consequent on their embodiment, both
physical and spiritual, is an ordinary, everyday experience: a person cannot be
reduced to one Ameaning@ or perspective, though a person has meaning and one has perspectives on
any person.[46] One
could argue that nonhuman objects, both animate and inanimate, are similarly
dense. The incarnational character of scripture makes it also dense and opaque C embodied C but the opacity of scripture is different from the unclarity of a
poorly-formed assertion.
Assertions that can have more than one
meaning are unclear because they are faulty as assertions. They are ambiguous
at best. However, it follows that all language ought to be clear in the same
way that assertions are clear only if all language is best understood as
assertional and referential. If scripture is not to be understood, fundamentally,
by means of a referential theory of meaning, then one cannot criticize it as if
it were a set of referential assertions. Scriptural opacity and depth are
different from ambiguity. One cannot reduce the density of scripture to
multiplicity of reference as do most of the critics of the Bible and most of
its defenders.
Both poetry and scripture attend to what is
excessive of language and attention; both are matters of reverence for what
exceeds and explains us. There is not enough space here to decide how they are
related. It is enough to notice that they at least overlap, and that overlap
helps us see how religious language differs from merely referential language.
In the languages of both poetry and religion, I intend what is beyond my
understanding, though often by means of something that does not, especially at
first glance, itself transcend my gaze. I intend what transcends my intention.
Thus, in both poetry and religion one speaks, but not to make everything
transparent and easily accessible. In fact, among other things, in both one denies,
by one=s way of speaking, by the language itself and
its Acontent@ (as if the two could be separated), the transparency of what one
intends and one=s ability to master it or fully intend it.
Religious and poetic languages show us that meaning is not reducible to
reference, for they mean without being able fully to refer, without trying
to refer. They mean by incarnating that which they mean rather than merely
referring to it.
The languages of poetry and religion
incarnate things that one is mastered by rather than master of. In those
languages, what I meanCwhat
my words and thoughts supposedly intendCoutstrips what I understand, outstrips what I mean. The object
of my intention is excessive of my intention, of any possible intention (see
endnote 46). However, what exceeds my meaning is not another meaning, not
something to be said Ain
other words.@ The abundance of meaning does not suggest
that, given sufficient time, I will be able to say everything, that the
abundance will disappear.[47]
Thus, what I intend in poetry or religion is never an object in the strict
sense of that term (Asomething
placed or thrown before me, clear to my sight and examination@), making the word intention itself
problematic, though it will do for now.[48]
Because of this abundance or excess, the languages of prophecy and poetry do
not dissimulate an adequacy and clarity of understanding that belie the truth
of what they say. They are not clear and distinct languages, in other words the
languages that Descartes proposes for modernism, because they remain true
to that of which they speak. For prophecy and poetry, as Walter Benjamin says, ATruth is not >an unveiling that destroys the secret,= but the revelation that does it justice@ (31; translation revised).[49]
It may seem that this discussion of the
abundance of scriptural language implies that scripture is necessarily obscure,
but that does not follow. The alternative to understanding the opacity of
scripture as multiple reference is not to understand it as obscure; scriptural
language is neither essentially obscure or essentially meaningless. Just as
opacity and the abundance that opacity makes possible are not the same as
unclarity, they are not the same as obscurity. Isaiah is not more of a prophet
than Mark or Nephi because he is more difficult to read; the abundance, depth,
and richness of incarnation should not be confused with obscurity.[50]
Any religious person has had the experience of discovering new meaning in texts
that she has read before, often many times. That is a phenomenon of abundance,
of the excess of meaningCof the incarnation of scriptureCnot a phenomenon of ambiguity or obscurity. Religious ordinances are a
perfect example of the kind of abundance that we find in religion and
scripture. In religious rituals, in other words in symbolic ordering enacted in
ritual objects and on my body, my words and actions intend more than I, as an
individual human being, can possibly intend, though they can and often are
themselves quite simple and straightforward.[51]
To take scripture as incarnational is neither
to conflate historical understanding and accurate description nor to take
scripture to be essentially referential. Neither is it to take scripture to be
merely metaphorical or poetic (in the impoverished, everyday sense of that
word). To see scripture as incarnational, as opaque and revelatory, is to see
it as telling the literal truth, as giving the literal history of the
world. As Frank Kermode says, speaking accurately of incarnational
interpretations (though he does not recognize them as incarnational): AThe spiritual sense so authorized [in other
words, within the structure of the medieval Catholic Church, official as well
as unofficial] was the true literal sense.@[52] This identification of Aspiritual sense@ and Aliteral sense@ is surprising to contemporary ears. After all, we take the literal
truth to be the truth that most accurately describes or refers to what
happened, independent of any symbolic ordering, and we take the Aspiritual sense@ to be something beyond the literal, to what we call Amerely symbolic.@ Premoderns, however, do not disjoin the
literal and the spiritual. For them, the word literal means something
quite different. For them, it means, Awhat the words say,@ rather than, Awhat
an objective report would say.@ The sentences, AWhat x says@ and Awhat x describes accurately,@ do not mean the same, even if the first is a
description. Even a careless reading of medieval discussions of scriptural
exegesis will show that the medievals= interest was not in deciding what the scriptures portray, but in what
they say. They do not take the scriptures to be picturing something for us, but
to be telling us the truth of the world, of its things, its events, and its
people, a truth that cannot be told apart from its situation in a divine,
symbolic ordering.
Of course, that is not to deny that the
scriptures tell about events that actually happened. They are about real people
and real events. What I propose is not a way to reduce the premodern
understanding of history to a modern view, to one that denies the historicity
of scripture by taking scripture to refer to a transcendent, nonhistorical
reality by means of only seemingly historical stories. Premodern
interpreters of the Bible understand the scriptures to be about actual events.
For them, what the scriptures say includes portrayal of and talk about real
things. However, premodern interpreters do not think it sufficient (or
possible) to portray the real events of real history without letting us see
them in the light of that which gives them their significanceCtheir reality, the enactment of which they
are partCas history, namely the symbolic order that
they incarnate. Without that light, portrayals cannot be accurate. A bare
description of the physical movements of certain persons at a certain time is
not history (assuming that such bare descriptions are even possible). APerson A raised his left hand, turning it
clockwise so that .03 milliliters of a liquid poured from a vial in that hand
into a receptacle situated midway between A and B@ does not mean the same as AHenry poured poison into Richard=s cup.@ Only the latter could be a historical claim
(and even the former is no bare description).
History is not possible without meaning and
significance, perhaps not even mere chronicle is. The question is where that
meaning and significance derive from. For premodern Bible interpreters, the
divine order that events incarnate gives them their meaning. A literal history,
therefore, necessarily incorporates and reveals that order. Any history that
does not incorporate it is incomplete and, therefore, inaccurate.[53]
It is inaccurate because it does not embody the divine order that makes it what
it is. That means that premodern literal historiesCthe accurate portrayals of what happened, if
one continues to insist on referential languageCwill differ significantly from literal histories told under the aspect
of a different order, such as that of the rationalism of modernism.
As already noted, modernism, too, requires
that meaning be Aadded@ to otherwise bare events so that we can understand them. In modernism,
too, something besides our accounts orders those accounts and stabilizes
meaning. However, with the Enlightenment, modernism does not recognize a divine
order as the source of order and stability. Modernist history intentionally and
necessarily ignores any divine ordering of history, taking up, instead, the
order of causation as understood scientifically. This is not a matter of
perversity or anti-theism on the part of modern historians. There are sound,
methodological reasons for such an assumption in academic history, as there are
in the Ahard@ sciences.[54]
Nevertheless, it follows that modernist historians cannot mean by the word history
what premoderns mean, and modernist criticisms of premodern histories, such as
the histories we find in scripture, will beg the question. In modernist
history, reason rather than the Divine gives the ultimate order of things, so
reason becomes the arbiter of any claims about divine order, rather than the
reverse. Modernist history and scriptural history are incompatible.
In conclusion and summary: If we understand
scripture by means of a referential theory of history, then we assume that
there is an original event that we represent (re-present) in language; on that
view, a historian repeats the original event by constructing a description that
represents the event as fully and accurately as possible. However, such a
theory of history is problematic, for to the degree that a historian can be
successful, there is, ironically, no real history, only the repetition of
something that is always the same. One explanation for the unending necessity
of writing histories that represent an original event might be that, though
there is an original event that we describe in our histories and for which
there is, in principle, one complete description, our language, methods, and so
on are finite. Thus, we do not come to an end of giving the one, complete
description. However, in addition to the problem already mentioned (namely that
such a theory seems to deny history even as it describes it), we can ask this
question: How can one justify the claim that there is such an event and
that there is one ideal description of that event without encountering the very
difficulty one is trying to avoid? With what language does one understand and
discuss the event that is in continual need of redescription? How is it
available to the historian apart from the finite language that he or she uses
to describe it? The only possible answer seems to be that historians are
engaged not only in the accurate description of events, but that they are so
engaged based on some kind of intuition (in the strict, philosophical sense) of
something that is, in principle, not ultimately capturable in human expression.
Because of this difficulty, some conclude
that, even if we begin with the view that there is only one, ultimate
description of an event, we are driven to conclude that there is nothing to
history except what we say about it. Recognizing the problematic character of
claims to intuitions of something ultimately ungraspable, they take what they
think is the only remaining position: history is only a socially determined,
infinitely redescribable matter, a matter of what we have to say about it and
no more. Though that position and variations of it have become fashionable
lately, it is a position fraught with problems, among them that to say
something is a human construction, even that it is necessarily a human
construction, is not to say that it is only a human construction. I
think that the position also entails that the person coming to this conclusion
is self-contradictory, arguing for radical historicism and invoking a principle
that is not to be understood from a radical historicist position. In short, in
spite of the current popularity of this response to the problem, I think it is less
sound than the flawed, referential position against which it responds.
I too conclude that writing history involves
an intuition of something more than what we can say. However, it is difficult
to know what it means to say that. For example, I don=t think the usual referential theories, which
gloss over the problem, are adequate. I have attempted to give one answer,
though not the only one, to that question:[55]
scriptural history is a matter of divine incarnation. And, I am supposing that
academic history is another kind of history, a kind that answers very
differently the question of what more there is to history than what we can say,
a way that is, therefore, strictly speaking, not comparable to scriptural
history because it incarnates something very different and even incomparable.
On the view for which I argue, one can
understand scriptural history using a premodern understanding of what makes
history as a starting point. For premoderns, genuine, literal history is
essentially symbolic, in other words, incarnational. For moderns, it is
essentially referential. With the rise of modernism, symbols came to be
understood as references (even if complex ones), and, therefore, so did the
Bible: scripture is a more or less accurate depiction of events that exist
independent of other considerations. (And whether one takes them to be more or
less accurate depends on one=s religious disposition.) Premoderns, however, understand the Bible
figurally or typologically: as incarnating a symbolic order and as giving an
order to life through its symbolic work. To say that is not to say that
people reading as premoderns understand the Bible to refer to another reality
or to be merely fictions. In fact, exactly the opposite is true: for
premoderns, history understood apart from revelation is a fiction, a necessary
and convenient one for some purposes, perhaps, but nevertheless a fiction, for
it doesn=t give us the fullness of the events of
history. Like moderns, those reading as premoderns understand that scripture
orders human history by giving it a shapeCa figure. However, they disagree with the moderns about what gives that
shape. For premoderns, the revelation of scripture gives history meaning,
without which there would be no real history, only chronology, if that.
For example, for medieval Christians the life
of Christ as revealed in scripture is a figure or type that we can use to
understand the scriptures as a whole and, therefore, history and our place in
it. It isn=t that Christ did not live or that the story
of his life is merely Asymbolic@ of some other reality. Truly to understand
the life of Christ is to understand it as a life that literally (in other
words, in the way that the texts say it is) is a figure of our lives and
history. Thus, to read the story of Israel=s exodus from Egypt, forty years in the wilderness, and entry into the
Promised Land as a figure of the granting of salvation, our continuing
sinfulness, and the promise of possible blessedness, in other words, as it
shows us our relation to Christ, is not to impose an additional meaning
onto the story of Israel. Contra Emmanuel Levinas, neither is it to reduce the
children of Israel to mere shadows, references to another reality. Instead, it is to see the biblical story of
Israel as an incarnation of the symbolic order of which we, being religious,
find ourselves to be part.
Those who read the Bible as an incarnation do
not reduce its texts to what is Aonly symbolic,@ for
the literal/symbolic disjunction is not a disjunction for them. For premoderns,
reading the story of Moses and Israel typologically, figurally, anagogically,
allegorically is not what one does instead of or in addition to
reading literally. Such readings are part and parcel of a literal reading.
Premodern understanding does not reduce the biblical story to a reference to or
representation of something else, though it also does not deny that there may
be an important representative element in scripture. Instead, premoderns
believe that to understand the story of Israel is essentially to
understand historyCactual
history, the real events of the worldCas incarnation, a continuing incarnation, as types and shadows, to use
the language of the Book of Mormon (for example, Mosiah 3:15). It is to
understand history as having an order and the events of history as related to
each other within that ordering (an ordering that does not exist independent of
events, but that cannot be reduced to those events as Abare@ events). It is to understand history as part of a symbolic ordering,
an ordering that is given not only in scripture, but also (perhaps most
importantly) in ritual, ritual objects and ritual language, as well as in the
moments of history themselves. Thus, for premoderns, the biblical narrative
is literal history; the literal truth, the truth Aby the letter,@ is that told in the letters and words of the
text as revealing and embodying the order given by God. The literal is the
truth constituted in and through the text as incarnation, not the supposed
truth supposedly only referred to by those letters and words.
In spite of appearances or what we might say
when we are asked to talk about scriptural history without having reflected
sufficiently on our experience with it, I think that most Latter-day Saints
read scripture as an incarnation of a symbolic ordering.[56]
We may often do so confusedly and inconsistently, but we do. That is why
we feel compelled to defend the historicity of the scriptures, whether we do so
naively or with a full range of scholarly, theoretical, and interpretational
tools at our disposal. This is especially true for adherents, such as
ourselves, of religions in which symbols and symbolic acts figure prominently.
The informality of LDS sacrament meetings may make us think otherwise, but the
Church=s all-encompassing social structure and the
importance of temple liturgy show that Latter-day Saints= lives, like the lives of other religious
people and perhaps more than many, continue to be ordered symbolically.
For the most part, we have lost or forgotten
the vocabulary and concepts for talking about our participation in a symbolic
order and our reading of scripture as part of that participation. As a result,
when called on to talk about scripture or to teach lessons from it or to speak
reflectively about it, we resort to language and methods that ignore the
symbolically ordered character of our lives and that deny the incarnate
character of scripture by making it merely referential. The fact that we mix
implicit attention to scripture as symbolic ordering with an insistence on
simple reference often confuses our reading. Nevertheless, it remains possible
not only to continue to read scripture as incarnational rather than merely
referential, but to do so more explicitly than we have done.
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__________. The Literal Meaning of Genesis.
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Historiography.@ Epoché: A Journal for the History of
Philosophy 1.1 (Fall 1993), 41-63.
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__________. Meditations on First
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Eco, Umberto. Theory of Semiotics.
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Faulconer, James. AA New Way of Looking At Scripture,@ Sunstone 18:2 (August 1995). 78-84.
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Fishbane, Michael. The Garments of Torah:
Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
Frei, Hans. The Eclipse of Biblical
Narrative; A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics. New
Haven, Yale University Press, 1974.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Warheit und Methode,
Grundzüge ein philosophische Hermeneutik, 3rd rvsd. ed.
Tübingin: Mohr, 1972. (Translated as Truth and Method, 2nd
rvsd. ed. Trans. rvsd. by Joel Wein. New York: Continuum, 1993.)
Guignon, Charles. Heidegger and the
Problem of Knowledge. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983.
Harrison, Carol. Beauty and Revelation in
the Thought of Saint Augustine. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992.
Hart, Kevin. The Trespass of the Sign:
Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.
Heidegger, Martin. Der Satz vom Grund.
(English: The Principle of Reason.)
__________. Sein und Zeit. Frankfurt
a.M.: Klostermann, 1977. (English: Being and Time. Trans. John
Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper, 1962.)
__________. AWissenschaft und Besinnung,@ Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Neske, 1978. 41-66.
(English: AScience and Reflection,@ The Question Concerning Technology and
Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper Colophon, 1977.
155-182.
__________. ADie Zeit des Weltbildes,@ Holzwege. Frankfurt a. M: Klostermann, 1950/1994. 75-113.
(English: AThe Age of the World Picture,@ The Question Concerning Technology and
Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper Colophon, 1977.
115-154.)
Held, Klaus. ACivic Prudence in Machiavelli: Toward the Paradigm Transformation in
Philosophy in the Transition to Modernity.@ In Reginald Lilly, Ed. The Ancients and the Moderns. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1996. 115-129.
Holgerson, Richard. AMilton Reads the King=s Book: Print, Performance, and the Making of
a Bourgeois Idol,@ Criticism
XXIX.1, 1987. 1-25.
Husserl, Edmund. Logische Untersuchungen.
Kant, Immanuel. ABeantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?@ Kants gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8.
Bonn: Royal Prussian Academy, 1988. 35-42. (English: AWhat is Enlightenment?@ Ed. Lewis White Beck. Kant Selections.
New York: Macmillan, 1988. 462-467.)
Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy: On
the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979.
Lectures on Faith. Provo, Utah: Infobases, 1992.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity,
An Essay on Exteriority . Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP,
1969.
Marion, Jean-Luc. God without Being.
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of Leuven: 8 January 1996.
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Wissenschaft. In Nietzsche Werke: Historisch‑kritische Ausgabe,
Part V Vol. 2, 11-335. DeGruyter: 1994. (English: The Gay Science.)
__________. AUnzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, II: Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie
für das Leben.@ In Nietzsche Werke: Historisch‑kritische
Ausgabe, Part III Vol. 1, 239-330. DeGruyter: 1994. (English: AUntimely Meditations II: On the Use and
Disadvantages of History for Life.@)
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the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
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[1]. I owe many people thanks for their critical
responses to this paper, though they need not take responsibility for what I
say here: Noel Reynolds, Michael Arts, Grant Boswell, Paul Hoskisson, Brandie
Siegfried, Daniel Graham, Mark Wrathall, and probably a number of others whom I
am churlish enough to have forgotten. In addition, I am grateful to Brigham
Young University which granted me a leave during which I wrote the first drafts
of this, and to the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), Belgium, which
appointed me a visiting professor during that leave and whose faculty,
especially Paul Moyaert and Rudi Visker, offered genuine philosophical and
collegial friendship, helping me to remember why I studied philosophy and
became a professor in the first place.
[2]. Philosophically, modernism is a way of
thinking about the world that is dominant from roughly 1500 to about 1800,
though it continues as an important force into the present. (In that regard, it
is important to note that for philosophy modern and contemporary
are not synonyms.) However, though modernism is the dominate way of thinking
during that period and though that period has given its name to modernism, what
we call modernist thought is not confined to that historical period. There were
modernist thinkers and elements prior to modernism and, obviously, there
continue to be modernist thinkers. (See Daniel.)
[3]. During the last several years there has
been a sometimes rancorous discussion among Latter-day Saint scholars about how
to understand history. I think the rancor of that discussion has died downCthank goodnessCso I hope that I can take up this related question without becoming
embroiled in that earlier debate. What follows is not a criticism of
academic history or historians or their methods. To offer another understanding
of what the word history can mean is not to suggest that there is
something wrong with other meanings of the word. We make a mistake when we use
a notion of history inappropriate to the context at hand, not when we use a
different notion of history. That mistake, a kind of equivocation, is what I
believe often happens in the debates between those who defend scriptural
historicity and those who attack it, as well as between those who deal with
that historicity by means of differing understandings of history. (For an important
though, I believe, generally misunderstood discussion of several possibilities
for history, see the second of Nietzsche=s Untimely Meditations, AOn the Use and Abuse of History for Life.@)
[4]. One problem with this view, a problem that
I cannot explore here, is that on such a view there can be nothing new in the
world. What-is is always and only what has already been; everything was given Ain the beginning,@ and nothing else can be. Though, under the
influence of Greek philosophy, this understanding has been a feature of much traditional
ChristianityCperhaps most explicitly in CalvinismCit is a view that is out of character with
Christianity, in which the hope for what is to come, what Bloch calls Athe Not-Yet,@ plays a crucial role. The not-yet is a notion without which it is
difficult to understand how such things as repentance and exaltation can have
meaning. Of course the same criticism can be applied to those who think of
religious truth as the expression of a Platonic realm of truth, a view more
common among orthodox Latter-day Saints.
[5]. Though I am not using the word myth
in its everyday senseCa
false or fanciful storyCI do use it here to denote an account that is not historically true. I
recognize that the common scholarly meaning of the word myth does not
include that it is not historically true, but I am not using the word in that
sense. However, if one were to us the word in that scholarly sense, then one
could take my argument to say, among other things, that scripture is
myth, but the myth of scripture and its factual history are not mutually
exclusive.
[6]. Literary criticism also owes much to those
debates. Most of the varieties of positions taken in criticism are very much
descendants of the various positions taken in them, and even those positions
that are not directly descended from those debates 200 years ago often rely on
parts of those arguments and positions. One need only read Frei=s overview of eighteenth and nineteenth century
debates about biblical meaning to see that. Much of the contemporary row over
texts and meaning amounts to little more than a rehash of eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century discussions.
[7]. Among other reasons, the terms are
problematic because the periodization of history is a questionable and
peculiarly modern practice, because the definitions of the periods take
modernism as their standard, and because those names of the periods do not name
specific periods of history so much as ways of thinking. As I will use the
terms here, premodern and modern are general terms. There were a
variety of ways of understanding history prior to modernism and there are a
variety of ways of understanding it in modernism. However, there is,
nevertheless, a divide between the two. Thus, in spite of the difficulties of
doing so, I will use the word premodern to refer to an understanding of
history perhaps best exemplified in medieval thinking and I will use the word modern
to refer to the Ascientific@ ways of understanding history that come to dominate with modernism.
[8]. Though I do not agree with his conclusions,
Frei=s seminal work on biblical meaning and the
influence of the modern understanding of history on our understanding of
biblical meaning serves as my own starting point.
[9]. However, whether we talk about real things
in the real world in a referential way (i.e., as explained by a
referential theory) remains a question. Strictly speaking reference per se
may be impossible, as thinkers such as Frege and Davidson argue. It does not
follow that we cannot speak of the world, only that we do not do so in the way
that referential theories of meaning assume that we do, namely by correlating
our meaningful sentences with states of affairs in something like a one-to-one
manner.
[10]. I take up the issue of signs from a
Derridean standpoint: every system of signs depends on something outside the
system, so no system of signs can completely capture that to which it refers;
and there is always more to reality than any interpretation if it, though we
can give only interpretations. Nevertheless, I do not think the Derridean
character of my argument is essential to it, as I will argue later. The points
I take from Derrida could also be made using other contemporary philosophers,
including Anglo-American ones.
See Hart=s The Trespass of the Sign for a
readable, more detailed overview of Derrida=s discussion of signs and for a treatment of the relevance of that
discussion to religious understanding. (For an excellent criticism of Derrida,
see Dastur, though her criticism does not undo this point about signs and
referentiality.) Eco has made a similar argument.
[11]. Thus, the attempt to specify the nature of
context theoretically requires a context, making our specification endless.
[12]. This means also that reference is
inherently unstable, not only in its inability to be explained by any theory of
reference, but also over time. As the context of an event changes over time
(and the event has temporal as well as momentary context), so too does the
event, as anyone who genuinely believes in repentance must believe. The present
can change the past or there is no difference between repentance and simple
regret.
The idea of
backwards causation sounds nonsensical to most people. However, consider an
example that I think can serve as an analog, rhythm. The moments of a rhythm
cannot be discreet as are the moments in a time line. If they were, they would
not be moments of a rhythm. Rhythmic moments require (Acontain@ already) their before and their after to be at all. One hit on the
head of a drum is not part of any rhythm; each beat in a rhythm is what it is
only in its relation to each of the other beats, only as it fits into the
rhythm as a whole. Consequently, as one varies a rhythm at any particular beat,
the meaning of each previous beats changes. Since beats are defined in
their relation to each other, the change in the relation between the various
beats has changed the beat in the past into something Anew,@ something other than what it was. The past beat no longer exists as it
did. At the time the drum head was struck initially, the beat was one thing.
However, with subsequent strikes, that past event is something other than what
it was.
If events are what they are in relation to each other, then the analogy
suggests that they could change over time.
[13]. Explaining Derrida=s position, Caputo says:
Derrida does not deny but delimits reference; what he denies is
reference-without-difference. Without différance [Derrida=s technical term for what happens in acts of
reference: the sign differs from its object and defers complete identification,
never completely corresponding to its object]. Différance does not lock
us up inside anything. On the contrary, différance is a doorway, a
threshold (limen), a door through which everything outgoing (reference,
messages sent, etc.) and incoming (messages received, perceptions, etc.) must
pass. A threshold supposes both an inside and an outside.
. . . On this accounting, proper names refer in actu exercitu,
in the exercised act, in actual use, in the concrete happening or the factual
event . . . . It is a wonder, a little difficult to account for, but it
happens. . . . [It is] something that philosophy is forced to swallow
while being unable to digest. (76-77; my bold)
As I said, the misunderstanding that attributes to Derrida the claim
that there is nothing external to language is common, so common that it has
become the Acommon sense@ of those who criticize Derrida. Nevertheless, it is mistaken, as a
careful reading of Derrida, in the context of his background in Husserl and
Heidegger, will show. Out of ignorance, some continue to make and repeat this
mistake because it has become so common. Others, such as Huston Smith, seem to
do so more willfully.
[14]. This explains why so many who read the work
of thinkers such as Derrida, Lyotard, Levinas, and others cannot see anything
in them but nihilism: since they reject modernism=s understanding of fixity, such readers assume
that such thinkers must argue for no fixity at all.
[15]. Those who assume that the absence of a
risk-free, universal viewpoint results in thorough-going relativism share with
the Enlightenment the assumption that meaning is either constituted as the
Enlightenment says it is or there is no meaning. With most contemporary
philosophers, I deny that assumption. As a consequence, vicious relativism
doesn=t necessarily follow from my denial of an
Archimedean leverage point for understanding and interpretation.
[16]. For example, echoing what other
contemporary philosophers have also said, Derrida says: AThere is no morality without faith, faith in
the other. There is no social experience without bearing witness, without
attestation, the recognition of a dimension of trust and faith. This is not a
religious point; it is the general structure of experience.@ The first of the Lectures on Faith
made a similar point more than one hundred years ago, and it presumably echoes
what the Prophet Joseph Smith believed. Joseph Smith might reply to Derrida: ATrue, it is the general structure of
experience, but that is a religious point, for religion gives a general
structure to experience.@
[17]. Such a view is consequent on the
traditional Christian understanding of God: As an unembodied being, God is
omnipresent. For such an omnipresent being, knowledge is aperspectival, i.e.,
universal. Thus, as the Renaissance argument goes, since we are made in God=s image, to the degree possible our knowledge
also should be aperspectival and universal. However, one can believe in God=s knowledge, understanding, and omniscience
without assuming that they are to be understood in these universal,
aperspectival terms. Much of David Paulsen=s work is dedicated to showing the alternative.
[18]. The concept of a symbolic ordering is not a
rigorous concept, but I do not think it a difficult concept to understand. I
think its meaning will become clear as I use the term in context. However, let
me try to say something for those who would like more of an explanation. For
background in understanding my discussion of symbolic ordering, one should read
sections 31 and 32 of Heidegger=s Being and Time (and perhaps the material leading up to those
sections). There he discusses understanding and the necessity of
preunderstanding to understanding and interpretation. (By understanding
Heidegger means something like Aimplicit understanding,@ and by interpretation he means the explication of
understanding.) The correlate discussion of preunderstanding in Gadamer=s Truth and Method and the discussion
of prefiguration (also called mimesis1) in Ricoeur=s Time and Narrative, volume 1 (1-64),
might be helpful. (Both Gadamer and Ricoeur rely heavily on Heidegger=s work.) Guignon=s book may also be helpful.
Briefly put, what we think of as
understanding requires preunderstanding; preunderstanding gives us our
possibilities for understanding. As we have understood since Plato, our
understanding of the world cannot begin from zero, ex nihilo. Something,
some way in which the world gives itself to us prior to reflection, makes
understanding possible. But the world does not give itself as the bare presence
of mere things. It always gives itself to us in shape and relations, in a
figure. The world gives itself to us, prereflectively, as configured. Thus, a
preunderstanding is the configuration of the world (the
κόσμoς) within which one finds oneself oriented in the
world: an ordering gives the possibilities for understanding by configuringCreconfiguringCthe world. Various things can serve to order, language and mathematics,
for example. A symbolic ordering is a preunderstanding in which symbols and
symbols systems (as opposed to sign systems) are fundamental, though not
exclusive, to the configuration in which one finds oneself oriented.
[19]. This reduction of religion to sets of
beliefs is also consequent on the traditional understanding of God and the way
that understanding led to the Enlightenment: On a voluntaristic Christian view,
God=s will is coextensive with his knowledge,
which is ideal and at least a representation of the world. Thus, since humans
image God, human knowledge, i.e., representation of the ideal, like God=s knowledge, is prior to or fundamental to
human action and life. On this way of thinking, religious beliefs are
representations to ourselves of the religious aspect of the ideal world. As
such, they make it possible for us to act in religious ways. Therefore, beliefs
are fundamental to religion. We generally take recognition of and adherence to
a particular set of beliefs to be identical with being an adherent of that
religion. (Note that it is possible to understand a good deal of modernism as
an outgrowth of voluntarism in theology. For an argument to this effect, see
Klaus Held.) To take religion to be a matter of symbolic ordering is to reject
this understanding of the connection between religion and belief. (Of course,
it is not necessarily to reject everything about voluntarism, only those
features that make belief and representation fundamental to action in the way
that voluntarism does.)
[20]. I am hesitant to define what I mean by sacred.
I fear a kind of definitional blasphemy, but I can say that it has to do with
what is excessive, in other words, abundant, and determinative: the sacred Atranscends@ the world of our experience and our ability to explain (though it
transcends without having to be, itself, in or of another quasi-Platonic realm)
and it Aexplains@ the world (by grounding that world, thoughCagainCit is not a ground outside or beyond the world). Those curious about
how to think such transcendence and ground might find Heidegger=s Principle of Reason interesting.
[21]. I use the language of form and content here
for heuristic reasons. As we usually understand that language, it requires
another world to which this world refers, i.e., something like a theory of
representation. However, one need not be a Platonist or a representationalist
to find the language of form meaningful and helpful. For the ancients, form
is that in which the real shows itself, presents itself. That is the point,
and the point need not be understood in representational terms, as Aristotle
well shows. Put otherwise: the language of form and content can be helpful,
though the danger is that we will understand that language via a theory of
representation or something like it. The work of Heidegger, for example, is amenable
to this way of thinking. I believe that Wittgenstein=s work is similarly amenable to form and
content language, though of course neither Heidegger nor Wittgenstein would use
the word form in its Platonic sense because of the metaphysical,
representational, baggage that the word carries with it. Heidegger speaks of
horizons, Wittgenstein of forms of life. In what follows, I will discuss how
form can be that in which the real shows itself without assuming that there is
another world to which the form must be correlate.
[22]. Searle=s work is an interesting and relevant example of the attempt to take
the language of symbolic ordering as parasitic.
[23]. Ironically, however, the exclusion of
symbolic ordering from the rational is self-defeating since rational language
cannot avoid the intrusion of the symbolic via such features of language as
metaphor: words such as inference and therefore are no longer
understood from the metaphors that inform them, but if all metaphorical
language were removed, even the language of logic, like all language, would
cease to function.
[24]. Some may expand on this, not placing the
value in the individual, but in the group. However, the basic structure remains
the same: the distinction between regions is determined subjectively or
intersubjectively.
[25]. This is not to say that the dogma of
transubstantiation begins with Aquinas. Rather, he formulates philosophically
the justification for a dogma that has been generally argued for (though not
always clearly required to be believed) since at least the tenth century and
that was made dogmatic only with the Fourth Latern Council (1215). The Thomist
interpretation of Aristotle=s doctrine of substance takes substance to be that which exists in
itself or that which remains what it is, though it might have differing
qualities at different moments. (For more on substance, see Aristotle=s Categories.) The second of these
characterizations of substance leads to the doctrine of transubstantiation as
understood in the dogma of the Catholic Church: the bread takes on the
substance of Christ=s
body, though in doing so it has different qualities than it does in the person
of Jesus Christ.
[26]. Thus, one takes a Reformation view when one
understands scripture as a more or less successful attempt to describe events
accurately and when one takes it to be essentially ahistorical and
referential to something transcendent.
[27]. Cited in Helgerson 4.
[28]. Writing falls short when it assumes that
the relation between the written word is simple reference rather than
enactment, for it will always fail to reach that which it supposedly represents
because, as simple reference, it removes itself from the act in which a genuine
reference could occur.
[29]. Ironically, I take it that the nineteenth-
and twentieth-century conservative Christian interpretations of sola
scritura is the consequence of the fact that scripture has lost its sacred
characterCan insistence on its sacred character when
the rational underpinnings for thinking it sacred have disappeared.
[30]. It is not central to the thesis of this
paper, but I should note that I distinguish memory from recall, as I hinted
earlier. Recall is a psychological event. Memory is what we share and
participate in. As such, it gives us direction (intention) beyond our subjective
intentions, often intentions we do not know. It also creates expectations of us
that are beyond our will. Though the cup remembers for Moyaert, it may not
always or ever recall for him.
[31]. For an interesting discussion of symbolic
ordering and its powerCin the
context of witchcraft rather than magicCsee Favret-Saada. The introduction to her work also shows why symbolic
ordering cannot be reduced to primitive science.
[32]. Interestingly, Descartes reduces the
religious region to the moral, a reduction that begins at about his time and
grows more prevalent until, today, the identity of religion and morality is
common senseCin spite of Nietzsche=s pointed and accurate attacks on such
religion. Such common sense robs religion of its vitality.
[33]. As Levinas shows (in, for example, Totality
and Infinity 48ff.), Descartes= attempt relies on the necessity of something beyond the rational (see Meditations
3). Nevertheless, Descartes seems not to have understood the degree to which
the necessity of recourse to the Infinite undercuts his methodological claims.
Even if he did understand that, it is certainly the case that those following
him did not.
[34]. Of course, if one does not have the
narrower definition of reason that modernism adopts, then it becomes possible
to identify the ground of reason (in the modern sense of reason) with
reason itself, as ancients and medievals usually do.
[35]. In spite of the way that, for heuristic
reasons, I have described the change from premodernism to modernism and in
spite of the way that modern thinkers often portrayed and understood
themselves, modernism was no sudden and absolute rupture with its past. Such
things as Greek epist‘m‘ combined with the Christian idea of an
external nature over which humans rule, the certainty of salvation, ascetic Amethods@ for achieving salvation, and voluntarism are important antecedents of
modernism. Nevertheless, with modernism=s explicit rejection of its roots and its move to the subject
(individual consciousness) as fundamental, a very new understanding of things
and the world entered into European history. For more on the antecedents of
modernism, see Dupré.
[36]. In Latter-day Saint scripture, see Moses 1:11
and Doctrine and Covenants 58:3, as well as 2 Corinthians 12:1-4.
[37]. The difference between what Augustine and
Aquinas mean by enlightenment and what the moderns mean is another way
to mark the difference between the medieval and the modern. The former has to
do with the gift of seeing the sacred in the temporal, seeing the sacred order
of the temporal; the latter has to do with using reason critically. (For the
former, see Augustine=s The
Literal Meaning of Genesis; for the latter, see Kant, AWhat is Enlightenment?@)
[38]. The incarnationist view of scripture is not
confined to Christianity. Speaking of the medieval Jewish mystical
understanding of Torah, Fishbane says, AOn this view, the Bible . . . is ontologically unique
principally because it is nothing less than a dimension of divinity itself@ (35).
[39]. Suppose, however, that one cannot accept
the argument that symbols are best understood incarnationally, that one still
feels that symbols must be understood as references, as a kind of sign. Even
then, it is impossible for us to refer adequately and accurately to the history
of the world. Human understanding may hold some few points of that history
together, but it cannot hold them together as a whole, especially not an
ordered whole. For human understanding, the kosmos becomes, at best, a
blur of amorphous shapes in an ancient mirror. (See 1 Corinthians 13:12.) If
the kosmos can be comprehended, only God can do so. Therefore, even if
scripture were referential rather than incarnational, for a believer only the
divine revelation of historyCin other words, scriptureCcould be an accurate reference to and representation of that history as
a whole, something that scientific history neither attempts nor wishes to give.
The events of history can be understood only as they fit into the whole of
which they are a part. Thus, even the particular events of a divine history
could not be understood except from within the perspective of a divine
revelation, the perspective purportedly offered by scripture and a perspective
purposefully and necessarily unavailable within the parameters of modern
historiography.
[40]. For Latter-day Saints, the comparison is
even closer: the Son is an incarnation of the Father without being the same
person as the Father.
[41]. Alternatively, it suggests something that
we find too mysterious, something like the standard interpretation of the
doctrine of transubstantiation.
[42]. This is how I read the Prophet=s seemingly tautologous statement that there
is no immaterial matter.
[43]. Talk of spirit bodies possessing physical
bodies doesn=t explain what it means to have a body since
according to LDS doctrine spirits, too, have material bodies.
[44]. One reason that I find Merleau-Ponty=s discussion helpful is that it echoes Paul=s way of talking about what it means to be a
Christian. See, for example, see Romans 7 and 8, where it is clear that the
change that occurs in a Christian is not a change of characteristics or
obedience, but a change of being. (Compare 7:22-23 with 8:8-9.) For Paul, the
division is not between inner and outer, or mind/spirit and body, but between
living by the Spirit and living according to one=s will, i.e. living according to the world. For Paul, to be a Christian
is to inhabit the world in a particular way, not to subscribe to a particular
set of beliefs (though beliefs will follow from the fact that one inhabits the
world as a Christian Csee
note 19). See also 1 Corinthians 1:26-29, especially verse 28, where Paul
speaks of the saints as Anon-being@
(μ¬ Ïv),
suggesting that the difference between Christians and nonChristians is a matter
of their being.
[45]. This is not to criticize scientists
for that attitude or to suggest that God ought to be part of science. A great
many other important things also do not exist in a world inhabited
scientifically, things such as morality and value or, of less consequence, good
taste in food or clothing. That absence is the consequence of the specialized
incarnation required of science and is only a problem if scientists (or more
often those who idolize science because they know too little of it) forget that
such a specialized incarnation is not the only one, the best one, or the final
one. (See also page 36 of this essay and Heidegger=s AThe Age of the World Picture@ and AScience and Reflection.@)
[46]. I have in mind here Edmund Husserl=s concept of Abschattungen, Aprofiles.@ We know an object only in its profiles, but it is always excessive of
those profiles as well as of any imaginative combination of profiles (and it is
important to recall that a combination of profiles is always the result
of an act of imagination; the objectivity of an object is the work of
imagination).
[47]. The Enlightenment had this overcoming of
all abundance and excess as its goal. In Derridean terms, it aimed at the
identity of text and world. However, the excess of meaning is a function of the
embodiment of the world and ourselves, and it makes continued speaking and
relation possible. Thus, the implicit goal of the Enlightenment was the
destruction of the body by the reduction of everything to certaintyCabsolute irrelation and silence; absolute
death.
[48]. Both Levinas=s and Marion=s
discussions of intention are instructive (Levinas, Totality and Infinity
23, 27-29, 49, 122-130, 204-209, 257-261, 294-295; Marion 18-23).
[49]. See also Nietzsche=s preface to the second edition of The Gay
Science, section four, where Nietzsche compares the will to see everything
to Egyptian boys who desecrate temples: AWe no longer believe that truth remains truth when one pulls off the
veils: we have lived too much to believe this. Today it seems to us a matter of
propriety that one would not to wish to see everything naked, to be present at
everything, or to understand and >know= everything.@
Perhaps this is a
way of explaining the Savior=s remark in Matthew 13:13: AI speak to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing
they hear not, neither do they understand.@ That idea is an important part of the Christian tradition, though it
is often a scandal to believers as well as nonbelievers. The traditional
explanation for parables and parabolic language is: AThe motives for symbolism are secrecy and
revelation, as accommodated to the abilities of the interpreters. God uses
symbols so that >the most sacred things are not easily handled
by the profane but are revealed instead to the real lovers of holiness= (1105C, 283)@ (Rorem 25; quoting Pseudo-Dionysius). My argument suggests that
perhaps, instead, parables are to be explained as the only possible response to
those who demand that the language of religion be Aclear and distinct.@ Parables demand that their hearers deal with
them as something containing a secret, but a secret that, it turns out, cannot
simply be removed. (Of course, the two explanations are not mutually
exclusive.)
Note also that the view I propose contests Kermode=s explanation of the secrecy of parables and,
therefore, of what it means to understand a narrative.
[50]. Of course, these remarks do not imply that
we ought to avoid clear and distinct language. Our preference for such language
is not merely contingent. Taking the identity of intention and expression to be
an ultimate good for writing is an outgrowth of our Cartesian goal of mastery
over everything with no remainder, the transparency of the world. However, the
identity of intention and expression is sometimes a good: when that identity is
possible, then our language ought to embody it. If our language does not, it
fails. It is inadequate. Nevertheless, languages other than the language of
clarity are also possible, even necessary. (For one thing, if they are not
possible, then it is not clear how to avoid making the desire for knowledge a
desire, ultimately, for annihilationCsee note 47.)
[51]. The Latter-day Saint and Catholic
recognition of the need for ordinances and for authority in ordinances is a
recognition of the inadequacy of individual intentions when it comes to
understanding or invoking the Divine. In general, Protestantism disagrees on
this point, but its disagreement runs the risk of reducing religion to the
thoughts and feelings of the individual, to only a psychological attitude. See
my AA New Way of Looking at Scripture@ (an unfortunate title, not of my choosing)
for a sketch of an argument for the necessity of authority. See also Marion 153
ff., from which I have adapted that argument.
[52]. However, Kermode misunderstands the
relation of the Roman Catholic Church to medieval scripture interpretation,
accepting without question the modernist view of the matter: he applies the
distinction between what the texts are about and what they mean, and he
criticizes biblical texts for their failure to describe events accurately. As a
result, he does not seem to understand the incarnational character of premodern
interpretation or its communal character. He also misunderstands Heidegger=s discussion of interpretation.
[53]. However, we must remember that we decide
accuracy relative to the region or order within which a description occurs and
to the purposes for which it is given. A scientific description would be
inaccurate in a scriptural text; a scriptural description would be inaccurate
in a scientific text. In neither case could one rectify the inaccuracy of the
description by saying more, by giving more detail, by looking more closely, by
correcting one=s Amistakes,@ for
the inaccuracy is a function of the relation between the description, the place
in and purpose for which it is given, and the order which gives it meaning
rather than a function of the descriptive skill of the person offering the description.
[54]. For a discussion of some of these reasons,
see Heidegger=s AThe Age of the World Picture.@
[55]. It should be clear by now that I do not
think there is only one way to do history properly.
[56]. Many nonLDS Christians probably also
continue to read symbolically, especially those often thought of as literalists
or conservative.