Sacred Texts on the Toilet

I mentioned in a response to Bryce’s excellent discussion on virtue-ethics last week that it would likely take an entire post to support my claim that Christianity has been, and is, yoked to a world-view grounded in semiotics. As it turns out, I’ve approached the subject in more roundabout manner than I originally intended—I hope the presentation does not detract from the promised explanation.

I saw Saint Augustine today, weeping under a fig tree as he watched me thumb through his Confessions on the toilet. In 4th century Hippo, most people probably shat communally as they sat atop stone privies designed to accommodate multiple participants. “Noli spectare. Perturbat me . . .”—this circumstance was perhaps not as convenient for light reading as is our current situation.


So, naturally, I could understand his confusion and disappointment as I skimmed over his conversion experience—the climactic triumph of his spirit over flesh—in such close proximity to excrement, which probably happens to be a good distance from the regenerate soul on the ladder of spiritual ascendance.

I know someone like Whitman wouldn't have minded and, in fact, would have likely welcomed this proximity; however, I had the distinct impression that Augustine was not pleased in the least. So I nodded, gently lay the book aside and began to think about the nature of sacred texts—particularly, whether or not they created or should be reserved for sacred spaces (unlike the one I currently occupied). Perhaps they demanded a more reverent physical and spiritual posture, a more solemn response.

For example, most patristic scholars contend that Augustine intended his Confessions to be read reflectively. He envisioned a connection between meditation, as a spiritual exercise, and reading. Thus, by tracing his own journey of self-discovery, which of course culminates in spiritual conversion, Augustine encouraged his readers to try out his method for themselves—uniting their own souls’ progress with the memory of their physical bodies’ passage through historical time just as he did. As Brian Stock suggests, “The individual life thereby became the setting for the reenactment of the biblical drama of alienation and return.” It is this speculation of Augustine’s authorial intent that consistently thwarts my attempts to shake the conviction that the bishop of Hippo did not imagine a toilet as the stage upon which my personal passion play, the death of my old self and resurrection of the new, would be reenacted. Ultimately, my disconcertedness emanates from the knowledge that the critical problem of Augustine’s Confessions is the translation of thought into action for both himself and his audience. And as I considered this problem with elbows upon knees, hands supporting head and bare feet pressed to cool linoleum, I couldn’t help but feel that my present action was not the most accurate physical translation of Augustine’s metaphysical message.

Perhaps when the saint gazed into the future to picture me reading his autobiography, I was seated beside a wooden prayer bench in a sunlit reading room as a single beam of light like a dove descended from heaven to anoint a particular passage before my eyes. Surely he did not suppose his most intimate work would be the subject of my powder-room perusal. To clarify, it’s not that I think Augustine is necessarily too stilted or sanctimonious to read on the toilet; it’s just that I don’t want to spoil his expectations. I don’t want to take lightly the ethical demands of his text—a text that is considered by many to be sacred.


This leads me to wonder whether secondary sources pertaining to Augustine are also off limits—perhaps, as long as I just skip over quoted passages? Only, this seems like a slippery slope because, as we all know, I’m not reading a first-hand account to begin with. I’m reading Henry Chadwick’s translation, which is only one translation in a long chain of translations and reinterpretations extending all the way back to the 4th century. And here in lies the problem—every new reading is new translation, meaning it must be the sense of the text that is sacred rather than the words on the page—and the sense seems inescapable.

Initially, I intended to suggest that bathroom reading might be a sort of litmus test for sacred texts—if you feel guilty reading it on the toilet, perhaps it’s sacred. However, for Augustine, all truth is God’s truth—all signs, natural and conventional, point to God. Thus, in the Augustinian semiotic explanation of the creation’s relationship to its creator, the sacred becomes inescapable--even on the toilet.

In light of this revelation, Augustine challenges us to assume vocations of “logobiography”— making it our lives’ objective to demonstrate the manner in which we are written into the text of God’s creation (here is where I begin to see obvious connections to our discussion of virtue-ethics). According to the saint, we should recognize our function as signs and producers of signs that point perpetually beyond our/themselves to the referent who subsumes the system of representation.

Of course, I’m not advocating that we return to a medieval world-view in which every mundane occurrence becomes a “sign” from God—I’m merely attempting to suggest that Christianity’s past and present rootedness in semiotics may be conceived of as a contiguous process. For example, I do not believe Augustine’s conception necessarily negates postmodernism’s notion that meaning is linguistically and thus socially constructed, but might rather suggest that the materials with which society constructs have their immutable origins in an original word. Therefore, while incorporeal conceptions such as love, justice and truth might ultimately originate in the logos, the corporeal and thus temporal and malleable manifestations of these conceptions are contingent upon the imbricated vocabularies we employ to communicate them. As reader-response critics Gerhard Ebeling and Ernst Fuchs suggest, our “language enables the ‘word of God’ to ‘speak.’”

Thus, in the reciprocal relationship between creator and created, the word first spoken by God is incarnated in and perpetuated by the thought and action of humanity. And if—as I suggested in my response to Daniel’s recent post—the divine logos pervades and is perpetuated by manifold discourses, contact and negotiation between multiple and divergent perspectives can be conceived of as an essential element in a process of revelation, which Ricoeur describes as “opening something that is closed, of making manifest something that was hidden.”

Ricoeur’s conception of revelation as process also serves as a reminder of what Augustine refers to as our status viatoris—our perpetual state of being on the way, which provides a valuable caution against attempts to reconcile discordant discourses for the achievement of hegemonic consensus. As Bakhitn asserts, “Christ’s truth is real, but its authority cannot be known as dogma or proposition. Genuine truth always involves more work and more risk than dogma or propositions require of us.”

The Case for Virtue Ethics

After reading over my comment on Nic’s post, I realize that I might be drawing his post into the sphere of my pre-occupation with virtue-ethics without due warrant. That kind of discussion is not very fair to Nic and the work he put into his argument; however, I genuinely believe that virtue-ethics has a place at the table, and my introduction to the topic is probably more a matter of kairos, or poor timing rather than irrelevance (That’s what she said). Let me give it another go, since I’ve already opened my imouth.

Daniel, your remark about the desirability of a middle ground seems apt. I generally lose excitement when the obvious answer to a problem begins to look like something in between to divergent opinions. I’m not sure where to go either, and we will probably have new and different lenses with which to ask the question within the next 20 years or so, so I’m not ready to subscribe to an answer to the whole foundation problem (The fact that I make that statement though, puts me in the layers camp. I still haven’t found out how to get out of my own situatedness). I can’t wait to read what you’ve got on that Eagleton lecture. I loved it and made everyone around me listen to it (much debate in the Doty household).

As a proponent of virtue-ethics, I must briefly touch on the idea of Wisdom, especially as articulated by theologian David F. Ford. First, let me define my terms so as to keep me honest, at least in my own system. When I think of virtue-ethics, I think of the body. I think of material and matter. One of the most hopeful promises I hold for virtue-ethics is that it is, or can be, a great destroyer of abstraction. Directly, it is the branch of ethics that is concerned with the development of practices and forms of living that shape a human life in such a way so that the whole of the human’s life becomes an example of the virtues he/she is striving for. Commitments are grounded in actions, and indeed the very body of the human. There are probably limits to what could constitute a virtue in this sense, but that I take to be a good thing. “Don’t listen to what it says, look at what it does” is a simple phrase that is a good example of what I’m trying to describe. If I claim to care about the plight of HIV victims in Africa, but my behaviors cannot corroborate this claim, then I in fact do not care about such matter. Right, right? Anyone care to critique/expand/narrow my definition thus far?

Wisdom, as I see it, is one of these virtues, which, as people who claim Christianity, should find expressions in our behavior and intellectual practices. Allow me to quote an extended passage from David F. Ford’s Shaping Theology:

[Wisdom] tries to embrace the imaginative, the intellectual, the passionate and the practical; it refers to the wisdom of God as well as to fallible human searching. Wisdom need not be competitive with the various other terms that describe theology, such as understanding, thought, knowledge, truth, reflective practice, dogma and doctrine. Yet it seems to me the most inclusive. While encouraging rigorous inquiry and thorough understanding it is also hospitable to the ethical and the aesthetic. Wisdom traditions are concerned with the long-term shaping of life in many dimensions, including the common good and the formation of the whole person (xvii).

Judging by this description, seeking wisdom is about asking different questions than those that create dichotomies and oppositions. When we seek wisdom, we entertain different consequences than just getting something right or wrong, we take heed of the common good and the consequences to our body and community. A good way to think of wisdom is as an inclusive theological category.
Nic’s post reminded us about the painful inaccessibility of our tradition; although he was quick to show us that our tradition is inaccessible only to those questions and pursuits that try to get it right and try to find an impervious ground to stand on. I introduced virtue-ethics to the conversations because I feel like the development of virtues is an appropriate way to do theology post-foundationalism. And here, more specifically, wisdom as an appropriate theological pursuit in this context, because the search for wisdom takes into account our fallible human searching and seeks to connect our theological pursuits to the way we live and the people and communities we form. That’s my case for virtue-ethics. Keep in mind that these thoughts come from a shameless dilettante, but that doesn’t give me the right to be lazy or make those who know more about this do my work for me. Any thoughts or reactions?

Intersections of Rhetoric and Theology--A Social Ethic of Love

Let me begin by confessing, up front, that I am no theologian. My training is in rhetoric. However, any sweeping survey of rhetorical studies, both ancient and contemporary, would be incomplete without addressing the vast connections between both fields. Rhetoric informs theology and, if you agree with Kenneth Burke, theology informs rhetoric -- they are both mutually dependent (i.e. Burke would argue God is a function of language, so when language dies God dies). For my inaugural post, I thought it would be good, mainly for my sake in being a theological novice, to start with what I'm familiar -- namely, the rhetorical -- and point out one way in which I see the two fields overlapping. And in case you're wondering, I am including a large selection of a recent paper I completed on rhetorical discourse and religious fundamentalism. In this post I will argue that Christian theology offers a rhetorical framework, in God's ethic of love, which dictates the performance of the social. As you read, please view this as jumping off point, and not an all-encompassing, fully thought-out exercise. I simply want to begin the larger pursuit of seeing the intersections of rhetoric and theology (I'd recommend reading Burke's landmark study The Rhetoric of Religion for a more comprehensive analysis)

The Christian story begins with God setting the world in motion, establishing order, and yet also endowing humans with the ability to choose. If order is established by command, such as when God commands Adam to not eat the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2.17), then "the word-using animal not only understands a thou-shalt-not; it can carry the principle of the negative a step further, and answer the thou-shalt-not with a disobedient No" (Burke qtd. in Biesecker 69). With Adam's choice to disobey God's command we see that action contains an ethical element, to act rightly or wrongly, which is made possible by the principle of the negative, or the idea of no. While it may seem, then, that the source of ethics lies in the individual subject, we must remember that Adam's decision not only affects him, but also his relationship to God, to nature, and to Eve. Therefore, God reveals his ethic of love through Christ, who Alan Jacobs reminds us, is "the one identified by the Christian Church as the incarnate love" (9). Christ famously declares, in Matthew 22.37-39: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind'. . . . And . . . 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" These two commandments, central to the Christian message, set the standard for the ethical relationship between the self and other that constitute the social.

If language predicates the existence of the social then rhetoric gives us a means of navigating the difference made possible by the principle of the negative, and God's ethic of love limits the possibilities of movement within the paradox of the always and already fractured relationship between "I," "You," and "We." Thus, Burke famously says:

If men [and women] were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorican to proclaim their unity. If men [and women] were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man's [and woman's] very essence. (qtd. in Biesecker 100).

So we can see, now, that language itself is proof of our incompleteness. Absolute communication, or unity, should never be a goal of an individual or community, because we know it is not possible. But what is possible, and what should be a goal, is the pursuit of love and love in the pursuit of the "other." As Biesecker concludes, "For Burke, that is to say, it is precisely the impossibility of closing the gap between self and other that keeps us engaged with one another, talking to one another, courting one another; that forever keeps us 'promot[ing]' social cohesion by acting rhetorically upon [our]selves and one another'" (100). The principle of the negative may be the motivation that keeps us "acting rhetorically upon ourselves," but God's ethic of love powerfully dictates how we are to act rhetorically. If the central message of the bible, and indeed the central message of Christianity, is the love of God and others, we can see why a Christian might be so well-equipped to engage in discourse that never forecloses difference, and act not only of responsibility but love.

Ultimately, this is why I want to contribute to this communal theology blog--not because I think that I, or any other writer, can reach some determinable end of knowledge or spiritual assent, but because I am spiritually convicted to act rhetorically with/upon others, not to mention the great pleasure I find in the process. So please, feel free to respond, critique, rebuke, or condemn anything you read on this blog. It's all part of the rhetorical process to which we are all committed.