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.”
6 comments:
Judging by your excellent tags for this post, I think it is high time we put a tag bar on our blog to show off how interesting we are. I really appreciated your post. You somehow managed to sound like a Billy Collins poem and yet throw some real insight in the whole mess without making the reader work too hard. (Not that poetry or well written pose is hard work, but that you, yourself did not sublimate into the author, and I have a clear path with which I respond.) I’ve delayed writing my response so as to give others a chance to reply so this post could have some other voices in it instead of the Brice v. Bryce of last week. Alas, since no one has thrown the first stone, I pick mine up now.
I better understand the connection you were making last week between language and our ability to act. In some ways I feel a little imprisoned by this idea. Last week, I didn’t want to admit that “the corporeal and thus temporal and malleable manifestations of these conceptions [love, Justice, etc.] are contingent upon the imbricated vocabularies we employ to communicate them.” I’m uncomfortable with the primacy that language is given here, if only because it demands so bloody much of us. I wanted it wholly the other way, or, stated in your terms, that the vocabularies we employ to communicate conceptions are contingent upon the corporeal and thus temporal and malleable manifestations of those conceptions. I think last week you mentioned that it does go tit for tat, so perhaps we can leave it at that for the moment. Actually, I think my whole argument is headed toward this. Whoops.
In what I believe to be my more interesting thoughts about your post, I found myself wondering where Jesus fits into the whole semiotic equation. That’s where I’m going now.
If we are to assume that all cognition, understanding, etc. have at their root, some form of discourse, we can go with Bakhtin’s dialogic here, and if the original discourse, according to Augustine, is conducted with “The” or an original word, what do we make of the “word that became flesh”? I largely agree with your points, I think it is a beautiful sentiment; however, for the moment I want to explore the idea of Jesus, especially as the transfigured word. I’m hoping that in doing so, it might better bridge the connections between metaphysical and physical that we seem to be breaking on. I wonder how your analysis of semiotics gels with a form natural theology. It kind of runs like this in my head: God has revealed the word, it is humanities job to make the word known, we have the tools, language, to do this, and finally, the transmission of The Word is contingent on the vocabularies that humanity creates to describe the word. Is there space for the entity Jesus here, or is it a closed system that does not require his revelation? My initial observation is that it functions quite nicely without Jesus. If we are formed from the word down, do we really need Jesus to act as a corporeal, temporal and malleable manifestation of the word? Or, what does this accomplish in respect to our relationship with the Word? In this light, I can see how Paul writes about the crucifixion as “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23). Obviously the Jews had vastly different expectations than a murdered Messiah, and for the rest of us, it doesn’t make much sense that the original word, the whole summation of our existence, should manifest itself as a victim of torture. We either all got the sign wrong or the signifier+signified chose to confuse the hell out of us. I guess I want to argue that our vocabularies have not done a satisfactory job of describing the word. Otherwise, we could have seen or predicted this whole Jesus thing.
But since it did happen, and in a manner that doesn’t make much sense, I’m coming to the conclusion or argument that it happened as a corporeal manifestation of the practices God wants our vocabularies to describe. We weren’t doing a good enough job of taking the Word, discoursing about it with ourselves and communities, and coming to appropriate manifestations or practices in response to the word. Yes the act is stuck in its own culture, history, and temporality, which makes it extremely difficult to use as an example. After all, we are now to the point of mediating an act of the word made flesh through words and words and words and time and time and time and culture and culture and culture. I guess it could work though, if we see Christ, and the act of Christ, in each other. Maybe he started a chain, and maybe we can see examples of those who are linked onto that chain. Or maybe the whole Eucharist allows us to see the example of Christ every week. I don’t know. But, both for the sake of understanding and fellowship, (I’m with you one hundred percent that this stuff should matter (I think you were getting at that somewhere)) I want to propose that the whole Jesus thing disrupted our relationship with the Word so much so, that we have to resort to the example of the act of Jesus in order to ground our vocabulary, speech, and discourse. Feel free to separate the wheat from the chaff in this response. I fear that it might be a little too out there to adequately get a handle on.
Thanks,
Bryce
Thanks for casting the first stone—I was beginning to feel like an unworthy target. I think Jesus’s role in this mess is a brilliant place to take the discussion, and I agree that Jesus as the incarnate Word is the ultimate site of convergence between the pesky and perhaps artificial (I’m still trying to sneak this idea in) physical/metaphysical divide. Maybe you’re right about us not doing a good enough job of communicating and acting upon the word; but of course we didn’t know how—we had (and still have) to conform our lives to an incomplete text. What do you think of the following idea?
The life and death of Jesus enable us to more accurately interpret the system because he is simultaneously signifer, sign and signified. When the “Word became flesh,” the transcendent God became present without relinquishing transcendence. In this sense, divinity—while it cannot be reduced to the physical—is nevertheless “enfleshed” in a physical body and thus signals beyond and, ultimately, back to itself. Jesus embodies and thus illuminates the nature of the system—signs make knowledge of transcendence possible by referring or pointing to what is other than themselves. Thus, the Incarnation is a physical manifestation of the “ultimate signifier” that illuminates the nature of the creator in the “text” of creation. As David Lyle Jeffery writes, “[...] the means by which language signifies only achieves its full comprehension in the datum of the Incarnation [...].” As the divine Word makes the decent into the world of embodied signification, it becomes the “Good Teacher” (Augustine’s term) whose doctrine transforms our own inner word by enabling it to be conformed to its “likeness.” The instruction of the “Good Teacher” persuades the individual will by presenting it with a compelling sign of God’s love; it is only through this recognition of divine, self-sacrificing love that the will is capable of being detached from its addiction to power—Girard’s mimetic rivalry—and returned to justice in the exercise of charity. The Eucharist is a reminder that the system finds its fruition in Christ—the signs (bread and wine) become the signifieds (body and blood). Or if we’re consubstantiationists, the elements are simultaneously signs and signifieds like Jesus himself.
I like this conversation. In regard to the endless proliferation of words, which fail to adequately connect us to the Word, I'd like to contribute a little. The advances of quantum science parallel that of many literary theories in this regard. Physicists have searched tirelessly to find the bottom ground of all reality, but the harder they look the more they find empty space. Atoms were originally thought to be solid masses, but now we know that their actual "mass" only accounts for an insignificant fraction of their volume. Elementary particles which are reported to make up this "mass" are not even supposed to be any sort of existent matter. Physics now teaches us that we can't ever "get to the bottom of everything", and that if we did we would probably find nothing at all.
The point being that for all the brilliance of human theories and the amazing advances that science has made, it seems in many ways that we have begun to reach a point where many of the big questions have ceased to matter. Quarks and muons may be interesting, but existentially all they really mean is that human reality really does amount to a vapor. It's statistically ridiculous that we are here at all. So, for all our knowledge of particles, atoms, molecules, etc., reality as we know it is all contingent on the actions and interactions those entities take. Maybe another way to say this is that we don't experience the "things themselves" but rather the movements those "things" would make if they were actually there.
I realize this may seem slightly absurd to be writing this for a theological/literary criticism blog . . . so really quick, allow me to try and tie this in. A month or so ago, I was reading Wittgenstein and his ideas about the human psycho-linguistic construction of "the world". We do this by the creation and recitation of 'atomic facts'. At that point I took full liberty of reading into the text what I wanted to, and drew a parallel with what I described above.
I find that the more precise we get with our language, using language to get to the bottom of it all, the more we realize that we are talking about nothing. When I scan the vast centuries of Christian theology and the endless hypotheticals that we have discussed ad nauseum, it seems to me that we have constructed a shroud that the risen Lord has no need of wearing. It is ultimately the animation of our discourses in lived reality that manages to not lose existential meaningfulness. If according to Wittgenstein the world is inescapably linguistic, then it is the action and interaction of words and actions which form an existence that we could view as "real". To stress either aspect to the detriment of the other is to cease to really live in a world we have come to think of as human. Only in the logocentric West we could stand to fall a long way toward praxis before the pendulum would begin climbing the opposite way.
Brice gets points for bringing excrement into a fruitful theological discussion. Joe gets points for correlating this with science (someone's got to do this, and you're probably more qualified than any of us in this regard). And Bryce gets points, of course, for bringing all this back to J.C. himself.
I agree wholeheartedly that Jesus does, as Bryce argues, scandalize human discourse. Paul's passage on the risen Christ being a "stumbling block" is a profound dogma of Christian faith. (Can I use that word? Can I advocate a dogma that undermines dogmatism, the way I would advocate religion that undermines religiosity, science that undermines scientism, and political commitment that undermines unfettered ideology?) I'll play the (armchair) Karl Barth card on this one: the Word of God comes crashing into human existence, with no prior anticipation or justification. The Incarnate and risen Word is a stumbling block to Jacques Derrida and foolishness to Richard Dawkins. Perhaps the keystone (if there is such a thing as a single keystone) of Christian theology is the infinite task of thinking and rethinking the mystery of the Incarnation. This is not to say that Unitarians can't be Christians--although I am perplexed by the appeal of an un-Incarnated God / non-divine Savior. Doesn't the Incarnate Word prevent our system from ever being closed in conclusively? Don't cross-bearing discipleship and the practice of the Eucharist prevent us from claiming Other-free world view and Other-free communal living? Jesus scandalizes these inclinations because they are at the heart of our sinful dispositions. This leads me to think that when we become totalizing in our politics or in our discourse this is, not a result of a failure in our liberal humanism--it is precisely BECAUSE of our liberal humanism--, but a result of a forgetfulness of the Incarnation.
Brice,
I appreciate your response. Here’s the difference that I read between our two ideas: We both understand Jesus as an event that brought the signified (God) and the signifier (Word) together as an important and inexhaustible act. Where you understand this act to be one referring back on itself and reifying the system of language by becoming the revealed word, I understand it as an act that destroys the system of language to make room for a more associative, mythical, and archetypal system. I’m not sure that I subscribe to my own argument, I think that’s allowed in the blogosphere, but I think it is highly interesting and worth peddling a while longer. If the event that is Jesus is, or should be the locus of human understanding, I can see how the Apostles went kind of crazy and nutso with it. If one takes the incarnation, or probably more accurately, the crucifixion as the starting point, what does that human life look like? I think that without a comprehensive system or account of knowledge or understanding, I think that’s called epistemology, that is provided by Jesus as the revealer and not the destroyer of the linguistic system, what’s left is an almost barbaric in its coercion (or faith) religious system awaiting its promised consummation by the return of Jesus. Perhaps the idea of Martyrdom fits in here, supplied by a quote from Chris Huebner’s Precarious Peace:
“Martyrdom names and approach to knowledge and a way of life more generally which assumes that the truth of Christ cannot somehow be secured, but is rather a gift received and lived out in vulnerable yet hopeful giving in return. On such a reading, the martyr is not one who dies for or because of her beliefs. Rather, the death of the martyr is in some meaningful way the very expression of belief itself.”
I pulled that from another theological blog, inhabitatio dei, so it’s not like I’m working off of a pristine well thought out argument, only that I’m putting the pieces together whenever I can make the connection. But in this context, the Martyr does not have the benefit of the revealed truth on his/her side, only a fumbling in the dark that is reified by the willingness to act on that fumbling. There is no recourse to a greater epistemological foundation.
If the sole prescription of the Christian faith was to embody the life of Jesus, where does that take the faith? That’s the associative aspect I see. The next, mythical comes out of the fact that without proper ways to transmit the story or acts of Jesus, it must evolve into a myth or legend that encompasses diverse interpretations of the acts of Jesus. The things like incarnation, transfiguration, crucifixion, resurrection, etc. are so weird and inexhaustible that I can see how they become black holes of a sort, capable of taking on varied interpretations so long as the fruit of those interpretations lead to more followers hung on crosses. And then naturally, to better stake out interpretations, Jesus, and the events surrounding Jesus, would necessarily become archetypes that combine “useful” interpretations of the acts and story into a ready-made caste.
I don’t think this view is attractive by any means, but I think it is what I was arguing to some extent. Without yoking the event of Jesus onto a broader ontology, we are probably left with a big giant mess that probably wouldn’t ring true to our ears. But at least it would solve the whole physical/metaphysical division.
In response to Joe, thanks for taking the time to comment. I took a look at your blog with the intent of commentating, but ever since I heard Terry Eagleton refer to Wittengenstein as the most depressing philosopher of all time, I’ve avoided him a la the plague. I’ll give it a better go in due course though. I think the analogy of the pendulum is useful, although I feel like it disenchants the whole enterprise.
The pendulum metaphor does easily slip into a sort of fatalism, which can be disheartening. Personally I try to always speak of metaphors tongue-in-cheek. Pendulums are merely one way to understand how we live in the various binary oppositions we've constructed. We set up polarizations purely because the tension that we encounter between them is the medium by which we experience meaning; thus action and thought. For me, speaking of these like a pendulum is more a way of expressing where we are between the two rather than dooming us to an eternal ebb and flow.
Regarding the conversation as a whole, I also thought I should clarify that when I speak of 'animating our discourse in lived reality', I have in mind Foucault's concept that our actions in and of themselves comprise a discourse. I don't want to accept that concept uncritically, since Foucault definitely takes it to extremes which I am not willing to adopt. But still, I think it does offer us a way of understanding that our actions are part, possibly even the lion's share, of the theories which we discuss verbally. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that until we have acted we really haven't said anything at all.
This attitude is readily apparent in Jesus' life and in the parables that he used to elucidate his way. This is extremely difficult for Westerners to really grasp. We live in a world where we "choose" between action and reflection. Yet this is something that most of us have come to view as a false alternative. Instead, I feel, we must always seek to discern where we should rest between the two poles.
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