A Poetic Christ: Thomist Reflections on Scripture, Language and Reality 9780567684691, 9780567684714, 9780567684707

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A POETIC CHRIST

Illuminating Modernity Illuminating Modernity is dedicated to the renewal of faith in a world that is both Godless and idolatrous. This renewal takes the legacy of faith seriously and explores the tradition in the hope that the means of its contemporary development are to be found within it. This approach takes the historical crisis of faith seriously and makes sincere efforts to receive the strength necessary for a renewal. We call our way the Franciscan option. And yet, one of the greatest resources upon which we hope to build is Thomism, especially those hidden treasures of modern Thomistic thought to be found in Continental and phenomenological philosophy and theology. The Franciscan option takes the history of faith seriously both in its continuity and in its change. It takes seriously the tragic experiences of the history of faith since the Wars of Religion and especially in late modernity. But it also takes seriously the rich heritage of faith. As Michael Polanyi argued, faith has become the fundamental act of human persons. Faith involves the whole of the person in his or her absolute openness to the Absolute. As Hegel saw, the logic of history is prefigured in the story of the Gospels, and the great and transforming experience of humanity has remained the experience of resurrection in the aftermath of a dramatic death. The series editors are boundlessly grateful to Anna Turton, whose support for this series made a hope into a reality. We also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Notre Dame’s Nanovic Institute for European Studies for giving us financial and moral support at the outset of our project. Many thanks to Anthony Monta and James McAdams for caring about the ‘Hidden Treasures’.

A POETIC CHRIST

Thomist Reflections on Scripture, Language and Reality

Olivier-Thomas Venard, OP Translated by Kenneth Oakes and Francesca Aran Murphy

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Olivier-Thomas Venard, 2019 Olivier-Thomas Venard has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. ix and x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Leonid Bogdanov / Getty All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-8469-1 PB: 978-0-5676-9593-2 ePDF: 978-0-5676-8470-7 ePUB: 978-0-5676-8472-1 Series: Illuminating Modernity Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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In loving memory of my master at La Sorbonne, Prof. Alain Michel, Paris and my masters in the Order of Preachers, Fr. Pierre-Ceslas Courtès, OP, Toulouse and Fr. Marcel-Jacques Dubois, OP, Jerusalem

CONTENTS Author’s Acknowledgements Translators’ Acknowledgements Abbreviations Foreword Translators’ Preface

ix x xi xii xix Part I SCRIPTURE

Chapter 1 A POETIC GOSPEL?

3

Chapter 2 TOWARDS A POETIC CHRISTOLOGY

64

Part II THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE Chapter 3 ‘I AM NO WRITER’: IS THERE A LITERARY VOCATION?

119

Chapter 4 ‘TO CONTEMPLATE AND TO HAND ON’: THE LITERARY DRAMA OF THE THEOLOGIAN’S VOCATION

148

Chapter 5 THE IDEA, POETICS AND CLASSICAL ‘IDEA’ OF THE SUMMA THEOLOGIAE

167

Chapter 6 LANGUAGE THAT WANTED TO MAKE ITSELF AS STRONG AS THE WORD

184

Chapter 7 IN SEARCH OF THE LOST WORD

199

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Contents

Part III LANGUAGE AS A THEOLOGICAL QUESTION Chapter 8 LITTLE THOMASIAN SEMIOLOGY

229

Chapter 9 A THOMIST RESPONSE: THE METAPHYSICS OF THE WORD

260

Chapter 10 THE EXISTENCE OF LANGUAGE AS A THEOLOGICAL QUESTION

302

Part IV WORD, CROSS, EUCHARIST Chapter 11 THE CROSS OF JESUS, THE SUMMIT OF THE SPEECH OF GOD

339

Chapter 12 THE CROSS OF JESUS: THE SOURCE OF THEOLOGICAL SPEECH

366

Chapter 13 THE EUCHARIST: THE EXERCISE OF ADORATION – GLOSSES ON ‘ADORO TE’

392

Part V CONCLUSION Chapter 14 ‘THE HOUR COMES AND HAS COME …’

419

Appendix Bibliography Index of Names

451 453 471

AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks: To my parents, Bruno and Guylaine, for passing on Christian rite, and to Christian: Christ continues to send out pairs of brothers, just as he did long ago on the shores of Lake Galilee. To my many teachers for their energy in communicating literature and theology: Professors Jacques Vier, Alain Michel, John Milbank and Avital Wohlman; Fathers Pierre Ceslas Courtès o.p., and Marcel-Jacques Dubois o.p.; Rabbi David Hartmann. To my collaborators who have inspired my thought: Bieke Mahieu, Soeur Marrie Ferréol de La Valette o.p., Soeur Marie Trainar o.p., Soeur Agnès de la Croix Bruyère, beat., Soeur Marie Madeleine Saint-Aubin o.s.b. To my artist friends, Henri and Colette Guérin, Michel Petrossian, Gad Barnea, Marie Montegani, Clémentine Yelnik, Thierry Escaich, Pierre Assouline, Catherine Bourgeois. To the Dominicans friars of the Toulouse Province for their living transmission of the Thomist tradition, to the brothers of the Couvent St Etienne-Ecole biblique française de Jérusalem for their patience: in the midst of a biblicist monoculture, they have for many years endured the presence of a ‘resident French intellectual’. To Professor Francesca Aran Murphy for making a start with this book, and persevering with it together with Kenneth Oakes, labouring over the translation with many cups of tea, while a cat and a dog, Yasmina and Olivier-Étienne, danced for us on the parquet floor.

TRANSLATORS’ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would gratefully like to acknowledge permission to cite the following works: Selections from Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition (trans. Wallace Fowlie; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Selections from Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations (trans. Barbara Johnson; Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; Copyright © 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College). The translation of this work was funded in large part by a generous Faculty Research Support Grant given by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (University of Notre Dame), and through the financial assistance of Nanovic Institute for European Studies (University of Notre Dame), which has been unstinting in their support. Our sincerest thanks to Tom Merluzzi, Jim McAdams and Tony Monta. We, along with the author, would also like to offer our dearest thanks to Terence Crotty, OP, for his beautiful translation into English of Adoro, petite traité à trois voix de la présence de Dieu, passages of which appear in Chapter 13 of this book.

ABBREVIATIONS The works of Thomas Aquinas are referenced as follows: Contra retr In Div Nom In I Cor In II Cor In Heb In Io In Meta In Peri herm In Symb SCG Sent ST Sup Ps de veritate

Contra doctrinam retrahentium a religione Super librum Dionysii De divinis nominibus Lectura super primam Epistolam Pauli Apostoli ad Corinthios Lectura super secundam Epistolam Pauli Apostoli ad Corinthios Lectura super Epistolam Pauli Apostoli ad Hebraeos Lectura super Ioannem Sententia super Metaphysicam Expositio Libri Peri hermeneias In Symbolum Apostolorum Summa contra gentiles Scriptum super libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi Summa theologiae Postilla super psalms Questiones disputatae de veritate

FOREWORD Olivier-Thomas Venard O.P. is Professor of New Testament at the École Biblique in Jerusalem, having studied in Paris and Toulouse. His lectures, articles and especially his books give the lie to the modern segregation between the disciplines of biblical studies, historical and systematic theology, philosophy and literary studies. One can only with some caution speak of his integral work as interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, since that attribution usually (a) tends to confirm the separateness of the disciplines that are brought together, and (b) relatedly suggests that the unity of the disciplines is extrinsic. Venard is also one of a number of inspiring younger Dominican theologians – many of us are familiar with the work of Gilles Emery – who discover and deploy an Aquinas whose thought not only has comprehensive range and penetrating intellectual and spiritual depth, but also is no dead letter irrevocably consigned to the premodern dogmatic and metaphysical past. In line with earlier traditions of the revival of Thomism, Venard retrieves an Aquinas who is not simply premodern, but genuinely postmodern or post-postmodern, an Aquinas who not only made the linguistic turn before the fact, but whose thought demonstrates precisely the imbrications between theology and philosophy that mark the criticism of the modern foundationalist project by postmodern thinkers, only, however, to go beyond them in turn. Now, it is not unfair to say that there are two kinds of theologians of excellence, those characterized by a projet and those whose production follows a more eccentric line. Venard clearly belongs to the former group, and though his project is likely to be developed further and perhaps in surprising directions, it is evident that the pedestal for all future theological sculpturing – I think I will be excused a Dionysian allusion – has been set in the trilogy of Littérature et théologie, La langue de l’ineffable and Pagina sacra. Now, if these three texts are part of an overall project concerning the proper understanding of the Word that is both gift and the foundation of language, they do not constitute a system. Rather they are three soundings into the Word as given and constitutive of discourse in what at first look seem to be very different areas of inquiry – biblical studies, theology and the relation between theology and literature – but which over the course of the three volumes we are able to unveil patterns of integration. Decentsize portions of each of the three volumes are represented here in the excellent translations of Kenneth Oakes and Francesca Murphy, with the sum amounting to approximately a third of Venard’s scintillating trilogy. The organization of the volume is thematic rather than chronological. Appropriately, Venard’s reflection on the Word as given to us in Scripture frames this volume which also includes Venard’s exciting exploration of the relation between the biblical Word and modern literature and the thought of Aquinas that centrally involves his theology

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of the Word, his reading of Scripture, his understanding of sacrament, and crucially his Christology and Trinitarian theology. It is appropriate to speak first to the translated selections from Pagina sacra that at once represents the goal of the trilogy and the crown of Venard’s achievement, albeit with the necessary caveat that the Word of Scripture is never far from Venard’s attention whatever the subject matter, whether it is Aquinas’ reflections on human thought and language or modern French poetry. Although the luminosity of the French essentially defies translation, the excellence of the translation is such that both the lucidity and depth of Venard’s writing come through. In his reflections on the biblical text, Venard insists on its incommensurability, that is, its irreducibility to it being one text among others. Precisely as Scripture, the biblical text, and especially the New Testament on which Venard concentrates, eludes not only historical-critical method, but any and all methods, whether semiological, semantic, hermeneutical, psychological or narratological. Venard does not dogmatically stipulate this point. Rather he shows it by enlisting all of these methods towards opening up the Word that exceeds them. To comment on Venard’s relation to just a few of these methods, it is worth noting in particular that Venard shows himself to be a master of all the instruments of historical-critical method, both philological and non-philological, while insisting that the historicalcritical method should understand that it serves the Word and that the Word it witnesses to does not serve it. Venard also shows surprising familiarity with the hermeneutic debate between the Chicago School, which privileged the general hermeneutic theory of Paul Ricœur, and the so-called Yale school, exhibited by Hans Frei, which insisted after Barth that the biblical texts demand a special hermeneutic. If Venard gives the nod to the latter, it is interesting that he rejects Frei’s fictive or history-like account of the narrative becoming of Jesus Christ. He insists on what might be called the Catholic difference, that is, the ontological vehemence of the biblical text that insists both on the real history and the metaphysical reality of the subject of action and passion of the Word made flesh. In some very definite sense Venard’s reflections on the biblical text reminds one of Benedict XVI. While their reflections are, undoubtedly, compatible, nonetheless, they come from two very different horizons and have very different audiences in mind. The horizon of Benedict is apologetic through and through, and his intended audience are educated Christians disturbed by the corrosive effect of historical-critical method on faith in Jesus Christ rendered in the Gospels. While the horizon of Venard’s work is also to some extent apologetic, it is primarily scholarly, and his target audience is the biblical guild itself. Moreover, his essential accusation against the guild of historical-critical method is different from that of Benedict: the problem is not as Benedict might lead us to believe a problem of over-sophistication, but rather of under-sophistication. Not only does the guild routinely fail to understand the unique use of signifiers in the text and shows itself reluctant to accept the union of signifier and signified in Christ, but it actually lacks the tools in narratology, semiotics and even rhetorical theory to accomplish the task of interpretation. Venard also persuasively demonstrates that French New Testament commentary, which is side-lined by the New Testament guild which

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favours scholarship in German and English, is operating at a considerably high level of intellectual rigour and has claims to our scholarly attention. In his writings on the New Testament Venard shows that he is unapologetically in favour of the New Testament canon. If there are differences between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John and in turn between the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, Venard is convinced that they constitute a multi-perspectival unity. On the one hand, this means that the differences between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John and between the different Synoptic Gospels are not absolute; on the other, it means that not only does Venard refuse to accept the cleft between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John, but he is unprepared to accept the view that the Synoptic Gospels are more authentic, because they are more theologically underdetermined, than the much later Gospel of John. On the contrary, it is one of the many achievements of Venard’s interpretation of the Bible to show that the Synoptic Gospels are quite theologically focused, even if not in the same way and to the same extent as the Gospel of John. In addition, Venard is persuaded of two very important things concerning the status of the Gospel of John: (a) despite its belatedness, a good case can be made for it perhaps being more in contact with the original sayings of Jesus than any of the Synoptic Gospels; and (b) in significant ways, while very much being a discrete entity with a particular point of view like the other three Gospels, the Gospel of John represents a point of integration of all the Gospels. Of course, the reason why the Gospel of John can function in this way is that each of the Synoptic Gospels is concerned with the Word made flesh, and how the words of the Gospel render him and are apt with regard to representation. Thus, each and all point towards the Gospel of John in which this problematic of the relation between Word and words becomes a theme. In his exploration of the New Testament Venard recalls judgements made in the nouvelle théologie, even if his work shows a great deal more methodological refinement. His reflections on the biblical text also recall the nouvelle théologie to the extent to which he disputes the gap involved between the biblical text and the theology that is the fruit of reflection on the Bible in the Patristic period and that is carried forward into the medieval period and exemplified in High Scholasticism; it is no accident that the subtitle of Pagina sacra is Le passage de l’Écriture sainte à l’écriture théologique (‘The passage from sacred Scripture to sacred theology’). What seems to suggest that Hans Urs von Balthasar is at the very least the first among equals is not only the relative frequency of citation of Balthasar, but Venard’s obvious desire to talk of the beauty of Christ who is an icon of the Father. Moreover, similar to Balthasar, for Venard the beauty of Christ is a unique beauty since it takes on not only finitude, but also the defacement of sin and the world’s refusal of the beauty. For Venard, as for Balthasar, the cross is central with the trope of kenosis serving an integrating function for both. Whatever the similarities between Venard and Balthasar, however, we are not dealing with a repetition. Two differences are especially worthy of mention. The first is formal. Venard’s decision to speak of the New Testament in terms of poetics rather than aesthetics is motivated. If Balthasar wants to say that we discover the irreducible phenomenon of Christ in and through reading the New Testament (as linked to the Old Testament), Venard

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goes a step further and says that this very Christ, the incarnate Word, is the raison d’être of the speech about him in the sense that Christ himself is a speaker whose sayings are recalled and produces narration and further speech. As Word Christ is the identity of the signifier and signified. As such he redeems backwards all that could at best have meaning inchoately. In addition, Christ redeems forward in narrower and broader ways: more narrowly in that as Word Christ anticipates the Catholic theological tradition that is grounded catechetically, liturgically and theologically in a reading of the biblical text; more broadly in that, on the model of de doctrina christiana, as Word Christ has the capacity to assume all culture. The second reason is substantive. For the New Testament scholar Venard, the pivot of the New Testament is neither incarnation nor cross. It is rather resurrection, even if resurrection is tied intrinsically to both. In effect, this represents a double departure from Balthasar’s theological aesthetics which variously emphasizes incarnation and cross. Subtitles are important in Venard’s work. This is particularly true of Littérature et théologie, whose subtitle is Une saison en enfer (‘A season in Hell’). Justifiably not as well represented as his crucial and compelling work on Scripture, the selections from what is, arguably, the most experimental volume of Venard’s trilogy, invoke the title of one of Arthur Rimbaud’s most famous collections of poems. This very fact suggests that Venard has far greater ambitions than teasing out positive relations between the New Testament and the broad Catholic theological tradition that remain faithful to it and the literary tradition that remains in touch with it. Although the standard model of the relation between the Bible and literature and theology more broadly and literature admits of a wide range of variability, a crucial aspect is that it tends to focus on writers who in terms of their own ipsissima verba and in terms of the deployment of Christian themes in their writings can with ease be regarded as Christian writers. Thus the assignation of Christian writer in the English-speaking world of G. M. Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R.Tolkien, Graham Green and Flannery O’Connor to mention a few of the more notable names. If one were to think of a French canon, then Racine, Corneille, Péguy and Claudel come to mind. Cosmopolitan though he is, Venard tends to operate in terms of a French canon. He does in fact briefly discuss the work of Paul Claudel and mentions him on quite a few occasions. Yet his main focus is on Rimbaud who renounces Catholicism, harangues and parodies it, and whenever possible subverts and inverts it into its scatological opposite. Now while it might well be the case that Venard has a particular affection for the ‘alchemist’ of the French language, this hardly accounts for what is going on in his extraordinary reflections which recurs to Adamic language and Jewish reflections on this language in the Kabbalah. Venard seems to be asking the following question: Is Christ validated in literature only in those writings that deliberately affirm him? This is a real question, and we have good reason to suppose that no less a figure than Balthasar would incline to answer in the affirmative. Venard says otherwise: Christ’s alluring attraction can be witnessed in modern and modernist literature that consciously and self-consciously refuses him. Put perhaps too extremely, Venard’s interest is whether Christ the Word

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demonstrates his power in the literature that execrates him just as much as in the literature that gives unstinting praise. Now what makes this line of inquiry compelling is that despite his transgressive speech, Rimbaud’s poetic aim, against all modernism avowal of immanence, is to reproduce the coincidence between the signifier and signified of which Christ is both the archetype and ultimately the condition of possibility. This is a startling claim or set of claims. And it would remain thus if Venard could not make a case that the Word in Scripture and the theological tradition rhetorically, semiotically and semantically exceeds all speech past, present and future and thus contains them. Given Catholic theology’s thirty-year negotiation with French postmodernism, it would make sense to think that Venard would supply a discourse such as negative theology to mediate between theology and modern literature. While Venard does not deny that apophasis is an ingredient in biblical and theological discourse, which necessarily cannot be adequate to the Word and the Word’s relations as its object, negative theology is not the hinge. Strikingly, even shockingly to the fore, is Thomas Aquinas who is in equal parts biblical exegete and High Scholastic theologian. For Venard, under both auspices Aquinas is a theologian of the Word who realizes that the Word is not simply an object of discourse, but also the subject and as such the regulator of all tropes and arguments, all signs and all meanings. Christ is both Language and primal speech. Thus, not only is a ‘Thomasian’ semiotics faithful to Scripture, it truly has the capacity to interpret and command theological and literary speech. If the claim requires a more detailed presentation of Aquinas’ thought than attempted in the opening volume, Venard achieves the nearly impossible by making his claim far more than plausible. And to the extent to which he does so, he challenges the postmodern orthodoxy of Umberto Eco that Aquinas is in no wise a semiotician and that nothing of his thought, especially his thought in the aesthetic register, can survive a modernity and postmodernity in which meaning and truth are not available. Venard believes that it can be shown, and that, indeed, he has shown, that the New Testament rightly understood and Aquinas rightly understood have the capacity to assimilate and surpass all modern forms of scepticism, relativism and even nihilism because the Word dominates all words and ensures that words, their fragments and aggregates, both archaeologically and eschatologically, recall the Word as the perfect correlation between signifier and signified. If this claim has the form of poetry, the content is quite literally poetic in that it is implied that Christ ‘produces’ all literary speech, speech that seems far from him as close to him, speech that seems to deny him as affirm him, the speech that seems to execrate him as well as praise him. It is odd to think together Aquinas and Walter Benjamin. Yet this is precisely what Venard forces us to do. For Benjamin, the task of translation and the aim of writing is to be coincident with Adamic language when the signifier and the signified were once happily one. Aquinas is a presence throughout the trilogy. He is a presence in Venard’s reflections on the relation between literature and theology and he is also a presence in the volume on Scripture. He too has a volume devoted to him, and in their translation the authors make sure that the Angelic Doctor is adequately

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represented. Venard’s second volume La langue de l’ineffable is less about God-talk than about divine speech or about the language and speech that define who God is – the verbum mentis – which is at once interior word and outer word, divine generation as divine self-utterance in creation and redemption or as creation and redemption. The subtitle of this volume on Aquinas is also telling, Essai sur le fondement théologique de metaphysique, and provides the key to what the volume is about, namely, that in Aquinas in paradigmatic fashion the discourses of philosophy and theology are each in their own way exemplary expressions of divine self-naming. Venard approves of Gilson’s metaphysics of Exodus, yet for him Aquinas’ articulation of the Word is ultimately theo-logical. The origin and term of all thought and language is the Logos and specifically the Logos incarnate who, as the perfect coincidence of signifier and signified, enfolds all human thought and language and serves as the ground of speech. While the particulars of Venard’s position are astonishingly original, his casting of Aquinas’ thought is fundamentally less so. Thomists such as Mark Jordan, Matthew Levering and Reinhard Hütter have been insisting on the priority of the theological in Aquinas for years. More specifically Venard finds himself in the company of a scholar of Aquinas such as Joseph Wawrykow who insists on the centrality of wisdom and emphasizes its Christological framing as well as Gilles Emery who similarly insists and points to the Trinitarian horizon. Importantly, Venard’s theological interpretation of Aquinas is far from being belligerently triumphalist. While theology as governed by the Word is horizontal, it is important for Venard not only to acknowledge but to demonstrate that philosophy, as the discourse of nature, enjoys relative autonomy. According to Venard, in the domain of philosophy, Aquinas offers a relatively adequate account of act of knowing and the linguisticality of human being, even if in the end only theology can account for the analogy between human knowing and language and the divine Word that makes both intelligible. Venard’s theological interpretation of Aquinas gains obvious traction when one considers – as many scholars of Aquinas have in recent years – that Aquinas is an exegete of Scripture. Venard supplies brilliant synoptic analyses of some of the texts, but especially of Aquinas’ interpretation of John, which, for Venard, is the pivotal biblical text. The three texts represented in this translation provide three different but related soundings in the relations between Scripture, theology and literature, approaching the issue of relations from each of the three discourses. The provocation is the situation of fragmentation and isolation of discourses from each other in the modern and contemporary period; the aim is integration, even if this has to be understood as a task rather than achievement. With its focus throughout the three volumes on the Word, one way to think of what Venard’s project is that he is taking truly seriously the centrality of the Word that was key in Dei verbum, but which has been overlooked, if not bowdlerized, in the reception of Vatican II. The issue of the reception of Vatican II cannot be reduced to Catholic recognition of historical-critical method, which then can function either imperiously or as a base to which one can add or subtract when it comes to the liturgical and homiletic use of Scripture and the need to preserve Catholic doctrine. This strategy cedes to

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fragmentation and encourages it. Dei verbum provides a positive doctrine about the Word that relativizes distinctions between historical-critical methods and more traditional modes of exegesis, and thereby constitutes the interpretive field as non-competitive. But for Venard, the biblical scholar and Catholic thinker, it does more: sorting out the issue of interpretation and its ultimate referent not only makes biblical theology possible, but also the relation between Scripture and doctrinal and philosophical theology, and between Scripture and other discourses. If Dei verbum has turned out to be something of a beginning not begun, Venard wants to go back to activate the beginning by beginning again. He does so in the conviction that the Word to which Scripture gives testimony and which in his view all thought and language intimate is the Beginning as such. Cyril O’Regan Huisking Professor of Theology University of Notre Dame

TRANSLATORS’ PREFACE Olivier-Thomas Venard’s trilogy Thomas d’Aquin poète théologien consists of three volumes: Littérature et théologie: Une saison en enfer (2002), La langue de l’ineffable: Essai sur le fondement théologique de la métaphysique (2004) and Pagina sacra: le passage de l’Écriture sainte à l’écriture théologique (2009). While a translation of the whole trilogy, which runs some 1800 pages in total, would have been ideal, the constraints of time and the spiritual, poetic and intellectual richness of the trilogy have led the translators to produce an anthology or reader of the three books. In consultation with Venard, the translators selected material to translate from each volume and in the end roughly a third of each volume is represented in what follows.1 Those intrigued by what they read will thus be pleased to know that, even after finishing this book, two-thirds of Venard’s trilogy still lies ahead of them. While this particular selection of material no doubt reflects the interests of the translators, it is hoped that the chapters translated will readily illustrate the sweeping, dynamic and creative energy of a trilogy which, given the author’s habitude, is as instinctually Thomistic as it is interdisciplinary. Finally, we should note that, in line with current practice, énoncé is generally translated as ‘utterance’ (meaning a segment of discourse) and énonciation as ‘enunciation’ (referring to the whole context and action of an utterance), and in the interests of space and flow, some footnotes have been shortened and some of the beginnings and endings of the chapters modified from their original forms.

1. See Appendix I for a list of the chapters translated in this book.

Part I SCRIPTURE

Chapter 1 A POETIC GOSPEL?

Introduction In his commentary on the Gospel of John, L’Ironie christique, Jean Grosjean says this about the fourth evangelist: John thinks that the gospel text or texts as they are encountered are necessary but also sufficient to reach the very heart of each generation. The é lan of life outside of itself (called ‘love’ because like language it presupposes another) is the very moment of language and its bright virtue. It is necessary but sufficient that in each generation this movement advances the gospel text towards the very center of each human being’s soul.1

We might say ‘necessary’ but not ‘sufficient’, for these texts neither fell from heaven nor were they magically transmitted. The synthesis of poiesis and faith includes the mystery of the Church as the Institution of the theandric mystery of language. Along with the Fathers and most Christian writers, St. Thomas Aquinas read the gospels as a unified whole. The Jesus he encountered throughout the New Testament was none other than the Christ of Catholic dogma and liturgy: the divine Word, the second Person of the Trinity who assumed human nature. As an act of prayer or lectio divina, reading itself was an encounter with the same resurrected and glorified Jesus Christ encountered in liturgical celebrations and works of charity. Within these presuppositions, the gospel stories are captivating portraits of the interaction between the divine Word and human language. In line with this theological tradition, this chapter and the next attempt in various ways to recover a harmonic reading of the four gospels. They do so for the sake of developing an account of the unity of ‘Christic speech’ (Christ’s own speech) and Christian speech. After all, should not the principle of Christological unification that the Fathers found in the Bible more generally apply a fortiori

1. Jean Grosjean, L’Ironie christique: commentaire de l’É vangile selon Jean (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), p. 23.

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to the New Testament?2 Today, however, it seems more common to be highly sceptical about any hasty integration of the diverse texts of the New Testament. The following chapter consists of four parts. We do not intend to engage solely in historical theology but in fundamental theology as well. We want to describe not only the conditions for the existence of Gothic theological speech, but also the conditions for any theological speech whatsoever. The first part of this chapter, then, will evaluate the current possibilities for maintaining the unity of the Gospel among the diversity of the gospels. We will offer several reasons for thinking that such a reading, fairly uncommon today, remains epistemologically legitimate within the context of Catholic theology. We will also justify the significant role given to the fourth gospel. After preparing this epistemological overture, we will then show how the gospels fulfil and ‘Christocentrate’ an ontology of the sacred text. According to the gospel stories, Jesus began this ‘reconfiguration’ of the sacred text during his public ministry. We will dedicate the third and fourth parts of this chapter to showing the principle which guides this reconfiguration. The aesthetics of this principle, and in particular the synthesis of hearing and vision, will be handled in the third part, and in the fourth part we will cover its rhetorical aspect, especially the dialectic of works and speech. These parts attempt to recover the Christian tradition of the dynamic between the eye and the ear and between speech and life, which also animates Jewish life with the Book.

The Unity of the Gospel in the Diversity of the Gospels Traditionally the unity of (the inspiration of) the collections of writings which make up Scripture was grounded in the immutability of God’s salvific plan within history, and here the harmony of the gospels was emphasized. Their theological unity patently depended upon the unity of the person of Christ. In the past century, however, emphasis on the differences between the gospels has steadily increased, for the sake of either admiring their doctrinal complementarity or, conversely, highlighting the variations which have marked Christianity since its birth. If the historical existence of Jesus is no longer questioned by serious scholars,3 the theology of the divine inspiration of the Scriptures, as well as what has been called a

2. On this, see Olivier-Thomas Venard, ‘Christology from the Old Testament to the New’, in Francesca Murphy and Troy Stefano (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Christology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 21–38. 3. One should note, however, that in the theory of performativity, which seems to be the new refuge of fantastical thought today, different contemporary polemists return to the most radical theses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which deny Jesus’ historical existence. See here the allusions to Jesus or to Paul in the polemical tract of Michel Onfray, Traité d’athé ologie: physique de la mé taphysique (Paris: Grasset, 2005).

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‘Christology from above’,4 has slowly and consistently been subordinated to the idea that one should not ‘flatten’ the texts and thus risk indulging in anachronism and misinterpretation. Within this context, traditional exegesis appears insufficiently cautious. This appearance of incaution means we should begin by examining the tenability of a harmonic reading of the books of the New Testament. The Diversity of the Gospels Since the advent of redaction criticism, New Testament scholars have attempted to distinguish the different literary and theological projects operative in the books of the New Testament. Each gospel is said to reflect the theological concerns of the witness on which it depends and the communities in which it developed. Each evangelist ‘included only information that served that purpose [of advancing his theology], and the needs of the envisioned audience affected both contents and presentations. That is why the Gospels written by different evangelists for different audiences in different decades had to differ.’5 Thus Mark is primarily addressed to a Roman community which had been subjected to persecutions and disruptions and which is sufficiently distant from Jewish practices that Mark thinks it necessary to offer explanations of these practices to his readers. Matthew is intended for heavily Jewish communities (some think that it is for Antioch of Syria, others Caesarea Maritima) and attempts to relate Jesus’ strikingly novel teachings to the demands of the Mosaic Law. Luke, written in a Greek clearly superior to the other three, is intended for groups in Greece and Syria and is obviously marked by the grandeurs of the Roman Empire. John, however, reflects the teachings of the original communities and yet is somewhat cut off from the communities of the other disciples. In addition to these undeniable pragmatic differences, it also seems possible to divide the gospels into two groups based on their style of writing. Luke and John bear the marks of easily detectable individual redactors who do not hesitate to explain their literary or theological projects (both of these gospels begin with a prologue). The author of Luke seems to be the only cultivated hellenophone among the evangelists and emphasizes the diversity of his sources. The author of John, however, blends all of his sources into his own unique poetic style (albeit some scholars see the fingerprints of a school of this unique style such that one or two redactors may have reworked the original author’s composition). Matthew

4. A ‘Christology from above’ accentuates the dogma of the incarnation of the Word and tends to place the idea of Jesus’ divinity within his own time so as to avoid reducing it to an a posteriori theological construction of a pagan Christian Church contaminated by ‘Hellenism’. A ‘Christology from below’ thinks it necessary to begin with the entirely human appearance of the life of the historical Jesus and emphasizes the slow development of Christological dogma. 5. Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997), p. 106.

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and Mark, on the other hand, seem to arrange various elements which had already been formed and stylized within their early transmission in the context of orally communicated literature. As for the viewpoint of the four writings, John is clearly different from the other three by its claim to be eyewitness testimony. This would help to explain how its unique chronology and the numerous topographical details it offers consistently turn out to be more precise than those of the three Synoptics who organize their material in a more topical fashion. These characteristics tend to support the claim that the origin of this gospel tradition genuinely is eyewitness testimony and yet this does not call into question the standard dating of the gospels: John can very well be the last gospel written and yet still be the closest to the original context. We will return to this idea in the next chapter. Finally, different theological questions permeate each gospel. Mark’s Christology offers the most human Jesus, a suffering servant shrouded by a Messianic secret that is only revealed after the resurrection. John, on the other hand, directly proclaims that the Word became flesh and describes Jesus’ ministry roughly in the same way that the ancient prophets imagined God coming ‘in person’ to judge his stubborn people. Between the second gospel’s ‘Christology from below’ and the fourth’s ‘Christology from above’ (if one wants to use this anachronistic schematization), there stand Matthew and Luke, the two gospels with genealogies. Matthew paints a portrait of Jesus as a wise teacher in the vein of a new and higher Moses while Luke-Acts follows a narrative development that depicts the triumphant expansion of the Word from its hidden beginnings in the Jerusalem Temple to the very heart of the Roman Empire. Accentuating the genuine diversity of the gospels, which we do here all too briefly, was a helpful step in recovering the realism of the incarnation. From the very beginning, Christian communities cautiously refrained from producing a fifth gospel which would replace the canonical texts and smooth over their differences. None of the ‘Gospel harmonies’ which have variously appeared were definitively adopted into the canon.6 In the context of modern historical positivism, however, the reasons for maintaining this diversity have changed. The traditional defence for the diversity of the gospels was inspired by a strong confidence in their apostolicity, and by the desire to ‘lose nothing’ of the historical and theological truth they contained. In the modern rediscovery of this diversity, however, there is present a certain methodological scruple based on the ‘methodological doubt’ inherent in historical criticism. Methodological Limits and Novel Elements Scholars have written histories of the communities which supposedly correspond to each of the gospels and base these histories on the putative composition-history of each gospel. They have even written histories of the communities presumed 6. Tatian’s Diatessaron (c. 170), the official gospel of the Syriac churches up until the fifth century, was subsequently abandoned in favour of the canonical gospels.

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to have produced and transmitted a hypothetical document posited by source criticism.7 Form criticism, redaction criticism or source criticism are perfectly legitimate enterprises and can be valuable for understanding the texts, but only insofar as the resultant hypotheses are not taken as indubitable fact. Historically, the best examples of this type of method were perfectly aware of the limits of their results,8 and it is unfortunate that their successors have not always heeded their warnings. In other words, one can ‘reconstruct more of the background of John than that of any other Gospel. Yet one should not confuse such reconstructive research with exegesis, which has to do with what the Gospel meant to convey to its readers. The evangelist tells us his purpose in 20.31, and it was not to recount background.’9 A new kind of allegorism seems to be at work here. This allegorism is no longer vertical like that of the Fathers, who at times overly harmonized and unified textual elements around Christ’s divinity, but seems to be a horizontal one: scholars extrapolate from the text to the historical reality through a type of homothetic imagination which moves from the signifier on the page to the referent in history.10 One reads the structures or the fissures of the canonical text as a kind of blueprint of the divisions and historical stages of the early Christian communities. The theological consequences of this practice are momentous, for it implicitly maintains that the different communities worshipped different Jesuses, with the range running from a prophetic figure who doled out predictions, to a kind of apocalyptic preacher, to a Galilean peasant, to a master of wisdom – parenetic or soteriological11 – and finally even to a kind of divine man (of ancient aretologies). The redactors of our canonical text then combined these different pictures by reorganizing the essential material available about Jesus around the Easter kergyma. Anglophone research has recently relativized these reconstructions. Many exegetes now think that we have exaggerated the idea that literature or writing is

7. See John Kloppenborg’s’ ‘tour de force’, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Fourth Gospel (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000). The adjective comes from the editor: www. augsburgfortress.org. 8. Brown, An Introduction, pp. 373–8. 9. Ibid., p. 374. Despite the author’s caution, the traditional reconstruction of the history of the Johannine community tends to determine the exegesis of the Johannine corpus. See the above note and Raymond Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves, and Hates of an Individual Church in New Testament Times (New York: Paulist Press, 1979). 10. Samuel Byrskog condemns ‘the excessive allegorization of the gospel writings’ in the traditional search for their context. See Samuel Byrskog, ‘A New Quest for the Sitz im Leben: Social Memory, the Jesus Tradition and the Gospel of Matthew’, New Testament Studies 52:3 (2006): 319–36 (here p. 326). 11. Some authors have proposed that the disciples who would have constituted the milieu corresponding to the oldest kernel of Q believed that Jesus saves by his wisdom: it is their faith in a kind of Gnostic Jesus, a saviour whose revelation gives life and liberty, that 1 Cor. 1-4 was forced to ‘rectify’.

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just as much the expression of a social context as it is the work of an individual, and point out the difficulties in naively assuming that a text could provide a sufficient basis for the reconstruction of a social context.12 The idea that each gospel reflects the interests of the church which produced it has also been further narrowed by the claim that they only reflect these interests,13 as if each gospel had been written primarily by and for a specific community and even written against one or more of the others.14 Against this primacy of the particular, we should first remember the general hermeneutical principle that one never writes only for one’s contemporaries or for a severely circumscribed public (with the exception of technical manuals for specific situations). Hans-Georg Gadamer has proposed the concept of Wahrheitanspruche, which refers to a text’s inherent claim to a truth which surpasses the contingencies of its production. The intentionalist definition of the literal sense of Scripture as that which the authors intended to transmit to their contemporaries, a definition assumed even in magisterial documents, is another sign of ‘the forgetfulness of

12. See Stephen C. Barton, ‘Can We Identify the Gospel Audiences?’ in Richard J. Bauckham (ed.), The Gospels for all Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 173–94. Also see Helmut Koester, ‘One Jesus and Four Primitive Gospels’, in James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester (eds.), Trajectories through Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), pp. 158–204, and in the same volume, Koester, ‘The Structure and Criteria of Early Christian Beliefs’, pp. 205–31, and Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006). 13. See Graham Stanton, ‘The Early Reception of Matthew’s Gospel: New Evidence from Papyri?’, in David E. Aune (ed.), The Gospel of Matthew in Current Study: Studies in Memory of William G. Thompson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 42–61 (p. 44): ‘The Evangelists did not write for one Christian community, or even for a cluster of Christian communities, but for all Christians everywhere.’ 14. See the list of exaggerations offered by Richard Bauckham, ‘For Whom were the Gospels written?’, in Bauckham (ed.), The Gospels for All Christians, pp. 9–48 (esp. pp. 13–22). This work marked a turning point in New Testament research, and not only for the debate which it initiated. See Philip F. Esler, ‘Community and Gospel in Early Christianity: A Response to Richard Bauckham’s Gospel for All Christians’, Scottish Journal of Theology 51 (1998): 235–48; and Richard Bauckham, ‘Response to Philip Esler’, Scottish Journal of Theology 51 (1998): 249–53. Joel Marcus’s Introduction in his Mark 1-8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New York: Doubleday, 2000) responds at length to Bauckham; David C. Sim, ‘The Gospels for All Christians? A Response to Richard Bauckham’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 84 (2001): 3–27. In any case, for a number of researchers the reconstruction of the respective communities of different gospel traditions seems to be a perilous enterprise; see Wim Weren, ‘The History and Social Setting of the Matthean Community’, in H. van de Sandt (ed.), Matthew and the Didache: Two Documents from the Same Jewish-Christian Milieu? (Assen/Minneapolis: Van Gorcum/ Fortress, 2005), pp. 51–62, in particular note 2.

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language’ in Western culture which Gadamer has criticized. Equally, contemporary hermeneutics have carefully scrutinized the effects proper to writing in such a way that we can understand better that the inspiration of the Scriptures can occur without any curtailment of the features of the utterly human art of writing.15 All this means that it is easy to imagine and claim that the New Testament texts have the ability to say more than they seem to express, for they even originate from a cultural context which sometimes produced texts intended for the gods.16 Furthermore, nothing compels us to assume that the first Christian communities were so isolated that they completely ignored other early Christian traditions. The letter, the literary genre of the earliest Christian writings, seems to suggest the opposite. ‘If Paul’s letters (and Acts) are any guide, the first churches consisted rather of “a network of communities in constant conversation”, linked by messengers, letters, and visits by leading figures in the new movement’17; In short, the fact that almost all the references to Jesus tradition in the writings of earliest Christianity are in the form of allusion and echo should be taken to confirm (1) that such letters were not regarded as the medium of initial instruction on Jesus tradition to new churches, and (2) that churches could be assumed to have a relatively extensive knowledge of Jesus tradition, presumably passed on to them when they were first established.18

15. On this point, see Olivier-Thomas Venard, ‘Literary Mediation of Knowledge and Biblical Studies’, Nova et Vetera (English edition) 4 (2006): 761–86, and the corrections proposed by Gregory Vall, ‘Israel’s Participation in the Prayer of Christ: A Response to Olivier-Thomas Venard, O.P.’, Nova et Vetera (English edition) 4 (2006): 787–98. 16. The location of certain Assyrian annals, inaccessible until excavations were made in the foundations of ruined buildings millennia later, suggests that the Semitic world sometimes composed writings of a historical character whose implied readers were not contemporaries but the gods (those which, for example, beseech the god to exonerate the king for this or that decision or action). Why, then, should we imagine that Jewish writings could never have been written for ‘the believing community’, ‘all of Israel’, ‘the Church’, rather than for a particular group of readers? 17. James Dunn, Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 252. See Acts 9.32-43 and Gal. 1.22. 18. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, p. 184. Even if oral instruction was largely dominant in ancient pedagogy, it is not necessary to imagine that there was ever a transition from the ‘wholly oral’ to the ‘wholly written’. On orality in ancient pedagogy, cf. Loveday C. A. Alexander, ‘The Living Voice: Scepticism Towards the Written Word in Early Christian and in Greco-Roman Texts’, in David J. A. Clines, Stephen E. Fowl and Stanley E. Porter (eds), The Bible in Three Dimensions (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), pp. 221–47. The Council of Jerusalem sends a letter in Acts 15. It is thus possible that the ‘apostles and the elders’ of Jerusalem wrote and had writings concerning the life of Jesus; Alan Millard, Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), p. 211. In 1 Cor. 11.23 Paul writes what he has received concerning the Lord: ‘In this case, however,

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We should thus reject the harsh dialectic between the kerygma and histories of Jesus derived from hypotheses regarding the gospels’ redaction history: ‘The project of narrativizing the kerygma by producing a story kerygmatically charged appears well anchored in the Christian kerygma according to its highly determinate specificity.’19 Even if Peter’s throwaway line, ‘as you know’, only hints at it, as his speech in Acts 2 is addressed to the Judeans, the early sermons which are echoed in Acts always imply the kerygma of biographical statements. Thus in Acts 10 Peter briefly describes the life of Jesus when addressing those who, being neither Judeans nor Galileans, are unaware of it. As Raymond Brown notes, ‘The appearance of the word euaggelion in Paul covering a content that would have a similar purpose (Rom 1.1-4; 1 Cor 15.1-8; cf., 1 Cor 11.23-26) means that Mark was certainly not the first to put together Jesus material for a salvific purpose, even though this was the earliest preserved material.’20 It might be helpful to return to a somewhat forgotten fundamental principle of form criticism: the different forms of the gospel writings certainly reflect the different ways in which the memories of Jesus were used in the different early communities, but when oral tradition concerning Jesus came to be compiled and fixed in different stories, this was done in order to pass on more material to the communities which already had some knowledge of it in one form or another. It is thus unnecessary to link an evangelist’s peculiar sources exclusively with his intended audience. So, for instance, Luke sometimes uses sources peculiar to a specific community or region, especially in his infancy stories. But even here the narrator makes clear that he has done some investigation before writing, an act which presupposes the desire to move beyond purely local traditions. And everything ‘local’ is caught up into the aim of reaching an extremely large

Paul also shared the tradition in writing and there is no reason to suppose that he was the first to do so’; Millard, Reading and Writing, p. 208. In 2 Thess 2.15 Paul recalls that he instructed the inhabitants of Thessalonica both in writing and orally: ‘So then, brothers and sisters stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught us, either by word of mouth or by our letter.’ 19. Paul Ricœ ur, ‘Le ré cit interpré tatif: exé gè se et thé ologie dans les ré cits de la Passion’, Recherches de sciences religieuses 73 (1985): 17–38 (here p. 21). 20. Brown, An Introduction, p. 104. ‘What we see in passages like those discussed above is evidence of the Jesus tradition shaping Pauline paraenesis at the level of his own thought processes, and no doubt intended by him to be recognized as derived from or indebted to the common memory of what Jesus had said and done’. James Dunn, ‘Jesus Tradition in Paul’, in Bruce D. Chilton and Craig A. Evans (eds.), Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current Research (Leiden: Brill, 1993), pp. 155–78 (here p. 178). See Eph. 4.21, Rom. 13, Gal. 4.4-5, 2 Cor. 5.16. See also 1 Tim. 5.17-19 where Paul cites Deut. 25.4, which he explains with words from Christ reported in Mt. 10.10 but without signalling it as such; just after he cites Deut. 19.15 included in another discourse from Jesus (Mt. 18.16). One can thus receive the impression that he knew at least something of the Synoptic tradition and cites it alongside acknowledged Scripture!

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audience. (Hence ‘Theophilus’, the recipient of his letter, is not necessarily a specific individual, but could also be, as an antonomasia, every ‘friend of God’.) Alongside these hermeneutical and historical limits, some features of the very materiality of the texts can also help to prevent an overblown insistence on the diversity of the gospels. Recent codicological findings tend to prove that Christian scribes produced books which were intended for a large and extended distribution much earlier than has long been thought. Additionally, the early Christian manuscripts available in the 1970s were of a poor material quality and were thus intended for personal use or limited to small circles. In the 1970s it looked as if such restrictions remained unchanged all the way down to the fourth century, with the imperial command to make large volumes. However, the papyri from Oxyrhynque published at the end of the 1990s considerably modified this early consensus. Four out of the seven oldest manuscripts of Matthew, dated from the second half of the second century and from a document which was well cared for and from an elegant hand, seem to be books for public use rather than private documents. Additionally, the sources available from the end of this second century attest to the existence of careful and expensive copies of Matthew or John.21 Several textual characteristics also show a profound Christological unity in the first Christian Scriptures. Ancient Christian manuscripts are especially distinguished from texts produced in an officially Jewish milieu by their extensive use of nomina sacra (pious abbreviations of the names of God and Christ, kurios or theos, under the form of KC or Θ C). Scholarly debate about their use is ongoing.22 This practice is, nevertheless, reminiscent of how the divine Name was written in paleo-Hebraic characters in the Dead Sea Scrolls and could testify to the ‘Essene ascendance’ in the environment which produced the New Testament.23 It could

21. See Graham Stanton, Jesus of Nazareth in New Testament Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 22. See Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism (trans. E. F. Rhodes; Grand Rapids-Leiden: Eerdmans, Brill, 1989), p. 76. See further Anton H. R. E. Paap, Nomina Sacra in the Greek Papyri of the First Five Centuries A.D.: The Source and Some Deductions (Lugduni Batavorum: Brill, 1959); Ludwig Traube, Nomina sacra: Versuch einer Geschichte der christlichen Kurzung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1908, repr. 1967); William Wallace, ‘An Index of Greek Ligatures and Contractions’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 42 (1923): 183–93. 23. É mile Puech confirms for us the relevance of this comparison; see his remarks in ‘Des fragments grecs de la grotte 7 et le Nouveau Testament? 7Q4 et 7Q5, et le papyrus Magdalen grec 17 = P64’, Revue Biblique 102 (1995): 570–84. According to Puech, the Christological expansion of piety for the Name should be related to the implicit claim at work in the exorcism formulas Jesus used, in which commands issued in the first person (‘I command you, come out of this man’) replace the ancient and unchanging incantation of ‘in the Name of G… ’ which the other Jewish exorcists (the Essenes for example) inherited

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even date back to the Jerusalemite context of the 50s–70s,24 and so perhaps the first generation of Christian writings simply continued the contemporaneous practice of the theology of the Name and extended it to the Lord Christ. Such a practice suggests the very early existence of a high Christology. These observations should suffice to render plausible works which postulate, at least under the guise of a hypothesis, the existence of a deep unity among the gospels. The Unity of the Gospel: Continuity from the Words of Jesus to Words about Jesus The historical fact of the unity of Jesus’ person should be enough to ensure a deep coherence among the texts which preserve his memory.25 Some scholars have attempted to develop a portrait of Jesus through showing the inner coherence of his words as preserved in the four gospels (this was the criterion of ‘coherence’ of historical criticism in the 1960s which came to be counterbalanced by the inverse criterion of ‘dissimilarity’ in order to understand Jesus’ novelty in his context). Should we not then recognize a certain unity of tone and language so as not to fall prey to ‘the forgetfulness of language’? It is also necessary to avoid artificially reading into ancient texts the theological elaborations of their descendants. In the case of the New Testament, however, we would also err by not seeing the anticipations of these elaborations which are already there. All the gospels are works of language, commentary and oral composition which are strongly marked by a literary awareness inherent to their style of narration. All of them speak of a person deeply engaged in teaching (or, in the case of parable, engaged in verbal creation) and each of them in their own way connects Jesus and language. Speech about Jesus thus began in the real impact of Jesus speaking to his disciples, and so the tradition did not cherrypick a posteriori the effects of Jesus’ preaching and ministry, but Jesus himself acted and spoke in such a way so as to influence how he would be received: how to frame his words and acts is one of the first effects of his acts and words.26

from Ancient Middle Eastern traditions and which remain identical two millennia later in Near Eastern rituals: Muslim exorcists still say bisn’illah. See É mile Puech, ‘Les deux derniers psaumes davidiques du rituel d’exorcisme, 11QPsApa IV4-V14’, in Devorah Dimant and Uriel Rappaport (eds.), The Dead Sea Scrolls: Forty Years of Research (LeidenJerusalem: Brill-Magnes-Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1992), pp. 64–89. 24. For the proposal that the practice goes back to the pre-70 Jerusalem Church, see Colin H. Roberts, Manuscript, Society and Belief in Early Christian Egypt: The Schweich Lectures of the British Academy, 1977 (London: British Academy [Oxford University Press], 1979), p. 46. 25. See above all Jean-Noë l Aletti, Jé sus Christ fait-il l’unité du Nouveau Testament? (Paris: Desclé e de Brouwer, 1994). 26. ‘The impact would include the formation of the tradition to recall what had made that impact. In making its impact the impacting word or event became the tradition of that

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From a heuristic point of view, it is impossible to separate Jesus’ ministry from its reception. Ipsissima vox? If it is historically futile to try to recover Jesus’ own Words (the famous ipsissima verba), which may very well give the same teaching in different forms, it is not impossible to think, as James Dunn does in the wake of a consistent academic tradition,27 that the ipsissima vox of Jesus remain perceptible in the gospels. The gospels are more preoccupied with conveying the linguistic authority and facility of Jesus rather than the particulars of this authority and facility, and so the é lan of Jesus of Nazareth’s thought, the dexterity of his speech, remained operative in the transmission of his memory. The Aramaisms and Hebraisms in the canonical Greek texts have been well documented and studied: there are ternary or quaternary rhythms, alliterations, assonances and paronomasia, and the characteristic use of the divine passive.28 It seems plausible that their source might be Jesus’ lips. We can thus speak of a certain ‘vocal imprint’ of Jesus in the gospels through the antitheses, synonymic parallels and paradoxes which recur in the four works.29 Jesus’ general attitude towards speech in the gospels seems quite consistent. Although less explicit than John, the Synoptics also connect Jesus, Jesus’ speech and God. Jesus’ healings, exorcisms and teachings are all places where we can find reflection upon the mysterious power of his speech.30 From this viewpoint, features thought to be ‘Johannine’ techniques also appear in the Synoptic writings. Without

word or event. The stimulus of some word/story, the excitement (wonder, surprise) of some event would be expressed in the initial shared reaction’. Dunn, Jesus Remembered, p. 239. 27. See Dunn, Jesus Remembered, p. 226. See also Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus (trans. John Bowden; London: SCM Press, 1971), pp. 3–29. 28. See Charles F. Burney, The Aramaic Origins of the Fourth Gospel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1922); The Poetry of Our Lord: An Examination of the Formal Elements of Hebrew Poetry in the Discourses of Jesus Christ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925), and Matthew Black, An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946, 1954). 29. Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium (San Francisco: Harper, 1996), pp. 144–5, and pp. 148–58. 30. See, for example, Mt. 9.34; Mk 11.28. Curiously, Jesus responds to the disciple who asks about the objective efficacy of Jesus’ name beyond the circle of those who officially follow him in this way: ‘Whoever is not against us is for us’ (Lk. 9.50), and ‘for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me’ (Mk 9.39b40). There are resonances with John here. This episode is often interpreted in a moralizing fashion (by noting that the Christian should not monopolize the power of Jesus for their Church, for example). But it actually simply means that the name ‘Jesus’ in itself has efficacy and that it gathers together those who use it. Incidentally, we should mention that the theory that the Son of Zebedee, the fisherman mentioned in Mt. 4.21, is the author of the fourth gospel has some merit. See R. Alan Culpepper, John, the Son of Zebedee: The Life of a Legend

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being exhaustive, we could mention here the staging of the incomprehension of Jesus’ interlocutors,31 or the ironic32 and pedagogical33 use of double meanings. The misunderstanding deliberately created by the mismatch of response to question in John corresponds to the portraits of the ‘ignorant’ disciples in Mark34 and to the crowds in Matthew. The Synoptics35 frequently resort to techniques of ‘Johannine irony’36 (perhaps more accurately called ‘Christic irony’ by Jean Grosjean) through attributing to Jesus phrases whose implicit illocutionary37 or perlocutionary

(Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1994), pp. 7–27; Philippe Rolland, L’origine et la date des évangiles: les témoins oculaires de Jésus (Paris: Saint-Paul, 1994), p. 160. 31. Particularly in light of the words which allow a glimpse into the mystery of the incarnation: Jn 2.19-21; 3.3-4; 4.10-11; 8.33-35; 11.1-3. Does this not find its equivalent, for example, in the inclusion of the great teaching of ‘the mysteries of the Kingdom’ between the only two passages in which the identity of the Father of Jesus (Mt. 12.46-50 and 13.55) is asked about? 32. ‘Raising up’ (Jn 3.3, 8, 14); the crucifixion as return to God (8.28, 12.34); living water (4.10); dying for the sake of (11.50-52). In the Synoptics: letting ‘the dead’ bury the dead (Mt. 8.22, Lk. 19.60); ‘touching’ the garments (Mk 5.30); the ‘yeast’ of the Pharisees and Herod (Mk 8.15); ‘being raised’ (Mk 9.31-32); the ‘exterior’ and the ‘interior’ of the person (Mk 7.14-23); ‘drinking the cup’ (Mk 38–40). 33. The verb ‘to come’, for example, sometimes might allude in the Synoptics to the divine source of Jesus’ authority. See Mt. 5.17, which is the heart of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law’, which could be glossed as ‘I was charged (by the Father) with this mission’. See Mt. 9.13; 10.34-35; 20.28, and compare with Jn 8.42; 10.10; 12.46. In Mark, as in John, Jesus provokes ‘stops on the signifier’, in the sense that one speaks of a freeze frame: see Mk 9.8-9, but also Mt. 17.9 and Lk. 9.36, and compare with all the literal repetitions in John which are cited in this chapter and the next. For theological significance of the ‘I have come’ sayings, see Simon Gathercole, The Pre-existent Son: Recovering the Christologies of Matthew, Mark and Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006). 34. See Jesus’ reproach in Mk. 7.18, or the ‘blocked spirit’ in Mk. 8.17, or the enigma of the ‘twelve’ and the ‘seven’ in Mk. 8.19-20. 35. Cf., for example, the ironies in the story of Mk. 12.12 (Jesus’ opponents enact the parable of the murderous vineyard tenants) or of Mt. 27.19 (performed by Pilate who sits as judge and Jesus stands as accused in the ironic reversal of Mt. 25.31); for ironies in discourse, see Mt. 13.9 and 43: ‘Let anyone with ears listen!’; halfway between the constative and the performative, the sense of akouô , hearing and listening, must give us pause and renders the formulation a paradoxical imperative; the imperative indicates a double sense of the word: it is a matter not only of hearing (entendre) but of understanding (entendre): comprehending! 36. See Jn 3.2; 4.12; 6.42; 7.35; 9.40-41; 11.50. 37. The Johannine clauses of the type ‘if I had not spoken they would not have been in sin’; ‘they judge you: the words which I have said’ implies that Jesus’ words, even beyond the miraculous healings, have (1) autonomous existence: they become in some way his vicars; and (2) efficacy: they judge, they make glad (the Farewell Discourse), etc. Similarly, Mt.

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significance is manifested in the incomprehension or hostility which they elicit, or through responding to his interlocutors at the level of their pragmatic situation rather than that of the semantic content of their questions. The chains of enunciations which we find in the Synoptic Passion stories recur in John in a near-systemic way.38 As for the content of Jesus’ speech, one could consider themes such as those of ‘the hour’,39 turns of phrase such as the solemn ‘It is I / I am’,40 or the rare poetic formulas of Father, Son and Spirit, to be places where the Jesus of the Synoptics expresses himself in a manner similar to that of John.41 In short, it is often thought that John a posteriori took the style of divine discourse found in the Old Testament, a style which seems much more solemn than the tone of the Jesus of the Synoptics, and applied it to his Christ who came from God. The inverse hypothesis, however, did not seem worthy of consideration. But could it not be that the Gospel of John, his redactional forays notwithstanding, was a book of testimony formed by an experience of and reflection upon what Jesus said, while the Synoptics were linked, more or less skilfully by the talents of their narratorsredactors-writers, to what was said of Jesus in the early communities, with all the simplifications attendant to oral, communal and popular transmission?42 In the Synoptics, Jesus’ speech is unified by a certain tone but arranged according to the mnemonic necessities of oral tradition, and so perhaps the ‘Johanninisms’

13.52-53 seems to be a simple conclusion from Jesus, but in reality it is perhaps a call to follow his example (he has strongly questioned his interlocutors just before). 38. See Oswald Ducrot, Dire et ne pas dire: principes de sé mantique linguistique (Paris: Hermann, 1972, 1980): presupposition is the act of language by which one responds to the implicit need experienced by the interlocutors: the imposition of a universe of discourse by the enunciator (for example, in the form of a question such as ‘that I say to you P’, where one is asked less about the saying P than the saying of it. In this way one can explain Jesus’ twofold response to his interrogators in Mt. 26.64 and 27.11): ‘You have said so.’ Jesus does not deny but neither does he affirm being ‘the Christ, the Son of God’ (Mt. 26.63) or ‘the king of the Jews’ (27.10); everything depends on what the high priest or Pilate or the reader understands by these terms. 39. See Mt. 14.35. ‘First, the utterance is trans-historical, I would say gnomic: it is necessary that the Son of Man be delivered up … . The time of this being delivered up is what is signified by ‘the hour’ … . Second, the event is written into the chronology that Mark punctuates with the three watches of the night: ‘the hour has come’. The shift in meaning of the word ‘hour’ from an eschatological plane to an episodic claim forms a figure ‘which ensures the unity of the kergyma and the events by giving to the figure a depth deeper than semiotics and a typology deeper than that later articulated in theory of the fourfold sense of Scripture’. Ricœ ur, ‘Le ré cit’, pp. 26 and 27. 40. Mk 6.50; 13.6; 14.62. 41. Mt. 11.25-27; Lk. 10.21-22. 42. See Pagina Sacra, pp. 106–11 for bibliographic references on the topological and chronological exactitude of John as compared to the arrangement of material by themes and the symbolic simplifications of temporal and spatial points of reference in the Synoptics.

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of the Synoptics could at least be enigmatic indications of contact between their traditions and the Johannine milieu. Perhaps traces of the wording present in Jesus’ loftier teachings resisted standardization in the process of their oral traditioning. A High Early Christology? In addition to its obvious stylistic differences, one of the reasons why the study of John has been isolated from that of the Synoptics is his Christology of the incarnation of the Word. This doctrine seems clearly more evolved than the Messianisms or theologies of ‘Wisdom’ or the ‘Son of Man’ found in the Synoptics. In reality, the hypothesis of an early ‘high’ Christology cannot be ignored, especially as the Intertestamental writings show that first-century Judaism has a number of expressions which could appear very ‘Greek’ to nineteenth-century detectives of hypothetical redactions. Historical-critical research on the Pauline epistles43 allows us to outline the theological environment of the 30s.44 From very early on, Christians worshipped Jesus as divine, as God in fact. If this worship was not idolatry then something else had to be happening: Jesus’ impact on the Jews who believed in him was not that of a mere human being.45 Is this not also shown in the fact that early Christian writers did not think it necessary to emphasize his divinity but rather to defend his humanity?46 That all of Jesus’ first disciples were Jews seems to necessitate such an interpretation: can we truly imagine first-century Jews applying a kind of pagan apotheosis to their rabbi? Jesus was certainly not a ‘man become God’ as in ‘Christologies from below’, whether

43. See 1 Cor. 15.3, the credo Paul transmitted in the 50s and which he would have learned in the 30s. See the very high affirmations of Christ’s status in Eph. 1.3-5 and Phil. 2.6-11, but also the nuanced reading that Dunn proposes in Christology in the Making, p. 255. 44. ‘Our argument will be that while Paul was a “creative” theologian, in all its essential points his Christology was not of his making but was formulated by those who were believers before him. This would mean that the Christology he articulates was formulated within that brief span between the crucifixion of Jesus and the conversion of Paul.’ Paul Barnett, The Birth of Christianity: The First Twenty Years (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 26. 45. Flavius Josephus, whose authenticity as a non-Christian witness is clear, relates a tradition about Jesus as an extraordinary thaumaturge; see Serge Bardet, Le testimonium flavianum: Examen historique, considé rations historiographiques (Paris: Cerf, 2002). This view is also confirmed by Talmudic passages (Sanhedrin 43a, Sanhedrin 106a) which sometimes speak of Jesus as a magician trafficking in the divine Name. Cf. also Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003) and Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008). 46. See Eph. 4.21, Rom 13, Gal. 4.4-5.

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they be adoptionist, Arian or Nestorian. Such a Christ would never have been recognized as Emmanuel,47 ‘the image of the invisible God’48. He would have been immediately rejected as an idol ‘incapable of saving’.49 The man who presumes to elevate himself unto the heavens is the biblical figure of Luciferian pride,50 as against the faith which cries: ‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down!’51 Judaeo-Christian Christology has been a theology of the dwelling of the Name of God in the flesh in the Semitic sense of a complete human nature (soul and body) fallen into sin. (Phil 2.6-11)52 This means that we do not want to deny the fundamental legitimacy of a Christology which begins from below in the initial stage of its investigation. For us as for the apostles the Christological question begins as a question of Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified and resurrected one. But this research can become problematic when it confines itself to the consideration of the glorious elevation of the resurrected Jesus and refuses to consider his origin in God and his ‘being sent’ into the truth of our flesh. For the New Testament authors have themselves accomplished such a reversal and have shown us that the Christology ‘from below’ was necessarily linked with a Christology from above.53

The Centrality of the Resurrection The deepest theological and poetic unity of the gospel comes from the experience of an encounter with the resurrected one. Certainly each evangelist developed the kerygma according to a strategy of preaching relative to his audience, his sources, the period in which he wrote and at the level of his own reflections. The gamut 47. Mt. 1.23. 48. Col. 1.15. 49. Deut. 32.37-38, Jer. 2.28. 50. Gen. 3.5; 11.4, Isa. 14.12-15, Exod. 28.2-9. 51. Isa. 64.1. 52. Jean-Miguel Garrigues, ‘Jé sus: Le salut comme chute et relevè ment d’Israë l’, in Jean-Miguel Garrigues (ed.), L’unique Israë l de Dieu: approches chré tiennes du Mystè re d’Israë l (Limoges: Crité rion, 1987), pp. 41–58. Also see Jean Danié lou, É tudes d’exé gè se judé o-chré tienne (Paris: Beauchesne, 1966). For an example of a Christology from below see Gerald Messadié , L’homme qui devint Dieu, 4 vols. (Paris: Laffont, 1988–91), and Pierre Grelot, Un Jé sus de comé die: L’homme qui devint Dieu (Paris: Cerf, 1989). 53. Bernard Sesboüé, Jésus-Christ à l’image des hommes: brève enquête sur les déformations du visage de Jésus dans l’Église et dans la société (Montréal: Bellarmin, 1978), pp. 38–9. The author increases ‘the ambiguities of the “christology from below”’: ‘One does not speak today of a theology of an “assumed human” but everywhere of a Christology from below (Kasper has shown the connection between the two). But the cultural and spiritual horizon has now changed: the wholly metaphysical concern of maintaining the transcendence of God has given way to a certain dread of any kind of “added value” in our claims about the Trinitarian God in relation to the revelation accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.’

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here runs from explicitly portraying the resurrection as an established fact (Paul),54 or as a physical event (Luke), or as a kind of negative presence experienced in the holy terror of a handful of women who were confronted by the empty tomb (Mark’s shorter ending), and it traverses a host of suggestive narrative techniques (the play of various points of view and different symbolisms and characters in a spatio-temporal framework which signify the resurrection without representing it). Despite all these differences, the shared foundation of the gospels is the resurrection, the principal condition for their very existence. From this point of view, we do not have to isolate the Johannine tradition from the others. It is simply the tradition which explicates most scrupulously what all of them have in common: to recount and to proclaim ‘that which has occurred among/in us’,55 and to express it with an authorial self-consciousness which is mainly implicit in the others. But ‘implicit’ does not signify ‘non-existent’ any more than ‘possible’ means ‘unreal’. Even the first verse of Mark, for example, constitutes a kind of anticipation of Jesus’ fate when it directly calls him ‘the Son of God’, an appellation paradoxically echoed at the very moment when Jesus seems to have definitively failed in Mark 15.39. In fact, Mark constantly uses the kergymatic energy of the resurrection in his ‘Messianic secret’ motif, which is developed through a narrative strategy of reticence and opacity very similar to Johannine irony.56 From a rhetorical standpoint, this strategy delays the comprehension of the story’s meaning until the reader reaches the Passion and resurrection story. In a rather Johannine logic, here enacted on the level of rhetorical strategy rather than made an explicit theme within discourse, it is only when everything (the story) is finished that one can understand it.57 For instance, just after the Transfiguration, Jesus insists that those who have witnessed this event keep it a secret under the following conditions: Et descendentibus illis de monte Praecepit illis ne cui quae vidissent narrarent Nisi cum filius hominis a mortuis resurrexerit Et verbum continuerunt apud se conquirentes quid esset cum a mortuis resurrexerit.

54. See 1 Cor. 15.1-8. 55. Lk. 1.1. 56. ‘Producing more darkness than light is perhaps a specific feature of Mark’s narrative. It brings about mis-understanding and turns it into such opacity that its reader can only identify with the perplexed women at the tomb’; Ricœ ur, ‘Le ré cit’, pp. 24, 30. 57. Jn 12.16. William Wrede has already pointed out that, when we read him closely, Mark bears a striking resemblance to John. See William Wrede, Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien: Zugleich ein Beitrag zum Verstä ndnis des Markusevangeliums (Gö ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913), and Charakter und Tendenz des Johannesevangelium (Tü bingen: Mohr, 1903).

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As they were coming down from the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean.58

We can see here the realism of (faith in) the resurrection: the apostles should not proclaim the glory of Jesus, because the efficacy of their proclamation is tied to the reality of the resurrection, which is active in the discourse of those who announce it through a kind of transitivity of the energy of the resurrection to the discourse of those whom it impacts.59 In this way, the sheer fact that the text we are reading exists becomes evidence of the resurrection! In addition to its presence within Jesus’ ministry itself, the ‘Messianic secret’ was probably a real rhetorical technique at the time when the narration of the gospel was performed orally.60 It would allow listeners and readers to participate in an active quest for meaning (in a complete reversal of the passive reception of a fictional work).61 In the story of the Transfiguration the use of this technique almost borders on caricature: the repetition of the puzzling phrase ‘resurrection from among the dead’ creates a state of expectation within the mind of the reader or listener that can be remembered after the announcement of the empty tomb at the end of the gospel proclamation. What we encounter here is a pedagogy of the letter inherent within Scripture which John in particular uses frequently. The fact that one can narrate the Transfiguration becomes a fruit of the resurrection: they kept his advice and yet they attempt to speak of the resurrection. The disciples have obeyed Jesus by ‘relating what they have seen’, by claiming that he has been resurrected. The gospel text is thus presented as pragmatically tied to the resurrection which happened in history and from there is set within the Jewish experience of transmission. What is true for the specific event of the Transfiguration is true for the story as a whole: by ending paradoxically with ‘and they said nothing to anybody’,

58. Mk 9.9-10. The reappearance of this motif in the other two Synoptics perhaps indicates something shared in the traditions which inspire them rather than a trace of Markan redaction (see Mt. 17.9 and Lk. 9.36). 59. See the dynamis at work in the first apostolic sermons of the kergyma (for example, Acts 4.33), or the analogous efficacy of Jesus’ resurrection and preaching about it in Paul (for example, Gal. 1.18 or 1 Cor. 15.13-14): ‘If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain [kenon] and your faith has been in vain [kenê ].’ 60. See Lk. 2.49-50; 9.44-45; 18.33-34. 61. See the ironic progression of Mk 8.14-33: the enigma of the yeast of the Pharisees (ending with ‘Do you not yet understand?’); the healing of the blind (ending with the insistence that ‘he looked intently and his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly’); Peter’s profession of faith (ending with ‘For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things’).

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Mark initially depicts the reality of the resurrection by the simple fact that somebody is there talking about Jesus. In the context of oral preaching, if the narrator pauses at ‘and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid’,62 then there is a severe tension between what is being narrated and the reality perceived by its listeners. If this story is actually being told then of course they must have said something to somebody, for how else could someone know the whole of a story which ended this way? Furthermore, if they have spoken to someone then this means that they have overcome their fear and have received the power to witness. The very fact that one could see a preacher speaking to crowds about the resurrection was no doubt the most wondrous proof of it.63 In short, the constant understatement in Mark – in perfect agreement with the theme of the Messianic secret – had a greater perlocutionary effect than that of a story which explicitly narrates the resurrection.64 The stories from the gospel seem far less distant and different from each other when we do not read them according to the logic and flow of a story but instead when we resituate them within the context of oral preaching (which was their origin) and the reactions they elicit within their listeners, when we take these stories as texts which are to be put into practice (in the liturgical framework of ‘service of the Word’ to which Luke perhaps alludes).65 Beyond the case of Mark, it seems that the most adequate representation of the resurrection seems not to

62. The current ending after Mk 16.8 was known since the second century by Tatian and St. Irenaeus: this canonical reading is thus very old. Even if one can note a jump between verses 8 and 9, this feature leads one to wonder whether the proclaimed gospel had a different ending. In this ending, Mark draws up a very laconic list (without his usual taste for picturesque detail): it is a series of facts which he reports to us. For a general study of Mark’s strategy of obscuring, see Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), and its critique in Joel Marcus, ‘Mark 4:10-12 and Marcan Epistemology,’ Journal of Biblical Languages 103 (1984): 557–74. 63. See ‘For we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard.’ (Acts 4.20) 64. In this we see less opposition between Mark’s ‘story which obscures’ (Ricœ ur) and John’s ‘story which clarifies’ on the Christological plane than on the stylistic or strategic plane. Even if his doctrine is altogether more glorious than the Christology of Mark’s Son of Man, it is on a concretely depicted gallows that John invites his readers to see the signs of glory. 65. It is difficult to take into account the anthropology of oral tradition when reading the New Testament. Walter J. Ong in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York: Routledge, 1991) compares it to the temptation of explaining the transition from horses to automobiles to those how had never seen a horse (the user of ‘wheelless automobiles’?; p. 12.). Nevertheless, this effort still seems necessary to Dunn if a realistic historical approach is to be adopted. Cf. James Dunn, ‘Altering the Default Setting: Re-envisaging the Early Transmission of the Jesus Tradition’, New Testament Studies 49 (2003): 139–75 (here p. 149).

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lie in imagined pictures of raising, awakening or transfiguration, but in vocal performance. The One who addressed Moses in the Burning Bush is more easily experienced than depicted: the efficacy of the resurrection transcends space and time, and one of these images – one of its vectors – is the spatio-temporal transcendence of language, which is heightened in its textualization.66 The Christian artists who have perceived this have attempted to find nonrepresentative symbols for the resurrection.67 This means that the deepest unity of the four gospels appears when they are employed as a kergymatic announcement within a performativity that may or may not be fertile – just the Word of God is likened to a seed which falls upon different kinds of soil. It is this perception which undergirds the exploration of a ‘poetic gospel’. The reader should not be misled by our title: in this chapter, we do not intend to describe the literary or prosodic beauties of the gospels (their ‘poetry’). Rather, we intend to sketch a poetics of the Gospel: we want to envisage the word of the Gospel as the result of an art of using words and phrases within a conception of language, the world and their relationship which is quite different from ours. Individual human ‘authors’ in the modern sense of the word are only partly responsible for this poetics. Even though John eventually captured it in a unique way, it results mostly from the pragmatics of tradition: the interplay of witnesses, traditioners, compilers and redactors, triggered by the words uttered by the Word come into flesh. Finally, we do not think that the current state of biblical studies prohibits every theological reading of the gospels as a harmony. The word ‘gospel’, which designates each of the four canonical texts relating to Jesus’ ministry, allows us to use the word ‘Gospel’ to designate the gospels taken together, the Christian proclamation itself, the one fourfold Gospel.68 But if there is a real unity here then it cannot be simply the fruit of a posteriori doctrinal reflection. It should also be poetic; that is to say, it should be present in the composition and concrete reception of the texts of the gospels themselves. What follows in this chapter and in the next one is an attempt to draw out some of the structural principles of a ‘poetic gospel’.

66. Thus Ignatius of Antioch encourages a Christian community to be attached ‘especially to the gospel, in which the passion is shown to us and the accomplished resurrection [kai he anastasis teteleiotai]’. Ignatius of Antioch, ‘Lettre aux Smyrniotes VII, 2,’ in Pierre-Thomas Camelot (ed.), Ignace d’Antioche: Lettres, Polycarpe de Smyrne: Lettre aux Philippiens; Martyre de Polycarpe (Paris: Cerf, 1951), pp. 7–181, here pp. 162 and 163. Why not grant this final expression a much stronger meaning than simply the fulfilment of the Scriptures through the resurrection with which the editor Camelot is satisfied? 67. For example, on the ambos of Pisa, that of the baptistery by Nicola Pisano and that of the cathedral by Giovanni Pisano, or that of the cathedral of Siena, decorated with a Christological cycle, one finds bas-relief panels representing all the great scenes of the gospel up until the cross, but not the resurrection. The two sculptor brothers very well knew that the only possible representation of the resurrection was its proclamation in actu exercito in the ambo which they were decorating and that such a mystery can only be experienced. 68. See Ireneaus, Adversus haereses III, 11, 8 (PG 7; Paris: Migne, 1857), col. 885.

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The Poetic Importance of Having Four Gospels The Gospel according to John will assume a primacy in our reflections such that our ‘evangelical’ poetics might seem to be merely a Johannine poetics (our ‘poetic Gospel’ could seem simply to be a Johannine poetic Gospel). Some justification of our approach seems in order. The first reason for the importance given to John is highly fortuitous. It turns out that St. Thomas Aquinas, our privileged interlocutor in the exploration of the conditions of the possibility for theology, commented on it between 1270 and 1272; so he was working on it at the same time as the secunda and the tertia pars of the Summa theologiae. In the chapters that follow we will cross-fertilize modern exegetical analyses with medieval readings of the same texts and supplement them both with our personal reflections on literary pragmatics. This should allow us to have both the rational clarity of modern approaches and the theological depth of Patristic readings. In his commentary, and in line with the Fathers of the Church, Thomas Aquinas has a conception of revelation as divine pedagogy,69 which in turn is inspired by John. One could, in fact, describe the fourth gospel as a cry of praise before the mystery of the incarnation of the Word of God which has come so near that we can touch, see and hear it. His movement is that of a revelation ‘from above’: God descends to earth in the person of his Word and speaks among men and women. When the Son is about to return to the Father, he summarizes his mission in this way: ‘Haec est autem vita aeterna ut cognoscant te solum verum Deum et quem misisti Iesum Christum’; ‘And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’70 John thus depicts the Word made flesh, God in his mystery and selfcommunication, as one who teaches by words and deeds so that the Father is made known. The problem of revelation is thus not only noetic but also linguistic and literary: how could inherently finite human words express the infinity of God? An additional reason for us to privilege the Gospel of John is that it seems the closest of the four gospels to this modern question. But to privilege John does not necessarily mean detracting from the other gospels: all of them, in fact, present one single conception of language marked by Jesus’ activity. As the author of the last gospel to be written, John could well have known the other gospels or traditions upon which they were based,71 and he could have had the task of deepening them, adding nuance to them, or even contradicting them. 69. See Aquinas, In Io, prol. 70. Jn 17.3. 71. For the state of the question, see Peder Borgen, ‘John and the Synoptics’, in David L. Dungan (ed.), The Interrelations of the Gospels: Jerusalem 1984 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, Peeters, 1990), pp. 408–37; or D. Moody Smith, John among the Gospels: The Relationship in Twentieth-Century Research (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992). The hypotheses range from John knowing Mark or the three Synoptics to simply them having shared protoEvangelical oral traditions or writings. In fact, one could compare the narrative backgrounds (shared sequences such as John 6 and Mk 6.30-54; 8.11-33), conduct statistical research on

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His theology of revelation as knowledge (and knowledge through language72) allows the narrator of John to reflect upon his own words, and so he introduces into his text a strong dose of meta-literary reflection and performance. Throughout the gospel, and in a manner highly faithful to the writing style used by the first biblical historiographers, language and books form objects of reflection, whether explicitly in its discourse or as implied in the story.73 We might almost wonder if John’s primary subject matter is the movement from the Word to the Gospel. Despite a lingering suspense, the heart of the Paschal mystery is now declared.74 The grand lines of history from the Prologue have reached their destinies.75 The ‘final crisis is now announced and named by John the Baptist: “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world”’,76 which is repeated in the proleptic

material that they have in common (15 per cent of the Passion of Mark is found in John), or establish contact between persons (Luke: Martha and Mary, Lazarus from the parable, Anne) and between similar passages; Jn 13.16 = Mt. 10.24, Jn 15.18-27 = Mt. 10.18-25. 72. See Gail R. O’Day, Revelation in the Fourth Gospel: Narrative Mode and Theological Claims (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986). 73. A complete typology of the passages in John which have meta-literary content would allow both for the identification of a narrative theory of language and words as well as a mise en abyme of the work, the gospel itself. The most important passages are those in which the author himself interrupts his work by commenting upon it and explaining how he would like to be read, very often at the limits of the text: the two conclusions, 20.30-31, 21.24; narrative metalepsis, 19.35-37; the meditative discursive pause of ‘among themselves’, 12.37-50; summary, 10.40-42; prologue, 1.1-18. It would also be necessary to connect to other glosses the occasions when the narrative voice comments on the mode of the text’s composition, its history, and its reception: as the work of memory, 2.11-12; 17.20; as the work of the Holy Spirit, 10.30; and as the fulfilment of the Scriptures (2.22, 12.15-16, 12.37-50). It would also be necessary to register the incessant mise en abyme of language at the diegetic and meta-diegetic levels under the form of questions on words, language and their reception that takes place in the different stories which make up the gospel. ‘Thanks to the mise en abyme, the intra-diegetic and the extra-diegetic addresses (to use the categories of modern narratology) are, so to speak, contiguous (but not identical) and the ethical engagement of the former cannot help but affect the ethics of the reception of the latter.’ Jean Pierre Sonnet, ‘“Lorsque Moï se eut achevé d’é crire” (Dt 31, 24): une “thé orie narrative” de l’é criture dans le Pentateuque’, Recherches de sciences religieuses 90 (2002): 509–24 (here p. 510). 74. It is one of functions of the theme of ‘the hour’ in Jn 2.4, see also 4.21, 23; 5.25, 28; 7.30; 8.20; 12, 23, 27; 13.1; 16. 2, 4, 21, 25, 32; 17.1. 75. See Marc Cholin, Le prologue et la dynamique de l’é vangile de Jean (Lyon: EMCC, 1995); Elizabeth Harris, Prologue and Gospel: The Study of the Fourth Evangelist (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1994); Jean Zumstein, ‘Le Prologue, seuil du quatriè me é vangile’, Recherches de science religieuse 83 (1995): 217–39. 76. É tienne Nodet, Le Fils de Dieu: procè s de Jé sus et é vangiles (Paris: Cerf, 2002), p. 73. See Jn 1.29.

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commentary which ends the scene of the money-changers in the Temple.77 The reader’s expectation is thus shifted from ‘narrative suspense’ – if one dares to call it that – to ‘didactic suspense’. From this point of view, the accent is placed on both the content and the function of the narration: the narrative has been put into writing expressly so that its readers may believe.78 The Johannine insistence on the reality of witness has been well documented.79 One could even go so far as to say that the entire fourth gospel has the appearance of a trial, with accusers, advocates and witnesses all present.80 But what is actually privileged here is the pragmatics of witness (perhaps under the influence of the text itself, which repeatedly invokes the biblical rule of two witnesses). In addition to the quality or the number of the required witnesses, however, the quality of the witness itself in terms of its verbal performance matters for its admissibility: the witness must be adequate to what it attempts to witness to, which is one more reason behind John’s meditation upon language. By moving from the figure of ‘John’ at the beginning of the gospel to that of the ‘beloved disciple’ in chapter 13, the central theme of witness is moved from the realm of the vocal and the oral to the realm of writing and the book, and in the process traverses the realm of action (as in the washing of feet, done as and in memory of Jesus). One could even say that the final state of the work reflects its historical origins inasmuch as Jesus’ oral teaching was relayed by early apostolic and ecclesial preaching up to its literary formation in the gospels.81 ‘It is highly significant for us

77. Jn 2.22. 78. ‘(These signs) have been put into writing so that you may believe’. Jn 20.31. 79. See the bibliographic summary put forward by Luc Devillers, ‘Les trois té moins: une structure pour le quatriè me é vangile’, Revue biblique 104 (1997): 40–87. 80. Raymond Brown notes that ‘Certain Johannine theological emphases appear in this first subsection. A legal atmosphere colors the narrative, e.g. JBap is interrogated by “the Jews,” and he testifies and does not deny – an indication that some of the Johannine tradition was shaped in a forensic context, possibly in a synagogue where Christian were interrogated about their belief in Jesus’ (p. 339). The same author points out in 5.19-30 a ‘subtle’ response in ‘five arguments’ which ‘are advanced as testimony as if there were advanced in synagogue debates: God (Another) has testified on Jesus’ behalf; so also JBap, and the works that Jesus is doing, and Scripture, and finally Moses who wrote about Jesus. Brown, An Introduction, p. 345. Cf. also parakletos, a Greek forensic term which in the NT is only used in John. 81. See Benoî t Standaert, ‘Jean 21 et les Synoptiques: l’enjeu interecclé sial de la derniè re redaction de l’é vangile’, in Adelbert Denaux (ed.), John and the Synoptics (Leuven: Leuven University Press, Peeters, 1992), pp. 632–43; Jean Zumstein, ‘Mé moire et relecture pascale dans l’é vangile selon saint Jean’, in idem, Miettes exé gé tiques (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1991), pp. 299–316; ‘La ré daction finale de l’é vangile selon Jean (à l’exemple du chapitre 21)’, in Jean-Daniel Kaestli, Jean-Michel Poffet and Jean Zumstein (eds.), La Communauté johannique et son histoire: la trajectoire de l’é vangile johannique aux deux premiers siè cles (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1990), pp. 207–30.

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that the fourth gospel contains many indications of its own genesis as a book, from an oral stage until its being put into writing, and that it does not neglect the role of human memory (2.17, 22; 12.16) and the Spirit (14.20).’82 Better put, the Witness par excellence in John is Christ, the one who has come from above. Throughout this gospel we find not simply a theory but a genuine theology of language. John is also the only gospel to give Jesus the title of Logos, even though it never places this term on Jesus’ lips, which is a remarkable scruple from the historiographical point of view. In this way, John compels us to reflect upon the relationship between God, Jesus and language (the language which Jesus himself uses, the language which is or will be used to speak of Jesus and the language which John uses). Its literary movement as a whole is that of an immense parabola: moving from the ineffability of God (the Logos of the first verse83) to the concrete book – codex or volumen – that the reader has in hand and will close,84 and in the process moves through the claim of the central verse of the gospel: ‘I and the Father are one.’85 In sum, this gospel has given us a way of knowing God through Scripture and through narrative. It is no surprise, then, that this gospel mobilizes literary and linguistic tools developed in the age-old traditions of Hebrew Scripture when it puts God into story and into words.

The Rule of the Word over History: The ‘Textual Dimension’ and the Primacy of Language in the Gospels John’s poetic form – with its sometimes dense metaphorical texture, its prosody connected by phrases teeming with symmetries and diaphoras which can be loosely compared to a series of waves in a rising tide (each is like the previous one but flows beyond it slightly) – contributes to the creation of a kind of fourth dimension, the construction of a specific space in which the reader can touch the Word through the words. It is to this dimension that we now turn. The Beginning and the End of John The Prologue and endings of the fourth gospel form the framework of what we could call a ‘linguistic space’. John begins with the beginning and, like Moses, he goes back to the principle. But what a progress into interiority. Moses moves from the foundation of the

82. Devillers, ‘Les trois té moins’, pp. 75, 76. 83. Jn 1.1: ‘In the beginning was the Word’. 84. Jn 21.25: ‘The world could not contain the books that could be written’. 85. Jn 10.30. See Maarten J. J. Menken, Numerical Literary Techniques in John: The Fourth Evangelist’s Use of Number of Words and Syllables (Leiden: Brill, 1985).

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The incipit ‘In the beginning was the Word’ is generally read as a theological statement which develops a content implicit within the creation stories with which Holy Scripture begins: it is through his ‘word’ that God created the heaven and the earth,87 and it is this word which is in the beginning. The term Logos at the end of the first verset is a point of intense theological concentration. As Northrop Frye has already demonstrated, the term itself constitutes a translation problem (is it language, word, reason, thought, or even fact or action?).88 In the Septuagint the term was often used to translate the Hebrew davar, which can designate both the word and the act inasmuch as it traverses the seamless movement from the interior thought to the external act, including the motivation and the decision to act. The biblical passage is also enriched by the different connotations the word has in various Greek philosophies and in Stoicism in particular, where it designates the divine organizing principle and humanity’s highest faculties: intelligence, discursive reason and language. By claiming that the world around itself has a meaning, that things themselves are organized, humanity has always reflected upon the mysterious thought operative in the world. In the face of the splendours or horrors of nature, events or destiny, humanity intimates that a deep word is addressed to it. Logos is the term around which these phenomena have gradually coalesced. Understood in this way, the Logos and other entities such as Wisdom were sometimes personified by Hellenistic Jews, as in Philo or in the Targums.89 This personification could even lead to them sometimes being described as ‘intermediary figures’ between the Creator and creation, which in Judaism could have prepared

86. Grosjean, L’Ironie christique, p. 11. 87. See Gen. 1. 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26, 29; 2.18; 3.1, 3, 13, 22. 88. For the history of the translation of Jn 1.1, see Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 303 and 304. 89. See Philo of Alexandria, De migratione Abrahami, 3–6; also see Sir 24:3.

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the way for belief in the incarnation.90 None of these entities, however, reaches the level of ontological autonomy that this label improperly bestows upon them.91 Discussion of these intermediary figures remains within figurative language, within ways of speaking about the interactions between God, his creation, and his people or about the experience of his immanence in revelation.92 The theological symphony which this phrase initiates contains a minor harmonic which the interpreters seldom listen to but which is worth hearing. At the beginning of a new book, with a glance at the opening verses of Genesis,93 the

90. There was an age ‘in Hellenistic Judaism,’ in which ‘Wisdom and Word were closely related concepts and they were often interchangeable … . One should note especially that Wis 9:1-2 practically identifies Wisdom and Word when referencing the work of creation. Since Jn 1:1-3 almost certainly alludes to Gen. 1:1-3 where one sees God “speaking” so that creation becomes actual, one would admit that it was easy to glide from the Sophia theme to the Logos theme.’ M.- É . Boismard, Review of Siegfried Schulz, Komposition und Herkunft der Johanneischen Reden (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), Revue biblique 69 (1962): 421–4 (here p. 423). 91. See the lengthy analyses of Dunn, Christology in the Making, in particular the conclusions on pp. 252–3. Also see Yves-Marie Blanchard, ‘La notion de Logos dans le Judaï sme ancien du premier siè cle et sa ré interpré tation chré tienne dans le Prologue de Jean’, Graphè 10 (2001): 47–60; Georges Neyrand, ‘La sens de ‘logos’ dans le prologue de Jean’, Nouvelle revue thé ologique 106 (1984): 59–71. 92. ‘Scholars often saw a precursor to John in Philo of Alexandria and his synthesis between Greek philosophy and Scriptures. But the Philonian Logos is not the perfect revelatory mediator between God and humanity as it is in John. It is not God, but an intermediary being, the divine Nous, the ideal and archetypal human from which came all empirical human beings. If John had known Philo, then the theological differences between the two conceptions of the Logos is such that he doubtlessly would have avoided using it.’ Marie-Joseph Lagrange, É vangile selon saint Jean (Paris: Gabalda, 1927), p. 32. It is, however, interesting to note that Philo, who is inspired by Plato’s Timaeus just as John is inspired by testimony of and about Jesus of Nazareth, uses the same Old Testament sources, in particular the Wisdom writings. They witness at least to the existence of parallel speculations on the intellectual and linguistic mediation between God and humanity in the Judaisms contemporary with the New Testament. Among the new religious trends of the first century, the Hermetic corpus, for example, developed interesting analogies between divine ‘psychology’ and human psychology. That scholars usually claim that such texts lacked any contact with Christianity; or else they find that an already paganized gospel proves the existence of noetico-theological speculations in a culture only slightly distant in time and space from the redaction of the fourth gospel. For an example of this position, see Jö rg Bü chli, Der Poimandres: Ein paganisiertes Evangelium: Sprachliche und begriffliche Untersuchungen zum 1. Trakat des Corpus Hermeticum (Tü bingen: Mohr, 1987). 93. It forms a system with many other allusions: in the Gen 1 creation story, the divine word creates ‘in the beginning’ (Gen. 1.1); the first action is the separation of the light and the dark (Gen. 1.4) and the last is the creation of humanity (Gen. 1.26); and the way and

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incipit of the whole of the book, and resonating with echoes in the literary form itself,94 there is present not only theological meaning, but also genuine literary awareness, intertextual play. This permits a very modest supplemental meaning to appear in John’s first words: ‘in the beginning was the word’, or ‘in the beginning was language’. By reversing the order of the proposition and the circumstantial complement (and it is unclear in this case whether it is temporal or spatial), the narrator emphasizes the fact that he intends to begin with the ‘beginning’. The first line of the gospel is thus deliberately meta-literary. The beginning is placed at the real beginning of this word. In it there comes together what is signified by the word arche and the reality of the linguistic act which it offers: I begin by speaking … from the beginning.95 Not only does the word signify an archetypal past (that of creation) or a historical past (that of revelation), but it also represents the speech situation which gave rise to it. Roughly speaking, one could rephrase this by imagining someone beginning to narrate something by remarking that it has been put into speech. He immediately continues by identifying that which was (present) in the beginning: the logos. According to the deepest wish of those who dwell in and upon language, here the text truly ‘does what it says’.96 The opening of John does not only mean that there is nothing without the logos, but also (and perhaps above all) that without language there is no word, nor this word, nor this book that the reader now holds. Whoever begins narrating a complex history or a discourse presuming to offer an ultimate truth – which is certainly the case with John97 – has a vested interest in showing as much as possible the ‘causes’ in the series which determine it, which in turn actually risks relativizing it. The initial garment of a message that attempts to speak truth among human beings is linguistic. Throughout the fourth gospel the evangelist also operates on this level. Although exegetes often remark upon

the life recalls the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil placed by God in the garden (Gen. 2). Cf. Roland Meynet, ‘Analyse rhé torique du Prologue de Jean’, Revue biblique 96 (1989): 481–510 (here p. 492 n. 37). 94. See Edwyn C. Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel (ed. F. N. Davey; London: Faber and Faber, 1947), pp. 140 and 141. 95. The meta-literary sense of the verse confirms this linguistic law: ‘Everything uttered is applied automatically to the phenomena having for a framework the spatial-temporal coordinates of the utterance if nothing in the context opposes it.’ Jean Cervoni, L’é nonciation (Paris: Presses universitaires de Frances, 1992), p. 42. 96. This phrase from Francis Ponge aptly articulates the deep desire of all contemporary poetry, at least since Mallarmé and Rimbaud. 97. See Jn 1.17; 1.51; 3.3; 3.5; 3.11, 3.21, 4.23-24, 5.19, 5.24-25; 5.33, 6.26, 6.47, 6.53, 8.16, 8.32, 8.34, 8.40, 8.44-46, 8.51, 8.58, 10.1, 10.7, 12.24, 13.16, 13.20-21, 13.38, 14.6, 14.12, 14.1, 15.26, 16.7, 16.13, 16.20; 16.23, 17.17-19, 18.37-38, 21.18.

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this feature of the gospel,98 a swathe of commentaries nonetheless fail to take it into account. The reasons for this failure might be a general lack of recognizing the extent to which the fourth gospel’s content is accompanied by an awareness of speaking or writing, or perhaps because there is a lack of the type of awareness of what speaking or writing mean, an awareness which can only be cultivated by poetic or literary activity.99 Within such a text the New Testament seems to offer a proleptic acknowledgement of the interweaving of thought and language, which renders the possibility of ‘revelation’ so difficult for modern minds. The New Testament offers the only possible continuation of this interweaving: not as a philosophical theory (as any type of logic would simply necessitate the cessation of speaking), but as a theological reworking enacted at the very heart of language by the visitation of the One who is its source. If the Gospel of John speaks of the beginning of the world such that our reading of it coincides with the beginning of the word which narrates and proclaims Christ, then the end of the Gospel also remains in Christ through this twofold logic of text and reality. It is perhaps this remaining which allows us to grasp better the

98. In his introduction, for example, André Feuillet develops a natural ontology of human language itself, emphasizing with Georges Gusdorf (Speaking [La Parole] [trans. Paul T. Brockelman; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1979], pp. 3–10). that human language, ‘without being strictly speaking creative, does not derive from a world of evanescent sensations and reactions, as that of an animal does. It is rather a universe of permanent designations and ideas, a universe of discourse, the very source of an infinite multitude of transformations and inventions’; André Feuillet, Le prologue du quatriè me é vangile: é tude de thé ologie johannique (Paris: Desclé e de Brouwer, 1968), p. 24. With Louis Lavelle, he remarks on language’s ability to open the natural to the supernatural: ‘It is not I who have made the world: at most I am able to modify it. But it seems that speaking is an action proper to me. Only the word brings the spirit. There is no point at which language does not surpass what the world gives me … . All one has to do is open one’s mouth and we are all attention, all expectation, as if we were about to hear the good news … . The Word is spirit itself inasmuch as it has the power of being communicated to all people. Such is the role of the Word which descends into the knowing of each person in order to illuminate them and which surrounds all people in the same light … . Language has its source in eternity.’ Louis Lavelle, La parole et l’é criture (Paris: L’artisan du livre, 1959), pp. 103–8. Feuillet also notes: ‘That onto the human word, which possesses such virtue, a biblical author has had the idea of superimposing an infinitely more elevated Word, a properly creative Word endowed with eternal existence, and thus no one can remain indifferent to wondering about the meaning of this strange human venture.’ Feuillet, Le prologue, p. 24. Unfortunately, he loses this line of reflection when he says: ‘obviously, the Christian reader of the fourth gospel is not fixated on this aspect of things’ (ibid., p. 25). 99. In this perspective, one can hope that Jean Grosjean and his L’Ironie christique will finally impact Johannine research. A poet himself, Grosjean regularly draws upon his own practices of writing in his very insightful commentaries.

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meaning of Jesus’ response, repeated by the narrator, to Peter’s question as to what would happen to the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’. Dicit ei Iesus si sic eum volo manere donec veniam quid ad te tu me sequere. Exivit ergo sermo iste in fratres quia discipulus ille non moritur et non dixit a Iesus non moritur sed si sic eum volo manere donec venio quid ad te. Hic est discipulus qui testimonium perhibet de his et scripsit haec. Jesus said to him, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!’ So the rumor spread in the community that this disciple would not die. Yet Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but, ‘If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?’ This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them.100

In the logic of Johannine irony, the initial meaning of a quick response can serve as a kind of delaying effect.101 Jesus sounds, however, two positive notes: the beloved disciple’s mission consists in ‘remaining’ ‘until I come’. The first note gives to the beloved disciple the customary function of an apostle,102 while the second forces us to move beyond mundane time into an eschatological perspective that even ‘the brothers’ can inadvertently perceive. But in what kind of time does the beloved disciple ‘remain’ as a writer? As for the word ‘until’ in the English translation, the Greek uses the conjunction é ô s which also signifies, following the indicative, ‘while – for as long as – as long as’. Thus Jesus describes his coming as a continually present action (erchô mai). ‘In the second conclusion (21.24) the “disciple whom Jesus loved” expressly testifies in writing; of him Jesus said only: “If I want him to remain until I come … .” This permanence, in contrast to the death of Peter just foretold, is like that of the written text.’103 100. Jn 21.22-24. In the story, the phrase ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’ designates the explicit author of the gospel. 101. It hearkens back to the response to the mother of James and John when demanding honours for her sons: ‘It belongs to the Father to decide’ (Mt. 20.23). 102. After Andrew’ and the other disciple’s approach to Jesus, ‘they remained close to him the rest of the day’ (Jn 1.38-39). See the theological and spiritual development of the theme in Jn 14.25 and 15.4. Perhaps this is what justifies the Vulgate translation: sic eum volo manere: I want you to remain here, in this contemplative communion. In this sense, Jesus’ response to Peter resembles his response to Martha in Lk. 10.41-42. 103. É tienne Nodet and Justin Taylor, The Origins of Christianity: An Exploration (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1998), p. 12. ‘From generation to generation, this word retains its permanence, the witness of the disciples remains fruitful. People are handed over the word, which they can receive or refuse’; Devillers, ‘Les trois té moins’, p. 76. See also Hartwig Thyen, ‘Noch einmal: Johannes 21 und “Jü nger, den Jesus liebte”’, in Tord Fornberg and David Hellholm (eds.), Texts and Contexts: Biblical Texts in their Textual and Situational Contexts, Essays in Honor of Lars Hartman (Oslo: Scandinavian University

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This could mean that the evangelist will remain in the form of his literary work until the (glorious) return of Jesus as judge. Yet it could also mean that Jesus will not cease returning in the perpetual present that the writing of ‘this disciple’ makes available to whoever will take up and read: the ‘coming’ in question is thus what spiritual theology will later call ‘the mission of the Word of love’, which grows in the knowledge of God put forth in his speech by remaining in the gospel text, by treading the way of the gospel text’s meaning. The very logic of the text confirms this ‘meta-literary’ interpretation: by purely and simply repeating Jesus’ response, without any explanation, the narrator forces his reader to remain in the words of Jesus that the narrator has written. He thus forces his reader to practice the imperative of ‘remaining in the word’ which Jesus often repeats to his disciples. The textual space knitted together by repetition is thus enlarged by the narrator and becomes the place of the coming of Jesus. We can see how foreign the idealist oppositions between the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’, the real and language, are to the New Testament, which is faithful to the Jewish Scriptures in the ontological weight it gives to speech.104 John continually maintains this dialectic of speech and reality (which actually structures this gospel to such an extent that it transcends the readily observable redactional layers) until his excipit: Sunt autem et alia multa quae fecit Iesus Quae si scribantur per singula Nec ipsum arbitror mundum capere eos qui scribendi sunt libros Amen But there are many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Amen.105

Press), pp. 147–89 (here p. 169 n. 54). É duoard Delebecque, ‘La mission de Pierre et celle de Jean: note philosophique sur Jean 21,’ Biblica 67 (1986): 335–42; Ignace de la Potterie, ‘Le té moin qui demeure: le disciple que Jé sus aimait’, Biblica 67 (1986): 343–59. According to Standaert, it is the community which employs his name that will ‘remain’ until the Lord’s arrival; he cites P. Aelred Cody in a footnote: ‘Only the words of the Lord remain eternally. These words are the gospel which has been announced to you. Only the text has survived and remains with us’; Standaert, ‘Jean 21’, p. 641 n. 11. 104. The biblical prototype of the strange coincidence between ‘coming’ and ‘remaining’ at the end of John is perhaps found in the meeting between Abraham and Melchizedek narrated in Genesis (Gen. 14.17-20) such as one might interpret it in the first century (see the reversal of textuality and reality enacted in Heb 7). 105. Jn 21.25.

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The full and complete story of what Jesus was, did and said turns out to contain the world!106 With this final hyperbole the cosmos is inserted into the logos, being into the word, and the g/Gospel is designated the new Torah: in Jesus human speech has genuinely encountered the Speech of God. The Consistency of the Word and the ‘Beginning’ in the Synoptics The Synoptics express a similar idea regarding text and reality when they attribute to Jesus this startling claim: ‘Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.’107 An imminent parousia, a return of Jesus before the death of the last apostle (‘this generation’ is mentioned in the verse before), is sometimes read as a reflection of the faith of the first disciples. But it cannot be reduced to this, for what it is claiming is so much more. That this world must pass away was a commonplace of religion,108 and it was common to contrast this world with something else more stable and lasting. The novelty here is that this ‘something else’ is Jesus’ own speech. On its own terms,109 such a claim places it beyond the Torah and identifies his words as God’s own.110 The identification is reinforced by the formulation ‘Amen, amen, I say to you’ which precedes this sentence. This formula, which appears many times in the Synoptic writings and most often in an eschatological context,111 is worth emphasizing, for it appears in the Synoptic gospels and yet is sometimes considered to be a trait peculiar to the Johannine Jesus.

106. The apparent hyperbole of verse 25 can be read in a less literal manner as a metonym of ‘world’ for those who are still in the world. Many ancient commentators up until St. Bonaventure interpreted it in this way: ‘it is not possible to comprehend what would have been written about him’. This emphasizes the fact that the book does not exhaust the Gospel, that the witness goes beyond the writing and that the tradition is as much assimilation as transmission, which accords with a logic developed by St. Paul: ‘Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ… the perfect imitator of the Father’ (1 Cor. 11.1, Col. 1.15; see de la Potterie, ‘Le té moin qui demeure’). 107. Mt. 24.35; see Mk 13.31: Lk. 21.33. 108. See Mt. 5.18, 24.29, which combines Isa. 13.10 and Isa. 34.4 (which inaugurates the comparison of heaven to a scroll: ‘heaven is rolled up like a book’, then repeated in Rev. 6.12-13. See Jer. 4.23, Eze. 32.7-8, Joel 2.10, 30-31, Amos 5.20, Zeph. 1.15, Hag. 2.6, 21; 1, etc.). 109. See Mt. 5.18 which insists on the Law’s perpetuity (see Baruch 4:1, 4 Esdras 9:37, 2; 2 Baruch 77:15). 110. See Ps. 119.89: Isa. 40.8. 111. See the exhaustive analysis offered by W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2004), pp. 487–9.

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The subordination of reality to the word is also operative in the parables of Jesus which have no (proto-) Rabbinic equivalent on precisely this point.112 While other Jewish sages used parables to illustrate Halakhic teachings given elsewhere, Jesus uses them in a prophetic manner to teach mysteries of the world to come.113 To this end, he does not hesitate to deform and reconfigure the most mundane of realities which are then used as a further point of departure for the efficacious reality of his word.114 The Synoptics also broach the themes of ‘beginning’, ‘word’ and the experience of the act of reading, but they do so more discretely. The beginning of Luke makes meta-literary claims, just as John’s prologue does. Even if there is not the same effect of remeze (or ‘intertextual play’) in the book’s reš it (or ‘beginning’), Luke accounts for the beginning of his gospel by describing his information as coming from those who ‘in the beginning [ap arkes] were eyewitnesses and servants of the Word’.115 Additionally, within the canonical context of the New Testament, the personification of ‘the word’116 can evoke for Luke’s reader John’s Christ-Logos, especially since Luke’s search for information from people close to witnesses who were there from the ‘beginning’ seems to put into practice Jesus’ command in John 15.27 (‘You are also to testify because you have been with me from the beginning’): ‘Does not what Luke says in 1:2 suggest that he has taken into account the apostle John as being among the witnesses whom he

112. There are very few examples of early Rabbinic parables: three from Hillel (very short and from around twenty years before Christ), eleven from the generation of ben Zakkai and thirty-two from the subsequent generation (ten of which are from Gamaliel II). Jesus and the Palestinian rabbis were probably relying on a common pedagogy, but while the Rabbinic parables primarily treat urban situations and advocate established values, those of Jesus take place in the countryside and reverse values. 113. See Mt. 13.10-11, 34-35. 114. Semiotic studies of the parables have shown this by emphasizing their implausibility. These studies should have definitely ruled out the ‘realistic’ reductions of Jesus’ parables to teachings marked by the common sense of rural Galilee, a reduction which for a long time has basked in a certain kind of romanticism. See the numerous bibliographic references given by Jean Delorme, Parole, figure, parabole: recherches du discours parabolique (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1987); Les paraboles é vangé liques: perspectives nouvelles, XIIe congrè s de l’ACFEB, Lyon (1987) (Paris: Cerf, 1989). 115. Lk. 1.2. When Luke refers to the beginning he primarily means John’s ministry of baptism (see Lk. 3.23 archomenos; Acts 1.21-22, 10.37). 116. ‘With the absolute use of ho logos, “the word,” Luke slips slightly from the strict secularity of his preface. Here it means no more than “the message,” but the existence of such a message is only satisfactorily accounted for by the Christian narrative to follow (these events imply a message), and Luke’s usage here reflects the technical use of ho logos for the gospel message (cf. Acts 8.4, 10.36, 11.19, 14.25)’; John L. Nolland, Luke 1-9:20 (Dallas, TX: Word Books, 1989), p. 8.

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has consulted?’117. The Lucan insistence on the transformation of ‘eyewitnesses’ into ‘servants of the Word’ effectively gives a positive function to the work of memory within time, which is similar to what John often emphasizes.118 It has been noted that ‘the Word’ in Acts performs a trajectory analogous to the one Jesus undertakes in Luke’s gospel: this time, however, the movement is not from Galilee to Jerusalem but from Jerusalem to the whole world. Mark’s incipit is still more lapidary: initium (arke) evangelii Iesu Christi Filii Dei.119 Here the issue is not the absolute beginning intended by John, but the beginning of the Good News. Certainly John begins before human history whereas Mark returns to Scripture written in human time (Mark’s beginning is oriented towards the Paschal mystery and grafts the Messianic secret into the heart of the gospel, at the moment when Jesus begins to announce his passion120). In their meta-literary impact, however, the first verses of John and Mark have similar effects. Mark’s opening words, ‘the beginning’, describe both the beginning of the gospel which one is reading or hearing and the beginning of Jesus, just as in John’s Prologue. Another similarity121 can be observed in the connection between Mark’s beginning and the preaching of the Baptist, which occurred as prophetically predicted by God.122 The term ‘gospel’ does not only signify the good news proclaimed by Jesus, but encapsulates even more broadly what came before him and came after him: not only what Jesus has been, done or said, but also the preparation and reception of what it is said that Jesus has been, done, and said, and it finally includes this text now being read

117. This bold statement is from Feuillet, Le prologue, p. 252. See also his ‘Johannine’ reading of Luke’s prologue, ‘“Té moins oculaires et serviteurs de la parole” (Lc 1:2b)’, Novum Testamentum 15 (1973): 241–59. 118. For example, one compares a verse like Jn 1.13 and allusions to the virgin conception of Jesus (Mt. 1.16, 18, 20; Lk. 1.35-38). 119. Mk 1.1: ‘The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ [the Son of God]’. 120. Mk 8.31. 121. Jn 1.5-7. 122. ‘The “beginning” or the basic “principle” of the gospel is the prophetic word brought to its climatic power and action in the words of the Baptist, while the gospel itself is an introduction for Jesus and the coming of the Kingdom of God in His person … . It is this identification of the “Word of God” with the gospel, which not only has Jesus Christ as its object but as its content, that gave rise, through Christian faith, to the truly original Christology found in the prologue of the fourth gospel. Kittle stresses this point in particular [in the ‘Logos’ article in the Theologisches Wö rterbuch] … . But at the very outset, related to the first “principle” of manifestation of the Word, transcending all creation but made known in and through it, is the historical “principle” of prophecy and its ultimate fulfillment in the person of John the Baptist.’ Louis Bouyer, The Eternal Son: A Theology of the Word of God and Christology (trans. Sr. Simone Inkel, S.L., and John F. Laughlin; Huntingon, IN: Our Sunday Visitor), pp. 266, 268, 269.

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and heard. This movement of events sublimely overflowing123 literary fictions – and certainly the event of Advent – is explicitly narrated in Mark 14.9.124 This is probably what gave structure to the shaping of oral recitations into the second gospel, before the accounts of the appearances were added to its ending. A twofold or even threefold significance seems to be present when Matthew begins his book with the phrase the ‘Book of the genealogy [biblos geneseos] of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham’.125 We could read this phrase as the title of the genealogy of Jesus’ ancestors that immediately follows, but we could also read it as the title of a larger work, the ‘Genesis of Jesus the Messiah’, that is, the history of Jesus’ appearance as the Messiah narrated in the first four chapters. Here a ‘historical’ meaning in the traditional sense of the term (a description of the past in the form of a genealogy) coincides with a ‘theological’ meaning (in Jesus there is new creation, new beginning), and at the same time there is an allusion to the beginning of the Book (the sefarim toledot which punctuate Genesis 1 and following). A text as ‘archaic’126 as that of the genealogy of Jesus (and perhaps also the subsequent infancy stories) thus performs a rhetorical and narrative function similar to that of the Johannine Prologue: both texts place Jesus within the continuous (writing of) salvation history which relates God and humanity127 from ‘the beginning’.128

123. Sublime: in an ‘Isidorian’ etymology, the aesthetic category of the sublime is defined as the approach to the limit (sub-limes), to the threshold between two orders of allegedly incommensurable realities. 124. ‘Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her’; Mk. 14.9. 125. See the analyses of André Paul, L’é vangile de l’enfance selon saint Matthieu (Paris: Cerf, 1968). 126. The reservations of 1 Tim. 1.4, the injunction of Tit. 3.9 perhaps refer to the increased fabrication of genealogies in the Judaism of the time (see, for example, the genealogies of the patriarchs and ancient heroes of the Bible, such as those in the Book of Jubilees). 127. If only to cover the gaps, the genealogy of Adam in Genesis 5 fills in the interval between creation and the flood (as that of Shem in Genesis 11 will do between the flood and Abraham). Placing the gospel in the concert of Scripture by alluding to the start of the Torah and its first three words, the Prologue of John assumes an analogous function to that of toledoth, from the fragments of the ‘Yahwist’ genealogy in Gen. 4.17, 25 (descending from Cain and Seth), which are supplanted by the first genealogy properly speaking, the priestly, of Gen. 5 (‘This is the list of the descendants of Adam. When God created humankind, he made them in the likeness of God’), up until the theological elaborations of Chronicles 1–9. 128. Equally, the canticles inserted into the Lukan infancies narratives are indirectly Christological inasmuch as they proclaim that God has decisively acted on behalf on his people in the context of Jesus’ infancy.

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It is worth highlighting the paradoxical function of the genealogy for today’s reader. A genealogy is a text which is simply a series of real individual human lives. It is an entirely referential text, as it has no other meaning than to refer beyond the text to real life. At the same time, however, the text displays its own textuality from the fact that we hardly know the persons listed. When we listen to these genealogies (which the liturgy proposes we do several times each year) they produce an effect even if we do not know any of the people listed: they anchor the name of Jesus in linguistic material, in discourse, in a kind of matrix. The weaving of proper names with other proper names in the stitching of ‘son of ’ (ben, or tou, the demonstrative in the genitive case in Greek) reproduces the thread of human generations and suggests a parallel between textuality and human procreation. A genealogy thus allows for the recognition of the deep connection which unites writing, human society and filiation, a connection which corresponds perfectly with the revelation of filial adoption.129 As Franç ois Martin puts it, the Scriptural text includes within itself the process that it is responsible for implementing: the establishment of subjectivity.130 Thereafter the whole gospel is divided into three parts by other phrases which combine beginning (or ending) and speaking.131 The logic employed here is thus

129. Eph. 1.5. 130. Significantly, the entry textus in the Index Thomisticus has a striking number of words from the gospels’ genealogies of Jesus Christ. This first shows that Thomas, the heir of ancient mythological motifs, did not misunderstand the ‘iphological’ metaphor latent in the ‘text’ that he applies to human life (vita enim hominis quantum ad aliquid similis est texturae: sicuti enim ille qui texit telam filis fila adjungit… ; tamen dicit quod velocius transeunt dies hominis quam tela succidatur, quia in opera telae textor interdum quiescit). Secondly, that Thomas, by recalling an example from Aristotle, establishes a mental link between texere and intelligere. He uses the verb texere to describe the direction of the Gospel story (incipit miraculorum ordinem texere a miraculo… , texere exordium, texere narrationem, historiam de Christo texere), and particularly that of Christ’s genealogy. The theologian knows the birth of Christ in the ‘making’ of a text. 131. After the book of the origins of Jesus the Messiah, Mt. 4.17 (‘From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”’) begins the book of the proclamation of the mysterious kingdom of Jesus the Messiah. Mt. 16.21 (‘from that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.’) begins the book of the mysterious advent of the kingdom of Jesus the Messiah. At least verbally, the gospel narrator connects beginning and word in Jesus’ ministry and perhaps also, more subtly, Jesus’ words and the kerygma of his first disciples.

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both narratival and theological,132 and it reproduces a rhythm which Matthew constantly employs.133 The first gospel returns to the ‘beginning’ (not archê this time but katabolê 134) at its very centre. At the heart of a long chapter replete with meta-literary content,135 the narrator explains that Jesus speaks in parables to fulfil an ancient prophecy: ‘I will open my mouth to speak in parables’!136 The accent is placed on the speech’s content, but ironically enough, this content deals with unknown ‘things hidden from the foundation of the world’137; they are the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven.138 The impression of reaching this seemingly impassable spot is reinforced

132. This classical division was proposed by Jack Dean Kingsbury, Matthew: Structure, Christology, Kingdom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975); Matthew as Story (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988); and Edgar Krentz, ‘The Extent of Matthew’s Prologue: Towards the Structure of the First Gospel’, Journal of Biblical Literature 83 (1964): 409–15, who divides Matthew according to Mt. 7.28-29, 11.1, 13.53, 19.1, 26.1. There is no unanimity about this position, but it has been nuanced and corrected rather than contradicted; see Frans Neirynck, ‘APO TOTE Ê RXATO and the Structure of Matthew’, in Frans van Segbroeck (ed.), Evangelica II, 1982-1991: Collected Essays by Frans Neirynck (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1991), pp. 141–82. 133. All of the good introductions to the first gospel note its tendency to group material into three’s. This tendency has been powerfully illustrated by Ulrich Lutz, Matthew 1-7: A Commentary (trans. W. C. Linss; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), p. 38. Such a rhythm is particularly adapted to the chiastic structures which are abundantly used by Matthew; see the general plan proposed by Charles Lohr, ‘Oral Techniques in the Gospel of Matthew’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 23 (1961): 403–35 (here p. 427). 134. Katabolê , literally ‘the action of throwing downwards’, in the New Testament, most often followed by kosmou (see Mt. 13.35; 25.34, Lk. 11.50, Jn 17.24, Eph. 1.4, Heb. 4.3, 9.26, 1 Pet. 1.20, Rev. 13.8, 17.8). The comparison with the Psalms of the Septuagint show that katabolê is here an equivalent of arkê (see thus Mt. 25.34, ‘since the foundation of the world’). 135. It concludes with an observation on the future work of every ‘scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven’ (Mt. 13.52) in which most modern Bibles see a discreet signature. See É cole biblique et arché ologique de Jé rusalem, Bible de Jé rusalem: é dition compacte (Paris: Cerf, 1988), p. 1434 n. f: ‘The Jewish doctor who became a disciple of Christ possesses and administers all the riches of the old covenant augmented by the perfections of the new, verse 12. This praise of the “Christian scribe” sums up the ideal of the evangelist Matthew and appears to be a discreet signature.’ Davies and Allison compare this passage to Mk 14.51-52 and note a possible ‘autobiographical insertion’, ‘the signature of the author’; Saint Matthew, p. 446. Like other authors, they propose to take the name Maththaios in verse 52 as a portmanteau term that would echo mathetheuteis (‘has become a disciple’, the passive aorist participle of a verb used only in Matthew and Acts 14.21). 136. Mt. 13.34. 137. Mt. 13.35. 138. Mt. 13.11.

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by the katabolê -parabolê paronomasia or pun present in the rigorously chiastic and highly repetitive structure of verses 34-35: Haec omnia locutus est Iesus in parabolis ad turbas Et sine parabolis non loquebatur eis Ut impleretur quod dictum erat per prophetam dicentem Aperiam in parabolis os meum Eructabo abscondita a constitutione mundi Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; Without a parable he told them nothing. This was to fulfill What had been spoken through the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth to speak in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world.’139

The claim of revelation, the allusion to the creation and the ironic twist of the ‘explanation’ root Jesus’ teaching (and Matthew’s) within the Wisdom tradition of maš al, which is also present in John’s Prologue. More broadly, it is possible to show a profound convergence between the central chapter of the first gospel (and its parables of the sowed word) and the Prologue of the final gospel: both teach the fecundity of the word when it is received with a good disposition140 and reflect upon Christ’s mysterious origins.141 In all three cases, the beginning of the text held in our hands brings together the historical beginning of Christian revelation and the absolute beginning of the Word in God. The double equivalence of the words that I am looking at when I read the text, the words that Jesus said ‘at that time’, and the transcendent Word

139. Mt. 13.34-35. 140. See Mt. 13.1-23, 44-53 and the antithesis of Jn 1.10-13. Cf. also Olivier-Thomas Venard, ‘The Prologue of John and the Heart of Matthew (Jn 1.1-18 and Matthew 12.4613.58): Does the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels really say nothing different from the prologue of John?’, in Adrian Pabst and Angus Paddison (eds.), The Pope and Jesus of Nazareth: Christ, Scripture and the Church (London: SCM, 2009), pp. 134–58. 141. The lofty central discourse of Matthew on the Word is surrounded by the only two passages in this gospel which tackle the problem of the parentage of Jesus. Mt. 12.4650 distinguishes the crowds (46) and the disciples (49) according to the quality of their listening and distinguishes it from any relationship to biological family. Mt. 13.53-58 relates the interrogation of his compatriots on Jesus’ true parentage and preaches the necessity of belief (… that he comes from the Father? See Mt. 12.50 and 13.55) for understanding him. See Jn 1.14, 18 and John passim. The suggestion here is that only those who listen to this words and understand them know who Jesus truly is (i.e., the Son of the Father), or conversely, that only those who know who Jesus truly is are able not only to hear but also to understand his words; ‘Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me’ (Jn 17.25).

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present at the origin of all things, will finally and starkly be expressed at the start of I John: ‘What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes … and testify to it, and declare to you.’142 An Implicit Theology of the Word The ‘beginning’ of the Word in the first verse of John echoes throughout Jesus’ life and words over the course of the gospel. We would like to consider two intriguing examples in particular. The first comes at the end of the famous ‘discourse on the bread of life’, which contains words which are ‘difficult to hear’ for many of the listeners, as some of them then abandon Jesus. Spiritus est qui vivificat Caro non prodest quicquam Verba quae ego locutus sum vobis spiritus et vita sunt Sed sunt quidam ex vobis qui non credunt Sciebat enim ab initio Iesus qui essent credentes Et quis traditurus esset eum. It is the spirit that gives life The flesh is useless The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life But among you there are some who do not believe For Jesus knew from the beginning who were the ones that did not believe And who was the one that would betray him.143

The Prologue of the Word and gospel is recalled in this extra-diegetic gloss about what Jesus knew ‘from the beginning’. The evangelist knows that the words of the preacher encounter the same thing as did the words of Jesus: acceptance or rejection. A different and particularly suggestive echo is placed on the lips of Jesus himself. The identification of Jesus and the Word is signalled when the beginning and the Word are rendered more complex: Dixit ergo iterum eis Jesus Ego vado, et quæ retis me, et in peccato vestro moriemini. Quo ego vado, vos non potestis venire. Dicebant ergo Judæ i: Numquid interficiet semetipsum, quia dixit: Quo ego vado, vos non potestis venire? Et dicebat eis:

142. 1 Jn 1.1-2. 143. Jn 6.64-65. Trans. modified.

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A Poetic Christ Vos de deorsum estis, ego de supernis sum. Vos de mundo hoc estis, ego non sum de hoc mundo. Dixi ergo vobis quia moriemini in peccatis vestris: si enim non credideritis quia ego sum, moriemini in peccato vestro. Dicebant ergo ei: Tu quis es? Dixit eis Jesus: Principium quia et loquor vobis Again he said to them, ‘I am going away, and you will search for me, but you will die in your sin. Where I am going you cannot come.’ Then the Jews said, ‘Is he going to kill himself? Is that what he means by saying Where I am going you cannot come’?’ He said to them, ‘You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins, for you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am’. They said to him, “Who are you?” Jesus said to them, ‘from the beginning the one whom I said.’144

Jesus’ final response is especially enigmatic on the grammatical level. As pointed out by recent philology and exegesis, the ‘from the beginning the one whom I said’ can be translated in different ways. It could be read, for instance, as ‘why did I speak to you in the first place?’ or ‘just what I said to you’,145 and also as ‘from the very beginning what I have not stopped telling you’,146 or as ‘since the principle, all that I have been passing on to you.’147 One could also understand the line in this way: ‘precisely what I say, at the origin’ or ‘above all, exactly what I tell you’148, or even ‘I am the principle I am trying to tell you about’149. The Vulgate has simplified the Greek text in its proposal of principium quia et loquor vobis.150

144. Jn 8.21-25. [The NRSV has ‘Why do I speak to you at all?’ Verse 25 has been modified so as to fit the discussion which directly follows. – trans. note.] 145. See footnote f, p. 1410 in the first edition of the Bible de Jé rusalem (É cole biblique et arché ologique de Jé rusalem, La sainte Bible, Paris: Cerf, 1956). 146. Ignace de la Potterie, ‘La notion de ‘commencement’ dans les é crits johanniques’, in R. Schnackenburg and J. Ernst (eds.), Die Kirche des Anfangs: Festschrift fur Heinz Schurmann zum 65. Geburtstag (Leipzig: Benno, 1977), pp. 379–403. 147. É duoard Delebecque, ‘Autour du verbe eimi, “je suis,” dans le quatriè me é vangile: note sur Jean VIII, 25’, Revue Thomiste 86 (1986): 83–9. 148. Robert René , ‘Le malentendu sur le Nom divin au chapitre VIII du quatriè me é vangile’, Revue Thomiste 88 (1988): 278–87. 149. Miguel Angel Pertini, ‘La genialidad grammatical de Jn 8, 25’, Estudios biblicos 56 (1998): 371–404. 150. ‘Quia’ is without a doubt the original form (as the least distant from the Greek). It has been replaced in the Sixto-Clementine edition by ‘qui’ resulting in an obvious Christological denotation which cannot be derived from the Greek.

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In addition to the problem posed by the tê n arkê n at the beginning of the phrase, we can note that the Greek deploys a verb which accentuates the verbal aspect of the word and in this way relates the beginning and the word of Jesus as word.151 In Jesus’ response the meta-diegetic level (of the auto-referential discourse of the evangelist which is reminiscent of the Prologue) and the diegetic level are identified. Jesus truly responds to the question posed by his opponents, and his response displays a reality which is simply itself: ‘I am what I have said to you since the beginning’. He is ‘from the beginning’ and he speaks ‘from the beginning’, and this also forms the beginning of the conversation of the episode of the woman caught in adultery and of Jesus’ mission more generally. Does Jesus actually use irony to say nothing at all? No, but the words that the evangelist attributes to him entail returning to Jesus himself, in the flesh, in bone and spirit, in Person. Beyond deciphering moot sound waves emitted from a mouth, reflection upon a Presence is required. The ‘beginning’ in Jesus turns out to be linguistically structured in a way similar to that of the divine Name, the fundamental tautology revealed to Moses in the Burning Bush and which Jesus invokes in his response. ‘I am’ and the ‘beginning’ are deeply identified and enable one to enter into an experience rather than to pursue quibbles.152 In this sense, the translation in the Vulgate is not finally misleading and remains highly faithful to the Jewish theology of reš it, here concentrated on the person of Jesus: ‘I am the Principle, I who speak to you.’ With an admirable faithfulness to the whole of biblical poetics, the gospel stories connect in two ways the theophanic movement from the man Jesus and his human, all too human, word to the Son who claims to be who he is, to the Word that the believers confess to be in him: (1) through the synesthesia of hearing and of vision and (2) through the dialectic of works and words.

Christ’s Aesthetic Manifestation: The Dialogue of the Eye and the Ear in the Literary Encounter with the Incarnate Word The gospel writings suggest that faith in Jesus is generated by the alchemy of ‘seeing’ and ‘saying’ in the people he encounters. Two examples immediately come to mind: the supernal theophanies of Jesus’ Baptism and his Transfiguration. These two

151. The verb laleô used here by the evangelist is said first of inanimate things in order to express the sound that they can produce (Rev. 4.10), then of people who speak, but with a stress on the linguistic performance rather than the rational content (covered by legô whose participle legôn accompanies sometimes other utterance verbs to introduce the content of a discourse, see Mt. 13.3). For example, ‘to speak’ versus ‘to conceal’ in Mk 1.34; ‘to proclaim’ in Mt. 13.33. 152. See the evocative title of Hans W. Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ: The Hermeneutical Basis of Dogmatic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1975), which revolves around Jesus’ question ‘who do you say I am?’

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theophanies are symbolically situated at the lowest153 and at the highest154 point of the Holy Land and skilfully combine the spectacular and the oracular, the paradoxical vision of the divine (under the form of a dove or a cloud) and the hearing of the Word of God which invites us to listen to it (in the ‘voice from heaven’155), all of which takes place to focus our entire attention on the simple and unique person of Jesus.156 Nevertheless, even during his ordinary ministry Jesus’ preaching is already characterized by a necessary dialectic between seeing and listening. Christ and the Scroll in Luke Doubtless the most striking illustration of this necessary dialectic is the episode in Luke where Jesus visits the synagogue in Capernaum. The visit becomes something of a gateway into his public ministry as a whole. The Evangelist creates an emblem of Jesus’ encounters with and preaching to his fellow Jews and draws into it Jesus’ relationship to Scripture and the impact of his words on many of his contemporaries. In a scene with strong Messianic overtones, Jesus also witnesses to having received and transmitted the Spirit by his sheer presence. Luke directly structures his work in terms of the Spirit which is received by Jesus, promised to the disciples and given to them during Pentecost, which is mentioned many times in Acts and which gives an exemplary (and meta-literary) value to this story. It offers a (narrative) theology refined by the relation between (the words of) Jesus, the Scriptures and the Spirit. Jesus finds the passage to read on the day and proclaims: Spiritus Domini super me: propter quod unxit me, evangelizare pauperibus misit me, sanare contritos corde, præ dicare captivis remissionem, et cæ cis visum, dimittere confractos in remissionem, præ dicare annum Domini acceptum et diem retributionis. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, Because he has anointed me To bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to The captives To let the oppressed go free, To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.157

153. In the lowlands of Arabia, ‘in the Jordan’ (Mt. 3.13). 154. ‘On an elevated mountain’ (Mt. 17.1). Whether the Tabor or the Hermon, it is the new Sinai, the place of eschatological revelation. 155. Mt. 3.17; Mt. 17.5. 156. Mt. 17.8. 157. Lk. 4.18-19; see Isa. 61.1-2.

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Jesus actualizes the Book simply by reading it. The synesthesia of seeing, speaking and hearing transforms common sensory experience into an experience of beauty: everyone in the synagogue is ‘struck with wonder’.158 What is most striking to them is that Jesus knows how to interpret the text and what he does with it: proclaiming that what he is reading is now being realized. Yet their wonder is mixed with a certain bewilderment and genuine incomprehension.159 They think they know him too well to be able to believe: he appears too ordinary to be able to incarnate the liberation prophesied by Isaiah. This is why Jesus has to force them to go beyond a simply aesthetic experience. He does this by demanding that his interlocutors undergo a vision rooted in words: with some provocation, Jesus exasperates his audience by proleptically disappointing every demand that he legitimate himself by performing certain actions.160 He rejects all spectacular healings, every kind of sign that would be visible to those who refuse to understand the audible signs. He is performing a paradoxical kind of revelation: some words count as acts. The two examples that he mentions should make this clear.161 The king did not believe Elijah’s words that the heavens were closed, and it is because the widow believed that she was graciously nourished in times of famine. Also, Naaman was healed of his leprosy because he believed in Elisha’s words. Jesus is placed here in the tradition of the Lord putting the unbelieving people of Israel on trial: he opposes merely knowing, which is enough for the wise in Israel, to the faith which involves the whole of the human heart, even if it is the faith of a woman from Sidon or that of a man from Syria. The theology implicit in the Lucan narration turns out to be similar to the theology explicit in the Johannine discourse, which contrasts those who simply ‘know’ the Scripture or who think they know the thought of God only by studying it162 to those who allow their knowing to be open to faith.163 A detail in the gospel’s redaction sums up this point forcefully. While ‘all had their eyes fixed on him’ in astonishment,164 Jesus sends them back to their ears.165 More precisely, Jesus proposes to those whom he encounters a journey from the eyes to the ears: he demands understanding.166 He makes the people move from what is seen to what is understood and thought (Latin theology would later say

158. The Vulgate has mirabantur; the Greek has ethaumazon (see Lk. 4.22). 159. Lk. 4.22: ‘Is this not Joseph’s son?’ 160. Lk. 4.28: ‘When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.’ 161. See Lk. 4.24-27. 162. Jn 3.2-3; 5.39a; 9.24, 29. 163. Jn 3.10-11; 5.39b, 45b-47; 7.52; 9.31. 164. Lk. 4.20b. 165. Lk. 4.21: ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ 166. See the refrain: ‘he who has ears, let him hear’ in the great discourse of Matthew 13 and its parallels.

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from the material and natural to the spiritual and supernatural). Here we can see Luke’s own version of the Johannine dialectic of sight and of faith.167 The mouth, eyes and ears: the actualization of Scripture that Jesus enacts is not a rationalization or a higher discourse. Yet it is also not simply an action to be marvelled at: it is primarily corporeal and thus eminently personal. To believe Luke’s poetics, a living encounter with Jesus of Nazareth effects a unification of the oracular and the miraculous and a reciprocal transmutation of the acoustic and the optical similar to what the reading of Scripture provides.168 ‘As if the spirit is only manifested by the subversion of the order of the flesh, as if it were necessary that the body were seized by the letter as if by an opposing and egregoric body so that the spirit can come.’169 By expressing himself though an alchemy of seeing and of saying, Jesus gathers the dialectical aesthetic of the biblical theophanies into his own person. It was Thomas Aquinas who gave the deepest theological reason for such a mode of revelation in Jesus: agere sequitur esse. If the incarnate Word turns his admirers from their eyes to their ears, this is because in Jesus, the perfect image of the Father in whom intelligence and existence are identical, understanding and seeing are one: quia in rebus intelligentibus aliud est eorum esse, et aliud eorum intelligere; ideo aliter accipitur ab eis cognitio per visum, et aliter per auditum. Sed in Deo patre idem est esse et intelligere; ideo in filio idem est videre et audire.170 Because in intelligent beings their being is different from their intellection, the knowledge that they receive through sight and that which they receive through hearing is different. But in God the Father to be and to intellect are identical; this is why in the Son, seeing equals hearing.

Nothing less than the divine unity of seeing and listening, of being and thought, stands behind the revelatory word of the incarnate Word. The beauty of Christ, which is a spiritual beauty, is fundamentally connected to a word, and this connection prevents the understanding from being satisfied with the pseudo-evidence of natural vision and it prevents beauty from being a captivating idol and ceasing to be an event. Beauty is a path forward when there is also a voice, when seeing beauty also means listening and answering to it. 167. See Jn 9.39-41; 12.40, referencing Isa. 6.10 as Mt. 13.15 or Mk 8.18; Jn 19.35; 20.9, 29. 168. For those who believe, in the light of the resurrection and early Christian meditation reflected in the New Testament, that Jesus is the Word, his deeds and words here are truly sublime. Here the living and incarnate Word opens the Book in which he was prefigured for thousands of years and reads! Here, at long last, explanations give way to meaning in person. 169. Jean-Luc É vrard, ‘Pré face’, in Frans Rosenzweig, L’É criture, le verbe et autres essais (trans. Jean-Luc É vrard; Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998), pp. 6 and 7. 170. Aquinas, In Io, III, 5, § 534.

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The Literary Beauty of Christ in the Christian Tradition We can better grasp the central function of the book in the encounter between Jesus and his compatriots at the synagogue when the literary and theological context of such symbolic richness is provided. This object is not only mediated by the themes which it offers to the understanding (the prophecies which announce Jesus), but also by the intellectual and spiritual experience it enables. For centuries in Israel, the scroll was the privileged means through which the divine pedagogy took place. Halfway between what is seen (letters of black ink on the skin of beasts) and what is not seen (the world of grace, the wholly spiritual world of God to which it gives access), there is the hearing of the divine Word in the contingency of a human reading which is first of all a seeing, which both creates and presupposes faith, and which thereby enables mixed creatures such as human beings, who are half-flesh and half-spirit, to enter into the world of grace. At the horizon of the fleshly and the spiritual, writing finally presents a ‘functional’ analogy to the sacraments. If the Scriptures, as writings, were first able to symbolize the unknowable God of the Mosaic revelation, how much more easily could the first Jewish believers in Jesus put the ontology of the book, an artefact in which ink on skin is consumed into spiritual meaning, into relation to the being of Christ, the dwelling of the Name in a human being. Implicit in the constitution of the oldest traditions, the image of Jesus as the true book flourished under the auspices of later Christian theology. Having recognized the intimate connection between the sometimes painful literary labour of finding the meaning of the text and the preparation for divine grace,171 the Christian tradition developed the practice of the lectio divina.172 The perception of this link has also contributed to the scrupulous respect the first generations of Christian had for the text. Ignoratio scripturarum est ignoratio Christi173: the physical continuity which connects the fleshly body of Christ with the textual body of the New Testament (a physical connection provided by communal mediations) explains why those who firmly held to this position paid such close attention to the minute details of written texts.174 171. Whether it is a matter of the complications of Johannine enunciation, or the often very enigmatic passages of the gospel in Greek, Latin or in other ancient versions, most translations have been the victim of a Neo-classical ideal of clarity which is foreign to Judeo-Christian literature. 172. For more on the lectio divina, see Venard, Pagina Sacra, pp. 353–447. 173. St. Jerome, Commentarii in Isaiam prophetam, Prologus (PL 24), 17A, or Jerome, Pars I, 2: Opera exegetica, Commentariorum in Esaiam libri I-XI. Commentariorum in Esaiam XII-XVIII. In Esaiam parvula adbreviatio (ed. M. Adriaen and G. Morin; Turnhout: Brepols, 1968). 174. Mt. 5.18. Consider the mixture of exactitude (before a sacred text) and of great liberty (in the Spirit) which characterizes the first generations of Christian scribes; cf. Aland and Aland, The Text of the New Testament; Leon Vaganay and Christian-Bernard

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Finally, early Christian iconography attests to the same connection: Not a single pre-Christian god of Mediterranean antiquity has the book or a scroll in his hands. In this, Christ is unique. He alone has divine attributes, and wields a scroll. He both is the word and reveals the book. The Word becomes Flesh in the Book. Writing becomes an allegory for the Incarnation in the Womb of the Virgin. Hence the liturgical reverence for the book as object.175

Thomas Aquinas continues this tradition of the Christ-as-book when the Epistle to the Hebrews refers to a verse from Psalm 40.9. in capite libri scriptum est de me. Iste liber est Christus secundum humanam naturam, in quo scripta sunt omnia necessaria homini ad salutem. Is. VIII, 1:  sume tibi librum grandem. Caput autem Christi est Deus, I Cor. XI, 3.  In capite libri, id est in ordinatione Dei, qui est caput Christi, qui est liber, scriptum est quod filius Dei incarnari deberet et mori. Vel liber, id est, Psalterium, cuius primus Psalmus est de Christo. Vel melius, liber vitae, qui nihil aliud est quam notitia, quam Deus habet de praedestinatione sanctorum, qui salvantur per Christum. Ergo in isto libro scriptum est de me, quia sancti per me praedestinati sunt. Eph. I, 4: elegit nos in ipso ante mundi constitutionem. Rom. VIII, 29:  quos praescivit et praedestinavit conformes fieri imaginis filii sui. Si ergo praedestinatio dicitur liber, manifestum est quod Christus caput est libri. Apoc. XXI, 27: qui non sunt scripti in libro vitae agni. Qui simpliciter est praedestinatus. Rom. I, 4:  qui praedestinatus est filius Dei in virtute. Ergo in capite libri, id est, in me, secundum divinam naturam, scriptum est de me secundum naturam humanam,  ut faciam voluntatem, scilicet  tuam, id est, hoc praeordinatum est, ut per gratiam tuam faciam voluntatem tuam, offerendo meipsum ad redemptionem humani generis. in the roll [head] of the book it was written of me. This book is Christ according to His human nature, and in it were written all the things necessary for man’s salvation: ‘Take you a great book’ (Is. 8:1); ‘And the head of Christ is God’ (1 Cor. 11:3). In the head of the book, i.e., in the plans of God, Who is the head of Christ, Amphoux, An Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism (trans. J. Heimerdinger; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See also William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), and above all James R. Royse, ‘Scribal Habits in the Transmission of the New Testament Texts’, in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (ed.), The Critical Study of Sacred Texts (Berkeley: Graduate Theological Union, 1979), pp. 139–61. It is striking that the very person (Origen) who founded Christian textual criticism was also noted for his personal devotion to the love of Jesus. 175. Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 122.

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Who is the book, it is written that the Son of God is to be incarnated and die. Or, the book, i.e., the Psalter, whose first psalm concerns Christ. Or better, the book of life, which is nothing else than the knowledge God has about the predestination of the saints, who are saved by Christ. Therefore, in that book it is written of me, because the saints are predestined by me: ‘He chose us in him before the foundation of the world’ (Eph. 1:4); ‘Whom he foreknew, he also predestinated to be made conformable to the image of his Son’ (Rom. 8:29). Therefore, if predestination is called a book, it is obvious that Christ is the head of the book: ‘They that are written in the book of life of the Lamb’ (Rev. 21:27).176 Therefore, in the head of the book, i.e., in me, according to my divine nature, it is written of me, according to my human nature, I have come to do your will, i.e., this was foreordained that by Your grace I should do Your will, by offering Myself for the redemption of the human race.177

It is worth briefly remarking on Thomas’ pedagogical recourse to prosopopoeia. For Thomas, teaching Holy Scripture truly means imitating Jesus Christ through continuing his words. Yet Jesus Christ is plainly more than a book. He fulfils the book, as Paul Claudel could articulate with a dash of humour: If God had only wanted to illuminate our minds then he did not need to become man and die on Calvary. A perfect book would have sufficed… If he had wanted to satisfy our imagination, it would have sufficed to display before our eyes a rich tapestry of magic tricks, such as those which amused the pagans for a long time. But his objective was different. He did not come to reform us; he came to transform us. He did not come to make himself understood; he came to take us with him. It is the flesh which has sinned in Paradise and it was with this flesh that he wanted to grow more intimate. The revelation that he came to give us is an incarnation.178

In this way the New Testament attempts to establish a proportion between Jesus and the written book or writing, a proportion which Jesus also surpasses inasmuch as he is also the principal subject of the book.179 It culminates in the Apocalypse, which concludes the Bible by declaring Jesus both its reader par excellence180 and

176. Aquinas, In Heb, X, 1, § 490. 177. Ibid. 178. Paul Claudel, ‘La sensation du divin’, in idem, Pré sence et prophé tie (Fribourg: Librarie de l’université de Fribourg, 1942), pp. 49–130 (here p. 57). 179. Ps. 40.9, Heb. 10.7, ‘in the scroll of the book it is written of me.’ 180. Rev. 5.9, ‘You are worthy to take the scroll.’

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its author.181 The analogy between encountering Christ and opening the book is dynamically created through identification and fulfilment: in Scripture one can see the glorified Word of Christ and hear his image. In the course of Jesus’ ministry, the play of the oracular and of the spectacular is especially mobilized in the dialectic between his words and acts.

Christ’s Rhetorical Manifestation: The Dialectic of Works and Word, or the Moral Force of the Incarnate Word John so strongly emphasizes the dialectic between works and words that his gospel is often used as illuminative of this dialectic in toto. Traditionally, for example, John’s Gospel is divided into three different books: the ‘book of signs’,182 essentially composed of actions of Jesus interspersed with explanatory words; the ‘farewell book’ constituted by Jesus’ discourses and accompanied by a unique symbolic action (the foot-washing183); and ‘the book of the passion and resurrection’.184 Some commentators who are particularly interested in the oral or written traditions which could have preceded the written compilation of the gospel also think there are two distinct sources of memories about Jesus: one source of discourses and another of stories (the two could otherwise be expressed in a single phrase in Hebrew, divre Yeswa, which also indicates their dialectical relationship). Of course, all throughout the gospel the Son’s revelatory action occurs through works and words which are dialectically related and sometimes united in the phrase ‘signs’. Jesus Speaks Puzzling Words which Draw Us into His Actions To illustrate Jesus’ ‘ironic’ style we should briefly consider some of his different conversations. At the start of John 2, Jesus says, ‘Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again’, even though it took almost half a century to build.185 In John 3 he says to a notable person who comes to visit him, ‘It is necessary to be reborn.’ In John 4 he assures the Samaritan woman, ‘The one who asks me, and who has nothing to draw with, I will give you water.’ In the same chapter, while they are the middle of nowhere, he tells his apostles that he has a different food to

181. In Revelation, it is not an angel but Christ himself who orders John to write what he has seen (Rev. 19.9). Christ dictates to him what he must write to the seven churches (Rev. 1.11, 19; 2.1, 8, 12, 17, 18; 3.1, 7, 12, 14), and finishes by sealing the book with his own authority (Rev. 22.18f.). For an interpretation of these events, see Aletti, Jé sus-Christ, pp. 266 and 267. 182. Jn 1.19 to 12.37-50. 183. Jn 12–17. 184. Jn 18–21. 185. Speaks to him of his body: see Jn 2.19.

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eat. In John 6 he deems himself capable of feeding a great crowd in the middle of the desert, without provisions and without purchasing anything, before assuring them that he will give his flesh to eat and his blood to drink. All of these forceful words elicit questions, and indeed scandal and desertion, just as the disciples find them ‘too hard’.186 Nevertheless, these words also lead to a deeper teaching (as Jesus’ remarks include the phrase ‘bread of life’) and a deeper discipleship.187 First and foremost, however, they spark discussion regarding Jesus’ authority: that he is asked to prove his words with actions shows that things are more complicated than they first appear. The Opacity of Jesus’ Actions Begets the Desire to Understand At times Jesus indeed turns his interlocutors from what he says to what he does, as if his actions were more evident than his words.188 Yet many of his acts remain puzzling: that he, a Jew, asks for a drink from a lone Samaritan woman, or that he presumes to teach without ever having studied.189 In the Johannine version of the story, for instance, we find ourselves at the outset of the first visit to Jerusalem. Jesus has driven the merchants from the Temple and he is asked for another sign to explain this sign,190 for his gesture against para-liturgical commercialism is a sign within a venerable Hebrew prophetic tradition: he actualizes (he stages!) Psalm 69.9: ‘Zeal for your house consumes me’. The gospel text explains that it necessarily took time to understand Jesus’ action and the movement from the Scriptural passage he evoked to the new words that followed it (‘Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again’191). Even if the disciples are able to remember the Scripture at this time,192 they are still not able to plumb all its depths: Cum ergo resurrexisset a mortuis, recordati sunt discipuli ejus, quia hoc dicebat, et crediderunt scripturæ et sermoni quem dixit Jesus.

186. See Jn 6.60. 187. Peter confesses the messiahship of Jesus just afterwards (Jn 6.68). 188. See Jn 10.25; Jn 10.37-38: ‘If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works.’ Jn 14.11: ‘Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.’ 189. Jn 7.15. 190. Jn 2.16b-22. 191. Jn 2.19. 192. At the same time, this accomplishment itself prophesies, signifies a more ultimate (as regards historical execution), or a more primary reality (as regards divine intention): that of the true temple, the body of Christ, since his action signifies his divine filiation (he speaks of the house of his Father).

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A Poetic Christ After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.193

As much as they could have already recognized or known the Scriptures during Jesus’ ministry, it is only in the light of the resurrection that they could believe in them and their profound connection to Jesus.194 As for Jesus’ miracles,195 they polarize those who witness them. The biblical prophets usually prove the authenticity of their mission by performing miracles accomplished in the name of God.196 Jesus performs ‘signs’ in order to tempt people to believe in his divine mission.197 His works witness that God has sent him,198 but many still refuse to believe,199 which means that ‘their sins remain’.200 In this way the miracles do not elicit faith, but confirm it.201 All are reached, but only some are touched.202 Ernst Fuchs has proposed that we take Jesus’ actions as the key for interpreting his whole message. God judges sinners in the actions of the Nazarene, but this judgement consists of welcoming and forgiving them. The parables most clearly illustrate this message. In fact, ‘Jesus’ conduct explains the will of God, by means of a parable drawn from that very conduct’.203 If Jesus’ words require acts which prove them, and if Jesus’ acts require words which explain them, then we can ask whether it is necessary to identify one by the other. Jesus Identifies His Acts and His Words In the discourse on the bread of life in John 6, Jesus transforms the sign of manna his interlocutors remember, which is a work, into a sign of teaching, into words! This sign is Jesus himself who teaches ‘amen, amen’.

193. Jn 2.22. 194. See Jn 2.17: ‘His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me’, this recollection took place when Jesus spoke and acted in the Temple. 195. The distinction between ‘knowing’ the Scriptures and ‘believing’ appears many times, in Jn 3.2-3, 10-11; 5.39-40. 196. In John 2 Jesus transforms water into wine, in John 9 he heals a blind man and in John 11 he resurrects Lazarus. 197. See Isa. 7.11; Jn 3.2, 6:29, 7.3, 31, etc. 198. See Jn 2.11, 23; 4.48-54, 11.15, 42, etc. 199. Jn 5.36, 10.25, 37. 200. See Jn 9.41; 15.24. 201. Also see Mt. 8.10; this is why the Jesus of the Synoptics demands secrecy from his beneficiaries (Mk 1.34) and cannot perform miracles where there is no faith (in Nazareth for example). 202. Jn 7.31: ‘Yet many in the crowd believed in him and were saying, “When the Messiah comes, will he do more signs than this man has done?”’ 203. Ernst Fuchs, Studies of the Historical Jesus (trans. Andrew Scobie; Naperville: Alec R. Allenson, 1964), p. 20.

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Later in the gospel a parallel is established between Jesus’ works and the revelation of the words of the Father. He offers words through which he manifests the Father, which is his essential work.204 He explicitly identifies these words as the works of the Father. Dicit ei Philippus: Domine, ostende nobis Patrem, et sufficit nobis. Dicit ei Jesus Tanto tempore vobiscum sum, et non cognovistis me Philippe, qui videt me, videt et Patrem. Quomodo tu dicis: Ostende nobis Patrem Non creditis quia ego in Patre, et Pater in me est Verba quæ ego loquor vobis, a meipso non loquor. Pater autem in me manens, ipse fecit opera. Non creditis quia ego in Patre, et Pater in me est. Philip said to him ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.’ Jesus said to him ‘Have I been with you all this time, and you still do not know me?’ Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?’ The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; But my Father who dwells in me does his works Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.205

204. Jn 17.4-8: ‘I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do … . I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world … and they have kept your Word … for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me.’ Outside and beyond hagiographical embellishment, the lives of some saints, and that of Thomas in particular, illustrate this assimilation of words to works: ‘The pope has been furnished with a celebrated saying that he never seems to have said: “As many miracles as articles” (et quo tot fecerat miracula quot scripserat articulos). In fact, one is a little surprised that the Bull Redemptionem misit is not more explicit on Thomas’s intellectual work. The text does mention his having been a master in sacra pagina and his teaching. But if we remember that the intellectual dimension of sainthood had been hardly taken into account up to that time, then we can truly appreciate John XXII’s allusion to Thomas’s devotion to study and the care he took to prepare himself through prayer for teaching as some of the reasons for the canonization’. Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work (trans. Robert Royal; Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 2005), p. 321. 205. Jn 14.8-12.

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God shows that Jesus comes from him by giving his ‘language’ to Jesus: ‘The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but my Father who dwells in me does his works.’ The words of Jesus are the works of the Father. Jesus’ ability to speak, along with his efficaciously pronounced words, signifies the dwelling of the Father in him. A specifically Christian and at the same time deeply Jewish ontology and mysticism of the text can be developed on the basis of these theological claims. In fact, by deliberately performing an often ‘unusual’ use of words (which John systematized but which is no less present in the Synoptics), Jesus establishes a kind of fourth dimension: that of memory in search of a meaning passed on through being condensed into a text in the course of apostolic transmission. The Words of Jesus Construct Another Dimension Jesus’ words often elicit reactions which show that without faith human beings are unable to imagine a non-material ‘elsewhere’: ‘Where I am going you cannot come’. The mysterious ‘dimension’ where he resides is no doubt the ‘theandric dimension’ of the incarnation: God has only one word, and if Jesus is the God of the Scriptures, he alone can definitively say ‘I am who I am’.206 This word, nevertheless, finds symbolic support in the textual dimension, the word-space that the repetition of Christ’s words mentally constructs in one’s memory and materially transmits to the page.207 On a simple literary level, John’s technique of frequent repetition creates a kind of incantation effect which invokes another dimension, that of meaning, whose purest vector in this world is language-in-act, the word. But it is Jesus himself in the gospel who seemingly wants to create a discourse of space which will grant his listeners entry into a new dimension.208 First, he gives a kind of ontological density to his words. At the end of this discourse he introduces his words ‘into the world’ as an object among other objects: ‘Nunc autem ad te venio: et hæ c loquor in mundo, ut habeant gaudium

206. É douard H. Weber has made a careful study of the wisdom of the ancient interpretation in ‘L’hermé neutique christologique d’Exode 3,4 chez quelques maî tres parisiens du XIIIe siè cle’, in Alain de Libera and Emilie Zum Brunn (eds.), Celui qui est: interpré tations juives et chré tiennes d’Exode 3 (Paris: Cerf, 1986), pp. 47–101. 207. During Jesus’ visit to Nazareth in Luke 4, the movement from ‘place’ [topos] to ‘writing’ [graphê ] is realized on the narrative level: ‘he found the place where it was written’ (Lk. 4.17). 208. It is in this perspective we should interpret the generic trait of ‘biblical parallelism’ which has been brought to light again in recent years. See Franç ois Rousseau, La Poé tique fondamentale du texte biblique: le fait litté raire d’un parallé lisme é largi et omnipresent (Montré al, Bellarmin, Paris: Cerf, 1989).

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meum impletum in semet ipsis’; ‘But now that I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves.’209 We must relate more closely this ‘word in the world’ and ‘writings in the world’ in the gospel’s final verse: the evangelist forcefully insists on the twofold reality of Jesus’ ‘poems’ (the Greek uses the verb poiein) and the writings which bring them together. This word itself subsequently leads to the relativization of the normal ways of perceiving the real: in the gospel writings – as in all the other biblical stories – space and time undergo an intriguing curvature. The Inversion of Time Jesus’ words create a particular temporality in which the future is already past, and he follows the tradition of the prophetic ‘now’ when attempting to create a ‘moment of eternity’. At the end of the ‘Farewell Discourse’ to the disciples, for example, ‘normal’ temporality is reversed: ‘Et in illo die me non rogabitis quidquam’; ‘And on that day you will ask nothing of me.’210 This is immediately followed by ‘nunc scimus quia scis omnia, et non opus est tibi ut quis te interroget: in hoc credimus quia a Deo existi’; ‘Now we know that you know all things, and do not need to have anyone question you; by this we believe that you come from God.’211 Jesus then replies: Modo creditis? ecce venit hora, et jam venit, ut dispergamini unusquisque in propria, et me solum relinquatis Do you now believe? The hour is coming, indeed it has come, when you will be scattered, each one to his home, and you will leave me alone.212

In fact, after the foot-washing, future, past and present seem to be united in a single prism which reconstitutes the normal temporal spectrum into a wholly different temporality. Nunc clarificatus est Filius hominis, et Deus clarificatus est in eo. Si Deus clarificatus est in eo, et Deus clarificabit eum in semet ipso et continuo clarificabit eum.

209. 210. 211. 212.

Jn 17.13-14. Jn 16.23. Jn 16.30. Jn 16.31-32.

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A Poetic Christ Now the Son of Man has been glorified, And God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself And will glorify him at once.213

The Inversion of Space There are several times when Jesus alludes to a non-local space, which his interlocutors find mystifying: Adhuc modicum tempus vobiscum sum et vado ad eum qui me misit. Quæ retis me, et non invenietis: et ubi ego sum, vos non potestis venire. Dixerunt ergo Judæ i ad se ipsos Quo hic iturus est, quia non inveniemus eum? numquid in dispersionem gentium iturus est, et docturus gentes? quis est hic sermo, quem dixit: Quæ retis me, et non invenietis: et ubi sum ego, vos non potestis venire? I will be with you a little longer And then I am going to him who sent me. You will search for me, but you will not find me. And where I am going you cannot come. The Jews said to one another ‘Where does this man intend to go that we will not find him? Does he intend to go to the Dispersion among the Greeks and teach the Greeks? What does he mean by saying, “You will search for me and you will not find me” And “where I am going you cannot come?”’214

Within this story, Jesus’ interlocutors are only certain about one thing: that Jesus has said these words. So they repeat them. Understanding these words requires that one pauses on them, that one binds oneself to them, that one remains with them. The frequent repetitions conserved by the evangelist force their reader to enter into the pedagogy Jesus commanded: to remain in his word. The Gospel introduces its reader into the non-chronological time and the nonlocal space of the Scriptures through presenting Jesus’ words and the reactions they provoke. The God who speaks in Jesus and in the evangelist turns out to be the same God who spoke in the beginning of the book and instructed one of its first characters to leave home: ‘Leave your country!’215 But as is always the case in the New Testament, these ancient words are at once radicalized and spiritualized:

213. Jn 13.31b-32. 214. Jn 7.33-36. 215. Gen. 12.1.

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it is no longer a matter of leaving one country for another, but of leaving this world for a mysterious and divine ‘elsewhere’. Jesus’ words and the evangelist’s text are presented for those who receive them as a vehicle away from ‘this world here’ and as an entrance into ‘this world over there’. Here we are alluding to the famous distinction that the Pharisees in particular developed in the first century: ha ‘olam haze-ha ‘olam haba. Beyond the political reinterpretations (and retrievals) of the great symbols of the Mosaic covenant, the rise of eschatological and apocalyptic movements led numerous sages to propose the existence of a world beyond this world and to look for the path or keys to this mysterious malekwt haš amyaim, the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God. Jesus had the audacity to present his word – ‘the Kingdom of God is near’ – and finally his person – ‘the Kingdom of God is among you’ – as ‘the way’. The movement which uses words to lead from this world here to that world there is reminiscent of the proto-Kabbalistic mystics who attempted to reach the divine world by meditating on the sacred text.216 For Christian orthodoxy, however, which from the outset resisted various Gnostic temptations, meditation on the text was not enough to enter into the Kingdom: first, because it is a matter of encountering the concrete person of Jesus in the space of the Gospel’s words; and secondly because Jesus himself has given priority to moral behaviour.217 The textual dimension is primarily that which enables the creation of the optimal conditions for the reflection upon and enactment of justice. The accent is on the first word of the joyful proclamation: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand!’218 The Words of Jesus Act Jesus’ words are not content merely to be in the world; they act in it. They are endowed with a real moral efficacy which works itself out in the true discernment of conscience: Si non venissem, et locutus fuissem eis, peccatum non haberent: nunc autem excusationem non habent de peccato suo. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin; but now they have no excuse for their sin.219

216. Especially through the stories of creation (ma’ase bereš it) and Ezekiel’s chariot vision (mas’ase markaba). Cf. Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah (trans. Allan Arkush; ed. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 2011). 217. Mt. 7.21. 218. Mt. 4.17. 219. Jn 15.22.

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In the mouth of Jesus, this efficacy is described as a true activity: the word acquires substance as it becomes his true ambassador. Thus the Johannine Jesus, in contrast to the Son of Man in the Synoptic gospels,220 does not come in vindictive judgement on the last day: his word, faithfully transmitted since his historical coming, speaks for him. It is his word which will judge on the last day, and it is his word which judges now: si quis audierit verba mea, et non custodierit ego non judico eum non enim veni ut judicem mundum sed ut salvificem mundum. Qui spernit me et non accipit verba mea, habet qui judicet eum. Sermo quem locutus sum, ille judicabit eum in novissimo die. I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. The one who rejects me and does not receive my word has a judge; on the last day the word that I have spoken will serve as judge.221

The emphasis here is placed on the irreversible fact that Jesus has spoken in the world. Judgement has already begun because of this speaking,222 for the word not only irreversibly divides every event in history, but also irreversibly divides the conscience of those who receive it: Sanctifica eos in veritate. Sermo tuus veritas est. Sicut tu me misisti in mundum,

220. See Mk 13.26. 221. Jn 12.47-50. 222. See Jn 3.19-21: ‘And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil … those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.’ This passage, whose enunciative framework is otherwise vague (is it part of Jesus’ response to Nicodemus which begins at verse 10? Is it a gloss from the narrator?) echoes the prologue (Jn 1.4-5), as if the words of Jesus had transmitted their efficacy to words about Jesus … . This transitivity of the force of words is staged in the episode of the Samaritan in the passage from Jn 4.39 (‘Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me everything I had ever done’’) to Jn 4.41-42 (‘And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believed, for we have heard for ourselves.”’)

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et ego misi eos in mundum: et pro eis ego sanctificabo meipsum ut sint et ipsi sanctificati in veritate. Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, So I have sent them into the world. As for their sakes I sanctify myself, So that they also may be sanctified in truth.223

Those sent out are sanctified in the truth, in the word, in Jesus who sanctifies himself. Believers are sanctified in Jesus, which means that they are separated from the world into which they are sent.224 The principle of this separation is present in Jesus’ words, in the truth, and they make each human being who has been baptized (even if during infancy) one who is separated. The Jesus-word itself separates: once one has heard it, one can never again act as if one had not.225 The journey through the text is thus comparable to a real lustration226: Jesus’ word, as performative and illocutionary, is cathartic: ‘Jam vos mundi estis propter sermonem quem locutus sum vobis’; ‘You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.’227 We can thus observe substantive meta-literary meaning in epanorthoses of this type: ‘Ecce venit hora et iam venit’; ‘The hour is coming, indeed it has come.’228 One could gloss this statement in this way: the hour is coming and it has come solely from the fact that you come to hear me (and to understand me) or to read of me

223. Jn 17.17-19. 224. This is the traditional sense of sanctification in first-century Judaisms; see the numerous references given in Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), p. 1060. Paul likewise will say ‘your life is hidden with Christ’: ‘Igitur, si consurrexistis cum Christo: quæ sursum sunt quæ rite, ubi Christus est in dextera Dei sedens: quæ sursum sunt sapite, non quæ super terram. Mortui enim estis, et vita vestra est abscondita cum Christo in Deo. Cum Christus apparuerit, vita vestra: tunc et vos apparebitis cum ipso in gloria’ (Col. 3.3-5). 225. Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Night in Hell’, as in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a Bilingual Edition (trans. Wallace Fowlie; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 275. ‘I am a slave to my baptism’. The poetic and spiritual trajectory of Arthur Rimbaud has become paradigmatic for (post-) modern awareness. Once the Word of God has been sown in someone’s life but prevented from ripening, a profound malaise will result from every attempt to repress the spiritual energies which have been transmitted. 226. See 13.5 and 13.10. 227. Jn 15.3. 228. Jn 16.32 and 4.23.

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(by hearing). Very concretely presented (‘I speak into the world’229), the utterances of Jesus such as ‘that they may have my joy complete in themselves’,230 ‘so that you all may’,231 ‘so that you may have my life in you’,232 ‘for you believe’,233 are selfrealizing prophecies. They point to a coincidence of the act of reading and the realization of the words read. If we believe the evangelist, then, Jesus himself has provided the channels through which these words will come this day – and this day has come – to touch me, in the moment when I read them: ‘Non pro eis rogo tantum, sed et pro eis qui credituri sunt per verbum eorum in me’; ‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word.’234 In the same text we see the presuppositions of the reading which guarantee their objective actualization – for this is the origin of the tradition of meditating on Jesus’ divine words by meditating on the apostles’ human words. In a sublime moment, the reality of reading comes to surpass the text as a kind of fiction and at the same time the reader finds herself within the text that she is attempting to understand. Sometimes this sublimity is created not through the words attributed to Jesus but through the story itself. Thus a story about the questions which Jesus’ interlocutors ask him concerning the meaning of his words often allows the evangelist to include within the text how one should read Jesus’ words, and the evangelist does this by putting the reader through a certain number of obligatory postures (of reading). We can see an example of this technique in Jesus’ final dialogue with his disciples. At the moment they arrive, Jesus reminds them how his teaching surpasses the capacities of his disciples,235 and he announces the coming of the Paraclete, the Spirit sent by Jesus when he has returned to the Father, who will disclose the definitive justice of God and lead the disciples ‘into all truth’236: Modicum, et jam non videbitis me; et iterum modicum, et videbitis me: quia vado ad Patrem. Dixerunt ergo ex discipulis ejus ad invicem: Quid est hoc quod dicit nobis: Modicum, et non videbitis me; et iterum modicum, et videbitis me, et quia vado ad Patrem? Dicebant ergo:

229. 230. 231. 232. 233. 234. 235. 236.

Jn 17.13-14. Jn 17.13-14. Jn 17.21. Jn 5.40; 10.10. Jn 14.29. Jn 17.20. Jn 16.12: ‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.’ Jn 16.13-15.

1. A Poetic Gospel? Quid est hoc quod dicit: Modicum? nescimus quid loquitur. Cognovit autem Jesus, quia volebant eum interrogare, et dixit eis: De hoc quæ ritis inter vos quia dixi: Modicum, et non videbitis me; et iterum modicum, et videbitis me. Amen, amen dico vobis: quia plorabitis, et flebitis vos, mundus autem gaudebit; vos autem contristabimini, sed tristitia vestra vertetur in gaudium. Mulier cum parit, tristitiam habet, quia venit hora ejus; cum autem pepererit puerum, jam non meminit pressuræ propter gaudium, quia natus est homo in mundum. Et vos igitur nunc quidem tristitiam habetis, iterum autem videbo vos, et gaudebit cor vestrum: et gaudium vestrum nemo tollet a vobis. Et in illo die me non rogabitis quidquam. Amen, amen dico vobis: si quid petieritis Patrem in nomine meo, dabit vobis. ‘A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me.’ Then some of his disciples said to one another, ‘What does he mean by saying to us, “A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me”; and “Because I am going to the Father?” They said, “What does he mean by his ‘a little while’? We do not know what he is talking about.” Jesus knew that they wanted to ask him, so he said to them, ‘Are you discussing among yourselves what I meant when I said, “A little while and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me?” Very truly, I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice; you will have pain, but your pain will turn to joy. When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you. On that day you will ask nothing of me. Very truly, I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.’237

237. Jn 16.16-23.

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“A little while, and you will no longer see me, and again a little while, and you will see me.” This difficult phrase is literally repeated three times in what follows! Each and every reader, in their concrete reading, is thus forced to follow the disciples’ questioning and to linger with them in their astonishment before Jesus. That Jesus answers in the form of the parable of a woman in childbirth generates even more puzzlement. Explanations of the Johannine misunderstandings and repetitions often resort to the history of the gospel text and compare the canonical text to an archaeological site consisting of many more or less neatly arranged ‘redactional layers’. But even in archaeology, it is not illegitimate to prefer the exploration of the surface to excavation in the trenches. What would make sense of the sequence of words in the existing text? In a short parable, after having acknowledged that they are asking about his words, Jesus interprets the current incomprehension238 and the future knowledge239 of his disciples as the pains and joys of a woman in labour. In doing so, what he really does is not so much respond to their questioning of the meaning of his words as give form and meaning to their questioning itself. Jesus does not respond to the content of their questioning but to the fact that it exists. He finally invokes the day of his return as a day when questioning will no longer have any reason, as if to emphasize that their questioning itself is questionable: ‘On that day you will ask nothing of me.’240 Some interpret this type of response from Jesus as deceptive. In fact, it reroutes the questioning through an excess, not a lack, of meaning: Jesus is not beneath but above the question. He muses on the ‘in a little while’ about which the disciples are asking beyond the play of temporal markers such as ‘when’, ‘now’, ‘again’ and ‘on that day’, but without removing the meaning of his initial enigmatic words. His response demands extended attention. ‘Misunderstanding is its own way of rupturing our discourse. Our monologue must stumble on the threshold of dialogue. This type of surpassing enables us in turn to see the lay of the land.’241 ‘On that day you will ask nothing of me.’ What will happen ‘on that day’? The disciples will have undergone a difficult ‘labor’, that of faith, and each of them will be a ‘new man’ who has appeared ‘in this world’. In his response, Jesus intimately associates faith and the coming vision of his own resurrected person in a near future (‘in a little while’). Thus the movement from sadness to joy, from mortal pains to a new life, is first and foremost his movement, through the Passion, death and resurrection: as with most of the symbols placed on Christ’s lips, that of birth encloses Christ and his interlocutors into one logic.242

238. 239. 240. 241. 242.

Jn 16.20: ‘You will have pain’. Jn 16.22: ‘I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice’. Jn 16.23. Grosjean, L’Ironie christique, p. 75. See the parable of the vine and the branches: Jn 15.1 and Jn 15.5.

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Finally, if Jesus does not respond to the disciples’ questioning on the plane of signifier or referent, it is because what he offers is of a different order than that of words exchanged or questions posed (even those posed to the master): it is a matter of living an experience. Such a dialogue thus generates the ‘strategy of belief ’,243 and exegetes have shown the coherence of this strategy by examining the places where the narrator explains to the readers the effects which he hopes to produce on them. It is only through the thickness of the redundancies and the ambiguities they enact that the text of the gospel itself becomes for its hearer or its reader the trigger of a spiritual experience, initiating the movement from Scripture to life, the first encounter with Christ. Other centuries, perhaps because they were more conscientious of the Hebraic tradition of reading, had a living knowledge of this spiritual experience at the very heart of the text. For example, in his commentary on John 14 Bossuet offers this exhortation: Read chapter 14: you will find there profundities to make one tremble. Lord, I am afraid: those who do not feel them do not understand them. Take advantage of what you understand, and adore what you do not understand: this is a splendid teaching. Do you wish to be helped by a salutary explanation of Jesus Christ’s words? Help yourself, search yourself, ask our great Father that he give you your bread … .You do not want to satisfy curiosity; you agree not to know what Christ did not want to reveal to you. Everything that you will think is clear is what he says to you; this is how he speaks to you; and when you do not understand, this is because he is speaking to you in a different way, he is saying: Believe, worship, be humble, desire, search; be glad whether you find God or if he reserves his grace for another time; by waiting you submit yourself, and by the fact that you are waiting you are submitting yourself, which is greater than having found and understood since it is the principle of understanding.244

Conclusion Scripture gives to those who receive it not just a set of performances but also a real ability to inhabit and enact these performances. As with all of Holy Scripture, the gospels are three-dimensional texts. Their meaning does not come from only  the two dimensions of the page, where lines vertically follow upon each other: their semantics depend on their pragmatics. To move from Holy Scripture to theological writing cannot be reduced to moving from one book to another or

243. Jean Zumstein, ‘L’é vangile johannique: une straté gie du croire’, in idem, Miettes exé gé tiques, pp. 237–52. 244. Jacques Bé nigne Bossuet, Mé ditations sur l’É vangile (Paris: Desclé e, 1913), p. 662. For a contemporary approach, see Sandra M. Schneiders, The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture (San Francisco: Harper, 1991).

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from one discourse to another, never leaving the linguistic dimension. It can only be to move from one experience to another, or rather: to continue the experience. In the New Testament, this movement and this continuation – this tradition – are ably signified by the semantic richness of the word Logos. This word ends up designating simultaneously the words of Christ245 and apostolic teaching about Christ.246 Yet inasmuch as these first two significations tend to mingle,247 this word ends up designating Christ himself, the same one who acts just as much in his glory as he did in the days of his flesh. In a more profound and better way than any of the literary efforts which have created this jargon, in Scripture the reader experiences the productivity of the text ‘in opposition to all communicative and representative – and thus re-productive – uses of language’248. In this way one can describe the implementation, in all the novelty of textuality, of the language of sender and receiver, of writing and reading, as that of ‘two productivities which intersect and the have space to intersect’. Without fully adopting these theories, we can credit them with the great merit of having reminded us that the text has its own proper reality, one which is much more complex than most of the critical historians fixated on referentiality have thought. Often marked by the materialist ideology of the death of the subject,249 contemporary speculation on the text as a kind of productivity can be applied with more realism to the products of oral and communal literature, and thus to the tradition which is the biblical texts. In the cultural context of first-century Judaisms, ‘signifiance’250 was not a theoretical abstraction, but the effect of a group of

245. See Mk 2.2, 4; 4.14, 33; Mt. 13.19, 21-23; Lk. 5.1; 9.28; Acts 10.36. 246. See Mk 16.20; Acts 4.29, 31; 6.2, 4, 7; 8.4, 14, 25; 10.36, 44; 11.1, 19; 13.5-7, 49; 16.6, 32; 19.20. 247. In Mk 8.32, ‘He said all this quite openly’, for example, these words are the first announcement of his sufferings, of his death and his resurrection. In the Pastoral Epistles, for example, the formula pistos ho logos, which in the Scriptures designates the Word of God itself, is applied five times to Jesus’ words as well as to the traditional formulas of the apostolic preaching which echoes them (see 1 Tim. 1.15; 3.1; 4.9; 2 Tim. 2.2; Tit. 3.8). On the narrative level, Jesus’ life sums up all of ancient piety for the Word: it is nourishment (Mt. 4.4) and a stronghold (Mt. 4.10-11). 248. We are using here the exquisite synthesis proposed by Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclopé dique des sciences du langages (Paris: É ditions du Seuil, 1972) pp. 443–8. 249. Cf. Ducrot and Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclopé dique, pp. 443–8. 250. ‘Signifiance is the work of meaning operated by language from within itself, in the signifying practices underlying the surface structured by the habitual use of language (representative of outside – the world – and of the inside within – the subject.) Signifiance is a differentiated infinity, whose limitless combinations never reach their end; it is the without-ending of the possible operations in a given field of language’. Ducrot and Todor, Dictionnaire encyclopé dique, p. 448.

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communicative practices which framed oral traditions; ‘generalized intertextuality’ could enter into dialogue with reality in the ‘fulfilment of the Scriptures’; different techniques of Scriptural interpretation, later systematized in the discipline of Pardes, have already ensured the exploration of the play between ‘pheno-text’ and ‘geno-text’251 which is recommended by contemporary theoreticians of the text. In the context of Christian theology, the presence of the Logos, the master and creator of both the exteriority of the object and the interiority of the subject, explains the existence of a higher logic which encloses everything understandable into a ‘paragrammatic reading’.252 In the Christian Bible, no less than the Tanakh, the relationship between words and things is irreducible to a simple bijection of the signifier to signified or sign to referent, for creation and language are homogenous in the Word, and the ‘things’ aimed at by the sacred writer (God, supernatural realities) are not entirely captured by natural human language: unable to say them, it must manifest them. ‘Fari non potes et tacere non debes’.253 The incarnation crosses and fills in the abyss between Word (Verbum) and words (verba), such that Christ’s words in the gospels become the paradigm for everyone who desires to speak of God: in them ‘the word of the absolute Other’ is intimated ‘in common human words’.254 Our next chapter will be dedicated to the conditions of such a discovery.

251. See Ducrot and Todor, Dictionnaire encyclopé dique, p. 448. 252. In the text, the reader encounters ‘the expansion of a function which organizes it’: the reading is made ‘paragrammatic’, ‘tabular’ more than linear. These authors come to envision a textual logic, including a logic of the sign, which Aristotle shares. The text is an ‘ordered infinite code’ of which all other codes are only subassemblies, including, for example, that of linear logic. See Ducrot and Todor, Dictionnaire encyclopé dique, pp. 443–8. 253. Augustine, Enarratio in Psalmis, Ps 32. 254. Jean Delorme, ‘Orientations of a literary semiotics questioned by the Bible’, Semeia 81 (1998): 27–61 (here pp. 51–2).

Chapter 2 TOWARDS A POETIC CHRISTOLOGY

Introduction The previous chapter dealt with the aesthetics of encountering Christ and of reading the text in the experience of New Testament faith. We hope that it at least established the relevance of an urgent question which is as important to history as it is to religion, and which could be formulated in this way: Is the admirable literary complexity of the New Testament merely the result of clever rhetorical propaganda which then calls for deconstruction, or did Jesus himself lay the foundations of this literary complexity in the course of his ministry? To put it in slightly cruder terms, Does the New Testament give us access to divine language, or just to human, all too human, translations and interpretations relative to a cultural moment in Middle Eastern history and religion? The heart of the Christian faith is the manifestation of the absolute in the relative. In Jesus the Word makes itself understood in human language. ‘But the word of the Lord endures forever. The word is the good news that was announced to you.’1 In the words of Vatican II: ‘For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the word of the eternal Father, when He took to Himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men.’2 After the linguistic turn, we cannot tone down such claims by limiting the scope of the word ‘gospel’ only to the content of the message. Certainly ‘biblical faith is not separable from the continuous movement of interpretation which brings it into language’3, but this faith is inaugurated, and not simply illustrated by Jesus.4

1. 1 Pet. 1.25. 2. Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, § 13. 3. Franç ois-Xavier Amherdt, ‘L’hermé neutique de Paul Ricœ ur en dé bat avec George Lindbeck et l’é cole de Yale’, in Marc Boss, Gilles Emery and Pierre Gisel (eds.), Postlibé ralisme? La thé ologie de George Lindbeck et sa ré ception (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2004), pp. 139–56 (here p. 152). 4. See the criticism Hans Frei levelled against reductions of Scripture to ‘cognitivepropositionalist’ facts by earlier dogmaticians or to ‘experiential-expressivist’ theories associated with liberal hermeneutics. Cf. Hans Frei, ‘The Literal Reading of the Biblical

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In this chapter, and with a host of other current authors, we will show that the response to perennial questions such as ‘What is fiction?’, ‘Is fiction irreducibly deceptive?’ and ‘Is it a lie which speaks truth?’ changes dramatically depending on whether or not we affirm the dogma of the incarnation.5

1. We will first return to our central question – ‘how should we believe in Holy Scripture?’ – and argue that an ‘analysis of enunciation’ offers to John’s readers a variety of substantive hermeneutical options concerning the historicity and textuality of the Gospel. 2. The confession of faith in the incarnation of the Word as related by the gospel texts connects the absoluteness of God and the relativity of human language. Such an encounter can cast a vivid light over language insofar as language itself becomes recognized as God’s gift to humanity in the form of participation in the divine Word. A ‘theological’ or even ‘Christological’ linguistics still needs to be developed, and we do not presume to offer a complete version of it here. Nevertheless, relying on the New Testament and on past theologians, especially St. Thomas, we will devote the second part of this chapter to the extensive fittingness between the mystery of the incarnation and the being and functionality of the sign.

The Enunciative Framing of the Gospel: The Equation of the Words of the Evangelist, the Words of Jesus and the Word of God The fourth gospel ascribes awareness of the future course of his words to Jesus himself and by doing so brings its readers into a ‘discourse-space’ and then a ‘textual space’ which advocates for some kind of identification between the words of the Gospel and those of Jesus. Yet this is only one aspect of a subtly strategic use of enunciation that needs to be described. Theoretic Reminders and General Hypothesis The importance of enunciation appears whenever one relativizes the idea that language is only used for communication in the narrow sense of the term, meaning the transmission of information. The fact that language enables interactions between people – its pragmatic aspect – is no less essential to it, and structures language itself, in particular through its system of speakers. ‘More often than

Narrative in Christian Tradition: Does It Stretch or Will It Break?’ in Frank D. McConnell (ed.), The Bible and the Narrative Tradition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 36–77, especially p. 46. 5. Such a hypothesis does not hold up against the crushing demonstration to the contrary in Alexandre Leupin, Fiction et incarnation: litté rature et thé ologie au Moyen  ge (Paris: Flammarion, 1993).

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not, phrases have an argumentative orientation: their signification contains an instruction, such as “by uttering this phrase we present ourselves as arguing in favor of this conclusion.”’6 Even a ‘simple observation’, even an affirmation, is a real speech act: ‘To use an assertion in an affirmative form is to posit oneself as believing what one says, and makes it impossible for my interlocutor to deny that he knows that I hold this belief, except in the case of bad faith.’7 Every text is the visible result of an act of utterance which was necessary to its creation and yet which does not necessarily remain visible on the surface of what is uttered. Everything begins with an ‘I-here-now’ which is outside the text and yet leaves its marks on the texts at hand. More precisely, the presence of the enunciator can be detected in a series of ‘linguistic blunders’, even if the enunciator attempts to cover their tracks. This is perhaps the case for the Synoptic gospels, which are primarily heterodiegetic narration, but perhaps not the case for John, in which there are many explicit redactional interventions. For the reader, the fact or the hope that discourse is not sheer nonsense presupposes a recapulative authority, the ‘enunciative authority’. This authority is not given a priori (as in the case of an easily identifiable ‘author’, since any author can use masks, which the existence of fictional autobiographies should be enough to demonstrate), but it still remains visible; it is detected within the act of reading itself, in the course of which the recipient of the utterance (enonciataire) figures out who the speaker is (enonciateur). The relationship between the reader and the text is, however, dialectical. The reader interprets in order to find the message (and the speaker who issues it), and he is himself ‘interpreted’ by the discourse which he receives and which modifies his representation of the world. Discourse, as composed of a series of linguistic acts, constructs successive images which project a world by working on ‘natural’ representations. The recipient of the utterance (the enonciataire) can hesitate or resist and so cannot initially find either the precise position which the speaker lays out for him or what the speaker exactly means. Ultimately, it is by repeated readings that the recipient figures out his position and truly enjoys the work: traditionally it has been said that the reader grows at the same rate as his reading does, or that the meaning of the Scriptures is deepened to the extent that the reader grows spiritually. According to early Christian tradition, the more one understands the Scriptures the deeper they appear. The Bible and the reader create a dialectical relationship, just like a mirror in which one sees oneself,8 such that Scripture is endlessly enriched by the new readings which are made of it. ‘And when the living creatures went the wheels also went together by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth the wheels also were

6. Oswald Ducrot, ‘Les lois du discours’, Langue franç aise 42 (1979): 21–33 (here p. 27). 7. Cervoni, L’é nonciation, p. 17. 8. Jas 1.23-25.

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lifted up with them.’ The living creatures go when the Saints understand from Holy Writ how to lead a moral life. Truly the living creatures are lifted up from the earth when the Saints raise themselves in contemplation. And because each of the Saints advances in Holy Writ as far as this same Holy Writ progress in him it is rightly said: ‘And when the living creatures went the wheels also went together by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth the wheels also were lifted up with them’ because divine words grow with the reader [divina eloquia cum legente crescunt], for the deeper each understands them the deeper they penetrate into him. Therefore the wheels would not be lifted up if the living creatures were not raised up, because if the minds of the readers have not attained to the heights, divine words, as if in the depths, life there not understood.9

Two major problems related to enunciation need to be addressed in order to explain authoritative texts in matters of faith. If we wish to analyse the relationship between our texts and reality10 (which is the goal of historical-critical methods), it is necessary to pay close attention to enunciation, for it provides the framework in which meaning is experienced and truth is proven. We will explore these two points in further detail. The object or objects designated by a statement forms its referent, which is not strictly constituted by objects taken from reality: natural languages construct the universe to which they refer and can be given a universe of discourse (literary universes are objects of possible reference just as is the ordinary universe). This is why ‘the question of truth, subordinated to that of reference, is equally inconceivable outside of enunciation: an utterance is not true or false in itself, but only becomes so in the course of a particular enunciation’.11 Once we identify the irreducible element of the metaphorical, the fictional and the figural in linguistic expression, we can rule out the view

9. Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (trans. Theodosia Tomkinson; California: Etna, 2008), I, VII, § 8, pp. 117–18. Also see Moralia in Job XX, 1, 1. 10. For an example of this close attention, see the linguistic analysis carried out by the American logician John R. Searle in Ducrot and Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclopé dique, p. 408. 11. Ducrot and Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclopé dique, p. 407. ‘The sign, taken in itself, does not have any assignable referent (to what do “I,” “you,” “this boy,” “John,” “the car which rolls up the street” refer?). It is only, with few exceptions, the event of a sign which has referential value, its use by a specific speaker in specific circumstances. As for the sign itself, one cannot recognize in it any “meaning.” Is it, then, that meaning contains a sign? It is, then, necessary to possess a method in order to determine, in each event of this sign, to what this event refers (to know the sign “I” is to be capable of knowing when a person say “I” to whom it refers.’ Ducrot and Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclopé dique, p. 318.

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However, enunciation is never the act of an isolated individual: ‘As a specific action, enunciation involves a complete study of behavior within a society and, more particularly, linguistic anthropology.’13 In order to clarify the referent of a text and its claims to truth, one must describe the illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects of the utterances which weave together the said text. HansRobert Jauss’s account of ‘productive reception’ offers a theory of this process in the case of secular literature. In the religious domain, appreciating enunciation requires further elaboration of tradition as the place of its manifestation in the interpretation of Scripture. As for the gospels, there is thus no reason to oppose a priori the presence of an enunciative strategy and their historical referentiality. It may very well be the case that the canonical text reaps the perlocutionary effects of a strategy inaugurated by Jesus himself. This is even more probable if we allow that the Christian tradition was not a posthumous appendix to Jesus’ life but rather arose from the impact of Jesus’ words during his time on earth. Observations on John The Blurring of the Enunciators’ Identities How are matters presented in the case of the fourth gospel? First of all, the readers most sensitive to language have not failed to notice a very strong presence of the evangelist himself: One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother.14 The other is without a doubt the person who is writing, but the text conceals his name. Is this because the one who is called John wishes to avoid being confused with John who was his first master? But why always omit the name of his family, his father Zebedee, his mother Salome, his brother James and even his aunt Mary who is the mother of Jesus? This anonymity cannot be explained if the evangelist was not John of Zebedee, but finding out which redactors may be lurking behind this highly noticeable discretion would be to flout the text which is only concerned with what it relates.15

12. Franç ois Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre: l’inspiration des É critures (Paris: Cerf, 1996), p. 336. 13. Ducrot and Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclopé dique, p. 407. 14. Jn 1.40. 15. Grosjean, L’Ironie christique, p. 44.

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The whole of the text, in fact, seems to depend more on the style of one single author16 than on the redactional activity of a community.17 However, ‘John’ (as we will call the person responsible for the work in its current state) appears to use his story in the framework of a deliberately ambiguous enunciation. The identity of the speaker in the Prologue is a problem: Who can say ‘in the beginning was the Word’? Who suddenly takes the floor when saying ‘we’ in verse 16? And if we move to the other end of the gospel, who is ‘this disciple’ reputed to have written what comes before? Who hides behind the ‘we’ assuring us that what has occurred is true? Finally, in the ultimate blurring, who in the end says ‘I’ when claiming that the story of Jesus’ life is greater than the world?18 The trouble of identifying the speaker even appears to contaminate the identification of the different agents mentioned. For example, while we most often identify the ‘John’ of verses 6 to 8 of the Prologue with John the Baptist – even as the mention of the hirsute prophet seems egregious in the midst of the divine splendours in the surrounding verses19 – it could very well designate a third person,20 the author of the text which we are reading. How can we not relate the mission of this John ‘sent by God’ with what is said in the Gospel’s ‘first conclusion’? hic venit in testimonium ut testimonium perhiberet de lumine ut omnes crederent per illum; He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him21

16. In addition to a ‘responsible reader’ as seen in Grosjean’s work, see André -Jean Festugiè re, Observations stylistiques sur l’é vangile de saint Jean (Paris: Klincksieck, 1974), especially pp. 7, 8. See further the arguments of André Feuillet, Jé sus et sa mè re d’apres les ré cits lucaniens de l’enfance et d’aprè s saint Jean (Paris: Gabalda, 1974), pp. 142, 143, who identifies the ‘beloved disciple’ constantly linked to Peter with the ‘John’ that the gospel takes care never to name. See also the curious study of Charles Hudry-Clergeon, ‘Le quatriè me é vangile indique-t-il le nom de son auteur?’, Biblica 56 (1975): 545–9. 17. See Brown, The Community. 18. Jn 21.25. ‘But there are many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.’ 19. ‘The place accorded to John in this hymn can seem astonishing. A probable hypothesis is that the two passages of the Prologue which treat John the Baptist are insertions into the hymn to the Logos.’ Annie Jaubert, Lecture de l’É vangile selon saint Jean (Paris: Cerf, 1976), p. 20. 20. As in Jn 21.24. 21. Jn 1.7.

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A Poetic Christ multa quidem et alia signa fecit Iesus in conspectu discipulorum suorum quae non sunt scripta in libro hoc haec autem scripta sunt ut credatis quia Iesus est Christus Filius Dei et ut credentes vitam habeatis in nomine eius. Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.22

Is the presence of the evangelist who mediates between the Revealer of the divine life and the reader in the first verses of the work any less ‘plausible’ than that of the Baptist? We could even wonder if these verses actually have a meta-literary significance. In fact, such a conclusion seems necessary in light of an important detail – he comes so that ‘all’ (pantes) may believe through him23 – which fits poorly with John the Baptist’s limited historical mission: ‘It is certainly not necessary to exclude any allusion to the evangelist himself as a witness (see John 19.35), as the traditional title of the book, Kata Ioannen, contends that he bears the same name.’24 In that case, the ‘parenthesis’ of verses 6-8 is not incoherent: the same voice which knew how to begin at the beginning of the first verse of his discourse – in media verba, just as we say in medias res! – also knows that he must prevent all confusion between his own words (and person) and those of the Word to which he gives witness. The narrative voice immediately wishes to clarify, after speaking of the light of the Word and introducing the person of ‘John’, that they are not identical, as if he were telling the reader to disregard the finger and to look at the sun to which the finger is pointing.25

22. Jn 20.30-31. See also 21.24-25, or 19.35 ‘He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth.’ 23. The ‘baptist’ interpretation of the passage draws on extensions to the text which are theologically interesting but somewhat superimposed onto it. For example, ‘in the thought of the evangelist, the Baptist announces his Savior to the entire world … . The message of the Forerunner is indissolubly tied to the good news of the Gospel intended for all people, and he participates in its universality … . The Prologue’s author is not only thinking of the very short span of Christ’s life on earth.’ Feuillet, Le prologue, pp. 55, 56. 24. Yves Simoë ns, Selon Jean, vol. 1, Une traduction, vols 2–3, Une interpré tation (Brussels: Institut d’é tudes thé ologiques, 1997), vol. 2, p. 36. 25. As regards John the Baptist and the Word, St. Augustine offered a fine phenomenology in relation to the ‘organ-obstacle’ which unites the word, the voice, on one hand, and meaning on the other, and which is not very different from what we described in the Prologue. In human speech in general, the sound vocalizes the meaning, just as John says of Jesus in Jn 3.27-30, ‘It is necessary that he increase and that I decrease, because it is

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Placed after ‘the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it’, this reflective movement gives the struggle between the light and the darkness a meta-literary sense: it is through the witness’ language that the light shines in the darkness. What do we read, then, when we read the Prologue if not the word of a witness? Thus the reception of the fourth gospel itself is described in terms of the struggle between the light and the darkness, and ‘John’ (which means ‘The LORD is gracious’) seems to be an especially apposite designation for a voice which witnesses hic et nunc when one is hearing, reading and understanding the text of the Prologue. This reflective movement also appears in the words of verses 7 and 8. The literal repetition of ‘he came to testify to the light’, badly stapled onto the syntax of verse 8, can be understood purely and simply as a citation of verse 7 (‘He came as a witness to testify to the light’), as if the narrative voice does not want to go into additional explanations when trying to justify or to prove his claim (which is useless, since from the beginning language will always be). He is content merely to repeat it. Verse 15 of the Prologue exhibits the same type of enunciative nesting: ‘John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.”’ The prepositional sequence (opisô , emprosthen, prô tos), which could be taken as the true literary template of the entire Gospel, spectacularly combines the phenomenological order and the theological order, the experience of the letter and of revelation. According to the wording, the Word, who is the object of witness, comes (or is known) after the witness: verses 9-12 come after verses 6-8. According to the reality, once the witness has discovered the true nature of the One to whom he witnesses (Jesus is the Word come in the flesh, verses 13 and 14), he discovers the true place which should be given to Him: the very beginning (verses 1 to 6). The witness is justifying in claiming that the Logos is both before and after him from the fact that the one who is made flesh and to whom he witnesses is the One who gives light and life to all people, and that he is himself one of these people (the anaphora anthroposanthropô n of verses 4 and 6 is an indication or a trace of a latent syllogism). Thus the meaning of these three prepositions play with time and space. In the temporal order, the incarnation of the Word is known after the testimony (and according to it), but the incarnation comes before it (and renders it possible!). In the spatial order, in the textual space, John’s witness is known before the incarnation but his existence comes after it (it is through the Word that everything – including ‘John’ – has been made!).

hard to distinguish word from voice, even John himself was thought to be the Christ. The voice was thought to be the word. But the voice acknowledged what it was, anxious not to give offence to the word. I am not the Christ, he said, nor Elijah, nor the prophet.’ The great rhetor of the Roman Empire thus perfectly takes into account the principle of epanorthosis and the reticence at work throughout the fourth gospel. St. Augustine, Sermon 293, ‘On the Birth of John the Baptist’.

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The gospel’s final scene has a similar literary play in its beautiful effect of enclosure. Peter, who accompanies Jesus, turns (epistrapheis) towards ‘the beloved disciple’ following him (akolouthé ô ) and asks about his fate.26 Jesus answers that he wishes that the beloved disciple remain (menein) until he comes (erchomai). Jesus is spatially before the disciple, but announces that he will return temporally after him, insofar as the disciple will ‘remain’. The narrator then relates the early community’s reception of Jesus’ enigmatic words. The disciples interpret the eô s erchomai in a temporal register: the disciple will not die before the parouisa.27 In reality, however, akolouthé ô can signify ‘to accompany’, not ‘behind’ (in the sense of ‘to follow’), but ‘on the side of ’. Eô s erchomai can also mean ‘during my arrival’ and not only ‘until I come’ (in classical Greek a verb in the subjunctive would be necessary for that meaning). The whole question thus turns on the meaning of the verb menein. Yet the narrator does not give a detailed explanation but is content literally to repeat Jesus’ words.28 He does not respond to the disciples’ questioning with speech, but with a gesture. He shows that the signifier of Jesus’ words and the intended object of ‘remaining’ is the words, the text, this text here which one is currently reading. It is thus completely natural that this text is mentioned just afterwards: ‘This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them down.’29 In conclusion, we can at least admit an overlap of two figures, the witness who transmits the gospel and the Baptist, who is not called such in the course of the story but only called ‘John’.30 Does it not happen sometimes that the narrator himself remarks how words – and sometimes even the Word – can be nested in the words of another?31 Such a claim has nothing of the fantastic about it, as several verses later the opposite occurs when John overlaps Christian preaching,

26. Jn 21.22. 27. Jn 21.23. 28. Jn 21.23b. 29. Jn 21.24. 30. Cf. É tienne Trocme, ‘Jean et les Synoptiques: l’example de Jn 1,15-34’, in J. Verheyden, F. Van Segbroeck, G. Van Belle, Ch. M. Tuckett (eds.), The Four Gospels 1992: Festschrift Frans Neirynck (Leuven: Peeters, 1992), vol. 3, pp. 1935–41, which emphasizes the fact that ‘John’ in the Gospel of John is never ‘the baptist’ but always ‘the witness’! ‘This applies to the first mention in the Prologue’. Also see more generally, Joahnnes J. Beutler, Martyria: Traditionsgeschichte Untersuchungen zum Zeugnisthema bei Johannes (Frankfurt-am-Main: Josef Knecht, 1972), p. 241. 31. In this way even the Machiavellian speech of the High Priest in Jn 11.51 contains a true word from God. In Jn 19.19-22 the public officials come to give to Pilate a lesson in the analysis of utterance in the titulus of Jesus’ condemnation which they deem poorly written: we will return to this point when studying the theology of the cross.

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the kerygma, onto the words of the Baptist by making him designate Jesus, before his public ministry, as ‘the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world’.32 This blurring is but the first manifestation of the desire to give credence to the possible continuity between human language and the divine language which has become incarnate and is the result of the Johannine theology of revelation and witness. The course of the Gospel, which runs from the transcendence of God to the words of the catechist or theologian, is remarkably shaped by John’s play at textual thresholds, which move from ‘In the beginning was the word … all was made by him’33 to ‘This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.’34 The Word which contains the world (as it created the world) comes into the world and manifests itself by words which are received, amplified and transmitted by the disciples – the traditional process of which the final text bears remarkable trace in the enunciative frame ‘he-we-I’. The Gospel works to guarantee a twofold equivalence: (1) between the ineffable Word of God and the human language of Jesus; and (2) between the words of Jesus and the words of the disciples, and those of the evangelist in particular. This is a common trait in the four canonical writings: ‘Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me,’35 and is linked to the question of authority which was central to first-century Judaisms.36 Jesus presents himself with a singular authority and passes it on to the disciples. Christian speech is only legitimate and true insofar as it continues Christic speech. The whole question is knowing how this continuity is possible.

32. From the outset of the Gospel John speaks like a Christian, in accordance with the confession of faith (see Jn 1.29-34; 3.31-36; see 1 Pet. 1.19; Acts 8.32; Rev. 5-end). If we admit that the ‘other disciple’ of the first chapter and the ‘beloved disciple’ are identified by the narrative flow of the gospel itself (in particular in the phrase from 20.2), then we can perceive that the series of witnesses in John is not linear: the analogous literary structure of witnesses from the beloved disciple, from John, and from Jesus himself is accompanied by a play of enunciative frameworks in the form of reciprocal nestings! We should not fail to mention, for example, that the written witness given to Jesus by the beloved disciple is described by the disciples (21.24; 19.35bcd) in the same way as was the oral witness of John the Baptist by his former disciple (1.6-8, 15-19). See George M. Mlakuzhyil, The Christocentric Literary Structure of the Fourth Gospel (Rome: Pontifico Istituto Biblico, 1987), cited by Devillers, ‘Les trois té moins’, p. 81. 33. Jn 1.3. 34. Jn 21.24-25. 35. Mt. 10.40; see Lk. 10.16; Jn 13.20. 36. See Bruce Chilton and Jacob Neusner, Types of Authority in Formative Christianity and Judaism (New York and London: Routledge, 1999).

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The first equivalence is primarily an affair of faith in the Lord Jesus who, according to John, affirms the faithfulness of his words to the Word: ‘What I speak, therefore, I speak just as the Father has told me.’37 As for the second equivalence, the gospel narration itself depends on the work of memory (certainly as helped by the Holy Spirit): Jesus often asks that we listen, that we keep his word and even that we remain in it. The equivalence pertains not only to faith in God, but also to human art. The gospels display a very specific set of literary conditions which are necessary for the discourse of the evangelists to coincide with that of the Word.38 All the more remarkable in John is perhaps the harmonization of the ‘styles’ of the Baptist, Jesus and the narrator. The latter seems to speak through his different characters, and Jesus himself does not elude this treatment.39 How should we understand such a resemblance on the linguistic and literary plane? Should we reduce everything to the reconstruction present in John’s style, as if he externally imposed his ‘claw’ on the material of events, narratives and discourse which in turn we should definitely reject? The Power and Limits of Enunciation What is presupposed in the enunciation of phrases such as ‘In the beginning was the Word … and the Word was God … with God’ is that their author had some access to the ‘beginning’ and to the divine interiority. The enigmatic description of ‘the beginning’ in the third person presupposes that the narrator enjoys a knowledge which does not only survey other human beings from above, in the way in which an omniscient narrator of the world might control the characters whose histories he relates, but that he somehow looks down from on high upon the Creator himself! In fact, the narrator seems to enjoy complete command of his story: he punctuates it with temporal and liturgical indications,40 and has access to the interiority of his characters, even Jesus.41 The unbelievable mastery of the narrator of the Prologue is, however, limited in the course of the story by his partially ignorant eyes.42 In the Prologue itself, the shift from the implicit and omniscient speaking voice at the beginning to a ‘we’ (v. 14) or even an ‘I’ (v. 15) places the discourse we are reading within the history he is narrating and as one of its results. The narrator does not make anything happen on the scene by himself and depends entirely on the history which he claims to relate. He relates a finished history a posteriori and cannot change any of it.

37. Jn 12.50. 38. They do so either through what they say (Matthew, Mark and Luke develop a genuine narrative theology of speech), or through how they say it (John). 39. Is not at least the inverse true? 40. Jn 1.18, 2.1, 6, 11, etc. 41. Jn 2.24: ‘he knew … .’ 42. See Jn 2.16, 22.

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The Prologue’s narrative voice exhibits a great modesty even when echoing the primordial words of Genesis 1 and surpassing them in the depths of his own. In comparison to ‘the voice which relates the work of creation’, the voice heard in the Prologue – even if it ‘is a voice which transcends human knowledge’ and ‘offers the reader witness to that which no human witnessed’ – still does not ‘enjoy the privilege of accessing the divine interiority’.43 He does not describe any feeling; he does not provide any of God’s reasons (in the style of ‘God saw that it was good’). He remains entirely on the side of the description (vv. 1-5) before beginning to witness (vv. 6-18). John is uttered by a narrator who participates in the divine knowledge44 from which he draws his authority: ‘Confronted by the first verses … with the extraordinary presumption of the narrative voice, the reader is called upon to acquiesce (or refuse to acquiesce) to the authority of this voice … a choice for or against the narrator conditions the intelligibility of the theological poetics of the set of macro-stories.’45 For the one who agrees to historical investigation (but not without qualifications), the question then arises of the possibility and the effective modality of such participation. The Tradition often describes the reception of divine knowledge with the striking image of physical contact, of the disciple’s ear placed on the Master’s heart during the Last Supper,46 and even sees here a model for theologians to follow.47 By doing so, it identifies the author of John and the ‘beloved disciple’,

43. See Jean-Pierre Sonnet, ‘Y a-t-il un narrateur dans la Bible? La Genè se et le modè le narratif de la Bible hé braï que’, in Franç oise Mies (ed.), Bible et litté rature: l’homme et Dieu mis en intrigue (Brussels: Lessius, 1999), pp. 9–27, here pp. 11, 12. 44. See the beautiful suggestions in Sonnet, ‘Y a-t-il un narrateur dans la Bible?’, p. 14. 45. Sonnet, ‘Y a-t-il un narrateur dans la Bible?’, p. 16. 46. See the superb Origenian rapprochement between Jn 13.25 and the Prologue: the monogenes’s remaining in the bosom of the Father (Jn 1.18) renders him able to reveal God to humanity, just as the fact that John rests on the bosom of Jesus during the Last Supper (Jn  13.23) allows him to reveal the mystery of Jesus to humans. Maurice F. Wiles, The Spiritual Gospel: The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel in the Early Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 10–11. Hoskyns effectively sees a redactional intervention in the coincidence of the two expressions; The Fourth Gospel, pp. 442–3. Augustine and John Chrysostom, at times giving different interpretations of the Prologue, are in agreement when adopting Origen’s explanation. See. Mary Aloysius Aucoin, ‘Augustine and John Chrysostom: Commentators on St. John’s Prologue’, Sciences ecclesiastiques 40 (1963): 123–31. One also finds it in the eighth century in the Venerable Bede, ‘Homily 8 on the Apostle John’, Homiliae (PL 94), col. 10–516, here 46, or in the eleventh century in Rupert of Deutz, Commentaria in Evangelium Sancti Johannis on John 11 (PL 169), col. 203–816 (here col. 686). 47. In the eleventh century, Theophylact, Commentary on John 13, 23 (PG 124) col. 159– 62 (here col. 162), essentially claims that if we imitate John’s virtues of purity and gentleness, the Lord will make us rest on his chest, which is a symbol of the dignity of the theologian.

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something which modern exegesis does not easily accept in view of the many ruptures it would then have to deal with in the text’s linear logic.48 To read properly what the gospel itself says, however, the knowledge of God presupposed by the Prologue seems to have been acquired by the masterful means of the work of memory: reflection upon the story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection from the dead49 allowed the author to present his hypothesis about the beginning as actually being the truth about the beginning. The tension between control of the story and dependence upon history seems to reflect an understanding on the part of the enunciator which grew over time between the course of the history and the deployment of the story and which did so according to the model seen in the episode of the merchants being driven from the Temple.50 When explanations are desired, the narrative paralepses which ensure the transitions from one focalization to another, most often in the form of glosses from the narrator which offer information on the interior life or intentions of this or that person in this or that circumstance,51 thematize either the hermeneutical light of the resurrection52 or the gift of the Spirit.53 One of the criteria proposed by linguists for distinguishing a fictional story from a factual one is thus verified throughout the gospel: ‘The narrator of a factual story can provide information on

48. For the state of the question, see Culpepper, John, and also Jean Colson, L’é nigme du disciple que Jé sus aimait (Paris: Beauchesne, 1969). Some contemporary scholars claim that the beloved disciple is the anonymous disciple of John (1.35) so that his written witness, the gospel, includes the oral witness of John. See Hartwig Thyen, ‘Die Erzä hlung von den bethanischen Geschwistern (Joh. 11, 1-12, 19) als “Palimpsest” ü ber synoptischen Texten’, in Verheyden et al (eds), The Fourth Gospel, vol. 3, pp. 2021–50 (here p. 2046). The debate did not end with the Bultmannian turn. Attempts to find another author for the fourth gospel have continued and new authors have added new arguments. Some of those who keep to the traditional identification are supported by literary arguments: as in Charles Giblin, who concludes ‘quite probably’ in its favour in terms of a narrative analysis; cf. Charles H. Giblin, ‘The Tripartite Narrative Structure of John’s Gospel’, Biblica 71 (1990): 449–68 (here p. 459). We should also mention Gunnar Ø stenstad, ‘The Structure of the Fourth Gospel: Can it be Defined Objectively?’, Studia Theologica 45 (1991): 33–55. More recently, and against Boismard, Devillers and Winandy (cf. Jacques Winandy, ‘Le disciple que Jé sus aimait: pour une vision é largie du problè me’, Revue biblique 105 (1998): 70–5), J. A. Caballero thinks it difficult to find any theological coherence in the gospel without the traditional identification of John; J. A. Caballero, ‘El discipulo amado en el evangelio de Juan’, Estudios Biblicos 60 (2002): 311–36. 49. See already Jn 1.17-18. 50. See Jn 2.22: ‘his disciples remembered’. 51. For example, those of Jesus (Jn 6.64; 10.6; it concerns more than a paralipsis, for the narrator is content to qualify the words of ‘mystery’ without further detail), or those of the parents of the man born blind (Jn 9.22). 52. Jn 2.21, 24-25. 53. Jn 7.37b-39; probably Jn 8.27.

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the thought or perception of a third person, but … it should justify the source of this information (that it was transmitted to him by the person in question … or that he reconstructed it by causal inferences from visible behavior).’54 From its outset, then, the Prologue of John presents itself as a work in which fact and interpretation interpenetrate. It is necessary, however, to go further. The first lines of the Prologue relate what a person by definition could not witness: what was in the beginning. The growth of knowledge does not only appear in the interpretation, but in the knowledge of the facts themselves. How could one have access to this information? Purely human means would not be enough to account for what the gospel says of itself: what is necessary are the action of factors which are hardly foreseeable, such as the divine interventions in history in the resurrection of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Such a response seems too pricey for modern rationalism: this is, without a doubt, what has pushed some contemporary exegetes to consider John a literary work which mainly uses fiction to say something theological. We should not be too quickly satisfied with this headlong rush into the literary, for it seems to conflict with the thematic of (eye)witness which structures the gospel. The Hermeneutical Dilemma: Fiction or Inspired Witness? The contemporary reader, accustomed to the critical detachment of the historical method, can only think with suspicion: he would like to be able to determine what ‘really’ took place, what ‘really’ was said, and compare this to what takes place in the gospels. Yet John seems to blur this distinction systematically through his constant literary elaborations and his equally constant claim of providing eyewitness testimony. To offer only one example, Jesus’ response to Pilate in John,55 compared to his much more laconic response in the Synoptics56, has been understood by modern exegesis57 as an addition typical of the fourth gospel’s author. Such an interpretation then places the exegete in a genuine dilemma: If I, as a twentieth-century reader influenced by the historical paradigm, think the (Johannine) phrases are not historical in the sense where the phrase ‘You say it’ is historical, the truth is that this position does not agree with the way things are presented in the gospel of John itself. The story of John relates that Jesus said

54. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, ‘Temps, mode et voix dans le ré cit’, in Oswald Ducrot and Jean-Marie Schaeffer (eds.), Nouveau dictionnaire encyclopé dique des sciences du langage (Paris: É ditions du Seuil, 1995), pp. 588–602 (here p. 597). 55. Jn 18.33-38. 56. Mt. 27.11-14. 57. See the state of the question in Sjef Van Tilborg, ‘Une lecture figurative des expressions en “Je suis” dans l’é vangile de Jean’, in Louis Panier (ed.), Ré cits et figures dans la Bible: colloque d’Urbino (Lyon: Profac-Cadir, 1999), pp. 145–77.

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A Poetic Christ all these things and not only that, but that he ‘discovered’ them. According to the focalization of the text, these lines are not ‘Johannine’ (I, the narrator and author of the book, am speaking), they are authentically the words of Jesus (Jesus himself said these words in these circumstances and said them in this way) … . But if we completely respect this focalization then we contradict two centuries of what scientific exegetical research has proposed to be the historical truth. Respecting the historical paradigm undermines the respect for the focalization itself and vice versa.58

Is not this dilemma softened by the injunctions ‘to remain in the Word’ which occur throughout the gospel? John, who insists as much on the value of his text as witness as on the fact that it is necessary to believe, claims that he himself is situated in the very logic of the life and speech – in brief, the enunciation – of what he speaks about and what he identifies as the Logos made man. Should we not admit that, in some way, the one who utters the gospel had access to the interior monologue of the incarnate Word? Traditionally, as we have mentioned, this access is linked to the fact that he leaned his ear on the heart of Jesus. Yet is this not suggested by the meta-literary propositions of the gospel? The narrator (from eyewitness testimony to the final redactor) himself has lived experience of what he recommends to his listeners: he believed, he became a ‘child of God’ and he received the wind of the Spirit which reminds him of Jesus’ words. He received the capacity of ‘doing even greater’ things and words: the monologues or long discourses of Jesus which he remembers are at once faithful and creative, identical and different. Such is the very co-penetration between Jesus the vine (and not the trunk) and his disciples the shoots (and not the branches which will be different59), which can also be seen in how the gospel text establishes a relationship between the reader and Jesus which moves beyond the dialectic of same and other. It is as if the author of this gospel, which is literally intended to be eyewitness testimony, had meditated on the mystery of Jesus Christ as the Verbum by focusing on the relation of this Verbum to the verba, the words which he utters, those which we utter about him, and finally those which he is uttering while meditating. Each story is in fact presented as written in the mode of a progressively deepening remembering. Better yet, it seems that the Holy Spirit glorifies Christ through the evangelist’s work itself: It was an admission (Saint Paul used the word epignosis) of what had always been present in Jesus but was only now being recognized. Jesus Himself had suggested it many times by His words, and even more so perhaps by His actions. But God,

58. van Tilborg, ‘Une lecture figurative’, pp. 152–3. 59. Jn 15.5: ‘I am the vine [ê ampelos, and not ho kormos, nor to premnon, nor to stelexos], you are the branches [ta klemata]’ – is not the vine both the branches and the trunk? Like everything in this section, Jesus is the body of which he is the Head.

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in a single instant, by raising Him from the dead, confirmed and manifested Him to those who believe in Him. At the resurrection, in other words, He did not become other than what He had been. But the indication He had given of what He was had always been, but which had remained hidden beneath a humanity that was exceptional while still remaining truly like our own, was now somehow transfigured and filled with His radiant presence.60

The narrator emphatically claims that he has witnessed or has heard from the mouth of the incarnate Word the facts and words which he relates. Fear before the glory of God or the risk of blasphemy does not appear within the work, as they do in the more abstract speculations of St. Augustine on the words and on the Word. At the heart of his poetics is astonishment and marvel before the Word, which is put into hazard when it assumes human language. It seems to us that the indeterminancy of the enunciative structure participates in the poetic and theological subject. It is a matter of making blow in the mind of the reader a wind which comes and goes from places she does not know.61 The Divine Word is like a mysterious breath: descriptive language is revealed to be inadequate for speaking of it. The signification of the Gospel is performed not only by the weave of the story and the thematics of its discourse, but also by the inscription of the reader herself into the text by the text. The Gospel thus proves to be a genre where signification, ‘significance’ and ‘significativity’ are mixed together. But the blurring of narrative identities is balanced by an opposite dynamic: the insistence on the fact that we are reading testimonies, and hence his constant repetitions, emphatic self-correction, understatement and heavy redundancy.62 This opacity is sufficient to ward off the risk of any confusion between the verba and the Verbum by the reader. Most exegetes shrink before such claims63 in an attempt to hold the text at a methodological distance. Many of them take refuge in the rapprochement between the assent of faith and adherence to a fictional pact. According to Sjef van

60. Bouyer, The Eternal Son, p. 212. 61. See Jn 3.8: ‘The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.’ Jn 8.14: ‘I know’, says Jesus, ‘where I have come from and where I am going’. 62. See Jn 1.6-8; 19.35; 5.32-34, and passim. 63. Some of those dedicated to historical-critical research on John have returned to this position after understaking analyses similar to those of Van Tilborg. After an utterly historical-critical career of scholarship, Thyen rejected all the hypotheses of the history of redaction and of the reconstitution of the milieu of the gospel’s production; cf. Thyen, ‘Noch einmal: Johannes 21’, pp. 147–89. Egil A. Wyller, ‘In Solomon’s Porch: A Henological Analysis of the Architectonic of the Fourth Gospel’, Studia Theologica 42 (1988): 151–67, offers suggestive analogous references to the musical pieces of Beethoven (p. 159) or of Bach (p. 165) in order to establish a chiastic plan with its centre being 10:30: ‘The Father and I are one.’ The unity of the gospel as a work of art leads him to reject any ‘redaction theory’; for

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Tilborg, the only solution for respecting both the presuppositions of historical research and the presuppositions of the work itself is ‘to read the Johannine text as if it were a historicizing story of Jesus; as if the references of the text to reality really were as stated; as if Jesus placed himself in the history of Israel just as the Johannine text says he did’.64 Armed with sophisticated references to the philosophy of fiction,65 the exegete believes that he can detect here ‘a literature which imaginarily conceives of the possible as real, and which asks the reader to follow suit. In short, the acceptance of historical presuppositions causes the reader of the Gospel of John to consider it to be the product of the activity of the imagination: the imagination of a possible reality as the true reality.’66 In this way people think that they can take refuge in the thickness of artistic mediation. Hartwig Thyen emphasizes the poetic transformation of history through its narration in order to understand the relationship between John and the beloved disciple to be that of a fictional person and his real model.67 What is being proposed here, then, is the already vintage epistemology of ‘storylike narrative’ of the Yale School. But if we take seriously the gospel’s claims to truth, can we be truly happy in a metaphysical ‘no man’s land’? ‘Yet by virtue of God’s own self-communication to us, has not the church’s self-understanding always been that it can and does make ontological truth-claims independent of believers’ moral dispositions and level of religious commitment?’68 Confidence

him, such a text can only have one author, one artist, the ‘beloved disciple’, John the Apostle, the author of both the gospel and the apocalypse (p. 167). 64. van Tilborg, ‘Une lecture figurative’, p. 153. 65. Hans Vaihinger, Der Philosophie des Als Ob: System der theoretischen, praktischen und religiö sen Fiktionen der Menschheit auf Grund eines idealistischen Positivismus: Mit einem Anhamung ü ber Kant und Nietzsche (Leipzig: Meiner, 1922); Wolfgang Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginä re: Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie (Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1991); Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 66. van Tilborg, ‘Une lecture figurative’, p. 153. 67. Thyen, ‘Die Erzä hlung’, p. 1244. The author posits a relationship between John and the beloved disciple like that of a painter with his model and the portrait which he has made. For Thyen, even if the beloved disciple explicitly appears only in Jn 13.23, he is present in Jn 1.35 as the anonymous companion of Andrew, because he should be there ‘from the beginning’ (Jn 15.27). Thyen, ‘Noch einmal’, p. 171. What is new in Jn 13.23 is his characterization as beloved. As for the anonymous disciple, it is a textual construction, easily recognizable in the cultural context in which the book appeared; Thyen, ‘Noch einmal’, p. 182. A similar focus on the properly artistic thickness of the fourth gospel can be found in Adele Reinhartz, The Word in the World: The Cosmological Tale in the Fourth Gospel (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992). 68. Mark Wallace, The Second Naï veté : Barth, Ricœ ur and the New Yale Theology (Macon: Mercer Press, 1990), p. 148, cited and translated by F. X. Amherdt, ‘L’hermé neutique de Paul Ricœ ur en dé bat’, p. 148.

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only in the coherence and authority of the chain of traditional mediations does not completely correspond to the text’s intentions. If John’s style is merely an a posteriori artifice, then it flagrantly contradicts the work’s explicit project, which is to elicit faith in a witness. The contradiction is exacerbated when such a ‘blunder’ is added to the fact that the gospel is otherwise so refined overall. If it is in fact vitally, linguistically, culturally (via the memory and all the cultural and sociological mediations which constitute the tradition) tied to the one whose words he claims to report (and precisely the words which he often invites interlocutors to ‘remain’ in), we are dealing with a real trace of Jesus’ preaching. From this perspective, the author, or at least the speaker whose performances and authority form the basis of the fourth gospel, genuinely knew and heard (from direct witnesses of) Jesus of Nazareth. In this way, his gospel continues the poetics of the astonishing words and teaching of the carpenter’s son, and thus the stylistic unity of his witness need not detract from its historicity but rather supports it. We hear here the ipsissima vox discussed in the previous chapter: ‘The Word-made-flesh spoke the language of his time. The Johannine tradition, with a special affection for this style of thought, may have been more attentive in preserving it.’69 Continuity in the ‘Mobius Strip’ of the Gospel Enunciation and Christic Enunciation For reasons at once metaphysical, literary and historical, and which must now be synthesized, the relationship of Jesus to the gospels cannot be reduced to the relationship between the subject of a book and a book which speaks about him. On the literary level, the relationship between a concrete person and the book which speaks of him is not strictly external, as if it only had to transmit the material or the history which then relates and interprets itself. There are three reasons why this is so. First, the book is the work of memory. As Louis Lavelle reminded us some time ago,70 a remembrance is not the ghostly double of a reality that is forever lost: the remembrance participates in the reality’s existence. Where, if not in remembrance, would a person become spiritualized and achieve eternal existence? Without remembrance, his immortality would not be his own, but that of another! Remembrance in itself is another form of the reality’s existence and it is endowed with privileges that the now vanished existence does not possess, most especially that of interiority: the remembrance within and close to those who remember and in this way can establish, beyond sensibility or emotion, a greater communion between someone living and someone dead than between

69. Brown, An Introduction, p. 373. The contrary and simpler opinion is argued by Dunn, Christology in the Making, pp. 30–2. It seems to us, however, undermined by more recent research from the same author. 70. Louis Lavelle, De la sainteté (Paris: Christian de Bartillat, 1993), pp. 36–40.

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two living people. As the fourth gospel teaches us, Jesus himself freely employed the benefits of memory.71 Second, the fact that the relationship between a person and the book which speaks of him is not purely external is even more true when this person himself has spent his life teaching and passing on words. There exists a mysterious continuity, a real participation, amid all the cultural mediations which separate the words deposited in the book and the words which gushed forth fully alive from his mouth ‘at that time’. We might even see such a continuity between the fleshly body of Jesus and the textual body of the New Testament in the way that the mediations of individual and collective memory, in the context of an oral and then written transmission, or as institutionalized in different functions of teaching or discernment, create a body, a social body, a mystical body which is the Church. Third, the personal resonance of a memory, the sustained echo of original words, the relationship between a book and a person of whom it speaks, becomes more intrinsic if this Person is presented – in the unique case of Jesus – as the very Word of God. For just as we cannot think the word without saying it, so in the same way, if Jesus is the very Intellect and the Word of the Creator from whom all created intellects have received their capacities for knowing and speaking, then we cannot discuss him in a purely and simply external way. More generally, if the words of Jesus are those of the Word – as the evangelist claims – then they rightly transcend the distinction between the universe of discourse and the real universe (a distinction which is already problematic on the level of concrete reality, for what would a ‘real’ universe without words be for humanity?). Things and words, events and stories, acts and languages, participate in the Gospel whose very logic transcends the superficial opposition between ‘language’ and ‘reality’: the Logos comes to recapture everything created. Finally, if Jesus is who he claims to be, or who we say he is, then the same holds true of speech about Jesus as for all speech about speech: it is always far preceded by its object, by what calls it forth! The process of enunciation in the gospels has kept a trace of the incarnate Word’s capacity to be at once internal and external to every thought and every word about it. The admirable and pious rhetoric of the French School of Spirituality rests on this great mysticism of the Word, and it described Jesus not only as the object intended by faith but as the true atmosphere, the very condition of the believer’s life. On the metaphysical level, the gospels participate in the ‘image’ status of a work of art, and they do so to a higher or better degree than the rest of the Bible. The ways in which the image differs from what it represents is not only negative, but also positive72: the interplay of the image is that what can only be

71. See Jn 2.22; 14.23, 29; 16.4, 12-15. 72. We can refer here to Gadamer’s distinction between ‘image’ and ‘copy’. His reflections on the work of art gives us ample justification for according such a status to the biblical texts. He reminds us that art attempts to free the truth of the thing represented by fulfilling

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indirectly perceived becomes manifested within it, becomes directly perceived, as the self-manifestation of that which produces the image. It allows one to move beyond mere perception inasmuch as it renders something of the truth of what is perceived, of what the perceived image says about the truth of the thing. The ‘increase in being’ of a model is not, however, created ex nihilo. What the artistic genius (or the inspired writer in the case of the gospels) portrays in a living relation with the truth is not pure invention or something externally added. ‘Essential to an emanation is that which emanates in an overflow. What it flows from does not thereby become less. The development of this concept by Neoplatonic philosophy, which uses it to get beyond Greek substance ontology, is the basis of the positive ontological status of the picture.’73 In other words, when the model presents itself through an image, which certainly occurs in the Gospel’s verba, this does not necessarily entail that its manifestation is tied to this or that representation: ‘It can also present itself as what it is in other ways. But if it presents itself in this way, this is no longer an incidental event but belongs to its very being.’74 For those plunged into the realm of multiplicity – which is the case for every person – the manifestation of the One in the many, which is only possible a priori, becomes necessary a posteriori. Metaphysically establishing the logic of fittingness, a concern throughout this work, can now be done in a different way. In the historical domain, as a result, one can attempt to distinguish between what Jesus was, did and said and what we say that he was, did and said. The believer even should do this, for the incarnation is real. But one cannot separate them, or can only do so under penalty of subscribing to a rationalist prejudice according to which the reconstructed history would be ‘truer’ than the history effectively carried by the culture which it engendered.75 We only have real access to Jesus’ speech through the mediation of the speech which speaks it – it is only given as true by its faithfulness to the original.

(in the evangelical sense of the term) its phenomenality accessible to perception: it does not produce ‘copies’ (Abbildungen) but ‘images’ (Bilder). With the copy as copy, every difference with the model is an imperfection: it is regulated by an ideal of signaletic transparency. The image, by contrast, possesses a certain intransitivity, an ontological weight which gives it a participation in the reality which it makes present. The image shares in the ontological radiance of what it images. The proper being of the image is translated by the closure of the work of art: it is not necessary to know the original in order to know the meaning of its artistic manifestation. It is in and through the contemplation of the work that there is manifested the truth which it attests. 73. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G Marshall; New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 140. 74. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 140. 75. See É mile Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste (Tournai-Paris, Casterman, 1962), p. 117.

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The impossibility of separating the poetic gospel and poetic Christology has left traces in the very language of the original Christian communities. In the previous chapter we discussed the case of the logos. Rhema, which picks up the semantic spectrum of the Hebrew dabar, is a similar case. In many passages, ta rhemata (tou Christou) designates not only the ‘words’ and ‘acts’ of Jesus, but also words about Jesus. ‘Faith comes from hearing, hearing happens through the speech [from the subject] of Christ [dia rhematos Christou]76.’ The genitive can be objective or subjective, and in this way the rhema designates, in the logic of a Christian theology of speech, both the container and the content, both the speech of Jesus and speech about Jesus. This could include, then, the history of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the catechetical teaching of the first Christian preachers, or early Christian life itself.77 The total structure of the enunciation of the Gospel finally resembles a Mobius strip, the famous geometric figure whose exterior is its interior.78 The evangelist gives voice to Jesus in the same way that any other narrator (‘exterior’ to the story) does to one of its characters (‘interior’ to the story). Nevertheless, the evangelist puts into words only what apostolic tradition, and finally Jesus as its source, has given him to say and write. This movement culminates in the Prologue of John (and perhaps in that of Luke), which recognizes the Logos in Jesus, but it is already outlined in the theology of words we find in the Synoptic stories. For example, we can perceive distant echoes (or warning sounds) of John’s Prologue in the Greek text of Jesus’ visit to Nazareth in Luke 4, which was discussed briefly in the previous chapter.79 Is it necessary to infer that the theological retrospective of John is nourished by remembrances of the life of Jesus such as the visit to Nazareth,80 or conversely, to see in the story of Luke a mise en abyme of the activity of the first Christian preachers?

76. Rom 10.17-18. 77. See Acts 10.37. 78. A ‘Mö bius strip’ (from the name of its inventor in 1858, the German mathematician Auguste Mö bius, born in 1870 and died in 1868) is a surface obtained by stitching together the two final points of a rectangular strip with a half turn, or the entire topological equivalent. We create a Mö bius strip by making a lengthwise segment permanently and evenly turn around a circle with a rotation of an uneven amount of turns. 79. The narrative framing of the scene is the same: Jesus has come to his own who do not recognize him (see Lk. 4.16; Jn 1.11); the narrative motifs such as the conflict of the darkness and the light, of blindness and sight, of expressions such as ‘begin to speak’, ‘announce’ and ‘witness’, are equally echoed in these two texts. 80. A different Johannine text insists: ‘We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life – this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us’ (1 Jn 1.1-2).

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Likewise, Matthew does not hesitate to place on Jesus’ lips his own poetic art: intellexistis haec omnia dicunt ei etiam ait illis ideo omnis scriba doctus in regno caelorum similis est homini patri familias qui profert de thesauro suo nova et vetera. ‘Have you understood all this?’ They answered, ‘Yes.’ And he said to them, ‘Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.’81

On the diegetic level, Jesus’ saying about the scribe describes what he himself comes to do in the great parabolic discourse that concludes it: he draws from his treasure what is new and what is old by filling his parables with allusions to ancient biblical stories. On the meta-diegetic level, Matthew places on Jesus’ lips the central maxim of his own poetic style: speaking of the Kingdom of Heaven means combining his own actualized interpretations82 with the communal memory concerning Jesus’ teaching. This is how it comes to be done. According to the order of the reception of the text (hearing it or reading it), the redactor’s discourse inserts and Jesus’ discourse is inserted. Yet according to the order of production (or composition), Jesus’ discourse takes priority. Matthew clearly places on Jesus’ lips the set of parables and the interpretations which follow them. In reality, Jesus offers his comparison of the converted scribe and the master of the household after asking the disciples if they have understood.83 And having received their affirmative response, we could thus gloss the logical relation between the short catechetical dialogue and the micro-parable which follows it in this way: If you have understood my words well, you yourselves will be capable of doing it in the same way, of drawing from your own treasure, from now on enriched by my own words [those becoming “the old” in this sense] from the new [your own parables] and from the old [the group of ancient Scriptures and the words which I have left you].

These verses from Matthew resonate outward when he announces that every competent disciple of Jesus will be capable of the same linguistic performances as the Master. The believing memory, whether in the ‘Johannine’ or the ‘Synoptic’ 81. Mt. 13.51-52. 82. For example, that of the parable of the tares (Mt. 13.36-43), where the allegory serves an eschatological point. 83. As he does throughout the parables; see Mt. 13.13, 19, 23.

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tradition, has remembered that Jesus bequeathed to the apostles a genuine competence at least as equal to his set of performances. This is the realization à la lettre of Jesus’ promise that John formulated so clearly before identifying Jesus’ words as the works of the Father in him84: ‘amen amen dico vobis qui credit in me opera quae ego facio et ipse faciet’; ‘Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.’85 Even greater! The disciple does so much more than merely parrot Christ’s words but says in them something greater. The Christian tradition explains this phenomenon by the gift of the Holy Spirit who comes not only to illuminate remembrances of Jesus’ ministry but to deepen and develop his message. In John, Jesus immediately offers the theological reason for the increased fecundity of his words in his disciples: his proximity with the Father to which he will return, now adorned with all the merits of being the redeemer, after his death.86 More precisely, it seems that the interlocking of Jesus’ words and those of his disciples have their properly theological source in the combination of the works of the Father and the words of Jesus: manifestavi nomen tuum hominibus quos dedisti mihi de mundo tui erant et mihi eos dedisti et sermonem tuum servaverunt nunc cognoverunt quia omnia quae dedisti mihi abs te sunt quia verba quae dedisti mihi dedi eis et ipsi acceperunt et cognoverunt vere quia a te exivi et crediderunt quia tu me misisti. I have made your name know to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you have given to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me.87

84. Jn 14.10: ‘The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works.’ See the section ‘Jesus Identifies His Acts and His Words’ in the previous chapter. 85. Jn 14.12. 86. Jn 14.12b-14: ‘The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.’ Reunited with the Father in the love of the Spirit, the Son will do what his disciples ask of him. 87. Jn 17.6-8.

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Here Jesus establishes an equivalence between himself and the words that he has said: the words that he has said just before, which we read in the text of the gospel (‘for the words that you have given to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you’88), echo in the words of his disciples: ‘Yes, now you are speaking plainly, not in any figure of speech! Now we know that you know all things, and do not need to have anyone question you; by this we believed that you came from God.’89 A double identity is suggested here: between Jesus and a gift from God – Jesus as the mystical Body – and between Jesus and the language which God gave to him (rhemata) – Jesus as the Logos. In these unusual verses, the authority of enunciation is coupled with what is enunciated, and in doing so bends the structure of enunciation into a Mobius strip whose underside is the topside just as the Father and Son are one, and just as the interlocutors of Jesus are one, and one with him and with the Father. By depending so heavily on Christic enunciation, Christian enunciation approaches the mystery of the language which exists in God himself. Just as the ‘textual dimension’ rests on a foundation intersected by the text and the world, the gospel enunciation is based on a foundation intersected by the divine Logos and human language. Thus if we believe that God, through his incarnation, entered into physical contact with human language – this certainty of faith is both a cause and an effect of the poetic gospel – can we not hope that the person, the life and the work of God illuminates in turn the experiences we have in and of language? The second part of this chapter will follow this hypothesis regarding the presence of meaning in the sign, and of the enigmatic fecundity of writing.

A Christological Linguistics? We have started to use the words ‘to believe’ and ‘to hope’. The intelligible light which radiates from the encounter of the Gospel and reflection upon language comes in the form of the different examples of fittingness put into play by the eyes of faith. Before describing them more fully in the case of the sign and more particularly of writing, it is worth insisting on their a posteriori character. We think that perhaps some recent research in the field has not sufficiently addressed this point. Methodological Digression with Franç ois Martin We think in particular of the productive test case Franç ois Martin performed regarding the inspiration of the Scriptures which showed how one might describe the Trinitarian rhythm of the Christian experience of the book. ‘To deal with inspired Scripture’, he claims, ‘requires the articulation of the forms

88. Jn 17.8. 89. Jn 16.30.

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and structure of the utterance which one finds in the Biblical text.’90 Drawing on linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis and sociology, Martin offers a fascinating account of the kinds of enunciation which underlie a canonical work like the Bible. He concludes by seeing the Holy Spirit at the heart of the ‘symbolic function’ which constitutes the human subject and which makes social relationship possible. He even seems to think that the dialectic of presence and absence inherent in all discourse calls out for the dogma of the incarnation: nostalgia for the living encounter of the body observed by psychoanalysis91 coincides with the incarnate Word found by the theologian at the source or the horizon of enunciation.92 It is impossible to give a brief account of the richness of his work, and so it is his method that we will explore. Before reaching his conclusions, Martin first redefines a number of current givens in reflection upon language (for example,

90. Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, p. 110. 91. ‘Our reflection can lead us further – towards the thing outside-of-discourse that the linguists call the “referent” and which the strictly observant semioticists a priori exclude from their reflections. This “thing-outside-of-discourse” that we point to on the horizon of discourse is not purely the same as the referent of the linguists … . It … is a matter of what constitutes or holds together the very act of enunciation: a Thing which – while not being itself a discourse – is below or above the enunciation. A Thing which is best represented by figures, that are constitutive of the letter. Discourse – and supremely literary discourse – is the ever repeated attempt to trigger a return of … that which can only be figured: to use the figure as a detour hastening the return of something which will never be the Thing, but always the penultimate stop before the Thing: the knot of flesh, imbued with significance, which is the body awakened to language and to perception by the presence of another speaking body. Hence, the “outside-of-discourse” that aims at signification is the body of the subject of enunciation, or rather the subject of speech as the body.’ Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, pp. 336–7. 92. ‘A kind of principle … retrospectively structures the composition of the entire Christian Bible: the acts of writing and the resulting text, wherever they might be situated in the redaction process of the Book, rest on the fundamental articulation of absence and presence, of anticipation and arrival, of promise and fulfilment, of letter and the body, of writing and encounter. Only the second writing [the New Testament], which witnesses to the advent of Christ, can explain this principle. Furthermore, the second collection seems to be written with the essential aim of arranging all ancient and new writing around this center – a gaping absence at the heart of the bipartite Book – which indicates its radical limit: the living encounter with the presence.’ Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, pp. 307–8.

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language,93 text,94 writings95 or writing96). He must find an authority which he calls the ‘letter’, ‘the dimension of discourse to which is entrusted the enunciative force of texts’,97 whose ontological and epistemological status at the crossroads of the human psyche and of the poetics of knowing, of phenomenology and theology, may remind us of the non-teleological finality of Kantian aesthetics, of the verbum interius in the metaphysics of knowledge, of ‘character’ or of the res et sacramentum of classical sacramentology.98 Martin thus arrives at beautiful formulations which knead together the letter and the flesh, Christ and the book, and which are highly suggestive for a Christian: the New Testament, by fulfilling

93. For Martin, language is as much a system (structured by the analysis of the sign as signifier and signified) as a process which – beyond the sign – makes discourse possible; Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, p. 108. For him, the distinction between communication and utterance precedes the distinction between the written and the oral. Indeed, the text merely enacts this distinction by enabling the disjunction of discourse and communication. This is why it is necessary to replace the distinction between language and writing – which neglects the fact that oral literatures do exist – with a distinction between communication and the ‘force of enunciation’ which drives the effort of communicating. 94. ‘We call a text the manifested state of signification’; the text is the ‘fruit of the operation of semiosis’, which consists, according to Hjelmslev, in the union of two forms, the ‘form of content’ (the immanence of the text) and the ‘form of expression’ (the manifestation of the text) in the act of speaking; Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, p. 108. 95. Writing, insofar as it is the ‘trace of the letter, the work of the “belles lettres,” is much more than merely that which has been put into writing’; every society have some “writing” at its disposal, even if some of them ignore the technique of writing; the spark of flint is “the oldest work of writing”’. Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, p. 108. 96. Writing has simply become ‘the most appropriate means to transmit communication [s]ince the Sumerians/Akkadians’. Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, p. 109. 97. Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, p. 108. 98. Manifested in oral or in written words, as well as in the wood to be carved or on the canvas to be painted, the ‘letter’ pervades every work of art. It is the force which drives the works of literature. Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, p. 108. The letter does not share so much in the ‘manifestation’ as in the ‘immanence’ of discourse: ‘independent of its material instantiation’ (ibid.), the letter ‘receives existence and vigor not from being put into writing but from being put into work’ (p. 105). As it ‘supports the reading of every literary work notwithstanding the spatio-temporal circumstances of its writing’, the letter, in the biblical corpus, ‘essentially appears (but certainly not exclusively) in the immanence of the Old Testament Scriptures’ (p. 114). In brief, the ‘letter’ is ‘the place where, in the immanence of discourse, the form of expression (especially expression of the content) links the enunciated to the enunciation, so well that the enunciated sounds as if it were the very enunciation. Thus, like a chemical precipitate of discourse and the capacity to speak, the letter appears as the basic place where one can think of the relation between text and subject of enunciation, and between the inspired Scriptures and the speaking subject.’ Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, p. 110.

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the types of the Old, manifests and crosses a trajectory always and already latent from the ‘letter’ to the body. By doing so it interprets the promise of the letter, not only the becoming which animates it, but above all the arrival that it indicates and whose certainty has been revealed. It is an arrival which is fulfilled by the return of the word towards the body of the subject, when the figures of the letter give place to presence, when the covenant of the flesh and of the word is sealed, and which is celebrated in the wedding of the Spouse with the Bridegroom.99

If his conclusions illuminate a question accessible to everyone (how should we understand ‘the original moment on which the human capacity to speak depends and whose place no author, hearing or reader can occupy’), the path which leads there is marked by (faith in) revelation. In a lengthy review of Martin’s book, É tienne Nodet has rightly highlighted the work’s apologetic aim: ‘We note a certain apologetic identification between Catholicism and genuine humanity: Protestants are torn between fundamentalism and subjectivism as they lack a theory of tradition, and unbelievers are simply blind. This is a perfectly legitimate Christian opinion, but … it is perhaps unintentional, for it is never declared as such even though the work contains explicitly theological remarks.’100 This intention in itself is not a defect: Is not the apologetic identification of genuine humanity with Catholicism (understood as integral Christianity) inherent in a theological speech which remains faithful to its Object?101 One can, however, regret its unintentional character, especially as Martin’s work constantly relies on the human sciences in order to show the rationality of dogma. Casting his work in terms of fittingness would help facilitate reading it: it is with the eyes of faith that he mobilizes and reorients various conclusions from the human sciences for his own ends.102 The Bible and secular literature, dogmatic theology and the

99. Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, p. 341. 100. É tienne Nodet, ‘De l’inspiration de l’É criture’, Revue Biblique 104 (1997): 237–74 (here pp. 260–1). The italics are ours. 101. The disciple of Christ is a member of a renewed humanity in the truth of the divine plan. See the Vatican II document Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World ‘Gaudium et Spes’ (1965), § 22: ‘The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.’ 102. Dubbing the literary work the epitome of language depends on making Scripture the epitome of literature. Note that the theorists of the ‘espace littté raire’ already thought of it by analogy with the Bible! Conversely, in the context of a reflection on the inspiration of the Scriptures, adopting literary works ‘as the best examples of what human speech is about’, insofar as they ‘call into question the prejudice according to which language is primarily

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human sciences reciprocally illuminate each other: Jesus is the form because he is the content, as Balthasar already anticipated.103 The Gospel itself causes us to understand this coincidence, as noted in the first section of this chapter: the incarnate Word is not part of an ensemble, but is why the ensemble makes sense. This point clarified, we can further Martin’s work by explicitly beginning from the mystery of Christ as depicted in the New Testament. Following the ‘retroactive reference to Jesus Christ’, Eberhard Jü ngel has developed ‘the ontological significance of Christological talk on the death of God’,104 we will now attempt to clarify the semiological meaning of Christological discourse on the death (and resurrection) of Jesus. The New Testament as Special Practice of Signs The New Testament is larded with moments where the presence of languagemeaning fits into Christ’s mission. These instances of fittingness are implied by the narration or rhetoric of the witnesses to Jesus, the echoes of whose own pedagogy we have mentioned when exploring the uniqueness of the Gospel in its biblical poetics. The pedagogy of Jesus Christ as practice of the sign105 Jesus often uses non-linguistic signs. Not only does Christ teach in the form of symbolic acts, as did the ancient prophets, but at the Last Supper, for example, he takes up ritual symbols and places his own future into the world of signs. Jesus’

designed to allow communication between human beings’; Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, p. 107. Does this not effectively amount to granting it a theological status?Likewise, Martin finds in the letter a natural analogue in linguistic anthropology of the revelatory function of the incarnate Word in dogmatic theology. But obviously the dogma of the incarnation of the Word had inspired his thought since the beginning. Eventually, as a theologian, he discovers in Christ the paradigm of all language – but did he not, as a Christian, presuppose it from the outset? Indeed, the fact that God speaks and that God ‘has’ a Word cannot be proven on the natural level. 103. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1, Seeing the Form (trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis; San Franscisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), pp. 28–32. 104. Eberhard Jü ngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism (trans. Darrell L. Guder; London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 199–225. 105. According to St. Thomas, the work of Jesus Christ was first a manifestation which then had to pass into speech. ‘The physical presence of a person, even be it that of Christ, is not enough to enlighten our mind. Our thoughts are incommunicable. Locutio exterior quae fit per vocem est nobis necessaria propter obstaculum corporis. Only language crosses this corporeal obstacle; its mediation is indispensable for communicating the truth to the mind of a person.’ Bernard Montagnes, ‘La parole de Dieu dans la cré ation’, Revue Thomiste

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teaching is not only a new message or set of doctrines but is also made up of protocols of signification into which one must enter and remain. As we have seen, his action on linguistic signs, at the summit of the semiological pyramid, is even more remarkable. The oral sign comes first. In his words Jesus Christ unites authority and reticence through the varied pedagogy of maš al. Many words attributed to Jesus only make sense when we presuppose that the one who utters them is God.106 When he utters the divine tautology of Exod. 3.14 in the first person, he shifts the ineffable into its proper union with God: to those who hear, he proposes a path to the inside of the divine tautology. Jesus does not infringe on the mystery of what later theology will call subsistent relations in God when he reveals them; he does not break the impenetrable circle of the Word of God in the ‘I am who I am’. On the one hand, ‘No one comes to the Father except through me’ (Jn 14.6), and yet on the other, ‘No one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father’ (Jn 6.65). He transfixes all the attention of his interlocutors and intends to occupy the whole field of their action: ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life.’ (Jn 14.6)107 In this way, the gospel completely unifies the presence of meaning in these propositions and the presence of God. Christ even restyles the written sign. In Mallarmé an terms, one could say that he ‘compensates for’ (‘ré munè re’) the defects.108 In his pronouncement on the written Law or writing itself, Jesus seems to advocate for a kind of surpassing of writing through passing through the interior of writing. The only time we see him writing is when he writes to draw his interlocutors away from being transfixed on writing by reminding them of its condition as an artefact and its relativity to living humanity. It is worth exploring this episode a bit more.

54:2 (1954): 222–30 (here pp. 226–7). The author cites ST 1, 107, 1 ad 2: ‘External speech, made by the voice, is a necessity for us on account of the obstacle of the body.’ 106. John is very explicit: ‘The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works’ (Jn 14.10) The same affirmation is found in Jn 12.49-50: ‘on the last day the word that I have spoken will serve as judge, for I have not spoken on my own, but the Father who has sent me has himself given me a commandment about what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I speak, therefore, I speak just as the Father has told me.’ 107. ‘The movement of the Son’s self forgetfulness cannot dissipate Jesus-Christological discourse. On the contrary, for it is in him and with him, but not without him, that we can move towards God and speak of him as is necessary. Otherwise the Johannine prolixity in this matter is left unexplained. It is for this very reason that the criticism of anthropocentrism made of the Jesus-Christology of the NT does not worry the exegete in me, for I find it external to the discourse that it criticizes and to the one-way trip that the NT proposes’. Aletti, Jé sus-Christ, pp. 269–70; our italics. 108. If writing can symbolize the immutability and the eternity of God, it can also prefigure the rigidity and stiffness of death; if writing can serve tradition by alleviating the memory of weights too heavy to bear, it can also encourage forgetfulness and numbness of heart.

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At the moment when he is asked to condemn the adulterous woman in the name of the Law, ‘Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground … and once again he bent down and wrote on the ground.’109 This gesture has been written about extensively since the first generation of Christians. Most often it was a question of what Christ wrote. Traditionally, it was thought that Jesus wrote a passage from Jeremiah 22, either verse 29 according to the Vulgate – terra terra, audi, scribe iustum virum sterilem – or verse 30 according to the Jerusalem Bible: ‘Thus says the Lord: Record this man as childless, a man who shall not succeed in his days; for none of his offspring shall succeed in sitting on the throne of David, and ruling again in Judah’, or even better, that he writes the sentence he then pronounces: ‘qui sine peccato est vestrum primus in illam lapidem mittat’. Contemporary exegetes have given some attention to this issue as well. In their comment on this passage, Marie-Emile Boismard and Arnaud Lamouille propose Jer. 17.13-15: O hope of Israel! O Lord! All who forsake you shall be put to shame, those who turn away from you shall be recorded in the underworld, for they have forsaken the fountain of living water, the Lord. Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved; for you are my praise. See how they say to me, ‘Where is the word of the Lord? Let it come!’

By forsaking the Law of God, the people of Israel have committed a graver sin; the woman is no more adulterous than the people.110 Thomas Aquinas summarizes

109. Jn 8.6, 8. The origin of the story seems difficult to establish for the textual criticism that takes the innocence of the woman to be what is at stake. This pericope is absent in the oldest Greek manuscripts and it is unknown to Tertullian and Cyprian. We find it in some ancient Greek manuscripts: the Codex Bezae, (sixth century), ms D, in the good Latin ms (Vulgate, fourth century: Jerome claims to have read it in many Greek and Latin mss.). The Greek Fathers are largely ignorant of it; certain mss. place it after Lk. 21.38, or move it to Jn 7.36. Its text contains an exceptional number of variations. In fact, it includes many Lucan traits (see Jn 8.1-2//Lk. 21.27-38; and Jn 8.3-11//Lk. 6.6-11) but also does not lack Johannine ones (elegon + present participle) which mark its purpose (8.11//5.14). However, the textual variations render problematic every conclusion established by stylistic analysis. Without describing its literary features, the narratological clues or the theological ideas which allow for the episode’s inclusion in the plot of John, we will content ourselves with a general remark: ‘Its narrative allure offers a good visual aid on law and sin, on evil and moral judgment. It helps us by not leaving it at overly abstract and theoretical considerations. Perhaps this is the reason why it was inserted here.’ Simoë ns, Selon Jean, vol. 2, Une interpré tation, p. 362. 110. Marie-É mile Boismard and Arnaud Lamouille, L’é vangile de Jean (Paris: Cerf, 1977), pp. 215–17, and Ulrich Becker, Jesus und die Ehebrecherin: Untersuchungen zur Textund Uberlieferungsgeschichte von John 7:53-8, 11 (Berlin: Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, 28, 1963).

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the hypotheses offered in the tradition that preceded him (Jesus writes the judgement that he will then read, or a biblical verse which speaks of God’s mercy, etc.), before adopting a system full of allegorical explanations of Jesus’ gesture. His bending down symbolizes the humility of his incarnation, the loose dirt and the gentleness of the new law in opposition to the hardness of the ancient tablets of stone.111 His finger symbolizes the finesse of his discernment: because of the suppleness of this digit, it is a symbol of discretion. It is also an allusion to Dan. 5.5: ‘Immediately the fingers of a human appeared and began writing on the plaster of the wall of the royal palace, next to the lampstand. The king was watching the hand as it wrote.’ The fact that he writes symbolizes his authority. According to Thomas, Jesus resumes his gesture after delivering his sentence so as to show the firmness of his pronouncement, so as to show them that they are unworthy of being regarded by him (!), and so as to leave them a way out, all shame having been removed (it is not ironic). Thomas Aquinas grasped the scene’s semiotic concern in a highly remarkable way: the second instance of fittingness that he finds in Jesus writing in the dirt is that it permits him to show that he had come to make signs upon the earth, ‘qui enim scribit signa facit. Scribere ergo in terra est signa facere’.112 But he shifts the questioning from the ‘what’ to the ‘why’. He is not interested in the historical referent of what Jesus writes – the evangelist does not reveal it – but in the circumstances of the gesture of writing itself.113 For our part, after the Derridean denunciation of ‘logocentrism’, we will gladly extend the interpretation in this way: through the act of writing, Jesus undertakes the pedagogy of writing inherent to Scripture, which can certainly be a symbol of the eternity and immutability of God, but also a prefiguration of the inflexibility of death. By staging this scene, the evangelist says what the redactors of the Torah say on the level of textuality itself through weightier methods like integral repetition, with optional variants of stories, descriptions and lists.114

111. According to Saint Augustine, for example, the mention of dirt shows his tempters on which side they have been placed in the judgement of God (see a contrario Lk. 10.20: ‘Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.’) Or further, the old law was written in stone, which is synonymous with hardness (Heb. 10.28: ‘Anyone who has violated the law of Moses dies without mercy “on the testimony of two or three witnesses”’), whereas the soft dirt symbolizes the gentleness of the new law. 112. See Aquinas, In Io, VIII, 4, § 1131. 113. Aquinas, In Io, VIII, 4, § 1131. 114. For example, in Exodus 25 to 30, the schema ‘revelation-transmission-realization’ gives the final redactor the opportunity for a triple description of the sanctuary of the Lord. At the end of the sequence, the comment, ‘The Israelites had done all of the work just as the Lord had commanded Moses’ (Ex. 39.42-43), takes on meta-literary connotations: the reader or listener, in the space of the imagination or of the scroll when it is read or spoken, also has the experience of faithful obedience (ob-audientia). In the poetry of

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By not giving his disciples space in which to become mesmerized by writing, Christ brings together three essential terms: poetic concern, the meaning of the human person and the reception of the Holy Spirit. Through his gesture Jesus highlights the poetic condition of writing. Scripture as writing is an ‘earth’, a place of experience before it is a collection of applicable instructions. Regardless of their faithfulness to the letter of the Law, about which there is much to discuss, feminist readings have not failed, for example, rightly to highlight that in this whole affair there is no issue of the man involved and whether he should be punished according to Law.115 It is not clear that the enemies of the adulterous women are actually reading the Word of God when they think themselves able to apply it to her in the deadliest of ways. By his words Jesus adds consideration of the woman as a living person: ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her!’116 Jesus defuses the violence by reminding the enunciators of the Law who they are. He refuses the binary arithmetic of the all-too-human justice that his interlocutors would like to exact on the woman from the Law of Moses (one action, one law which rewards or punishes). He adds a question regarding a third term which establishes the relationship between the first two: the judge himself. He implicates the judge in the judgement: he appeals to the judge’s understanding (and personal experience) of reform, of the always open possibility of repentance. Jesus thus teaches that understanding the Word of God in a written text is not simply a matter of perceiving its signification, but also of accepting its significance.117 It is necessary not only to know or be acquainted with Scripture, but also to believe it.

revelation, the repetitions and lists of Scripture have as their primary function the creation of the space of an experience. On the repetition of this pedagogy by the Johannine Jesus, see Sacra Pagina, p. 254. 115. See Lev. 20.10; Deut. 22.22-24. 116. Jn 8.7b. 117. According to Austin, for our verificationist mentalities the truth of speech is generally experienced as a certain ‘correspondence to facts’. There will always be many features of speech: the locution itself, that to which it is related (its grammar, signification, referent) and the illocution-perlocution (with all the strategies of utterance that it allows). More generally, human knowledge is made of experience, understanding, judgement and decision; see Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), pp. 13–20. The same goes for theology: ‘Since philosophy describes the sign according to its characteristic features as sensible, meaningful, historical, and universal, theology adds another characteristic which closes the hermeneutical circle: significativity. To say that the sign is significant is to see it in relation to life. The person will be quicker in deciding the message expressed by the sign and the sign will better signify the reality that transcends it, and, additionally, it can give meaning to life by moving beyond contradiction.’ Rino Fisichella, La Ré vé lation: La ré vé lation et sa cré dibilité : Essai de thé ologie fondamentale (Paris-Montré al: Bellarmin, Cerf, 1989), p. 198.

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Jesus appears here at the summit of the worldly experience of Israel’s prophets: Was it not already paradoxical that prophetic books were written when the prophets were primarily men of spoken words? The words which Jesus pronounces are less a set of contents signified in words than the place of an experience. These oral words do not abolish the written law. Rather they accomplish it through revealing in which way and under what conditions the law is the Law: ‘This is the judgment’,118 the mystical teaching which follows this episode seems to say.119 However, the Christic practice of the sign and of words is not detached from the literary strategies of the New Testament authors. The Literary Strategies of the New Testament Authors One could describe what comes before as poetic reverberations of the kerygma. Because the ordinary vector for reaching people are words, the ‘supernatural’ mystery of the resurrection, a ‘fact which is realized by its announcement’,120 cannot remain distant from the ‘natural’ enigma of signification. On the anthropological level, the kerygma carries human language to the (non)place which has always annihilated the hope for the richness of meaning: death. The act of faith in the resurrected Christ encourages the act of trust in language. On the psychological level, the kerygma, and the life of Jesus Christ more generally, affirms the quiet triumph of meaning over the absurd and provides a meta-story which can frame all the little stories in which the experiences of life take place. By showing that the distance between God and humanity, between life and death, has been peacefully crossed, the proclamation of the Paschal mystery creates the possibility of meaning victoriously crossing the signifier. We cannot, of course, ignore the cross’ tragic aspect. However, making it the final word of the Christian experience would be, well, hardly Christian. Is not what is essential in the Christian life the attempt to ‘understand that we draw Life from the power of the resurrection regardless of the poverty of our understanding of it and of our being moved by it … understanding that the resurrection of Christ from the dead is not a question but an answer which has been given to us’?121

118. See Jn 3.19. 119. Jn 8.13-58. 120. The admirable formula of Heinrich Schlier, La Ré surrection de Jé sus (trans. M. Benzerath; Mulhouse-Paris-Tournai: Salvator-Casterman, 1969), which emphasizes how much the Church has never spoken apart from the resurrection of Jesus, created a consensus among Catholic exegetes. The resurrection is a ‘precise historical fact [Ereignis] which, being accomplished, passes on to human experience and passes into the realm of human language … . It is a fact [Geschehen] which is announced by being accomplished; Schlier, La Ré surrection de Jé sus, p. 19. See Acts 10.36: ‘that message spread throughout Judea’. 121. Karl Barth, ‘The Christian in Society’, in idem, The Word of God and Theology (trans. Amy Marga; London: T&T Clark, 2011), pp. 31–69 (here p. 50). See also David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 188 and 189; pp. 208–10: the Christian faith implies a rhetoric of

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It is not surprising, then, that the poetics of the New Testament connects the presence of meaning and resurrection: spirant resurrectionem.122 Throughout the story of Jesus’ ministry, we see the Scriptures being fulfilled in the actsigns and the words which ceaselessly generate astonishment and the quest for meaning: John thematizes the ‘signs’ that he makes converge on the sign of the cross. There is no infinite regression, however: the body of Christ is the starting point (historically and narratively) and the destination (existential and mystical). From this body there gushes forth meaningful actions and words. Thus we read of Jesus handing over the Sign par excellence, his body, the divine dwelling, to those who ask for another sign to explain the sign he offered when overturning the merchants’ tables in the Temple. This leads us to the reciprocal integration of Jesus and the book, of grace and the text. The Reciprocal Integration of Jesus and the Book, of Grace and the Text The New Testament authors finally place Jesus Christ at the centre of a matrix of meaning, which in its original culture was Scripture.123 In the Book of Revelation which closes the book, Jesus is not only the principal subject of the book,124 but also its author125 and reader126 par excellence. The reciprocal integration of Jesus and the Book has its corollary in the reception of the word and the gift of grace (or even of glory). It is manifested, for example, in the meta-literary transpositions of the Transfiguration127 which Paul invokes

peace. Against the classical scenario of sacrifice which creates peace by violently destroying the victim, Christ is resurrected: destruction is surpassed. Christ transcends the violent rupture between being and non-being, God and creation. The Resurrection means that the distance between God and humanity is peaceful. Instead of an impenetrable abyss or a sublime restlessness, Christian speech depends upon a crossed distance, a conjunction of distance and intimacy. 122. Barth, ‘The Christian in Society’, p. 44. 123. The final authors of the NT integrate stories about Jesus as such into the rule of faith for every one of his future disciples. Thus 2 Peter insists on the necessity of apostolic witness for having access to knowledge of Jesus. Cf. Aletti, Jé sus Christ, pp. 114 and 115 and p. 266. The same could be said of Matthew’s final verses, which attempt to identify Jesus’ teaching with the whole preceding book. The Fathers simply draw out the consequences of this poetics when they teach that ignoratio scripturarum est ignoratio Christi. 124. Ps. 40.9; Heb. 10.7: ‘in the scroll of the book it is written of me’. 125. In Revelation, John must write not because of an angel (Rev. 19.9), but because Christ asks him to write what he has seen. Christ told him what he should write to the seven churches (Rev. 1.11, 19; 2.1, 8, 12, 17, 18; 3.1, 7, 12, 14), and concludes by sealing the book with his own authority (Rev. 22.18). 126. Rev. 5.9: ‘You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slaughtered’. 127. In the Synoptic narration, this event appears in the second period of Jesus’ life: after the ‘Galilean spring’ which culminates in the Messianic proclamation of Peter in

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when continuing the biblical dialectic of the visible and readable. Paul opposes those who demand written proofs and guarantees of his authority by reworking the theme of the glory of Moses.128 ‘Glory’ is henceforth the deep understanding of the Scriptural texts; ignorance of the Scriptures is the veil which shields one from being blown away.129 We are, however, far from any notion of gnosis: glory does not only consist in reading well, but also in living well: the Transfiguration becomes interiorized in

Caesaria. The time of strife, which will lead to Gethsemani and the cross, starts before the Resurrection (see Matthew 17, Mark 9, Luke 9). From now on Jesus regularly announces to his apostles that he must suffer and die in order to accomplish his mission. Each time the apostles repulse before the dark face of this mystery. In this context, the Transfiguration becomes a means of lifting the veil of glory before these tragic developments in order to safeguard a place of hope and faith. Jesus is transfigured on the mountain; he speaks of his coming sufferings and his death with Moses (the lawgiver) and Elijah (the prophet), his most illustrious predecessors; and the Father is manifested by the voice in the cloud in order to establish his lawful authority and divine love of his Son and gives the command to listen to him. On the poetic level, the echoes throughout the NT of the Transfiguration (see Jn 12.2, 2 Cor. 3–4) contribute to the constant rapprochement of the encounter of Christ and the experience of the text. The lone names of Moses and Elijah, which sum up the Law and prophetic Wisdom, as well as the Father’s voice who invites others to listen to Jesus, are narrative elements which prepare for such an interpretation (or presuppose it?). Furthermore, by tying the Gospel to a person and no longer to a place, Jesus fulfils the biblical tradition of the tabernacle as an itinerate sanctuary of a God who always transcends the place where he resides. The Transfiguration thus becomes the prototype of spiritual experience. It has inaugurated the quotidian experience of each Christian, which consists of letting the Paschal mystery transfigure him or her before their consummation in glory. The believer knows that the church, the cloud, is at work on the earth, and that by faith the Resurrection already works on the body. In the transfigured Jesus the invisible is manifested visibly, so that in each Christian the visible – thanks to the text which relates it and the spiritual community which bears it – is oriented to the invisible. 128. 2 Cor. 3.4-10: ‘Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. Now the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory?’ 129. 2 Cor. 3.14f: ‘But their minds were hardened. Indeed, to this very day when they hear the reading of the old covenant, the same veil is still there, since only in Christ is it set aside. Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their minds, but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.’

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the believer’s daily life, for experience of the ‘knowledge of the glory of God, which is on the face of Christ’ is synonymous with ‘conversion’.130 In conclusion, the New Testament, as the rule of faith, is structured in such a way that at the same time when I offer acts of faith in Christ, I offer acts of trust in the cultural and linguistic mediations which make him known to me and vice versa. To the extent to which language is a structure – through its transitivity from one corpus to another, from the Gospel in the New Testament to the whole Gospel and to all of language – the entire structure is ‘revived’ in God by Christ, who is its cornerstone. Reflections from the rest of Christian tradition will help us to develop this hypothesis further. Tradition as the Continuation of the New Testament’s Pedagogy of the Sign The belief which underlies the incessant activation of Scripture through ritual is that by becoming incarnate God has given matter the capacity to be a bearer of meaning. We participate in this capacity because of the mediations of gesture and words which extend it to and in the Church.131 We will show here that Christian speech and practice are analogously structured. We will then look for the basis of these analogies in Christ himself. Christian Speech Continues Christic Speech Since its beginning, Christian reflection has experienced a paradox: Jesus Christ himself wrote nothing and yet the Church’s authority is largely based upon Scripture. Living in a time when cultural upheavals demanded deep reflection upon writing, Saint Thomas Aquinas showed that, in reality, the words of Christ fulfil writing. He did so in his biblical commentaries, where writings create writing, and in his systematic works when he dealt with the question of the writing of Jesus, still a live issue in his time.

130. 2 Cor. 3.16 and excipit: ‘And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.’ Is it not in terms of an enveloping light that the story of Paul’s conversion is described (see Acts 9.3), as it was during the vision of Jesus in glory, beyond every dwelling made of human hands, and that Stephen knows in the moment of his torment (Acts 7.48, 55-56)? 131. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of John, 4, 2: ‘For since the lifegiving Word of God indwelt in the Flesh, He transformed it into His Own proper good, that is life, and by the unspeakable character of this union, coming wholly together with It, rendered It life-giving, as He Himself is by Nature. Wherefore the Body of Christ giveth life to all who partake of It.’ In addition to the gift of the Spirit, this presupposes a certain physical contiguity, through time.

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His reflections on writing were encouraged by his philosophical formation which had placed him ‘in the midst of a debate on the role of writing’.132 Thomas is aware of Platonic speculation on writing, in which the capacity to write is viewed more through the lens of forgetting than of remembering, more as the conservation of the past in the past than its continual recreation in the present. He grew up in a cultural context which encouraged such reflection. In fact, he experienced the cultural transition from the oral to the written, during which the written text would change its status: ‘The move from recitation to reading perhaps caused a transfer of the sacrality and presence of the word to the Book.’133 Better still, he belonged to a milieu which would catalyse this move while still keeping a balance between the two: ‘The Dominican liturgy which [provided] such a beautiful example of the reorientation of liturgical practice through its relationship with the written text, remained largely oral.’134 Is it not also significant that many of Thomas’ works are known to us only in a ‘mnemonic’ version of the text, reportatio for example, in which the text is intrinsically linked to an oral performance and thus lacks the autonomy of ‘read texts’ (a distinction proposed by Alain de Libera)? In question 42 of the Tertia Pars, he first denies the venerable belief that Christ wrote down the formulas of his miracles in some magical book, and then gives many reasons why Jesus did not write anything, some of which he inherited from the traditional philosophical preference for living speech. Just as with the greatest masters of human wisdom,135 Jesus did more by speaking than writing,

132. Thomas William Elich, Le contexte oral de la liturgie mé dié vale et le rô le du texte é crit, thè se pré senté e pour l’obtenion du doctorat d’histoire des religions et d’anthropologie religieuse, Université de la Sorbonne-Paris-IV (Paris, 1988), vol. 1, p. 5. 133. Elich, Le contexte oral, p. 5. Elich uses here an article whose title itself he finds an interesting hypothesis: Philippe Bé guerie, ‘La Bible né e de la liturgie’, La Maison-Dieu 126 (1976): 108–16. 134. Elich, Le contexte oral, p. 423. We have had confirmation of point this by consulting ms. 75 of the Bibliotheque municipal de Bordeaux, a Dominican liturgical book from 1260 which is almost entirely composed of abbreviations! The Order to which Thomas belonged was one of the great innovators in the massive introduction of books into the liturgy; see Elich, vol. 2, pp. 314ff. 135. Writing appears as a stopgap for preserving invaluable teaching: in doctrina, the oral takes precedence over the written. See Elich, Le contexte oral, p. 423. ‘This is why Pythagoras and Socrates, the best teachers among the pagans, wished to write nothing down. Writings effectively aim at impressing a doctrine on the heart of their hearers.’

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for anything written is finished136: he ‘prints’ the truth directly onto hearts.137 His speech was an astonishing ‘spiritual writing’. Such is the Christian experience of the letter: necessary but not sufficient.138 Paul, the first Christian writer, already witnesses to this experience in his powerful dialectic of flesh and stone, of spirit and the letter. As a good Pharisee, he knows what the text means, which allows him to meditate on the relationship between the mystery of Christ and the being of the word and the text. When responding to his opponents he invokes a type of ‘writing’ different from that of letters of ink: ‘You show that you are a letter of Christ … written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, written not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.’139

136. Jesus’ speech enacts the first, horizontal, surpassing of the space and time that writing allows. In writing, speech triumphs over the hic et nunc of its original enunciation (ST 3, 42, 4, 1). But it does even more in terms of vertical transcendence, as it reveals the life of God beyond created modes of space and time. For a description of this surpassing of the written by speech, Thomas turns to the end of John: ‘But there are many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.’ This verse from Jn 21.25 show that the excellence of Christ’s teaching cannot be enclosed in the letter. And according to Augustine: ‘It is not necessary to believe that the world could not contain the local space of these books: it is rather that the capacity of readers who could not understand.’ Thus if Christ had consigned his doctrine to writing, people would have thought that there was nothing more in the doctrine than that which the writing contained (ST 3, 42, 4, c). The world in question in the Gospel is more than the spatial and material world of our current experience, for it is also the mental space of its readers’ intellects: if Christ had written things down, people would have been able to imagine themselves capable of emptying his teaching into what is signified in his writings. 137. Aquinas, ST 3, 42, 4. 138. Thomas the realist does not forget that the theology of surpassing writing [l’é criture] is only possible because of Scripture [l’É criture]. It was necessary that writing exist on tablets of stone in order to reveal the ‘writing’ on tablets of flesh: the dead skin of the scrolls which he studies and on which he teaches continues the living lips of the One who has since spoken. 139. 2 Cor. 3.1b, 3. See already the prophecies of Jeremiah which pick up Deut. 30.11-14 when they invoke the time when God will write his law on hearts. The Old Law is superseded by a more eminent ‘text’, one which is deeper and more demanding: the touchstone of the apostles’ ‘speech’ is nothing other than the faith that generates it. Paul addresses himself to a community which is not aware of any specifically Christian text: its faith rests on the living word of the kerygma. Finally, Paul reaches the heart of hearts, the consciousness/ conscience – the proper place of Christian glory in this world and also the seat of the faculty of speaking – the knowledge of the glorified Christ: ‘but by the open statement of truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world

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The adynaton of a writing without sensible signs should be linked with the Patristic concetto of Tradition as ‘the writing of Jesus Christ’. Within the history of theology we run across the suggestion that in some way Christ, all of whose teaching was oral, actually did write: Is he not the head of a Body whose hands were the evangelists?140 In this perspective, there is certainly a mental habitus inherited from Dionysius which recalls the hierarchical charismas which structure the mystical body. Yet it also provides the outline of a literary explanation for Tradition which we can develop further: Christ prompts others to repeat his words and then to write them down so as to guarantee them a ceaselessly renewed life in the dynamism of oral and verbal interlocution. The metaphor of the mystical Body designates the structured community of his disciples, simultaneously the producer, promulgator and recipient of the Scriptures and Tradition, and thus recalls the cultural thickness of the incarnation. Jesus himself141 has been embedded within social groups and from these groups he adapted some signs which would become the interactive context of his mysteries, that is, the ‘sacraments’ subsequently celebrated by his disciples.142

has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God … . For it is God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 4.3, 6). See the echo of this passage in Aquinas, ST 3, 42, 4, ad 2. 140. ‘For at His command they, being His hands, as it were, wrote whatever He wished us to read concerning His deeds and words.’ Aquinas, ST 3, 42, 4, ad 2. Thomas sees different reasons for the fittingness of this choice by the incarnate Word, in particular the habit God has of working through ordained mediators: ‘Thirdly, that His doctrine might reach all in an orderly manner: Himself teaching His disciples immediately, and they subsequently teaching others, by preaching and writing: whereas if He Himself had written, His doctrine would have reached all immediately. Hence it is said of Wisdom (Proverbs 9.3) that “she hath sent her maids to invite to the tower.”’ Aquinas, ST 3, 42, 4. 141. As for the institution of the sacraments, the Church does not have faith in Jesus Christ’s own personal ingenuity but rather in his absolute freedom, as the saviour God, to choose the signs and words through which he bequeaths to his disciples properly divine mysteries that could only be known to him (see 1 Cor. 2.9 and ST 3, 60, 5.). 142. Through sacramental words, language also establishes the spinal cord of the sacraments (a possible translation of ‘mysteries’) and the Church itself is intended to be a sign. See Lumen Gentium, § 1. It presents the consubstantiality of a signifier – human nature – and a signified – the reality of communion between people – analogous to that which ensures the structural unity of the linguistic sign. Cf. Daniel Bourgeois, La Pastorale de l’É glise (Luxemborg: Saint Paul, 2001), p. 142. The author alludes to St. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, I, II, 2.

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Christian Practice Continues Christic Practice As we will see in the subsequent chapters, Christian memory is continued within signs that are analogously structured. For example, what Scriptures and the Eucharist both signify (Christ) is mysteriously present in their mode of signification (the Old Law or the species of bread and wine). Both are presented as divided signs: ‘the double mode of signification of Scripture: of words and of things signified’143 corresponds to the ‘double signification’ of the Eucharist (those of words and of the species, and that of body and blood). Finally, the sacrament of the Eucharist is temporally structured in three ways (the present fact of holiness recalls the Passion which was its cause and announces the replete future which is its end), just as the spiritual sense of Scripture is divided into allegory, tropology and anagogy.144 The Christian tradition labels as ‘mysteries’ these structures of analogous significations which actualize Christ’s action. Designating both the thing signified and the manner in which it is signified, the mysterion is thought of in the linguistic categories of when Scripture appeared. It ‘goes hand in glove with speaking, preaching, signification, inner and outer words, and revelation’.145 As the inner word hidden in God, the outer word pronounced by God in the Old Testament and now fulfilled in preaching, the mystery places language at the heart of the relationship between God and humanity. Thus all the mysteries echo ‘the one mystery of Christ, with the emphasis on both mystery and Christ’.146 Christ himself is a ‘mode of signification’, for ‘Christ is the unique revelation of God, his mode

143. Henk J. M. Schoot, Christ, the ‘Name’ of God: Thomas Aquinas on Naming God (Leuven: Peeters, 1993), p. 32. The author adds, ‘The correspondence serves to bring out the differences: unlike things signified in the Old Testament, the things signified in the Eucharist by bread and wine are identical with its sign. The aspect of veiling, however, is common to both: Christ’s presence in the thing signified by Scripture is just as veiled and concealed, and an object of faith only, as Christ’s presence in bread and wine.’ 144. See ST 3, 60, 3. ‘This broader triple mode of signification corresponds with the triple mode of signification secundum mysterium of Scripture, i.e, the allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses. The hidden signification of the passion of Christ, of the moral situation of God’s people, and of the ultimate end of eternal life, resembles the sacrament of the eucharist in its signification of the mystery of the passion, of the mystery of the body and the blood, and its mystical union with the faithful, and of eternal life.’ Schoot, Christ, the ‘Name’, p. 33. The names of the sacrament of the Eucharist reflect this structure: sacrifice, communion and viaticum can be understood as the meaning set by the past, given in the present, and reaching towards the future (see ST 3, 73, 4). 145. Schoot, Christ, the ‘Name’, p. 14. 146. Ibid., p. 35. The author adds to the denotations of the mode of the signifier and of the thing signified the connotation of the enigmatic spiritual presence that the word takes on in the context of the Eucharistic ritual.

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of signifying God is unique’.147 With these remarks we can see the enactment of a Christological recovery of language. Implications of the New Testament Poetics in Reflections on Language Reflection on the resurrection and the incarnation should show the isomorphism148 between the ontology of Christ and that of linguistic signs. This isomorphism could be called a Visitation of the Sign. Consequently, the asceticism of language which Christological discourse should respect reshapes the veridical capacity of words in general. There is a Visitation of Signification. The Visitation of the Sign The sign is sensible by definition149 and thus immediately appears as an ‘organobstacle’ of thought. By forcefully emphasizing the sign’s slant towards immanence, deconstructionism posed in language itself the ancient metaphysical problem of bridging the divide: how does one move from the material to the spiritual? The deconstructionists deemed this movement to be metaphysical illusion or theological alienation. Yet their pessimistic interpretation of the signifier’s irreducibility, which is indeed a fact, as a sort of deceptive fatality is not at all necessary. In the light of Christ, the theologian instead delightfully discovers something of sacramentality (the possibility of a transcendent spiritual reality giving itself through and in a sensible reality) already present in the function of language. The first discovery relates to the proclamation of the kerygma. The Resurrection as preached and celebrated provides a narrative context for experiencing the covenant of sound and meaning in language: it rhetorically implies that the isomorphism of the relationship between signifier and signified is no longer linked with that of the natural body-soul relationship, as in paganism,150 but with the supernatural relationship of a dead body to a resurrected body. The resurrected

147. Schoot, Christ, the ‘Name’, p. 12. The author adds realistically that ‘It is unique since Christ is God and since Christ’s humanity and all that comes with it (passion, resurrection, ascension, second coming) is a sign of God’s being. However, this mode of signification is hardly plain, nor [sic] is it out in the open for everyone. One needs the eyes of faith, and being graced with it, the first and the last that one knows is God’s eminence, God’s exceeding all human intellective powers.’ ‘This relation is applied to the union of Christ the Word with his human nature as well, drawing attention to Christ’s human nature as his “mode of signification”. Christ’s human nature both hides and reveals the God that he is.’ Schoot, Christ, the ‘Name’, p. 192. 148. Thomistic theologians would speak of a convenientia proportionalitatis. 149. See Aquinas, ST 3, 60, 4, ad 1, and ST 3, 61, 1; 64, 7, ad 1. See also Chapter 8, ‘Little Thomasian Semiology’. 150. Paganism offered a pessimistic interpretation of the relationship between the split in the sign and the duality of human being, with the sign being equivalent to a cadaver (sô ma-sê ma).

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life is incommensurably tied to life in the flesh,151 as meaning is to sound in a word, as always substantiated in some way. At the same time the resurrection is the object of an (p)act of a community’s faith, just as the sign is conventional.152 It is not surprising, then, that the resurrection and signification resemble each other in their relation to the human spirit: just as there is no witness to the resurrection but only to the resurrected one, so the appearance of meaning escapes analysis: meaning is always already given. The second discovery is more speculative. After the Resurrection, faith in Christ’s divinity would move from reflection upon his work to reflection on his very being: in this man the divine Name dwelt in fullness. Thus the union of divinity and humanity in Christ cannot be thought of along the lines of any known model: Christ is aluid et aliud without being alius et alius, as the traditional formula says, which means that the union of humanity and divinity in him is neither substantial nor accidental.153 Theological speculation would invent a series of categories,154

151. Paul uses the metaphor of the relationship between the plant and the seed (1 Cor. 15.37) while Luke insists on the permanence of organic functions in the resurrection. 152. More particularly, one could continue this point further by proposing that the act of the Resurrection resembles that of writing. The Paschal mystery of Christ thus allows Thomas Aquinas to think of a certain bending of space (ST 3, 52, 2, c: dicitur aliquid esse alicubi per suam essentiam per suum effectum: Christ was present in hell on the side of the prisoners of original sin in the first way, and on the side of the damned in the second; ST 3, 52, 3, c: Totus Christus tunc erat ubique, ratione divinae naturae) or to imagine a movement without local motion (see ST 3, 52, 1, ad 3 and 1, 53, 1. Christ’s soul descended to hell, not according to corporeal movement but according to the type of movement appropriate to angels), which brings up the ontology of writing. 153. A union of substance supposes a transformation of substance: Jesus is not a mixture of humanity and God; but it is no longer ‘accidental’ for Jesus to be a man, and, conversely, human nature appears in the Person of the Word without becoming a part of the divine nature. 154. For example, union according to substance (ST 3, 2, 6, explaining how two different substances can be united as they belong to the same suppositum subsisting in both). Thus, the principle of subsistence, under the principle of individuation, cannot be conceived of as another form: it should be non-representable and non-conceivable. At the same time it cannot be a matter of the divine esse itself which is common to the three Persons, for then the three persons together would be incarnate by the communication of their common esse to this man. This leads to the categories of depersonalization: in order to be able to subsist in a subject different from oneself (in the divine Person of the Word), Christ’s humanity could not have its own ‘personality’ (in the sense of a principle of subsistence of a rational nature; his principle of subsistence does not belong to that nature, and yet ‘depersonalization’ does not prevent Christ from being as truly human as we are: he is not deprived of personality but heightened to an infinitely higher one; see ST 3, 2, 2 ad 2).

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but for the sake of finally confessing and knowing Christ as one unknown.155 Thomas Aquinas, the champion of this Christological apophaticism, proposes an approximation of the hypostatic union in the form of comparisons drawn from language: for example, the union of meaning and sound in phonation.156 In order to appreciate the scope of such a rapprochement, it is necessary to remember that Thomas thinks that the faculty of language (interpretatio) is closely related to the supernatural.157 In fact, there exists no better conceptual grasp of the enigma of the covenant of sound and sense than the mystery of the union of God and humanity in Jesus. We should conclude dialectically: the incarnation teaches us something about language inasmuch as language prefigures the mystery of the incarnation. There appears here a practical solution of the dialectic of the sign: without reducing God to a ‘function of meaning’, nor meaning to a ‘function of God’,158 the ritual celebration of Christ guides the movement through the thickness of signifiers. We come, then, to a second proposition: Christological discourse guarantees the veridical capacity of language in general.

155. The least inadequate category for thinking of creation (ST 1, 45, 3), the incarnation (ST 3, 2, 7), the Eucharistic presence (ST 3, 76, 6), or the presence of grace (ST 1, 43, 1) is relation, and even mixed relation: real on the side of the created, but rational on the side of God. ‘We can only know God as the transcendent term of the relation of creatures to their causes: the concepts which we use to know God are drawn from our experience and first represent created perfections; they can only apply to God by virtue of the act of analogical judgment which, applying them to the transcendent term of this relation, makes them surpass themselves in order to point at that which is beyond all the objects of our intellect. Therefore, the concepts through which we attend to God can only be relative concepts. And this rule is effective for revelation itself, and thus for theology, for in order to reveal himself to humanity, God used human concepts developed by humans starting from their own experience.’ Jean-Hervé Nicolas, Synthè se dogmatique, vol. 1, De la Trinité à la Trinité (Fribourg-Paris: É ditions universitairesBeauchesne 1985), pp. 334–5. 156. It is necessary to clarify the way in which God was able to assume a body: ST 3, 6, 3 ad 3; or in order to explain the way in which grace is in the sacraments (see ST 3, 62, 4 ad 1; ST 3, 60, 6, c.). 157. Thus he has to describe the faculty of language as a faculty which transcends all natural power: ‘The faculty of speaking, which we do not attribute to a motive faculty, but to reason; thus, it is not a natural power, but it is beyond all corporal nature, because the intellect is in no way a corporal act, as Aristotle shows in the third book of De Anima’; In Per., L, I, 1.6, § 81. 158. Adolphe Gesché , Le Sens (Paris: Cerf, 2003), p. 172.

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The Visitation of Signification159 Yet the mystery of Christ does not only provide practical illumination. This mystery provokes intense logical and linguistic reflection and by doing so confirms the possibility of speaking truthfully of God and of beings. God, and especially the union of humanity and God in the person of Christ, excludes all conceptual grasp and thus all signification. Yet we need only pray to speak well of God. Theology must speak of Christ but cannot conceptualize his union with God, and so it is forced to deepen common sense onto logical parallelism with new logical tools, such as the theories of inherent-predication and of reduplicated judgements, or the analysis of the supposition.160 Both an intralinguistic phenomenon (as a mode of signification) and the actualization of the intellect’s intentionality, the supposition allows for the true designation of what is still not completely known. Christ can really be spoken of by an act of extrasemantic suppositio performed at the heart of enunciation, even though the unity of his person is unrepresentable. The development of a responsible ‘Christology’ requires that one assent to this apophaticism.161 The idea of a ‘negative Christology’ has even been proposed.162

159. Here we are synthesizing the second, highly theoretical part, of La Langue de l’ineffable and placing it within a theological context The reader will find in this volume further details and references. 160. The suppositio unifies logic, psychology and metaphysics: the suppositum forms the bridge between the domain of language and that of the real. It is a matter of ‘determining a way of speaking which conforms to the thing of which one speaks: is it a subsistent thing, or an aspect of such a thing?’; Gesché , Le Sens, p. 53. ‘It is well established today that the distinction between signification and supposition was a medieval parallel to the distinction that the twentieth century draws between connotation and denotation, signification and reference, Sinn and Bedeutung, intensive value and extensive value’; Gesché , Le Sens, pp. 41–2. See Venard, Le Langage de l’ineffable, pp. 128–41. 161. ‘The Uniqueness of the One talked about and to be talked about requires the study of the semantics of supposition, and in Aquinas we recognize this best in his sermo de Christo. The Son of God and human nature and one in this singular event, in this singular person. The logic of supposition teaches one, on the level of reflection upon linguistics, how to deal with this singularity.’ Schoot, Christ, the ‘Name’, p. 72. ‘In fact, the whole of Christology is built on the distinction between signification and supposition’; Schoot, Christ, the ‘Name’, p. 55. ‘Just like words that have different significations can be one in their supposition for one and the same supposit, Christ can be called done since two natures and united in one person. The mode of signifying Christ is analogous to Christ’s mode of being.’ Schoot, Christ, the ‘Name’, pp. 194–5. 162. ‘The Son of God shares in the ineffable supremacy of the entire Godhead, and the personal union in Christ does so as well. Albert says (and Aquinas acknowledges this) that this union affects all discrete naming of Christ, since the ineffable union makes Christ’s human nature ineffably one with God. Aquinas as well as his partners in discussion

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The possibility of discourse about God is also enhanced. The application of words taken from creatures to God, despite his singularity, is effectively realized in Christ, a realization which renders theology realizable: a posse ad esse valet illatio. Better still, speaking of God means approaching him by way of eminence, for language can indeed become a symbol for God163: ‘It is not a definition which allows us to know [him], but his distance from everything which is not him. God is known but only as posed by a judgement.’164 The possibility of a realist discourse is also reinforced. Everything uttered is potentially tautologous by reason of its ‘verbal vein’. But the supposition breaks fixation with logical identity in order to rejoin intention and being intended into enunciation itself: and if this is true of the One who is a fortiori, it can also be true for beings. That supposition finally depends on the speaker’s intentionality reminds us that ‘what is true about speech is not more speech, but an act’: speech ‘presupposes a light that it did not create’,165 and which radiates in the act of assenting to being and language, an act which is not illegitimately compared to faith.166 Thus the veridiction rendered possible by ontologico-logical parallelism is framed by a Christologico-logical parallelism. Through the practice that he inaugurates and the theory he inspires, Jesus Christ has enacted a new covenant between the intellect, the world and language, a covenant which is infinitely better than that built by the poets over the last two centuries (as Rimbaud ingeniously intimated). Thus if we bring together the structural resemblance between the mystery of Christ and the experience of language with the thesis of its divine origin, is it not reasonable to suppose that there exists a genuine participation between the two?

emphasize the inadequacy of human naming and the supremacy of this ‘name’, for which reason we dared to use the phrase “negative Christology”’. Schoot, Christ, the ‘Name’, p. 194. 163. The very formation of the proposition can represent the divine unity when considered outside of the irreducible multiplicity of its terms. Not only should this multiplicity not prevent us from speaking of God, but it would seem, on the contrary, that for an incarnate intellect speaking of God is one of the best ways of approaching him. One could see here a consequence, on the propositional level, of the linguistic condition of thought and of the ‘habitual knowledge’ of God implied in the tension surrounding identity – both are implied in the first principle (the principle of non-contradiction). Discourse thus appears as the required detour of anyone, such as Moses, who wishes to approach God; cf. Venard, Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 374–96. 164. Thierry-Dominique Humbrecht, ‘La thé ologie né gative chez saint Thomas d’Aquin’, Revue Thomiste 94:1 (1994): 71–99 (here p. 81). 165. Joseph Rassam, Le silence comme introduction à la mé taphysique (Toulouse: É ditions universitaires du Sud, 1980), p. 29. 166. ‘In relation to speech, truth is both “intus et foris,” just in the same way that, for St. Thomas, the principles of knowledge, while received from the senses, presuppose a light through which the principles are received, just as the “fides ex auditu” presupposes a “habitus fidei infusus”’. Rassam, Le silence, p. 20. See Augustine, De Trin., 3, 1.

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How Does Language Participate in the Word? Thomas Aquinas does not explicitly treat this question, but he does leave behind clues for a potential answer. For example, he appeals to humanity’s perfection as one reason for the fittingness of the incarnation of the Word rather than the Father or the Spirit. The Word can accomplish the work of perfecting humanity inasmuch as it is precisely by participation that one hears the Word through the exercise of the intellect and the will167: ‘Humana natura … nata est contingere aliqualiter ipsum Verbum!’168 In this way the faculty of language is not only related to the resurrection but also to the incarnation. Constituted in its participation in the Word, human understanding naturally traverses the signifier. For Christian truth there is, in addition to the sound which strikes the ear, a secret voice which speaks internally and without which what humans say would only be noise. Augustine already thought of it as a sacramentum magnum. The ‘inner teacher’169 and the interior word converge in this way: the inner word is purely relative, designatable without being definable in a manner distantly similar to God, and so it ensures a primary mediation between the human and the divine. Whoever says ‘participation’ in metaphysics says ‘called to communion’: intelligent creatures are moved towards union with God in an intellectual mode, and this movement is just as ontological as it is epistemological. The acts of the intellect and the will performed by the incarnate spirit are thus real, they can transform those who perform them, and we cannot reduce them to abstract epistemic operations.170 The doctrine of the inner Teacher not only has the potential to contribute to systematic theology (where we could study the faculty of language as a true prefiguration of grace), but it could have interesting consequences for exegesis as well: St. Augustine might help us explain the form and efficacy of Jesus’ teaching 167. Aquinas, ST 3, 3, 8. 168. Aquinas, ST 3, 4, 1: ‘because human nature, as being rational and intellectual, was made for attaining to the Word to some extent by its operation, viz. by knowing and loving Him’. Thomas routinely admits ‘an analogy between the divine light and created light’. Hyacinthe M. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, saint Augustin et saint Thomas (Paris: Cerf, 1951), p. 233. For speech in particular, see his commentary on the Prologue of John’s Gospel, especially In Io, I, 5, § § 127 and 129. 169. ‘We speak, but God teaches’, says St. Augustine (Sermon 153, 1; see De magistro 11, 38; Tractatus in Ioannem 1, 7; 20, 3; 26, 7; 40, 5). ‘Just as the mission of the Son had as its effect to lead us to the Father, so the mission of the Holy Spirit is to lead believers to the Son … . Thus the effect of this mission is to make men participants in the divine Wisdom and to introduce them to the Truth.’ Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 2, Spiritual Master (trans. Robert Royle; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2003), p. 223. 170. Far from being a ‘purely linguistic process’, then, analogy concerns ‘the judgment of a soul participating in divine spirit’. John Milbank, The Suspended Middle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), pp. 31, 27. This is why literary composition itself can become a kind of optical device for the theologian.

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as related in the gospels. Equally, St. Thomas could aid us in emphasizing the exceptional character of Christ’s teaching inasmuch as it speaks directly to the heart. In his fundamental reflection on human teaching, in fact, St Thomas highlighted the irreducibility of the symbol and the signifier. ‘The human mind cannot receive a purely intelligible truth, because its nature requires that it grasp concepts through knowledge of sensible images.’171 This is why the master ‘does not produce the intelligible light in his disciple, neither does he directly communicate intelligible ideas’; the most the master can do with her teaching is push the disciple to use his own mental powers to form the intelligible concepts which the teacher proposes to him under the form of signs, the schematic material.172 Human beings acquire knowledge through an inner principle, through the light of the agent intellect, which is inaccessible to the exterior, but whose operation – which involves illuminating the intelligible present in the phantasms which things provide to the senses – can be facilitated by teaching with sensible examples or by relating the difficult subjects to be learned to less abstract propositions already known by the one being taught. As a human being, Jesus Christ taught as all human teachers do: by aiding the agent intellect of his interlocutors to move from potency to act by means of the sensible signs that he gave to them in his miracles and by the symbolic mode which pervades all his discourse. Yet Jesus Christ is the incarnate Word: as God he is the Creator of the light of the agent intellect.173 Christ has the power to illuminate directly the intellects of his interlocutors: the recognition of the person of the incarnate Word in Jesus enables a deeper understanding of why the pedagogy that the evangelists attribute to him emphasizes misunderstandings which have been surmounted. If Christ’s speech convinces, it is because the one who speaks to the sensible ears is the same one who has created the ear of the heart, the intellect, and who gives it a share of his light. As the Word, he transcends the distinction between internal and external which is inherent in the physical world and assumed by the signifier.

Conclusion The mystery of the incarnation of the Word enables us to reconsider the whole series of intersected foundations built upon the split of the sign, of language and the real, of words and thought, of the oral and the written, and to do so in the light

171. Aquinas, ST 1, 111, 1. 172. See ST 1, 117, ad 3 or ST 3, 12, 3, ad 2. 173. ‘The other masters teach only the exterior, but Christ also teaches the interior because, as it is said in John 1:9 “he was the light which enlightens all people”; this is why to him alone wisdom gives; Luke 21:15, “for I will give you words and a wisdom.” This is something which no human being who is only a human being can say.’ Aquinas, In Io, III, 1, I, § 428.

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of the intersection of the Word of God and the words of human being. We might call this the semiological dimension of ‘life in Christ’, which brings together life and language. The incarnate Word, and he alone, answers this urgent and familiar question: What reasons are there for believing in a text such as the Scriptures when their fictional dimension is so apparent? He is the cornerstone of all semiology. If it is true, on the one hand, that semiology is based on the existence of semiotic relations between interpreted systems of signs and interpreting systems, and that there needs to be a categorization of these systems until the discovery of the one which interprets all others and is self-interpreting; and if it is true, on the other hand, that the question of language cannot be solved without some theological light, then it is Christ, and not language, who grounds all signifiance. Is not this conclusion reflected in the twofold continuity between the ‘divine enunciation’ and Christic enuncation, and between Christic enuncation and Christian enuncation, and in the complexity of different mediations in early Christian literature? St. Augustine suggests as much when he compares Christ with light and intellect themselves: But Christ preaches Christ, for He preaches Himself; and so the Shepherd enters in by Himself. When the light shows the other things that are seen in the light, does it need some other means of being made visible itself? The light, then, exhibits both other things and itself. Whatever we understand, we understand with the intellect: and how, save by the intellect, do we understand the intellect itself? But does one in the same way with the bodily eye see both other things and [the eye] itself? For though men see with their eyes, yet their own eyes they see not. The eye of the flesh sees other things, itself it cannot [see]: but the intellect understands itself as well other things. In the same way as the intellect sees itself, so also does Christ preach Himself. If He preaches Himself, and by preaching enters into you, He enters into you by Himself. And He is the door to the Father, for there is no way of approach to the Father but by Him. For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5). Many things are expressed by a word: all that I have just said, I have said, of course, by means of words. If I were wishing to speak also of a word itself, how could I do so but by the use of the word? And thus both many things are expressed by a word, which are not the same as the word, and the word itself can only be expressed by means of the word.174

Today this intuition is confirmed by the ingenious works of medieval linguistics which see in the notion of mysterium not only a (transcendent, enigmatic) content but also, and above all, a mode of signifying which rests on an analogy between the hypostatic unity of the Word and humanity in Christ and the human mode of signification which seems to ground the very possibility of a theo-logy.175 We might

174. Augustine, Homilies on the Gospel of John, 47, 3. 175. See Schoot, Christ, the ‘Name’, p. 110.

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even be tempted to offer a meta-linguistic interpretation of Jesus’ words which describe him as the way, the truth and the life.176 In the poetic operation of the New Testament, is he not the signifier, the signified and the referent; in short, is he not the entire sign? Finally, in an anecdotal but suggestive way, such an interpretation could be seen in the following retroversion in Hebrew of Jesus’ famous words from Revelation: ‘I am the alpha and the omega’177: ani aleph wthw ‫יִנֲא ףֶלָאָה וָּתַהְו‬

By removing the definite articles and making three final letters a single word, ani ’wt ‫ת ו א ינא‬

this phrase could be read as: ani ’wt [‫] ת ו א‬, which translates into: ‘I AM – SIGN’. In some way all of language seems to sign towards this sign. Is it not revealing that in the final years of his life Hans-Georg Gadamer believed that Christological dogma offers a positive vision of the materiality of the signifier beyond the ‘forgetfulness of language’?178 He even went so far as to affirm the participation of human language in the divine Word: ‘This is more than a mere metaphor, for the human relationship between thought and speech corresponds, despite its imperfections, to the divine relationship of the Trinity. The inner mental word is just as consubstantial with thought as is God the Son with God the Father.’179

176. Jn 14.5. 177. Rev. 1.8. 178. See Marie-André e Ricard, ‘Hermé neutique contemporaine. Le verbe inté rieur au sein de l’hermé neutique de Hans-Georg Gadamer’, Laval theologique et philosophique 57:2 (June 2001): 251–76. Christ confirms the singularity of the exterior logos (materiality as the principle of individuation, applied to meaning become meaningful in itself; speech is an event); the essential identity of the external word and the internal word, the former being the place where the latter is actualized; and the exteriorization of speech, which is not extrinsic to knowledge but coincides with the formation of thought. Conversely, the dogma of the incarnation helps us to understand the limits of language and of knowledge by showing the contrast between the simplicity of the divine intellect and the complexity of human intellects: ‘The essential unity (homoousia) of the exteriorization of the logos and the interior word does not correspond with our experience of language. This imperfection is not intrinsic to language as such, as Platonism claimed. Rather, it is due to the finitude of human thought itself.’ Jean Grondin, ‘L’universalité de l’hermé neutique et de la rhé torique: ses sources dans le passage de Platon à Augustin dans Vé rité et mé thode’, Revue internationale de philosophie 54 (2000): 469–85 (here p. 475). 179. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 421.

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Theological speech, if it claims to be Christian, must remain faithful at least to this sign. It is not a matter of adopting some kind of gnosis: the Word became incarnate in order to ‘witness to the truth’. The words of Christ, who is the truth,180 show that he is the martyr181 of truth. He sends a Spirit who is the truth.182 This is why his pedagogy begins by returning his interlocutors to the very foundation of discourse: the human being endowed with the faculty of language. Through preaching, the Word made flesh indexes the value of signification to the spiritual openness of the locutionary or allocutionary subject (which also allows us to understand why the perversion of his message is not simply moral but also metaphysical183). A Christian theology worthy of the name must offer words faithful to this dialectic, which is at once ontological and moral, existential and linguistic (whether speech or text), in which the New Testament was created and to which it never ceases to point insofar as it is a witness. ‘The contribution of theological language to the science of language is the sensus hominis … . Theology presents the person of Jesus as the ultimate and definitive sign through which humanity can come to know God. Jesus speaks the word of God in the expressivity of human language, imprinting it with a force which remains throughout time.’184 At the end of our journey into the poetic Bible and the poetic gospel we might notice that talking about language in the case of God seems much more complex than talking about language in general. The Scriptures grasp the figure of ‘language’ and yet end up emptying it: The fi gure of speech as the word is in a way emptied of its preestablished contents by the elimination of agreed meanings attached to the language and its current uses. The fi gure of the word becomes available to carry something else than conventional knowledge. It becomes a signifi er capable of reaching a subject on the border line between what can and cannot be said. It is an “other” word, but not a foreign word, because it is through the summons that the speech/word of an other is for us that one becomes truly human. Therefore, the phrase, “Word of God,” in the Bible and in the reading tradition of the “inspired” Scriptures, does

180. Jn 14.6. 181. Jn 8.40; 18.37. 182. 1 Jn 5.6. 183. Through studying St. Thomas’ semiology, we have seen that he based the moral ideal of a chaste expression of the truth on a conception of language as an instrument of the expression of the truth which precedes it. See also Chapter 8, ‘Little Thomasian Semiology’. Lying, or speech deployed with the intention of misleading for harm, is a sin not only because it injures the neighbour’s right to truth, but because it turns the natural ‘instrument’ that language is away from its natural end, which is truth. We can now more deeply acknowledge that what is blameworthy in lying is not only the perverse use of language, but that it is first of all an offense against God, who is the original source of all true speech. 184. Fisichella, La Ré vé lation, p. 199.

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not only designate the message of a divine sender. It calls upon the founding experience of humanity, while it empha-sizes the “otherness” of a Word which cannot be reduced to the discourses that invoke or concern it.185

We can see here why it is impossible to offer a general poetics of the Bible or of the Gospel: encountering God will always mean surprises for humanity.186 From a theological point of view, this impossibility entails in turn the impossibility of elaborating any type of exhaustive theory of language187: Franç ois Martin has already begun to explore the wide apologetic space left open to Catholic thought here. Catholic Tradition has shown itself to be faithful to the complexity of the ‘Word of God’ spoken in human words long before the recent conjugation of the Bible with semiotics, depth psychology and social theory. It has done so by rendering complex our approach to and reading of the Book. The Catholic relationship to the Scriptures has sometimes been described as a sort of ignorance imposed upon the People of God. Certainly there have been excesses, as when priests purely and simply forbade access to the book of Scripture itself. Without justifying these excesses, a more refined hermeneutic and the renewal of dialogue with Judaism allow us a better appreciation of the wisdom which the Church exhibited when urging consideration of the lives of the saints and glosses – as Christian Targums – rather than a ‘Book’ which risks being reduced to its literality by the half-educated. There is, in fact, much wisdom in surrounding the proclamation of Scripture with the richness of the symbolics and aesthetics of the whole liturgical universe. One could even reexamine in this context the stimulating set of arguments for or

185. Delorme, ‘Orientations of a Literary Semiotics’, p. 51. 186. As wisely pointed out by Robert Alter in the Conclusion to his The Art of Biblical Narrative. 187. See Delorme’s relating of Greimas’ radio broadcast as given in Delorme, ‘Orientations of a Literary Semiotics’, p. 32 n. 4, and the development of the form (Algirdas Julien Greimas and Joseph Courtè s, Sé miotique: dictionnaire raisonné de la thé orie du langage [Paris: Hachette, 1979, 1986]) of the dictionary in 1979 in the list of questions debated in 1986. A similar development can be noticed between the two editions of the Dictionnaire encyclopé dique des sciences du langage (ed. Jean-Marie Schaeffer; Paris: É ditions du Seuil, 1974, 1996), for the second edition is clearly more dialogical than the first.

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against the translation of the Bible into the vernacular188 advanced by Catholic priests during the Council of Trent.189 The Catholic Tradition – in its awareness of the irreducibility of the Word to any one discourse, even if it is biblical – has fostered experiences of the spoken Word which are not immediately verbal experiences (but which nevertheless always occur in relation to speech): experiences of the sacramental and the sacrament. Both involve signs structured around speech which represent a sacred reality in the act of sanctifying190 and which make heard the divine Word among those who genuinely celebrate them. We will later return to the crucifix, the sacramental object which left eloquent traces upon Thomas Aquinas through his devotion to it, and the Eucharist, the sacrament which inspired him to compose his only poetic work: Pange lingua gloriosi corporis mysterium. Before doing so, however, we will linger for some time on the relationship between the Word and words as seen in the relationship theology and literature, and language as a theological question.

188. At the invitation of Bernard Montagnes, we have personally studied the work of Esprit Rotier (1490-1563 or 1573), priest (and inquisitor) of Toulouse at that time. See E. Rotier, De non vertenda scriptura sacra in vulgarem linguam deque occidente litera & vivificante Spiritu dissertatio Christianissimo Regi Francorum Henrico dicta. Item parergus similitudinum, quibus errors depravatae intentio Haereticorum, malitiae ipsorum fructus ad oculum demonstratur, (Toulouse: Jean Dembat et Jean Chalot, 1548) (Bibliothè que muncipale de Toulouse: Res. D XVI 792. 1). 189. For some general context, see Guy Bedouelle, ‘Le dé bat catholique sur la traduction de la Bible en langue vulgaire’, in Irena Backus and Francis Higman (eds.), Thé orie et pratique de l’exé gè se: Actes du troisiè me colloque international sur l’histoire de l’exé gè se biblique au XIe siè cle (Genè ve, 31 aoû t-2 septembre 1988) (Droz: Geneva, 1990), pp. 39–50. See also Concilium Tridentium diariorum, actorum, epistularum, tractatum nova collectio (Fribourg: Herder, 1901–), in particular vol. v, which deals with session IV (9 April 1546): first decree, ‘Concerning the Canonical Scriptures’ and second decree, ‘Condition of the Edition and Use of the Sacred Books’; and session V (17 June 1546), second decree: ‘On Reformation’. 190. See the classic definition from ST 3, 60, 1.

Part II THEOLOGY AND LITERATURE

Chapter 3 ‘I AM NO WRITER’: IS THERE A LITERARY VOCATION?

Our thesis in the following is that what captivates the readers of modern and contemporary literature is its theological dimension. Those invested in contemporary literature forget this dimension as often as Jews and Christians forget the idols which populate their own history: even if they are no longer gilded pieces of wood or easily recognizable objects, money, power and sex are now actual idols inasmuch as they become absolute priorities within one’s life. Likewise, a certain manner of speech, a certain praxis of the text, can in turn divinize speech and writing. We will shift between our time and the Middle Ages in order to compare literature and religion and gauge their place in the lives of writers. If theologians undertake their task within the context of existential commitment, then the corresponding question to ask to literature is whether there is such a thing as a ‘literary vocation’.

First Steps with Arthur Rimbaud We could simply respond with a quick affirmative. As with any artistic creation, literature is an activity which excludes all others: who would not think here of the torments of the reclusive Flaubert? Like all the arts, literature devours the human person. Art is long and time is short. It demands sacrifices. (Consider Balzac’s theories on sexuality and literary creation: a certain type of celibacy is required of the poet dedicated to the fine arts). Rainer Maria Rilke, whose advice to a young poet influenced the literary consciousness of many of our contemporaries, seems to move in this direction. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all — ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge

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and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.1

These lines from Rilke are remarkably similar to some thoughts found in the Journal of a renowned contemporary theologian. Father Congar wrote the following about a trendy colleague to whom he had paid a visit: I had the impression, which is perhaps false, that if we asked him to leave such work and thinking to others he could do so without any difficulty, but also without any change. Without even suffering. I think of the contrary view found in what Rilke said about the poet’s vocation and which holds true for any genuine vocation: you would die if someone preventing you from pursuing it. I had the impression that Father Boyer did it because he was appointed to do so; but he is not fully in it with his thoughts and with his heart.2

Beyond the anecdotal encounter between Congar and Boyer, and without detracting from the charity which compelled the Dominican to fulfil his scholarly mission in the Church, these lines pose an urgent question: Is it not the necessity of writing, the project of composing a work, which renders a ‘theological vocation’ as demanding as a literary one? Literature necessarily seems to take over a person’s entire life. Such was indeed the case for Thomas, a theologian who poured his life into his work. Rilke did not speak just of any type of ‘literature’, but of poetry: the young poet should speak himself, speak the world, speak the ‘compulsion’ to write in itself. The very Catholic Claudel did not hesitate to use the term ‘vocation’ when describing such a phenomenon in Arthur Rimbaud. In a Preface to Rimbaud’s works, Claudel speaks of the tragic story of this vocation. But this is not a word he would have understood. Is it a voice? Still less, but a simple inflection is enough to render tranquility and ‘the company of women’ impossible for him. Is it so imprudent to think that it is a higher will which inspires him? In the hand of the one we all are: mute and who has chosen to stay quiet. Is it common to see a child of sixteen years gifted with the expressive faculties of a genius? As rare as praise to God on the lips of a newborn about whom we hear incontrovertible stories. How should we name such a strange event?3

1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (trans. M. D. Herter Norton; New York: Norton, 1954), pp. 18–19. 2. Yves M. Congar, Journal d’un thé ologien, 1946-1956 (ed. É . Fouilloux; Paris: Cerf, 2001), chap. 2, dated May 1946 (to Rome). 3. Paul Claudel, ‘Arthur Rimbaud’ (Paris, October 1912), in Œ uvres en prose (ed. J. Petit and C. Galpé rine; Paris: Gallimard, 1965), pp. 514–21 (here p. 515).

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The vocation of writing can be seen in a certain native use of language (to speak of things as Adam was able to name them), and it is heard in a certain gush of language to the heart of human existence. The purpose of language is not primarily found in the social utility of communication, nor is it a quest for (‘literary’) beauty: it turns out to be necessary for the blossoming of life. In this way the literary inevitably enters into relation with the religious. ‘I want to be a poet and I work so as to turn myself into a seer.’4 By equating ‘seer’ and ‘poet’, Rimbaud gives poetry a prophetic function,5 understood as a vocation and as an inspiration. It is first a vocation heard at birth and to which it is necessary to sacrifice one’s whole existence: ‘The sufferings are enormous, but it is necessary to be strong, being born a poet, and I recognize myself as a poet. It is false to say: I think; We should say: I am thought.’6 Poetry is the instrument of a higher thought which surpasses it in turn, which it has ‘in no way’ sought out but to which it must give obedience. He is the genuine heir of the ancient vates, the seers and shamans of tradition. It is enthusiasm, literally understood, that Rimbaud discovers in a century which could only believe in what is seen and proven, and which believes poetry only to be decorative (the Parnassians?) or official (Victor Hugo). It is also an inspiration which comes from elsewhere and enters into the very heart of consciousness: ‘I is an other. So much the worse for the wood which finds itself a violin.’ Rimbaud perceives the qualitative leap which separates the human work of the poet and the result of his work. He uses as quaint of an image as that of a musical instrument, a violin which is nothing other than wood and strings until the violinist makes it sound with a music which he makes but which comes from elsewhere, from an other, from something greater than himself. When the poet says, ‘I think / do / sense, etc.’, he is in reality the mouthpiece of powers other than those of himself, the powers of novelty, of the unknown. Or more exactly, from one other power: ‘I is an other.’ To whom belongs this speech which resounds in my voice? Who is this ‘other’ that says to me that ‘I’ am? First, ‘I is an other’ author: from childhood on, Rimbaud was a brilliant pasticheur, and he knows that ‘I’ can be Cicero, Apollonius, Villon, Charles of Orlé ans, Racine, Victor Hugo or any other contemporary poet whom he can speak with his lips. He has many voices at his disposal. (‘I became a fabulous opera.’7) He is inspired. Second, ‘I is an other’ social individual. Picture the year 1871: fascinated with Paris, energized by the mysticism of revolution and progress, the provincial

4. We use here the text of Rimbaud from the ‘é dition du centenaire’; Arthur Rimbaud, Œ uvre-vie (ed. Alain Borer with André Montè gre; Paris: Arlea, 1991). 5. 1 Sam. 9.9: ‘(Formerly in Israel, anyone who went to inquire of God would say. “Come, let us go to the seer”: for the one who is now called a prophet was formerly called a seer.)’ 6. Rimbaud, Œ uvre-vie, p. 183. 7. Rimbaud, Collected Works, p. 293; Une saison en enfer (Brussels: Alliance typographique, Poot et Cie, 1873), ‘Alchimie du verbe’, sixth section, p. 34.

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teenager has run away from his maternal home for the third or fourth time; he has participated as closely as possible in the fall of the Empire and the Paris Commune and in the revolt against the bourgeois order. A number of his poems witness to this thirst for change in the social order and in the allocation of tasks between the classes and even the sexes. Rimbaud, however, soon realized the naivety of a ‘faith’ which inherits so much from the religion which it pretends to replace. ‘Everything has been reconsidered’,8 he says when noting that the needs to which religion responds remain, and that the responses themselves have hardly changed: scientists, positivists and revolutionaries all flow into the theoretical mould of Christianity! If he finally rejects them as superficial, perhaps he does so not only for a poetic reason – his experience of inspiration – but also for a religious one: he retained from his childhood the deep intuition of his religion and he spontaneously preferred the original to its copies, he who detests all artifice! Finally, not only ‘I is an other’ being than this boy conditioned by his family, education, culture, socio-economic conditions and civilization, but also ‘to each being it seemed to me that several other lives were due’.9 Beyond the petty appearances to which Prudhomme’s science has reduced nature, the poet wants to see the true life which is absent from this world. Such an ambition is metaphysical. His time saw the triumph of a positivist ideal of a total adequation of words and things: to each concept there must correspond an experienced reality, a truly ‘scientific’ one. On the one hand, language is then reduced to the status of a purely descriptive means of labelling the world that technical science attempts to transform. On the other hand, and in a gesture of compensation, it concedes to language as a purely decorative ‘artistic’ function. Rimbaud intimates that language is much more than a descriptive discourse which comes after being. He knows that it is filled with mystery. It is very likely that he inherits this conviction from his Christian initiation – which consists precisely in leaving behind ‘the old man’ so that ‘the new man’, for whom Christ is both model and head, may surface – and from which he has received the sacraments: beyond his mother’s bigotry he learned in his childhood the imitation of Jesus Christ. ‘I is an other’ man than this being of flesh and blood, with this defective, suffering or diseased body, this life limited in time and space and marked for death, other than the devout little boy whose mother raised him on Jansenism. In a highly controversial text, Claudel wrote: Arthur Rimbaud was a mystic in natural form, a lost source who springs up from a saturated soil. His life, a misunderstanding, the vain attempt to fly and escape the voice which calls and revives him and which he does not want to recognize: until the end, reduced, leg cut off, on a bed in a hospital in Marseille, when he

8. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 267; ‘Mauvais sang’, second section, p. 7. 9. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 293; ‘Alchimie du verbe’, sixth section, p. 35.

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knew. ‘Happiness! Its tooth, sweet to death, warned me at the crowing of the cock – ad matutinum, at the Christus venit.’10

Claudel has been accused of having ‘annexed’ Rimbaud11: but we have scarcely paused to hear the real question which he poses: To what kind of invitation does ‘entering into literature’ respond? If the writing of a poet is defined by the ‘call’ that Claudel detects, and if the ‘will’ which ‘creates’ this call grasps all of humanity in its hand, is this nothing more than a certain use of common words? Before returning to Rimbaud we must plunge more deeply into these preliminary questions. The essential notion proposed by W. von Humboldt and restored to life by Noam Chomsky is that language is not a product (Erzeugtes) but primarily a production (Erzeugnung) … . It is not sufficient to think of language as that which produces this or that particular word, but the complete idea of language also must make room for the ever-open possibility of producing an illimitable quantity of words … . We have at our disposal a mother tongue [langue maternelle] which we come upon completely developed, and even its rules of literary composition; but every man invents in part the language which he uses. Whether it be a question of speaking a tongue [langue] or simply of understanding it, one must invent it. The high virtuosity of a Shakespeare is not of any other nature than that which each of us scarcely ceases to give proof of.12

Monsieur Jourdain has not stopped being astonished: every person is a poet. Arriving at this point means that there is no ‘literary vocation’. The poets themselves say it: except for on a highly external, sociological level, literature does not exist as a closed field which we could fence off. The human condition has language, the sign of consciousness, at its very heart. The person thinks and is spoken. Some enter into writing to express the questions of existence. Others recognize them and then dedicate themselves to their fellow humans as a ‘writer’ or ‘poet’, and are invested with an almost religious, priestly function. We are aware of how Georges Bernanos denied being dedicated to his profession as a writer in the Preface of his A Diary of My Times: I am no writer. The sight alone of a blank sheet wearies my spirit, and the sheer physical isolation imposed by such work is so distasteful that I avoid it as much as I can … . Not that I decline being called an author out of some sort of inverted

10. Claudel, ‘Rimbaud’, Œ uvre-vie, p. 295. 11. Cf. Roland Barthes, Critical Essays (trans. Richard Howard; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 68. 12. É tienne Gilson, Linguistics and Philosophy: An Essay on the Philosophical Constants of Language (trans. John Lyon; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 54–5, 57.

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snobbery. I respect the job which – next to God – has enabled me to keep my wife and children.13

By completely accepting his condition of a man who writes, Bernanos, who thought he heard a call to priestly vocation in his youth, in the name of a supernatural realism of holiness refuses the prestige of ‘creator’ which is draped around modern artists. Not only does he know himself to be called but also is invited to call others to follow suit: ‘A vocation is always a call to action – vocatus – and every call must be passed on. Those to whom I call are obviously few. They will alter in nothing the ways of the world. Yet it is for them – for them that I was born.’14 His is not an isolated case. More recent authors have expressed themselves similarly: ‘I do not know what it is to be a writer,’ claims Jean Grosjean. There are those who write, but there are also those who do so only once in their life, for their Last Will and Testament: it is the first time that they write something of weight. As for the great writers (Musset, Lamartine, Ré gnier, Hugo, etc.) – or if we prefer, those who are recognized as such – it is my opinion that they create an unassailable masterpiece by accident … . When we talk about ‘the writers’ we do so, in fact, sociologically, as those who make a living with their pen. Is that to say that they create literature? I think that there is not any sort of break between ‘writer’ and ‘non-writer’.15

Phillipe Jaccottet no longer believes in granting writing the prestige of being a vocation: Basically I do myself this justice of having always been, for lack of anything better, very clear on not imagining that in being a writer I accomplish some decisive and important act (I no longer judge it to be so completely useless either); at the beginning, I surrendered myself almost without thinking, as obeying an indubitable need, but quite different from making a world. And not only did I not dedicate myself any of my nights to this work; but when I put myself into it, it was only for a few hours, and without blackening many pages or multiplying deletions: would I dare still speak of work in [this] case? … What determined these moments, I suppose, was a certain degree of emotional pressure beyond which keeping it unexpressed would have been painful; thus it was with a certain intensity of the life that I lived. Plainly put, that was having the experience of ‘being inspired’ but even during that time without granting to this word any

13. Georges Bernanos, A Diary of My Times (trans. Pamela Morris; New York: MacMillan, 1938), pp. 18, 19. Translation slightly modified. 14. Bernanos, A Diary of My Times, p. 19. 15. Jean Grosjean, ‘Entretien’, L’Œ il-de-bœ uf 1 (June 1993), p. 7.

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magical, mysterious, or sublime overtone … . What does this resonate with? That helped me a bit to live.16

The contemporary poets we cite are haunted by the ‘unlimited’. Grosjean, who often anchors his own poetry in the Bible, perhaps even realizes the model of vates, for he was a priest before he dedicated himself to the arts. We know the strange profundity of Rilke’s spirituality. Their desire not to invoke any kind of special ‘grace’ in order to demystify inspiration, even their desire not to cut themselves off from the community of mortals seems rooted in the awareness of having done nothing else than act as human beings do. To speak of ‘vocation’ is to speak of a ‘call’. What then is the summons that we hear: the compulsion of life, of language, of an internal word which burns the lips – or it is God? The problematic relationship between the pressure of language and the call of God forms the issue of these next chapters. The poet is the one who is sensitive to this distant call heard in language, in writing, of the Word who calls and magnetizes the language of every person. Literary vocation is human vocation, simple as that. Roland Barthes, a master of the once fashionable scholasticism of the ‘new criticism,’ uses sociological terms to deny the existence of a ‘literary vocation’. We can readily find under his pen, dipped not in holy water but in the ink of Marxism or psychoanalysis, traces of the transcendence which haunt writing: Naturally, literature is not a grace, it is the body of the projects and decisions which lead a man to fulfill himself (that is, in a sense, to essentialize himself) in language alone: an author is a man who wants to be an author. Naturally too, society, which consumes the author, transforms project into vocation, labor into talent, and technique into art: thus is born the myth of fine writing: the author is a salaried priest, he is the half-respectable, half-ridiculous guardian of the sanctuary of the great French language, a kind of national treasure, a sacred merchandise, produced, taught, consumed, and exported in the context of a sublime economy of values. This sacralization of the author’s struggle with form has great consequences, and not merely formal ones: it permits society – or Society – to distance the work’s content when it risks becoming an embarrassment, to convert it into pure spectacle, to which it is entitled to apply a liberal (i.e., indifferent) judgment, to neutralize the revolt of passion, the subversion of criticism (which forces the ‘committed’ author into an incessant and impotent provocation) – in short, to recuperate the author: every author is eventually digested by the literary institution, unless he scuttles himself, i.e., unless he ceases to identify his being with that of language: this is why so few authors renounce writing, for that is literally to kill themselves, to die to the

16. Phillipe Jaccottet, Une transaction secrete: Lectures de poé sie (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 318–19, 320.

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being they have chosen; and if there are such authors, their silence echoes like an inexplicable conversion (Rimbaud).17

The critic adds in a note: ‘These are the modern elements of the problem. We know that on the contrary Racine’s contemporaries were not at all surprised when he suddenly stopped writing tragedies and became a royal functionary.’18 It seems to us that Barthes lacks any explanation for this discrepancy insofar as he restricts himself to the overly materialistic framework of social critique. In reality, a writer is not someone who merely wishes to be one. One could pretend to be a writer, but something separates the writer from the scribbler: Beauty? Truth? A call heard by human beings to their way of speaking. It is not enough to be placed in the social structures of writing in order to be a writer. Perhaps it is the cultural context in which they appear that differentiates Rimbaldian mutism and Racinian silence (we could add the silence of Thomas at the end of the Summa), and not only an economy or a society. If it is true that Rimbaud could no longer consider poetry a craft – what the situation of the arts and civilization allowed the tragedian in the seventeenth century – the autotelic use of language remains one poetic choice among others. We cannot identify this choice with the essence of the literary any more than it can be reduced to the socio-economic conditions of its appearance. A certain historical hindsight is necessary here. It was almost fifty years ago that Paul Bé nichou, when studying the age which immediately preceded that which saw the birth of literary history, demonstrated that literature in its current sense only appeared in the eighteenth century and was only thought of as ‘sacred’ in the nineteenth.19 ‘Sacred, i.e., separated, appointed. This presupposes “writers” highly aware of holding an autonomous spiritual power and which are recognized in this mastery, not simply by the young but also by the traditional holders of spiritual power, the clergy and the Church.’20 We have already seen a beautiful example of this type of recognition with Father Congar’s reference to Rilke when he wanted to describe theological vocation! It is necessary to pursue these points further. During the symbolist period, the writer – renouncing the romantic pretexts for literary powers (national, social, political or even religious mission) – justifies his royalty by a gnosis of language. Wanting to wield only spiritual power, in the face of all other instances of culture compromised with what it sees as the ‘world’ (politics, science, religion), literature tends to retreat to a sublime Aventin [to

17. Barthes, Critical Essays, pp. 146–7. 18. Ibid., p. 147. 19. Paul Bé nichou, The Consecration of the Writer, 1750-1830 (trans. Mark J. Jensen; Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). 20. Marc Fumaroli, L’â ge de l’é loquence: rhé torique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’é poque classique (Paris: Albin Michel 1994), p. 17.

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refuse to take any part]. Nevertheless, thanks to the conquests of the romantic language, it mobilizes concrete supports, reviews, editors, the ‘literary world’, which permit it to be nourished from itself and to shine on a cultivated and reverent public. In order to gain such a heroic awareness of itself and attempt to participate by modern society, a literature of the ‘mages’, the guides of the nation, or of the ‘seers’ on the margins of it, nineteenth-century literature, at the height of its prestige, had to sacrifice the encyclopediaism of knowing and acting inherited from the preacher of the seventeenth century, the philosopher of the eighteenth, of the revolutionary orator. At the same time it wanted to preserve ‘all the lyre’ of the Fine Arts of the Ancien Regime: poetry, history, the novel, the essay. Even in its Golden Age, literature changed its boundaries and its standing: after having looked for its ‘coronation’ in gigantism, it arrogantly believed it could find it in angelism. It had to throw off ballast in order elevate itself so high: entire swathes of knowing and power escape it and nevertheless, notwithstanding the effort of the NRF writers to reverse it, they distrust it, whereas journalism, encyclopedic by nature, seize its remains. It thus gained its supreme independence but at the height of a ‘ivory tower’ from where it no longer descends without running the risk of being confused with specialized knowledge or with vulgarization and journalistic ‘engagement’.21

But let us return to Rimbaud. If he participated in the political, scientific or prophetic pretensions of the persons of letters of his time, he finally denounced them as illusions. So we can pose the question: Did Rimbaud really ‘confuse his being with that of language’? Indeed, writing seems to have been a means of maturation for the genius adolescent. As suggested by Louis Forestier, one of his academic exegetes, we should read his poems as a sequence of ‘essays’ in the style of Montaigne: as bursts of the different stages of a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly in a movement of perpetual renewal.22 After the ‘textuality’ fad of the 1970s and 1980s faded, we have rediscovered that the literary work is not closed in upon itself, but that it is open to a world and that it plays a large part within this world in the biography of its flesh-andblood author, such that we would err by maintaining too strict of a separation between the meta-literary authorities of an implied author or narrator. The editors of the Œ uvre-vie found a healthy equilibrium on this point by granting as much importance to the establishment of authentic texts as to their inspiration in Rimbaud’s biography.23 In one of the richest comments in this edition, Dominique Noguez cautions the reader against:

21. Fumaroli, L’â ge de l’é loquence, pp. 17–18. 22. Louis Forestier, ‘Notice’, in Rimbaud, Poé sies, Une Saison en enfer, Illuminations (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 225–33. 23. We could cite here the wholly admirable comment that Dominique Noguez dedicates, at the end of the critical apparatus of Une Saison (Œ uvre-vie, p. 1207 sq.), to ‘biography’, the ‘great repression of our modernity’.

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A peculiar misunderstanding of Rimbaud’s originality, characterized by a blunt use, without prevarication, without regard for conventions, sometimes without modesty, of the gifts of life, by an impatience which does not allow the delights of a subtle reconstruction long after, but which imposes, on the contrary, the voluntary and immediate confusion of artistic work and life. And this confusion is nowhere else truer than in A Season in Hell, whose unique radiance in the history of literatures, consists in the fact that somebody, while he is writing, while he is extremely gifted and even very tricky while doing so, while he is very capable of using the resources of rhetoric, jostles them into a kind of permanent short-circuit, in what I would playfully call an electro(lo) cution, because there is an urgency and because it is a matter of his salvation and his life.24

Thus to say that writing was, even temporarily, his raison d’ê tre, is the result of a ‘critico-centrism’. When he succumbs to the sin of the specialist, the literary critic will always tend to consider the reality of a work only under the formality of his textual discipline: fascinated by the prestige of language, he tends to reduce the reality of its subject. It is true that Rimbaud deliberately borrowed his famous formulas on a poetry which would signify ‘literally and in every sense’. The prodigious connoisseur of the literary ‘factory’ (as Ponge later called it), to the point of knowing how to adapt freely ‘from Lucretius’, ‘from Hugo’, ‘from Villon’ or ‘from Banville’, he deliberately let the words take the initiative, and he was often attentive to the explosion each word effected upon the linear discourse of reason (particularly in his Illuminations). But it was more a fulfilment than a negation of ancient poetry: Poetic old-fashionedness figured largely in my alchemy of the word.25

For Rimbaud, writing remains a means in the service of a highly ‘traditional’ end. It is wisdom which Rimbaud pursued, the most banal and the highest wisdom that there is. The highest: the desire to find the ‘ground, with a duty to seek, and the rough reality to embrace!’ and ‘to possess truth in one body and soul’.26 The most banal: the search of an adolescent who thinks of himself as a genius. Rimbaud writes in order to become himself. The abandonment to writing was a stage within, not the culmination of, the Rimbaudian vocation. Through this abandonment he escapes the aesthetic closure of ‘pure’ literature: ‘If according to this young man, at least as much poet in life as in literature, the literary is never separate from the lived, then for this once extremely brilliant student, the lived is never separated from literature, and culture and

24. Rimbaud, Œ uvre-vie, pp. 1211–12. 25. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 289; ‘Alchimie du verbe’, p. 35. 26. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 305; ‘Adieu’, p. 52.

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rhetoric, far from being obstacles, are the surest means of the analysis of the self.’27 Throughout his work, it is the man, and not only the author, that we encounter. Rimbaud’s biography shows that poetic activity surpasses mere ‘literature’ and touches on the deepest aspects of human existence – does ‘literature’ truly exist if it is not surpassed? His search for the absolute surpasses literature considered as one of the ‘fine arts’, but we hesitate to name it: ‘It was not some personal uniqueness that he sought in poetry, but something external or foreign that would speak through him’28: to express the world so as to change life (‘changer la vie’). Poetry was this undiscoverable alchemic formula, this impossible mission whose vanity he ended up grasping; one enterprise among others, (perhaps) the most sublime, the only one in any case which is addressed to us. Opposing the man who spoke about money and the poet who spoke golden words is to read his correspondence flatly. Capable of anything at any moment and always good for nothing, everywhere Rimbaud seeks ‘something to do’: the formula has no name, this something becomes The Thing, das Ding of Hö lderlin, that we cannot name on his behalf and which he could no longer designate. He sought it through all means, in all his books, in many languages, in many bodies. It did not matter to him that it was this rather than that – repeating from one year to the next: ‘anything anywhere’.29

Without presuming to name the thing, it does seem possible to illuminate it by resorting to one of the bodies he never wholly abandoned: the mystical body; or by considering one of the languages with which he was obsessed: that of the catechism and the Missal; or by remembering one of the books which he never ceased to read: the Bible.30 The reality of Rimbaud’s life, haunted by the Catholic religion, its holy Scriptures, its dogmas, its piety, its clergy, requires the careful criticism of a responsible reading, a reading attentive to the religious culture he inherited and without which we would be oblivious to the brightest jewels in his writings. As he was on a quest for spiritual beauty, Rimbaud has often been studied as the inventor of a new aesthetic of beauty. One could say of Rimbaud, mutatis mutandis, what has been said of Gide: He very dangerously spoke of God, Christ, the Church, the soul, sin. Right down to the delicate texture of his sophisms, such subjects demanded from him an awareness and a rigor of expression that contemporaries no longer understand … . A terrible lucidity accompanied each step towards the abyss until the day when he bridged it without ever totally losing the feeling of profundity

27. Noguez, ‘Note’, Œ uvre-vie, pp. 1211–12. 28. Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life (New York: Viking, 1986), p. 265. 29. Borer, ‘Introduction’ to Œ uvre-vie, p. LXXV. 30. We hope to develop these ideas further in a forthcoming book on Rimbaud.

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and neither that of vertigo. Rimbaud or Gide are no more understood than is Bossuet: their ‘overly rich word discourages weak stomachs’; without religious culture, ‘the human sciences, these servants-mistresses turned into queens of the city, only retain in their work that which psychoanalysis and sociology, and castrate them from their art … . Would we have imagined them the victims of the plague of ‘desacralization’ which spreads throughout our age? He ended up demolishing the ark of the covenant. Bravo! But after how many useless pirouettes! Is his flirtation with the devil, which is today denied even by some priests, was it anything more than a sign of a disturbing senility … . How much time seems to be lost on learning how to write when ‘writing degree zero’ is enough. We always return to the start: [Rimbaud] does not believe in God, but his style does. For him, just as for Voltaire, no salvation outside of the Church!’31

We do not understand the great profundity of Rimbaud’s work without tapping into the great resource of Christian resonances on which his life and work played. Identifying his poetic vocation with a religious vocation would be to force the analysis, but nothing obliges us to be deaf to its most serious harmonics. If the poet is indeed summoned into the intimacy of his heart, it is ‘not a language which he hears. Still less is it a simple inflection’ which compels the poet to speak so as to ‘give words to this crucifying voice at his core’.32 Claudel believed he could identify this mysterious speaker: it was God, the true God, the God of Jesus Christ, who called Rimbaud: You know, Rimbaud, and in your room in Roche full of so many visions and battles As proof this cross, having finished writing, that you etched on your writing desk.33

In theological terms, the poet heard in language the distant call of the divine Word who ‘enlightens everyone, coming into the world’.34 According to Yves Bonnefoy himself – whom we could hardly suspect of Christian appropriation – Rimbaud is not resigned to silence regarding God;

31. Jacques Vier, Gide (Paris: Desclé e de Brouwer, 1970), pp. 106–7. 32. Claudel, ‘Arthur Rimbaud’, in Œ uvres en prose, pp. 515–16. 33. Paul Claudel, La Messe là -bas (Paris: Gallimard, 1911), p. 42. Cf. the end of ‘Un dernier salut à Arthur Rimbaud’: ‘Paterne Berrichon told me, some days before the war of 1914, that in the grain room on the farm of Roche the table on which he had written Season in Hell was discovered. The top had been turned over. When replacing it to its older position, those present were shocked to see a cross deeply notched in by a knife and surrounded by rays!’ Paul Claudel, ‘Un dernier salut à Arthur Rimbaud’, in idem, Œ uvres en prose (ed. Jacques Petit and Charles Galpé rine; Paris: Gallimard, 1965), pp. 521–7 (here p. 527). 34. Jn 1.1, 9-10.

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he was ‘incapable of forgetting Jesus’ promises’.35 What are these promises? Precisely love, the true life, justice, the new, themes which appear throughout his work. In fact, after he thought that the true ‘I’ would be found by rejecting all its cultural, historical and especially religious conditioning, did not Rimbaud grasp that it was religion itself, as his deepest condition, which had revealed to him that ‘I is an other’ (Je est un autre)? ‘Churchmen will say:’36: I is an other Christ.37 ‘It is true!’38 This mystical identification of the other and Christ is literally present in the first Lettre du voyant, where he applies a verse from a liturgical hymn to his mother’s reaction to his excesses: ‘Stat mater dolorosa, dum pendet Filius.’39 The work of the seer, ‘responsible for humanity, even for animals’,40 demands the true sacrifice of his life (‘Let him die!’41). Such an expression could very well designate the work of redemption and of revelation accomplished by Jesus Christ in his passion and on the cross! By seeking the other, the poet comes to this alternative: to imitate Christ or to compete with him. We must thus situate Rimbaud’s Christianity or anti-Christianity not simply on the thematic level of ideology, but on the level of poetic profundity. Commentators today hesitate to name the ‘thing’ that Rimbaud seeks ‘God’. While they employ Christian theological categories, they often retreat into a more abstract realm when they name it ‘Genie’ – the title of one of the Illuminations. Even Alain Michel has his doubts. He notes that Rimbaud joins ‘God and Christ’ and ‘that he discovers the question posed by Hö lderlin: “He will not journey there, he will not descend from a heaven, he will not carry out the redemption of the anger of women, the gaieties of men, or of all sin: for he is done being himself and being loved.”’ He then poses the question: ‘Is this indeed Christ? The image makes us think of the composition of the ensemble of Illuminations and the comparison with their final text, Bethsaida. But this poem is called the Genie.’42 The question posed here concerns the relationship which exists between the ‘compulsion of language’ and a call from God: Christ or not, it is the genius who is the redeemer. Rimbaud refuses being enslaved to dogma or morality. On the contrary, the genius that he loves deliver him from all this: ‘Oh to him and us! Pride more benevolent than lost charity,

35. Yves Bonnefoy, Rimbaud par lui-mê me (Paris: É ditions du Seuil, 1961), p. 184. 36. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 299; ‘L’impossible’, p. 41. 37. Cf. Gal. 2.20. 38. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 299; ‘L’impossible’, p. 41. 39. Ibid., p. 371; Œ uvre-vie, p. 183. 40. Ibid., p. 379; Ibid., p. 190. 41. Ibid., p. 377; Ibid., p. 188. 42. Alain Michel, In hymnis et canticism, culture et beauté dans l’hymnique chré tienne latine (Louvain and Paris: Publications universitaires/Vander-Oyer, 1976), pp. 307–8. See ‘Bethsaida’, Œ uvre-vie, pp. 395–7.

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o world! And the clear song of new misfortunes.’ The hymnic poetry leads the poet to pass from Christianity to a liberating gnosis … . We understand that the pathetic provocation that he borrows from Baudelaire succeeded in being confused at times with religious jubilation. The pagan reinterpretation of the Gospel message reaches its extreme point and the poet ignores neither its Satanism nor its piety. In so doing, by exalting both human force and the reality of the absolute, he belongs to his time: ‘It is necessary to be absolutely modern’.43

In short, Rimbaud does the work of ‘sacred poetry’, which, ‘as with all poetry, should be seriously grasped because it returns to fundamental questions.’44 May we identify the voice that the poet hears resonating in the depths of language with the voice of God? If yes, then the intersection between literature and theology would already be found: the poet, like the theologian, is concerned with the Word of God. But for many of our contemporaries, the opposite question prevails: Is the ‘voice’ of God nothing but an illusory effect of the play of language?45 We will not chance an overly hasty response at this point. If there is no such thing as a literary vocation, this is not because literature is reducible to a technique falsely sacralized by society. Rather, it is because there is a more profound human vocation to which the people most sensitive to the depths of language give witness. In the weave of language, they hear a voice which desires their very life as a response. Who is the one who calls? Before being able to answer such a question, we have to meditate deeply on the use of language in art and in everyday life. We will now attempt to compare the quest for wisdom inherent to the human condition and the singular activity that is the writing of texts, and in doing this we will describe the relationship between art, which is a specific human activity, and life in general. We now return to the scholastic tradition.

43. Michel, In hymnis et canticis, pp. 308–9. The first quotation is from ‘Gé nie’ (Illuminations, in Œ uvre-vie, p. 375) the second is from ‘Adieu’ (Une saison, p. 52). 44. Michel, In hymnis et canticis, pp. 308–9. 45. ‘In its most abstract form, then, that aporia within which we are struggling would perhaps be the following: is revealability (Offenbarkeit) more originary than revelation (Offenbarung), and hence independent of all religion? ... Or rather, inversely, would the event of revelation have consisted in revealing revealability itself, and the origin of light, the originary light, the very invisibility of visibility?’ Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone’, in Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (eds.), Religion (trans. Samuel Weber; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 1–78 (here p. 16). Italics removed.

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The Specificity of Language as Artistic Material In Art and Scholasticism, Jacques Maritain puts forward one of the clearest discussions of this question. After observing that the intellect is exercised differently in the practical order than in the speculative, he notes: The practical order itself is divided into two entirely distinct spheres, which the ancients called the sphere of Doing (agibile, prakton) and the sphere of Making (factibile, poieton). Doing, in the restricted sense in which the Schoolmen understood this word, consists in the free use, precisely as free, of our faculties, or in the exercise of our free will considered not with regard to the things themselves or to the works which we produce, but merely with regard to the use which we make with our freedom … . The sphere of Doing is the sphere of Morality, or of the human good as such.46

This is the domain of prudence. In contradistinction to Doing, the Schoolmen defined Making as productive action, considered not with regard to the use which we therein make of our freedom, but merely with regard to the thing produced or with regard to the work taken in itself. … Thus Making is ordered to this or that particular end, taken in itself and self-sufficing, not to the common end of human life; and it relates to the good or to the proper perfection, not of the man making, but of the work produced.47

Maritain clarifies this point: This work is everything for Art; there is for Art but one law – the exigencies and the good of the work. Hence the tyrannical and absorbing power of Art, and also its astonishing power of soothing; it delivers one from the human; it establishes the artifex – artist or artisan – in a world apart, closed, limited, absolute, in which he puts the energy and intelligence of his manhood at the service of a thing which he makes. This is true of all art; the ennui of living and willing, ceases at the door of every workshop. But if art is not human in the end that it pursues, it is human, essentially human, in its mode of operation … . The work of art has been thought before being made, it has been kneaded and prepared, formed, brooded over, ripened in a mind before passing into matter. And in

46. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism with Other Essays (trans. J. F. Scanlan, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), pp. 9–10. 47. Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, pp. 10–11. Maritian also offers this clarification: ‘Prudence, on the contrary, is the undeviating determination of acts to be done (recta ratio agibilium), and Science the undeviating determination of the objects of speculation (recta ratio speculabilium)’ (p. 184).

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matter it will always retain the color and savor of the spirit. Its formal element, what constitutes it in its species and makes it what it is, is its being ruled by the intellect. If this formal element diminishes ever so little, to the same extent the reality of art vanishes. The work to be made is only the matter of art, its form is undeviating reason. Recta ratio factibilium: let us say, in order to try to translate this Aristotelian and Scholastic definition, that art is the undeviating determination of works to be made.48

Of course, current philosophy of art often objects to the idea that a work of art is thought before it is executed, and points to the fact that in reality the artistic form is birthed forth in a dialogue with the material; creation is the discovery of a form latent in the material. Should we speak of the mind itself being found? On the other hand, we should emphasize more than Maritain does the dialogue between making and doing: I can consider existence itself (the whole order of doing) as a work of art, and evaluate it in turn by making a work of art. We think of the inversion of sanctity in Genet, or of the moralizing aesthetics of the eighteenth century. Conversely, we should emphasize the place of Making within Doing in general. Early or later on in my art, I cannot avoid posing to myself the human question of ‘why’ in addition to the poetic question of ‘how’?49 The ethical erupts, not on the side of, but at the very heart of aesthetics. St. Thomas himself does not ignore the dialogue of art and prudence. In the end, the metaphysical principle of finality leads him to claim that every created agent, when acting, seeks a ‘perfection’ which is indissolubly the good itself which comes about for it through acting, and the good of the effect which results from the action when it ends in an external effect. This also closely ties making into doing in the very act of the creature being a creature.50 He also points out the interactions between art and prudence in more particular domains. For example, in politics,51 where it is a matter of particulars, the prudent human being does not employ science but only rhetoric when choosing the true and good contingent means which allow him to obtain the desired end in view of the common good.52 In this way, political or ‘royal’ prudence greatly resembles art – the virtue of best utilizing the singular53 – and this is why we call politics an ‘art of the possible’. Unlike art, however, its end is not only the work to be produced (a ‘political work’?), but it

48. Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, pp. 11–12. 49. This question led Claudel clearly to subordinate art – amounting to a grace gratis data (a purely gratuitous gift which does not transform those who receive it) to prudence – amounting to a grace factum faciens, which perfects and sanctifies its beneficiary. Cf. ‘La poé sie est un art’, in Claudel, Œ uvres en prose, pp. 54–5. 50. Aquinas, ST 1, 44, 4. 51. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 47, 3, ad 2. 52. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 49, 4, ad 3. 53. Aquinas, ST 1-2, 57, 5, ad 3.

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embraces our collective life and each human person in their dignity: politics is the art of the better possibility. Even if it is never encountered in its pure state, the difference between making and doing nevertheless has the value of being highly clear: it provides categories – in particular the distinction between labour on a material in view of a work to be made and work on oneself in view of the good – which allow us to specify artistic activity. Paradoxically, in the poetic consideration of the work to be made, distinguished from the moral examination of human activity, it is the limits of the material to be worked on which renders art so absolute and so liberating in the midst of the troubled consciousness of human existence. Thus the distinction between art and existence through the matter or material used is best suited for the art which is exercised on language. In fact, if we call ‘literature’ the activity of ‘making’ exercised on language, must we not consider that, however unconsciously, literation operates in all human activity? Language is the vector of common meaning, and so everyone thinks they are familiar and adroit with this material. As a general tool, it seems unfit to specify a form of human activity. To exist is to speak. I escape myself through the relaxation of consciousness: the presence of an influx of consciousness, of a word, within me actually duplicates me; in place of simply being in the world, I possess what I am, my being is given to myself as a having, and I escape to a peaceful world. The questions gush forth: ‘What should I do?’, ‘What am I?’ or rather ‘What am I in time?’ As my being does not coincide with itself, inasmuch as becoming seems to be at its centre, how do I fulfil myself? Language is an essential given of the human condition: its presence in the person actually allows her to think of her existence as a condition. Thus, the ‘making’ exercised on language seems to be everyone’s fate, and not simply that of some. What would establish the specificity of literature is also what prevents it from being a vocation, let alone a profession! Daily life is woven with language. I talk to myself all day long (and even in the night, in my dreams). I work on meaning in order to make more precise the object of my question, my pleasure or my sorrow, and perhaps without even taking myself into account. During this time, during my work, my unhappiness is turned into joy and my distress into calmness. I feel better a posteriori: what is the ‘magical’ power of language which has consoled or calmed me? Du Bellay wrote of it in a famous verse: But I don’t sing, Magny, except to cry my troubles. You might say that I sing them in sobs, So I often sing to my tears to charm them54

54. Joachim du Bellay, ‘Sonnet 12’, in idem, Les Regrets (ed. Franç oise Joukovsky; Paris: Flammarion, 1994), p. 66.

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A quest for joy lies at the horizon of language just as much as it lies at its source. As for this search, Maritain claims: If the condition of the artist is more human and less exalted than that of the wise man, it is also more discordant and more painful, because his activity does not remain wholly within the pure immanence of spiritual operations, and does not in itself consist in contemplating but in making. Without enjoying the peace and substance of wisdom, he is caught up in the hard exigencies of the intellect and the speculative life, and he is condemned to all the servile miseries of practice and of temporal production.55

In reality, this opposition is slightly artificial, for in this perspective the only possible wise man is an angel or God. Maritain himself suggests as much when citing Aristotle: to have true wisdom ‘is not a human possession, for human nature is a slave in so many ways’.56 In fact, the wise of this earth, the metaphysician, the theologian, must produce, manifest, experience, teach or write their wisdom, their contemplation. In this sense, he shares with the artists ‘a strange and saddening condition, which is itself an image of man’s condition in the world, where he must wear himself out and live with the spirits’.57 He himself, Maritain, is in the process of writing. Such is the discursive dimension of wisdom: the fruit of prudence in doing, it is also the fruit of the art of making: Even if the theologian were to know all the analogies of the divine processions and all the whys and the wherefores of Christ’s action, he would not have perfect joy, because his wisdom has a divine origin but a human mode, and a human voice … . This is what prompted St. Thomas Aquinas, a short time before his death, to say of his unfinished Summa, ‘It seems to me as so much straw’.58

This ‘human mode’ is characterized by the presence of language, speech and writing. ‘Now to speak is to act, to write is to do; the written word is the fruit of a production accomplished by means of writing, a trace of that which of itself leaves no traces.’59 Speech [parole] in becoming written changes species. Spoken, it is a being: written it is a thing. The spoken word is not at the disposition of our needs and desires … . The characteristic that writing has of immobilizing thought in time in conferring on it the permanent possibility of an indefinitely renewable

55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, pp. 37–8. Ibid., p. 37. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 38–9. Gilson, Linguistics and Philosophy, p. 122.

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present modifies profoundly the attitude of the subject speaking in regard to his own speech [parole].60

To write is to reserve for oneself within language the right of repossession, but it is also to toil greatly: This effort to find form for thought is exactly the same as that of homo loquens to invent words and fashion himself a language. Only in the case of writing, the effort becomes considerable, because the resources of the signifier being inadequate, since finite, to the requirements of the signified, which are properly infinite, words and phrases naturally lag behind thought, which is more rapid than language, and do not discern exactly the meaning of it, which one never captures in the net of words and which escapes in every direction.61

Arranging the lexicon and syntax so as to give form to thought is common to human beings: it is particularly visible in those who write, whether they write ‘literature’ or ‘theology’. We deliberately quote Thomist thinkers in order to remember these elementary linguistic givens of thought: the fact that they are so little alluded to in commentaries on St. Thomas is all the more striking. In this way we are led to a meditation on language. Roland Barthes, already encountered in a similar context, analyses the phenomenon in a famous text: Literature has a particular status in that it is made of language, i.e., of a substance which already signifies when literature takes possession of it: literature must secrete itself in a system which does not belong to it but which nonetheless functions to the same ends as literature, which are: to communicate. It follows that the strife between language and literature forms in some sense literature’s very being: structurally, literature is only a parasitical object of language; when you read a novel, you do not first of all consume the signified, a ‘novel’; the idea of literature (or of other themes subsidiary to it) is not the message you receive, it is a signified which you receive in addition, marginally; you sense it vaguely, floating in a paroptic zone; what you consume are the units, the relations, in short the words and syntax of the first system (which is the language you are reading); and yet the ‘reality’ of this discourse you are reading is indeed literature, and not the anecdote it transmits to you; in short it is the parasitical system here which is principal, for it controls the final intelligibility of the whole: in other words, it is this system which is ‘real.’ This complex inversion of functions explains the familiar ambiguities of literary discourse: it is a discourse we believe without believing it, for the act of reading is based on an endless

60. Ibid., pp. 125, 126. 61. Ibid., 127.

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exchange between the two systems: look at my words, I am language; look at my meaning, I am literature.62

The existence of literature, its definition and its limits, are literature’s first questions. In this sense, ‘literature’ is coextensive with the disciplines which use language without any naivety except for when doing so consciously or deliberately (which will be the case in Thomasian ‘metaphysics’). The other ‘arts’ do not know this constitutive ambiguity. Of course a figurative painting transmits (by its ‘style,’ its cultural references) many other messages than the ‘scene’ it represents, starting with the very notion of painting; but its ‘substance’ is constituted by lines, colors, relations which do not signify in themselves (contrary to the linguistic substance which serves only to signify); if you isolate a sentence from the dialogue of a novel, nothing can distinguish it a priori from a section of ordinary language, i.e., from the reality which serves it in principle as a model; but you can choose the most veristic detail from the most realistic painting, and you will never obtain anything but a flat, painted surface and not the substance of the object represented: a distance of substance remains between the model and its copy. There ensues a curious exchange of positions; in (figurative) painting, there is an analogy between the elements of the sign (signified and signified) and a disparity between the substance of the object and that of its copy; in literature, on the contrary, there is a coincidence of the two substances (language, in both cases), but a dissimilarity between reality and its literary version, since the connection is effected here not through analogical forms but through a digital code, that of language. We are thus brought back to the inevitably unrealistic status of literature, which can ‘evoke’ reality only through a relay, language, this relay itself having an institutional relation to reality, not a natural one.63

Barthes can thus help us understand why doing and making coincide in literature. The material of poetic fabrication – language – is the medium of every order of doing. Language and literature are given the same end: to communicate. Nothing immediately distinguishes them. How, then, do we account for the specificity of the ‘literary’? The drama is that the means taken to arrive at wisdom also constitute an obstacle: through language I escape myself and things escape me. The ‘literary vocation’ is situated at the transition between the ‘why’ and the ‘how’: the question is posed at the moment when it is already resolved: I write, this is a fact. Why is it that I write? The question arises too late for I have already begun to write. The ‘why’ only arises in the ‘how’: I write. I must write in order to justify my writing. In this sense writing takes on the necessity of vocation, and dangerously so: one ‘enters into writing’ just as one enters into religion life.

62. Barthes, Critical Essays, p. 266. 63. Ibid., pp. 266–7.

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Such is the heart of the problem: the foundation of literature seems to coincide with the question of language’s origin, which runs parallel to the question of being. Metaphysics and poetry go hand in hand. This question coincides with the presence of consciousness in human beings: it is what prevents their voices, cleaved into matter and spirit, from being simple, like the cry of the purely animal. Language is fundamentally a means, and some human beings, the poets, seem to make it into an end: are they engaged in a literary or existential impasse, or are they on the way to illumination? The critic compares literature with other arts. In order to maintain its classification, the critic posits a radical disjunction between nature and language: language is a priori considered in its linguistic materiality and not as a sign which refers to the real. This is already to make a choice, for we could also envision this material, this ‘relay’ of evocation of the real, in the context of its function of signifying things in the world. Barthes adopts, in linguistics, the first point of view and situates communication solely at the verbal level. Nothing he says, then, accords with the analysis of the relation between language and reality, even within literature. For the experience of writing, as that of reading, manifests a primacy of meaning – even in its being questioned. If I ask for a pound of bread, I could do so in a study on linguistics, in which case bread is a noun which signifies the idea of bread. But if I pose the same question to a grocer, bread does not signify the idea of bread: it signifies bread, and it does not signify it through the idea of bread. That is its meaning directly and immediately.64

As common language, the literary text presents a ‘piece of language’, but it represents, through meaning, things other than words. This is why it is so difficult to establish the distinction between the language of literature and the language of real life. This is why, in the name of truly ‘bourgeois morality’, ‘purely literary’ texts, such as novels, are condemned. The curious thing is that the critic concludes that literature is finally irrealist: in this case, is it not necessary to speak of the irrealist condition of reality itself? Here the discourse spins without reason – sophistically. The literary experience, written or spoken, is halfway between the common use of language, which is used in doing, and the linguistic attention paid to its very existence, which relates to making. We have wrongly accepted the Jakobsonian definition of poetic function (as the self-reference of the linguistic message to itself) for a definition of the poetic, which excludes all reference to any subject or to any object. The practice and reflection of poets opposes to this definition, for they, resisting the terrorism of textuality, for the most part continue tightly to link their writing to a personal

64. Gilson, Linguistics and Philosophy, p. 78.

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experience and a discovery of the world. All poetic experience engages in three terms: a subject, a world, a language.65

Just as with referentiality and meaning, so the theoreticians of literature, inspired by linguistics, ignore the reality of thought. Although thought is never perceived outside of its relationship with language, it is nevertheless in some way autonomous, in permanent play. Without this permanent play of thought, how else could we account for the existence of homonym? We should consider the abundance of metaphysical vocabulary in the text from Barthes under discussion: ‘substance’, ‘being’, the ‘real’, ‘analogy’ and so on. Even if the critic tries to give them a purely linguistic content, the terms of metaphysical discourse are being mobilized. Certainly the idea does not pre-exist language and is formed within it; nevertheless, in order to trigger language, thought must preexist not as it is in language but as an X that escapes observation and wording. The finest Thomists have noticed this phenomenon: Language immediately signifies, not thought, but things. It can only signify them, we might say, if there exists in man a power of knowing things under the form of universals, or general ideas, applicable to classes each of which can be designated by a name. Our understanding of these universals is what we call ‘concepts.’ That is what Thomas Aquinas calls verbum, because this word is what the intellect conceives by things. This power of conceiving of the universal ought to be as immaterial as is the universal itself … . This order of the immaterial, the existence of which one cannot even deny without speaking and consequently attesting to its existence, is the witness in us of the reality of metaphysics.66

It is by the word that the mind knows the reality of the real, the metaphysical domain. It is the real that I know, and I know it in the word. Thus the word must make itself transparent so that in one way or another it is identified with the real. The dialogue of language and logos shows that meaning and language are not identical. Christianity has known this throughout the centuries before the liturgical decline which accompanies the advent of conceptualist rationalism. ‘Is it necessary for the believer to understand everything? There are many words in the Word of God. God does not only speak to human beings by discourse, but also, when we actually hush up, by an interior reach which language does not know. Liturgy is a primary and quasi-sacramental avenue for this approach of the divine.’67 Thomas Aquinas frequently cited the liturgy that he celebrated every day; he even composed liturgical poems: he no more limited the intellect to the

65. Michel Collot, La poé sie moderne et la structure d’horizon (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1989), pp. 5–6. 66. Gilson, Linguistics and Philosophy, p. 78. 67. Marie Noë l, Notes intimes (Paris: Stock, 1959), p. 132.

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play of concepts than he reduced language to pure thought. With him, we must grasp afresh how to distinguish different experiences of the logos which are not necessarily conceptualizable.

The Permanence and Forgetfulness of the Theology of the Word Since the Patristic era, which Thomas Aquinas knew well68 and of which he is perhaps the final representative, the original theological given of our problematic is that of a transcendent and creative Speech, the absolute key of the intelligibility of the real. The Word is the point of encounter between human and divine discourse. The Prologue of the Gospel of John raises it: there is in God a logos which humans understand through the image of the word which exists in them and which precedes them such that this word and the occasion of entry in it is only an image and effect. Verbum non solum est id per quod fit disputatio, sed est ipsa Patris dispositio de rebus creandis, et ideo aliquo modo ad creaturam refertur. The Word is not merely that by which the arrangement of all creatures takes place; it is the arrangement itself which the Father makes of things to be created. Hence, in some way, the Word is related to creatures.69

The Word is active both in its operation – the appearance and ordering of creatures – and in the result – the disposition itself. Speculations on the ‘word’ in God would simply be an absurd tautology if they did not rest on a higher order of initiative: revelation. The finite, as large as it may be, will not reach the infinite: ‘How could humanity go to God if God had not come to humanity?’70 The question is knowing precisely how the divine Word and human language are articulated. Very generally, the existence and functioning of human language creates signs pointing Godward: There is no culture or religion that has not received and does not express a ‘visitation of the Word’. Maximus the Confessor distinguishes three degrees in the ‘embodiment’ of the Word. In the first place, the very existence of the cosmos, understood as a theophany; this symbolism is the foundation of the ancient religions, which see in it the means to the deepest spiritual understanding. Secondly, the revelation of the personal God, who engendered history, and the

68. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, pp. 137–41. 69. Aquinas, de veritate, 4, 5. 70. Irenaeus of Lyon, Adversus Haereses, IV, 33, 4.

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embodying of the Word in the Law, in a sacred Scripture; Judaism and Islam are obvious examples. Finally, the personal incarnation of the Word who gives full meaning to his cosmic and scriptural embodiments, freeing the former from the temptation to absorbed the divine ‘Self ’ in an impersonal divine essence, and the latter from the temptation to separate God and humanity, leaving no possibility of communion between them. For in Christ, to quote the Fourth Ecumenical Council, God and man are united ‘without confusion or change’, but also ‘without division or separation’. And the divine energies, reflected by creatures and objects, do not lead to anonymous divinity but to the face of the transfigured Christ.71

One of the consequences of this theology of the Word is that sensible apprehension itself is integrated into a theological framework. The world is meaningful inasmuch as it is seen through the divine intellect which gives it existence and sustains it in being. Thus, for St. Thomas, creatures are, metaphorically speaking, ‘words’ of God. As we have taken up the question of metaphor, however, there also exist words which can be said properly of God. Here, for example, is an analysis which precisely concerns the word ‘word’. Verbum igitur vocis, quia corporaliter expletur, de Deo non potest dici nisi metaphorice: prout scilicet ipsae, creaturae, a Deo productae verbum eius dicuntur, aut motus ipsarum, inquantum designant intellectum divinum, sicut effectus causam. Unde, eadem ratione, nec verbum quod habet imaginem vocis, poterit dici de Deo proprie, sed metaphorice tantum; ut sic dicantur verbum Dei ideae rerum faciendarum. Sed verbum cordis, quod nihil est aliud quam id quod actu consideratur per intellectum, proprie de Deo dicitur, quia est omnino remotum a materialitate et corporeitate et omni defectu; et huiusmodi proprie dicuntur de Deo, sicut scientia et scitum, intelligere et intellectum. Now, because the vocal word is expressed by means of a body, such a word cannot be predicated of God except metaphorically, that is, only in the sense in which creatures or their motions, being produced by God, are said to be His word inasmuch as they are signs of the divine intellect as effects are signs of their cause. For the same reason, the word which has an image of the vocal word cannot be properly predicated of God, but only metaphorically. Consequently, His ideas of things to be made are called the Word of God only metaphorically. But the word of the heart—that which is actually considered by the intellect— is predicated properly of God, because it is entirely free of matter, corporeity, 71. Olivier Clé ment, The Roots of Christian Mysticism: Text and Commentary (trans. Theodore Berkeley; London: New City, 1993), p. 35. The author is drawing upon Maximus the Confessor’s Ambigua. For the Origenist source of the theme of successive incorporation, see Henri de Lubac, History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture according to Origen (trans. Anne Englund Nash; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), pp. 385–426.

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and all defects; and such things are properly predicated of God, for example, knowledge and the known, understanding and the understood.72

The words within human language which apply properly to God are totally removed from matter. ‘Il quod actu consideratur per intellectum’: the circumlocution designates the intelligible in act, the properly ineffable, which is ‘uncontaminated’ by materiality and corporeality. As is common in discussions on the ineffable, Thomas expresses his examples through words arranged in figures of morphological derivation which outline a ‘non-spatial space’ in the text itself, that of polyptoton itself. The form of the words comes to the aid of their meaning (significatio) through presupposing (suppositio) what cannot be signified. We should insist for a moment on the radical Christocentrism of this linguistic thought: it is because God has spoken human language in Christ that the human being in turn can attempt to speak ‘as’ God (to speak of the being of the real) and to speak of God (to speak of the reality of Being). Only the incarnate Word establishes the realism of human language: The Word is concentrated and takes bodily form. That can be first understood in this sense … that by coming in the flesh he deigned to concentrate himself in order to assume a body and teach us in our human tongue, and by means of parables, the knowledge of holy and hidden things, which surpasses all language. It can also be understood to mean that for love of us he hides himself mysteriously in the spiritual essences of created beings, as if in so many individual letters [of the alphabet], present totally in each one in all his fullness … . In all the variety is hidden the one who is eternally the same, in composite things the one who is simple and without parts, in those things which had to begin on a certain day the one who has no beginning, in the visible the one who is invisible, in the tangible the one who cannot be touched. It can finally be understood to mean that for love of us who are slow to comprehend, he has deigned to use these letters to express the syllables and sounds of Scripture, in order to draw us after him and unite us in his spirit.73

Scripture concretely provides access to the speech of the historical and concrete body of the Logos-Christ, which is now invisible. For example, Thomas maintains that there is an equivalence which exists, in the act of faith, between Scripture and the vision of the resurrected Body:

72. Aquinas, de veritate, 4, 1, resp. 73. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua (PG 91, 1285–8), as in Clé ment, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, p. 36.

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Sicut per sacram Scripturam nostra fides certificatur, ita discipuli certificati sunt de fide per Christi apparitiones. Just as Sacred Scripture certifies our faith, so the appearances of Christ certifies the disciples’ faith in the resurrection.74

Finally, for the Christian, revelation constitutes the foundational experience of meaning: the text is deployed in practice, in the sacraments. The question of literary vocation finds a response in this context: the poet hears in language the whispers of the Word who calls from near and from far. We hope to show later that Thomas’ theological poetics are anchored in his reading of Scripture. In marked contrast to the relative openness of Thomas’ poetics, the moderns tend to effect a reduction inasmuch as their exclusively linguistic projects lead to the identification of language, logos and the intellect. How should we understand the fact that we ‘cannot make the physics of language correspond to the metaphysics of thought’?75 The linguistic reduction observed in Barthes had been prepared for some time by the attitude of the most lucid of poets. We think in particular here of Sté phane Mallarmé , who painfully lived the linguistic intersection between making and doing in literary composition; he understood what prevents literature from being a profession like any other. It is with him that we will end our exploration of literary ‘vocation’. We know that Mallarmé – who made great use of the aesthetics of Christianity – dreamed of being another ‘Bé ranger or a bishop’ and that some of the regulars of the Mardi de Rome saw in him a celebrant.76 Yves Bonnefoy sums up the poet’s initial temptation in this way: to see, to think the universe in its true form. ‘The cricket, says a remarkable passage from a letter [of Mallarmé ] from 1867, has “one” voice, not “decomposed” into material and spirit, it is “the sacred voice of the ingé nue earth”, and this is because its voice is not permeated with the nothingness of words, as, on the contrary, the song, two steps beyond it, of a young woman.’77 In his study of pure sense, the poet was so fascinated and preoccupied by the signifier that he would have forgotten the signified if the necessity of being understood, experienced fatalistically, had not drawn him back. He dreamed of a literary making which would become a pure doing. For example, as he was looking on the road workers (terrassiers) at the end of their daily labour, he dreamed that only his gaze could transubstantiate the laborious condition of people into the real presence of wisdom:

74. Aquinas, ST 3, 55, 4, 3. 75. Gilson, Linguistics and Philosophy, p. 78. 76. Pierre-Olivier Walzer, Essai sur Sté phane Mallarmé (Paris: Seghers, 1963), pp. 6–7. 77. Yves Bonnefoy, ‘Preface’, in Sté phane Mallarmé (ed.), Igitur, Divagations, Un coup de dé s (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), pp. 7–40 (here p. 12).

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Sadness that what I produce remains, to people like this, essentially, like the clouds at dusk or the stars in the sky, vain. Then one day I hear a sudden silence. What is happening? Constellations begin to shine: I wish that, in the darkness that covers the blind herd, there could also be points of light, eternalizing a thought, despite the sealed eyes that never understood it – for the fact, for exactitude, for it to be said. I will thus think exclusively about them, about those whose abandon blocks my access to the vesperal distance more than their daily commotion ever did, Keeping watch over these artisans of elementary tasks, I have occasion, beside a limpid, continuous river, to meditate on the symbols of the People – some robust intelligence bends their spines every day in order to extract, without the intermediary of wheat, the miracle of life which grounds presence.78

In his poetic quest for wisdom, Mallarmé noted that despite ‘the exceptional attitude granted to the literary man’ the level of business quickly comes back. Letters offer no career; the word is used as lyric poets used it, to describe the sun’s path to its zenith – which, in a little while, it will reach – ascension not advancement. The profession is lacking, for several reasons, of which one is the rareness of genius throughout existence, and therefore the obligation to hide that lack with filler, which compensates, the way a newspaper spaces a paragraph.79

This poetic vocation, even though it ends up in the fall of Icarus in the form of the feullonistes, had been essentially religious. Yves Bonnefoy was convinced of it. When you write, it is said, you have to choose between the beauty of a welldefined but spectral intelligibility, and questioning it. A questioning which only truth allows, truth, yes, the truth which is the relativization of our personal speech, always overly limited, by the recognition of the existence of a world beyond it, a world which transcends it. This is what Rimbaud so passionately proposed: ‘I who called myself magus or angel, exempt from all morality, I am thrown back to earth, with a duty to find, and rough reality to embrace! Peasant!’

78. Sté phane Mallarmé , ‘Conflict’, as in idem, Divagations (trans. Barbara Johnson; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 45–6. 79. Mallarmé , ‘Confrontation,’ as in Mallarmé , Divagations, p. 279. We should note that this text contains the first appearance of a Eucharistic paradigm in the context of modern poetry. Through the mediation of wheat, the miracle of life and assured presence: by this constellation of meanings, the poet elevates the labour of road workers to the spiritual efficacy of the Eucharistic sacrifice. One could investigate this attempt to enact the Eucharistic paradigm in the Mallarmean poetics: such motifs as the monstrance, with the old veiled sparkle of the magician’s voice ready for an incantation, the antiphon and its versets symbolize the poem as early as the ‘Ouverture ancienne d’Hé rodiade’.

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These last words seem to me to announce metaphorically the programme, otherwise hardly accepted these years, of a truly modern poetry: constrained by death, or silence, or God, of being an autonomous form, an act of solitude – which Mallarmé assumed with a gallant heart – but condemned to suffocate in its vain repetition if it is only not – for the divine absence does not nullify the need for human communion – and thus obliges coming out of oneself in order to reencounter the risk of other beings, of other words.80

Paradoxically, his quest for pure sense leads to hermeticism. Bonnefoy respectfully reproaches him: ‘He was wrong right from the start to search for essences, for “pure ideas”, whereas, in itself and beyond all lack, even during the night, it is necessary to love presence – it is wrong to dream of a perfection of language, for we must recover our loved ones, right now, and thus speak with words such as they are’.81 Certainly the man of letters can believe himself to have risen above the mass of humanity, but it is clear that he must quickly rejoin them in a common condition. It is the call of the other, of the loved one, which compels him to accept language as it is, as it signifies. The disjunction between artistic language, literary language and common speech turned out to be necessary to the ‘modern’ project: the pointless ‘throw of dice’ of Mallarmé , just as the ‘I know no longer how to speak’ of Rimbaud, have become for their poetic descendants a kind of paradoxical postulate of poetic reason.82 Because of the ‘prostitution’ of banalized speech, poets had to (or believed they had to) allow common speech to become one more product in a consumerist world. To tell the truth, art took to enclosing itself in its famous ivory tower, in the XIX century, only because of the disheartening degradation of its environment.

80. Yves Bonnefoy, Entretiens sur la poé sie (1972-1990) (Paris: Mercure de France, 1990), pp. 54–5. The quotation from Rimbaud comes from ‘Adieu’, the final poem of A Season in Hell. 81. Bonnefoy, Entretiens sur la poé sie, p. 37. 82. George Steiner suggests that there is close connection between the history of poetry and the history of civilization: ‘Note the compelling congruence of Mallarmé ’s and Rimbaud’s proposals with the fundamental crises of method and metaphor in modern science. The epistemology, the linguistics of ‘real absence’ coincides with the physics of ‘black holes’. Rimbaud’s pulverization of psychic cohesion into charged fragments of centrifugal and transient energy corresponds not only to the modern evolution of particle physics but, more stringently, to speculations on anti-matter. Such reciprocities at the level of perceptions and of inquiry cannot, I think, be altogether fortuitous. We shall see, moreover, how in both the arts and the sciences principles of indeterminacy become pivotal. In each of these methodological and metaphoric affinities – method being metaphor made instrumental – we experience the tenor of thought and of feeling after the Word.’ Steiner, Real Presences, pp. 99–100.

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But the normal condition of art is altogether different. Aeschylus, Dante, or Cervantes did not write in a vacuum bell. Moreover, there cannot in fact be any purely “gratuitous” work of art – the universe excepted. Not only is our act of artistic creation ordered to an ultimate end, true God or false God, but it is impossible that it not regard, because of the environment in which it steeps, certain proximate ends that concern the human order. The workman works for his wages, and the most disincarnate artist has some concern to act on souls and to serve an idea, be it only an aesthetic idea. What is required is the perfect practical discrimination between the aim of the workman (finis operantis, as the Schoolmen put it) and the aim of the work (finis operis): so that the workman should work for his wages, but the work should be ruled and shaped and brought into being only with regard to its own good and in nowise with regard to the wages. Thus the artist may work for any and every human intention he likes, but the work taken in itself must be made and constructed only for its own beauty. It is the idlest fancy to think that the ingenuousness or the purity of the work of art depends on a break with the animating and motive principles of the human being, on a line drawn between art and desire or love. It depends rather on the force of the principle that generates the work, or on the force of the virtue of art. There was a tree that said: ‘I want to be tree only and nothing else, and to bear fruit which will be pure fruit. That is why I do not want to grow in earth which is not tree, nor in a climate which is climate of Provence or of Vendé e, and not tree-climate. Shelter me from the air.’83

Equidistant from both linguistic idealism and materialism (both purveyors of hermetism), does not the theology of the Word open up the third way of symbolic experience? It does not deny but fulfils the strange experience of literary vocation felt by the moderns at the heart of language. In order to show that such is the case, it will be necessary to move through the metaphysical and biblical domains which ground human speech on the Speech of God. For the moment, we will at least establish that a medieval theologian like Thomas Aquinas knew the ‘literary’ interaction, at times dramatic, of making and doing.

83. Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, pp. 76–7.

Chapter 4 ‘TO CONTEMPLATE AND TO HAND ON’: THE LITERARY DRAMA OF THE THEOLOGIAN’S VOCATION

The theologian who writes also lives out the drama of all authors. This can be hidden from readers by the signified on which theologians work: the bearer and product of a revelation whose spirituality captures all of one’s attention. This situation can lead us to think that the issue is only one of meaning, and that the signifier interests the theologian merely as the bearer of the signified, hence the strong tendency to gloss over the roughness of discourse in order to systematize a conceptual construction. Yet the epistemological situation of medieval theology as the summit of the sciences seems to imply that theology shares not only in religious reasoning (guaranteed by the science of the God mysteriously participated in by faith) but also, insofar as it is spoken and written, in the ‘peculiar situation’ of modern literature, which ‘holds to what it has made with language’. In Thomas’s time, ‘science’ was an essentially discursive affair, and the theologian was well aware of the torments of writing. We will now show that Thomas recognized the ‘literary’ risk of language, namely, that language can hide its object by substituting itself for its object. We will then see how he guarded against this temptation through relating teaching and contemplation.

Dicere Theology was born from the commentary, and so it knows the danger of rendering banal what is originally revealed. Without referring here to Rabelasian caricatures of scholastic verbosity,1 two quotations from Thomas are enough to make us aware of the interweaving of language and knowledge in the theology that he practices:

1. The several articles in the Summa in which Thomas deals with questions of pure possibility, which might also seem the least interesting to us, deal in ‘theological fiction’, that is, in theological ‘what if ’s’ (cf. ST 3, 3, 3, or 7, where the astonishment before the miracle of the incarnation comes together with pedagogical chutzpah). As for the subsequent generations, even the works of Rabelais do not overly caricature the caricature: ‘Rabelais’ take on scholasticism is not reducible to the figure of Janotus. We should simply note

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Scimus enim quod haec propositio quam formamus de Deo, cum dicimus Deus est, vera est. Et hoc scimus ex eius effectibus, ut supra dictum est. We know that this proposition which we form about God when we say ‘God is,’ is true; and this we know from His effects.2 Basilius enim dicit quod per hoc quod dicitur, dixit Deus, importatur divinum imperium. therefore Basil says (Hom. ii, iii in Hexaem.) that the words, ‘God said,’ signify a Divine command.3

If there is an omnipresent word in the Summa, surely it is ‘dicere’. Commentators hardly ever mention this point, and even those who begin with similarly precise textual observations often end up dealing with the work as if its material were simply pure ideas. From its very first article the reader of the Summa is inducted into a world of discourse: the opinions of the Fathers and previous theologians are introduced with some form of ‘dicit’, and Scripture itself is frequently given the ‘dicitur’ of the sed contra. In the body of the articles St. Thomas seems to be paying back a debt of discourse: ‘Respondeo dicendum quod’. As Franç ois Vallanç on notes, ‘St. Thomas’ response does not have the reality of a thing’, rather ‘it is a saying. It is not just any saying, but a saying understood as the discharge of a debt … . It is the discharge of a debt vis-à -vis someone who is above than him, which shows us what kind of person St. Thomas is and what humanity is more generally: below God but above things.’4 Every previous statement calls for a statement in response. ‘There was a question, there was a response, and after all of this we speak: it is the ad 1, ad 2, ad 3. We do not begin the speaking and we will not end it; we continue the speaking.’5 Speech is caught between God and things. Even if readers discover a world of words they do not find a world reducible to words, but instead become cognizant of the fruitfulness of positing the logical homogeneity of the discourse of thought and the reality of things in God: the principle of the analogy of being entails the total intelligibility of being. The difficulties arise from being blinded by a light which is all too dazzling, rather than moving about in the darkness: from verba to Rabelais’ whole struggle against scholasticism find its focal point in the negation of free will by the “predestinarians” of Geneva’. Bruno Pinchard, ‘Expé rience de l’ê tre, expé rience du sujet dans le champ scolastique de la pensé e; le té moignage de Dante et de Rabelais’, in Saint Thomas au XXe siè cle: colloque du centenaire de la ‘Revue thomiste’ (1893–1992), Toulouse, 25–28 mars 1993 (Paris: Saint-Paul, 1995), pp. 247–67 (here p. 264). 2. Aquinas, ST 1, 3, 4, ad 2. 3. Aquinas, ST 1, 74, 3, ad 1. 4. Franç ois Vallanç on, ‘Domaine et proprié té : Glose sur Saint Thomas d’Aquin, somme thé ologique IIa IIae qu. 66. art. 1 et 2’, 3 vols, thesis submitted to Paris II (Paris 1985), vol. 2, p. 380. 5. Vallanç on, ‘Domaine et proprié té ’, vol. 2, p. 419.

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the Word, the person is able to know an ability corrupted by original sin which the theological art of dicere helps to offset. What is dicere for St. Thomas? It is, first, to offer a ‘word’: nihil enim est aliud dicere quam proferre verbum. Sed mediante verbo importat habitudinem ad rem intellectam, quae in verbo prolato manifestatur intelligenti. For ‘to speak’ is nothing but to utter a word. But by means of the word it imports a relation to the thing understood which in the word uttered is manifested to the one who understands.6

The Summa also claims that ‘dicere’ is a personal property of the Father, the first divine Person, understood through an analogy with the human psyche which St. Augustine had already suggested.7 St. Thomas notes that it is not exactly the same for the case of ‘dici’: Sed dici convenit cuilibet personae, dicitur enim non solum verbum sed res quae verbo intelligitur vel significatur. On the other hand, ‘to be spoken’ belongs to each Person, for not only is the word spoken, but also the thing understood or signified by the word.8

Thomas presupposes in these discussions that the verbum is ‘said’ with the res; that its proper objectivity, as distinguished from reference and the meaning to which it refers, is tied to the utterance, which is different from saying that thing and word can be immediately identified. For Thomas, language is not immediately transparent, and the movement from word to thing, from diceri to esse, requires intellection (intelligatur) and signification (significatur). Intus legens, an etymology that St. Thomas likes to invoke, means that the intellect of the one who speaks the word does not consist of pure intuition, but requires the mediation of the concept and the sign, which are products of knowledge as much as they are the path to the object. They themselves can be known as objects of knowledge. The risk here is stopping at the concept alone instead of integrating it into the living process of an intellectual experience. For a soul destined to know God ‘totum sed non totaliter’, ignorance seems to suggest a lack of finesse in intellection, signification or diction: the theologian must then ‘discover’ the appropriate verba. It is not a matter of making the real lie down on a Procrustean bed of a priori categories, but of finding categories and words as prolific as the real. There is, of course, an aesthetic concern here: the reader is often struck by the elegance of discovering the appropriate vocabulary and by the rhythmic beauty of the cursus of phrases which end the analyses.

6. Aquinas, ST 1, 34, 1, ad 3. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid.

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The awareness of the irreducibility of the world, God and language could lead the theologian into a certain inflation of dicere. In this way, Alain Michel is justified when he speaks of the ‘realism which believes too much in words’,9 which is less paradoxical than it might initially seem. Yet just as he is not a ‘Thomist’, so St. Thomas is also not a ‘realist’, and his work cannot be reduced to one system of thought. Following St. Augustine, even if not explicitly, he follows the interior voice of experience. Modern readers can at times intimate in his texts a tension between the postulate of realism and the invasive reality of discourse. At the same time, one of the main functions of the Summa’s many questions which explicitly deal with dicere is the avoidance of linguistic illusion.10 A good example can be found in St. Thomas’ Trinitarian theology: after attempting to clarify metaphysically the difference between the rigid genitive structures of language (he distinguishes between ‘pulchritudo hominis’ and ‘mulier egregiae formae’), Thomas explains how ‘una essentia trium personarum’ and ‘tres personae unius essentiae’ are synonyms: Et similiter, quia in divinis, multiplicatis personis, non multiplicatur essentia, dicimus unam essentiam esse trium personarum; et tres personas unius essentiae, ut intelligantur isti genitivi construi in designatione formae. In like manner, as in God the persons are multiplied, and the essence is not multiplied, we speak of one essence of the three persons, and three persons of the one essence, provided that these genitives be understood as designating the form.11

The exchange here represents the ‘play’ that St. Thomas is able to see and sagaciously preserve between reality and the language which desires to speak of it. The comparison of such texts with their translations, even recent ones, reveals the misrecognition of the textual and thus the literary dimension of theological writing. Father Roguet, for example, translates the passage we have cited in this way: ‘Likewise, since in God there is a multiplication of person without the multiplication of the essence, we say: the one essence of three persons, taking the genitives as determinations of the form.’12 In addition to replacing ‘designation’ with ‘determination’, and forgetting the operative notion of the ‘constructio’, we can notice the suppression of the main stylistic device and see how the translator believes himself able to retain only the idea. Doing this, however, means effacing the Thomasian awareness of the arbitrariness of language, which far from determining the things of God, ‘de-sign-ates’ them. Through its reciprocity, the genitive relation 9. Michel, In hymnis et canticis, p. 82. 10. We speak of a ‘linguistic illusion’ in terms of Bergon’s criticisms of ‘retrospective illusion’. 11. Aquinas, ST 1, 39, 2, c. The editors titled it: ‘Utrum sit dicendum tres personas esse “unius essentiae”’. 12. Aquinas, ST, 1, 39, 2, resp.

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of essence and persons calls for the silence of contemplation which the translation hastily fills up. Another example can be found in the relationship of the Word and existing creatures: dicitur in Psalmo XXXII, dixit, et facta sunt; quia in verbo importatur ratio factiva eorum quae Deus facit. It is said (Ps. 32:9): ‘He spake, and they were made;’ because in the Word is implied the operative idea of what God makes.13

As God knows not only real beings but also possible beings, must we not also speak of a relation of the Word and possible creatures? To deal with this question, St. Thomas ends his article with a chiseled parallel: Sed tamen verbum est entium ut expressivum et factivum, non entium autem, ut expressivum et manifestativum. Nevertheless the Word is expressive and operative of beings, but is expressive and manifestive of non-beings.14

The variation in adjectival predication and its effects of symmetry and rhyme evince a wholly intellectual art (the ‘manifestativum’ finally becomes the necessary key for harmonizing previous authorities) and simultaneously perhaps serves a mnemonic function. Is not the theologian tempted to reverse the process of knowledge and to search through things for explanations of phrases who only exist in language? Thomas has many distinctions available to avoid this danger, the first one being the distinction between secundum esse and secundum dici. Scholastic theological speech turns out to be deeply structured by the pragmatics of dialogue. In addition to a genuine appetite for the mystical, theological elaboration is spurred on by another desire: answering the criticisms levelled by the adversaries of the faith. The existence of objections to the faith, the rejection of the teaching of sacred doctrine, provokes theological speech. This apologetic dimension, which is essentially tied to the structure of Christian revelation, discretely labours throughout its discourse. The Christian writer cannot hand on revelation without taking into account the situation in which she speaks if she wishes to remain faithful to the teaching of Jesus himself!15 Theological speech is born in an exchange between human speakers and this naturally affects the form that it assumes: it is inherently intended to be persuasive and culturally can

13. Aquinas, ST 1, 34, 3. 14. Aquinas, ST 1, 34, 3, ad 5. 15. For example, cf. Mt. 7.6; 7.24; 13.11-17.

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appeal to the services of the rhetorical arts. All this results in the typical genre of scholasticism: the quaestio.16 The literary genre of the quaestio is born from the pedagogical practice of the disputatio, the ordinary disputation wherein the master takes the initiative or disputes ‘de quolibet ad voluntatem cuiuslibet’, which is a fiercely acrobatic process and demands a strong presence of mind and universal competence. The master engages in debates which may stem from a ‘curious unfamiliarity, or a restless spirit’, or from a ‘jealous rival’ or a ‘suspicious master’ who attempt to put the pedagogue into a critical situation. ‘Such is the internal life of these stereotypical formulas, their real life as historical disputed questions, the life which remains in the “articles” written in the room, the life which is that of the mind at work.’17 The stylization of imaginary disputations renders possible the movement from persuasion to theological convenientia, which touches on the relations between dicere and esse.18 What is the place of dicere in the search for truth? Etymologically, convenientia is that which ‘goes along’ with things: ‘unicuique rei conveniens est illud quod competit sibi secundum rationem propriae naturae’; ‘what is befitting to each thing is that which belongs to it by reason of its very nature’19 God has created all things in wisdom and so convenientia must reign in the order of being. The third part of the Summa actually begins with questions on the ‘fittingness’ of the mystery of the incarnation – ‘Videtur quod non fuerit conveniens Deum incarnari’; ‘It would seem that it was not fitting for God to become incarnate’20 – and it is here that the aesthetic meets the theological.21 Yet the verba, the dicta, also possess a certain kind of being and so fittingness must also be established between them and in them.22 The innumerable expressions which arise from the ‘meta-dicere’, the most frequent of which is a type of ‘ut supra

16. Cf. ‘The birth of the quaestio’, in M. D. Chenu (ed.), Toward Understanding Saint Thomas (trans. A.-M. Landry, O.P. and D. Hughes, O.P.; Chicago, 1963), pp. 85–96. 17. Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, pp. 80–1. 18. ‘There is, precisely in the Cratylus, that which Claudel calls a “formidable dossier,” which would be necessary to open one day.’ Gé rard Genette, ‘Langage poé tique, poé tique du langage’, in idem, Figures II (Paris: É ditions du Seuil, 1969), pp. 123–54 (here p. 146). 19. Aquinas, ST 3, 1, 1. 20. Ibid. 21. ‘But evil of fault is committed by withdrawing from the art of the Divine wisdom and from the order of the Divine goodness. And therefore it could be fitting to God to assume a nature created’. Aquinas, ST 3, 1, 1, ad 3. We might be somewhat tempted to translate erroneously the word ‘ars’ by the word ‘art’ understood in its contemporary sense, and fittingness would then appear to be the artistic ‘precipitate’ of the Wisdom which establishes creation and the Goodness which orients it. In this context we should remember that one of the first authorities cited in the treatise on the incarnation is Horace’s Art of Poetry (ST 3, 1, 1, 2). 22. Vallanç on can speak of the Thomasian question as an ‘agreement or agreements’, or an ‘architecture of agreement’; ‘Domaine et proprié té ’, p. 396.

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dictum est’ or ‘hoc non convenit his quae supra determinata sunt’,23 evince a care for internal coherence which ensures a relative closure of the work, motivated by aesthetic implications, in the order of inventio and dispositio (architecture and variation). The attention given to internal fittingness could compromise the quest for reality inasmuch as it always risks confusing the end and the means, preferring words to things, the harmonious beauty of the system to the eschatological incoherence of the mystery, and thus substituting the study of possible discourse about God for the quest for God himself. The risk is even greater insofar as diction essentially performs a mediatory function: language is par excellence the moment of conciliation between opinions and situations (‘dicit x, dicit y’) which are threatened with ruin in the wear and tear of contradiction. Different techniques are then mobilized – the distinctions between points of view, between proper and figurative senses, analyses and presuppositions, etymological play, types of usage, exempla and so on – and put into the service of the poetic principles.24 Certainly the truth that the theologian reaches for when selecting this or that authority is enunciated on different levels, but it is only reached or communicated in speech. The omnipresence of dicere in the Summa theologiae, which reminds us of a certain impasse debated in contemporary literature,25 poses the question of the realist foundation underlying the imperative of ‘internal fittingness’. The latter seems to have as much reality as the ‘objective’ fittingness which exists between things. A certain performativity of discourse, an efficacy of theological dicere, is thus required. The equivalences St. Thomas establishes between dicere and ostendere, determinare or aestimare aim at this goal. Certain quotations and allusions constitute real ‘acts of discourse’, as when the reminder of the condemnations pronounced by this or that council against a ‘dit’ cuts short the objections or nearly halts the discussion. The very model of the divine factio factiva26 lies at the foundation of these practices. For one of the functions of the divine Word is the establishment of fittingness: ‘verbum Dei a quo est omnis forma et compago et concordia partium’; ‘The Word of God is all form and fitness and concord of parts’.27 Suffice to say, in the final analysis the theology of the Word has to establish the dicere of the Summa through adding the reality of participation of human speech in the Logos of truth to formal or proportional analogy. Without such an addition, how could we reconcile confidence in the word with a realist position? The persuasion Thomas employs in theological speech is that of the primacy of simple intellection: for Thomas, as for his master, truth is its own proof. The theologian’s

23. Aquinas, ST 3, 28, 2, ad 3, among innumerable other examples. 24. The short list given here only comes from looking at two questions of the Summa! Cf. ST 3, 2 and 3. See Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 169–85. 25. How could one ever escape the literary? 26. Aquinas, ST 1, 34, 3. 27. Aquinas, ST 1, 65, 4.

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entire effort consists of expressing the truth in the most direct manner possible so that the truth itself can illuminate the mind of the listener or reader. It is found in the necessity of establishing the fittingness between being and language, between the truth and efficacy of speech. Convenientia is not the fabrication (fictio) of verbal solutions to real problems. Language’s participation in the Word grounds not only the realism of theological discourse, but also a poetics of conciliation between words and things, a communion of language with the real, which is the source of aesthetic and spiritual pleasure, the sobria ebrietas.

Contemplari From Plato’s Symposium to Philo of Alexandria’s De ebrietate, the sobria ebrietas is a frequent topic in the ancient Church’s spiritual writings and liturgical hymnody and it is connected in particular to the poetics of the Holy Spirit.28 The sobria ebrietas may also provide some help in answering our question: Does not Thomas’ calm and inspired contemplation banish the risk of discourse about the object of theology hiding the very object itself? If it is true that the beauty of God leaves one speechless, is not mystical intuition the fulfilment of theology in the same way that in philosophy the demonstrative is the fulfilment of the dialectical? As in the general Prologue, Thomas ‘attempts’ to write the Summa ‘with confidence in divine assistance’. This is not a mere stylistic device. The witnesses to Thomas’ piety are many, and they insist that Thomas fuit homo magnae contemplationis et orationis. We understand his prayer most often in direct relationship with his intellectual work. ‘Every time that he wanted to set about doing a disputation, to teach, to write or to speak, he first retired into the secrecy of the oratory and prays by pouring out tears, therewith reaching knowledge of divine mysteries … .’ Such was his habitual practice. Then, having reflected on the metaphysical difficulties of the permanence of the Eucharistic accidents sine subjecto, he stands before the crucifix and, placing open before him as before his master the notebook on which he wrote, he prays with outstretched arms.29

Thomas could say with the prophet, ‘O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed.’30 When attempting to explain the faculties engaged in the contemplative life, he begins with the will, the motor of the intellect. In fact, it is sometimes love for

28. Cf. Alain Michel, Thé ologiens et mystiques au Moyen  ge: la poé tique de Dieu (Vᵉ -XVᵉ siè cles) (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 224. 29. Jean-Pierre Torrell, ‘Saint Thomas d’Aquin’, in M. Viller, F. Cavallera and J. de Guibet (eds.), Dictionnaire de spiritualité , vol. XV (Paris: Beauchesne, 1991), col. 749–73 (here col. 746). 30. Jer. 20.7.

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the thing regarded, sometimes love for the knowledge procured by consideration of the thing, which impels the ‘appetitive power’ to consider something. Such is indeed the effect of the beauty of God. Et propter hoc Gregorius constituit vitam contemplativam in caritate Dei, inquantum scilicet aliquis ex dilectione Dei inardescit ad eius pulchritudinem conspiciendam. Wherefore Gregory makes the contemplative life to consist in the ‘love of God,’ inasmuch as through loving God we are aflame to gaze on His beauty.31

How should we characterize the beauty of God? In the Summa Thomas teaches the following: sicut accipi potest ex verbis Dionysii, IV cap. de Div. Nom., ad rationem pulchri, sive decori, concurrit et claritas et debita proportio, dicit enim quod Deus dicitur pulcher sicut universorum consonantiae et claritatis causa. As may be gathered from the words of Dionysius (Div. Nom. iv), beauty or comeliness results from the concurrence of clarity and due proportion. For he states that God is said to be beautiful, as being ‘the cause of the harmony and clarity of the universe’.32

Thomas’ theological compositio aims at harmony and clarity. In this way the theologian performs in the Summa the same type of action that God performs in the world and thus fulfils the dream of all modern novelists, those demiurges of their narrative universes, but he does so without hubris. First off, he is aware that his power, even the glory of his intellect, comes from another: it is in the light of the divine Model that the theologian discovers the reasons, hidden in God, for the harmony and beauty of created realities. Secondly, the discovery of the divine beauty described by Denys presupposes the acquisition, at least by desire, of spiritual or intelligible beauty: The beauty of the body consists in a man having his bodily limbs well proportioned, together with a certain clarity of color. In like manner spiritual beauty consists in a man’s conduct or actions being well proportioned in respect of the spiritual clarity of reason. Now this is what is meant by honesty, which we have stated to be the same as virtue; and it is virtue that moderates according to reason all that is connected with man. Wherefore ‘honesty is the same as spiritual beauty.’ Hence Augustine says (Questions [83], qu. 30): ‘By honesty I mean intelligible beauty, which we properly designate as spiritual.’33

31. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 180, 1. Cf. Gregory, Homilies on Ezekiel II, 2. 32. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 145, 2. 33. Ibid.

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As a preaching friar, Thomas Aquinas lives under the Rule of St. Augustine, whose final article commends the brothers to live ‘in a spirit of charity as lovers of spiritual beauty, giving forth the good odor of Christ in the holiness of your lives’.34 For the Christian, Christ is effectively the divine idea of human perfection; the harmony of creation and redemption is based on the mystery of the incarnate Word. The Dominican’s theological work reproduces the unity of the grace of Christ, in stark contrast to modern divisions between the ascetic and the mystical. It presupposes, for example, the virtuous exercise of the intellect as well as prudence and patience: The virtues can even be an earth-bound obstacle to happiness by reason of their ascetical struggle. Their equilibrium, even when achieved, never reaches to the kalos kagathos (the perfect moral character of Aristotle’s ethics), since the beauty of the virtues is only ‘borrowed’: Beauty is discovered principally and essentially in the contemplative life and in contemplative understanding, whose prerogative it is to provide illumination for the rest of life and to develop our being according to its proper proportions. So it is said of the contemplation of Wisdom: ‘I have fallen in love with beauty.’ (ST II-II, q. 180, art. 2, resp. 3)35

Theoria and praxis are reunited through the evangelical passion of the vita apostolica, through the unity of a life in which ‘action flows out of the abundance of contemplative experience in such a way that, under the structuring guidance of contemplation and by force of its unifying power, this “mixed” life is understood to be superior to pure contemplation’.36 This is why the theologian is effectively engaged in the work of imaging and the whole activity of his writing opens out into the sublime.

34. ‘Donet Dominus ut observetis haec omnia tanquam spiritualis pulchritudinis amatores et bono Christi odore de bona conversatione fragrantes.’ Several years after the death of St. Dominic, when Thomas was still rather young, a master of the Order of Preachers described the Dominican ideal in terms of beauty. In an encyclical letter addressed to the Order in 1233, he invokes the holy memory of Dominic, the translation of whose relics had just taken place and was accompanied by astonishing miracles (the perfume of saintliness, most notably), and then exhorts his brothers to follow the example of this patriarch: ‘Non-nullus per Dei misercordiam in vobis video, super quibus gaudeo et gratias ago Deo, qui pulchritudinis studium habentes colunt conscientiam, perfectionem exquirunt et in praedictatione laborant, in studio fervent, in orationibus atque meditationibus exardescunt, providentes Dominum in conspectu suo semper, tamquam suarum remunatorem et  iudicem animarum.’ Jordanus de Saxonia, Magister Ordinis, ‘Littera encyclica anno 1233’, in Archivum fratrum præ dicatorum, vol. 22 (Rome: Istituto Storico Domenicano, 1952), pp. 182–5 (here p. 185). 35. Marie-Dominique Chenu, Aquinas and His Role in Theology (trans. Paul Philibert; Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2002), p. 43. 36. Chenu, Aquinas and His Role in Theology, p. 44.

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Does this mystical sublime offer a satisfactory response to the risk of the inflation of the discourse under discussion? Certainly ‘yes’, for the theologian does not hesitate to compare contemplation, as disinterested as beauty, with play, and he recognizes that both are autotelic. Like play, the contemplation of wisdom is not ordered to anything other than itself, it finds its proper end in itself, and it is delightful. It is even the supreme delight, for in contrast to all other pleasures, the contemplation of wisdom discovers the cause of its delight in itself, and so no anxieties nor fears can disturb it. This is why the divine Wisdom compares its own delight to that of play: ‘And I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always.’37 Perhaps ‘yes’ even for his thirteenth-century reader. Thomas shares with his contemporaries a ‘pancalist’ vision of the universe.38 ‘To put it more precisely, the medievals did not succeed in devising a terminology for distinguishing between the admiration they felt for a sunset, or God’s grandeur, and the admiration they felt for a statue (that is, in our language, a work of art), or for the beauty of a porphyry vase (a work of craft).’39 It is difficult, then, to decide whether he [Suger] loved God as beauty, or loved beauty as a secondary revelation of God. As we shall see, when I come to discuss the allegorical and symbolical element in the medieval sensibility, this lack of clarity was valid within the medieval framework. Suger’s attitude is not clear because it was not supposed to be. We shall see, in connection with the neo-Platonic elements in Aquinas, that for the medievals the aesthetic moment was characteristically theophanic.40

Thus, Another element in medieval aesthetic pleasure appears in a passage in which Suger relates what it is to contemplate the beauty of his church. It is an experience which unites the sensuousness of beautiful materials with an awareness of the supernatural, in a manner which he describes as ‘anagogical.’ In the medieval Weltanschauung there was a direct connection linking the earth with heaven, and this must be taken into account when one considers their aesthetic perceptions.41

In this vision of things, one can intimate a theologico-aesthetic sense even when the artist works with the immaterial material of language, which is both her tool and her lifeworld. For our contemporary mindset, by contrast, language’s singular

37. Prov. 8.30. It is this type of play in Aquinas which leads to Umberto Eco finding an ‘underlying aesthetic consciousness’; Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas (trans. Hugh Bredin; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 18. 38. Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, pp. 12–19. 39. Ibid., pp. 12–13. 40. Ibid., p. 14. 41. Ibid.

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ability to span both artistic fiction and real truth casts a suspicion of irrealism upon all of language. No such suspicion existed in the thirteenth century, however, for in this context the gracious presence of meaning in human speech glows with the divine transcendence which comes forth from the lips of the incarnate Word. Nevertheless, Thomas is not satisfied with mute admiration: the same reason, the same charity, which compels him to contemplate also compels him to hand on what has been contemplated. Given the scholarly character of this transmission, the place of speech in the traditio contemplatorum must be described within the broader context of the Thomas’ understanding of teaching. Language plays a crucial role in this handing on inasmuch as it formulates the realities contemplated for the sake of communicating them. It has been said that for Thomas ‘all speech is offered in order to be put into action: Estote factores Verbi. Under this series of seemingly frigid deductions there burns an internal flame.’42 The writing of a saintly ‘master’ invites a meditation on the efficacy of language in spiritual experience. It is necessary to distinguish infused contemplation, which was a personal, supernatural and incommunicable grace of religion, and the acquired contemplation that the Dominican theologian had to hand on.

Tradere For St. Thomas, this contemplation is a gazing at, an intuitus, of the truth,43 which is not surprising for our ‘romantic’ idea of this activity, but this contemplation is also ‘the crowning of philosophical activity’,44 which might indeed surprise us. For Thomas, the structure of our mind is such that to be fixed on the consideration of a truth requires that our understanding be based on principles, even implicit and unarticulated ones, and to reason in their light, even if this discursus does not take the form of a syllogism, and at the end of this journey to see the truth thus uncovered. In other words, the logic which guides the scholar towards the truth is not different from the logic which guides other people in their instinctive search for the very truth which they in turn desire to contemplate.45

42. Marie-Joseph Nicolas, ‘Introduction à la Somme thé ologique’, in Thomas d’Aquin (ed.), Somme thé ologique, vol. 1 (Paris: Cerf 1980), 13–66 (here p. 12). Thomas alludes to Jas 1.22 in ST 1, 1, 4. 43. ‘Contemplation regards the simple act of gazing on the truth’; Aquinas, ST 2-2, 180, 3. See also ST 180, 4, ad 3; 180, 6; Sent III, dist. 35, q. 1, a 2, n. 37-38. 44. Thierry-Marie Hamonic, ‘Ratio, intellectus, intuitus et contemplation philosophique selon saint Thomas d’Aquin’. Thesis presented to the Université des sciences humaines de Strasbourg (1992), p. 15. 45. Hamonic, Ratio, intellectus, intuitus, pp. 15–16. See also Paul Philippe, ‘La contemplation au XIIIe siè cle’, in M. Viller, F. Cavallera and J. de Guibet (eds.), Dictionnaire

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As is necessary anthropologically, the mind’s movement while it searches for a vision through the discursus of reason concretely occurs within the context of the irreducibility of language in the contemplative life and, in the case of theological contemplation, of the necessity of employing poetics. The text itself is the trace of the discursive activity of reason and it remains a necessary path for the human intellect in its journey towards contemplation. Contemplatives are incapable of liberating themselves from discourse through the grace of the mystical and so they must speak a highly particular language in order to banish the risk of the inflation of theological discourse. We first think of the Word of God consigned to Holy Scripture: does not the sacred text constitute the middle term between prayer and literary composition in Thomas’ life? On the moral level, and like the Fathers, Thomas presents the study of Scripture as the foundation of the religious life which guides him: it purifies and illuminates interior space. Teaching plays a complementary role here inasmuch as it calms, by forming and ordering, the interior passions from which come many of the ‘phantasms’ which impede contemplation.46 On the epistemological level, the theological dicere is intended to take place in a genuine continuity with the discourse of Scripture. After creating all things, God brought the animals before the Adam ‘to see what he would call them’47: the theologian’s copia verborum literally translates his zeal to satisfy this desire for God. If the Speech of God created what it said, then Adam’s speech, following his desire for God, speaks the created. Inspired by Scripture, the discursus of reason which

de spiritualité , vol. 2 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1953), col. 1966–88. We find here the classic (and evangelical) theme of an understanding shared by the savants and the little ones (cf. Lk. 10.21 and Mt. 11.25). 46. ‘The active life may be considered from two points of view. First, as regards the attention to and practice of external works: and thus it is evident that the active life hinders the contemplative, in so far as it is impossible for one to be busy with external action, and at the same time give oneself to Divine contemplation. Secondly, active life may be considered as quieting and directing the internal passions of the soul; and from this point of view the active life is a help to the contemplative, since the latter is hindered by the inordinateness of the internal passions. Hence Gregory says (Moral. vi, 37): “Those who wish to hold the fortress of contemplation must first of all train in the camp of action. Thus after careful study they will learn whether they no longer wrong their neighbor, whether they bear with equanimity the wrongs their neighbors do to them, whether their soul is neither overcome with joy in the presence of temporal goods, nor cast down with too great a sorrow when those goods are withdrawn. In this way they will know when they withdraw within themselves, in order to explore spiritual things, whether they no longer carry with them the shadows of the things corporeal, or, if these follow them, whether they prudently drive them away.” Hence the work of the active life conduces to the contemplative, by quelling the interior passions which give rise to the phantasms whereby contemplation is hindered.’ Aquinas, ST 2-2, 182, 3. 47. Gen. 2.19.

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is searching for a vision has a foretaste of it in a certain way: Thomas is all the more assertive the less he is aided by reason alone, for he thinks that the master’s certainty can coincide with flashes of hesitation and doubt surmounted in faith. This confluence seems to characterize literary inspiration: according to the principle of ‘circularity’,48 the compositio of theological work somehow continues the prophetic inspiration that it explains. Holy Scripture ensures a certain deflation of speech by forming rational discourse through the process of the lectio. Silent prayer, however, is the element of the contemplative life which spontaneously appears as the most effective for stabilizing theological discourse. What place, then, does it occupy in theological writing? Is it merely the atmosphere which surrounds writing without penetrating it? Alluding to St. Thomas’ devotion to the crucifix after study, Torrell speaks of ‘the expressive simplicity of the gesture – sublime in its naivety – and the deep intention of the saint’s attempt at “verifying” in prayer the solidity of his intellectual construction’49; but prayer does not occur only after theology. How is prayer related to the discourse of the mind in contemplation? Does it play a role in the vague illumination which activates reason? Questions regarding the interrelationship between silence and words are particular instantiations of a larger dialectic between the active life and the contemplative life. A brief look at Thomas’s treatment of this distinction should be of help. When comparing them from a genetic point of view, the theologian gives precedence to the active life over the contemplative life: Alio modo est aliquid prius quoad nos, quod scilicet est prius in via generationis. Et hoc modo vita activa est prior quam contemplativa, quia disponit ad contemplativam, ut ex supra dictis patet. Dispositio enim in via generationis praecedit formam, quae simpliciter et secundum naturam est prior. Secondly, a thing precedes with regard to us, because it comes first in the order of generation. In this way the active life precedes the contemplative life, because it disposes one to it, as stated above (Article [1]; Question [181], Article [1], ad 3); and, in the order of generation, disposition precedes form, although the latter precedes simply and according to its nature.50

However, the contemplative life is primary from the point of view of finality: a vita activa proceditur ad vitam contemplativam secundum ordinem generationis, a vita autem contemplativa reditur ad vitam activam per viam directionis, ut scilicet vita activa per contemplationem dirigatur. Sicut etiam

48. Cf. Venard, Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 147–67. 49. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and his Work, p. 285. 50. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 182, 4.

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per operationes acquiritur habitus, et per habitum acquisitum perfectius aliquis operatur, ut dicitur in II Ethic. Progress from the active to the contemplative life is according to the order of generation; whereas the return from the contemplative life to the active is according to the order of direction, in so far as the active life is directed by the contemplative. Even this habit is acquired by acts, and by the acquired habit one acts yet more perfectly, as stated in Ethic. ii, 7.51

How should we relate the act of teaching to St. Thomas’ theological composition? In the Secunda Pars, he discusses the role of teaching in the context of contemplation and action through a fundamental analysis of speech. The act of teaching, Thomas observes, has two objects: the matter of the idea within the mind and the audible discourse which formulates it. Within doctrina itself, Thomas distinguishes the signified, the object of the interior idea, and the signifier, its oral manifestation in audible discourse: fit enim doctrina per locutionem; locutio autem est signum audibile interioris conceptus. For teaching is conveyed by speech, and speech is the audible sign of the interior concept.52

As regards the signified, teaching is an act of the contemplative life insofar as the intelligible truth conceived is the source of meditative delight; it is an act of the active life, however, inasmuch as the person initially conceives it internally in order to move towards external actions. As regards the sign itself, the object of the doctrine is its intended recipient, the audiens.53 In this sense teaching, like all other external activity, wholly involves the active life. However, in the body of a question devoted to a fairly general question – ‘Whether a religious order can be established for the works of the active life?’ – Thomas presents works performed in charity for the neighbour as sacrifices offered to God, as acts of religion par excellence. Dei servitium et famulatus salvatur etiam in operibus vitae activae, quibus aliquis servit proximo propter Deum, sicut dictum est. In quibus etiam salvatur singularitas vitae, non quantum ad hoc quod homo cum hominibus non conversetur; sed quantum ad hoc quod homo singulariter his intendat quae ad divinum obsequium spectant. Et dum religiosi operibus vitae activae insistunt intuitu Dei, consequens est quod in eis actio ex contemplatione divinorum derivetur. Unde non privantur omnino fructu contemplativae vitae.

51. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 182, 4, ad 2. 52. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 181, 3. 53. Ibid.

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Service and subjection rendered to God are not precluded by the works of the active life, whereby a man serves his neighbor for God’s sake, as stated in the Article. Nor do these works preclude singularity of life; not that they involve man’s living apart from his fellow-men, but in the sense that each man individually devotes himself to things pertaining to the service of God; and since friars occupy themselves with the works of the active life for God’s sake (intuitu Dei), it follows that their action results from their contemplation of divine things. Hence they are not entirely deprived of the fruit of the contemplative life.54

If we attempt to place the activities of study, preaching and teaching (which are Thomas’ activities as a member of the Order of Preachers) into this dialectic, an interesting meta-literary twist occurs. In his article comparing the active life and the contemplative life, and after noting the superiority of the former absolutely speaking, he then distinguishes between two types of active lives and gives the premier place to the one that he himself chose! summum gradum in religionibus tenent quae ordinantur ad docendum et praedicandum. Quae et propinquissimae sunt perfectioni episcoporum, sicut et in aliis rebus fines primorum coniunguntur principiis secundorum, ut Dionysius dicit, VII cap. de Div. Nom. Secundum autem gradum tenent illae quae ordinantur ad contemplationem. Tertius est earum quae occupantur circa exteriores actiones. The highest place in religious orders is held by those which are directed to teaching and preaching, which, moreover, are nearest to the episcopal perfection, even as in other things “the end of that which is first is in conjunction with the beginning of that which is second,” as Dionysius states (Div. Nom. vii). The second place belongs to those which are directed to contemplation, and the third to those which are occupied with external actions.55

We might be tempted to smile when hearing the Dominican Thomas Aquinas claim that the ‘mixed life’ (which the preaching friars live) is the highest state of life. Nevertheless, beyond the apology pro domo of the life he leads and its foregoing of respectable familial and ecclesiastical customs, he formally justifies his claim through appealing to the (episcopal!) dignity of preaching and teaching and to the fact that it is more charitable to hand on what one has contemplated rather than solely to contemplate: opus vitae activae est duplex. Unum quidem quod ex plenitudine contemplationis derivatur, sicut doctrina et praedicatio. Unde et Gregorius dicit, in V Homil. super Ezech., quod de perfectis viris post contemplationem suam redeuntibus dicitur, memoriam suavitatis tuae eructabunt. Et hoc praefertur simplici 54. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 188, 2, ad 1. 55. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 188, 6.

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contemplationi. Sicut enim maius est illuminare quam lucere solum, ita maius est contemplata aliis tradere quam solum contemplari. The work of the active life is twofold. One proceeds from the fullness of contemplation, such as teaching and preaching. Wherefore Gregory says (Hom. v in Ezech.) that the words of Ps. 144:7, “They shall publish the memory of ... . Thy sweetness,” refer “to perfect men returning from their contemplation.” And this work is more excellent than simple contemplation. For even as it is better to enlighten than merely to shine, so is it better to give to others the fruits of one’s contemplation than merely to contemplate.56

When he describes the ‘mixed’ life which he leads, Thomas loves to cite Gregory the Great’s fifth Homily on Ezekiel. Perfect contemplation must express the sweetness of God, the joy which God brings about, through its words: this incarnated speech (eructare) has to remember the aesthetic, gustatory or visual effects of delight in the company of God in order to communicate them. In this way, the superiority of the mixed life in relation to merely the contemplative life involves the practice of speech. It certainly presupposes contemplation as a foundation, but it fulfils (without abolishing) contemplation through the communication of contemplated things. ‘Contemplata aliis tradere’ is the motto of the Dominicans: for St. Thomas, the true end of an apostolic order is not preaching, but ‘to contemplate in order to hand on’, contemplation which bears fruit in speech; the former is not the means of the latter, but its cause. How do we situate the act of writing a theological work within the dialectic of the active life and the contemplative life as specified by teaching? Participating in teaching prepares the author for contemplating his subject matter, just as the discursus of reason is fulfilled by the purity of intellection, but this purity of intellection itself comes to fruition in the contemplative life. The Prologue of the Summa theologiae inducts us into a work which simultaneously inhabits the universe of writings (with Scripture as its absolute norm, and the writings which precede the Summa being so much matter which requires form) and the world of concrete life (it is rooted in diligent contemplation and seeks to communicate knowledge in accord with the exigencies of charity proper to the 56. Ibid. See also ST 2-2, 184, 7, ad 3: ‘As Gregory says (Pastor. ii, 1), “a prelate should be foremost in action, and more uplifted than others in contemplation,” because it is incumbent on him to contemplate, not only for his own sake, but also for the purpose of instructing others.’ The Rule of St. Augustine cultivates a spirituality different from those of the monks: to the obligation of understanding common to all human beings corresponds, according to the regular canon, the obligation of teaching through his type of life (vita) and wisdom (doctrina), and through his words (verba) and his example (exemplo). By emphasizing that the task of preachers is exemplum, and its result is aedificatio in the lay community, the Dominican Order accentuates the social dimension of religious life, whereas in the spirit of the Rule of St. Benedict, the monk is truly the monos face-to-face with God and so the example which he provides is not an essential component of his life.

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Catholic faith). The work is presented, through prolepses and repetitions, as the patient unfolding of an intelligible totality which remains unfinished. This being left unfinished, in part voluntary, shows that the idea was not exclusively located in the intellectual or artistic order. Thomas pursues in writing an end which surpasses the order of making and which is located in the order of doing: the sanctification of the Christian and the preacher-friar which he is. He seeks knowledge of God himself, and seeing turns out to be irreducible to writing. In this way, the Summa constituted a sort of immense spiritual exercise for its author.57 In a sermon in which he alludes to the paths of wisdom, after recalling the teaching of his ancient and modern masters and the teaching of the things created by God, Thomas describes the process of theological inventio precisely in terms of communication: Moreover, a person must acquire wisdom by sharing it with others. As it says in Wisdom: ‘I learned without guile and I impart without grudging’ (Wis 7:13). Everyone can find out that no one advances in knowledge better than by sharing what one knows with others; and it is an obligation to responds to others regarding what one knows. As it says in Proverbs ‘to show you what is right and true, so that you may give a true answer to those who sent you’ (Prov 22:21). Christ answered and ‘all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and at his answers’ (Luke 2:47).58

Thomas claims that ‘everyone can find out’ the fruitfulness of communication for knowledge itself: as he often does in his preaching, he alludes to daily life. He continues his sermon by proposing an ethics of speech which serves its spiritual fruitfulness.59

57. In the sense in which the Super Boethium de Trinitate, even though it was an unfinished youthful work, has been compared to a ‘personal reflection conducted with pen in hand’, a sort of intellectual exercise, ‘a sort of program’ of the intellectual life. Cf. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, pp. 67, 68. The Summa itself exercises a similar effect upon its reader. The student-reader passes from active reading to contemplation through pursuing the generative process of the contemplative life through the active life! 58. Aquinas, ‘Sermo in I Dominica post Epiphaniam “Puer Iesus”’ in Opera omnia (Paris: Vivè s, 1889), vol. 32, pp. 668–9. 59. In his de magistro, Thomas acknowledges a contemplative power proper to teaching. Even when responding to an argument which claims that it is necessary to give deeper consideration to teaching than to pure contemplation (‘the active life “sees less while it is engaged in work.” But one who teaches must of necessity see more than one who simply contemplates. Therefore, teaching pertains more to the contemplative than to the active life’), Thomas does not deny that teaching itself provides some vision, but simply establishes that the vision gained in teaching is not primarily tied to the act of teaching, and that the principal concern of teaching is communication more than signification: ‘The insight of the

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In this way the composition of a theological work can coincide with the moment of contemplation if one sees nothing more or else than what the voice illuminates.60 In the course of this life, the composition of his works becomes an integral part of Thomas’ regular regiment of contemplation. ‘Teaching is an action’,61 certainly, but ‘communicating divine truth means, in a sense, not abandoning it, but rather remaining lovingly attached to this truth that is intimately assimilated and possessed’.62 This reasoning is not opposed to the fact that Thomas places teaching on the side of the active life: we have heard him responding to those who wish to restrict the perfection of the religious life to simply ‘pure’ contemplation and his answer is that activity itself can be contemplative when it occurs with and in the ‘intuition’ of God. ‘And all were astonished at his responses’: Christ’s example is placed at the heart of the pedagogical experience: the living continuity between contemplation and preaching analogically participates in the living continuity Thomas establishes between the incarnation and the redemption, and the latter is the cause of the former: the mystery of the superabundant grace of the God-man is communicated by the mystery of the cross. As Thomas understands it, the existence of the preacher is a constant experience of the ‘law of sacramentality’ which characterizes Christian revelation and in which the realities of this world, and particularly speech, are elevated to the status of signs which make known the divine life and to the status of instruments which truly mediate it. Even in the thirteenth century, then, speech was not merely a transparent means for transmitting information, but it was also a place for discovering the contemplated object through a subtle dialectic of the Word and the verba. In this age and in this theology, the intransitivity of language could coincide with the irreducibility of discourse in the luminous experience of faith. Our age believes we must refuse this light, even as it retains some nostalgia for it.

teacher is a source of teaching, but teaching itself consists more in the communication of the things seen than in the vision of them. Hence, the insight of the teacher belongs more to action than to contemplation’. Aquinas, de veritate, 11, 4, ad 3. 60. For an extended discussion of the experience of the lectio divina, see Venard, Sacra Pagina, pp. 353–403. 61. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 181, 3. 62. Chenu, Aquinas and His Role in Theology, p. 46.

Chapter 5 THE IDEA, POETICS AND CLASSICAL ‘IDEA’ OF THE SUMMA THEOLOGIAE

If we are to believe the Prologue of his Summa theologiae, Thomas is aiming for the most direct possible reception of his writing. This consideration for his readers leads him to choose an aesthetics whose motto could be ‘order and poverty’. Thomas’ very project thus partially links art, wisdom and friendship. ‘The difference between the contemplative sage and the active person resides in the fact that the latter seeks friendship as an end, while the former seeks contemplation of the supreme Good which is their end beyond human friendship and has no need of this friendship.’1 The Summa is the fruit of solitary contemplation and friendship with others, for Thomas was one member of a religious order and thus among his brothers. This friendship pushes him towards abundance, just as his contemplation of the ineffable leads him to laconism: theological wisdom results in a poetics of the equilibrium between Asianism and Atticism, between abundance and laconism, the two perennial tendencies of the art of speech. Far from the modern conception of aestheticism, Thomas, like all medievals (and like all ‘classicals’), tightly links the aesthetic and the functional: everything is inserted into a hierarchy of ends which is entirely centred on persons and their supernatural end. In this sense, the stress the Prologue places on the utility of working for his brothers does not move away from the aesthetic sphere; on the contrary, it indicates the way in which the reader is to enjoy the work’s beauty. No less than in his metaphysics, St. Thomas’ aesthetics2 contemplates substances, whose arrangement constitutes the texture of reality. A substance is the organic union of a form and the matter which it organizes: for Thomas, we can judge beauty under the threefold aspect of (1) proportion, the ontological relationship of matter and form, perceived as a sensible,3 spiritual or intellectual4

1. Marie-Dominique Philippe, Philosophie de l’art (Paris: É ditions universitaires, 1994), vol. 2, p. 41. 2. For this development, see Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (trans. Hugh Bredin; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 83–91. 3. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 141, 4, ad 3. 4. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 145, 2.

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(‘fitting’) harmony; (2) integritas, the presence in the whole organism of the parts which define it as such;5 and (3) claritas, the radiating of the form upon the whole, the expressivity of the substance as such. Thomas conceives of beauty in such a way that it is both on the side of the object which is ontologically available to be judged as beautiful, and on the side of the subject who alone perceives harmony, perfection and brilliance within it. Works of art are susceptible to similar types of analyses as those performed on natural substances6: we can thus enjoy the Summa’s beauty (judging it to be harmonious, complete and clear!) once we have evaluated whether its form conforms to the end to which it aims: the useful handing on of sacra doctrina. The modern, for whom God is above all ineffable, could be tempted to judge this end to be inaccessible, and thus the Summa’s beauty would be irretrievably lost. The modern, in front of the immense detours (through the Bible and metaphysics, the two sources of sacra doctrina) necessary to whoever wants to enjoy this particular pleasure, might also wonder if a beauty which demands such effort is worthy of the name. But is not the fatigue of a long pilgrimage necessary for the sublime encounter that the pilgrim experiences upon entering the sanctuary (rather than remaining content with a postcard)? Furthermore, the metaphysical framework of Thomas’ aesthetic vision means that noticing it is less a matter of immediate perception than an act of judgement,7 for a thing’s intelligible or spiritual beauty is not immediately perceived in intuition but at the end of a discourse. This chapter hopes to contribute to the elaboration of such a discourse as regards the Summa. In order to do this, it is first necessary to be persuaded that the Summa is a work of art. As a book, the Summa is the product of an artistic type of making and its text is crafted by the ‘end without an end’ proper to every work of art. To understand it we must rid ourselves of both Pseudo-Aristotelian ideas regarding the philosophy of art and the prestige of ‘inspiration’ with which public art is infatuated, whether it is solemnly understood to be the ‘artist’s creative process’ or reduced to caprice. If it is obvious that the work of art does not pre-exist the completed idea in the artist’s mind, as a sort of perfect model by which she is inspired, it is no less clear that her activity is oriented from within and is animated by an idea. Understanding a work of art thus requires us ‘to infer the existence of the artistic idea’8: The form pre-exists in the artist in view of the work and for realization, whereas, in the work, it exists in a perfectly determined manner … . Thus, on one hand it exists perfectly and on the other it pre-exists in an intentional mode, determining

5. 6. 7. 8.

Aquinas, ST 1, 73, 1. Which, analogically, are already considered works of divine art! Eco, Art and Beauty, pp. 90–1. A phrase borrowed from Philippe, Philosophie de l’art, vol. 2, p. 293.

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the artistic consciousness itself; on the one hand, we call it artistic form, on the other artistic idea.9

Philosophically, the artistic idea is described as the product of artistic knowledge in a somewhat similar way to how the concept is the product of speculative knowledge: it immanently orients artistic causality as the exemplary cause of the work produced by the art. Given the transcendence of its subject matter (the cognitio Dei), the idea of the Summa surpasses the field of artistic creation. It thus concerns the existential process which renders this subject matter accessible, and in this way artistic composition and religious sanctification are interdependent. As a work of art, the Summa is situated in the tradition which associates the True, the Good and the Beautiful, an association which runs through Plato’s Hippias Major, Cicero’s De Officiis and St. Augustine’s On the Beautiful and the Fitting (which is now lost but mentioned in Confessions, IV, XIII). The Summa’s characteristic temperance is an echo of it: ‘honestum et decorum idem esse videntur’.10 The beautiful and the honest constitute a type of ‘operative’ beauty, whose primary realization is in God and which pushes the reader into a search for its cause. On the poetic level, ‘ea quae ad sacram doctrinam pertinent, breviter ac dilucide prosequi secundum quod materia patietur’11 can also be understood as the first formulation of the idea which is operative throughout the work: the ‘poet’ aims at a certain end which orients his making, but which he only knows at the end of the work. The poet intends to realize it to the extent that the matter allows, and not a priori. The three words which follow the initial quia of the Prologue, ‘catholic’, ‘truth’ and ‘doctor’, speak to the author’s ambition. Whether for the purpose of praising or denouncing it, a superficial reading would view the stark contradiction here with the scepticism present within the projects of modern writing, which feign ignorance and amplify the questions. In reality, the doctor’s authority serves the work of writing in the accumulation of reflections on a material which precedes him and which seems to have surpassed preceding authors.12 In his prologues, Thomas often presents his work as the reorganization of a matter which he inherited. For example, the prologue of the Secunda secundae is marked by the phrase syntagma materia moralis, which is related to the verbs considerare, reducere, procedere, diversificare, continere and numerare, and which is inspired by a desire to be

9. Philippe, Philosophie de l’art, vol. 2, p. 294. 10. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 145, 2, s.c; ‘Honesty and beauty seem identical here.’ 11. Aquinas, ST 1, prol.; ‘to set forth whatever is included in this Sacred Science as briefly and clearly as the matter itself may allow.’ 12. Leonard Boyle notes that Thomas, to those who have read William Perault’s Summa de vitiis et virtutibus, tries to ensure that nothing from his predecessors should be forgotten in the Secunda secundae; see Leonard E. Boyle, The Setting of the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1982), pp. 20–2.

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exhaustive: et sic nihil moralium erit pratermissum.13 Contemporary theologians are not insensitive to the aesthetics of contrast generated by this practice: as regards the prologues, in phrases so neatly crafted, Torrell is well aware of how he guides the enormous and complex mass of his reflections, which are both very fine and detailed, into two essential categories: since we are speaking about the return of man to God, his ultimate end, the first considers that end in itself (QQ. 1-5: beatitude), then the means by which man arrives at that end or, on the contrary, turns away from it.14

The Prologue speaks of erudition. This term should be translated as ‘rough shaping’, as in the first step when sculpting stone. It involves a work which is perhaps the opposite of ‘erudition’ in the modern, accumulative sense of the term. To strike the ‘right balance’ between doctrinal presentation and theological explanation requires that moral decision join poetic act: the scientific ‘restraint’ of his thought is thus a moral elegance on Thomas’s part. The poetic choice of the quaestio privileges the sculptor’s work. However, the discursive work of original enunciation, the work of drawing the explicit out of the implicit, and the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin or Paul Ricœ ur and other contemporary proponents of ‘dialogism’,15 have all taught us that ‘my’ speech is always kneaded from the discourse of others: the medieval university knew this, and the form Thomas chose allows him to stage several voices which the reader can directly recognize as different, which makes the discussion easier. In the Summa, the two fundamental pedagogical tendencies of dialogism and confidence in the natural desire to know result in a work structured by the selection of authorities tied to each question. Yet the principle of eruditio is not the only reason behind the idea of a Summa, as the Prologue already cited suggests that there are several others. From the outset Thomas conjugates the gesture and the word. For example, the expression ‘propositum nostrae intentionis’, usually oversimplified by translations, interlinks the final cause and the exemplary cause: the author’s intention obeys a well-defined subject. Thus the Prologue itself is already marked by two characteristics of Thomas’s sensibility: the tendency towards determination and the taste for clarification. We will now explore further these architectonic ‘principles’ which organize the Summa’s poetics.

13. Aquinas, ST 2-2, prol. 14. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, p. 149. 15. Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (ed. Michael Holquist; trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981); Oswald Ducrot, Le Dire et le Dit (Paris: Minuit, 1980); Paul Ricœ ur, Oneself as Another (trans. Kathleen Blameyl; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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The Poetic Principles of the Summa theologiae ‘Thomas semper formaliter loquitur’: The Principle de determinatio One of the most striking and vital aspects of St. Thomas’ thought and of the words and phrases which attempt to articulate it is the attention brought upon that which is determined, delimited and distinguishable in the object, its formal aspect: e.g. the definition of a given virtue or a power is primarily done by discovering its ‘formal object’. The words adopted to render this precise aspect of the reality will have to be themselves carefully determined and delimited and the appropriate style will be mostly analytical. Such is the first and most perceptible characteristic of St. Thomas’ language, in which we perceive right away the fittingness with the abstractive conception of the intellect inherited from Aristotle.16

The introduction to question 1, just after the general Prologue, confirms this sentiment: it is necessary to assign precise limits to theological intentions and efforts: Et ut intentio nostra sub aliquibus certis limitibus comprehendatur, necessarium est primo investigare de ipsa sacra doctrina, qualis sit, et ad quae se extendat. To place our purpose within proper limits, we first endeavor to investigate the nature and extent of this sacred doctrine.17

When we connect these initial remarks to the fact that Thomas deliberately left the Summa unfinished, then we can understand how Thomas’ writing is genuinely a search. The final and proper theological reason for this can be clarified by looking at the threshold texts of the Prima Pars and the Prologue of the second question: Quia igitur principalis intentio huius sacrae doctrinae est Dei cognitionem tradere, et non solum secundum quod in se est, sed etiam secundum quod est principium rerum et finis earum, et specialiter rationalis creaturae, ut ex dictis est manifestum; ad huius doctrinae expositionem intendentes, primo tractabimus de Deo; secundo, de motu rationalis creaturae in Deum; tertio, de Christo, qui, secundum quod homo, via est nobis tendendi in Deum. Because the chief aim of sacred doctrine is to teach the knowledge of God, not only as He is in Himself, but also as He is the beginning of things and their last end, and especially of rational creatures, as is clear from what has been already said, therefore, in our endeavor to expound this science, we shall treat: (1) Of 16. Henri-Dominique Gardeil, ‘Appendice II- Renseignements techniques, I: Problè mes litté raires de la Somme thé ologique’, in Saint Thomas d’Aquin (ed.), Somme thé ologiques. La thé ologie (Ia, Prologue et Question 1) (Paris: É ditions du Cerf, 1968), pp. 75–93 (here p. 88). 17. Aquinas, ST 1, 1, prol.

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God; (2) Of the rational creature's advance towards God; (3) Of Christ, Who as man, is our way to God.18

The issue at hand is how to speak about the knowledge of a God who is infinitely beyond the capacities of human language. We would be mistaken if we purely and simply identified the objective intentio of sacred doctrine and the author’s intention of presenting this doctrine: his presentation will have its own linguistic and poetic tendencies. This is why it would be nonsensical to be scandalized by this initial quia and the following provocative igitur, as some modern thinkers would be: neither word denotes the illusory dogmatism of a Promethean author. They connote instead the audacious effort of a seeker who is supported by revelation and who is confident enough in the human intellect to push it to its extremes, in line with the gospel parable of the talents: quantum potes, tantum aude!19 ‘If he is consistent with himself in his large-scale choices, Thomas is nothing like a fixed systematician. Rather, he is a genius in motion, perpetually in the act of discovery.’20 Theological speech in a work like the Summa is simultaneously shaped by determinatio and breached by its very object. We could be tempted to connect it to that of the poet of the fifth Great Ode: Blessed be God, who does not leave his work unfinished, And who has made me a complete man, in the image of his own perfection And I am able to understand, being able to grasp and measure. You have placed within me relationship and proportion Once and for always; for a number may be changed, but not the relationship between two numbers; certainty is there. You have made of my spirit an inexhaustible vessel like the cruse of the widow of Sarpeta.21

It seems necessary here to examine a Thomist maxim (from Cajetan) which seems to counteract every proposition of an immanent reading of the idea of the Summa: Thomas ‘semper formaliter loquitur’.22 This phrase is generally taken to mean the necessity of rigorous conceptualization. Thomas, however, knows how to soften his rigour for the sake of his interlocutors. For example, in the article ‘The Gift of Tongues’, he invokes the principle of the divine economy – ‘nature does not employ many means where one is sufficient;

18. Aquinas, ST 1, 2, prol. 19. For a more detailed theological reading, cf. Michel Corbin, Le chemin de la thé ologie chez Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Beauchesne, 1974), pp. 681–904. 20. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, p. 67. 21. Paul Claudel, Five Great Odes (trans. Edward Lucie-Smith; London: Rapp and Carroll, 1967), pp. 74–5. 22. A maxim cited by Chenu, Towards Understanding St. Thomas, p. 110.

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and much less does God Whose work is more orderly than nature’s’23 – and yet claims that the gift of tongues is the ability to speak many languages, rather than the ability to speak one language which can be understood by people who speak different languages. His main argument is that it is more fitting that the apostles understand what their interlocutors might want to say: in this way a principle of efficacy (in the service of charity) comes to temper the ideal of laconism. Thomas alludes to the Glosse of Lombard which point out that the literary quality of the Epistle to the Hebrews is higher than that of the other epistles, and explains this difference by highlighting the fact that St. Paul is here using his maternal language. He responds: Sicut dicitur I ad Cor. XII, manifestatio spiritus datur ad utilitatem. Et ideo sufficienter et Paulus et alii apostoli fuerunt instructi divinitus in linguis omnium gentium, quantum requirebatur ad fidei doctrinam. Sed quantum ad quaedam quae superadduntur humana arte ad ornatum et elegantiam locutionis, apostolus instructus erat in propria lingua, non autem in aliena. Sicut etiam et in sapientia et scientia fuerunt sufficienter instructi quantum requirebat doctrina fidei, non autem quantum ad omnia quae per scientiam acquisitam cognoscuntur, puta de conclusionibus arithmeticae vel geometriae. As it is written (1 Cor. 12.7), ‘the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man unto profit’; and consequently both Paul and the other apostles were divinely instructed in the languages of all nations sufficiently for the requirements of the teaching of the faith. But as regards the grace and elegance of style which human art adds to a language, the Apostle was instructed in his own, but not in a foreign tongue. Even so they were sufficiently instructed in wisdom and scientific knowledge, as required for teaching the faith, but not as to all things known by acquired science, for instance the conclusions of arithmetic and geometry.24

In a novel synthesis of Atticism and Asianism, the scholastic views Christian speech as governed by a principle of stylistic and rhetorical economy: between the laconism to which his strenuously negative theology tends and the abundance demanded by his charity as a pedagogue, there exists for Thomas a right measure in the use of the discursive means required by the demands of teaching the faith. On the other hand, if it is true that Thomas more often speaks formally, There is meaning and use of a different type of expression which, for him, is suppleness itself, analogical discourse, and this is no less important. On the level of thought itself, this aspect of St. Thomas’ intellectuality has recently been rehabilitated. But it would be necessary to see if the language of the author

23. ‘natura non facit per multa quod potest fieri per unum, et multo minus Deus, qui ordinatius quam natura operatur’. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 176, 1, 2. 24. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 176, ad 1.

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was perfectly successful in rendering the very activity of the mind [as regards discursive thought, especially in its demonstrative form].25

That Thomas always speaks formally can be understood in a relative sense – which would immediately place Thomas on the level of the concept – or it can be understood in the operative sense of a tendency towards the form, of the é lan of the mind seeking to understand. The first interpretation places us in the context of an angelic thought which has been freed from discourse. In reality, however, the intellect’s abstractive process forms a living movement, not the instantaneousness of a calculating machine. Theological speech in the Summa plays in two keys: that of demonstrative discourse, which characterizes the horizontal analyses, both anthropological and moral, of the Secunda; and that of ‘analogical’, more intuitive discourse, which serves and follows the vertical by reaching towards supernatural realities. Yet within the sphere of the incarnation, verticality and horizontality are united in the sign of the cross. For our author, we could characterize his language by noting that the formaliter loquitur should be phrased in an analogical suppleness which also accompanies his discourse: these are the two keys which he jointly plays in a highly subtle relationship. In any case, it would be necessary to remember that in St. Thomas the prevailing clarity of expression in no way excludes the profundity and sense of mystery, the mystery of the faith, the mystery of the divine transcendence, which is also operative even if it is less obvious.26

Given this covenant between mystery and clarity, can we imagine a ‘phenomenology’ (of the reading) of scholastic texts? Such a project would be doomed from the outset if the reader remained only on the level of the signifieds. Some short phrases to which one must pay attention, such as secundum qui and quodammodo, are often used; but our mind is first adapted to understand sensible things where univocity reigns supreme, and in order to reach and experience higher realities, God in particular, one must use certain devices. St. Thomas was perfectly aware of this difficulty, which is dealt with in the Summa itself in the lengthy thirteenth question of the Prima Pars which asks whether names can be attributed to God. His response is not wholly negative, but he takes care to demarcate the limits and relativity of the expressions used.27

25. Henri-Dominique Gardeil, ‘Appendice II – Renseignements techniques, I: Problè mes litté raires de la Somme thé ologique’, in Saint Thomas d’Aquin (ed.), Somme thé ologiques. La thé ologie (Ia, Prologue et Question 1) (Paris: Editions du Cerf-Desclé e, 1968), pp. 75–93 (here pp. 86–7). 26. Gardeil, ‘Appendice II’, p. 90. 27. Ibid., pp. 89–90.

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In matters such as the divine names, reading will not recover the activity of contemplation without being inventive (meant here in the rhetorical sense of the term) and in this way following the journey of the mind which produced the text: remaining only on the conceptual surface of the signifieds, even if they are accompanied by quodammodo or secundum quid, is like being satiated by reading the recipe instead of eating. The reading which we are advocating is justified by the authentic autographs of Thomas which witness to the genesis of his writings and by the coherence between the conclusions of properly literary commentary and the theological teaching of those texts. On the poetic level, the work itself requires such a reading because it constantly indicates to the reader in the form of prologues and divisions the approach which has generated it. Through these addenda, the work truly participates in the Gothic aesthetic of ‘clarification’. ‘Nam et sensus ratio quaedam est’: The Principle of Clarification (Even the Senses Are a Sort of Reason) The general Prologue of the Summa uses a metaphor from the Apostle to the Gentiles – lac potum dedi vobis non escam28 – to illustrate the project’s pastoral dimension and it also provides Thomas with the occasion to specify his object through explaining the Pauline image: milk designates the type of teaching which is fitting for beginners. Thomas again conjugates gesture and word: confident in his interlocutors, he always shows them the light which illuminates all of them. Such is the ‘principle of clarification’ of theological poetics, and which participates more generally in the Gothic aesthetic: a tour through architecture is helpful here. With reference to twelfth and thirteenth century architecture, the alternative, ‘all is function–all is illusion,’ is as little valid as would be, with reference to twelfth and thirteenth century philosophy, the alternative ‘all is search for truth–all is intellectual gymnastics and oratory.’ The ribs of Caen and Durham, not as yet singulariter voluti, began by saying something before being able to do it. The flying buttresses of Caen and Durham, still hidden beneath the roofs of the side aisles … began by doing something before being permitted to say so. Ultimately, the flying buttress learned to talk, the rib learned to work, and both learned to proclaim what they were doing in language more circumstantial, explicit, and ornate than was necessary for mere efficiency; and this applies also to the conformation of the piers and the tracery which had been talking as well as working all the time. We are faced neither with ‘rationalism’ in a purely functionalistic sense nor with ‘illusion’ in the sense of modern ‘art pour l’art’ aesthetics. We are faced with what may be termed a ‘visual logic’ illustrative of Thomas Aquinas’s nam et sensus ratio quaedam est. A man imbued with the Scholastic habit would look upon the mode of architectural presentation, just as he looked upon the mode of literary 28. 1 Cor. 3.2: ‘I fed you with milk, not solid food.’

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presentation, from the point of view of manifestatio. He would have taken it for granted that the primary purpose of the many elements that compose a cathedral was to ensure stability, just as he took it for granted that the primary purpose of the many elements that constitute a Summa was to ensure validity. But he would not have been satisfied had not the membrification of the edifice permitted him to re-experience the very processes of architectural composition just as the membrification of the Summa permitted him to re-experience the very processes of cogitation. To him, the panoply of shafts, ribs, buttresses, tracery, pinnacles, and crockets was a self-analysis and self-explication of architecture much as the customary apparatus of parts, distinctions, questions, and articles was, to him, a self-analysis and self-explication of reason. Where the humanistic mind demanded a maximum of ‘harmony’ (impeccable diction in writing, impeccable proportion, so sorely missed in Gothic structures by Vasari, in architecture), the Scholastic mind demanded a maximum of explicitness. It accepted and insisted upon a gratuitous clarification of function through form just as it accepted and insisted upon a gratuitous clarification of thought through language.29

Thomas’ care for clarity and brevity expresses such a principle. The composition is to be worked and reworked as much as possible, and this part of his elocution consists in arranging expressive terms. The rhetoric here considers ‘the primary cause of the feeling of genius which a text or discourse elicits from those who read or listen to it’.30 The reader of the Summa is immediately situated within an elevated genre and within a highly structured and tightly sequenced text, in which the elocutio reflects in the details what the dispositio more broadly puts forth. When reading St. Thomas’ prose it is thus necessary to be attentive to the acoustic and semantic importance of words. His prose moves from informed accumulation to enumeration in order to reflect the spacious work formed from the abundant material which structures the Summa. We should thus be sensitive to research on a natural level, even if it be the ‘phantasm of prescriptive rhetoric’, as the moderns might interpret it. There is a ‘linguistic feeling’ here which is both historically situated and real, and a minimal familiarity with the Latin poetry of his time would be of help. Thomas is also attentive to the liaison of words in the acoustic sequence they produce. The acoustics, through their succession of phonic masses, the play of volumes and timbres in the form of homoeoteleutons or figures of diversion, mimic on the linguistic level the types of fittingness that the intellect knows on the ontic and ontological level. Finally, it is necessary to acquire a certain sensibility for nouns: as we can see in his poetry, for Thomas metre is primarily concerned with the syllabic count. 29. Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), pp. 57–60. 30. Georges Molinié , ‘Composition’, in Dictionnaire de rhé torique (Paris: Le Livre de poche, 1992), p. 87.

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Certainly it would be difficult to characterize his ‘measured prose’, but it is nonetheless clear that scholastic formalization lends itself to the play and variable temperament of quasi-rhythmic structures. A productive reception of the text can be seen in Father Chenu’s sonnet-like expression of Thomas’ definition of the virtue of prudence: Prudence is made up of several components: The memory of past experiences, An inner feeling for a particular end or goal, Docility toward the wise and toward more experienced persons, Careful attention to circumstances, Determined exploration using reasoning that perseveres, The consideration of future possibilities, The assessment of opportunities, and Taking care to avoid obstacles. Following that, these, too, are components of prudence: Good counsel from a reason that is well ordered, Right judgment about particular actions, and The ability to discern conditions in which exceptions must be made.31

Thomas shares a similar concern for the unity of expression.32 His prose is short on periods except for simple formulations forcefully asserted (primarily at the end of articles or questions) and where the emphasis serves to communicate ‘the final word’ on the question. He manifests a real sensitivity to the sentence as a melodic, enunciative and thematic-argumentative unit which forms a kind of organic whole. The play of the solution and the parallels and counterpoints which frame the sequences of objections and responses allow for changes of directions, for successive and more or less systematic transformation within a sentence. Through all of these techniques Thomas truly shows himself to be ‘Gothic’, and to be employing the aesthetic principle of manifestatio on the literary level. This principle is also related to the play of intratextual allusions and referrals (we have already noted an example of this technique in the prologue of the second question). The work is itself constituted by a complex structure of connections and interdependencies and in this way stylistically reflects the trajectory of rational discourse which is searching for the intuition which has generated it: this

31. Marie-Dominique Chenu, Aquinas and His Role in Theology (trans. Paul Philibert; Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 2002), p. 121. 32. See Franç ois Charpin, L’idé e de phrase grammaticale et son expression en latin (Lille, Paris: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1977).

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intertextual, endophoric memory becomes the paradoxical sign of the eternity of the text’s principal object.33 This extensive use of the principle of clarificatio or manifestatio shows St. Thomas to be as devout as he is Gothic. For it is the incarnate Word himself who provides the paradigm here inasmuch as his whole work of salvation is interconnected in his desire to manifest the love of God (ostendere is repeated in the famous second article of the Tertia Pars dedicated to the various ways in which the incarnation is fitting). Here the poetic and the holy coincide and the art of writing becomes an imitation of Jesus Christ. Omnis effectus aliqualiter repraesentat suam causam: The Principle of Causality (Any Effect Somehow Represents Its Cause) The first word of the Summa is ‘quia’. Even if its meaning in this context is ‘weak’, this conjunction sets the tone of the whole work: following Aristotelian notions of science, the entire work will be dedicated to the search for causes. It may seem strange to speak of causality within the context of poetics: is not causality a subject within metaphysics? St. Thomas thinks of causality as the diffusion of a substance’s activity and grounds it within the mysterious law of the generosity of being (bonum diffusivum sui) which in turn ultimately reflects the fecundity of the Creator himself. In this way causality is doubly reconnected to the transcendent phenomenon of signification: on the metaphysical level it establishes repraesentatio (Thomas will often claim that every effect represents or signifies its cause in some way); on the epistemological level, it renders possible a certain participation in the creative intellect through discovering the relations between these real causes and their effects, and thus we touch upon the ordo the Creator has enacted in nature. In brief, the metaphysical principle of causality deeply grounds into the concrete world of substances the theological symbolism that St. Bonaventure, for example, used in the abstract, if not ideal register of expressio. It is in this way that Thomas becomes of interest to poetics: Inest enim homini naturale desiderium cognoscendi causam, cum intuetur effectum; et ex hoc admiratio in hominibus consurgit. Si igitur intellectus rationalis creaturae pertingere non possit ad primam causam rerum, remanebit inane desiderium naturae. For there resides in every man a natural desire to know the cause of any effect which he sees; and thence arises wonder in men. But if the intellect of the rational creature could not reach so far as to the first cause of things, the natural desire would remain void.34

33. ‘Endophoric’ concerns the interior of a text, its participation in the dimension of textuality, while ‘exophoric’ concerns the exterior of the text, its referential reality. 34. Aquinas, ST 1, 12, 1.

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Here a claim regarding nature grounds the contemplative optimism and boldness of St. Thomas’ writing: what nature does cannot be in vain, and since the desire to know causes exists within humanity, such a desire must be able to be satisfied naturally. On the speculative level, this optimism culminates in the famous Thomist thesis of the ‘natural desire to see God’ present in every being and in every person. Aristotelian metaphysics is helpful at this point because it offers a variety of causes: extrinsic, such as final and efficient causes; and intrinsic, such as formal and material causes. The sensibility for the real operative here is much subtler than the monovalent efficient causality which has overrun the West since the early modern period. Certainly Thomas is far from thinking, as modern hermeneutists do, that understanding something always means understanding it as the answer to a question. Nevertheless, with Aristotle in one hand and Scripture in the other, he never neglects the why alongside the how. Better put, the answer to a question, to a ‘why’ statement, is not only situated on the human level, but is perhaps buoyed on the inexhaustible ocean of the divine intelligibility. Defined and characterized in this way, the principle of causality will sometimes pull the theologian towards abundance and sometimes towards laconism. By contemplating things through the prism of multiple causalities, Thomas will often use what Alain Michel has called an ‘aesthetics of secundum quod’,35 which simultaneously emphasizes the simplicity of their being and the plenitude of their substance and relations with other things. In this way, we find ourselves completely within the atmosphere of clarificatio. Conversely, in the context of determinatio, the play of causalities enables the scholastic method of reductio (or resolutio), of leading a being back to its foundation, to its principle. Such a method presupposes the relating of the many to the one, the imperfect to the perfect, the effect to its cause, the image to the model, or the sign to the signified. However, inasmuch as it moves a hidden cause from the latent to the patent, reductio is also accompanied by the subtle effects of clarificatio.36 Theologically, however, it is not simply a matter of beginning from effects and then tracing them back to their causes, for an infinite cause can only be presupposed and not known in itself when starting from its finite effects. By distinguishing between the equivocal agent (which does not communicate its perfection to its effect) and the univocal agent (which does communicate it), St. Thomas enfolds the theological deployment of causalities into an apophatic framework while not thereby dissolving these causalities. In short, even causality has to be thought as analogical. If indeed we can name God on the basis of the creature, it is ‘accordingly as there is some relation of the creature to God as to its principle and cause, wherein all the perfections of things

35. Michel, Thé ologiens et mystiques, p. 534. 36. An example of this twofold movement can be found in ST 1, 45, 7, where the whole richness of Bonaventurian Trinitarian resonances are magnificently concentrated on the one threefold metaphysical rhythm: subsistentia, forma, ordo.

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pre-exist excellently’ (Summa Theologiae 1 a, qu. 13, art. 5). Here we see the distinction among univocity, equivocalness, and analogy carried from the level of meanings back to that of efficiency. If causality were single and undivided, it would engender only the same; it if were purely equivocal, the effect would cease to be like its agent. The most heterogeneous cause must therefore remain analogous cause.37

The Cause shows itself through analogy and revelation, and in this way we can start from a higher order which has been gratuitously given. The explication of Holy Scripture occurs through the use of discovered causalities and the systematic unfolding of images. This procedure enables Thomas to avoid the play between the signified and the textual referent in which the positivist has remained since at least the nineteenth century. Even now contemporary analyses of enunciative frameworks are forced to respond to positivist suspicion through appeals to literary genre, authorial intentions and the history of redaction. For example, Thomas wonders whether prophecies can be false.38 The case of Hezekiah seems to show that they can be, as he lives for fifteen years after Isaiah had announced his impending death.39 Thomas responds by invoking the principle of causality: he first affirms the divine foreknowledge of causes to effects before arguing that the gracious fulfilment of prophecy can always occur in new way.40 This potential novelty shows that prophetic revelation does not always benefit from the twofold knowledge proper to the divine intellect. Sometimes prophetic revelation receives the impression of future things as they are in themselves (which will be infallibly fulfilled), and sometimes it receives only the impression of the order of causes to their foreseeable effects (in which case something other than what was prophesized can occur): Nec tamen prophetiae subest falsum, nam sensus prophetiae est quod inferiorum causarum dispositio, sive naturalium sive humanorum actuum, hoc habet ut talis effectus eveniat. Et secundum hoc intelligitur verbum Isaiae dicentis, morieris, et non vives, idest, dispositio corporis tui ad mortem ordinatur Yet the prophecy does not cover a falsehood, for the meaning of the prophecy is that inferior causes, whether they be natural causes or human acts, are so disposed as to lead to such a result. In this way we are to understand the saying of Is. 38:1: ‘Thou shalt die, and not live’; in other words, ‘The disposition of thy body has a tendency to death.’41 37. Paul Ricœ ur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), p. 277. 38. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 171, 6, ad 2. 39. See 2 Kings 20. 40. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 171, 6, ad 2. 41. Ibid.

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Thomas then adds a further clarification which allows him to inscribe metaphysical explanation into the letter of Scripture. Dicitur autem Deus poenitere metaphorice, inquantum ad modum poenitentis se habet, prout scilicet mutat sententiam, etsi non mutet consilium. God is said ‘to repent,’ metaphorically, inasmuch as He bears Himself after the manner of one who repents, by ‘changing His sentence, although He changes not His counsel’.42

In this way metaphysical analysis can approximate the divine point of view, and because of Scripture it can transcend the difference between speech and event. More generally, we could allude to Thomas’ frequent recourse to the charitable interpretation of texts according to the intentio auctoris. Such a procedure allows for the integration of texts written by past philosophers or theologians which may seem embarrassing or less than clear, but which can nevertheless be adopted by and used within sacra doctrina, and he does so by understanding them better than they understood themselves! In this way the appeal to different causalities allows one to save the letter of these texts while remedying their spirit. Such a hermeneutic of charity is clearly inspired by the exegesis of sacred texts. Recourse to etymologies involves the same conception of the text and the same intersected foundation of symbolism and causality. Thomas’ extensive use of etymology may strike the contemporary reader as strange. Providing etymologies is a highly traditional exegetical tool, and so Thomas is certainly not original here. Nevertheless, the strength of his personality is such that his use of etymologies is always deliberate rather than automatic. Aristotle’s Rhetoric lists twenty-eight topoi of proof and places topos apo tou onomatos last.43 Thomas often alludes to this detail but will then proceed to ‘launch’ into his own analysis. He inherited a tradition which gave great importance to the geology of words. In his Topics, for instance, Cicero explores the usefulness of knowing the exact meaning of words and notes that it enables the orator to draw persuasive energy ex vi nominis.44 He even thinks that being able to provide etymologies of proper names is an admirable personal quality. Quintilian broadens this idea by specifying the importance of the etymology of honorific designations, such as sapiens, bonus, pius, etc. We may be reminded here of the long analyses of the divine attributes in the Summa, and while these analyses should not be reduced to an exercise in rhetoric, the opposite error would be to think that they have nothing to do rhetoric at all.

42. Ibid. 43. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1, II, c. 23, § XIX. 44. Cicero, Topics, c. 36; c. 8, § 35.

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Thomas often cites Isidore of Seville’s Etyomologiarum libri,45 which was the major encyclopedic project of the Middle Ages46 and which attempted to use the names of things in order to find their origin (origo) and energy (vis). Isidore himself was only systematizing a method already present in earlier Christian writings. Jerome’s Liber de nominibus hebraicis was composed as a kind of etymology and its ingenuity is at times close to Augustine’s word plays, which retain both the portmanteau word and the phonetic dissemination: Ernst Robert Curtius cites the example of fides – fit quod dicitur.47 Thomas regularly uses similar procedures. To avoid potential confusion, however, it should be noted that medieval etymology is not the same as contemporary philology, as Gilbert Dahan has helpfully pointed out in a recent book.48 Dahan shows that etymologia is less a matter of the arts of language than of philosophy. Isidore, for example, thinks that its object is the essence of the realities to which words refer. More generally, the medievals distinguish etymologia, which is a kind of ‘fumbling search, admitting a plurality of approaches, for a truth other than the philological’, and the derivatio, which is ‘unitary and based on linguistic elements’ and which would correspond more to our modern concept of etymology.49 The use of these methods presupposes a vision of the world in which ‘every sign and its referent generates a decipherable correspondence’50 and the existence of a primal language, an assumption often found in commentaries on Gen. 2.19-20. In this way, etymology is biblical before it is theological or scholastic. The sacred writers were highly dependent on the processes of oral literature and so often provide the etymology of a particular name with a historical episode or concrete monument to which it refers. Whether the writer invented the episode in order to explain the name, or if he wrote the name to commemorate the episode is often asked about today.51 This question, however, is rendered somewhat obsolete for Thomas given the apodictic status he accords to Scripture. If a passage does not have a literal historical sense, the literary method

45. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri, 2 vols (ed. W.-M. Lindsay; Oxford, 1911). 46. Ernst Robert Curtius notes, ‘the importance of this work, which can hardly be overestimated; it may be called the basic book of the entire Middle Ages’; European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (trans. William R. Trask; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 496. We are inspired here by his remarks on etymological thought on pp. 495–500. 47. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, p. 496. 48. Gilbert Dahan, L’exé gè se chré tienne de la Bible en Occident mé dié val, XIIe-XIVe siè cles (Paris: Cerf, 1999), pp. 307–25. 49. Dahan, L’exé gè se chré tienne, p. 311. 50. Claude Buridant, ‘Dé finition et é tymologie dans la lexicographie et la lexicologie medievales’, in Jacques Chaurand and Francine Maziè re (eds), La Dé finition (Paris: Larousse, 1990), pp. 43–59 (here p. 45). See also Alain de Libera and Irè ne Rosier, ‘La pensé e linguistique mé dié vale’, in Sylvain Auroux (ed.), Histoire des idé es linguistiques, vol. 2, Le dé veloppement de la grammaire occidential (Liè ge: Mardaga, 1992), pp. 115–86. 51. For example, see Num. 11.1-3.

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of etymology could still provide it with a literal figural sense. Here we can clearly observe the reciprocal fructification of language and being, with either language establishing being or being generating language. Etymology participates in the two poetic principles of theological writing: the principle of manifestatio – above all a figure of amplificatio – and the principle of causality inasmuch as etymology is concerned with words deposited in the divine revelation, words which are highly likely to be a divine intention and one of the ‘currents’ through which the Word, the creator of res and verba, deeply animates human language. More generally, Thomas’s frequent use of ‘nominal definitions’, which at times structure a treatise (that of the sacraments for example), seems to presuppose a similar trust in language, as if this divine animation of language gushes outward from the biblical domain. Through these principles of determination, clarification and causality, St. Thomas’s writing finally consists of giving to a material (the texts collected by sacra doctrina) the most luminous and simplest form possible. The Thomist tradition has sometimes defined the beautiful as the radiance of a form on its matter: theological work takes iridescence to be an undeniable aesthetic value. But how is the activity of an author writing a Summa in search for divine Truth different from that of a profane author on a quest for natural beauty? The question is even more pressing inasmuch as the theologian, willingly or unwillingly, makes extensive use of the poetic procedure par excellence: metaphor. An analysis of its presence in Thomas’s writing would allow us to meditate on the Word’s magnetizing of language and the theological audacity to which it leads.52

52. See the chapter ‘Entre necessitas et delectatio, la mé taphore’, in Venard, Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 187–222.

Chapter 6 LANGUAGE THAT WANTED TO MAKE ITSELF AS STRONG AS THE WORD

Even though it has forgotten the secret of the contemplative life, the literature of our time remains shaped by how the practice of writing weaves together ethics, metaphysics and theology. The doing which is included within literary making, even if it be criticism, presupposes an understanding of the world and humanity: within and beyond aesthetic beauty, the writer always hears the transcendent call of spiritual beauty. Even in the form of its denial, the voice of the Word is often heard resonating within texts.

The Apotheosis of Literature As Barthes would have it, for example, the ‘“linguistic” status’ of literature is enough to explain the ethical questions which it encounters. Literature is only language, and a second language at that, a parasitical meaning which can only connote reality, not denote it: logos thus appears irremediably severed from praxis; impotent to fulfill language, i.e., to transcend it in the direction of a transformation of reality, deprived of all transitivity, forever doomed to signify itself just when it wants to signify only the world, literature is a motionless object, separated (from?) a world in the making. But also, each time we do not close the description, each time we write ambiguously enough to suspend meaning, each time we proceed as if the world signified thought without saying what, then writing releases a question, it troubles what exists, though without ever performing what does not yet exist; it gives the world an energy: in short, literature does not permit us to walk, but it permits us to breathe.1

1. Barthes, Critical Essays, p. 267.

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The critic then offers a lovely allegory: One could say that literature is Orpheus returning from the underworld; as long as literature walks ahead, aware that it is leading someone, the reality behind it which it is gradually leading out of the unnamed – that reality breathes, walks, lives, heads towards the light of a meaning; but once literature turns around to look at what it loves, all that is left is a named meaning, which is a dead meaning.2

Within this glorification of unawareness, within this proposal of as if, one senses a kind of nostalgia for the symbolism of faith. For direct literature, which does not fruitlessly gaze only upon itself and is confident in its ability to lead one to the real, is the literature of the eras of faith in which the real and the ‘literary’ are not so different that one could oppose them. It is not clear that the dialectic described by Barthes is real: the quest for pure transitivity is only contingently identical to the claim of the indeterminacy of meaning. Their only shared point is the forgetfulness of the logos in the sense of the Word, the forgetfulness of the primacy of meaning in reality itself, which is a consequence of the immanentism of modern atheisms. The Creator God ensures the stability and truth of the appearances of the world, the superabundance of the meaning of the real. That the critic operates within the theological sphere is confirmed in the following lines: What do things signify, what does the world signify? All literature is this question, but we must immediately add, for this is what constitutes its specialty, literature is this question minus its answer … religious and also critical when it questions, it is irreligious and conservative when it does not answer: a question itself, what the ages interrogate in literature is the question, not the answer. What god, Valé ry once said, would dare take as his motto “I disappoint”. Literature would be that god.3

Barthes delights in using enigmatic phrases about literature which aim ‘to provoke meaning in order to arrest it’. By naming the unnameable, by returning to negative theology, the critic touches readers at the linguistic point of luminous darkness which opens them up to transcendence. We are well aware of the fascination this style of discourse exerts over contemporary audiences. Yet this disappointment, which Barthes thinks is essential to literature, may well be essential to language itself today. Disappointment, fiction, the murkiness of my interrogative language, the prestige of my own words, may trump me. If my inner voice in its self-inebriation forgets that happiness consists in encountering the real and the other then I succumb to aestheticism, mannerism and preciousness, which are disappointing. Only those whose sensibility is subtle and whose awareness

2. Ibid., p. 268. 3. Ibid., pp. 202–3.

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vivid feel that disappointment. True poets recognize not only the contingency of the real, but also the contingency of the contingency they have discovered. The contingent itself is made up of the hazardous combinations of language. Mallarmé experienced it as né ant, Cé line employed the metaphor of slobber, a metaphor Ponge also used when comparing the writer writing his text to a spider spinning its web – ‘empty words made up of nothing but saliva but woven nevertheless’ – and Cioran recultivated the aphorism after experiencing the fear of a world of words collapsing around him. Yet this ‘disappointment’ also has consequences for literature as a whole. We should pause, for example, on the threshold of a collection of poetry: Nearly poetry. Vision and language do not always coincide with the height of the poem. Often there only remain kernels, germs, images or brush strokes as the paradoxical vestiges or remnants of a shipwreck. Is all of poetry anything else? Perhaps we should speak here of fragments in free fall, splinters of poems, gestures of an approach, pieces of textual poetic material which incessantly give birth. And to console ourselves with the idea that birth is a never-ending process.4

The fragment accents the materiality and contingency of the signifier: meaning might not have been; something else could have been birthed. The generation of meaning is eternal. By displaying poetic genesis, the fragment suggests that the poem, like the Word of the Credo, is ‘begotten, not made’. It is less the result of a calculus, a ‘sum’ of operations, than a radiance which comes from we know not where, borne by the bosom of language, fashioned into language, and put into the world in close communion with language. ‘Literature would be that God’, as Barthes says! In its pretention to be the unique provider of meaning, as exclusive as it is disappointing, literary making not only transforms doing, but is a genuine praxis. In the Greek meaning of the term, praxis designates an action which contains its goal within itself: thus mathematics, the contemplation of purely intelligible beings, suffers degradation if it is turned into a useful discipline, if it comes to serve engineering, for example. Contemporary linguistic criticism raised literature to the level of praxis when it advocated for its ‘autotelism’. The forgetfulness of the Word becomes apparent in the newfound attention given to the material of language itself. Writing and reading – these practices, to speak like Mallarmé – are henceforth charged with an existential weight, with the quasi-mystical intensity of spiritual exercises: The writer [l’é crivain] performs a function, the writing-person [l’é crivant] an activity. This is what grammar itself teaches us: it opposes rightly the substantive of the one to the verb of the other. Not that the writer is a pure essence: he acts,

4. Roberto Juarroz, Fragments verticaux (trans. Silvia Baron Supervielle; Paris: Corti, 1994), incipit.

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but his action is immanent in its object, it is performed paradoxically on its own instrument: language; the writer is the man who labors, who works up his utterance (even if he is inspired) and functionally absorbs himself in this labor, this work.5

We should note the discrete personification of grammar, which is as much a rhetorical device as it is a revealing slip: language in itself constitutes here a final principle of explanation. His activity involves two kinds of norm: technical (of composition, genre, style) and artisanal (of patience, correctness, perfection). The paradox is that, the raw material becoming in a sense its own end, literature is at bottom a tautological activity … the writer is a man who radically absorbs the world’s why in a how to write. And the miracle, so to speak, is that this narcissistic activity has always provoked an interrogation of the world.6

Barthes justly writes of ‘a miracle, so to speak’, for there is indeed a miracle, but we will not describe it as he does: in the final analysis, the cultural, historical and theological backdrop of literary making and doing invites us to go much farther. Nothing could be less certain than the idea that it is the writer who encloses the ‘world’s why’ into the ‘how to write’. This enclosure is one choice among others. It is the reader who is eventually interested in the ‘how’ in and for itself; it is the writer who typically wishes to say something. Barthes notes as much in regard to Fourier: ‘A writer can produce a system, but it will never be consumed as such. I give to you its description of the world.’7 Certainly the modern writer often attempts to produce a text which ‘does what it says’, to use Ponge’s familiar expression which stands as a formula for his own poetic art. However, to be initially interested in the ‘how’ involves a particular, historically situated poetics. It is possible to turn this specifi c interpretation of literature into a literary absolute, but looking at literature for a kind of truth in itself is perhaps the symptom of historical or cultural myopia. In any case, the Barthes article we are citing makes explicit its Marxist coordinates by painting the history of literature in terms of the ‘classical capitalist era’, of ‘producers’ and of ‘production’. There is, nonetheless, a miracle: literature, the order of language effectively rejoining reality by not being able to speak it. It is the place of (possible) meaning for human beings. In its depths, people love to speak of a ‘magnetization’ of the word. Barthes senses it:

5. Barthes, Critical Essays, p. 144. [Within these passages l’é crivain is translated ‘writer’ while l’é crivant is ‘writing-person’.] 6. Barthes, Critical Essays, pp. 144–5. 7. Ibid., p. 145. (N.B., the last line does not appear in the ET.)

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Language [parole] is neither an instrument nor a vehicle: it is a structure, as we increasingly suspect; but the author is the only man, by definition, to lose his own structure and that of the world in the structure of language.8

‘Structure’ appears here as an ultimate explanation; the end of the sentence gives the text an aura of ‘faith’ (the cessation of doubt) and revelation: ‘Yet this language is an (infinitely) labored substance; it is a little like a superlanguage – reality is never anything but a pretext for it (for the author to write is an intransitive verb).’9 The Middle Ages was not unaware of the distinction between ‘transitive’ action and ‘intransitive’ action,10 as should be clear in the distinction between ‘making’ and ‘doing’. It knew that transitive action intended an object other than the agents themselves: in this context, writing as Barthes understands it would almost be a morality or spirituality! The literary praxis that Barthes, a virtuoso, illustrates and recommends amounts to the sacralization of profane literature and renders it a site of revelation just as the sacred text once was. For the critic, ‘The writer participates in the priest’s role, the writing-person in the clerk’s; the writer’s language is an intransitive act (hence in a sense, a gesture), the writer-person’s an activity.’11 Barthes asks the writer to fulfil a religious function. A little before, the critic spoke of koiné and thus decidedly anchored his proposal in a specific hermeneutical tradition, that of Jewish and Christian exegesis. We should finally note the (adverbial) appearance in the critic’s text of the ‘infinite’ in relation to the work of the literary language of praxis. For all its depreciation, the ‘infinite’ still produces an effect of depth. There is here a flash of or a tacit textual appeal to language which is more than language. ‘Hence it can never explain the world, or at least, when it claims to explain the world, it does only the better to conceal its ambiguity: once the explanation is fixed in a work, it immediately becomes an ambiguous product of the real, to which it is linked by perspective.’12 What we can ask of a writer is that he be responsible; again, let there no mistake: whether or not a writer is responsible for his opinions is unimportant; whether or not a writer assumes, more or less intelligently, the ideological implication of his work is also secondary; an writer’s true responsibility is to support literature as a failed commitment, as a Mosaic glance at the Promised Land of the real.13

The revealing slip of a Jewish and Christian origin which is forgotten if not fully repelled and the allusion to Moses show the movement, finally without rupture,

8. Barthes, Critical Essays, p. 145. 9. Ibid. 10. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, IX, 8. 11. Barthes, Critical Essays, p. 147. 12. Ibid., p. 145. 13. Ibid., p. 146.

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from one culture to another in the equivalence which it establishes between the biblical type and the writer: the ‘modern framework of the problem’ turns out to be less in opposition with what precedes it than the product of secularization’s attempt (as one speaks of a ‘product of decomposition’) to imitate transcendence.

The Pantheon of Writers A certain apotheosis of writers among theorists has accompanied the overestimation of the literary. Once language is untethered from reality in the forgetfulness of the theology of the Word, being is reduced to language and language is taken to be the logos: lacking a theology of the Word, the poets believe themselves invested with the inordinate task of ensuring permanent meaning in the universe, ‘for is it not the divine absence which renders obsolete the need for communion among human beings’.14 Human beings are connected to each other through what best connects their consciousness to reality, their words to the things they perceive. Such was, however, the poet’s religious function: to be a sorcerer, the stealer of fire according to Rimbaud. Paul Bé nichou could speak of the ‘consecration of the author’, and it has led to a genuine sacralization. The modern poet has to account for the reality of the real as far as possible and has to encourage human beings who have forgotten about the real to wonder about it. Such was perhaps Mallarmé ’s project. We should return to him and his window, watching the road workers at rest: No, my view can’t, from the window I’m leaning out, go all the way toward the horizon, without part of me stepping over the window sill, awkward and lacking in social graces in my turn, to become part of the swathe of workers: whose mystery and duty I should understand.15

The poet wants to awaken these sleeping men to the sacred mystery of life and presence through his poetic language, acting as a sort of good shepherd illuminating ‘the blind herd’.16 Nineteenth-century writers were obsessed with the image of Christ, some adopting it and others refusing it. With Mallarmé , this image was ushered into the interiority of very great poetic depths: through the aesthetic, sociological and literary meditation of liturgical mystery,17 beyond the mystery’s thematic, the very gesture of the poet becomes anointed. The poet is set

14. Bonnefoy, Entretiens sur la poé sie (1972-1990), p. 55. 15. Mallarmé , ‘Conflict’, in Divagations, p. 45. 16. Ibid., p. 46. 17. Cf. Mallarmé , ‘The Mystery in Letters’ and ‘Services [Offices]’, in Divagations, pp. 231–51.

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in the seat of the theologian, not so much in order to speak of God than to attempt to speak as God! Claudel found in him ‘a professor of attention’18: ‘literature has lived on inventory and descriptions since Balzac’, ‘Mallarmé is the first who placed himself before the outside world, not as much as before a spectacle or as a theme for homework in French class, but as before a text, asking this question: “What does this mean?”’19 ‘Once the illusion [of direct referentiality] has been dispelled, as well as the hope for such a thing, the intellect could only find a way to escape in disinterested speculation.’20 Poetic verse was the chosen place for the transmutation of the sensible into the intelligible, for it allows us to replace ‘the image which appears in our eyes’ with ‘what we create with our breath’, which amounts to ‘imitating the thing through making it’,21 an almost blasphemous proposal inasmuch as without God human breath only animates human beings themselves. The project leads to the ‘catastrophe’ of sterility: ‘The drama of Mallarmé ’s life is that of all nineteenth-century poetry which, separated from God, finds nothing more than a real absence. It no longer has anything to say and results in this blank, this void.’22 Mallarmé is the most innovative of his contemporaries, the poè tes maudits who had perhaps ‘consummated’ literature as begun in the Bible in the sense in which Hegel claims to consummate philosophy. There had been precedents for this in Germany with Hö lderlin, who had understood that the metaphysical fraying of the world, the loss of the noetic constancy of language, and finally the crisis of imitation henceforth required one to redesign the use of language every time one employed it: Hö lderlin seems the first in a long series of victims since the end of the Lumiè res (the twilight proclaimer of the modern night) and the collapse of tradition. He is certainly the first to have faced with such lucidity the disappearance of all rules and all models, of all codifications regarding art: to reflect upon all its implications, the general crisis of imitatio (which redoubles or repeats, in the aftermath of Kant, the crisis of Reason and, in the convulsions engendered in 1789, the definitive rupture of the theologico-political institution), and to be consumed with the nearly creatio ex nihilo of future work or new art. In this sense he incarnates in his very tragedy the quintessential modern contradiction: the impossible anticipation (the impossible ‘modelization’) of the work. Blanchot: ‘The poet must exist as a presentiment of himself, as the future of his existence. He still is not, but he has already to be what he will later be, in a ‘not yet’ which

18. Paul Claudel, ‘Le catastrophe d’Igitur’, in idem, Œ uvres en prose (ed. Jacques Petit and Charles Galpé rine; Paris: Gallimard), pp. 508–13 (here p. 510). 19. Claudel, ‘Le catastrophe d’Igitur’, p. 511. 20. Ibid., p. 509. 21. Ibid., p. 511. 22. Ibid., p. 514.

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constitutes the essence of his mourning, of his misery and also his grand wealth’. Otherwise said, the possibility of the work is its very impossibility. Or the converse. This essential contradiction, this ‘madness’ (all forms of destruction or self-destruction) is its destiny: the absence of resolution. The ancient divine possession is a lightning bolt, inspiration (or creation) an agony. Mallarmé will say, summarizing all the pathos, taken in its strict sense, of modern art: ‘Destruction was my Beatrice.’23

The Word is lost, a situation which every poet strives to remedy. Some are tempted to make themselves the place of its actualization beyond any relation to the world (or rather in a permanent labour to exclude reference): literary activity then becomes the fabrication of absolute language. In terms of wisdom, this choice was that of a catharsis. After Nerval, and as inspired by psychoanalysis, the surrealists attempted to do this. Others searched for the realest, the most distant and the most transcendent real possible, or they created a language of the absolute in terms of ecstasy (Michaux?) and metaphysics. The didactic shipwreck of great poets such as Aragon has shown the failure of ideological solutions. Francis Ponge quickly intimated it and attempted in neoclassic, Gothic and Marxist ways to ground language upon itself: ‘We will do classical work (the choice of speaking and writing within genres) but after having said why (Boileau) … . Only literature … allows you to play for it all, to remake it all, because of the concrete and abstract, the internal and external character of the Word, because of its semantic thickness.’24 The domain of ‘play’, if we can call it such, is richly religious. All the way up to Ponge we can find a strong Christic biblical presence, albeit in the register of denial. He sees, for example, a connection between language and resurrection: Suscitation or surrection. Resurrection. Insurrection. It is necessary that the human being, as with the poet first, finds his law, his key, his god in himself. That he wants to express it loudly and strongly, towards and against everything, that is to say, to express himself … . It is necessary to speak: silence in these matters is the most dangerous thing in the world.25

Elsewhere the poet invests himself with the mission of enacting a new incarnation: It is necessary to reintegrate the idea of God and the idea of humanity. And simply to live … Ecce homines (one would maybe say later) or rather not: ecce

23. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘Introduction’, in Friedrich Hö lderlin (ed.), Hymnes, Elé gies et autres poè mes (trans. Armel Guerne; Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1983), pp. 5–20 (here pp. 8–9). 24. Francis Ponge, Proè mes, ‘Ré flexions en lisant l’Essai sur l’absurde’, VIII in idem, Tome premier (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), pp. 227–8. 25. Ponge, ‘Ré flexions en lisant l’Essai sur l’absurde’, IV, p. 216.

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never says anything correct, will never be the right word. Not I see (here) the man, but make man happen.26

As a creative idea, the poet’s efficacious word desires to establish being: Of course the world is absurd! Of course the meaninglessness of the world! But is there tragedy here? I would willingly stop putting tragic overtones on the absurd. By the expression, the creation of the Beautiful Metaphysics (i.e., Metalogic). The ontological suicide is the only fact of some young bourgeois (elsewhere sympathetic). Opposing the birth (or resurrection), the metalogic creation (Poetry).27

By bidding farewell to the siren song of these demiurges, others, with Claudel being among the greatest, have attempted to reach what Mallarmé missed through the invocation of faith and Scripture: It is passé . We know that we are made to dominate the world and not for the world to dominate us … . We know that the world is in fact a text and that it humbly and joyously speaks to us, of its own absence, but also of the eternal presence of something other, namely its Creator. Not only the writing, but the writer. Not only the dead letter, but the living spirit, and not a magical grimoire, but the Word in which all things have been made. God! We know through Holy Writ – the writing par excellence! Holy Scripture – that ‘we are a kind of first fruits of the creature’ and that we see all things ‘in darkness and as in a mirror’.28

St. Thomas grounds theological speech on very similar convictions: only Holy Scripture enables us to transcend the obstacle of language into transparency to reality. In our time, Claudel was simply an enormous exception. Even in his own lifetime the poets who admired him refused to read Holy Scripture as the ‘writing par excellence’.29 It is the possibility of rediscovering a language as other which is today denied by the specialists of textuality: we want the language of the other to be an other language and all that we hear, all that we read, is human, all too human.

26. Ponge, ‘Notes premiè res de l’homme’, in idem, Tome premier, p. 245. 27. Ponge, ‘Ré flexions en lisant l’Essai sur l’absurde’, V, p. 219. 28. Claudel, ‘La catastrophe d’Igitur’, pp. 512–13, with references to Jas 1.18 and 1 Cor. 13.12. 29. The strongest impression comes from the reading of the numerous encomia to Claudel published by the NRF in 1955: Grosjean and Ponge concur in admiring in the work of their common master an inspiration present before he ever read the Bible. Is it really so easy to distinguish the writing of the poet from the faith of the believer?

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The great poets of our day are aware of the irreducibility of Christian language. Nevertheless, either through their embracing of the aesthete’s insouciance or through their inhabitation of a Gnostic bubble,30 they adopt the language of theology without being touched by it and so mishandle its majestic transcendence. They appropriate the program of the seer – to change life – without accepting the self-sacrifice it requires and which surpasses labour and ambition. They nonetheless hope one day to achieve through poetry alone the salvation that Rimbaud had the genius to realize will always be immense. The distant heirs of the ‘theologians of glory’ castigated by the Reformers, they are invulnerable to the Word that they exploit (at least they reject outright the consequences which it should have in their actions).

Revelation Forbidden? Barthes is highly representative of this climate: The author existentially forbids himself two kinds of language, whatever the intelligence or the sincerity of his enterprise: first, doctrine, since he converts despite himself, by his very project, every explanation into a spectacle: he is always an inductor of ambiguity; second, evidence [té moignage], since he has consigned himself to language, the author cannot have a naï ve consciousness, cannot “work up” a protest without his message finally bearing much more on the working up than on the protest: by identifying himself with language, the author loses all claim to truth, for language is precisely that structure whose very goal (at least historically, since the Sophists), once it is no longer rigorously transitive, is to neutralize the true and the false.31

30. Yves Bonnefoy’s poetic project borrows much from Plotinus: ‘this is a fundamental feature of [Bonnefoy’s thought] … : adopting Christian ideas, emptying them of their content as belief does not enter into play, and investing them with lived experience but without excluding transcendence’. Sophie Guermè s, ‘La poé sie d’Yves Bonnefoy: une nouvelle alliance’, in D. Millet-Gé rard (ed.), Le Lys et la langue (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1998), 45–58 (here p. 50). ‘Bonnefoy affirms it in L’Improbable; poetry intends to be the successor to “religious thought.” It is through this use of the Christian heritage that he conserves the hope of revealing the transcendence which remains in the world even during the fading of the collective experience of God … . One can, in the final analysis, understand salvation as the revelation that there is being, at the end of a series of operations through which the poet leads us to perceive the intelligible in the sensible, the infinite in finitude, and starting from and taking leave of two worlds, separated by Plato and Christianity[!], aims to show that there is only one’ (pp. 54–5). 31. Barthes, Critical Essays, pp. 145–6.

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To accept the assumptions of linguistic relativism would entail remaining what Pascal called ‘half-educated’.32 Barthes dreams of a naivety which surpasses the naivety which writing, for him, would structurally prevent: it is only because we presume that reality and language are perfectly separated from each other that we end up believing that all words are empty. In reality, there is no such ‘rigorously transitive language’. Barthes reflects on purely chimerical types which are seductive in their apparent exactitude for minds which lack clear and distinct ideas, but these types finally do not exist. Writers are not the only ones who ‘labor’ over their language, for this is the condition of human beings as such. To be laboured is the definition of the human cry, since it is lit up from within by consciousness. There no longer exists any witness other than that of labour, and this is similar to what prompted Pascal to say that he does not believe in witnesses except for the ones who are put to death.33 Barthes attributes to writers a naï veté which they do not have: why not imagine that writers, aware of the intransitive aspect of writing, turn to a precise and controlled and meaningful end? An exaggerated confidence in the human sciences, especially in linguistics, supports the repression of the question of ‘why’ as regards language.34 Paradoxically, the sophistical neutralization of this question by contemporary literary thinkers resembles the reticence of ‘realist’ philosophers before the ontology of language. For these philosophers, language does not raise any question; it is purely a tool, entirely transparent to the real. For our contemporaries, language is not a problem for ‘reality’ itself is essentially an effect of language. This helps to explain why their

32. Let us recall this distinction which is so important for the history of ideas: the half-educated possesses a truth which leads them out of ignorance, but which they cannot fathom in all its entirety. ‘Knowledge has two extremes which meet; one is the pure natural ignorance of every man at birth, the other is the extreme reached by great minds who run through the whole range of human knowledge, only to fi nd out that they know nothing and come back to the same ignorance from which they set out, but it is a wise ignorance which knows itself. Those who stand half-way have put their natural ignorance behind them without yet attaining the other; they have some smattering of adequate knowledge and pretend to understand everything. They upset the world and get everything wrong. Ordinary people and clever people make up the run of the world; the former despise it and are despised in turn. All their judgements are wrong and the world judges them rightly.’ Blaise Pascal, Pensé es (trans. A. J. Krailsheimer; London: Penguin Books), pp. § 83 (§ 327), p. 22. 33. The witness displays that the human body lies at the heart of language. The thematic of the incarnation (or the drama of disincarnation) is involved here: language calls for (the abolition, the sacrifice of) life as language from language, the criterion of apodicticity. Poetry as martyrdom, and the poets as holy martyrs? 34. Who now remembers that in 1866 the Socié té de linguistique de Paris banned all discussion on the origin of language? While the ban was formally lifted several years later, it has remained de facto in effect until today. Cf. Merritt Ruhlen, The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue (New York, 1994).

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philosophy is dedicated to an analysis of suspicion which censures past utterances which assumed to speak of the real. In the face of these reductions, it is necessary to recall the specificity of biblical language. The Biblical terms usually rendered ‘word’, including the logos of the Gospel of John, are solidly rooted in the metaphorical phase of language, where the word was an element of creative power. According to Genesis 1:4, ‘God said, “Let there be light; and there was light.”’ That is, the word was the creative agent that brought the thing into being. This is usually thought of as characteristically Hebrew in approach, although in Heraclitus the term logos is also essentially metaphorical, and still expresses a unity of human consciousness and physical phenomena. In the metonymic phase logos takes on rather the meaning of an analogical use of words to convey the sense of a rational order. This order is thought of as antecedent to both consciousness and nature. Philo and the author of John combine the two traditions, and John’s ‘In the beginning was the logos’ is a New Testament commentary on the opening of Genesis, identifying the original creative word with Christ. Erasmus, in the Latin translation appended to his edition of the Greek New Testament, renders “In the beginning was the Word” as “In principio erat sermo”. This is a purely metonymic translation: in the beginning, Erasmus assumes, was the infinite mind, with its interlocking thought and ideas out of which the creative words emerged. Erasmus is clearly more influenced than Jerome by the later Greek history of the word. It would be cheap parody to say that Erasmus really means, “In the beginning was continuous prose,” but the link between his “sermo” and the development of continuous prose is there nonetheless.35

In the modern phase of language, the descriptive phase, we no longer so easily understand the incipit of John. Faust struggles with the verse and the translation of logos alternates from das Wort to der Sinn before he finally settles on die Tat, ‘the event of existential reality that words describe at secondhand. At that point Faust begins to fall into the power of Mephistopheles, the spirit of denial.’36 In the context of descriptive language,

35. Frye, The Great Code, p. 18. 36. Frye, The Great Code, p. 18. There is another alchemist of the word who was been profoundly marked by this work: ‘In April 1873 Rimbaud wrote the beginning of A Season in the atmosphere of Easter feasts which accompany the first pages of Faust and one can think that he reinvested these highly charged circumstances into the more general composition that he began in May 1873. It is in this moment that he truly needed Faust and asked Delahaye to buy him a copy of it [cf. ‘Lettre de Laï tou’, Œ uvre-vie, p. 459]’. ‘One could profitably compare the two works in numerous ways’; J.-L. Steinmetz, Note, Œ uvre-vie, p. 1207.

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Faust makes us realize how completely we have lost the metaphorical clue to what John means by logos. For John goes on to say ‘And the logos became flesh.’ Evidently, he thought of this as an intelligible statement of the type ‘And the boy became a man,’ or ‘And the ice became water.’ But within a descriptive framework of language it can only be an unintelligible statement of the type ‘And the apple became an orange.’ For descriptive language, the word has no power to be anything but a word.37

The sphere of human communication has replaced the ‘world’ of the ancients. In this sphere, ‘the chain of signs is infinite. It is one’s perception of the nature and status of that infinity, either transcendent or, in the severest yet also most playful sense, meaningless, which will determine one’s exercise of understanding and of judgement.’38 The majoritarian choice for the absurd and indeterminate which the world of contemporary literature has made is translated into an inflation of critical commentary at the expense of poiesis. Interpreting it as a kind of Fall, Steiner has rung the alarm bell: ‘We crave remission from direct encounter with the “real presence” or the “real absence of that presence”, the two phenomenologies being rigorously inseparable, which an answerable experience of the aesthetic must enforce on us.’39 For a ‘direct encounter’ to be possible in this current framework, it would first be necessary for an identifiable other to speak. At least since Rimbaud, it is accepted that ‘I is an other’. Where neither ‘I’ nor ‘you’ are identifiable, how could ‘him’, the Other be? With the Word lost and Holy Scripture invalidated, it is often thought that wisdom can be found in the quest for meaning. From now on, however, the poets must be content with a meaning of sorts. Such would be the ‘indeterministic’ poetics proposed by Bonnefoy: But what will happen if we grasp that risk is ever present and thereby find out that the last stage, hitherto unnoticed or repelled, of our interlocking with the real amounts to erecting up true structures and thus at last provides the conditions which allow us to throw the dice successfully? Let us agree that the work will not unveil anything but a constellations of notions, i.e., a configuration similar to the one we believe we see in the stars in the distant heavens … . Now that we know that our indetermination is our essence, having overcome the old dream of equating a human being with a cricket, we will be able to embrace this way of a definitely human way of writing until every single one of us will have differentiated his own language, displayed his personal universe.40

37. 38. 39. 40.

Frye, The Great Code, pp. 18–19. Steiner, Real Presences, p. 59. Ibid., p. 39. Bonnefoy, ‘Pré face’, in Mallarmé , Igitur, pp. 35–6.

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But can poetry avoid the absolute? Being content with detailing and explaining the question itself is not (or is no longer) a viable answer to these insoluble questions. Rilke attempted the highest variation of human relativism and his search for purity of heart is certainly moving, as is his quest for a language that rings true, for a language inebriated with the experience from which it overflowed and which is reminiscent of the ancient discipline of contemplation: You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves—like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. The point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living.41

In their shared relativism, however, all these attempts neglect to mention that offering no response is one response among others! The question of meaning comes first. The poets are the inheritors, volentes nolentes, of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and they seem condemned to rival mythically or mystically the incarnate Word, Christ himself. What is this unnoticed ‘entering into the answer’ which Rilke suggests if not a symbolic experience, a consequence of the incarnation of meaning which is present (for the Christian) in Christ? In him alone is truth, ‘before all beginning’, the arché which must be reenacted in each existence. Many poetic works or contemporary critics style themselves as attempting to define in their spoken or written material some deep magnetization of language that people of letters do not cease to feel, despite the erosion of the JudaeoChristian context of contemporary society. Throughout the centuries the theology of the Word has provided the vocabulary which enables one to take into account the mysterious creative power of language. Forgetting this theology of the Word imposes on the arts of language the need to imagine anew the whole matrix of meaning; ‘geno-text’ and ‘pheno-text’, ‘archi-é criture’ and ‘é criture’, a symphony of undetermined idioms, accepting questions without responses: multiple ways of speaking of lived difference, with the knowledge of the discursive character of all human thought, between language, thought and the real. After the proclamation of the death of God and the erasure of ‘religion’ in any genuine form, idols are forged in the new ‘mythologies’ which became the great ideologies of the past century. Both the ‘realists’ and the ‘pure critics’ reject the question of ‘why’, but they do so for opposite reasons. For the former, as we have begun to intimate, the problem of

41. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, pp. 34–5.

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meaning is determined by the theology of the Word, even if it has been so forgotten that it now leaves only some unknown marks on the surface of discourse that sometimes pretends to be exclusively philosophical. For the latter, the question is denied through a philosophy of the absurd or of disenchantment.42 In both cases, the question of meaning is ignored. Yet this question is as vital to discourse as light is to vision, and thus literature has become the place where moderns seek to revive the original and Adamic experience of naming. Consciously or not, the musings of the modern poet are theological. In our current cultural situation, the theologian would err in accusing poets of being usurpers; as such an accusation would ignore the specific and radical question to which the poets are seeking to respond with the means at their disposal.

42. Such could be one of the possible consequences of the philosophy of despair of André Comte-Sponville as put forth in Le Mythe d’Icare, traité du dé sespoir et de la bé atitude (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988).

Chapter 7 IN SEARCH OF THE LOST WORD

If we can see in modern poetic projects the presumption of a language which wants to make itself as strong as the Word, we should also note the number of poets who are engaged, body and soul, in search of the lost Word. To substantiate these intimations beyond the offering of mere generalizations, we will meditate further on a particular poetic path – that of Arthur Rimbaud, whom we last encountered at the moment of his call. We will reread ‘several leaves’ of the poet’s ‘notebook’1 which make up A Season in Hell. We should perhaps first respond to a preliminary question: Why Rimbaud? The answer is that Rimbaud, with Mallarmé , forms the foundation of modern poetry.2 The answer is also Rimbaud inasmuch as his reception constitutes one of

1. Cf. Arthur Rimbaud, Une saison en enfer (Brussels: Alliance typographique, Poot et Cie, 1873), p. 2; Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works, Selected Letters (trans., intro. and notes Wallace Fowlie; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 265. 2. Certainly, ‘modernity’ was first thought and painfully lived by the previous generation and by Baudelaire, but it is only with these two poets that it systematically reaches the literary form of expression itself. ‘We know that nothing of this structure remains in modern poetry, which springs not from Baudelaire, but from Rimbaud’. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith; New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 42. ‘Rimbaud both anticipated the poetry of the twentieth century and created new paths while at the same time completing and fulfilling them. Moving from 1869 to around 1875 – no time at all – from an older (Latin) form to a new form (the Illuminations, or poetry freed from all formal constraints, poems in prose without any relationship to Baudelaire’s ‘poetic prose’), Rimbaud exhausted the whole of poetry. Superior to his teacher Baudelaire in the invention of form, he recapitulates the grand characteristics of French poetry and at the same time he leads it to a limit which is perhaps its limit and in fact the limit of all poetry – silence: is there anything after Illuminations? The twentieth century at times attempted to repeat A Season in Hell (Claudel’s Tê te d’or, Pinchette’s Les Epiphanies), or to restart the Illuminations (Breton’s Constellations, Char’s La Fontaine narrative); it has attempted ‘automatic writing’ (Les Champs magné tiques) in the hope of recovering a language open to presence and unity (Bonnefoy’s L’Arriè re-Pays by) in the acceptance of enigma or taking the side of things, but the century has not been able to respond. Modern poetry… has given

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the most beautiful examples of the unreasonable overestimation of art which Ernst Curtius noted. The specialized critic readily sees in him the prophet of contemporary literature: Rimbaud tells us how a text is significant: literally and in every sense. It does not have one sense or another; it is a multiplicity of possibilities. In such poetry, the word takes the initiative of saying everything that it can. Such is Rimbaud’s fundamental quest, similar to that of Mallarmé . They substitute the explosion of each word for linear and rational discourse, a word which shatters in multiple directions in a flash of fire. The difficulty of Rimbaldian poetry consists in these divergent solicitations, all of which – as the glittering palm of a piece of artifice – are supplied by a dynamic and rapid core which instantly becomes obscure in that burst of ‘illumination’. It thus seems interesting and fruitful to me that different readings are offered: the point of convergence is the ‘burst’ heart of the poem.3

Here Rimbaud’s text is treated as a kind of absolute Scripture: its intelligibility is literally described as dazzling because of its superabundance of sense. This results in a genuine lectio divina, a reading-cum-searching, a quasi-mystical quest. Whether he wanted to be or not, the poet is divinized: ‘One must visit often with Rimbaud in order to find oneself face to face with the poet-god, illuminating every person in a different way. One feels alone, since the work has led us over the hills and far away.’4 The ‘centenary edition’ is another symptom of this profane canonization of the poet. It displays all the characteristics of a contemporary hagiography, a secularized hagiography, certainly, but a hagiography nonetheless. It strikingly resembles, for example, the Œ uvres complè tes of Saint Thé rè se of the Child Jesus published by É ditions du Cerf, or even the edition that J.-F. Six made of the same texts: an extended recapitulation of previous editions, a scrupulously careful selection of only authentic texts classified in chronological order, a development of an analytical procedure for those uninterested in superficialities (to this end Alain Borer devises the interesting paradigm of the Œ uvre-vie), and above all a highly selective list of authentic words, ipsissima verba or ultima verba.5 This edition brings together seventeen critics to establish and annotate the texts, and

us poetic attempts as beautiful or as different as Rimbaud, but – to pose the question in the spirit of the young avant-garde Hegelians – it has not moved much beyond him. After the Illuminations is there anything left except for deconstruction?’ Arthur Rimbaud (ed. Alain Borer with André Montè gre; Paris: Arlea, 1991), pp. XVII–XVIII. 3. Louis Forestier, ‘Notice’, appendix to Arthur Rimbaud, Poé sies. Une Saison en enfer. Illuminations (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 225–33 (here p. 233). 4. Forestier, ‘Notice’, p. 226. 5. Cf. Dominique Noguez, ‘Paroles attribué es à Rimbaud’, Œ uvre-vie, section IV, pp. 867–903.

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many different notes are offered for the same passage: we are in the presence of a kind of Rimbaldian Talmud or Gloss. Such was Bonnefoy’s intention in this work: Reliving the clashes in the coming to be of the Saison itself which spins in all its circles and being exhausted without victory is to be closer to the real thing than is every idea formulated about Rimbaud’s true meaning. I will try to begin a running commentary on these all too few pages which have become one of our quasi-sacred books because they did not lose any of their human ambiguity.6

‘Sacred books’! This is a canonization. Rimbaud himself, it is true, cultivated this atmosphere of revelation around himself. He wished to be a seer; he offered some of his texts as ‘Illuminations’; he practised the ‘alchemy of the word’; he was on a quest for a word which would be ‘of the soul for the soul’.7 ‘Heartbreaking misfortune’,8 the text of A Season is deliberately contradictory when it tackles the themes of reason, the mind, science or God; the epanorthosis bears the weight of existence in the process of writing itself. The ‘formerly’ of the incipit announces a history; several lines below ‘This inspiration proves that I have dreamt’ refers to the time of the writer himself; ‘I unfasten for you some hideous leaves of my notebook of the damned’ gives the ‘genre’ of A Season: these are the pages of a notebook which are torn between what is stable and what is moving. We find a verbal matrix for the whole book in ‘The Impossible’: I am escaping! Let me explain.9

Or again, in ‘Bad Blood’: You cannot get away – Let me follow the roads here.10

The great question for the responsible reader of A Season is knowing what meaning to give to this dynamic of writing caught between story and discourse. There are good reasons to give it a religious, even a Christian meaning.

6. Bonnefoy, Rimbaud par lui-mê me, p. 110. 7. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 379; Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871, in Œ uvrevie, p. 190. 8. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 297; ‘L’impossible’, Un Saison, p. 41. 9. Ibid; Ibid. 10. Ibid., p. 269; ‘Mauvais sang’, fourth section, Un Saison, p. 8.

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Rimbaud’s Christianity or anti-Christianity Rimbaud himself assures us that ‘theology is serious’.11 Why not take him at his word, since his poems signify ‘literally and in every sense’? After Baudelaire or Hugo, he resumes the task of the poet-theologian. More precisely, in his rejection of Christianity he devises the project of expressing ‘in pagan words’ something of the inexpressible, which is why he also wants to remain silent. The coincidence of ‘I no longer know how to speak’ and ‘I no longer know how to pray’ suggests as much: has the poet simply attempted an idiosyncratic re-appropriation of Christian vocabulary? A Season is literally very close to a mystical text. To be more convincing on this point, let us compare two texts: the first is an extract from Rimbaud’s corpus and the other is drawn from the Book of Visions and Instructions of the blessed Angela of Foligno, a fourteenthcentury Italian saint.12 The pagan blood comes back. The Spirit is near. Why doesn’t Christ help me by giving my soul nobility and freedom? Alas! the Gospel has gone by! The Gospel! The Gospel. Gluttonously I am waiting for God. I am of an inferior race from all eternity. I am no longer in the world, – Theology is serious, hell is certainly down below – and heaven up above. – Ecstasy, nightmare, sleep in a nest of flames.13 --Then do I wish to hear nothing of the Passion, neither would I that God should be named before me, because when I hear Him named it exciteth in me so much devotion that I faint and am distressed for love of Him, and lesser things do trouble me. In comparison with this do I esteem as nothing all that is related in the Gospel of the Life of Jesus Christ, or in other places, for in God do I behold greater and yet more incomparable things.

11. Ibid., p. 277; ‘Nuit de l’enfer’, Un Saison, p. 16. 12. Some time ago Claudel remarked: ‘“Through the spirit one moves to God… It is this moment of awakening which gave me the vision of purity… If I were awakened from this moment… Harrowing misfortune!” Compare, among many texts, this reference borrowed from Saint Jane-Frances de Chantal (cited by Rev. Bremond): “At first light, God made me taste almost imperceptibly a little light in the supreme, the highest point of my spirit. All of the rest of my soul and my faculties did not enjoy it: but it lasted me about a half Ave Maria.”’ Paul Claudel, ‘Arthur Rimbaud’, Pré face Œ uvre en prose (ed. Jacques Petit and Charles Galpé rine; Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 515. 13. Rimbaud, Complete Works, pp. 269 and 277; ‘Mauvais sang’, p. 7; ‘Nuit de l’enfer’, p. 16.

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Since he hath left me I am remained as contented as an angel; for I love toads and serpents, and even fools and demons.14

One could easily interpolate the fragment of one work into the other! Claudel doubtless offered the poetic synthesis of these two texts: For me the maximum desolation in the maximum of light! As long as I have not Paradise, the true place for me more resembles Hell.15

Rimbaud himself alludes to ‘the spiritual combat … as brutal as the battle of men’ and affirms a classical apophaticism: ‘The vision of justice is the pleasure of God alone.’16 On the thematic level, the first section of the collection is clear. ‘But recently’17 introduces the spiritual search for ‘charity’, which is contradicted at the very moment of writing by the devil and possession: the order of charity completely veers into the ineffable in contrast to the spoken reality of vice and damnation. The ambivalent use of the same terms to designate despised or desired realities18 reflects both the necessity of Christian language in spite of its erosion for saying certain things and the concern for veridiction which drives the poet: he expresses his project in terms of infernal abandonment, of a quest for a lost key, of old feasts, of the virgin’s waiting for the spouse, of nostalgia for charity, of justice, of Eden and even of salvation. In short, it is truly as a poet and not merely as a young provincial in an adolescent crisis that Rimbaud calls himself a ‘slave to his baptism’: there is no language for saying the thing that he wants to say other than the language of Christianity, for it is in this language – which he rejects as artificial and alienating – that he has access to the idea and reality of ‘true life’ (‘heavenly, aerial calm and prayer – like ancient saints. – Saints are the strong ones! Anchorites are artists not wanted anymore’19), access to a life which would truly be ‘out of the world’,20 to an Eden and past purity, to an impossible charity,21 to a justice reserved for God.22 The dynamic of writing, that of an impossible flight between ‘I am escaping’ and ‘You cannot get away’,

14. Angela of Foligno, The Book of Divine Consolation of the Blessed Angela of Foligno (trans. Mary G. Steegmann; London: Chatto and Windus; 1909), pp. 180–1. 15. Claudel, La Messe là -bas, p. 38. 16. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 303; ‘Adieu’, final section, Une saison, p. 52. 17. Ibid., p. 265; Une saison, p. 1. 18. In A Season there is happiness and happiness, childhood and childhood, science and science, spirit and spirit, reason and reason, justice and justice, charity and charity, prayer and prayer, Jesus and Jesus, and even God and God. 19. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 273; ‘Mauvais sang’, final section, p. 12. 20. Ibid., p. 277; ‘Nuit de l’enfer’, p. 22. 21. Ibid., p. 297; ‘L’impossible’, pp. 40–1. 22. Ibid., p. 303; ‘Adieu’, p. 52.

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could be the spatial imaging of Rimbaud’s linguistic relation to the incarnation and revelation. We glimpse here the ambivalence of Rimbaud’s ideological anti-Christianity. The poet certainly denounces all artifice, including that within religion. In his search for the absolute, he rejects the ambivalence of all mediation, which is a priori suspect. First, poetic mediation: the poet wants to remove ‘from the sky the azure that is black’23, to be content with ‘natural light’ (as we speak of ‘natural yoghurt’ without any added colours or flavours), as the azure held so dear by the symbolist poets masks the simple blue of the sky. Yet religious or mystical mediation as well: from the oldest poets onward Christ sometimes appears, despite Christianity, as the very epitome of revolt against the forces of evil,24 the archetype of the poet as the thief of fire and the victim of social or religious oppression. For the poet, Jesus had in fact been betrayed by the ‘French way of life’,25 and we should note that he is talking here more about the traitors than about Jesus himself! If the figure of a Christ who could help is present in A Season,26 what is first registered is actually the crisis of mediation, the collusion of the religious and the social-cultural. Speaking of ‘the history of France, the eldest daughter of the Church’, the poet claims never to see himself ‘at the councils of Christ, or at the council of Lords – representatives of Christ’.27 The collusion of culture and religion is simultaneously adopted and rejected. It is hypothetically adopted in the ironic description of a return to Europe after a wild life in the form of an equivalence between salvation and voluntary participation in public affairs: ‘I will go into politics. Saved.’28 Yet it is finally rejected and the French way of life is described as a hell through the superimposition of the themes of execution squads29 and sensory pains.30 ‘Ah!’ The blow has been struck, but the poet is still alive; it is a death without end, which is indeed hell; ‘That would be the French way of life, the path of honor!’31 The ‘French way of life’ both

23. Ibid., p. 293 [trans. modified]; ‘Alchimie du verbe’, Une Saison, p. 33. 24. ‘O million Christs with dark soft eyes’; Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 37; ‘Morts de Quatre-vingt-douze[… ]’, Œ uvre-vie, p. 153. 25. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 275; ‘Mauvais sang’, final section, p. 12. 26. Ibid., p. 269; ‘Mauvais sang’, third section, p. 7. 27. Ibid., p. 267; ‘Mauvais sang’, second section, p. 6. 28. Ibid., p. 269; ‘Mauvais sang’, third section, p. 8. 29. ‘Fire! Fire at me!’ Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 275; ‘Mauvais sang’, final section, p. 12. This motif appears in the introductory poem: ‘I called to my executioners to let me bite the ends of their guns, as I died. I called to all plagues to stifle me with sand and blood. Disaster was my god. I stretched out in mud’. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 265; Une Saison, p. 1. It is revisited in ‘Bad Blood’: ‘I saw myself in front of an infuriated mob, facing the firing-squad.’ Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 271; ‘Mauvais sang’, fifth section, pp. 8–9. 30. ‘The heart… the members’, Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 274; ‘Mauvais sang’, final section, p. 12. Also see the poem ‘Nuit de l’enfer’, pp. 15–17. 31. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 275; ‘Mauvais sang’, final section, p. 12.

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makes Christ known and damns. Rimbaud rejects this life and describes it with a derisive mystical expression: ‘I do not believe I have embarked on a wedding with Jesus Christ as father-in-law.’32 Parodying the Gospel theme of weddings, Rimbaud affirms a close connection between culture and faith in Christ. He carries the sophistical logic to its conclusion: if France is the eldest daughter of the Church and if I marry the French way of life, then I would have Jesus Christ, groom of the Church, for a father-in-law! When he addresses the fate of the ‘poor people in church’33 or children in catechism, Rimbaud primarily sees Christ as the source, guarantee and cornerstone of a society and world which is deeply alienating and from which he wants to escape. He ‘turns on the priests, on dogma, on everything that makes religion a giant mechanism of enslavement. “The poor people in church” denounce this Christianity as the provider of illusions, the propagator of human brainwashing.’34 ‘A Heart under a Cassock’,35 or the poems in honour of Venus and nature,36 demonstrate this through their adoption and heightening of anticlerical cliché s to an incandescent metaphysical level37: the poet revolts against the Christ of Monsieur Prudhomme, the Christ of the clergy and the bourgeoisie. Rimbaud projects onto Jesus the betrayal he suffered by ascribing Judas’s gesture to Jesus – just as one accuses his dog of having rabies before drowning him – and lashes the hysterical mystic with the ‘putrid kiss of Jesus’. Christ! O Christ, eternal thief of energy God who for two thousand years consecrated to your pallor The brows of women of sorrow, nailed to the ground Or thrown back with shame and head pains.38

The Christ ‘thief ’ of historical Christianity is joined by the ridiculous Christ of the socialists, whose lachrymose tone is mocked in ‘Nuit de l’enfer’: ‘Poor men, workers! I am not asking for your prayers. With your trust alone, I will be happy.’39 And thus even God himself behaves like a robber, a forceful usurper deposited in the human heart. To Christ is opposed the Promethean genius, ‘man forced to go naked, the face bloodied by battle’. The genius should take up the salvation

32. Ibid., p. 273; ‘Mauvais sang’, fifth section, pp. 8–9. Also see Rimbaud, Œ uvre-vie, notes 411–13, p. 1196. 33. Rimbaud, Œ uvre-vie, p. 201. 34. Forestier, ‘Notice’, p. 230. 35. Cf. ‘Credo in unam’, Œ uvre-vie, p. 235. 36. Cf. ‘Le mal’, Œ uvre-vie, p. 154. 37. Cf. ‘First Communions’, Complete Works, pp. 98–107. 38. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 109; ‘Les premieres communions’, Œ uvre-vie, p. 235. 39. Ibid., p. 277; ‘Nuit de l’enfer’, p. 17.

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of the world; but this time he will not take the road of the Messiah: ‘You will not come down from heaven.’40

‘Why doesn’t Christ help me… . The Gospel has gone by!’;41 the poet echoes the ideological controversy of his context when rendering the ‘representatives of Christ’ responsible for his state. His time is marked by the crisis of mediation: within the Church, the ardour of faith in the sacraments has been cooled by the spectacle of an ecclesiastical institution lacking evangelism, by an insufficiently Christocentric catechism which dissolves Christic speech into Christian discourse and by a narrow apologetics which tries to assume the triumphant discourse of technology or which conversely denies it. In sum, this crisis has been instigated by an uncoupling of the Person of Christ in and beyond history from religion as it is here and now.42 In addition to the Faustian resonances already mentioned and the painful experience of homosexuality to which we will return, we should consider the disruption of traditional readings of the Bible in Rimbaud’s time caused by the emergence of disciplines which eventually dissolved revelation into historical positivism. Rimbaud read a great deal of Edgar Quinet. For Quinet, ‘the cultural project vis-à -vis religion is to understand it rather than jettisoning it. It is one reaction against the unbelief of the English and above all French Lumiè res.’43 Quinet44 adopted from Schelling45 the romantic thesis that it is not the people who create the religion but the religion which creates the people: in the phenomena of belief, the beginning is not free. The person is possessed by a god, and it is never known which god will appear. Such readings anticipate not only the Rimbaldian rejection of ‘sensitive hearts’ and the frivolities of eighteenth-century farcical charity, but also the idea of baptism as slavery!

40. Georges Durand, Arthur Rimbaud et la fin de Satan, typescript, Marseille, Dominican Convent, no date, p. 2. 41. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 269; ‘Mauvais sang’, second section, p. 7. 42. A book like that of Dom Bernard Botte’s Le Mouvement liturgique, té moignage et souvenirs (Paris: Desclé e, 1973) represents the effacement of mystagogy in the Catholic liturgy as it was celebrated at the end of this century and in this geographical zone (Belgium). 43. Franç ois Laplanche, La Bible en France, entre mythe et critique, XVIe-XIXe siè cles (Paris: A. Michel, 1994), p. 138. 44. Cf. Edgar Quinet, De l’origine des dieux (Paris, 1828), and Du gé nie des religions (Paris, 1841). 45. Cf. Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology; the ‘Introduction’ to Jean Pé pin, Mythe et allé gorie, Les origines grecques et les contestations judé o-chré tiennes (Paris, 1976); Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit; Francis Guibal, Dieu selon Hegel: essai sur la problé matique de la Phé nomé nologie de l’esprit (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1975).

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If the religion creates the person, it is the person who degrades authentic religion! ‘There is no longer a religion which would not be subject to all the general laws of history.’46 For Quinet, Christ’s speech and work has two essential characteristics: they valorize spontaneity, freeing religious aspirations from the rites and obligations which seek to bind people, and they orient human beings to the future. But the churches have muddled their founder’s message: they tighten their dogmas and retreat into the past. This is particularly true of the Catholic Church, which life has deserted.47

Rimbaud thinks that the Bible, the Speech of revelation and the historical person of Jesus Christ have been banished from the religion in which he was raised and in which he believed (when we see his photograph as a first communicant with his white armband we are reminded that he was treated as a ‘petit cagot’ for scuffling with the ‘big kids’ who were playing with the holy water). Anti-Christian ideology runs through every work – ‘Therein I recognize my filthy education of childhood’48 – but it seems shot through with doubt. Rimbaud also perceives the limits of these theories: he has intimately felt how the Speech which resonates in Scripture surpasses the historical conditions to which the theoreticians reduce it, and he has felt it with all his being as a poet and as a believing child. He does not wish to renounce myth or symbol. He rejects the romantic ideology according to which ‘man only exists through society, language, and religion: no nature without culture’,49 as well as the idealist naivety of the ‘philosophers’50 or the silliness of the ‘century of sympathy’. Certainly ‘there has been no history without religion’, but Rimbaud refuses to conclude that ‘man is not anterior to society, language, and to religion’.51 He refuses to live from a natural light. In his context, advocating for the transcendence of language over history and reaching the universal only seems possible in a language coloured by the French Lumiè res, the intellectual patrimony of Monsieur Prudhomme that he abhors. I am not a prisoner of my reason. I said: God. I want freedom in salvation. How can I pursue it? I have no more taste for frivolity. No more need of devotion

46. É mile Littré , La Vie de Jé sus, ou Examen critique de son histoire par le docteur David Fré dé ric Strauss (Paris, 1864), vol. 1, p. I; cited by Laplanche, La Bible en France, p. 138. 47. Laplanche, La Bible en France, p. 139. 48. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 301; ‘L’é clair’, Une saison, p. 46. 49. Benjamin Constant, De la religion, considé ré e dans sa source, ses formes et ses dé veloppements, (Paris, 1824), vol. 1, p. 23, as in Henri Gouthier, Benjamin Constant devant la religion (Paris: Desclé e, 1967), p. 60. 50. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 299; ‘L’impossible’, p. 41. 51. Laplanche, La Bible en France, p. 139.

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or divine love. I do not regret the age of tender hearts. Each is right, scorn and charity. I reserve my place at the top of the angelic ladder of common sense.52

As regards Christianity or Christ himself, Rimbaud is just as opposed to eighteenthcentury pretentious Lumiè res as he is to nineteenth-century positivism: Oh! Science! Everything has been reconsidered. For the body and the soul – the viaticum – there is medicine and philosophy – old wives’ remedies and rearranged popular songs. The diversions of princes and the games they forbade! Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry! Science, the new nobility! Progress. The world marches on! Why shouldn’t it turn back? It is the vision of numbers. We are moving toward the Spirit.53

Rimbaud senses that trying to overcome Christianity with universalism, whether ‘humanist’ or ‘scientistic’, means sawing off the branch on which one is sitting, for only Christianity ensures the universality of language. ‘Hearthbreaking misfortune!’ Not possessing the language of the absolute is the greatest misfortune: ‘In truth it is what I always had: no faith in history and the forgetting of principles. I will not speak of this: poets and visionaries would be jealous.’54 In this context, ‘l’Evangile a passé !’ is as much an observation as a Christian lamentation. On the one hand such a claim challenges the libertarian cliché of the poè te maudit of eternal revolt, and on the other, it challenges the fear generated by his bawdy homosexuality and systematic derision of all traditional forms. The explicit projects that he left behind seem far not only from mysticism but also from simple Christian morality. And yet. Despite the efforts of É tiemble,55 his disciples and some other very fine poets56 to ‘demythologize’ Rimbaud, reading him as a kind of mystic is not as outmoded

52. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 273; ‘Mauvais sang’, penultimate section, p. 11. 53. Ibid., p. 267; ‘Mauvais sang’, second section, p. 7. 54. Ibid., p. 277; ‘Nuit de l’enfer’, p. 16. 55. René É tiemble, Le Mythe de Rimbaud, vol. 1, Genè se du mythe (1869-1949) (Paris: Gallimard 1952). 56. In a note in his work on Rimbaud, Bonnefoy justifies his surprising methodological ignorance of the poet’s final conversion: ‘Rimbaud had wanted to change life. And if God, through the fact of his existence, had been able to help him in this task, he would have wholeheartedly sold his soul to God, and many times he tried – but in vain – to do everything he could to believe in God. On my hospital bed the fragrance of incense comes back to me so powerfully… Coming from this soul incapable of forgetting the promise of Jesus, the in extremis conversion to the Catholic faith in Marseille was not the first movement towards hope. But the fact is that in all of the previous ones – as far as Rimbaud was aware – God did not respond. In A Season in Hell or Illuminations the Christian God

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as the theologically uncultured critics who currently rule the literary roost would have us believe. Since he lived before the great secularization of the twentieth century, Rimbaud still lived and breathed within a strongly Catholic culture and could thus think through his poiesis in rigorously theological terms. He remained conscious of the mystery of ‘natural’ existence, of the nature which is more than nature (grace?), which fascinated him and had been revealed to him by Christ and Christianity: ‘It is the result of my catechism.’57 Poetry becomes an oracle of revelation, and the theologian can discover the persistence of God in the actual é lan of writing and the sacramental dimension of poetry when practiced by a baptized person – and who was more aware than Rimbaud of being marked by his baptism: ‘I am a slave to my baptism’? Von Balthasar has described this phenomenon in relation to another poet: So Christianity is really an ‘inspiration’ such as is expressed both in the ethical sphere (above all as love for one’s neighbour) and in the aesthetic (as an exact experiencing of the forms of the world) with the most careful, most sober endeavour … . The idealists and romantics were right when they understood that the inscapes would only open themselves to the poet in some creative consummation between him and the spirit of nature; but for the Christian the final creative unity lies higher, and he must raise himself to this in his faith, in the great sacrifice; his enthusiasm may have no other source than does his faith. It is of this exaltation as the whole man’s engagement and effort that the poetic form must speak; the unprecedented character of [the poet’s] language is a theological phenomenon and can be understood only in this way.58

Before reaching the fundamental discovery of the place which unites speech, writing and Jesus Christ, lived as a burning contradiction, Rimbaud wanders the stages of an ambiguous journey, in the environs of the mystical life and the sin of

is often detested for the morality that he authored, or sometimes awaited with gluttony, but he always remained absence. If Rimbaud’s work can be taken as a witness, it only witnesses to the same death of the divine as Nietzsche represented it. One may try to turn the conversion of a dying man into a sign of a reawakening of God if one wants it to be such a thing. But one may not try to find God’s presence in a poetic work which had often challenged God but without eliciting anything other from him than silence.’ Yves Bonnefoy, Rimbaud par lui-mê me (Paris: É ditions du Seuil 1961), p. 184. Such a view of Rimbaud’s work is reductive, for it outlaws any kind of ‘responsible’ reading of it as a Christian mystical experience (even if it be that of the spiritual night), an experience which literally pervades the entire work. 57. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 275; ‘Nuit de l’enfer’, p. 15. 58. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 3, Studies in Theological Styles: Lay Styles (trans. Andrew Louth et al.; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), pp. 391–2.

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magic, where writing and fable – the hallucination of words – are joined to the reality of experience – the hallucination of sense. It is worth retracing these stages, for they orient the voyage of all the literature which follows him.

Hallucinations: Mystical Experiences? The revolt against the social authorities which promulgate the truths of religion, the mind, positivist progress and philosophical logic provided the adolescent with the temptation to fall back on beauty alone, as the Parnassiens and Banville had done. Yet beauty cultivated for its own sake turns out to be as disappointing as positive truth. From ‘What is Said to the Poet regarding Flowers’ onwards, Rimbaud rebels against the doctored, the artificial, the decorative falsehood and the frivolity of ‘art for art’s sake’, this ‘poetic old-fashionedness’.59 ‘I pulled Beauty down on my knees – I found her embittered and I cursed her.’60 The mind (or conscience) always digs beneath the aesthetic surface of things and finds in them depths in which there resonates a voice that cannot be silenced: ‘Happiness was my fatality, my remorse, my worm: my life would always be too immense to be devoted to strength and beauty.’61 For the seer, aesthetic beauty manifests itself as an enigma: it conceals what it cannot give absolutely. The search for the new, for the unknown, for ‘true life’, is fundamentally a call for truth. The discourse of truth which should disclose this thing has been monopolized by the Prudhommesque west which has imprisoned reason in a ‘descriptive or instructive’ language, whether scientific or moralistic. In order to liberate reason it is thus necessary to pass through madness, ‘to believe in all the enchantments’, to devote oneself to magical sophisms, to change life, to escape reality, to reach freedom in salvation. ‘Nature might be bored, perhaps!’62 Rimbaud searches for a truth of nature which is beyond culture, but he is anything but naï ve (this is his drama!): he knows that it is humanity’s nature to be cultural, and so we must to read his aspirations as suggesting that there could be nature and nature, reason and reason. Let us remember, for example, the paradox at the end of ‘Bad Blood’: ‘Reason was born in me … God is my strength, and I give Him

59. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 288; ‘Alchimie du verbe’, p. 35. Rimbaud denounces imagery disconnected from reality, a fiction of drool which drowns or dilutes the real far more than revealing it. ‘Yes! Your droolings from shepherds’ pipes / Makes precious glucoses! / – Pile of fried eggs in old hats, / Lilies, Asokas, Lilacs and Roses!...’ Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 113; ‘Ce qu’on dit au poè te à propos de fleurs’, Œ uvre-vie, p. 215. 60. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 265; Une saison, p. 1. 61. Ibid., p. 295; ‘Alchimie’, p. 35. 62. Ibid., p. 297; ‘L’impossible’, p. 40.

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praise’,63 which is said alongside of ‘I am not a prisoner of my reason. I said: God.’64 God against God, reason against reason: the task is rid oneself of the pomp which obstructs the simple voice of nature in order to bask in the artifice of words. Since language is no longer pure, the poet endeavours to change language itself, to reground its validity anew and afresh. In ‘Alchemy’ he speaks of the means he has chosen for this end: on the one hand, ‘simple hallucination’, the methodological ‘disruption of all the senses’ – work on himself, his psyche, his body; on the other hand, the ‘hallucination of words’, ‘magical sophisms’ – work on language. Two contradictory ways are open to him in his search for a direct relation with the Absolute: the way of the flesh and the way of the spirit. We read the opposition of ‘Gluttonously I am waiting for God’65 and ‘Through the spirit man goes to God’.66 The poet searches for a language of the soul which ‘will be of the soul for the soul, containing everything, smells, sounds, colors, thought holding on to thought and pulling’.67 Yet the poet knows from experience that every interior decision, every project in the order of doing, is initiated and animated by the artefact of language and so is composed of words which wed them to the domain of making. Unable to render language purely intelligible, he is forced to render the intellect sensible: he searches for a language of the body, ‘I prided myself on inventing a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses.’68 Claudel speaks here of a ‘type of materialistic mysticism’.69 In short, poetic language stands before two opposite directions and attempts to make itself more than human and less than human. First, more than human. The poet wants a language from the Other to speak the Other: we encounter instantiations of this not only in his desire to learn foreign languages which he felt until the end (‘Which language should I speak’, he wonders in ‘Bad Blood’; Verlaine described him as a ‘formidable linguist’), but also, and more profoundly, in his desire to make the order of language and reality coincide. As a poet he lives and experiences within language his concern for absolute truth and the reunification of to be and ought to be, and his rejection of any difference between the signifier and the referent as hypocrisy and falsehood. To recover the key to the communion of words and things between the inaccessible language of angels and the cries of beasts, the poet attempts to change language, to rid language of its all too human humanity.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 273. Ibid. Ibid., p. 269; ‘Mauvais sang’, second section, p. 6. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 299; ‘L’Impossible’, p. 41. Ibid., p. 379; Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May, 1871, Œ uvre-vie, p. 192. Ibid., p. 285; ‘Alchimie du verbe’, p. 30. Claudel, ‘Arthur Rimbaud’, p. 518.

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In his pastiche he attempts to harness the prestige of Holy Scripture. For example, he takes literally the metaphors, comparisons and images drawn from the Gospel.70 In ‘Hunger’, the verse poem integrated into ‘Alchemy’, we read: If I have any taste, it is for hardly Anything but earth and stones … Eat the rocks that are broken, The old stones of churches; The pebbles of old floods, Bread scattered in gray valleys.71

Through the magic of his words the poet makes bread out of rocks and thus succumbs to the first of the three temptations of Christ that the gospels narrate: he gives to himself the language of the ‘anti-Christ’ in the desert. As Satan tempts Christ by asking him to transform stones into bread, so the poet sees bread in the rocks themselves and invites us to consume them. A similar anti-prophetic temptation is present, for example, in the inversion of words from Ecclesiastes in ‘Lightning’72 or the (biblical?) inclusion of the discourse of revelation parodied from the gospel (‘Listen!...Then trust in me. Faith relieves and guides and cures. Come all, even the little children—and I will comfort you, and pour out my heart for you’73) or the lines ‘I am no longer in the world’ and ‘Surely we are beyond the world’. In his rivalry with the Word of Scripture, the poet searches for a language which is more than human. The task here is to make human language itself – mixed with every logos – the supreme authority of objectivity: I invented the color of the vowels! … I prided myself on inventing a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses. I reserved translation rights. It was at first a study. I wrote out silences and the nights. I recorded the inexpressible. I described frenzies.74

Conversely, language also attempts to make itself subhuman: fascinated by rocks, but unfit for petrification,75 he moves towards animality: 70. Andre Gide used a similar flattening device in Les Faux Monnayeurs to castigate the artifice of a certain kind of piety when he turns the metaphors elaborated by Bossuet in his Pané gyrique de saint Bernard into concrete and delirious episodes in the life of his hero Bernard Profitendieu or of other characters. 71. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 291; ‘Faim’, Une saison, p. 33. 72. Ibid., pp. 299–300; Rimbaud, ‘L’é clair’, pp. 45–6. 73. Ibid., p. 277; ‘Nuit de l’enfer’, p. 16. 74. Ibid., p. 287; ‘Alchimie de verbe’, p. 30. 75. Caillois, in a collection dedicated to Stones, writes a poem whose title is taken from another poem by Mallarmé : ‘Le dé mon de l’analogie’; Roger Caillois, ‘Le dé mon de l’analogie’, in Pierres (L’É criture des pierres [Geneva-Paris, 1970; Paris: Gallimard, 1971,

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Priests, teachers, masters, you are wrong to turn me over to justice. I have never belonged to this race. I have never been Christian … . I do not understand your laws. I have no moral sense. I am a brute. You are making a mistake.76

At the culmination of a wandering search for wild vigour, he takes refuge in the pure, blind force of the beast [bê te]: The pagan blood comes back. The Spirit is near. Why doesn’t Christ help me by giving my soul nobility and freedom … . Gluttonously I am waiting for God. I am of an inferior race from all eternity … . De profundis Domine, a fool [bê te] I am!’77

The Rimbaldian hell is thus brightened by an undefined aspiration for infinity, like that of an animal which has God before it but without knowing him, an animal which goes to God by instinct, hunger, ‘gluttony’. The project ties him in tortuous knots, because the poet can only change language from within language, from within what already exists, fully constituted, blended together from what he wants to avoid! This is why his project turns into the attempt to move beyond poetry through the poetic. It is necessary to pass from the fabrication of poems to the transformation of the poet’s life, from the order of making to that of doing and from merely considering one’s life as a work of art to making it a work of art. In addition to the ‘hallucination of words’, the ‘hallucination of sense’ is the high road for reaching his end: by making himself a seer, the poet decides to search for the true ‘I’ through replacing his current historical, cultural and religious conditions with their opposite. We all know the famous letter: The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he

p. 116]). The poet is surprised, incredulous, at the rough drafts which seem to await him already all prepared in the given roughness of mineral, a natural thing. Since he is now plunged into a cosmology where mathematics and geometry have replaced the measure lines of the Creator, he believes that he has available only a measure without measure, in a space reduced to quantity and which is no longer quality, where nonsense is the initial given (nonsense which is to sense as amorality is to morality). In that cosmos, discovering meaning is surprising, it is like a type of ‘demon’ or bad habit which the mind cannot undo – the exact inverse of the theology of the Word! 76. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 271; ‘Mauvais sang’, fifth section, p. 9. 77. Ibid., p. 269; ‘Mauvais sang’, fifth section, p. 9.

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becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed— and the supreme Scholar!—Because he reaches the unknown!78

The poet attempts to reconcile in poiein the soul, body, nature and God that the catechism separated, a separation which the Western adolescent resents: Could not the establishment of a technical relation to oneself mean the ability to transcend the distinction between moral virtue and technical skill, the painful ground of the human condition? In his attempt to erase the borders of art and moral action, Rimbaud is ‘the first poet of a civilization which has not yet appeared’79 of which René Char spoke; he ‘ends the humanist era: he opens a new time’.80 ‘It is necessary to be absolutely modern’: the modern world requires technique and science (‘Ah ! science does not move fast enough for us!’81) rather than morality. Far from the pangs of conscience, he wishes that acting could become a making applied to itself. We also understand the poet’s fascination with the East, which presaged the West’s fascination today for Eastern wisdom which has become vulgarized and presented as ‘introverted techniques, applied to interiority’. The conceptions of the world which accompany the use of these techniques advocate the abolition of personality and of knowledge of oneself in favour of an identification with the absolute conceived of as impersonal. Thus, the conception of humanity which is encouraged ‘by the context of Western society marked by the predominance of technique could be found to agree with the approach implied by Eastern techniques’.82 Through a spiritual reversal which could be called diabolical, in A Season in Hell knowledge itself seems to be the source of impurity, and so it is necessary to flee from it (‘I envied the happiness of animals – caterpillars representing the innocence of limbo, moles, the sleep of virginity!’83). One flees into the fiction generated by the hallucination of sense which provides ‘the secrets for changing life’84; ‘I will wake up, and laws and customs will have changed’.85 The hallucination of words enables us to see, for example, a ‘strong one’ (fort) and a ‘saint’ (saint) in the ‘obdurate convict’86 (forç at intraitable) through the phonetic resonances (for/sa-in) which then allows us to turn ‘infamy into glory’.87 The hallucination of words also packs expressions with double entendres which suggest vice: ‘We got

78. Ibid., p. 307; Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871, Œ uvre-vie, p. 188. 79. René Char, Recherche de la base et du sommet (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p. 102. 80. Gabriel Bounoure, Le Silence de Rimbaud: petite contribution au mythe (Le Caire: Libr. L.D.F., 1955), p. 102. 81. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 299; ‘L’Impossible’, p. 41. 82. Georges Cottier, Dé fis é thiques (Saint-Maurice: Suisse, 1996), p. 154. 83. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 289; ‘Alchimie du verbe’, fourth section, p. 31. 84. Ibid., p. 281; ‘Vierge folle – L’é poux infernal’, p. 23. 85. Ibid., p. 283; ‘Vierge folle – L’é poux infernal’, p. 25. 86. Ibid., p. 268; ‘Mauvais sang’, fifth section, p. 9. 87. Ibid., p. 281; ‘Vierge folle – L’é poux infernal’, p. 22.

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on together. We worked together in a state of joy. But after a penetrating caress, he would say … it is my duty to help others. Although it is not very attractive … dear heart.’88 However, the walking, the alcohol, the drugs and the debauchery do not bestow any unknown wisdom and in the end culminate in aphasia – ‘no more words’ – and the pagan language of anthropophagy: ‘I will bury the dead in my belly.’89 When all is said and done, ‘Life is a farce carried out by everyone’: the poet leans on an existence beyond norms (expressed in the highly ambiguous thematic of the collection’s last lines). He ends by becoming silent: A Season is a kind of ‘adieu’ to literature.90 The poetic project of discovering the ‘other’ who ‘I is’ by means of these two ‘hallucinations’ fails. To understand the theological import of such a literary experience requires deepening the most pregnant experience of Rimbaud’s hallucination of sense: his homosexual practice. Christian readers have long denied the poet’s homosexuality as it made it impossible for them to reconcile his ‘prophetic’ charism with a Christian moral code. Thus Claudel, who spoke of ‘the angel of Charleville’91, refuses to see that by wanting to make an angel Rimbaud ended up making a beast.92 For Catholicism today with its integration of depth psychology,93 its rediscovery of the ethics of self-construction and virtue morality, and so with its vision of human action which is less juridical and more dynamic, homosexuality is less of a taboo than in Claudel’s time, and so we can consider the question more calmly. Such a question even has to be asked for the sake of a responsible reading, as ‘The Infernal Bridegroom’, the poem which condenses this experience, is the longest of the collection whose centre it also occupies in a diptych with ‘Alchemy of the Word’.

88. Ibid., p. 283; Ibid., p. 24. 89. Ibid., p. 271; ‘Mauvais sang’, fifth section, p. 10. 90. Even if it were the case that Rimbaud retouched or even rewrote several of the texts published as Illuminations, this would simply be another example of the blurred line in the spiritual life between deciding and enacting decision. 91. Claudel, ‘Un dernier salut à Arthur Rimbaud’, p. 523. 92. ‘What a mistake Jacques Riviè re made when he turns this unfortunate child into a paragon of perversity. “The truth will come from the mouths of babes.” For the first time ever, we find here a childhood which speaks for itself, green with night and mystery, instead of being interpreted by its reflection in the memories of grown-ups. In this way it pleased Providence to grant this “seven year-old poet” the expressive faculties of a genius.’ Claudel, ‘Un dernier salut à Arthur Rimbaud’, p. 522. We find a good example of this moralism, sometimes accompanied by fine literary and theological intuitions, in the chapters dedicated to Verlaine and Rimbaud by René Dumesnil in Histoire de la litté rature franç aise (ed. Jean Calvet), vol. IX, Le ré alisme et la naturalisme (Paris: J. de Gigord, 1936), pp. 372–8. 93. Cf. Jean-Louis Bruguè s, Dictionnaire de morale catholique (Chambray-lè s-Tours: CLD, 1991, 1997). See Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2357-59.

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‘Delirium I’ is ‘one of the places of A Season in Hell, this Verdun literature, where one is most violently confronted’. From Claudel to Antoine Adam through Marcel Ruff and Raymond Clauzel, we have witnessed ‘the extraordinary effort to render Rimbaud “proper” (É tiemble)’. Today ‘the question is no longer the fact of his homosexuality but of knowing in what ways Rimbaud practised it: by taste or by “system”’.94 Rimbaud’s homosexuality, well attested by different documents, was without a doubt constitutional. ‘The awakening of puberty must have provoked an exceptional disruption because it churned against a background of accumulated hate and repressed resentments’,95 and most notably against an overly possessive mother.96 In the fourth section of ‘Bad Blood’ we also find a confession of incorrigible bad habits which prefigure those which Gide later made in his Journal: ‘You cannot get away. Let me follow the roads here again, burdened with my vice, the vice that sank its roots of suffering at my side as early as the age of reason – and that rises to the sky, batters me, knocks me down, drags me after it.’97 Far from asepticizing the text by disincarnating it, by reducing it to ethereal insipid meditations, purely rhetorical allegories or auspices of amusement, by metaphorizing it instead of taking it “literally and in all its senses”, it is necessary to take seriously the alchemy of the word and of life “which operates in all creation and where there is both reflection and anamorphosis”.98

We can then see that in this poem, so informed by his experience, Rimbaud has ingeniously typified the pain his homosexuality has caused him. First, the collection’s tone hesitates between dense, mysterious and pathetic drama,99 and a foolish and paltry comedy of manners (‘A strange couple!’100). Sexual activity is described as compulsive (‘I go where he goes. I have to.’ ‘I used to follow him. I had to!’101), haunting and frustrating, as a source of regression,102 and finally marked by impotence (‘I ignore … I no longer know … I forget’, etc.). The narrator moves from a febrile enthusiasm for discovering the ‘new’ and the illusion of belonging to the elite to a despair as bleak as that of Judas who, believing

94. Noguez, ‘Note’, Œ uvre-vie, p. 1209. 95. Raymond Pouillart, Litté rature franç aise (ed. Claude Pichois), vol. 4, Le romantisme III: 1869-1895 (Paris: Arthaud, 1968), p. 220. 96. Bonnefoy, Rimbaud, pp. 10–12. 97. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 269; ‘Mauvais sang’, fourth section, p. 8. 98. Rimbaud, Œ uvre-vie, pp. 1210–11. 99. Rimbaud, ‘Vierge folle – L’é poux infernal’, p. 21. 100. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 285; ‘Vierge folle – L’é poux infernal’, p. 26. 101. Ibid., p. 281; Ibid., pp. 22–3. 102. ‘Oh! will you give me, who have suffered so much, as a reward the life of adventure that is in children’s books?...Then he would recover his manners of a young mother… I am a slave to him.’ Rimbaud, Complete Works, pp. 283, 285; ‘Vierge folle – L’é poux infernal’, p. 25;

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himself to have betrayed another with no possibility of remission, hanged himself. Similarly, Rimbaud stops writing. The narrator thus expresses a feeling of culpability and of shame which makes him lament a purity (‘I am impure. What a life!’103) which has always been lost (‘If it had been awake until this moment, I would not have given in to my deleterious instincts at an immemorial time!’104), and which compels him to evade the real world, the religion which he thought condemned him and finally himself. In the end, the foolish virgin calls himself ‘damned and dead to the world’, and playing on this final expression, she cries out: ‘What a life! Real life is absent. We are not in the world.’105 From illusions into disillusionments, the experience systematically troubles the identities of the protagonists through the play of titles; the gap between ‘the confession of a hell-mate’ /‘I am mad’ moving through the epicene ‘I am the slave’106). Who is man? Who is woman? Who is the ‘you’ and who is the ‘I’? The results is the adynaton which describes their relationship: ‘I was in his soul as in a palace that had been emptied in order not to see so mean a person as myself, that is all.’107 The biographical threads of Rimbald and Verlaine interlace here: ‘It is interesting that in this particular passage of the “Foolish Virgin” Rimbaud does not as much provide a portrait of Verlaine which faithfully transcribes the reality but rather a portrait of himself as viewed by Verlaine. A ruse of narcissism but perhaps of a kind of suffering, even masochistic narcissism’. The result is ‘a kind of mental interpretation, of the fusion of two souls where Ruff and company wish to see a parable, but which is probably an almost realist manner of describing conflictual and personal proximity’.108 It is finally language itself which is disturbed by the experience: the confusion of identities is reflected in the disturbance of language and through it touches the relationship to God. His homosexual practice adds the felt impossibility of speaking to the felt impossibility of praying: ‘How can I describe him to you! I can no longer speak’109 is echoed in ‘Does he speak to God? Perhaps I should appeal to God. I am in the lowest depths and I have forgotten how to pray.’110 The troubling of language seems due to Satan’s influence, who appears in the introductory poem of A Season: ‘Dear Satan … for you who like in a writer

103. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 279; ‘Vierge folle – L’é poux infernal’, p. 21. 104. Ibid., p. 299; ‘L’Impossible’, p. 41. 105. Ibid., p. 281; ‘Vierge folle – L’é poux infernal’, p. 22. 106. Ibid., p. 279; Ibid., p. 24. 107. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 283. 108. Noguez, ‘Note’, Œ uvre-vie, p. 1211. The critic adds that Rimbaud had already employed the same process in his French composition which was meant to imagine a letter from Charles of Orleans to Louis XI: in the text that he hands in to his Professor Izambard, he gives Villon a voice through identifying with and pastiching him. 109. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 279; ‘Vierge folle – L’é poux infernal’, p. 22. 110. Ibid., p. 283; Ibid., p. 25.

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an absence of descriptive or instructive faculties.’111 Neither description nor instruction: the seer refuses to undertake the classical work of the philosopher who defines truth as the adequation of words to things or of the moralist who teaches what is good through attributing an ought to be to being; Rimbaud tries to navigate a path beyond true and false. There is manifested here a refusal of symbol, of covenant – always more or less constraining – between signified and signifier, a refusal which grounds literature (in Barthes’s sense of the term). Alienated from contemporary language which he deems strained through its perverted concern for truth and goodness, the poet dreams of a language which would be pure action. In all of this there is present ‘a craving for purity, to be new, which tortures him; not purity in the religious sense, but a virginity of being, ontological, to become “pagan” and be without precedents and without ancestry and without an education which places constraints upon nature … a state which would enable him to touch the world with an absolute innocence of sense and spirit’.112 ‘Isn’t it because we cultivate fog?’113 From ‘What Is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers’ onwards, Rimbaud denounces literary imagery disconnected from reality. He wants to disperse this mist through avoiding the cultural artifices of symbol and metaphor. To gaze anew upon things, to see them as they themselves are without their being reduced to technical or conceptual slavery (through science or the mind) – in brief, to retrieve the primordial or original power of naming (Eden, the state of nature or barbarism) – presupposes the dehumanization of the gaze in order to recover the brutality of beginning. There appears here a pessimist view of the human gaze as inherently impure (inasmuch as it reduces everything it sees to utilitarian use?). Rimbaud refuses to pay and to be paid himself with words.114 His aim does not even seem to be recovering some truth. He no longer has the patience to resume the historical and metaphysical work of correlating words and things. He simply desires to live a life in which language and existence coincide, as described in the famous quatrain: It has been found again! What has? eternity. It is the sea mixed With the sun.115

111. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 265 [trans. modified]; Une saison, p. 2. 112. Pouillart, Litté rature franç aise, pp. 222–3. 113. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 298. 114. ‘I loathe all trades. All of them, foremen and workmen, are base peasants. A writer’s hand is no better than a ploughman’s. What a century of hands! I will never possess my hand.’ Rimbaud, Complete Works, pp. 265, 267; ‘Mauvais sang’, p. 5. 115. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 293; ‘Alchimie du verbe’, p. 34.

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To achieve this necessarily means battling against the linguistic source of all alienation: fiction. It is fiction which makes it difficult to believe in the real through words, which makes one look to the future instead of living the absolute of the present, which is alone real.116 Between the two images or discourses which he juxtaposes without integrating – and thereby inventing what will later become the ‘surrealist image’ – in the hope that a creative electrolocution of reality bursts out, there exists another way, that of analogy, which enables one to speak beyond the human in the hope of opening immanence to transcendence. For instance, the linguistic and poetics choices which underlie St. Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysical discourse presume that at the basis of knowledge of language and intuition of the real, all wisdom is rooted in a type of folly. At the heart of ‘naï ve’ realism (for which the understanding sees real things and discourse speaks of them as they are), there is symbolism (the word is adequated to the thing through an accepted symbolic convention). At the heart of reason there is imagination (of the sign): ‘the fictive’, philosophically understood, is no more opposed to the real than faith, psychologically speaking, is opposed to doubt. Rimbaud’s homosexual orientation and his refusal of the symbolon are logically connected. His practice makes him live in his body the disallowance of the symbol, of the fruitful complementarity of beings. The body is the person’s access to the real to speech: his misuse of it directly influences the set of possibilities open to him and in particular the deepest one: signi-fication. The soul is so bound to the body that it feels inalterably creased by it: his corpus is effectively traversed by the feeling of an irrecoverable loss, of an absolutely unique and unspeakable fault, of an unforgivable sin. In his flesh Rimbaud denies the possibility of the symbol and of mature signification (that is to say, conventional, ordered by a law which allows communication). Finally, his revolt is not only moral but theological: by attacking the modus symbolicus, a form essential to revelation, Rimbaud takes on God himself! Symbolon is opposed to diabolos: a diabolical source is visible behind every attack on the symbol. It is not altogether surprising to discover the diabolical in the poetics of a speech addressed to ‘dear Satan’, as found in the introductory poem of A Season in Hell! Rimbaud alludes to his homosexual experience in the twofold title, which is both evangelical and diabolical: ‘The Foolish Virgin – The Infernal Bridegroom’. The partner, who was already a ‘satanic doctor’ in ‘Vagabonds’117 (in which Verlaine recognized himself), is described as ‘dear Satan’ in the introductory poem of A Season. ‘He is a demon, you know. He is not a man.’118

116. Cf. ‘Never any hopes / No orietur.’ Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 293; ‘Alchimie du verbe’, p. 34. 117. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 331; Œ uvre-vie, p. 349. 118. Ibid., p. 281; ‘Vierge folle – L’é poux infernal’, p. 22; The link between the use of descriptive language and the acceptance of sexual alterity can find another illustration in the Bloyenne and Claudelienne glosses on the language of the Virgin Mary, mother

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Is the Word His Rival or His Beloved? We must view Rimbaud’s references to Christianity as genuinely ambivalent. His verbal hallucinogenics give him the appearance of competing with the Word embodied in Scripture, and his sensory hallucinogenics compete against the Word incarnate in history. Yet it is possible that his spiritual lucidity and his physical and spiritual engagement in the quest for an authentic life have turned his antiChristianity upside down. With apologies for offending some contemporary Rimbaudians, this is what we will now claim. As the time of hallucinations came to its close, the poet invoked the sign of the covenant: I saw the consoling cross rise. I had been damned by the rainbow. Happiness was my fatality, my remorse, my worm: my life would always be too immense to be devoted to strength and beauty.119

In the Bible the rainbow is a sign of salvation and a symbol of the covenant God made with humanity after the Flood. What could turn it into a sign of condemnation? To understand this reversal, we could invent a little verse-fiction and imagine the poet’s interior monologue to be something like this: Ever since Noah the rainbow has taught me that God will not destroy me, will have mercy on me, will protect me and will love me. He thus places upon me an obligation to be happy. But I cannot live up to this.120 For I dreamed of consecrating my life to strength and to beauty, to the sun and to the sea and to the rainbow as the fruit of their misty union, the purest spectacle of natural light … . Yet the Bible tells me that the rainbow signifies, and acknowledging this renders my life forever immense. As it is neither the glint of gold nor clowning and whimsy, nor a magnificent opera, the conscience awakened within me by Christianity reduces the sublime to an obligation. I am condemned to Happiness.

The poet gives ‘Happiness’ a majuscule because it refers to Someone. At the time when he was finishing A Season, Rimbaud paraphrased the words of St. John in those places in the text where the person of Christ appears to shine forth: the back pages of Pierre Brunel’s draft manuscript of A Season contain three ‘evangelical prose poems’.121 ‘It would be a mistake to reduce these lines of inarguable poetic

of the incarnate Word, which tightly link femininity and the word. Cf. Dominique Millet-Gé rard, Anima ou la sagesse: Pour une poé tique comparé e de l’exé gè se claudé lienne (Paris: Lethielleux 1990). 119. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 295; ‘Alchimie du verbe’, sixth section, p. 35. 120. The poem which follows is called ‘The Impossible.’ 121. Critics sometimes call this the ‘Johannine suite’. Cf. Œ uvre-vie, pp. 393–7.

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quality to a parody.’122 The last of the three prose poems alludes to the episode of the healing of the cripple at the pool of Bethesda,123 and mixes into the Gospel words an ‘I-witness’ to a miracle and a demoniac imagery which anticipates the writing of A Season.124 The narrative arc connects the enclosure of ‘I’ with the ‘infamous invalids’, full of ‘sins, slight, tenacious sons of the demon, who for somewhat sensitive hearts made these men more terrifying than monsters’,125 who throw themselves into the filthy pool while ‘the sins cast them back on to the steps, and forced them to look for other places, because their Demon can only stay in places where he is sure of getting alms’126 and is apparently broken by the spectacle of the paralytic man entering in to the town after Jesus came in: ‘He was watching the sons of Sin. The demon was sticking out his tongue in their tongues; and ridiculing everyone.’127 The Christ of the evangelical paraphrases is literally revamped in A Season when Rimbaud evokes Jesus walking on the water, a scene which in the Gospel of John comes just after the stories referenced in the ‘Prose poems’: Jesus is walking over the scarlet brambles, without bending them down … . Once Jesus walked on the troubled waters. The lantern showed him to us, standing and pale, with long dark hair, beside an emerald wave.128

Christ on the ‘consoling cross’ is mentioned just before the rainbow and just after ‘The Happiness! [… ] ad matutinum au Christus venit.’129 He is still the main subject in the subsequent verses which begin: ‘O Seasons, O castles / what soul is without flaws?’ Christ is at the heart of the internal debate: if I know I am to be saved by God, having seen him lifted up on the cross, knowing the meaning of the rainbow, and if I nonetheless continue to want to restrict my life to strength and to beauty, I am thoroughly damned through a soul-destroying self-knowledge. A particular knowledge makes my life ‘always more immense’ than itself. The poet’s relationship to Christ is not merely critical but is rather torn between fascination and rejection. It is true that at the end of ‘Alchemy’ the narrator’s terse comment on his story is ‘That is over’, and the assertive tone of the final line ‘Now I can greet beauty’ appears to relegate the tale to bygone pranks and youthful

122. Pierre Brunel, ‘Note’, Œ uvre-vie, p. 1189. 123. Cf. John 5. 124. ‘The paralytic who had remained lying on his side stood up [crossed the gallery] and the damned saw him cross the gallery with an unusual firm step and disappear into the city’. ‘Prose called “evangelical”’, Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 261; ‘Bethsaï da’, Œ uvre-vie, p. 397. 125. Rimbaud, Collected Works, p. 261; ‘Bethsaï da’, p. 397. 126. Ibid.; Ibid. 127. Ibid.; Ibid. 128. Ibid., p. 277; ‘Nuit de l’enfer’, p. 16. 129. Ibid., p. 295; ‘Alchimie du verbe’, sixth section, p. 35.

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misdemeanours. From ‘Bad Blood’ onward, the cross is just a figment in the archives of the declining West: when the time to speak of it reappears at the end of the collection in ‘Adieu’, the cross has become that ‘horrible tree’.130 At this point in the writing, the poet is no longer thinking that his life is too immense for beauty. In the section just before the ‘Rainbow’, he has already affirmed that ‘morality’, the conscience which creates the illusion of depths under and beyond the surface of things, is ‘a weakness of the brain’. Fascinated by strength, Rimbaud spent his life seeking for the secret of escaping his cruelly resented frailty, where the realm of conscience is reduced to the weakness of a physical organ. If that quest ‘is over’, it is because the narrator has abandoned the search for Happiness, and is resigned to being placed at the top of what he ironically calls ‘the angelic ladder of common sense’131 when he opposes the indifferent character of ‘scorn’ or of ‘charity’ to the Christian ideal of charity.132 Conversely, Rimbaud always seems to have been enchanted by the notion of life with Christ. ‘That is over’,133 does not mean that he is over. It literally just means that these events have unfolded. An utterance like ‘now I can greet beauty’ does not so much contradict the previous section on a life too immense to be devoted to Beauty but is instead offered in response to the beginning of the infernal journey: ‘Beauty … I cursed her.’134 It is this curse which is opposed to salvation. The testing of the poet enables beauty to return, transfigured by the suffering. Does this not place Rimbaud on par with ‘the great thinkers who at various times discussed the relationship between revelation and the beautiful’?135 These thinkers ‘always began by depreciating the latter [the beautiful], as if it had to be discarded in order to make way for the religious idea; only later, as a result of the cleavage, did the beautiful force its way back in the form of what was actually revealed’.136 The drafts confirm this interpretation: one reads there of ‘goodness’ rather than ‘beauty’, as in ‘I now know to greet beauty’. The draft concludes by replacing the ideal of art with that of sanctity: In the greatest towns, at dawn, ad matutium /  diluculum, at the Christus venit, when the Christ comes for the strong men, his (?) teeth, sweet unto death,

130. ‘We must be absolutely modern. No hymns. I must hold what has been gained. Hard night! The dried blood smokes on my face, and I have nothing behind me except that horrible tree… ’ Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 303; ‘Adieu’, p. 52. 131. Rimbaud, Complete Works p. 273; ‘Mauvais sang’, penultimate section, p. 11. 132. ‘No more need of devotion nor of divine love’. Rimbaud, Complete Works p. 273; ‘Mauvais sang’, penultimate section, p. 11. 133. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 295. 134. Ibid., p. 264; Une saison, p. 1. 135. Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘Revelation and the Beautiful’, in idem, Explorations in Theology, vol. 1, The Word Made Flesh (trans. A. V. Littledale with Alexander Dru; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), pp. 95–126 (here p. 101). 136. von Balthasar, ‘Revelation and the Beautiful’, p. 101.

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forewarning me with the cock-crow. Happiness. So weak. I cannot believe I could survive in a society which compels us to be happy. How could such refined distaste be cloistered? What wicked pity. Everything has gradually been and gone. I now hate mystical outbursts and grotesque mannerisms. Now I can state that art is a stupidity. Our great poets make art all too easily: art is stupid. A salute to goodness.137

In short, Rimbaud’s relation to Christ is more multifaceted than just straight revolt. The hexametres immediately following ‘Alchemy’, ‘O seasons, O castles’, resonate like a lamentation on mystical experience: A salute to it each time A Gallic cock sings.138

The bird combines the cock who trumpeted during Peter’s betrayal ad matutinum, the mercy of Jesus Christ who had prophesied this fall and forgiven it in advance and the ‘French way of life’: ‘Gallic’ appears at the outset of ‘Bad Blood’ which ends by welding them all together: ‘That would be the French way of life, the path of honour!’139 The French way of life is simultaneously this betrayal and this mercy. It is a betrayal in the sense that ‘M. Prudhomme’, the product of so many centuries, ‘is born along with Christ’. At the time when Rimbaud was writing, he was the one who believed in Christ and who spoke of Christ, albeit through the mouth of Mme Rimbaud. It is mercy inasmuch as Jesus Christ, the Happiness who took on body and soul, has brought life through this discourse even if it is mediocre. Thus the ambiguity remains: in the same way that the rainbow signifies the impossibility of escaping from revelation and conscience, and thus from God and the call to happiness, so even the cock inescapably signifies the fact that Christ is present in history. Did Jesus of Nazareth, omniscient as God made man, oblige Peter to repent and convert when he foretold Peter would deny him? This is the meaning of the fourth couplet: Ah! I will have no more desires It has taken charge of my life.140

This is more sad resignation than joyous conversion. The fifth couplet speaks of the figure of ‘Christ eternal thief of energy’:

137. Rimbaud, Œ uvre-vie, pp. 855–6. [The translation has been aligned with some of the lines which appear in the Fowlie edition.] 138. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 295. 139. Ibid., pp. 265, 275; ‘Mauvais sang’, pp. 5, 12. 140. Ibid., p. 295.

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This charm has taken body and soul And dispersed every efforts.141

The ‘charm’ is literally opposed to the project as a whole and the narrator’s goal in A Season: ‘to possess truth in one body and soul’142 It seems as if the poet regrets that the incarnation of the Word has already happened inasmuch as it evacuates his own poetic enterprise. The first version of ‘O seasons, o castles’ confirms this suspicion. Just after the passage cited at the beginning of this paragraph we find this couplet: What can be understood from my words? It makes them escape and fly off.143

Christ has already done what the poet would like to do, and the poet cannot but know this (he has been baptized, catechized and has read the Scriptures). We cannot stop at the magical sophism of the ‘wedding with Jesus Christ as father-inlaw’: Rimbaud lived the law of the incarnation in a tragic mode,144 and he knows that it is only through Christ’s sometimes gross representatives that he can know Christ, and at the same time that Christ is not reducible to his mediations or to these ‘representatives.’ It is as a poet that he quarrels with his baptism: his poetic experience reveals to him the ties that bind the speech of the west to the Christian religion and the crisis which sets in motion their decline. The imprisonment which he resents is not only the product of moral or social regulations invented by the West over the centuries. It operates through thoughts, words and writings: ‘Every word being an idea, the time of the universal language will come.’145 Doubtless ‘the Gospel’ is ‘over’ for Rimbaud, and while he perceived the depths and genius of its language and of its poetry, he wanted it to be mute because he thought that this would induce in turn a new incarnation of the Word, one which would oppose the catechism. Rimbaud believed that he no longer believed in the incarnation: consciously or not, he called on an other, as evinced in the excipit of the Season. Yet the whole time he was seeking the language which would reunite the fragmented world, the self and God, and he knew that the incarnation can only take place once within history and that the irreversible Gospel grounds his project to dust.

141. Ibid. 142. ‘Farewell’, Complete Works, p. 305; ‘Adieu’, p. 53. 143. Rimbaud, Œ uvre-vie, p. 308. 144. Contemporary theologians speak of the ‘law of the incarnation’ to mean that divine grace only comes to human beings through the humanity assumed by the Son of God, and through the institutional mediations which overflow from it (Church, sacraments, Scriptures) in order visibly to continue his work. 145. Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 379; Letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May 1871, Œ uvrevie, p. 190.

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‘At heart, the key to this savage parade is that nothing has begun; everything is given from the outset. The problem is at the origin.’146 ‘Rimbaud revolts against the original conditions in which we have been “since always”, since before being itself – the separation of the soul and the cosmos, of thought and the logos, the precipitation in time and space which one cannot grasp.’147 Unlike his contemporary fan club, the poet identified the problem theologically: ‘The first notebook of the Conspecto immediately designates the culprits, “Adamus et Eva”.’148 In this sense, his quest for language beyond pagan speech (unreachable for a baptized westerner) and beyond Christian speech (which has become deceitful, for its speakers have forsaken it insofar as they no longer believe in the reality of the supernatural) is really a search for the lost Word: his failure and his nostalgia for the Gospel suggest that what is needed if he is to change life is a transcendent and divine poetics. This is why Rimbaud, like Verlaine and Mallarmé , never gave up dreaming about the Middle Ages. A Season alludes to it from ‘Bad Blood’ onwards with all its citations of Latin hymnody. Yet under these aesthetic or ideological borrowings, Arthur de Charleville reconnects with Thomas Aquinas in his revolt against servitude to historical conditions. The Angelic Doctor thought it scandalous that a spiritual entity such as humanity should by nature be subjected to the contingencies of corporality as we experience it, subjected to sickness and to death: the theologian will not concede that God could have created humanity in such a state of dependence upon the necessities of matter. For St. Thomas, the human vocation surpasses the ignoble trappings of this world inasmuch as this vocation is primarily spiritual, and the fact that human beings are enslaved to historical conditions is a consequence of original sin! Thomas shares Rimbaud’s opinion that the origins of this situation must be sought in Adam and Eve!149 Rimbaud’s drama is that the way out, the key to the ancient festival of the Eucharist, the Gospel, or the Cross, have ended up under the regime of history too: for Charleville, the Prudhommesque ugliness, which is falsely called ‘beauty’, has ended up overwhelming the means of retrieving nature as it really is intended to be: true beauty, the supernatural! After believing that poetry must be the rebel’s way of escaping his origins, even though it too is enchained, he will throw away this whole damnable project, and like a clodding ‘peasant’ take up the taciturn labour of Adam. This requires the responsible reader to ask if history is in fact the realization of nature through culture, the gradual ‘unravelling’ of human possibilities which romantic theorists of human evolution such as Michelet, Quinet, Blanc and others have envisaged. But does the unfolding of reality into concepts and language result in a more intense and fertile experience of what is implicitly lived in the silence, or does it result in being placed at a distance from reality and objectivizing it? In

146. 147. 148. 149.

Rimbaud, Œ uvre-vie, pp. lxxxi–lxxxil. Ibid. Rimbaud, Œ uvre-vie, pp. 19, 21. See especially De Malo, q. 5, art. 4 and 5.

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short, is human speech life-giving or mortifying? A birth certificate or a death certificate? And, more deeply, how freighted with silence is it, or drawn into the magnetic power of prayer? Another path remains open: the return to the Word disseminated throughout the world, incorporated into the Scriptures, incarnated in Jesus Christ and permeating the Church. After Rimbaud Verlaine would refuse to take the same road or fail at the attempt. To the dream of liberation which his companion had proposed, he will respond in an equally modern way: that of weakness. Wisdom offers us the sincere witness of a great personal experience; but by returning to the twofold classical and mediaeval culture which dominates the French tradition, the poet primarily inscribed his suffering in a broad knowledge of the past and he defined in a single stroke the two aspects of modern piety: in an era modelled around efficiency, when the dream of power so forcefully exerts itself, how is that a person does not reach holiness? They must be reformed in the spiritual order in order to experience their limitations. [This] states precisely the conclusion to Lé on Bloy’s La Femme pauvre: ‘The only sadness is not to have been a saint’.”150

Other successors to Rimbaud have experienced a similar about-face.151 For those who have not yet abandoned the hope of ‘greeting Noel on earth’, the Magi of the mind are not enough; it is also necessary to follow the Magi of the soul. Sanctity, even if that is not what it is called, reveals a poetic splendour which cannot be reduced to utility, which requires to be served in humility rather than put to service. In Rimbaud’s own generation, Ernest Hello initiated such a movement, and in the subsequent generation Bloy was the cantor of the language of God and demolished the idolization of art. One of the points they had in common was love of the Middle Ages. But now it is time for us to return to Saint Thomas, not only Thomas the theologian but also Thomas the poet, the cantor of the ‘ancient festival’ for which Rimbaud dreamed of regaining his appetite.

150. Michel, In hymnis et canticis, p. 309. 151. Cf. F. Gugelot, La conversion des intellectuels au catholicisme en France 1885-1953 (Paris: CNRS é ditions, 1998), pp. 31–2, 85, 251, 468.

Part III LANGUAGE AS A THEOLOGICAL QUESTION

Chapter 8 LITTLE THOMASIAN SEMIOLOGY

In his Language: A Linguistic Introduction to History, Joseph Vendryes offers this poetic yet technical passage on the human voice as the greatest of wind instruments: Man’s phonetic apparatus consists essentially of a bellows, i.e. the lungs, and a sound-tube, the trachea, closed at its upper extremity by a two-fold swelling known as the vocal cords, or, in a single word, the glottis. It is, therefore, a wind instrument, and an instrument with a double reed. It is in this arrangement of the glottis that is manifested the superiority of the human apparatus to all other vocal instruments. The vocal chords have a flexibility which the necessarily rigid tubes of an oboe cannot attain. Thanks to a delicate mechanism which brings into play several pairs of muscles, they can assume different positions. They can either be kept closed or be more or less completely opened, made to vibrate throughout or in part, and modified as to their tension. All this gives language the variety of resources by which it profits. At the same time, the sound apparatus would be most imperfect if it consisted solely of the glottis.1

The physicality and corporeality of voice, speech and language is on full display here. It stands in sharp contrast to the modern tendency towards allegory, which flows out of a distrust of language’s ability to speak about how things actually are. This tendency towards allegory is the linguistic manifestation of nearly four centuries of dualism. St. Thomas’s work takes the opposite path and invites us to recover the symbol. Symbolism and allegory are two ways of being situated in and towards the world and in and towards language. These are also two ways of thinking through the ‘poetic’ difference, which can be seen in the medieval mentality of Thomas and the mentality of the moderns, including neo-Thomists.

1. Joseph Vendryes, Language: A Linguistic Introduction to History (trans. Paul Radin; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), p. 20.

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Some Landmarks of a Cultural History Symbolism or Allegory ‘Symbolism’, writes a historian of beauty in the Middle Ages, ‘is the aesthetic expression of ontological participation’.2 In contrast to the entirely static ideogram or sign, the symbol is above all dynamic. The symbol invites us into an action which it has already initiated: the symbol participates in the reality that it signifies. When Plato speaks of the symbol he uses terms such as mé thé xis (participation), mimesis (imitation), parousia (presence) and koï nonia (communion). In short, ‘the symbol is the reality as it manifests itself ’.3 In contrast to the symbol, allegory consists of a kind of equation, a correspondence posited between a patent meaning and a hidden meaning. The symbol loads spiritual content with concrete elements, while allegory materializes abstract ideas. The former begins with the givens of a twofold reality which is visible and invisible; the latter is a concept, a product of the intellect endowed with a body. No third thing is possible here, and there is no mediation with allegory: it conventionally unites a signifier and a signified without posing the metaphysical question of the referent’s existence. In the age of speculative grammar, language could maintain a symbolic relationship with the real through the relationship that the two enjoyed with the Word. We will develop this point shortly. The Modistae posit the isomorphism of language and the real. But in the age of Saussarian structural linguistics, which emphasizes the arbitrariness of the sign in order to isolate better theoretically its formal object and ground what Roland Barthes has called ‘the old modern myth’ of transparent language, language is thought of in an allegorical mode. Indeed, one can identify, for Saussure, the beginning of the dissolution of the sign: by adopting a purely internal perspective on the sign, methodologically the linguist only analyses the two poles of the signified and the signifier, leaving the study of its referential function to others. Throughout the twentieth century the philosophy inspired by this decision has pursued the dissolution and ended up substituting the couplet ‘intentional sign / attentional sign’ for the traditional couplet of ‘artificial sign / natural sign’. Henceforth it is thought that ‘natural’ signs are not uttered as signs but are simply ‘indices’ or ‘symptoms’ subject to the interpretation of the subject who makes them or does not make them, a sign according to the type of attention that the subject brings to it.4 ‘Natural signs’ no longer result from a communicative intention (which could only be, in the final philosophical instance, that of a Creator God through nature and his law), but are only a phenomenon of interpretation. This is the exact inversion of the theology of the Word and such a view can quickly regress 2. Edgar de Bruyne, L’esthé tique du Moyen  ge (Louvain: Institut supé rieur de philosophie, 1947), p. 93. 3. Pierre Miquel, Petit traité de thé ologie symbolique (Paris: Cerf, 1987), p. 20. 4. Cf. Ducrot and Schaeffer, Nouveau dictionnaire encyclopé dique des sciences du langage, pp. 214–15.

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into a kind of natural agnosticism already held by some ancient philosophers which then readily slides into nominalism: for the Stoics, for example, neither the fact that thought signifies and names things, nor the fact that things are signified, truly involves reality. For the moderns or the postmoderns, positivists, neo-positivists or antipositivists, the word-bearer of meaning is projected onto the reality as an (‘unreal’, ‘subjective’, non-existent?) entity projected onto a (‘real’, ‘objective’, the only existent?) thing.5 In the act of speaking, reality and language encounter one another as a blind person and a ghost; one publishes the notices of their marriage, and one is convinced, merely by saying it, that the union has been consummated. In such a context the relation of word to thing involves allegory. In allegory there is always a death; it ‘demands a face-to-face: everything third is too much. It thus leads, without mediation, to a power grab of one term over the other.’6 Two options remain after the allegorical account of speech has excluded the word. First, language is sometimes lead into silence by the ambiguous metaphorical rhetoric of the ineffable – language is nothing! Secondly, the real is sometimes packed away within lusciously linguistic ‘system’ or ‘doctrine’ – there nothing is except language!7 Their marriage, forced rather than arranged by a prevailing nominalism, only lasts as long as it takes to produce a book, and their divorce is announced at the death of every philosophical Pandarus: the meaning of the things he presumed to say is finally but a blind spectre of factuality generated by his style. ‘Language is fascist!’, it was said long ago on the left bank of the Seine. All signification would seem to be the tentative result of a history tormented by power and violence. Yet it was necessary to speak in order to say these things, and so he is hoisted upon his own petard. The postmoderns of today ‘deconstruct’ the moderns of yesterday and include within their pious nominalist exhortations the current legislative disintegration of the most natural of social realities. It is necessary at this point to disabuse oneself of the current conception of the ‘symbol’ that the ‘Symbolist school’ has advanced since the nineteenth century. Deformed for at least three centuries by rationalism and the positivism to which it wanted to respond, its advocates tend to encrypt or decrypt the symbol allegorically.

5. Reading Georges Gusdorf, for example, one has the feeling that human speech is the tool through which the universe itself is created. Human beings save the world from its facticity through their language: ‘speaking constitutes the essence of the world and the essence of man’. Georges Gusdorf, Speaking (La Parole) (trans. Paul T. Brockelman; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1979), p. 37; and finally ‘Language is reality’ (p. 38). These theses, inherited from a wide swathe of German philosophy, have been broadly vulgarized by Lacanian psychoanalysis. 6. Albert Rouet, Art et liturgie (Paris: Desclé e de Brouwer, 1992), p. 21. 7. Cf. the movement started by Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology; for a brief introduction, see Ducrot et Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclopé dique des sciences du langage, pp. 435–9.

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But for the ancients, the symbol was neither the inverse nor the contrary of reality; the symbol was tied to reality as an integral part of the whole. Allegory reconciles two objects neatly posed before thought, since the reality symbolized is only first perceived in the symbol. Otherwise said, allegory displays a relation that the symbol keeps indistinct, and since the symbol surpasses any concept, it translates, more or less happily, these concepts into images. Since it is only one mode of expression which can at most refer to an experience, there is a ‘symbolic experience’ in which one must truly recognize a ‘mode of thought’. In the symbol, which is intuition in contrast to allegory which is discourse, form and meaning are not separable … . This is the distinction that the Latin Middle Ages had not developed theoretically.8

The reason for this is that such a distinction presupposes a properly modern dualism of knowledge and reality.9 Does Thomas’s account of language escape this dualism and thus involve symbolic experience? The signum – the ordinary means for managing the duality – plays an essential role in his work when he considers the relationship between reality and language. At first glance everything seems rather simple: words are the signs of concepts and stand in a relation of similitude with the real.10 It is through the intermediary of an operation, that of the intellect which conceives, that words

8. Henri de Lubac, Exé gè se mé dié vale: les quatre sens de l’É criture (Paris: Aubier, 1964), vol. IV, p. 178. Henri de Lubac does not hesitate to speak of an ‘anti-symbolism’ initiated in the modern period: ‘To go to the root of the question, it is in a very different direction that the spirit of the age carries us. To say that it repudiates or disintegrates any kind of symbolism is again to stop at appearances. Rather, in a thousand ways, it establishes an anti-symbolism … . Running counter to the Christian ages and the way of the ancient Greeks, who found in the stories of their gods an allegory for the natural forces or faculties of the soul, we are threatened with a totalitarian ‘earth-boundedness’ and humanism. In the diversity of their systems, psychologists, sociologists and metaphysicians conspire to impose such views on us. In a word, our great temptation is to make God the symbol of man, his image objectified. Through this dreadful inversion, all biblical allegory, along with faith itself, would obviously be taken away with a single stroke.’ Henri de Lubac, History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen (trans. Anne Englund Nash; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), pp. 493–4. 9. This is why it is mistaken to make Thomas a stranger to the modus symbolicus: what he rejects is a certain form of allegory, not the whole symbolic mentality in which he participates. Cf. our Litté rature et thé ologie, chapter VI, ‘La mé taphore, entre plaisir et né cessité ’, pp. 187–222. 10. Aquinas, ST 1, 13, 1: ‘According to the Philosopher (Peri Herm. i), words are signs of ideas, and ideas the similitude of things, it is evident that words relate to the meaning of things signified through the medium of the intellectual conception. It follows therefore that we can give a name to anything in as far as we can understand it.’

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are related to things. There is a relationship of similitude between things and their intellections (still rightly called conceptus and verbum), and a relationship of the sign between intellections and words. Language is thus a twofold system of signs: on the one hand, the speaker offers her listener not the thing itself but a speechsign of this thing (speech, which is composite, is a sign and not only a word); on the other hand, speech is not knowledge itself, but a manifestation of knowledge or a movement which results in knowledge. For Thomas, the sign is not the event of a dualistic or allegorical thought, for he does not analyse only two entities, materiality and meaning, but three: materiality, meaning and supposition. He uses human speech when positing the isomorphism of reality, thought and language. In metaphysical speech, for example, the word ‘being’ is symbolically connected to the reality of being, in the enunciation of a judgement through which the philosopher-locutor says ‘it is’ (or ‘it is not’) in the presence (or absence) of a reality, and in the signifying materiality in which it takes body (if we could put it this way). The foundation of metaphysical symbolism, the common ‘place’ shared by the words of human language and the reality of the being, is a mysterious word in all its ‘overflowing’ naivety. Housed within speech but irreducible to language, it genuinely unites two elements apparently heterogeneous to each other: the rational discursus of the subject and the objective presence of the thing. St. Thomas primarily considers the sign in its practical generality: as a means of interpersonal communication,11 the sign is less something to know than something through which we know. This is because he generally relies on the very broad Augustinian definition of the sign as ‘res praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus aliud ex se faciens in cogitatione venire’; ‘a sign is a thing which causes us to think of something beyond the impression the thing itself makes upon the sentences’.12 As in all questions related to language, practice is primary. We should emphasize the essentially operative, if not operational, character of the Thomasian sign, for in the following generation, Aquinas’s disciples responded to Duns Scotus by making the sign a thing in itself. Some centuries later, John of St. Thomas in his Logic defines the sign in such a way that in addition to the ‘dynamic’ definition of the sign which is faithful to St. Thomas, there is also a static definition of the sign as that which functions to represent something other than itself to a knower: thus the sign has an allegorical relation to what it signifies.13 The word significare has a broad semantic range in Thomas: it covers the linguistic field as well as the

11. ‘But a sign is that by means of which one attains to the knowledge of something else’; ST 3, 60, 4. ‘Signs are given to men, to whom it is proper to discover the unknown by means of the known’; ST 3, 60, 2. 12. Augustine, De doctrina christiana, II, 1, cited in ST 3, 60, 1, 2; 60, 4, ad 1. 13. ‘Signum est quod repraesentat aliud a se potentiae cognoscenti’; Logica, IIa Pars, q. 21 and 22, in John of St. Thomas, Cursus philosophicus thomisticus (Paris: Vivè s, 1883), vol. 1, pp. 559–631 (here p. 559). The commentator adds that the Augustinian definition only fits the instrumental sign. He very explicitly inaugurates the duality in the definition

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non-immediately verbal systems of representation constituted by indices, types or figures14 in which the reality itself is made understandable by natural signs. For all its generality in the thirteenth century, the sign is an object15 connected through an essential relation (which constitutes its genre) to another being which is less known than it and which it makes present to the faculty of knowledge. It belongs to the formal order of the representatio, which is why alterity is essential to it. Formally it is a substitute of the signified, measured by it, inferior to it and dependent on it; the thing in its own nature is one thing, the thing as the subject of signification is another.16 The sign, as a noetic intermediary, manifests. It is categorized under the genre of relation, less for the relation that it maintains with a knowing subject (for it shares that with any object) than the relation that it maintains with the object signified.17 Such is the metaphysical reality of signification: as the essential relation of measure which considers the signified in recto and the power in obliquo, the measure of being and representation of one object though another object which is less known and on which it depends, it exceeds the linguistic sphere. In such a framework, words appears as the sign par excellence, for they are primarily instituted and used in view of signification: indefinitely adaptable and combinable, words better express the ideas of the mind.18 They even allow us to transfer ideas essentially related to speech, such as truth, falsehood or insult into other systems of signs, such as gestures or actions.19 In this way language turns out to be the semiotic system par excellence and furnishes the necessary model for the interpretation of all others: the symbolism of natural things in themselves ends up

of the sign: ‘Nihil enim est signum sui, nec significat se’ (p. 560), and identifies manifestatio and representatio. In these conditions, the real will hardly be epiphanic. 14. For two examples among thousands see ST 3, 36, 3 ad 4 and 49, 5, c. 15. Understood here in the technical sense of the term, the object is the thing insofar as it is confronted with a power of knowing, the thing maintaining a relation by denomination with the faculty of knowing. 16. Aquinas, ST 3, 60, 4, ad 2 and 3. 17. This relation is an essential relation, secundum esse and not secundum dici: it is not simply a relation included in the essence of an absolute being, but it demands a foundation distinct from itself with the whole of its being consisting in being relative to an absolute being (cf. ST 3, 63, 2, ad 3). There exist three types of relation by essence: numerationquantification (the relation of a simple to a double, for example), passion-action (the relation of a father to a son, for instance), degree to degree in being and in truth; cf. Aquinas, In Meta., V, lect. 17. ‘Not relevant for the material but for the form, the sign can only come under three kinds: the sign depends for its being and for its truth on the signified which it reflects’. Aymon-Marie Roguet, ‘Appendice II: Renseignements techniques’, in Saint Thomas d’Aquin, Somme thé ologiques. Les sacrements (3a, questions 60-65), É ditions de la revue des Jeunes (Paris-Tournai-Rome: Desclé e, 1951), pp. 255–379 (here p. 289). 18. Aquinas cites Augustine’s De doctrina christiana II in ST 3, 60, 6, tertio. 19. Cf. Aquinas, de veritate, 23, 3, ad 2 and ad 3.

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being conceived on the model of words. For example, following St. Augustine,20 Thomas gladly appeals to the linguistic model of symbolic decryption when drawing out some figuralis ratio. We can only remark in passing that the two fundamental laws of semiology are thus present in St. Thomas’s theological endeavour.21 Noetic mediation, however, is not only found in speech (nor in the instituted sign in general). The figura, for example, is the natural expression of the substance and is thus also a noetic mediation.22 Signification itself is even rooted in this fundamental metaphysical and phenomenological fact: the substance, which in itself is hidden to the senses which only know the accidents, shines forth through its accidents.23 Through its accidents the substance is a sign of itself in some way!24 Speech is thus the first sign in perfection, but not in institution: it is rooted more generally in the essential radiance of being which shines forth analogously and is not limited by the spiritual or the bodily. In advance of every word, ‘natural forms are known as the immaterial images of things’!25 As Roguet suggests:

20. See, for instance, his use and dependence upon the hermeneutics of Augustine to decode the meaning of ritual classifications of animals in the old covenant: ‘Hence Augustine says (Contra Faustum iv, 7): ‘If the swine and lamb be called into question, both are clean by nature, because all God’s creatures are good: yet the lamb is clean, and the pig is unclean in a certain signification. Thus if you speak of a foolish, and of a wise man, each of these expressions is clean considered in the nature of the sound, letters and syllables of which it is composed: but in signification, the one is clean, the other unclean”’; ST 1-2, 102, 6, ad 1. These analyses are not simply forced upon Thomas by medieval theological discourse; he develops them at length and offers a complete journey through all the categories of animals involved in the old covenant rites. 21. The first law is the necessarily semiotic nature of every relation between semiotic systems in terms of ‘interpreted system’ and ‘interpreting system’; the second law is the primacy of language over all other semiotic systems: ‘Language is the interpreter of all other linguistic and non-linguistic systems’; ‘no other system is given a language by which it could be categorized and interpreted according to its semiotic distinctions, whereas language can, in principle, categorize and interpret everything, including itself ’. É mile Benveniste, Problè mes de linguistique gé né rale (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), vol. 2, p. 60 and pp. 61–2. 22. Figura results from quantity inasmuch as it is delimited. The imago may be called figura through metonymy, since it represents a thing by reproducing the lineaments of its figure, and one can also call a figura every species of sign representing a thing by means of a certain similitudo. 23. ‘the nature of the substance is known by its accidents’; ST 3, 75, 2, ad 3. 24. in natural things the shape [figura] is a sign of species’; ST 3, 74, 3, 1; cf. In I Cor, cap. II, 1.2. 25. Boethius is cited by Thomas, De veritate 9, 4, c. ‘Quomodo autem Angeli suos conceptus aliis manifestent, oportet accipere ex similitudine rerum naturalium, eo quod formae naturales sunt quasi imagines immaterialium, ut Boetius dicit.’

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But they are only images, for here there is still a weak signification and an aptitude to signify rather than a true signification. Words come to actualize this signification through power. Produced by art but arising from nature, they are continuous with it and come to crown it through determining it, just as positive right or human institution come to determine the natural right without which they would be of no practical value.26

The Cultural Necessity of the Intuition of Being? For our contemporary outlook, it might seem that what is supposed to be demonstrated is simply presupposed: namely, that there always and already exists a continuum between the signifying system, full of conventions and arbitrariness, full of the historical scars and stitches which is language, and the meaning allegedly present in things from the very fact that they exist (the analogous radiance of being). For example, in order to describe the relation between natural and positive right as is done here, one is supported by the fact that natural right is henceforth positively observable on the side of positive right: it has been enunciated. Matters are very different for the signification of being: what would allow one to place an ‘essential radiance of being’ in the order of meaning? Even less than natural right (which is largely denied now), this ‘radiance’ has not been unanimously accepted, as is clear from the number of those who are ‘disenchanted’ or ‘desperate’ and whose works garnish the display stands of the great libraries! For the Gothic, the inheritor of the Romanesque, the situation is entirely reversed: the cosmos itself is received and thought of as the Creator’s speech.27 Fundamentally speaking, there is no gap between (1) the presence of the highly particular portion of created reality which is thought and the speech which expresses it bodily and (2) the presence of the intelligible, the vestige of the Creator Word in all the things which exist; in a certain way the human word symbolically imitates the Word. The practical differences between smoke, a sign of fire in the fireplace; the day, a sign of faith in the Scriptures; the sun, a sign of Christ whose beams shine through the rose windows to create a pool of fire on the stone slabs between the choir stalls while the monks are signing a hymn to Christ the true sun; and the word ‘God’, a sign of God on the lips of the Master who dictates – the practical differences between these signs are perhaps less stark than the gaps posited between them by theories of the sign, symbol and allegory, for one divine order governs all of them. Our hypothesis is that only the revelation of the creation of the world by an intelligent and loving God enables us to enter into the fundamental symbolic experience of the realist intentionality of speech, and to the extent that this idea is

26. Roguet, ‘Appendice II’, p. 297. 27. On this, see Venard, Litté rature et thé ologie, ‘Introduction gé né rale’, pp. 27–56, and chapter XI, ‘La poé tique de Dieu au XIIIe siè cle’, pp. 345–69.

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expressed, metaphysics depends on the biblical text. Before exploring these points, we will discuss some authorities on the issue: É tienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain. These preliminary distinctions will perhaps enable us to understand better the origins of the debate regarding the intuition of being.28 The inheritors nolentes volentes of the modern allegorical conception of language which somewhat reduced the question of signification to that of representation, the champions of a Thomist renewal, in an age when ‘symbolic experience’ was contaminated by romantic or decadent images of the symbolical, attempted to speak a different type of relation between the real and language and referred to an ‘eidetic intuition of being’ or enacted an exaltation of the ‘transcendent’ power of ‘enunciation’. While Gilson laconically insisted that this came from ‘the timeless Thomism of Thomas Aquinas himself ’ (which was good enough for the believing historian, but scarcely touched the secularized reader of our age), Maritain attempted to fill the void opened up between medieval experience and our own by a verbose poetizing of the intuition of being. Even as they rediscovered the ‘metaphysics of judgement’ in all its richness, they did not describe the poetic consequences for the very ‘profession’ of the metaphysician or the theologian which involves, as we have seen, the literary pragmatics and linguistic theories of enunciation and supposition. Whether laconic or verbose, they climb two sides of the same symbolical summit constituted by the continuity and discontinuity of thought and the real, the intelligible and the sensible, the invisible and the visible, the subjective and the objective, speech and silence. Gilson considers philosophically indescribable what Maritain attempts to suggest literarily through metaphor and quotation. This is why, if we must render a judgement on the debate regarding the ‘intuition of being’, we would say with Gilson that such an experience in itself is neither demonstrable nor necessary, but with Maritain that it is necessary for us, the inhabitants of modern ‘secularity’, of interactive virtual reality, of the promotional, ideological and economical inflation of discourse. This is why it is once again urgent to undertake vigorously Jacques Maritain's project of an apologetics of being. As he did so for ideas then in vogue – philosophies of duration (Henri Bergson), of dread (Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre) or of commitment (Gabriel Marcel) – it would now be necessary to show how the poets,29 philosophers and theologians30 of our time lead their readers to

28. See Venard, La langue de l’ineffable, ‘Le point de dé part de la mé taphysique, é tude d’histoire de ré ception’, pp. 43–114. 29. In addition to those named above (or considered in Litté rature et thé ologie), we should mention Jean Mambrino, S.J., and especially his ‘Le lieu non dit, Poé sie et transcendance’, É tudes 374:2 (February 1991): 221–30; for him, ‘language is thus elevated towards an unknown source, and inclines itself in an interior movement which is the very sign of nobility, appealing to the grandeur of and bowing before it as before its origin’ (p. 227). 30. Recent German theology, through the work of Eberhard Jü ngel, gradually seems to offer an means of escaping the dialectical inheritances of Hegel: beyond a refusal of

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the threshold of the question31 in order to help them pass through it, to deepen the experience of an analogy of being which they already have into a grasping of being itself! Such experiences bring us to the threshold which it is then for us to cross by taking the decisive step. We do this by letting the veils – too heavy with matter and too opaque – of the concrete psychological or ethical fact fall away to discover in their purity the strictly metaphysical values which such experiences concealed. There is then but one word by which we can express our discovery, namely being. Let us have the courage to require our intellect, acting as such, to look at the reality signified by the term in the face. It is something primordial, at once very simple and very rich and, if you will, inexpressible in the sense that it is that whose perception is the most difficult to describe, because it is the most immediate. Here we are at the root, at last laid bare, of our entire intellectual life.32

This root, as we will see, is as much a real experience as is the experience of the shock before the word ‘being’, the very experience of the impact of the word and its referent. We should thus note the inversion of perspective effected in the course of the metaphysical text: from the experience to the word (‘there is then but one word’), and then from the word to the experience (‘to the reality signified by the term’). Undoubtedly, metaphysics constantly celebrates the marriage of words and of things. In this intellectual context, we should cite here the remarkable little books of Pierre-Marie Emonet which ‘decant’ Maritain’s work into an evangelical simplicity and which draw on numerous poets in order to lead readers from the word ‘being’, ‘without any phonetic or grammatical change’, to its actual ‘metaphysical denotation’.33 More than his predecessors Maritain or Journet, Father Emonet

modern theodicy based on the principle of sufficient reason à la Leibniz, the ‘qualitatively new experience’ of ‘ontological shock’ which comes from “the negative side of the mystery of being – its abysmal element”’; the ‘state of mind in which the mind is thrown out of its normal balance, shaken in its structure’ as it discovers the ‘possibility of non-being’, could be described as paths towards the ancient conception of being as act and radical gift. Cf. Jü ngel, God as the Mystery of the World, p. 32. 31. ‘Even if psychology and ethics enrich their own speech with metaphysical echoes or undertones, they will be but echoes.’ Jacques Maritain, A Preface to Metaphysics: Seven Lectures on Being (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1958), p. 52. Building an entire system on these experiences would amount to focusing on only one single analog of being, that through which the philosopher would have had his most profound experience of being. 32. Maritain, A Preface to Metaphysics, pp. 52–3. Our emphases. 33. Pierre-Marie Emonet, God Seen in the Mirror of the World: An Introduction to the Philosophy of God (trans. Robert R. Barr; New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2000), p. 53. See by the same author Une mé taphysique pour les simples (Chambray-lè s-Tours: CLD, 1991) and L’Â me humaine expliqué e aux simples (Chambray-lè s-Tours: CLD, 1994).

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makes explicit his twofold point of departure – things and words – and does not hesitate to elaborate upon the theological foundation and horizon of the metaphysics of being. All too often in contemporary metaphysics, however, one remains solely at the level of philosophical debate, forgetting that one is in the midst of speaking or writing. By not showing the ontological anchor of the speech which one is offering or the text which one is writing, one no longer recognizes that it is necessary to ground them too in a realist way. Because we no longer have an ontology of language (and perhaps also of theology), because ‘deconstruction’ is already passé and its philosophical response came too late,34 metaphysical speech was taken to be a futile and null path and so the death of metaphysics was proclaimed. In a modern context, inasmuch as we no longer consciously integrate language into the consideration of being, the very form of metaphysical discourse will always appear as an unthought residue, and will be the prey, even in theology, of any deconstructive enterprise. In truth, if the allegorical disjunction of language and reality is impossible this is because the order of words, itself ballasted by the solidity proper to all things,35 participates in being rather than hiding it. For the moderns, however, language itself is somehow contrary to the real, so that the simple presence of meaning in the world already constitutes a problem: how is it that the human person transcends the order of facts and lives in a meaningful world? The modern represents the real as a kind of ‘potluck party’ in which everyone discovers the meaning created by his or her own speech (which for each one is either nothing or everything and which finally returns to itself). The moderns thus seems condemned to allegorism when attempting to think the relationship of language and the real.

The Two Sides of Language The age in which St. Thomas lived was wiser. It had inherited the two complementary noetics of Plato and Aristotle and was forced to reconcile them. ‘For the Platonist, knowing is primarily a confrontation; it supposes the duality of knower and known; it consists in a consequent, added movement … . For the Aristotelian, on the other hand, confrontation is secondary. Primarily and essentially, knowing is perfection, act, identity. Sense in act is the sensible in act.’36 On the one hand, the Platonic practice of allegorizing brought with it an awareness of the transcendence

34. For example, Gilson’s excellent Linguistics and Philosophy was originally published in Paris in 1969. Was it a bit too late? 35. On this final point, see the helpful account of the sophistic theory of language in Pierre Aubenque, Le problè me de l’ê tre chez Aristote (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1977), pp. 94–106. 36. Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), pp. 183–4.

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of meaning: words essentially designate things and are abstractions made of individualities. On the other hand, the Aristotelian practice of knowledge was a symbolic experience: the knower and the known are made for one another. Conceived in this way as the vector and motor of knowledge, language in the thirteenth century was a symbolic generator at the heart of the cosmos, placing the human being within the whole of creation and uniting without confusing the visible and the invisible, the sensible and the intelligible, the immanent and the transcendent, which is a far cry from the splendid isolation language has endured in the West for more than a century. As an inheritor of the antique tradition, Thomas does not believe that the relation of language and the real is entirely conventional. Underneath its establishment, he remains sensitive to something deeply natural in language (he is also, as we will see, sensitive to something profoundly linguistic in nature itself). But nor does St. Thomas believe that the relation of language and the real is totally natural. Every person is endowed with the faculty of expression faculty or of interpretatio37: the faculty of speaking is a given of human nature as much as the capacity for self-movement: ‘potentia interpretativa est naturalis hominis’.38 Yet Thomas has the wisdom to describe it both as immanent (it is natural for human beings to speak) and as transcendent (insofar as human beings are engaged in immaterial intellectual activity). Far from the idealist or materialist simplifications to which many contemporary philosophers and linguists have accustomed us, St. Thomas does not attempt to reduce the element of mystery in speech any more than he does in anthropology or noetics: The intellect is not the human being, it is not the essence of the human being, but a faculty of its essence. It is the immaterial faculty of an immaterial soul, although it is the form of a structured material body This is an ambiguous situation, but one which is a fact. A separated intellect is a clear case; a living being which is non-rational but endowed with sensible knowledge is a relatively clear case; a living being endowed with reason and intellect is a paradoxical being about which Pascal never ceased to be astonished. Thomas takes it as it is … . Forma ergo hominis est in materia, et separata: in materia quidem, secundum esse quod dat corpori … , separata autem secundum virtutem quae est propria

37. In the logical tradition following Boethius, interpretatio was synonymous with vox significativa or enunciatio. 38. Aquinas, In Peri herm, I, 1, 6. ‘The expressive faculty is natural to human being’. Cf. Aristotle, On the Soul, II, 8, 420 b 5. ‘Once air is inbreathed, Nature uses it for two different purposes, as the tongue is used both for tasting and for articulating; in that case of the two functions tasting is necessary for the animal’s existence (hence it is found more widely distributed), while articulate speech is a luxury subserving its possessor’s well-being’.

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homini, scil. secundum intellectum. Such is the knowing person: an animated body endowed with an intellect; one must take it as it is.39

Thomas’s understanding of the sign in general and the structure of the linguistic sign in particular perfect fits with this non-reductive anthropology: the sign is made for and belongs to the human being for the sake of reaching the unknown through the intermediary of the known.40 He not only presupposes the capacity to manifest interior states externally, but even of intentionally doing so through relations consciously established between the represented and the representer.41 The sign follows the order of human knowledge and creates a discursus which moves from the sensibility of its signifier to the spirituality of its signified: ‘signum, proprie loquendo, non potest dici nisi aliquid ex quo deveniatur in cognitionem alterius quasi discurrendo’.42 The sign is the ordinary means of knowing for human understanding, which abstracts from the senses and maintains (or is maintained in) a discourse which moves from something known to something unknown (which is why one speaks of a ‘spiritual sign’ or of the ‘sign’ of an image only in a broad and derivative sense).43 In this way, language in general is immanent to the sensible corporeal world through its genesis, and yet it is also, just like the linguistic sign and the human person, open to transcendence by its very essence. We will explore both of these sides. The Immanent Side We will first tackle the body. Thomas would no doubt respond to the modern questions of ‘What is it that ensures the real has a meaning for us? Why and how do things speak to us?’ by answering that the real and that things speak to us human beings without wanting to simply because we have bodies. Speech is tightly linked to the body both in terms of the signifier and the signified and thus it inscribes the person within the cosmos. Language is generated by a faculty of the created spirit (the potentia interpretativa), and like all products of culture is formed by corporeal organs. Following Aristotle, St. Thomas takes pleasure in considering the physiological anchor point of the faculty of speaking:

39. É tienne Gilson, ‘Propos sur l’ê tre et sa notion’, in San Tommaso e il pensiero moderno: Saggi (Studi tomistici 3) (Rome: Città Nuova Editrice, 1975), pp. 7–17 (here p. 14). The author cites De unitate intellectus I, 192: ‘Man’s form therefore is in matter and separate: in matter indeed insofar as it gives existence to body … separate however because of the power which is proper to man, namely intellect.’ 40. Aquinas, ST 3, 60, 2. 41. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 110, 1 and 85, 1, ad 3. 42. Aquinas, de veritate, 9, 4, ad 4; ‘A sign in the proper sense unless one can come to know something else as if by reasoning from it.’ It has a noetic efficiency inasmuch as it affects the sensibility, in prayer for example; ST 2-2, 83, 12. 43. Cf. Aquinas, ST 60, 4, and ad 1; 61, 1; 64, 7, ad 1.

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Sicut enim virtus motiva utitur naturalibus instrumentis, sicut brachiis et manibus ad faciendum opera artificialia, ita virtus interpretativa utitur gutture et aliis instrumentis naturalibus ad faciendum orationem. For just as the power of motion uses natural instruments such as arms and hands to make artificial works, so the interpretative power uses the throat and other natural instruments to make speech.44

Language is at the intersection of the natural and the cultural inasmuch as it artificially informs a natural capacity.45 This vision of the practice of language can be seen in the theory of the noun. By deliberately defining the noun through the voice rather than the sign – ‘significative voice’ is more fitting (convenientius) than ‘vocal signal’46 – the commentary on Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias (De interpretatione) avoids any gap within language between artefacts produced by convention and things produced by nature. As regard its material and genre, the substance of the noun, language is a natural thing47; as regards its form, which is identified with the signification (ratio or definition) of the noun, it is conventional. Speech, then, is connected to nature not only through the matter of speech which is signifying sounds, but also through its very form! Even the content of speech, sometimes referred to as a passio, can be described as being largely dependent on the physical world. Commenting on a Latin translation of Aristotle which suggested to him the use of word passio (‘sunt ergo ea quae sunt in voce, earum quae sunt in anima passionum notae’), St. Thomas explains that concepts were called passions because of the passive character of the reception of phantasms, which provide the intellect, through the work of intermediary faculties, the matter from which it extracts concepts. earum quae sunt in anima passionum, considerandum est quod passiones animae communiter dici solent appetitus sensibilis affectiones, sicut ira, gaudium et alia 44. Aquinas, In Peri herm, I, 1. 6. 45. ‘It is natural to man to express his ideas by signs, but the determination of those signs depends on man’s pleasure’; Aquinas, ST 2-2, 85, 1, ad 3. Thomas affirms this principle in when he is considering whether or not sacrifices involve the natural law. 46. Cf. Aquinas, Peri Herm, I, 1, 2, 1. As John of Saint Thomas would insist: ‘Nomen est vox significativa ad placitum, sine tempore, cuius nulla pars significat separata, finita, recta’; Summa totius Logicae Aristotelis, 6, 1. 47. If the names of artificial things (for example the noun ‘name’) signify the accidental form (for example, the signification) associated with concrete natural subjects (for example, the sound of the human voice), it is more fitting to pose in their definition the natural thing like the genre and the artificial form as the difference. It would be otherwise if we took the names of artificial things as if they signified the artificial forms in the abstract. (For the details of the analysis, see § § 39-40.) The fittingness in question shows the primacy given by Thomas to the sensible object (here the sound of the voice) in knowledge and in communication.

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huiusmodi, ut dicitur in II Ethicorum. Et verum est quod huiusmodi passiones significant naturaliter quaedam voces hominum, ut gemitus infirmorum, et aliorum animalium, ut dicitur in I politicae. Sed nunc sermo est de vocibus significativis ex institutione humana; et ideo oportet passiones animae hic intelligere intellectus conceptiones, quas nomina et verba et orationes significant immediate, secundum sententiam Aristotelis. When he speaks of passions in the soul we are apt to think of the affections of the sensitive appetite, such as anger, joy, and the other passions that are customarily and commonly called passions of the soul, as is the case in II  Ethics [5: 1105b 21]. It is true that some of the vocal sounds man makes signify passions of this kind naturally, such as the groans of the sick and the sounds of other animals, as is said in I Politics [2: 1253a 10-14]. But here Aristotle is speaking of vocal sounds that are significant by human institution. Therefore ‘passions in the soul’ must be understood here as conceptions of the intellect, and names, verbs, and speech, signify these conceptions of the intellect immediately according to the teaching of Aristotle.48

In the context of reflection upon the genesis of language, the animal dimension (linked to the body) of the ‘conformation to the things themselves’ undergone by the physical passions is thus fulfilled and not annulled by the intellect’s linguistic activity!49 These claims relate the human person to other animals, highlight the corporeal givenness of language and invite the reader not so much to ‘intellectualize’ the passions as to ‘passionize’ the intellect. In a parallel fashion, this body is not a monad but lives within society. The functional and social genesis of language entails that this foundation of culture is naturally given in the human person: Et si quidem homo esset naturaliter animal solitarium, sufficerent sibi animae passiones, quibus ipsis rebus conformaretur, ut earum notitiam in se haberet; sed quia homo est animal naturaliter politicum et sociale, necesse fuit quod conceptiones unius hominis innotescerent aliis, quod fit per vocem; et ideo necesse fuit esse voces significativas, ad hoc quod homines ad invicem conviverent. Unde illi, qui sunt diversarum linguarum, non possunt bene convivere ad invicem. Now if man were by nature a solitary animal the passions of the soul by which he was conformed to things so as to have knowledge of them would be sufficient for him; but since he is by nature a political and social animal it was necessary that

48. Aquinas, In Peri herm, I, 1, 2. ‘Intelligere intellectus conceptiones’; as for the appearance of meaning, Thomas does not attempt to explain the inexplicable. 49. Cf. Aquinas, In Peri herm, I, 1, 2. See also de veritate, 9, 4, obj 10 and ad 10, where Thomas relates the multiplicity of concepts, which is one of the causes of language, with the multiplicity of desires.

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his conceptions be made known to others. This he does through vocal sound. Therefore there had to be significant vocal sounds in order that men might live together. Whence those who speak different languages find it difficult to live together in social unity.50

If human beings were solitary, then passions would be enough for them to assent to things and to know them, and elementary and natural image-signs, such as gestures or grunts, would suffice if they encountered other human beings. Certainly the desire to emit a sound often comes from some ‘passion’ in the proper sense. In a general sense, St. Thomas tightly links the sign with desire: the sign participates in the sensible through its signifier, and the sensible in turn engages the appetite.51 The ‘passional character’ of human communication (if we could call it that) is thus not abolished when conceptualization intervenes, but can even be round at the very beginning of the intellect’s operation! Utitur autem potius nomine passionum, quam intellectuum: tum quia ex aliqua animae passione provenit, puta ex amore vel odio, ut homo interiorem conceptum per vocem alteri significare velit: tum etiam quia significatio vocum refertur ad conceptionem intellectus, secundum quod oritur a rebus per modum cuiusdam impressionis vel passionis. Aristotle uses the name “passion,” rather than “understanding,” however, for two reasons: first, because man wills to signify an interior conception to another through vocal sound as a result of some passion of the soul, such as love or hate; secondly, because the signification of vocal sound is referred to the conception of the intellect inasmuch as the conception arises from things by way of a kind of impression or passion.52

Even the signification of words, the conception of the intellect, in some way involves passion and the physical world, for signification arises from things through the mode of some sensible impression. Signification engages the operation of the intellect which abstracts concepts from something received through the senses. For St. Thomas just as much as for Aristotle, knowing is first ‘to suffer and undergo the intelligible, or something analogous to that’.53 Speech, as the sign of intellectual knowledge abstracted from givens provided by the body, thus radically participates in nature. The word of a person is linked to their thought through an act within reality and in this way it is linked to a sensible body and attuned to the

50. Aquinas, In Peri herm, I, 1, 2. One often finds this idea within religion: because of signs, human beings can engage in communal and social activity addressed to God; cf. ST 2-2, 83, 12. 51. Cf. Aquinas, SCG II, 119. 52. Cf. Aquinas, In Peri herm, I, 1, 2. 53. Aristotle, On the Soul G, 4, 429a 14.

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existing things of which they speak, which means that language communes with reality as much as the human intellect does. A realist approach to metaphysical language should thus give primacy to the speech which it uses.54 From the history of metaphysics, it seems that offering a ‘metaphysical’ discourse is a challenge managed only by the greatest, and that their posterity is not always able to match the line of credit they have borrowed. We asked above regarding the powers of enunciation on which metaphysics is inextricably built and which allow for the reveries of Gilson himself. We now have outlined a response: it is the body which paradoxically allows him to transcend created things. Maritain said something similar in a beautiful text on exactly the enfleshment of the metaphysician! From this you will understand what kind of man the Thomist metaphysician should be. He should possess a sensitive body, be like St. Thomas himself mollis carne. Most certainly he must not be exclusively an intellect. His equipment of senses must be in good order. He must be keenly and profoundly aware of sensible objects. And he should be plunged into existence, steeped ever more deeply in it by a sensuous and aesthetic perception as acute as possible, and by experiencing the suffering and struggles of real life, so that aloft in the third heaven of natural understanding he may feed upon the intelligible substance of things. Is it necessary to add that the professor who is nothing but a professor, withdrawn from real life and rendered insensible at the third degree of abstraction is the diametrical opposite of the genuine metaphysician? The Thomist philosopher is dubbed scholastic, a name derived from his most painful affliction. Scholastic pedantry is his peculiar foe. He must constantly triumph over his domestic adversary, the Professor.55

It has sometimes been observed that allegory is related to a rejection of the incarnation: allegory would amount to a coup d’é tat of the mind against a reputedly dumb body, or rather to reason deluding itself with the fantasy of the angelism. The Transcendent Side We pose again the modern questions of ‘What is it that ensures us that the real has a meaning? Why and how do things speak to us?’ and we can add nuance to the

54. Note that speech is only one of two means through which language is inscribed into reality: the second (which is perhaps the first, as Derrida pictured it) is in fact writing, the text, the book, in which language is embodied. This idea will be explored in the chapters which follow. 55. Maritain, A Preface to Metaphysics, pp. 23–4. Thomas in fact gave off the impression of a man who was very sensitive and delicate about his flesh. Cf. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, pp. 278–81, which relates some amusing anecdotes on Thomas’s sensibility when fasting or being bled.

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first part of our response: Thomas does not answer that they speak to him ‘only because he has a body’. We must add that this body is informed by an intellectual soul, which transcends all corporeal nature and which, because of its immateriality, is apt to become the other as other in knowing. In his reading of the Peri Hermeneias alluded to earlier, Thomas deems erroneous (quamdam errorem) the following line of argument which posits the natural character of enunciated speech: natural instruments involve a natural power, for nature does not lack necessary things, and thus the potentia interpretativa is natural to the human person as are its instruments, particularly the utterance through which the potentia in question interprets the mind’s conceptions (is not the instrument of power ‘that through which’ it acts?).56 Thomas first refutes this sophism by appealing to Aristotle’s argument which demonstrates that the utterance is not an instrument of the potenta interpretative, which is a natural power, but that it is an artificial effect which results from the use of natural instruments, that is, from the organs of phonation, from the throat and the chest which form the voice and the tongue and teeth which articulate its different sounds. The utterance signifies ad placitum and not naturally; that is, it signifies as do all artificial things: according to an institution of the human intellect and will.57 More generally, language, whose principle means of teaching itself is itself, presupposes a collaboration of art and of nature: art operates in its own sphere through imitating the means of nature in its own, and it never operates except as the means and instrument of the principal agent, that is, nature.58 Language is thus artificial as an invented tool and natural as the product of natural organs, following the order of human knowledge (from the known to the unknown). What is artificial in language is both the liaison of the unknown and the known and the exercise of this liaison (the use of language is voluntary and free in contrast to the natural signs of emotion which ‘escape from’ us). The word is only joined to the thing through the intermediary of thought, the immaterial and necessary gauge of signification. The essence of speech consists in the imperium of the will which establishes relations between thoughts,59 and in the intentio, the active dynamism which moves the will itself. In ‘utilitarian’ communication, this intention can itself supplement some of the sign’s deficiencies, which aptly displays the range of the phenomenon of the sign from its most sensible aspects down to its immaterial and spiritual core. In the commentary on the Peri Hermeneias, St. Thomas deepens these philosophical nuances:

56. Cf. Aquinas, In Peri herm, I, 1, 6. 57. Cf. Aquinas, In Peri herm, I, 1, 6: ‘so the interpretative power uses the throat and other natural instruments to make speech. Hence, speech and its parts are not natural things, but certain artificial effects. This is the reason Aristotle adds here that speech signifies by convention, i.e., according to the ordinance of human will and reason.’ 58. Cf. Aquinas, ST 1, 117, 1 and de veritate, 11, 1. 59. Aquinas, ST 1, 107, 1, and ad 1.

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si virtutem interpretativam non attribuamus virtuti motivae, sed rationi; sic non est virtus naturalis, sed supra omnem naturam corpoream: quia intellectus non est actus alicuius corporis, sicut probatur in III De anima. if we do not attribute the interpretative power to a motive power, but to reason, then it is not a natural power but is beyond every corporeal nature, since thought is not an act of the body, as is proved in III De anima [4: 429a 10].60

In these lines Thomas establishes an implicit equivalence between ‘naturalis’ and ‘corporalis’. The intellect (and the faculty of speaking) is thus actually placed beyond nature. Conversely, is there not suggested here a mysterious communication between super-naturalis and spiritualis, which readily corresponds to the fundamental Thomist thesis of a natural desire to see God? Nevertheless, the potentia interpretativa is a gift of nature, but it is precisely a gift and so open to something beyond nature. What implicitly appears here is the theological theme of the human intellect’s participation in the divine light. We often find such a pattern of thought in Thomas, such as when he asks whether the human being can know something true without grace.61 His response, which is affirmative, is often interpreted as a particular instance of his naturalistic re-balancing of Christian thought, inspired by Aristotle, against every occasionalism (Augustinian or derived from the falsafa) which denies to creatures real causality under the pretext of better honouring the Creator’s power. Thomas acknowledges an efficacy proper to the intellectual activity of the human being, at least for reaching natural truths, just as he defends the real efficacy of secondary causes against those who want to reduce them to the divine activity, which may stem from a pious sentiment (exalting the divine omnipotence) but which too crudely conceives of the relationship between the Creator and the creature (as concurrence of secondary causes and the first cause in which they are ‘nested’). For our theologian, faithful to the Bible, ‘the glory of God is the living human being’: we better exalt the Creator by showing that he really creates beings in his image who are gifted with a certain autonomy of action rather than by making the Creator a producer of automatons; God creates substances, not merely accidents! Nonetheless, Thomas’s ‘naturalism’ ought not to be exaggerated. When Thomas speaks of ‘nature’ he does not mean the neutral phenomenality that it is today. One could even wonder whether his theology is not betrayed by insisting on its naturalistic side in our (neo-/anti-) positivist context. When closely examining the basis of this question, one in fact sees that Thomas calls ‘the light of grace’ the 60. Cf. In Peri herm, I, 1, 6. Thomas can make this point even more precisely: ‘Moreover, it is reason itself that moves the corporeal motive power to make artificial works, which reason then uses as instruments; and thus artificial works are not instruments of a corporeal power. Reason can also use speech and its parts in this way, i.e., as instruments, although they do not signify naturally.’ 61. Cf. Aquinas, ST 1-2, 109, 2.

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form which is superadded to the human intellect in order to enable it to know truths which surpass what abstraction is able to know, not because it comes from God in contrast to the light of nature, but because it comes from God in addition to the light of nature, which is itself already a participation in the divine light and a gift from God! Thomas is a theologian before he is a philosopher, and when he writes that the superadded light may be called (dicitur) the ‘light of grace’, this is to emphasize a kind of homogeneity between this light and the natural one which it intensifies.62 Thomas is also careful to add that God always reserves the right to intervene miraculously in order to make known by grace things which are naturally knowable. We should first note that knowing is an activity of the lumen intellectualis. All activity involves some kind of movement, and every movement requires a first mover. Yet this movement is as material (referred to a mover which is a celestial body) as it is spiritual, for it has God as its first mover (‘secundum providentiae rationem, non secundum necessitatem naturae, sicut motio corporis caelestis’63). Furthermore, God is not only the source of all movement as first mover, but is also the source of all form (perfectio formalis) as first act. Actio intellectus, et cuiuscumque entis creati, dependet a Deo quantum ad duo, uno modo, inquantum ab ipso habet formam per quam agit; alio modo, inquantum ab ipso movetur ad agendum. The act of the intellect or of any created being whatsoever depends upon God in two ways: first, inasmuch as it is from Him that it has the form whereby it acts; secondly, inasmuch as it is moved by Him to act.64

Every form which God imprints on a being both gives to it the possibility of acting and determines and limits its action. A being must receive a new form if it is to exercise an efficacy beyond the acts to which it is limited,65 as water must receive from fire the form of heat in order to be able to heat in turn. In the same way, before the human intellect has the superadded light which illuminates the world of grace, it already has a form which enables it to know the intelligible things to which the senses give access, and this form is itself a gift from God:

62. As Jean-Hervé Nicolas explains in a footnote, ‘One should be careful not to take the image implied in “superadded” in an extrinsic fashion, as if grace were overlaid upon nature. Grace is added as an enrichment which transforms nature from within, which further highlights the idea of a habitus (‘don habituel’), which is used to express what grace is in relationship to nature (q. 110 a. 2)’; Saint Thomas d’Aquin, Somme thé ologique (Paris: Cerf, 1984), vol. 2, p. 750 n 1. 63. Aquinas, ST 1-2, 109, 1; ‘this motion is according to the plan of His providence, and not by necessity of nature, as the motion of the heavenly body.’ 64. Aquinas, ST 1-2, 109, 2. 65. Ibid.

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Ad cognitionem cuiuscumque veri, homo indiget auxilio divino ut intellectus a Deo moveatur ad suum actum. Non autem indiget ad cognoscendam veritatem in omnibus, nova illustratione superaddita naturali illustrationi; sed in quibusdam, quae excedunt naturalem cognitionem. For the knowledge of any truth whatsoever man needs Divine help, that the intellect may be moved by God to its act. But he does not need a new light added to his natural light, in order to know the truth in all things, but only in some that surpass his natural knowledge.66

It is unnecessary, then, to frantically make Thomas the pioneer of an autonomous nature and world well on their way towards secularization. Superficially correct in one version of the history of ideas, this interpretation is almost nonsensical from the Christian point of view of Thomas himself. Thomas actually does the opposite. His predecessors tried to find all sorts of vestiges, traces and indices of God’s presence in the world so as to make them witnesses to the truths of faith. Thomas, by contrast, does not waste much time with apologetics and rests in the calmly possessed certitude of presence, which in turns allows him to develop a more precisely rational account of this faithful view of the world. In the article quoted above, Aquinas insists on the difference between the providential motion of God and the merely physical motion of celestial bodies. There is just as much faith and credulity in the Gothic thinker as there is in the Romanesque. In line with the rediscovery of Aristotle, Thomas certainly wants to grant natural substances their due weight, but he does not want to do so to the detriment of God’s presence and action in creation; on the contrary, he attributes the weight of created substances entirely to God. For example, to the objection that only God is a teacher such that no human being could be one,67 Thomas responds that human teaching is effectively only an instrument of a principal agent which moves the human being and which, in the final instance, is the Creator himself: homo docens solummodo exterius ministerium adhibet, sicut medicus sanans, sed sicut natura interior est principalis causa sanationis, ita et interius lumen intellectus est principalis causa scientiae. Utrumque autem horum est a Deo. Et ideo sicut de Deo dicitur, qui sanat omnes infirmitates tuas; ita de eo dicitur, qui docet hominem scientiam, inquantum lumen vultus eius super nos signatur, per quod nobis omnia ostenduntur. The teacher only brings exterior help as the physician who heals: but just as the interior nature is the principal cause of the healing, so the interior light of the

66. Ibid. 67. ‘For the Lord says (Mt. 22.8): “Be not you called Rabbi”: on which the gloss of Jerome says, “Lest you give to men the honor due to God.” Therefore to be a master is properly an honor due to God. But it belongs to a master to teach. Therefore man cannot teach, and this is proper to God.’ Aquinas, ST 1, 117, 1, 1.

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intellect is the principal cause of knowledge. But both of these are from God. Therefore as of God is it written: ‘Who healeth all thy diseases’ (Ps. 102:3); so of Him is it written: ‘He that teacheth man knowledge’ (Ps. 93:10), inasmuch as ‘the light of His countenance is signed upon us’ (Ps. 4:7), through which light all things are shown to us.68

As regards light, one must appeal to an essentially theological reality in order to account for the transcendence of meaning in human speech: a light which is in some way ‘divine’ shines in the verbal light of judgement! With this thematic of light St. Thomas places himself in the great tradition of Augustinian noetics. It is also characteristic of Thomas’s thought that this inheritance is hardly ever made explicit. Faithful to his logical habitus of the suppositio, Aquinas assumes the Augustinian heritage common to his age, and if he sometimes offers his own definition of the sign,69 ‘it is in passing and is rapid’.70 The Thomist tradition has at times attempted to construct a posteriori a Thomasian semiology, but it has often erred by taking its bearing from other authors, such as John of St. Thomas, who had already inherited an allegorical view of language. In reality, what is most striking for those who wish to study the sign in St. Thomas is doubtless the fact that he himself constructed no theory of it. This is why it would certainly be more productive to explore the reasons why St. Thomas did not write a theory of the sign which would respond in advance to the ‘deconstructionist’ questions of our age. We will attempt this now by describing the general contours of what one could call a ‘dialectic of the sign’ in St. Thomas and which he does not seem to have attempted to surpass demonstratively through any ‘general theory’ of the sign. On the one hand, the Angelic Doctor appears to envisage a transparent, purely spiritual language which does not weigh down the intelligible matter which it serves to communicate. On the other hand, the pedagogue has an acute awareness of the being of language, the resistance it offers to pure intelligibility and the practical necessity of taking it into account.

The Dialectic of the Sign Transparency The first reason for this noted ‘lacuna’ stems from the fact that language for St. Thomas is primarily a means. A quick glance at the writings and erasures of his manuscripts would be convincingly enough! Although he continuously had the experience of its thickness and its weight, Thomas envisions language as ideally transparent and freed of the all too material weight of signs. 68. Aquinas, ST 1, 117, 1 ad 1. 69. For example, in Aquinas, ST 3, 60, 4: ‘A sign is that by means of which one attains to the knowledge of something else.’ 70. Roguet, ‘Appendice II’, p. 278.

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This ideal is not only shown in the presentation of words as the signs par excellence which fulfil all others without abolishing them and the overarching status allotted to language among the other semiotic systems mentioned above, but it is also present in the analysis of the structure of the sacraments. To use Roguet’s suggestive metaphor, if the sacrament is a symbolic pyramid made up of sensible matter, gestures and words, then language is the pyramid’s summit. The celebrant utters phrases which give meaning and form to all the different components of the rite, and in this context language seems to be an instrument of univocal determination: more precisely, the words limit the polysemy inherent in gestures (dipping a person into water can signify washing, drowning or refreshing so long as one does not say ‘I baptize you’).71 This ideal of expressive transparency can also be found in the questions St. Thomas dedicates to the morality of speech in which language is primarily described as a means of expression normed by truth and reality, which presupposes, even if mentioned in passing, that neither truth nor reality starts with it! For the Christian, the definition of truth adaequatio intellectus ad rem est acknowledges the rights of others to be a spiritual good of the utmost importance. The Christian is guided from the outset by his or her refusal of falsehood and consciously false speech (as distinguished from error), which abuses the community’s right to the trustworthiness of language at the level of social relations and justice. Christians dedicate themselves to truth through study (the virtue of studiousness is opposed to the vice of curiosity) and dialogue. Christians owe truth to their neighbours, which is displayed in the virtues of veracity, authenticity and faithfulness. Christians will even be a martyr for truth. In brief, using language well means expressing the truth chastely, which means not deforming it and not instrumentalizing it for any impassioned end. In this way, the Thomasian morality of language makes chatter an injustice and silence a right, monologue a danger and dialogue a virtue. Many passages of the Summa presuppose the fact that language primarily involves the order of uti. A preliminary example can be found in the question on the gift of tongues.72 On the day of Pentecost, the apostles received from the Holy Spirit the faculty of speaking in such a way that people from the most diverse races and nations understood them.73 Thomas asks whether those who received the gift truly spoke in every language. Along with Lombard’s Gloss, he first proposes a negative argument: no, they did not speak every language, but they spoke their own language better, just as St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews shines with a greater loquaciousness than his other epistles because he wrote in his maternal language and not in Greek like the others. Here is the response to this argument:

71. Aquinas, ST 3, 60, 6. 72. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 176, 1. 73. Acts 2.1-13.

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Ad primum ergo dicendum quod, sicut dicitur I ad Cor. XII, manifestatio spiritus datur ad utilitatem. Et ideo sufficienter et Paulus et alii apostoli fuerunt instructi divinitus in linguis omnium gentium, quantum requirebatur ad fidei doctrinam. Sed quantum ad quaedam quae superadduntur humana arte ad ornatum et elegantiam locutionis, apostolus instructus erat in propria lingua, non autem in aliena. Sicut etiam et in sapientia et scientia fuerunt sufficienter instructi quantum requirebat doctrina fidei, non autem quantum ad omnia quae per scientiam acquisitam cognoscuntur, puta de conclusionibus arithmeticae vel geometriae. As it is written (1 Cor. 12:7), ‘the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man unto profit’; and consequently both Paul and the other apostles were divinely instructed in the languages of all nations sufficiently for the requirements of the teaching of the faith. But as regards the grace and elegance of style which human art adds to a language, the Apostle was instructed in his own, but not in a foreign tongue. Even so they were sufficiently instructed in wisdom and scientific knowledge, as required for teaching the faith, but not as to all things known by acquired science, for instance the conclusions of arithmetic and geometry.74

Utilitas against ornatus: doctrinal language is characterized by its concern for optimal transparency in communication. Such an intuition is reminiscent of the Pauline distrust towards the arts of language already encountered in the opposition between sapientia verbi and verbum crucis.75 The issue becomes how to arrange the means required for the teaching of the faith. Thomas’ practice, however, is richer than his theory itself would lead us to believe. Even here, at the moment when he seems to depreciate the ontological value of language for the sake of advancing an immediacy of truth, he keeps in mind the irreducible thickness of language for accessing truth. There still reigns, nevertheless, a certain depreciation of the sign in terms of the intelligible truth signified. For example, as regards the gift of tongues, he analyses the interconnection of language and thought by showing that the gift of prophecy is better than the gift of tongues. The words of tongues, voces, are only signs of the truth, intelligiblis veritas, just as the phantasms in imaginative visions are signs; prophetic illumination, however, gives knowledge of the intelligible truth itself. The sign, similar to imaginative visions as regards its relationship to the truth, is again depreciated as such.

74. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 176, 1, ad 1. 75. Cf. 1 Cor. 1.17-18 and our remarks in Venard, Litté rature et thé ologie, ‘Litté rature et thé ologie: deux hermé neutiques rivales?’, pp. 59–86, and chapter 13, ‘Sagesse de la rhé torique’, pp. 397–427.

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The Obstacle The sign is sensible and not immediately intelligible like pure truth, and so it seems to be a genuine organ-obstacle. Its dialectical character renders it difficult to conceptualize. On the noetic level, the sign has no efficacy in itself and simply presents similarity or pieces of information to the understanding which alone is the efficient agent,76 and yet the sign is also always in danger of diverting attention to the sensible signifier (the suppositio materialis). The sign is sensible by essence: The name and definition of a thing is taken principally from that which belongs to a thing primarily and essentially: and not from that which belongs to it through something else. Now a sensible effect being the primary and direct object of man's knowledge (since all our knowledge springs from the senses) by its very nature leads to the knowledge of something else: whereas intelligible effects are not such as to be able to lead us to the knowledge of something else, except in so far as they are manifested by some other thing, i.e. by certain sensibles. It is for this reason that the name sign is given primarily and principally to things which are offered to the senses.77

The sign thus turns out to be the organ-obstacle of the contemplative life: as long as she is in the world of signs and its attendant discursive ratiocination, the contemplative is not in the ultimate act of contemplation but in a preparatory ‘cogitation’.78 ‘The intellectual intuitus is defined in relation to rational discourse. “To intuit is proper to the intellect, to search is proper to reason.” To reason is to begin searching for the intelligible; to intuit is to have found it and to rest in it by fixing one’s attention upon it … . What can be the object of this simple attention?’79 ‘Intuitus most often refers to the judgment in which the understanding’s operation is perfected.’80 We sometimes might imagine there to be a certain intuition of an essence which follows the process of abstraction. But would such an intuition be absolutely free of the order of signification? This idea is often expressed through metaphors of repose or of fixed attention and without the thematization of the whole use of language present in the enunciation of a judgement. But is it not necessary to speak in order to judge? The ‘reduction to first principles’, the key moment of speculative knowledge, must certainly ‘lead to the intellectus from the connection between the subject and the predicate which the conclusion 76. ‘For the signs are not the proximate efficient cause of knowledge, but reason is, in its passage from principles to conclusions’; Aquinas, de veritate, 11, 1, ad 4. 77. Aquinas, ST 3, 60, 4, ad 1. Cf also ST 3, 61, 1; 64, 7, ad 1. 78. Cf. Thomas’s classification, which draws upon Richard of St. Victor, St. Augustine and St. Bernard in ST 2-2, 180, 3. 79. Hamonic, ‘Ratio, intellectus, intuitus’, pp. 85–6. The author cites III Sent, 35, 2, 1, s.c. 80. Hamonic, ‘Ratio, intellectus, intuitus’, p. 86.

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enunciates. The understanding can thus fix its attention and rest securely in what it is has enunciated since at least it sees that such is the reality of the case, but all this happens mediante verbo!’81 Perhaps it is necessary to have something written in order to read (legere): ‘This simple focus on the essence is also suggested by the etymology of the word intellectus: “Dicitur autem intellectus ex eo quod intus legit intuendo essentiam rei”’?82 A true dialectic of the sign runs throughout St. Thomas’s texts, and it would be easy to point out the host of semiologically contradictory propositions found within his work. For example, if the sign par excellence is the sensible sign, as it will later come to be, Thomas will also speak of ‘spiritual signs’ (in the sacraments,83 for example, or the medium of angelical knowledge). We could go further and see a potential dialectic in the conception of signification itself: formally distinct from its subject, signification seems to be a simple form which is one with its sign; materially, however, it often only exists through and in multiple, perhaps even disparate elements, as in the case of the sacraments. To offer another example: if the figure is a sign of the substance in the way previously noted, then the figure is not a sign properly speaking, for the purpose of the sign is to make known an other while the figure makes known a substance outside of which it cannot exist; the fourth species of quality, the figure is thus not a sign for nothing is a sign of itself.84 But if alterity is essential to the sign, is the metaphysical foundation of signification the substantial radiance of accidents? However, if the sign’s purpose to make an other present, then it can only be of use if this other is absent, hidden, or harder to know than the sign itself. If the signified itself is shown, then the sign has no reason to be. But in the case of God, who is supremely knowable, the Other is too luminous for the human understanding, and so here the sign becomes a means of filtering and polarizing its light for the human understanding. ‘In order to reveal himself to us, God must speak to us. Yet our body constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to any direct

81. 82. 83. 84.

Ibid., p. 67. Ibid. The author cites Eth. VI, lect. 5, § 1179. Cf. Aquinas, ST 3, 63, 1, ad 2. Or that it is present under a different aspect. Cf. Aquinas, IV Sent, 8, 1, 2, ql. 2 ad 3.

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divine communication.’85 The necessary link between the body and language is what renders the existence of a language between the angels so astonishing.86 The Formal Sign and the Instrumental Sign In order to clarify the relations between the idea of the sign and knowledge, especially in the case of language, Thomists since John of St. Thomas have distinguished between the ‘formal sign’ and the ‘instrumental sign’. St. Thomas himself rarely speaks in this way, but he does sometimes distinguish between what one could call the sign ex quo (implying a discurrere starting from the signifier which is first known and then moving to the signified which it enables one to know) and the sign in quo (where the movement towards the object represented and the movement towards the sign are immediately identified: the signified is known first). More recent authors have preferred to speak of the ‘image sign’ and the ‘discursive sign’, for John of St. Thomas’s formulation suggests the idea (which for them is erroneous) that there is efficacy in the ‘instrumental’ sign and only knowledge in the other sign, so that between the two of them the formal sign is more clearly a ‘sign’.87 The discursive sign always implies some movement and its apprehension involves two moments: knowledge of the thing given through the sign and knowledge of the object of thought that it signifies, which are separated by a discursus (which can go from an instant to a long time of meditation). As for the image sign, it seems to permit a greater immediacy of knowledge. This distinction appears to overlap with the distinction between the natural sign (which resembles what it signifies) and the symbol (which is conventional) made by the

85. Montagnes, ‘La parole de Dieu dans la cré ation’, pp. 216–17. The author cites ST 1, 107, 1, ad 2: the external locution made by the voice is necessary for us because of the obstacle of corporeality. He alludes to the ‘ad 1’ from the same article in a note: ‘Our mental concept is hidden by a twofold obstacle. The first is in the will, which can retain the mental concept within, or can direct it externally. In this way God alone can see the mind of another, according to 1 Cor. 2.11: “What man knoweth the things of a man, but the spirit of a man that is in him?” The other obstacle whereby the mental concept is excluded from another one’s knowledge, comes from the body; and so it happens that even when the will directs the concept of the mind to make itself known, it is not at once make known to another; but some sensible sign must be used.’ He then mentions as an example the semiotic structure of the sacraments, in which signification is principally tied to the words of liturgical speech: ‘The sensible elements of the sacraments are called words by way of a certain likeness, in so far as they partake of a certain significative power, which resides principally in the very words’; ST 3, 60, 6, ad 1. 86. On this, see the chapter ‘L’ideal d’un langage purement spirituel’, in Venard, La langue de l’ineffable, pp. 299–343. 87. For a detailed critique, see P. Blanche’s review of J. Maritain, Ré flexions sur l’intelligence in the Bulletin thomiste (November 1925): 363–4.

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Augustinian and Aristotelian traditions, with John of St. Thomas distinguishing a third kind of sign, a sign ‘of habitude’ (ex conseutudine). For our purposes here, we should note that these categories also exhibit a dialectic. For the practical ideal of expressive transparency, on the one hand, the image sign seems to be the perfect sign, for it is entirely referential to the signified and is free of the inherent thickness which weighs down the meaning it should carry.88 The discursive sign, on the contrary, seems impure, for it appears to be an object before it is a sign and it does not resemble its signified. On a more formal theoretical level, on the other hand, the discursive sign better conveys alterity in relation to the signified, which is essentially the definition of a sign. Thomas explicitly affirms that for him this is the sign proprie loquendo, with the image sign only being a sign transsumptive. In relation to what is represented, the sign is either formal or instrumental. It is formal when it is an imitation, a reproduction of traits, a reconstitution of the physiognomy of the represented. For example, the idea, the image and the portrait are formal types of signs. They are in such internal continuity with the signified that if one is attached to their soul, if one considers them in their purely representative function, they make it appear spontaneously. In being perceived, by I know not what magic, they succeed in making one perceive the signifier. Better still: they contain it in an ineffable manner. There is a mysterious presence, a very special kind of spectre. What is represented is doubled, spiritually emigrates in the sign, and fills it with its being and by doing this transforms itself in the element of representation. Thus one and the same act of the understanding is enough to know two things, the sign and the signified.89

Thomas elaborates this category in terms of images such as portraits, the crucifix and paintings.90 It is worthwhile to reread his own analyses. For Aquinas, the ontology of the image can be realized either in a being of the same specific nature as what it represents or in a being of a different nature which simply reproduces the features of this figure. The archetype of the image, present to the theologian’s mind as soon as she speaks of it, is the Christ-Word of God.91 In the noetic

88. Cf. John of St. Thomas, Logica, IIa Pars, q. 22, art. 1. 89. Louis Lachance, Philosophie du langage (Montreal: Levrier, 1943), pp. 100–2. We should remark in passing on the ‘magical’ dimension of this type of signification, invoked by the philosopher through the rhetoric of the ineffable. Cf. Aquinas, ST 3, 25, 3. 90. Aquinas, ST 3, 25, 3 and 4. 91. Aquinas, ST 1, 35, 2, ad 3: ‘The image of a thing may be found in something in two ways. In one way it is found in something of the same specific nature; as the image of the king is found in his son. In another way it is found in something of a different nature, as the king’s image on the coin. In the first sense the Son is the Image of the Father; in the second sense man is called the image of God; and therefore in order to express the imperfect character of the divine image in man, man is not simply called the image, but “to the image,”

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movement towards the image, it is very well possible to stop at the materiality of the carrier as a thing,92 but if one is turned towards the image as such, then there is an identity between the apprehension of the image (as image) and that of the object to be thought. ‘Now it is the same motion to an image as image, and to the reality’93: Thomas makes this claim when explaining how the faithful of the old covenant could truly venerate Christ in images and in their liturgies. Thomas can be even more explicit: ‘res videtur in sua imagine sine discursu’.94 The thing is known in the very knowledge of the sign, through the same act and not through starting off from this knowledge. Thomas agrees, however, to call such a medium of knowledge a sign ‘communiter’.95 In the Summa theologiae, he clarifies the nature of the movement towards the image as image: it is ‘unus et idem cum illo qui est in rem’96 (this article precisely deals with the relation that one must have with the image of Christ!). He concludes his line of reasoning in the most devout manner possible: ‘the same reverence should be shown to Christ’s image as to Christ Himself. Since, therefore, Christ is adored with the adoration of “latria,” it follows that His image should be adored with the adoration of “latria”.’97 Furthermore, he enunciates an interesting ‘rule’ of the image: ‘Movement towards an image as such is referred to the thing represented by the image: yet not every movement towards an image is referred to the image as such.’98 The beginning of this sentence presupposes that in the thought created by

whereby is expressed a certain movement of tendency to perfection. But it cannot be said that the Son of God is “to the image,” because He is the perfect Image of the Father.’ 92. Aquinas, de veritate, 8, 3, ad 18: ‘An image of a thing can be considered in two ways. First, it can be considered in so far as it is a certain thing; and since as a thing it is distinct from that of which it is an image, under this aspect the motion of the cognitive power to the image will be other than its motion toward that of which it is an image. Second, it can be considered in so far as it is an image. Under this aspect, the motion toward the image will be the same as the motion toward that of which it is an image. Consequently, when a thing is known by means of a resemblance existing in its effect, the cognitive motion can pass over immediately to the cause without thinking about any other thing. This is the way in which the intellect of a person still in this life can think of God without thinking of any creature.’ 93. Aquinas, ST 3, 8, 3, ad 3. 94. Aquinas, de veritate, 8, 15, ad 6. 95. Aquinas, de veritate, 9, 4, ad 4: ‘we commonly call anything a sign which, being known, leads to the knowledge of something else’. 96. Aquinas, ST 3, 25, 3. 97. Aquinas, ST 3, 25, 3: ‘The same reverence should be shown to Christ’s image as to Christ Himself. Since, therefore, Christ is adored with the adoration of “latria,” it follows that His image should be adored with the adoration of “latria”.’ 98. Aquinas, ST 2-2, 103, 3, ad 3. ‘For though, in respect of that dignity, man is made to the image or likeness of God, yet in showing reverence to a person, one does not always refer this to God actually. Or we may reply that the movement towards an image is, after a fashion, towards the thing, yet the movement towards the thing need not be towards its

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the image there is contained a certain apprehension of the image as a thing distinct from what it represents. The Thomists gladly oppose to the ‘magic’ of the formal sign the ‘mechanical’ conventional mentality of the instrumental sign, which involves language: It can immediately seem that language does not arise from the category of formal sign. There could be no such contiguity, no such adhesion between words and the thought-objects they express. It is an entirely different matter … . The one is not the mirror of the other, nor does it have the intrinsic virtue of making one see it, but, in favor of pre-established relationship, one only gives to thought an impetus which goes on to carry one to knowledge of the other. The one is not perceived in the other, but one through the other.99

We could clarify the semiotic interlocking of the real and of language in this way: ideas are formal signs of the things that generate them in the mind, and words are only instrumental signs of ideas.

Conclusion: A Question Always Awaiting an Answer Such a distinction has the merit of great clarity, but when more examined closely it turns out to be overly schematic: is the signification of a formal sign accessible otherwise than in a word? Was it not necessary that someone told me of Christ’s Passion, that the virtues of his Cross were explained to me so that I would know the signification of my crucifix? Conversely, do not the poets labour to release the formal sign hidden in the instrumental sign, to ‘remunerate the lack’ of language, to use Mallarmé ’s words? Does not the etymological sensibility Thomas inherited from Isidore often tend towards this sense when he begins his analyses with some nominal definition or examination of the mode of imposition or institution of the word in question? Louis Lachance, having started from these ideas on the instrumental sign, comes to describe language as a pure instrument of evocation.100 But is it not necessary to notice as well a latent system of formal signs at the heart of language? If the image, properly speaking, is distinguished from the sign by the fact that in the image the signified is known first and the sign is known second, through a reflective movement, is it not necessary to conclude that speech is an image, or that it ends up (re)becoming one, as has been shown through allusions

image. Wherefore reverence paid to a person as the image of God redounds somewhat to God: and yet this differs from the reverence that is paid to God Himself, for this in no way refers to His image.’ 99. Lachance, Philosophie du langage, p. 102. Cf. Aquinas, In Per L. 1, l. 2, § 19: ‘We do not attend to any idea of likeness in regard to them but only one of institution, as is the case in regard to many other signs, for example, the trumpet as a sign of war.’ 100. Lachance, Philosophie du langage, p. 103.

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to the Gothic attitude towards the arbitrariness of the sign? In effect, even if the image does not present a similitude of the figure with that which it intends, its meaning is perceived first, and the fact that it is a word is normally taken into consideration only if this meaning is not immediately perceived.101 In short, should we say that language, although it seems artificial, stretches upwards towards the ideal of the natural image?102 St. Thomas did not answer these questions, but he did not raise them either. The different semiotic dialectics that have been discussed simply show that within his thought there is both a tendency to conceive of language as the transparent vehicle of a meaning which absolutely precedes it and a highly vivid awareness of the sensible thickness of language. Further confirmation of these remarks could be found in the Angelic Doctor’s thoughts on the language of angels and the language of Adam.103 We, however, will now turn to Thomas’s understanding of the metaphysics of the Word.

101. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 180–1: ‘“to understand means to come to an understanding with each other” (sich miteinander verstehen). Understanding is, primarily, agreement (Verstä ndnis ist zunä chst Einverstä ndnis) … . The real problem of understanding obviously arises when, in the endeavor to understand the content of what is said, the reflective question arises: how did he come to such an opinion? For this kind of question reveals an alienness that is clearly of a different kind and ultimately signifies a renunciation of shared meaning.’ 102. Louis Lachance cannot hide his enthusiasm: he implicitly connects the natural phenomenon he was describing to theological and religious ends: ‘What a miraculous adventure is artificial sign! By an unfathomable fate, it has been endowed with the power to extend nature, and even of greatly surpassing it. Like nature, but in a purified, immaterialized mode, it has been made an agent for transmitting and perpetuating life. But the life that it is intended to propagate is far superior to the life which nature multiplies: it is in the order of spirit and grace. Because of language, the highest intuitions of thought become communicable, virtually hereditary; because of the sacraments, the life of God is granted to humanity. How exalting this is for our soul! Our soul’s mastery of the artificial sign not only enables it to escape its prison, but this mastery also gives it dominion over splendorous kingdoms. This power makes our soul the inheritor of all the treasures of profane culture and all the wealth of grace’. Lachance, Philosophie du langage, p. 109. 103. See the chapter ‘L’ideal d’un langage purement spirituel’, in Venard, La langue de l’ineffable, pp. 299–343.

Chapter 9 A THOMIST RESPONSE: THE METAPHYSICS OF THE WORD

In his famous essay on the origin of language, Louis de Bonald writes, ‘The whole question of language is perhaps reducible to this carefully considered proposition: “that a person thinks their speech before speaking their thought”, or otherwise said, “a person cannot speak their thought without thinking their speech.”’1 We will return to the Vicomte’s reflections on the origin of language in the subsequent chapter and for now examine how for St. Thomas the primary issue at stake in reflection on the mental word was not philosophical but theological. We will begin by discussing Thomas’s understanding of the mental word as it forms the necessary context for understanding the development of his thought on the word.

The Theological Occasion of the Discovery of the Mental Word In the general epistemology of sacra doctrina, theology is never far from Thomas’s ‘philosophical’ considerations, such as those which deal with the cognitive sciences under discussion here or with metaphysics itself. Thomas commented on Holy Scripture each morning and so he was provided with ample theological opportunities for philosophical reflection. More particularly, Paissac notes that ‘in order to show the reality of relations in God, Thomas will undertake an examination of the mental word’.2 Since the noun ‘word’ in revelation designates a divine Person, especially in the Gospel of John from its very first verse, it should first of all designate a created reality which possesses two relative characteristics. God is triune. In the eternal subsistence of his unique nature, he is, in the consubstantiality of the persons, the eternal and necessary communication of the divine nature of the Father to the Son by the procession of generation, and from the Father and the Son to the Holy Spirit by the procession of spiration. These

1. Louis de Bonald, ‘De l’origine du langage’, in idem, Recherches philosophiques sur les premiers objets des connaissances morales (Brussels: La Socié té nationale, 1845), pp. 72–139 (here p. 75). 2. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, p. 185.

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inner-Trinitarian processions cannot be of a transitive order of local movement or exercised efficiency – as happens in the physical world – but must be conceived according to the immanent mode of intelligible emanation. Immanent action as actio perfecti, which involves procession by way of intelligible emanation, is alone capable of offering an account of the distinction of persons which can only be conceived by a relative opposition of origin. Hence the relations which find their basis in the immanent action proper to a spiritual nature, in the measure to which the spiritual realities are the only ones which allow a role for analogy, are the relations proper to intellection and willing. Thus there can only be two divine processions ad intra, that of the Word and that of Love. While in his commentary on the Sentences Saint Thomas held to the idea of ‘Son’ by reason of its essential relativity as ‘word’ was not yet being clearly distinguished by species and recognized in its relative being, in the Summa theologiae he no longer hesitates to claim: ‘In God, the appellation of word properly said is understood in a personal sense; it is the proper name of the person of the Son.’3

There can only be real relation in God secundum esse and subsequent to an immanent action of intelligence or of willing. St. Thomas’s reflection on the nature of the verbum mentis in human beings finds its coordinates between these two axes. His overview of the Trinitarian theology of the Church teaches him that for a name to designate a divine person properly it must represent something which is relative by essence and a real relation.4 The use of the term ‘word’ to designate the mystery of a Person in God poses as stark of a problem as does God’s unity. As already argued in the question on the divine names, everything that is ‘perfect’ in creatures can be attributed to God only on the condition of recognizing that the very essence of any given perfection is present in God and thus his perfection is not realized in the way it is for particular beings. Let us consider the example of the perfection of the logos, translated as intellectus, ratio or verbum, and so on. We can contemplate God as an intellectual being, indeed as an intelligence in act. But the perfection implied by the act of the intelligence necessarily presupposes, in itself and independently of any particular realizations, the presence of both that which sees and that which is seen; the act of intellectual knowledge essentially involves a knowing (subject) and a known (object). But how can we say ‘two’ of God? Equally, as ‘word’ typically means the speech through which the mind says what it thinks (and is itself said), does this not constitute another object and generate an even more awkward tertium quid? As Thomas argues:

3. Yves Floucat, L’intime fé condité de l’intelligence: le verbe mental selon saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Té qui, 2001), pp. 79–81. The author summarizes the broad characteristics of the treatise on the Trinity (ST 1, 27) and cites ST 1, 34, 2: ‘“Word,” said of God in its proper sense, is used personally, and is the proper name of the person of the Son.’ 4. Cf. Aquinas, De pot. 2; 7; 8; 9.

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We must attribute to God every perfection that is in creatures, as regards the essence of the perfection absolutely but not as regards the way in which it is in this or that one. Thus goodness or wisdom is not in God as an accident as it is in us, although in him is supreme goodness and perfect wisdom. Now in creatures nothing is more excellent or more perfect than to understand: a sign of which is that of all creatures intellectual substances are the highest and are said to be made to God’s image in respect of their intelligence. It follows then that understanding is in God as well as whatsoever is essential thereto, although it belongs to God in one way and to creatures in another. Now for the act of understanding it is essential that there be one who understands and something understood.5

What needs to be grasped here is ‘the plurality or at least the duality realized by this presence. This presence is nothing more than the relation of the word to its principle, for the word is nothing but pure object.’6 ‘We know that the dissolution of the subject-object duality was one of Plotinus’ great concerns, and also the concern of more than one modern philosopher. It would probably be helpful to know what Thomas thought of the Neo-Platonic tradition on this point. In any case, his purpose was to purify the very idea of the object, as Plotinus attempted to do.’7

Once again, however, the question that preoccupies Thomas is not philosophical but theological: The issue at hand is establishing theologically that Word, in the proper sense, is the name of the Son and can only be applied to him, and here he joins St. Augustine. For such to be the case, it is necessary and sufficient that the name ‘word’ designates, as clearly as does the name ‘son’, a reality which is relative by essence: as Augustine already saw, Word is not an absolute term, but is only relative to That To Which the Word belongs, that is to say, the Father.8

Thus in the course of ‘explaining’ Trinitarian dogma St. Thomas is led to a ‘deepening of his metaphysical reflection on the act of intellection which is not tangential to his theological reflection but present at its very core (and confirmed by it in turn)’.9

5. Aquinas, De pot., 9, 5. 6. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, p. 191. 7. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, p. 191 n. 2. 8. Floucat, L’intime fé condité , pp. 90–1, with reference to St. Augustine, De Trinitate, VI, II, 3 (cf. ST 1, 34, 2, s.c.) and VII, II, 3. 9. Floucat, L’intime fé condité , p. 92.

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The Theory of the Word The theological goal of philosophical reflection on ‘word’ is thus clear: to find a verbum in the created world which is sufficiently opaque and transparent to be able to serve as the basis of a theological analogy and designate in God a Person really distinct from the two Others and who is nonetheless of the same nature as them. This goal cannot be reached without some trial and error. A Progressive Deepening St. Thomas’s work on the word can be divided into two broad periods of before and after the question in De veritate dedicated to it (after 1256). Even up until De veritate he thought of the word as that through which the mind knows as well as that which it produces through knowing. In this first period, the formation of the word is nothing other than the formation of quiddities by the intellect which has received the species, but the word itself is the result of a kind of work (quoddam operatum ipsius).10 In order to explain the existence of a word in the human mind, Thomas initially searched for an intellectual operation in which the mind truly produces ideas, in which it is not content to act on images as in knowledge: he proposes an artistic activity understood along the lines of the Platonic theological tradition which the Augustinians transformed. In his commentary on the Sentences Thomas appeals to Plato (through Albert?) and his comparison of the divine intellect to a Father ‘independently of the readings that he could have made of the books of the Old Law he found in Egypt, because he saw that in itself the intellect in some way has conceived the idea of the world to realize, as an artist conceives his model’.11 Thomas undertakes a Christian transposition of Plato and claims that the Son proceeds as an ‘artistic idea of everything that will be created by the divine intellect’.12 Thomas then cites Augustine: ‘Whoever denies the existence of ideas denies the existence of the Son.’13 The relationship between the ideas and the Son is not specified, however, and the relativity of the artistic ‘word’ to the object of art it produces

10. Cf. Aquinas, de veritate, 3, 2. 11. Aquinas, I Sent., d. 3, 1, 4, ad 1; ‘secundum expositionem Commentatoris, Aristoteles non intendit Trinitatem personarum in Deo ponere; sed propter hoc quod in omnibus creaturis apparet perfectio in ternario, sicut in principio, medio et fine, ideo antiqui honorabant Deum in sacrificiis et orationibus triplicatis. Plato autem dicitur multa cognovisse de divinis, legens libros veteris legis, quos invenit in Aegypto. Vel forte intellectum paternum nominat intellectum divinum, secundum quod in se quodam modo concipit ideam mundi, quae est mundus archetypus.’ 12. See Aquinas, I Sent., d. 10, 10, 1, 1 ad 3 and I Sent., d. 6, 10, 1, 2: ‘Thus the intellect in God is turned towards the generation of the Son who proceeds as word and art; the Son is not produced by the Father as a work of art but as art.’ 13. Aquinas, I Sent., 1.1, d. 36, 2, 1.

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prevents it from being simply transposed into God. Certainly the creature is the manifestation of the Son and the divine Word manifests the glory of the Father, just as the human word reveals the understanding, but the manifestation of the Word is absolutely immanent and so wholly effected ‘interior’ to the divinity. Philosophically conceived in this way, when the noun ‘word’ is brought into theology it designates both the divine essence insofar as it knows (God knows everything and he knows everything through contemplating his own essence) and the Person of the Son (as an appropriation). In the course of his speculations the theologian begins to deviate from the artistic model and returns to the intellectual operation through which the understanding speaks its thought to itself: the explanation of the use of ‘Word’ for God will fail if the soul engenders nothing within itself when it knows. The essential necessity of inner words in us appears as soon as Aquinas got beyond the initial period of the Sentences. In the De Veritate the Aristotelian parallel between nature and art was given its complement by a parallel between speculative and practical intellect. Practical intellect thinks out plans, designs, programs. Such plans, say, of an architect, are the form whence external operations proceed. But they cannot be the form whence proceeds the ‘thinking out’ that evolves the plans. There must be a prior form, the intellectual habit of art, that stands to the thinking as the thought-out plan stands to the external operation. But if nature and art are parallel, so that nature is but God’s artistry, it follows that there will be a parallel between speculative knowledge of nature and practical knowledge of art. Just as the habit of art results in the thinking out of plans whence artefacts are produced, so speculative habit or form, by which we understand in act, results in the quidditas formata and the compositio vel divisio by which we come to knowledge of external things. Needless to say, this intermediate role of the inner word between our understanding and the external thing does not disappear in later Thomist thought.14

Following Aristotle,15 Thomas finds in ‘cogitation’ an image of the word in human beings: in reasoning the conclusion truly proceeds from the principles, which means that there takes place a kind of generation. Cum enim verbum dicat quamdam conceptionem intellectus, ista conceptio apud nos oportet quod consequatur aliquod lumen intellectuale, et saltem lumen intellectus agentis, et primorum principiorum ex quibus accipitur conclusio. Unde si consideretur sapientia apud nos secundum quod consistit in cognitione conclusionis quae mente concipitur, sic est idem quod verbum mentis; si autem consideretur sapientia secundum quod consistit in lumine

14. Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, p. 192. 15. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, A, 2, 71 b20; Physics, B 3, 195, a 18.

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intellectus agentis et cognitione primorum principiorum, sic praecedit verbum, quod est conceptio conclusionis Since word says a certain conception of the intellect, this conception for us should necessarily come from some intellectual light; this will be at least the light of the agent intellect and the first principles from which the conclusion is conceived … . Knowledge of the conclusion that the mind conceives is thus the mental word … . The word is the conception of the conclusion.16

However, even if the formation of a conclusion is more abstract it is still too similar to a transitive operation like that of artistic production which results in an external object. The word remains understood as an intentional form, as an idea which qualifies the intellect and is relative to the subject, but it is still not relative by essence. In natural knowledge there is a principle and an end: the principle is external (and drawn from sensible things) and the end is internal.17 From the Summa contra gentiles onwards, St. Thomas comes to think much more rigorously about the immanence of knowledge and he draws some novel conclusions. He will see in the word more than that which the mind knows, the pure product or immanent goal of the operation of knowledge (and not that through which the mind knows). Originating from the species, the word is no longer an idea derived from another idea or a conclusion derived from its principle, but becomes the offspring of the intellect as fertilized by the species, and here we move from the epistemological or noetic order to the ontological. Understood in this way, the word is essentially relative to the knowing mind and the things known. The name ‘word’ is now not simply appropriated to the Son, but it is a property of the Second Person to be the divine Word. In fact, the term ‘word’ can only designate the Son and not the divine essence itself. As for the relationship between creatures and God, if it is true that God knows creatures inasmuch as he created them (through the divine ideas) and that it is the Word who is the divine art, then there is more than simply an appropriation in the relationship between the Word and creation. The Final Synthesis What is the theoretical synthesis of the interior word that Thomas comes to at the end of his reflections? In Aristotle’s view, which St. Thomas generally adopts, knowledge is primarily the actualization of the luminosity of a sensible image 16. Aquinas, I Sent., d. 34, 2, ad 2. 17. In natural knowledge we receive universal ideas from the images perceived by the senses because of the light of the agent intellect: ‘in cognitione intellectualium est duo considerare; scilicet principium speculationis, et terminum. Principium quidem est ex sensibilibus; sed terminus est in intelligibilibus, secundum quod in cognitione naturali ex speciebus a sensu acceptis intentiones universales accipimus per lumen intellectus agentis; et ideo dicendum est, quod quantum ad terminum speculationis principium oportet ex aliquibus sensibilibus speciebus in divina consurgere.’ Aquinas, I Sent., d. 34, 2, ad 2.

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by the light of the agent intellect: the operation of understanding is a passive reception. Following Aristotle, Thomas simultaneously maintained both the realism of intellectual knowledge and the rigorous immanence of the act in which this knowledge is consummated. But the Stagirite did not go so far as to uncover the reality proper to the word itself: for Aristotle, the word, the articulated sound of the voice, was merely a sign of what we know, the similitude of the thing in our mind. Is there something more in the understanding in act than what the idea has imprinted on it? St. Thomas, inspired by his theological investigations, comes to respond in the affirmative: Yes, there is an interior word. Our voice intends to signify what has passed into the understanding; it is necessarily in the understanding that what we know lives. But it would be wrong to think that we can only find the idea in the understanding, the similitude of the thing received in the intellect as an impression. Here it is only a matter of a first operation, abstraction, whose goal is the idea. But this idea is in turn the principle of another operation which ends in the act of knowledge, an even more mysterious operation … . Impressed by the idea of the thing, the understanding reacts in an é lan vital in order to form and produce its fruit. This fruit, very precisely what the word here signifies, is reason, ratio, as St. Thomas writes in order to translate logos, the word (ST 1, 85, 2 ad 3).18

The idea makes the thing present in the intellect and is thus a principle of the act of knowing; only the word makes the thing present as an object, and in the word alone is there exactly realized what the understanding knows. In this way, sensible speech does not signify the idea imprinted onto the mind, but what the mind conceives, forms and keeps for itself when it judges the thing, the reflection and the thought. Words harvest the fruits of the mind. ‘This term is not properly speaking the thing in its exteriority, and neither is it the idea which flows from it: what the understanding knows is that which comes from the intellectual action of which the idea is a principle.’19 But what is this concept exactly? It is not the thing, for the thing is external while the concept is internal. It is not the idea, for the idea is the principle of intellectual action and the concept is its goal; just as burning is the realized idea of the nature of fire, so the intentionally imprinted idea is the realization of the understanding which grasps it. It is also not the action of the understanding, for it is the goal of the action, ‘something that the action puts into

18. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, pp. 199–200. 19. Ibid. Cf. Aquinas, ST 1, 85, 2, ad 3: ‘Words do not therefore signify the intelligible species themselves; but that which the intellect forms for itself for the purpose of judging of external things.’ Paissac relates this to an interesting comment from Cajetan: ‘species ut imagines, sunt quibus intellectus intelligit, ut in corpore dictum est; conceptions autem ut intentiones sunt quas intelligit. Et hoc ideo quia species repraesentat intellectui rem ut comprincipium intelligendi; conceptus autem praesentat illam objective.’

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existence’. It is a sui generis entity and is identified as the mental word because it is what vocal speech signifies.20 Such is the word signified by the external speech when I call a thing by its name. This assemblage of sounds does not precisely signify the thing itself: it is like a stranger who has nothing to do with me; neither the idea: it has no other interest to me than rendering possible my action; nor this action wholly oriented towards its goal; but this term itself; by it the thing is birthed in me. It is the word: its role is to represent for me what I know, to realize this living presence of the thing to myself, to render this thing relative to me, interesting for me, to engage my existence. Such is the meaning of the word, the goal of the action terminated in it.21

‘Speech directly signifies what the understanding has conceived, what the understanding has known. Thus the word is more the object of knowledge than the thing is.’22 We can only understand this claim by avoiding the modern meaning of the word ‘concept’: the voice, when it articulates intelligible words, intends to signify what we know, the object of the understanding in act. The ‘concept’ signified by the voice is a conception of the mind in the operative meaning of the term. In this noetic framework, the word genuinely has its own reality. Between being endowed with understanding and things to know, intellectual action establishes a relation, or rather gives a place to the whole web of delicate and mysterious relations. When I know, there is a relation between this apparently foreign thing and myself. But as we are aware, this relation is not simple. The presence of this thing is realized first by the idea which is imprinted on my understanding but which I still do not know much about. There is not yet a new birth, a perfect action. The action of which I am capable is not finished; like the fire, wholly informed as it is by the presence of the idea which realizes it, expects that we give it something to burn so as to receive the wood and finish its action. The action of knowledge is achieved in the moment in which the understanding, taking and knowing in some way that which has first informed it, gives it a new life, a new birth into the concept: the thing then gives birth to the understanding, as the wood gives birth to the fire; and the concept together

20. Aquinas, De pot., 8, 1: ‘It is considered as the term of the action, and as something effected thereby … . This intellectual concept in us is called properly a word, because it is this that is signified by the word of mouth. For the external utterance does not signify the intellect itself, nor the intelligible species, nor the act of the intellect, but the concept of the intellect by means of which it relates to the thing.’ 21. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, p. 186. 22. Ibid., p. 193. Italics added.

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with the thing gives the understanding a new birth, transforming it into a new being by its riches.23

If the entire being of the word is a being in relation to its principle, and if the thing enters into the constitution of this same principle because of the idea which represents it, then the thing also contributes to the determination of the character of the word. The word, a pure relation to its principle, will also be a pure relation to the thing. In some way the thing is an object, but it is so because of the word. In short, the idea, the species impressa, is to the word as to see is to regard. The word thus ensures the presence of the thing rather than representing it: in itself the idea is only a simulacrum, an effigy of the thing, still too much from myself in order to be (an object) before me, a quality which affects the intellectual substance. Such is not the word. To illustrate this point, Paissac cites Gabriel Marcel: When I say that a being is given to me as a presence or as a being … this means that I cannot treat the other as if he or she were simply placed there, positioned in front of me; there arises between the other and me a relationship which in a certain sense goes way beyond the conscious awareness I may have of it. The other is not only before me, the other is also within me; more exactly, the physical categories are transcended.24 An effigy is after all a reproduction, a diminished reduction; it is metaphysically less than the object. Presence, on the contrary, is more than the object, surpassing it in every sense.25

The word is nothing other than this presence, the goal of the act of the understanding without which intellection could only be rough and undetermined. The word vanishes as soon as the act of the understanding ceases. The face to face, one could say, only lasts a moment of the perfect actuality of which the understanding is capable. When this moment is finished, the word ceases to be present. After the fleeting actuality in which the word illuminates our being in its presence, the idea remains within us, ‘in the dark treasure chest of memory’, as St. Augustine said.26

The idea, the relic of the word in memory, is only a representation,

23. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, pp. 185–6. 24. Gabriel Marcel, Gabriel Marcel’s Perspectives on the Broken World: The Broken World, a Four-Act Play: Followed by Concrete Approaches to Investigating the Ontological Mystery (trans. Katharine Rose Hanley; Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998), p. 191. 25. Marcel, Broken World, p. 190. 26. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, pp. 194–5.

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An image of it remains that we can maintain in the sense that a housekeeper or a maintenance person keeps an apartment or a house in good repair. It’s obvious that this type of maintenance has no ontological value. But if fidelity is creative in the sense that I have tried to define, then it’s an entirely different situation. A presence is a reality, a certain influx; it depends upon us whether or not we remain permeable to this influx … . The word influx expresses, although in too spatial of a fashion, the kind of enrichment from within that happens the moment when presence occurs.27

This influx begins when the word is grasped and realized and the understanding remains faithful to its object. These analyses complement Maritain’s description of the mental word in the ‘intuition of being’: ‘a living content which is a world of trans-objective presence and intelligibility. Then we are confronted within ourselves with the object of this intuition, as an object of knowledge, living with an immaterial life, with the burning translucence of intellectual nature in act.’28 Such is the being of the word. It realizes the ‘mystè re, autre que repré sentatif’ which haunted Mallarmé .29 It is neither a pure immediacy, nor a substantial mediation; the medium is here the thing itself insofar as it reveals itself. We should emphasize this point. The Thomasian ‘concept’ is not the concept of the modern conceptualists; it is the fruit of the carnal union of the spirit and the real in the incarnation of each person. The word is thus the place where the thinking person and reality commune; it is the symbolic link of the person and the cosmos. Even more strongly, it is a kind of mediation between the human and the divine: ‘The understanding projects … into the light the objects which it contemplates in a sudden illumination in which there is no movement, in a miraculous action which tends to be pure relation; St. Thomas does not hesitate to compare it to creative action.’30

27. Marcel, Broken World, p. 191. 28. Maritain, A Preface to Metaphysics, p. 49. 29. Stephane Mallarmé , ‘Offices’, in idem, Igitur – Divagations – Un Coup de dé s (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 289. 30. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, p. 201. The author alludes to ST 1, 45, 2, ad 3, and 1, 41, 1, ad 2: ‘if we take away movement, action implies nothing more than order of origin’. Thomas responds to an objection regarding the impossibility of creation ex nihilo (which claims that the creative act has to precede creation itself and thus presupposes an object on which it is performed) by stressing the difference between being made and having been made: ‘In things which are made without movement, to become and to be already made are simultaneous, whether such making is the term of movement, as illumination (for a thing is being illuminated and is illuminated at the same time) or whether it is not the term of movement, as the word is being made in the mind and is made at the same time. In these things what is being made, is; but when we speak of its being made, we mean that it is from another, and was not previously. Hence since creation is without movement, a thing is being

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The ‘natural’ perfection manifested in reflection can thus become an analogy for the divine processions: As a result, the precise and true conditions are found in the object known as such; the relations of the subject to the object can give a place to this almost phenomenological description so different from some Thomistic accounts, but so close, probably, to the genius of St. Thomas. The action of the understanding appears all too pure, too close to the ‘indefatigable operation’ for not being used in the theology of the three persons.31

We find here a structure of symbolic thought which is based upon faith and theological reflection. We have perhaps even found the basis for a mysticism of the image-intellect and participation in the divine understanding. If the image comes to think the Original, to unite itself with it, it experiences a theological or theologal sublime, which is the material of a number of highly different experiences, from the ‘conjunction with the separate agent intellect’ of the heterodox members of the faculty of Arts (once known as ‘Latin Averrorists’) of St. Thomas’s time up unto the sincere movements towards God in the apex mentis of the RhenishFlemish mystics. Contemporary critics might rightfully wonder if we have actually explained what the word is. Do the above arguments effectively demonstrate that the word’s essence is summed up by its relativity, or do we simply assert this equivalence as a necessary theological thesis? The latter case would not be very surprising, for at the end of our journey we would simply reencounter the symbolic vision established at the beginning: the creation of all things by the divine Word! The objection is even stronger historically speaking. Augustine’s thought, which stands at the origin of every theory of the word, developed within a context in which Trinitarian theological speculation which had to differentiate itself not only from Arianism (through a close reading of logos in the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel), but also from the noetic distinctions it had inherited from the Stoics (such as the distinction between the verbum institum and the verbum prolatum). It is to this end that Augustine discovered a third word which is neither that of human rationality nor that of language: he speaks not only to his readers’ understanding but also to their heart when he invites them to examine themselves inwardly in order to discover the speech of the spirit interior to the spirit!32

created and is already created at the same time.’ Aquinas, ST 1, 45, 2, ad 3. According to the optics and physics of his day, light diffuses itself instantaneously. 31. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, p. 234. 32. Cf., for example, Augustine, De Trinitate, XV, XII, 22: ‘All these things then that the human consciousness knows by perceiving them through itself or through the sense of the body or through the testimony of others, it holds onto where they are stacked away in the treasury of memory. From them is begotten a true word when we utter what we know, but a word before any sound, before any thought of sound. For it is then that the word is most

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For modern agnosticism, the metaphysician’s sublime experience of discovering the analogical intimacy of the human word and the creative action of the divine Word has an air of tragic irony about it. Agnosticism might readily agree that creation can be thought of as the (per)locutionary equivalent of the divine locution and not some artefact resulting from a transitive action, but it might mischievously add that if the human word turns out to be so ‘marvellously’ divine, this is probably because the divine word in Genesis was already a little bit too human! The Perplexity of the Moderns Those who rediscover St. Thomas Aquinas’s reflections on the word emphasize, in season and out of season, the purely relative essence of the word so conceived. The word should be ‘open’ and ‘transparent’ on the two ‘sides’ where it appears ontologically: the intellect in act and the reality considered. On the side of the intellect, the primary concern of commentators has been to avoid making the word a positive qualification of the intellect. They return the problem to its source, which concerns the essence of species. Floucat states: If it is not a pure relation which by itself fully returns the intellect in the plentitude of its actuality to the thing which informs it with objectifiable content, and is said interiorly to itself, then it is necessary to say how and why, in the intelligible determination that it constitutes for the intellect, the species expressa effectively allows the objective thing to be reached but without constituting a tertium quid.33

They then might use some stylistic flair to eliminate a conception of the interior word as a mental qualification: The understanding does not fabricate any old, anonymous ‘expressive species’ from an ‘impressive species’ as one thing from another thing. The mind carrying the idea speaks its word, that is to say, confers on this idea its backdrop and its life in act, by detaching it in front of itself as a known object. This concept or mental word is presented not as an absolute thing but as pure relation, as a son in relation to a father, but without the difference between the two substances, as a son reduced to or more exactly brought to this unimaginable perfection: to exist

like the thing known, and most its image, because the seeing which is thought springs direct from the seeing which is knowledge, and it is a word of no language, a true word from a true thing, having nothing from itself, but everything from that knowledge from which it is born. And it makes no difference when the man who utters what he known learnt it – sometimes he utters it as soon as he learns – provided it is a true word, that is one that has arisen from things known.’ Augustine, The Trinity (trans. Edmund Hill; Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991), p. 416. 33. Floucat, L’intime fé condité , pp. 116–17.

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as the pure and simple fact of being the son of his father, a mystery realized in God and in a certain measure in humanity in the pinnacle point of knowledge.34

We should point out how the revealed dogma remains determinative at the very moment when we are attempting to describe the created reality which is supposed to illustrate it! On the side of reality, the word should also be as transparent as possible. The ideal would be that things could speak of themselves, and we are not very far from this idea in some texts: The whole objectivity of human knowledge depends in the last analysis upon the fact it is not a superadded intermediary, or a distinct substitute which is introduced into our thought in place of the thing. It is, rather, the sensible species of the thing itself which, rendered intelligible by the agent intellect, becomes the form of our possible intellect.35

What Gilson describes here is the movement from possibly ambiguous ‘expressions’ to the existential reality of the act of knowing. The philosopher attempts to explain this originary and absolute given in the phraseology of immediacy: the symbol is constituted by the linguistic articulation of thought and the real.36 Through the species the real itself speaks. We moderns have unlearned this language of the real, and we could perhaps relearn it in the school of St. Thomas: Let us remember that sensible species are not scattered sensations in physical surroundings looking for knowing subjects in which to reside. … Like their causes, species have no existence distinct from that of the object which produces them and of which they are but the continual emanation. Proceeding from the form of the object (not from its matter), the species retains its active virtue. It is by them, accordingly, that the object actualizes the sensory organ and assimilates it to itself.37

34. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, p. 234. 35. É tienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas (trans. Laurence K. Shook; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 227–8. 36. Aquinas, ST 1, 12, 2, 3: ‘Further, the intellect in act is the actual intelligible; as sense in act is the actual sensible. But this comes about inasmuch as sense is informed with the likeness of the sensible object, and the intellect with the likeness of the thing understood. Therefore, if God is seen by the created intellect in act, it must be that He is seen by some similitude.’In his response to this objection, St. Thomas privileges the pure and simple identity of the intelligible and the intellect in the symbolon of knowledge over and against the temptation to give any ontological weight to the mediating similitudes of the intelligible in the intellect. However, the issue here is the vision of God: because God is the source of all light, God directly illuminates without any image or resemblance. 37. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, p. 473.

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Contemporary scepticism might offer this rejoinder: but are not these species – which we could simply translate as ‘ideas’ – projected onto reality by the human understanding? Or more exactly, are they not just ‘frames of mind, fantasies?’ Does not St. Thomas himself suppose as much when he describes the utter exteriority of the thing in relationship to the understanding: Whereas the thing itself that is outside the soul is not touched by that act, inasmuch as the act of the intellect does not pass into exterior matter by changing it; so that the thing which is outside the soul is wholly outside the genus of intelligible things. For this reason the relation which arises from the act of the mind cannot be in that thing.38

Additionally, such a presentation of the species seems to involve a sort of philosophical allegory: are we not too quickly forgetting the linguistic mediation of thought? Or is it not true that no mental given is accessible without language? The mind itself speaks when it thinks! As for the mental word, it is wrong to represent or imagine it as first being a kind of movement or outflow to the object. Knowledge is not a movement from the mind towards things but, conversely, a movement of things towards the mind. And the raison de ê tre of the word is to render the thing present to the mind, to reveal the thing to it. The mind speaks a language to itself, and in this way manifests the exterior thing to itself.39

Is the use of the word ‘language’ here merely metaphorical? As this manifestation of the external thing that the mind generates for itself is effected by the necessary intermediary of a formal sign, of a word, then it is impossible that this could be a quo cognoscitur res exterior without first being a quod cognoscitur. There is an inescapable anteriority of nature. An unknown

38. Aquinas, De pot. 7, 10. 39. Lachance, Philosophie du langage, p. 102. Cf. Aquinas, ST 1, 16, 1 and 1 Sent, 27, 2, 2: ‘Potest autem homo manifestare intellectum suum vel alteri, sicut verbo vocali, vel sibi ipsi, sicut verbo cordis. Ita dicunt, quod utroque modo Deus manifestat intellectum suum, scilicet condendo creaturam, quae est verbum ipsius, quasi verbum vocabile, et generando filium, secundum quod manifestat se apud seipsum, et hoc est idem quod verbum cordis. Unde dicunt, quod verbum dictum de Deo semper est personale. Sed hoc non videtur verum: quia si inquiratur quid sit istud verbum quo aliquis sibi loquitur, non invenitur esse nisi conceptio intellectus. Conceptio autem intellectus est vel operatio ipsa quae est intelligere, vel species intellecta.’

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sign is powerless to make anything known. A sign is not an open window, but a necessary substitute for an absence that it represents.40

Logically, the idea is anterior to the word, and yet it only becomes fully realized with the word that speaks it: the word alone has the power of reawakening the idea that comes to life or slumbers in the mind. Within this framework, is not the problem of objectivity at root that of interconnecting the intelligible species and the word? The question becomes even sharper when Thomas Aquinas, following a terminology he inherits, identifies the ‘word of the heart’ with the ‘word of the thing’. In the Monologion, for example, Anselm writes that the ‘word of the thing (the verbum rei) is the reflection (cogitatio) turned towards the likeness of the thing and formed from memory’.41 Thomas himself identifies the verbum rei and the verbum cordis or mentis:42 the simple ambiguity of the genitive in such expressions, which could be either objective or subjective, renders porous the border of reality (res) and its apprehension (heart). We find here the same question which is raised by the language of angels or of Adam, and aside from some statements of principle, we scarcely find a response in Saint Thomas. To the first objection regarding the complete immanence of knowledge, Thomism classically responds by affirming the species’ purely ‘intentional’ character. The necessity of the intelligible species is based on the fact that a thing can be the object of the intellect only insofar as the thing communicates to the intellect its form, which is the principle of both the intelligibility and being of every material being. It can only do so, however, by radiating into the possible intellect and ‘imprinting’ its intention upon it, which is its power to be objectivized and communicated. But we should emphasize that it is the form of the objectas-communicated, for ‘the species of an object is not one being and the object another. It is the very object under the mode of species; that is, it is still the object considered in action and in the efficacy it exerts over a subject.’43 The ontological weight of the species, then, is nothing; it does not truly exist as an entitative ens but is pure tendency, and so enjoys a tenuous, decanted, spiritual and intentional existence. ‘Intentional’ is the crucial word here. Generally speaking, the relativity proper to ‘intentional being’ plays an essential role in the Thomasian noetic, for it allows

40. Lachance, Philosophie du langage, p. 100 n. 1. The author recommends that his readers read Cajetan’s commentary, I, q. 27, a. 1. 41. Anselm, Monologion, c. 48; ‘Verbum vero rei est ipsa cogitatio ad eius similitudinem ex memoria formata’. 42. Aquinas, I Sent, 27, 2, 1.: ‘Si ergo accipiatur locutio secundum quod est in parte intellectiva tantum, sic est verbum cordis, quod etiam ab aliis dicitur verbum rei, quia est immediata similitudo ipsius rei’; ‘The word of the heart, which other authors call the word of the thing, is the immediate likeness of the thing itself.’ 43. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, p. 227.

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an entitative ens to be able to exist for another, to exist in a being quite different from that of its own nature, which simply is what the very fact of knowledge presupposes. When the realist metaphysicians are asked about the ontological rooting of intentionality, a fundamental question for nominalist thought, they readily offer the apparently philosophical response of ‘assenting to being’, or of meditative silence amid reality itself. In the process, however, these philosophers end up performing a kind of theological ventriloquism and speak of the real religiously: ‘Qui habet aures audiendi audiat!’ Intentionality, they claim, has its roots in the diffusive and expressive generosity of being insofar as being attempts to surpass itself and communicate itself in every possible way.44 But is this a given of experience, a legitimate induction of reason thinking the real, or does not Thomism, without feeling the need to explain it, ground its discourse on a soil which is originally theological: the creation of beings through the speech of a God who is self-diffusive goodness and who grants to all things an intelligibility which is homogenous to the discursive rationality of the human intellect? It is the believer who can think that cosmic reality is itself already ‘speech’, and in this way the theory of the species is integrated into a theological vision of the world. Is it not necessary, then, to link the continual emanation of ‘species’ (of which the philosophers speak) to the ‘verbal’ origin of creation from which creatures emanate, with their speechless speech being a reflection of the Creator (of whom theologians speak)? The question which the theory of the mental word poses to contemporary thought now becomes: Is it not faith which in some way makes such a mental word exist? As for the second objection regarding the linguistic condition of thought, the Thomist could exonerate St. Thomas of all bad faith by responding on a methodological level: How could he even respond to a question which he did not ask? In fact, mediation on the attribution of ‘word’ to God is a particular case of general reflection on words which designate a perfection in God. Reflection on the divine names, then, invites us to distinguish the signified from its different modes of realization and presupposes an isomorphic conception of being and language in which certain enunciative acts come to transcend the division of creatures and the Creator. In the face of these issues the theologian might feel less inclined to ask about verbality in itself! We can only speak about words by using words, and so discourse about words always moves within tautology. Contemporary deconstructionist thought denounces this irreducibility of language as the source of ‘metaphysical’ illusion. It is this irreducibility which we must attempt to ground. More particularly, within the context of the logic of the perfections required by transcendental analogy, Thomas, who ‘considers the emanation of the word in the intellect in the act of knowing as a perfection in itself independent of its more or less deficient conditions’,45 logically

44. Cf. Joseph de Finance, Ê tre et agir dans la philosophie de saint Thomas (Paris: Beauchesne et Ses Fils, 1945), pp. 72–8. 45. Floucat, L’intime fé condité , p. 100.

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tends to regard as negligible the linguistic aspect of thought: in this way we try him unjustly, without due process. The theory of language that philosophers attempt to reconstruct from St. Thomas’s texts always oscillates between (1) an entirely operative conception of the sign and the concept which considers the sign under the category of relation and (2) an entirely ‘resultative’ conception which tends to think of the sign and concept under the category of substance. In the first case, the word is pulverized and swept away from a philosophical discourse which regards speech as transparent to the real. In the second, the word is more or less assimilated to the concept, without properly understanding which one occasions the other. We should regard the being of the word as being between the pure intellect in act and the real thing to be known. If Thomists do not undertake a theoretical account of the word, as Thomas himself did not, this is undoubtedly because for them the status of the word is grounded in practice. Finally, what is most striking is the dialectical aspect of the discovery of the word through the inspiration of Trinitarian dogma: we should first establish its existence independently of the noetic methods recognized by philosophy up until now. Secondly, we must lighten its ontological weight as much as possible so that it may become essentially pure relation. Here the aim is to maintain both the spiritual immanence of knowledge and its realist reference to a world external to the mind. Thomism runs two risks in this project. On the one hand, it risks envisioning the internal word as a sign or of placing something like a word in the internal word (for the sake of ensuring its ontological weight). On the other hand, it risks pulverizing the ontology of knowledge by denying all semiotic and representational dimensions of the word in the hope of preserving the realism of knowledge. The Thomist tradition has run these two risks consecutively.

Three Thomist Traditions on the Ontology of the Internal Word The Classical Thesis of the Instrumental Sign and Virtual Transitivity To avoid the first risk, ‘classical’ Thomism understood the word to be a mental qualification related to the species and was then forced to give to it the lightest ontological status possible. To this end, it elaborated, especially for the sake of the verbum, the notions of ‘formal sign’ and ‘virtual transitivity’! While claiming to be expositing St. Thomas, John of St. Thomas46 follows Cajetan and attempts to demonstrate against Scotus that the operation of the understanding is the expression and production of a word inasmuch as this formation through transitivity is subordinated to the very understanding on

46. John of St. Thomas, Cursus theologicus, vol. IV (Paris: Solesmes, 1953), q. 27, disp. 32, art. 5, p. 90, § 77: ‘Eadem operatio quae est intelligere, est expressio et productio verbi, quatenus ista formatio subordinatur ipsi intelligere et ab eo dependet.’

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which it depends. By following this path, we end up with the following conception of the word: Thought is being, not production; it is pure quality, not a movement. To restrict it to the production of the concept is to disqualify it as an immanent activity. Considered in isolation and not per se, the internal expression of what is thought may appear as an efficient, transitive action essentially related to a term distinct from itself … . Thus thought and the expression of what is thought are fused in a single act, at once immanent and productive – primarily immanent, since the production of the concept has thought for its end – in which immanence and productivity are distinct only as two modalities of that act. And if it seems difficult to accept that a pure quality – which is what immanent action is – may be confused with any kind of production, we should remember that bringing together in one and the same reality the antinomic pair of efficiency and quality is precisely the ontological privilege of immanent activity.47

John of St. Thomas will elaborate the notion of a formal sign precisely in order to think through this metaphysical ‘privilege’, the same formal sign whose enigmatic character we observed in the previous chapter when we sought to apply it to the exterior word. ‘As a formal sign, the word – “first known (in a priority of nature not of time)” – “is not the thing known, but the form of knowledge”, such that “to be know is, for him, an intrinsic denomination, because its entire essence and its entire “being known” is to render the signified present to knowledge.’48 Yves Floucat, who will inspire us throughout this chapter, expresses very well the great difficulty of having to admit such a privilege if we want to maintain the desideratum of realism: If it is truly constituted by a kind of transitivity, the word cannot be a pure relation: it is rather a thing internally produced, capable of qualifying the intellect which knows it, in the order of res intellecta; otherwise stated, it is an absolute which is additionally relative, what St. Thomas calls a relation by denomination secundum dici, and not a relation by state or secundum esse.49

One could interpret the elaboration of the idea of a formal sign as an attempt to relativize it, to turn it into a pure intention whose entire essence is to signify. The realism of understanding ‘can only be preserved and ensured by the objective

47. Yves Simon, An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Knowledge (trans. Vukan Kuic and Richard J. Thompson; New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), pp. 134–5. 48. Floucat, L’intime fé condité , pp. 151–2. The author cites Jacques Maritain, Quatre essais (Paris, Saint-Paul, Fribourg: É ditions universitaires de Fribourg, 1983), p. 109. 49. Floucat, L’intime fé condité , pp. 109–10; references in the text have been removed.

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transparency of the mental word in a cognitive and intentional relation of the sign to the signified’.50 One cannot follow this path and end up discerning, both from the point of view of being and of knowing, the purely relative essence of the word. In fact, when the word is primarily presented in its being as a determination of the soul and as a formal sign in the order of knowing, it will only ever be a res (accidental), a res which – for our noetic ends only – is also relative by denomination.51

The Contemporary Thesis of the Operated Act The failure to think through virtual transitivity naturally leads thinkers who want to be realists to move away from the noetic and the semiotic realms in order to concentrate on ontology. With them we should note that St. Thomas himself was not misled by the notion of the sign. In fact, Aquinas only used the notion of the sign with great prudence as regards the mental word. He appears to have admitted the legitimacy of the usage, but in a broad and improper sense. Following Aristotle, he attributes to the external word the function of directly being the sign of the object that the intellect apprehends in conceiving it. And he adds that what he calls here the internal word – specifically “the model (exemplar) of external speech ... , which is in the likeness of the voice” – has more the character of a sign than an exterior word. Finally, judgment amounts to a sign by virtue of the composition that constitutes it. In fact, this composition is the sign of the identity of the reunited elements which, in the real, are the distinct determinations similar to a subject. The vocabulary of the sign in relation to what the intellect knows, at least in a broad sense, is thus not totally foreign to St. Thomas. It is for him a means of explaining the reason for the objective intentionality of the mental word. Nevertheless, he hardly lingers on it for long, and even less does he highlight the essential relativity of this intentio intellecta … . The intentionality of knowing includes, for St. Thomas, a double relativity, noetic and ontological, which in reality is only one. Maintaining the single criterion of the sign and of intentionality of objective function entails omitting that which grounds the realism of the act of intellection, specifically, at the heart and at the end of the immanence of the intelligere, the pure, essential and intentional relativity of the objectification of the real in the proffering of the word.52

50. Floucat, L’intime fé condité , p. 148. 51. Ibid., p. 151. 52. Ibid., pp. 151–3.

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In this perspective, the entitative immanence of the known in the power of knowing, the immanence of the object in the knowing subject through the mode of likeness or representation and according to an intentional being, would be a metaphor, a mere way of speaking … . However, ambiguous his language, for St. Thomas everything takes place not according to quiddity or substance but as regards the work or the act.53

At the risk of reducing Thomas’s thought to an essentialism, André de Muralt remarks, It would be better … to reject the image of the representational immanence of the object in the subject of knowledge and to substitute for it the expression of the formation of the intellectual power by the intelligible form of the real thing, that is to say, the expression of the actuation of the intellectual power by the intelligible form of the real thing as the formal objective cause of intellection.54

There is not an intelligible or intellected species ‘in’ the knower in the way that a form exists qualitatively in a physical subject. Instead, the species is nothing other than the operative formal objective cause acting immediately and by itself on the intellect that considers it. The sufficient formal reason of the cognitive similitude remains in this actuation, this operative information in esse intelligibili, of the power by its object. The species is thus not a representation which ‘intentionally’ refers to the real object known.55

The problem here is thus the reverse of that of the formal sign, as one neglects the two experiential reasons, emphasized by St. Thomas himself, which render necessary the concept of a representational word which is different from the mere reception of the species. First, the fact that the intellect knows an absent thing and a present thing indifferently presupposes a permanence of the objectivity of knowledge which is greater than the mere physical presence of reality. This leads to the clarification that the species is that through which the mind knows while the word alone is that in which the mind knows: there is nothing more contrary to Thomism than an ultra-realist representation of knowledge as the brute contact of the mind and being! Consequently, the intellect has the capacity to know the thing separated from its material conditions (without which it does

53. Ibid., p. 44. 54. André de Muralt, L’enjeu de la philosophie mé dié vale. É tudes thomistes, scotistes, occamiennes et gré goriennes (Leiden, New York and Cologne: Brill, 1993), pp. 94–5. 55. Mauralt, L’enjeu, pp. 96–7.

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not really exist), which the intellect could not have if it were not formed from a word which is immaterial and immanent to thought in which to know it. The word is aliud quam species; it alone is the end or term of the operation of knowing of which the species is the principle. The State of the Question The metaphysician strenuously attempts to avoid the two symmetrical excesses described here in order to maintain both the representational dimension of the interior word and its complete transparency to the real. We could summarize this position in a paradoxical phrase: to know is to speak without words. It is first to speak. ‘When someone knows something, and from the very fact that he knows, something proceeds within him: namely, the concept of the thing known which proceeds from the knowledge of the thing. Understanding could thus not be achieved without a word.’56 The activity of the thinking mind is assimilable to speech. Now when the mind turns itself to the actual consideration of any habitual knowledge, then a person speaks to himself; for the concept of the mind is called ‘the interior word.’ (loquitur aliquis sibi ipsi, nam ipse conceptus mentis interius verbum vocatur).57

However, the intelligere and the dicere remain distinct: Nam intelligere importat solam habitudinem intelligentis ad rem intellectam; in qua nulla ratio originis importatur, sed solum informatio quaedam in intellectu nostro, prout intellectus noster fit in actu per formam rei intellectae. In Deo autem importat omnimodam identitatem, quia in Deo est omnino idem intellectus et intellectum, ut supra ostensum est. Sed dicere importat principaliter habitudinem ad verbum conceptum nihil enim est aliud dicere quam proferre verbum. Sed mediante verbo importat habitudinem ad rem intellectam, quae in verbo prolato manifestatur intelligenti. For ‘to understand’ means only the habitude of the intelligent agent to the thing understood, in which habitude no trace of origin is conveyed, but only a certain information of our intellect; forasmuch as our intellect is made actual by the form of the thing understood. In God, however, it means complete identity, because in God the intellect and the thing understood are altogether the same, as was proved above. Whereas to ‘speak’ means chiefly the habitude to the word conceived; for ‘to speak’ is nothing but to utter a word. But by means of the

56. Floucat, L’intime fé condité , p. 93. 57. Aquinas, ST 1, 107, 1.

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word it imports a habitude to the thing understood which in the word uttered is manifested to the one who understands.58

Floucat comments, To speak, as such, does not encapsulate what the act of understanding comprises: to understand is not reduced to conceiving, although there is no understanding without saying. The diction proceeds from the very heart of understanding. It allows the understanding to accomplish and achieve in its goal by giving it its object. It is only in and through the word that the extra-mental thing itself can be objectivized in order to be actually known.59

But it is a matter of speaking without words. Thomas never ‘advances the idea that dicere would be, properly speaking, a productive activity, a form of transitivity. On the contrary, diction, which he considers a necessary condition for intellection to attain its objective goal, primarily seems to him to be the accomplishment of the immanence of knowing and of the communication of intelligible forms which is inherent to it.’60 St. Thomas is not tempted, as Duns Scotus appears to have been, to confuse the pure spiritual vitality of the intelligere with a form of transitivity. Without a doubt the intellect should be informed by its object, and thus identified with it in the first act, so that it can intentionally be assimilated to it in the final act. However, it is in reality, in itself, a potentia activa whose action is in no way transitive, since it does not consist of transforming or constructing its object, but is immanent, since it does not terminate in an external object but in the agent himself, as the vision in the one who sees.61 Thus, the diction of the word is nothing other than an emanation or an internal conception by which it communicates, in and through the act of intellection, such and such determination of the thing known. The dicere as an emission of a

58. Aquinas, ST 1, 34, 1 ad 3. 59. Floucat, L’intime fé condité , p. 93. Josef Pieper stated decisively that ‘the Ancients’ ‘gave the inner fruit of the process of cognition, that which the knowing subject forms in its act of cognition, the name of a “word”, of a “verbum cordis”, of something soundlessly spoken. Of course, the vocable “interior word” is not what matters here. On the other hand, there is certainly no question of mere trivial allegorization; the decisive point is the conviction that one simply misses and falsifies the phenomenon of human speech if one does not see its complex structure. The first stage of speech is that basic existential act which we call cognition and elucidation of reality.’ Josef Pieper, ‘The Meaning of “God speaks”’, The New Scholasticism: Journal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 43:2 (Spring 1969): 205–28 (here p. 214). Second set of italics added. 60. Floucat, L’intime fé condité , p. 106. 61. Ibid., p. 107.

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verbum cordis is the figure realized from the communication of a form, which is made by an immanent action and in the order of the mind.62

At the end of these meticulous analyses, we may remain perplexed about what gives us the authority to maintain that we should affirm the word’s pure transparency. The definition of the interior word at which we have arrived is clear: the word is purely and simply the goal of the intellectual act whose principle is the species; it is not a being in itself, nor even an in itself which would be relative to something else, but a pure relation, a relativum secundum esse. By its esse in it resides in the subject in the act of knowing to the extent to which this esse in is identical with the very being of the intellectual act which constitutes it as its own immanent end. By its esse ad, it confers on the knowing subject itself its realization or its perfection in the immanence of intellection (actus perfecti) by connecting it to the principle of its act, namely, the thing rendered present to the intellect by the species intelligibilis.63

Some precautions are necessary, however, to ensure that the word is purely ‘the goal of the intellectual act whose principle is the species’ and ‘not a being in itself, nor even an in itself which would be relative to something else, but a pure relation, a relativum secundum esse.’ One should distinguish it from judgement,64 as well as from definition,65 but without identifying it with the understanding itself.66

62. Ibid., p. 86. 63. Ibid., p. 96. 64. ‘Assuredly, for St. Thomas, the judgment is, in a derivative sense, a verbum, because only it allows us to reach the truth of knowledge. But insofar as it presupposes composition and division, it is – like reason – part of the limit of the human mode of conceiving, and not of the understanding in itself, which is nothing other than a relation to the known object means of assimilation and union. This process is only achieved in the conception of a word.’ Floucat, L’intime fé condité , p. 96. 65. ‘Aquinas designates by verbum or conception what the intellectual operation achieves. But this achievement can be of two kinds: a definition, the product of simple abstraction, or a judicative enunciation resulting from composition and division. St. Thomas indeed knows that “the perfection of the intellect is the truth known insofar as it is known” and that “truth is in the intellect which composes and divides, that is to say, as it judges; truth is not in the senses and it is not in the intellect apprehending the quiddity.” And judgements intend the very being [esse] since “it is the being [esse] of the thing, not its truth, which causes the truth of the intellect”’; Floucat, L’intime fé condité , pp. 129–30. The author cites and translates ST 1, 16, 2 and ST 1, 16, 1, ad 3, respectively. 66. ‘The word is extrinsic to the very being of the intellect [extrinsecum ab esse ipsius intellectus, et quasi passio ipsius], since knowing is an accident. However, it is not exterior to the act of intellection [non tamen extrinsecum ab ipso intelligere intellectus], but it is only distinguished from this operation by being in its own immanence, and as constituted by

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The question that is inevitably posed before these three great attempts to grasp the pure noetic and ontological immanence of the interior word, its purely relative essence, is the question of its existence! What exactly is the word which is neither the thing, nor the representation, but which I must say is the object of my knowledge? At the end of our analyses of knowledge, all shaped by the language they have mobilized, it seems to disappear behind a postulate of pre-verbal, pure thought. We seem to have forgotten that we would have to fabricate this thing which is a discourse or a text in order to say ‘this unimaginable perfection: to exist’ as a pure and simple relation, and that the ‘materiality’ of this thing ballasts the purity of the relation and the transparency of the presence. In this presentation of the noetic, the word certainly has its own reality, but to reach it involves employing the rhetoric of the ineffable and of presence. Does this rhetoric not show how subtly entwined are the subject of enunciation and the grammatical subject (the ‘I’ or the ‘we’) of its utterances? We agree that thought is ‘globally’ present in a deep form; that ‘a sort of interior comparison is sometimes made in difficult areas of study between the “primitive level” and concepts (which themselves are expressed in speech and in writing)’; that ‘the primitive level shows its reality by rejecting concepts insufficient to its own riches and singularity’; that ‘“deep thought” [guides] this work of conceptualization and [that] the latter passes into words’; one can certainly admit that the ‘interior word is thought “being made”, not ex nihilo, but rather from an intellectual seed. Plato has already analysed this “inner dialogue of the soul with itself without any words which we call thought.”’67 But this inchoate and imperfect state of thought could never result in a ‘word’ which would be a sufficient basis for an analogy in divinis! In addition, the paradoxical fact that analyses which want to establish the existence of thought without language require a deal many words to praise the ineffable hardly seems to prove much more – and it is already too much in our dualist culture – than the necessity of a general substrate prior to all verbalization. ‘The true obstacle to accepting thought without language’, writes Dominique Laplane for example, would be that ‘it is counter-intuitive. Indeed, the normal brain does not function by compartments, and when we try simply to reflect on non-verbal thought words quickly rush in. We could attempt to doubt their existence, but we would not even be able to imagine what this could mean. This “understandable” argument has, however, little weight in the face of the

it, its own proper end [quasi quoddam per ipsam constitutum]. Understanding could not be achieved without it [ipsum intelligere compleri non possit sine verbo praedicto]: it would be purely and simply object-less, since the intellect can relate to the thing only through the interior conception [qua mediante refertur ad rem].’ Floucat, L’intime fé condité , p. 158; cf. De potentia, 8, 1. 67. We take all these expressions from Louis Millet, ‘Le langage’, in La Pensé e catholique nº 279 (Paris: Editions du Cedre, 1995), pp. 26–43 (here p. 35). The author provides the following references: Plato, Sophist, 263e; Theaetetus 190a; Philebus 39c-e.

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evidence of neuro-psychological observation and experimentation.’68 In spite of these pretentions to experimental evidence, we should note that his ‘connectivist hypothesis’ – not ‘that thought is entirely pre-formed before its formulation, but that language completes a thought already largely elaborated’69 – is supported by experiments which deal with ‘artificial life’.70 The fabrication of ‘neural networks’, machines made of computational units assembled together by a network, etc., allows us to explore schematization, or the work of imagination on the phantasms, but not the understanding. These are necessary for thinking but are not yet thought. There can be no question of schematization in divinis! Laplane borrows from Wittgenstein a definition of the concept as a ‘family resemblance’ between the elements that it includes,71 and claims ‘that we can think that an aphasic has kept this family resemblance in his neural network’. Finally, the case of the memories of the aphasic72 (the most telling experimental evidence uncovered by Laplane) is not conclusive, for it is only in retrospect, only when we return to speech, that we can affirm the riches of what was ‘thought’ without language. Louis de Bonald already argued some time ago: We only know how to think by having words in the mind, just we can say of the one who speaks that he has thoughts on his lips; the person cannot think of material objects without having in himself the image which is the expression or representation of these objects, and he cannot think of incorporeal objects which do not fall directly under any of the senses without mentally having in himself the words which are the expression or representation of these thoughts and which become discourse when he makes them understood to others. JeanJacques Rousseau has understood this well. ‘When the imagination stops’, he says, ‘the mind only advances with the help of discourse’; which means that we can only think by means of words while we cannot think by means images.73

68. Dominique Laplace, ‘La pensé e sans langage’, É tudes 3943 (March 2001), pp. 345–57 (here p. 348). See by the same author, La pensé e d’outre-mots: La pensé e sans langage et la relation pensé e-langage (Paris: Institut Synthé labo pour le progrè s de la connaissance, 1997); ‘Comment expliquer les performances intellectuelles des aphasiques? Controverse: existe-t-il pensé e sans langage’, La Recherche, 325 (November 1999), pp. 62–7. 69. Laplace. ‘La pensé e sans langage’, p. 356. 70. Cf. Francisco Varela, Autonomie de la connaissance: Essai sur le vivant (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1989). 71. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (trans. G. E. M. Anscombe; Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 72. Cf. the cases of Dr. Saloz, author of a famous autobiographical account of an aphasia, and of Professor Lordat, Mé moire d’un aphasique, cited in Laplace, ‘La pensé e sans langage’, p. 354. 73. de Bonald, ‘De l’origine du langage’, p. 75.

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The Causes of These Divergences Rather than wanting to resolve theoretically the dialectic between representation and relation, between noetic and the metaphysical and between the interior and the exterior which is inspired by the question of the mental word, perhaps it would be more valuable to establish a certain rhetorical distance and attempt to describe the causes behind this dialectic. In the same way that we earlier tried to understand and account for the absence of a definitive theory of the sign or of language in St. Thomas, we will now ask why thinking about the word is inevitably structured in a dialectical fashion. We should begin by highlighting the theological background of this thought. Ever since Saint Augustine, the revelation of the incarnate divine Word seems to have been the occasion, but not necessarily the cause, of the discovery of the word of the human mind. An exegetical question from the sacred text (the designation of the Son as Word in the New Testament writings) spurs on Thomas to find the word on the natural level, and so there arises a dialectic of the revealed and of the naturally knowable. When Paissac invokes Plato, however, he seems to be drawing on a non-revealed source with his purpose being to explore the Thomasian manifestation of the revelation of a Word in God. But revelation was already there and present even while being (methodologically) ignored.74 Plato acknowledged the paternity of the divine intellect ‘independently of the readings that he could have made of the books of the Old Law found by him in Egypt’.75 The word exists before the Word speaks, but it is the speech of the Word which pushes the human understanding to a more vivid awareness of the presence of the word in itself. We can wonder if what the metaphysician describes is nothing more than the relation of the word to its principle when saying that it is ‘nothing but the pure object’, or if she has been drawn to this ‘natural’ reality, unperceived until now, through the revealed use of the term. We would maintain that revelation has often advanced philosophy by helping the human understanding discover swathes of reality that would have remained undiscovered without it. The event of the revelation of the Infinite often helps to illuminate knowledge of the finite just as a word revealed by the invisible allows for the discovery of the visible. From the ideas of nature or persons which form

74. When Paissac writes after having discussed the ‘Trinity’ found by Augustine in the soul (mind, word and love) that ‘The word discovered in this way, with the mind and its love, enables us to understand, as far as is possible, the mystery of the second Person. But we do not have to reach the Word through the name revealed by Holy Scripture; supposing that St. John never spoke of the Word, the observation of the image of God within humanity could have led to this intimate word of the mind’ (p. 50), he confuses the order of revelation and that of natural knowledge: if it is true that the image of God in humanity is independent of the knowledge that human beings have, it is not true that it could be known as such (as image) without divine revelation. 75. Aquinas, 1 Sent, 3, 1, 4, ad 1.

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the foundations of the ethical to the key concepts of right and politics,76 we can observe that numerous realities from the context of dogmatic theological or moral speculation (and in particular in Christology) are now considered the shared goods of philosophy. Yet we should confess that the ‘essentially relative mental word’ we have attempted to explore here still remains profoundly enigmatic and difficult to define, which should readily help to explain the diversity of Thomistic speculations on the subject! The Intersected Foundation of the Theory of the Word and Its Expression The first phenomenon to acknowledge is the presence of external language in the very expression of the theory of the word. The debates among Thomists on the interior word perhaps stem from not considering language carefully enough, which prevents an adequate account of the intersected foundation which exists between the mental word and the expressed word. Two series of givens present themselves. One the one hand, there is the theological necessity of having an absolutely pure immanence of knowledge (which is otherwise confirmed by the ordinary concomitance of thought and the object thought in the act). This necessity is concretely imposed by a text, that of the Scriptures. On the other hand, there is the evidence of the secondary character of the theory of the mental word in relation to the existence of articulated language (it is accounting for this that leads us to emphasize the problem of expression and to develop a theory of virtual transitivity). In the very imposition of the term ‘interior word’, external language brings its whole weight to bear: all Thomists distinguish between the ‘word of the heart’ (the thought of reality before it is tied to any sound-image, the flow of knowledge which does not belong to any language); the ‘interior word’ (the internal discourse which contains the ‘image’ of the sound); and the ‘external word’ (articulated speech and audible sounds). Contemporary linguistics poses to this theory this question: ‘Are there not already words in the internal word?’ The logical response is at first ‘no’, because the internal word is the same for every person regardless of their language. But the very name of the word invites

76. In Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), John Milbank argues that much of one’s concrete experience of life within society had to be ignored and excised for the sake of developing ‘scientifically’ a ‘natural human being’, a ‘social reality’, a ‘secular society’. Conversely, he develops a conception of the social bond which integrates the supernatural vocation of the concrete person and demonstrates not only that it does not corrupt one’s condition of being natural, rational and social, but even grounds it. Cf. also Farhad Khosrokhavar, L’instance du sacré , essai de fondation des sciences morales (Paris: Cerf, 2001); Antonio Padoa-Schioppa (ed.), Legislation and Justice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), which shows how ecclesial models helped to inform national constitutions; and William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination: Christian Practices of Space and Time (Edinburgh and New York: T&T Clark, 2002).

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further attention: does not the linguistic dimension present in the discovery/ imposition of the name ‘word’ contaminate its reference in pure thought? Even as regards the ‘word’, Thomas recalls that the effect through which the thing to be named affects the speaker matters more than nature itself in the giving of names: Et ideo, quia verbum exterius, cum sit sensibile, est magis notum nobis quam interius secundum nominis impositionem, per prius vocale verbum dicitur verbum quam verbum interius, quamvis verbum interius naturaliter sit prius, utpote exterioris causa et efficiens et finalis. Consequently, since the exterior word is sensible, it is more known to us than the interior word; hence, according to the application of the term, the vocal word is meant before the interior word, even though the interior word is naturally prior, being the efficient and final cause of the exterior.77

This is why the ‘word’ in question participates in speaking just as much as in knowing, and in this way it is possible to confuse the word of the heart and the interior word. The internal word, which is identical to what St. Thomas calls … the word of the heart, corresponds to the ultimate phase of the act of knowledge, which the same author names the intentio intelligibilis: ‘the intelligible intention is that which the mind knows in itself of the thing that it knows … . It is a likeness that the 77. Aquinas, de veritate, 4, 1. Louis Lachance translates this text and the following one: ‘It is the final cause, indeed, because we use the exterior word to manifest the interior. Hence, the interior word is that which is expressed by the exterior. Moreover, the exterior word signifies that which is understood, not the act of understanding, nor the habit or faculty, as the objects of understanding, unless the habit and the faculty are themselves the things that are understood. Consequently, the interior word is what is understood interiorly. Again, the interior word is the efficient cause of the word spoken exteriorly, for, since the meaning of a word is arbitrary, its principle is the will – just as the will is the principle of other products. Moreover, just as there preexists in the mind of a craftsman a certain image of his external work, so also does there pre-exist in the mind of one who pronounces an exterior word a certain archetype of it. Consequently, just as we consider three things in the case of a craftsman, namely, the purpose of his work, its model, and the work now produced, so also do we find a threefold word in one who is speaking. There is the word conceived by the intellect, which, in turn, is signified by an exterior vocal word. The former is called the word of the heart,  uttered but not vocalized. Then there is that upon which the exterior word is modeled; and this is called the interior word which has an image of the vocal word. Finally, there is the word expressed exteriorly, and this is called the vocal word. Now, just as a craftsman first intends his end, then thinks out the form of his product, and finally brings it into existence, so also, in one who is speaking, the word of the heart comes first, then the word which has an image of the oral word, and, finally, he utters the vocal word’; de veritate, 4, 1; Louis Lachance, Philosophie du langage, pp. 106–7.

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intellect knows of the thing known, and that the words pronounced outwardly reveal’; ‘it follows from this that the intention is called the interior word, which is revealed by the external word’. The word of the heart is thus at the junction of knowing and of saying: it belongs to two domains as the fruit of thought destined to be proffered.78

If it is true that we name a thing from its effects and that the internal word is known through the exterior word, then it is also true that an external word is needed in order to say that the internal word is known through the exterior word. The whole problem consists of interconnecting the two. For Thomas, the internal word is the final cause for the voice which attempts to express it, and it is also the efficient cause inasmuch as it is by convention (which presupposes an act of the will) that the exterior word signifies something: Efficiens autem, quia verbum prolatum exterius, cum sit significativum ad placitum, eius principium est voluntas, sicut et ceterorum artificiatorum; et ideo, sicut aliorum artificiatorum praeexistit in mente artificis imago quaedam exterioris artificii, ita in mente proferentis verbum exterius, praeexistit quoddam exemplar exterioris verbi. Again, the interior word is the efficient cause of the word spoken exteriorly, for, since the meaning of a word is arbitrary, its principle is the will – just as the will is the principle of other products. Moreover, just as there preexists in the mind of a craftsman a certain image of his external work, so also does there pre-exist in the mind of one who pronounces an exterior word a certain archetype of it.79

The exemplar which pre-exists the word uttered in words seems to be nothing other than the signified itself, while the signification, understood as the production of the sign, is the intermediary stage: Et sicut in artifice praecedit intentio finis, et deinde sequitur excogitatio formae artificiati, et ultimo artificiatum in esse producitur; ita verbum cordis in loquente est prius verbo quod habet imaginem vocis, et postremum est verbum vocis. Now, just as a craftsman first intends his end, then thinks out the form of his product, and finally brings it into existence, so also, in one who is speaking, the word of the heart comes first, then the word which has an image of the oral word, and, finally, he utters the vocal word.

At this point in our reflections we might be tempted to respond to the initial question by saying that just as there is no bronze in the idea of the sculptor who

78. Thomas Aquinas, Questions disputé es sur la vé rité : question IV, Le Verbe (ed. Bernadette Jollè s; Paris: Vrin, 1992), p. 100 n. 22; the author cites SCG IV, 11. 79. Aquinas, de veritate, 4, 1.

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imagines his statue, so also there are no words in the interior word. In addition to being a misunderstanding of the concrete experience of the artistic creation, such an attitude displays an insensibility to the poetic specificity of language.80 By thinking the genesis of speech on the model of artistic production in the first half of his work, Thomas seems to ‘substantialize’ an exemplary word between the non-verbal signified and the speech uttered. We would be wrong to take as a psychological reality what is primarily an analogical intuition (knowledge of nature must resemble that of art), a theological induction (revelation uses the word ‘Word’ to designate a divine Person, and because we name things according to the way we know them, then there must be a corresponding natural reality), and a logical deduction (all human beings think the same reality even if they do not speak the same language). In his own use of speech, Thomas does not distinguish very precisely the verbum cordis and verbum interius (that is, between ‘pure’ thought and verbalized thought81). Thomas, who dictates his works, is just as aware as the German Romantics that the idea comes from speaking. What does he mean when he speaks of the word of the heart? Does it have more reality than simply being a theoretical bit within the project of clarifying Trinitarian dogma? Which of the two ‘words’ is the effect of the other? Is it not the suggestion of an interior word merely an effect of the exterior word? In fact, we could just as well call the exterior word an effect of the depths inherent within language: the existence of an inside and an outside. This effect is put to good use in the question St. Thomas devotes to the application of the noun ‘word’ in the Holy Trinity. The Doctor denounces as heretical the claim that ‘word’ can only be a metaphor when used for God inasmuch as this denies the substantial equality of the Persons. He then also shows that making ‘word’ a metaphor resolves nothing, because every metaphorical use of the noun ‘word’ is based on the idea of a manifestatio present in the compared reality. In fact, ‘word’ means the outflow or the source of a manifestation. If it means the source (manifestatum verbo), then we must postulate the existence of a word-outflow which manifests it. If it is the outflow (exterius manifestatur), then

80. Cf. Chapter 3 of this volume, ‘I am no writer’, for a discussion on language as artistic material. 81. If striving for clarity, the translator is forced to choose between the verbum cordis and the verbum interius when Thomas discusses the efficient cause of the external word and yet does not specify what he means by ‘interior word’. Lachance, for his part, writes: ‘It is pure fantasy to believe that there is, first the individuated nature, second nature in us, and third the word, the mirror which overflows it and in which we contemplate it. Without a doubt the word is altogether, depending on the aspect in which we consider it, a quod, a quo, and an in quo, but it does not follow from that that there are three terms in the problem. In fact there are only, namely, the nature outside us and the nature inside us, in the guise of the word of the imago. Once again, nature in ourselves and verbum are materially identical.’ Lachance, Philosophie du langage, p. 101.

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we must postulate the word-source that it manifests.82 In short, ‘word’ seems to transcend the distinction between the metaphorical and the proper, because the metaphysical reality that it intends, the manifestatio, covers the semantic or logical relationship of the proper and the figured in such a way that even the reality of the manifestatio or expressio always ends up invading the ‘fictional’, even in the metaphorical use of the term. Thomas explains that there are many different ways of interconnecting the traditional distinction between the three words: the word of the heart, pure relation without words; the interior word, imagined words; the exterior, articulated words. In fact, he is struck by the difficulty of thinking the intelligible word before the ‘imagination’ has clothed it so that it can be expressed. When citing the Damascene, he is forced on the one hand to conceive the intelligible word through the formal analysis of relation which enables one to postulate the real possibility of a pure relation, and on the other hand he must imagine it through images of light. This dialectic of the internal and the external as regards the word could be the source of the dialectics of the sign described in the previous chapter. It is, in fact, reverberated like an echo in the intersected foundation of oral speech and writing and in the very ‘spiritual’ image that we can make of them. The oral context in which he composed his works83 means that we should not expect to find any long meditation on writing as such in St. Thomas’s works. Yet St. Thomas was certainly not insensitive to the literary practice of medieval teaching, as Scripture formed the absolute and primary given and he was intimately familiar with the very concrete and highly quotidian contingencies of the writing desk. An echo of this primacy of Scripture in the Thomasian performance of speech seems to be present in the way in which the oral and the written are reciprocally grounded in the few texts which deal with writing. In a brief passage from his commentary on Peri Hermeneias, in the midst of discussions on the value of the practice of language, he offers his ‘discourse on the origin’ of writing: Si homo uteretur sola cognitione sensitiva, quae respicit solum ad hic et nunc, sufficeret sibi ad convivendum aliis vox significativa, sicut et caeteris animalibus, quae per quasdam voces, suas conceptiones invicem sibi manifestant: sed quia homo utitur etiam intellectuali cognitione, quae abstrahit ab hic et nunc; consequitur ipsum sollicitudo non solum de praesentibus secundum locum et tempus, sed etiam de his quae distant loco et futura sunt tempore. Unde ut homo conceptiones suas etiam his qui distant secundum locum et his qui venturi sunt in futuro tempore manifestet, necessarius fuit usus scripturae. If man had only sensitive cognition, which is of the here and now, such significant vocal sounds as the other animals use to manifest their conceptions to each other would be sufficient for him to live with others. But man also has 82. Cf. Aquinas, ST 1, 34, 1 and ad 1. 83. Cf. Elich, Le contexte oral de la liturgie mé dié vale et le rô le du texte é crit.

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the advantage of intellectual cognition, which abstracts from the here and now, and as a consequence, is concerned with things distant in place and future in time as well as things present according to time and place. Hence the use of writing was necessary so that he might manifest his conceptions to those who are distant according to place and to those who will come in future time.84

Writing is a system of signs derived from and based on the visual sense (which Thomas thinks is the sense closest to the intellect) and it enables the transmission of language, which is made up of transitory sounds, through different times and spaces.85 It has its origin in the intellectual faculty of surpassing the hic et nunc, and it can affect not only those within one’s own time and space but also those who are far beyond it. Thomas will speak of the vox significativa for some animals who use ‘words’ (voces) to express their conceptions (conceptiones). The intellect gives to the human voice the power to transcend space and time and writing is its necessary manifestation. In these terms, we could say that writing is the characteristic trait of the human voice and a sign of humanity.86 That the written enhances the oral can also be seen when Thomas observes that sounds, the informed matter, are impossible to put down in writing, which is not the case for nouns.87 We should add that Thomas freely alludes to the image of the ‘tabula in qua nihil est scriptum’88 in order to describe the process of knowledge. This metaphor already links written language to the activity of knowing, and by this Thomas avoids a radical ‘logocentrism’. If we continue reading the same passage, we soon find that the relation of the signifier to the signified in writing serves as the paradigm for understanding the relations of the word to the immediate passions of the soul such that we can even speak of ‘letters’ in the context of oral language. Dicuntur litterae etiam in prolatione et Scriptura, quamvis magis proprie, secundum quod sunt in Scriptura, dicantur litterae; secundum autem quod sunt in prolatione, dicantur elementa vocis. They are called letters in both speech and writing, although they are more properly called letters in writing; in speech they are called elements of vocal sound.89

84. Aquinas, In Peri herm, 1, 1, 2. 85. This thought is even more explicit in a different section of this commentary, which makes writing the distinctive characteristic of human signification; in a context strongly marked by Aristotle’s Parts of Animals, it appears as the proper thing of human beings in contrast to the cries of animals which cannot be written (cf. In Peri herm, I, 4). 86. Aquinas, In Peri herm, 1, 4. 87. Ibid. 88. Cf. Aquinas, ST 3, 9, 1. 89. Aquinas, In Peri herm, 1, 2.

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When preferring a more precise terminology – the difficulties of which he notes – Thomas goes on to say: ‘Nomina et verba quae scribuntur, signa sunt eorum nominum et verborum quae sunt in voce’.90 Plato observed in the Cratylus that letters end up taking on elements of speech: words are the atoms of discourse and the act of speaking becomes thought of as the production of a discourse which can be broken down into smaller entities. We find in Thomas an indication of this basic intersection of human speech and writing when he analyses the conventional character of language by starting from writing.91 Both the cause and effect of what comes to be said, we find in St. Thomas a highly spiritual image of both oral speech and writing: the voice itself wants to be devoted to a spiritual power (quaedam vis spiritualis).92 He also spontaneously situates writing on the side of intellectuality and the mind. For example, apropos of the necessity of material signs in the celebration of the sacraments, Thomas makes a curious distinction between ‘those who study books’ and sheer geniuses. Being educated is placed on the side of intellectuality and spirituality more so than on the side of sensibility, as if the signifier were pure transcendence; the order of litterae is entirely tied to that of the mind and opposed to the sensibilia signa!93 The Intersected Foundation of Verba and Word The linguistic dimension not only ‘contaminates’ the expression of a theory of the word but it ends up being manifested in the theory itself. To state a point we could not emphasize enough, the theory firmly establishes that it is necessary to speak in order to think and that it is necessary to reject as untenable any dissociation between intellection and conceptualization: to think and to express thought are two modalities of the same operation. Taking a broader view, however, we come to realize that the expression of what is thought can never be an action really distinct from thought itself. For although the immateriality of the object of thought in act, which constitutes the conceptual state of what is known, presupposes the exercise of thought, thought can be in act only with an object brought to such a state. Any sort of dissociation

90. Ibid. 91. Cf. Aquinas, In Peri herm, 1, 2. 92. Cf. Aquinas, ST 3, 62, 4, ad 1: ‘A spiritual power cannot be in a corporeal subject, after the manner of a permanent and complete power, as the argument proves. But there is nothing to hinder an instrumental spiritual power from being in a body; in so far as a body can be moved by a particular spiritual substance so as to produce a particular spiritual effect; thus in the very voice which is perceived by the senses there is a certain spiritual power, inasmuch as it proceeds from a mental concept, of arousing the mind of the hearer. It is in this way that a spiritual power is in the sacraments, inasmuch as they are ordained by God unto the production of a spiritual effect.’ 93. Cf. Aquinas, ST 3, 66, 10, c.

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between the act of thinking and the act of expressing what is thought would imply that there could be thought without an object or that becoming an object of thought could have its source in something other than thought itself.94

Here we find on the linguistic level the dialectic of the one and the many already encountered in the relationship between the notion of being and the experience of being: we must reflect upon beings in order to forge a concept of being, just as we must say words in order to perceive the reality of a word. It is well and good to maintain that there is a simple interior word, but we only ever grasp it through composite speech. For the sake of abstract analysis, we are constrained to disassociate the spontaneous and pre-reflective act of simple apprehension and the reflective act of the reditio completa which constitutes judgment. Concretely speaking, however, it is in the act of conceiving that the intellect reflects on its act, so as to be able – in the principle of judicative intellection – to compose (or divide) that which it conceives with the givens of previous knowledge. In this way the complex interior speech of judgment incorporates into its composition and division the interior, non-compound, word(s) issued from the abstraction. Additionally, it is not without the intermediary of discourse or of reason that human thought progresses from judgment to judgment, for it is indissolubly intellectus and ratio. The truth of the concluding judgment is reflexively and vitally perceived by virtue of its correlation to the principle, and ultimately to first principles.95

Finally, ‘in the complexity of interior speech, which brings intellection and its word to its highest point of generosity, there must be a communion, in a reflexive conformity to the reality of things, between the immanence of the mind in act and the intelligible actuality of its object. By its essence, it asks to be a speech of truth.’96 This irreducible dialectic of the complex and the simple ensures the realism of human thought. The necessity of passing through the succession proper to discourse, as the conceptual and judicative bi-polarity of our grasp of the truth, which witnesses, in the abstract and rational conditions of knowing, to the finality which directs the different moments of this process: the absolute respect for the object by the intellect to which it is unified intentionally, as well as the immanence of the thought in act. This multiplicity of intellectual acts indicates the limits and imperfections of human intelligere.97

94. 95. 96. 97.

Simon, An Introduction to the Metaphysics of Knowledge, p. 134. Floucat, L’intime fé condité , pp. 140–2. Ibid., p. 142. Ibid.

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The Necessity of Language for Thinking More fundamental still, the concept itself is only forged in the anvil of the mind by the blows of judgements. ‘Despite its presupposed authority in the order of specification’, the concept ‘is wholly intended for the existential realism of judgement in which our different and progressive conceptualizations wait to be adopted and assumed so that our thought is reflectively kept in proportion, correspondence or adequation with what is.’98 As Joseph de Finance wisely remarked: St. Thomas certainly did not admit that the concept is never given outside of the judicative synthesis, but he saw in judgment the act in which, by a distinctive movement of the mind, human knowledge is realized. Thus, if the true metaphysical method is to explain the imperfect by the perfect, should we not, in order to give an account of the simplex apprehensio, envision its essential ordination to the operation which ‘composes and divides’? Would the concept emerge from pure subjectivity, if it did appear, confusedly and implicitly, as the object of possible judgments? Even though St. Thomas has not articulated this, he seems to us that it nevertheless is consistent with his thought to attach, as did Kant, the concept to the synthetic activity of the spirit.99

Concretely speaking, ‘Simple apprehension’ is first produced within a judgment: it only arises on the occasion of the concrete object to which we refer at the same time by a very basic judgment of reality which can be explicit or implicit. And it is precisely in consideration of this judgment, at least implicitly and where it is always engaged, that the Scholastics sometimes attributed to it the privilege of logical truth.100

This primacy of the judgement in the development of concepts is clearly manifested in language, and the necessary recourse of intellectus to ratio has literary consequences. With Aristotle and against Plato, Thomas does not think that the forms of physical reality can subsist without matter: they are potentially intelligible. Being given the power to act requires the action of a being in act; the understanding itself ensures the actualization of intelligible objects by abstracting them from their material conditions. The reception of the intelligible form is produced under the effect of a twofold causality: that of the actuated form and that of the agent intellect. Thomas thinks there are two sources for human knowledge, 98. Ibid., p. 126. 99. de Finance, Ê tre et agir dans la philosophie de saint Thomas, p. 114. 100. Joseph Maré chal, Le point du dé part de la mé taphysique: Leç ons sur le dé veloppement historique et thé orique du problè me de la connaissance, part V, Le thomisme devant la philosophie critique (Paris: Alcan; Louvain: É ditions du Museum Lessianum, 1926), p. 302. Cf Aquinas, SCG I, 59.

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one sensible and the other intelligible, but he also affirms their interdependence, as the intellect does not actualize the form without material on which to operate any more than the form received informs the passive intellect without the agent intellect actualizing it. Thomas thus describes the relation of the understanding and of reality as a symbol. We must speak or write to describe the complementarity of the sensible and intellectual sources of knowledge. It is through words that I explain the question of the word, and if the understanding finds its source in the sensible, it also finds its culmination there. Thomas is well aware of the sensible inscription of the word-bearer of intelligibility; he knows the etymology ‘verum boans’ – ‘bellowing the truth’.101 The vocal or textual thickness of these mediatory events ensures the inscription of knowledge in the order of things, which is necessary for the Aristotelian concept of knowledge as identity or perfection. When the space of discourse is constituted in this way it becomes the very index or place of symbolic experience. This is why the theory of the ‘three words’ is more about the affirmation of the essentially poetic character of the most quotidian activities that exist, understanding and speaking, than it is about any naï ve belief in the effective separation of words and thought. St. Thomas’s question is less about language and thought than about language and truth. The Thomists who are interested in language sometimes come very close to this interpretation but do not seem to follow it to its proper conclusion and thus do not accept the verbal nature of thought: It is still important here to note the originality and transcendence of thought. When it judges, something new or something strange passes into the sphere of the sensible world: ‘intellectus incipit aliquid proprium habere quod res extra animam non habet.’ We should scarcely be surprised if we remind ourselves that the mind is not only a receptive capacity, but also an illuminative and transformative power.102

On the literary level, the discovery of the word demonstrates the irreducibility of discourse: we attempt to speak of the transparency of the understanding through

101. Cf. Aquinas, de veritate, 4, 1, 8: ‘Every noun especially signifies that from which it has been derived. But verbum (word) is derived either from verberatio aeris (a disturbing of the air) or from boatus (shout), so that verbum means simply verum boans (shouting what is true). Hence, this is what is especially signified by the noun verbum. Now, this cannot be said to be in God except metaphorically. Therefore, a word, properly speaking, is not in God.’ 102. Lachance, Philosophie du langage, pp. 67–8. The author cites De ver., 1, 3: the intellect begins to possess for its own something which the thing outside of soul does not.

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weaving a discourse which concretizes it. The issue here involves the ‘poetic é lan of the mind’,103 the poetic dimension of metaphysical knowledge itself. St. Thomas, however, strongly insists on the immanence of intellection, and at times he seems to describe an immediate vision of reality rather than an effort of abstraction.104 However, inasmuch as the interior word and articulated language are reciprocally grounded, then it is through making that I have access to the real. Thomas notes, with Cicero, that art is necessary for speculative knowledge as it mobilizes discourse.105 No less than ‘real’ being, language precedes me with all its objective resistance and through the activity of knowing I am engaged in a making, in the production of a discourse (even if that of ‘definition’) which is unquestionably new: ‘Thought grasps and is expressed to itself by relations without which it would never have existed … . The soul of its discourse, the light in which it constructs its immaterial web, originates in itself.’106 The recognition of the word follows the expression of its theory. More concretely, mathematicians know that ideal space only emerges when the lines and the points of an initial construction outline a geometric space.107 But

103. Marcel de Corte, ‘Ontologie de la poé sie’, Revue Thomiste 43 (1937): 361–91, and 44 (1938): 99–125 (here p. 376). 104. There exists for St. Thomas two types of abstraction: the first, similar to that which the empiricists would later envision, consists of separating some aspect of the sensible ‘by composition and division’. The other, however, consists of considering the universal ‘by a simple and absolute consideration’, as ‘when we think of an object without paying attention to another’; ‘to proceed in this way is to abstract the universal from a particular, or the intelligible from the image’; this is not a computation, but a change of method, of formal object, which allows the intellect to have a kind of vision of the specific essence of natural reality. Thomas does not use this term (he denies the possibility of an intellectual intuition for humanity), but how could we not relate this first apprehension of the real per modum simplicis et absolutae considerationis which leads the intellect to refer itself to already acquired universal principles? Then we have the process which nuances this first apprehension, under a mode similar to touching: cf. ST 1, 85, 1 ad 1. 105. For much richer clarifications, cf. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memories: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 65: ‘As he adapts these texts in his own thought, Thomas Aquinas addresses the three basic meanings of prudence given in Ad Herennium, Classical rhetoric had defined “the knowledge of an art” as one aspect of prudence, or what we might now call “know-how.” In his general discussion of the nature of virtue, Thomas considers the question of whether art (artifice) can be considered as relevant to speculative knowledge or only to mechanical knowledge. He responds that even purely intellectual activities require art.’ The author refers to this passage from the Summa among others: ‘Even in speculative matters there is something by way of work’; ST 1-2, 57, 3, ad 3. 106. Lachance, Philosophie du langage, p. 68. 107. Here we follow John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 125–30.

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since Immanuel Kant and his scheme/concept dualism, philosophers no longer seem to see that every concept only emerges through the linguistic mediation of humanity and the world, and that ideal meaning cannot be isolated from its material container through rational analysis: words will always be required for explaining the conceptual content of a word by placing it within a new network of referents. In other words, the concept is not immediately posited on the purely spiritual level. In concrete and observable human existence, there is initially a linguistic experience of indifference which is only determined and constituted gradually in the concept through the repetitive use of signs, in different contexts where they cannot be grasped, even abstractly, without the cluster of sensible perceptions which accompany them. We can now understand better why Jacques Maritain praised the metaphysician’s flesh! Reality is always already spoken. Nature never shows itself outside of convention and the arbitrariness of a cultural system of signs. Even if there are philosophical universes, they exist from ‘concrete universals’ produced by poetic judgement. The truth only appears in the repetition of a particular linguistic form, in the exchange between living speakers specific to their incarnate existence, in circumstances which embrace both the speakers and their listeners, and in this way truth thus turns out to be essentially traditional. This is why a certain ‘spirit of prophecy’ (Hamann) is necessary – something like the daemon of Socrates, composed of desire and recognition – to enable thought to leave the semantic labyrinth of all the previous uses of the terms it employs so as to disclose the possibility and novelty of what it attempts to know. One can certainly accept all of these claims without renouncing realism: the irreducibility of language and the metaphorical is one thing and the primacy of mystification is another. The former expresses nothing other than the essential implication of culture in human nature! Contrary to the presuppositions of ‘deconstructive’ philosophies, the irreducibility of linguistic and cultural mediation is not a fatality but a fact: human beings make signs and signs make human beings.108 At the horizon of corporeality and immateriality, human history perhaps develops on the ground of a fundamentally metaphorical grasp of the

108. It is the cultural manifestation, which theologians rarely take into account, of the adage well known among the ethicists who write on habitus: ‘we are both the parents and the children of our actions’; Jean-Louis Bruguè s, Dictionnaire de morale catholique (Chambray-lè s-Tours: CLD, 1991), p. 22. Nature and culture form a circle: ‘We are never in the situation of the pure possibility of culture, but no cultural actuality would be registered before one’s sense of its possibility, albeit this is only fully determined with the actuality itself ’. As the same author remarks, we can wonder whether Derrida sufficiently notes the impact of culture, a mixed reality in which contingency disputes necessity: it only appears as the illusion born of the trace, of a plentitude of natural sense. But nothing necessarily ties together the inevitable character of the sign and a complete indeterminacy: the whole of Derridean theory rests perhaps on a phantasmal vision of ‘nature’, if not an idealist prejudice towards it!

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universe.109 Perhaps the whole of culture, and above all human language, begins with this ‘original metaphorical tension’, concretized by the expressive gestures of the body, in which the cosmos is grasped as the history of a divine power whose presence constitutes a teleological imperative for human beings. The grandeur of the Judeo-Christian revelation is having never consented to the reduction of the divine presence to any idol, even to the written letter, of having never reduced metaphor to any synecdoche or metonym, in contrast to the pagan nations which fetishize their cultural productions. By their refusal to capture the divine in this way, by preserving intact the original metaphorical tension, the Israelites preserved both the meaning of divine transcendence and the knowledge of the fundamentally human character of cultural development. Is not this ‘original tension’ manifested in the paradoxes of (finding/inventing) the interior word, as it is simultaneously too divine to be human and too human to be divine? And is it not this idolatrous capture of the divine which is manifested in the modern reduction of thought and being to language? But if it is the case that the truth is essential ‘traditionally’ and requires the consensus of its speakers on ‘concrete universals’, on a ‘spirit of prophecy’, then we return to the ‘theological intention which presides’ over every doctrine of the word: ‘To release and to manifest that which our understanding, taken in the natural plentitude of its rational capacities of penetration and of comprehension, can receive light in the mystery of faith which is supernaturally received, confessed, celebrated and contemplated’.110 By introducing the metaphysics of the word, we hope to avoid the fideism of solely invoking the medieval or Christian worldview in order to explain St. Thomas’s reservations regarding a theory of signification or language, but it is to this that we finally return! What did the theory of the word clarify as regards the problem of language?

Conclusion It first clarifies the ‘problem’ by establishing its theological dimension and not simply its linguistic or philosophical ones. The progressive development of the theory of the word in St. Thomas and the history of its reception in Thomism situates the interior word at the junction of two intersected foundations: on the one hand, that of (the theology of) the divine Word and of (the metaphysics of) intellection – where the Word mobilizes a word! – and, on the other hand, that of language expressed and of thought presupposed without any words – where this word requires words! This observation naturally leads us to connect the common terms of these foundations: the divine Word itself and human language as such. It then outlines a firm line of two asymptotes between which all true thought regarding language must be situated: on the one hand, it is necessary to postulate

109. Cf. Milbank, The Word Made Strange, p. 73. 110. Floucat, L’intime fé condité , p. 79.

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a certain state of thought before language; on the other hand, spoken thought is ungraspable without language. If the problem concerns the ‘ontological validity of human speech’,111 one cannot resolve it without remaining faithful to these two points. On the psychological level, however, thought without language is but a fog: the form of thought is the formulation which speaks it. Nevertheless, as for its relation to language, the interior word seems to be like God: it is designatable more than nameable. (This is why St. Thomas performed similar linguistic analyses in terms of the modus impositionis and of suppositio for the One and for the other).112 Because we can never think except by expressing thoughts in discourse, the mental word will always elude demonstrative philosophical projects and can only be attained in a logic of suppositio! As in the case of God and of God, it is a matter of agreeing to move from the formulation to the act from which it emanates, which is deeper than mere verbalization. Moreover, the cases of verbum and that of deus are not separated: it is the whole metaphysical lexicon which is at stake: ‘There seems to be a frequent paradox in the history of metaphysics that as soon as the word is established, the thing itself has already disappeared – thus the “analogy of being” (in the fact of being), “ontology”, “subjectivity” – or it still remains quite far off – so “metaphysics”, etc.’113 More broadly still, There is not a word in our language whose immediate signification does not depend upon a transcendent signification contained in the former but impossible to grasp except as beyond. The terms ‘beyond’ and ‘transcendence’ are no exceptions. They suggest common, even superficial experiences, and only allude to the absolute by a meaning more primary and more interior to the terms than their immediate sense. Everything boils down to recognizing in these words, i.e., in the experiences that they gather together, a relation which is as

111. Gusdorf, Speaking (La Parole), p. 22. We are inspired here by the very beautiful book by Joseph Rassam, Le silence comme introduction à la mé taphysique (Toulouse: É ditions universitaires du Sud, 1988), pp. 20ff. 112. See the amusing linguistic analysis he offers in response to the objection that ‘verbum’, which is derived from verum boans, can only be said of God metaphorically, for God does not bellow (boare): ‘verbum (word) is derived from verberatio (a disturbing) or from boatus (shout) because of those who use it – not because of the thing it signifies’; de veritate, 1, ad 8). Is humanity able to name truthfully that which it does not entirely know? We discover the same dialectic of the known and the unknown in the responses of the eleventh argument of the same question. In these analyses, Thomas reaches the limit of the metaphorical through the consideration of the operation of signification. He moves from the level of the utterance to that of the enunciation; on this level, the evidence of the presence of God transcends all speech about him. 113. Jean-Luc Marion, ‘Saint Thomas d’Aquin et l’ontotheologie’, Revue Thomiste 95:1 (1995): 31–66 (here p. 43, n 26).

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impossible to deny as to define and which grounds all possibility of experience and definition.114

Finally, the twofold intersected foundations of the theory of the word encourage us not to reduce the problem of language to the traditional question of the relationships between thought and its verbal expression between words and things. When the problem is posed in these terms, we are directly led back to the impasse of allegory, relativism and finally of nihilism. This complex foundation obliges us to interrogate more deeply the relationship of discourse to truth. In its dialectic with the verba, the discovery of the verbum claims that speech is neither the cause nor the foundation of the truth that it transcribes, and that ‘that through which a word is true is not another word, but an act’.115 In its dialectic with the Verbum, the discovery of the verbum enables us to grasp that ‘every word presupposes a light that it could not create’.116 This also means that every word presupposes a silence, a time of interior turning to this light. Saying this is not to naively reprise the praise of the ineffable, nor to claim that the truth is outside of discourse, as if we had not firmly established the irreducibility of language. It is to discover that the truth can only be grasped by an act interior to discourse itself. ‘In relation to the word, the truth is both “intus et foris”’. This is similar to St. Thomas’s claims that knowledge of principles received from the sensible presupposes a light through which the principles are received, just as ‘fides ex auditu’ presupposes an ‘habitus fidei infusus’.117 Even before Christian truth itself it is necessary to experience the fact that Beyond the sound which strikes the ear there is a secret voice which speaks internally and that this spiritual and interior discourse is the true preaching without which everything that people say would be utterly useless … . St. Augustine speaks of this when saying: here, my brothers, a big secret, sacramentum magnum, the sound of speech strikes the ears, the master is within. Sonus verborum percutit, magister intus est.118

Finally, the intersected foundations of the theory of the interior word with language and with the theology of the divine Word perhaps does not say anything more than this: speech, the first of its kind among human values, is neither ideally transparent to the truth in its plentitude – to believe this would mean the deification

114. Pierre Fontan, Adhé sion et dé passement (Paris: Desclé e de Brouwer, 1952), p. 70. 115. Rassam, Le silence comme introduction à la mé taphysique, p. 27. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid., p. 29. Cf. Aquinas, De Trin, 3, 1: ‘Unde sicut cognitio principiorum accipitur a sensu, et tamen lumen quo principia cognoscuntur est innatum, ita fides est ex auditu et tamen habitus fidei est infusus.’ 118. Rassam, Le silence comme introduction à la mé taphysique, p. 29. The author liberally cites from Bossuet’s ‘Sermon sur la Parole de Dieu’.

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of humanity – nor total indeterminacy and submission to the arbitrariness of the passions – it would be better to say nothing at all in this case. At the horizon of the corporeal and the spiritual, of the relative and the absolute, speech is capable of truth because it participates in divine language. The question now is to understand how.

Chapter 10 THE EXISTENCE OF LANGUAGE AS A THEOLOGICAL QUESTION

We never reach human beings reduced to themselves. É mile Benveniste Problè mes de linguistique gé né rale Per fidem venitur ad cognitionem et non e converso St. Thomas Aquinas Summa theologiae ‘The idea of light merges with its function, and its function will remain obscure if it is not reflected upon. By contrast, the relationship of light with its ruler, the sun, is perceptually and mythologically clear.’1 We must say of the word what has been said so well of light. In the context of the theology of the Word,2 the theory of the word could be the linguistic/literary instantiation of the fact that ‘every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken’.3 By not offering and explaining a definition of the interior word, Thomas indicates that his ultimate aim is not so much demonstratio as it is the manifestatio of a reality and situation in which all human beings are always already engaged. 1. Monique Dixsaut, Platon et la question de la pensé e: É tudes platoniciennes I (Paris: Vrin, 2000), p. 135. 2. This relationship indicates the essential difference between Thomas Aquinas and broadly Hegelian projects: by insisting too heavily on the ‘productivity’ and creativity of the human mind, to the point of believing that the whole life of the intellect is only creative action, that the mind cannot turn itself towards what is not without running the risk of ‘alienation’, the Hegelian ‘spirit’ moves towards itself and the things which are offered to the understanding do not fructify it, but prevent it from finding and recognizing itself. See, for instance, Hegel’s discussion of ‘Common Ideas of Art’, in his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (trans. and ed. Sir Thomas Malcolm Knox; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 25–55. The poiesis of the Hegelian spirit does not attempt to lead nature to its fulfilment and perfection, as is the case in the world of St. Thomas. 3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes (trans. Alphonso Lingis; ed. Claude Lefort; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 266.

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The major difference between the ‘the idea, a relic of the word’ as a mental qualification and the word as an essentially relative emanation can be seen on the linguistic level in the gap between utterance and enunciation. It is as impossible to separate the word from the idea as the enunciation from the utterance in the hope of turning them into the objects of any exhaustive theory. The theory of the word establishes a discursive interval or a textual space around an object which it seems itself to generate through a series of logical, metaphysical or psychological propositions crystallized upon a primary theological given. This readily ensures that at the heart of Thomasian thought there is a ‘consent to language and to the internal conflict in which it places us’4 which the contemporary censors of ontology have recently criticized him for having forgotten. Ceaselessly reworked, the theory of the word was the way in which Thomas addressed what our age views as the problem of language. It was a resolutely theological undertaking. St. Thomas had a fine feeling for it: language is in being and insofar as it has being eludes speakers who think they can employ language as a pure vector for absolute and wordless thought; language is a priori excluded from any philosophical reduction. Unlike some of our contemporaries, the medieval theologian did not deem it necessary to be resigned to the absolute indeterminacy of language, and this was possible inasmuch as he neither took the theological dimension of the problem lightly nor denounced it as an illusion. The enunciator posits such a strict isomorphism between language and the real that there is no need for any systematic explanation of language for reflecting upon reality, and so we do not have to explain the presence of the source of enunciation in every utterance (in the form of a philosophy of the sign or of perfected language). Only faith in the Creator of both language and the real allows us to reconcile such a postulate with genuine realism.5 We will leave behind the (post)moderns whose suspicions have spurred on our reflections and led us to (re)affirm the presence of revelation in the face of their denials. This will hopefully enable to transition calmly into theology, which is one of the conditions for handling the ‘problem’ of language.

4. The rupture set into discourse by the theory of the verbum protects the Thomasian analogy against an overly general criticism sometimes levelled at it: ‘As a doctrine validating the truth of our language about God, that is, guaranteeing the adequacy of our judgments concerning the divine reality, analogy erases the internal conflict inherent to any discourse. However, this conflict cannot be resolved; rather, it must be managed – and precisely through the mediation of language: once we are able to say it, we are able to live it as the ever open place where the true nature of what we are in our relations with others and with God may become reality.’ Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (trans. Patrick Madigan and Madeleine Beaumont; Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1995), p. 41. In the context in which he was writing, Thomas used analogy to increase the rupture. 5. For more on this, see the Conclusion of La langue de l’ineffable, ‘Vers une semiologia maior: une structuration sacramentelle de la parole’, pp. 461–72.

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The Origin of Signification: A Theological Challenge A Reminder: The Permanence of Theology in ‘Deconstruction’ The philosophers of deconstruction have inadvertently helped us to understand that the major presuppositions of every realist theory of language are not linguistic but theological. In fact, just as they denounce metaphysics and theology as illusions when pointing out the irreducibility of language in reflecting upon being and God, so one can denounce their own denunciations as a sophism of bad faith – in the religious sense of the term! – by pointing out the irreducibility of theology in their denials of the religious foundations of speech. For example, the list of concepts and genres which Barthes and Derrida reject at the end of their analyses, including ‘truth’, ‘consciousness’, ‘doctrine and the kergyma’, is enough to show the (ir)religious dimension of ‘deconstruction’ and its avatars. These authors themselves say as much: the sign involves a theological vision of things; it is a universal fact, related to the organizing power of the language inasmuch as it designates, and it is also a particular fact within Hebraic-Attic civilization. In this way, we can find Judeo-Christian experiences of language in the background of all their theories. One needs only to peruse their texts to see that those who argue for the total indeterminacy of language have finally substituted a haunting absence for a fetishism of presence which imposes itself all the more as it is incessantly dismissed. This presence is none other than that of God, of the Speech of God. Most theoreticians of language think that we should ‘be honest and percipient enough to set the metamorphic insignificance, the arbitrariness of meaning, always open to deferral or to vacancy, against the fossilized authority of the Logos, of what deconstruction call “the logocentric order”’.6 Yet readings of Derrida are often inspired by ‘a “zero theology” of the “always absent”. The Ur-text is “there”, but made insignificant by a primordial act of absence. We think of that Torah imagined by certain Kabbalists, of a meaningfulness untouched by human speech, by human ambiguities of references or interpretation and, therefore, out of reach.’7 Their treatment of the word also seems to rest upon vestiges of transcendence and to use a masterfully concertized biblical and religious sounding board.8 It is not only the Word of God embodied in Holy Scripture which haunts contemporary language, but also the Word of God incarnated in Jesus Christ. The members of the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ movement have shrewdly observed that Derridean scepticism, for example, can be interpreted as a resurgence of Valentinian Gnosticism insofar as it finally imagines creation to be an irremediable Fall which only aesthetic joussiance renders bearable. We mentioned a ‘death’ in 6. Steiner, Real Presences, p. 121. 7. Ibid., p. 229. 8. For our analyses of Barthes, see Chapter 6, ‘Language which Wanted to Make Itself as the Strong as the Word’ in this volume, and chapter XII of Litté rature et thé ologie, ‘De la Bible à la litté rature et retour’, pp. 373–96.

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the allegorical dialectic of language and the real. Christian revelation also speaks of a death at the end of a similar dialectic: Christ dies because he was who he said he was and we did not believe him.9 The only resurrection possible for these modern ‘deaths’ of language or the real will be (a participation in) the resurrection of the incarnate Word. The denial of the effective presence of God, whether in the Bible or in the Messiah, and the denial of the relevance of theological discourse have not been completely carried out. In recent years there have been a series of concessions and hesitations from the pens of the ‘deconstructors’. For example, in response to sharp criticism regarding signification one destructor speaks of abstract ‘messianicity’, a kind of ‘appeal to faith that inhabits every act of language and every address to the other’.10 The messiah of dogma is fiercely rejected, however, and the overriding presupposition is that there is an ‘unquestionable presence which pulverizes every indictment which claims to be prior’.11 Following Heidegger, we may wonder about which comes first: revealability or revelation. In its most abstract form, the aporia which we are discussing would perhaps be this: is revealability (Offenbarkeit) more originary than revelation (Offenbarung) and thus independent of religion?..,Or, conversely, would the event of revelation consist in revealing revealability itself, and the origin of the light, the light of the originary, the very invisibility of visibility?12

Once revelation is confused with an effect of the signifier itself, many theoreticians will reject it in a kind of sceptical demythologization, while the poeticians will adopt a Gnostic mythologizing mode.13 The History of a Denial The problematic was already posed in Renan’s work: realizing the unity of thought and language portrayed in the Bible in the form of God’s gift of language to Adam, he reduced it to a Judeo-Christian topos whose ‘intention he had grasped. If language is said to be revealed by theologians, this is because language is by

9. Cf. Jn 10.33: ‘It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God’; Jn 8.40: ‘now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God’. 10. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, p. 18. One should remain sceptical to these abstractions which are differently named depending on the system. 11. Cf. Pierre Gardeil, Quinze regards sur le corpe livré (Geneva: Ad Solem, 1997), p. 25 n. 2. 12. Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge’, p. 16. Italics removed. 13. We must be content solely with pointing the reader to the work of Yves Bonnefoy. Cf. in particular L’Improbable et autres essais, as well as the work of one of his most authoritative interpreters: Sophie Guermè s, ‘La poé sie d’Yves Bonnefoy: une nouvelle alliance’, in D. Millet-Gé rard (ed.), Le Lys et la langue, pp. 45–58.

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essence revelatory, a quality traditionally attributed to the divine. The strength of revelation is intrinsically tied to the original unity of form and the senses’,14 and in no way to the higher entities that the religious invoke! Renan attempted to maintain a certain equilibrium. Influenced by the traditionalism of the previous generation, his naturalism left a small opening for the transcendence of God in the question of language. He writes that the ‘philosophical reaction which signaled the beginning of the nineteenth century’ had anticipated ‘under a somewhat unscientific form, it is true, the interior unity, the truly divine lifeblood of language’.15 Yet he immediately confused language and the Word, as can be evinced in claims such as this: ‘Thus language has not appeared in a determined moment in history, like the invention of the human mind: it is born the moment we speak it; its essence is to be eternally born.’16 In this way, he wanted to speak of revelation only metaphorically: The eighteenth century was completely infatuated with freedom, or to put it better, with human caprice. One of the schools which tried to further the cause of spiritualism and religion attributed everything to God. Language had been a purely human invention, now it became a divine revelation. This term, which when taken as a metaphor will perhaps be most exact for expressing the miraculous appearance of language, was unfortunately understood in a strictly literal sense.17

At the end of a literal exegesis of Gen. 2.19-20, he writes, ‘If philosophy wanted to adopt its most exact formulations on language’s appearance from a poetic myth, it would find none more beautiful than this: God taught humanity to speak as a father teaches his son; God brought about occasional causes which exercised the faculties and which thereby completely allowed the faculties themselves to act.’18 Renan might seem close to a correct metaphysical conception of the nesting of secondary causes within the first cause when he approves talk of language being a ‘work of God’: ‘Nothing is truer, provided that one knows how to understand it; for what occurs in spontaneity is more the act of God than the act of the human being, and it is less dangerous to attribute it to the action of the universal cause than to the particular action of human freedom.’19 But this ‘universal cause’ no longer has much to do with the revealed God: ‘If one understands by revelation the spontaneous play of human faculties, in the sense that God put into humanity

14. Franç ois Laplanche, ‘Introduction’, in Dictionnaire du monde religieux dans la France contemporaine, vol. 9, Les sciences religieuses: le XIXe siè cle, 1900-1914 (ed. Franç ois Laplanche; Paris: Beauchesne, 1996), pp. v–xxv (here p. viii). 15. Ernst Renan, De l’origine du langage (Paris: Calmann-Lé vy, 1883), p. 80. 16. Renan, De l’origine du langage, p. 33. 17. Ibid., pp. 80–1. 18. Ibid., p. 85. 19. Ibid., p. 82.

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everything necessary for the invention of language and so in this way could be called its author, then we are close to the truth; but this became a kind of misused and strange claim when there was another more philosophical and natural way of expressing the same fact.’20 With his customary ambiguity and his inability to yield to an atheism with which he could never be satisfied, Renan fell back on an agnostic naturalism, although his readings of de Bonald21 had shown him that such a position was also insufficient: ‘Let us take the only possible side’, he concludes, and ‘attribute the creation of language to human faculties spontaneously acting as a whole’.22 It would be absurd to regard as an invention the use that humanity has made of the eyes to see, of the ears to hear, and it is no less absurd to call the expressive use of speech an invention. Humanity has the faculty of signs or interpretation just as it has those of sight and hearing; speech is the means it uses to exercise the former just as the eye and ear are the organs of the latter two.23

He then says, ‘Nature reveals to us the end at the same time that it reveals to us the means which we must use to reach it.’ He also alludes to Lucretius, who ‘said that in some beautiful verse’.24 Here as elsewhere, Renan’s talent consisted in using the assertoric power of his own style to maintain a weak position between two contradictory opinions: The true author of the spontaneous works of consciousness is human nature, or, if one prefers, the higher cause of nature. At this level it does not matter whether we attribute the causality to God or to humanity. What emerges spontaneously in the human being is both divine and human. Here is the point of reconciliation between opinions which are incomplete rather than contradictory, and which,

20. Ibid., p. 83. 21. ‘How those who admit a supreme Being and the creation of humanity can suppose that this Being, essentially power and goodness, has put humanity on earth to live on it in society, not recognize at the same time that this Being had to give them or inspire them, from the first moment of their existence, the knowledge necessary for life … . The human race, deprived at birth of its noblest prerogatives, mute and naked, would have stagnated for thousands of years in an absolute lack of understanding until a fortunate accident would have revealed to a human genius (if he could have been a genius, since, lacking expression, he would not have been able to think at all), the miraculous artifice of language, and at the same time inspired in his companions in ignorance a will to listen to him and the mind to understand him! For sure, physical existence, if it is an existence at all, would have come at a very high price. In that case, why not imagine humanity being born from the fermentation of matter.’ de Bonald, ‘De l’origine du langage’, p. 78. 22. Renan, De l’origine du langage, p. 89. 23. Ibid., p. 90. 24. Ibid., p. 91.

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as they touch upon one side of the phenomenon rather than the other, are each part of the truth.25

Finally, despite the weakness of Renan’s case regarding the transcendence of meaning, we retain the ‘two faces’ of the ‘phenomenon’: the dialectic of the linguistic sign is no better explained by the savant than by the theologians. The savant has simply substituted his own word for the sacred Word which alone enables his endeavour! Louis de Bonald, Renan’s main interlocutor on these questions, certainly wanted to prove the necessity of thinking of language as a gift. He started off in the school of Rousseau, who said that he himself is ‘afraid of the difficulties which multiply and convinced of the impossibility, almost demonstratively proven, that language could have been born and established by purely human means’.26 Nevertheless, he ended up identifying human language and the divine Word and unwittingly prepared the way for the oversimplifications to which the question is subsequently subjected. Maybe this identification stemmed from his ignorance of the ancient theory of the Word, or his being enamoured with his apologetic zeal, or from his frequent reading of Holy Scripture, which is the only place where this identification is possible. It is worthwhile for us to linger for a bit in de Bonald’s company, for the Victome responds in advance to the naivety of current speculations on the origin of language which we will consider shortly. He first establishes that language is impossible to invent: The partisans of the invention of language say that human beings observe, reflect, compare, judge, etc., because it was indeed necessary to invent the art of speaking. But I ask, of which kind, I could almost say of which color, were the observations, reflections, comparisons and judgments of these minds which would still not have in their search for language any expression which could give them consciousness of their own thoughts? Philosophers, try to reflect, compare and judge without having present and perceptible to your mind any word, any speech … . What happens in your mind? What do you see there? Nothing, absolutely nothing, and you can no more perceive your own thoughts when they deal with incorporeal objects, or compare them with one another or judge between them without the expressions which represent them to you, than you can see with your own eyes and pronounce on their form and colour without a body which mirrors their image.27 The means for inventing anything at all have to be invented before the inventing could begin. Since thought is nothing but the interior word, and words nothing other than thought rendered external and sensible, it was absolutely necessary that the inventor of language had thoughts and invented the expression of his 25. Ibid., p. 94. 26. As in de Bonald, ‘L’origine du langage’, p. 139. 27. de Bonald, ‘De l’origine du langage’, p. 82.

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thought, since without expression he could not have even had the thought of invention.28

This means that if language exists it has been given: There cannot be, without previous expression, any thought of things which have no image. Therefore, a thought or mental language was necessary to be able to think of all the combinations of language, even to think of inventing speech. Thus language has been given to humanity and was not invented by it, as language has always been, and still is, everywhere transmitted and nowhere invented.29

‘Whether a person was created speaking, or whether knowledge of language is instilled within a person shortly after birth, we have words as soon as we have thoughts, and we have thoughts as soon as we have words … emanated along with language from the supreme intellect.’30 ‘Everything is explained or can be explained by the hypothesis of a language initially given to the first human being, spoken in the first family, and transmitted from generation to generation to all their descendants.’31 Unfortunately, de Bonald had a slight tendency to identify human language and the Word: Speech is like life for us, which we enjoy without knowing what it is and without reflecting on what makes it possible. Being, society, time, the universe, everything plays a part in this magnificent composition … . Everything that language designates is or can be; only what is nothing or impossible does not have a name. The light of the moral world which enlightens every person coming into this world, the bond of society, the life of intellects, the deposit of every truth, every law, every event, language regulates humanity, orders society, explains the universe. Everyday it draws the mind of human beings from nothing, just as in the first days of the world a creative speech drew the universe from chaos; it is the most profound mystery of our being, and humanity is not even able to understand it, and so certainly is not able to invent it.32

Since Renan, the theological implications of reflection on language have been more and more deeply repressed: in 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris forbad public discussion on the origin of languages! In addition to the legitimate concern to circumscribe precisely the formal object of a new disciple, there was also some positivist obscurantism directed against theology. Recent progress in linguistics

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Ibid., p. 83. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., p. 105. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid.

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itself has voided these old scientistic censures. Current research on the origin of languages, in particular, dramatically revives the debate on the original mother language (whose existence is still maintained by many and supported by other sciences such as the genetics of populations).33 In works such as these we see the linguists pigeonhole one another into the monogenist and ‘orthodox’ camps, which suggests the religious dimensions of the positions! The origin of language is also a frequent subject in popular science articles. Some maintain that it has a social origin, noting that human beings spend most of their time discussing among themselves just as primates spend most of their grooming each other.34 Others maintain that it has a political origin and see in language a typical product of natural selection (the communication of unusual facts reinforces the group’s security and therefore enables the maximum amount of descendants35). Others think that it has a gestural origin, and try to ask gorillas and chimpanzees for the secret.36 Unfortunately, fundamental philosophical reflection – with the minimum of piety that it entails –is often sadly lacking in their investigations and their materialist-evolutionist naivety prevents them from even seeing the problem. As Pieper observes: And this act, in which the knowing conception of reality comes about together with the formation of the interior word as the beginning and the first step of speech – this act, because in it the life of spirit itself takes place, is clearly withdrawn from our disposing grip to almost the same degree as our existence itself, which likewise is not left to our discretion. This is, by the way, one of the reasons why a theory of language, which interprets the use of the exterior sound

33. Though languages may be diverse, they all share the same power of expression and some specific structural elements (for example, the recursivity of syntax, or even the capacity of expressing modalities and temporality). Cf. Merritt Ruhlen, The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue (New York: Wiley, 1994) and Luigi Luca CavalliSforza, Genes, Peoples, and Languages (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000); Johanna Nichols, Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 34. Cf. James R. Hurford, Michael Studdert-Kennedy and Chris Knight (eds), Approaches to the Evolution of Language: Social and Cognitive Bases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1997). 35. Cf. Jean-Louis Dessales, Aux origines du langage, une histoire naturelle de la parole (Paris: Hermè s science publications, 2000). 36. Cf. Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1994); David F. Armstrong, William C. Stockoe and Sherman E. Wilcox, Gesture and the Nature of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); David McNeill, Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992).

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word after the pattern of the use of a tool for the sake of an aim outside itself, necessarily must miss the decisive point.37

The attempt to think of human nature before language and culture requires that one sign up not only for the ‘death of God’, but of humanity itself: Humanity has not been created twice, once without language and another time with language. The emergence of Homo in the animal line may have been fostered by its bodily structure or its nervous system, but its emergence is primarily due to its faculty of symbolic representation, which is the common source of thought, language and society.38

In short, if we accuse theology of masking, if not outright denying, the problem of language, it at least preserves intact the real duality of immanence and transcendence in the sign and in language by not pretending to reduce or simplify their dialectic into an autonomous and definitive philosophicallinguistic theory. But in their fundamental materialism, contemporary perspectives on language can no longer even see the existence of a problem: the incommensurability of the signified to any signifier, of conceptualization and sensation! How can one say ‘language is impossible’, or write that ‘writing is an intransitive act’, as postmodern thinkers do, without saying nothing about anything, without ‘drawing a blank’ as when soldiers ‘fire a blank’ in training exercises? Remaining at this stage is regressive and implies rejecting the law that makes language language and limiting oneself to the pleasure of merely playing with words: it is to surrender to what contemporary psychoanalysis call (not without ambiguity) the ‘magic of the word’.39 When compared to these eliminations of reflection, Gothic speculations on the interior word do not cut such a bad figure. The question of the foundation of thought and discourse remains. All told, the permanence of the theological in even the most negative of thinking about language leads to an alternative: either the postulate of relativism, nominalism and sophistical materialism, or the wager on revelation, reason and Christian theology.

The Epistemological Framework of a Sensible Reflection on Language The Search for Fittingness That there is no place from which we can survey language as a whole does not mean that language deceives us, but that every speaker is necessarily committed to and involved in that of which they speak. This means that, without falling out 37. Pieper, ‘The Meaning of “God speaks”’, p. 215. 38. Benveniste, Problè mes de linguistique gé né rale, vol. 1, p. 27. 39. Cf. Tony Anatrella, Non à la socié té depressive (Paris: Flammarion, 1993), pp. 20–1.

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of Scylla into Charybdis when passing from the mirage of language as the source and summit of humanity to the illusion of being external to language which would allow for an ‘objective’ description of the emergence of meaning to the signifier, theoreticians (whether linguists, metaphysicians or theologians) should be all the more rigorous in providing a coherent exposition of their presuppositions. As regards language, there is no rigorous objective position: how could one simply mention without further explanation the ‘transcendence of signification’ as an inexplicable brute fact? The task is to recover a trust in language, a trust which is not wholly identifiable with faith theologically understood, but which constitutes a necessary foundation. Less often observed is the act, the tenor of trust, which underlies, which literally underwrites the linguistic-discursive substance of our Western, Hebraic-Attic experience. Often unregarded, because so evidently resistant to formalization, is the core of trust within logic itself, where ‘logic’ is a Logos-derivative and construct. There would be no history as we know it, no religion, metaphysics, politics or aesthetics as we have lived them, without an initial act of trust, of confiding, more fundamental, more axiomatic by far than any “social contract” or covenant with the postulate of the divine. This instauration of trust, this entrance of man into the city of man, is that between word and world.40

Leaving it at that would require an alien positivistic fideism with which Christian theology cannot be satisfied, especially as transcendence has been questioned by a number of modern and contemporary authors41 whose opinions are then relayed by the popular theoreticians of our times. Without mentioning the intellectual charity which animates Catholic theology and which comes to the aid of sheep lost in the wilderness of nonsense, a responsible science – and can theology allow itself to be anything else? – must raise the question of meaning in the linguistic order inasmuch as this responsible science speaks and expresses itself. Linguistics is interested in the how of signification while the why escapes it42: there is no meta-language without language! For the metaphysician and the theologian, placing the emphasis exclusively on language would run the risk of practically identifying, if not theoretically conflating, the word and the Word, just as their postmodern opponents do. As we have seen, in our secular culture, particularly in literary circles, the repression of Scripture as the origin and norm of meaning has been offset by a new abstract mythology of writing and language, or, more exactly, of a ‘mythography’! 40. Steiner, Real Presences, p. 89. 41. Cf. Chapters 5, ‘Language that Wanted to Make Itself as Strong as the Word’, and 6, ‘In Search of the Lost Word’, of this volume. 42. It is by agreeing to this loss that linguistics is established as a science: the Linguistic Society of Paris understood this when it censured the question of the origin of language.

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We must take this into account if we do not wish to contribute to a more general religious regression. Not only would we be agreeing with a product of the secularization43 of the Judaeo-Christian theology of the Word, but we would also be renouncing rationality, a risk which a number of thinkers in other fields and with no connection to the Christian faith have pointed out.44 Theoreticians and authors give themselves away by their use of personification as a figure of speech: ‘language does this’, ‘speech does that’, ‘discourse produces this’. Even in its religious uses such as in Biblical exegesis, contemporary semiology rests upon an implicit philosophy of the depths and fecundity of language,45 which often ends up becoming a sort of beautiful and suggestive negative theology which calls out for a theological foundation. It would be as useless to attempt to verbalize faith without faith as to try to speak of language without language. But if we cannot think of language without words, how could we even form the idea of creating them without their support? Only a divine intervention seems able to break the disenchanted circle of non-sense: the intersected foundation of words and thoughts, including the discourse we offer on their relations, finally presses us to recognize the postulate of an original gift of language in order to take account of its transcendent side. It is here that knowledge of the theological or theologal sources of the theology of the word could transfigure the logical resignation of the theoreticians of linguistic deconstruction, who only

43. In the sense in which one speaks of ‘products of decomposition’. 44. Cf. Gilbert Hottius, L’inflation du langage dans la philosophie contemporaine (Brussels: É ditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1979); Jean Gayon, Jean-Claude Gens and Jacques Poirier (eds), La Rhé torique: enjeux d’une ré surgence (Paris: Ousia, 1999); Jacques Bouveresse, Prodiges et vertiges de l’analogie: des l’abus de belles lettres dans la pensé e (Paris: Raisons d’agir É ditions, 1999). This author reacts against the unthinking use of Gö del’s Theorem, against the ‘immoderate jouissance of literary effects’; he denounces a ‘literarism’ or ‘philosophism-literarism’ which removes reason and transmits to the imagination the legislative power of thought. The collaborator of Cahiers rationalistes concurs with some analyses of Cardinal Ratzinger concerning contemporary relativism today. See Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Biblical Interpretation in Conflict: The Question of the Basic Principles and Path of Exegesis Today,” in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, God’s Word: Scripture, Tradition, Office (ed. Peter Hü nermann and Thomas Sö ding; trans. Henry Taylor; San Francisco, 2008), pp. 91–126. 45. Here are several representative fragments: ‘Logically anterior to thought, [language] is the founder of humanity, the foundation of humanity … . The definition of human being as “speaking being” … takes priority over any other approach and notably over that which would reduce the human being to a historical being’; Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, p. 322. Or as Delorme notes in a roundtable dedicated to different types of exegesis, ‘Language, that is to say … the original and signifying material, where something of humanity is articulated’, as in Joseph Doré (ed.), Les cent ans de la faculté de thé ologie (Paris: Beauchesne, 1992), pp. 197–219 (here p. 202). See also Delorme, ‘Orientations of a Literary Semiotics Questioned by the Bible’, pp. 27–61 (esp. p. 34).

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admit that there might be an ‘abstract messianism’ present in every human word: is it possible to identify the linguistic abstraction of which our contemporaries speak with the wholly concrete Messiah that is the Christ of the Scriptures and the Church? The self-implication of language in all thought entails that this identification cannot be demonstrated, but it is possible to show its relevance from a knowledge which knows itself to be wholly kneaded of words and of language and which nevertheless dares to speak of things such as they are and even to return knowledge to its proper source. This movement of critical self-transcendence is characteristic of Biblical revelation, which both presupposes faith and kindles it. On the one hand, it presupposes faith in the Word of God (in the sense that reason is not demonstrative for the believer); but on the other hand, it is completely open to the work of reason, at least as regards the integration of human phenomena in general (in the sense that it can speak to every person who is interested and desires to understand). The discussions which follow take place within the register of ‘necessary hypothesis’ or of ‘fittingness’.46 The presupposition is the revelation of the divine Word. We begin from revelation, but this does not mean, as the moderns have thought for quite some time, that we thereby leap into the irrational. Far from it, beginning in this way means that we can discover the coherence of the ‘reasons of God’! The Analogy of the Divine Word and Human Language Revelation teaches that God’s plan is to communicate himself in order to create a convivum with humanity. This convivium is called mysterion in Greek and is often translated sacramentum in Latin. If it is true that the necessity of language is related to humanity’s natural sociality, and if it is true that the divine plan for humanity is adoption into the divine society itself (the Holy Trinity), then it is necessary that God speaks to humanity! The divine plan of redemption implies that a shared language exists between the two. Some modern thinkers might retort: how could there be a ‘phonetic and semantic community between the divine being and the human being’47? As M. Cousin said, ‘the institution of language by God repels and displaces the difficulty, but it does not resolve it. Signs invented by God would for us only be

46. In the technical and precise sense of speculative theology: cf. Gilbert Narcisse, Les raisons de Dieu: Argument de convenance et esthé tique thé ologique selon saint Thomas d’Aquin et Hans Urs von Balthasar (Fribourg: É ditions Universitaires, 1997). 47. Lé on Brunschvicg, Le progrè s de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale (Paris: Alcan, 1953), vol. 2, p. 722.

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things, not signs. We would then have to turn them into signs by connecting them with this or that meaning.’48

The proposition ‘God speaks’ or ‘God thinks by declaring a Word’ is undecidable on a natural level.49 A propter quid demonstration (through the cause) of the existence of a Word in God is impossible because reason only reaches God through creatures. The same holds true for a quia demonstration (through the effect): it reaches God through an efficient causality which is attributed to the unity of the divine nature common to all three Persons and not to the specific Person of the Word of whom Scripture speaks. Hence, though our intelligere is always a dicere, this cannot be demonstrated of God. Though we can demonstrate that God understands, for understanding is pure perfection, still we can no more than conjecture the mode of divine understanding and so cannot prove that there is a divine Word. Psychological Trinitarian theory is not a conclusion that can be demonstrated but a hypothesis that squares with divine revelation without excluding the possibility of alternative hypotheses. Finally, Aquinas regularly writes as a theologian and not as a philosopher; hence regularly he simply states what simply is true, that in all intellects there is a procession of inner word.50

What type of relation can be established between human language and God under these conditions? We could finally say that the relation between the word observed in humanity and that in God is ‘analogical’, yet not in the sense that we speak of an analogy between the goodness of God and that of creatures (because one is able to discern a relation between God and the world based on the efficient creative action): We have said that there is no relation of efficient causality, no intervening action between the Word of God and our mental word. But St. Thomas follows Aristotle’s Metaphysics in thinking that action is not the only foundation of relative being. Independently of quantity, which rightly understood should be excluded from God, a certain measure or rather a certain harmony or proportion

48. Renan, De l’origine du langage, p. 83. The author cites Victor Cousin, Pré face to Œ uvres philosophiques de Maine de Biran, vol. IX, p. xv. 49. Even though St. Thomas holds as established the fact that every intellect produces a verbum (cf. for example, In Io: ‘It is thus manifest that one should acknowledge a verbum in all reality endowed with intelligence. In fact, the act of the intellect itself implies that the intellect, in knowing, forms something; thus that which is formed is that which called a ‘verbum’; consequently, it is necessary to recognize a verbum in every being in which the intellect is active’), it is impossible to infer naturally from observations of created minds that which happens in God. 50. Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, p. 196.

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can suffice to establish a relation, and consequently an analogy between things, and this means that it is only a question of formal cause. St. Thomas comments on Aristotle’s thought by giving the example of an image being analogous to its model. This is precisely what we find in the theology of Word developed by St. Augustine. The relation between our mental word and the second Person, which allows us to speak of analogy, is not based on efficient causal action, but only on the fact that the image of the Trinity is found in our soul.51

The discovery of this type of analogy enables us to clarify the articulation of philosophy and theology in the theory of language elaborated around the notion of the word. The difference between analogy by image and other types does not lie in the nature of analogy itself, but in the way of moving from one term to another by a relation of analogy: in the case of goodness, the mind finds itself necessarily led from consideration of created things to a claim about the divine nature by virtue of the relation of efficient causality intervening here and being established with certitude. When we speak of the Son of God, on the contrary, and by analogy with our mental word, no efficient causal relation allows us to move from our psychology to the mystery of the divine life. Our soul simply is the image of the Trinity. In this way an image says nothing to the beholder who wholly ignores what it represents. A reality takes on the value of the image only when that of which it is an image is revealed; it does not necessarily lead by itself to the knowledge of what it represents.52

This is why even if there are in creatures analogical similitudes of properties which distinguish the divine Persons, we are still incapable of deciphering them to reach knowledge of the Trinity if God does not give us the key to this hidden and mysterious language inscribed into the world. Only the Word of God which reveals the Trinity to us shows us his reflection, his vestige, and his image in creatures: the study of this image in humanity helps us to know the origin of Persons.53

51. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, p. 227. The author references In Meta V, 17, § 1027. 52. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, p. 419. 53. Montagnes, ‘Le parole de Dieu dans la cré ation’, p. 232. The author is even more precise: ‘The philosophical analogy behaves a double noetic process: first a movement of ascent from creatures to God, objectively grounded on ontological participation and subjectively on the knowledge of first principles; at the end of this initial approach we can affirm that God is and knows that which he is intrinsically and formally. Second, descending from God, analogy permits an explication of creation: on the one hand all created perfections are relative to their author, on the other hand all beings have in themselves

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Revelation is thus necessary for recognizing the existence of the personality of a divine person: ‘per fidem venitur ad cognitionem et non e converso.’54 It is only in Scripture that God reveals the presence of the image of God in the human being and that the ‘Son’ is also the ‘Word’. We have constantly run up against the necessity of ‘divine’ illumination in the understanding – from the very abstract form of ‘habitual knowledge’ of God presupposed by the habitus of first principles to meditation on the transcendence of meaning through a certain pre-knowledge of the logic of perfections.55 That establishing the absolute worth of the understanding requires being open to God invites us not to oppose the analogy based on creative efficacy and the analogy of the image. In fact, the theory of the word involves the ‘symbolic’ in the sense that we have defined it and not only the ‘image’ in the modern allegorical sense. On the one hand, discovering the analogy between the divine Word and the human mental inner word depends on revelation’s use of the term ‘word’ in divinis. On the other hand, once this analogy has been revealed it is possible to connect the efficacy of the human understanding to its participation in the divine Word using the principle maxime tale. As we will see, this is what St. Thomas himself does. We should now further develop the theme of illumination in St. Thomas. Thomas Aquinas is often opposed to St. Augustine,56 but this alleged opposition cannot account for the originality of his noetic within the Augustinian tradition, an originality which we can see in the shift of emphasis away from the enigma of the manifestation of things (Augustine) to the life of the understanding itself (Thomas). Necessary Illumination Briefly put, we could say that Augustine is interested in the source of the light in humanity, while Thomas, following Albert the Great but without continuing his master’s interest in the question of origins, is instead interested in its radiance. In the light of dogmatic speculation on the Holy Trinity and rooted in the exegetical problem of the translation of verbum in the Gospel, St. Augustine discovers that signification is a constitutive dimension of thought, not a secondary expressive function: to think is to speak. Through analyses of conceptual

some similitude to the divine perfections. The analogia fidei excludes any possibility of an ascending approach since creation does not have its principle in the divine persons and the natural play of our mind does not allow us to know the Trinity from the first principle.’ 54. Aquinas, ST 1, 32, 1. It is through faith that we reach knowledge, not the reverse. 55. For more on this, see the section ‘L’ê tre et le non-ê tre, le dire et le contredire’ in La langue de l’ineffable, pp. 183–91. 56. Cf. É tienne Gilson, Pourquoi saint Thomas a critiqué saint Augustin: suivi de Avicenne et le point de dé part de Duns Scot (Paris: Vrin, 1981), which is a reprint of two articles which appeared in Archives d’histoire doctrinale et litté raire du Moyen  ge in 1927 and 1927.

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knowledge such as mathematics, and of the communicability of states of the soul (the famous contemplation of the arch of Carthage), which presupposes its ideal corrected through memory and the understanding, St. Augustine establishes that human thought is realized in ‘illumination’ as the act of the mind speaking a word (dictio verbi). I judge the arch of Carthage that I remember to be beautiful and true on account of its correspondence to the ideal: I would like to say it to others in a manifestation of light. For the idea is adorned with all its splendor, vibrant with truth and beauty, and in this way it emerges from my soul which judges it and admires it, saying that it is beautiful and true; it is the interior word born from the mind.57

For St. Augustine, the idea emerges from simple intuition which comes to the intellect from the intelligible, from the thing that it is to be known and whose superfluous material ornaments are stripped away in order that its ideal splendour may appear. However, one thing more is necessary for this idea to be plainly and consciously known: it should not only be in me as luminous, but must also be interiorly in front of me, so that it may be admired and judged; it must come to be expressed by a word. The judgement of truth and of beauty is a light projected on the arch, an idea hidden in my hazy memory. The light of enunciation in which I conceive of a thing by recognizing its form in the sensible givens of this material cannot come from me. The ancients accounted for this by the myth of anamnesis which they connected to a belief in metasomatosis: in the living process of knowledge, everything happens as if I had already seen this arch in another life! Faith, however, cannot countenance a realist affirmation of anamnesis. St. Augustine then offers the only possible solution which could satisfy a Christian contemplative: ‘The light transforming my idea is “the light shining on everyone coming into the world”, it is God illuminating my vision of the light of his truth.’58 This dictio verbi, the very existence of a verbum mentis, appears to him as a bridge between divine eternity and human time. The thinking mind speaks and renders itself present to the thing and thus present to the signification God placed in it by creating it through his speech. God and the human being are thus fundamentally in dialogue. In this way there is a ‘shared language’ between God and humanity. In his doctrine of illumination, St. Augustine established a relation of direct causality between the divine Word and the human word by introducing the first Cause into the play of secondary causes in a way that St. Thomas in his fundamental Aristotelianism cannot accept. Aristotle also recognized the light at work in intellectual operations. But he does not say that the principle of this light is God, for persons possess in themselves an

57. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, p. 140. 58. Ibid.; the author is citing Jn 1.9.

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active intellect as a light. ‘By a stroke of genius Aristotle replaced mythical Platonic anamnesis by psychological fact and, to describe the psychological fact, eliminated the subsistent ideas to introduce formal causes in material things.’59 We should perhaps nuance what these positions could infer from philosophy alone, for É ric Weil’s work has shown how Aristotle is also indebted to a mythical conception of the world which is inspired by a Stoic theology of the Logos,60 and which would later appear fulfilled in the incarnation. For Aristotle, the intellectual soul which guides the movements of other living things must come to it from beyond the embryo, for it has ‘something of the divine’.61 We have already encountered this idea in relation to the potestas interpretandi. Among the commentators on Aristotle who come before Thomas, the Muslim Avicenna (an occasionalist on clearly religious grounds) interpreted the Aristotelian noetic by positing a separated intellect.62 William of Auvergne would then Christianize this position by attributing to the human soul an intellect which is only passive, with the agent intellect being the illuminating God of St. Augustine. This would then perfectly explain the generation of the word of knowledge in the human mind. Fructified by God acting within it, the intellect, passive up until this point, now becomes ‘like an overflowing and abundant fountain, overflowing in itself, that is to say, interior to itself ’.63 The resemblance between the human word and the Word is thus easy to explain: Just as God the Father, from the plentitude of his own fecundity, has expressed this good Word – it is what is spoken (quod est dicere) – and has engendered it within itself, so the intellectual power, fertilized in some way and fecundated by what it has from God (quasi impreganta et foecundata hujusmodi habitu), from this plentitude expresses and gives birth to the sciences in itself and within itself.64

Faithful to Aristotle’s humanism and careful to safeguard the creature’s own perfection, Thomas rejects the theory of the separated intellect, even if he admits the power and beauty of William’s argument.65 For Aquinas, the self-awareness of every mind offers proof that it has its own agent intellect: ‘Non enim videtur probabile quod in anima rationali non sit principium aliquod quo naturalem

59. Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, pp. 187–8. 60. See É ric Weil, ‘Quelques remarques sur le sens et l’intention de la mé taphysique aristoté licienne’, in Essais et confé rences, vol. 1, Philosophie (Paris: Plon, 1970), pp. 81–105. 61. Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, II, 4, 736 b 28. 62. Cf. Gilson, Pourquoi saint Thomas a critiqué saint Augustin, pp. 35f. 63. William of Auvergne, De anima, VII, 8, in Opera Omnia (Paris, 1674), vol. 2, p. 214. 64. Paissac, Thé ologie du Verbe, p. 140. 65. ‘Quidam catholici doctors … satis probabiliter posuerunt ipsum Deum esse intellectum agentem’; Aquinas, II Sent, d. 17, 2, 1.

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operationem explere possit’; ‘It hardly seems probable that there is not in the rational soul the principle which allows it to accomplish its own operation.’66 He then encounters the following difficulty: how can two powers, the active intellect and the passive intellect, be rooted in one substance? How can one substance be in potency and act in relation to intelligible forms? He initially responded by finding in the soul a sort of matter/form composition: intellectual being carries within itself the light which can act on sensible images, but it must receive determinations of its knowledge from outside.67 At first, he followed St. Albert’s commentary on De anima. For Albert, there is an agent intellect in the human mind, but its light is insufficient and so complete understanding requires the help of the uncreated intellect, just as the light of the star is reinforced by the rays of the sun.68 The Master of Cologne holds that there is a work of light in intellection, but in the end his noetic does not retain the intellect’s real fruitfulness: rather than engendering a word, the intellect causes to bloom the idea germinally contained in the sensible image. Thomas, however, followed Aristotle more closely than did his master, and so he recognized a genuine autonomy in the intellect’s operation. But for the same reason, and as inspired by Lombard – est ipsa mens quasi parens et notitia eius quasi proles eius69 – he had the genius to integrate his Augustinian inheritance into the Aristotelian noetic. From Augustinian speculation on the procession of the inner word, he was led to distinguish far more sharply than Aristotle did between intelligence in act and its products of definition and judgment. But his greater debt was to Augustinian theory of judgment with its appeal to the eternal reasons; Aquinas transposed this appeal into his own ‘participatio creata lucis increatae’ to secure for the Aristotelian theory of knowing by identity the possibility of self-transcendence in finite intellect.70

Thomas finally comes to maintain that the intellectual soul knows all truth in the eternal reasons, and does so by explaining what the expression ‘to know in’

66. Aquinas, II Sent, d. 17, 2, 1. 67. Cf. Aquinas, III Sent, d. 14. 68. Albert the Great: ‘Lux intellectus agentis non sufficit per se nisi applicationem lucis intellectus increate, sicut applicator radius solis ad readium stellae’ (in I Sent. d. 2, 5); cited by Paissac, Thé ologie du verbe, p. 144. We find in these words the beautiful microcosmic vision of medieval man. ‘The potential intellect must be illuminated in order to receive the idea, or better, it is found illuminated in the very reception of the idea every light which enriches it’. Albert the Great, De anima, bk. III, tr. 2, c. 18, cited and translated by Paissac, Thé ologie du verbe, p. 140. 69. See Peter Lombard, Libri IV Sententiarum (Ad Claras Aquas: Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1916), 2 vol., bk. 1, d. 3. 70. Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, pp. 188–9.

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means.71 If we know the eternal reasons as images of truths reflected in God as in a mirror, then the soul of the person in this life is incapable of reaching them and they are reserved for the blessed. In reality, however, the eternal reasons are a principle of knowledge in which the agent intellect participates: it knows ‘in eternal reasons’ just as we see ‘in the sun’ the things that the sun illuminates. The intellectual light in the person is nothing other than a participated resemblance in the uncreated Light which includes the eternal reasons. Such a participation in the eternal reasons is not enough to know material things, and so it is still necessary that the intelligible species be drawn from said things.72 We might deny that the human person knows the divine ideas directly, and prefer to connect the validity of human knowledge to a work of abstracting intelligible structures from the world as it is and as it is manifested through the natures of things. Two further steps are necessary. First, we have to ground the capacity of natures to show themselves truthfully in the fact that they are fully true in the thought of the God who is thinking them, speaking them and creating them. Second, we have to root ontologically the participated potency of the created intellect in the perfect intellect of the Creator. Does not this amount to returning to the theory of illumination and the divine ideas? Rather than a denial of the Augustinian theory of illumination,73 the accent is simply different, for the theological character of the solution given to the problem of bridging (the sensible and the intelligible) remains, even if it does so inconspicuously under the trappings of a participatio creata lucis aeternae. It is sometimes less inconspicuous, however, as can be seen in the Summa contra Gentiles, which is more marked with apologetic concern than the Summa theologiae. In the former work, St. Thomas claims that God, the producer of rationes by his Word, is not only the cause of natural substances but of all intellectual

71. Cf. Aquinas, ST 1, 84, 5: ‘a thing is said to be known in another as in a principle of knowledge: thus we might say that we see in the sun what we see by the sun. And thus we must needs say that the human soul knows all things in the eternal types, since by participation of these types we know all things. For the intellectual light itself which is in us, is nothing else than a participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types. Whence it is written (Ps. 4.6,7), “Many say: Who showeth us good things?” which question the Psalmist answers, “The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us,” as though he were to say: By the seal of the Divine light in us, all things are made known to us.’ 72. Aquinas, ST 1, 84, 5: ‘But since besides the intellectual light which is in us, intelligible species, which are derived from things, are required in order for us to have knowledge of material things; therefore this same knowledge is not due merely to a participation of the eternal types, as the Platonists held, maintaining that the mere participation of ideas sufficed for knowledge.’ 73. Cf. Aquinas, I Sent, 27, 2, 2, ad 2, for Thomas’s summary of the Augustinian position.

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knowledge.74 He does not go into great detail on this point and merely invokes ‘a certain light’ (lux quaedam) through which the Word manifests the truth to created intellects. He clearly attributes error, however, to the lack of con-version in human beings who neglect to turn themselves towards the Word in order to receive its light.75 Likewise, in his commentary on the Prologue of the Gospel of John, he does not hesitate to make human words participate in the divine Word: Then since the Word is the true light by his very essence, then everything that shines must do so through him, insofar as it participates in him. And so he enlightens every man coming into this world … all men coming into this visible world are enlightened by the light of natural knowledge through participating in this true light, which is the source of all the light of natural knowledge participated in by men.76

Once again, it is Holy Scripture which plays a crucial role in the finding and description of the mental word as a participation in the divine Word. If the truth of speech about reality is ensured by the participation of the human intellect in the divine Word, then it is no less true that the discovery of this participation has been very concretely conditioned by the reception of the Speech of God in the Bible. Beneath all the reflections and speculations we have cited, St. Thomas turns out to presuppose in the very reality of his theological performance something which he does not show on the theoretical level: a kind of direct illumination by the Word (incorporated into the Scriptures)! More generally, the theological thematic of ‘knowledge of truth in the eternal reasons’ might be the theoretical expression of the pragmatic rooting of all knowledge in the text of Holy Scripture (initiated in St. Augustine’s De doctrina christiana).77 The differences in how these two authors treat this thematic could

74. Cf. Aquinas, SCG IV, cap. 13, § 11: ‘God is not only the cause by His intellect of all things which naturally subsist, but even every intellectual cognition is derived from the divine intellect’. 75. Aquinas, SCG IV, cap. 13, § 11: ‘Necessarily, then, it is by the Word of God, which is the knowledge of the divine intellect, that every intellectual cognition is caused. Accordingly, we read in John (1:4): “The life was the light of men,” that is, because the Word Himself who is life and in whom all things are life does, as a kind of light, make the truth manifest to the minds of men. Nor is it a failure of the Word that not all men arrive at a knowledge of the truth, but that some exist in darkness. This comes, rather, from a failure of men who are not converted to the Word and cannot fully grasp Him. Hence, there still remains darkness among men greater or less, as men are more or less converted to the Word and cleave to Him.’ 76. Aquinas, In Io 1, 5, 1, § § 127 and 129. 77. Cf. the sections ‘Scientia: la science comme discours’ and ‘Sacra doctrina: La science dans la foi’ in Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 92–113.

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reflect changes in the Bible’s epistemological status in the cultural contexts of late antiquity and the Gothic period. In fact, the Augustinian and Thomasian interpretations of ‘knowing in’ correspond to two very different periods in the reception of Judaeo-Christian revelation. In the richness of antique intertextuality and the vibrancy of the rhetorical tradition which Augustine inherited, the Bible (which he himself had much trouble reconciling with his theoretical framework) was still a great novelty and the revealed dimension of its wisdom shone forth in the pagan world. Thomas, however, lived in a period in which the intellect was plunged deeply into a profoundly Christianized ‘logosphere’ and profoundly shaped by revelation: the supernatural was a sort of second nature! Saying that we know everything ‘in the Word’ was not very different from saying that we breathe in air or swim in water. Whereas St. Augustine confronted pagan conceptions of the world, the Gothics were the inheritors of the Romanesque epiphanous world which viewed creatures as words of the Christ-Word, the master of the cosmos and the one who preserves them in existence. In short, while the mental space opened by ‘in’ (‘in eternal reasons’) is still circumscribed and visible in Augustine’s age (in which the Bible is still one book among others: Scripture was ‘new’78 and brought with it an entirely new vision of the world), it seems highly vague and inadequate at the height of medieval Christianity (in which the Bible is the book). As a convert who lived in a world still marked by paganism, St. Augustine cannot imagine speaking without invoking the principle interlocutor of his speech: the God who hears, the God who speaks, the God who gives being and strength and the desire to speak. We could perhaps see the ‘confession’, the dialogue with God, as the framework of all of his writing. St. Thomas, however, does not seem to address God first, but his novice brothers in religious life. In this context, responding to questions of faith or doubt, whether antique or contemporary, involves perceptible evidence: it a matter of the interconnection of language and reality through the Word. Whereas St. Augustine simultaneously treated discourse and meta-discourse through invoking God himself in order to avoid the openended inflation of speech about speech,79 the ‘scientific’ Gothic theologian limited

78. St. Augustine describes the expanding novelty, the progressive recognition of the authority of the Book in all the peoples up to the Populus romanus, and recounts the conversion of the prestigious Marius Victorinus himself by simply reading the Bible! Cf. Confessions, VIII, II. He displays a cosmic conception of the Book of Scriptures, described as a ‘forest’ (Conf. XI, II, 3), as ‘oceanic depths’ (Conf. XII, XIV), as the ‘firmament’ of the world (Conf. XIII, XV, 16, 18). 79. Augustine lived in a world where, on the one hand, speech had sufficient social validity to fulfill the life of the professor of rhetoric (and make him resist God: cf. the description of maternal ambitions in Confessions II, III, 8; expressions such as being a ‘merchants of words’ in the ‘speech-markets’ Confessions IX, 5 and IX, 2 are contrasted with the pursuit of wisdom in Scripture). On the other hand, rhetoric and philosophy allowed him to control the oratio utens with the oratio docens. This provided him with a theory of

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himself simply to discourse: the knowledge that he has to speak is not integrated into his speech about speech and he does not investigate it in and for itself or inquire after its origin. Albert handled the question of intellectual light by showing that the possible intellect finds itself illuminated in the reception of every luminous idea which enlarges it: the light comes from the object to be known inasmuch as it realizes an idea which is incipiently transmitted by its sensible image. He only handles its origin implicitly (the idea realized by the object should finally be referred to the creative intellect), as his intention was primarily to describe the function of the intellect in the act of knowledge. The Gothic mind was no longer especially interested in the relation of the verba and the Word, but in the question of the production of verba and the intellectual operations which fashion them. (We remarked on this above in relation to the modus impositionis and the institution of language.) The question of their relation to the Word can only be posed secondarily, in a subsequent moment, as we cannot speak of everything at the same time. In the literary order, theology must then reconcile two realities, two developments, two texts. St. Augustine described in one stroke the real relation between these two realities, and he resolved it by positing, through analogy, an ‘exemplary causality’. Is the ontology of the image sufficient to establish a real relation between language and God? Is not this analogical bond related to the real existence within me of a mental word that conceives of and speaks it (in terms of ‘exemplary causality’ for example)? In order to explain not only knowledge of reality but also the expression of this knowledge, which Augustine did in a single oratorical movement, it was necessary to double the theory and the practice of analogy through the most precise metaphysical description possible of the mental word which expresses it. Finally, there are two main philosophical and theological reasons for presupposing a certain ‘continuity’ between the thought and the language of humanity and the divine Word. The first is the acknowledgement of the irreducibility of language in thought. St. Augustine’s rhetorical training had markedly persuaded him of this: whatever the psychological and philosophical mediations of the noetic, knowledge must finally be said, and this saying cannot escape the theological consideration that the revelation of creation causes us to bring upon everything that is, including speech. The contemporary rediscovery of the ontological density of language is useful here: the primary lesson of the ‘linguistic turn’ of Western philosophy is that language is not an understudy of a lesser ontological degree than the reality being described, but is sometimes even constitutive of reality itself. It is, for example, an integral element of the ontological reality of society.80

the perfect word (related to truth), which would lead him to turn the Biblical sublime into sacramental experience. 80. ‘Only language permits society. Language is what binds human beings together, the foundation of all their relations which establish their society’. Benveniste, Problè mes de linguistique gé né rale, vol. 1, p. 29.

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It is just this lesson which must be applied to the order of revelation so that we can discover the second, theological reason for the theory of illumination. The mystery revealed by God is given as a system of signs which relate humanity and God. The church is, in and through the incarnate Christ, a twofold reality. If one adopts the linguistic definition of the sign which makes the signifier and the signified two inseparable sides which constitute the nature of the sign, or even if one adopts the traditional Augustinian position which opposes the reality to sign, one should still recognize with E. Benveniste ‘the consubstantiality of the signifier and the signified [which] ensures the structural unity of the linguistic sign’ and one can suggestively apply this structure to the very reality of the mystery of the Church. There is, on the one hand, the reality signified, the concrete reality of connections which exist between the persons who make up the ecclesial communion or society (both the Trinitarian Persons as well as the human persons which constitute it), and, on the other hand, the reality of the signifiers through which are effected changes and acts of communion between the members of this society, the system of signifiers being here the human nature which, in all the riches and diversity of its semantics, turns the Church into the sacraments of the personal communion of human beings with God in the Person of the Son.81

The ‘sacraments’ through which the Church believes God communicates himself, the sacramentality of the Christian life in general, constitute a system of signs whose soul is speech, a ‘language’ which enables, maintains and fosters humanity’s fellowship with God. More profoundly still, the divine plan of redemption presupposes that language (essential to human nature and the form of most of the seven sacraments recognized by the Council of Trent) is not an element superadded to the human–divine conviviality but lies at the very heart of the relationship between God and humanity. Thus the illumination of the intellect by God is not an epistemological or ideological expedient which intends to turn human knowledge into an absolute. Such is the case whether one thinks of it ‘naï vely’ as St. Augustine does, or as kneaded into the very process of knowledge as does St. Thomas, who is also careful to place it wholly within nature. It is, rather, an admission that its truth does not only depend on the immanence of the relation of subject and object. The dictio verbi is thus not only a central problem for religious discourse (as it would be for a purely philosophical attempt to speak of God in a pagan context), but it is also a constitutive element of the reality of the relation between God and his creation. To conclude this meditation, we discover with astonishment and not

81. Bourgeois, La Pastorale de l’É glise, p. 142. The author alludes to Augustine, De doctrina christiana, I, II, 2, and cites Benveniste, Problè mes de linguistique gé né rale, vol. 2, pp. 51–2.

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with (post)modern disillusionment something of sacramentality – a transcendent spiritual reality giving itself in and through a sensible reality – already present in the function of language. We can also notice a change in the terms of the problem, which is not so much that of the reliability of an instrument which carries a thought which is other than itself, but that of the foundation of the astonishing capacity of communicating with God.

The Bible and Creation: The Intersected Foundation of Two Books Unless we decide to settle for a crude anthropomorphism, the agnostics’ question is still a live one. Speaking of and knowing God seems to be of a different order than human discourse and to have more truth within it, for God creates the truth of the reality itself whereas human discourse can only discover it. But where can we find access to knowledge and speech about God? How can God speak to us, how can we understand that a word is a divine word from the moment in which it is received into the vocabulary of human beings, borrowed from the realities of the world? ... If there is a phonetic and semantic community between the divine being and the human being we must find it in our own world.82

A Semantic Community between God and Humanity: The Book of Creation If God used human language but intended something utterly different than what we understand by it – for example, if the divine ‘paternity’ were absolutely different from human paternity – then we would have to conclude that the Speech of God has no meaning whatsoever for us. For St. Thomas Aquinas, however, created reality relates us to the divine intellect: ‘Creation is the divine act which establishes a semantic community between God and us: God himself has created the basis of the sacred language which he employs to reveal his mystery to us.’83 Things here below participate in the ideas of God as a kind of material surface created by the divine artist for translating his thought. As words, creatures themselves express the divine ideas which they resemble in the way that the vestige of an image resembles its original.84

82. Montagnes, ‘La parole de Dieu dans la cré ation’, p. 214. 83. Ibid., pp. 233–4. 84. Thomasian speculation thus assumes the Augustinian theory of the image: for Augustine, in fact, Holy Scripture signifies the thoughts of God as a letter expresses the thought of its sender. Cf. É tienne Gilson, Introduction à l’é tude de saint Augustin (Paris:

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The parallel established by antique and medieval theology between artistic creation and the divine knowledge does not allow for an object to exist outside of the latter; this is why the mediatory space which interconnects unthought reality and human thought (which is discursive and linked to language) can be found in the ‘ideas’ or ‘reasons’ (rationes): this is the necessary place for searching for a semantic community between God and humanity. In Thomas’ time, the Latin word ratio had several meanings which he summarizes in his commentary on Denys’s Divine Names.85 It first and foremost expresses the faculty of knowing proper to humanity. It then means what is provided by this faculty’s activity, namely, the cause or the reason, the accounts given or the justifications, the very nature of things expressed in their definitions and by their names. Finally, the word ratio could be translated as ‘argument’, ‘the idea is relating to a created work’, and, in the phrase ratio dicti, by ‘sense of the word’. Ratio thus encourages the efflorescence of an abstract vocabulary (that of notions or perfections) which touches upon the intersection of words and things. This coincidence of the real and of the transcendental which St. Thomas posits on the level of signifieds can already be found in his treatise on the divine names.86 Such a coincidence is not the relic of an old Platonic world of more-thanreal ideas transparently available for understanding the real world, but is rather inherited from Aristotle’s metaphysics. The observation that finality is at work in the movement from potency to act led to the conception of a being coming into being, as having been thought somewhere. As the same reality both is and is not in the process of its physical blooming, its becoming proceeds according to an end which must be located in some mind somewhere. The theological backdrop to these claims is clear. In his Summa aurea William of Auxerre wrote that the Father offers his goodness through creatures which are like his ‘external word’. Anselm claimed that things in themselves are truer than their likenesses as they exist in the human mind. He also paved the way for Thomas Aquinas when he then showed that speaking about and knowing God are higher and truer than speaking about and knowing created substances inasmuch as the latter are truer in the Word than they are in themselves.87 Albert the Great, relying on both the Old Testament (Ps 18.6; Job 12.7-8) and on Basil of Caesarea and Gregory the Great, wrote that creatures can be called ‘words’ inasmuch as they speak of the Creator through their very existence. Thomas adopts this line of inquiry when responding affirmatively to the question: ‘Is the science of God the cause of things? ... Not because they are, does

Vrin, 1943), pp. 242 and 269; Fulbert Cayré , La Contemplation augustienne (Paris: Blot, 1927), pp. 176f. 85. Aquinas, In Div Nom, c. 7, lect. 86. See the section ‘Application thé ologique: la dé fense de la pré dication substantielle proper’, in La langue de l’ineffable, pp. 142–70. 87. Cf. Aquinas, Questions disputé es sur la vé rité : question IV, Le Verbe, pp. 101, n. 25, and 114, n. 111.

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God know all creatures spiritual and temporal, but because He knows them, therefore they are.’88 This principle allows him to ground human knowledge: ‘Natural things are midway between the knowledge of God and our knowledge: for we receive knowledge from natural things, of which God is the cause by His knowledge.’89 God’s knowledge is the cause of things ‘since the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is to things made by his art’,90 but matters are different with human knowledge. For human knowledge, natural things are like ‘a house [which] is midway between the knowledge of the builder who made it, and the knowledge of the one who gathers his knowledge of the house from the house already built’.91 However, since they derive from an intelligible principle, things retain indicative marks which the human understanding can retrieve. For Thomas, however, the creature cannot be properly called a word, but rather the voice of the word: creation is not an immanent intellectual representation (verbum), but the exterior or oral expression of this representation, or to put it in slightly different terms, creation is a language.92 Contrary to what those influenced by deconstruction might think, the theology of language implicit in Christianity is not a ‘mythology’, nor one ‘mytho-graphy’ among others which we can only enter into through a leap into the absurd. Faith in creation means that Christian revelation (in contrast to more or less emanationist mysticisms) does not maintain that the mysterium/signum creates the mutual presence between God and humanity but that it presupposes and is derived from it. It would be difficult not to quote at length some unpublished remarks from Pierre-Ceslas Courtè s, a Dominican and philosopher who is as important as he is unknown. These remarks are taken from preparatory notes for a seminar on the sign that he gave at the Institut catholique de Toulouse some years ago. They offer an exemplary posing of the problem of revelation in a semiotic context. We will cite them here without modifying the probing questions and remarks appropriate to its genre. I would like to mention one of the points which seems important to me. I have spoken of the sign and you might take this to mean an isolated sign. In fact, there is no such thing as an isolated sign and there is no absolutely one-off isolated

88. Cf. Aquinas, ST 1, 14, 8. 89. Aquinas, ST 1, 14, 8, ad 3. 90. For Anselm, ‘the creature in the Creator is essentially creative’, which Thomas modifies by saying that the Word is not only that through which the capacities of things are made, but even the capacity of things to create itself. Aquinas, de veritate, 4, 5, ad 6: ‘The Word is not merely that by which the arrangement of all creatures takes place; it is the arrangement itself which the Father makes of things to be created. Hence, in some way, the Word is related to creatures.’ 91. Montagnes, ‘La parole de Dieu dans la cré ation’, p. 219, n. 2. 92. Ibid., and he cites on this subject I Sent. 2, 2 qla 2.

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sign. The sign always belongs to a certain system of signification. The green light is not an isolated thing; it belongs to the system of permissions and prohibitions of which it is one element, so that we understand it in relation to a red light and a yellow light. This is also true for language, in which an isolated word does not have any meaning, except in God … the Speech of God, the Word. The word can only be understood in a proposition, which is itself tied to another thing. Consequently, every system of signification takes part in a more or less large network which can define cultural networks. From this we can ask the question: what is the network of signification of the world in its totality? Is there such a thing or is there not? Is the world or humanity a sign of something other than itself? Or does signification take place within the world? If it takes place within the world, then it is clear that the universe as such and in its totality does not have any meaning. ‘The world is absurd’ (Jean-Paul Sartre). Human life is absurd, not because we do not give it particular meanings, but because it has no definitive or deep meaning. Can we correctly read the world as a sign of something else which we could call God or can we not? Or is its meaning closed in upon itself? The question of meaning opens us to the world and the value of our action in the world. If the world does not have a definitive meaning then it is placed into deep non-sense; it only has a sense delimited by human life, by a certain culture, by a certain action. How do we regard the world? Can we see in it a meaning in relation to God? Or is meaning in relation to God a kind of superadded extrinsic meaning which only comes from faith and thus from outside? In some way this meaning would be added and foreign to the world because it comes to it in a purely arbitrary fashion and is based upon a divine arbitrariness introduced upon a world which in itself has no meaning. If the world in itself does not have any meaning, then I can always say to God: I do not accept the convention by which you have given it a meaning because it comes from elsewhere and does not have any anchor in the world. From this conclusion, unbelievers like Jeanson absolutely reject a God or an intervention of God ‘coming from elsewhere’. Coming into the world, does God comes from elsewhere or does he come from himself? [And] is God entitled to give supernatural meaning of the relation of the world to God because there is a certain natural meaning of the world in relation to God? This question of meaning is also tied to the question of the language of faith. What encounters what? If we first receive and encounter reality, encounter someone, do we encounter a being who opens us up to something infinitely beyond the world? Or are we before someone who, according to his natural mode of being, knowledge and signification, is mired in deep nonsense and in whom it is impossible to discover any substantive meaning?

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You see that it is the scope, the value of what we encounter which is at stake. It matters little here that those whom we encounter have effectively discovered that meaning; they may well deny it, but it is important to know if, in humanity, the order of meaning ends up in an absolute and transcendent meaning or if its meaning usually ends in nonsense.93

Unlike the pagan, the Christian does not contemplate an external god who is an object of knowledge,94 but instead reflects upon a reality in and through which the human being is already engaged in a relation with God. In the Christian mystery, then, the fact of signification and language is not an extrinsic supplement to the natural reality of divine and human convivium, but instead forms an integral part of it. The place of human language in the ‘extension’ of the divine Word is a particular case (but perhaps the most central one) of the participation of the creature in the perfections of the Creator. The human mind, even as a simple vestigium on a purely natural level inasmuch as it knows by speaking, is already in the presence of God, a presence which is spoken by acts whose structure manifests something of God’s intimacy. Language is implied in the relation that God has established from his creation to himself insofar as it is an indication of the transcendence of its goal, which is God. St. Thomas’s reflections explain the human through the divine, for they implicate the human within the divine. For example, we can speak, through similitude, of a cogitation of God,95 if not even metaphorically of a vocal word of God.96 Although he resists transposing an all too human discursivity into God, St. Thomas does present his predecessors’ impressions on this point and argues why even the Word is involved in discursivity.97 It is the human mode of artistic creation which enables us to imagine the transcendence of the creative knowledge of God.98 In the Middle Ages, the theory of art was heavily dependent on the theology of creation so that

93. Pierre-Ceslas Courtè s, Preparatory Notes for a seminar on the sign delivered at the Institut catholique de Toulouse. 94. The transcendence of the true God is not that which the human mind spontaneously imagines, that of the absolutely separated ‘Wholly Other’. For God is beyond the dialectical relation of the other to the same. God is differently other, that is to say that he has – why not? – the liberty of making himself the same (in the incarnation). 95. Cf. Aquinas, I Sent., 27, 2, 1, ad 3. 96. Cf. Aquinas, de veritate, 4, 1. 97. Aquinas, de veritate, 4, 1, ad 1: ‘Moreover, the notion of the mental word does not require that the act of the intellect which terminates in a mental word take place by means of some reasoning process which thinking seems to involve. It is enough that something is actually understood – no matter how this takes place. But because  we  usually speak interiorly by means of a reasoning process, Damascene and Anselm in defining a word use thinking instead of consideration.’ 98. We acknowledge in passing that if the scholastic theory of art consists above all in clarifying different questions related to the activity of God the Creator, it is, however, an

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mobilizing it in order to explain the question of the Word seems tautologous and to explain nothing! The Book of Scriptures: A Linguistic Community between God and Humanity? This would effectively be the case if we envisioned the Speech of God in the world independently of the unity of the divine plan. In reality, creation and redemption, creation and revelation are indissoluble. One of the first redemptive events is precisely the gift of divine speech expressed in human words and documented in Scripture. Without this divine–human language, the wisest position would be a kind of agnosticism. As we have seen regarding the ‘word’ in God, the revelation of the Trinity alone allows us to know that there is an image of the divine Persons in the human person and vestiges of this image in all beings. As Montagnes puts it, For human language to be truly the speech of God, God himself must guarantee the correspondence of signs at each stage: from the divine reality to the earthly reality through creation, from the created ontological similitude to its human conceptualization through prophetic illumination, from thought to oral or written expression through the charism of inspiration.99

That God reveals his mystery to us in the book of creation removes nothing from the transcendence of the mystery nor from the necessity of faith.100 Conversely, how could one speak of this mystery without the language that God instituted through creating the world? If the language of Scripture is composed of representations borrowed from the world, the content of the book of Scripture should already be inscribed in the book of creation; otherwise said, it must contain the totality of the divine revelation but under a form which safeguards the transcendence of revealed truth.101

The natural knowledge of God in creation and the Speech of God in Scripture have, in fact, ‘fundamentally the same structure’.102 There is no more beautiful nor persistent metaphor for the interweaving of the divine and the human than the book: God creates the universe as an author composes a book: in order to manifest his thoughts. Thus book must be given to us, this book must have a meaning, and we

exaggeration exaggerate to claim (as Panofsky did) that scholasticism did not also aim to honour art: art is raised to the divine level. 99. Montagnes, ‘La parole de Dieu dans la cré ation’, p. 219. 100. Ibid., p. 237. 101. Ibid., p. 216. 102. Ibid., p. 230.

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must be capable of understanding this meaning. These are the three conditions of all knowledge of God here below. St. Thomas explains that we necessarily have to deal with three types of means: first, it is necessary that there are creatures for us to think about; it is then necessary that these creatures bear the divine resemblance; finally, we have need of the intelligible light in order to decipher this image, either by the natural virtue of the understanding or by the grace of faith, according to the nature of truths contained in the book of creatures.103

Without this third means, without the illumination of faith in the speech revealed through the book of Scripture, the second type of means vanishes, the book of Creation is deprived of its supernatural meaning and the mind is confined to its immediate and earthly content. It is thus necessary to deal with Scripture when considering communication between God and humanity. Like an excellent master, God has taken great care to compose for us excellent writings, for the end of instructing us in perfection. Everything that is written, says the Apostle, is written for our instruction (Rom 15:4). These writings are found in two books: the book of creation and that of Scripture. In the former, as much from creatures as from excellent writing which teaches us the truth without falsehood. And this is why Aristotle, when asked where he had learned so much, responded: ‘In the things which do not know how to lie.’104

We should not be confused when finding out that Aristotle is cited in these elaborations upon revelation: far from indicating a presumption to know things which are beyond the ken of the creature, the reference to the Stagirite draws the field of ‘natural’ observation into the orbit of the revealed Word. We could, however, think that the book of Scripture primarily enriches the book of Creation which already an ontological meaning, with new, supernatural, symbolic and revealed meanings. What the philosopher says of simple perfections we should affirm of all revealed concepts, even for paternity. We do not conclude from an examination of human paternity that there is generation in God, but only do so by faith and revelation. Otherwise said, the concept of generation, and also all those concepts which express supernatural mysteries, does not first appear to designate a simple

103. Ibid., pp. 238–9. 104. Thomas Aquinas, ‘Sermo quintus de Dominica se. de Adventu’, (Paris: Vivè s, 1889), vol. 29, p. 194, cited by Montagnes, ‘La parole de Dieu dans la cré ation’, p. 214. This sermon is not mentioned in the list of authentic works; see Louis-Jacques Bataillon, ‘Les sermons attribué s à saint Thomas: Questions d’authenticité ’, Miscellanea mediaevalia 19 (1988): 325–41. There is, however, another sermon included there which says the same thing: ‘Sermo in I Dominica post Epiphaniam: “Puer Iesus”’ (Paris: Vivè s, 1889), vol. 32, pp. 668–9.

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perfection; however, once utilized in revelation and guaranteed by God, we can show its transcendent scope … . There are in the world realities similar to the divine mystery since God himself has utilized them to speak to us.105

But it is necessary to go further: the revealed meaning of created realities most often turns out not to be an extrinsic ‘surplus’, but a deepening or an enlargement of natural meaning. Gratia non tollit naturam sed elevat! The things of nature, sufficiently intelligible without faith, are supremely intelligible in faith. Revelation does not make nature into an allegory, but into a parable. A parable is an invitation to consider a more accessible reality in order to move from it to the consideration of a less accessible reality. There are two considerations, two stages, because there are two realities. And what is remarkable is that the first is not, as in an allegory, a pure sign of the second; it has its own value, a consistency sufficient in itself; it only becomes a sign of the second because the second exists, which is the case of all signs, but their rights to existence are independent of their aptitude for being a sign, which is not true in the case of the pure sign. There is no reason for there to be powerful indicators if there were not bifurcations; but there are reasons, at least gastronomic, for there to be chestnuts, even if their thorny husks were not put into the service of the parable that it is necessary to go beyond appearances. We should explain this! Even if, in every other circumstance, appearances show the foundation, the shell of the chestnut still keeps its spikes, because it is not for the sake of teaching that appearances do not always manifest their foundation. Suppose that someone ignores this truth, he will not learn it from the chestnut and yet he will nevertheless know the chestnut in its own being without knowing that it can also provide this lesson. Otherwise said, the chestnut is sufficiently intelligible without its symbolic value; who, however, would deny that it is supremely intelligible for the one who also considers it with this value? The chestnut does not demand to be a symbol; it is not even positively fitting for it to be one and nothing would be lost if were not one; if it becomes a symbol, however, something is added to it, something which is gracious, something which is of grace. Superior intelligibility is conferred upon the chestnut just as, all things being equal, grace is to humanity; it is the grace of the chestnut!106 105. Montagnes, ‘La parole de Dieu dans la cré ation’, p. 220. The author then cites Thomas’s commentary on Ephesians: ‘paternitas quae est in ipsis creaturis, est quasi nominalis seu vocalis, sed illa paternitas divina, qua pater dat totam naturam filio, absque omni imperfectione, est vera paternitas’; Super Eph, 3, 4. We can see here how the faith of St. Thomas inverts the poles of reality and fiction, the trace of which we have seen in his use of ‘quasi’ in a metaphysical context. 106. Victor-Alain Berto, ‘Ré flexions sur l’enseignement religieux’, typewritten text (Pontcallec: Institut des Dominicaines du Saint-Esprit, 1938), VIII, pp. 16–17.

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We find in these remarks the dialectic of Being and of Saying observed by Ricoeur in the play of perfections in the treatise on the divine names. In fact, ‘the fundamental act of speaking … consists in affixing a verbal contour to things’; ‘each essence’ has ‘a contour which justifies its title of eidos’.107 To say a singular thing is … to express its essence wholly by abandoning, as an unspoken residue, that which makes it a numerical individual. The page on which the saying of things is written thus always involves at the edges of its text a margin of the inexpressible, a white streak which marks the forced absence of things in their singularity. This singular existence, never heard in the discourse, is always implied, and Aristotle, when speaking of things would have been able, from this point of view, to say with Lautré amont: ‘The author hopes that the reader will make inferences. These margins of discourse, nonetheless, do not remain empty; for Aristotle it is the sensation and not the word which comes to fill them; thus “what is one by discourse is many by sensation” … Aristotle delimits the regions rather than superimposing the moments, and a region is not negated by its neighbor: language gives us what no sensation could hand to us, but even sensations hand to us that which no language could give us.’108

This pragmatic of language was largely suppositive: in sensations, and more generally in experience, we fill up the margins. We can end up in either scepticism or realism depending upon the stronger or weaker confidence we can have in the appearing of things. Without a transcendent foundation, mythic or religious, the silent margins of things can seem to menace thought: when we no longer consider things by questioning their relation to Being,109 we end up regarding them as purely ‘given’, as insignificant factuality; things no longer have anything to ‘say’, not even to sensible experience (deemed fallible a priori) and philosophers, editing but without knowing the work of the Good God, hasten to fill in the margins Aristotle

107. Paul Ricœ ur, Being, Essence and Substance in Plato and Aristotle (trans. David Pellauer and John Starkey; Cambridge: Polity, 2013), pp. 16 and 18. 108. Gilbert Romeyer-Dherbey, Les choses mê mes, la pensé e du ré el chez Aristote (Lausanne, L’ ge d’homme, 1983), p. 142. The author cites Aristotle, Metaphysics A, 5, 986 b 33. 109. One could connect the nominalist turn of medieval thought with the progressive focus on considering God as supreme Will, rather than as Ipsum esse subsistens: by disconnecting the appearance of things and their deep nature, by forgetting that beings are constituted by their participation in Being, one can no longer think of the diversity of their appearance and their becoming. We know how the apparently pious consideration of the potentia Dei absoluta from the end of the thirteenth century fostered the development of an effective ‘fiction theology’; and because one has thus dialectically stuffed the real with imaginary possibilities, its real appearances look like illusions, uprooted from their deep reality.

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left blank!110 In the paradox of modernity, which dispels the real in the very gesture it claims to recognize its weight,111 Thomas might respond in advance by first thinking things in the light of participation and thus without leaving any portion of created reality to the side as self-sufficient. Between Aristotle and Thomas, the revelation of the Gospel (in particular that of the Holy Trinity) forces us to think of the language of humanity as a participation in the divine language and even to think of things as divine words. In this way it has illuminated the possibility of naming real things despite their particularity. The language of things is accessible to theology: it can outline the verbal contours of things (and even slightly overflow into the margins) but without pretending to correct the Creator by annexing all of being to human concepts and language! It is often said that for St. Thomas creatures are signs or symbols of spiritual realities, but that this does not enter into their definition because one can rigorously study them outside of their relation to God. We should perhaps respond that things cannot be studied without language and that language postulates the absolute.

Conclusion Such is the intersected foundation of the two ‘books’ written by God for human beings: the Book of Scripture is necessary for piercing the enigma of nature and transfiguring its meaning; the Book of nature is necessary for understanding Scripture. The dialectic of Scripture and creation, of ‘revealed sense’ and ‘ontological sense’, encapsulates all the dialectics that we have encountered up until now (between the signified and the signifier, the oral and the written, the transparent and the opaque) without, however, being necessary for the intelligibility of either one. This is the first application of the theological adage that the order of grace presupposes that of nature; from this fact the utterances of the divine mystery are appropriate for translating this mystery by their own virtue, by their analogical

110. In order to grasp the real one has to attempt to contain its incessant flux in a kind of a network of stable laws – the mathesis to which knowledge has gradually been reduced – which amounted to annulling the profuse reality of the real! But by attempting to think finite being in that rigorous framework without interrogating its relation to Being – attempting to separate epistemology from ontology – one ends up both haunted by the question of a deep ontology behind appearances and persuaded that some knowledge has no necessary connection with what truly exists. Following Jacobi, John Milbank speaks in this sense of a radical Kantian ‘nihilism’: Kant ends up treating reality in itself as nothing. 111. Thus Hegel reverses Aristotle’s realist intention regarding ‘sensible certitude’: language cannot refer to sensible being as such. Nevertheless it speaks of essence and thus language ‘is the more truthful’; G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Miller; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), § 97, p. 60.

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scope; they do not express the mystery because they are chosen by God, but are instead chosen because they themselves are apt for expressing the mystery. Nothing better indicates both the coherence as well as the distinction of the two orders of truth and the transcendence of supernatural truths.112

This dialectic culminates in discourse about God, in which language transcends itself in the blind demonstratio of a mysterious presence. God can only speak to us by utilizing the contents of the book of creation: no human speech, nor the Speech of God formulated in human language, can designate the divine being otherwise than by terms borrowed from creatures. Such is the paradox of a knowledge of God by the means of what is not God himself: creatures resemble him, he remains an inviolable transcendence, he is in no way similar to creatures and cannot be fully represented. Deficunt a repraesentatione ipsius … . The scope of our affirmations does not depend on the quality of our representations. We know God in the mirror of creatures but the affirmation of his Speech makes us surpass the level of the world in order to know his mystery itself.113

Such is the theological extension of the ‘unbelievable power of enunciation’ performed by Gilson in metaphysics.

112. Montagnes, ‘La parole de Dieu dans la cré ation’, p. 233. 113. Ibid., pp. 239–40.

Part IV WORD, CROSS, EUCHARIST

Chapter 11 THE CROSS OF JESUS, THE SUMMIT OF THE SPEECH OF GOD

Numquam sic locutus est homo sicut hic homo! John 7.46

Introduction: Why Should the Theologian have a Special Devotion to the Crucifix? The Example of St. Thomas We will not be offering a complete ‘theology of the cross’ in the two chapters we devote to the crucifix. Instead, we wish to focus on the effects or consequences of devotion to the cross in practice (and then in theory). From very early on the Christian tradition recognized a possible rivalry between crux and verbum, between the cross of Jesus and a certain type of rhetoric: I have come to you, St. Paul says, ‘not wise of speech so that the cross of Christ would be reduced to nothing’, before he then invokes the divine power of the ‘language of the cross’.1 Only rhetoric could mock rhetoric so well: if it is true that negation presupposes affirmation, then the cross is also somehow present on the level of speech.2 Preaching, of course, narrates the cross of Jesus of Nazareth so as to inspire faith in Jesus the Son of God. Furthermore, the cross itself ends up being received as speech: ‘The language of the cross [ho logos tou staurau] is for us the power of God [dynamis theou]’.3 From the very beginning of Christianity, the blood of Christ shed on the cross has been considered more ‘eloquent’ than any human speech, and in Christian mysticism the cross, as we will see, gradually became the ‘true book’ of the wisdom of God revealed to the elect. By coming to act as a kind of epiphany of the Word in words, the cross can only captivate those who seek to speak true words about God: it is here that we will turn to Thomas Aquinas. His personal devotion to the cross has left highly noticeable traces. Jean-Pierre Torrell has provided us with the best account of this aspect of Thomas Aquinas’s

1. 1 Cor. 1.17. 2. For further remarks on these verses from Paul, see Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 421–7. 3. 1 Cor. 1.17-18.

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life. He highlights, among the ‘characteristic traits of Thomas’ way of praying, ‘the relation of prayer to study’. Guillaume de Tocco ‘nicely summed it up as being one of the points of struggle with the seculars who could not understand that we can be saved in sola studii contemplation’.4 He cites a number of anecdotes from medieval sources, most of which are taken from Tocco.5 According to these sources, Thomas had a habit of devotion to the crucifix. Tocco mentions him making the sign of the cross during storms while repeating, ‘God became incarnate; God died for us.’ The Proprium ordinis praedicatorum, the current breviary of the Dominican order, preserves four ‘aspirations’ attributed to Thomas. All of them speak of the cross: Crux mihi certa salus! Crux est quam semper adoro! Crux Domini mecum! Crux mihi refugium!6 The cross is my salvation! It is the cross which I always embrace! The cross of the savior is with me! The cross is my refuge!

This regular devotion also appears during moments of theological work. One day when he was asked by the Masters of Paris to speak sententialiter on the continuity of Eucharistic accidents sine subjecto, Thomas ‘put himself before the cross, and, placing in front of himself, and before his Master, the open notebook on which he had written, he prayed with his arms in a cross’.7 This way of praying was one of ‘the nine ways of prayer’ which St. Dominic, the founder of the Order of Preachers, would use to pray and which manuscripts spread throughout the Order. Here Thomas is following his example. ‘If one wishes to know what the image before which Thomas prayed looked like’, it is best not to think of Grunewald’s tortured man.

4. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, p. 286. At the end the author cites ST 3, 79, 1, ad 2. 5. Guillame de Tocco, L’Histoire de saint Thomas d’Aquin de Guillaume de Tocco (ed. Cl. Le Brun-Gouanvic; Paris: Cerf, 2005). For more precise references, see the notes in Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, pp. 284–95. 6. Vincent de Couesnongle (ed.), Libellus precum in ordine traditum, excerptus ex editione typica (Rome: Sainte-Sabine, 1982), p. 754. Many decades ago, Dominican priories sold metallic crosses had engraved on one side these prayers and on the other side, in place of the Crucified one, St. Thomas carrying a book and a pen, and in place of the titulus, the radiant dove of the Holy Spirit. There coincides here a naive piety and a most profound intuition of Christian piety. 7. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, p. 284.

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We should doubtless look at miniatures like those we find in this manuscript if we wish to know what the image was like before which Thomas prayed. Not Grunewald’s tortured man, but majesty suffering in dignity, which had not yet entirely disappeared from the pantocrators of Byzantine mosaic; highly stylized, the expression of sorrow resides almost solely in the facial features, the blood that gushes from his side being rather the symbolic expression of the sacraments that gave birth to the Church. It is precisely to this context that the following story refers, which is situated at Naples, during the time when Thomas was writing the questions on the Passion and Resurrection of the Lord. As was his habit, he prayed quite early in the morning in the chapel of St. Nicholas; Dominic of Caserta, the sacristan who observed him, saw him in levitation and heard a voice coming from the crucifix: ‘You have spoken well of me, Thomas, what should be your reward – ‘Nothing other than Thee, Lord.’ This episode is better known than the preceding one; certain scholars even think it rings truer because it is more sober; we cannot, however, guarantee its strict historicity (the relative similarity of the two stories leads us to think that one of the two is a doubling).8

We will leave these discussions to the historians and return to Thomas and the cross: We think it at least plausible that Thomas would have prayed before a crucifix. But it would not be entirely out of line to emphasize a common element in the two cases: those present report a vision – audition, of which they themselves were the beneficiaries. Neither Thomas nor his prayers before the altar or the crucifix are in any way compromised. This is one of those typical cases in which the witnesses reveal the way they approach the saint. But the saint whose piety we may imagine to be more cerebral did not fear to write that Christ’s humanity was a pedagogy supremely adapted to enabling us to arrive at his divinity.9

It is necessary to insist on the crucial specificity of Thomas’s devotion. Certainly omnis Christi actio nostra est instructio, but it is Christ on the cross who is the absolute paradigm: ‘Among everything that Christ suffered during his moral life, his venerable cross is offered to us as the principal example that we should imitate.’10 Whoever wishes to lead a perfect life has nothing other to do than scorn what Christ scorned on the Cross and desire what he desired. There is not a single example of virtue that the cross does not give to us. You seek an example of

8. Ibid., p. 286. 9. Ibid. 10. ‘But among all that Christ did and suffered during His mortal life, the example of His most holy Cross is, above all other things, proposed to Christians for their imitation. He Himself says, “If anyone would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mt. 16.24); Aquinas, Contra retr, c. 15.

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charity: There is no greater love than to give up his life for his friends, and Christ did it on the Cross … . Are you looking for an example of patience? The most perfect patience is found on the Cross … . Are you seeking an example of humility? Look at the Crucified One … . An example of obedience? Begin following Him who was obedient even until death … . An example of scorn of earthly things? Follow behind him who is King of Kings, Lord of Lords, in whom are found all the treasures of wisdom and who nevertheless on the Cross, appears naked, the object of mockery, spat on, beaten, crowned with thorns, given gall and vinegar to drink, and put to death.11

Thomas’s contemplation was thus not only related to study, but it is often found in study. More precisely: there exists an essential relation (which Thomas does not entirely make explicit as language in itself is not a concern of his) between Christ on the cross and (Christian) teaching, not only because of the central place of the mystery of Easter in the kerygma – and then in the Bible as a whole – but also because the event of the cross is itself the bearer of an enigmatic and mysterious word, the verbum crucis, which transcends and grounds Thomas’s ‘direct’ theological discourse. In his commentary on Psalm 21, Thomas explains the true relationship between Jesus Christ in his Passion and the words written down in the text of Scripture in this way: Cor Christi intelligitur sacra scriptura, quae manifestat cor christi. Hoc autem erat clausum ante passionem, quia erat obscura; sed aperta est post passionem, quia eam jam intelligentes considerant, et discernunt quomodo prophetiae sint expondendae. The heart of Christ makes understood Holy Scripture, which manifests the heart of Christ. Yet this was closed before the Passion, which was obscure; but it is open after the Passion, because they now consider it understood and discern in what manner the prophecies are to be interpreted.12

In this way the Passion, especially the incandescent moment of Jesus’ death on the cross following the piercing of his side, becomes the cornerstone for understanding the Scriptures and for explaining and expositing them. The cross grounds theological speech. In this chapter we will return to the sources of theological speech:

1. We will first show how the cross appears as the culminating point of Jesus’ speech in the Gospel. 2. The cross, ‘logically’ the result of God’s appropriate of human speech, gradually becomes the summit of his Speech: the death of the Word completes 11. Cited by Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, pp. 287–8. 12. Aquinas, Sup Ps, 21, 11.

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a whole series of biblical types relating the tortured body, the book, speech and God. After showing the presence of the pattern of ‘from the God who speaks to a God who dies’ throughout the Scriptures, we will explore some of the significant biblical types which illustrate the relation between the book and the tortured body, a type which finds its culmination in the cross. We will conclude with a practical exercise of meditating before the crucifix and in this way attempt to understand anew the language of the cross. In his agony, Jesus speaks the most convincing language there is regarding love: that of the body.

The Cross as the Final ‘Word’ of Jesus Jesus was condemned to death and executed through a twofold trial conducted by Jewish and Roman authorities. This alone is enough to suggest that there is a relationship between speech (of witnesses accepted or rejected) and the cross. Without delving into the socio-political dimension of the Roman trial (Jesus as revolutionary?), we should note that as reported by the gospels Jesus’ death is the outcome of his general posture towards Israelite religion. His ministry questions the usual ways in which it was practised. In works and language, in miracles he performs as signs that the Kingdom has come, and in words that he pronounces as ‘powers given to human beings’ (exorcism or the forgiveness of sin in his own name, as well as blasphemies), he relativizes the current religion and gradually places himself at the centre of its true reestablishment, claiming that he is greater than the Temple, and even greater than the Torah, towards which he shows himself to be truly free: ‘Moses said to you … but I say to you.’ The highest religious authorities of his people could not accept such boldness: after months passed of ‘setting traps’ for him in words and attempting to ‘entrap him in what he said’,13 they arrest him for a final interrogation which is soon interrupted by the crisis that ‘he has blasphemed, he deserves to die!’ Speech as such plays a central role at the heart of this confrontation, within its contingent political stakes and even within its religious dimension.14 The evangelists also emphasize that Jesus willingly goes to his death and that it is inflicted upon him. If he ends the trial by remaining silent during his questioning,

13. Mt. 22.15; Mk 12.13; Lk. 11.54, 20.20. 14. If one believes the rare Jewish sources concerning Jesus in the old Slavonic version of Flavius Josephus’s works, Jesus’ words themselves would pose the most difficult problem to the wise ‘collaborators’ who decided to eliminate him: he healed on the Sabbath, certainly, ‘however, he did nothing impure nor any manual work, but arranged it all only by word’. Was this the forbidden work? See Flavius Josephus, Jewish Wars, 1, 2, chap. CLXXIV, cited in the Old Slavonic version by É tienne Nodet, The Historical Jesus?: Necessity and Limits of an Inquiry (trans. J. Edward Crowley; London: T&T Clark, 2008), p. 204.

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is this not because the cross will be the ‘final word’ of the work of redemption he came to accomplish?15 Writing: A ‘Natural’ Victory over Death? We must first acknowledge the bond connecting speech and death. On a strictly human level, speech already maintains an ambiguous relationship with death. Speech is certainly a victory won against death, a victory aptly symbolized by writing, which enables human thought to transcend time and space. Yet through this victory itself, writing constitutes a constant reminder of our mortal condition: when speech is written it becomes haunted by death; the trace of what was and no longer is foreshadows what will no longer be. Among the innumerable examples from twentieth-century literature, fragments pulled from Marguerite Duras’s final work, published some months before her death, strikingly portray the poignant coincidence of the fragility and the depths of life and death within speech and literature: Y. A.: What is on your mind? M. D.: Writing. A tragic occupation, at least in relation to the course of life. I am in that without effort.

Later, the same afternoon: Y.A.: Do you have a title for the next book? M. D. Yes. The vanishing act of the book … 16

Silence, and then. Find something more to write.17 Vanity of vanities. All is vanity and the pursuit of the wind. These two phrases afford all the literature of the earth.18

15. He attempted to say ‘I am’ to them with words, but it is be being ‘raised’ that he comes to make them know (Jn 8.28). 16. Marguerite Duras, No more, C’est tout (trans. Richard Howard; New York: Seven Stories, 1998), p. 18 [trans. modified]. We choose to cite this text, rather than a hundred others which are perhaps richer that we could find in Blanchot or in Borges, because these final words, from a novelist not specially known for her mystical é lan, bear numerous traces of the presence of the Paschal mystery in the form of dates which imply Holy Week. 17. Duras, No more, C’est tout, p. 35. 18. Ibid., p. 39.

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I feel crushed by existence. It makes me want to write.19

Silence, and then. That does it. I am a dead woman. It’s over.20

It’s over, and yet is it has just begun. Scripture, Speech and the Endangered God A theatrical dialogue John sets during the scene of Jesus’ arrest heavily suggests that Jesus’ words are what lead to his death. John’s Gospel differs here from the Synoptics, which simply report Jesus’ capture after a brief episode of forceful resistance which Jesus rapidly puts to an end. In John, however, Jesus cannot be seized until he speaks and thematizes himself. John presents an elusive Jesus, as he does not formally assume his name (and through it the Name), and an evasive Jesus, as he is not explicitly handed over by words. The passage is well known: at the moment of his arrest in chapter 18, Christ responds to those who look for ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ that ‘Ego sum’, ‘I am he.’21 The Greek says Ego eimi: here Jesus speaks for himself through the self-naming of God.22 The soldiers instantly fall down.23 The scene is then repeated.24 Jesus finally changes the form of his response, and thematizes the ego eimi by subordinating it to a declarative verb: ‘Respondit Iesus dixi vobis quia ego sum’.25 ‘Jesus answered, “I told you I am he.”’ Only then can the group arrest him. With a bold hieratic gesture, merely by thematizing speech in speech (‘Jesus answered, “I told you … .”’), John enables us to understand the coincidence of poverty and omnipotence in Christ’s divine Speech: his diction, his speech renders him vulnerable: through speaking himself, through revealing himself, God simultaneously offers a sign of weakness and a sign of omnipotence; he has nothing greater than himself that would guarantee his speech!

19. Ibid., p. 52. 20. Ibid., p. 58. 21. Jn 18.6. 22. For a clear recapitulation of the immense body of literature concerning this syntagma, see A. Bessette, ‘Je suis’, Revue Scriptura 21: Un univers christocentré , l’É vangile de Jean (1995), pp. 25–43, especially pp. 38–43. 23. Jn 18.5-6. 24. Jn 18.7-8. 25. Jn 18.8.

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Ego eimi: Jesus’ words flow into the mould of the divine Speech, of the tautology which veils everything through revealing it and which reduces language to silence so as better to let speak the fact of two freedoms in a covenantal relationship. In the dialogue during his arrest, Jesus performs the paradox of the Speech of God. If Jesus is indeed the mercy of God which he announces, his project could not entail forcing evidence upon us. Can this God here, who uses a language comprehensible to humanity, say anything other than ‘I am who I am’? Through these words he invites us to believe what he says. Jesus’ persecutors refuse to enter into the covenant of freedoms: they refuse to believe that his speech evades dialectical analysis and the unavoidable dissolution between what speech is and what it says which occurs in all purely human speech. Jesus will be condemned to death at the end of a pseudo-dialectic which in reality will be a purely mechanical dialectic where discourse calls for more discourse: ‘We say that this man has said … .’26 Time and again God has used indirect words in order to have any chance of being understood while he reveals himself: words from the wise, the poets and the prophets which use figures of speech to train the ears of his interlocutors until these figures come to inform a whole culture. Jesus began his ministry by doing the same. On Jesus’ lips, just as through the ancient prophets or the pens of the sacred writers, God employs the existence of the written Scriptures to make people hear. Jesus’ words are continuously permeated with the ancient sacred texts in which he reads the proof of the truth of his words: he draws his words from the Scriptures in which are already announced the effects that his words will have: faith in some, disbelief in others.27 To the educated Jews who refuse to believe what Jesus says: est qui accuset vos Moses in quo vos speratis si enim crederetis Mosi crederetis forsitan et mihi de me enim ille scripsit si autem illius litteris non creditis quomodo meis verbis credetis?28 Your accuser is Moses, on whom you have set your hope. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But if you do not believe what he wrote, how will you believe what I say?

How is Jesus the subject of the ‘writings of Moses’? The more traditional way of understanding this reality works on the thematic level: Moses spoke of me when he promised another prophet, like himself, at the end of time.29 Does not Jesus

26. Mt. 26.61-67. 27. See Jn 15.25: ‘It was to fulfill the word that is written in their law, “They hated me without cause.”’ 28. Jn 5.45-47. 29. The crowds appear to have often called Jesus a ‘prophet’ (Mt. 16.14 // 21.11, 46; Mk 6.15 // Lk. 7.16, 39; 24.19; Jn 4.19; 9.17), but he seems to have accepted that title for himself only in a backhanded way. At that time the title had a Messianic connotation: one thought

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come with an even greater claim? If we hear him rightly, it seems that we can only find life in the Scriptures of Israel when we recognize him as the One who he claims to be through them.30 Rejecting Jesus means that one does not hope in Moses and that one does not accept his writings with absolute seriousness. In addition to this Johannine passage and specific ‘writings of Moses’, we can invoke the entire Gospel dynamic of the ‘fulfillment of the Scriptures’. Early Christian authors extensively developed this theme by showing how Jesus fulfils not only the Law but also the Prophets and the Writings in his virginal conception, his flight from Egypt, his healings of the sick, his teaching and parables, his entry into Jerusalem, his betrayal by Judas, and his Passion and resurrection.31 Another way of understanding how Jesus is the subject of Moses’s writings is more pragmatic and less thematic. The existence of a group of set texts authorizes a dialectic of the oral and the written, of life and speech, in which Jesus attempts to make himself heard without being killed. He seems to concede to them, ‘It is easier to believe in a written and sacred text by generations of pious Israelites than in me, who before your very eyes I am only a man like you.’ However, the a fortiori argument implied in the question that follows presupposes that the two are analogues. What is lacking in those who do not believe does not come from the writing: the insufficiency is not on the side of the text but on that of the reader.

of the spirit of prophecy mentioned in Malachi and it was associated with the return of Elijah (Mal. 3.22-23, repeated in Mt. 17.10-11) or the outpouring of the Spirit (Acts 2.1718, 33) as the sign of the Messianic age. Thus the famous passage from Deut. 18.15-19 (‘The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people’) was read in a Messianic framework. Numerous false prophets were ‘raised up’ in Jesus’ time; Jesus himself sees a true prophet and even the new Elijah in John the Baptist (Mt. 11.10; 17.12), who himself seems to deny being ‘the’ prophet announced by Moses (Deut. 18.15; Num. 12.7 repeated in Jn 1.21), and awaited the Messiah who will renew a hundredfold the miracles of the Exodus. 30. Jn 5.39-40: ‘You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.’ 31. The relationship between Jesus and the Scriptures is a commonplace of early Christianity. For some deep theological reflection on this, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theodrama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 1, Prolegomena (trans. Graham Harrison; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), pp. 34–7. In his theodramatic perspective, Balthasar notes that in the context of a dialogue between God and humanity there is a kind of speechless action which carries discourse beyond itself. Through its openness to the unexpected, the dialogical principle grounds what theologians call ‘theologal hope’, which introduces eschatology into the believer’s reading and existence. We will see how this attitude ends in rendering speech sublime in the witness of the believer who is a martyr – the final word in the dialogue with God.

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Even the reader of Moses must be in a particular condition to read: with an appetite for the truth. Good faith and goodwill, ‘fear of the Lord’,32 ‘thirst for Wisdom’33 or ‘hearing the Voice’34 require a certain relationship with the presence of His name, a disposition of faith, which is present before reading but which is also generated and nourished by it and which enables one to hear and remain within the voice of the God, to actualize the text in speech. It is a matter of putting oneself in the hearing of the Father,35 in the Spirit: ‘est scriptum in prophetis et erunt omnes docibiles Dei’; ‘it is written in the prophets, “And they all shall be taught by God.”’36 Jesus gives himself as the cornerstone of this disposition: omnis qui audivit a Patre et didicit venit ad me Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.37 et qui misit me Pater ipse testimonium perhibuit de me neque vocem eius umquam audistis neque speciem eius vidistis et verbum eius non habetis in vobis manens quia quem misit ille huic vos non creditis And the Father who sent me has himself testified on my behalf. You have never heard his voice or seen his form, and you do not have his word abiding in you, because you do not believe him whom he has sent.38

Believing in the Law, studying and practising it, means hearing the voice (phô nê ) and seeing (oraô ) the eidos of the Father himself beyond the Law’s current meaning. It means having the logos remain within oneself, which means having the agapê of God remain within oneself.39 It is, as Jesus says, to come to Jesus. Not without tragic irony, Jesus adds: ‘nolite murmurare in invicem nemo potest venire ad me nisi Pater qui misit me traxerit eum et ego resuscitabo eum novissimo die’; ‘No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day.’40

32. See Gen. 20.11; Deut. 25.18; 2 Chron. 26.5; 2 Sam. 23.3; Neh. 5.15; Job 28.28; Sir 1.11, 12, 18, 27, 28, 30; Ps. 36.2; Lk. 23.39; Rom. 3.18; 2 Cor. 5.11; 7.1; Acts 9.31. 33. Isa. 41.17-18. 34. Jn 5.37; see Ps. 65.7-8. 35. John explicitly affirms this while the Synoptics suggest it by their use of the divine passive in texts such as Mt. 13.11. 36. Jn 6.45. 37. Jn 6.45. 38. Jn 5.37-38. 39. See Jn 5.42. 40. Jn 6.44.

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The argument is clearly circular. It is his condition and reality as the symbol of the Father which makes Jesus vulnerable before human beings, demanders of reasons and desirous to capture, to conceive, to define, to limit or to grasp meaning. Believing in Jesus, understanding Who he is, means accepting the movement through the tautology in his human language to the real presence of divinity in the One who enunciates it. On Jesus’ lips, words speak of a Reality which they seem to create because they alone reveal it. The Scriptures, as writings, do not guarantee the presence of the Logos in themselves; it is the reader’s relationship to Jesus which alone provides the connection: ‘scrutamini scripturas quia vos putatis in ipsis vitam aeternam habere et illae sunt quae testimonium perhibent de me’; ‘You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf.’41 In this context, the faculty of hearing speech corresponds to the faculty of seeing the invisible God in the letter of the text, or of perceiving the imperceptible God in the flesh of Jesus. This is why Jesus juxtaposes his fate with that of Scripture: both of them are misunderstood. There exists a relationship between disobedience to the law and death42: ‘nonne Moses dedit vobis legem et nemo ex vobis facit legem quid me quaeritis interficere’; ‘Did not Moses give you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law. Why are you looking for an opportunity to kill me?’43 That Jesus comments on the Scriptures and yet is the subject of the Scriptures, the subject of whom they speak – ‘it is of me that they have written’ and the Subject who (there) speaks – is suggested by the parallel between his teaching and ‘the letters’44: ‘If you do not believe his writings, how can you believe my words?’ We find here the tautology of faith, which will always scandalize the opponents of the Gospel: ‘tu de te ipso testimonium perhibes testimonium tuum non est verum’; ‘“You are testifying on your own behalf; your testimony is not valid.”’45 Jesus as the Ultimate Referent of the Scriptures Jesus’ use of Scripture implies that he is its unique referent. More precisely, his body, and his body given over and ‘raised up’, puts into focus all the ‘signs’ that he gives to those who demand reasons to believe. For example, during his first visit to

41. Jn 5.39. 42. See Jn 7.20. 43. Jn 7.19-20. 44. Jn 7.15-19: ‘The Jews were astonished at it, saying, “How does this man have such learning, when he has never been taught?” Then Jesus answered them, “My teaching is not mine but his who sent me. Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own. Those who speak on their own seek their own glory; but the one who seeks the glory of him who sent him is true, and there is nothing false in him. Did not Moses give you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law.”’ 45. Jn 8.13.

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Jerusalem, after he fulfils an ancient prophecy when driving the merchants from the Temple,46 his interlocutors ask him, ‘quod signum ostendis nobis quia haec facis?’; ‘What sign can you show us for doing this?’47 Furthermore, after delivering an urgent exhortation to believe in the name of God,48 Jesus is asked to give a sign in the name of the Scriptures: quod ergo tu facis signum ut videamus et credamus tibi quid operaris patres nostri manna manducaverunt in deserto sicut scriptum est panem de caelo dedit eis manducare. What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’49

In both cases, the sign (the driving out of the merchants, the multiplication of the bread) calls for another sign, and Jesus responds by symbolically indicating his own body. His body is the true Temple, destroyed and rebuilt.50 His body is the true bread from heaven. He substitutes his own person for the object, as mysterious as the manna, that his interlocutors imagine when they ask concerning his claims, when saying: ‘Ego sum panis vitae’; ‘I am the bread of life.’51 Jesus himself is the sign that he describes and that he promises. He does not envision the concrete actualization of his words outside of his own body from which his words come. His response to the insistence for manna in John is equivalent to his response to Satan the Tempter in the Synoptics52: when the devil demands a centrifugal efficacy of Speech (‘speak to these stones and they will become bread’), Jesus retorts by plunging him back into Speech, the absolute nourishment, with a citation from Deuteronomy: ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’53 Simply put, John goes further in ensuring that Jesus, who promises bread, does not merely have bread, but is himself the bread. Additionally, Jesus is the gate of the lost sheep and the shepherd, which implies that the listeners are both the herdsmen (who pass through the gate) and the lost

46. Jn 2.16: ‘He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a Marketplace!” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” On traders in the house of the Lord, see Zac. 14.21; on zeal, see Ps. 69.9. 47. Jn 2.18. 48. Jn 6.29. 49. Jn 6.30-31. 50. Jn 2.19-22. 51. Jn 6.35. 52. See Mt. 4.1-11; Mk 1.12-13; Lk. 4.1-13. 53. Mt. 4.4, see Deut. 8.3.

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sheep (which the shepherd leads to graze).54 Applying the parable to reality makes faith in the works/words of the Son the criterion for distinguishing between the sheep.55 It seems as if every sign Jesus offers can only return back to himself: Jesus is the goal and the way56; he speaks the promise of the resurrection and is the resurrection57; he has light to walk without stumbling and he is the light. The Gospel is thus woven with figures58 fulfilling the Scriptures59 in acts and words which generate astonishment, questioning and the search for meaning – acts and words are thus presented as signifiers of new signs, of other signs. Focusing on both the question and the response,60 Jesus claims to have at his command not only meaning but also the reception of meaning. Using words which transcend the distinction of signifier and signified in the sign and transgress the frontier between addresser and addressee in speech, Jesus forces his listeners to enter into the enunciation of the figures61 he employs, and to discover that

54. Jn 10.9, 11, 14. 55. Jn 10.26-27. 56. Jn 14.4-6. 57. Jn 11.23, 25. 58. A figure, in the technical sense of semiotics, is not the mere verbal expression or representation of things from the natural world. It is crafted only in discourse, without which it does not exist. It is a ‘hub of virtual significative effects which summons other figures’. Through the figures which ‘sustain’ it, discourse wholly returns to the speaker’s enunciative act: this act alone maintains discourse as a meaningful whole. The figurative dimension orients the acts of speaking or listening towards a ‘central and originary point where neither world nor meaning are available, although the very capacity of speaking or signifying comes from it’. Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la letter, pp. 134, 170–3. 59. ‘By redefining the signification process as the passage from figure to fulfillment, the New Testament does not turn it into a chronological succession in which the fulfillment would obliterate the previous step. Rather, it displays a logical relation which, once the fulfillment has occurred, vividly retains the process of signifying even though it is now disclosed. The way from what-was-signifying to what-has-been-signified remains open: the cognition which has been supplied is in fact a recognition of what was already there but hidden in a figurative state.’ Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, p. 324. Martin rightly adds: ‘Figures display both the continuity and the discontinuity between the two states of cognizance: gauging these variations is probably the best way to try and give a solid theoretical account for what is called the “spiritual sense”’. 60. Compare Jn 8.19 and Jn 14.8-9: Jesus’ words serve as their own proof: the play between the tenses introduces Philip to the sacred text-space in which he is taught the equivalence of deeds and words. 61. ‘A figure speaks of the world more than it reproduces it. It is only meaningful alongside other figures: like a watermark, the relations between figures point to the enunciative function of the speaker. Therefore, one can study figures in two ways: on the thematic or on the enunciative level. The thematic study of figures deciphers them as indices of a given system of values, whereas their enunciative study describes the very relation

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the divine ego eimi is the only assignable source of his utterance. Only a divine authority can guarantee the truth of Christic speech. The Gospel very clearly makes the apparent absence of the referent of Jesus’ words the cause of his condemnation to death: ‘lapidamus te … de blasphemia et quia tu homo cum sis facis te ipsum Deum’; ‘we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God.’62 Jesus can only provide the true referent of his words by appealing to the divine power and presence shared between the Father and the Son which he, the Son, receives from the Father, and to whom his very words gravitate: ‘si cognovissetis me et Patrem meum utique cognovissetis et amodo cognoscitis eum et vidistis eum’; ‘If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.’63 Jesus is given over as the Sign par excellence to those who demand a sign: his body is the divine indwelling. The sublime paradox here is that the unveiling of that sign is elicited by the very unbelief that calls for the sign and which the sign provokes: it is this which procures (historically) the union of these words and the reality of which they speak, as the accomplished transversal of death in the resurrection will attest to their truth through the divine radiation of the body which pronounces these words. The persecution and then death of Jesus originate from the unbelief of his contemporaries, for whom Jesus’ language is uncoupled from reality and who do not see that Jesus’ words are a work performed on their behalf. Some of them, however, do grasp this: ‘Numquam sic locutus est homo sicut hic homo!’; ‘Never has anyone spoken like this!’64 On the level of speech, Jesus’ condemnation to death begins at the moment of the initial dialogue between him and his unbelieving compatriots: these are the words which cause his death. One could even think that those words aim precisely towards this death, for it is only by moving through his death that the path to Resurrection will be opened, a path that will confirm those very words.65 What forms the greater obstacle for trusting in Jesus’ words, and which causes his being put to death, is that they seem to be dependent upon himself, that is, their fundamentally tautological structure. For the believer, on the contrary, this self-referral is the shocking sign of his divinity: only the living and true God, the

between the thematic warp and the figural weft of the text. Such a description elicits a supplement of meaning which is irreducible to any semantic or narrative decoding.’ Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, pp. 134–5. 62. Jn 10.33. 63. Jn 14.7. 64. Jn 7.46. 65. See the echoes of the disciples’ early preaching to the Jews in the Acts of the Apostles: ‘this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men … . But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled.’ Acts 2.22-23; 3.17-20.

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Creator and guarantor of our freedom, can speak to us with such authority and such vulnerability at the same time. To sum up, the cross appears as the solution to an equation which to human eyes seems impossible: the relation between the omnipotent divine will to save humanity and human freedom. For the God of love to reveal himself as such requires both that he is rendered accessible in speech and that he escapes the corrosive infinite regression of speech. It is necessary, that is to say, that he (does not) speak. It is necessary that he take up the cross. If Jesus lets himself be led to death without opening his mouth, ‘as a lamb led to the slaughter’, this is because Jesus has dared to speak so as to affirm his absolute reality: ‘Before Abraham was, I am’. Jesus’ human words were an introduction, a way towards the Speech which has no need of words because it does what it says, because it is Him whom they signify. Jesus’ words turn out to be identical with those which are heard ‘in the beginning’ of the world and of the Book. ‘I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do these things.’66 Frye notes: The traditional Christian view of the verse ‘And God said, Let there be light, and there was light’ is that it is the Word of God that creates, and that therefore Christ, identified with the Word of God in John and elsewhere, was the original creator. But to speak is to enter the conventions of language, which are a part of human death-consciousness67; so if we push the image far enough, we come to the possibility that as soon as God speaks, and transforms himself into a Word of God, he has already condemned himself to death.68

On the true cross where he dies for an enslaved humanity, Jesus appears as the Word of God crucified to human speech and as human speech crucified to silence. From the beginning and in a mysterious way, the God who speaks is a God who loves until death! The Father, the Son and the Spirit are equally God and determine in their action ad extra that ‘in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself ’.69

66. Isa. 45.7. 67. It is here that we can mention George Steiner’s forceful comments: ‘In the Western sphere, the conceptualization of God was at the outset and during its history in action that of a speech-act, of a grammatical absolute manifest in the tautologies of God’s selfdefinition. Only death is outside discourse, and that, “strictly non-speaking,” is its meaning so far as it meaning is accessible to us. It is solely in reference to death that the great antechamber of liturgical, theological, metaphysical and poetic simile or metaphor – that of “return,” “resurrection,” “salvation,” “last sleep” – leads nowhere (which does not signify that the journey is in vain).’ Steiner, Real Presences, pp. 88–9. 68. Frye, The Great Code, p. 111. 69. 2 Cor. 5.19.

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The Scriptural Paths from the God Who Speaks to the God who Dies In this way Jesus’ death appears as the summit of the fulfilment of the Scriptures as the Word of God. In a highly significant way in John, his death is the only ‘fulfilment’ to be described as an achievement and a perfection through the use of the verbs teleô -teleioô ,70 contrasted with pleroô which signifies filling or plenitude in the rest of his gospel.71 With a paradoxical logic analogous to that of Mark in its brief ending, John makes exaltation and humiliation coincide in Jesus’ suffering. The reader should read the very signs of the horror of a crucifixion – so horrible that antiquity did not depict it artistically in the now familiar way before the Romans had stopped using this form of torture – as the radiant presence of God. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews even goes so far as to say that Jesus Christ himself had been ‘fulfilled’ by his suffering,72 and later Christian reflection on the cross would see in it the eternal design of God.73 The mordant fulfilment of the human speech assumed by God is realized in a particularly expressive manner in the stories of the crucifixion. John is exemplary here: after having drunk the vinegar, Jesus cries out, ‘It is finished’, using the verb teleô which is different from verb teleioô used in the same passage but for Scripture. The final saying of the Word has a word: tetelestai – “It is done”. The final word of the Word does not have a different “subject” than the One who offers it: he himself. This life, this death, this person, his relations and his world, everything which the gospel of John represents to us is condensed in this Word which is forever more sealed as love.74

Beyond the narration and the themes of the Gospel according to John, the cross seems to mobilize the entire body of Scripture. In the details surrounding the cross, such as the hyssop,75 or the vessel,76 or the tunic,77 the whole imaginary of

70. Jn 19:28 (teleioô ) and 30 (teleô ). 71. For example, Jn 12.38; 13.18; 15.11, 25; 17.12; 18.9, 32; 19.24, 36. 72. Heb. 2.10 and 5.8-9 (teleioô ). 73. See 1 Cor. 15.3, 14; Acts 2.23 and 4.28; Acts 1.18. 74. Simoë ns, Selon Jean, vol. 3, p. 846. Both verbs refer to Christ’s love for them ‘to the end’ [eis telos] of Jn 13.1. 75. See Jn 19.29. Notice the ritual overtones of the same word conveyed by Lev. 14.4; Ps. 51.9; Isa. 1.18; Ezra 36.25; Job 9.30; Num. 19.18 (echoed in Heb. 9.13-14), and above all the Paschal symbolism of Exod. 12.22 (echoed in Heb. 9.18-20). 76. The term skeuos (vase) appears in Heb. 9.21, which alludes to Exod. 24.6-8. 77. Jn 19.23. Beyond the explicit citation of Ps. 22.19, this insistence on the tunic might allude to the robes of the priest (Exodus 28) which they receive on the day of their consecration – a day precisely called teleiosis in the Septuagint (Exodus 29, Leviticus 8 and 10). Significantly, they wear it when offering the holocaust (Leviticus 6) and on the day of Kippur (Leviticus 16).

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the priestly tradition converges towards the Crucified one. As for the staging, it manifests, by the allusions to the very first story of the Biblical canon, the crucial paradox of the divine use of human speech from the beginning so well elaborated by the Wisdom tradition.78 The Body of Tortured Flesh and the Body of the Lacerated Text in the Scriptures: Three Types of the Cross as Book The book, the body, God, speech, death: in the grand biblical kaleidoscope, well before the narrations of the Passion, several stories or poems had combined these enigmatic elements. One could mention here the history of Joseph in Genesis, or certain passages from the fate of the prophets which connect the appearance of the Word of God in a human body, persecution and death. They culminate in the famous ‘Servant Songs’ of the prophet Isaiah,79 of which there are several echoes: ego Dominus vocavi te80 I am the Lord, I have called you Dominus ab utero vocavit me de ventre matris meae recordatus est nominis mei et posuit os meum quasi gladium acutum81 The Lord called me before I was born, While I was in my mother’s womb he named me. He made my mouth like a sharp sword Dominus dedit mihi linguam eruditam ut sciam sustentare eum qui lassus est verbo erigit mane mane erigit82 The Lord has given me The tongue of a teacher, That I may know how to sustain the weary with a word Morning by morning he wakens

78. The ‘garden’ of Golgotha with Mary and John at the foot of the cross brings the reader back to the original Paradise where, in the beginning, a man and a woman already stood in awe at the foot of a desirable fruit tree. Even the tunic has protological and sapiential overtones (Gen. 3.21-22, 37). 79. Four famous passages depict a mysterious suffering servant: Isa. 42.1-4; 49.1-6; 50.4-9; 52.13-53.12). 80. Isa. 42.6. 81. Isa. 49.1-2. 82. Isa. 50.4

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ecce intelleget servus meus exaltabitur... ipse autem vulneratus est propter iniquitates nostras … oblatus est quia ipse voluit et non aperuit os suum... videbit et saturabitur … 83 See, my servant shall prosper … But he was wounded for our transgressions … He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth He shall see light; he shall find satisfaction

We know how important these texts were for early Christian literature when Jesus’ followers were attempting to understand the catastrophic end of Jesus’ ministry in Jerusalem.84 For first-century Jewish speakers, it was easy to think about those texts insofar as they were partially actualized in their own daily life of prayer. For example, some Psalms clearly relate the body, death, the book and divine commissioning: Sacrificium et oblationem noluisti aures autem perfecisti mihi Holocaustum et pro peccato non postulasti tunc dixi: Ecce venio. In capite libri scriptum est de me ut facerem voluntatem tuam. Deus meus, volui, et legem tuam in medio cordis mei. Sacrifice and offering you do not desire But you have given me an open ear Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required. Then I said, ‘Here I am; in the scroll of the book it is written of me. I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.’85 Inperfectum meum viderunt oculi tui et in libro tuo omnes scribentur die formabuntur et nemo in eis. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written All the days that were formed for me.86

83. Isa. 52.13; 53.5, 7, 11. 84. Hence their haunting presence in the Passion’s intertext: for example in Mt. 26:28 (Isa. 53.12); 27.14 (Isa. 53.7); 27.38 (Isa. 53.9,12); 27.60 (Isa. 53.9). Later narratives squarely identify Jesus and the ‘Suffering Servant’, e.g. Isa. 42.1-4 and Mt. 12.17-21. 85. Heb. 10.5-9 places Ps. 40.6-7 on Christ’s lips as he enters the world. 86. Ps. 139.16.

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The well-known biblical scenes of prophets eating books vividly portray the somatic repercussions of the Word of God: Ezekiel87 and John88 incorporate the prophecy. Such a rapprochement of the Word and the body instantiate the first wages of many sufferings. Here we would like to linger on other ‘types’ of the cross which are linked to the book, and on which scholars have rarely meditated in and for themselves. In many passages in the Old Testament, a body broken into pieces becomes the pledge of a given word. The body in pieces is the guarantee of faith placed in a word. In the time of the Patriarchs, for example, and in the stories of the promises (of descendants and land) made to Abraham, we first find an affirmation of his faith: ‘And Abraham believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.’89 When Abraham asks for a sign of the fulfilment of these promises, the response is, ‘Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.’ He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away. As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.90

God then speaks and announces to him the fate of his descendants: When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Repham, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’91

This is an ancient covenant ritual: those in the contract pass between the bloody pieces of flesh and call upon them as signs of the victims’ fate if they transgress their promises. God and God alone, under the symbol of fire,92 passes through these pieces, for his covenant is a unilateral pact: ‘As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature

87. Ezra 3.3. 88. Rev. 10.8-11. 89. Gen. 15.6. 90. Gen. 15.9-12. 91. Gen. 15.17-21. 92. See the Burning Bush in Exod. 3.2, the column of smoke in Exod. 13.21 and the smoking mountain of Sinai in Exod. 19.18.

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that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark.’93 This is a solemn promise sealed by an imprecatory oath (passing between the cleaved carcasses). We can also find this tight relationship between the tortured body and the offered word elsewhere. During another moment of faithlessness when the chosen people attempted to reclaim the slaves freed during the Sabbath year as the Law prescribed,94 God cries out, ‘The officials of Judah, the officials of Jerusalem, the eunuchs, the priests, and all the people of the land who passed between the parts of the calf shall be handed over to their enemies and to those who seek their lives. Their corpses shall become food for the birds of the air and the wild animals of the earth.’95 This case is particularly interesting inasmuch as it explicitly applies the fate of the animal-symbol to the parties of the covenant. The cleaved cadaver literally constitutes a sym-bolon. We should also note in these examples the unnamed presence of blood poured out: a relationship is established between the body of flesh, the life of this body (which resides in the blood, the biblical holder of the soul), and the word spoken and to be kept. There appears here a type of symbolic covenant which Jesus will definitively seal in his body and in his words during his life and on the cross. From this complex of bodies in pieces linked to the living speech, we find the figure, spread out, in the association that Scripture often makes between the book and the body. Let us move to the years 605–604 BC and to the heart of the book of Jeremiah. The prophet calls his secretary Baruch and dictates to him the words that God has addressed to the prophet since the outset of his ministry (around 626).96 During a day of fasting, Baruch, once he had copied the prophecies Jeremiah dictated, reads them at the Temple to all of the people, even the officials who then become frightened. They must warn the king: ‘Then they questioned Baruch, “Tell us now, how did you write all these words coming from his mouth?” Baruch answered them, “He was uttering all of them from his mouth and I was writing them with ink on that book.”’97 The prophet, through his body, is truly ‘the mouth of God’.98 He authenticates the active Presence of God in the reality of the body. Knowing the corporal process of dictation, the appearance of these words, is to be convinced of their potential energy. Through the prophet’s mouth and the scribe’s ear, mouth and hands, the

93. Gen. 9.9-10. 94. Deut. 15.12-13. 95. Jer. 34.8-22 (here 19-20). 96. See Jer. 36.2. 97. Jer. 36.17-19. Note the ‘from his mouth’, often omitted by modern translators but scrupulously preserved in the Vulgate: ‘indica nobis quomodo scripsisti omnes sermones istos ex ore eius’. 98. Hence the stress on the fact that the words were actually uttered by his mouth. See Exod. 4.14-15; Jer. 19.15-19.

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divine Speech becomes the body of the text. In the context of revelation, the power of God is disseminated through his Word in all its various states of incorporation and embodiment. The reader witnesses a barbaric and magnificent palace scene in the story that follows: the king rejects the catastrophic prediction foretold by Baruch, and displays his rejection of this prophecy by destroying with his own hand the words that were said to him. King Jehoiakim slashes, tears up and throws Jeremiah’s prophecies into the fire, three columns at a time as read by servant Jehudi, until the fire in the brazier consumes the entire scroll. Three officials intervene to prevent this destruction and the way this action is described is reminiscent of torture (‘the king would cut them off with a penknife’),99 and the relationship with the body is created by the allusion to the possible affliction of those who have rejected repentance and to those threats which bear upon the prophet’s physical integrity: ‘Yet neither the king, nor any of his servants who heard all these words, was alarmed, nor did they tear their garments.’100 The king orders the arrest of Baruch and Jeremiah, ‘But the Lord hid them.’101 Jeremiah then dictates everything again to Baruch and now incorporates into his writing even the destruction of the scroll which has just happened and adds, not without some irony, ‘and many similar words were added to them’.102 Contained within this episode is a narrative theology of the book as body: This is to say that it is necessary to make place for a critical conception of the Word-Scripture relation, the opposite of the widespread conception which emphatically maintains their equivalence … . The ‘passion’ of the Book – which the king throws into the fire piece by piece – authorizes one to conclude that there is a Passion of Speech when it is put into writing. This point of view is additionally suggested by the analogy between ‘being made man’ and ‘being made writing’, for the idea of the incarnation is connected to that of a divine kenosis, and thus a dispossession, of a process of striping away from an original plentitude of meaning and being. The doctrine of the successive states of the divine Word103 also tends in this direction insofar as the initial state, that of the ‘abbreviation of the speech’, appears under an explicitly ‘oppressive’ aspect.104

The New Testament will deepen the theology of the book into a theology of Scripture (and of all writing) as the passion of the Word. In the Old Testament

99. Jer. 36.23. 100. Jer. 36.24. 101. Jer. 36.26. 102. Jer. 36.32. 103. There is an allusion here to Ambrose and Hilary of Poitiers. 104. Karl Kertelge and Eugen Biser, ‘Parole de Dieu’, in Peter Eicher (ed.), Dictionnaire de thé ologie (Paris: Cerf 1988), pp. 503–14 (here p. 513).

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the ‘despair of writing’ seems ‘overwritten by a different, more anguished kind of distress: that of the prophet suffering as he receives the Word’; In Paul, however, we initially witness an intuition of the limits of this mode of communication when he places it at the service of apostolic preaching that he poses as the foundation stone of the New Testament, but not without forgetting to mention “I wish I were present with your now and could change my tone, for I am perplexed about you” (Gal. 4.20).105

In the second part of Zechariah’s prophecy (which dates from after the fourth century), we find an astonishing passage whose literal meaning constitutes an exegetical problem. A literal translation would read, ‘And if one says to him, “what are the wounds between your hands,” He would say, “those that I have received from those who love me”’.106 However, the Greek version, when rendering the Hebraic twist so literally, translated ‘between’ (bin) with ‘in the middle of ’ and took ‘your hands’ in a distributive sense, which gives us, ‘What are these wounds in the middle of your hands.’107 This rendering is clearly adopted in the first Christian writings for a good typological reason; twenty verses before, in the same prophecy, there appears the famous phrase used in Jn 19.37, ‘They will look on the one whom they have pierced.’108 The Vulgate109 and the Western translation tradition110 adopted this version. Known for its rigour, the Jerusalem Bible translates this passage in this way: ‘And if one says to him, “What are the wounds on your body?”, he will say, “Those that I have received from those who love me.”’111 In the first editions, it offered different glosses of the verse in a note, stating it could either be an allusion to paternal correction112 or to a friendly spat.113 Finally, one could see here an

105. Kertlege and Biser, ‘Parole de Dieu’, p. 513. 106. Zech. 13.6. 107. Septuagint: ana meson tô n xeirô n sou. 108. See Zech. 12.10. 109. Vulgate: in medio manuum tuarum. 110. The King James Version has ‘in thine hands’ and Lemaî tre de Sacy has ‘au milieu des mains’; Ph. Sellier (ed.), La Bible: Traduction par Le Maistre de Sacy (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1990), p. 1188. 111. Aggé e, Zacharie, Malachie, trans. A. Gé lin, in La Sainte Bible (1948), p. 54. The implicit philological reasoning is that in Hebrew bin means ‘between’, not ‘in’, and that yad means more than ‘hand’ and could signify the wrist (Gen. 24.22; Ezra 16.11; 23.42) or the whole arm (Jer. 38.12; Ezra 13.18). Hence the translation ‘between your arms’, that is to say, ‘on your chest’. 112. See Deut. 25.2; Prov. 19.29. 113. Aggé e, Zacharie, Malachie, p. 56 note a.

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allusion to the practice within the groups of the old prophets of making incisions on the body in order for blood to flow.114 The literal sense of the Hebrew text is thus highly perplexing. At the end of chapter 12 the ‘pierced one’ seems to be YHWH, looked upon in a moment of total repentance, while in chapter 13, on the contrary, it seems to refer to a sinner, to the prophet of falsehood: in Zechariah’s vision of a reborn Jerusalem and of its people drenched by a new pouring out of the Spirit, those who bears the wounds or scars will be accused of continuing old superstitious mantic practices and will defend themselves by alluding to a friendly dispute.115 They would nonetheless be pierced by their own parents for their transgressions.116 In chapter 13 there also appears yet another typological passage: God calls for the moment when he will ‘strike the shepherd, that the sheep may be scattered’.117 This text cryptically suggests that there is a relationship between the prophetic word and the pouring out of blood from the body, the chest or the hands, a relationship that God disapproves of while still seeming to accept it. One could also mention the older and better known episodes at the conclusion of the Mosaic covenant, when the proclamation of the Law was accompanied by sacrifices and the sprinkling of blood.118 Von Balthasar has well described the ritualized accumulation of blood scattered throughout the whole Bible: ‘That the bloody sacrifices – unchanged, unspiritualised, and finally even uncomprehended too – should be delivered in their incarnate, crude realism at the door of the New Testament, that the ancient Passover of blood should be celebrated in the temple at the same afternoon hour as the new Passover of blood was celebrated outside the gates.’119 In this way he brings together ‘the blood event’ and the silence of the Word which affects the Israelites before the Exilic period. The signification of blood is not clear even for those who sacrifice their life for the covenant: And when blood and word stand together, then the blood certainly stands in the place of the last word, which perhaps can no longer be uttered, and can only be whispered or shouted: it continues to shout, when men can no longer shout, or on the contrary it summarises what the existence of man ought to have wanted to say and was not able to say.120

114. See 1 Kgs 18.28. 115. La sainte Bible (1956), p. 1272 and pp. 1272–3 note j. 116. Zech. 13.3. 117. See Mt. 26.56. 118. See Ex 24, cited in Heb. 9.19. 119. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 6, Theology: The Old Covenant (Brian McNeil and Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), p. 389. 120. von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 6, Theology: The Old Covenant, p. 392. The mystery of blood comes to be paired with absolute obedience to the Word of God. ‘Since both are essentially the same thing: faith, as acceptance of every word from God, is the perfect disposition of sacrifice which allows God to make the one who believe the

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Even if certain Greek influences (especially in the Wisdom books121) placed in the Bible a tension between incarnation and dis-incarnation, the (human) body enters into the composition of the Book of God. The reading of this Book commits the body to a particular challenge of life and death; the book itself, the scroll of hide, is a body that one lacerates. The lectio of the book is simultaneously an experience of limits (of knowledge) and an experience of absolute certitude (that of the perception of one’s own body). In this coincidence of power and finitude (transcendence is easily within reach! Transcendence is destructible!), the lectio anticipates and extends the martyr’s experience.

Conclusion: Contemplation of the Crucifix, or, What the Cross ‘Says’ The torture undergone by Jesus is clarified a posteriori by one such typological glance backwards. If we follow the fourth gospel in particular, Jesus himself uses the ancient Scriptures to describe the way in which he will die. In John 3, for example, Jesus announces his crucifixion as an ‘elevation’, comparable in form and effect to the bronze serpent Moses lifted up.122 ‘Sicut Moses exaltavit serpentem in deserto ita exaltari oportet Filium hominis ut omnis qui credit in ipso non pereat sed habeat vitam aeternam’; ‘And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.’123 For John, then, the bronze serpent was a reality here below and not a glorious achievement in the world of God, and at the same time it was a salvific reality. Moses placed a sculpture of a serpent on a pole for the Israelites who had been bitten by venomous serpents and it healed them. This figure resembles the evil it cures (a serpent against serpents, with the remedy and the evil being homogeneous), and its almost magical effect stems from the fact that it was invested by the Word of God addressed to Moses, as the Biblical tradition later depicted it.124 In the New Testament, it is no longer only a matter of healing a searing bite, but of negatively being liberated from something and positively of ‘rising to heaven’ in

perfect sacrificial beast, the lamb that is led to the slaughter without opening its mouth.’ von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 6, Theology: The Old Covenant, p. 399. 121. See Wisdom of Solomon 9.15. 122. Num. 21.2-9. 123. Jn 3.14-15. 124. The bronze serpent might have been preserved as a memorial of the Torah in the guise of the tefillin (see Exod. 13.9). Later it elicited an idolatrous cult and so Hezekiah destroyed it (2 Kgs 18.4). Such ambiguous memories lead the author of Wisdom to stress that those who were looking at the statue were not healed by it, but by their conversion to the Word which this gesture entailed (Wis 16:6-7, 12-13).

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order to ‘see the Kingdom of God’.125 From now on, it is a question of eternal life and no longer of mortal life. Now the fruit of Christ’s passion is eternal life; hence he says, so that everyone who believes in him, performing good works, may not be lost, but have eternal life. And this fruit corresponds to the fruit of the symbolic serpent. For whoever looked upon the serpent of bronze was freed from poison and his life was preserved. But he who looks upon the lifted up Son of Man, and believes in the crucified Christ, he is freed from poison and sin: ‘Whoever believes in me will never die’ (below 11:26), and is preserved for eternal life. ‘These things are written that you may believe ... and that believing you may have life in his name’ (below 20:31).126

On the cross Jesus participates in and fulfills these two aspects of the miraculous statue: homogeneity with the evil that it heals and the efficacy of the healing. First, God ‘made him to be sin’,127 according to St. Paul, and it is this evil that he destroys. However, Jesus on the cross is not some kind of talisman endowed by convention with a thaumatic power,128 for seeing him does not suffice for salvation. The statue was only a representation, a figure resembling venomous serpents, a sign which was efficacious by (divine) convention. Jesus, however, is the presence himself. He is the power himself as a person in the world and hence seeing no longer suffices: it is necessary to believe in him to be healed. At the same time, however, faith remains present in the line of sight: faith in Jesus is a kind of ‘supravision’ which no longer heals mortal life as did the fleshly vision of the bronze sculpture but which offers ‘eternal life’. What does that mean? In the desert, the sovereign God granted an object the power to heal, and he only needed to establish the conventio: seeing the sculpture automatically healed anyone physically facing it. On the cross, God himself suffers. The remedy and the sickness are completely homogeneous since God took on a body of flesh. This occurs on the level of the real and is no longer simply in the order of the sign. Yet the efficacy seems radically lessened. What a paradox: in order to save what is the most important in the human beings and to offer them eternal life, God seems less ‘effective’ than when he was healing physical life. How should we understand this? It is as if the evil that God desired to heal through the cross was damaging ‘something’ in human beings that God can only heal by experiencing it himself

125. Jn 3.3. 126. Aquinas, In Io, III, 2. 127. 2 Cor 5.14, 20-21. 128. For the medieval theory of the talisman, see SCG, c. 104, and Irè ne Rosier-Catach, La parole comme acte: Sur la grammaire et la sé mantique du XIIIe siè cle, ‘Sic et Non’ (Paris: Vrin, 1994), pp. 228–9.

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(as opposed to the serpent that healed a sickness whose causes and effects were clearly identified: recriminations against Heaven and against Moses). Logically this ‘something’ must be that through which humanity is essentially connected to God (and no longer a question of earthly nourishment as in the desert), and, if we can put it this way, that through which God is necessarily connected to humanity (but what could such a necessity be?). Thomas himself intimates that there is a mysterious necessity in the cross. How is God ‘necessarily’ connected to humanity? This ‘necessity’ can only be a relation that God himself has created, and so it occurs in the order of covenant: for example, that of being signified, manifested, glorified in and through humanity: through the being of humanity which is in his image, and by the acting of humanity which is in his likeness.129 Thomas expresses this in terms of fittingness. Let us not think that this necessity is not a true necessity in God inasmuch as God was free when he himself created it. The Scriptures teach this as early as in Isaiah: God is connected to humanity by the unbreakable bond of freedom. He cries out this astonishing statement: verumtamen servire me fecisti in peccatis tuis.130 In truth you have enslaved me by your sins!131

Through their faults the chosen people have reduced God to servitude! This claim comes at the heart of the passages in Deutero- and Trito-Isaiah which portray the Messiah as a servant.132 The weaker of the two parties soils the covenant which is supposed to be a sign of holiness and in doing so soils the other party.

129. Compare Gen. 1.27 with Ps. 8.6, two statements on humanity mankind which inspired this famous passage from Irenaeus: ‘For this reason did the Word become the dispenser of the paternal grace for the benefit of men, for whom He made such great dispensations, revealing God indeed to men, but presenting man to God, and preserving at the same time the invisibility of the Father, lest man should at any time become a despiser of God, and that he should always possess something towards which he might advance; but, on the other hand, revealing God to men through many dispensations, lest man, falling away from God altogether, should cease to exist. For the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God. For if the manifestation of God which is made by means of the creation, affords life to all living in the earth, much more does that revelation of the Father which comes through the Word, give life to those who see God.’ Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, IV, 20, 7. 130. Isa. 43.24. Coming in the context of an unconditional pardon by God foretold as a res nova (Isa. 43.19), this strong statement is somewhat weakened in the Vulgate, which seems to translate the Greek in this way: verumtamen servire me fecisti in peccatis tuis; ‘thou hast made me to serve with thy sins’. 131. Our translation. 132. The term ‘servant-slave’ appears twenty times in the singular (chps. 39-53) and eleven times in the plural (chps. 54-66).

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The Omnipotent one is thus free and he is not free, for the creature can make him a slave. The only name for the coincidence of freedom and servitude within human language is love. Love is its symptom. Thus we must finally say that this necessary relationship between God and humanity is nothing other than human freedom. Because God is God, because humanity is humanity, and because God has created humanity in his image and likeness, their relationship is what makes humanity human and what makes God divine, what makes God human and the human divine: freedom is the daughter of reason and of will; freedom is the sign of a consciously lived life,133 one lived on the basis of eternity. Our own discourse becomes tautological at this point and sees the central figure of revelation (and of faith) to be the intrusion of the infinite into the finite which, in order to be recognized, can only be said in finite terms. It is necessary to write that the ‘thing’ which we see here is the fact that God is God for humanity (God knows and loves humanity). Certainly we could speak of absolute transcendence and holiness, but they would need to be thought of as meaning ‘non-created’ and ‘not-soiled’, and we would need to think of them in their relationship with created freedom (the only kind we know), even if thought must release them via remotionis, via negationis and via eminentiae. Thus the relationship between the believer and the Word of God implied by the lectio is transfigured by the spectacle of the crucifix. On the cross the incarnate Word speaks the most meaningful language there is when it comes to love: not the language of words, nor that of acts, but the language of the body. The relationship that the cross establishes between God, the book, the body and human language not only offers a historical fulfilment of ancient prophecies but also a paradigm for all future theological speech. Our next chapter will expand upon this claim.

133. ‘What a face! … It is not so much a vision of overwhelming majesty as the perception, in ourselves, under sin, of our utter and radical indignity – the annihilating awareness of the naught that we are. In these closed eyes, in this ultimate and ethereal figure, there is something destructive. As the mortal blow of a sword right into the heart, it brings about conscience. Something so horrible and so beautiful that you can only escape it in adoration.’ P. Claudel, ‘La Photographie du Christ’ (or: ‘Votre face, Seigneur’, Sept, 6 September 1935), cited by Dominique Millet-Gé rard, ‘Paul Claudel et la dangereuse mé taphysique du Beau: Recherche sur la conception de la Beauté à l’é poque du mouvement symboliste et du Renouveau thomiste’, Bulletin de la Socié té des amis de Paul Claudel 125 (1992): 1–19 (here p. 10).

Chapter 12 THE CROSS OF JESUS: THE SOURCE OF THEOLOGICAL SPEECH

Now You are before us On the cross outstretched as a book1

Introduction Just as with the whole of the Gospel, the New Testament poetics of the cross was a matter of a progressive discovery. The apostles initially recoiled at Jesus’ announcement to them of his coming Passion, then there was their denial or flight from the unbearable when Jesus was indeed crucified, then there was the illumination offered in their encounters with the Resurrected one and their discovery of typologies of him in the Scriptures, and then there was the famous Pauline declarations of the First Epistle to the Corinthians: ‘For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God … for God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.’2 This progressive unveiling of mystery reminds us of how the incarnation markedly intensified real time and gave it a thickness and importance never attained before this Revelation. Additionally, while the cross intensifies time, it in turn subverts history: once we recognize that it was the incarnate divine Word who suffered, died and was resurrected, then his cross becomes far more than a past event whose significance might eventually be determined with the passing of time. Instead, the cross becomes the hidden code of all creation, the always contemporaneous secret of spiritual metamorphosis. Everyday devotion to the crucifix rests on this mysterious ‘effectivity’. Its pathos touches not only our emotions, but our minds as well, for there is indeed a deep

1. Paul Claudel, ‘Hymne du Sacré -Cœ ur’, in idem, Corona benignitatis anni Dei (Paris: Gallimard, 1920), p. 66. 2. 1 Cor. 1:18, 25.

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‘science of the cross’.3 Jesus Christ’s death on the cross first calls for the response of a silent love,4 and yet the garrulous will not hold back for long but will hasten to offer words to soften the unbearable and to domesticate death. The unique event of the cross, God’s extraordinary self-communication to humanity and Christ’s resurrection seem also to enact the victory of speech. Instead of allowing speech to sink into the absurd, the death of the incarnate Word once again gives it meaning and finally restores it. Such is what this chapter wishes to illustrate.

1. We will first describe the way in which the cross generates speech, and in particular speech about God: at the very moment of Jesus’ crucifixion, a dispute erupted between Pilate and the Jewish leaders regarding the sign of his condemnation. Inspired by St. Augustine’s reading of John, Thomas Aquinas discovers at the heart of this dispute a hidden path leading from human speech to divine Speech. For St. Thomas, the cross is given to us as an open book to be read, and we will follow him in adumbrating this mystical path. 2. Inasmuch as it links something – and someone! – to be seen with oral or written speech and with God, the cross of Jesus can a posteriori appear as a highly paradoxical paradigm of the sign. In the cross, the tension between the two poles of signifier and referent are taken to their extremes in order to generate an unexpected meaning. 3. Finally, the reconciliation of opposites that occurs in the cross can deeply leaven a culture with hope: when contemplating the cross of Christ, the believer can grasp how the impossible can become the possible, how past time can return to the present and how beauty can illuminate the ugly.

The Cross as the Source of Speech about God The pericope of the woman caught in adultery provides us an initial opportunity to meditate on the theology of writing implicit in the Johannine narration. There is, however, a second time in John when writing as such becomes narratively elaborated: the dispute regarding the sign of condemnation placed by Pilate on the gallows where Jesus hangs. This dispute over the sign fastens onto the cross a dialectic between oral and written speech.

3. Cf. Edith Stein’s Science of the Cross (trans. Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D.; Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002). 4. Isa. 52:15: ‘so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which had not been told them they shall see, and that which they had not heard they shall contemplate.’

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The Cross Makes Speech: Pilate’s ‘Titulus’ as a Paradoxical Model of Theological Writing We should briefly relate the gospel story here: Pilate has posted onto the cross the reason for Jesus’ condemnation: ‘Jesus of Nazareth: King of the Jews’. The leaders who demanded Jesus’ death then reproach Pilate for his mistake: for these leaders, Jesus is not king but has only said that he is. With Thomas Aquinas as our guide, we would suggest that the quarrel over the title on the sign allows the evangelist the opportunity to reflect on what is written within the context of his story. Pilate also wrote a title and put it on the cross. This was understandable, for it was a way of getting back at the Jews by showing their malice in rising up against their own king. It was also appropriate for this mystery, for just as inscriptions are placed on trophies of victory so the people will remember and celebrate the victory – ‘Let us make a name for ourselves, before we are scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’ [Gen 11:4] – so it was arranged that a title was put on the cross so that the sufferings of Christ would be remembered: ‘Remember my affliction and my bitterness, the wormwood and the gall!’ (Lam 3:19).5

The memorial function of writing is thus multiplied into infinity. As with all of the gospels’ remarks on Christ’s death, writing does not only show time passed, but also time surpassed. After having alluded to the memorial function of this sign, which actually forms a kind of prototype for Scripture itself, Thomas details its inexhaustibility: The content of the title, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews, words which are very fitting for this mystery of the cross. The word Jesus, which means Savior, corresponds to the power of the cross by which we have been saved: ‘You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins’ (Mt 1:21). The word Nazareth, which means abounding in flowers, corresponds to the innocence of the one suffering: ‘I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys’ (Song 2:1); ‘A flower will rise up out of his root’ [Is 11:1]. The words King of the Jews accord with the power, the dominion, which Christ earned by his suffering: ‘Therefore God has highly exalted him’ (Phil 2:9); ‘He shall reign as King and be wise’ (Jer 23:5); he will sit ‘upon the throne of David and over his kingdom’ (Is 9:7).6 5. Aquinas, In Io, XIX, 4, § 2419. 6. Aquinas, In Io, XIX, 4, § 2420. We spoke earlier of the coming of being to the mind as like the emergence of flowers from a plant. Thomas gives us the prototype of this phenomenon: it is Christ who is the true flower. Thomas shares this topos with the liturgical poetry of his time, and could have learned it from the De laudibus of his teacher Albert the Great. Many years later, the frescos of another Dominican, Giovanni da Fiesole, or ‘Fra Angelico’, certainly must be alluding to him. See Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (trans. Jane Marie Todd; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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In a completely Johannine irony, human writing (that of Pilate) appears at the mysterious intersection of divine omniscience and human freedom. Thomas, for example, offers this remark on the request of the Jewish priests to remove the sign which the Romans had placed on Jesus’ gallows: ‘He said, What I have written I have written. This did not happen by chance; it had been arranged by God and predicted long before.’7 He draws this conclusion from the many prophecies which relate to the cross: stulte clamabant pontifices quia sicut non potest corrumpi quod veritas dixit, ita non potest deleri quod Pilatus scripsit. Ideo enim Pilatus quod scripsi, scripsi, dixit, quia dominus quod dixit, dixit, ut dicit Augustinus. And so it was folly for the chief priests to complain, for just as they could not destroy what the Truth had said, so also they could not destroy what Pilate had written. Pilate said, What I have written I have written, because what the Lord said, He said, as Augustine remarks.8

This passage takes the transcendental and conversational functions of writing and the eternity and immutability of divine speech and splices them together in a real symbol.9 Within the Jewish tradition, a line from the Fathers mysteriously affirms that ‘writing is one of the things drawn from the nothingness at the twilight of the Friday evening’.10 On the titulus, ‘at the twilight of the Friday evening’, at the moment when the Word enters into the Sabbath of a kenosis (nothingness) absolutely inaccessible to the human mind, writing is divinely reborn. What is written on the titulus manifests the mystery, and the writing (l’é criture) which does so attains its status as Scripture (l’É criture). Throughout his remarks Thomas consistently emphasizes, in the form of amplifications, the gospel sequences of the type ut Scriptura impleretur, which not only show human beings fulfilling the eternal decrees of salvation through the

7. Aquinas, In Io, XIX, 4, § 2424. 8. Ibid. 9. P. C. Courtè s offers this beautiful metaphysical interpretation of the passage: ‘The  repetition Dominus quod dixit dixit manifests that the truth that the divine speech cannot be compromised … . The duplication quod scripsi, scripsi signifies that non potest deleri. The scripsi or the dixit, is the act of speech or of writing whose being or content is what has been said or written. In short, what is aimed at is ens as compared to esse, which is immutably true, which does not fall into non-being or untruth. For a thought where ens dicitur ab esse, there is no the tautology in affirming the esse of the ens, for it can be denied or conceived as perhaps not being.’ Pierre-Ceslas Courtè s, L’ê tre et le non-ê tre selon saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Tequi, 1998), pp. 57–8. 10. Mishnah, Pirqé Abot, 5, 6, in bT Pessahim 54 a, as translated in Joseph Cohen, L’É criture hé braï que, son origine, son é volution, et ses secrets (Lyon: Cosmogene, 1997), p. 18.

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cross but which also so thoroughly blend Scripture and historical fact that they become fused into one. Here is one example from among many: He states that the prophecy was fulfilled, So the soldiers did this. We can see from this that the divine Scripture is fulfilled even in its details: ‘Not an iota, not a jot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished’ (Mt 6:18); ‘Everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and the psalms must be fulfilled’ (Lk 24:44).11

Thomas also comments on the fact that the titulus was written in three languages from an intellectual perspective: ‘And so, all thought is brought into captivity and obedience to Christ, as we see in 2 Corinthians (10:5).’12 The theme here is the bringing of every kind of intellect to faith in Christ: the Hebrew signifies the devout, the religious and the theologians (note this highly significant grouping!); the Greek signifies the sages who observe natural reality and it is their natural language; and the Latin signifies the powerful, those concerned with practical and moral philosophy, which shines out in particular among the Latins. In addition to the simple allegory provided by the metonymy of language to its speakers and then of the speakers to their ‘science’ or expertise, such a reading displays the intellectual efficacy of Christ’s cross: ‘By the cross of Christ [all intellects] were to be converted and ruled.’13 Pilate’s titulus thus appears as a genuine matrix of theological speech! Here we are at the heights of Johannine irony: the only human speech possible at the cross seems to be that which condemns God to death (there is the material verbum crucis of Pilate and the kergymatic verbum crucis about Jesus, which could only be gradually understood and proclaimed after the Crucifixion and Resurrection). The source of all pathos and of deep beauty is at work in the writing of the theologian who speaks and writes about God: speech which seeks to ‘elucidate’ God,14 which desires to encounter God in his depths, predicates the death of God: Ut impleretur Scriptura … Videbunt in quem transfixerunt.15 What is extraordinary is that God is read in a human body: the arrival of Scripture’s supernatural referent coincides with the piercing of Christ’s body. The

11. Aquinas, In Io, XIX, 4, § 2433. 12. ‘Sic in captivitatem redignature omnes intellectus in obsequium Christi, ut dicitur II Cor. X, 5’; Aquinas, In Io, XIX, 4, § 2422. 13. ‘In quo signatur quod per crucem Christi subiugari debebant et converti [omnes intellectus]’. Aquinas, In Io, XIX, 4, § 2422. 14. On the theological principle of clarification, see Chapter 7 in this volume. 15. Jn 19:36-37; see Zech. 12:10: ‘And I will pour out a spirit of compassion and supplication on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, so that, when they look on the one whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child’.

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revelation of the Resurrection coincides with the recognition of the God of life in the body of a dying man. A posteriori, the spectacle of this death can restore the human faculty of vision: in does not only signify the direction (the local circumstance) or the point of impact (the indirect object) of the vision: the preposition inaugurates a true mode of vision, in the way that the eis of the Septuagint at times reproduces the Hebrew instrumental be. After the Easter of Jesus, it is only by moving through Christ’s body on the cross, the revelatory prism of the divine brilliance in the light of contemporary life, that the human being in search of the absolute can see. The titulus also functions as an instruction or as a mode of application. The cross of Christ must be read, and such is the intellectual interpretation that Thomas offers. The cross is the sign of a divine ‘supra-language’. The verbum crucis reveals – describes and simultaneously inaugurates – the faculty of seeing glory, even in its basest abjection. Mutatis mutandis and in the categories of Gothic grammar, it increases both ‘cognitive’ speech and ‘factive’ speech. Without fear of indulging in a false gnosis and actually countering it in the development of a ‘true gnosis’,16 we can show that the cross successfully surpasses the interior of language and illuminates vision. We will next explore how St, Thomas himself deciphers the language of the cross. The Cross Itself as Pedagogy When Thomas studies the symbolism of the cross, he seems able to read a whole body of doctrine in the open book of Christ’s crucified body. He explicitly develops the comparison of Christ and of a charta (paper or writing) in his commentary on the Apostle’s Creed: Filius Dei est verbum Dei, et verbum Dei incarnatum est sicut verbum regis scriptum in charta. Si igitur aliquis dilaniaret chartam regis, pro tanto habetur ac si dilaniaret verbum regis. Et ideo tanto habetur peccatum … ac si occidissent verbum Dei. The Son of God is the Word of God, and the Word of God made flesh is like the word of a king written on paper. So if one should tear this royal paper in pieces, it would be considered that he had rent apart the word of the king. Thus, their sin … was as grievous as if they had slain the Word of God.17

This image of the book ripped into shreds should show that the typological reading of Jeremiah offered in the previous chapter is authentically Thomasian! In many of his other texts which deal with the cross, St. Thomas compares Jesus’ human nature to a book: ‘This book is Christ according to His human nature, and

16. This expression from Clement of Alexandria should cause us no alarm. 17. Aquinas, In Symb, 4.

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in it were written all the things necessary for man’s salvation.’18 In brief, if we can risk this etymological tautology, Thomas offers an ‘intellectual reading’ of the cross: because the spectacle of the cross is tied to faith, it generates intellectual efforts in the form of outbursts of love. Yet this reading acts like a kind of a ‘boomerang’, for the cross is not merely an object to see but it causes one to see, and it deepens, enlarges, refines and elevates the capacity of vision of those who contemplate it. The crucifixion offers a Scripture hermeneutic in which God himself is revealed. The second authority refers to his statement, ‘One of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear’, and is taken from Zechariah: They shall look on him whom they have pierced. Our text of Zechariah reads: ‘They will look on me whom they have pierced’ [Zech 12:10]. If we join the statement of the Prophet to what the Evangelist says, it is clear that the crucified Christ is God, for what the Prophet says he says as God, and the Evangelist applies this to Christ. They shall look on him, he says, at the coming judgment. Or, they will look on him when they have been converted to the faith, and so forth.19

The piercing of Christ’s heart enables vision, or rather restores the vision of God, a vision through the mirror of the text, through the thrust of the spear into Christ’s side. Thomas furthers this intellectual vision of the cross when he gives a ‘pedagogical’ interpretation of the crucifixion: This seems extremely bizarre to the irreligious and to unbelievers, it is a great mystery for believers and the devout: ‘For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God’ (1 Cor 1:18). Christ bore his cross as a king does his scepter; his cross is the sign of his glory, which is his universal dominion over all things: ‘The Lord will reign from the wood’ (Ps 95:9, sic); ‘The government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called “Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”’ (Is 9:6). He carried his cross as a victor carries the trophy of his victory: ‘He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in himself ’ (Col 2:15). Again, he carried his cross as a teacher his candelabrum, as a support for the light of his teaching, because for believers the message of the cross is the power of God: ‘No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar or under a bushel but on a stand, that those who enter may see the light’ (Lk 11:33).20

18. Aquinas, In Heb, X, 1, § 490. 19. Aquinas, In Io, XIX, 6, § 2462. 20. Aquinas, In Io, XIX, 3, § 2414.

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If we understand Thomas’s metaphor correctly, the cross was a candelabrum and Christ’s body was the lamp placed on the candelabrum, and thus the whole spectacle of the crucifixion was a lesson given by Christ the teacher. Allegories such as these are not overdrawn, for Thomas is here alluding to concrete and quotidian acts of teaching. The metaphor of light is highly suggestive: the cross appears as the focal point of intelligibility, a centre of illumination, just as much as it is an object to comprehend, and so it illuminates the light of the human intellect.21 In this way, the act which is supposed to explain the crucifixion is actually generated by it: the writing on the cross is a development of the cross itself, one of the outgrowths of his virtus. We discover a similar ‘pedadogico-centrism’ in the Summa theologiae when St. Thomas lists different types of ‘fittingness’ of the cross in the context of Christ’s agony.22 This topic appears when he responds to objections which contrast the figures of sacrifice and the offensive symbolism of the gallows in the Old Testament to the authority of New Testament claims such as ‘he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross’.23 The response that he most fully develops (the sixth one) constitutes a genuine point-by-point deciphering of the different virtues of this mystery which is the cross, and it is here that Thomas so naturally exercises his pedagogical reflexes. He lets St. Augustine take the lead: The sixth reason is because of the various virtues denoted by this class of death. Hence Augustine in his book on the grace of the Old and New Testament (Ep. cxl) says: ‘Not without purpose did He choose this class of death, that He might be a teacher of that breadth, and height, and length, and depth’, of which the Apostle speaks (Ephesians 3:18): ‘For breadth is in the beam, which is fixed transversely above; this appertains to good works, since the hands are stretched out upon it. Length is the tree’s extent from the beam to the ground; and there it is planted – that is, it stands and abides – which is the note of longanimity. Height is in that portion of the tree which remains over from the transverse beam upwards to the top, and this is at the head of the Crucified, because He is the supreme desire of souls of good hope. But that part of the tree which is hidden from view to hold it fixed, and from which the entire rood springs, denotes the depth of gratuitous grace.’ And, as Augustine says (tract. cxix in Joan.): ‘The tree upon which were fixed the members of Him dying was even the chair of the Master teaching.’24

21. Thomas’s observant face in Fra Angelico’s Crucifixion provides an illustration of this point. See Ambroise Gardeil, Les Dons du Saint-Espirit dans les Saints dominicains: é tude de psychologie surnaturelle et lectures pour le temps de la Pentecô te (Paris: Lecoffre 1903), pp. 161–3. 22. Aquinas, ST 3, 46, 4. 23. Phil. 2:8. 24. Aquinas, ST 3, 46, 4. Thomas cites Augustine, Letter 140, 26 then Tractatus in Ioanne 119 on Jn 19:26.

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The paragraph’s final line posits Christ on the cross as a model for the teacher and the theologian! Such ‘teacher-centrism’ may amuse the contemporary reader or exegete: Does Thomas fall so victim to teacher syndrome that he projects the professor’s mentality onto the cross? The six other reasons he gives helpfully offer a wider perspective. First, Christ stands here as an example of courage before any type of death. Secondly, by dying on a tree (ligno), Jesus erases the sin of Adam who took fruit from a tree (pomum ligni). Thirdly, Christ nailed to the cross sanctifies the air by touching it with his body, just as he sanctifies the earth by walking on it. We should cite more fully this remarkably expressive text which plunges us into the objective and cosmic piety of the medievals: The third reason is because, as Chrysostom says in a sermon on the Passion (De Cruce et Latrone i, ii): ‘He suffered upon a high rood and not under a roof, in order that the nature of the air might be purified: and the earth felt a like benefit, for it was cleansed by the flowing of the blood from His side.’ And on John 3:14: ‘The Son of man must be lifted up’, Theophylact says: ‘When you hear that He was lifted up, understand His hanging on high, that He might sanctify the air who had sanctified the earth by walking upon it.’25

The fourth reason is Christ’s Ascension prepares the way for humanity’s ascension, with reference here to Christ’s being lifted up on the cross, which implicitly coincides with his glory.26 The fifth reason alludes to the dynamic of the cross’s shape, and here he draws upon Gregory of Nyssa’s interpretation of it in terms of universal salvation: ‘The shape of the cross extending out into four extremes from their central point of contact denotes the power and the providence diffused everywhere of Him who hung upon it.’27 In the seventh and last instance of the ‘fittingness’ of the cross, Thomas, the experienced practitioner of the pagina sacra, notes that the cross perfectly resonates with numerous figures from the Old Testament, in a series from Noah’s ark to Moses’ staff and which continues to grow until the tree of the cross.28

25. Aquinas, ST 3, 46, 4. 26. Compare Lk. 24:50-53 or Acts 1:3-12; 2:33; 5:31, with Jn 3:14; 12:32, 34; Lk. 14:11; 18:14; Mt. 23:12; Phil. 2:8-11; Heb. 7:26. 27. Aquinas, ST 3, 46, 4. 28. Aquinas, ST 3, 46, 4: ‘this kind of death responds to very many figures. For, as Augustine says in a sermon on the Passion (Serm. ci De Tempore), an ark of wood preserved the human race from the waters of the Deluge; at the exodus of God’s people from Egypt, Moses with a rod divided the sea, overthrew Pharaoh and saved the people of God; the same Moses dipped his rod into the water, changing it from bitter to sweet; at the touch of a wooden rod a salutary spring gushed forth from a spiritual rock; likewise, in order to overcome Amalec, Moses stretched forth his arms with rod in hand; lastly, God’s law is

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In this list of seven instances of ‘fittingness’ we should note and appreciate the remarkable metonymic order in the movement from one reason to another. We are led from a moral example to original sin; from original sin to the tree of the cross via the lignum; from the tree of the cross to the sanctification of the air (which the tree’s sacred foliage touches); from airy spaces to the ascension; from the ascension to universal salvation; then to the complete exercise of all the virtues; from the exercise of these virtues to the teacher’s lesson (via the lesson that it itself constitutes), and from the teacher’s lesson to the sacra pagina. This network of images and associated ideas certainly arises from mnemonic technique. More profoundly, however, it witnesses to a semiology in which language is not separated from the rest of creation and whose cornerstone is the cross. It is to this point that we should now turn.

The Cross Intensifies the Experience of the Sign The cross itself not only speaks but generates speech. The cross functions as a symbol inasmuch as it is a concrete sign related to power,29 generates words30 and itself becomes a true word.31 Viewed in the context of general reflection on language or the sign, it heightens the perennial question of the origin of meaning to its maximum intensity. The Sign of the Cross as Documentum Fidei We should first discuss context.32 In the Gothic universe, the linguistic sign is one sign among many in a whole series of signs with which the Creator surrounds humanity. Words and things are not opposed to each other, and so the figurative

entrusted to the wooden Ark of the Covenant; all of which are like steps by which we mount to the wood of the cross.’ 29. In the symbol, ‘the semantic aspect returns to the non-semantic aspect. The symbol is linked, it has roots, it dives into the obscure experience of Power.’ Paul Ricœ ur, ‘Parole et symbole’, Revue des Sciences Religieuses 49:1 (1975): 142–61 (here p. 142). 30. ‘The symbol only gives rise to thought to the extent that it first gives rise to speech.’ Ricœ ur, ‘Parole et symbole’, p. 149. Ricœ ur observes that the linguistic character of the symbol is attested by the simple fact that we can form a semantics of the symbol, a theory which gives an account of its structure in terms of meaning or signification. 31. For those who participate in the symbolic communication there are not two levels of interpretation, one literal and the other symbolic, including a surplus of meaning, ‘but one movement which transfers us from one level to another and which assimilates us to the second meaning thanks to – or through – the literal signification.’ Ricœ ur, ‘Parole et symbole’, p. 150. 32. For a detailed description of this universe, see Chapter 8, ‘Little Thomasian Semiology’.

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thought inherited from antiquity, the Bible and the Fathers enables us to speak simultaneously in a metonymic language, in the ‘descriptive’ language of (meta)physics and in the symbolic language of revelation, which ‘is poetic and “hieroglyphic”, not in the sense of sign-writing, but in the sense of using words as particular kinds of signs’.33 As creatures, all things, are the ‘speech of God’. For divine wisdom, when making the world, left indications of itself in the things of the world, as it says in Sirach (1:10): ‘He poured wisdom out upon all his works,’ so that the creatures made by God’s wisdom are related to God’s wisdom, whose signposts they are, as a man’s words are related to his wisdom, which they signify.34

God first speaks by leaving behind numerous vestiges of his being: these are ‘words’ which resound in created nature, the world of things and the world of thought. Creatures not only manifest the existence of God, but they also enigmatically signify the mystery of the Trinitarian communion that God is: certainly all creatures are the common work of the Three, but some of them seem to have been created to display more specifically one of the Persons, as a species of a diverse lexicon. Thomas thinks, following Augustine, that the language of creatures is so habitually the language of God that God does not hesitate to create beings wholly for the purpose of signification35 and after which their reality vanishes.36 This type of sign perhaps includes the pillar of cloud in the Exodus, the Burning Bush in the desert, the dove which appeared during Jesus’ Baptism,37 and the tongues of fire at Pentecost. The cross is neither a natural object, nor a supernatural apparition. If it is presented ethically then the cross becomes an instrument of torture made by the wickedness of men. If it is presented metaphysically then the cross becomes

33. Frye, The Great Code, p. 6. 34. Aquinas, In I Cor, 3, § 55. 35. When he discusses the interventions of the Holy Spirit, Thomas distinguishes between imaginary and prophetic vision, which is made of spiritual images of the body but is not corporeal vision; the vision of conventional signs, of natural realities endowed with signification by an exterior will, such as sacramental signs – for example, the rock in the desert was Christ (1 Cor. 10:2-5) – and the vision of the intentional sign, realities wholly created by the ministry of the angels for the sake of signification and which then disappear. See Aquinas, ST 1, 43, 7, ad 3: ‘Although the whole Trinity makes those creatures, still they are made in order to show forth in some special way this or that person. For as the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are signified by diverse names, so also can They each one be signified by different things; although neither separation nor diversity exists amongst Them.’ 36. Aquinas, ST 1, 43, 7, ad 2. ‘For the purpose of the bodily appearances of those things was that they might signify, and then pass away.’ 37. See ‘La colombe de saint Thomas’ in Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 210–18.

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a created thing, a sign among signs. Such is what the comparison between the cross and its Old Testament ‘figures’ suggests. In order to counteract competition from a typology which would insist on the disparity between the cross and the figures of sacrifice by the sword or fire in the Old Testament, Thomas highlights the differences between the figure and the exemplar in these terms: The altar of holocausts, upon which the sacrifices of animals were immolated, was constructed of timbers, as is set forth in Exodus 27, and in this respect the truth answers to the figure; but ‘it is not necessary for it to be likened in every respect, otherwise it would not be a likeness’, but the reality, as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iii). But in particular, as Chrysostom [Athanasius, vide A, III, ad 2] says: ‘His head is not cut off, as was done to John; nor was He sawn in twain, like Isaias, in order that His entire and indivisible body might obey death, and that there might be no excuse for them who want to divide the Church.’ While, instead of material fire, there was the spiritual fire of charity in Christ’s holocaust.38

The difference between figures and reality almost seems to be qualitative: non respondet quantum ad omnia. If all the elements of the truth were present in the figure, then it would no longer be a figure but the original. The movement from the figure to the original is thus not simply a return from the representation to the thing itself. It is also not the replacement of a crude signifier by a more refined signified. It is also not the substitution of the reality of a certain concrete nature for a pure epistemic sign-phantasm which represents the reality. Given the difference between the Creator and creatures, the figure-sign is a reality of the same kind as that which it signifies: a creature. It thus somehow signifies the will and the speech of the Creator. Signifiers and signifieds are as inseparable in the sign composed of the figure and the truth as in both of its elements. This initial writing present in the symbolic world of creatures does not suffice, however, to render the cross intelligible, far from it. Human beings struggle to understand the meaning that God placed even within the most natural of things: And just as a disciple reaches an understanding of the teacher’s wisdom by the words he hears from him, so man can teach an understanding of God’s wisdom by examining the creatures He made, as it says in Romans (1:20): ‘His invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.’ But on account of the vanity of his heart man wandered from the right path of divine knowledge; hence it says in Jn (1:10): ‘He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world knew him not.’39

So God decides to speak differently. He supplements the language of creation with the language of redemption:

38. Aquinas, ST 3, 46, ad 1. 39. Ibid.

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Consequently, God brought believers to a saving knowledge of Himself by other things, which are not found in the natures of creatures; on which account worldly men, who derive their notions solely from human things, considered them foolish: things such as the articles of faith (documenta fidei). It is like a teacher who recognizes that his meaning was not understood from the words he employed, and then tried to use other words to indicate what he meant.40

The gnomic realism of the final comparison between God and pedagogy is marked by Thomas’s pedagogical charity; this educational emphasis at the heart of an educational enterprise gives a somewhat circular twist to the argument: Thomas the teacher teaches that God teaches as a teacher. Once again, there is no reason to believe that we must dispense with believing! The evidence of this new kind of sign only appears to the eyes of faith. The wise, having severed wisdom from its source, the language of being, will be addressed in a different language: that of the documenta fidei. These ‘documents’ are also argumenta in the sense which Thomas borrows from the Gospel in Latin: ‘After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs (in multis argumentis), appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the Kingdom of God.’41 argumentum dupliciter dicitur. Quandoque dicitur argumentum quaecumque ratio rei dubiae faciens fidem. Quandoque autem dicitur argumentum aliquod sensibile signum quod inducitur ad alicuius veritatis manifestationem, sicut etiam Aristoteles aliquando in libris suis utitur nomine argumenti.42 The word ‘proof ’ is susceptible of a twofold meaning: sometimes it is employed to designate any sort ‘of  reason  in  confirmation  of what is a matter of  doubt’ [Tully, Topic. ii]: and sometimes it means a sensible sign employed to manifest the truth; thus also Aristotle occasionally uses the term in his works [Cf. Prior. Anal. ii; Rhetor. i].

The Gospel argument does not correspond to the Aristotelian idea of what constitutes an argument. Primo igitur modo accipiendo argumentum, Christus non probavit discipulis suam resurrectionem per argumenta. Quia talis probatio argumentativa procedit ex aliquibus principiis, quae si non essent nota discipulis, nihil per ea eis manifestaretur, quia ex ignotis non potest aliquod fieri notum; si autem essent eis nota, non transcenderent rationem humanam, et ideo non essent efficacia ad 40. Aquinas, In I Cor, 3, § 55. How could we not see in the final line an indication of the charity of Thomas’s teaching? 41. Acts 1:3, cited in Aquinas, ST 3, 55, 5, s.c. 42. Aquinas, ST 3, 55, 5. Thomas cites Cicero, Topics, 1.2, and alludes to Aristotle, Pr. An., L., 2, c. 29, 10 (70b 2).

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fidem resurrectionis adstruendam, quae rationem humanam excedit; oportet enim principia ex eodem genere assumi, ut dicitur in I posteriorum.43 Taking ‘proof ’ in the first sense, Christ did not demonstrate His Resurrection to the  disciples  by  proofs, because such argumentative  proof  would have to be grounded on some principles: and if these were not  known  to the  disciples, nothing would thereby be demonstrated to them, because nothing can be known from the unknown. And if such principles were known to them, they would not go beyond human reason, and consequently would not be efficacious for establishing  faith  in the  Resurrection, which is beyond  human  reason , since principles must be  assumed  which are of the same  order, according to 1 Posteriori.

In order to communicate the resurrection, an argument was necessary which would single-handedly provide (the pre-comprehension of) the principles on which its knowledge would be based. The Scriptures, as the foundation of faith, can provide arguments,44 but they are not enough. Thomas then considers a second meaning of argumentum: Si autem accipiatur secundo modo argumentum, sic Christus dicitur suam resurrectionem argumentis declarasse, inquantum per quaedam evidentissima signa se vere resurrexisse ostendit. Unde et in Graeco, ubi nos habemus in multis argumentis, loco argumenti ponitur tekmerium, quod est ‘signum evidens ad probandum’.45 But if the term ‘proof ’ be taken in the second sense, then Christ is said to have demonstrated His Resurrection by proofs, inasmuch as by most evident signs He showed that He was truly risen. Hence where our version has ‘by many proofs,’ the Greek text, instead of ‘proof ’ has tekmerion, i.e. ‘an evident sign affording positive proof ’ [Cf. Prior. Anal. ii].

The argumentum fidei is thus not solely a discourse drawn from Scriptures, but it is also a sign-act of Christ which contains within itself the proof of the meaning that it establishes. By belonging to the category of a clear sign, the documentum fidei in some way aligns with the proof of every created thing: it is a ‘new creation’ (as early theological reflection put it46) which shows itself to have already begun from

43. Aquinas, ST 3, 55, 5, with reference to Aristotle, Post. An., 1.1, 7 (75a 38). 44. Aquinas, ST 3, 55, 5: ‘it was from the authority of the Sacred Scriptures that He proved to them the truth of His Resurrection, which authority is the basis of faith, when He said: “All things must needs be fulfilled which are written in the Law, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning Me”: as is set forth Luke 24:44.’ 45. Aquinas, ST 3, 55, 5. 46. See 2 Cor. 5:17: ‘If anyone is in Christ there is new creation’. We have not yet fully grasped the dramatic alternative that Christian preaching put before a religious Jew during

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the reality of the resurrection and in the deeds, gestures and words of the incarnate Word.47 Once again, the Word become flesh blurs our modern boundaries between ‘brute’ reality and the language which represents it48: acts surpass words and convey a higher wisdom. Yet what role does the cross play in the divine pedagogy briefly outlined here and in the wider universe of signs which the incarnation and the resurrection so enrich? ‘Verbum crucis’: The Sign of the Cross as the Cornerstone of Meaning The question of the institutio, the prima impositio, of the name (often unknown) causes a rift between the language of things (ideally that of their Creator) and the language of human beings who want to speak of them. Even in the case of things specifically created to signify, Thomas takes care (or needs) to find confirmation of their meaning in Scripture itself.49 The cross maximizes this rift: What relation can there be between the language which speaks of the cross’ objective reality (‘I am a horrific torture device’) and ‘the language of the cross’ proclaimed by Christians (‘I am your divinely offered salvation’)? This rift is even ‘iconized’ by the sign Pilate put up above the gasping Jesus: the nailed ‘legend’ on the same wood of the abased Body proclaims the exact opposite of the scene on display: JESVS REX. In the chapter ‘Little Thomasian Semiology’ we explored the scholastic distinction between the formal sign and the instrumental sign: the formal sign (e.g., the typical image) both constitutes and shows the signified; the instrumental sign is a label and is conventional, as in the case of names according to the ‘arbitrariness of the sign’, an idea still prevalent among linguists. (Is it not the ambition of the

the time of the New Testament. For a first-century Jew, the opening of the covenant to all through the gift of the Spirit and beyond the rites of sanctification (that is to say, apart from them) signifies either that creation would return to chaos, as since Genesis creation had been thought of in terms of separations (between light and darkness, water and earth, high and low, animal and human, man and woman … peoples and the peoples, Levites and the rest of the tribe, etc.), or that the Creator himself was rejuvenating creation at its very roots: that a ‘new creation’ has begun in which death and evil were vanquished! See further the excellent remarks Nodet, The Historical Jesus? 47. In New Testament Greek, a single locution, ta rhemata tou Christou, synthesizes all of them. 48. See the chapters ‘The Word, Scripture and Tradition’ and ‘God Speaks as Man’, in von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, vol. 1, The Word Made Flesh, pp. 11–26 and 69–93. 49. The creature-signs of the visible mission of the divine persons continue the parallel of words and things established in relation to the vestiges with which the Trinity and each of the persons marks the creation. They appear ad utilitatem (1 Cor. 12:7), and Scripture itself explains the utility displayed by each sign: see, for example, the references given in order to explain the meaning of the visible mission of the Holy Spirit to Christ or to the apostles in ST 1, 43, 7, ad 6.

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poets to turn words into formal signs?) The images of Christ on the cross initially seem to be in the former category.50 But if the cross signifies only what it represents, the death of a tortured man, then it is difficult to see how it could be at the very heart of a religion of salvation which is primarily addressed to the lowly, for God must be truly omnipotent in order to console his little ones. Certainly it initiates their consolation by accepting solidarity with their most extreme pain, but what all the anawim of history yearn for in their groans and cries for help is to be freed by one who is more powerful than death. The cross must have a meaning that subverts what it is as a formal sign: bearing all the light of the resurrection, this other meaning is given by the words of verbum crucis. But what exactly is this ‘language of the cross’? Broadly speaking it is the kergymatic proclamation of the crucified one’s divine identity. One can only narrate the cross in the light of the resurrection; the ‘language of the cross’ announces what it has accomplished: ‘Verbum enim crucis, id est annuntiatio crucis Christi.’51 In this way, the divine plan is at the source of speech: ‘God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.’52 More specifically, it is the titulus. We have seen above that the titulus appears a posteriori as an ironic condensation of the divine Wisdom (and the Scriptures which reflect it) which from all eternity has arranged this means of salvation. We should thus not be surprised that Thomas finds the prototype of the verbum crucis on the lips of Christ himself. He spends some time commenting on a verse from John at the end of the crucifixion story: ‘facta sunt enim haec ut scriptura impleatur’; ‘These things happened so that the Scripture would be fulfilled.’53 He first notes that this ut should not be taken in a final sense (i.e., these things happened in order to fulfil Scripture), but in a sequential sense (i.e., these things happened, and in this way Scripture was fulfilled) which reverses the axis of time by subordinating the past to Christ. The theologian then amplifies the two prophecies referenced by John to support his claims54: by completely fulfilling the prefigurations of Scripture, the cross confirms and displays the truth of Christ’s speech instead of emptying it of all meaning as his persecutors were hoping.55 He then concludes: ‘This is why Jesus said before: “When you have lifted up the Son

50. See Aquinas, ST 3, 25, 3 and 4. 51. ‘The language of the cross, that is to say, the announcement of the cross of Christ’. Aquinas, In I Cor, 3, § 47. 52. Acts 2:36; see 1 Cor. 15:3-4. 53. Jn 19:36. 54. Exod. 12:46; Zech. 12:10. 55. Aquinas, In. Io., XIX, 5, § 2461: ‘It was commanded that the bones of the Passover lamb should not be broken in order to teach us that the courage of the true Lamb and unspotted Jesus Christ would in no way be crushed by his passion. The Jews were trying to use the passion to destroy the power of Christ’s teaching, but his passion only made it stronger.’

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of man, then you will know that I am he” (8:28).’56 For Thomas, these lines from Jesus are the centre of the verbum crucis, the speech of the cross: the ‘language of the cross’ does not simply designate the preaching of the cross in general, but this singular speech: ‘When you have lifted up the Son of man, then you will know that I am he.’ Indeed, in the Summa theologiae Thomas glosses the syntagma verbum crucis with ‘that which should be understood in his elevation/exaltation on the cross’.57 This verbum forms a tight connection between the cross of Jesus and the appropriateness of his use of the divine phrase Ego sum, and then between the cross and the intelligibility of all his words. This is why analysis of the ‘necessity’ of the cross – the main subject of the article which we are discussing – culminates in the reminder that Scripture is the receptacle of the divine plan: ‘For it is thus written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise again from the dead.’58 Scripture, the intelligibility of Jesus’ words, and the cross are united by a relation of necessity, ex parte Dei and ex parte hominis. The contemplation of the cross is both animated by faith and engenders it in turn, and it opens up the possibility of surpassing the incommensurability of signifier and signified in the moment when it takes this incommensurability to its absolute limit. For in this particular experience, the convention which ties together signifier and signified is confirmed by the Creator. The sign is thus ‘re-naturalized’ at the same time that it is ‘super-naturalized’. For the theologian, since the Word (whose speech is truer than that of nature since it is in the Creator) is the inaugurator of this sign, the instrumental meaning (which is given by God) transfigures the formal meaning (a tortured man). By (the language of) the cross, Jesus Christ brings into speech a formal sign which encapsulates the nature of the instrumental sign. ‘I will draw all to myself ’ and ‘you will know that I am’: Jesus’ preaching on the spiritual consequences (at once metaphysical, noetic and theological) of his

56. Aquinas, In. Io., XIX, 5, § 2461. 57. Aquinas, ST 3, 46, 1, s. c. 58. Aquinas, ST 3, 46, 1: ‘Yet it was necessary from necessity of the end proposed; and this can be accepted in three ways. First of all, on our part, who have been delivered by His Passion, according to John (3:14): “The Son of man must be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him may not perish, but may have life everlasting.” Secondly, on Christ’s part, who merited the glory of being exalted, through the lowliness of His Passion: and to this must be referred Luke 24:26: “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and so to enter into His glory?” Thirdly, on God’s part, whose determination regarding the Passion of Christ, foretold in the Scriptures and prefigured in the observances of the Old Testament, had to be fulfilled. And this is what St. Luke says (22:22): “The Son of man indeed goeth, according to that which is determined”; and (Luke 24:44-46): “These are the words which I spoke to you while I was yet with you, that all things must needs be fulfilled which are written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms concerning Me: for it is thus written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise again from the dead.”’

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‘elevation’ announces a mysterious coincidence between the formal sign accessible to human beings and a divine instrumental sign. In the act of faith which arises from the contemplation of the cross, language (the verbum crucis) comes to the aid of the sign (the crucifix) so as to create a documentum fidei. A contemporary philosopher has rather boldly named ‘the mystery of God’ the formal object of symbolic relationships: if there is a symbol which substantiates this claim, it is the cross of Jesus.59 For what is at stake in the cross is the possibility of communication between God and the human being. Naturally, ‘Contemplation of the mystery of the cross does not do away with the revelation of being (and so of the esthetic factor), nor does it replace the latter, for then God would be canceling his own plan for the world, together with the conditions he laid down for its fulfillment.’60 The cross seems to sustain being all the more deeply. Do Ignatius of Antioch’s highly forceful claims also apply to the noetic register: ‘You are united in an unbreakable faith, nailed by flesh and spirit to the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and strengthened in love by the blood of Christ … . It is in the fruit of his cross and divine passion that we must exist’?61 Pure negation, death, is usually taken to flow backwards over Jesus’ entire life and ministry so as to cover them with their highest meaning. The cross assumes the hermeneutical circle of the martyr and meaning, for if Jesus dies for a determined value (the mercy of God), then it is a value that only his death makes definitively known. For those who undergo this experience in the Spirit, the ‘language of the cross’ offers an unexpected reward for the problem of language. This is certainly what most deeply motivates the attraction (and thus the repulsion) that the Crucified one persistently exerts in the world of poets.

The Efficacy of the Sign of the Cross: The Surpassing of the Impossible, of Time and of the Beautiful by Love Speech develops new powers when it is written on the cross or said of its subject, and those who contemplate the crucifix experience as much. For the believer, there exists an agreement as perfect as surprising (and even scandalous), an unexpected harmony, between what the human heart desires and what is finally manifested on

59. ‘In the movement from one reality to another the verticality of knowledge of the divine is gradually opened up, beyond all discourse. The divine is, as Hö lderlin said, “close, but difficult to grasp,” for it does not appear as an object for thought or for contemplation, as a being, but as the very distance between the symbol and its full meaning, an ever impassable distance, yet already abolished. Since it is impossible to tell this advent, let us together with the Tradition call “the mystery of God” what the symbol displays in abolishing itself in silence as soon as it reaches what it intended.’ Geneviè ve Trainar, Transfigurer le temps: nihilism, symbolism, liturgie (Geneva: Ad Solem, 2003), p. 40. 60. von Balthasar, ‘Revelation and the Beautiful’, p. 114. 61. Ignatius, Letter to the Smyrneans, 1, 1.2; SC 10b.

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the cross. The recognition of the agreement between the cross of Jesus and salvation coincides with the moment of the act of faith: his rejection and abandonment is connected to the feeling of the irreducibility of language’s arbitrariness, which is the first step of all po(i)etic wanderings, of every search for lost communication, for the air or for the song under the text. Reason Renewed, or the Defeat of the Impossible by the Love of the Incarnate God Was Christ’s passion, his death on the cross, necessary for the liberation of the human race? To answer this question about fittingness, Thomas observes the necessary articulation of faith and the cross. For it is by the cross that faith can be born: And Paul himself says below that the word of the Cross [verbum crucis] actually does contain foolishness he adds: but to us that are being saved, namely, Christ’s faithful who are saved by Him: ‘He will save his people from their sins’ (Matt 1:21), it is the power of God [virtus Dei est], because they recognize in the cross of Christ God’s power, by which He overcame the devil and the world.62

It is necessary to emphasize here what we have left out: virtus. We mentioned above that the cross manifests for Thomas the ‘truth’ of both Christ’s teaching and the Scriptures; a more faithful translation would speak of their ‘power’ or ‘energy’. Virtus connotes the efficacy of Christ’s speech, which is here linked to the cross. For the incarnate spirit which is humanity, a certain experience is inherent in the language of the cross, an experience of an influx of new forces in moral and spiritual battle as well as the power they experience in themselves, when together with Christ they die to their vices and concupiscences, as it says in Gal (5.24): ‘Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.’ Hence it says in Ps (110:10): ‘The Lord sends forth from Zion your mighty scepter’; ‘Virtue went out of him and healed all’ (Lk 6:19).63

This experience consists of an intimate and quasi-sensory perception of grace, of the divine virtus operative in the resurrection and administered in specific moments in spiritual combat. Only spiritual experience resolves the dialectic of excess and lack initiated between the verbum crucis – this sovereign speech of consolation – and whatever human speech says about the cross – this horrific torture. Contemplation of the cross thus intensifies the dialectic between what is seen and what is heard and understood, a dialectic which structures the whole history of revelation.

62. Aquinas, In I Cor, 3, § 47. 63. Ibid.

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Something divine seems to be foolish, not because it lacks wisdom but because it transcends human wisdom. For men are wont to regard as foolish anything beyond their understanding: ‘Matters too great for human understanding have been shown you’ (Sir 3:23).64

That the wisdom of God is foolishness for human beings is a consequence of the discrepancy between humanity and God: St. Thomas once again offers his readers a lesson in rigour by leaving room for foolishness, understood here not as the repudiation of reason but its excess. If it is true that speech cannot exist without positing the transcendence of being, then it is the transcendence of the Word which is given in the intimation of being. And the weakness of God is stronger than men, because something in God is not called weak on account of a lack of strength but because it exceeds human power, just as He is called invisible, inasmuch as He transcends human sight: ‘Thou dost show thy strength when men doubt the completeness of thy power’ (Wis 12:17).65

It is necessary to note the dialectic of the visible and the invisible at work behind this dialectic of excess and lack. Since the divine Truth exceeds our cognitive capacities, when the light of God bedazzles our vision it resembles foolishness for those who do not know, just as Paul writes to the Corinthians. In this way, humanity’s relation to God is immediately situated at the level of the sublime, in a movement beyond limits. It is at this moment that Thomas employs a concessive proposition to reveal the heart of question: in the end, it is a matter of the incarnation. However, this could refer to the mystery of the incarnation, because that which is regarded as foolish and weak in God on the part of the nature He assumed transcends all wisdom and power.66

Because it exceeds all meaning, because it involves contact between the infinite and the finite, only the incarnation can render the incarnation credible. What makes the verbum crucis come to be believed is absolutely not the persuasive rhetoric with which I can coat it, but the fact, the real fact, of the incarnation. The ‘co-penetration of the love of God and of his creature’ manifested in the incarnation culminates in the cross. A century after Thomas, Angela of Foligno describes it in this striking way:

64. Aquinas, In I Cor, 3, § 62. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid.

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Oh my God, Jesus Christ, make me worthy that I may know Thy most holy mystery, which hath been wrought by Thy most ardent charity. That is to say, the most high and profound mystery of Thy most holy Incarnation, which Thou has wrought for our sake and which hath been the beginning of our salvation, for it doeth two things unto us. Firstly, it filleth us with love; and secondly, it maketh us to be verily certain of our salvation. Oh how unspeakable is this charity! Truly there is none greater than this, that my God, the Creator of all, should have become a creature in order that He might make me as God. Oh burning love!67 Oh Thou incomprehensible One, who hast made Thyself comprehensible unto me, Thou God Uncreate made creature for me! Oh Unthinkable One, made conceivable for me! Oh Untouchable One, made so that I may touch Thee!68

Charity culminates in the connection between flesh and the invisible manifested by Jesus dying of love on the cross. (Faith in) The incarnation cements the intersected foundations of the Word and words, of the oral and the written, of grace and of freedom, of nature and revelation, of being and beings: here the infinite regression of the truth in linguistics, ethics, noetics or metaphysics is arrested. Thomas articulates human wisdom and divine power through the mystery of the incarnation and in this way places on a speculative level a topos of Christian poetry which he daily encounters in the liturgy: For the Middle Ages up to the twelfth century, the artes are the basic schema of the world of thought. Only the central event of the historical process of salvation, the Incarnation, could and indeed must overthrow it and pass beyond it. When the Creator became a creature (‘factor factus est factura’), all the artes were invalidated: ‘in hac verbi copula stupet omnis regula.’ Mary is at once mother and virgin. ‘Thus in her concur two designations which elsewhere conflict … Here Nature falls silent, Logic is conquered, Rhetoric and Reason fail. She, the daughter, has conceived the Father, has borne Him as her Son’: Nata patrem natumque parens concipit… . Dante puts these paradoxes of the Incarnation into the mouth of St. Bernard at the end of the Paradiso (XXXIII, 1): Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio.69

The cross, like the incarnation, asserts the possibility of the impossible. To God everything is possible (one of the first inspired lines in the history of the mystery

67. Angela of Foligno, The Book of Divine Consolation of the Blessed Angela of Foligno (trans. Mary G. Steegman; New York: Cooper Square, 1966), pp. 252–3. 68. Angela of Foligno, The Book of Divine Consolation, p. 253. 69. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, p. 42.

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of the incarnation70), but without God it is impossible to believe that everything is possible: Because of their lack of wisdom they suppose that it is impossible for God to become man and suffer death in His human nature; but due to a lack of prudence they consider it unbecoming for a man to endure the cross, despising the shame (Heb 12:2).71

St. Thomas begins his list of impossibilia with the mystery of the incarnation; for him it is the crucial point of the articulation of the Word and our language. ‘“Has not God made”, i.e., proved, “foolish the wisdom of this world” by achieving what it considered impossible, namely, that a dead man rise, and other things of this sort.’72 The false sages of this world consider these words to be impossible (dictum esse) and yet Thomas asserts them here and in the process paraphrases St. Paul’s oral questioning. Such a textual rapprochement shows that Thomas is aware that he is echoing the theandric mystery through his poesis as a ‘Doctor of Catholic Truth’ and in the very activity of theological writing. Time Transcended The cross gives human language a twofold power: the power of not only transcending time but of also embracing it. This process immediately flows from the identity of the Crucified one. As suggested by the poetics of the Synoptics and clearly affirmed by John, the human ‘I’ of Jesus enters into the mystery of God himself: the Christian faith confesses the presence of a divine person within historical existence, which necessarily entails that everything in history finds its meaning in relation to his seemingly contingent fate.73 For paganism time is a closed prison, either as a succession of moments or as a cyclical return of identical myths. Once the eternal Word enters into time in Jesus’ historical existence, the passing of time becomes the very rhythm of freedom. This liturgy is not about the sacrificing of animals, of a ‘something’ that is ultimately alien to me. This liturgy is founded on the Passion endured by a man who with his ‘I’ reaches into the mystery of the living God himself, by the man who is the Son. So it can never be a mere actio liturgica. Its origin also bears within it its future in the sense that representation, vicarious sacrifice, takes up

70. These are the words of the angel Gabriel in the Annunciation (Lk. 1:37). 71. Aquinas, In I Cor, 3, § 50. 72. Aquinas, In I Cor, 3, § 54. 73. Cf. Francis Martin, ‘The Influence of Biblical Studies on Ecclesial Self-Awareness since Vatican II: A Contribution of Dei Verbum’, in Steven Boguslawski and Robert Fastiggi (eds.), Called to Holiness and Communion: Vatican II on the Church (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2009), pp. 339–65.

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into itself those whom it represents; it is not external to them, but a shaping influence on them.74

As Jesus dies on the cross, The exterior act of being crucified is accompanied by an interior act of selfgiving … . As St. Maximus the Confessor showed so splendidly, the obedience of Jesus’ human will is inserted into the everlasting Yes of the Son to the Father. This ‘giving’ on the part of the Lord, in the passivity of his being crucified, draws the passion of human existence into the action of love, and so it embraces all the dimensions of reality – Body, Soul, Spirit, Logos. Just as the pain of the body is drawn into the pathos of the mind and becomes the Yes of obedience, so time is drawn into what reaches beyond time.75

So ‘Christified’, if we can speak this way, time is no longer a brute fact which relates only to exteriority: no longer subjected only to suffering time, one can enter into it and reach the immemorial. It is a little like entering into a church: the same stained glass windows, gray and greenish from the exterior, are suddenly illuminated with the deepest sparkling of colours for all those who agree to enter it. In triumphing over death in the resurrection, the human nature united to the divine Word suffuses the immemorial. The commemoration of the incarnation in Christian signs, and the cross in particular, coincides with the interior offering which participates in it. Once again, it is primarily a matter of an experience. ‘They will look upon the one whom they have pierced’76; ‘late have I love you, Beauty so old and so new’77: what is unfulfilled in the prophecy of Zechariah is seeing, and what is unfulfilled in Augustine’s confession is loving in perfection. Beyond the flow of time, the crucifix is the place where the gaze pauses in the offering and profusion of the light – the place where memory awakens the intellect to love, faith and hope. This is why the crucifix generates a speech as dramatic as itself, a ‘demonstration of spirit and of power’78 as Paul wrote. In this way, the cross not only modifies the experience of time, but also recreates beauty. Beauty Renewed We are dealing with a beauty ‘of which aesthetics knows nothing’,79 a non-worldly beauty, an ‘Easter beauty’, a beauty which agrees to take on ‘the crossing of death

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 57–8. Ibid., p. 56. Zech. 12:10. Augustine, Confessions, X, 27, 28. 1 Cor. 2:4. See 1 Thess. 1:5; Eph. 3:16; Rom. 1:4. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, p. 224.

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and nothingness’80, a ‘grace, even more beautiful than beauty’.81 In the cross, the Christic and Scriptural alchemy of seeing and hearing finds its most sublime point of application. The idea that the cross teaches us to see can be found in enigmatic traces in certain rapprochements in the ancient collection of biblical proverbs between the wisdom of discernment, the purification of evil by bleeding wounds, and the divine gift of hearing and seeing: Sucit aqua profunda sic consilium in corde viri sed homo sapiens exhauriet illud.82 Livor vulneris absterget mala, et plagae in secretioribus ventris.83 Aurem audientem et oculum videntem Domine fecit utrumque.84

The act where beauty is discerned despite all appearances to the contrary is identical with the act by which speech becomes beautiful: it can longer distinguish the moment when it grasps beauty and the moment when beauty gives itself. There speech manifests the highest beauty, that which speaks ‘to God’.85 The crucifix is ‘sublime’ in the modern sense of the term,86 for it makes the category of the ugly disappear. What is more horrific than torture? Yet there is also the opposite of the ugly: clarity, measure and transformation, for the anamnesis of suffering is performed in the light of the resurrection. The Christian sublime is not opposed to the ugly; in attempting to approach the point of view of the Creator, it redeems the ugly itself: ‘The croaking of a frog to God appears as fair as does the lark’s sweet trill.’87 In meditation upon the cross there is obscurity (which is necessary to astonishment), grandeur (which suggests the infinite by repetition) and the absence of movement (which anticipates and transcends all species of reasoning): in this way the pained face of the three gallows of Golgotha is surrounded by darkness and yet resonates with the seven last words of the Nazarene. These words never cease to inspire poets, but above all they never cease to inspire musicians: there is no danger here, for they invite us into a meaning which is not ‘representational’. Those who continuously contemplate the crucifix experience a mix of terror and serenity, which is linked to approaching the mystery through study but also to the

80. Trainar, Transfigurer le temps, p. 78. 81. This is surely a development, within a completely different context, of La Fontaine’s striking statements about the Adonis. 82. Prov. 20:5. 83. Prov. 20:30. 84. Prov. 20:12. 85. We are inspired here by a talk by Jean-Louis Chré tien, ‘La beauté dit-elle à Dieu’, given at the Dominican convent of Marseille in 1994. 86. See, for example, Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 87. Angelus Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer (trans. Maria Shrady; New York: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 52.

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muscular contractions and extreme nervous tension induced by the contemplated object. That Thomas died of such causes is the general hypothesis maintained by his biographers. These were the earthly anticipations of the celestial delight for which he hoped. The beauty manifested by the Crucified takes the form of the cross and here glory transforms extreme horror. Within Christology, this beauty blurs the limits of the created and the Uncreated and within typology, it blurs the frontiers between the past and the future. It is vertical: ‘that in a man’s voice the very voice of God is to be heard, that God speaks along with him, is the culmination of all religion’88; and horizontal: ‘that fulfillment corresponds to promise, is the culmination of all art’.89 It is this beauty which not only invites us to experience passively but also to contemplate actively the crucifix.

Conclusion: The Cross the Foundation of Culture? We should conclude by first insisting on the power of the cross. It is not an inert ‘cultic object’, it is not the static representation of an event lost in the past: it is an active sign for those who look upon it with ‘the eyes of faith’ and it is capable of erecting in those who contemplate it a new canon of beauty. It is true (I look at the cross!), that You are drawn taunt like a bow from which arrows stream forth from all sides! It is true (I look at the cross!) that the cross and You, together form a formidable bow, a formidable tool in action! And this activity, if I place myself in the infinite field that it covers so as to appreciate it, how to call it other than beauty? In no sense a beauty of imitation, an inert beauty, but a beauty which makes beauty, a joy which makes beatitude, a life which makes life!90

The Christian poetic operative within theology, literature and art ‘has always been conscious of being subject to the exigencies of the form of Christ. It has always been, at its height, a spiritual activity, aware not only of a rational and ethical but of an esthetic responsibility to the relative proportions of the various parts of revelation.’91 It ‘introduces into the perfection of the proportio fidei the essential

88. von Balthasar, ‘Revelation and the Beautiful’, p. 118. 89. Ibid. 90. Paul Claudel, Paul Claudel interroge Le cantique des cantiques (Œ uvres complè tes XXII) (ed. Louis-Raymond Lefè vre et al; Paris, Gallimard, 1963), pp. 115 and 116. Italics added and inspired by Millet, ‘Paul Claudel et la dangereuse mé taphysique de Beau’, p. 9. 91. von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, vol. 1, pp. 120–1. The philology here is suggestive: inasmuch as doxa signifies ‘splendor and radiance’ before it means ‘opinion’, it is

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fittingness of a salvation won against evil and into the center of suffering the aesthetic figure’.92 In the past century, Hans Urs von Balthasar saw ‘the heart of the Christian revelation and the best of its credibility. Christianity is believable because one perceives in the figure of the incarnate and crucified Word the plentitude of the glory of God, his love for humanity.’93 His perspective was clearly apologetic: he wanted to employ beauty to retrieve the two other transcendentals of revelation beyond the criticisms of German idealism. St. Thomas’s perspective was clearly different. In his ‘pancaliste’ cultural context and his ‘de facto poetics’, the sublimity of the cross could have been an important principle. Throughout our work we have often spoken of an ‘intersected foundation’ in order to describe some apparent aporiae of Thomasian metaphysics or linguistics.94 It is not unreasonable to think that these intersections are epistemological echoes of Thomas’s devotion to the cross. We have discovered, a posteriori, moments of fittingness between the mystery of the cross and the enigma of meaning. Before the cross, the act of faith (which seems to presuppose itself in the dialectic of grace and freedom) transfigures the confidence we can have in speech to speak of what truly is. The contemplation of the cross reopens the path which leads beings to God and from natural confidence in words to supernatural faith in the Word. This is why (the language of) the cross has throughout the centuries constituted the centre of all culture founded on faith in the redemptive incarnation of the Word which culminates in his sacrifice on the cross.

possible that ‘orthodoxy’ did not initially designate ‘correct doctrine’ but rather ‘true clarity’, or the fitting glorification of God. 92. Narcisse, Les Raisons, vol. 2, p. 447. 93. Ibid. 94. See the section ‘Les causes de ces divergences’ in La langue de l’ineffable, pp. 381– 406.

Chapter 13 THE EUCHARIST: THE EXERCISE OF ADORATION – GLOSSES ON ‘ADORO TE’

Now marveling cannot be without reason, since it implies the collation of effect and cause, i.e. inasmuch as when we see an effect and are ignorant of its cause, we seek to know it1 The lectio divina and the adoration of the cross show how the book overflows with inspired language: enacted through reading, preaching and teaching, this inspired language finally becomes the framework of devout, sacramental and ritual experience. In the Eucharistic symbol it seems that the presence of divinity in the Eucharistic symbol is better and more easily spoken and deciphered by the meal of a word than is the case with the ‘sign-book’ of the cross: here the words of consecration, there the verbum crucis. The complex experience of the ‘Speech of God’ inaugurated by the New Testament is continued in the Church through the combination of the sacraments and preaching. Whereas the crucifix offers a ‘minimalist’ experience of the divine Word when it displays the Word in a culmination of paradox and silence, the Eucharist offers a ‘maximal’ experience of it. Christian orthodoxy believes that God invites himself into the Church’s celebrations by passing through the lips of the priests who pronounce the words of consecration on the bread and the wine2 and then onto the tongues and lives of the faithful who consume them.3 Speech seems to reach its

1. Aquinas, ST 3, 5, 4. 2. Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1377: ‘The Eucharistic presence of Christ begins at the moment of the consecration and endures as long as the Eucharistic species subsist. Christ is present whole and entire in each of the species and whole and entire in each of their parts, in such a way that the breaking of the bread does not divide Christ.’ 3. In one of his letters Gregory of Nazianzus writes this prayer: ‘very reverend friend, do not stop praying and interceding for me when you make the Word descend by your speech, when by an unbloody separation you splice the body and blood of the Lord using your voice in place of a lance’; Epistolae (PG 37), cc 280–1, p. 171. While these lines seem to prefigure

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highest efficacy in the Eucharist inasmuch as it seems to create reality, ‘This is my body, this is my blood.’4 The Catholic Church teaches that ‘it is a dogma for Christians that the bread changes into flesh and wine into blood’,5 and it also sings: Here in outward signs are hidden Priceless things, to sense forbidden; Signs, not things, are all we see:Flesh from bread, and Blood from wine; Yet is Christ, in either sign, All entire confessed to be.6

The whole of Christ is present here: not only is Jesus Christ himself,7 the God-man, signified and contained in the sacramental signs, but so is the whole Church, his mystical Body,8 which is signified but not contained. The act of Eucharistic faith is thus a moment of crisis, of discernment in the human soul, for this moment of greatest certitude coincides with that of greatest concealment: how are we to perceive God under such modest appearances? ‘The true existence of the Body of Christ in the sacrament, on the one hand, and the sacramental species of bread and wine, on the other, are not perceived as one by

‘immolationist’ theories of the Eucharist (fortunately abandoned by the contemporary Catholic church), how could only not be struck by these words? 4. Mt. 26.26-28; 1 Cor. 11.23-25. 5. Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1376; and Paul VI, Mysterium fidei, § 39, which reaffirms the teaching of the Council of Trent, 13 session (11 October 1551), ‘Decree Concerning the most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist’, chapter III and IV: ‘Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation’; Denzinger, § 1642. 6. Lauda Sion, strophes 6-7; see Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 348–50. 7. Aquinas, ST 3, 65, 3: ‘it contains Christ Himself substantially: whereas the other sacraments contain a certain instrumental power which is a share of Christ’s power’. 8. Aquinas, In Io, 6, 7, § § 963-64: ‘the other sacraments have individual effects: as in baptism, only the one baptized receives grace. But in the immolation of this sacrament, the effect is universal: because it affects not just the priest, but also those for whom he prays, as well as the entire Church, of the living and of the dead. The reason for this is that it contains the universal cause of all the sacraments, Christ.’

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the believer’s senses. Nor can the believer’s mind understand how Christ’s body truly exists as the one substance under accidents that are not its own.’9 Throughout the centuries, however, entire communities have held fast to the extreme tension in this paradox, as can be evinced in the splendid artistic creation which the Eucharistic cult inspired in the west. Some of the great modern and contemporary poets, from Mallarmé to Bonnefoy, have seen in such radical boldness the deepest foundation of the West’s confidence in language’s ability to speak of the world and to unite human beings. Equally, it is in the decline of Eucharistic faith that these poets begin the dismantling of the thousand-year-old covenant between words and things and in this way there begins the silence of the poets. Yet poets are not the only ones who have admired this aspect of Eucharistic speech, for some of our greatest theologians continue to do so. Karl Rahner, for example, pursues it in these terms: ‘When is the most concentrated, the most effective word spoken? When is everything said at once, so that nothing more has to be said, because with this word everything is really there?’10 And the response is: in the institution of the Eucharist, which is ‘the sacrament of the word absolutely, the absolute case of the word anywhere’.11 For some of our leaders today, the Latin Church, or the Church in Western Europe at least, lost the sense of wonder before the Eucharist once it ceased to be the presence of a Someone who gives himself and the practice of adoration that this Someone grounds.12 In this context, it is understandable how an English

9. Robert Wielockx, ‘Poetry and Theology in the Adoro te devote: Thomas Aquinas on the Eucharist and Christ’s Uniqueness’, in Kent Emery, Jr., and Joseph Wawrykow (eds.), Christ among the Medieval Dominicans: Representations of Christ in the Texts and Images of the Order of Preachers (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), pp. 157–74 (here p. 165). 10. Karl Rahner, ‘Priest and Poet’, in idem, Theological Investigations, vol. III (trans. Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger; London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1967), pp. 294–317 (here p. 306). 11. Karl Rahner, ‘The Word and the Eucharist’, in idem, Theological Investigations, vol. IV (trans. Kevin Smyth, London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1966), pp. 253–86 (here p. 283). Rahner adds: ‘The efficacious word of the Mass, being the proclamation of the death of Christ, is the primary kerygma’ (p. 286) and ‘where this word attains its absolute climax, as the incarnational and eschatological word of God, and absolute self-expression of the Church as a whole and as directed to the individual, the word of the Eucharist is heard’ (p. 286). 12. See Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1418: ‘Because Christ himself is present in the sacrament of the altar, he is to be honored with the worship of adoration. “To visit the Blessed Sacrament is… a proof of gratitude, an expression of love, and a duty of adoration toward Christ our Lord” (Paul VI, Mysterium fidei, § 66).’ ‘The Eucharist is too great a gift to tolerate ambiguity and depreciation,’ as John Paul II notes at the end of the following paragraph from Ecclesia de Eucharistia: ‘In some places the practice of Eucharistic adoration

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theologian would begin an article dedicated to the Eucharist by insisting on the piety required of all reflection on such a subject matter. Inasmuch as it comes after revelation, all theology is ‘grasped’ before it ‘grasps’, which is why the theologian’s discourse on the Eucharist should always manifest, together with the understanding which proposes it, its proper relation to mystery (to ‘perform and disclose’).13 For Hemming, theological speech should not remain content to be pedagogical (which it does too much now!), but it should itself be anagogical and lead its reader deeper into the depths of the mystery of salvation. Such was precisely Thomas’s goal when he began to compose the liturgical office of the Holy Sacrament, his only poetic work.14 This is why, in our attempt to recover the meaning of Eucharistic adoration, we will begin by focusing on his school and also not only on Thomas as theologian but also as devout poet. The Eucharist is one of the ‘three characteristic traits of Thomas’s way of praying’ which Torrell identifies. The testimony to his attendance at two masses daily – the one that he celebrated, the other at which he was present – is too frequently repeated for us to doubt it. He also had, it seems, the habit of reciting at the moment of the elevation the second part of the Te Deum: Tu rex glorie Christe, Tu Patris sempiternus es Filius, to the end … the canticle recalls at that moment the whole set of “mysteries” of Christ’s life.15

has been almost completely abandoned. In various parts of the Church abuses have occurred, leading to confusion with regard to sound faith and Catholic doctrine concerning this wonderful sacrament. At times one encounters an extremely reductive understanding of the Eucharistic mystery. Stripped of its sacrificial meaning, it is celebrated as if it were simply a fraternal banquet. Furthermore, the necessity of the ministerial priesthood, grounded in apostolic succession, is at times obscured and the sacramental nature of the Eucharist is reduced to its mere effectiveness as a form of proclamation. This has led here and there to ecumenical initiatives which, albeit well-intentioned, indulge in Eucharistic practices contrary to the discipline by which the Church expresses her faith. How can we not express profound grief at all this?’ John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, § 10. 13. See Laurence Paul Hemming, ‘Transubstantiating Our Selves’, Heythrop Journal 44 (2003): 418–39 (here p. 418). 14. In Litté rature et thé ologie we described his poetics in terms of a beauty which assumes a sacramental character, in which praise causes language to pass from being the tool of communication to an instrument of communion, in which the poem becomes a monstrance: ‘just as the Gothic cathedral appears as a translucent shrine where the whole of Christendom can see God with its eyes, so the poem is changed into a monstrance. The encounter of the sensible and God (which is the great task of this theology) can only be accomplished through the sacrament: it alone ensures human imperfection the assistance of the graces of God, whose operation, whose causality, provides the creature with its integrity’. Michel, In hymnis et canticis, pp. 225–6. 15. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, pp. 286–7.

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But above all, It was during the celebration of the Mass that Thomas had the prolonged ecstasies of his last months: the one that occurred on Passion Sunday (26 March 1273) and the one on the feast of Saint Nicholas eight months later (6 December 1273). Since Thomas had reached Q. 90 of the Tertia Pars, the composition of the treatise on the Eucharist (completed earlier) had therefore occurred approximately between these two dates. The evolution already seen at Orvieto, at the time of the composition of the Blessed Sacrament, came to its end here also and the author experienced in his own person what he had written: ‘By the Power of the Sacrament, the soul is spiritually restored by the fact that it rejoices spiritually and, in a certain way, it is intoxicated by the sweetness of the divine goodness, according to the words of the Canticle (5:1): Eat my friends, and drink; drink deep my well-beloved.’16

According to some witnesses, when in agony St. Thomas whispered the verse of one of his most famous Eucharistic poems, the Adoro te:17 Adoro te devote latens veritas, Te que sub his formis vere latitas

I adore You devoutly, hidden Truth You are truly there, hidden beneath these appearances

Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit Quia te contemplans totum deficit

To You my entire heart submits itself Because in contemplating you it entirely falls short

Visus, tactus, gustus, in te fallitur Sed auditu solo tute creditur Credo quicquid dixit dei filius Nichil veritatis verbo verius

Sight, touch, taste, all fail in You; Only by hearing is it all believed! I believe what the Son of God said: Nothing is truer than the Word of truth.

In cruce latebat sola deitas Sed hic latet simul et humanitas Ambo vere credens atque confitens Peto quod petivit latro penitens

On the cross hides only the divinity But here likewise hides the humanity. Both, however, I believe and profess And plead for what he pleaded, the good thief.

Plagas sicut Thomas non intueor, Deum tamen meum te confiteor Fac me tibi semper magis credere In te spem habere, te diligere. O memoriale mortis Domini

The wounds which Thomas saw I do not see Nevertheless I confess that you are my God! Make me always believe more in You, Hope in You, love You! O memorial of the death of the Lord!

16. Ibid., p. 287. 17. We are indebted to Robert Wielockx for the definitive demonstration of the poem’s authenticity and for a remarkable and exhaustive literary analysis of it: Wielockx, ‘Poetry and Theology’, Appendix I, p. 172, and his prosodic remarks inspire much of what follows in these pages. See also André Wilmart, ‘La tradition litté raire et textuelle de L’Adoro te devote’, Recherches de thé ologie ancienne et mé dié vale 1 (1929): 21–40, pp. 149–76, and Auteurs spirituels et textes dé vots du moyen â ge latin: É tudes d’Histoire litté raire (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1932), pp. 361–414.

13. The Eucharist: The Exercise of Adoration Panis vivus vitam prestans homini, Presta michi semper de te vivere Et te michi semper dulce sapere

Living bread making man live, Make me always live through you And to savour your sweetness.

Pie pellicane, Ihesu Domine, Me immundum munda tuo sanguine, Cuius una stilla saluum facere Totum mundum posset omni scelere!

Kind pelican, Jesus Lord Purify impure me by your blood Of which one drop could save The entire world from its sentence.

Ihesu quem velatum nunc aspicio Quando fiet illud quod tam sicio Ut te revelata cernens facie Visu sim beatus tue glorie?

Jesus whom I now see veiled, When will that which I thirst for come? When, discovering you with unveiled face, Will I be blessed to see your glory?

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This poem was certainly his favourite, as its tone is the most personal. A human ‘I’ addresses itself to a divine ‘You’ while each remains on different sides of the veil of created appearances. At the centre of the poem, verses 13-15, Thomas the theologian invokes the example of his patron saint, Thomas the Apostle (whom he even presumes to surpass in faith!), and then offers this remarkable maxim of the theologal life: tibi semper magis, ‘To you always more’. Thomas the Master’s devotion for his patron saint has often been mentioned: he saw in Thomas the Apostle not only a general model for the Christian life but also a model for the theologian. In this way he comes to ‘an astonishing observation about his patron saint: when he falls on his knees at the feet of the Risen Lord, who shows him his wounds, the apostle Thomas, the doubter, immediately becomes a good theologian’.18 This poem also perfectly fits Thomas Aquinas’s last moments as its whole structure reflects the Easter he was preparing to experience. In a tension highly characteristic of his late thought, the Saint and Doctor mentions faith and sacramental order in the first half of the poem (verses 1 to 14, written entirely in masculine rhymes), and the beatific vision and resurrection in the second half (verses 14-15 to 28, completely in feminine rhyme). In what follows we will explore the sentiments of the theologian, saint and Eucharistic mystic by examining the poem strophe by strophe, following the traditional arrangement of the missals, and a scholia will briefly develop one of the theological themes present in the strophe.19 We contemplate with Thomas Aquinas the ‘bread’ and the ‘wine’, just after the priest speaks ‘the word par excellence’:

18. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 2, Spiritual Master, p. 6, citing In Io, XX, 1, 6, § 2562: ‘It seems that Thomas quickly became a good theologian by professing a true faith.’ 19. The pages which follow are very much inspired by a pamphlet we published with Geneviè ve Trainar: Adoro, Petit traité de la pré sence de Dieu. à trois voix dominicaines: Gloses, notes et scholies d’un frè re prê cheur et d’une sœ ur moniale dominicaine sur un poè me de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Geneva: Ad solem, 2005). We also use and reference here the English translation beautifully prepared by Terence Crotty, OP, as Adoro: A Short Treatise on the Presence of God for Four Dominican Voices, and which has not been published.

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HOC EST ENIM CORPUS MEUM… HIC EST ENIM CALIX SANGUINIS MEI… 1. Adoro te devote latens veritas, Te que sub his formis vere latitas Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit Quia te contemplans totum deficit I adore You devoutly, hidden Truth You are truly there, hidden beneath these appearances To You my entire heart submits itself Because in contemplating you it entirely falls short Yes, I adore you, I do not only venerate you As one might venerate some beloved object I do not only respect you As one might someone grand I do not only love you As a friend. I adore you as one adores God for it is God who is there I adore you and I devote myself to You, God who is Truth itself, here, brightly hidden under these modest appearances, a little like you did, a wisp deeply buried at the bottom From a simply woman, mother, virgin, Mary, Or as Adonai in the bush Which Moses saw Burning without burning. To adore, it is to bow down, it is to place one’s lips against the earth, But it is with my heart that I adore, Not with only my body, not With only my mind, but With what is deepest in me The articu-lation Of my body and my mind

Hidden God, concealed Truth, intensely hidden under these appearances of bread and wine: ‘Faith in the real presence consists in taking literally the words of Christ in the institution, the words of the priest in the celebration of the Eucharist.’20

20. Aymon-Marie Roguet, ‘Appendice II: Renseignements techniques’, in Saint Thomas d’Aquin, Somme thé ologiques. Les sacrements (3a, questions 60-65), É ditions de la revue des Jeunes (Paris-Tournai-Rome: Desclé e, 1951), pp. 255–379 (here p. 367).

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Jesus does not say, ‘this bread is my body’,21 which would merely mean that this bread symbolizes his body, as this statement is unclear or contradictory or meaningless.22 This claim does not occur in a poetic or symbolic register, as when he says, ‘I am the true vine’,23 or when Paul says, ‘the rock was Christ’.24 Furthermore, ‘Because this game of symbolization dulls under the brilliance of the holy Presence, as the stars are dulled by the shining of the sun: here and here alone there is an abyss between what I see and what I believe to be the truth. What simple faith affirms with ease is breathtakingly high for human understanding,’25 even if it is in symbol. On the evening of Holy Thursday Jesus is engaged in a concrete action: he institutes a zikkaron. He himself taught as much: ‘The bread that I give to you is my flesh for the life of the world.’26 Christ is not present as in a figure, nor only as a sign which might help us to think of him, to imagine him, but rather he himself is present. He is truly there, mysteriously, for the Eucharist is a sacrament, a mysterion. It is a unique mode of being present, and Thomas spent his life contemplating this mystery. In the following strophe, he elaborates this difficulty further. 2. Visus, tactus, gustus, in te fallitur Sed auditu solo tute creditur

21. ‘Then, when [our Lord] distributed the bread, he did not say that this is a type of my body, but that “This is my body”; and in like manner as regards the chalice [of wine], that this is not a type of my blood, but that “This is my blood.” For when we receive the grace coming from the Holy Spirit, [our Lord] wanted us no longer to regard the nature [of the body and blood] but accept them as the body and blood of our Lord.’ From Theodore of Mopsuestia’s ‘Catechetical Homilies’, as in Frederick G. McLeod, Theodore of Mopsuestia (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 168–9. 22. ‘And so it would be wrong for anyone to try to explain this manner of presence by dreaming up a so-called “pneumatic” nature of the glorious body of Christ that would be present everywhere, or for anyone to limit it to symbolism, as if this most sacred Sacrament consisted in nothing more than an efficacious sign “of the spiritual presence of Christ and of His intimate union with the faithful, the members of His Mystical Body.”’ Paul VI, Mysterium fidei, § 39. The current vogue of linguistic pragmatics (in particular the theory of language acts) in Eucharistic theology at times veers towards to the second ‘it would be wrong’ inasmuch as it substitutes for the efficacy of the word (aided by the Holy Spirit) on the things themselves, the bread and the wine, the efficacy of the word on the understanding, ‘symbolical efficacy… which works on the subjects and by the relation which is established between them’. Cf. Louis-Marie Chauvet, ‘Parole et sacrement’, Recherches de sciences religieuses 91 (2003): 203–22 (here p. 209). 23. Jn 15.1. 24. 1 Cor. 10.4. 25. Trainar, Adoro, note on strophe 2; Adoro: A Short Treatise, p. 19. 26. Jn 6.51.

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Credo quicquid dixit dei filius Nichil veritatis verbo verius Sight, touch, taste, all fail in You; Only by hearing is it all believed! I believe what the Son of God said: Nothing is more true than the Word of truth. You are there and I sense nothing – how is this possible? I want to see it more clearly within myself – who will tell me that you are there: sight? Touch? Taste? None of that It is necessary to traverse the visible, to go right into the invisible… How will this be possible? Who can see God? Or sense him? Or hear him or touch him? No one can see me and live, he once said. You are infinite, beyond my intellect. It is faith that sees beyond How does it see? Through a word. The ear hears, even if the other senses sense nothing, This – my body Here–I–am Jesus here

The naysayers balk at the idea that an Aristotelian such as Thomas could write that vision, touch or taste can deceive.27 No, the senses never deceive when they judge their object rightly, and for this inconsistency alone has the poem’s authenticity long been doubted.28 Yet how can we not see that Thomas is addressing himself to Christ in the sacrament, who is quite clearly beyond all sensory perception? Yes, vision, touch and taste deceive their subject!

27. For instance, the Latin-French edition of the Roman Breviary contains this note on Adoro te: ‘The attribution of this piece to St. Thomas is dubious. We could point to the contradiction between the lines on Visus tactus … and the teaching of the Summa, 3a P., qu. 75, art. 5, according to which our senses are not deceived in the sacrament (for the senses do not judge, nor are they susceptible of error; rather the intellect, which alone can judge and be deceived, is here guarded by faith against all error). But the poem is not written with the same rigour as was the Summa theologiae’; Le Bré viaire romain: é dition bilingue, latin franç ais, hors commerce, entreprise par l’Association Les Amis du Bré viaire romain (Tours, 1980), p. 1200. Henry Spitzmü ller likewise points out that ‘the attribution to St. Thomas is contested for serious reasons’; Poé sie latine chré tienne du Moyen  ge, IIIe-XVe siè cle (Paris Desclé e de Brouwer, 1971), p. 978. 28. See Louis Richard, ‘D’un dé saccord entre saint Thomas poè te et saint Thomas thé ologien’, Recherches de sciences religieuses 5:2 (1914): 162, and the note on the first strophe of the Adoro te devote in several missals or breviaries before the last liturgical reform.

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But on this point the senses are not deceived: the proper object of sensible perception is inseparable from an individual who is present here. Even if the dimension, the surface, or the colour and the taste delude me, it is through the appearances of bread and wine (his, v. 2) before me here (hic, v. 10) that God is present to me. Certainly Christ is not here according to quantitative accidents (those of the bread and wine are not their own), but he is here by reason of his relationship to them. Just as the Bush burned with being consumed, so Christ is here without being localized. It is the accidents which are localized and Christ is where they are. In this way the action of the senses is indispensable to Eucharistic adoration: if the senses were deceived not only in terms of the special forms of their objects but also by their proper object, then the celebration or adoration would be without an object. To believe that Christ is fully present in the sacramental kinds here and now requires that the act of faith include an act of sensible perception which hic et nunc can only perceive the food and drink. The fact remains that ‘the Real Presence is not touched by sentiment or feeling but by faith, a naked faith, a faith which at times can crucify the understanding and mortify the senses’.29 To move from the visible to the invisible is possible for an understanding which sees beyond the eyes. In the meagre bread our eyes see a brown loaf with a white interior, our hands touch a crust which envelops a spongey substance, our mouths eat something which has a definite taste, but it is our understanding which sees bread. This means that in addition to sensible appearances, it ‘sees’ only the substance. Thus Jesus, when declaring his body to be present ‘in this, which retains all the appearances of bread, forces us to think that between this bread and his body there exists a whole unique type of relationship, a passage from one to the other, a change from one to the other’.30 The substance has changed: transubstantiation! Claudel says it with baroque suggestiveness: Under his very flesh and under His sensible appearances, He has wanted to reach the very substance. He is reduced to the substance finally to pass into ours. It is there, below the senses and below the intellect, that the mystery of the communion is accomplished and what makes Christ becomes what makes St. Peter and St. Paul and every child who returns to join hands from the sacred Table. He has really become for us food and drink, something directly accessible to our corporeal organs, to our physical comprehension … . Infinitely more has been provided to us than what the apostle St. Thomas asked when he boldly declared: If I do not put my fingers in the holes of his hands, if I do not press them into the wound on his side, I will not believe. It is into His substance that we are initiated.31

29. Trainar, Adoro, note on strophe 2; Adoro: A Short Treatise, p. 19. 30. Roguet, ‘Appendice II’, p. 369. 31. Claudel, ‘La sensation du divin’, pp. 57, 58.

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We must believe it to see it. Faith here expands, enlarges and strengthens vision and the understanding. Appearances normally correspond to the thing which they allow us to see. Here, and here alone, this is not at all the case! There is a kind of second miracle in the Eucharist: even as the substance has changed, the appearances are always those of bread and wine. In this way, God is not only present under these modest appearances, but he directly sustains the existence of the appearances of bread and wine. What is most wonderful for Thomas is that God comes without abolishing or destroying the humble homely realities where he makes himself present. What is astonishing and surprising is that the bread and the wine become Him and that their substance is not destroyed but converted and assumed into the whole of the substance of the Body of Christ. This is ultimately nothing else than the other world now descending upon the altar, God all in all.32

Yes, truly, this is the grand mystery of faith! Only Jesus’ words can make us believe that he is there, because they alone have the power to do so, to perform this miracle. This is possible because Jesus is himself the Word of God. For it is through his Word that God created the world in the beginning. In God the Holy Spirit we confess that it is God the Son, the re-Creator, who says on the evening of Holy Thursday, ‘This is my body’, and that is God the Father, the Creator, who said in the beginning, ‘Let there be light and there was light! Let the waters be gathered together and let dry land appear.’33 Yes, truly there is nothing truer than the Word of Truth: I believe everything that the Son of God has said. And yet the leap of faith which the understanding makes is not a jump into emptiness or into the doubtful idealism of the world behind the lines. It cannot be in any sense a credo quia absurdum, believing because it is absurd. Faith always remains faith in a word, that of the Son, received and handed on by the Church so that all can hear it on the ‘day of the Lord’s favour.’ Nothing, therefore, can be more real. We note in passing that St. Thomas’ theory of knowledge is in some manner safe even within the mystery: faith comes to depend once again in a certain way on the senses, since the Word comes to us through hearing. I see, I touch, I taste, but I believe what I hear… Did Luther know he was so close to Thomas when he wanted to nourish himself on that which can nowhere be seen, according to the Word and only by hearing?34 3. In cruce latebat sola deitas Sed hic latet simul et humanitas 32. Trainar, Adoro, note on strophe 2; Adoro: A Short Treatise, p. 21. 33. Gen. 1.3, 9. 34. Trainar, Adoro te, note on strophe 2; Adoro: A Short Treatise, p. 19.

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Ambo vere credens atque confitens Peto quod petivit latro penitens On the cross hides only the divinity But here likewise hides the humanity. Both, however, I believe and profess And plead for what he pleaded, the penitent thief. The act of faith that you ask of me, Jesus, is still greater Than that offered by the good thief who saw you condemned And who still recognized that you were God Who believed in You and asked that You take him with You to paradise! It was already difficult to see: a man And to confess: God But I not only do not see God, but I do not even see a man Only the appearance of bread and wine. And yet, you say only one word, and because you say it through the Mouth of the priest whom you have chosen I believe I believe Purely and simply In a great act of love For you who are given over for me In a great act of hope in your forgiveness, and to You, present Jesus, I ask you the same question as did the good thief: Take me with You!

The Eucharist makes present Christ on the cross, Jesus in his passion and death. This is what he himself says through his priests: this is my body given over,this is my blood poured out. It is ‘very clear that Christ’s celebration of the Last Supper with the bread and the wine, his body and his blood, would have been the signs of a sacrifice to the disciples: “den bisri – this is my body – den idemi – this is my blood”. The disciples had before them the signs of a sacrifice.’35 Did not the expression ‘blood of the covenant’ also refer to the communion Moses offered at the covenant’s beginning?36 This is also symbolized by the two separated elements of the Eucharist: bread and wine – body and blood. When these two elements are separated life has left the body: the twofold consecration thus symbolizes the effusion of blood in Jesus’ selfsacrifice. In this way the congregation joins ‘symbolically, through the centuries,

35. Max Thurian, L’Eucharistie: mé morial du Seigneur, sacrifice d’action de grâ ce et d’intercession (Neuchâ tel: Delachaux et Niestlé , 1963), p. 196. 36. Exod. 24.5-8.

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the sacrificial separation of blood and flesh on Calvary’.37 Through symbolically identifying the act by which it ‘consecrates’ the bread and wine with Christ’s act of dying on the cross for the forgiveness of sins, the Church offers the same and unique sacrifice that he himself made. It may seem paradoxical today that Jesus’ death is a sacrifice,38 especially as Jesus himself seems to have opposed the Temple during his ministry and with all the prophets preferred mercy to sacrifice.39 Christ’s sacrifice, however, can be understood in two ways: historically and anthropologically. Historically, interpreting Jesus’ death on the cross as a sacrifice is a product of the whole of early Christian exegesis, which symbolically deepened the prophecy Jesus made concerning his death at the meal of the Last Supper. Up until the first century, the entire biblical cult aimed at communion with God, and this turned out to be problematic – as sinners, human beings are never found ‘at the heights’. Throughout its extensive liturgical history, the chosen people had developed, as a preliminary to the rite of communion, a rite of atonement in the form of a sacrificial system. As well intentioned as this was, here the goodwill of human beings, who view expiation as only possible with sacrifice and communion as only possible with good works, collides with the divine will of gratuitous salvation. The prophets never forgot this.40 Equally, during the Exile and in the absence of the Temple, the devout among the Israelites in captivity developed alternative ritual systems, including a meal taken in common,41 which encouraged the interiority and purity

37. Nicolas, Synthè se dogmatique, vol. 1, De la Trinité à la Trinité , p. 938. 38. ‘In his sacrifice, Jesus fulfills the various meanings of the different sacrifices of the first covenant. These meanings should be taken into account if one wishes to know the riches of the Eucharistic sacrifice, etc.’ Confé rence é piscopale francaise (ed.), Caté chisme pour adultes des é vê ques de France (Paris: Librairie gé né rale francaise, 1993), § 420. 39. Mt. 9.9,13; 12.7, citing Hos 6.6. See the state of the question in Louis-Marie Chauvet, ‘“Sacrifice”: An Ambiguous Concept in Christianity’ (trans. Felicity Leng), Concilium 4 (2013): 13–24. Chauvet concludes that ‘the sacrificial vocabulary in Christianity cannot be ignored for at least three reasons’ (p. 22): its pervasiveness in the Bible, its roots in the most ancient of ritual anthropology and its necessity for expressing Christian soteriology (it is a violent death which Jesus dies). However, in order to dispel the risk of the ‘deconversion’ of Christian language we should not forget that sacrificial language is only one of the possible languages of salvation (e.g., a language of initiation like that found in John may be better adapted to an age). As for the deconversion of Christian language, see Bernard Sesboü é , Jé sus Christ l’unique mé diateur. Essai sur la ré demption et le salut (Paris: Desclé e de Brouwer, 1988), pp. 59–86. 40. See Amos 5.21, until the famous divine diatribe of Isa. 1.11-16. 41. According to Bouyer, the Passover meal was the only sacrifice at the very beginnings of Israel (p. 79): Essene practice and then Christian practice would have thus been a return to the sources: ‘For the priests of Qumrâ m or Damascus, as for the Essenes or the Therapeutes mentioned by Philo or Josephus, this meal came to constitute not only a new equivalent of the old sacrifices, but ultimately the only sacrifice remaining in the expectation of the new

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of religious sentiment even when the cult could resume the reconstruction of the Temple.42 Jesus follows these traditions by announcing and manifesting God’s salvific plan in the symbolic form of a solidarity proposed to all, with no preliminaries necessary other than the forgiveness that he himself grants: his table unites atonement and communion.43 He graciously offered communion in his preaching, but it was precisely his preaching which led to his death: would this not suggest that such gratuity is difficult and even unbearable for the hearts of sinful human beings?44 The resurrection of the Son after the drama of his rejection and death shows that God’s final word will be the affirmation and victory of love and communion. The astonishing thing is that while this offering was refused, his fate and his words instituted a rite which opened a path which was understood45 to enact and offer reconciliation without ever raising obstacles to communion. In this way, the sacraments, alongside

and eternal covenant.’ Louis Bouyer, Eucharist: Theology and Spirituality of the Eucharistic Prayer (trans. Charles Underhill Quinn; Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), p. 49. 42. The Community Rule of the Essenes rendered the community itself its own sacrificial system; its members constituted the Temple, and their prayers, the offerings of their lips and their holy lives became the expiation and fragrance of righteousness for Israel’s sake (1QS 9:3-5). See also, Otto Betz, ‘Le ministè re cultuel dans la secte de Qumran et dans le christianisme primitif ’, in J. P. M. van der Ploeg (ed.), La Secte de Qumran et les origines du christianisme (Paris: Desclé e de Brouwer, 1959), pp. 163–202. The ‘Banquet of the Many’ in the Community Rule speaks of an eschatological banquet which will be held under the aegis of the two messiahs (the priest and the king); see 1QSa 2:17-20. Christian Grappe has argued that the early Church in Jerusalem adopted a similar theology: Christ is the only rock of the foundation and the Spirit ensures the divine Presence in the milieu of the community (see the argument of 1 Cor. 3.11, 16 against the divisions discussed in 1 Cor. 1.12); Christian Grappe, D’un temple à l’autre: Pierre et l’É glise primitive de Jé rusalem (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992), pp. 88–115 and 164–72. 43. See Mk 1.1-12; Lk. 7.36-50. 44. See Mk 2.17 // Mt. 11.19 // Lk. 7.34; 15.2. 45. In 1 Cor. 15.3; 5.7; 3.25-26: Jesus dying is interpreted as the victim of expiation; in Rom. 3.25-26, Jesus is not only the victim but also the place of expiation (an allusion to the kapporet of the ancient Temple); the whole Epistle to the Hebrews elaborates the theme in order to show that access to (communion with) God henceforth passes through the very flesh of Jesus (Heb. 10.20: Jesus inaugurates the way towards the sanctuary through the veil of his flesh; the tearing of the body of Jesus // that of the screen between Holy and the Holy of Holies // the heaven in baptism (Mk 1.10) follows the proclamation of his divine sonship (Mk 1.11)). For a study of the hypothesis according to which the death of Jesus has been understood a posteriori in sacrificial categories, see Max-Alain Chevallier, La Pré dication de la croix (Paris: Cerf, 1971).

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the preaching and the eruption of the Kingdom, assume the two aspects of the sacrificial cult: the divine offer of communion and the human need for reconciliation. They intimate to the sons and daughters that they share in the Son’s destiny, and that they are made to be participants in the ‘already’ of a communion ripe with the promise of the fullness of the kingdom.46

Cult(ic)urally, Jesus’ first disciples were thus equipped to understand his death – and his commemorative ritual – as a sacrifice. On the anthropological level, it is through the deepening of the genuine idea of sacrifice that we can, following St. Augustine, interpret it as the gift of Jesus’ very self.47 What is essential to sacrifice is not what is sacrificed, but the will of offering what one possesses, as a work of ‘justice’ towards God who has given everything. ‘External goods, of which God has no need, can only play the role here of a sign: they are extensions of the personality of those who possess them, extensions of themselves. To recognize the sovereignty of God over things without recognizing his sovereignty over oneself would be nonsensical.’48 Jesus accepts giving his life on the cross, and it is not the horrific torture which makes Jesus' giving his life on the cross a sacrifice, but the fact that Jesus turns it into the act of the High Priest sacrificing the lamb in the Temple. Certainly everything he lives out is a passion (he suffers it), but it is by his own fully human and fully divine will that Jesus performs a sacrifice in order to save the world (‘I have eagerly desired … ’). By wholly offering himself, both body and soul,49 Jesus literally fulfils all the Scriptural passages in which the deepest of religious desires is exhaled: to offer one’s own life as a sign of contrition and submission, as an act of grace and praise.50 ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’:51 because he is borne by this perfect love, love for the Father and mercy for human beings, his brothers and sisters, Jesus’ sacrifice is the one and unique sacrifice which is pleasing to God. Jesus does not abolish sacrifices; he fulfils them by definitively replacing them with his very self in a movement of recapitulation already initiated in the ritual meals held by earlier communities seeking to be faithful. The movement of revelation may lead to an interiorization of the cult, but it does not intend to abolish

46. Christian Grappe and Alfred Marx, Le Sacrifice: vocation et subversion du sacrifice dans les deux Testaments (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1998), p. 130. This work proposes that the Body and the Blood ‘given for’ us signify entry into supreme communion with God, and that the Eucharist realizes the ‘vegetal utopia of the cult’ (offering vegetables as the purest sacrifice of communion) at odds with the ancient Israelite ritual system. 47. See Augustine, The City of God, 1, X, III-VI. 48. Nicolas, Synthè se dogmatique, vol. 1, De la Trinité à la Trinité , p. 924, referring to ST 2-2, 85, 2 and 3, 2. 49. See Rom. 12.1-2. 50. . Ps. 51.17: ‘The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit’. 51. Jn 15.13.

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the cult. As rectitude of one’s interior will is required to give value to the sacrifice being offered to God, so the exterior element of sacrifice remains necessary for the expression of the incarnate person’s acknowledgement of God, and this expression is far more than a pious vow or a pure intention.52 Visible sacrifices signify the gift of oneself to God and to the neighbour.53 In this way Biblical revelation enacts what one might call a ‘dialectic of sacrifice: God gives; the person becomes aware that everything she has comes from God and gives to God in gratitude for what she has received from God; in response God then re-gives superabundantly’.54 The ordinary movement of grace and the act of grace culminates in the sacrifice of Christ, which is consummated in the resurrection and the granting of the ‘Name which is above all names’.55 ‘The resurrected Christ is no longer dead.’56 With57 or without58 the marks of his torture,

52. This is why Thomas Aquinas prefers to call the interior gift of one’s self to God ‘internal’ the ‘spiritual’, ‘principal’, or ‘interior sacrifice’, which St. Augustine in turn designated ‘true sacrifice’. The primary meaning of sacrifice, for us incarnate spirits, includes the sign of exterior offering; ST 2-2, 85, 1, 3, 2. 53. Likewise, inasmuch as God is not a visible being who could come to receive what is being offered to through by a perceptible act, sacrifice generally includes the ‘destruction’ of the thing given, and through this act the human being apportions to the invisible God what he has given up. The religious person ‘refuses to appropriate to himself the first fruits … abandons them to the divinity by giving them over to divinity through offering or sacrificing it.’ Traduction œ cumé nique de la Bible: l’Ancien Testament (Paris: Cerf-Alliance biblique universelle, 1975), p. 155, note c on Exod. 13.12. ‘The Christian ritual is thus second but not secondary: it eschatologically realizes the sacred cult that should be Christian existence… In the Church the cult is essential. But it only finds its place through and in view of the first cult, which is the constant and quotidian lived existence of faith and fraternal love… The Eucharistic liturgy shows in a distinctive way the original status of the cult in Christianity, which cannot be achieved through rites and which challenges them in the same movement in which it affirms them. The Eucharist carries this challenges within itself inasmuch it prevents the believer from concretely closing in upon himself and permitting him an illusory faith which is tranquilly satisfied with itself.’ Roger Bé raudy, Sacrifice et eucharistie: la dimension anthropologique du sacrifice dans la cé lé bration de l’eucharistie (Paris: Cerf, 1997), p. 90. 54. Nicolas, Synthè se dogmatique, vol. 1, De la Trinité à la Trinité , p. 925. 55. Phil. 2.9. 56. Rom. 6.9. 57. Inspired by the stigmata of the Passion which remain on the glorious body of Jesus, the French School of Spirituality popularized the idea that Christ continues to offer himself as a victim in heaven (see Jn 20.27 and ST 3, 54, 4). 58. ‘As for Lord’s body, it remains in heaven at the right hand of the Father, and is immortal, inviolate, untouched, and unscathed, so much so that we could say that one consumes the same body which was drawn from the Virgin that one consumes and also that it is not the same: same in essence, its true nature, and in its salvific virtue; not the same,

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his glorified body now sits at the right hand of the Father. Thus on the altars and in the heart of the Eucharists, it is the living Christ in all his mystery, light, joy and glory, and not simply Jesus suffering and dying, who is present. Such is what we sing to him during each Mass: ‘We proclaim your death, Lord Jesus, and we celebrate your resurrection.’ The following strophe suggests as much, and it also alludes to the resurrected Jesus’ appearance to the apostle Thomas, the patron saint of Thomas Aquinas. 4. Plagas sicut Thomas non intueor, Deum tamen meum te confiteor Fac me tibi semper magis credere In te spem habere, te diligere. The wounds which Thomas saw I do not see Nevertheless I confess that you are my God! Make me always believe more in You, Hope in You, love You!

I do not even see your glorious body, nor the marks from the nails upon your hands and feet! And yet like the apostle I say to you: ‘My Lord and my God’ The night of the Last Supper, you prayed for those who Thanks to the words of your apostles would believe in You: after your resurrection You said to Thomas that ‘happy are those who will believe without seeing you’ In the course of history of the Church! Two thousand years later, me here, I see nothing but these modest appearances where I believe you are present,

Lord, I love you and I hope in You! There are three virtues, three deep and stable ‘good habits’ which directly connect us to God.59 They are called the theologal virtues: faith, hope and love. In contrast to all other virtues, which are a kind of right proportion or an equilibrium between two extremes (bravery, for instance, is a mean between timidity and rashness), these three virtues should be cultivated to their utmost: one can never believe in God enough, since God is the eternal truth itself; one can never hope in God enough, since God is infinite mercy; one can never love God enough, since God is infinite love, the sole source of all our loves, hopes and truths!

however, as regards the exterior form of bread and of wine’. Lanfranc, Liber de corpore et sanguine Domini (PL 150) cc 407–42 (here c 430). 59. See Aquinas, ST 1-2, 62, 1, and ST 1-2, 62, 3.

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5. O memoriale mortis Domini Panis vivus vitam prestans homini, Presta michi semper de te vivere Et te michi semper dulce sapere O memorial of the death of the Lord! Living bread making humanity live, Make me always live through you And to savor your sweetness. Astonishing bread, heavenly bread, I want to consume you, And you want to feed me but it is not me Who transforms you into me It is You Heavenly nourishment which transforms me into You60 as you said ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.’61 It is not the life of the body that you want to give me, But that of the heart, of the soul, the deep, the eternal … Oh that never you approach me with indifference But on the contrary, each time that I consume you, Live in my palate new sweetness! – like the Israelites, my older brothers and sisters in the Covenant with You, In the manna that they collected each morning around their tents in the Desert – A taste adapted to the trial, to the joy, to the step Where I am on my pilgrimage On earth …

The Eucharist is not only the sacrifice prophesized in Jesus’ words during the Last Supper, words symbolically continued in the form of Eucharistic consecration prior to the meal in which the faithful participate in the sacrifice: it is also a memorial. It is a sacrifice in the form of a memorial: ‘We do not offer a different sacrifice, but always the same one, or rather we celebrate a memorial.’62 As we have seen, a memorial is far more than a mere subjective conjuring of memories.63 Instead, a memorial is an objective act through which one reminds

60. ‘I am the food of full-grown men. Grow and you shall feed on me. But you shall not change me into your own substance, as you do with the food of your body. Instead you shall be changed into me.’ Augustine, Confessions VII, X, 16 (trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin; London: Penguin Books 1961), p. 147. 61. Jn 6.51. 62. Jean Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle to the Hebrews, 17, 3 (PG 63, 161). 63. See Pagina Sacra, pp. 120–7.

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God of his past promises so that he will keep them in the present and in the future. Every memorial is not necessarily a sacrifice (as it can take place in other rites, or simply in prayers). Nevertheless, every sacrifice is a memorial, in the sense that it intends to remind God of the one who is offering, or of what event or promise has to be fulfilled. More specifically, the memorial is one part of the sacrifice, the part which one sends up before the Lord as a memorial, with the rest of it consumed by the priests and the faithful. To the extent to which the sacrifice is interiorized, the memorial is the ‘benediction’ which accompanies the sacrifice and expresses its meaning, which is the proclamation of the name of God, the action of grace, the offering of one’s self. The offerant himself becomes the higher form of sacrifice, for the sacrifice of thanksgiving or of praise includes, along with the praise of God, the first fruits, the offering of a pure and upright conscience, and thus the love of which the alms are a sign.64

Just as with every cultic act, however, the memorial produces nothing in God, who has no need of mnemonic devices nor any incentive to act. Rather, through these acts the human community is resituated in its relationship to the divine promises, to the eternal presence of God. From this comes Thomas’s insistence that Jesus transform it: presto! The most beautiful memorial of the old covenant is the Passover meal, a ritual dinner held in memory of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, of their passage from slavery to freedom. They consume unleavened bread, like our hosts, in remembrance of the manna, the miraculous food that God provided in the desert, and a roast lamb, which serves as an image of the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. They also drink cups of blessed wine. Even today this memorial enables Jews to keep present the wonder of the God who delivers them from the anguish of oppression and who gives them a Law to deliver them from injustice! The Eucharist is the memorial of the new and eternal covenant: it makes present that which takes place in Jesus’ Passion. As we have noted, what occurred there has been understood (and perhaps even lived) as a sacrifice. The Eucharistic memorial makes present the very substance of the Passion offered and of Jesus’ determination to enduring it for the sake of the world, so that this sacrifice could touch every person. Not only does the Eucharistic memorial claim that Jesus delivered us from hate and sin through his sacrifice, death and resurrection, but also that Jesus makes himself present now in order to continue to deliver us and to strengthen us through his great spiritual power. In the Christian memorial, just as in the Jewish one, there is not only food but also drink.

64. Nicolas, Synthè se dogmatique, vol. 1, De la Trinité à la Trinité , p. 886 (summarizing Thurian, L’Eucharistie, pp. 49–51).

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6. Pie pellicane, Ihesu Domine, Me immundum munda tuo sanguine, Cuius una stilla saluum facere Totum mundum posset omni scelere! Kind pelican, Jesus Lord Purify impure me by your blood Of which one drop could save The entire world from its sentence. Astonishing wine, heavenly wine, Salutary drink,

You do not only want solely to shower me and intoxicate me with the love of God who has come so far for me – it is said that the pelican is a marvelously compassionate animal to its young: when they cry out their hunger or their thirst and there is nothing more to eat, it is not content to give them that which it has brought back in its beak; it opens itself, its heart, and offers its blood to drink. How right we were, O Jesus, To embroider pelicans on the vestments That the priests wear in order to celebrate the Eucharist, Or to paint them close to the altars or the tabernacles Where you reside: For you, heart pierced on the cross, You are greater than the pelican as you give the gift of your Body And your Blood!

Redemption is an act of gratuitous love on God’s part. God graciously saves humanity from sin and death, and human beings had nothing to do with this gracious act. There were no preliminary conditions for the forgiveness of God, for human beings would be incapable of meriting them: What could one give to God, the Creator of all, which God did not already have? Additionally, when I have offended a friend, am struck by remorse, and want to turn back to him, I must not only ask for forgiveness but I must then act in such a way that he will believe me and could admit that I have genuinely changed. This is what it means to repent, and in this way I must offer conciliatory acts until he forgives me. However, the greater the person whom we offend, the more difficult it is to repair the offense. God is the one who is offended by sin, and God is infinitely great; how could we make restitution in this case? God clearly had no need of Jesus’ horrific death to save humanity (only one drop of his blood and God’s omnipotent will would have sufficed). Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is not a tribute offered to God in order to acquit humanity; instead, it is the most interior act of the cult, the purest and most complete offering of oneself

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which has even been made. The recovery of the dissolute human will, the desire to recover the grace of God so that one prefers God to oneself even if this might mean death: no one was capable of these things until Jesus lived it out in our name and opened up to us the path to follow, his path. In no way is this suicidal; it is loving! Throughout the centuries martyrs have preferred the Author of life to life itself whenever evil men have forced them to choose between the two, and in this decision they witness to God’s love. ‘For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.’65 The resurrection of the Son is the response of the Father to such love. Yet the Father and the Son are equally God, and so they act together and as one in the unity of the Holy Spirit. In Christ God has reconciled the world to himself.66 7. Ihesu quem velatum nunc aspicio Quando fiet illud quod tam sicio Ut te revelata cernens facie Visu sim beatus tue glorie? Jesus whom I now see veiled, When will that which I thirst for come? When, discovering you with unveiled face, Will I be blessed to see your glory? Thus Jesus, it is You whom I behold, when the priest, after having consecrated it, elevates the host in order to show it to me. But you hide yourself behind This veil of modest appearance! And my desire breaks against This veil O this veil I wish that you would remove it, and see You Face to face, like A friend My friend Then I pray to you with an old prayer: ‘We have communed in the mystery of our salvation: give us, O God, always to do in this life in some way that which you still desire of us, until we will see You for eternity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit!’ Amen.

From the start of the poem, we have tried to understand ever more gradually the miracle, the mystery of God’s presence in the Eucharist. This is not possible with only the light of the senses, nor with only the understanding. We can only come

65. Jn 10.17-18. 66. 2 Cor. 5.19.

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to understand this great mystery partially through another light, an obscure light like that of the luminous cloud of which Exodus speaks and which accompanied the people in the desert. This other light is the light of faith. At the beginning of the poem the senses, the understanding and the heart faltered under the excess of the divine truth. At its end, the gaze of faith touches God and knows that its vision will one day become clear vision. At the beginning there was hidden, almost anonymous deity. At the end Jesus is named although still veiled, and while it may be a diaphanous veil, it is still a veil nonetheless: and this is not enough for us! Many things remain hidden to us. A great desire animates the whole of our Christian life, including the celebration of the Eucharist: we celebrate your death, resurrected Lord, while we wait until you come in glory. What compels us forward and what is promised to us is to contemplate God face to face. Such will be the great joy of ‘heaven’. Yet the human understanding will always be too weak; in order for our desire to be ultimately satisfied and for us to be definitively glad and joyous and in the company of the angels and the saints of heaven, God himself must achieve this through giving us a light far, far more powerful than faith: his own glory. The Eucharistic adoration of the theologian finally appears as an intense moment of the regrounding of confidence in language on a Christocentric faith.67 Indeed, the object of Eucharistic faith is described as a word of Jesus more than a reality, and as a word pronounced in a distant past: Credo quicquid dixit Dei Filius. This word reigns over the diversity of the sensible world. This word relates the multiplicity (of signs to see, of truths to believe) to the unicity of the senses: purely and simply different objects of belief are wholly accepted on the witness of the one Word of truth. This Word allows itself to be reached through signs and words which are made to participate in the intuitive simplicity of the divine Truth. More generally, then, the Eucharistic experience shows that the entire order of knowledge is affirmed and grounded in a participation in the divine knowledge: ‘When one believes something to be true because God is Truth itself, one begins to know all the rest in virtue of one’s knowing God. Thereby one begins to know in a way similar to the way God knows. For God characteristically knows all that is true by knowing – or rather by being – his own Truth.’68 As in the Biblical memorial, this word reigns over time. It reigns over the past inasmuch as Christ continues to reveal himself through an aesthetic dialogue between vision and hearing present in the Eucharistic experience. Offered for the adoration of the faithful, the consecrated species are an echo of the hic et nunc of the days of his flesh.69 The consecrated species are reminiscent of the oldest

67. Here we are synthesizing the conclusions of Wielockx, ‘Poetry and Theology’, p. 166. 68. Wielockx, ‘Poetry and Theology’, p. 166. 69. ‘Not unlike Jesus, who proclaims that God’s eschatological sovereignty begins in his own actions here and now, Thomas confronts us with the paradoxical claim that the One Simple Truth joins with us in the most extreme here and now of the sacramental species.’ Wielockx, ‘Poetry and Theology’, p. 166.

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theophanies of the old covenant: this is why Biblical speech so easily flows into the speech of the Christian who is contemplating the Eucharist. Quando te revelata cernens facie visu sim beatus tue glorie? ‘St. Thomas’ question seems to echo the Psalmist’s nostalgia for God or Moses’ sighing to see God face to face. While it may seem strange for Christians, the same terms and language spoken in the Old Testament return.’70 Moses’s desire flows into Hosea’s jubilatory prophecy. Through the lips of an ancient oracle, God says, ‘Sponsabo te mihi in sempiternum, sponsabo te mihi in fide’.71 The Gothic theologian responds to him, ‘Fac me tibi semper magis credere; michi semper te vivere, et te michi semper dulce sapere.’ For Thomas, seemingly alone among his contemporaries, the divine marriage is not reserved for a mystical elite founded in love, but is instead consumed by the believer’s first act of genuine faith.72 The future itself is anticipated, and what a future it is! The poem’s final note on the theme of faith occurs in the fifteenth verse, at the start of the second part, and it points towards the beatific vision which is invoked in the final verse. By this connection Thomas is suggesting that faith really is the beginning of vision. It is the beginning, and yet only the beginning: by carrying the power of language to its highest summit, the Eucharist also exhibits its weakness. At the summit, in both the grandeur and humility of sacramentality which is centred on a word, the relationship of the Eucharist to the Body of Christ resembles the relationship of language to thought in a weak sense. Sacramentality ‘requires not separating the mystery of God from the symbolic mediation in which it gives itself, but also of not confusing them’,73 just as all thought is identified with a language but cannot be reduced to it. In this way, the Eucharistic words turn out to iconize dramatically the sublime yet modest, necessary yet secondary, condition of language in the weaker truths which we can transmit.

70. Trainar, Adoro te, note on the final strophe; Adoro te: A Short Treatise, pp. 41–2. The author offers this magnificent gloss: ‘Is this to say that the gift of the Eucharist, God-with-us along the path of the Church, would not suffice for the heart of a human being? Certainly not, but its most marvelous effect is perhaps to make us taste and see that we are not of this world, that this world passes away and that, as St. Thé rè se puts it, Your face, O God, is my only homeland. St. Thomas, who one day will turn away from his theological work as “so much straw” because of what he had seen, asks here for this vision of glory which surpasses the sacrament. He knew that his life is hidden in Christ in God.’ 71. Hos. 2.19-20: ‘And I will take you for my wife forever; I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy.’ 72. ‘Faith brings about four good effects. The first is that through faith the soul is united to God, and by it there is between the soul and God a union akin to marriage. “I will espouse you in faith” [Hosea 2:20].’ Aquinas, In Symb, § 860. 73. Chauvet, ‘Parole et sacrement’, p. 212. See also Chauvet, ‘“Sacrifice”: An Ambiguous Concept’, p. 19: ‘“the sacrament of the Body of Christ is the Body of Christ.” But of course this is true only if we bear in mind the symbolic mediation of the rite: in other words, the distance between the actual event of the paschal cross and its sacramental instantiation’.

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We do not presume that all believers would have to explain the riches of their celebration and adoration of the Eucharist in these terms, or even that all believers would be aware of the place that the sacrament, the source and summit of the Christian life ends up occupying in the linguistic and metaphysical structuration of their experience. If such were indeed the case, the various sorts of ‘deconstruction’ on offer would seem far less novel to those who advance them and far less dangerous to those who combat them. Nevertheless, we hope that those who welcome reflection on their Eucharistic experience might a posteriori recognize some of their own experiences in these remarks. It should no longer be surprising that this light is recapitulative: it is only afterwards that theological rationalization discovers the fittingness of the divine initiative, just as the Bible regularly shows the presence of God being discovered retrospectively. God is often there and not noticed, often speaks and is not heard. The patriarch Jacob falls asleep, exhausted, his head on a rock for a pillow. In the night there appears to him in a dream a ladder which the angels of God ascend and descend. Not only does he sense nothing at this moment, but he is even asleep! It is when he awakes that he cries, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!’74 ‘Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!’75 Many books later, it is only after, well after, their time with Jesus that the apostles understood that the Scriptures had been fulfilled before their eyes when they felt their hearts burning with truth and love when Jesus spoke to them. ‘You do not know what I am doing, but later you will understand.’76 Jesus said to them, ‘It is when everything is finished that you will understand’,77 and theologians would do well to think that these verses are also meant for them.

74. 75. 76. 77.

Gen. 28.17. Gen. 28.16. Jn 13.7. See Jn 2.22.

Part V CONCLUSION

Chapter 14 ‘THE HOUR COMES AND HAS COME… ’

It is the hour of Compline.1 All the brothers congregate in the church. A light meal was taken in the refectory – it is Lent – whilst listening to a reading from the Fathers. A Psalm was chanted: Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’2 Jeremiah’s voice declared: ‘Do not forsake us Lord.’3 A brief response: ‘Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit’ opens the lips of each one, just as Christ spoke on the cross, and here they are, appropriately, in the Dominican liturgical hymn: ‘O Christ, you are the light and the day.’ Compline culminates in the vision of the crucifix or the adoration of the Eucharist: ‘Now Lord, let your servant depart … my eyes have seen the salvation that you were preparing.’ There rises up the poignant song of the Media vita: Media vita in morte sumus: quem quaerimus adiutorem nisi te, Domine, qui pro peccatis nostris iuste irasceris … Sancte Deus, sancte, Fortis, sancte, et misericors Salvator, amarae morti ne tradas nos! ... Ne proiicias nos in tempore senectutis, cum defecerit virtus nostra, ne derelinquas nos, Domine.4

1. The following passage is adapted from André Duval, ‘Les larmes de Saint Thomas’, Bulletin de cercle thomiste Saint-Nicolas de Caen, nouvelle serie 68 (1974): 25–30 (here pp. 27–30). 2. Ps. 90 (91):1. 3. Jer. 14.9. 4. The translation of the Media vita from the 1789 US Book of Common Prayer runs: ‘In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour; thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.’

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Our soul has escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers. Sancte Deus … it rains in the space within Media Vita … eyes are torn by the voice of Your cataracts … Thomas cries. This great scholar, whose constant toil we well know, who is a legend for his erudition, who is famous for the accuracy of his judgement, and whose distractions and naiveties are the subject of humourous anecdotes, we see him crying! Why does he cry? What contrast of sadness and joy, what intimate feeling of consolation has moved him to tears? The music is certainly not the direct cause of this emotion: it is, however, not unrelated to it … . It carries, it extends, it enriches in him the intimate resonance of words. Which words touch his heart so? Commenting on chapter 27 of Matthew, where the verset of Psalm 21 is placed on the lips of Jesus on the cross, and meditating with Origen on the outcry – voce magna – where all the mysteries lie enfolded, ascending his heart’s memory brother Thomas hears the words and song of the Media Vita: ‘O thrice Holy … ’, and he directly inserts, in his commentary, at this very spot, the verset of Isaiah (6:3) expressing the Seraphim’s adoration. ‘What is God?’ he had already asked, since, when a little boy, he questioned the monks, his masters, in the cloisters of Monte Cassino! How many vigils, readings, analyses, commentaries had he dedicated to examining the mystery of mysteries, only to confess at the end that, on his own, man can only answer Thomas’s question by saying what God is not. But God has spoken! The Word was made flesh, and now brother Thomas adores this answer. This Man who, in the noon of his life, struggling with death because He had taken upon Himself the sin of the world, cries his agony to the One who alone may deliver him from this death; this Man, is his God. In the Convent in Naples, while writing the articles in the Summa theologiae on the passion and resurrection, brother Thomas exclaimed before an image of the Crucified: ‘For me, no reward other than you, Lord.’ Nisi te Domine.

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Propositions on Thomasian Speech To the hasty reader, St. Thomas Aquinas often gives an impression of dryness and rigidity. This is because true love speaks less of itself and more of its object. Moreover, it speaks less than it acts: kindled by diligent study of the Scriptures, stirred by contemplation of the crucifix, nourished by the celebration and adoration of the Eucharist, the invisible fire of an immense love for the incarnate, crucified and resurrected Word burns without consuming the thousands of pages of his theological work. Whether it is in the contemplation of creation, or in the proclamation of the Scriptures or during meditation on the crucifix or in the course of Eucharistic celebration, these ritual experiences build up Christianity as the logikè latré ia.5 For Aquinas, the Christian rite joins the logos of humanity to the Logos of the Creator. Thomas has uncovered the Word at work in the very structure of created being. He knows the Word as the basis and horizon of all thought and of all speech. The covenant of meaning and sound in human speech is both the precursor and the echo of the visitation of the divine Word into our depths.6 A deep analogy unites language and the incarnation: there is a relationship between the transcendence of meaning in speech and the transcendence of God in the body of flesh that he assumes. This results in a theological style: the Thomasian terseness, for example, in comparison to the Bonaventurian abundance.7 The presence of God, embedded within the depths of being and thought, is no longer a justification for lyrical or symbolic effusions. Because it is founded on the unique Word, the Creator and Redeemer, the purest Christian symbolism, far from being an allegorical flight from this world, is realism. As speech speaks forth the mystery and actions of the incarnate God, it somehow inhabits its source: it reflects its own foundation; theological speech inhabits the sublime, faithful to the end to the fundamental tautology of the Burning Bush. The poetic reception of Thomas’s theological work, the exploration of its metaphysical and Biblical bases, uncovers a style of thought very different from any abstract taxonomy, from a code of ‘preemptory and coercive laws of being’8 or

5. On this term, see the remarkable pages in Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 45–50. 6. See Jn 1.1, 9 and Chapter 10, ‘The Existence of Language as a Theological Question’. 7. For more on Thomas’s theological style, see Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 59–222. 8. Thus Gianni Vattimo considers scholasticism to be a foundation of ‘technological civilization’ which, following Heidegger, he rejects. ‘A “natural” theology which is supported by authoritative and coercive laws of being would fail its calling to “proclaim liberty to the captives”. If we based new religious discourse on these “physical” laws, we run the risk of the total organization (in Adorno’s sense) of thought and life in a world in which there already reigns a technological super-organization.’ Gianni Vattimo, Dopo la cristianità : per un cristianesimo non religioso (Milan: Garzanti, 2002), p. 18.

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the ‘logocentrism’9 to which scholastic discourse is often reduced. Since Aristotle, being, taken as both eidos and energeia, is an idea that works, and the speech which attempts to give an account of it is an operation (of judgement) rather than a chart of frozen concepts. For St. Thomas Aquinas metaphysical speech attempts to figure (symbolize) reality: opening itself to the Author of being for the sake of theology (as seen in his doctrine of the Eucharist), this speech receives, as by magnetization, a certain fruitfulness, a certain performativity. Beyond the denunciations of the postmoderns (who all too simply follow the moderns on this point), it is not clear that it is necessary to exclude metaphysics, or even that it is necessary to oppose metaphysics to a participatory knowledge based on the event of revelation. The operative idea of the Summa, a work deliberately left unfinished, is that of inadequation: between the beginner and the expert, the artist and the sage, the philosopher and the saint, the intellect in via and the beatitude to come. Inadequation reflects the very structure of the real that Thomas discovered: his metaphysics is rooted in faith in a God who creates ex nihilo and this forms the deep ground of his poetics. The explanation for why a being acts and should act is that it is inadequate in itself, that is to say, that it is constituted by a duality and an é lan which propels it toward a superior unity … . Ontologically speaking, the final principle and structure of the concrete is the distinction between essence and existence … . As the ontology here is genetic and dynamic, every reduction of being to the concept is impossible, for ontology as ‘ontogeny’ never ceases to exceed the power of representation and the attempt to freeze being within a purely conceptual essence. But at the same time, and this might appear paradoxical, it guarantees the ontological consistency and autonomy of beings, for beings can be more than evanescent phenomena only if they are given (by the metaphysical principle on which they depend) a dynamism to actualize and fulfill, an ‘ontological standard’.10

9. ‘According to Lindbeck, the deconstructionist critique of Christian “logocentrism” or of “onto-theology” follows from a misunderstanding of the specificities of classical hermeneutics … . “It is not the text, but only the ‘present’ word, the word as used in a situationally specific speech act, which has a single, fixed meaning. Derrida’s theological error is to suppose that Christians have historically understood the logos, the Word incarnate, in terms of the ontotheology against which he polemicizes. Jesus Christ has never been treated in practice (whatever may have been true of doctrine or theology) as similar to a speech act with a single unchanging meaning, but is now, as the ascended Lord, just as much a living person in his days on earth.”’ Boss, ‘Le postlibé ralisme’, p. 126, citing George Lindbeck, ‘Scripture, Consensus, and Community’, in Richard John Neuhaus (ed.), Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), pp. 74–101 (here pp. 95–6, n. 9). 10. Emmanuel Gabellieri, ‘Saint Thomas: une ontothé ologie sans phé nomé nologie?’, Revue thomiste 95 (1995), pp. 150–92 (here pp. 181 and 182, 183). The author cites Maurice

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This metaphysics allows us to take into account the experience of duration. The distinction between essence and existence within the indivisible unity of worldly being (distinctio “realis” essentiam et esse, or inter existentiam et essentiam) is ever new, indeed, because of perspective, inexhaustible. It reveals, then, a movement within being occurring between its two poles … . Regardless of how we consider this movement in creaturely being, one thing is clear: the mysterious nonidentity between essence and existence is intimately related to the phenomenon of time. Indeed, insofar as time is a fundamental structure of being, this nonidentity is even coextensive with it.11

Even if he did not thematize it, how can we doubt that Thomas himself lived the analogy of duration and eternity? The lectio, praying before the crucifix, his theological writing, all anticipate the ‘parousia’ of which mystical experiences give a foretaste. The Eucharist in particular stirs up a desire for the coincidence of phenomenology – visus, tactus, gustus – and metaphysics – latens veritas – promised by the Word who decides all truth – nil hoc veritatis verbo verius. The last words attributed to Thomas when receiving the viaticum sound like a cry of victory: ‘I receive you, price of my soul’s redemption, I receive you, viaticum of my pilgrimage, for the love of whom I studied, watched, labored, preached, taught.’12 Beyond the text, but still within the veil, communion anticipates beatitude. In short, speculative theology as practiced by St. Thomas knows how to make necessary distinctions but ignores the divisions between philosophy and theology, metaphysics and phenomenology13 which the postmoderns at times perpetuate

Blondel, L’Ê tre et les ê tres: essai d’ontologie concrè te et inté grale (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1935), pp. 225, 226. 11. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory, vol. 1, Truth of the World (trans. Adrian J. Walker; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), pp. 194, 195. These passages are cited by Gabellieri, ‘Saint Thomas’, pp. 185–6, who then comments: ‘Here we encounter one of the most original of Balthasar’s thoughts regarding classical metaphysics: time is not simply the negation of eternity (the absence of the eternal present), but expresses something positive (an eternally new present), and so time and eternity are far from being opposites but are instead to be thought of in terms of analogy, time being in truth a reflection and a revelation of the eternal dynamism of the divine life.’ 12. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, p. 136 n. 67. 13. See the remarkable analysis offered by Gabellieri, ‘Saint Thomas: une ontothé ologie sans phé nomé nologie?’, pp. 191, 192. If a phenomenology is something one may ‘see’, the ontological difference and the metaphysical difference cannot be ‘seen’, even though they are implied in the former. This is why we maintain that phenomenology and metaphysics can neither exclude nor swallow one another up, but must depend upon each other. A metaphysics without phenomenology would have no ground; a phenomenology without metaphysics would have no depth. Yet reducing one to the other would amount to a sort of eschatological impatience that would seek either to grasp the absolute through thought

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even if their own ‘textualism’ might render them attentive to the blurring of epistemological borders inside sacra doctrina.14 Today just like yesterday, for speech to be possible it is necessary to rely upon Scriptural and sacramental paths for the redemption of speech. Is it not the proper task of a ‘theological poetics’ to identify the paths which ensure the conciliation of the experience of literary beauty and the theologal discovery of theological truth? Taking our inspiration from Paul Valé ry, we define this hypothetical discipline as ‘the form of intellectual activity which engenders works’ of speech about God (poetic utens), and the study of this form (poetic docens). By finding in the mystery of Christ the deep grounds for confidence in speech’s capacity to articulate being and God, by manifesting meaning in its nascent state in the same way as great philosophy and art attempt to do,15 such a poetics could cure us of nostalgia for the time of a ‘parole premiè re’ and the question of ‘the being of language’ which haunted Foucault. We have attempted to trace its outlines by proposing to poets, philosophers and theologians a literary reception of St. Thomas Aquinas’s works. Are the Scriptural and sacramental paths for the redemption of language definitively lost to the critical and historicizing thought of our time? One might believe such to be the case, and this question will be explored in the reflections which follow. Nevertheless, it seems that some of our leading contemporaries remain sensitive to the idea of a foundation of words in the Word beyond words, but it is only in a mode of regret that they reexamine clues which had been wrongfully neglected. Our task, then, is to reconsider these

or pure affectivity, or to see its direct, unmediated manifestation. In this way, a coincidence between the object of phenomenology and metaphysics can only occur in the final parousia. 14. See Gabellieri, ‘Saint Thomas: une ontothé ologie sans phé nomé nologie?’, p. 191. ‘Aquinas’s thought could be dubbed a phenomenological metaphysics which rejects rationalist and idealist metaphysics as well as the different phenomenological responses to the crisis of metaphysics. Its intellectual process moves from (1) a concrete phenomenology of beings (which stresses their self-expression and activity), to (2) an ontological structure of being (the difference between esse-essentia) which itself points, to 3) a metaphysical principle which transcends it … . This triple determination displays a structure and field of meanings much richer and more sophisticated than is usually expressed by means of the classic metaphysics/physics distinction. This is how Gilson’s line can be understood: “The true metaphysics of being never received the phenomenology which it deserved.”’ Gabellieri cites here É tienne Gilson, L’ê tre et l’essence (Paris: Vrin, 1972), p. 22. 15. As is best illustrated by musical language, artistic signification is not transcendent to the signifier: its signified inheres in it. It is thus almost a matter of principle that works are left unfinished – such as the Summa theologiae. The one who speaks here is no master of sign or the meaning. Nor does he aim to create a direct encounter with the meaning. It takes us to the meaning by a lateral and indirect path. See Jacques Taminiaux, ‘Le langage artistique’, in Langage et symbole (Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain-laNeuve, 1984), pp. 171–82, especially p. 179.

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clues. We will conclude by examining the enrapturing experiences into which Christians are invited so that speech about God may re-enchant the world.

The Ancient Foundations A Metaphysics of Participation The world which surrounds us signifies as realistically as any language does: it grasps humanity just as humanity grasps it. Or to put it more simply, being, thinking or speaking are always just as much to be grasped as to grasp; humanity does not create but discovers meaning. Beyond the knowledge that it may possess, humanity is included within the very object which it wishes to understand. Is humanity thus the victim of an alienation from which it is necessary to liberate itself? In a highly significant way, the perplexity of the moderns touches upon both the power of human speech and the knowledge of God.16 The ordinary experience of Christian speech invites us to accept this intimate dispossession. The tradition inspired by the Bible has long known that humanity is a child of language as well as of nature; it capitalizes ‘Word’ because it is aware of receiving it as a gift, and even that it is the giver of all words. It confidently attributes to ‘God’ the alterity operative in its speech and does not believe itself to be ‘alienated’ from him because this ‘alienation’, coextensive with all language, promises resurrection. It senses the presence of God at the heart of human speech. Speech is not elicited by an alienating impersonal force, but by the Word in which it participates and which once upon a time and forever appeared as the face of Love for all things in time and in space. For the atheist and the agnostic, the theology of the Word (or Trinitarian theology more generally) can be deconstructed as the sublimation of phenomena inherent in the human psyche or in language (whether thought, oral or written) or in social mediation. God remains for them ‘the wholly other’ of a human, all too human, alterity which is hypothetically carried ‘to infinity’. Conversely, for the Christian, as she knows by speaking, the human spirit is already in the presence of God and the structure of its acts manifests something of the intimacy of God: throughout the centuries dogmatics has given a truly Trinitarian horizon to the noetic. In Christian revelation, and unlike any type of crude mysticism, the mysterium does not create the relation of the mutual presence between God and humanity: it presupposes and is derived from it.17 Whereas the pagan contemplates an external god, an object of knowledge, the Christian reflects on the reality in and through which he finds himself already

16. See chapters 6, ‘In Search of the Lost Word’ and 10, ‘The Existence of Language as a Theological Question’ in this volume. 17. See Louis Bouyer, Mysterion: du mystè re à la mystique (Paris: OEIL, 1986), p. 26, and André -Jean Festugiè re, L’Idé al religieux des Grecs et l’É vangile (Paris: Gabalda, 1981), p. 133.

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in relation with God, the transcendent Creator who has created all things from nothing. However, God’s immanencing into the world in Jesus Christ can be neither constructed (Hegel) nor postulated (Baius) starting from the world. Precisely in John, where the world has already been created in the Logos and fashioned in conformity to him, this immanencing is received as pure ‘grace’ (Jn 1:14, 16-17). But … we realize that the incarnate Word comes into ‘his own property’ (Jn 1:11). Hence he does not merely travel into a foreign land (as Karl Barth says) but into a country whose language he knows; not only the Galilean variety of Aramaic that he learns as a child in Nazareth, but, more profoundly, the ontological language of creatureliness as such. The logic of the creature is not foreign to the logic of God; it could be likened to a dialect of the standard language spoken in pure form by God.18

In this theological framework, language is an integral part of the real relation of the creature to God. God, after all, made the creature according to his own image and likeness, so that, by his grace, it might become inwardly capable of serving him as a loudspeaker through which to express himself and make himself understood. We are thus concerned no longer merely with the structures of human language but with the ‘language’ residing in the structure of worldly being itself, a language that everyone who lives as a creature knows in one way or another, even if he does not formulate it explicitly.19

In the Bible, the Word of God is not the hypostatized sublimation of human words: We do not declare that God speaks because of the model of human speech. Rather, it is because word and creation share a common nature that the speaking creator gives language to humanity, as his counterpart. All the natural, objective characteristics we observe in human speech … are such because they are the characteristics of the Word as expression of God the creator.20

18. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory, vol. 2, Truth of God (trans. Adrian J. Walker; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), p. 84. The author goes on to clarify: ‘Yet, our simile limps, because Jesus can make the divine archetype shine forth in the worldly images and similitudes. Human beings will need the one gift of the divine Spirit to understand Jesus’ language, but this changes nothing of what we have said; Jesus is not a distorted image but the pure truth, because he gives the adequate exposition of the Father in worldly figure [Gestalt].’ 19. von Balthasar, Theo-Logic, vol. 2, Truth of God, pp. 82–3. 20. Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word (trans. Joyce Main Hanks; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), p. 64.

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The participation of human language in the divine Word thus appears to be a particular case (but perhaps the most important) of the participation of the creature in the perfection of the Creator, which is fully revealed in Christ. If it is God who becomes incarnate in the man Jesus, such an encounter of the absolute in the relative could not help but have a real impact on things themselves. In this way there is discovered a type of ‘economic participation’ in the ‘Jesus Christ event’ which necessarily conforms to the metaphysical participation which runs throughout the whole of creation: ‘Transcendental participation is now seen to be ontological reality because of the revelation of creation, just as economic participation is an ontological reality because of the Incarnation.’21 What is proposed here is the existence of a ‘concrete universal’22 found in the very contingency of the life of Jesus and informed by his resurrection. Christ fulfils in reality all the figures of humanity’s metaphorical imagination and the poetic judgement of human beings in their attempt to stabilize meaning in order to allow thought to exit the semantic labyrinth of all preceding uses of the terms employed and to uncover the knowledge which is sought. Language is thus recreated by the appearance of the Word who comes to his own. For the believer, then, all of language offers signs to Christ, whether the speaker or writer is aware of it or not! For the believer, the operation and working of language do not pose an insurmountable difficulty, for to speak is already a type of act of faith. A ‘Platonizing’ Logic? The relationship we have uncovered between the divine Word and the language of human beings which participates in it could be described in terms of cause and effect, but only on the condition that the meaning of ‘cause’ is broader than normally intended. ‘Cause’ here does not simply mean efficient causality (and since the advent of modern physics there has been a temptation to reduce all causality to efficient causality), but also describes a relationship through which the cause is only manifested in the realization of its effect. It is less Aristotelian ‘cause’ than the Dionysian ‘requisite’ (aitid), or attribution to the original source of the “gift” of the effect in its whole entirety as effect. For this view (which entirely circumvents David Hume’s correct critique of the metaphysics and physics of causality), a cause does not really ‘precede’ an effect, since it only becomes cause in realizing itself as the event of the giving of the effect. Thus, for Aquinas, in the case of divine causality, the decision to create

21. Martin, ‘The Influence of Biblical Studies on Ecclesial Self-Awareness since Vatican II’, p. 355. 22. Relying on Pico de la Mirandola (as reread by de Lubac), Vico, and on Bé rulle for whom the exploration of the ‘states’ of Jesus Christ illuminates the fundamental categories of being, and of human being in particular, John Milbank has offered an account of being in conversation with Balthasar and Hegel in his The Suspended Middle.

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and the ‘eminent’ reality of creatures are included in the eternal uttering of the Logos. Inversely, an effect does not really come after a cause, since only the effect realizes the causal operation and defines it.23

The inspiration here is Platonic, but against Neo-Platonism and with the reconceptualization of the logos within Trinitarian theology, the original ‘expressive’ emanation is in no way thought to be a declension of being but is always co-predicated with the original source.24 The theology being advanced here ‘is supported by complete confidence in a metaphysical system which does not separate origin and manifestation, reality and the phenomenon’.25 Such a causality is essential to Christian speech. It analogically structures not only Trinitarian theology, but also Biblical and sacramental theology: the use of the word logos in the Prologue of John causes the divine logos to be found, which in turn causes the Prologue (and all of language) to exist; Jesus’ resurrection causes the unification of the Scriptures which were necessary for him to be expressed and communicated; and Jesus’ final days in the flesh cause the Eucharistic celebration which unfolds their meaning and efficacy.

Ruined Foundations? It might seem exorbitant to place such faith or simply confidence in the guarantee provided by a Creator and his benevolent designs in the face of how the world actually appears. The catastrophes of the twentieth century have made less evident than ever the existence of a good God. The metaphysics and logic of participation invoked can thus seem antiquated and more appropriate to being placed in the history of ideas rather than the theologian’s current mission in the Church and in the world. The Obsolescence of Metaphysics Truth be told, this way of thinking has deep and identifiable cultural roots, and it has recently been shown that there have been changes in the understanding of causality within Western thought. Jacob Schmutz, for example, has studied

23. John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 27–8. 24. We are borrowing this idea from Milbank, who nicely shows how it radicalizes the Augustinian notion of verbum mentis by strengthening its specificity in relation to the notion of the simple mental ‘idea’ and by connecting it to a meaning inseparable from a whole material system of signification. 25. Thierry-Dominique Humbrecht, ‘L’Eucharistie: “Repré sentation” du sacrifice du Christ selon S. Thomas’, Revue thomiste 98 (1998): 355–86 (here p. 385).

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the history of the word ‘influentia’.26 Until roughly 1250 the liquid metaphor was obvious, as influence involved the Neo-Platonic idea of processio: divine influence remained an in-fluentia, the influx of something superior into something inferior and proportionate to its capacity. Within this metaphor, general divine action and special divine action are indissoluble; creation is not only ‘under the influence of ’ God, but it was itself created as influence. In such a framework, to use a well-known formula, grace appears as the gift of a gift to a gift. The co-existence of the gift of God and of response to this gift (the dynamism of all being towards its perfection, understood as a return towards its creator) does not lead to any dialectic between a purely gratuitous gift and a gift awaiting a response: every being is only itself through an Other! Yet every being exercises its own proper and complete causality in imitation of its Creator. The unilateral influence of God, then, is not merely a general framework of being and acting, a global determination in which created causality would operate: created causality only exists in and by the divine influence. Conversely, the ‘global determination’ in question has no other manifestation than the sum of particular things that it determines (even if we must, by way of negation and eminence, pose it as a dynamis which infinitely exceeds this sum). At the same time this understanding of causality changes how the metaphor of influentia is used (until it is now, in modern English, a pale catachresis of the word ‘influence’). Eventually influentia merely means an exterior causal action and is no longer the flowing of an actuality which constitutes the very interior of the affected reality. In the former vision, the action of the primary cause was higher and more intimate and intrinsic to the second cause than the second cause is to its own proper activity. In its new conception, however, the primary cause is only one factor among others in the action of the second cause.27 Not only is it possible to narrate the history of the doctrine of participation in this way, but we can also establish its death certificate. This vision of beings was not adopted in the secular thought which sprung from the introduction of Aristotelian naturalism in the west and the advent of the empirical sciences, which wished to study beings in their own context and thus independently of any theological presuppositions. From now on, presupposed metaphysical causes and observed concrete effects are separated in order to study each in its autonomy. The result has been that logic and metaphysics and noetics and dogmatics have been divorced for centuries.28 As soon as God’s presence was found not only in

26. Here we follow Jacob Schmutz, ‘La doctrine mé dié val des causes et la thé ologie de la pure nature (XIIIe-XVIIe siè cle)’, Revue Thomiste (2001): 217–64, and Milbank, The Suspended Middle, chp. 9. See also Simon Oliver, Philosophy, God and Motion (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 27. Thomas says of the divine esse that ‘esse est intimus quam ea quae ipsum determinant’; ST 1, 105, 5. Duns Scotus will say the exact opposite: ‘esse simpliciter est propius effectus Dei … videtur esse falsa’; Opus Oxoniense: Opera omnia, 26 vols (Paris: Vivè s, 1891–5), vol. XVIII, dist. 1, q. 1. 28. See here the analyses offered by Paul Ricœ ur at the end of The Rule of Metaphor.

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cosmic or psychological symbolism but at the very root of the whole of reality as the giver of its being, theology became less exclamatory and confessional and more soberly demonstrative. Such was the point of equilibrium reached by the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas in particular. Unfortunately, later thinkers were fooled by this apparent ‘impersonal objectivity’ and the result was the possibility of thinking of the world without God.29 Being comes to be thought of in a secular way, independently of the realism of its creatio ex nihilo by God, and the last straw was when Christian thought was thought to offer a positive contribution to this progressive uncoupling of God and the world, the human and the religious, and the profane and the sacred.30 The Permanence of the Theological Some of the major discoveries of contemporary physics have thrown into crisis the idea of pure objectivity. Our age is dominated by descriptive language and has made sensory perception the criterion of all truth and the ideal of objectivity, but it also harbours suspicions regarding every naï ve claim to objectivity, since the exact sciences have proven that the observer is no longer separable from what is observed. The crisis of representational thought has thus resulted in the triumph of a nihilism embarrassed by itself, torn in two between rationalistic disintegration and novel irrational mythologies. This context has been described with either terror or excitement as ‘the return of the religious’, and might indeed be advantageous to the rediscovery of the irreducible permanence of Someone whom we have believed ourselves able to do without. ‘God may have lost his function as the subject or object of a predicate, but may not be so much dead as entombed in a dead language.’31 In fields from ontology to sociology, we wind up wondering if the consistency and thickness of things is not suspended upon their status as creatures (if we wish to speak in these terms).32 In fact, within the history of thought we can see that the revelation of a

29. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 4, The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity (trans. Brian McNeil et al; Ignatius Press, 1989), pp. 405–7. 30. See Johann-Baptist Metz, Zur Theologie der Welt (Mainz: Matthias Grü newald, 1998). This is what Marcel Gauchet has called ‘a religion for departing from religion’ in his The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (trans. Oscar Burge; Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 101. 31. Frye, The Great Code, p. 18. 32. This movement of theological recentering has been undertaken across the whole range of different disciples of thought; see the essays published in John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (eds.), Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). It is, however, so deeply settled in intellectual debate that Pope Benedict XVI, in a reversal of the Kantian formula, has even proposed to European philosophers aware of the crisis of meaning in western societies to act ‘as if God … existed!’

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Creator God who creates from nothing (in contrast to any kind of emanationism33) was necessary to give beings and creatures a genuine autonomy and to enable the study of different instances of efficient causality. Is there nothing more distinctly ‘Christian’, perhaps, than the claim to scientific objectivity which marks western knowing from history to physics? These ideas might also allow us to understand better the futility of the basic assumptions of liberal critique within historical research on Jesus or study of the New Testament. The agonistic criticism of Scripture is embroiled in a fundamental contradiction: the negation of economic participation (of rationality and human language in the mysteries of the incarnate Word) is joined by the negation of metaphysical participation (of the very existence of humanity in God) in order to saw off the (rational and linguistic) branch on which we and the whole of language are sitting. The difficulty does not only stem from epistemological reasons (that the only available documents melt into one historical and theological flow, or that history is written as theology) or from cultural reasons (that valuing ‘positive’ historicity is culturally linked with faith in the incarnation). It stems, and rather deeply so, from what we have forgotten: the covenant of meaning and its seal in the mystery of Christ. As already seen, the kerygma of (faith in) Jesus’ resurrection is not only an image of speech’s spatio-temporal transcendence, but instead constitutes a true vector into this transcendence. Likewise, the economy of the Easter mystery generates a relationship of participation between the presence of meaning in human speech and Jesus’ resurrection: in the announcement of the resurrection, the ‘copy’ somehow rediscovers its ‘original’. In this way, the Mobius-strip-like structure of New Testament enunciation, the Paschal mystery and the mystery of the incarnation are all both upstream and downstream of the speech which claims to carry them. In essence, historical research lacks wisdom.34 Even if traditional readings bear less witness to the material nuances than current studies do, they also more

See Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, L’Europa di Benedetto nella crisi delle culture (Sienne: Cantagalli, 2005). 33. Some scholars have argued that the history of metaphysics within a Christian context meant the progressive purification of any emanationist element. See Robert Sokolowski’s account of ‘the Christian difference’ in his The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982). Jesus himself, in in the gospels, emphasizes the transcendence of God. By insisting on the gratuity of God’s action towards humanity and the world in general, Jesus eliminates any necessary link between Creator and creation. The biblical position on the origin of the world avoids any type of more or less pantheistic Neo-Platonic emanantionist mold into which some would want to cast it. 34. Historical methods have meant that ‘exegesis is enriched in knowledge but not always in wisdom, that is to say, in the deep perception of the Bible as the Word of God

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clearly manifest ‘true understanding’ of the texts.35 A picture may be helpful here: rationalistic criticism of the claims of theological dogmatics is very much like judging the luminosity of the sun in the light of the moon. The believer points to the sun and the theologian explores the trajectory of its rays all the way to the moon that in turn reflects it. Yet someone could certainly think that the moon produces its own light, and such is the case for those who would silence Christological claims regarding Christ and faith in the resurrection under the pretext of ‘pure’ historical Jesus research. Once again, having a reason to believe does not mean that we can then dispense with believing.

The Resilience of Speech about God Despite everything, it remains possible to believe. While it would be fruitful to consider the witness of some surprising contemporary converts, here we will explore the persistent call of beauty, not just any kind of beauty but that of eternity, and not just the beauty of any time and place but that of the cultures and the times we know. The Persistence of Beauty Some of the above claims might worry theologians interested in dialogue with contemporary thinkers: if everything is cultural, textual and narrative, then why choose this particular story, text or culture? Must not all enthusiasm, aestheticism and fideism be cast off in order to speak intelligibly of God and of Christ? We should begin by emphasizing that we are not pursuing another variation of ‘the return of the religious’, but are instead seeking a re-foundation for confidence in reason through faith, and not a resignation to the temporary nor a flight into the imaginary. Indeed, we recognize that there can be stages between the simple assent to the beauty of a line of reasoning and the elegance of the integration of multiple givens through experimentation and faith. In any case, our contemporaries, even those who not (yet?) share the Christian faith are not insensitive to the intelligible beauty exhibited in and by biblical revelation. The unique beauty of the biblical texts presents a kind of challenge to thinkers such as George Steiner. He refuses the Gnostic seduction of the idea of ages of language as well as any nostalgia for a bygone era in the covenant between word

written in the language of human beings’. Jean-Michel Poffet, ‘Fondateur de l’É cole biblique: le pè re Lagrange’, Biblia 19 (2003): 38–41, here p. 41. 35. Marie-Joseph Lagrange, a speech given on 15 Nov 1890 for the inauguration of the É cole biblique, in Marie-Joseph Lagrange, L’É criture en É glise: choix de portraits et d’exé gè se spirituelle (1890-1937) (Paris: Cerf, 1990), p. 107.

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and world,36 and yet he cannot imagine the author of certain biblical texts which glow white hot with ‘real presence’. Steiner, who notes that he speaks only for himself,37 writes of the biblical witness in this way: Reason as I can, there are passages in the Old and New Testaments which I am unable to accord with any sensible image, however exalted, of normal authorship, of conception and composition as we seek to grasp them in even the greatest of thinkers and poets. Mundane imaginings are almost wholly rebuked by, for example, the thought of Shakespeare coming home for lunch and reporting on whether or not the writing of Acts III and IV of King Lear ‘had gone well’. Almost. Considered reflection does allow such a vignette its place at the far edges of the ordinary. As I have remarked earlier, I am at a loss when, by analogy of similitude, I try to graft this picture on to the author of the speeches out of the whirlwind of Job. When I would apply it to certain sequences in the Psalms or Ecclesiastes. When I would explain to myself the genesis of such pericopes in the Gospels as Jesus’ ‘Before Abraham was, I am’ or very nearly the entirety of chapters 13-17 in John. In such biblical instances, the concept of a wholly rational hermeneutic escapes me. I find myself backed up against the harsh radiance of ‘the scandalous’. It is not ‘theology as grammar’ which seems pertinent. It is grammar as theology.38

The same author calls for a cultural renewal of theological realism by means of ‘re-cognition’: I sense that we shall not come home to the facts of our unhousedness, of our eviction from a central humanity in the face of the tidal provocations of political

36. ‘In his reading of the Pre-Socratics, Martin Heidegger posits a moment in the evolution of language, and of thought and perception within speech-acts, prior to that which we have known since rationalism, i.e. Plato and Aristotle. The auroral texts of the pre-Socratics tell of an immediacy of rapport between word and world, between discrete beings and being itself, unrecapturable since. The very first poet-thinkers “spoke the world” with a truth and unobscured vulnerability to the core of life which only a handful of poets have echoed since them. This is a wonderfully seductive notion. Biologically, historically, there is not a shred of evidence for it. Homo sapiens sapiens has had what is, in evolutionary parameters, a very brief time on this earth. There is no evidence whatever that the mental, psychic organization that generates and is generated by human speech has altered in any fundamental way. If we can, with whatever philological-hermeneutic qualifications, understand, argue with Anaximander or Parmenides or Heraclitus, the simpler reason is that we apprehend their means of utterance. As we do those of the authors of the Books of Moses or of the Prophets even at the extreme pitch of vision.’ George Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1996 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 86. 37. ‘And yet. I speak here only for myself.’ Steiner, No Passion Spent, p. 86. 38. Steiner, No Passion Spent, pp. 388–9.

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barbarism and technocratic servitude, if we do not redefine, if we do not re-experience, the life of meaning in the text, in music, in art. We must come to recognize, and the stress is on re-cognition, a meaningfulness which is that of a freedom of giving and of reception beyond the constraints of immanence.39

Better still, Steiner intimates that to explain the cultural condition of our age we need to turn to the concrete universal of the Paschal Triduum. In the context of Christian mystery, art above all seems to him, rightly in our view, as a means of waiting. There is one particular day in Western history about which neither historical record nor myth nor Scripture make report. It is a Saturday. And it has become the longest of days. We know of that Good Friday which Christianity holds to have been that of the Cross. But the non-Christian, the atheist, knows of it as well. This is to say that he knows of the injustice, of the interminable suffering, of the waste, of the brute enigma of ending, which so largely make up not only the historical dimension of the human condition, but the everyday fabric of our personal lives. We know, ineluctably, of the pain, of the failure of love, of the solitude which are our history and private fate. We know also about Sunday. To the Christian, that day signifies an intimation, both assured and precarious, both evident and beyond comprehension, of resurrection, of a justice and a love that have conquered death. If we are non-Christians or non-believers, we know of that Sunday in precisely analogous terms. We conceive of it as the day of liberation from inhumanity and servitude. We look to resolutions, be they therapeutic or political, be they social or Messianic. The lineaments of that Sunday carry the name of hope (there is no word less deconstructible). But ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, or rebirth on the other. In the face of the torture of a child, of the death of love which is Friday, even the greatest art and poetry are almost helpless. In the Utopia of the Sunday, the aesthetic will, presumably, no longer have logic or necessity. The apprehensions and figurations in the play of metaphysical imagining, in the poem and the music, which tell of pain and of hope, of the flesh which is said to taste of ash and of the spirit which is said to have the savour of fire, are always Sabbatarian. They have risen out of an immensity of waiting which is that of man. Without them, how could we be patient?40

The concrete universal of Jesus Christ does not pull on the strings of the heart any less today than it did yesterday.

39. Steiner, Real Presences, pp. 49–50. 40. Ibid., pp. 231–2.

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The Need to Begin Again That we have recently witnessed at least a theoretical revival of interest in Christian revelation among some intellectuals invites us to explore the surprising resemblances between our current ‘postmodern’ moment and the first century CE. It is, however, just as difficult to locate the beginning of the cultural profusion which has taken place in an era of globalization as it would be to locate the beginning of eclectic culture of the imperial cities in which the first Christian writers lived.41 As Wittgenstein succinctly and aptly put it, it is ‘difficult to begin at the beginning’.42 He ‘does not mean that it is difficult to begin at the beginning and not further on; he meant it is difficult to begin at the beginning and not try to go further back’.43 In other words, to try to go further back to an unfounded beginning that founds and is the beginning of everything else is an illusion. The beginning can only be found where we already are: in the middle … . ‘We must begin wherever we are … in a text where we already believe ourselves to be.’ To begin where we are, then, is to begin at the beginning. But this, of course, is to raise the question of where we are now, or where we believe ourselves to be.44

The culmination of the genius of the evangelists is found in John’s explicit recognition that Jesus is the Word of God made flesh. It would be foolish to claim that the postmodern and premodern are finally the same thing: modernity has brought us individual rights, the experimental sciences and the rise of technology, all of which constitute authentic progress!45 41. In our contemporary situation, we no longer know where the starting point is; linear time has been replaced by an intense, superabundant present in which nostalgia and bricolage are the remains of the past and the future. The end of ‘history’ means that there is no longer a beginning, middle, and end. The present condition is incapable of imagining anything beyond itself, and thus reduces every possibility of the future. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992); Gavin Hyman, The Predicament of Postmodern Theology: Radical Orthodoxy or Nihilist Textualism? (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), p. 10. 42. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright; trans. Dennis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), § 471, p. 62. 43. Gerard Loughlin, ‘Prefacing Pluralism: John Hick and the Mastery of Religion’, Modern Theology 7:1 (October 1990): 29–55 (here p. 29). 44. Hyman, The Predicament, p. 10. 45. See Luke Timothy Johnson and William S. Kurz, The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 63: ‘I do not suggest that being postmodern is the same as being premodern. People in today’s world have a sense of the largeness and complexity of the universe (both cosmological and personal) unavailable to ancients, and we have (some of us) a sharper sense of critical history and of being ‘historical creatures’. We have learned, and are unwilling to unlearn, the benefits of empirical testing in the realms of science and technology. We have a commitment

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Another difference between premodern Jews and Christians and postmodern thinkers is that the former privileged a text and a style of intertextual interpretation aimed at reading everything, including the extratextual reality of this text, whereas the latter refuse to favour a single idiom, a single text or a single world constituted by the text, and opt instead for an intertextuality which is unlimited and ultimately arbitrary.46 Yet when forced by the pressures of Islam in particular to say finally where they place their concrete beginning, the text in which they genuinely find themselves, our societies find themselves in complete ‘Scriptural amnesia’47 and without divine revelation can no longer wrap themselves in any of the universalisms which they considered themselves authorized to do since the time of the Lumiè res.48 The past century should have been enough to educate us in the barbarities which universalism without God can lead to under the guise of ideology. Never mind the century to come. Beyond a rational reason which no longer has any heirs, we should gradually recover the path of the biblical ‘beginning’ of Genesis 1 and John 1. This beginning is at once poetic and conceptual, aesthetic and logical, devotional and rational, spiritual and corporeal, present and past, universal and particular. The religion of the God come in the flesh, which is neither nihilism nor the cult of difference, neither illuminationism nor the culture of an abstract and de-incarnated universal, is supremely fitted to the concrete human person, the incarnate spirit. Christian proclamation claims both our incarnated condition and the relativity of all knowledge to particular cultures and the universality of a revelation which Jesus Christ has wrought in his own specific culture. The Gospel, the gift of God for all people, transcends culture: it comes from the heart of one culture and yet is addressed to that which surpasses all particularities within the human being. This delicate equation is solved by ‘inculturation’, which necessarily occurs case by case, in an experience of discernment and of fulfilment which differs for each culture affected.

to political liberty and to the equality of persons that the ancients did not have. These are all gifts of Enlightenment, and we would be churlish (and stupid) to scorn them. But in important ways, we are closer to the earliest Christian interpreters than we might at first imagine, and it is this closeness that enables a conversations across centuries.’ 46. Above all, see the famous book by George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville: Westminster John Know Press, 1984), p. 116. 47. We borrow this fine expression from Marc Boss, ‘Postlibé ralisme thé ologique et communitarisme é thico-politique: La critique de la socié té libé rale chez George Lindbeck’, in Postlibé ralisme? La thé ologie de George Lindbeck et sa ré ception, pp. 68–84 (here p. 80). 48. Even if the most entrenched conservatives attempt it (in France in particular).

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Which Beauty Will Save the World? It is no longer certain that we will be able to delude ourselves for much longer with literary or aesthetic idolatry be able to use literature to compensate for the loss of the ontological status and referentiality of language. Some of the greatest poets of our time have felt tempted to substitute the idols of literature for God and for faith, and theologians are not immune to this temptation either, especially the exegetes who favour ‘literary methods’. Rimbaud’s self-appointed successors seem not to have read in Rimbaud that the season in hell is over.49 Outside of the milieu of these subsidized artists, there are now many young creators who are ready for and working towards the next season. We sense that the foundation of the civilization to come, if it should remain human(e), that it must be linked to a deepening of aesthetic experience. In the face of a scientific know-how which increases in power just as it decreases in cognitive status – and certainly does not constitute any sort of wisdom – is there not an unexpected anagogical return offered in the universal and unimpeachable experience of beauty, whose meaning always contains a unity in diversity and often a salvation through suffering? Created things in all their many forms are epiphanies: the unity which transcends their irreducible multiplicity, beyond the charming and the ugly, and which makes up the world, gestures towards the beautiful. All authentic experience of beauty, as pointed towards the absolute, is permeated with an immemorial desire for ascension and simplification. Yet we also believe that the Christ who hung on the cross and is present in the Eucharist elucidates this universal experience of beauty and so in the end it becomes a profoundly Christian beauty. This does not mean ‘that the only true beauty is of a religious order and that the shock which induces us to turn aside from the seeming beauty of the world is precisely some glimpse of the only true beauty’.50 The mere fact that grace could replace beauty in a human heart entails that they share a common ground: the good keeps what beauty promises, and we have consistently emphasized the analogies between revelation and the experience of beauty. In this way, the properly aesthetic moment is not denied but taken up within the ethical moment inaugurated by Jesus’ ministry. Von Balthasar notes that the ‘great thinkers who at various times discussed the relationship between revelation and the beautiful always began by depreciating the latter, as if it had to be discarded in order to make way for the religious idea’, but ‘only later, as a result of the cleavage, did the beautiful force its way back in the form of what was actually revealed’.51 The return to the beautiful after the Christic Passover and Christian baptism and conversion thus invites us to integrate two

49. See Litté rature et thé ologie, chapter 12, ‘De la Bible à la litté rature et retour’, pp. 373–96, and ‘Conclusion’, pp. 475–81. 50. Ibid., p. 104. 51. Ibid., p. 101.

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types of beauty rather than oppose them.52 The Christological in-forming of perception which we have described does not negate the world’s aesthetic beauty. Instead, it recreates this beauty: ‘The beautiful, then, will only return to us if the power of the Christian heart intervenes so strongly between the other world salvation of theology and the present world lost in positivism as to experience the cosmos as the revelation of an infinity of grace and love – not merely to believe it but to experience it.’53 The Absolute of Time or the Absolute of God? When will this experience prophesied by von Balthasar happen? When will we once more see the universal in the particular, or even the beautiful in the ugly? We might be tempted to answer: when we relate the absolute of times past and present to the absolute of God. Against the modern pretension to autonomy, the temporal ‘it was’ reveals the insurmountable limit of desiring and hurls it back into its own finitude.54 Of all our representations which involve the will, it is that of time, which is essentially that of a flight, which paralyses it. The moderns have

52. There is a type of continuum from aesthetics to morality, from frui to uti, for those who know how to see (see the famous passage from Augustine, Confessions, X, XXXIV, 53). As von Balthasar notes, ‘The beauty inherent in things is susceptible of degrees from the lower to the higher, from the purely material and functional to the organic and sensible, and so from that of symmetry, proportion and harmony to that shown in vital tension and power, in the alternation of disclosure and concealment, in all the forms of interaction both inside and outside the erotic with its beguiling qualities. It includes all that in nature and in the human sphere serves to deck out the bare existence, whatever is agreeable, adornment, clothing, all the apparatus created to serve the purposes of society, its customs, distractions and prevailing modes of living. And everywhere there should be a correspondence between object and subject: the external harmony must correspond to a subjective need and both give rise to a new harmony of a higher order; subjectivity, with its feeling and imagination, must free itself in objective work, in which it rediscovers itself, in the course of which (as in the fables of Novalis), there may be as much self-discovery as experience of another. Tension, disguise, transformation together constitute the drama, and it is not lacking in an element of cruelty, inevitably so, for man is a part of nature. Man’s need and impulse to play and to shape things combine to produce the things of everyday life – a house, curtains, chairs, bed. The occasions for these are countless, and so also are the occasions for all the various forms of the beautiful which lie at his disposal. And since the beautiful comprises both tension and its release, and reconciliation of opposites by their interaction, it extends beyond its own domain and necessarily postulates its own opposite as a foil. The sublime has to be set off by the base, the noble buy the comic and grotesque, even by the ugly and the horrible so that the beautiful may have its due place in the whole, and that a heightened value may accrue from its presence.’ von Balthasar, ‘Revelation and the Beautiful’, p. 105. 53. von Balthasar, ‘Revelation and the Beautiful’, p. 109. 54. Trainar, Transfigurer le temps, p. 19f.

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long held a grudge against the past inasmuch as it showed them their Achilles’s heel. In the particular field of the biblical sciences, for example, one could interpret the irreligious recovery of ‘scientific’ historical reconstruction against historical tradition55 as one instantiation of this (more of less conscious) struggle against the reality of time, against a real past. If the early humanists were right in their intuition to recover their unfamiliarity with and difference from the past, the temptation for the moderns is to gain a stranglehold on it.56 Through indissolubly interweaving knowledge and language, facts and discourse, history and literature, some aspects of the ‘linguistic turn’ have led to the rejection of the pan-historical paradigm of modern Western knowing and have once again rendered accessible the biblical arche or reš it: God in speech. Language is no longer considered a simple psychological function put at the disposal of the human being – no matter how noble. Language is, in the words of Georges Gusdorf, ‘the necessary and sufficient condition for entrance into the human world’. Logically anterior to thought, it is the founder of humanity, the foundation of the human. Adopting such a point of view on the human not only reverses philosophy’s traditional perspective but it also questions the priority of history which has secretly guided modern exegesis since its birth. In fact, the definition of human being as a speaking being … takes precedence over other approaches and especially over those which define the human being as a historical being.57

55. The works of Pierre Gibert, however, show the faithful intention of many of the first practitioners of biblical studies and the deplorable consequences of de Bossuet’s victory in his controversy with Richard Simon: Bossuet’s triumph handed criticalhistorical methods over to the libertines of the subsequent centuries, who then turned criticism into little other than an instrument with which to mock the Scriptures. See Pierre Gibert, Histoire, exé gè se et lecture chré tienne de la Bible (Paris: Cerf, 1984), or Vé rité historique et esprit historien: l’historien biblique de Gé dé on face à Hé rodote: essai sur le principe historiographique (Paris: Cerf, 1990); Petite histoire de l’exé gè se: de la lecture allé gorique à l’exé gè se critique (Paris: Cerf, 1997). 56. Voguish stories about alternative Christian origins no doubt flatter our clever contemporaries, who deprive ordinary people of their catechism (‘our sole enemy is the catechism’, said two TV journalists publicizing their montage of learned interviews on Christian origins) without being able to give them any better story about what makes their lives worth living. 57. Martin, Pour une thé ologie de la lettre, p. 322, citing Gusdorf, Speaking (La parole), p. 4.

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The revelation of an eternity beyond time, however, does not lead to the abandonment of time. Rather, as Vatican II emphasized,58 such a revelation transforms time. The ultimate secrets of nature will not be revealed until man has stopped the self-destructive activity that prevents him from seeing what kind of world he is really in. The real world is beyond time, but can be reached only by a process that goes on in time. As Eliot says, only through time time is conquered.59

The conviction that there is a temporal victory over time (already accomplished in Christ) should alert us to reject not only cyclical or disenchanted conceptions of time, but also the familiar fatalism present when thought and belief are subjected to ‘historical sense’. This conviction rejects as a fatal regression the feeling common today of the irreversibility of ‘historical movement’. This conviction rejects the contemporary idea that ‘we can no longer’ say, think or believe this or that ‘after’ such and such.60 These points need to be reaffirmed forcefully in these unsettled times of manipulated individual and collective memories: since the day of Christ’s resurrection, time is no longer the absolute which it was for the pagan world, in which death decided and imposed all limits. Against the negative idolatry of time and its illusory reification as ‘that which should not have happened’, we must reaffirm that ‘time is the human itself in its subjective existence’.61 For the Christian, the transfiguration of time, which is impossible if we remain on a conceptual level, is an experience to undergo, an experience in which body and spirit, heart and reason, have their place: it is none other than the integral Christian life, faith in Christ for the sake of service to humanity in the world, and passes through the practice of the memorial rite of the Eternal’s visitation of our time.

Invitations to Enthusiasm It should be clear at the end of our return to the sources of Christian speech that theology extends to us an invitation to renew our confidence in the possibility of speech: speech received, prayed and celebrated. There are not very many theologians today who are attempting to rebuild confidence in language. Their

58. See Vatican II, ‘Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World’, Gaudium et spes, § 39: ‘the expectation of a new earth must not weaken but rather stimulate our concern for cultivating this one.’ 59. Frye, The Great Code, p. 76. 60. ‘After Descartes … ’, ‘After Kant … ’, ‘After Wittgenstein … ’, ‘After Freud, Nietzsche, or Marx … ’, ‘After two world wars … ’, ‘After September 11 … ’. 61. Trainar, Transfigurer le temps, p. 19. We might add that it is also the objectivity of cosmic rhythms; cf. Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 92–111.

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scant regard for this issue could perhaps be explained by their life of faith and their practical frequentation of the mystery of Christ, which (re)creates speech, even without the knowledge of its speakers. While the ‘postmoderns’ think that meaning is arbitrary, Christians believe that they know that words signify conventionally, even if not naturally, and thus they forget that in reality they believe it! We have suggested as much by broadly alluding to the history of the book, for the evolution of Western culture largely explains this forgetfulness. Our relationship to the Scriptures has undergone an unprecedented exile: the printing press has made the book an object like any other, a neutrally available commodity among innumerable others for commonplace consumption. We no longer perceive the astonishing reality which the Scriptures constitute: an ensemble of human words which claim to be divinely created, received and transmitted. For our own part, we would be content simply to have resurrected a bit of wonder before the Word of God. At the frontlines of culture we should return to the ‘Christian heart’ convinced of the resurrected one’s victory over time and over meaninglessness. We will thus conclude with an invitation to mystical engagement and action. If the metaphysics of participation is true, then the existence and the presence of the Cause can only be proved in the deployment of its effects. ‘Dare as much as you can’; ‘quantum potest tantum aude’. Such is the ‘motto of Gothic style’ which we follow Alain Michel in taking from the Lauda Sion, and which we hear once again on Thomas’s lips in relation to spiritual regeneration in the incarnation of the Word. It is no longer simply a question of being able to dare, but of also being able to see and enter into: Note that above he had said, he cannot see the kingdom of God, while here he says, he cannot enter the kingdom of God, which is the same thing. For no one can see the things of the kingdom of God unless he enters it; and to the extent that he enters, he sees. “I will give him a white stone upon which is written a new name, which no one knows but he who receives it” (Rev 5:5).62

A small engraved stone now takes the place of the Tablets of the Law. It bears a new name, which nobody knows except for the one who has received it. As Pascal rightly saw when he invited his libertine friends to convert, the important thing is to enter into, or to re-enter into, the celebration of the mystery of Christ.63

62. Aquinas, In Io, III, 1, § 441. 63. ‘You want to find faith and you do not know the road. You want to be cured of unbelief and you ask for the remedy: learn from those who were once bound like you and now wager all they have. These are people who know the road you wish to follow, who have been cured of the affliction of which you wish to be cured: follow the way which they began. They behaved just as if they did believe, taking holy water, having masses said, and so on. That will make you believe quite naturally, and will make you more docile.’ Pascal, Pensé es, § 418 (§ 233), pp. 124–5.

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Believing Before theological speech can blossom anew we must be opened to the Word of God, that is, open to the adventure unveiled by the tautological literary form of Revelation: to believe in God because of God. From the Burning Bush, through the prophetic oracles,64 to the cross of Jesus, the living God has revealed himself as the ‘I am’ and thus he can only invoke himself in order to prove himself in the face of another freedom.65 God’s speech seeks to provoke the generation of theologal virtues, the immediate confidence and hope in the One who offers them. While they are leaps into the absurd for the non-believer, the ‘acts’ of faith, hope and charity (but also contrition) reflect the tautological structure of the divine self-revelation in the mirrors of our created hearts. Ever since the prophets, God wishes to be the sole reason for belief, love or hope in God. This phenomenon is magnificently rendered in the Tanakh by the delightful lines which play on the same root to express divine action and human action.66 The Psalmist places between God and humanity a relationship like that of a mirror: With the loyal you show yourself loyal With the blameless you show yourself blameless With the pure you show yourself pure And with the crooked you show yourself crooked.67

The New Testament continues this relationship between God and the believer68 and finds within it a spur to action.69 The metaphysical reason for this is that there is no concurrence between the action of the Creator and the actions of creatures: to act well is to be acted upon by God. We have knowledge from God if we desire 64. Isa. 43.8-13: ‘You are my witnesses, says the Lord, and my servant whom I have chose, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me. I, I am the Lord, and besides me there is no savior. I declared and saved and proclaimed, when there was no strange god among you; you are my witnesses, says the Lord. I am God, and also henceforth I am He.’ 65. Heb. 6.13: ‘When God made a promise to Abraham, because he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself ’. 66. There is also the famous passage from Isa. 7.9: ‘If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all’ (playing on the root ‘mn), and its echo in 2 Chron. 20.20, ‘Believe in the Lord you God and you will be established’. Cf also Jer. 1.17: ‘Do not break down before them, or I will break you before them’ (a pun on the root ḥ tt). 67. Ps. 18.26-27. Trans. modified. 68. See Lk. 12.8-9: ‘And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man will acknowledge before the angels of God; but whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God.’ 69. Jas 4.8, 10: ‘Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you … . Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.’

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to open ourselves up to this action, for desiring to know God is already a gift from God.70 The New Testament also gives us a theological reason: we do the good only in Christ,71 who is the head of the mystical body and thus more ourselves than we are, according to St. Augustine’s bold words. (To attempt) To grasp is already to have been grasped.72 There is thus a perfect coherence which is not only metaphysical but also biblical73 and mystical74 when St. Thomas perpetually speaks of God and Christ as both the end and the cause and the motor of our study. God is both the object which we attempt to see and the source of our capacity to see. As already seen, the God who speaks himself in the tautology of the Burning Bush returns us to an experience whose privileged place is prayer: In its own eyes, prayer appears to be always surpassed and preceded by the one to whom it is addressed. It does not begin, it responds, and this alone is what, in the very uncertainty where its uprightness puts it, gives it confidence. The circle is not an absurd circle: it refers to the event of an encounter. This speech act does not offer its own security, but it has the security of standing in the sole place where it can in truth struggle for the truth and become upright. For the obstacles of speech to dissipate only in speech, as lovers’ quarrels are resolved only in

70. Phil. 2.12: ‘work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.’ 71. Eph. 2.10: ‘For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared to be our way of life.’ 72. Phil. 3.8-14: ‘More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already attained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.’ 73. Ps. 36.9: ‘For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light’. ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life’, claims the Jesus of the Gospel of John. 74. From faith to beatitude through the experience of the ‘divine missions’, the believer experiences God as sublime: ‘“if there existed a reality that would simultaneously be the source of our capacity to see and the reality seen itself, whoever sees would have to receive from that reality both the capacity to see and the ‘form’ through which the seeing is realized.” [ST 1, 12, 2] Taking into account that here below “we walk in faith and not by sight,” this is exactly what occurs in his special presence: God does not only come for an encounter with men, He gives Himself also and at the very same moment the possibility of encountering Him.’ Torrell, Thomas Aquinas, vol. 2, Spiritual Master, p. 93.

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love, therefore in being pursued, and not if they are set aside and expected to disappear on their own.75

Prayer integrally respects the mirror-like relationship between God and his faithful: to glorify God transfigures the person, which is why many of the words of prayer or adoration in biblical Hebrew are conjugated in a reflexive form. St. Thomas, rigorously faithful to the theological program implicit in sacred language, goes so far as to suggest that it is always for themselves that people pray to God.76 Facing the hidden God, the One who waits at the door, human beings speak and open themselves! They do not wait for God to be manifested, but believe that he will manifest himself in the very context of prayer. In some way, prayer proves the existence of God.77 Celebrating More generally, we should remember the importance of a liturgical anchoring for theological speech. The liturgy is the place where a person is not only exposed to the radiance of the Word, but learns divine habits through imitation. The prayers of the most inspired Mass reflect the mirror-like relationship between God and the believer revealed in Scripture: ‘Only your grace can prepare us to receive your graces’, says the rightly most famous one.78 Even a simple homily can be the place of enthusiasm, for it is Christ who speaks through his disciples.79 Far better than any analysis of genre that we have proposed

75. Jean-Louis Chré tien, ‘The Wounded Word: The Phenomenology of Prayer’, in Dominique Janicaud et al. (eds.), Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate (trans. Bernard G. Prusak; New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), pp. 147–75 (here p. 158). 76. See Aquinas, ST 2-2, 83, 2. 77. For justification of this point we could point to many monastic texts, in the form of the pleas pro domo, the opus Dei of the consecrated, which are incomprehensible for modern utilitarianism. More astonishing is the anecdote formerly collected from Father Courtè s. Being a prison chaplain in the 1950s (at the Santé , I believe), he interacted daily with a gang of robbers and formed a friendly relationship with the ones who were charged with guarding the entrance of the rooms or the house they ‘visited’ while the others worked … . One such robber confided to him that he had the habit of saying a Pater noster during such times. 78. ‘Deus, qui nos sacramenti tui participatione contingis, virtutis eius effectus in nostris cordibus operare, ut suscipiendo munieri tuo per ipsum munus aptemur. Per Christum … ’. Missale Romanum, postcommunion prayer, ‘in feriis temporis Navitatis, feria tertia et feria sexta.’ 79. The traditional doctrine of the ‘inner teacher’ tells the believer that Jesus speaks through his preachers; the Spirit makes the Word of Life sensed, touched, seen, felt (see

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in this work, the play of readings and of rites places the faithful within the complex enunciation of the inspired Word.80 The incarnation of the divine Word at the heart of the Christian faith calls for the existence of rites. The living God has assumed a human body and in doing so has given to humanity the gift of true and authentic worship, for he marks out for corporeal and temporal beings the path which leads towards himself. In Jesus Christ the divine penetrates daily life down to its smallest detail and in this way completely sanctifies and ritualizes it, fulfilling in the process the Old Testament Halakhic ideal of a spiritual burned offering.81 The path and destiny of the incarnate Word has an anthropological dimension: its commemoration in Christian ritual coincides with the interior offering of those who take participate in it. In this way Christian liturgy fulfils the spirit of the rites by making the human body, fleshly and temporal, set out on the path of God; as St. Paul puts it: ‘Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.’82 In this work we have repeatedly dialogued with theologians justly concerned with rejecting an overly ‘technical’ vision of the world. Far better than merely substituting one mathesis (linguistic or symbolic) for another one (neo-scholastic), participation in the liturgical rite is the most ‘effective means’ for liberating the theologian from the dictatorship of the technical and ‘the useful’. In the rite there is the deployment of an intense richness of focus, melodies, gestures, objects, vestments and elements, all done without any concern for utility. In its multiplication of genuinely gratuitous acts which resist the technical reduction of the world and the spirit, the liturgy rips the net which imprisons us and enables us to ‘soar into the heights’.83 Equally, and as the human sciences currently note, the rite is the very place where the subject is born and grows and it thereby surpasses the idealist (metaphysical) distinction of subject and object in favour of the ‘symbolic order’ or the ‘order of signifiers’.

1 Jn 1.1) in the verba of life: the interior teacher focusses our attention on what is more enigmatic, on what suggests the ‘dimension’ of God. 80. For example, by sometimes placing believers on the side of the wicked (after Palm Sunday, the same crowd at the Trial), sometimes on the side of the saints (the veiling of the Tomb, Good Friday and Holy Saturday), sometimes even on the side of Jesus (the singing of Tenebrae), during the rite we enact in gesture, speech and music the sagacious blurring of the Gospel enunciation, which is itself a result Jesus’ preaching. As the vine, he is both the trunk and the branches which are the believers. 81. See Ps. 40.7-10; 51.17-19; Prov. 15.8; Heb. 13.15. Where, if not in the rite which she experiences and passes on, could the person learn to attune her body, that is to say her soul, to the rhythm of God? See Mt. 26.26-29; Mk 14.22-25; Lk. 22.14-19. See Nodet and Taylor, The Origins of Christianity, chp. VII, ‘Passover, Pentecost, and Covenant’, pp. 351–435. 82. Rom. 12.1. Above all see, Trainar, Transfigurer le temps, p. 140. 83. See Ps. 124.7-8. The ‘heights’ in question are not ‘only’ divine, they are wholly and simply human.

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There is nothing magical in any of this: in the celebration we move from being spectators to active participants! We become actors who allow themselves to be infused with a sixth sense, that of spiritual beauty: ‘All of this is connected with spiritual beauty, the beauty which essential to us, the beauty of causes, an intellectual and moral beauty, the beauty that in God is the response of the Father and the Son’s mutual embrace, a beauty that is the embrace in us of soul and body, being and conscience, cause and answer’; ‘a beauty in us which is essentially connected to the image of God’.84

Witnessing Our reader might be tempted to sigh and note, ‘We have read hundreds of page simply to end with an encomium of ritual!’ ‘Is it the theologian’s mission to plead for a reality as archaic as a rite?’ It is not difficult to show how the rite remains relevant in practice85 and in theory86, but we want to conclude our study by returning to a line of questioning which has been present throughout this work. Is the primacy given to practice over theory (to context over propositions, to language over temporality, to liturgy over theology, to the poetic over philosophy) a weakness which theologians should attempt to conceal from non-believing thinkers? The Church We do not think so, and for two reasons. The first is pastoral87: people aspire to practice. Theoretical truth never suffers fools and most of our contemporaries are hardly sensitive only to the voice of the intellect or speech. Acts and deeds affect

84. Claudel, Paul Claudel interroge le Cantique des cantiques, pp. 113–14. 85. Scholars have theologically misinterpreted ritual in the same way as they have misinterpreted being by viewing the movement to decouple God and the world, the human and the religious, the profane and the sacred, as a typically Christian thought. Some of those searching for the ‘historical Jesus’ have imagined him to be a militant secularist who would have eliminated ritual and liturgy so as to set one’s relation to God solely in the sphere of moral behaviour and abandon the everyday to its profane greyness! But anthropology can only respond: ‘This was to forget that the life of modern man is swarming with half-forgotten myths, decaying hierophanies and secularized symbols. The progressive de-sacralization of modern man has altered the content of his spiritual life without breaking the matrices of his imagination: a quantity of mythological litter still lingers in the ill-controlled zones of the mind.’ Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (trans. Philip Mairet; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 18. 86. Many authors have undertaken a defense of rite. See, for example, Jean-Robert Armogathe, ‘Dé fense du rituel’, Communio 108 (July–August): 5–13, and more recently the admirable Trainar, Transfigurer le temps. 87. A friendly exhortation from Pierre Gardeil serves as the inspiration for this paragraph.

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them infinitely more. Within this context the central Christian proposition is Jesus autem tacebat. Pilate has the definitive word: Ecce homo. The unbearable wound which marks the Word shows that he did not come to write a book but to give himself, neither to sages nor to the wise, but to the poor in spirit. No longer a ‘religion of the book’, Christianity is not reducible to a religion of the w-Word: it is a religion of the body. In this way it uncovers the fundamental desire which animates human beings since the day of their birth – being with, making body with – and perceives its true object: the Body, being in the body. Are our explorations of the sources of theology thus nothing other than a formalism which theologically remains in the conditions of the possibility of discourse? Is it merely a new gnosis – at best a Christian gnosis – reserved for the initiated? May God forbid such a thing! It is a service rendered in the hope of being truly faithful to Christian speech from its very origin.88 A service rendered in hope – is this not a beautiful definition of theology? The more fundamental justification for accepting reasons which come from practice is that theological discourse is by nature situated in a kind of supernatural pragmatism.89 We have insisted that historicity is the essential place for understanding Christianity. It is, moreover, the historical arrival of the Christian ‘myth’ which gives to morality and metaphysics, and their attendant theoretical disciplines, an actuality far superior to that of the universalizing philosophies of antiquity, which are dependent on ahistorical pagan myths. The Christian life is above all a way of acting which is historically situated. In the beginning was Christ, whose redemptive power is culturally manifested by the inauguration of an interpretative process begun in the New Testament and which consists in moving through his apparent failure (death and the cross) to the real triumph of his resurrection.90 Jesus includes human beings into this process through saving them. In this way the Church is a practice, a way of being just as much as it is organization which exists for the sake of passing on language and practices. Within this context, theology, which is secondary and thus ‘metanarrative’, becomes exegesis: it is primarily a reasoned history of the poetics of faith practised by a concrete community. Jesus Christ Does giving such importance to the poetic not risk causing theology to slide into irrationality? Given that metaphor, the central pivot of poetics, dismisses the principle of non-contradiction, would not a theoretical language which gives so much space over to poetics elude every kind of verification? It would be a mistake

88. See 1 Pet. 3.15: ‘but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.’ Heb. 10.23: ‘Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he how has promised is faithful.’ 89. See Aquinas, ST 1, 1 and 2. 90. See Milbank, ‘The Name of Jesus’, in The Word Made Strange, pp. 145–68.

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to think so: advocating for the poetic in epistemology does not entail denying the validity of the logical principle of non-contradiction for established meanings, but rather recognizes that the poetic is logically necessary for the establishment of meaning.91 Moreover, it is not just any poetics which is given this fundamental role, but the poetics inaugurated by Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. Such a response will, of course, not satisfy sceptics: if Christology re-grounds not only the faculties of thinking and speaking, but also the meaning of history, time and the beautiful, does not Christian thought a priori escape all verification? Worse, by hanging meaning so radically upon Christ, do we not risk encouraging Christian intolerance: Are we not claiming that we not only have the truth, but even the source of all truth? It is indeed a risk if the theologal life does not the match the dogma which is professed to be believed. But Christological dogma, if it is deeply rooted, is in fact the best guarantee against all forms of Christian intolerance, and it is with this point that we will conclude. As a matter of fact, if we have reason to say that in the ‘Jesus phenomenon’ God become more intimate to humanity than ever before, it is not possible to reduce the distance and the mystery which surround Jesus. Such distance and mystery prevent the Christian from any presumption of possessing Jesus Christ. Jesus as a historical personage already escapes us. On the epistemological level, he participates in the absolute of past time: nothing has power over him. On the anthropological level, as with every person, Jesus is an undefinable absolute (‘who do you say I am?’). His strangeness is doubled in the gospels: he intimates his unique relationship to God and his irony loosens all conceptual grasp. Subsequent theological reflection has somewhat elucidated this enigmatic presence. If it is God who came near in the man Jesus, then his transcendence is heightened in the very moment when he approaches. In short, when the Church confesses Jesus, the Word made flesh, as its Lord and its God, it cannot then appoint itself the proprietor of a Christ which it has to impose upon others: it is present as the spouse and servant of Jesus Christ, whom it knows but does not possess. In the past, we have sometimes believed that historical criticism offered theology the best guarantee against the dangers of fundamentalism. Today, however, we might wonder whether the ‘historicizing’ deconstruction of Christian dogma has not played an important role in the arrival of the crisis of reason, the elaboration of ideologies and the establishment of the barbarisms which have menaced Europe

91. See Milbank, The Word Made Strange, p. 128. ‘Far from being a part of conceptual thinking, such semantic innovation marks the emergence of such thought’; Paul Ricœ ur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Forth Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), p. 57. ‘Considered in terms of its referential bearing, poetic language has in common with scientific language that it only reaches reality through a detour that serves to deny our ordinary vision and the language we normally use to describe it. In doing this both poetic and scientific language aim at a reality more real than appearances.’ Ricœ ur, Interpretation Theory, p. 67.

14. ‘The Hour Comes and Has Come … ’

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and the world in the past centuries. Have we ever found a better guarantee of confidence in reason than faith in God and the Trinity, whose Word, the giver of all understanding and all speech, is incarnate in a single man, in a given culture, for the salvation of the world? We are suspicious, and not without reason, before the rise of new irrationalisms, of all communication which overruns the logic of a reasonable reason and feel it to be a violation of our freedom. But if symbolic communication is genuinely at the service of the Word made flesh, is it necessary to be afraid? All that it ventures to pour into hearts is the sense of the dignity of every human person and the unconditional call to compassion and mercy. Christians have admittedly not always been faithful in their practice to the transcendence of God, which speculatively has been taken to an incomparable degree in the doctrine of the incarnation. Without any concrete sense of the majesty and the immensity of God, thinking about Jesus, consciously or not,92 will turn into idolatry and will always risk the irruption of violence. However, history also shows that in the contexts in which the honour of the Creator was always vigilantly guarded, faith in the incarnation produced the most beautiful of human and spiritual fruits. Such was St. Thomas Aquinas’s context, which was in dialogue with the strict monotheisms of the Islamic falsafa and the wisdom of Maimonides. Such a context will increasingly become ours: Is not being in the company of contemporary Judaisms, for example, already an integral part of the task of the Catholic theologian?93 In this favourable situation, what protects us most effectively against the parallel intolerances of rationalism and fundamentalism is the new encounter with Jesus Christ, true God and true man.

92. As Cardinal Lustiger maintained in one of his most discussed books, paganism will always remain a temptation with which Christ’s disciples will have to deal. When cut off from its Jewish roots, the Church will continuously run the risk of identifying itself as a pagan-Christianity and losing sight of its Christian identity and of reducing Christ to just one more pagan god. The Church can only receive Jesus Christ, true God and true man, in constant dialogue with Israel. See Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, La Promesse (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2002). 93. Ought we to add Islam? David Burrell sees in the encounter between the believers of the three monotheisms the best guarantee of their spiritual purity: ‘the more notions of the divinity tend towards idolatry, the more we will find them opposing one another like tribal gods. Yet as such “theologies” claim to be “monotheistic,” that opposition will be the more acrimonious in that each pretends to exclusive possession of a complete account of reality: a posture academics call “exclusivism.” And when that complete account is reinforced by economic and political power, the opposition becomes deadly’. David Burrell, ‘Anthropomorphism in Catholic Context’, Claremont Conference on Philosophy of Religion 11–12 February 2005, to appear in the Proceedings, cited by personal correspondence with the author, p. 2.

APPENDIX

The three volumes of Thomas d’Aquin poè te thé ologien are: Litté rature et thé ologie: Une saison en enfer (Geneva: Ad Solem, 2002). La langue de l’ineffable: Essai sur le fondement thé ologique de la mé taphysique (Geneva: Ad Solem, 2004). Pagina sacra: le passage de l’É criture sainte à l’é criture thé ologique (Paris: Cerf/ Ad Solem, 2009). The chapters in this work correspond to the following chapters of these books:

I. Scripture 1. A Poetic Gospel? = ‘Une poé tique é vangé lique?’, Sacra Pagina, pp. 183–271. 2. Towards a Poetic Christology = ‘Vers une poé tique christologique’, Pagina Sacra, pp. 273–348.

II. Theology and Literature 1. ‘I am no writer’: Is There a Literary Vocation? = ‘“Je ne suis pas é crivain”: y a-t-il une vocation litté raire?’, Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 225–62. 2. ‘To Contemplate and to Hand On’: The Literary Drama of the Theologian’s Vocation = ‘“Transmettre à d’autres ce qu’on a contemplé ”: la dramatique litté raire de la vocation du thé ologien’, Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 263–88. 3. The Idea, Poetics and Classical ‘Idea’ of the Summa theologiae = ‘L’idea classique de la Somme de thé ologie’ and ‘Les principes poé tiques dans la Somme de thé ologie’, Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 162–7 and 169–85. 4. Language That Wanted to Make Itself as Strong as the Word = ‘Le langage qui voulait se faire aussi fort que le Verbe’, Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 289–307. 5. In Search of the Lost Word = ‘A la recherché du Verbe perdu’, Litté rature et thé ologie, pp. 309–44.

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Appendix

III. Language as a Theological Question 1. Little Thomasian Semiology = ‘Petite sé miologie thomasienne’, La langue de l’ineffable, pp. 251–96. 2. A Thomist Response: The Metaphysics of the Word = ‘Une ré ponse thomiste, la mé taphysique du verbe’, La langue de l’ineffable, pp. 344–402. 3. The Existence of Language as a Theological Question = ‘L’existence du langage comme question thé ologique’, La langue de l’ineffable, pp. 407–59.

IV. Word, Cross, Eucharist 1. The Cross of Jesus, the Summit of the Word of God = ‘La croix de Jé sus, sommet de la Parole de Dieu’, Sacra Pagina, pp. 503–44. 2. The Cross of Jesus, Source of Theological Speech = ‘La croix de Jé sus, source de parole thé ologique’, Sacra Pagina, pp. 547–88. 3. The Eucharist, the Exercise in Adoration = ‘L’eucharistie, exercise d’admiration’, Sacra Pagina, pp. 635–68.

V. Conclusion 1. ‘The Hour Comes and Is Gone… ’ = ‘“L’heure vient et elle est venue… ”’, Sacra Pagina, pp. 853–99.

BIBLIOGRAPHY The Works of Thomas Aquinas The Latin texts and English translations of the works of Thomas Aquinas were largely cited from the website http://dhspriory.org/thomas/ (last accessed 23 June 2017), a remarkably helpful resource. The English translations of the texts on this site were translated by the following: Contra retr. trans. John Procter, O.P. In I Cor trans. Fabian Larcher, O.P. with Daniel Keating In II Cor trans. Fabian R. Larcher, O.P. In Heb trans. Fabian R. Larcher, O.P. In Io trans. James A. Weisheipl, O.P. and Fabian R. Larcher, O.P. In Peri herm trans. Jean T. Oesterle de potentia Dei trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province In Symb trans. Joseph B. Collins SCG trans. Anton C. Pegis, James F. Anderson, Vernon J. Bourke, Charles J. O’Neil ST trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province de veritate trans. Robert Mulligan, S.J., James McGlynn, S.J., Robert Schmidt, S.J.

Works Referenced Aland, Kurt and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament: An Introduction to the Critical Editions and to the Theory and Practice of Modern Textual Criticism (trans. E. F. Rhodes; Grand Rapids-Leiden: Eerdmans, Brill, 1989). Aletti, Jean-Noë l, Jé sus Christ fait-il l’unité du Nouveau Testament? (Paris: Desclé e, 1994). Alexander, Loveday C. A., ‘The Living Voice: Scepticism Towards the Written Word in Early Christian and in Greco-Roman Texts’, in David J. A. Clines, Stephen E. Fowl, and Stanley E. Porter (eds.), The Bible in Three Dimensions (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), pp. 221–47. Amherdt, Franç ois-Xavier, ‘L’hermé neutique de Paul Ricœ ur en dé bat avec George Linbeck et l’é cole de Yale’, in Marc Boss, Gilles Emery and Pierre Gisel (eds.), Postlibé ralisme? La thé ologie de George Lindbeck et sa ré ception (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2004), pp. 139–56. Anatrella, Tony, Non à la socié té depressive (Paris: Flammarion, 1993). Angela of Foligno, The Book of Divine Consolation of the Blessed Angela of Foligno (trans. Mary G. Steegman; New York: Cooper Square, 1966). Angelus Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer (trans. Maria Shrady ; New York: Paulist Press, 1986). Armogathe, Jean-Robert, ‘Dé fense du rituel’, Communio 108 (July–August): 5–13. Armstrong, David F., William C. Stockoe and Sherman E. Wilcox, Gesture and the Nature of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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INDEX OF NAMES Aland, Barbara 11, 45 Aland, Kurt 11, 45 Aletti, Jean-Noël 12, 48, 92, 97 Alexander, Loveday C. A. 9 Allison, Dale C. 32, 37 Amherdt, François-Xavier 64, 80 Amphoux, Christian-Bernard 46 Anatrella, Tony 311 Angela of Foligno 202, 203, 385, 386 Angelus Silesius 389 Armogathe, Jean-Robert 446 Armstrong, David F. 310 Aubenque, Pierre 239 Augustine 63, 70, 71, 75, 79, 94, 101, 102, 108, 109, 111, 150, 151, 156, 157, 164, 169, 182, 233, 234, 235, 254, 262, 263, 268, 270, 271, 285, 300, 316, 317, 318, 319, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 367, 369, 373, 374, 376, 388, 406, 407, 409, 438, 444 Bakhtin, Mikhail 170 Balthasar, Hans Urs von xiv, xv, 91, 209, 222, 347, 361, 380, 390, 391, 426, 427, 430, 437, 438 Bardet, Serge 16 Barnett, Paul 16 Barth, Karl xiii, 96, 97, 426 Barthes, Roland 123, 125, 126, 137–40, 144, 184–8, 193, 194, 199, 218, 230, 304 Barton, Stephen C. 8 Bataillon, Louis-Jacques 332 Bauckham, Richard 8, 16 Becker, Ulrich 93 Bedouelle, Guy 115 Béguerie, Philippe 100 Bellay, Joachim du 135 Bénichou, Paul 126, 189 Benveniste, Émile 235, 302, 311, 324, 325 Béraudy, Roger 407

Bernanos, Georges 123, 124 Berto, Victor-Alain 333 Betz, Otto 405 Beutler, Joahnnes J. 72 Biser, Eugen 359, 360 Black, Matthew 13 Blanchard, Yves-Marie 27 Boismard, Marie-Émile 27, 76, 93 Bonald, Louis de 261, 284, 307, 308, 309 Bonnefoy, Yves 130, 131, 144–6, 189, 193, 196, 199, 201, 208, 209, 216, 305, 394 Borgen, Peder 22 Boss, Marc 64, 422, 436 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne 61, 130, 212, 300, 439 Botte, Bernard 206 Bounoure, Gabriel 214 Bourgeois, Daniel 102, 325 Bouveresse, Jacques 313 Bouyer, Louis 34, 79, 404, 405, 425 Boyle, Leonard E. 169 Brown, Raymond 5, 7, 10, 24, 69, 81 Bruguès, Jean-Louis 215, 297 Brunschvicg, Léon 314 Bruyne, Edgar de 230 Büchli, Jörg 27 Buridant, Claude 182 Burke, Edmund 389 Burney, Charles F. 13 Byrskog, Samuel 7 Caballero, J. A. 76 Caillois, Roger 212 Camelot, Pierre-Thomas 21 Cardinal Lustiger, Jean-Marie 449 Cardinal Ratzinger, Joseph 313, 388, 421, 422, 431, 440 Carruthers, Mary 296 Cavanaugh, William 286 Cayré, Fulbert 327

472

Index of names

Cervoni, Jean 28, 66 Char, René 199, 214 Charpin, François 177 Chauvet, Louis-Marie 303, 399, 404, 414 Chenu, Marie-Dominique 153, 157, 166, 172, 177 Chevallier, Max-Alain 405 Chilton, Bruce 10, 73 Cholin, Marc 23 Chrétien, Jean-Louis 389, 444 Claudel, Paul xv, 47, 120, 122, 123, 130, 134, 153, 172, 190, 192, 199, 202, 203, 211, 215, 216, 365, 366, 390, 401, 446 Clément, Olivier 142, 143 Cohen, Joseph 369 Collot, Michel 140 Colson, Jean 76 Comte-Sponville, André 198 Congar, Yves M. 120, 126 Corbin, Michel 172 Corte, Marcel de 296 Courtès, Joseph 114 Courtès, Pierre-Ceslas 328, 330, 369, 444 Culpepper, R. Alan 13, 76 Curtius, Ernst Robert 182, 200, 386, 388 Dahan, Gilbert 182 Daniélou, Jean 17 Davies, W. D. 32, 37 Delebecque, Éduoard 31, 40 Delorme, Jean 33, 63, 114, 313 Derrida, Jacques 132, 231, 245, 297, 304, 305, 422 Dessales, Jean-Louis 310 Devillers, Luc 24, 25, 30, 73, 76 Didi-Huberman, Georges 368 Dixsaut, Monique 302 Doré, Joseph 313 Ducrot, Oswald 15, 62, 63, 66, 68, 77, 170, 230, 231 Dumesnil, René 215 Dunbar, Robin 310 Dunn, James 9, 10, 13, 16, 20, 27, 81 Duns Scotus 233, 276, 281, 429 Duras, Marguerite 344 Duval, André 419 Eco, Umberto xvi, 158, 167, 168 Eliade, Mircea 445

Elich, Thomas William 100, 290 Ellul, Jacques 426 Emery, Gilles xii, xvii, 64, 394 Emonet, Pierre-Marie 238 Esler, Philip F. 8 Étiemble, René 208, 216 Évrard, Jean-Luc 44 Festugière, André-Jean 69, 425 Feuillet, André 29, 34, 69, 70 Finance, Joseph de 275, 294 Fisichella, Rino 95 Floucat, Yves 261, 262, 271, 275, 277, 278, 280–3, 293, 298 Fontan, Pierre 300 Forestier, Louis 127, 200, 205 Frei, Hans W. xiii, 41, 64 Fuchs, Ernst 50 Fukuyama, Francis 435 Fumaroli, Marc 126, 127 Funk, Robert W. 13 Gabellieri, Emmanuel 422, 423, 424 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 8, 9, 82, 112, 259 Gardeil, Ambroise 373 Gardeil, Henri-Dominique 171, 174 Gardeil, Pierre 305, 446 Garrigues, Jean-Miguel 17 Gathercole, Simon 14 Gauchet, Marcel 430 Gayon, Jean 313 Genette, Gérard 153 Gens, Jean-Claude 313 Gesché, Adolphe 106, 107 Gibert, Pierre 439 Giblin, Charles H. 76 Gilson, Étienne xvii, 123, 136, 139, 140, 144, 237, 239, 241, 245, 272, 274, 317, 319, 326, 336, 424 Gisel, Pierre 64 Gouthier, Henri 207 Grappe, Christian 405, 406 Gregory the Great 67, 164, 327 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 114 Grelot, Pierre 17 Grondin, Jean 112 Grosjean, Jean 3, 14, 26, 29, 60, 68, 69, 124, 125, 192

Index of names Guermès, Sophie 193, 305 Guillame de Tocco 340 Gusdorf, Georges 29, 231, 299, 439 Hamonic, Thierry-Marie 159, 253 Harris, Elizabeth 23 Harris, William V. 46 Hart, David Bentley 96 Hegel, G. W. F. 190, 206, 237, 302, 335, 426, 427 Hemming, Laurence Paul 395 Hoskyns, Edwyn C. 28, 75 Hottius, Gilbert 313 Hudry-Clergeon, Charles 69 Humbrecht, ThierryDominique 108, 428 Hurford, James R. 310 Hurtado, Larry 16 Hyman, Gavin 435 Ignace de la Potterie Illich, Ivan 46 Ireneaus 21 Iser, Wolfgang 80

31, 40

Jaccottet, Phillipe 124, 125 Jaubert, Annie 69 Jeremias, Joachim 13 John of St. Thomas 233, 250, 255, 256, 276, 277 Johnson, Luke Timothy 435 Jordanus de Saxonia 157 Juarroz, Roberto 186 Jüngel, Eberhard 91, 237 Keener, Craig S. 57 Kermode, Frank 20 Kertelge, Karl 359 Khosrokhavar, Farhad 286 Kingsbury, Jack Dean 37 Kloppenborg, John 7 Knight, Chris 310 Koester, Helmut 8 Krentz, Edgar 37 Kurz, William S. 435 Lachance, Louis 256, 258, 259, 273, 274, 287, 289, 289, 295, 296 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 191

473

Lagrange, Marie-Joseph 27, 432 Lamouille, Arnaud 93 Laplace, Dominique 284 Lavelle, Louis 29, 81 Leupin, Alexandre 65 Libera, Alain de 52, 100, 182 Lindbeck, George A. 422, 436 Lohr, Charles 37 Lonergan, Bernard 95, 239, 264, 315, 319, 320 Loughlin, Gerard 435 Lubac, Henri de 142, 232, 427 Lutz, Ulrich 37 McLeod, Frederick G. 399 McNeill, David 310 Mallarmé, Stéphane 28, 92, 144, 145, 146, 186, 189–92, 196, 199, 200, 212, 225, 258, 269, 394 Mambrino, Jean 237 Marcel, Gabriel 237, 268, 269 Marcus, Joel 8, 20 Maréchal, Joseph 294 Marion, Jean-Luc 299 Maritain, Jacques 133, 134, 136, 147, 237, 238, 245, 269, 277, 297 Martin, Francis 387, 427 Martin, François 36, 68, 87–91, 114, 313, 351, 352, 439 Marx, Alfred 406 Menken, Maarten J. J. 25 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 302 Messadié, Gerald 17 Metz, Johann-Baptist 430 Meynet, Roland 28 Michel, Alain 131, 132, 151, 155, 179, 226, 395, 441 Milbank, John 109, 286, 296, 298, 335, 427–30, 447, 448 Millard, Alan 9, 10 Millet, Louis 283 Millet-Gérard, Dominique 193, 220, 305, 365, 390 Miquel, Pierre 230 Mlakuzhyil, George M. 73 Molinié, Georges 176 Montagnes, Bernard 91, 115, 255, 316, 326, 328, 331–3, 336 Muralt, André de 279

474

Index of names

Narcisse, Gilbert 314, 391 Neirynck, Frans 37 Neusner, Jacob 73 Neyrand, Georges 27 Nichols, Johanna 310 Nicolas, Jean-Hervé 106, 248, 404, 406, 407, 410 Nicolas, Marie-Joseph 159 Nodet, Étienne 23, 30, 90, 343, 380, 445 Noël, Marie 140 Nolland, John L. 33 O’Day, Gail R. 23 Oliver, Simon 428 Onfray, Michel 4 Ong, Walter J. 20 Østenstad, Gunnar 76

Rimbaud, Arthur xv, xvi, 28, 57, 108, 119–32, 145, 146, 189, 193, 195, 196, 199–226, 437 Roberts, Colin H. 12 Roguet, Aymon-Marie 151, 234, 235, 236, 250, 251, 398, 401 Rolland, Philippe 14 Romeyer-Dherbey, Gilbert 334 Rosenzweig, Frans 44 Rosier-Catach, Irène 182, 363 Rouet, Albert 231 Rousseau, François 52, 284, 308 Royse, James R. 46 Ruhlen, Merritt 194, 310

Paap, Anton H. R. E. 11 Padoa-Schioppa, Antonio 286 Paissac, Hyacinthe M. 109, 260, 262, 266–70, 272, 285, 316, 318, 319, 320 Panofsky, Erwin 176, 331 Paul, André 35 Pertini, Miguel Angel 40 Philippe, Marie-Dominique 16–69 Philippe, Paul 159 Pickstock, Catherine 428, 430 Pieper, Josef 281, 310, 311 Pinchard, Bruno 149 Pinker, Steven 310 Poffet, Jean-Michel 24, 432 Poirier, Jacques 313 Ponge, Francis 28, 128, 186, 187, 191, 192 Pouillart, Raymond 216, 218 Poulat, Émile 83 Puech, Émile 11, 12

Schaeffer, Jean-Marie 77, 114, 230 Schlier, Heinrich 96 Schmutz, Jacob 428, 429 Schneiders, Sandra M. 61 Scholem, Gershom 55 Schoot, Henk J. M. 103, 104, 107, 108, 111 Seigel, Jerrold 129 Sesboüé, Bernard 17, 404 Sim, David C. 8 Simoëns, Yves 70, 93, 354 Simon, Yves 277, 293 Smith, D. Moody 22 Sokolowski, Robert 431 Sonnet, Jean-Pierre 23, 75 Spitzmüller, Henry 400 Standaert, Benoît 24, 31 Stanton, Graham 8, 11 Stein, Edith 367 Steiner, George 146, 196, 304, 312, 353, 432, 433, 454 Stockoe, William C. 310 Studdert-Kennedy, Michael 310

Rahner, Karl 394 Rassam, Joseph 108, 299, 300 Reinhartz, Adele 80 Renan, Ernst 305, 306–9, 315 René, Robert 40 Ricard, Marie-Andrée 112 Richard, Louis 400 Ricœur, Paul xiii, 10, 170, 180, 334, 375, 429, 448 Rilke, Rainer Maria 119, 120, 125, 126, 197

Taminiaux, Jacques 424 Taylor, Justin 30, 445 Thurian, Max 403, 410 Thyen, Hartwig 30, 76, 79, 80 Tilborg, Sjef van 77, 78, 79, 80 Todorov, Tzvetan 62, 67, 68, 231 Torrell, Jean-Pierre 51, 109, 141, 155, 161, 165, 170, 172, 245, 339, 340, 342, 395, 397, 423, 443 Trainar, Geneviève 383, 389, 397, 399, 401, 402, 414, 438, 440, 445

Index of names Traube, Ludwig 11 Trocme, Étienne 72 Turner, Mark 310 Vaganay, Leon 45 Vaihinger, Hans 80 Vall, Gregory 9 Vallançon, François 149, 153 Vattimo, Gianni 132, 421 Vendryes, Joseph 229 Vier, Jacques 130 Wallace, Mark 80 Wallace, William 11 Walton, Kendall L. 80

475

Walzer, Pierre-Olivier 144 Ward, Graham 430 Weber, Édouard H. 51 Weil, Éric 319 Weren, Wim 8 Wielockx, Robert 394, 396, 413 Wilcox, Sherman E. 310 Wiles, Maurice F. 75 Wilmart, André 397 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 284, 435, 440 Wrede, William 18 Wyller, Egil A. 79 Zumstein, Jean

23, 24, 61