The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics [1 ed.] 0268020345, 9780268020347

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The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

 John Arthos

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2009 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Arthos, John, 1956– The inner word in Gadamer’s hermeneutics / John Arthos. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. isbn 978-0-268-02034-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 1900–2002. Wahrheit und Methode. 2. Hermeneutics —Religious aspects — Catholic Church. 3. De differentia verbi divini et humani. 4. De natura verbi intellectus. 5. Word (Theology) I. Title. bx1795.p47a78 2009 121'.686092 — dc22 2009007125 This book is printed on recycled paper.

To my parents

Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim



Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xvii

List of Abbreviations

xix

Introduction: From Logos to Verbum to Sprache

1

Part I.

The Verbum in the History of Ideas

Chapter 1

The Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian Word

31

Chapter 2

Immanence and Transcendence in the Trinity

70

Chapter 3

Hermeneutic Anticipations: The Circular Ontology of the Word in Augustine

98

Chapter 4

“The Word Is Not Reflexive”: Mind and World in Aquinas and Gadamer

135

Chapter 5

The Pattern of Hegel’s Trinity: The Legacy of Christian Immanence in German Thought

162

Chapter 6

Heidegger: On the Way to the Verbum

194

viii

Contents

Part II.

Exegesis, Truth and Method, Part III, 2, B

Chapter 7

The Verbum and Augustine’s Inner Word

219

Chapter 8

The Aquinas Section

260

Chapter 9

The Neoplatonist Section

285

Chapter 10 The Three Differences

311

Chapter 11 Gadamer’s Summation and Prospectus (pars. 21 ‒‒ 22)

335

Part III.

Conclusion

Chapter 12 Gadamer and the Verbum Interius

351

Appendix: Source Texts

362 364 383

De natura verbi intellectus De differentia verbi divini et humani

Notes

390

Bibliography

441

Index

458



Preface

There is, however, an idea that is not Greek which does more justice to the being of language, and so prevented the forgetfulness of language in Western thought from being complete. This is the Christian idea of incarnation. —Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, III, 2, B

It is still a commonplace, at least in the popular culture of the West, that language and thought, expression and meaning, are separate. The instrumentalism of a scientific culture has encouraged us to think that language is the container of meaning, a tool for communication. To be sure, the idea that such a separation of language and thought is problematic has remained alongside it all the while, but often as an almost subterranean theme. In one of Cicero’s fictional dialogues, Scaevola locates the moment in history when the study of philosophy and oratory were separated: The subjects that we are now investigating were designated by a single title, the whole study and practice of the liberal sciences being entitled philosophy. Socrates robbed them of this general designation, and in his discussions separated the science of wise thinking from that of elegant speaking, though in reality they are closely linked together. This ix

x

Preface

is the source from which has sprung the undoubtedly absurd and unprofitable and reprehensible severance between the tongue and the brain, leading to our having one set of professors to teach us to think and another to teach us to speak.1 In arguing prodigiously against the separation of thought and language, the twentieth-century German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer appealed for support to an ancient theological conception, the verbum interius or “inner word.” The phrase was coined when Augustine of Hippo used the analogy of human language to help explain the mystery of the Trinity. Just as that which our words newly conceive is always already linguistic, so the Son, conceived from the Father, is not a different being. The Father begets an offspring who is eternal with him, and nothing new is created in that birth. But the verbum is no mere analogy, since the divine procession itself is conceived in terms of language, as the prologue to the Gospel of John affirms: “and the Word was God” (1:1).2 Such an ontological relation is as if the pupation of the chrysalis was a being already in flight, its metamorphosis indistinct from its origin and end.3 In thinking through this enigma, Gadamer considers the verbum from the reverse direction—How does the human word resemble divine procession? By turning to Christian authority on the question of language, Gadamer does a great deal more than reinforce Cicero’s insistence on the unity of word and thought. To conceive of the word in the terms of Christian revelation takes us back along the path of metaphysics where language theory is no longer at home, and asks us to consider whether there is not something we may have missed. The proper domain of Gadamer’s hermeneutics is the meaning that lies beyond the boundary of the statement, the logical proposition, and the code, those tools of information which have become “the destiny of Western civilization.”4 But rather than move towards a poetics of the ineffable, Gadamer draws on the traditional studies of rhetoric, practical reason, hermeneutics, and process theology to develop a model of culture and history as an unending conversation.5 The idea of the word (logos or verbum) that passes through and between Greek philosophy and JudaeoChristian theology is a rich tradition of thought that serves as a central impetus for the hermeneutic theory of language, part of a long countertradition that unites strains of humanist rhetorical culture with a theology of kerygma:

Preface

xi

[W]hen the Greek idea of logic is penetrated by Christian theology, something new is born: the medium of language, in which the mediation of the incarnation event achieves its full truth. Christology prepares the way for a new philosophy of man, which mediates in a new way between the mind of man in its finitude and the divine infinity. Here what we have called the hermeneutical experience finds its own, special ground. (Truth and Method, 428) If the rhetorical tradition returns logos to the wholeness of the person and the particularity of the situation so that the word is now irreducibly an existential fact, the Judaeo-Christian tradition of the word makes this relationship identical with history. Logos is now transposable with person, culture, and world. The Judaeo-Christian Word takes language the furthest distance possible from instrumentality. The Christian concept of the word is an historical turning point in the narrative of a humanist paideia obscured by the grand march of rationalist empiricism. If Cicero locates a definitive moment of division that had fateful consequences for Western culture, Gadamer finds another moment that salvages a better possibility for that culture. It represents a path not taken, buried under the terrible momentum of the more efficient path, but like the scribes who preserved a textual heritage through dark times, the idea of the word as it developed in theology provided a safe haven for a way of thinking that would come vibrantly alive again with hermeneutics. The confluence of the Greek propensity for abstraction, Hebrew covenant identity, and Christian trinitarianism produced an idea powerful enough to stubbornly shadow the implacable progress of technical reason, lying in wait to point another way when that other had spent itself. The verbum interius represents a high point of theological rigor in approaching the meaning of the “incarnate word.” Aquinas’s commentary on the Gospel of John took the evangelist quite literally, asking what “vocal sounds” have to do with the Logos of the prologue. Thomas followed Augustine in analogizing the relation of “the conception in our mind” and “the vocal utterance” with the Father’s will and its worldly expression.6 The “inner word” is a kind of lekton that straddles the interiority of the mind and the embodied world, one foot in each. It was a concept formed at a crossing point of cultures, not only in the tensive amalgam of Platonist, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonist influences, but in

xii

Preface

the conflicting upsurge of mystical and conceptual impulses of dogmatic theology. Pulled in one direction by the urge to cultivate the division of an inner and outer life,7 and in another by the logic of incarnation; drawn towards the clarity of analytic logic (as ratio, definitio, and adaequatio), but in the opposite direction by the trinitarian logic of procession, dialectic, and paradox, the verbum interius marks a nexus of contending cultural tendencies.8 For Gadamer it represented the possibility of a different way of thinking about our own tradition, a discarded narrative thread that we might pick up and weave into a framework for the linguistic basis of knowledge. Gadamer’s principal statement on the verbum interius occurs in a short section of his magnum opus, Wahrheit und Methode (Truth and Method), originally published in 1960.9 The verbum section is undoubtedly one of the most difficult to understand, so my effort here is in part to make it more accessible. Alasdair MacIntyre wrote of Truth and Method: “To accord a text the status of a classic is to say that it is a text with which it is necessary to come to terms, that failure to reckon with it will seriously harm our inquiries. Yet there are sometimes obstacles to be overcome, before we can learn what such a text has to teach us.”10 But more importantly, “Verbum and logos” is an effort to grasp the significance of the inner word as a critical moment in a narrative that Gadamer wishes now to place back on track.

Argument and Structure What is the relationship between human beings and language? The hermeneutic structure of that relation is anticipated in Philo’s twofold Logos, the Stoic in medium vertitur, Augustine’s negotiation of the duplae and simplum of incarnation, Aquinas’s duplex actio of reflective understanding, Hegel’s Verdoppelung, and Heidegger’s “middle voice”; these all lay the groundwork for the circle of meaning in philosophical hermeneutics. All to one degree or another place human meaning at the juncture of the reflective mediation of finitude and infinitude, and human being as the witness of this process. The reflexive structure of this negotiation is at the heart of the long gestating and still veiled effort to understand the living voice of language.

Preface

xiii

The reflexive embodiment of the word has a number of entailments, a complex of interconnected parts. The insight into the incarnate nature of language was understood by Christian theology in terms of the convertibility of person and word, and this metamorphosed under the pressure of secular German historicism and speculative philosophy into a new conception of reason, a dialectic of reflective consciousness and objective spirit. And then once more, by this different reading of the logos tradition, language took the place of reason as the more accurate descriptor of thought’s manifestation in its radical finitude. Logos or verbum in this second reading is the unending dialectic between intuitus and discursus, our limited existence in a finite position as something attuned to the infinite. Blessedness and tragedy are twin products of this tension. The path of the circle of understanding necessarily covers up and destroys while it opens up and enlightens. This twinned fate is revealed in the biblical plaints of human frailty, Augustine’s mediating struggle with a rhetorical culture, Heidegger’s poetics of clearing and withdrawal, and Gadamer’s dialectic of distance and belonging. The response this thought offers to the ancient problem of the one and the many is the tragicomedy that radical human finitude experiences. It rejects the false choice between the abstractions of the universal and the unmediated concreteness of life by embracing the paradoxes of an embodied word. This second reading of logos, as distinct from the rationalist enterprise, served as the basis for ancient and Renaissance humanism, was lost to the vision of Ramus, Galileo, and Descartes, refound incipient in German Romanticism, and is surfacing now again under the rubric of hermeneutics. Gadamer’s explication of the structure of this logos is initially brought forward in the course of an extended commentary on the inner word in Truth and Method. Section III, 2, B,“Sprache und verbum,” is itself a close exegesis of a text, or rather two texts interpretively collated, the De natura verbi intellectus and the De differentia verbi divini et humani, which are the Thomist treatises devoted to the subject of the verbum interius. The De natura in particular is a remarkable text that has the same complexity and opacity as Gadamer’s explication, as well as the same dense energy, because it is a concentrated preçis of the riddling idea of the inner word.11 My study provides an extended introduction and commentary to these three primary texts. As I develop their meanings, the idea of the logosverbum tradition as a counterpoise to the rationalist alternative will begin

xiv

Preface

to fill out. The first chapter places Gadamer’s exegesis in the context of his entire work. Chapter 2 is an historical introduction to the Greek and Judaeo-Christian tradition of the word (memra, logos, sermo, verbum) with an eye toward the developing understanding of human language as a bridge between the material and spiritual realms. This chapter explores the basis for trinitarian teaching as the audacious effort to connect the immanent and transcendent through the concept of incarnation. It is in the effort to explain Trinity and incarnation that Augustine resorts to the analogy of the inner word, and so the third chapter looks carefully at this linkage and at its implications for the conception of language. Thomas Aquinas’s appropriation of Augustine’s analogy takes up the greater part of Gadamer’s commentary, in part because it is Aquinas who explains in systematic detail the differences between the divine and human word, thus providing a bridge to the hermeneutic consideration of the word outside of its theological implications. Chapter 4 therefore compares the Thomist and Gadamerian conceptions of the word as it relates to the structure of human understanding. Although “Sprache und verbum” is an explication of the scholastic doctrine of the inner word, it is operating at a number of different levels in advancing the hermeneutic conception of the word. It is impossible to understand the text without understanding its Heideggerian and Hegelian overtones. Gadamer’s understanding of Trinity and word is, in the first place, overlaid with Hegel’s appropriation of the Trinity as a model for the dialectic, so that in chapter 5 I give a thorough account of these interconnections. Hegel in fact provides the conceptual means to translate the duplex actio of Christian psychology into the mediation of ontoepistemic immanence in philosophy. Chapter 5 explains how Hegel uses the structure of trinitarian immanence and transcendence as the basis of the dialectical structure of logical reflection. He thus provides the strong conceptual basis for Gadamer’s linkage of verbum and Sprache. Chapter 6 shows Heidegger’s presence in Gadamer’s verbum, and a major reason for the attraction of hermeneutics to the doctrine of the inner word. Heidegger repeats the Christian dispersion of agency across history in his own reflections on language, echoing and radicalizing its Augustinian themes. Chapters 7 through 11 are an extended, paragraph-by-paragraph reading of the ten pages of Gadamer’s “Sprache und verbum.” The explication

Preface

xv

attempts to work out the difficult and obscure points that may impede an understanding of his argument, and develop the meaning and significance of the hermeneutic appropriation. The close work of exegesis confronts at a granular level this deep analogical conception of the inner word, so that we can test the strength of this paradigmatic challenge to linear rationalism. Such an extended look at such a short text in Gadamer’s oeuvre might seem a disproportionate effort. As I think the study will show, both through the depth of the history that attaches to its central idea in its various guises, and the wealth of little known material uncovered in the investigation, Gadamer’s appropriation of the verbum—something that he continues to allude to throughout the rest of his life until the very end— serves as a kind of linchpin or passkey for the great challenge to conventional thinking about linguistic being, a challenge that culture had been preparing for as an alternative to the dominant tradition for a long time. The verbum is Gadamer’s logos, and he treats it as a kind of Archimedian point to leverage the ancient and theological conception of the word against the entrenched instrumentalism of the West.



Acknowledgments

I am especially appreciative to Jeffrey Hause for his careful review and correction of my Aquinas translations, including the opusculum De natura verbi intellectus, located in the appendix of this book. He applied himself with the devotion of a true medievalist to a Thomist tract that Gadamer himself described as “schwierige and gehaltvolle” (Wahrheit und Methode, 426, note 45). I would like to thank Denison University for an R.C. Good Fellowship and DURF grant that were helpful in finishing this book. I would also like to thank Pam Magelaner and the entire Doane Library reference staff, Ludwig Ries at the Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg archives for his research assistance, Chuck van Hof at the University of Notre Dame Press for having faith in this project, Margaret Hyre for her careful copy editing, and Gabriele Dillmann, my German teacher. A version of chapter 4 appeared in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 78:4 (2004): 581 ‒‒ 608 as “The Word Is Not Reflexive: Mind and World in Aquinas and Gadamer.” Kind thanks also go to Mohr Siebeck for permission to quote extensively from Wahrheit und Methode.

xvii



Abbreviations

Aquinas De differentia verbi divini et humani De natura verbi intellectus Summa contra Gentiles Summa theologiae

DD DN SCG ST

Aristotle Metaphysics Nicomachean Ethics

Met. NE

Augustine De Trinitate The Trinity

DT TT

Gadamer Gesammelte Werke Truth and Method Wahrheit und Methode

GW TM WM

Hegel Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion / Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion

PR xix

xx

Abbreviations

Heidegger Being and Time Contributions to Philosophy Gesamtausgabe Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle Sein und Zeit Was Heisst Denken What Is Called Thinking

BT CP GA PIA SZ WHD WCT

Quotations from the Bible are taken from the Douay Rheims version.



Introduction From Logos to Verbum to Sprache

The greater miracle of language lies not in the fact that the Word becomes flesh and emerges in external being, but that that which emerges and externalizes itself in utterance is always already a word. —Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, III, 2, B

Hans-Georg Gadamer taught that interpretation underlies human experience through and through. Jean Grondin, a student of Gadamer, once asked him to explain this universality, and his answer was surprising: In a formulaic and unsophisticated way, I asked him to explain more exactly what the universal aspect of hermeneutics consisted in. After everything that I had read, I was prepared for a long and rather vague answer. He thought the matter over and answered, concisely and conclusively, thus: “In the verbum interius.”1 This reference to the theological idea that Gadamer used to understand the mystery of language has been cited often of late but is still not well understood, even though a great deal hangs on the extent of Gadamer’s allegiance to the Augustinian idea.2 What might otherwise be a comparatively uncomplicated assertion about interpretive understanding takes on a deeper complexion here, reflecting one of the profoundest revisions of knowledge theory in Western cultural history. In this opening chapter I would like to sketch out in a preliminary way what is at stake. 1

2

The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

For Gadamer, Christian incarnation “is strangely different from” the manifestations of pagan gods in human form (TM, 418/WM, 422). In Christology, the spirit made flesh is “not the kind of becoming in which something turns into something else” (TM, 420/WM, 424). This strong enigma places the credal faith apart, and upends the normal relation of the spiritual and the material. The indivisible bond between the word and the person is a fuller ontological relation than simply the unity of the spiritual and material. The relation between word and person is no bloodless, conceptual abstraction. The constancy of the person in the word represents a concentration or fullness of meaning and an increase of being. We can see this, for instance, in the idea of a promise, in which a person stands behind the word that is given, since it is they as much as the word that is at stake, and the fulfillment of the promise strengthens the person who made it and the community it forms. The innovation of the doctrine of the word is to reverse the trend set in motion with the Greeks that the reasoning faculty distills the mind’s work from the accidents of the flesh. Logos is rather the fully embodied medium of human community. The Judaeo-Christian habit of concentrating history, being, and action into the single locution “word” reverberated as an idiom of thought that fed back into the humanist tradition of the West and had a fruitful and consequential life thereafter. We can see a result of this, for instance, in the Renaissance revival of rhetoric, where the classical union of eloquence and wisdom is intensified by the ontological background of Christian Neoplatonism. It resonated deeply in German mysticism and Protestantism, explaining in part the depth of the German philosophy of language: “If I were as eloquent as Demosthenes I would yet have to do nothing more than repeat a single word three times: reason is language, logos. I gnaw at this marrow-bone and will gnaw myself to death over it. There still remains a darkness, always, over this depth for me; I am still waiting for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss.”3 The verbum interius, Gadamer tells us, “is more than a mere metaphor” (TM, 421).4 The link between human language and the theological doctrine of incarnation, if taken seriously, cannot be a convenience of explanation for language theory. Gadamer did not approach the theme from a religious perspective, but he did not link language to incarnation as merely an example. Augustine’s analogy of the verbum interius feeds on the epochal achievement of the church to conceive of itself and its

Introduction

3

kerygmatic mission as an extension of God’s utterance, and of world history as a figural and narrative enactment that bespeaks the person of the Word. Gadamer’s reappropriation of the link between incarnation and Sprache (language or speech), worked out in ten or eleven dense pages of text in his magnum opus, continues to feed on this link. In the decades following the publication of Wahrheit und Methode, Gadamer often reaffirmed the importance of Augustine’s idea to his development of hermeneutic understanding,5 and we have to get to the bottom of this allusion. It is a great deal to say that thought and speech are as interrelated as the persons of the Trinity, and that the inner word “is just as consubstantial with thought as is God the Son with God the Father” (421). Gadamer does not say a similarity, a comparable relation or an illuminating likeness, but an analogy in which the terms of relation are the same. “Exegesis interprets the speaking of the word to be as miraculous as the incarnation of God” (III, 2, B).6 Gadamer relates the Augustinian doctrine to hermeneutics not in an off-hand way, but to his central thesis of human linguality (Sprachlichkeit). The verbum takes him straight to the complex ontological circularity of language and thought, word, and history, a relation that occurs along the circuitous path of discursive understanding. He recognized that this idea is prefigured and in great part prepared for in the sensitivity to the word as it existed in the Hebrew prophets: “And as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return no more thither, but soak the earth, and water it, and make it to spring, and give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be, which shall go forth from my mouth: it shall not return to me void, but it shall do whatsoever I please, and shall prosper in the things for which I sent it” (Isa. 55:10 ‒ 11).7 The idea of the incarnate Word in Christian teaching goes even further, as the integration of each individual Christian life with the unfolding history of the universe: [W]e shall be transformed more and more to the word, that is, the light of the son, while the holy spirit strengthens assent or faith in our hearts, and the word comes upon motions in harmony with it. And just as there is an order of cognition and will in us, so the word displays the reconciliation of the father and the holy spirit ignited joy so that we are able to invoke God, confirms assent, and ignites other

4

The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

motions harmonious with it. So Athanasius said that the image is renewed to become like the son, and wherever the holy spirit is, it is there through the word.8 Late in Gadamer’s career when he reflected back on his reference to the verbum interius, he made it clear that he was modeling human solidarity in language on the processive relation of the persons of the Trinity: The true conversation is a lived with-one-another, in which the one and the other unite themselves. To express this with reference to Augustine’s speculation on the Trinity, I once used the Stoic concept of the “unspoken logos” (logos endiathetos) that does not disintegrate into different languages and guides one to the mysterious sense of “process.”9 Humboldt, Herder, Hamman, and the tradition of German language philosophy pushed deeper into the linguality of understanding, but hardly approached the same breadth of conception underlying the processive relation of Trinity and incarnation. This nexus anticipates the furthest reaches of Heidegger’s most radical thought experiments, not only the displacement of agency from the transcendental subject but the constituitive significance of what Heidegger calls Sprachwerden (becominglanguage, lingual becoming, etc.). The constant hermeneutic appeal to terms such as Miteinandersein (being with one another), Sprachwerden, Sprachgebundenheit (languageboundedness), etc., point to a remaking of the ontological relation, one in which word is the medium of being, dispersed across communities and histories. The relation of humans to this linguistic playing out of what is meaningful is radically different from the subject-centered model of knowing that still permeates our conventional paradigms of knowledge.10 Less well recognized is the extent to which Heidegger and Gadamer fashioned the ontological structure of Sprachwerden from the example of evangelical Christianity and the doctrine of the word, a connection that deepens and complicates considerably the paradigmatic implications of their hermeneutic perspective. To lay bare this ontological complexity and trace its different manifestations and relations is the purpose of this book. As such, this is not simply an exegesis of Gadamer’s verbum, but a continuation of the inquiry into the paradigmatic significance of a hermeneutic logos for our culture.

Introduction

5

Gadamer took the leitmotif of the verbum interius as a project he carved out for himself, but it was not a departure from Heidegger.11 In the 1921 lectures on Augustine and Neoplatonism, Heidegger reflects on the homo interior (the inner human being) of the Confessions, an interiority in which a voice “soundeth, which time deprives me not of ” [et ubi sonat, quod non rapit tempus], a sound that approaches the paradoxical discursivity of the verbum interius in the De Trinitate.12 But more importantly, Heidegger sees the complex structure of Sprachlichkeit latent in Augustine’s restless crossing back and forth between worldly experience and insight, and this structure is ultimately what Gadamer finds at stake in the verbum interius. This habit of crossing leads Heidegger to perceive the oscillating relation between “the initially constituting moment of meaning” in one’s own personal comportment and the enacting fulfillment of life knowledge,“a structure in which the possibilities for fulfillment (according to the structure) are inherent in the most multifarious way.” He concludes that “our living consciousness is a constant following and interweaving of situations,” attaching not only understanding but human knowledge to the Vollzug (actualization) of life experience.13 The path that Gadamer would follow in tracking the verbum interius as an anticipation of the hermeneutic reflexivity of lingual being is already roughly sketched out here. Nevertheless, Gadamer’s linkage of Sprachlichkeit to the De Trinitate rather than to the Confessiones was a critical move, because it shifted the focus from Augustine’s self-examination to the trinitarian dialectic of immanence and transcendence. It can be no surprise that the relation of language to Trinity became an inexhaustible lifelong theme for him. Because Gadamer’s own explication of the verbum interius is rather cryptic and elliptical, it invites misinterpretation and neglect. Running to a mere ten pages in Truth and Method, it is more like a sketch of Gadamer’s investment in this idea. His assumption that readers would engage the primary texts of reference to come to terms with the idea was misplaced. In an age of specialization, his sources—spurious texts, doctrinal arguments, scholastic definitions—appear obscure and irrelevant. As a result much of the force of the analogy is lost. We seem increasingly less inclined to take Gadamer’s counsel that we must remain open to the claim of tradition, and that if we read the traditional texts “historically” we have already “thoroughly smoothed them out beforehand” (TM, 361).14 This book arises out of the conviction that, as conversation partners,

6

The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

Augustine and Aquinas have said to Gadamer and to us something important that we have not fully taken in. Commentary has tended to flatten the significance of the analogy, Augustine’s insight has been disconnected from John’s innovation, and the verbum interius has been disassociated from the verbum. The position that I am going to advance is that the analogy is far more than an explanatory figure, and Gadamer’s appropriation more than an illustration of thought’s proximity to language. If it were only that, what would account for Gadamer’s constant invocation of trinitarian theology? If Gadamer’s point was only to turn our attention to the surplus of meaning beyond what is spoken, he need hardly have gone beyond the language theory of Seneca. In a second conversation with Grondin some years after the cryptic remark in the Heidelberg pub, Grondin asked Gadamer why he had connected the unending hermeneutic task of finding the right word with Augustine’s doctrine.15 Instead of saying that the verbum is about the proximity of word and thought, or, as Grondin himself might have said, that Augustine discovers a surplus of meaning beyond any expression, Gadamer’s response was again cryptic: “Precisely because Augustine needed not fewer than fifteen books to come close to the mystery of the Trinity without thereby falling into the false expedience of the gnostic presumption.”16 It is important to note that Gadamer did not simply refer to the fifteenth book of the De Trinitate which contains the analogy of the inner word, but to virtually the whole of the work which Augustine had composed over a period of twenty years. Further, Gadamer places this achievement in the light of the gnostic heresy, which understood the divine Son as a different being from the mortal Christ figure. Therefore what struck Gadamer was not simply an anticipation of the intimate unity of thought and speech, but the feat of imagination that conceived the unity of transcendent and immanent being. Just so deep is the meaning of language. This gives some sense of the scope I believe Gadamer gives to the verbum as a contribution to what he calls hermeneutic understanding.

The Verbum in the Argument of Truth and Method I would contend that the reference to trinitarian theology in Gadamer’s 1996 response to Grondin relates closely to his 1988 discussion with Grondin about hermeneutic universality. The enigmatic relation of the univer-

Introduction

7

sal and the particular remained a central problem for Gadamer, because at its core the theme of interpretation addresses the fact that human experience is disparate, never quite whole, and yet understands itself somehow in relation to a whole. But this question is also fundamentally the question of language. The concept of Logos stood at the crossing point between the Greek and Judaeo-Christian traditions, at the center of the inscrutable middle place of human finitude. Heidegger himself had gone to these same sources first, although from a different direction, moving back from Augustine to Aristotle to the pre-Socratics. The theme was the same however: the ontic and ontological structure of language. Heidegger’s ontological innovation was precisely to interpose language at the core of the riddle of the one and the many, a riddle that had formed the course of speculative thought in the West since the pre-Socratics. While Gadamer took his cue from his mentor, he wanted to make two emendations to Heidegger’s program. First, he believed more strongly than Heidegger that grafting language onto the problem of universality was a natural development of Western thought in its history, not a leap back to origins. Second, he believed that sociality was at the core of the human relation between language and the problem of the one and the many. What is interesting and difficult about our inquiry is that the verbum interius which Gadamer makes so central to his idea of hermeneutic consciousness is eminently designed to speak to the first emendation, and less so to the second. His late comments on its importance obscure a bit its place in the historical development of hermeneutics, so we need to clarify the context of its introduction in Truth and Method in relation to the broader meaning of Sprachlichkeit. Gadamer does this himself late in Truth and Method, where he speaks retrospectively of the scholastic innovation in relation to what came after. Significantly, he locates the verbum explicitly in relation to the ancient dilemma of the one and the many.17 The statement occurs in the penultimate section of the book (III, 3, B), just at the point where Gadamer turns from Hegel to Heidegger. (The phrase “Only now” refers to Heidegger’s innovation in the face of Hegel’s speculative absolutism.) Only now can the great dialectical puzzle of the one and the many, which fascinated Plato as the negation of the logos and which received a mysterious affirmation in medieval speculation on the Trinity, be given its true and fundamental ground. When Plato realized that the

8

The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

word of language is both one and many, he took only the first step. It is always one word that we say to one another and that is said to us (theologically, “the” Word of God)—but the unity of this word, as we saw, always unfolds step by step in articulated discourse. (TM, 457 ‒ 458)18 The scholastic innovation thus represents a progressive step in the cultural conversation, and the achievement has to do with the successiveness or temporality of discourse: The word unfolds (legt sich . . . je und je) in the process of thinking things through or talking things out, and this on the grand stage of history—we think here of Shakespeare’s “to the last syllable of recorded time.” This aspect of discursivity is given its true and fundamental ground in Heidegger’s embrace of an insurmountable human finitude. In this passage, to clarify Heidegger’s importance, Gadamer creates a simple axis between the metaphysical assumption of an order of perfection and a world operating with the limits and possibilities of finite, speaking communities. “The fundamental finitude of being,” he asserts, is constituted out of “the occasionality of human speech” (TM, 458). The commitment to a language that emerged slowly out of German historicism and philosophy of language (Herder, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Ranke, Droysen, Dilthey, etc.) put Heidegger and Gadamer on a collision course with the dualism and idealism that the West had nurtured. To be sure, the simplicity of this division within the tradition works only so long as Gadamer fixes his attention on the tendency of Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, and Hegel toward an order of perfection. The way Gadamer puts this contrast in the opening of III, 3, B shows how elusive a simple contrast will be for him: That human experience of the world is linguistic in nature was the thread underlying Greek metaphysics in its thinking about being since Plato’s “flight into the logoi.” We must inquire how far the answer given there—an answer that lasted until Hegel—does justice to the question we are concerned with. (TM, 456) “How far?” indeed. The ramifying, compounded tradition that contributed to Gadamer’s Sprachlichkeit sits on more than one simple axis, and Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, and Hegel are in many respects allies to Gada-

Introduction

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mer’s cause. Because Gadamer sees the various contributions to his idea of Sprachlichkeit from so many different sides, the distinctions between the various perspectives tend to the lose their edges. Such a compositing of ideas is a characteristic of Gadamer’s mode of thinking.19 His hermeneutic palimpsest does not discard the Hegelian dialectic, which is in many ways trinitarian, but instead superimposes on it the Christian, and also ultimately Heideggerian, insight into the brokenness and “complicatio” of human reason.20 This is in part what is at issue for him in the Augustinian and Thomist contrast of the Word of God and the multiplicity of human words. Moreover, discursive finitude for Gadamer is not an idea that ripens progressively in the movement from Plato to Aquinas to Hegel to Heidegger, but is rather an amalgam of their contributions, since each historical figure offers something more and less than what Gadamer calls Sprachlichkeit. The intriguing thing about Gadamer’s statement on the one and the many (above) is that it mixes the language of theology and philosophy with the language of rhetoric, that is, of everyday speech: “Es ist immer ein Wort, das wir einander sagen und das uns gesagt wird (theologisch: ‘das’ Wort Gottes)—aber die Einheit dieses Wort legt sich, wie wir sahen, je und je auseinander in artikulierte Rede” (WM, 461 ‒ 462; emphases added). [It is always one word that we say to one another and that is said to us (in theology, “the” word of God)—but the unity of this word, as we saw, always unfolds step by step in articulated discourse (TM, 457 ‒ 458).] Rede is the German word for talk, the informal common speech that occurs in daily life, or the public speech of the political sphere. Gadamer refers twice in this passage to communal dialogue, and he uses only the first person plural, we and us —e.g., the word that we speak to one another, even though the theme he is addressing is the word of God. This mixed discourse expresses the composite layers of Gadamer’s discursivity: both its deep theological and speculative ground, and its dialogic, practical embodiment. To understand Gadamer’s claim clearly we want to tease out these various strands or voices and see how they relate to each other. In order to do this, I will start with the speculative dimension of the problem, unity and multiplicity as it relates to the idea of language, and then indicate how the dialectical structure of language will eventually be related to the rhetorical structure of the polis and Socratic dialogue. The verbum will locate itself in relation to this double obligation.

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The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

The Speculative Dimension of the One and the Many The aspect of Hegelian dialectic that Gadamer holds onto is the ceaseless movement between the particular and the universal that constitutes temporal-historical understanding. Separately, the concrete and the abstract are virtualities, since they exist only in relation to each other.21 This is what we might call the speculative dimension of the one and the many, to distinguish it from the existential or rhetorical dimension. To it applies all the issues of determinacy, temporality, and logic that relate to the power of language to signify. The Western speculative tradition is tied closely to the development of this question. The temptation at a certain point was to harness language as a pointer to an ideal world beyond accidents and imperfections. The tendency for immanent and transcendent reality to split off into distinct realms was embraced and spurned in various ways. It was more difficult to reject than to affirm, and no challenge to dualism maintained itself for long. Plato’s methexis and mimesis did not satisfy Aristotle as a solution to separation (cwrismovı) and so Aristotle bound the universe more tightly into the dialectic of dynamis and energeia. In turn, Aristotle did not satisfy his Peripatetic followers, who found a greater unity between nature (fuvs iı) and mind (nou˜ ı), but who in their turn reduced the kosmos even more to a physical process (kivnhsiı). The Stoics found a greater unity (hvgemonikovn) in the reason (nou˜ ı) of the cosmos and the soul, only to distance the soul from its bondage to the world. The Epicureans retrieved a greater dignity for the material world, but withdrew from judgment anything beyond practical insight. Neoplatonism retrieved the transcendent realm for a greater unity, but in the process consigned the finite world to insignificance. Patristic thought elevated the world of the flesh to a necessary role in the divine order, finding the balance point between the immanence and transcendence of God’s identity, and as we shall see in chapter 5, Hegel’s dialectic mirrored this structural relation. That achievement may have been the high point of the effort to reconcile the world to an ideal order of perfection. But this shows the problem. In a divine and perfect order, the particular would give way to the universal, and language would resolve into concept as an unalloyed grasp of what is. Indeed, the section following the verbum section in Truth and Method is entitled “Language and Concept

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Formation,” because the hope of escaping the overdetermination of language, fatefully for the West, depended on the promise of the unifying concept. This is what Hegel tried heroically to mediate when he spoke of a concrete universal. But the point of hermeneutics would be to disappoint this long experiment, and describe a human order unavailable to perfection. In a late repetition of the theme of language and the concept (1995), Gadamer drove the point home. In a paper entitled “From Word to Concept,” he announced somewhat subversively in the opening paragraph: “Of one thing I am sure: the concept, which very often presents itself as something strange and demanding, must begin to speak if it is to be really grasped. For this reason I would first like to revise my topic a little to read: ‘Not only from word to concept but likewise from concept to word.’22 Hermeneutics leads away from the dream of an absolute purity and toward an inexhaustible discovery inherent in the uniqueness and diversity of human language. Here is a partial quotation from what I will refer to as Gadamer’s definition of language: “Le langue, c’est en réalité le mot unique dont la virtualité nous ouvre l’infinité de la poursuite du discours’ . . .” [Language is in reality the unique word whose virtuality opens to us the infinite pursuit of discourse . . .]23 The speculative relation between the one and the many does not resolve to the one, but expands in a ceaseless interplay of unity and difference.

The Social Dimension of the One and the Many Incarnation did not only speak to the speculative dimension of the problem of universals. That the Church is the body of Christ, and that this embodied Word unfolds in the community of the faithful as its history, is a manner of thinking that literally transforms the notion of language. We are accustomed to speak figuratively of the living “word” in the singular, and there is a good deal that is invested in this locution. It carries the mark of the religious teaching, starting with Jewish covenant, that faith community is bound together by speech, by a promise that unites history. It is the nature of this speech that it should be one word, that is, lacking equivocation and enduring in its constancy. A great effort of thought was required to reconcile the “discursivity” of human speech, i.e., that we must use more than one word, with this perfection. Religious

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The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

teaching did not give up on the essential relation between the divine and human word, and this is one of its greatest gifts to thought. The idea that a professing Christian, for instance, lives in and professes the word, that the living word unfolds through history, and that human history is in effect that word, implicitly acknowledges a commonality between divine and human language. The question, then, is to reconcile or explain the difference. One answer is that the human logos is many words because our reason is processive and discursive. We need to talk things out and think things through. This is the answer that the verbum interius points to specifically, although, to be sure, Augustine and Aquinas are never too far from John’s prologue and the greater potency of the link to incarnation. That the word of God unfolds in human history as the nexus between the transcendent and immanent procession will be a kind of touchstone for the idea of discursivity Gadamer develops all through his career. Therefore in an important way Christology moves beyond the conceptual problem of universality and touches the existential questions Heidegger was absorbed in. Here is where the axial opposition of Heidegger and the tradition is confounded, and we can find common cause in that tradition all the way through. We go beyond the speculative dimension when Heidegger’s exploration of linguistic finitude sends the matter back to Rede in a way that undermines the simple axis of Gadamer’s “dialectical puzzle” statement. The interaction of the one and the many in language works much closer to the ground, in the occasionality of speech and in the indeterminacies of human situations, so that it refers now not only to a cognitive phenomenon but to a lived experience. Gadamer’s definition of language (the full quotation this time) provides a marvelous example of Gadamer’s mixed speculative-practical discourse: “Le langue, c’est en réalité le mot unique dont la virtualité nous ouvre l’infinité de la poursuite du discours’, et du discours avec les autres, et de la liberté du ‘se dire’ et du ‘se laisser dire.’” [Language is in reality the unique word whose virtuality opens up for us the endlessness of the pursuit of discourse, and the endlessness of the discourse with others, and the endlessness of the freedom to let something be said.]24 It is precisely because Gadamer conceives this interaction as people engaged in situated dialogue about things that matter that he returns to Plato. This Plato is not the theorist of numbers and signs, but rather the author of those dialogues that model for us the embodied

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character of understanding. The rhetorical culture embodied in Socrates’ status as gadfly, a questioning of meaning “that will make us better and wiser,” manifests the discursive relation of the one and the many as a social phenomenon. This return to Plato is acted out in the narrative progression of the third part of Truth and Method, where Gadamer first moves his argument beyond Augustine and Aquinas after the verbum section to Cusa and Humboldt, who prize the multivocality of language and its resistance to any standard of perfection. In moving from a faith in the absolute to an acceptance of the inexactness of language (TM, 437), the privileging of the particular and the contingent (TM, 430), the metaphoricity of concept formation (TM, 429), and the occasionality of speech (TM, 458), Gadamer ultimately finds himself back in the classical rhetorical polis, although certainly transformed by the journey. My cautionary claim about this return is that the circling back is not a destruktion. Whatever direction Gadamer goes in, it is always tracking with a sympathetic resonance that picks up the harmonics of the tradition, in the same way that the notes of a stringed instrument in its lowest registers contain all of the overtones. I would propose that the resonance of the idea that the Church of Christ is the historical community of faith, and that the body of Christ is His word unfolding in the life of individual Christians down through history, heightens Gadamer’s ideal of ancient dialogue when he finally comes back to it. Gadamer returns to Plato and the ancients at the end of Truth and Method as to a kind of goal or end, but now with a special value added. Gadamer wants the extraordinary advance that the idea of incarnation brings to language, an idea we shall begin to understand in this book, but he also wants to keep this ontological turn within the useable framework of practical discourse.25 The dialectic of the one and the many shucks off the vestiges of its idealist purity and dons the patchwork mantel of our rough-hewn indeterminacy. On the other hand, the occasional and the contingent are no longer simply the vocabulary of everyday rhetoric, but the truth of our being. Gadamer wishes to transplant all that has been learned about our middle place between the particular and the universal back into the ethos of dialogic inquiry. If he can do it, if he can imagine a rhetorical community informed now by the exquisite structure of speculative reflection, he will have the framework

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The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

for hermeneutic experience he aspires to give his students. Gadamer’s discussion of the verbum sits within this context; it is a fundamental moment in the narrative that leads to what Gadamer calls hermeneutic experience.

From the Agora to the University and Back Again In spite of a growing scholarly reputation in the German university system, Gadamer wrote and published relatively little for the first decades of his scholarly career. With great difficulty in his fifties he set about writing “a book which was indicative of my practice of the interpretation of texts and my teaching generally.”26 The product of almost ten years, Wahrheit und Methode was an effort to show “how the various paths of philosophizing which I retraced in my teaching could be made genuinely relevant to today by starting from the current philosophical situation.”27 This is a fair description of how the book reads, a heady navigation through compounded layers of tradition to create a new amalgam, a humanism cured in the fires of German romanticism, historicism, and phenomenology. When I say humanism, and this is the word Gadamer himself uses, I am referring to the hermeneutic transformation of the studia humanitatis by a new emphasis on the constitutive role of language. Unexpectedly the book hit a nerve, gaining a rapid international reputation, and brought Gadamer to prominence among scholars worldwide, although the interest generated by the book went in a direction away from Gadamer’s original question. His idea was to recuperate the humanist tradition as a response to the twin modern threats of subjective relativism and instrumental objectivism. Living in the crisis of Humboldt’s Geisteswissenschaften, Gadamer looked to the rhetorical curriculum of Renaissance humanism, which itself was a recuperation of an earlier classical humanism, as a useable framework for an education based on dialogic understanding. Gadamer reawakened this spirit from out of the tangle of post-Kantian, post-Hegelian thought in the age of reproduction, and breathed new life into the ancient ideals of practical philosophy and rhetorical culture.28 But this retrieval was always strangely tied up with strains of mysticism and theology that had pervaded Heidegger’s thinking. In Gadamer’s “palimpsestuous” thought the Greek logos could never be un-

Introduction

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derstood except as it was refracted through the millennia of Western cultural history, and this worked its way laboriously back through German language theory, speculative idealism, Kantian metaphysics, and Christian theology.29 This book is primarily about the influence of the compounded tradition of Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian logos. In his nineties, Gadamer wrote retrospectively that it was the verbum interius that guided his understanding of the question of language: “I myself relied on Augustine’s reception of the Stoic teaching of the ‘inner word.’ ”30 This statement occurs in Gadamer’s review of the historical argument about linguistic being from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Derrida and himself. Gadamer conceives the prodigious mystery of language under the mantra that there is only ever one word (TM, 427/WM, 430). That human language is multiple and heterogeneous, discursive and evolving, that it exists only in its enactment, that its temporal expression is always incomplete, ambiguous, contingent, and indeterminate, stands in productive tension with and does not at all obviate the truth of its singularity. That finite human understanding is not able to grasp the unity of the word is the occasion for its history. We can begin to hear this in Gadamer’s response to Grondin’s question about the verbum: “Words are not what is written down. Words are not buried in the brain. What is unfolded, so to speak, is rather the capacity to create new combinations that makes language possible. This is linguisticality, an expression that means the ‘inner conversation’ that the Stoa called the logos endiathetos.”31 The performativity of language has to do with the fact that discursivity (discursus) stands in a dialectical relation to insight (intuitus). It is patently clear that for Gadamer the idea of the Leibnizian intuitus is by itself only a phantasm, a romantic dream, but what is easily missed is that, for him, the discursive manifold by itself is equally virtual. For Gadamer human finitude is not simply a failing, but bears some indistinct and generative relation to the singularity of the word. If the verbum is the locus classicus for Gadamer’s insights into the universality of the hermeneutic experience, it cannot simply be extracted from the philosophical history that underlies Gadamer’s larger effort. Even more than this, the central place of the word for Gadamer (logos, verbum, Sprache) depends on its recursive incarnations in Western intellectual culture, and what Gadamer sees in the verbum is strengthened

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The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

by its resonance with that ongoing tradition. Of particular importance is the life of logos in the humanist tradition that is the subject of the first part of Truth and Method. We shall find that there is a crucial nexus between the theology of the word and the rhetorical culture of civic humanism that plays out in Gadamer’s thinking. Gadamer makes this connection explicit in his conversation with Grondin, where he links Augustine’s reflection on the Trinity to the long rhetorical tradition of contingent knowledge: “There is a knowledge not always of mastery. It has to do with familiarity. . . . There are many things that we basically do not understand with which we are yet familiar. How we know so much in this way is full of mystery.”32 The argument of Truth and Method as it is developed initially was an attempt to mediate the framework of the Geisteswissenschaften of the German university system and the Renaissance curriculum of the studia humanitatis. Gadamer sees the former as a complex and wayward development of the latter, and his idea is to see past the distortions of the “human sciences” by taking guidance from the humanist past. It is this ramified standpoint between Renaissance humanism and the intellectual culture of post-Enlightenment Germany that is worked out through the first two parts of Truth and Method. Gadamer’s argument reflects his standing in and speaking from these multiple locations, which is what accounts for the complexity of his exposition.33 If we extract the theme of classical humanism out of the larger setting, the nature of its appropriation looks fairly straightforward, i.e., a recuperation of humanism for the foundations of human culture as the language of political discourse and practical judgment, of historical and literary studies, of ethics and aesthetics. Gadamer conjures up the classical and Renaissance worlds of decorum, common sense, cultivation and judgment, worlds of civility, of pragmatism, and above all of sociality. The sense of the appropriate that guides judgment extends across the boundaries of art and politics. But we cannot extract the humanist theme from Truth and Method if we are to follow Gadamer’s argument, because the studia humanitatis is always refracted through the contemporary situation. Gadamer’s starting point, the Geisteswissenschaften, betrays in its name a subordinate relation to the natural sciences. This is what makes following his argument particularly complex. To start with the Geisteswissenschaften is to pick up the subject of the humanities in midstream, rather late in its course, and to follow several of its currents as they disperse and intermingle. More than

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this, Gadamer is simultaneously paddling upstream as “we work our way back” to the ideal of humanism from the Geisteswissenschaften, and then riding on ahead beyond the line of vision to a world of hermeneutic understanding, treating the modern appropriation of humanism as a work in progress in which his book will play a part. There is a question of relevance to the modern situation of the balanced and humane world of the agora and the court that Gadamer is looking for—civic humanism—and we hear in the first part of Truth and Method a somewhat forced encounter of the two incommensurate worlds. It seems possible for Gadamer to bring together Thomas Reed, Vico, Oetinger, Humboldt, and Shaftsbury, with Pseudo-Dionysius, Chrysippus, and Marcus Aurelius, but it becomes progressively more difficult to introduce Kant, Hegel, and Dilthey into this complex tapestry. Enlightenment had already been weakened by the growing dominion of technique, by objectifying method and categorial division, and there is a sense that beyond this its cultivation of Bildung suffers by a kind of inordinate growth. Having lost the delicate humanist balance, there is both a tremendous deepening of insight and a distortion. Kant is really the pivot point, and his mixed contributions express this conflict. His moral philosophy “purified ethics from all aesthetics and feeling” (TM, 40/WM, 46), yet he asserted that “‘The beautiful is the symbol of the morally good’” (in Gadamer, TM, 75/WM, 81). The intellectual history that Gadamer follows exhibits this pattern of gain and loss. Romanticism (e.g., Schiller) finds genius at the source of beauty and goodness, but at the expense of reason. With German idealism, life itself becomes the object of aesthetic pleasure, but as a life of beautiful experience, so that beauty is “contrasted with practical reality” (TM, 82/WM, 88). In so many ways the German sensitivity to the ontological claims of art expand and enrich the understanding of the aesthetic, but the balance that humanism had achieved among all spheres of life has been sacrificed. The epitome of this loss of balance is what Gadamer calls “aesthetic consciousness” (TM, 89 ‒‒ 100/ WM, 94 ‒ 106), and it is with the critique of this concept that the first part of Truth and Method ends. In spite of this historical devaluation of the humanist ideal, Gadamer develops simultaneously an increasingly complex picture of the ideal modeled on the humanist appreciation of beauty, both moral and aesthetic, and cultivation of the public good, all held in balance in a harmonious civic life. The Greek sense of kalon must be the paradigm, because

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The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

here the beautiful was in no sense divorced from the true expressing the pervasive order of the cosmos (TM, 477 ‒‒480/WM, 481 ‒‒484). The progressive demotion of beauty and art into separate and then ancillary subjects defines in part the career of humanism, and this is the historical point at which Gadamer’s inquiry enters. Even Hemholtz, who opposed the Diltheyan effort to find method in the humanities, conceded too much by searching for its equivalent (TM, 8/WM, 13 ‒‒ 14). But the guiding concept that anchored the Geisteswissenschaften was sturdy enough to expand in healthy and unhealthy directions without losing its core. This guiding concept, a child of the eighteenth-century German classicism, is Bildung (Part I, I, 1, B, i). Gadamer’s conception of Bildung is intimately related to the classical tradition of phronesis, a central pillar of Gadamer’s entire hermeneutic programme.34 To understand phronesis and Bildung is to go a great ways toward grasping the circular structure of hermeneutic understanding, and of the structure of the word that guides this study. Bildung, the formation of character and culture, unites in a processive way meaning, experience, and judgment in a kind of feedback loop that gains at each pass. Gadamer reinterprets Bildung’s relation to the past (tradition and language) and the future (possibility and invention) through Heidegger’s temporal ecstatic being of Dasein, which is what gives hermeneutic truth its special complexity. The language of Bildung in its cognates—Einbildungskraft, Bild, Vorbild, Abbild, Nachbild, Urbild —expresses “in advance” of our conceptualizing, as Gadamer would say, the reciprocating structure of being-in-theworld (WM, 98/TM, 103). Our informing form, which is “consciousness at work” (arbeitende Bewußtsein), working the world through works, is simultaneously a coming to terms with the world and a self-forming. Human being is such that, “by forming the thing it forms itself ” (TM, 13/WM, 18). The distance between the agencies of self and thing are actually generative, since, in a Hegelian sense, the alienation of spirit in time motivates the movement of understanding. The basic character of Bildung is “to reconcile itself with itself, to recognize oneself in other being” (TM, 13/WM, 19). The felt absence of what has been lost of us to ourselves through time, quoting Hegel,“contains at the same time all the exit points and threads of the return to oneself, for becoming acquainted with it and for finding oneself again” (TM, 14).35 The meanings of Einbildungskraft, Vorbild, and Bildung as a network of terms are all related to this interani-

Introduction

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mating characteristic. Humboldt prepares us for what this is when he says that Bildung is “something both higher and more inward, namely the disposition of mind which, from the knowledge and the feeling of the total intellectual and moral endeavor, flows harmoniously into sensibility and character.” [Wenn wir aber in unserer Sprache Bildung sagen, so meinen wir damit etwas zugleich Höheres und mehr Innerliches, nämlich die Sinnesart, die sich aus der Erkenntniss und dem Gefühle des gesammten geistigen und sittlichen Strebens harmonisch auf die Empfindung und den Charakter ergiesst.]36 Gadamer relates this definition to “the ancient mystical tradition according to which man carries in his soul the image of God, after whom he is fashioned, and which man must cultivate in himself” (TM, 11/WM, 16). Humans form in disposition and character out of the culture they subsequently enrich by their own actions. Gadamer reads the relation of the German concept of Bildung to phronesis through the intermediary concept of the sensus communis, the basis of Vico’s rhetorical humanism. We can see here the three-point perspective with which Gadamer views his subject — from the Geisteswissenschaften through Christian humanism to ancient classicism. I would maintain that, although the Greek and Roman ideals are the constant orienting star of Gadamer’s thinking, the true center of gravity of Gadamer’s treatment of humanistic understanding in the first part of Truth and Method lies between the querelle des anciens et des modernes at the balancing point of the studia humanitatis. When Gadamer acknowledges that hermeneutics is fundamentally grounded in the classical tradition of rhetoric, he is pointing not only to Aristotle and Cicero but to Renaissance humanism, a movement that took its direction from the recovery of the rhetorical tradition. Italian humanists believed that knowledge was fundamentally social, and their conception of education linked intellectual activity to praxis.37 At the center of culture they placed rhetoric, which meant for them both the texts of the ancients and the public oratory of self-government (text and speech). The cultivation of the arts of language became “the basis of a general education and of an integrated culture” (204). Excellence in the word turned for its models to the tradition of classical texts, whose authority was such that it “needed no demonstration” (204). The humanists believed that speech was in no way separate from knowledge (“wisdom speaking copiously”38). All of this is repeated in Gadamer as central to his purpose.

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Although Renaissance humanism constituted itself in many ways in opposition to scholasticism, it emerged out of that Christian worldview. Valla’s translation of logos as oratio rather than ratio thus honors both Ciceronian republicanism and Christian evangelism. Valla’s choice “not only suggests the dynamism and the substantive importance of rhetoric but is also significantly closer to the biblical than to the philosophical world of thought.”39 The classical curriculum allowed Renaissance scholars opportunities both to distance themselves from their more immediate patrilineage and to deepen their understanding of it. We can see, for instance, how decorum “suggests that language seeks man out as he is from moment to moment and addresses him not as the representative of a species, in the timeless language of absolute truth, but as an individual” (425). Language’s “malleability, its adaptability to the nuances of experience, allowed it to mold itself flexibly around the infinitely varied and constantly shifting particularities of life” (425). This combination of influences, the rhetorical and the biblical, is a hybridity that continues to resonate through German intellectual culture up to the present. The classical ideal is deepened and enriched by the uniqueness and centrality of personal experience as it is taught in the salvation narrative. Christian humanism reads the existential pathos of the Gospels in the situated and contingent art of rhetoric. On the one hand, with “its gravitation toward classical rhetoric, Renaissance humanists developed a worldview that contrasted with the relatively static and hierarchical absolutism of medieval theology” (425). On the other hand, with its rejection of “the abstract man of classical anthropology with its separate, hierarchically distinguished faculties, rhetoric accepted and appealed to man as it encountered him in the individual moments of his existence. Man was no longer merely a rational animal but an infinitely complex being . . . a mysterious unity” (425). Christian humanism combined the rhetorical understanding of language with the theological reverence for the word. Instead of a bloodless contrast between the particular and the general of dialectical studies, it sees particularity in the complex wholeness of the individual in the fullness of life and experience. The rhetorical word is produced out of and addressed to this whole. This is very much in keeping with biblical tradition. The individual person is an image of the model of Christ, and this recapitulation draws its meaning from the singularity of personal redemption.

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Gadamer’s humanism, and his debt to the humanists, can be fixed in relation to this point. There is no danger in misinterpreting his appropriation of the personal nature of the word as a return to subjectivity. This cannot be an alternative, since the thrust of his thought is to depose the idea of the transcendental subject. He was opposed as much to the Romantic ideal of personal genius as to the Cartesian self as starting point. The full energy of his thought points toward the dispersion of agency from person to text, from person to culture, from conscious presence to history. But the important nuance is that this is not an appeal to an impersonal reality, or for a world spirit. It is rather the Greek idea that what is meaningful is present and carried on in our works and words as much as in ourselves. This is where the Judaeo-Christian word again becomes crucial, because it provides the purest and fullest model for this idea. The word passed down through generations, observed in ritual, alive in the reading of scripture, returning us to its source. This comes full force in Gadamer’s explanation of the word of the gospel, which is proclaimed anew to each individual soul, something that is “not extractable from what is spoken from someone to someone. What can be understood with regard to it is not the abstract logical sense of an expression, but a convenienta that happens in it” (WM, 431). The convenientia of person and word is the convergence of rhetorical decorum and the theological verbum. The living word brings together persons, experience, and culture in meaningful relation. Thus Gadamer will break decisively from the current of the tradition, present almost from the beginning, that flows towards the subjectum. Language is not on the outside of the constitution of social meanings, but is its living center. The appeal to the theology of the word has another reason.40 There is nothing in the classical or humanist tradition after Heraclitus that gives to the mystery of language the same weight of purpose. When Gadamer defends his famous formula that being that can be understood is language, he uses a Heideggerian locution that goes well beyond even Cicero’s fusion of wisdom and eloquence: “Vor allem heißt es das eine: Sein, das erfahren und verstanden werden kann, bedeutet: Sein spricht ” [This signifies above all that being that can be experienced and understood means: Being speaks].41 This is an idiom formed out of contact with the Graeco-Christian tradition of the logos. When Gadamer addresses the question of language in the third part of Truth and Method, a topic that he

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is always careful to qualify as an inexhaustible mystery, he needs a model that outstrips the practical idioms of the rhetorical tradition. What he sees in language and what he is after in deciphering it is a structure that goes to the heart of the human mystery, and he finds this model in the theology of incarnation. It is here that he will develop the structure of the hermeneutic circle as it manifests itself in the interplay between reflective being and language. The development of trinitarian doctrine in the first centuries of the Christian church pressed the mediation between the material and spiritual realms to its extreme by insisting on the full humanity and the full divinity of the Logos. Here lies the inordinate power of the dogmatic model for hermeneutics, because the question of language is placed in juxtaposition to the person of the word. The nexus between humanity and divinity is not a reduction of some kind, as an overflow or surplus, as a tool or instrument, but contains the whole within it. The impact of this idea can be felt throughout the subsequent intellectual history of the West. When Renaissance humanism appropriates classical rhetoric, it is no wonder that it should be receptive to the idea that reason lies in the fullness of the person. And when hermeneutics takes an ontological turn, it is no wonder that it should appeal to the great refusal of a reduction in the idea of incarnation.

The Circularity of the Word I will sketch out briefly what is on offer here that affects our normal conception of experience and understanding, which is what Gadamer regards as fundamentally lingual and which the verbum helps to characterize in a radically different way. The word for Gadamer is not just a sign, a package carrying meaning from a sender to a receiver. Different from this simple functionalism, language has a circular structure that enfolds the being of the linguistic animals who live in it and the historical world that unfolds dialectically with it. What is meaningful is carried along in the constancy of language and pivots in the reflective consciousness of beings, gathering up and returning to its source, with each pass reflecting a new aspect. This circularity is a quietly recurring theme in Western thought, but no match for the linear model of the sign.42 The

Introduction

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Christian conception of God as Word is the literal apotheosis of this circularity in which language passes through and includes the constitution of being in the world. The identification of word and true personhood is an innovation that pushes to the furthest limit the idea of ontological circularity, but it includes and is built up from the notions of circularity that came before it. Likewise, the hermeneutic circularity of language that Gadamer develops borrows from this earlier iteration and continues to draw illumination and guidance from it. In Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, the circular structure of understanding is articulated in terms of a reciprocity between consciousness and history: “Historical consciousness . . . . adopts a reflective posture toward both itself and the tradition in which it is situated. It understands itself in terms of its own history. Historical consciousness is a mode of self-knowledge” (TM, 235/WM, 239). The hermeneutic foundation stone on which the circle of understanding is built is Heidegger’s contention that “understanding is Dasein’s mode of being” [Verstehen ist die Seinsart des Daseins] (259/264). Reflection is a structure constitutive of human being: “[L]ife itself is ordered toward reflection” [Das Leben ist selbst auf Besinnung angelegt] (235/239). More than once in Truth and Method Gadamer quotes Dilthey that “life is understood by life” (229/233). Gadamer interprets this to mean that “for historical consciousness the whole of tradition becomes the self-encounter of the human mind” (229/233). The immanent knowledge of life “folds back on and returns to itself ” [es sich mit sich selbst zusammenschließt] (253/257) through a series of intermediaries. It is this circular ontological structure that constitutes Gadamer’s appropriation and innovation. Gadamer goes further in insisting that the path of reflection is not “still oriented to the interiority of selfconsciousness” but orients “itself toward the functional circle of life” (250/254 ‒‒ 255). By “life” Gadamer means something like the DiltheyanHusserlian conception of “the intersubjectivity of the communal world” (250/254). He transforms the idea of Erfahrung from the conventional “experience” of the individual phronimos to a “fundamentally anonymous intentionality — i.e., not achieved by anyone by name” (246/250 ‒‒ 251). Gadamer’s emphasis is on the with-one-another (Miteinander) of dialogic philosophy, a development beyond Heidegger’s less socially emphatic notion of Mitsein (BT, 308/SZ, 263). The dispersal of agency and displacement of the Western mind into “the intentionality of universal

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The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

life” is completed by a “self-reflection” that involves a redistribution of agency from subject to communal history (259/263). The privilege attached to subjective understanding, reaching its apotheosis in Hegel’s complete presence of the absolute idea is, in retrospect, a grand overreach, and the Western rationalist orientation of subject and substance finds a corrective: “In fact history does not belong to us; we belong to it. . . . The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life” (276/281). But Gadamer does not simply repudiate the humanist tradition, and this is evident in the fact that he keeps the language of reflection and consciousness in many of his principle themes, a practice that he has had to defend while others have gone much further in the deposition of intentional agency. The tightrope Gadamer walks is illustrated in the concept of wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein, an idea that brings to a culmination the second part of Truth and Method. The locution is untranslatable partly because it uses the peculiar resources of German to express a doubled over, folding back structure that is neither completely subjective understanding nor the anonymous intentionality of history, but something “in between.”43 Weinsheimer offers an admirable preçis of Gadamer’s coinage: Wirkung is related to wirken (knit, weave, integrate), to verwirklichen (realize, make real), and to Wirklichkeit (reality, actuality). Wirkungsgeschichte is the reality of history in that it is the history of realization. What is real works—that is, in realizing itself it works itself out. The history of how something works out, or history in its working out, is Wirkungsgeschichte. Wirkung, then, means work in the transitive sense. History is Wirkungsgeschichte in that it works something or works on something: it effects and has an effect. The effect of history — its realization, its reality—is history itself. Precisely for this reason history itself always exists in relation: to its effects and hence to subsequent history, the course of events. The history of an event’s consequence and effects is not something different from the history of the event but is rather the history of the event itself, its own history.44 It is only after an extended exploration of Heidegger’s thought on language (chapter 6) that the significance of this compromise will come fully

Introduction

25

into view, but we can get an inkling of its structure in the language Gadamer uses to indicate its in-between status. The miracle of understanding, he says, “is not a mysterious communion of souls, but sharing in a common meaning” (eine Teilhabe am gemeinsamen Sinn) (TM, 292/WM, 297). This phrase puts us in mind of the sensus communis, and gives it the proper accent. Gadamer is not after something mystical or idealist, but something grounded in the practical life of the political community, the humanist ideal of the civitas. Unlike Heidegger, Gadamer draws the JudaeoChristian achievement back into the humanist tradition. The Christian overtones of the wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein (historically effected consciousness) enter into Gadamer’s further description of the mediation and human being and language: “Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as an involvement in the event-happening of what is passed down” (Einrücken in ein Überlieferungsgeschehen) (TM, 290, modified/WM, 295). Subjectivity is not the end-all, but only part of a participatory structure in which destiny plays an equal role. The genius of the phrase is that it captures the push-pull of the two sides of this new conception of agency, one in which subjective intentionality is diminished in importance and yet reflexivity is an essential component. On the one hand “we are always already affected by history,” but on the other hand, we are conscious of the hermeneutical situation in which we are surrounded (300/305). This is the positive case for the dog that chases its tail: “Understanding proves to be a kind of effect that knows itself as such” (341/346). Gadamer gives an entire section (Part II, II, 3) to the question of “how knowledge and effect belong together” (TM, 341/WM, 346), and the critical point for us is that, in spite of all his cautions and remonstrances about reflective philosophy, wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein is inherently reflexive: “The structure of reflexivity is fundamentally given with all consciousness. Thus this must also be the case for historically effected consciousness” (341/347). He will get at the limits of reflexivity by a process of subtraction: We are concerned with understanding historically effected consciousness in such a way that the immediacy and superiority of the work does not dissolve into a mere reflective reality in the consciousness of the effect—i.e., we are concerned to conceive a reality that limits and exceeds the omnipotence of reflection. (342/348)

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The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics

Gadamer explores the concept of experience (Part II, II, 3, B), particularly as it is understood by Hegel and Heidegger, as a way to delimit the claims of reflection. Experience (Erfahrung) is conventionally thought to be the possession of the person, but Gadamer conceives it as a shared possession, the incursion of history into the person, the imprint of common human finitude: “Although in bringing up children, for example, parents may try to spare them certain experiences, experience as a whole is not something anyone can be spared” (356/362). Experience is the learning of one’s own finitude: “The nature of experience is conceived in terms of something that surpasses it” (355/361). Thus self-consciousness is consciousness of what the self is not. Gadamer’s preoccupation with the idea of human finitude is not the simple fact of finitude, but the self-knowledge of finitude’s constituitiveness.45 This is not only the awareness of our extreme limitation, but the understanding that such a limit offers. Any limit or boundary has this attribute: “What makes a limit a limit always also includes knowledge of what is on both sides of it” (343/348). Gadamer specifies the character of this limit by relating it to the Socratic docta ignorantia, which is paradoxically both a vigilant humility and the wisdom that arises out of that humility, thus operating from both sides of the limit. Gadamer prepares the way for this double-sidedness by an extended analysis of Aristotle’s notion of phronesis (Part II, II, 2, B). The comportment of the phronimos (the person who has phronesis) is, on the basis of prior hard experience and knowledge of the constitutive indeterminacy of the future, a cultivated openness to what is probable. This means that the phronimos has both “a sense of direction” (Richtungssinn) (362/368) about the question in hand—i.e., what direction to face in addressing the question — and a deeply internalized sense of inadequacy before the question. The combination of these two sides of the limit is expressed in a comportment that we recognize in the wise person, what Gadamer calls a “readiness for experience” (Erfahrungsbereitschaft) (363/367). We trust someone who seems to be on the razor’s edge of the probable. This comportment is formed under the pressure of awareness that we are less directing our own destinies than responsive to the questions that present themselves to us, and that these questions typically will remain “unsettled” (Nichtfestgelegtsein) (363/369). In fact understanding proceeds by a process of destruction. It is when we are pulled up short by the interruption of our preconceptions that we learn.

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27

It is in this way that Gadamer describes the cooperation of subjectivity and history. Human being is on a balancing point between the creative agency of history and the responsiveness of personal understanding. Hermeneutics is a relocation of agency that does not diminish the value of the human. This is accomplished primarily through a redefinition of language. After establishing the intermediate status of the wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein at the macro-level of history and experience, Gadamer turns in the third part of Truth and Method to an analysis of language in order to reimagine the relation of human community and historical finitude. Language for him is the site of mediation (as opposed to subjectivity) where history and understanding collide. The understanding of language that Gadamer is tracing, it is fair to say even now, is alien to much of the dominant Western culture. Its first glimmering was present in archaic Greece, when the name of a person seemed “to belong to his being,” but then this was lost to the instrumentalist view of language that is our heritage (405/409). Historically the verbum cordis is a temporary reprieve in the face of the forgetfulness of language in the West.46 Plato’s Cratylus depicts language as a network of signs modeled on mathematical numbers, and the correctness of words is determined by their adequacy in describing a prior truth. In dismissing this Gadamer points to the elusive alternative: “But all this misses the point that the truth of things resides in discourse—which means, ultimately, in intending a unitary meaning concerning things—and not in the individual words, not even in a language’s entire stock of words” (411/416). Here the word is not merely inseparable from the thing, but from the community that speaks it and the future that it hopes for itself. The hermeneutic anticipation of the whole is transformed into an expectation of existential wholeness that our discursivity perpetually denies and imagines. What is it that does not exist “even in a language’s entire stock of words” but the dynamis that that language allows? To say precisely what that potential is, Gadamer turns to the idea of the verbum interius in the third part of Truth and Method.



Part I

The Verbum in the History of Ideas

chapter 1



The Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian Word

And as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return no more thither, but soak the earth, and water it, and make it to spring, and give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be, which shall go forth from my mouth: it shall not return to me void, but it shall do whatsoever I please, and shall prosper in the things for which I sent it. — Isaiah 55:10 ‒‒ 11

The Spirit of the Lord has filled the world, and that which holds all things together has knowledge of speech. —Wisdom 1:7

A profusion of meanings attached to the idea of the Word in ancient Western history. To the Hebrews it meant the breath of God, the commandments, or the scripture. To the early Christians it meant the person of Christ and the profession of the faithful, the Gospels and the sacrament of the Eucharist. To the Greek and Roman theologians it meant as well the principle or pattern of the universe, the underlying reason of matter and the fulfillment of humanity. But the “Word” accrued these various meanings without contradiction, referring to the whole body of received tradition, achieving a figural elasticity and potency that came to typify its use. The audacity of the thought contained in John’s predication—“And the Word was God”— was a crystallizing moment in this expansionist history, and Christian theology in its long gestation was victorious in 31

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maintaining the identity of person and Word. The doctrinal insistence on this identity had enormous consequences for thought in the West beyond religion. Gadamer noted: “I personally believe that this doctrine has constantly stimulated the course of thought in the West as a challenge and invitation to try and think that which continually transcends the limits of human understanding.”1 What hermeneutics says in its appropriation of the theology of the word is that what takes place in language, in the life of a promise, in the uncertainty that opens up before a question, in the world that emerges from a story, is who we are. Our meaningfulness, our love, our coherence, our ability to relate to anything and everything, arises out of this central and primal being-in-the-middle-of language. At its source, human being is with language. The meaning of things is intrinsic to logos, that in which humans understand. This view is alien to a rationalist culture that sees language as merely instrumental, as a tool, or as a container for information. We think now that we use language to name truth, but it is rather in language that we have any truth, for all its ambiguity, its rootedness in culture and particularity, and its origin in the human voice. Gadamer’s understanding of Sprachlichkeit draws on this conception of language that grew out of a stream of thought that was fed by the Talmud and the New Testament, the Stoics and the Church Fathers, medieval scholasticism and German mysticism, Lutheranism and the counterEnlightenment.

Talmud and Targum Gadamer spoke tangentially about Judaism’s role at the origins of hermeneutics, and this was not enough.2 Hermeneutics needs not just a belated acknowledgment, but an openness to the continued vital role of the midrashic tradition as a guide to hermeneutic understanding. Whereas Christology may express the extreme limit of the idea of linguistic embodiment, the understanding of tradition as a living voice in Christian practice is still deeply dependent on that original mediation of divine utterance and human interpretation. Jewish scriptural tradition provides, from a Western rationalist point of view, a radical understanding of the living word. The rabbinical prac-

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tice of biblical exegesis is a response to the words of scripture carried on over the millennia as a conversation, originally and primarily an oral conversation. Thus the Word existed for the larger community in the living voice of the exegete in dialogue with the congregation, and the law was transmitted as both text and commentary. But the great interpretive traditions were in their earliest histories oral not only because of illiteracy among the faithful or scarcity of texts, but also because “the Oral Law (rightly) was seen as subject to further change, a malleable thing,” and “to write it down would be to freeze it, to institutionalize it.”3 Because the scriptures constituted a covenant law that informed the life of the community, the institutions of religious study, teaching and observance were simultaneously forms of judicial proceeding that adjudicated on questions of right thinking about the meaning of scripture for the social body. The observance of religion thus operated within a legal framework of precedent, appeals, review, and application, not simply interpreting the covenant but developing it through debate, deliberation, and adjudication. An oral tradition was congruent with this fluid and developing practice, which was by its very nature intended to serve as an adaptation to particular circumstances.4 Eventually both the mass of accumulated law and the dispersion of the faithful across vast distances compelled rabbis to record and disseminate interpretation in writing.5 This adversion to textuality nevertheless retained something of the motile and extemporaneous character of the oral tradition. The Gemara, for instance, a commentary text on the legal rulings derived from the Bible known as the Mishnah, is a kind of transcript of the scholarly debates in the academy, typically recording both sides of an interpretive dispute. A passage from Mishnah was interpreted by a question and answer session which may or may not have resolved an interpretive question. If the interpretation remained at issue, the Gemara structure allowed a formal means to defer the answer indefinitely (344). This practice institutionalized the open-ended power of interpretation to keep the text alive, and it is no exaggeration to say that “the Talmud has never been completed” (274). The practice gives exemplary force to Gadamer’s rubric that there is no last word. Roger Le Déaut provides a rich account of the interpretive nature of the Hebrew scriptural tradition and a helpful summary of its hermeneutic practices in Liturgie juive et Nouveau Testament. He notes first that

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the canon of Jewish texts comprising sacred scriptures was itself a constantly evolving interpretive tradition. What is primary text and what is gloss was not anywhere as important in that tradition as in modern literate cultures of the West.“Scriptures” were a progressive elaboration which in a peculiar way resisted canonization, even as that canonization became necessary. Because of the value attached to the living character of the covenant voice, the cultural assumption was the opposite of our trained belief in the determinateness and historical intentionality of texts. The importance of the oral tradition gave a certain priority to interpretation that had the effect of equaling out the relationship between what is set down and fixed and the conversation that grows out of the confrontation with the text: “In effect, it is absolutely certain that [Scripture and Tradition] were not separated and that the sacred text was not considered independently from its traditional interpretation. . . . Scripture and Tradition formed one unique source of revelation which was continually evolving under the guidance of the Spirit.”6 The fluid relation of scripture and reception is inscribed in the text itself, which developed as an ongoing effort of transmission and reception: “Isaiah refers back to Amos; Jeremiah shows the influence of Hosea, then of Isaiah; Ezechiel, beyond his ties to the holy Code, goes back to Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and above all Jeremiah.”7 The traditions of the synagogue were an actualization of Gadamer’s assertion that every text “must be understood at every moment, in every concrete situation, in a new and different way.”8 The interpretation of scripture was its Vollzug: “It has always to do with a living word addressed personally to a people of God and to each of its members, a word which manifests the divine expectations and commands, and which calls for a response which is not simply theoretical, but rather an actual engagement of the faith of the community and of its members to the demands made manifest in it.”9 In the intensely engaged way that scripture is made the community’s own, the text is not allowed to become alien. Speaking of tradition in a remarkable Gadamerian voice, Déaut observes: “One sees that within this conflict between Scripture and Tradition it is Tradition which wins out!”10 This is tradition as living conversation, the practices of study and worship that constitute the sedimented communal knowledge which emerges out of a constant effort of appropriation. The weaving together of canonic texts and interpretive traditions11 undermines habitual modern assumptions about interpretive fidelity and

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textual authority, and challenges us to rethink our standard assumptions about interpretive practice. In targumic exegesis, “the meturgeman, without any scruples, reads the text with a meaning opposite to what is in the text” (19). Radical interpretive practice was in a sense built into the structure of scripture, given the inherent ambiguity of a written text without vowels: “Thus the interpreter could give to the consonants of many words in the text several possible vocalizations so as to extract all the possible meanings of the word” (19). The idea embedded in the preservation of midrash and targum is an alteration of the sense for the priority of the original. The idea here is that oral improvisation enriches the material which constitutes the living word.12 The original text is not authoritative, but cherished as the generative source of new understanding. As Déaut summarizes it, the interpretive texts “should not therefore be considered solely as privileged witnesses to the history and critical establishment of the sacred text,” but rather “as revealing the various stages in the evolution of religious ideas” (21). This interpretive practice was resolutely hermeneutical, in the sense that the secrets of the text were the occasions for interpretation, understood to be the genuine actualization of the sacred meanings inherent in scriptures, but finding fulfillment only in continual interpretation. Here the canonical text plays the role of a kind of seed or germ of wisdom, and the interpretive practice the fruition of the seed, as important in the particularity of its adaptations and in its connection to the root: “The Word of God is living, addressed hic et nunc (‘here and now’) to human beings of all times. It maintains all of its practical value as the rule of life, from which flow religious teaching by constant adaptation to new situations” (11). Thus Judaic scriptural interpretation addresses the central problem of utterance of transcendent being: How is the Word of God made manifest? To an unparalleled extent, Jewish religious practices embody an answer to this question. The indeterminacy of human reception is bound up in the very utterance. Scriptural interpretation “can be carried on at considerable length, or in several directions, and to no determinate end. This open-endedness suggests that the rabbis did not think of interpretation as problem solving, settling things once and for all, or working toward a final agreement as to how the text is to be taken.”13 Moreover, the Word is not an expression captive to the past, to a law once set down, but bears the marks of its own temporality in an even more profound sense:

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The entrance of God’s eternal Word into the human realm means that it is formed in the future as well: “As a redacted rather than an authored text, the Scriptures are structurally orientated away from an original intention toward the manifold possibilities of future understanding. They possess the openness to the future interpretation that is characteristic of, for example, a good law” (76). Thus ancient Jewish practice is already a deeply informed and mature hermeneutic understanding of the idea of a living word mediated through writing and interpretation.

The Word of God in Hebrew Scriptures For she is a reflection of the everlasting light, and a spotless mirror of the activity of God, and a likeness of his goodness. Though she is one, she can do all things, and while remaining in herself, she makes everything new. —Wisdom of Solomon 7:27 ‒‒ 28.

What is the relationship between the Word of the Hebrew and New Testament scriptures? Some have maintained that the hypostasization of the Word is suggested, anticipated or prefigured by the personifications of Yahweh’s mediating power, but this position has been controversial, and less and less accepted. Bultmann, for instance, is dismissive of the desire to find incarnation prefigured: “The mythological hypostasizing of the ‘word’ can be ignored.”14 For one thing, Hebrew faith emphasized the profound otherness of Yahweh, and resisted the anthropomorphic tendencies of other ancient religions with which it came in contact.15 The interruption of the relation between God and humans was occasioned by sin at the origin of history, so that Hebrew scripture, particularly by the time of the post-exilic Wisdom writings, tended as it developed to mark the godhead as a being apart, a transcendent figure whose distance was explained by the rupture of the covenant bond.16 Intermediation was understood as a response to alienation, and the Word carries the weight of mediation on its own shoulders, so to speak: “God’s word is God’s act, not because the Word is reasonable but precisely because it is incompre-

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hensible. But God’s Word is God also in so far as he claims men by an understandable command under which man stands.”17 It is easy to see, however, what leads to seeing prefigurations of Christ in Judaism. In scripture, divine agency emerges under various guises in the character of messengers, increasingly in personified form, either of Wisdom, Prudence, or the Word. In Proverbs, wisdom is fully personified: Doth not wisdom cry aloud, and prudence put forth her voice? Standing in the top of the highest places by the way, in the midst of the paths, beside the gates of the city, in the very doors she speaketh, saying: O ye men, to you I call, and my voice is to the sons of men. . . . I wisdom dwell in counsel, and am present in learned thoughts. . . . The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made any thing from the beginning. I was set up from eternity, and of old before the earth was made. The depths were not as yet, and I was already conceived, neither had the fountains of waters as yet sprung out: The mountains with their huge bulk had not as yet been established: before the hills I was brought forth: He had not yet made the earth, nor the rivers, nor the poles of the world. When he prepared the heavens, I was present: when with a certain law and compass he enclosed the depths: When he established the sky above, and poised the fountains of waters: When he compassed the sea with its bounds, and set a law to the waters that they should not pass their limits: when he balanced the foundations of the earth; I was with him forming all things: and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times; playing in the world: and my delights were to be with the children of men. (8:1 ‒ 31) In the Psalms the Word is also clearly personified: “He sendeth forth His commandment on earth, His Word runneth very swiftly” (Ps. 147:15); “The Word which Isaiah saw” (Ps. 107:20; 119:89). The Christian theological scholar Jarislov Pelikan regards Wisdom in the Hebrew scriptures to be of even greater significance for the development of the Logos doctrine than John: “ ‘Logos’ never lost the Old Testament connotations which, despite the term’s eventual role as an apologetic device, had originally been the basis of its appearance in the Christian vocabulary. In fact, if we concentrate on the entire body of Christian literature rather than on the apologetic corpus, it becomes evidence that the basis for the fullest

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statement of the Christian doctrine of the divine in Christ as Logos was provided not by its obvious documentation in John 1:1 ‒ 14 but by Proverbs 8:22 ‒‒ 31” (186). It is here in Proverbs that personified wisdom is established as equiprimordial with the creative power and the mediating force of deliverance: “The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made any thing from the beginning . . . . When he prepared the heavens, I was present. . . . I was with him forming all things. . . . He that shall find me, shall find life.” Perhaps the most important convention was the investment of the Word with the power of creative action: “By the Word of the Lord were the heavens made . . .” (Ps. 33:6). This makes explicit what is implicit in Genesis, where speech (“And God said . . .”) and not thought is privileged. God utters the universe. This agency of the Word becomes a critical component of twentieth-century philosophical hermeneutics, and its privileged expression in the tradition is already here in Hebrew scripture. In the Jewish tradition, the word calls a community into being, and keeps it alive. Whenever its community was threatened with destruction, a constant feature of its history, it found its preservation in the sacred writings and practices. The word came to be understood as literally that which sustains, preserves, and gives meaning. This deep respect for the word found its fullest expression in the idea of covenant. The relation of covenant is a peculiar kind of relation. It connects an event which falls into the past, an instituting moment of commitment, to a later condition of blessedness, through a stipulation, an adherence to the understanding that informs the commitment.18 The promise of covenant is a testimony to the value of the relation and its proof. This commitment entails an implicit responsibility on the other end, a reciprocal promise, i.e., remaining true to that which inspired the commitment. The word is no mere information vehicle, but the witness of our fullest value as human beings. As such the word carries our humanity with it. Commitments to temporal beings are, nevertheless, fraught, because we are frail and corruptible, and the promise we hold out is uncertain, existing rather as a potentiality that will suffer a history. Covenant, therefore, implies within its very structure the uncertainty of contingent experience and the fragility of volition. I promise because I need to keep a determination before my mind, against failure of memory, changes of perception, weakness of will, intervention of obstacles, accidents of fate.19

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Our promises are inspired by an insight into the value of a thing and an awareness that that insight is transient. Such promises intend themselves as a proof against time.20 The sense of the word as that which claims and sustains people in sacred community thus has deep roots in the Judaic tradition, and the most prodigious innovations of Patristic theology on the doctrine of the Word do not supplant this contribution. It is a salient presence and a profound legacy for hermeneutics.

Lovgoı One of the fruits of the confluence of Judaeo-Christian and GrecoHellenistic cultures was the conception of the Son in the New Testament as “Logos.” Martin Heidegger never ceased thinking about “all that is said in the Greek word lovgoı?21 Its shifting registers of meaning in archaic and classical Greek culture is a linguistic fact we still marvel at.22 Marcel Detienne’s description of the Greek sense of lovgoı, which I summarize here, gives some sense of the power of this conception and its relevance for our study. In archaic Greece, poetic speech (lovgoı) structured reality by weaving together the world of Mneme with present life through praise narrative. The worth of the warrior was conferred by his institution in the memory of song (lov g oı) by fighting off the death of oblivion. The judicial speech of sovereignty gave to lovgoı the authority of ethical truth, truth present in the word itself. Oracular speech (lovgoı) divined truth through second sight, guarding decision against contingency. Martial speech completed the arsenal of the warrior as an attribute of military skill, through which his valor was realized and accomplished.23 One of the great enigmas of the Greek lovgoı is that it enabled both the enormous symbolic potency and productive ambiguity of Greek mythos along with the zeal for the clarity of categorial logic that the Greeks bequeathed to the Western tradition. It is important to keep in mind that the purging of ambiguity in the Western conception of logic is a later development, and that in ancient Greece lovgoı never entirely lost both senses. Detienne theorizes that the Greeks moved towards rationalism as democratic forms emerged out of military culture. Because of the loose organization and dispersion of authority in the tribal confederations

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of armies, principles of equity lay at the base of the distribution of spoils, and deliberative discourse fostered social cohesion. Dialogue to determine what is best became a dominant practice in the emergence of new political and cultural forms. Once this practice was habitual the axis of speech shifted in emphasis from truth as the mediator between oblivion and memory to truth as the arbiter between knowledge and doxa.24 But even as Greece moved towards a rationalist faith, logos never quite lost the enharmonics of its origins, and the potency of ambiguity and memory continually sounded through Plato and Aristotle. With the birth of philosophical thinking, the sudden extraordinary discovery of the abstract, the power of logos, the thought and its naming, comes to the center of attention. In attempting to understand what Heraclitus meant to say about logos, one must hold together in one’s mind the web of related meanings it seems to possess for him, which is to say, at the very least, reason, word, proportion, principle, intuition, measure, account, law, and energy of order. Heraclitus cultivated a style of affirmation that left these varieties of meanings about logos intentionally open. He could cultivate this ambiguity because logos had still this freedom of potential. It was for him a master term, somewhat like what contemporary physicists hail as a theory of everything.25 For Heraclitus, the ceaseless change of the world is lawful, the working out of relations of balance in the rhythms of opposition and reconciliation. He called this principle of order variously lovgoı divkh or eiJmarmevnh.26 The multiple and the indeterminate did not threaten chaos, as if unity had been abandoned by nature, because they were themselves a relation by opposition to unity. Heraclitus reconciled the many and the one through the attunement of opposing tensions in the logos with the use of a musical metaphor: “There is a back-stretched connection, as in the bow and the lyre.”27 Palivntonoı means counter-stretched, the tension of the bowstring by opposite forces to assure its attunement. Because at a certain point Greek thought began to understand the logos as a sign, as an instrument of communication, it followed a path away from language as presentation toward the instrumentalist perspective that has become our heritage.28 But we will now leap past this rationalization of the concept of logos to the Christian conception that, according to Gadamer, “prevented the forgetfulness of language in Western thought.”29

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The Christian Appropriation John and Paul continue the scriptural tradition of personifying the Word and exhibit the same fluidity in passing between references to Christ as person, utterance, instrument, and conception. Normal speech categories are simply flattened in the range of usage that attaches to the denominations of the godhead. The Son can be both progeny and declamation in the same predicative construction: “No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18). In the locution “until Christ be formed in you” (Gal. 4:19), Christ means at once the entire Bildung of Christian character and life and the personal Savior. John’s use of Logos in the prologue adds a further twist to an already fraught construction. Christ as utterance is the eventfulness of history itself as an animating force that contains its own telos. Logos combines the Jewish sense of word as personal and communal destiny with the Greek sense of logos as principle of order that permeates the universe. Westcott describes the confluence of traditions in the word logos: When St. John surveys in his own person, in a few sentences, the great facts of the Incarnation in their connection with all the past and all the future, and as they reach beyond the very bounds of time, he speaks of the Lord under a title (lovgoı) which is only faintly and partially imaged by “the Word.” The rendering, even on the one side which it approaches, limits and confines that which in the original is wide and discursive. As far as the term Logos expresses a revelation, it is not an isolated utterance, but a connected story, a whole and not a part, perfect in itself, and including the notions of design and completion. But the meaning of Logos is only half-embraced by the most full recognition of the idea of a given revelation, conveyed by one who is at once the Messenger and the Message, speaking from the beginning in the hearts of men, of whom He was the Life and Light, and by the mouth of those who were His prophets: it includes also that yet higher idea, which we cannot conceive except by the help of the language which declares it, according to which the revelation is, in human language, as thought, and the Revealer as reason, in relation to the Deity. In this sense the title lifts us beyond the clouds of earth and time, and shows

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that that which has been realized among men in the slow progress of the world’s history, was, towards God, in the depths of the Divine Being before creation.30 Irenaeus made the circular direction of this movement even clearer: “His handiwork, confirmed and incorporated with His Son, is brought to perfection; that His offspring, the First-begotten Word, should descend to the creature, that is, to what has been molded, and that it should be contained by Him; and, on the other hand, the creature should contain the Word, and ascend to Him, passing beyond the angels, and be made after the image and likeness of God.”31 This circular movement was taught to Irenaeus by Isaiah: “And as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return no more thither, but soak the earth, and water it, and make it to spring, and give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be, which shall go forth from my mouth: it shall not return to me void, but it shall do whatsoever I please, and shall prosper in the things for which I sent it” (55:10 ‒‒ 11). The Greek notion of the word as manifestation is absorbed and transformed in the Christian theology of incarnation: “As the Son and Logos of God, Christ was the revelation of the nature of God; in the formula of Irenaeus, ‘the Father is that which is invisible about the Son, the Son is that which is visible about the Father.’”32 This analogy of incarnation to language is worked out with rigor and precision. As Gregory explains it: “He is ‘Word,’ because he is related to the Father as word is to mind, not only by reason of the undisturbed character of his birth, but also through the connection and declaratory function involved in the relationship. One could say too, perhaps, that his relationship is that of definition to term defined, since ‘word’ has the meaning in Greek of ‘definition.’ He who has known the Son (‘seen’ means ‘known’ in that context) has known the Father. The Son is the concise and simple revelation of the Father’s nature—everything born in a tacit definition of its parent.”33 The analogy of language as revelation in the sense of making outward what is inside cannot be pressed too far, as Cyril makes clear: “Nor did the Father beget the Son as among men mind begets word. For the mind in us is subsistent, but the word, when uttered is dispersed through the air and is lost. But we know that Christ was begotten, not as a word pronounced, but a Word subsisting and living.”34 As Augustine and Aquinas will later

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explain it, the analogy of speech falls short insofar as the Word was begotten “far more swiftly than our words and thoughts. For in our case, when we speak in time, we consume time; but when there is question of Divine Power, the generation is timeless” (219). As Westcott puts it, the divine Word “is not an isolated utterance, but a connected story, a whole and not a part, perfect in itself, and including the notions of design and completion.”35 This distinction reflects a tension that will appear in secular hermeneutics as well with regard to the finitude of discourse. Whether personified in the figure of Wisdom (Sophia), or expressed as an agent of God’s will, as a spirit moving among his people, as a power (duvnamiı), as a word passed down in covenant, or as a son somehow different from all the other children of God, the idea of the full personhood of the Word seemed to emerge in the strange new religion with the force of revelation. Here is one of the signal instances of the power of an idea, that somehow in the juxtaposition of the preposition and the copula— “and the Word was God”—a faith tradition should find its special character. That the divine promise could be conceived as a person not metaphorically but literally was the locus of a faith which saw deliverance through an act of love. What more perfect expression of love than in the form of a person, which is how we understand love, and what more perfect act of generosity than the complete giving of oneself ? The identification of person and word is the enigma at the center of Gadamer’s appropriation: “In this way the early Fathers used the miracle of language to explain the un-Greek idea of the creation.”36 The mixed heritage of the Word is a perplexity for the German Protestant theologians of the twentieth century who were part of the background of Gadamer’s treatment of logos and verbum. Bultmann tried to separate the two streams of culture that collided in John’s logos. He objected to the hypostasization of the word, which he believed was not sanctioned by the text of the Bible, and was only a later innovation of Alexandrian origin. He drew a sharp line between the Greek and Hebrew senses of the word. The Hebrew sense is, in the first place, the spoken and living word, speech that makes a claim in a personal way, “a temporal event in a specific situation, an event in a specific history.”37 It is the arbitrary and incomprehensible summons of God to an individual or community. It is thus principally that which is spoken and heard in the eventfulness of the moment, as a claim made upon one and as a call to

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decision (291). By contrast, for the Greek what is important is the meaning that inheres in the lovgoı itself, not the fact that it is spoken: Thus the word is not primarily regarded as the event of its being spoken, but as possessing comprehensible meaning. . . . The original meaning of levgein (saying) is not “summon” but “explain.” The root meaning of levgein is colligere = gather up; but in the sense of a selective gathering, cf. Homer, Odyssey 24, 107f.,“it is even as though one should choose out and gather together (krinavmenoı levxaito) the best warriors of the city.” In the further development of the usage, the element of judging (krivnein) in the gathering was emphasized, so that levgein acquires the sense of estimating, classifying, analyzing, explaining. . . . Logos acquires the sense of proof, of cause. It is the meaning, not the being spoken, which is constitutive. (292) This basic position is echoed in Gadamer’s attribution of Greek forgetfulness of language,38 but as Bultmann elaborates his distinction, the clarity of the opposition he creates opens up space between himself and philosophical hermeneutics. Whereas Gadamer’s tendency is to see the confluence of traditions in the conception of verbum, Bultmann sees their radical difference: In Greek, therefore, Logos does not have the character of a summons. In fact, the idea of summons is wholly absent. Anyone who listens to the discourse of a philosopher should agree with the Logos—not with the philosopher. Anyone who hears the Logos does not feel any claim upon him which arises out of the immediate situation confronting him. . . . He hears no Thou; he hears himself, whose real existence is an existence in the Logos. Therefore Socrates can understand the oracle of the Delphic go, “know thyself,” as directing him to the pronouncements of reason. Therefore an absolute claim is never presented by a single Logos, as it is by the Word in the Old Testament. The single statement must always remain open to argument; that is it must always be questioned anew. Therefore the speaker has no authority. Each man must listen even to the rocks and trees and decide “whether they speak the truth.” This conception of the Logos dominates Greek thought to the end. . . . Man does not understand his existence as historical existence which is determined by the interaction of I and Thou.

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He seeks to understand his existence in the world from the standpoint of the thinking self. He does not need to “hear”; he wants to “see.” The Logos is not summons but declaration. (293) The counter to Bultmann’s position of difference, and a position more congenial to Gadamer, is Ebeling’s view that “what the Bible means by ‘word’ does not, for all its differences, put out of commission what the Greek understands by ‘word,’ while on the other hand the Greek conception of hermeneutic, with its root in the Logos idea, allows of being corrected in the light of the biblical understanding of ‘word.’”39 Ebeling sees the encounter of the two traditions of logos to be “exceedingly fruitful” (100). The eventfulness, the historical nature of speech, serves the theology of the Word and the secular function of language, since it is incumbent on humans in any case “to search for that word which is a true” word (104). Gadamer stands in a strange relation to Bultmann’s opposition. In spite of his basic agreement with Bultmann about the Greek forgetfulness of language, he articulates a position about the logos which is an amalgam of the two tendencies Bultmann describes as opposite. The word exists for Gadamer, as for the Greeks, beyond just the personal claim or intention of the speaker. But on the other hand, the word for Gadamer is surely an encounter of the I and the Thou, and it is something one needs to hear rather than see. Both of these principles are bedrock for philosophical hermeneutics. The word makes a claim on us, even though that claim does not emerge from a subjective will.

Stoicism The Greek development of logic with Aristotle is indicative of a cultural movement towards objectification, toward the reduction of language to a sign-function, and therefore of the diminishing importance of logos as an ontological principle. Even in the pagan tradition after Aristotle, however, there was something like a return to an appreciation of the logos as an ontological category. In Stoic thought, the metaphysical conception of the logos spermatikos, the distinction between the logos prophorikos and endiathetos, and the mediating role of the lekton were potent elaborations of language theory that prepared for Augustine’s conception of the inner word.

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a. logos spermatikos The Stoics’ conception of logos operates as a principle of proportion through dynamic tension. This Heracletian-like tension is that of the stringed instrument that creates a sympatheia, a coherence from interaction, exhibiting the balance of the opposing movements of nature.40 Human being is caught up in this tensive motion, since human perception is a kind of communication interface, or to put it differently, understanding is a meeting point of nature’s sympatheia: “anima . . . quae in medio consistens ubique permeat usque at superficiem in medium vertitur.”41 It should be noted here that this understanding of human being as interface or turning point in the work of the logos (in medium vertitur) could not be more important. It is the thread that winds through this entire study on the verbum, tied into the structure of language for Augustine, Aquinas, Hegel, Heidegger, and Gadamer. Seminal logos (spermatikoi˜ lovgoi) combines the fulsome generativity of language and the order of reason in an interacting whole. Because this dialectical relation could be found both in nature at its basic structural level and in human understanding, the Stoics believed in a reciprocal interaction between physical nature and human reason. This answered a problem in Aristotle’s metaphysics. Aristotle developed the idea of a noesis noeseos, thought of thought, which he deduced to be, as the final cause of the universe, immaterial, without potentiality, and so self-standing.42 The problem of bridging the immanence and transcendence of mind and world in this formulation was recognized by Aristotle’s own students, and their attempt to reconcile the problem led to the reinstatement of logos to its former stature. First Theophrastus (c. 370 ‒‒ 286 BC), who left Plato to work with Aristotle, rejected a transcendent nous in favor of nous as a “self-developing activity.”43 His successor Strato (c. 340 ‒‒ c. 270 BC) continued to radicalize this notion of a reason in nature that differed only in degree from the reason found in human thought. Although growing out of the Peripatetic school, the Stoics inclined to a more unitary and inclusive theory of relation, wherein mind and world are consubstantial. The reason of the human soul and the reason of the universe are not different in kind, but exist rather along a continuum. Reason simply permeates all matter, and thus stands without need of an external cause. Aristotle’s unmoved mover becomes un-

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necessary, and the problem of transcendence is resolved through a return to an older sense of the logos. For the Stoics, as distinct from Aristotle, nous and logos exist either as synonyms or on a close continuum. Zeno of Citium speaks of “right reason which pervades all things, and is identical with Zeus.”44 Alexander of Aphrodisias relates that “god is mixed with matter, pervading all of it and so shaping it, structuring it, and making it into the world.”45 This Stoic idea is described eloquently in the Aeneid: “First of all the heaven and the earth and the expanses of the sea and the shining globe of the moon and the Titan stars are nourished by a spirit (spiritus) from within, and Mind (mens), penetrating every limb, moves the whole mass and is mingled with the vast body. From this come the race of humans” (Aeneid 6.724 ‒ 728).46 This reason is pervasive and single,“in accordance with our own human nature as well as that of the universe,”47 and it works its way from the divine will in ordering the cosmos through to the ordering of human life by reason: “Again, living virtuously is equivalent to living in accordance with experience of the actual course of nature, as Chrysippus says in the first book of his De finibus; for our individual natures are parts of the nature of the whole universe.”48 It should be noted that the same view emerges in the Wisdom literature in Judaic tradition. The sages “believed that written into the very nature of things is a divine order which can be found through human search and reflection. To live in harmony with this order brings the good life.”49 If logos is pervasive, the various dualisms (objective/subjective, nature/ reason, mind/world) can be discounted. Now the relation of immanence and transcendence is reciprocated rather than barricaded. This power of logos to bridge the universal order and the interior of the human soul prepares the ground for the doctrine of the inner word in Augustine. Logos is already in the pagan conception fully a communicatio Dei: Epictetus’s statement is so prescient at so many levels that a long quotation is warranted: And if our minds are so bound up with God and in such close touch with Him as being part and portion of His very being, does not God perceive their every movement as closely akin to Him? Consider this: you, a man, have power to reflect on the divine governance and on each divine operation as well as upon things human, you have the faculty

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of being moved in your senses and your intelligence by countless objects, sometimes assenting, sometimes rejecting, sometimes doubting; you guard in your own mind these many impressions derived from so many and various objects, and moved by them you conceive thoughts corresponding to those objects which have first impressed you, and so from countless objects you derive and maintain one after another the products of art and memory. And this you do, and is God not able to behold all things and be present with all and to have some communication with all? . . . “But,” says one, “I cannot comprehend all these things at once.” Of course no one tells you that in faculty you are equal to Zeus. Nevertheless He has set by each man his genius to guard him. . . . Therefore, when you close your doors and make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone: you are not alone, God is within, and your genius [is within].50 Epictetus’s argument that the human soul both mirrors and participates in the godhead, and that therefore intellect can have access to the divine by inner reflection is both the argument and the method of Augustine’s inquiry into the nature of the Trinity, and, as we shall see, the path along which he discovers the verbum interius. The way was further prepared for the doctrine of the word by certain original aspects of Hellenistic thought. Initially, the dissipation of Greek hegemony in the Mediterranean and the fragmenting of its culture and traditions led to a pragmatic and more narrowly scientific development of Aristotle’s program. The already weakening hold of religion lost its moorings in the migration of culture east and west, and in reaction, thought turned to the ethical life of the individual. Aristotelianism continued to evolve as it broke the boundaries of Greece and extended through the Hellenistic empire, especially in the elaboration of the individual sciences and the practical use of reason. Increasingly drained of its ties to the sacred and unable to feed the hunger for religious comfort, the cultural influences of the East beckoned. Gradually materialist science and ethics began to feel the influence of these metaphysical longings, and philosophy began to reflect a greater attention to the health of the soul. This transition was aided by the dependence of the Peripatetic and Stoic schools on the teleological, as opposed to atomist, view of nature, which located “the natural causes of the cosmic processes . . . in the origi-

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nal qualities (poiotaites) and powers (dynamis) of things.”51 The Peripatetic Strato (second successor to Aristotle) rejects the transcendence of the prime-moving power that animates the cosmos, placing its dynamis squarely in nature. Nature itself contains the engine of its own self development, and no external force is necessary. This is well expressed later in Seneca. An integrated ontoepistemology combined a science of nature with the more ancient idea of divinity within human reason: “Reason, however, is nothing else than a portion of the divine spirit set in a human body” [Ratio autem nihil aliud est quam in corpus humanum pars divini spiritus mersa].52 The Stoics construed a cosmos that was a living and complete whole described in terms of dynamic continuum, coalescent union, vital tension, total mixture, or sympathy. By postulating an affinity of the various parts to the whole, uniqueness and difference could exist within a syncretic unity. The vision of a cosmos with an animating reason embedded in every particular, moving towards a kind of blessed order of the whole, was ripe for its Christian appropriation and transformation. Telos had not yet been transformed into a concept of historical precedent, and so development occurred according to a recurrent pattern: “Fate is a sempiternal and unchangeable series and chain of things, rolling and unraveling itself through eternal sequences of cause and effect, of which it is composed and compounded.”53 Because of the unbroken continuity between the material and the spiritual in the Stoic universe, the animating physical principles of nature were carried over into human psychology. Logos becomes the active cosmic principle, permeating both the physical world and the human mind: “Mind, penetrating every limb, moves the whole mass and is mingled with the vast body.”54 More than this, the Stoics saw mind and world as reciprocally interpenetrating: [T]he end may be defined as life in accordance with nature, or, in other words, in accordance with our own human nature as well as that of the universe, a life in which we refrain from every action forbidden by the law common to all things, that is to say, the right reason [orthos logos] which pervades all things, and is identical with this Zeus, order and ruler of all that is. And this very thing constitutes the virtue of the happy man and the smooth current of life, when all actions promote the harmony of the spirit dwelling in the individual man with the will of him who orders the universe.55

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Reason, the tendency towards order and pattern, is instinct with nature, and the whole of nature is moving towards its own perfection in each of its parts. The Stoics regarded this mutual interdependence of part and whole, spirit and matter, mind and body, as an operative principle, sympatheia: “The physical state is an organization of dynamic character, each of its elements subsisting only in co-existence with the rest, and not able to exist if the organization as a whole disintegrates.”56 Seeing, then, that the Universe also is a body, it is either unified or of conjoined or separate parts. But it is neither of conjoined nor of separate parts, as we prove from the “sympathies” it exhibits. . . . So then, the Universe is not held together by mere attraction. But if not by this, then certainly by organic structure; for even the bodies which are controlled by soul were first of all held together by organic structure. Necessarily, then, it must be held together by the best structure, since it contains the structures of all things. But that which contains the structures of all things contains also such as are rational; and, moreover, that which contains the rational organic structures is certainly rational. . . . But if that structure which governs the Universe is the best, it will be intelligent and virtuous and immortal. And being such, it is God.57 The tension or tonos that guarantees the coherence of the physical continuum is repeated in the structure of the mind. This tension is a movement of opposites that creates a balance, whether in the case of the cosmos—how earth and water are bound together by the pneuma, or in the case of the soul—how health and well-being are bound together by ponikhv kivnhsiı. This tonic movement is not a Newtonian movement from one point in space to another. Its movement, according to Chrysippus, is “both inward and outward at the same time.”58 The double movement into and out of itself (ejx auJtou¯ te kai; eijı auJtov) is regarded as one single movement, and the opposing directions of the movement account for distinctions of multiplicity and unity: “The tonic movement that moves outward creates quantity and quality, and that which moves inward, unity and substance.”59 When this bi-directional movement is translated into the reasoning capacity of humans, it explains the double action of intellect in negotiating the material and immaterial sides of the world. What initially looked like a reduction and simplification of Aris-

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totle by going back to a unified Logos shows signs of something more complex—a reflexive logos that turns back upon itself. b. prolepseis and lekta The Stoics had an idea of innate tendency, the natural elaboration in humans of basic drives and mechanisms, such as the will to self-preservation, the resistance to what is unpleasant, etc. The natural-born inclinations associated with human cognition were called prolhvpyeiı, preconceptions or anticipations.60 According to Diogenes Laertius, Chrysippus describes these preconceptions as “being a general notion which comes by the gift of nature (an innate conception of universals or general concepts),61 what Watson elaborates as “anticipations, necessary assumptions, linking tendencies.”62 Or they may be notions acquired by experience which then become sedimented into preconceptions or schematisms, notions that are “manifested, activated or embodied by working on the matter presented through the senses” (24). Here is Plutarch’s summary of the case: The Stoics say as follows: At the birth of man, the governing part of the soul resembles a blank sheet ready for the inscription of every notion. The first mode of inscription comes through the senses: If one perceives, for example, a white object, one is able to recall it once it has disappeared. Once these memories of like kind become numerous, we speak of experience (in effect, experience is the abundance of “representations” of the same type). Among notions, some are produced naturally by the process just described and without intervention of any technique, while the others necessitate on our part experiment and work. These latter have the single name of “notions,” while the former are also called prenotions.63 As such, prolhvpyeiı are not hard-wired innate ideas or templates but rather motile schematisms that continue to form in the course of experience. This experience, it is noted, colors the taking in of percepts: “[A]t all events a statue is viewed in a totally different way by the trained eye of a sculptor and by an ordinary man.”64 As a priori of developmental schematisms, the proleipseis are elements in a process that leads from perception to expression, sometimes through reasoning, in an unbroken chain,

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as Diocles is reported to have written: “For presentation [fantasivaı] comes first; then thought, which is capable of expressing itself, puts into the form of a proposition that which the subject receives from a presentation.”65 The products of these predispositions or tendencies in the mind the Stoics called lekta, judgments ready for articulation in words. It is important to catch the virtuality of this conception of lekton (literally “the sayable”), which is “neither the word nor, of course, the object nor the ejnnovhma, but the connection established by us in the external universe and between it and ourselves, because of logos through which we tend to articulate reality for ourselves.”66 As mediating nexus, the lekton is not very far, as we shall see, from the structure and function of the verbum interius, both as it is worked out by Augustine and Aquinas. The prolepseis as seminal patterns modified by experience must be just the other side of the lekta that manifest these evolving patterns, and exist to each other as recto and verso of an articulate understanding. It is difficult to imagine speech divorced from intention, but if we could separate out the mere sounds that resonate from the passage of air through the vocal chords, such sounds would be meaningless, and not what we call speech. The physical exteriorization of speech is an effort to communicate to another, an effort to articulate an understanding, and a part of the process of coming to be in the ongoing development of the logos which is also simultaneously the formative energy of our meaningful existence. This conception of lekta is implicit already in the belief that the cosmos is permeated by logos, since Stoicism simply took as given the essential connection of order, reason, and speech as manifestations of the same thing, logos. The labile interaction between prolepseis and lekta, between patterns of thought continually shaped in the course of experience and their linguistic embodiment in the activity of speech, as well as their parasitic relationship to experience, describe a linguistic understanding that is anything but the simple adequation of signs of later semiotic theories.

Logos Endiathetos Chrysippus gave a name to an idea immanent in the ancient logos by distinguishing between logos endiathetos and logos prophorikos, the word held within the breast and the word uttered into the air.67 Like the Latin

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ratio and oratio, the pairing suggests the close common identity of thought and language. This distinction is nothing as simple as an idea in the mind and a word expressing that idea. It is the wonderful fact that the one word as word somehow still inhabits the other, both being neither simply ever thought nor speech. I will draw here on Sextus Empiricus’s summary of the Stoic teaching of the logos endiathetos, the word conceived in the mind.68 The distinction comes up in the context of the discussion of what we would nowadays call semiotics. The treatise Pros Logikous is an examination of the relation of language and truth, and much of the book revolves around issues of predication, logical relation, syllogism, judgments, etc. The Stoics did not reduce logic to the kind of bloodless paradigms that gave birth to modern logic, since they did not lose track of the relation of language use to the whole person. But they did exercise considerable energies on what a sign is, what is signified by words and propositions, what is the meaning of true and false, and so forth. Sextus challenges the Stoic conception of sign as an antecedent judgment by noting that animals use signs, even though they are not capable of reasoning things through reflectively: [T]he dog, when he tracks a beast by its footprints, is interpreting by signs; but he does not therefore derive an impression of the judgement “if this is a footprint, a beast is here.” The horse, too, at the prod of a goad or the crack of a whip leaps forward and starts to run, but he does not frame a judgement logically in a premise such as this—“If a whip has cracked, I must run.” Therefore the sign is not a judgement, which is the antecedent in a valid major premise. (2.271) When Sextus says judgment, he is talking about the sequential process that goes on in the mind when human reason thinks things through. He has limited language available to him to talk of this process, and it devolves for him to the faculty of memory, and to a distinction between simple impressions, which animals use to understand signs, and transitive and constructive impressions (metabatikh˜), processive activities of the reflective mind: “Hence, since [man] has a conception of logical sequence, he immediately grasps also the notion of sign because of the sequence; for in fact the sign in itself is of this form —‘If this, then this.’

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Therefore the existence of sign follows from the nature and structure of Man” (2.276 ‒‒ 277). It is in this context that the logos endiathetos comes up, and it is here the name given to this complex reflective capacity to reason out: “[The Stoics] assert that Man does not differ in respect of uttered reason (logos prophorikos) from the irrational animals (for crows and parrots and jays utter articulate sounds), but in respect of internal reason (logos endiathetos); not in respect of the merely simple impression (for the animals, too, receive impressions), but in respect of the transitive and constructive impression” (2.276). The interaction of the logos endiathetos and logos prophorikos is therefore a processive movement of discursive judgment: “[Man] possesses a retentive sense of sequence, by which he remembers what things he has observed together with what, and what before what, and what after what, and from his experience of previous things revives the rest” (2.288 ‒‒ 289). A sign is a pointer to an impression, whether simple or complex. When the sign points to the more complex transitive and constructive impressions of which humans are capable in rendering judgments, it is a pointer to the discursive process that took place in the logikoi. It is through the sign that “we are capable of remembering the things laid bare together with it” (2.274). The logos prophorikos is therefore an outward expression of the inner process of reasoning of which humans are capable.

Hellenistic Judaism and the Logos With the Macedonian conquest of Asia Minor, Palestine, Phoenicia, and Egypt in the fourth century BC, Alexander established bases for the extension of empire unified not by allegiance to a centralized political authority, but by language and a certain idea of civic membership. In contrast to the ancient Greek suspicion against non-Greek speaking peoples (barbaroi), cosmopolitan Hellenism conquered with an enlightened assimilationism. Alexander set the example by tolerating cultural and religious difference in the outposts of his empire, which had the effect of encouraging a melding of Greek and foreign political and social practices. Power was vested in the Greek settler class whose authority resided in their privileged link to the wealth of empire, and local populations won advantage by acculturation to the dominant group. One example of this rapid acculturation was

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the replacement of Aramaic by Greek among the Jewish settlers in Egypt as their common language. An Alexandrian Jew could enjoy the privileges of Hellenic citizenship only with the ability to speak Greek, and within a very short period of time Jewish immigrant groups formed thriving Greek-speaking communities in Alexandria. Along with the rights of citizenship came freedom of religious practice for the Jewish settler: “Without relinquishing his Jewish faith, he could be Greek in language, culture, and social status.”69 Philo of Alexandria (25 BC –40 AD) not only wrote in Greek, but used a Greek translation of Scripture, and the extent of his knowledge of Hebrew is a matter of controversy.70 With Philo we glimpse something of that extraordinary moment of convergence, like one of those points of passage between worlds marked out by the ancients, of two monumental and vastly different traditions of the word. The Judaic reception of Greek culture and philosophy was marked by an openness and receptivity grounded in the certainty of its own religious beliefs. That reception seems like a true assimilation and adaptation. The Greek translation of the Bible provides an example of the character of this assimilation: In the Greek translation of the Bible, when the translators came to translate the various Hebrew terms for God, they did not attempt to coin new Greek terms; they borrowed terms already used in Greek religion. Elohim becomes qevoı, even though the Greek term had already various connotations in Greek religion. Adonai and Jehovah, the latter of which was pronounced by Jews Adonai, are translated kuvrioı, Lord, even though in Greek literature that term is used as an epithet of various gods.71 This is not to say that Alexandrian Jews had no difficulty in negotiating Jewish identity and Greek culture, but in this time and place there were not overburdening proscriptions either from Greek political or Jewish religious pressures (83). Consequently a variety of approaches developed towards the mutual influence of Greek and Jewish culture. Some interpreters read scripture as an allegory for philosophical truths, while traditional literalists found no use for the application of philosophy to scripture. Philo sought a middle ground between the literal sense and the allegorical implication.

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The philosophical bent of the Alexandrian Jews assimilating Hellenism in this period did not flow into the mainstream of rabbinic scholarship, and Philo’s influence was never primary in that tradition,72 but he was, ironically, of extraordinary importance to Patristic theologians such as Origen, Clement of Alexandria, Ambrose, and Augustine.73 Clement of Alexandria learned from Philo, for example, “how a link could be made between Platonist ideas and the contents of scripture.”74 He aided the reconciliation of philosophy and theology, and he did this through his elaboration of the conception of lovgoı, the common term between the Greek, Stoic, and biblical traditions. This effort of ecumenism accounts for the wide and variegated meanings of Lovgoı in Philo. Let us briefly summarize this ecumenical effort, which Philo accomplishes by a collation of biblical and Platonic creation stories. We must begin by recalling the all-important depiction of creation in Timaeus 28 ‒‒ 37. Timaeus deduces a divine artificer who fashions the universe according to an unchanging pattern: “The world has been framed in the likeness of that which is apprehended by reason and mind and is unchangeable, and must therefore of necessity, if this is admitted, be a copy of something” (29a–b).75 What was it that served as the pattern of the universe? He speaks of this world as “a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence” (30b–c). It is called in turns an animal, a being, a god, but not like any single creature we know, since it is “the very image of that whole of which all other animals both individually and in their tribes are portions” (30c). But at the same time Timaeus says that the artificer, who is only good, could only wish to create something which “should be, so far as possible, like unto Himself” (29e). So we already have an important confusion, because the universe now appears to be modeled after the artificer himself. And yet at 30d Timaeus asks “In the likeness of what animal did the creator make the world?” and the answer offered is that animal which “contains in itself everything intelligible” (30e). What is relatively clear is that the universe, as a copy and therefore as something less, is a mixture of the ideal and the material, intelligence being interfused throughout. But from this conception another confusion emerges, since this copy must now be a part of the all, and must somehow participate in any sense of the whole. The story in any case is the focus of the Platonic and Neoplatonic thinking about the architecture of the kosmos from then on, and for Philo too it is the basis of a rapprochement with the creation story of the Bible.

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Philo interpolates the Logos into this creation story in complex ways. In following the Timaeus, Philo has God the architect of the universe, like the architect of a city, to create the idea in his own mind which serves as the pattern for the visible world, so that “he carries about the image of a city which is the creation of his mind.”76 In contrast to Timaeus,77 Philo is very specific about the location of this archetype: “As, then, the city which was fashioned beforehand within the mind of the architect held no place in the outer world, but had been engraved in the soul of the artificer as by a seal; even so the universe that consisted of ideas would have no other location than the divine reason” (tovn qei˜on lovgon to;n tau¯ ton diakosmhvsantai) (5.20.17). Indeed at this point logos seems to take the place of mind: “The incorporeal world, then, was now finished and firmly settled in the Divine Reason” (10.36.27). Here Philo is consistent in his usage in substituting the term Logos for the Platonic and Aristotelian nous.78 Here Philo reserves the term nous for the human mind, and uses Logos to indicate the universal mind. In another place, though, reason and mind are equivalent: “For (to revert to our illustration) the city discernible by the intellect alone [nou¯ ı] is nothing else than the reasoning faculty [lovgoı] of the architect in the act of planning to found the city.”79 But Philo gives as support for this claim the language of Genesis 1:27 that man was made in the image of God: “Now if the part is an image of an image, it is manifest that the whole is so too, and if the whole creation, this entire world perceived by our senses (seeing that it is greater than any human image) is a copy of the Divine image [mivmhma qeivaı ei[konoı], it is manifest that the archetypal seal also, which we aver to be the world descried by the mind, would be the very Word of God.” (6.25). Here in close order we have a sequence of identifications: Human reason with Divine reason, world with the Divine image, Divine image with the Word of God. It is difficult to keep separate agent and agency here, so close is the proximity of mind, reason, and architect. The pattern itself is thoroughly Godlike (qeoeidestavtw paradeivgmati) (3.16). This by no means exhausts the variety of Logos meanings in Philo.80 It is for instance the place (tovpon) where the divine ideas reside.81 The move from the transcendent Nous as being (Plato) to transcendent Logos as place (Philo) is traceable to Aristotle, who identifies the soul as “a place of forms,” and thought as “the form of forms.”82 Philo substitutes logos for the Platonic world soul, following the Stoic example.83 But in Philo, God’s use of Logos in his direct intervention into the world is distinct from the

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Stoic sense of an independent formative principle.84 God uses Logos as an instrument of His will: “Thus God sharpened his all-cutting Word, and divided universal being, which was without form or quality.”85 In this mode of direct personal agency, Logos often serves as God’s messenger: “To his Word, His chief messenger [avrcaggevllw], highest in age and honour, the Father of all has given the special prerogative, to stand on the border and separate the creature from the Creator” (41.205 ‒ 206). According to Wolfson, Philo sometimes treats the ideas and powers “as a totality, no longer as the patterns or causes of individual things in our world but as the pattern or the cause of the world as a whole,” and to this totality he gives the name Logos.86 The universe was thought through to the end in the mind of God before its actual creation: “We must infer that when he founded ‘the greatest city’ [i.e., the cosmos], he first conceived its type or pattern after thinking it over, composing it in his mind, and out of this pattern he brought the cosmos to fulfillment, all that can be perceived, expressing [crwvmenoı] the paradigm in each of its parts.”87 Crwvmenoı has the basic meaning of utterance, and in the active form (cravw) literally the pronouncement or declaration of the gods. Logos as type or pattern in the sense here expressed is a form of forms (ov nou¯ ı eij˜doı ei;dw ˜ n), but also the mechanism of its articulation.88 With this amalgamation of Platonic, Aristotelian, and scriptural elements, Logos is the cosmic totality as pattern and cause both in the mind of God and as its embodiment. The word is the thought toward which the utterance of the world is always on the way. Philo too brings us very close to the verbum interius. We are closing in from all directions. The proximity is reinforced by a commonality of sources. When Philo lists eujlogiva in a catalogue of God’s gifts, he adopts the same emanationist figure that is used to explain the verbum: I will eulogize you means I will give you the gift of praiseworthy logos. This has to do entirely with excellence. Logos on the one hand is like a spring or well, on the other hand like the efflux of the stream. It is like a spring in respect to intellection, and like its outflow in respect to utterance (prophorikos) by the mouth and tongue. Each of these versions [eij˜doı] of logos improves human wealth greatly. Intellection provides right reason [eu;logistiva]89 in all things great and small, and correctness of education directs speech [prophorikos].”90

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Philo says that eujlogiva is both the good thinking of the mind and its expression in speech. This double meaning is the root of the tradition that we are following, a tradition that flows from Heraclitus to Isocrates to Cicero to Erasmus to Gadamer. The same logos is the order of the mind and the mundane order that results from the mind’s direction. The metaphor of the spring is particularly apt here, because it figures the movement of reason as the circuit of nature. The water that wells out of the fountain waters the earth, returns to the ground, and feeds the spring. Philo takes another stab at this intimate unity of thought and speech in another work in which he develops through a reading of Genesis 91 a distinction between e[nnoian and dianovhsin (“having in mind” and “bethinking”), “the former being the thought quiescent in the mind, the latter the thought brought to an issue.”92 What God “has in mind,” or more literally, lays to heart (e;nqumevomai) is for Philo e[nnoian, something that is in mind, “laid up in store [ejnapokeimevnhn], and what is intended or purposed [dianovhsin] is that which is brought to fruition as dievxodon, the issuance of a thing” (Liddell and Scott). This double action is a continuity or cohesion (oJ sunech;ı), binding together thought and speech. In a crucial passage, Philo speaks of the double action of the word as an interface between the timeless order and the discursive world of becoming that is mediated by human cogitation. He articulates this in the form of a four-part analogical schematism, the outward expression of reason is to inward thinking as the sensible world is to the expression of the intelligible ideas: There is a point, too, in the reason-seat [tov logei˜on] being doubled [diplou˜ n], for the rational principle is twofold as well in the universe as in human nature. In the universe we find it in one form dealing with the incorporeal and archetypal ideas from which the intelligible world was framed, and in another with the visible objects which are the copies and likenesses of those ideas and out of which this sensible world was produced. With man, in one form it resides within, in the other it passes out from him in utterance [oJ mevn ejstin ejndiavqetoı, oJ de; proforikovı]. The former is like a spring, and is the source from which the latter, the spoken, flows [oiJ˜a tiı phghv, oJ de; gegwno;ı].93

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With these two principles — the indissociability of thought and word, and the human being as the point of mediation between temporal and eternal—Philo has arrived at the theme that is sounded in every thinker we are following in this study. Philo is not developing a theory of dualism, but rather a way to overcome dualism. His solution is the one that we are tracing all the way to twentieth-century hermeneutics.94 Eternity “is the archetype and pattern of time,” the interaction of past, present, and future resembling weakly the constancy of God’s timeless presence.95 This anti-dualism is expressed in Philo’s explication of the most basic condition or habit (hexis) of organic life, its cohesion. Even the most basic forms of organic life, such as stone or bits of wood, exhibit this trait: Cohesion is a breath or current ever returning to itself. It begins to extend itself from the centre of the body in question to its extremes, and when it has reached the outermost surface it reverses its course, till it arrives at the place from which it first set out. This regular double course [divauloı] of cohesion is indestructible; and it is this which the runners imitate at the triennial festivals in the places of spectacle universal among men, and exhibit as a great and splendid feat, well worthy of their efforts.96 In the race, the runner runs to a post at the edge of the stavdion and returns to the starting line. Cohesion is thus related to the idea of origin and return, and the world finds its cohesion by the doubling back. We can see that this pattern of return will be repeated at the highest levels of life, and it will be connected to the e[nnoian and dianovhsin, the thought that is minded, that is held within, and expressed. The genius of Philo’s fourfold conception (inner/outer, origin/return) is that the human mind has a dual function in the scheme, as the starting line at one level, and as the post at another. In being able to think and express, it is the origin. But this is an imitation of God, and is in fact the method by which God’s thought “returns” to Him. By echoing the structure of origin and return in the structure of thought and speech in God and human, Philo creates an inherent reciprocity of being. As a corollary to the divine mind, the human mind as a similitude is alone in the world capable of understanding what God had first thought through to the end. The role of the human being

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in the order of things is here exalted. Philo’s encomium of human intellect is a less ambiguous expression of wonder than the famous parallel in Sophocles, establishing a direct through-line between omniscient mind of God and human reason: [A]fter the pattern of a single Mind, even the Mind of the Universe as an archetype, the mind in each of those who successively came into being was molded. It is in a fashion a god to him who carries and enshrines it as an object of reverence; for the human mind evidently occupies a position in men precisely answering to that which the great Ruler occupies in all the world. It is invisible while itself seeing all things, and while comprehending the substances of others, it is as to its own substance unperceived; and while it opens by arts and sciences roads branching in many directions, all of them great highways, it comes through land and sea investigating what either element contains. Again, when on soaring wing it has contemplated the atmosphere and all its phases, it is borne yet higher to the ether and the circuit of heaven, and is whirled round with the dances of planets and fixed stars, in accordance with the laws of perfect music, following that love of wisdom which guides its steps. And so, carrying its gaze beyond the confines of all substance discernible by sense, it comes to a point at which it reaches out after the intelligible world, and on descrying in that world sights of surpassing loveliness, even the patterns and the originals of the things of sense which it saw here, it is seized by a sober intoxication, like those filled with Corybantic frenzy, and is inspired, possessed by a longing to see Him, pure and untempered rays of concentrated light stream forth like a torrent, so that by its gleams the eye of the understanding is dazzled.97 Here we obviously look forward to the Thomistic view of human intellect as a completion of the temporal universe, but what is also present is a conception of wholeness that makes of reason the binding element not only in the universe but between transcendent and immanent realms. The parallel relation of reason in God and human (“the human mind evidently occupies a position in men precisely answering to that which the great Ruler occupies in all the world”) unites divine intuition and human discursive reason in a single continuum. Thus Logos is all-encompassing,

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and it is no stretch to understand it as the form of forms, as that which has only to be thought through to the end. The articulation of the cosmos is the expression of the ideas in the mind of God.

Plotinus (203 ‒‒ 270 AD) Scholars do not believe that Plotinus read Philo,98 and although the similarities in the Logos of Philo and the Nous of Plotinus are remarkable, the fundamental difference between them is that in the former, emanation is the direct expression of the divine will, and in the latter the necessary effect of supernal abundance. There is no evidence that Christian theologians read Plotinus until the fourth century, where it is clear he influenced figures such as Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine.99 But his influence at that critical point was so great that Armstrong speaks of a Christian-Plotinian tradition: “It was Plotinus who more than anyone else brought Hellenic philosophy to a point where it could meet Christian doctrine to produce the new synthesis of the philosophia perennis.”100 In Plotinus, soul, both the world soul and each particular soul, is the expression or utterance of Nous (hJ yuch; lovgoı nou˜) and its offspring (nou˜ de; gevnnhma lovgoı tiı).101 The world soul “was given ordered beauty according to a logos, since soul has potentially in it, and throughout the whole of it, the power to set in order according to logoi; just as the logoi in seeds mould and shape living beings like little ordered universes” (4.3.10.11 ‒ 13). The logos is therefore that which carries into the material world the order and beauty of the intelligible realm. As such, it takes a step back from the conception of Philo. According to Rist, “We should see that such a logos would be parallel to the Logos of Philo in that it organizes the world, but different in that it is not a hypostasis or level of reality in its own right. It would be an aspect of soul, to be understood, like soul in general, in terms of its origins in the Intelligible World, but also acting as a link between that world and material objects.”102 The One of Plotinus in its repose “remains continually turned towards itself,” and it is only the radiant energy, the aura given off from its being, that is diffused throughout nature. Plotinus uses the phrase “expression of the mind” (lovgoı nou˜) to describe this radiant emission.103 Logos is the product of the mind, and the mind’s “product is less than itself.”104 Discursive reasoning for Ploti-

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nus, as it is later for Augustine and Aquinas, is “something distinct,” an image (ei;kwvn) of nous, which is, in the spirit of Plato, something less than nous. It is in this context that Plotinus appropriates the Stoic notion of the logos prophorikos, a logos that, as an outward expression, is something less than the logos endiathetos, the logos ejn yuch/ v (5.1.3.9). He saves this “distinction” from dualism by adversion to the metaphor of procreation: “like a father who brings to maturity a son whom he begat imperfect in comparison with himself” (5.1.3.14 ‒ 15) . Plotinus uses emanation as well as procreation to express his nondualism. His emanationism is not always consistent, partly as a result of his effort to bring together the Platonic Nous as the place of forms with the Stoic logos as self-developing activity. This is evident, for instance, when he describes emanation as both seed and light. The lovgoı spermatiko;ı is an image of generation and increase, but the metaphor of light is characterized by diminution. In the former case, according to Armstrong, the universe is “the flowering and perfection, the realization of the dormant potentialities, of the One.”105 In the latter case, the universe is an overflow falling off from and dependent on its source. Plotinus’s development of the Stoic side of his theory blossoms into a remarkable conception of the intimate unity of thought and speech. The nexus between sense and intellect is never wholly severed, with each “at two ends of a continuum, the one an intensification of the other.”106 The relation between human sensation and intellection is an imitation of an analogous archetypal relation on which it is wholly dependent, so that “those [archetypal] realities do not look to the things here below but these are dependent on those and imitate those, and that this man here below has his powers from that intelligible man and looks to those realities, and these sense-objects are linked to this man and those others to that.”107 This leads Plotinus to think of sensation not in terms of the distance nature has fallen from grace, but as the primal link to it: “[T]hese senseperceptions here are dim intellections, but the intellections there are clear sense-perceptions.”108 Moreover, human nature in the moment of vision is disposed toward the One, which bestows speech, mind, and sensation, the functions of which are to interpret the relation of the cosmos to the One. Plotinus describes something similar to Gadamer’s Richtungssinn,109 the inexplicable tendency of the mind to be inclined in the right direction:

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But as those who become inspired and possessed may know this much, that they have something greater [than themselves] within them, even if they do not know what, but from what they are moved and what they say derive a sensation of that which moves them while they are different from that, thus we are apt to be disposed toward [“have toward”] it [i.e., the One], when we have pure intellect, divining that this is the inner mind, which bestows essence and the other things that are of that rank, itself not being such, as it is not these, but something greater than that which is called “being,” but fuller and greater than what-is-said, because it is itself greater than speech and mind and sensation, bestowing these, while not itself being these.110 The One itself provides the impulse to speak, which is simply a phase further down the line of the continuous process of emanation. There is an inherent need to express what is, and speech is the human manner of this expression or articulation. Plotinus establishes the most intimate link between what, in III, 2, B, Gadamer offers as a problematic opposition, intuitus and discursus. For Plotinus, discursivity is simply the human translation of the vision that is natural to divine intellect: [F]or what someone receives in his soul, which is the form of lovgoı, what can it be other than the silent form of lovgoı . . . The soul, then, when it has become akin to and disposed according to the lovgoı, still, all the same, utters (profevrei) and propounds it—for it did not possess it primarily—and learns it thoroughly and by its proposition becomes other than it, and looks at it, considering it, like one thing looking at another; and yet soul, too, was a lovgoı and a sort of intellect, but an intellect seeing something else. For it is not full, but has something wanting in relation to what comes before it; yet it itself sees also quietly what it utters. For it does not go on uttering what it has uttered well already, but what it utters, it utters because of its deficiency, with a view to examining it, trying to learn thoroughly what it possesses.111 Discursive utterance is thus the slow working out of what comes to the soul as vision. Logos here is, as it will be later, the necessary completion and fulfillment of thought. Plotinus conceives the rational principle in a way analogous to how we might think of the relation of speech and

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understanding. Something imagined in the mind is not simply clothed in words: We work out the meaning by finding words for it, and bring the thought to fruition by “coming to terms” with it. Further, many ideas are not captured in the initial effort of expression, and we have to return again and again to this effort to do justice to the idea. It is often the case that we only ever understand something well when we have learned to articulate it. It is then that we “learn thoroughly what it possesses.” For Plotinus there is, even in human experience, a moment of achievement at the end of the discursive process when the mind knows fully what it has worked out: “The truly good and wise man, therefore, has already finished reasoning when he declares what he has in himself to another; but in relation to himself he is vision. For he is already turned to what is one, and to the quiet which is not only of things outside but in relation to himself, and all is within him.”112 Moreover, in Plotinus speech is not only the weakened form of human articulation of being, but the method of communication of the One to the cosmos: “There, surely, one need not wonder if that which the soul pursues and which gives light to Intellect and in falling upon it stirs a trace of itself has so great a power, and draws to itself and calls back [ajnakalouvmenon] from all wandering to rest beside it.”113 Schroeder believes this Plotinian language of summoning makes its way into Augustine as the mundane form of divine communication: “Ecce sunt caelum et terra, clamant, quod facta sint [Look here—heaven and earth already are — they speak aloud that they were created].”114 Speech thus has a double direction, of human articulation of being, and of divine calling to human nature.

The Protestant Reception How do we speak of God? The legacy of speculative theology, that is to say, of the need of Christian theology for Greek speculation, was that Western thought became versed in the paradoxes of temporality and causality, of the limits and possibilities of language as a tool of explanation, and as a way of being. The centuries of intellect devoted to the relation of immanence and transcendence, to the expression of the ineffable, identity in difference, have taken us to the far reaches of thought about

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the use of concepts and language, analogy and metaphor, paradox and proposition. When Gadamer said that the truth of the universality of hermeneutic understanding lies in the verbum interius, he meant that Heidegger’s speculations on language and being sprang from the fertile ground that had been cultivated in the Christian encounter with logos. But the hermeneutic attention to the Judaeo-Christian idea of the word cannot be understood outside of the influence the Protestant origins of hermeneutics.115 Although Luther is not mentioned in Gadamer’s explication of the verbum interius, he is an undeniable presence. When Bultmann famously argued for “demythologizing” the New Testament, he is at the end of a long process of return, a return to the word of the Hebrew scriptures and away from the word of Greek speculation that had so influenced the early church fathers. The word here is no longer the underlying reason-structure of the cosmos, and more simply the event of God’s personal communication. This change in emphasis and direction plays itself out at a very deep level in Heidegger and Gadamer, even though philosophical hermeneutics involves a counter-movement to it. In all of this, the word plays the prominent role, the pivot around which circulate questions of the immanence and transcendence, and the mediation and presence of spirit. The abiding motif of the word in Luther is so pervasive and constant a refrain that it almost disappears into his language as a stock usage. It is a note he rings through all its changes, and the center of his teaching: But amongst all the gifts of God, the gift of his holy word is the most excellent, and if we take away the word, what do we else but take away the sun out of the world? . . . For what can all these do without the word? which alone bringeth life and comfort to the soul, peace and quietness to the conscience. . . . Albeit therefore there be many and wonderful gifts of God in the world, given for the use of man, yet the only gift which containeth and preserveth all the others, is the word of God, which pronounceth and witnesseth to our consciences, that God is our merciful father; which also promiseth unto us remission of sins and life everlasting.116 The Lutheran word has all of the familiar and by now prosaic range of meanings that we have come to associate with Christian proselytizing;

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as synonym for the gospel, for the articles of faith, for the act of witnessing, for the covenant with mankind, for Christian fellowship, for ministry, for the many acts that encompass the diffusion of God’s creation and redemptive intervention in history. It means these things all at once: “The name of God dwelleth in Christ and his Church, which is one body with Christ, where is the word of God, baptism, the supper of the Lord, and the exercise of obedience towards God” (140). And humans express the word in every mode of witness: “To utter, to promise, to confess, to sit, to judge, to testify, to teach, all these words in effect do signify as much as to preach or publish the word” (171). Luther’s “word” echoes with the themes that will preoccupy twentiethcentury hermeneutics. The word is inexhaustible and unknowable: “But because God’s word exceedeth the capacity of man” (Luther, Commentary on the Psalms). The word is the manifestation of the truth that withdraws: “That which is taught them in the church is invisible and absent, and therefore can be apprehended by no other means, but by the testimony of the word” (172). The word overturns the Western privileging of the visual: “For God is invisible, and therefore when they are heard which teach and preach unto us the word of God, then God himself is heard.” (172). The word is the dwelling and abode: “A heap of earth the bodily eyes might see, but the holiness, the power, and the majesty of God there present, they could not see, nor that the word of the Lord was there, that the Lord had promised there to dwell and abide, that he had put a memorial of his name in that place, and that there he would be sought, there he would be found” (142). The word calls us away from our subjectivity: “[T]he word itself, which is not ours but Christ’s” (132) . . . . according to his word, and not according to our imaginations” (138) . . . . We must hear what his word saith, and not what our own heart saith” (144) . . . . We must not judge therefore according to our own feelings, but according to that which the word of God pronounceth and judgeth, or rather God himself in his word” (146). And Luther gives the reason for this: “[W]herein the word might be published and taught if there were no knowledge of God, no invocation of God, but every man had his peculiar idol to worship?” (161). We consult the word over against our selfunderstanding: “Therefore we must judge according to God’s promises concerning invisible things, and see what God hath said in his word” (147). And: “It showeth moreover what is to be done, and what remedy is to

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be sought in such afflictions; even to resort to the word, to hearken to the word, to rest in the word and promise” (145). Thus the eventfulness of the word is that it calls us out of our subjectivity, and into community, as Ebeling explains: “According to Luther, the word of God always comes as adversarius noster, our adversary. It does not simply confirm and strengthen us in what we think we are and as what we wish to be taken for. It negates our nature, which has fallen prey to illusion; but this is the way the word of God affirms our being and makes it true.”117 Of particular interest is Luther’s distinction between the inner and outer word. The ring of Augustine is unmistakable: “[T]he word is in our mouth like as a burning coal which cannot be kept in, but compelleth us to open our mouths.”118 The outer word is somehow necessarily linked with the inner word: “Such therefore as willfully strive against the truth, and will not be convinced, after once or twice warning, let us give over, and by the example of David let us with prayer fight against them. . . . But to the external word we must join prayer” (113 ‒ 114). However, the human word is to be distinguished from the divine word: “We must make a great difference between God’s Word and the word of man. A man’s word is a little sound, that flies into the air, and soon vanishes; but the Word of God is greater than heaven and earth, yea, greater than death and hell, for it forms part of the power of God, and endures everlastingly; we should, therefore, diligently study God’s Word, and know and assuredly believe that God himself speaks unto us.”119 Ultimately Luther’s inner word as an activity of the soul is closer to Heidegger than Gadamer in that it privileges the singular dialogue of the soul: “To read the word, to hear the word, and to teach the word, are indeed excellent and heavenly works, which require the help and aid of the Holy Ghost; but the inward practice of faith, so to turn unto the Lord, so to pray, so to presume of God’s favour that their prayer shall please him, and that he will hear the same, this is a hard matter indeed” (116). There is a problem in the exchange of the manifestation of the word, so dependent is it on its origin: [H]ow can we know what is God’s Word, and what is right or wrong? . . . you must determine this matter yourself, for your very life depends upon it. Therefore God must speak to your heart: This is God’s Word; otherwise you are undecided. . . . And God commands this Word to be told you through men, and especially has he permitted

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it to be proclaimed and written for you by the Apostles; for St. Peter and St. Paul do not preach their own word, but God’s Word, as Paul himself testifies in I Thess. 2:13: “When ye receive the Word of God which ye heard of us, ye received it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, the Word of God, which effectually worketh also in you that believe.” Surely, a person can preach the Word to me, but no one is able to put it into my heart except God alone, who must speak to the heart, or all is vain; for when he is silent, the Word is not spoken. Hence no one shall draw me from the Word which God teaches me.120 The absence of much reference to Luther in Truth and Method is an odd omission. The history of linguisticality moves from Augustine to Cusanus to Humboldt, although in other works Gadamer has much to say about Melanchthon. When Christopher Smith locates Gadamer’s ontology in “a tacit Lutheran German semantic field” and asks if Gadamer is “implicitly extending a theme of Luther’s,” Gadamer agrees that “the voice of Luther, and thus the soulful voice of Christian biblical language, resounds on the semantic level, that is, in the vocabulary and the conceptual world within which my own thinking moved.”121 That is perhaps the closest he comes to speaking of this connection.

chapter 2



Immanence and Transcendence in the Trinity

Person as Mediation As we have just seen, the idea of the inner word was being anticipated and prepared for in the career of logos from a number of directions, so that when it arrives it is rich with the resonance of culture. What is original about the Augustinian conception stems from its origin in philosophical speculation about the nature of the Trinity. The earlier conceptions had fused language to thought, being, reason, history, and divinity, but this new use suggested an altogether more complicated structure of relations. The idea of Trinity seemed almost designed to defeat the very resources of speculative thought itself, so the analogy of the verbum interius as the principle aid to thinking Trinity places heavy demands on the idea of language, and on its side provides a heuristic that continues to bear fruit. The Trinity is a teaching grounded in mystery: “Indeed the mystery of Christ runs the risk of being disbelieved precisely because it is so incredibly wonderful.”1 Its vibrant life from the beginning was guaranteed by the audacity of its enigmas, its location at the center of dogmatic disputes over centuries was effectuated by their inscrutability to reason, and its legacies for philosophical thought were a result of their generative power. The conception of the Trinity is at its core a provocation to logic. It flaunts common sense principles of identity and number, it conflates abstraction and narrative, and confuses the literal with the figurative. For these reasons the church fathers tested the limits of Western rationality in its defense, and pushed the boundaries of speculation. Augustine read trinity 70

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into the basic structures of human thinking, finding its triads everywhere. Aquinas explained the relations of paternity, filiation, and inspiration as the necessary structure of divine thought and will: “For it must be observed that in God there exist the relations of the intelligent agent to the thing understood, and of the one willing to the thing willed” (ST, I, q. 28, a. 4). Its long and thoughtful consideration, as Gadamer notes, was a generative force for much of the grandest speculative thought that was to follow. Against the Aristotelian principles of logic and the Cartesian rules of method, it taught Hegel how to think.2 It is a seedbed for Heidegger’s breakthrough to a hermeneutics of facticity and Gadamer’s ontology of language. In this chapter I explore the development of trinitarian doctrine because the idea of the inner word rests not merely on the analogy of language and Logos, but on the entire network of relations that underpin trinitarian thought. The most lasting contribution of this doctrinal achievement to hermeneutics is the structural relation it established between transcendence and immanence. In retrospect, every earlier attempt to articulate the double interface of the logos feels like a preparation, and every subsequent effort an echo. In figuring the correct relation of the eternal God and the Word in history, it negotiated the vexed cruces of dualism—particular and universal, abstract and concrete, absolute and contingent, temporal and timeless—with a breathtaking solution: The structure of the logos is both immanent and transcendent. With the peculiar doctrine of trinitarian personhood, the theoretical is inseparable from the narrative and the historical.3 What is endowed with personal agency now speaks out of birth and death, experience and reflection, and unites in a peculiar way the biography of an individual not only with the history of a race, but with the categories of thought. Immanence and transcendence is both a reconciliation of the abstract and concrete in philosophical terms, and an account of something that happens in our lives. Existential thought in its battles against the categorial is indebted to the theologies that took the Christian narrative as the basis for speculation. The identification of the second person of the Trinity with the salvific word instigates a productive tension between the ideas of history and personal agency that bear fruit in the hermeneutic understanding of language. Hermeneutics wants to center reality in the realm of language rather than subjective consciousness,4 but on the other hand, reason is

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not to be divested of its grounding in the whole person. The location of the word in the Son provides a model that reconciles these two disparate aims. The contrast of rhetorical humanism with calculative science acquires an entirely new dimension when it adopts this perspective, because what is most fully human (in the way that Christ is fully human) becomes de facto the fullest authority and proof. Incarnate logos shows the way forward to the carefully modulated Destruktion of Heidegger’s Sprachwerden and the strange “linguistic humanism” of Gadamer. Trinitarian doctrine provided the bedrock for this hermeneutic ontology of language, and so the close attention paid to its dogmatic development in this chapter will give us a privileged view into ground upon which the verbum interius was formed.

History of Dogmatic Development The early Christian church emerged out of a caldron of contending currents of religious faith. The layered strata of Semitic, Persian, and Babylonian cultures caught up in Alexander’s cultural campaign flowed into “a cosmopolitan interchange of ideas” that led to an extraordinary religious syncretism.5 The mystery and savior cults of Greek religion were very much alive in the imagination of early Christian communities.6 Hellenism in the East, Roman institutional culture in the Latin West, and the underlying influence of Jewish traditions flowed together into the “complexity and urgency of the early Christian community’s enterprise of defining itself as a distinct entity.”7 As it grew, the Christian church moved not unpredictably from a charismatic leadership to an institutional structure, and the development of credal doctrine and confessions of faith were a necessary step in the consolidation and systematization of its identity. The natural tendency towards a diversification of faith beliefs for a movement expanding so rapidly across cultures and geographies was countered by efforts toward institutional orthodoxy. Creeds and formularies arose out of this effort in a series of negotiated compromises and innovations over generations. Although doctrinal debate was always impassioned, the codification of dogma moved towards reasoned justification and explanation.8 In spite of this prolonged effort, stresses animating doctrinal disputes never com-

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pletely resolved, and the church achieved dogmatic coherence against the constant threat of schism. But this tension was perhaps the secret of its innovation. The conceptual resources and traditions of Greek speculative thought were tapped by “a faith-confession that appropriates for itself Hellenistic categories and in the process transforms them.”9 A compelling Christian identity during these formative centuries was forged by its unique and powerful idea of salvation. The numerous biblical references to Jesus as a human being who suffered and died, who was called Son by the Father to whom he prayed, created a distinctive opportunity and a distinctive danger for the new religion. The Christian community stood to lose its unique relation to God if the Christ figure became identified as a demigod, as one among the many in the ancient world. On the other hand, it needed to maintain the divinity of the incarnate Son as the ultimate expression and perfection of the covenant relation with Yahweh. It needed on the one side to assert the singleness of the godhead so as not to be swallowed up in the polytheistic ocean, and on the other side to affirm the special role of the Son as the genuine fulfillment of the redemptive promise to Israel. The doctrine of the Word was formed over the early centuries by these two pressures, and because an institutional self-identity was at stake in this debate, the elevation of seemingly obscure doctrinal questions were raised to special prominence in the life of the times. Gregory Nazianzus described arguments about the Trinity in the common culture: Every square in the city has to buzz with their arguments. . . . No feast, no funeral is free from them: their wranglings bring gloom and misery to the feasters, and console the mourners with the example of an affliction graver than death. Even women in the drawing-room, that sanctuary of innocence, are assailed, and the flower of modesty is despoiled by this rushing into controversy.10 The orthodox conception of Trinity came to fruition slowly. The nature of the Holy Spirit is not made explicit in the gospel teachings, and the perfect equality of the Son with the Father was a point hardwon for orthodoxy. There is certainly preparation for the idea of Trinity in the Hebrew scriptures, and scattered recognition of a trinitarian structure in the New Testament. Spirit and word are spoken correlatively or

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synonymously, sometimes as agent and instrument, or subordinate to one another, and personified in various ways. The insemination of the divine in the world was figured sometimes as Sophia, Angelus, or Logos. The presence of a trinitarian belief is held by many theologians to be implicit in the New Testament. It is certainly suggested rhetorically, as here in Matthew: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19).11 Paul makes no explicit faith statement about the Trinity per se, and yet he speaks in a trinitarian spirit: “And because you are sons, God hath sent the spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying: Abba, Father” (Gal. 4:6). Some have argued that it was the logic of the economy of salvation, or political and institutional exigencies that made a trinitarian structure inevitable. In the view of Jarislov Pelikan, the processes “by which the doctrine of the deity and homoousia of the Holy Spirit developed, simultaneously presupposed and compelled development of a more nearly adequate doctrine of the Trinity itself.”12

The Vocabulary of Trinity There is a certain instability in the paradoxical formulation of Trinity that feeds its controversy. The teaching introduces a series of related cruces for dogmatic theology, problems addressed at various times over the critical first centuries of the early church.13 The intercession of God in history by incarnation raises the question of Christ’s identity. The insistence on his divinity and manhood raises the question of immanence and transcendence. And the dialectic of immanence and transcendence raises the question of the meaning of procession. How is God human? How is God Father and Son? How is God a trinity? The creative responses to these dilemmas had the consequence of providing not only reasoned support to the testimony of faith, but also new manners of thinking. Trinitarian argument left a legacy that expanded the repertoire of speculative reason that bore particular fruit in the German philosophical tradition. It was grounded in a nexus of interrelated ideas that solved the conceptual dilemma of the one and the many by giving it a third dimension in the discursivity of narrative becoming. This unification of logos and mythos transformed the Aristotelian framework of category and

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identity into an embodied reason that we are still learning to appropriate to thought. The victorious formulation of the Nicene creed contains the kernel of the orthodox view, proclaiming that the Christ who came to earth as the Redeemer of humankind was “God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, homoousios with the Father, through whom [namely, the Son] all things came into being, things in heaven and things on earth, who for the sake of us men and for the purpose of our salvation came down and became incarnate, becoming man, suffered and rose again . . .”14 This compact formulation is, as Pelikan puts it, “both a cosmological confession and a soteriological confession simultaneously.”15 It expresses both the relation of the Son to the Father in their transcendent being, and the relation of the Son to the world as both transcendent and immanent, the two most difficult cruces of trinitarian doctrine. In its brevity it did not resolve all questions about identity or incarnation, and the doctrine of the Trinity worked out in the third quarter of the fourth century would give the fuller precision to the orthodox position.

The One in God, the Three in God The matter of biography, in this case procreation and filial relation, were appropriated and confounded in the ontological categories of divine being. Even before the birth of Christ in history, faith proclaimed the eternal truth of the Son and the Father. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria and chief spokesperson for the church at the council of Nicaea in 325, emerged as the champion of the orthodox view on this question, and developed many of the traditional justifications: For the Son is in the Father, as it is allowed us to apprehend, because the whole Being of the Son is proper to the Father’s substance, as radiance from light, and stream from fountain; so that whoso sees the Son, sees that which is the Father’s, and apprehends that the Son’s Being, because from the Father, is therefore in the Father. For the Father is in the Son, since the Son is what is from the Father and proper to Him, as in the radiance the sun, and in the word the thought, and in the stream the fountain.16

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In the Nicene creed, the relation of the Son to the Father” is expressed as an oJmoouvs ioı (homoousios). The term homoousios itself (of the same substance, or, consubstantiality) had a prodigious history, and served as a kind of lightning rod for debates about the nature of the Son. It was not a word to be found in scriptures, and was appropriated from Greek philosophy at a moment when Christian theology benefited from the erudition of speculative thought.17 The Greek ousia, in the first place, had a wide range of meanings, from the most universal and generic sense of being, to the particularization of individual essence. But in all its manifestations it designated whatness, the essential, definitive nature. The prefixing of (same) to ousia essentiality meant, as a category of one, that this mortal human was also the divine Godhead. Ambrose relates a story about the use of the term at the council of Nicaea which gives some sense of its career. He claimed “that Eusebius of Nicomedia was himself responsible for throwing the word homoousios into the debates.” He goes on to say that “when his letter had been read out, the fathers inserted this word into their definition of faith because they observed that it struck terror into their adversaries’ hearts.”18 The emperor Constantine, wanting stability in the young church more than anything, saw in the ambiguity of the term a means for promoting unity, and urged its inclusion as a means to achieve a fragile consensus. Three hundred bishops ratified its use. After the council, contention around the term continued to fester. Homoousios could be understood to refer to two substances of exactly the same constitution, or of one substance in separate forms. The former interpretation threatened to provide space for movement away from belief in one God, which sectarian movements constantly threatened. This position was fed by the many scriptural references seeming to depict distinct identities of Father and Son: “I can do nothing on my own authority; as I hear, I judge; and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me” (John 5:30),“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46), and so on. Arianism could argue subordination from the self-evident logic of birth language in scriptures. If the Son was begotten of the Father, he had a beginning, and could not be eternal. This forced speculation towards the relation between purpose and consequence, causality and temporality. Backed into a logical distinction, orthodox thought conceived of “a birth

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and not a becoming, a derivation and yet not a beginning.”19 Athanasius represented the bishops of Nicaea in this way: A son, they said, is an offspring, but, in order to be such, he must spring from that of which he is the offspring; nor does he so spring, unless he is from what that original is,—that is, in other words from its substance, as the derivation of the word “substance” shows. Thus, to be the Son of God, if He is God’s offspring or true Son, is to be “of ” or “one with” God’s substance,—that is, to be “consubstantial” with Him. Such was the conclusion of the Fathers at Nicaea; they determined that consubstantiality was bound up with the idea of Sonship, that nothing short of this word adequately expressed their doctrine of the Son’s relation to the Father, and that it was a denial of any true Sonship to deny the consubstantiality.20 Here derivation and origin are held together in such a way that something following from something must necessarily be original to it. It exists in relation and difference because it is of the same. Causation does not imply temporality. Now the ground gained with the assertion of consubstantiality (homoousios) did not have an equal intellectual justification in the question of difference. In the next generation, three Cappadocian monks, Basil (c. 329 ‒‒ 379), Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 325 ‒‒ 390), and Gregory of Nyssa (331 ‒‒ 394) found a formulation for this purpose that gained currency.21 They located a nuance in the Greek that softened the paradox and preserved both the distinction in the scriptural narratives and the contiguity in the doctrine. Greek had two words for substance, ousia (generic nature) and hypostasis (special or characteristic nature). The Cappadocians saw this linguistic possibility as a way to suggest a difference of aspect—three hypostases in one ousia. The Roman church translated this distinction as one substance (substantia) and three persons (personae).22 The tremulous balancing act of this century of Christology was maintained against two equally plausible simplifications; on the one side, the idea of two distinct beings, Father and Son (in Nestorianism, for instance), and on the other side, one undifferentiated being (Monophysitism).23 Nestorianism had the earlier hold on the debate, and was addressed and put down at the Council of Ephesus in 431. This only gave impetus to the

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opposite tendency, which came to a climax at the Council of Chalcedon in Asia Minor in 451, the fourth ecumenical council. For this occasion, Pope Leo found the elaborated formula of reconciliation that had the required subtlety and precision: . . . the same perfect in godhead, the same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the same of reasonable soul and body; homoousios with the Father in godhead, and the same homoousios with us in manhood. . . . acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation [ejn duvo fuvsesin ajsugcuvtwı, ajtrevptwı, ajdiairevtwı, ajcwrivstwı]—the difference of the natures being by no means taken away because of the union, but rather the distinctive character of each nature being preserved . . .24 The council’s resolution lead to a level of doctrinal stability,25 and the most improbable enigma held sway. Christianity seemed to gain traction by a penchant for the counterfactual truth or the countervailing idea. The shepherd left the flock for the stray, the father chose the prodigal son, Jesus turned the other cheek. Holding together the genuine fatherson relation of the gospel narratives with the notion of an undivided being challenged the very logic of reason, the Greek inheritance based on division and subsumption, contradiction and identity, and the Western imagination from this point was destined to struggle with the nature of the logos that served as the medium of thought: “I personally believe that this doctrine has constantly stimulated the course of thought in the West as a challenge and invitation to try and think that which continually transcends the limits of human understanding.”26 Hegel adopted trinitarian ways of thinking for speculative thought, and in turn gave this heritage to Gadamer: “Life is defined by the fact that what is alive differentiates itself from the world in which it lives and with which it remains connected, and preserves itself in this differentiation. . . . Differentiation, then, is at the same time non-differentiation.”27 The confrontation of Greek reason with this strange Judaeo-Christian world of contradiction expanded the idioms and vocabulary of rational speculation, and energized the space between concept and metaphor. Pelikan concludes that trinitarian theology represents “a refusal to go all the way toward a genuinely speculative solution,” a refusal that informs Gadamer’s appropri-

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ation of the verbum and his subsequent treatment of concept formation as fundamentally metaphorical.28

Incarnation We have seen that the other side of the trinitarian mystery, Christ’s divine and mortal nature, was also addressed in the doctrinal formulations, but it too remained a bone of contention: “What strange thing do we announce in saying that God was made Man? . . . What strange thing then do we announce?”29 How could the Son of God suffer and die? How could he be both God and man? How did the death and resurrection of one redeem the whole of humankind? What was the relation between the impassable nature and the eventfulness of Christ’s life, between person and work? There would be nothing new in ritual sacrifice as purgation or rituals of assumption of divinity, and Neoplatonism had taught the insemination or effluence of the divine Logos. The particular formula of Christian salvation was based on a greater provocation to reason, the double predication of a “perfect man and perfect God.”30 Each side of this formula of perfection satisfied an aspect of salvation faith. The sacrifice of perfection to humankind accomplished the redemption of the human soul by a symbolic exchange. But the extremity of the sacrifice by the maintenance of perfect identity was an audacious leap. The problem for theology was that each side of this formula pulled at the other. The need for ultimate sacrifice, for death and suffering, made the humanity of Christ essential, but this denied the very principle of the assertion of impassability. Somehow both had to be maintained simultaneously and justified to reason, in spite of the seemingly insuperable problem of an immanence and transcendence on terms that seem to falsify the one against the other. The doctrine’s attraction to adherents was that it proclaimed the sharing of divine life and the transfer of impassability to humans, so that sustaining both qualities was critical. This tension is expressed in two correlative arguments circulating at the time, that of hypostatic union, the complete communication of God into this human form, and that of the doctrine of the indwelling Logos that emphasized the distinctness of the human Christ. I will take the second first. The argument for the humanity of Christ hearkened back to the Stoic tradition of logos seminales, in which the

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harmony and proportion of logos infused not simply humankind but the universe in its entire reach. The presupposition of this understanding was the interconnection of all parts of the universe in the balance of reason, which had been set out of joint with the fall. Humans held a special place in this design, as the highest expression of reason in nature and the keystone of proportion for all the rest. By setting humankind right, the incarnation reestablished the balance of nature. The gift of redemption conferred by the resurrection perfected humanity by restoring it to its antediluvian state, one in which, according to Theodore, “death was defeated, corruption dissolved, passions vanquished, mutability destroyed.”31 The same miraculous transgression of categories is present here with the transference of wholeness to the species by the single instance: “[T]he Only-Begotten became a perfect man in order to deliver our earthly body from a foreign corruption,” and by so doing, said Cyril, “dyed the soul of man with the stability and unchangeability of his own nature.”32 A theology that emphasized the humanity of Christ to secure the salvific function of Christology necessarily emphasized the distinctions rather than the unities of the Godhead. To say that the Logos dwelt within a man is to imply a double predication: “Do I alone call Christ double? Does he not call himself both a destroyable temple and God raising [it] up?”33 Having a Word within provides a kind of transportability, and can be extended to all humans as well through the sacraments and teachings. We are returning here more proximately to the traditions of the word in pagan philosophy and Judaism in which human beings are merely vessels, and the dynamic word passes through history as an active power. In contradistinction, the doctrine of the hypostatic union emphasized the indivisible unity of all attributes of the Word—human, divine, eternal, mortal, suffering, impassable. As this doctrine was elaborated, its emphasis on one “nature” tended to swallow up the integrity of the fully human. The salvation of humanity depended on the capacity of Christ as man truly to suffer and die. The doctrine of the indwelling Logos attempted to preserve the coexistence and distinction of full humanity and divinity by defining a union distinguished in its persons, or by referring to the human nature of Christ as the dwelling of the divine Logos, a literal embodiment: “He called this man who assumed a body his temple, by which he indicated to us that he himself lived in that temple; and indicated the extent of his empire by its delivery to the destruction of death

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according to his wish, and likewise to show the extent of his power, resuscitated it.”34 This interpretation drew upon Colossians 2:9 ‒‒ 10: “In him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you are filled in him.” It is easy to see how this teaching lends itself to an opposite imbalance, which is that the body as temple did not fully assume the character of the divine but became a mere repository. The Logos had entered into and spoken through other humans—the prophets and the apostles, and so this teaching muddied the distinction. The debate between the two teachings was joined at the Council of Ephesus in 431, and a compromise was sought in which “the human and the divine had to be united closely enough to achieve the salvation, but not so closely as to render it irrelevant to man as man.”35 This compromise, which became the orthodoxy of the West, confirmed the indwelling Logos and the hypostatic union as different aspects of revelation. The key that united the two was the idea of an exchange that forged a link between the distinction of persons in God with the narrative history of salvation. As Leo the Great expressed it, “For He had come into this world a rich and merciful Merchant from the skies, and by a wondrous exchange had entered into a bargain of salvation with us, receiving ours and giving His, honour for insults, salvation for pain, life for death.”36

The Doctrine of Exchange One of the key proof texts for this doctrine of exchange was Philippians 2:5 ‒‒ 7: “For let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man.” How does the birth, suffering, death, and resurrection of one, the events of a life, transform the souls of all ? The credal language leaps over the gap between the Stoic Logos as a force in the cosmos, and Logos as an historical person. But how does it justify this leap? How is it that through the resurrection “sin is extinguished . . . and the anguish of the law [novmoı] surpassed”?37 Theodore, a theologian from Antioch, helps the argument along by returning to the grammar of predication—two natures (fuvseiı) in one person (provswpon)—to create a chiasmus between what belongs properly to one nature in regard to the other. Within this structure what is eternally

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begotten can be born of human, and what is all-knowing can be doubting. This communicatio idiomatum is a participation of attributes, a “pervasion” of natures (pericwvrhsiı).38 But the more potent response is expressed in Leo’s answer that “Without detriment therefore to the properties of either nature and substance which then came together in one person, majesty took on humility, strength weakness, eternity mortality.”39 And in a famous letter to Flavian, bishop of Constantinople, Leo presses this rhetoric of contradiction into a logical argument that will become a quintessential Thomist idiom. For He who is true God is also true man: and in this union there is no lie, since the humility of manhood and the loftiness of the Godhead both meet there. For as God is not changed by the showing of pity, so man is not swallowed up by the dignity. For each form does what is proper to it with the co-operation of the other.40 Contradiction has been transmuted into aspect, and aspect is then set into motion by relation: “For each form does what is proper to it with the co-operation of the other.” After this Hegel cannot be far behind. Leo rehearses in its many registers the manner of conversion from the category of a life lived to the generic category of human life itself. The transference occurs at several levels. At the level of history, narrative is converted into the sacramental life of the Church: “All therefore that the Son of God did and taught for the world’s reconciliation, we not only know as a matter of past history, but appreciate in the power of its present effect.”41 We are taught the nature of this conversion in the unbroken passage of the word: “And so that which till then was visible of our Redeemer was changed into a sacramental presence, and that faith might be more excellent and stronger, sight gave way to doctrine, the authority of which was to be accepted by believing hearts enlightened with rays from above.”42 At the level of attribution, incarnation is figured as a ritual allegory of purgation, but in a way that shatters the normal laws of reciprocity. By becoming the frailty which requires the ministrations of the strong, that strength passes out of the terms of the relation into its very opposite, an act of generosity so full as to assault logic. In fact, this seems to be the import. Leo develops this idea through a metaphor of barter: “For He had come into this world a rich and merciful Merchant from the

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skies, and by a wondrous exchange had entered into a bargain of salvation with us, receiving ours and giving His, honour for insults, salvation for pain, life for death: and He Whom more than 12,000 of the angel-hosts might have served for the annihilation of His persecutors, preferred to entertain our fears, rather than employ His own power.”43 Love passes over figuration to upset rational comprehension. The transfer is accomplished in the double predication of son: “For ‘the Word became flesh’ in order that from the Virgin’s womb He might take our suffering nature, and that what could not be inflicted on the Son of God might be inflicted on the Son of Man.”44 Here an equivocation is the mechanism of assertion. Leo quotes Paul to locate the coordinates of the mystery: “[I]n Him it was pleasing that all fullness should dwell, and that through Him all things should be reconciled in Himself ” (Col. 1:19).45 But this reconciliation is accomplished in the teeth of the paradox, insofar as the terms of the contradiction are held in resolution: “For as God is not changed by the showing of pity, so man is not swallowed up by the dignity.”46 Christian thinking dwells on this contradiction: “While He is the Word He is also in heaven, while He is the flesh He is also the Son of Man, and while the Word was made flesh He is from heaven. . . . and the Word made flesh, while it was flesh, was nevertheless also the Word.”47 But, and here is the addition of the Christian contribution to thought, the paradox is not simply asserted: “He who humbles Himself has this quality in His nature that He is not lowly” (484). Hilary’s explanation makes contradiction a virtue, and cultivates a mode of thought that combines division and subsumption. In the need for a pragmatic compromise, the fathers took refuge in the equivocation of language, which then served as a generative principle for the development of a sustainable theology.48 The tremulous balance between a theology of unity and a theology of distinction was sustained by a vocabulary of exchange. Immanence and transcendence were mediated by the rhetorical resources of scripture, and amplified by the idioms of secular philosophy, producing a potent hybrid of mythos and logos that enriched both. The relation of true God and true man under these terms was parallel to the transcendent relation of father and son insofar as it expressed identity and division in static terms. It now waited to be animated by the further extraordinary combination of philosophical concept and historical narrative.

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Recapitulation While the enigma of trinitarian identity yielded a challenge to categorical logic, incarnation worked at the boundary between reason and narrative history. The symbolic function of the biography of Jesus as it was woven into the economy of faith was a hybrid form of argument that Aristotle could scarcely have imagined. A powerful example of this commingling is Irenaeus’s doctrine of recapitulation (a;nakefalaviwsiı). As Daniélou shows, the term is appropriated from the rhetorical tradition: In classical Greek the word belongs to the technical terminology of rhetoric, being derived from the word kefavlaion, which denotes the top of the head, or, in literature, a chapter. Anakefalaiv j wsiı is thus the act of making a summary of the chapters of a work, a résumé of its principal ideas, a compendium. . . . It is this meaning of the term which Irenaeus applies to the Incarnation in the strict sense: Christ takes up and summarizes in himself all mankind. There is in fact a passage where the shift from the rhetorical to the theological sense is explicitly set out: “When he was incarnate, and became Man, he recapitulated in himself the long story (expositio = ejxhvghsiı) of mankind, giving us salvation in a summary” (compendium = suntomiva) (Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, 3.18.1).49 Christian theology advanced the role of narrative as a mediation of the universal and particular when it went about explaining the meaning of incarnation. Theology had to find a way to bring together the life of Christ and the life of the church as a singular event, uniting the historical Jesus and universal history. Recapitulation was an example of this kind of mediation. It took a familiar scriptural practice (typology) and elevated its function, wedding history and ontology. Typology was an exegetical method of finding figurative anticipations of New Testament persons and events in Hebrew scriptures, a practice that is suggested by Paul: “But death reigned from Adam unto Moses, even over them also who have not sinned after the similitude of the transgression of Adam, who is a figure of him who was to come” (Rom. 5:14). The word tuvpoı refers in the Greek to either the print or impress of a seal, or the seal itself, hence “the original type or model of a thing” (Liddell and Scott).50 Linkages from original to copy could occur in two ways: in the historical “repetition” of

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an event, personage or thing in a later form, demonstrating a sacred continuity (the Tent of Meeting recapitulated in First Temple, which in turn is recapitulated in the Second Temple51), or the prefigurement of later persons, events or things in earlier forms (Adam prefiguring Jesus Christ, the second Adam).52 Irenaeus pressed typology into the service of his christological argument. As Woollcombe explains, Irenaeus’s innovation was to make typological recapitulation function as consummation rather than simply reiteration.53 When the typos is not the impression but the mold that makes the impression, it becomes the pattern or sum, and thus represents the whole. Thus Leo states: “In order, therefore, that the shadows should yield to the substance and types cease in the presence of the Reality, the ancient observance is removed by a new Sacrament, victim passes into Victim, blood is wiped away by Blood, and the law-ordained Feast is fulfilled by being changed.”54 Genesis represents the origin of sin as the failure of the first man and woman. Adam represents humanity in his type: “And the Lord God formed Man.” Thus the result of Adam’s single sin represented a general pollution of the stock: “Because thou has done this, thou art cursed.” Although pollution is already in the standard narrative of patrilineage, Irenaeus adds to this continuity of natures a further dimension. All humans are descendants of Adam through genealogy. By transferring the symbolic force of “first man” to a second Adam, the recapitulation invests the repetition with a generalizing force in reverse —a kind of inverted genealogy in which descent is concentrated back into origin: “Wherefore Luke points out that the pedigree which traces the generation of our Lord back to Adam contains seventy-two generations, connecting the end with the beginning, and implying that it is He who has summed up in Himself all nations dispersed from Adam downwards.”55 The genealogical account of Genesis is appropriated into the figure, reading Jesus’s life as a reversal of Adam’s act. Taking Jesus as the sum of seventy-two (“For both he that sanctifieth, and they who are sanctified, are all of one” [Heb. 2:11]) does not simply reverse the symbolization of Adam— humanity fallen, humanity saved — it transfigures the symbol of pollution into a symbol of providence. Adam becomes, after the fact, an instrument of deliverance. The sin of Adam is invested with the salvation history, bearing the seeds of its own correction. The symbolic exchange expresses the single act of a single individual as a resignification of a history, as Cyril explains: “In this way he saved his own people, not as a man conjoined to

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God, but as God who has come in the likeness of those who were in danger, so that in him first of all the human race might be refashioned to what it was in the beginning. In him all things became new.”56 The life history of Jesus is transmuted into a symbolic act at the level of world history, his personal history assimilating and transfiguring that world history through a symbolic exchange. In the typological imagination the metonymic passage from species to individual can be turned around. The resurrection of the Son is a metonymy that passes from the personal narrative as a type to the narrative of human history, working “a resurrection year by year in these visible things.”57 This conception marks the event of incarnation as the fulcrum or midpoint of history, where the human narrative comes to a point in the life of one human being. In the way that a life narrative acts out the history of the race, its every particular passing itself to the general condition, the universal and the particular are collapsed.58 What was before is summed up and transformed, what will unfold is made possible and prefigured: “And as Christ was in reality crucified, and buried, and raised, and you are in Baptism accounted worthy of being crucified, buried, and raised together with Him in a likeness, so it is with the unction also.”59 Recapitulation is enacted not only in the person of Jesus but in the ritual life of the church: “For in the figure of Bread is given to thee His body, and in the figure of Wine His Blood; that thou by partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ, mayest be made of the same body and the same blood with Him. For thus we come to bear Christ in us, because His Body and Blood are distributed through our members” (151). In Leo, concept, personal biography, and universal history are so intermixed that typology becomes the very idiom of speech. He reads the passion as the self-conscious enactment of this three-tiered expression of meaning, event, and instruction. We hear, for instance, the criss-crossing of theological concept and narrative event in the placement of the robbers on Calvary: “[S]o that even in the incidents of the cross might be displayed that difference which in His judgment must be made in the case of all men” (Leo, sermon 55, sect. 1). The historical event and the cosmic drama interact with each other: “And when the Author of life was undergoing this mysterious phase, and at so great a condescension of God’s Majesty, the foundations of the whole world were shaken, when all creation condemned their wicked crime by its upheaval” (168).

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Recapitulation works across the boundaries of logic and narrative, from substance to person and person to history. It is a rhetorical device used in the justification of faith as a reasoned proof. Christian argument depends on this assimilation or transposability. It is what is cultivated preeminently in the fluid usage of the Word as active power, commandment, relation, person, way of life, and history. Having destroyed the static nature of the symbol through narrative, uniting concept and biography, theology then set this image of eternity into perpetual motion by mutating the life of Christ into the sacramental life of the convert. The principle of oijkonomiva, the economy of salvation, is a way of conceiving the fulfillment of God’s covenant plan with humanity by the intercession of an incarnate God. This oijkonomiva is read into the Trinity if the procession of the Son from the Father is conceived in terms of the birth, death, and resurrection of the Christ and the fulfillment of human history through the agency of the Word. Daniélou explains oijkonomiva “as a term for the plan of salvation, denoting explicitly the events of the life of Christ understood not as mere facts but as the manifestation of the plan conceived by God’s wisdom.”60 Second- and third-century theologians such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Novatian identified the persons of the Trinity with their roles in the salvation of the world, at some expense to Trinity understood in terms of the interrelation of the three persons.

Continuing Doctrinal Debate The focus on the eternal relation of the three persons came to the fore in the late third and early fourth century in reaction to the emphasis on economic trinitarianism, which made the role of the Son in human salvation so distinctive that the temptation to think him either a separate god or simply human was threatened. In response, orthodoxy went in the other direction, emphasizing the transcendent unity of the three persons. The resources of secular philosophy were called upon in the development of both sides of this controversy. Economic trinitarianism drew upon pre-Socratic and Stoic theories of the seminal logos, and transcendent trinitarianism drew upon Neoplatonic mysticism. The orthodox impulse to simple unity was aided by secular philosophy in Plotinus’s theory of

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the mystical unity and divine simplicity of the One. Augustine emerged as the reconciler of the two strains, attending first to the problem of immanence and transcendence, and then to the double procession. He accomplished the first by distinguishing between the procession from the Father, since the Son is eternally begotten, and the mission of deliverance, in which the Son is sent by God to become flesh. For him, the distinction between the Trinity as eternal procession and as temporal mission is understandable as a convenience for thought, since it treats different moments in the same action, which is to say, the eternal utterance of God’s love. Put another way, the temporal mission reveals the eternal procession to humans. Augustine uses an analogy for this: But in my words Father and Son and Holy Spirit are separated and cannot be said together, and if you write them down each name has its own separate space. Here is an example: when I name my memory, understanding, and will, each name refers to a single thing, and yet each of these single names is the product of all three; there is not one of these three names which my memory and understanding and will have not produced together.61 The atemporal relation of difference and sameness, which must perforce be constituted of three moments (as Hegel has subsequently taught), is the eternal procession between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This Trinity has various permutations for Augustine, but the principle is the reciprocal relation. With two, we only have difference; a third element is necessary for the relation of sameness in difference. Edmund Hill gives a philological basis for the pericwvrhsiı or circum-incession of the interpersonal relationship of the hypostases, “an eternal inter-communication of wisdom and love and glory”: “The Greek word in its secular use means a revolving or a revolution—the revolution of a wheel. It conjures up the rather lovely picture of an eternal divine round dance.”62 Irenaeus traces the lines of the dance: “It is the Spirit who prepares man in the Son, it is the Son who leads to the Father, it is the Father who bestows incorruption unto eternal life, which comes to anyone from his seeing God.”63 In the effort to understand the communication of a transcendent God, Christology provided a radical idea. Its innovation rested not so much in the idea of apotheosis, but in the insistence that the unique intervention of incarnation was a repetition without loss. We normally incline to think

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of the importance of a unique historical event as something that can be cultivated in memory, commemorated by ritual, renewed in thought. But even these efforts are subject to the work of time and the diminution of our human capacities to recall. Against this inevitable loss, the law of diminishing returns, Christian dogma asserted a renewal of the unique event by a kind of transference. The Logos which takes on human form in the person of Christ is no different than his manifestation in the witness of the living Church as it takes place in each person through history. This assertion of continuity returns the manifestation of the logos to its earlier traditional forms as human utterance, now sanctified by that most perfect intervention. As each soul is converted and renewed in the body of Christ, incarnation continues to happen: All therefore that the Son of God did and taught for the world’s reconciliation, we not only know as a matter of past history, but appreciate in the power of its present effect. It is He Who, born of the Virgin Mother by the Holy Ghost, fertilizes His unpolluted Church with the same blessed Spirit, that by the birth of Baptism and innumerable multitude of sons may be born to God . . . (176 ‒‒ 177) Therefore what is spoken of on the one hand in the historical narrative, and on the other hand in the sacraments of the Church, is, as one unique moment of intervention in human history, without difference. Incarnation becomes the whole of the rest of human history through the power of language. This transference is of signal importance in Gadamer’s appropriation of the verbum interius: “The proclamation of salvation, the content of the Christian message, is itself a unified event in sacrament and preaching, and only brings to expression what happens in Christ’s redeeming act. It is yet a single word out of which proclamation continually goes forth” (TM, 427/WM, 431). In Christianity, the second person of the Trinity inherited many names deriving from Hebrew scriptures —Wisdom, Power, Light, Life, Truth, Word, Son, although mainly Son: “By what may be called ‘a collation of images’ the title Son of God was able to take up into itself not only the content of other titles of derivation such as Logos, but also the connotations of almost all the other sets of passages for the divine in Christ, each of which contributed something to the eventual understanding of the content of ‘Son,’ whether or not this had originally belonged to this title.”64

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But at the same time, the name Logos came to have a special place because of its capacity to signify the Son as both God incarnate and living proclamation. The increasing usage of Logos as a denomination for Christ was a function not only of the influence of Greek philosophy on theological speculation, but also of its usefulness in the effort to articulate the faith role of the Church. Like Luther later, the pragmatic Roman fathers underlined the relation between the incarnate Word that the Father uttered and the word of faith as the dissemination of its teachings in the ongoing institution of the Church. Logos was often translated in the Roman Church into Latin as sermo,65 reinforcing the idea that the church existed through the living witness to and of the Word through the kerygma. Christian doctrine adopts from the Greek tradition the principle of an active, diffusive, unifying force in the logos, “quickening and sustaining all things everywhere, each severally and all collectively; while He mingles in one the principles of all sensible existence. . . . the result a marvelous and truly divine harmony.”66 Christian faith defied the logical consistency of a God either perfectly transcendent (deus absconditus) or immanent. By situating faith in the difficult and abiding correspondence of immanence and transcendence, Christology created a deeper and more comprehensive answer to the relation of being and becoming than had yet been expressed. By gathering up the eventfulness of past history in recapitulation (“so that type was turned into Truth, prophecy into Revelation”), and extending the singular event of incarnation through kerygma (“the seed of the Word, which consists of the preaching of the Gospel”), theology merged the universality of the concept and the contingency of history into a singularity (“and in Thyself so accomplishest all mysteries, that as there is but one sacrifice instead of many victims”).67 What Gadamer calls “the great dialectical puzzle of the one and the many” is offered a depth dimension in this sublime unification of logos and mythos (TM, 457/WM, 461).

Augustine’s Contributions to the Debates With Augustine, who stands in the tradition of Hilary and Leo, the power of language to cope with the equivocation of the double nature is not only asserted but thematized, and in fact Augustine’s wrestling with the

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idea of the homoousios becomes the occasion for the development of a theory of the symbol. He begins with an assertion of the unchangeability of the Son, and expresses this by contrast with his own human inconstancy. However, this very contrast gives Augustine the opportunity to assert a connection between the human and the divine: “But we were exiled from this unchanging joy, yet not so broken and cut off from it that we stopped seeking eternity, truth, and happiness even in this changeable time-bound situation of ours—for we do not want, after all, to die or to be deceived or to be afflicted.”68 The fathers had already drawn the arguments for this relation from secular thought. According to Cyril, the natural connection between human and divine natures is the relation between creator and created: “And from such members He is not ashamed to assume flesh, who is the framer of those very members.”69 The continuity with the divine nature of human nature before the fall is spoken of in the language of the Timaeus and the spevrma lovgou e;mfu˜ton: “For [Ecclesiastes] teaches us here that the universe is entirely consistent with itself, that there is an indestructible harmony among all intelligible things and a kind of cooperation which exists among all beings.”70 A further proof of this natural connection for Augustine is our own desire. Our sense of what it means to be whole, and our misery in inconstancy (in death, deception, and affliction), is proof of our connection with the immutable, constant, and impassable. Because of our separation, God needed to reach across the divide, so he “sent us sights suited to our wandering state.”71 These were the signs recorded in the Hebrew scriptures, but also in the Word made flesh. Augustine relates the manner of that communication to the needs of the situation: First we had to be persuaded how much God loves us, in case out of sheer despair we lacked the courage to reach up to him. Also we had to be shown what sort of people we are that he loves, in case we should take pride in our own worth, and so bounce even further away from him and sink even more under our own strength. So he dealt with us in such a way that we could progress rather in his strength; he arranged it so that the power of charity would be brought to perfection in the weakness of humility.72 By this account, incarnation is seen as a rhetorical act (“First we had to be persuaded”). The manner of God’s appearance through the narrative

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of poverty, suffering, and death was dictated by the audience. The terms of the narrative, its narrative logic, spoke in the form least likely to be misunderstood: a lesson of humility figured in the story of the derogation and betrayal of a simple man. This form had two functions. In the first place, it showed us “what sort of people we are that he loves,” and it brought his charity “to perfection in the weakness of humility.” This is less a theology of exchange than of mimesis, in that an instruction by an author is accomplished through narrative, and the didactic purpose is to be read out of the events of a life. By this human mirroring we learn of the essential humility of our state: “[W]e had to be shown what sort of people we are that he loves.” Even the wonderful exchange can be understood as narrative instruction, because in Augustine’s logic, this exchange is explained by the narrative. The humility of Christ is itself transformative. The way in which he was born and lived and was treated, set against his divinity, is so overwhelming an instruction in the generosity of God that, although we cannot fathom it, we continue to take its lesson: “So we needed to be persuaded how much God loves us, and what sort of people he loves.”73 This is not the logic of justification but an explanatory psychology. It is a return to the narrative instruction of Paul, whom Augustine quotes: “He did not spare his own Son but delivered him up for us all; how then has he not given us all things with him” (Rom. 8:31). It is the same lesson of generosity, but the bald paradox of the wondrous exchange in Paul engages Augustine’s mind. And by way of explanation, Augustine comes up with a theory, a theory he discovers that he has had all the time from the Greeks —“consonant proportion” (congruentia or consonantia from aJrmonivan)— and so we are come full circle from rhetorical appeal, to the Jewish sense of paradox and dissonance, back to the Greek sense of the harmony of the created universe.74 The rupture of the fall meant that the world had fallen out of joint, and humans were incapable of full participation in God’s love. There was an essential disparity introduced by sin, and the sin had somehow to be purged by a redress of the disequilibrium. But there was a problem: Humanity condemned itself to separation by its own act of will. The breaking of a most sacred covenant by an act of pride severed the connection of the world with its creator. Even if divine mercy, which is infinite, wished to heal the rift, how was it to engage with what had become so alien? How

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can what is, by its perfection, removed from sin enter into communion with what is removed from that perfection by its own pollution? Augustine detected some wiggle room, schooled as he had been in the notion that, in spite of its fallenness, nature is informed by a divine spark, a logos seminales, just as Justin understood the lovgoı informing the cosmos in natural relation to the Word. The stuff of human nature is instinct with God’s being as the material of his creation. That nature which has been broken yearns for what it is not, what it once was. The break with God is precisely what is unnatural, and it exists as a denial of the growth of that seed. The space of commonality is now the desire, which is precisely the presence of perfection in the form of its absence. It is the correction of the disequilibrium which is natural, and not its continuance. The correction is accomplished by connecting the two, the desire of one and love of the other. It only takes the initiative of grace to restore that participation, since desire is answered by its need, and the relationship begun again. Augustine tried to argue that this all has a certain necessary logic. The point of contact needed to be of a particular type. Signs were not enough. A passageway between mortality and immortality had to be established. Community was found in establishing a point of commonality through which communication might pass. Divine perfection found this point of contact in a miraculous innovation; the common term was the rupture itself, which was humanity’s weakness and its need for wholeness, and this common term served as a point of modulation between imperfection and perfection. In describing this exchange, Augustine sets up the terms in a mathematical relation of proportion: To contemplate God, which by nature we are not, we would have to be cleansed by him who became what by nature we are and what by sin we are not. By nature we are not God; by nature we are men; by sin we are not just. So God became a just man to intercede with God for sinful man. The sinner did not match the just, but man did match man. So he applied to us the similarity of his humanity to take away the dissimilarity of our iniquity, and becoming a partaker of our mortality he made us partakers of his divinity. It was surely right that the death of the sinner issuing from the stern necessity of condemnation should be undone by the death of the just man issuing from the voluntary freedom of mercy, his single matching our double.75

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The modulation is accomplished through the common term, which is the essential nature of humanity, already a gift of God’s love. Augustine’s explanation relies on the idea of the middle term. The syllogism, the ability to derive new knowledge from old, is derived from just this technique of finding a hinge in the terms of predication. But Augustine does not conceive of this shared relation in logical terms, and he struggles for language to describe the relation: “This match — or agreement or concord or consonance or whatever the right word is for the proportion of one to two—is of enormous importance in every construction or interlock — that is the word I want — of creation. What I mean by this interlock, it has just occurred to me, is what the Greeks call harmonia.”76 Augustine records his struggle, his rumination, in order to mark the significance and novelty of the notion. Harmonia means in its primary sense the carpenter’s join, as between two ship’s planks, in which two are brought together as one by the tight overlap, by the jointure itself. Then in language it comes to mean a concord of sound, and the principle of musical proportion that underlies the universe of Pythagoras. In either case there is a proportion of single to double. Two are both themselves but constitute one as well. Augustine dwells upon the musical analogy because of its inherency in human understanding: “It is what makes concord between high-pitched and deep voices, and if anyone strays discordantly away from it, it is not our knowledge, which many lack, but our very sense of hearing that is painfully offended” (ibid.). The consonant proportion of the single to the double is then worked out in terms of the economy of salvation. Human nature is two because it is both soul and body, “in soul because of sin, in body because of sin’s punishment” (ibid.). By the fall our double is subject to a double death, both in the corruption of the flesh and the loss of eternity. The event of Christ’s intervention is then a double salvation: To balance this double death of ours the savior paid in his single one, and to achieve each resurrection of ours he pre-enacted and presented his one and only one by way of sacrament and by way of model. . . . For he was not a sinner or godless, and so he had no need to be renewed in the inner man as though he were dead in spirit, or by regaining wisdom to be called back to a life of justice. But being clothed with mortal flesh, in that alone he died and in that alone he rose again;

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and so in that alone he harmonized with each part of us by becoming in that flesh the sacrament for the inner man and the model for the outer one.”77 We have here at a critical point in theology a cultivation of the principle of equivocity. One is two, two is one. One may doubt if logic can maintain its reliance on the univocal in the first place, since the middle term exists through the possibility of multiple predication, but Augustine’s conception is figural. Although grounded in the example of the musical scale, it relies in its descriptive formulation on the poietic exploitation of a generative ambiguity: “The sinner did not match the just, but man did match man. So he applied to us the similarity of his humanity to take away the dissimilarity of our iniquity.”78 The interesting thing is that, though Augustine seems to develop what sounds like a metaphorical understanding, the violence to attribution in the metaphorical exchange, which certainly happens in the incarnation, is substituted here for an emphasis on concord, on the overlapping of disparate categories. The incarnation “applies a similarity to take a dissimilarity away.” This seems to be the tendency in the typological imagination. Whereas metaphor is the occasion for new understandings, the type or symbol is a way to gather together the general and the particular. Perhaps we can say that the wonderful exchange that theology develops to explain salvation history is inclined less to the metaphorical than the symbolic. In fact, Romantic idealism and trinitarian theory coincide in the development of the idea of the symbolic, which refers to representations in which the universal is intuited through the particular. “True symbolism is where the particular represents the more general, not as a dream or a shadow, but as a living momentary revelation of the Inscrutable,” as Goethe puts it.79 For Schelling, the symbolic is the synthesis of these two modes, “where neither the universal means the particular nor the particular the universal, but rather where both are absolutely one.”80 In such a case, “the universal is completely the particular and the particular simultaneously the entire universal, and does not merely mean or signify it.” Coleridge borrowed and elaborated this idea in his own occasional remarks on the symbol: “[A] Symbol is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the General in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the

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Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative.”81  The varieties of hereticism that continued to appear and reappear through the early centuries of the church testify to the difficulty for a dogmatic theology of fixing conceptually the nature of the Son of Man as the Son of God, in what sense he was divine, and in what sense human. The task for thought was enormous — the affirmation without contradiction of the procession of the Word who was not a separate being and yet a distinct person. This relation was also necessarily tied in all its complexity to the trinitarian relationships that comprehended the relation of the divine to the human through time and eternity. The formula worked out over time that served the institutional stability of the church was a kind of delicate compromise that could never tilt too far in one direction or another without danger of losing its balance. Whereas its formulation was certainly created out of political, historical, and institutional pressures, the intellectual achievement was impressive in its own right. What is the legacy of trinitarian theology for philosophy? Kant declared flatly that “With the doctrine of the Trinity, taken literally, there is nothing to be done for all practical purposes.”82 Schleiermacher descried that the doctrine “is not an immediate utterance concerning the Christian selfconsciousness,” and directed liberal Protestantism towards a more strictly economic trinitarianism.83 The life of the idea flows from its refusal to concede either movement, towards the purely transcendent or practical, and that is precisely the ground of its achievement—the radical subversion of the logic of identity and difference, the transformation of the relation between social history and personal narrative, and between these and the abstractions of logic. In the working out of its particular problem we have a model for thought across the boundaries of speculation and narrative. Universal and particular, history and category, mind and world, person and meaning. The doctrine of incarnation needed, and then taught, how to work against the univocity of reason, and thought with a kind of symbolic understanding that moved easily between the one and the many. Cyril illustrates this capacity in eminent fashion:

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But the Savior comes in various forms to each man for his profit. For to those who have need of gladness He becomes a Vine; and to those who want to enter in He stands as a Door; and to those who need to offer up their prayers He stands a mediating High Priest. Again, to those who have sins He becomes a Sheep, that He may be sacrificed for them. He is made all things to all men, remaining in His own nature what He is. For so remaining, and holding the dignity of His Sonship in reality unchangeable, He adapts Himself to our infirmities.84 Above all, Christian theology learned and taught the profound connection and reciprocity of mythos and logos in the justification of faith, and whereas Western reason for a long time abandoned this complex interrelationship, its recovery has been and will always be stimulated by an exemplary model.

chapter 3



Hermeneutic Anticipations The Circular Ontology of the Word in Augustine

the action of the mind beyond all things that may be said —Heraclitus, Fragment 18

Being and Embodiment Late in his life, Hans-Georg Gadamer reaffirmed his primary debt to Augustine in the development of a hermeneutic understanding of language: “I myself relied on Augustine’s reception of the Stoic teaching of the ‘inner word.’ Augustine refers to this [teaching] in order to bring closer to human thinking the mystery of the Incarnation, where the word ‘becomes flesh.’ In this Christian message a doubling of the world is explicitly avoided. The inner speaking is not the pattern for the expressed speaking, but the whole is a process of its own mysterious structure.”1 In spite of Augustine’s reliance on the Platonic forms and the dualistic language of inner and outer worlds, I want to show how Gadamer is right about this non-dualism, pace Lonergan and others,2 and why, for this reason, the complex structure of the word in Augustine is deeply involved in hermeneutics. We misunderstand Gadamer’s appropriation of the inner word if we think it has to do simply with an explanatory analogy,3 because the complex relation of immanence and transcendence, which is to say, the relation of incarnation and Trinity, is a pattern of thought at the root of philosophical hermeneutics.4 If we wish to understand the relationship between language and being that is at the root of the thought of Gadamer, the model of Augustine’s inner word is indispensable. 98

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It is in the De Trinitate that Augustine develops the idea of the verbum interius, the inner word, which he also calls the verbum mentis, or the verbum cordis. He set about writing the De Trinitate at a time when the Church was still in a protracted struggle for a coherent trinitarian theology that could withstand the various heretical challenges. Its doctrine was motile and in flux, tilting now towards subordinationism, now towards modalism.5 His innovations were directed in response to these tensions towards affirming the mystery of a Trinity of distinct relations yet single substance, both transcendent and immanent. Characteristically, he believed that humans are given reason in order to seek a clearer vision of their faith, “to look for His face always” (Ps. 105:4). Augustine’s strategy of approach to the mystery, his method of investigation, was revolutionary for Western thought. Without direct access to the image of God that he seeks, he will take an indirect route:6 He will look inside of himself. From Paul he knows that there he will catch a glimpse of the divine face by a reflection—“this disparate image, yet image nonetheless, which is man.”7 This image is no passive image like an impression or the likeness in a painting, but an imitation in being and act: “What we are now trying to do is to examine this question in the human mind; here our own nature can, so to say, answer our questions.”8 There is a problem here, because the action and being that Augustine is seeking is what he is doing. Because what he is seeking with his mind is his mind, he is caught up in the contradiction of his own intentions that Gadamer describes at the end of Truth and Method: “In understanding we are drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were, too late.”9 The seeming impossibility of this task is the source of Augustine’s most prodigious insights. His choice of approach leads him to ponder the fact that our mind in its fullness is never fully present to itself. It hides away great swathes of experience and wisdom, which are in our possession in spite of our not being aware of them. This absent presence or present absence is at the heart of the problem of knowledge that puzzled the ancients. How can we be aware of our ignorance of something about which we have no knowledge? How can we desire to know a thing that we do not know? The Greeks thought about this in terms of the relation of part to whole. How can the human mind conceive of the whole without being able fully to grasp its contents? Nevertheless the mind somehow has this capacity.

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The part somehow contains an intimation of the whole even before it is fully aware of the fact. We have both the capacity for a conception of the whole and the inability to realize it fully. Augustine sees this paradox in terms of the divine order, reflecting the mind’s proper derivation from divine intelligence, and its weakness. The sense of a whole is guided by an anticipatory awareness of the end (the telos of happiness) that a full comprehension will confer, when we see His face. But how does it have this prior awareness? Augustine’s answer is, in its desire. The mind has a conception of wholeness that it extends to what is partial and incomplete. Its want or lack is testimony to the whole that it needs. “The mind is so constructed . . .” The whole of the tenth book of the De Trinitate is devoted to what we now call the hermeneutic circle.10 Human inquiry is moved on by its intuition of the whole in its felt absence. Our appetite is created by a taste of the whole, always a part, and our understanding is moved in this shuttling between part and whole by desire. It is our finitude that moves us, as a kind of Hegelian negative, but even more like the gravitational pull of the whole, in our potential for being “altogether permeated with possibility.”11 Gadamer is very aware of the fact that the inner word is not just an analogy, a point that is lost on much commentary in the hermeneutic literature.12 The culmination of the De Trinitate, a work that took fifteen years of Augustine’s life to complete,13 seeks the meaning of the biblical idea that man is made in God’s image, and in this effort the verbum mentis is both reflective of and continuous with the divine. Augustine understands the Latin verbum with something of the same breadth as the New Testament logos, and as such, its usage passes quite fluidly from its denomination as Son, to the principle of reason embedded in the soul, to the teaching of Christ in the church. This fluidity extends to the association of word and image, which are roughly equivalent in Augustine’s thinking, since a conception, whether of justice or of a city, is an image: “Its image in my memory is its word.”14 Unlike the piecemeal of our corrupted senses, the image of God is the Word of God, and so it is in our minds: “[J]ust because we say that thoughts are utterances of the heart, it does not mean that they are not also seeing, arising when they are true from the seeing of awareness. When these things happen outwardly through the body, speech is one thing, sight another; but when we think inwardly they are both one and the same” (409). Thus the imago Dei and

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verbum interius are equivalent in the economy of divine emanation. This transposability will be helpful as Augustine constructs his reflective ontology. The key to the understanding of imago is the idea that the likeness that man bears to God is a participation in his very being (9.16). The procession of God’s will and love extends to creation the mysterious relationality of divine generation in which God’s creation is not simply an object over against his subjective willing, but a participation in his goodness. This conception has its roots in Augustine’s appropriation of Neoplatonist emanation theory, although he can cite Acts 17:27 as support that the good “is not situated far from anyone of us; for in it we live and move and are” (8.5). Goodness is not only the medium of our existence as a kind of domicile, but penetrates to our very being: “So the good the soul turns to in order to be good is the good from which it gets its being soul at all. This is when the will accords with nature to perfect the soul in good, when the will turns in love toward that good by which the soul is what it does not forfeit being” (8.5). Not only is this goodness constitutive of our being, but equally is it constitutive of our understanding: “This then is our good, in which we see why anything ought to be or to have been that we understand ought to have been” (ibid.). Goodness is thus that which we seek, live in, move, and are, the object of our search and its engine, its cause and effect. This reversibility thesis is a critical advance on Augustine’s way towards his reflective ontology, because it allows, by means of a subterfuge, thought to break into the circle that always precedes it. The pay-off is that, because of the participatory structure of goodness, self-reference can be a divine reflection: “So then, since we desire to understand as far as it is given us . . . . we believe about him what we experience in ourselves” (8.7). Augustine first works this reversibility out with the example of justice. Why do we love the apostle Paul? We didn’t know this man personally. What we love in him is his just mind. And how is it that we know he has a just mind?—“for the simple reason that we ourselves also have a mind. . . . nobody knows what ‘just’ is unless he is just himself ” (8.9). Such understanding is given “by a kind of natural affinity” which exists, amazingly, even if a person is not themselves just.15 Augustine will support this last feature of understanding later when he develops a conception of a kind of Hegelian negative, but here he remains focused on the

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method of comparison from affinity, and extends it not only to understanding, but even to the conception of the word. Not only do I understand what “just” is by searching within myself, but I find the word to express it by this method: “When I seek to express what it is I do not find the answer anywhere but with myself; and if I ask someone else what ‘just’ is, he searches in himself to find the answer. And anyone who has ever been able to answer the question truly has found the answer in himself” (8.9). The word “just,” just as the word “Carthage,” is a kind of image in the soul,“and so I have fabricated its image as best I could in my mind, and this is its word for me when I wish to express it” (8.9). What this all leads to is a transitivity between what a person is and what a person knows, not the perfect transitivity that exists in God’s knowledge and being, but a similitude that connects the transitive passage of will, knowledge, and being of the transcendent Trinity to the immanent mission of Trinity in and through the world. As such, we know from and by what we are. The trinity of being, will, and knowledge are made concrete at the level of introspection as self, love, and word. The form “according to which we are and according to which we do anything with true and right reason” is “a kind of word” that is bound to us through love: “So love, like something in the middle [quasi medius], joins together our word and the mind it is begotten from” (9.13). This results in a perfect transitivity: “And since it loves knowledge and knows love, the word is in the love and the love in the word and both in the lover and the utterer” (9.15). In an echo of Aristotelian metaphysics (via Plotinus [?]), we arrive at the dissolution of the border between subject and object, in something that sounds very much like the Aristotelian operation of the intellect: “So the consciousness has some kind of likeness to the positive quality known” (9.16). Augustine, however, takes this metamorphosis a step further. With him not only does the boundary between epistemology and ontology break down, but thinking about God or about his creation is an increase of being:16 “By the same token when we know God we are indeed made better ourselves than we were before we knew him, especially when we like this knowledge and appropriately love it and it becomes a word and a kind of likeness to God.”17 The word is the product of the procession of divine love past the barrier of transcendence, and as such it stands as the pivot, reflecting up to

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the face of God and outwardly to the increase of human being in love. This self-progressing movement is one that moves first towards humans by the energy of its goodness, then back towards its source, but magnified by an increase of being that then is able to see better and better what informs it. The word as utterance, as message, as mind, as image, is means and end at every point in this relay, the substance of the circle of relation between God and creation, the manifestation of the reciprocity of being and becoming. It is hardly enough to say that the word is reflexive, unless we understand in this denomination the double action of its circling being. No wonder hermeneutics was drawn to this reflection on the word as a way of approach to the mystery of language.

Following Augustine’s Approach to the Verbum Interius We now have some sense of the radical power of Augustine’s idea, but we lack as yet a precise knowledge of the working of the verbum mentis itself. We need to know this with precision if we are to understand how it is adapted to hermeneutics. Gadamer relies heavily on the concept, but his description in Truth and Method remains abbreviated and suggestive. This may be a strategy to engage us in the primary text, or an assumption of familiarity. The hermeneutic appropriation of the inner word depends on the circular ontology that is gradually unfolded in Augustine’s search for the meaning of the Trinity. Therefore we must follow his argument from the beginning. Augustine is like Dante’s Pilgrim who must take an indirect route to knowledge, and for Augustine this route is a journey into the recesses of his own mind. His argument is indeed like a journey, progressing step by step. I have tried to summarize this intellectual journey in four summary steps. Because what reflects darkly the image of the Trinity is the mirror of Augustine’s mind, he demonstrates first how his own seeking is already a kind of dark reflection. Second, this reflecting mind exists in the exact middle of the immanent and transcendent realms as a kind of passageway, seeing in both directions simultaneously. Third, he shows how this double-seeing is actually a circle, as if the reflecting surface bends back upon itself to reveal what is behind it and in front of it. Finally, he shows how the knowledge of this reflection is a word. We start at the first step.

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De Trinitate starts by disclaiming the habit of anthropomorphizing God, and yet asserts that understanding something of God is not outside human reason. So already we start with the enigma that is played out until the end of the work. Our sight is not irreparably incompetent, but capable of progress, and indeed that is our function, to see better and better, and understanding comes as the person is made better or more capable of understanding. There is the circle. God’s divinity is so unlike the changeable world that “it is necessary for our minds to be purified before that inexpressible reality can be inexpressibly seen by them” (1.3). Here already we have the anticipation of a fundamental, revolutionary ontological principle of hermeneutics, that understanding is not the grasping of a fixed object by a sovereign subject, but rather is caught up in a process in which the person changes in understanding and in order to understand. This principle foreshadows the entire intellectual journey toward the Trinity, since the understanding is caught up in the reflective movement of divine immanence. The introduction to De Trinitate has a preparatory discussion of method, but, just as with Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (as we will see), the method of inquiry is already a description of the knowledge being sought, already caught up in the circle. Augustine cautions in his introduction that his book on the Trinity will not succeed in perfect understanding, since “no one has ever expressed himself well enough to be understood by everybody on everything. . . . That is why it is useful to have several books by several authors . . . so that the matter itself may reach as many as possible, some in this way, others in that” (1.5). Pairing this with a citation from Paul that “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ” (Col. 2:3), he develops the theme that communication is itself always already a mediation, and understanding is an always unfinished process. The differences inherent in experience and position mean that understanding is not simply removing layers of misunderstanding until the bare truth is revealed, but rather that we bring our experience and perspective to bear on the issue in order to understand better, enriching our understanding by the addition. Thus, understanding is a process of transformation —What we see and who we are move forward in tandem. The effort to understand the enigma of the Trinity is not the definitive answer to the enigma, because, as Augustine acknowledges only too willingly, “these matters live permanently in our

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thoughts” (1.8). Any human effort to grasp the enigma is going to be caught up in the movement of revelation and withdrawal that characterizes temporal understanding. Augustine borrows from Philippians 3:12 to describe this motion of advance and recoil in language that prefigures Heidegger’s formulation of temporal being: “I forget what lies behind and stretch out to what lies ahead, and press on intently” (1.8). Augustine’s work, the De Trinitate, is performative in that it engages him in the advance and recoil of his own growth in understanding, and that as a teaching it is also a learning. His book answers the questions people ask of this enigma by involving himself in the dialogue of understanding, becoming folded into the ceaseless play of question and answer. He is not the expert, but he hopes that “in being prompt to answer their questions I should also find the answers to my own. And so at the bidding of the Lord our God and with his aid I have undertaken, not so much to discuss with authority what I have already learned, as to learn by discussing it with modest piety” (1.8). The progress in understanding in which the thinker is himself changed by what he expresses flows from the logic of God’s immanence: “His essential goodness, in the last resort, is attained in that sight or vision in which God is manifested to the pure of heart” (1.31). The desire to understand the enigma of the Trinity is not merely a curiosity instigated by a peculiarity of faith, but is its destiny. And this is precisely the formula Gadamer offers for hermeneutic understanding: “[I]nterpretation doesn’t occur as an activity in the course of life, but is the form of human life.”18 Augustine says almost the same thing: “[I]t is not one thing to understand and another to live, but understanding is identical with living.”19 In Book II Augustine comes to the question of incarnation, the manner by which God comes into the world, and he does this by playing with the semantic equivocation of “Word” as the second person of the Trinity: In what manner did God send his Son? Did he tell him to come, giving him an order he complied with by coming, or did he ask him to, or did he merely suggest it? Well, whichever way it was done, it was certainly done by word. But God’s Word is his Son. So when the Father sent him by word, what happened was that he was sent by the Father and his Word. Hence it is by the Father and the Son that the Son was sent, because the Son is the Father’s Word. (2.9)

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Within this dense text there is a sliding between the word as instrument (“it was certainly done by word”), the word as someone’s attribute (a man’s word), and the word as (a)filiation (the Father’s Word). Augustine’s intent is not to sort all of this out, but to elide the connections, so that the usage manifests the unity of the Word of the Old and New Testaments and the testimony of the Church in the historical unfolding of Christianity. This transitivity of such different senses of the Word allows Augustine to create a kind of internal catachresis that expresses the enigma of immanence and transcendence in terms of the event of language: “And when this fullness of time came, God sent his Son made of woman (Gal. 4:4), that is made in time, in order that the Word might be shown to men incarnate; and the time at which this should happen was timelessly contained within the Word” (2.9). We hear in this all the senses of word that he has invoked up to this point, and we are meant to hear them together. Augustine’s argument is rhetorical — not a chain of logic but a presentation from out of the resources of the language. In Book IV Augustine develops the systemic theological implications of Neoplatonic oneness that would also feed high scholasticism. To reconcile reason to the transcendent and immanent Trinity, Augustine invokes the principle of the order of perfection, “the sweetness of begetter and begotten pervading all creatures according to their capacity with its vast generosity and fruitfulness, that they might all keep their right order and rest in their right places” (4.11). It is in the context of this teaching that Augustine explains the temporal unfolding of discourse in reflecting an atemporal divinity. The three persons are inseparable, but cannot be manifest separately in human speech: But in my words Father and Son and Holy Spirit are separated and cannot be said together, and if you write them down each name has its own separate space. Here is an example: when I name my memory, understanding, and will, each name refers to a single thing, and yet each of these single names is the product of all three; there is not one of these three names which my memory and understanding and will have not produced together. (4.30) Hegel will express this law of temporal unfolding in the Phenomenology as the inner necessity of something that “lies in the shape in which time sets forth the sequential existence of its moments.”20 And so when Gada-

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mer follows Augustine and Aquinas in relating the divine procession to human thought, we hear the entire tradition in his words: “It is true that no temporality enters into the relations of the divine persons to one another. But the successiveness characteristic of the discursiveness of human thought is not basically temporal in nature either. When human thought passes from one thing to another—i.e., thinks first this thing and then that—it is still not just a series of one thought after another.”21 Our inability to conceive the divine simplicity, however, proves to be a sticking point for Augustine. The passage from transcendence to immanence has been advanced through a series of metaphors, but the means of transition from the one to the other remains vague. It is in this context, a search for a way to understand his simplicity, that the analogy of the inner word is first introduced. The Greek inheritance had established logos as the point of entry to the eternal or intersection between the material and eternal, and this came eventually to refer specifically to the workings of the intellectual faculty (reason), but in developing the idea of the inner word Augustine postponed the complete identification of logos with human reason. Augustine might be considered as the mid-point in the Western conception of reason, because his emphasis on the inwardness of the mind is balanced at the same time by his belief in the word as the continuity of will and history. For him the Word has a trans-subjective aspect that is, in fact, mirrored in the workings of the mind. This position is well supported by the strong role scripture gives to speech in the economy of salvation. The Holy Spirit is Wisdom standing in place of the Neoplatonic nous, spirit overflowing from the One throughout the universe, and Wisdom, by the customary usage of scripture, is spoken: “For the Father utters her to be his Word, not like a word spoken aloud from the mouth, or even thought of before it is pronounced — such a word is completed in a space of time, but this other Word is eternal; and she by enlightening us utters to us whatever needs to be uttered to men about herself and about the Father.”22 The word as it is thought and then spoken becomes the point of modulation between the timeless and the temporal, and its mechanisms become the mode of travel. Having established this Janus-like position of the Word, Augustine must now attempt its explanation. As Edmund Hill has noted, Book VIII of the De Trinitate suddenly reverses the movement of Augustine’s thought, and the text deepens precipitously.23 Instead of arguing the character of the faith he plunges into the effort to understand its reason. Book VIII is

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the hinge between the first and second halves of the De Trinitate, between the mystery of the Godhead and its reflection in the human image. The tenets of faith in the divine lead to an aporia, the unsurpassable enigma of God’s truth, and Augustine’s momentous decision to scale this mystery by looking into the human mind as into a reflecting glass toward God. This strategy takes him, in the final books, to an exploration of reflection itself. In the prologue to Book VIII, Augustine frames this attempt by a metadiscourse on the linguistic function of predication, since the use of language to describe God even indirectly would seem to betray his ineffability, and Augustine’s ruminations on this topic anticipate Hegel’s famous attack on predicative logic. What are the relationships between name, self, reference, being? Against the reality that Deus non est in genere, the machinery of generalization and distinction in human language turns out to be a crude and clumsy instrument of understanding that is not, Augustine responds, entirely divorced from divine being, and here we begin to sense the first glimmerings of an appeal to John’s prologue. Augustine argues in the following way. The attribution of three persons in one God is the perfect evidence of the weakness of categorical thought. We simply do not have the capacity to conceive properly what faith dictates. But this is not the occasion for despair, because this poor instrument of understanding provides an indirect route to the truth. We must tack up to the problem sideways, seeing it “like a flash from the corner of your eye” (velut coruscatione perstringeris), battling all the while to avoid sliding back into the natural fog of our occluded vision.24 Augustine hangs the possibility of progress in understanding on the Platonic principle of methexis.25 The universe that Augustine imagines is one formed out of the energy of goodness (“the good of every good,” 8.4), so that what is not fully good desires and looks for good and in so doing becomes more perfectly itself: “So the good the soul turns to in order to be good is the good from which it gets its being soul at all. This is when the will accords with nature to perfect the soul in good, when the will turns in love toward that good by which the soul is what it does not forfeit being, even if the will turns away again.”26 Consequently, the intellect works by deciphering the manner and measure of goodness in nature as its working principle. For this reason, we are capable of grasping something of the divine, since we partici-

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pate in it to the degree that our lives are informed by goodness. Understanding is facilitated by finding in strange things something that we have in common with them, so that a likeness is never purely analogical, but meets us “by a kind of natural affinity” (8.9). Thus, “nobody knows what ‘just’ is unless he is just himself” (ibid.). So understanding involves a kind of self inspection, looking into oneself for what one already knows of what one is seeking to understand. Which brings us back around to the issue of predication. It is just upon this point that Augustine locates the axis of participation. The phrase “good soul” consists of two things, the bare object which needs no action to be what it is (soul), and the object with attribution (good soul) which requires an action, a doing good. But here is the interesting part: If the soul turns away from the good, “it will have nowhere to turn to again if it wishes to reform, unless that good which it has turned away from remains in itself ” (8.4). There must be always a good within the soul to which the changeable soul may advert. The good is always an option because it exists at least in potency as a choice. We have inwardly the possibility of goodness, and this possibility never deserts us. Nevertheless, we do not fully know this good unless we choose it and act upon it —“you can perceive good itself by participating” (8.5). This modulation from virtual to actual represents the small space of commonality between the temporal world of absence and change from the perfect world of presence and fullness: “The only good, after all, that can diminish or increase is one that gets its being good from another good” (8.5). The very division that requires predication is a break from the continuity of perfection, but it is not an absolute break. In a world in which attribution is separated from being through action, still some trace of the original belonging persists; we somehow reflect the absence of genera because of our origin in the divine. This relates to the issue of predication in that a substantive, soul, for instance, “has” itself somehow the infinite possibilities of attribution as a condition of its being. To repeat: “So the good the soul turns to in order to be good is the good from which it gets its being soul at all. This is when the will accords with nature to perfect the soul in good, when the will turns in love toward that good by which the soul is what it does not forfeit being, even if the will turns away again” (ibid.). The energy of divine goodness is not something we put on and take off like the latest fashion, but rather the

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element of our being in which we gather or disperse: “This good then is not situated far from anyone of us; for in it we live and move and are (Acts 17:27)” (ibid.). The deficiency that separates human from divine is also the engine of movement from the one to the other, since we desire the good we lack. But this presents a problem that had been proverbial since Plato. How can we desire what it is that we lack if we do not know it? This is the great theme that follows Augustine until the very end of the book. What he presents as the initial answer to this problem anticipates the formulation of the hermeneutic circle: Yet unless we love him even now, we shall never see him. But who can love what he does not know? . . . And what does knowing God mean but beholding him and firmly grasping him with the mind? . . . But then to behold and grasp God as he can be beheld and grasped is only permitted to the pure in heart . . . so before we are capable of doing this we must first love by faith, or it will be impossible for our hearts to be purified and become fit and worthy to see him. (8.6) Faith in Augustine’s formulation is equivalent to the Vor-Struktur of Heidegger’s hermeneutic understanding.27 Purity of heart is the comportment towards God as the prior condition to knowledge of him. But the acceptance of God does not work in only one direction. Faith is only a starting point, and requires knowledge to complete it: “The certitude of faith at least initiates knowledge; but the certitude of knowledge will not be completed until after this life when we see face to face” (9.1). The spirit in us “that believes what it cannot yet see” must “be on its guard against fabricating something that does not exist,” and so reason comes in after it (8.6). The structure of understanding is a movement towards God that is fired by his absence in the predisposition to him that grace provides. The Augustinian structure of understanding is, as Kierkegaard would say, a repetition forward. Referring to Paul (Philippians 3:13), Augustine defines knowledge: “Perfection in this life, he is saying, is nothing but forgetting what lies behind and stretching out to what lies ahead intently” (9.1). The echo of Heidegger here is unmistakable, and it was upon this construction of the temporal that Heidegger built his hermeneutics of facticity.28

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The Difference Between the Inner Word and the Platonic Form Augustine is keenly aware that the idea of a human knowledge of God is both presumptuous and problematic, since cognition is enslaved to the materiality of the senses. The solution Augustine devises to get past this second impasse leads us directly to the verbum interius. He starts with the fact that human cognition even for the empirical realm is defective. When we use our imagination to conceive of something about which we have no direct evidence (see face to face), we construct an image in our mind patched together out of the experience of our own lives. Thus, everyone’s image of something unavailable to direct sense is going to be unique, built up from the contingencies of personal experience. Everyone who imagines the apostles “will think of their physical features and lineaments in a different way,” and so the apostles are understood “with infinite variety by countless imaginations.”29 This leads Augustine not to despair, but to a distinction between the accidents of the senses and the root categories that underlie them: “Nor as regards the faith we have in the Lord Jesus Christ is it in the least relevant to salvation what our imaginations picture him like, which is probably quite different from the reality. What does matter is that we think of him specifically as a man” (8.7). What is significant about this formulation is not its patent Platonism but the recognition of an interplay between the general and the specific. The human mind holds together “the species and genera of things which are either connatural to us or gathered from our experience” in such a way that we have access to the idea of man even if we have only the outward perception of specific men (8.7). The mind extracts from experience of the many basic categories that are then available to conceptual inference: “Nor do we have the slightest idea, we who have not seen these things, whether they are like what we think of them as being; indeed we assume that in all probability they are not . . . And yet we firmly believe those things because we think of them in terms of general and specific notions that we are quite certain of ” (8.8). The mind works inferentially from things known to things unknown: “[W]e know what it is to live and what it is to die because we live ourselves and have sometimes seen and had experience of people dying or dead” (8.8). The value of this faculty is that, although a crude and broken instrument, the movement beyond direct experience to imagination provides

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the means to leap completely beyond the perceptual world. But the mind stands appalled before such a leap. What can the imagination construe that approaches that immateriality? Here is the trick. It is the mind itself. Since the material world that is the normal object of the mind’s work is not suitable to the task, Augustine will make use of the mind itself and its operations, which are once removed from that materiality. He attempts the leap by a kind of double reflection, turning the instrument of reflection upon itself: “What after all is so intimately known and so aware of its own existence as that by which things enter into our awareness, namely the mind?” (8.9). This strategy has an important side benefit that gets at the problem of circularity Augustine had broached with the question of justice. When we seek to know something outside of ourselves, like justice in a good man, we search for the meaning within ourselves, “even when we are not yet just” (8.9). How is this possible? Just like the imagination that can picture a city that it has not yet seen, the mind is capable of forming an image of something it has not yet experienced. We expect that Augustine will call this a form, but the name that he gives to this image in the mind is “word” (verbum) (8.9). This word has a notable characteristic. It imagines something (like the mind of a just man) within the mind, even though that thing is not literally “in” us: “Is there then another just mind in the mind that is not yet just? If not, then what is it seeing there . . . ?” (ibid.). Here Augustine does refer to the Platonic notion of form, but with a difference. The mind contains the forms (formae) of essential and unchangeable truths, but these forms have a particular entailment. Forms resident in the soul are the directions through which a life finds its fulfillment (“by cleaving to that same form which they behold, in order to be formed”), and the distance between the real and the ideal accounts for the desire that moves a life from the one to the other (8.9). So the forms are different and distinct from the person, and yet they are determinative of the person’s fullest potential. This double relation is crucial, because it explains both the analogy to the Trinity and the obscure working of the inner word. Augustine broaches the manner of this working by using the example of charity, rather than justice, as a form resident in the soul. It will turn out that this choice of an example is not arbitrary. Of course charity, as a form, does not exist as an idea devoid of relation. Charity must be charity

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towards something or someone: “For when we love charity, we love her loving something” (8.12). But more than this, we love charity only because we are moved by it, that is, by love, to appreciate what it is. Thus a circular relation exists in the appreciation; from oneself, to the idea, to the object of relation, back to oneself. This is a very complex path Augustine traces, and it mirrors the relation of the Trinity. Here is the full circuit that he performs: “Oh but you do see a trinity if you see charity. I will just remind you of a few things, and so help you if I can to see that you see it; only let charity herself be present so that we may be moved by her to something good. For when we love charity, we love her loving something, precisely because she does love something” (ibid.). The remarkable thing about this explanation is that the idea (of charity) is already and necessarily resident in the movement of thought towards its object, charity. This is how hermeneutic understanding is explained both by Heidegger and Gadamer, as a Vorbegriff that directs our interpretive understanding, something always already there, even though it is that which we set out to find. The Augustinian form, or the inner word, is not an isolated object in the chamber of the soul, but a complex reflecting set of relations. The person seeking to know charity is moved by charity already in the effort to know it, and thus charity is tied up in the very process of its understanding. Furthermore, the person seeking to know is in-formed by it, that is to say, is being formed by what is being sought in the very process. It is this enigmatic circuit that resembles the trinitarian relation. Augustine makes clear that this circular relation is in fact ontological, since “this brotherly love—it is of course brotherly love that we love each other with—is proclaimed on the highest authority not only to be from God but also simply to be God” (8:12). We cannot objectify or reify the idea of love because it is not simply what one has or uses, but what one is. Or more precisely, it is both. And then, as if this were not enough of a burden to place on the example, Augustine takes the immanent circle of charity and extends it to the transcendent circuit of divine being: Now he sees his brother with ordinary human vision which God cannot be seen by. But if he were to love with spiritual charity the one he sees with human vision, he would see God who is charity with the inner vision which he can be seen by. How therefore can the man

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who does not love the brother he sees love God, who he does not see for the reason that God is the love which he lacks by not loving his brother? (8.12) The identification of God with love elevates the transit of the circle, which had been in the original example from person to idea to object (“For when we love charity, we love her loving something, precisely because she does love something”), to a more encompassing movement from God, to self-idea [love], to object [brother], to God. The full circuit of the double Trinity! The inner vision, or inner word, works by being in some manner manifesting and driving in all these relations, rather than just as a form resident in the soul. The distinction between the strictly Neoplatonic and the Augustinian form turns on the method of translation across the temporal/atemporal divide. The progress Augustine has made to this point is to establish that three things of entirely different categories (subject, substance, and the desire of the one for the other), are in fact a unity in a different sense: “The mind therefore and its love and knowledge are three somethings, and these three are one thing, and when they are complete they are equal . . . . So we have been right in saying that when these three are complete they are consequently equal” (9.4). This relation exhibits the characteristic of the Trinity that most shocks reason: “In a wonderful way therefore these three are inseparable from each other, and yet each one of them is substance, and all together they are one substance or being, while they are also posited with reference to one another” (9.8). Moreover, this trinity is temporally successive only in our attempt to analyze its components: “At the same time we remind ourselves, if we are at all able to see it, that these things come to light in the soul — where they are, so to say, all rolled up and have to be unrolled in order to be perceived and enumerated” (9.5). What allows for this difference between an atemporal reality and its temporal perception? First Augustine notes that the mind exists in a kind of middle world between changeable perception and right reason, able to negotiate between the two with some degree of success: “But the form itself of unshaken and abiding truth . . . continues unruffled as eternity to shed the same light of the purest incorruptible reason both on the vision of my mind and on that cloud of imagination which I perceive” (9.12). Thus great architecture, for instance, participates in both worlds because

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the mind grasps “by simple intelligence the proportions, the inexpressibly beautiful art of such shapes, existing above the apex of the mind” (ibid.). Augustine then comes to what is the crucial move by establishing the relation of forma and verbum. The eye of the mind is able to observe “the form according to which we are and according to which we do anything,” and “by this form we conceive true knowledge of things, which we have with us as a kind of word that we beget by uttering inwardly, and that does not depart from us when it is born” [tamquam verbum apud nos habemus et dicendo intus gignimus, nec a nobis nascendo discedit] (9.12). There it is. The word is a result or product of the mind’s activity, aided by the unchanging forms of things, and that product is somehow a permanent acquisition. The hinge between atemporal unicity and the cognitive vision of it is “word”— something that is both reason (ratio) and form (forma), both the mind’s activity and its object. The verbum is not simply an unchanging idea, because it is embodied. The frailty of human understanding is that is temporal and processive, which means that the contents of the soul “have to be unrolled in order to be perceived and enumerated” (9.4). Augustine attends to this particular weakness because it is at the root of the trinitarian enigma. How can God be both three and one? It is not faith but our intellect that is flawed, which must unroll what is “all rolled up” in order to comprehend. But Augustine sees that this is not just a question of succession, one thing following another, because even human understanding grasps the wholeness of that which unfolds, or else it could not be perceived as one. To grasp the whole of anything temporally revealed requires a certain capacity to hold onto what has fallen away into the past and anticipate the wholeness of what is to be unfolded. Here as in the Confessions, this leads Augustine to that exposition of the circle of understanding Gadamer must have had in mind when he referred to this ancient idea.30 The engine of temporal understanding is desire, wanting what one does not have, a felt absence. The structure of human understanding is an instinct for the whole implanted in the mind, which knows perfection (the divine) without being able to have it, and so a ceaseless desire animates the intellect to know (amor studiendum). The first example Augustine uses to illustrate this principle is, coincidentally, the sound of a new word that excites the passion of learning: “The loveliness of such knowledge . . . so inflames the studiousness of learners that they get all excited

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about it and hunger for it in all the work they put into acquiring such a competence.”31 However for Augustine this is not an incidental desire, but rather indirect evidence of the primal desire to know God. Love of linguistic competence is symptomatic of a much deeper desire: “It is plain for almost any rational soul to see that there is a beauty about this skill that enables men to know each other’s thoughts by uttering meaningful sounds; and because this beauty is known, and loved because known, this word that is unknown is studiously asked about” (10.2). The entire principle Augustine will unfold is stated in nuce in this sentence. What we are seeking when we track down the meaning of a new word is the increase of beauty in our own lives and in our own persons. It is, at the first level, the desire to know beauty itself: “And so we see that the love of a studious spirit, that is of one who wishes to know what he does not know, is not love for the thing he does not know but for something he knows” (10.3). Beauty is that generic thing which a person knows intuitively, and which draws him or her to beauty in the unknown, and thus we have a statement of the hermeneutic circle: “So no studious man, no curious man whatever loves the unknown even when he exhibits a ravenous appetite for knowing what he is ignorant of. Either he already has a general kind of knowledge of what he loves and longs to know it in some particular or in all particulars which are still unknown to him” (10.3). The movement that impels reason forward is an increase of being. The more the human mind knows, the more it desires to know. The word is never just one word, but this is not just a defect of the mind. The idea of beauty is only a kind of formal indication,32 something that will be enfleshed by our ongoing pursuit of it. By the combinatory power of the imagination, the mind is able to form new words, new conceptions of beauty, and approximate ever more closely to the fullness of God’s vision. The inner word escapes the fixed essentialism of the pure form by its embodiment.

How Love Unites the Inner and Outer Word Augustine’s attempt to describe something like a formal indication comes about as a result of his effort to frame the hermeneutic circle as a movement inspired by the trace of God’s being: “Perhaps then the mind sees

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some excellent end, that is its own security and happiness, through some obscure memory which has not deserted it on its travels to far countries and it believes it can only reach this end by knowing itself.”33 Here the mind knows what it does not know in the sense that God’s image is obscured by sin, but made evident by reason: “[W]e see something in the form of everlasting reason, and then we believe and love some expression of it in the formation of some temporal thing” (10.4). The movement of the circle (from the Father to the Son) is impelled by love, an energy that continually pushes past the boundary between immanence and transcendence. As hinge or mediator between the two worlds, the word is not fully itself when it forgets its link to the eternal, as for instance when the word “love” refers only to carnal pleasure. Conversely, the word love becomes fully itself when it is the bridge-point between earthly and heavenly love. This is what Augustine means when he says that “the word conceived and the born word are the same thing when the will rests in the act itself of knowing” [Conceptum autem verbum et natum idipsum est cum voluntas in ipsa notitia conquiescit] (9.14, translation modified, emphasis added). The trinitarian language here is precise and telling. Knowing is both active and still, just as it must be in the Trinity. The stillness results from the equilibrium the word achieves between the two worlds, the meaning of love in the lower world reflecting the love of the higher. But the word is active in the sense that the higher love flows into the lower. Love, which is here analogous to the Holy Spirit rather than the Son, is not just the energy that moves the mind from absence to fulfillment, but the very medium of the connection between a knowledge and its object: “So love, like something in the middle, joins together our word and the mind it is begotten from, and binds itself in with them as a third element in a non-bodily embrace, without any confusion” (9.13). This binding of mind and object through love establishes an ontological continuity of substance and subject: The kind of word then that we are now wishing to distinguish and propose is “knowledge with love.” So when the mind knows and loves itself, its word is joined to it with love. And since it loves knowledge and knows love, the word is in the love and the love in the word and both in the lover and the utterer. (9.15)

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The circularity described here is a triple movement, from love to word, word to love, and both to and from the mind—notice that Augustine distinguishes between the mind that utters and the mind that hears the word in love, and this completes the circle’s perfection. Augustine adds that love is not simply a tool, but both means and end, since the production of the word itself is an act of love. The inner word is specifically that word “which we like when it is conceived by the mind” (ibid.). This is the pleasure of intellect, the pleasure at finding just the right word. In any art, the knowledge of relevant faults “is rightly applauded when the connoisseur distinguishes the quality of some relevant excellence from the defect of it” (ibid.). Thus the mind may traffic in what it does not love but still love the word involved. Love is in a sense the substance of the entire movement, being its cause and its result. The circle of knowledge that moves between form and material is now extended to divine knowledge. The mind that is empty of justice is made for justice, and its lack is the motive force for its movement toward justice. Thus in a sense it is never absent: “So the consciousness has some kind of likeness to the positive quality known, either when it takes pleasure in it or when it is displeased with the lack of it” (9.16). By this reasoning Augustine has also provided the mind the capacity to know God, since it is able to know lack, and thus is able to see its own likeness and defect. It is not only love that exhibits this relation of part and whole. The mind itself, in conceiving the word, is transformed by it, caught up in the movement of the circle. Just as the senses record perceptions of the outer world as images in the mind, so judgment is rendered in a kind of image, or word. The translation from perception to image, or outer to inner, is also a process of purification through abstraction—“the image of the body in our consciousness is better than the reality of the body itself insofar as it is in a better nature, that is, in a living substance such as the consciousness” (9.16). The analogous operation, the purification of the mind in knowing God, has a similar but reverse result. It is not the object that becomes better in the translation, but we: “By the same token when we know God we are indeed made better ourselves than we were before we knew him, especially when we like this knowledge and appropriately love it and it becomes a word and a kind of likeness to God” (ibid.). As the word becomes a likeness to God, so does the mind that conceives it. The on-

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tological character of language emerges here in the deep underlying relation of the utterance to the mind, which comes into being by the act for which it is intended. The forms do not exist in some inert state as templates, but rather are actualized in the process of judgment itself: “So the consciousness has some kind of likeness to the positive quality known, either when it takes pleasure in it or when it is displeased with the lack of it” (9.16). So here it appears we have a divergence from a standard Neoplatonic account. The form does not preexist the knowing, but its being is actualized in knowing. Likewise,“when we know God we are indeed made better ourselves than we were before we knew him” (9.16). Thus, the act of knowing changes the knower. This anticipates the heart of hermeneutic ontology, that “interpretation doesn’t occur as an activity in the course of life, but is the form of human life.”34 Or perhaps it is the other way around, that hermeneutic ontology reflects trinitarian being. Heidegger’s world worlds, and Augustine’s mind minds.35 Having established the plasticity of the word to match, exceed, or fall short of its object, Augustine now has a human example of something that is generated from itself, reflecting of itself, and identical with itself: From this we can gather that when the mind knows and approves itself, this knowledge is its word in such a way that it matches it exactly and is equal to it and identical, since it is neither knowledge of an inferior thing like body nor of a superior one like God. And while any knowledge has a likeness to the thing it knows, that is to the thing it is the knowledge of, this knowledge by which the knowing mind is known has a perfect and equal likeness. And the reason it is both image and word, is that it is expressed from the mind when it is made equal to it by knowing it; and what is begotten is equal to the begetter.36 The overarching thread in this argument has been that the inner word is a word that is loved, and from this attribute flow all the others. The fundamental point is that “word” is not just an object or a sign of something that we perceive or think, but is who we are as we think it. Subject and substance are one. This participation across the ontological, epistemic divide is the enormous contribution of theology to hermeneutic ontology, which was revolutionary when it also refused the categorical distinction between perceiver and perception.

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The unicity of seer and seen, knower and known, subject and object is mediated by or accomplished through the energy or spirit of desire that links the two. This inclination is the two. The sustaining logic of movement and connection, the engine of passage. It is why the third person of the Trinity is not begotten like the second. Love is what “joins” the knowledge to the begetter (9.16), and that knowledge “is preceded by” the love or inquisitiveness that prompts the inquiry (9.18). Thus love exists in the not-yet of the procession. The interesting thing for hermeneutics in this argument is that in dwelling on the product-character of knowledge, Augustine locates the habitation of love in this in-between world: “Now this appetite shown in inquiring proceeds from the inquirer, and it is left somewhat hanging in the air and does not rest assuaged in the end it is stretching out to, until what is being looked for has been found and is coupled with the inquirer” (9.18). This spirit becomes a part of the unicity of the procession of knower and known as act to actor and result. Desire in the economy of knowledge works as a kind of energy source in the self-propelled movement of inquiry. Knowledge acts as an accelerant, powered by its own momentum: “The more therefore the thing is known without being fully known, the more does the intelligence desire to know what remains” (10.1). The more you feed the beast, the more the beast requires. Knowledge therefore operates by a law of increase. Augustine understands the operation of this mechanism as a function of language. We presume an unknown word used in conversation has a meaning, since people speak in order to convey meaning and be understood.37 The kernel of knowledge that exists in a word unknown to the listener is in the speech itself, which acts like forms in the soul, inciting our curiosity. In fact in one place he calls these words forms.38 Someone says a strange word, but the person listening is attuned to its meaningfulness by the very disposition of speech: “What more could he ask for in order to know it better, seeing that he knows all its letters and its stresses and quantities, were it not that he realized simultaneously that it was a sign . . . ?”39 In other words, speech is always already directed towards understanding. Furthermore, speech is not simply that on account of which we are disposed to be curious and to know; it is the very object of our desire. If someone seeks to know something he does not yet know, “can he be said to be without love? What does he love, in that case?” (10.2). Since it is obviously not the three nonsense syllables (me-the-glin), he is after the language—its usages, discriminations, breadth and subtlety — that

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comprehends both sign and content: “It must be that he knows and sees by insight in the very sense of things how beautiful the discipline is that contains knowledge of all signs; and how useful the skill is by which a human society communicates perceptions between its members” (ibid.). This is a surprising jump from the word and its meaning to the very capacity of speech, a jump in levels from what a sign indicates to the fact that the sign indicates. But Augustine’s purpose here is to show the character and value of spirit in its human image. We recall that one of the chief characteristics of the word is that it is both permanent and portable, and this fact is responsible in his mind for the love we bear it: “[F]or it is one thing to observe it in the light of truth, another to desire to have it at one’s disposal” (10.2). Thus it is language that he in fact loves: “And so we see that all the love of a studious spirit, that is of one who wishes to know what he does not know, is not love for the thing he does not know but for something he knows, on account of which he wants to know what he does not know” (10.3). Desire is for a knowledge whole and complete, and it is this that motivates the studiousness of the intellectual endeavor: “The loveliness of such knowledge is now perceived in thought, and the thing so known is loved. This in turn is contemplated, and so inflames the studiousness of learners that they get all excited about it and hunger for it in all the work they put into acquiring such a competence” (10.2). This love leads Augustine to posit rhetorically how great it would be “to understand and speak all the languages of all peoples, and so to hear nobody as a foreigner, and to be heard by no one as such either” (ibid.). Of course, in retrospect we know why he fantasizes in this way, since it will be the inner word that lacks this defect of the outer word of Babel. But in this context, this transcendence solves the paradox of the just man, since the desire of knowing is not for the specific thing but for the knowledge that it promises, which each person has already in some measure, and only wishes to increase.

How Self-Knowledge Is a Word Having grasped the unity of mind, object and interest, Augustine is now able to show how this unity reflects the unity of the divine by a reflecting similitude, which is manifest in the circular ontology that underlies

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his vision. But there is an even greater challenge facing the issue of selfknowledge, since it would seem impossible for one to see oneself seeing. To answer this problem Augustine turns to Plato again, paraphrasing Socrates’ exchange with Alcibiades,40 and blending that discussion with Paul’s metaphor of the speculum. The nub of the problem of self-knowledge is that the mind cannot see itself, and the solution is the commonplace that it must look indirectly, as through a mirror: Or if it is like the eyes of the body which know other eyes better than themselves, then it should stop looking for itself because it is never going to find itself; eyes will never see themselves except in mirrors, and it is not to be supposed that in the contemplation of non-bodily things a similar device can be provided, so that the mind can know itself as to a mirror. (10.5) The equivalent of the forms in this case is the dim insight into an equiprimordial identity: “Perhaps then the mind sees some excellent end, that is its own security and happiness, through some obscure memory which has not deserted it on its travels to far countries and it believes it can only reach this end by knowing itself ” (10.5). But how is this obscure memory the reflection in a mirror? Here Augustine turns to the distinction he made in regard to knowledge in general, that the desire to know is not motivated by the object of inquiry but by the prized acquisition of knowledge itself. Knowledge is not just the information that is collected but a state of being: “But why in this case could the memory of its happiness remain with it while the memory of itself could not, so that as well as knowing that which it wants to reach it might also know itself who wants to reach? Or is it that when it loves knowing itself it is not itself that it loves, which it does not yet know, but the very knowing” (10.5, emphasis added). One seeks erudition in order to be erudite. This transforms the very idea of knowledge he has been working with. There is the straightforward reflection on things that are before our eyes, and then back of this an inkling of something that makes that reflection possible: “How comes it then that a mind which does not know itself knows itself knowing something else? It is not that it knows another mind knowing, but itself knowing. Therefore it knows itself. And then when it seeks to know itself, it already knows itself seeking” (ibid.). It is

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clear Augustine is attempting to put his finger here on something that is almost unnamable. This is because he is hard on the trail of the attribute of reflection that echoes the paradox of identity and difference in the Father and Son. He works at this by exploring the rhetorical topos of part and whole: What are we to say then? That the mind knows itself in part and does not know itself in part? But it is absurd to say that the whole of it does not know what it knows: I am not saying “It knows the whole,” but “What it knows, the whole of it knows.” And so when it knows some of itself, which only the whole of it can do, it knows its whole self. (10.6) This difficult idea suggests an indirect reflection, a knowledge that does not look at itself but rather is itself. Such a knowledge is always already there, not the conscious object of reflection, but the a priori condition of that reflection, and Augustine asserts that this given condition fosters a first-order awareness that does not arise out of conscious attention. By knowing the world, the mind is in operation and thus actualizes its selfknowledge, which is the extraordinary act of being-knowing. Augustine does not stop here, but adds a further extraordinary characteristic to this description. He has said that we are distracted from the mind in turning to the things of the world, but this is not entirely true. Although, when we think about the world, we have turned our attention away from the mind that thinks the things of the world, in another sense our mind has the extraordinary effect of changing the world by its act of knowing, translating perception through the mind into “images made in itself out of itself ” (in semetipsa de semetipsa) (10.7). In effect, the mind ontologizes the empirical world in an act of giving: “For [the mind] gives something of its own substance to their formation” (10.7). The constitutive point is not all, however. Augustine enriches the Aristotelian trope in the second half of the statement by the addition of productive distance: “For [the mind] gives something of its own substance to their formation; but it also keeps something apart by which it can freely make judgments on the specific bearing of such images” (ibid.). In giving and holding back Augustine establishes a living tension that we will see replicated in the dialectic of distance and belonging in Gadamer’s linguistic reflexivity.41 Augustine the Platonist then elaborates his point with a certain expression of

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regret, since the intermingling of mind with the things of the world is a kind of pollution and distraction, and true self-knowledge involves, in his view, a purging of these distractions. Nevertheless, he has accomplished a remarkable phenomenological act of description that is perhaps more powerful than he had intended: What after all can be as much in the mind as mind? But it is also in the things that it thinks about with love, and it has got used to loving sensible, that is bodily things; so it is unable to be in itself without their images. Hence arises its shameful mistake, that it cannot make itself out among the images of the things it has perceived with the senses, and see itself alone; they are all stuck astonishingly fast together with the glue of love . . . While then mind is at the inner level, it comes out of itself in a kind of way when it puts out feelings of love toward these images which are like the traces of its many interests . . . What it did was to mix itself up with something else that it loved together with itself and to coalesce with it in some way or other; and as a result, by comprising divergent things as a unity in itself, it came to think that these things which really are divergent were one with itself.42 This powerful effect, which we now think of as intentionality, serves as a caution to think the mind as something purer, and this leads Augustine to come to his conclusion about the nature of true self-knowledge, which is an automatic and non-reflexive awareness: “But when the mind is told Know thyself, it knows itself the very moment it understands what ‘thyself’ is, and for no other reason than that it is present to itself” (10.12). If, then, we think back to the original question —How can one look for what one does not know?— we see that the question is a strawman in regards to the mind, and this leads to a formulation of the circularity of human understanding, since “the mind knows itself even when it is looking for itself ” (10.16). The inner vision of the Trinity is best approached through its analog in outer vision, the literal perception of the material world. Vision is a trinity, since the object of sense, the actual sight, and the conscious intention all combine in the act. All three parts are different from each other, while at the same time partaking in the single process of vision. The sense object itself is the most alien, both to the sense of sight and the image in the

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mind produced by the sense. The latter two partake more closely in the complex mechanism of mediation of inner and outer worlds. The image in the mind “is clearly nothing but this sense informed by the thing” (ex ea re informatus), an impressed form (11.2).43 The faculty of sight corresponds in this analogy to the mind in the previous chapter by displaying the potency of being, “the sense which was already there in the living being even before it saw what it could see when it lit upon something visible” (ibid.). The conscious intention is the most removed from the sense world, “since it belongs only to the consciousness” (11.3). Having articulated their difference, Augustine then expresses their unity with a nice bit of phenomenological description. Each part of the apparatus of vision needs the other part. Take any part away and the vision disappears. The sense is “informed” by the object as an imprint, and alive through the seeing subject. The sense is not begotten from the object but from the sentient being. The entire process is a translator apparatus, so that the external object can be taken in by the mind, but it would be a mistake to think that the mind does not change in the process, because sight is an act “to which the soul is adjusted in its own wonderful fashion” (11.3). So on the one hand what the mind does is “to mix itself up with” the things of the world, and on the other hand sees the world “to which the soul is adjusted in its own wonderful fashion.” In its own way worldly understanding manifests a similar unity of being and world. But to get even closer to the Trinity we must move into the mind alone, that is, once the impressed forms have been taken in and are manipulated in thought. Cogitation is once removed from the sense world because of the faculty of memory, which stores the images of sense and makes them available to the mind apart from that direct exchange with the outer world. Cogitation is the cooperation of memory, internal sight, and will, or in other words, the impression of the object held in the mind, the mind itself in its conscious attention to the thought, and the thought itself, which is a coalescence or co-agitation (11.6), something formed by the active work of the mind on the impression. Interestingly, Augustine makes a further distinction between the likeness stored in memory by the impress of the world on the mind, and the activated image,“that which is formed from it in the conscious attention as you actually recall something” (ibid.). To his way of thinking, the first remains in the memory as a resource, and what is actualized in the mind during cogitation is some

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kind of virtual image of that first, an “off-print” (ibid.), a copy of a copy. In cogitation, the “original” is left alone and the manipulation is with the off-print. The extraordinary advantage of this process is that images can be combined and changed “by increasing, diminishing. altering, and putting them together as [the mind] pleases” (11.8).44 In spite of this freedom to combine and mix, and similar to the way that “ghosted” images in a digital film editing program “refer” to the original source image by an unbroken link, the copy remains linked to its original in the cubiculum: “The will, then, turns the attention here and there and back again to be formed, and once formed keeps it joined to the image in the memory” (11.7). Augustine foregrounds the tight imbrication of memory, thought, and will in the production of the word in such a way that we feel the absence of space between the operation, the faculty, and the result. The unity of the three is such “that the same intention of the will is to the coupling of the image of a body in the memory to the sight of the one thinking about it, which is the form grasped by the conscious attention as it goes back to the memory; and here too a unity is produced out of three, which are not now differentiated by diversity of nature but are of one and the same substance, because all this is inside and it is all one consciousness” (11.7). Even the cogitation of images in the mind is for Augustine still in a way a trafficking in the things of the world, and he has his sights set on a purer activity. The “half-way level of self” (per medium sui) (12.16) is “subjoined to intelligible things,” that is, designed to mediate the ephemeral and enduring through the process of recollection, by which “it will be able somehow to chew this in the cud and transfer what it has learnt into its stock of learning” (12.24, 11.23). This process is a manner of seeing the eternal in the temporal. Augustine gives an example of this process in its virtue and imperfection: “[I]f the sheer arithmetic of a beautiful piece of music that passes through a temporal rhythm is comprehended without time, standing still in some high and secluded silence, it can at least only be thought for as long as that tune can be heard” (12.23).45 Sequence is temporarily annulled. This is the closest humans get to timeless procession in pondering the things of the world. We have now a sketch of the mind as the machinery of translation at the midpoint between temporal and eternal realms, “so established by the disposition of its creator that it is subjoined to intelligible things

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in the order of nature, and so it sees such truths in a kind of non-bodily light that is sui generis, just as our eyes of flesh see all these things that lie around us in this bodily light, a light they were created to be receptive of and to match” (12.24). In Book XIV, thus, we are connected to the eternal by a series of similitudes of ascending purity: “What we have to find in the soul of man, that is in the rational or intellectual soul, is an image of the creator which is immortally engrained in the soul’s immortality” (14.5). This “image” is the capacity to use reason.46 It is a very odd thing to say that a capacity is an image, unless we hear image as a process rather than an object, as an imaging. Image is in this sense an actualization of relation, a mirroring, but a mirroring as an act of identification. In this special usage, likeness and vision are the same thing. When we imitate, we are ourselves trying to be what we love and admire. Augustine takes advantage of this fact, and wants us to take a peek at this thing that we do, in order to see indirectly what it is that we are imitating. What is to be seen in this sneak peek is the act of reflection, a complex operation that is not a conscious turning of mind to self, as if such a thing were possible, but a process that occurs by the very nature of thought itself. The mind is always already thinking “about” itself in the very act of thinking, is reflective before any conscious turning round, so that “in the mind which already was should be born the same mind which was not yet” (14.13). What Augustine is describing is something that resembles the relation of the persons of the Trinity, something that defeats both temporal succession and logical sequence, unlike the normal phenomenon “where parent precedes offspring by an interval of time” (14.10). Instead, the inner memory, the inner understanding, and the inner will are “simultaneously together and always have been simultaneously together from the moment they began to be” (ibid.). The beauty of this special set-up is that this already doubled selfturning, that is to say, mirroring, is simultaneously the vision of God that we have planted in our souls. By mirroring ourselves we mirror God. That is, the act of mirroring, of self-seeing, duplicates our origin and reflects our being related to it. It is a double action: “It is his image insofar as it is capable of him and participates in him,” that is,“by being his image” (14.11, emphasis added): “So what we have been trying to do is somehow to see him by whom we were made by means of this image which we ourselves are, as through a mirror” (15.14).

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And it is here that we have arrived at our hermeneutic destination, because this operation I have just described is what Augustine calls a word, the image imaging, formed “out of the very act of thought” (ex ipsa cogitatione) (14.13). The word is a trinity, and if we are to understand Augustine’s use of the term inner word, we must understand it as a trinity. And if we are to understand Gadamer’s appropriation of the inner word, we must understand it as a trinity. The likeness is not a perfect image. It is fractured in the way that it is both temporal and atemporal. Its strength is thus its weakness. The way that Augustine explains how human reason participates in both realms is through a conception that we now call the hermeneutic circle. Commenting on the text from a Psalm he says: And yet the prophet Isaiah testifies that the Lord God can be found provided he is sought. . . . So if he can be found when he is sought, why does it say Seek his face always? Does he perhaps have to be sought even when he has been found? That is indeed how incomprehensible things have to be searched for, in case the man who has been able to find out how incomprehensible what he is looking for is should reckon that he has found nothing. Why then look for something when you have comprehended the incomprehensibility of what you are looking for, if not because you should not give up the search as long as you are making progress in your inquiry into things incomprehensible, and because you become better and better by looking for so great a good which is both sought in order to be found and found in order to be sought? (15.2) Socrates comes to a similar conclusion in the Meno when he says that he is always denied true knowledge, but that he is better for having tried to find it. The circle does not triumph over the unfolding nature of our understanding, but it is an accommodation to our weakness. The mirroring that we enact by being is not static. Paul himself says that “we are being transformed into the same image [1 Cor. 11:7]” (15.14). The advantage of setting up the mind as a partnership between memory, understanding, and will, which operate, respectively, from the past, present, and future, is that the circle can be understood as a temporal cooperation: “You can experience what I mean in speeches or songs which we render word for word by memory clearly, unless we foresaw in thought what was

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to follow, we would not say it. And yet it is not foresight that instructs us how to foresee, but memory” (15.13). This wonderful category slippage in which the ability to see ahead is not given by a faculty of the future but a faculty of the past anticipates the Heideggerian insight into the paradoxical meaning of thrown-ness. The language of image, face, and sight that Augustine has been using to speak of the mind in act is rather casually transposed to speech—the easy transition from sight to sound, that is, from the mind as image to the word as utterance, indicates that Augustine did not feel as we do that this is a rather momentous shift. First he asks rhetorically, “Who fails to see his own thoughts?” (15.1), asserting that we see them with an inner gaze. Then he asserts that thought can be spoken of metaphorically as either sight or hearing, since inwardly they are “one and the same” (15.18). Thus he moves from inner gaze to inner word as if this were no transition at all. The shift must have been necessitated by the simple fact that there is no clear sequence between the mind’s awareness of something and the seeing of it, whereas there is a plain sequence between thinking and speaking. Further, an utterance is just more concrete and embodied than a seeing. It is this kind of more textured embodiment that allows him to draw the key comparison: “Thus in a certain fashion our word becomes a bodily sound by assuming that in which it is manifested to the senses of men, just as the Word of God became flesh by assuming that in which it too could be manifested to the senses of men” (15.20). What is striking about this analogizing is that we seem to have shifted from an analogy for the Trinity to an analogy for the incarnation. Heretofore, the operation of the image has described a likeness to the procession, the principles of which are common to transcendence and immanence. The transition from inner to outer word, however, is specific to the Son’s taking on of human form. The inner word without reference to its outward expression is a procession analogous to the transcendent Trinity, and outward expression then completes the circle. The easy shift from sight to sound has rather innocuously bridged one of the most difficult of all transitions, comprehending the procession of the three Persons and the procession of incarnation. The Word is indeed the mediator par excellence. The shift from sight to sound that makes so little difference to Augustine will make all the difference in the world to Gadamer.

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What Then Is Augustine’s Inner Word? There is an equivocation in Augustine’s development of the inner word in Book XV. He gives two primary examples which do not altogether reconcile. The attributes of each separate kind of inner word are together what we must posit in order to reflect the Trinity. The inner word 1. is that word “which precedes all the signs that signify it,” and 2. “is begotten of the knowledge abiding in the consciousness, when this knowledge is uttered inwardly just exactly as it is” [gignitur de scientia quae manet in animo quando eadem scientia intus dicitur sicuti est].47 When we draw upon the material of sense or memory and construe judgments that are in accord with knowledge, the result is a true word: “It is when we think about something we have found to be true that we are primarily said to understand it” (15.40). This is “our word, the one that has neither sound nor thought of sound, the one that belongs to the thing we utter inside as we see it” (15.24). Somehow the articulation, even silent and inward, is an addition or completion of thought. These might have the form, “yes, it fits in that category,” or, “this will be the result,” or, “let me put it this way . . . ,” finding just the right word, or cinching a judgment. On the other hand, the inner word is not perfect, only “at least something like” the Word of God (15.24). Just because of the fact that the word is the result of a process of cogitation there is the possibility of error. This is never the case with divine knowledge, since being and knowing are identical. Our thoughts are not the same as our consciousness. We always know this or that, and the multiplicity of words results. The closest thing we have to that knowing-being is what we have called indirect reflection. This is the case in which “perhaps you could say that the very possibility of thought, given that what is known can be truly thought about even when it is not being thought about, is a word as continuous as the knowledge itself is continuous” (15.25). Thus there is one particular inner word that is distinct from the others. This word has the characteristic of the hermeneutic circle in that it is always already there: But there are more hidden depths in our memory, where we found this thing even when we thought about it for the first time, and where the innermost word is born that does not belong to any language—

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born as knowledge from knowledge and sight from sight, and as understanding which is manifested in thought from understanding which was already lurking, but hidden, in memory. (15.40) Ultimately Augustine will take this word as the closest likeness to the divine procession, because it identifies so closely the knowing mind with the thought. If we locate this word in the trinitarian structure of vision that he established earlier as the cooperation of memory, love, and knowledge, “because the gaze of our thought only goes back to something by remembering, and only bothers to go back to it by loving” (15.41), and see this trinity not as separate from our being, since for the person thinking they “are mine, not their own” (15.42), we have something like a knowledge-inbeing, three distinct operations circling in one identity. Yet Augustine doubts whether even this is fully a word according to his definition, since it “has not yet been formed in the sight which is actual thought” [Sed quomodo est verbum quod nondum in cogitationis visione formatum est?] (15.25). Its hiddenness, its being in potency, is not like the arrival of a word in definition or judgment, or the abiding knowledge of God. And since knowledge is the actualization of a form, how can that which is only a possibility be a word? This difference in its mode of givenness, of being possible rather than actual, formable and not-yetformed, renders it problematic as a word. A word must be a firm result of the movements of our cogitations: “And the time you get a true word is when this thing that I have said we cast around with a chopping and changing motion falls onto something we know and is formed from it and takes on its exact likeness, so that the thing is thought about exactly as it is known, that is to say is uttered in the heart without either voice or thought of voice which would ipso facto belong to some language.”48 The formed finality of a word is a key attribute, and explains why the scriptures speak of God’s word rather than God’s thought, so as to avoid any implication of processive change in the products of his mind. Still, Augustine does not want to reject this formable word that is continuous with knowledge itself, and so he simply marks its falling off from the divine word in perfection. Thus we are left with two human examples, neither of which is perfect. Words that are actualized forms resemble God’s word in its unchangingness, although such words are not constantly before us and not identical with our being. When such a word is formed, and when we have done

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with it, “then we deposit it again in the memory” (15.40). It is thus complete but not abiding. On the other hand, the word that is the very possibility of thought is coterminous with mind, but is flawed in respect to its “becoming nature” as formable not-yet-formed. It is abiding but not complete. Perhaps the best of the two of them together gives us a sense of what God’s word is like, and gives us a sense of how we will be perfected when we look directly into the face of God. When that happens, it will be the fulfillment that existed only in potential, and we will be “a creature that was once formable which is formed, so that it now lacks nothing of the form to which it was intended it should come” (15.26). By bringing together the best qualities of these two imperfect examples we can venture to know what Augustine means by the inner word. From the first instance we know that in its best self it is commensurate with the mind, circling through memory, love, and understanding in identity with whom each one of us is in the economy of salvation. From the second instance we know that it is something determined, the result of a process of thought. It is something fixable, storable, and retrievable. It is therefore available to be brought back into the flow of thought, where it can be used in the process of cogitation once again. We know that, because of the flexibility of the imagination once removed from sensual reality, that it is combinatory, that is, susceptible to new formations, new judgments. So now that we have the characteristics of an inner word that will help us understand the transcendent trinitarian relation, what is its relation to the outer word, so that we may understand the immanent procession? When the outer word is a true word, we can see something like an incarnation: When it is uttered vocally or by some bodily sign, it is not uttered just exactly as it is, but as it can be seen or heard through the body [. . . non dicitur sicuti est sed sicut potest . . .]. So when that which is in the awareness [in notitia] is also in a word, then is it a true word, and truth such as a man looks for so that what is in awareness should also be in word and what is not in awareness should not either be in word. It is here that one acknowledges the Yes, yes; no, no (Matt. 5:37; 2 Cor. 1:17; James 5:12). In this way this likeness of the made image approaches as far as it can to the likeness of the born image, in which God the Son is declared to be substantially like the Father in all respects. (15.20)

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Our lives proceed from the word in our minds as an incarnation of our thoughts. To the extent that this approximation is an unfolding, it is transforming, and we are in the process of perfecting our sight in the image of God. The same tension and resolution exists in hermeneutics. Gadamer speaks in various places of finding just the right word, or of the artist’s final touch that gives perfection to the work, and yet he is always at pains to stress the unfinished work of human dialogue. His constant refrain is that there is always more to be said. The former perfection is a kind of promissory note, an intimation of immortality, and the latter incompleteness is a reminder of our discursivity. In the end the language of the Church is still the best when it speaks of the “living word,” and says that we must “live in the word.”  Gadamer’s secular hermeneutic frame of reference is vastly different from the imperatives that animated Augustine’s passionate search, and so their deep common accord is all the more interesting. The ontological structure of the word in this shared conception is radically different from the common belief in language as simply a tool of communication. The word works at the very center of the reflecting activity of understanding that brings together the one and the many. It refuses to be merely object or act, subject or substance, and while it anticipates its own unfolding, it is only through its unfolding that it becomes what it is. The word is both motile and steady, preserving what we learn in memory, and innovating for future possibilities. It is not merely that by which we from some sovereign position understand, but that of which in the very process of catching sight we are transformed. This dislocation of being from its concentration in a single place (the world, the sovereign self, etc.), and its diffusion across language, history, mind, and other in a widening circle of participation, is the gift of language. The word is the actualization that perpetually crosses out the dualism of being and becoming, or temporal and eternal, by being their reciprocity. The word is not merely an analogy or metaphor for the Trinity, because it is a participant in the trinitarian procession. Thus its reflection of what is other is simultaneously a selfreflection. Gadamer says almost the same thing, that understanding is

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always self-understanding, and he can say this because he understands the word as the mediating point of intersection, the thing or act that doubles back on itself. The word is at the center of our very being, constituting and transforming us in our personhood, not as a fixed subjectivity, but as participant and witness of our own self-becoming. This circular ontology of the word came out of Augustine’s position between the logos tradition of the Greeks and the tradition of the word in Hebrew and Christian teaching. The supreme irony is that Augustine was himself a principal in intensifying the inward conception of the mental life that led ultimately to Cartesian dualism. But in his conception of the inner word, he created a synthesis between the inner and outer worlds that was later to be split apart. He laid the ground for the onto-epistemic divide that has become our legacy, and provided a key for repairing this rupture, which we are only now beginning to understand. By temporalizing form, so to speak, he provided a model for understanding the mystery of language that was instrumental in Heidegger’s breakthrough to a hermeneutics of facticity and Gadamer’s subsequent development of a theory of language. He inspired Heidegger to think of the structure of care’s feltabsence as the mediation of temporality and its negation. He destabilized subjectivity by placing agency in the word, but then found dignity in the person by locating the word in the mind. He read against the grain of Western thought to recognize the transitivity of being and language, and we are in his debt if we ourselves make our way back to this realization.

chapter 4



“The Word Is Not Reflexive” Mind and World in Aquinas and Gadamer

Thomas Aquinas and Hans-Georg Gadamer are allies in the effort to distance understanding from subjective idealism, and this effort is central to their interest in the inner word, which always has some reference to the world of sense. But there is an important difference between Gadamer and Aquinas on this matter which is not clarified by Gadamer’s exposition of the doctrine of the inner word in Truth and Method. This difference has to do with the question of reflexivity. Gadamer underlines the non-reflective character of the inner word in Aquinas: “In fact the formation of the word is not reflexive. For the word does not at all express the mind, but rather the thing meant.”1 This is a faithful reading of the doctrine, but not sufficient, because reflexivity in Aquinas is quite complex, and there are implications in this complexity that impinge on the question of the subjective. The relationship between reflection and understanding in these two thinkers illuminates both a profound accord and a profound difference in their conception of the work of intellect, and my effort here is to lay out that agreement and that difference. I will do this in several steps. First I will briefly situate the nature of Gadamer’s opposition to subjectivism. Then I will sketch out the extent of the agreement between him and Aquinas on the non-reflexivity of the intellect. I will then present what I am calling inherent reflexivity, a form of self-awareness present in both Augustine and Aquinas which Gadamer does not address. Finally I will take stock of the relation between Aquinas and Gadamer on the place of human intellect in the unfolding of being. Gadamer asserts that Aquinas professed “the direct, unreflective character of the inner word” (TM, 426/WM, 430), a belief that comports well 135

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with Gadamer’s own theory of language. For Gadamer, language has its constitutive role for human being precisely because it “is not a creation of reflexive thinking” (TM, 450/WM, 453). There is not world over here and language over there, but a world that emerges out of our being creatures of language. He associates reflexivity with the Cartesian isolation of the mind and the ascendancy of the subject. The idea Gadamer wants to promote is that language, subject, and culture are not severable, and that there is no sovereign, isolated, subjective realm of pure ideas. The world of culture and language is as much a part of human being as the conscious awareness of individuals. We witness this in the very practice of speaking and listening. In the immediacy of speech, we are caught up in what is said, and its meaning absorbs not only our attention but the words in which it is spoken. Reflection on the language that we use is the exception: “Only in exceptional situations does one become conscious of the language in which he is speaking. It happens, for instance, when someone starts to say something but hesitates because what he is about to say seems strange or funny. He wonders,‘Can one really say that?’”2 More often, language is the medium of our being together, that which links us to each other and our common concerns. This has many dimensions—the past and future, the right and the wrong, I and Thou, the abstract and concrete, etc. It is simply all that constitutes what humans uniquely do and are. So Gadamer’s polemical insistence on the unreflective character of the word is about the organic, or at least holistic, relation of reason and speech, history, culture, tradition, and community. There is, of course, a sense in which reflection operates in language, but it is at an oblique angle: “[T]he immediacy in which we persist in our view of the world and of ourselves is preserved and altered in it, because we in our finite being always come from a distance and reach into the distance. . . . Thus in the happening of speech is found not only the persistence of our state, but the mutability of things.”3 This dialectic of change and persistence is not a return to the bare self, but the increase of our being as an intellectual engagement with the manifold world. This is in perfect consonance with Aquinas. Gadamer’s polemic against subjective reflection is pointed not only at rationalist dualism, but at the strong tendency of German culture towards inwardness that was fed by pietism and that blossomed in Romanticism. The inclination to turn inward fostered the aesthetic of genius and of the soul thrust back upon itself. This Gadamer opposes with almost equal

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vigor, which creates a complex ambiguity in Gadamer’s relation to German thought as it relates to the subjective. Luther, so devoted to the inner life, believed that the sinner needed to abandon him- or herself in trust to God and to be utterly absorbed in that grace. It is a cardinal point with him that “we must hear what his word saith, and not what our own heart saith.”4 Schleiermacher understood this absorption in the terms of Christian faith as well, for he states that “in the consciousness of a person in the grip of conversion, every sense of human intermediation vanishes, and Christ is realized as immediately present.”5 So Gadamer can turn to the very legacy that cultivates inwardness to free himself from subjectivism! This complexity continues with his relation to Hegel. Although Gadamer would amend Hegel’s dialectic insofar as it affirmed an absolute self-consciousness as its end, Gadamer followed Hegel’s method in giving thought over to the Sache as the witnessing of what is not self. With Hegel, speculation surpasses itself in the other, “tarrying with it, and losing itself in it . . . being preoccupied with the real issue and surrendering to it.”6 There is a necessary humility in pursuing the subject matter “where our subjectivity is not allowed to interfere,” since “thought is only true in proportion as it sinks itself in the facts.”7 This absorption in the object is an acknowledgment that the understanding of what is under consideration amounts to a modification of the subject (“thought becoming the other of itself ”), and the thoughtful relation to the world is the development of the larger whole: “[T]hinking (and its determinations) is not anything alien to the object, but rather is its essential nature.”8 This too will become a signal point of agreement with Aquinas. Nevertheless, Gadamer asserts that even Hegel relies “far more upon the principles of the Cartesian method, on the learning of the Catechism, and on the Bible,” leaning, in his will for system, towards the certainty of the one, rather than toward the radical indeterminacy of the many.9 Instead of moving with Hegel towards the unity of absolute knowing, Gadamer saw in the impulse of German historicism and in Heidegger’s radicalization of human temporality an embrace of the finite and particular as unsurpassable realities. Human being unfolds always in dialogue with tradition and culture. To use the hermeneutic analogy, “a person reading a text is himself part of the meaning he apprehends.”And the converse is true; the text is part of the understanding. We have in Gadamer Aristotle’s lesson of the dependence of form and matter writ large, as the inextricable relation of subject and substance. The philosophy of the

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cogito, of a pure I, is a vain illusion. Gadamer’s difference with Hegel on this point has its corresponding difference with Aquinas, although this is a difference that will take some effort to unpack. It is the direction of my inquiry, and it will lead us in the last section of the chapter to a discussion of the place of the individual in the respective programs of Thomism and hermeneutics.

Aquinas and Non-Reflexivity In the verbum section of Truth and Method, Gadamer attributes the antisubjectivism of language to Aquinas, who understands the intimate unity of word and thought not simply as reference or adequation. One attribute of this intimate unity is that the inner word has no reflective component, since the mind is wholly absorbed in its contemplation of the thing: “In fact the formation of the word is not reflexive. For the word does not at all express the mind, but rather the thing meant” (TM, 426/WM, 430). Here is the entire passage:

Die innere Einheit von Denken und Sichsagen, die dem trinitarischen Mysterium der Inkarnation entspricht, schließt in sich, daß das innere Wort des Geistes nicht durch einen reflexiven Akt gebildet wird. Wer etwas denkt, d. h. sich sagt, meint damit das, was er denkt, die Sache. Er ist also auf sein eigenes Denken zurückgerichtet, wenn er das Wort bildet. Das Wort ist wohl das Produkt der Arbeit seines Geistes. Er bildet es in sich fort, sofern er den Gedanken aus und zu Ende denkt. Im Unterschied zu sonstigen Produkten verbleibt es aber ganz im Geistigen. So entsteht der Anschein,

The inner unity of thinking and speaking to oneself, which corresponds to the trinitarian mystery of incarnation, includes the idea that the inner word of the mind is not formed through a reflexive act. When someone thinks something, i.e., says it to himself, he means what he thinks, that is, the matter at hand. He is then directed back to his own thinking whenever he forms the word. The word is indeed a product of the work of his mind. He forms it in itself as he thinks the thought through and to the end. What is different from other products is that it remains entirely within the mind’s

“The Word Is Not Reflexive” als handelte es sich um ein Verhalten zu sich selbst und als wäre das SichSagen eine Reflexion. In Wahrheit ist es das nicht, wohl aber liegt in dieser Struktur des Denkens begründet, warum sich das Denken auf sich selber reflexiv zu richten und sich so gegenständlich zu werden vermag. Die Innerlichkeit des Wortes, die die innige Einheit von Denken und Sprechen ausmacht, ist die Ursache dafür, daß der direkte, unreflektierte Charakter des “Wortes” leicht verkannt wird. Wer denkt, schreitet nicht vom Einen zum Anderen, vom Denken zum Sichsagen fort. Das Wort entsteht nicht in einem vom Denken noch freien Bereich des Geists (in aliquo sui nudo). Daher rührt der Anschein, daß das Bilden des Wortes einem Sichauf-sich-selbst-Richten des Geistes entstammt. In Wahrheit ist bei der Bildung des Wortes keine Reflexion tätig. Denn das Wort drückt gar nicht den Geist, sondern die gemeinte Sache aus. Ausgangspunkt der Bildung des Wortes ist der Sachgehalt selbst (die species), der den Geist erfüllt. Das Denken, das seinen Ausdruck sucht, ist nicht auf den Geist, sondern auf die Sache bezogen. So ist das Wort nicht Ausdruck des Geistes, sondern geht auf die similitudo rei. Der gedachte Sachverhalt (die species) und das Wort sind es, die auf das engste zusammengehören. Ihre Einheit

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own space. Thus it gives the appearance of being a retention within one’s own self, as if speaking to oneself were reflexive. In truth this is not so, although there lies in this structure of thought the reason why thinking to oneself can turn to itself reflexively and become an object of thought. The inwardness of the word, which is what constitutes the intimate unity of thinking and speaking, is the reason why the direct, unreflective character of the “word” is often mistaken. Whoever thinks, does not proceed from one to the other, from thinking to speaking to oneself. The word does not come into being in an area of the mind that is empty of thought (in aliquo sui nudo). It appears in this respect that the form of the word issues from an inner-directedness of the mind. In fact the formation of the word is not reflexive. For the word does not at all express the mind, but rather the thing meant. To put it another way, the formation of the word is the content of the thing itself (the species) that fills the mind. The thinking which seeks its expression is not relative to the mind, but to the thing. Thus the word is not an expression of the mind, but relates to the similitudo rei. The matter as it is conceived (the species) and the word belong together most closely. Their unity is so close that the word does not take

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ist so eng, daß das Wort nicht neben der species als ein zweites im Geiste Platz greift, sondern das ist, worin die Erkenntnis sich vollendet, d. h. worin die species ganz gedacht wird. Thomas verweist darauf, daß das Wort darin wie das Licht ist, in dem die Farbe erst sichtbar ist. (WM, 430)

a second place next to the species, but rather is that in which the mind’s knowledge is fully realized, i.e., is that in which the species is completely understood. Thomas instructs us that in this respect, the word is like the light in which color is first visible. (TM, 426)

In the analysis of the inner word in Truth and Method, Gadamer is focused on the possibly spurious De natura verbi intellectus and the De differentia verbi divini et humani, which are excerpted from Aquinas’s commentary on the Gospel of John, itself a scribe’s reportatio of a lecture. The De differentia deals with the question of the unreflective character of the inner word briefly, and the De natura at great length. The relevant passage in the former reads: [T]he word is the measure [ratio] and impression [similitudo] of the thing understood. If the one understanding and the thing understood are the same, then the word is the measure and impression of the intellect from which it proceeds. However, if the one understanding and the thing understood are different, then the word is not the measure of the person understanding the thing, but of the thing understood, just as the conception which someone has of a stone is more an impression of the stone. But when the mind understands itself, then in this manner the word is the measure and impression of the mind.10 Gadamer’s interpretation is a fairly close paraphrase of the De natura verbi intellectus (hereafter De natura). Gadamer emphasizes again and again the non-reflective character of the word because the De natura does. For instance, it is the defect of human understanding that the mind is directed outwardly to the world primarily, and does not yet discern itself, “but only other things which it acquires from the outside.”11 In the extended passage we have cited from Truth and Method, Gadamer’s comment about the mistaken impression that the mind is involved in a relationship with itself is in reference to section 275 of the De natura, where

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the basic configuration of human understanding is depicted as an interaction between matter and form: “The object is not present to the soul which is informed by that species, since the object is external to its nature; however the activity of the soul is not from outside, since understanding is a movement toward the soul. . . .” This line of thinking culminates in section 278 of the De natura with the bald statement that “the word expressing the thing which it understands is not reflexive [non est reflexum].” The human word understands intentionally as an “expression of the quiddity of the thing which is conceived” (sect. 278). Even though understanding is brought about within the mind, it must travel outward to have matter for understanding: “That which intellect is able to bring about directly within itself, this is always an act terminating in the object created in itself and from itself ” (sect. 278). Intellect must have real objects about which to think by its very nature. To be formed, the word needs more than the mind and its images: “For it would not become [a word] simply out of intellect and species, since intellect would not understand unless it made something [aliquid] one with a species” (sect. 278). The same word-thought-thing relationship is expressed in the Summa theologiae in a similar manner: “Through the word as medium [mediante], to speak does imply a relationship to the thing understood, which stands revealed to the knower in the word expressed.”12 Aquinas is also very clear on the more general point of self-awareness. The human intellect is neither its own act of understanding, nor is its own essence the first object of its act of understanding, for this object is something extrinsic, namely, the nature of a material thing. And therefore that which is first known by the human intellect is an object of this kind, and that which is known secondarily is the act by which that object is known, the perfection of which is this very act of understanding. (ST, I, q. 87, a. 3) Aquinas counters the subjective idealism of his time with the Aristotelian cooperation of form and matter.13 But, ironically, at the center of this conception is the inner word, an Augustinian conception filled with latent relationships to Platonic and Neoplatonic idealism, and its demotion of the sense-world. The inner word for Augustine is more a reflection of God’s light than a line of sight to the exterior world. So where, in

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fact, does Aquinas stand between Aristotle’s concrete and particular world of nature and community, and the exquisite private world of Augustine’s inner chamber of the heart? Take away the inner chamber, and you have removed the most potent analogy to the divine mind, which is nothing if not reflexive. Lonergan works at this precise problem: “Augustine had argued that we know truth not by looking without but by looking within ourselves. Still, we all may know the same truths, and you do not know them by looking within me, nor I by looking within you, so that knowledge of truth is not merely a matter of looking each within himself.” Lonergan concludes, along with Aquinas: “One knows by what one is.”14 This does not deny reflexiveness, but it transforms it into an existential category. It is what I will call inherent reflexivity.

First- and Second-Order Reflexivity In arguing non-reflexivity, Gadamer locates a distinction that is certainly in Aquinas. Self-knowledge is, in common understanding, the reflective awareness of self, a thematized self-consciousness which is the exception rather than the rule. Aquinas devotes a quaestio to this topic in the Summa theologiae (I, q. 87). Here the awareness of self is thematized as a conscious second-order event or process. If this were the only way in which self-consciousness is understood in Aquinas, Gadamer would be accurate about the negation of “the reflexive act.” But this stops short of the truth of the matter, and can be deceiving. I will argue that both Augustine and Aquinas develop, in addition to that second-order thematization, an additional form of self-knowledge, one that is comprehensive of all intellectual activity, including the direct encounter with the sensible world. Let us examine a statement from the Summa theologiae that offers a slightly different take on the plain agreement of Aquinas and Gadamer (I, q. 87). In one sentence Aquinas states the claim against which Gadamer’s assertion of non-reflexivity must be measured: “Our mind understands itself as it is made actual through the abstractions of ideas from sensible things through the light of the intellect” [seipsum intelligat intellectus noster, secundum quod fit actu per species a sensibilibus abstractas per lumen intellectus agentis]. Here the process of abstraction

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from sensible things is not set off from self-knowledge, but is of a piece with self-knowledge.15 In fact, it is the finest result of our grasping of the essence of things, that we thereby approach a kind of knowledge which resembles the divine understanding; that is, a knowledge which understands all things in understanding itself. Ricoeur describes this as “a selfreference which is more basic than all judgment,” a reflection “already implied in the action of the self . . . embedded even in my least reflexive acts.”16 We are starting to see that “reflection” is going to be the term of equivocation in relation to the question of self-knowledge, an equivocation that has its roots in Hegel, who sought to transcend the Kantian Reflexionsphilosophie, by which a reflecting subject progressively abstracts universal concepts in a process of distinction and determination. Hegel’s speculative reflection unifies, or rather sublates, the opposition of subject and object, universal and particular, and one concept and another. Thus reflection for Hegel has both distinction and identity. In refusing to recognize an absolute dichotomy between self and world, Hegel chose to understand the language of self-consciousness as referring to everything that is, a hyperextension of the language of selfhood that does not translate over fluidly into scholastic terminology, even though Aquinas has something analogous to Hegel’s sublation. This is what introduces the complexity in Gadamer’s explication. Since he is reading Aquinas through Hegel and the modern tradition, we must hear the crisscrossing resonances in the word “reflection” as it traverses these different histories and registers.

Augustine and Reflection We have seen that reflection can refer to the conscious attention to one’s own mind and thought as an object of reflection. I will refer to this kind of thematized self-knowledge as second-order reflection. But there is another self-knowledge in the absence of this directed attention. In the De Trinitate, Augustine comes upon this second type as he is trying to work out the enigma of the mirror in Paul’s text.17 How are we made in the image of God, and how do we see God in this reflected image? This image is our mind, the operation of which is a kind of sight. Augustine is thinking about the mind’s thoughts as something we “have in our

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awareness even if we are not thinking about them.”18 It is the fact that we have a mind and think at all: “What after all is so intimately known and so aware of its own existence as that by which things enter into our awareness, namely the mind?”19 He can even assert it as a proof: “[M]an’s mind knows itself. The mind knows nothing so well as what is present to it, and nothing is more present to the mind than itself.”20 But in fact Augustine is far from unaware of the difficulty of moving from the directed attention to this second form of self-awareness. Here is the full text of Augustine’s question: What after all do we not know, if we do not know what is in our own mind, seeing that whatever we know we can only know it with the mind? Such however is the force of thought that the mind cannot even set itself in some fashion in its own view except when it thinks about itself. Nothing is in the mind’s view except what is being thought about, and this means that not even the mind itself, which does the thinking about anything that is being thought about, can be in its own view except by thinking about itself. Though as a matter of fact, how it can not be in its own view when it is not thinking about itself, seeing that it can never be without itself, as though it were one thing and its view another, I cannot really fathom.21 In this text, first there is an assertion equivalent to the claim in the De natura that thought can only be about the thing intended: “[N]ot even the mind itself . . . can be in its own view except by thinking about itself,” and then this assertion is unraveled in the last sentence: “[H]ow can it not be in its own view [conspectus]?” We are for the moment left with a puzzle. To solve it, Augustine turns to the figure of the mirror, and asks how sight compares to the mind’s self-knowledge. He compares the turnabout of conscious reflection (conversione revocetur) to the mirror,22 but this analogy from sight is not enough, since when the mind “is not thinking about itself, it is indeed not in its own view, nor is its gaze being formed from itself, and yet it still knows itself by being somehow its own memory of itself.”23 This “somehow” Augustine works out as habitual potency in a manner not unlike Aristotle and Aquinas. The capacity is not absent which we do not for the moment use. But for Augustine this does not yet solve the enigma. Having discovered that “in the recesses of the mind there are various awarenesses [notitia] of various things,”24

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he wants to be able to say more exactly what kind of awareness this selfawareness is: [T]he mind always remembers, always understands and loves itself, even though it does not always think about itself as distinct from things that are not what it is. So we must go on to inquire in what way understanding [intellectus] belongs to thought [cogitatio], while awareness of anything that is in the mind even while it is not being thought about is said to belong only to memory.25 Augustine builds this inquiry from different directions. We know axiomatically that when one perceives good, one perceives God, because God, the supreme good, is the author of creation, and would not have created anything that is not good. Every good is to a degree a participation in the supreme good. This leads to the conclusion that we have some notion of goodness that supersedes all particular goods: This is good and that is good. Take away this and that and see good itself if you can. In this way you will see good, not good with some other good, but the good of every good. For surely among all these good things I have listed and whatever others can be observed or thought of, we would not say that one is better than another when we make a true judgment unless we had impressed on us some notion of good itself by which we both approve of a thing, and prefer one thing to another.26 We have here the epistemological foundation for the mirroring that is present in knowing God and knowing the world. Two subjects from different directions, God and world, share in a manner of speaking, a single predication, and so we need to understand this relation more exactly, and to find language to express it. And this is what happens. The intellect is the closest thing in creation to God. The mind “is his image insofar as it is capable of him and can participate in him; indeed it cannot achieve so great a good except by being his image.”27 What is suggested here is that the capacity is born out of a relation of natures. Humans have “a capacity for/from him” (ab eo capax).28 It is this relation of natures that must be worked out. It is how we are made in his image, and by this similitude we know him: “[T]he chief capacity of the human mind” is that “it knows God or can know him.”29

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Here image and likeness are bound up with the conceptual vocabulary of self-awareness—reflection! The final achievement of this effort of thought is the recognition that the reflective capacity of the mind gives us a hint of the nature of the Trinity. The enigma of the Trinity for human understanding is its identityin-difference, a seeming contradiction. But here the same relation is expressed in human terms—the mind knows itself by knowing the world. It has this knowledge by the inherence of natures, by the presence of something shared and resonant. The basis for this belief has already been enunciated in an earlier book of the De Trinitate: “[T]he nature of the intellectual mind has been so established by the disposition of its creator that it is subjoined to intelligible things in the order of nature, and so it sees such truths in a kind of non-bodily light that is sui generis, just as our eyes of flesh see all things that lie around us in this bodily light, a light they were created to be receptive of and to match” (emphasis added).30 The second part of this statement invokes the metaphor of light that follows the Christian effort to understand participation all through its history, but the first part of the statement articulates the non-metaphorical idea of a pre-existing relation of mind to world that is the grounding premise of the entire argument. Any understanding of similitudo that comports with inherent reflexivity leads back to this starting point, and the mirror metaphor cannot be properly understood without it. This order of nature is a reflection in the world of the divine mind, which is then also a reflection of the mind which reflects. The mind being born of God’s love finds God’s love in the world, and so discovers itself. This discovery is a journey by indirection. It is like the discovery of a likeness in a mirror, and this is the metaphor Augustine falls back on: “If we ask what kind of mirror this might be, the thought occurs to us that the only thing ever seen in a mirror is an image. So what we have been trying to do is somehow to see him by whom we were made by means of this image which we ourselves are, as through a mirror.”31 The sinuous involution of this formulation gets at the complexity of inherent reflexivity; human being occupying the role of object, reflecting surface, and subject in its own trinity. Hence the mirror too moves us toward an ontological understanding of the reciprocity of self, world, and creator. Augustine speaks of this unconscious awareness as an introduction to the idea of an inner word. He is searching for an analogy to the proces-

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sion of the Trinity, and he finally lights upon the theme of the verbum interius, which leads him away from addressing this question of consciousness. But from the very beginning of Augustine’s development of the doctrine of the inner word, his attention is squarely focused on selfreflection. The access a person has to the sight of God is through this reflected image of the human mind, and it is by virtue of the fact that “the human mind knows itself and loves itself” that it can see God indirectly.32 With Augustine there is something besides just the conscious awareness of the mind, the infrequent and second-order awareness when we happen not to be absorbed by other things: “[T]he human mind, then, is so constructed that it never does not remember itself, never does not understand itself, never does not love itself.”33

The Presence of Inherent Reflexivity in Aquinas Does Aquinas follow Augustine in this distinction between first-order and second-order reflection? The text that Gadamer relies on to explicate Aquinas is the De natura verbi intellectus, which concerns itself only with the world-directedness of the inner word. Here is the pertinent section: But if there were reflection in the return to the word, it would not be a return to the species, nor to the intellect formed by the species, since these are not perceived when the word is forming; the generation of the word is not reflexive. For the word itself is not generated through an act of intellect, nor of its likeness, nor even that likeness of the species by which intellect is informed, as if the word would be an expression of it; no, it is a likeness of the thing. For the resemblance of that thing is generated which is recognized in its likeness. The word itself is a likeness of that species to the extent that [it resembles] that from which it is created and is most like to itself. A true similitude of the thing regards that which is formed, and insofar as it is its exemplar. (Sect. 280, emphasis added) This is a rejection of the subjectivism of pure ideas, but it also seems to reject the first-order reflection which I have called inherent reflexivity. There may be a reflection, a bending back, but it is to the word, which is

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a conceptual point of access to the real which always involves the material world, however indirectly. But this is not really a rejection. Aquinas’s complex mechanism of human intellection is set up as a series of buffers that are able to negotiate the transition between the particular and universal, the temporal and eternal. Reality is the cooperation of intellectual act with material possibility, and there is never no cooperation. The relationship between understanding and reflection stands not in absolute disjunction but in some kind of relation.34 We can get at this relation by considering the duplex actio by which the mind understands both itself and the ideas it collects from the world of sense.35 In question 10 of the De veritate, Aquinas takes up Augustine’s theme, relating sense knowledge and knowledge of self to the creation of the inner word. Regarding sense knowledge, “material things are more unlike God than is the mind itself. Thus, the mind does not become fully conformed to God for being informed by knowledge of these material things.”36 This is a very interesting statement of the matter in a certain respect, because it places material things and mind on a continuum as objects of understanding of greater or lesser likeness to God. This already says a great deal, because it establishes both material things and mind, on a certain level of commensurability, as similitudes.37 Knowledge of material things and knowledge of the mind are related by likeness to God. But then the category of similitude is shifted in a subtle and complex way. The mind and material things are no longer of the same category, because material things do not reflect God as does the intellect. In this respect the knowledge of the mind itself and of God is similar to God in the way that the mind is, in both cases, in act. It mimics God’s procession. When the mind understands itself, it resembles God by analogy. But when the mind thinks of God, it passes from the indirect likeness to a direct assimilation: “But in that cognition by which the mind knows God the mind itself becomes conformed to God, just as every knower, as such, is assimilated to that which is known.”38 This act of intellection is itself a reflection. The intellect is both the manner or medium of movement toward God and the actualization of its belonging. God is the pure act of intellection, and to the extent that we are in act, and to the extent that that act is intellectual, our existence is conformed to God. We “reflect” God by being like him. We are not the mind that

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sees an image of itself in the mirror. We are the mirror. This means that image cannot be understood statically or as an object, but as an active imitation.39 To understand is to come to, to become like God, our destiny and end. It is important to distinguish this kind of similarity from analogy.40 A true analogy compares unlike things by a likeness of relation. The assimilation to God in its conformatio is the return to the activity that emanates from God. In the communicatio boni, there is a direct line of connection between God and his creation, as cause to effect. This belonging is what Thomas thought of as a causal participation (et similiter effectus dicitur participare suam causam).41 Significantly, this Neoplatonist conception underlines the ontological belonging of an effect to its cause: “A cause communicates something of its perfection to the effect, expresses itself in the effect, which therefore must be to some degree similar to its cause.”42 There is a deficiency in the similitude, insofar as every effect will bear a weakened likeness to its cause by definition, as light on the earth is diminished in brightness the further it travels from its source, but this deficiency has a positive aspect. The deficiency of the likeness to God of his creation (in multiplicity, in discursivity, in the division of essence and accident, etc.), is the engine of its desire to return. The divine intellect is related to the human intellect not only as its efficient but as its final cause, which means that the human intellect in its imperfection seeks its perfection as its end, which is to say, it seeks God: “Now everything seeks after its own perfection. And the perfection and form of an effect consists in a certain likeness to the agent, since every agent makes its like. Hence the agent itself is desirable and has the nature of good. But the very thing which is desirable in it is the participation of its likeness. . . . All things, by desiring their own perfection, desire God Himself.”43 The communicatio boni, God’s grace, is not only a movement outward from its source, but a movement back again. The effect circles back to its cause as to an end. This return takes the form of a conformatio, the conformation of created being to its final cause.44 This would seem on the face of it to be a simple circle: from God to his creation and back again. It is not, and this is because of the nature of its imitation of the Trinitarian procession, an imitation accomplished through human intellect. God knows and loves himself, utters himself. There is perfect identity of knower and known, subject and object,

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essence and act. How is the sensible world to imitate this miracle? How is there not a complete separation of these alien modes of reality? The imitation is in fact accomplished by the strange turning back upon itself (reflectitur) of intellect, not in a moment of self-consciousness, but simply in the operation of understanding, which gathers the whole into itself by its very working.45 Here is where the duplex actio comes into play. The relation of mind to world is one in which “our thought occasions a teleological realization of the formality of things, and, in doing so, is itself brought to fruition.”46 The idea is that the sympathy of word and thing completes the meaning, and the relation manifests the unity. In this dependency, we leave the positivist view of conformation as adequation, and come much closer to the idea of conformation in the phenomenological tradition:47 In the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger says that “from the very beginning, there occurs a holding together: man’s holding himself together with something in such a way that he can come into agreement with whatever he is holding himself together with . . . . Only something which is referred to as such in the utterance can be held together, something with which, in uniting it, this holding together agrees.”48 Thus adequation so called is not merely epistemic but ontological. Blanchette underlines the Thomist conception of mental relation to the world as “a coming together of beings—convenientiam unius entis ad aliud—and such a coming together cannot be in a fundamental and ontological sense unless there is some being whose nature it is to come together with everything—hoc quidem non potest esse nisi accipiatur aliquid quod natum sit convenire cum omni ente [De veritate, q. 1, a. 1, c].”49 Moreover, there is not only an ontological dependency, but a mutual transformation of being. For Aquinas, as Pickstock explains it, intellection is “a beautiful ratio which is instantiated between things and the mind that leaves neither things nor mind unchanged. This means that one must think of knowing-a-thing as an act of generosity.”50 There is something very much like a phenomenological chiasm51 at work in Aquinas’s notion of correspondence: Thus, as we shall see, correspondence or adequation for Aquinas is not a matter of mirroring things in the world or passively registering them on an epistemological level, in a way that leaves the things themselves untouched. Rather, adequating is an event which realizes or ful-

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fils the being of things known, just as much as it fulfils truth in the knower’s mind. Correspondence here is a kind of real relation or occult sympathy—a proportion or harmony or convenientia —between being and knowledge, which can be assumed or even intuited, but not surveyed by a measuring gaze.52 God creates the world as a good which we seek to understand, and in understanding it we learn of his goodness. But it is in our understanding that we manifest the good which he intends of us. The two goods are two sides of the same coin, because they are the same act — what we understand and that we understand. This is not second-order reflection, but the pivot which is being enacted in intellection, comprehending self and other correlatively. This trope of the pivot is Lonergan’s, who shows how Aquinas derives the inner word from the principle of emanation. Aquinas distinguishes the emanation of seeds, which grow to outward forms, from the emanation of the sensitive soul, which moves in the opposite way: “The further the emanation proceeds, the more does it penetrate within.”53 The duplex actio of emanation by the intellect means that the outward movement completes the inward movement: “Inasmuch as the form perfects the matter by giving it being, it is in a certain way diffused in it; and it returns to itself inasmuch as it has being in itself.”54 Te Velde stresses this seamless and implicit connection between the mind’s capacity to know all things and its own self-knowledge: “So the intellect, which has its principle in a self-subsisting form, knows itself, returns completely to itself. In this sense, to know oneself means to be in oneself, to be immanent in oneself, in a more perfect manner than non-knowing things are, as nonknowing things are what they are to the exclusion of other things whereas knowing beings contain in themselves all other things.”55 And insofar as we contain all other things, we are like God. This kind of reflection is therefore not a self-conscious awareness but a harmonia. Blanchette speaks not in terms of a pivot but of a hinge: “The lowest of intellectual creatures, human beings, is still the hinge on which the whole universe turns, because it is the horizon and the confine where the material and immaterial come together.”56 Aquinas’s reflexive understanding sits within the economy of trinitarian procession as a pivotal moment in the path of emanation, imitation, and conformation, enacting the circular movement of God’s love

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through creation: “Although man is the term of creatures, as presupposing all other creatures according to the natural order of generation, he is appropriately [convenienter] united to the first principle of things so that the perfection of things may be included in a certain circularity [ut quadam circulatione concludatur].”57 Reflection is the switching point in this relay system, the event horizon where difference and identity, distance and proximity, unity and plurality, play out their relation.58 Blanchette describes what we might call a fold in the universe, the intellect of the human creature as “pivotal in this emanation and return of being in the universe, from the Principle to the effect and back from the effect to the Principle, that is, in function of the intellectual creature whose role it is to collect (colligere) all things through its knowledge and lead them back to the Creator. Indeed, the very notion of return is closely related to the idea of universe, since verti in Latin means to turn.”59 It is this doubling back occurring in intellection that most imitates the procession of identity in the Trinity. Aquinas happened on the metaphor of the mirror to illustrate this phenomenon, a metaphor that has caused some difficulty,60 so that we must ask what it tells us and whether it is helpful. We participate in the movement of creation toward God by fulfilling our best self, a telos that is of a piece with God’s utterance to himself. But being only a finite, temporal part of that movement, our intellect labors discursively toward that end, and we are only ever becoming in that image: “In the acts by which man catches hold of God in knowledge and love, man becomes a representation of God.”61 Merriell traces Aquinas’s growing sense that “the image of the Trinity is something to be achieved.”62 The human image is never static, and for this reason the conventional sense of a mirror image as an object seen whole and at once is not helpful. We must focus on the predication of Paul’s metaphor, through a glass darkly, and regard the imperfection of the image as the license Aquinas took to regard the metaphor processively. So Aquinas says, for instance: “The powers of the mind in which the image resides are made perfect by certain habits, according to which the deformed image is said to be re-formed and made perfect.”63 But the mirror metaphor is helpful in two other senses. First, in its indirectness. Just as Perseus could look on the image of Medusa only indirectly, so human vision needs an intermediary to see God, and this is the world of the senses. The desire native to the intellect to know the

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causes of all things leads the intellect to the ultimate cause, and so by our progressive understanding of the cosmos we discover what we are most like. Aquinas calls this operation of the intellect, after Aristotle, “speculative.” Such indirection is the reason for the curious attribution of nonreflexivity.64 The sight of God is accomplished indirectly, that is, by his reflection in human intellect. But intellect is an act, not an object, and so it is not seen in the ordinary way. It is “seen” by its actualization, by the interanimation of form and matter, mind and world: Although this mirror, which is the human mind, reflects the likeness of God in a closer way than lower creatures do, the knowledge of God which can be taken in by the human mind does not go beyond the type of knowledge that is derived from sensible things, since even the soul itself knows what it is itself as a result of understanding the natures of sensible things, as we have said.65 Thus the human intellect reflects the mind of God by its speculative grasp of the cosmos — the mirror’s surface — and its knowledge of “itself ” is implicit in this operation. Secondly, a mirror image must have not merely the object and the reflecting surface, but the eye that sees, a necessary relay point in the circuit. The act of intellection is non-reflective in that the mind is not looking at itself directly, but insofar as it is reflecting on the world’s causes, it is itself a reflection: “this mirror, which is the human mind, reflects the likeness of God.”66 The mind is both the mirror and the perceiver. Similarly, the world, of which the mind is a part, is what is reflected. One cannot ultimately separate out these relay points in the circuit discretely, because of their overlap. The metaphor is useful only when we think, not of the object, but of the act. The Thomist reflexivity of intellect is not a perception or insight of a fixed and whole subject, but an active, transformative process, and the metaphor of the mirror must not be construed in terms of a fixed reflection, but rather as an imitatio, a relationship “in which the distance between image and exemplar is seen to diminish.”67 It remains to understand how the chiasm of the mirror relation actually works at the moment of folding back. The difficult idea of a duplex actio or overlap in the circuit of understanding has to do essentially with the realization of creation’s progressive likeness (similitudo) to God. As

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the reflection of God in creation, and as the engine of its movement, likeness is a kind of master concept that comprises the whole process: “It is clear that to become like God is the ultimate end of all.”68 It is at the root of cause, identity, act, agency, and end in the circuit of creation, and we can locate it at every stage and in each modality of the process. God creates mankind in his likeness, so that there is always already a permanent imprint of the divine, a gift of grace. So, likeness to God is infused in the world by the very act of creation and in its result. But it is in the nature of a likeness that it is less perfect than its source, and this is the motive force for its desire for assimilation more perfectly to its source. Thus similitude is actualized as imitation, reflection, and conformation, the process itself by which likeness increases: “Created things are made like unto God by the fact that they attain to divine goodness.”69 Since the progress towards God is an increasing likeness, similitude is also a result. This many-faceted presence of similitude finds its most complex manifestation in human intellect, where it performs the conversio that most faithfully reflects the divine procession. Aquinas’s frequent use of the analogy of heat places the term similitudo in a special light: ut calor calefacientis est similitudo calefacti —“as heat in the heater is a ‘likeness’ of the thing heated.”70 It is difficult to get the literal translation here, and the Latin syntax makes the point stronger, but the sense is that the heat of that which heats (say, a fire) is a similitudo of that which is heated, say, a stone. It can be misleading, therefore, to translate similitudo here as likeness, because it is nonsense to say in our ordinary language that stone bears a likeness to a fire. However, the stone becomes like the fire as a medium of heat. In spite of the difference between the generation of the Son and of the creation, there is an ontological continuity between Creator and created, in the way that a progeny bears a likeness to its progenitor. Te Velde makes this point about causal similitude in relation to Aquinas’s use of participation theory, which Aquinas appropriates from Pseudo-Dionysius: The basic assumption in Dionysius as well as Aquinas is that an effect manifests in some way its cause, since it proceeds from the cause according to an intelligible pattern. A cause communicates something of its perfection to the effect, expresses itself in the effect, which therefore must be to some degree similar to its cause.71

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In this reading, the difference implicit in the notion of similitude is brought forward as a relation of similitude between cause and effect, or Creator and creature. The differences that express this relation are at the core of its significance: Creatures imitate the divine essence in the way this essence is understood by God as imitable by other things, that is, each according to a distinct and particular mode of being. . . . The point is that creatures do not participate in the divine essence as such, but in its similitude, which precisely as similitude is distinguished from the divine essence itself, and consequently in itself distinguished into a multitude of distinct “similitudes” according to the differences of being (differentia entis).72 “Imitate” here means “resemble,” and the resemblance is inevitable, because it is being which passes itself along in the same way that heat is passed along from fire to stone. Yet the process involves transformation, because what is transmitted or received is an effect of its cause. Thus do the lesser perfections of the mundane orders of being participate in the divine. But here is where reflection, the peculiar attribute shared between God and human, has a double action, because God is in act as intellection, and the effect of his emanation in humans is a similar act of intellection. Now, human intellection is this convoluted circuit through materiality. But this very act of intellection is also a mirror of God, that is, the reflection by which we know him. This reflection is not the secondorder activity of looking at ourselves thinking, but our very being in the world, the circuitous way that we understand. Aquinas says that “if God is actually seen by the created mind he must be seen through some likeness.”73 Put the analogies and the aids to thinking aside, and attempt to understand the meaning of this statement by itself, and you are forced to come to terms with the ontological import of attunement, harmony, and similitude. Perhaps the way to think of this is that such a reflection is the least conscious thing of all.74 Or perhaps it is what Aquinas means when he says that we do not reflect on ourselves mainly, even though this is the most important result of our thinking. To the extent that it is known consciously it is incidental, and this may be only the confirmation of that

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similitude which animates our being. Analogously, I only really begin fully to understand exceptional achievement when I progress in this excellence myself. My goal is not to understand achievement, but to achieve.75 Nevertheless this involves knowing what achievement is and growing in appreciation of what it is. Likeness is sharing of essence, and insight comes through resonance with things held essentially in common. Thus to say “that by which the sight sees is the likeness of the visible thing” means that the eye and the things that the eye can see have a primordial connection, share a virtue in common (namely, light). To put this in another way, we have the common phrase “that by virtue of which,” and to understand Aquinas we want to understand “virtue” here as more than the logical reference to means, but in addition as truly a virtue shared. A parent can understand what another parent is going through better than a child; an athlete another athlete. Similitudo is something essential held in common that inspires vision or insight, not a superficial trick of likeness. What happens here is that the intermediate which shows the likeness (the species, the word, the portrait) recedes, and what is advanced is the likeness of seer and seen.76 This is all about helping us understand how humans tend toward God through understanding, through understanding the world better, and the point is that the world as medium of understanding recedes, and our likeness to God is revealed. It is a trick of perception that the likeness appears to be only in the thing (the portrait), since the really important likeness is between the perceiver and the original.

Gadamer and Inherent Reflexivity After Plotinus, Augustine was the great force of gravitation in the Western intellectual tradition towards the inner life, what Socrates called the dialogue of the soul with itself.77 The way was certainly prepared for this, inasmuch as the perfect life was held by Aristotle to be a life of contemplation. Augustine hungers for that quiet of the inner world, and he develops a vocabulary of inwardness—the inner man, the inner life, the inner word, the mental vision, the storehouse of the soul, etc., and with this language his exquisite ruminations on the inner life. One of the most beautiful expositions of this idea is contained in the short dialogue

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De magistro, in which Augustine imagines the truth resident in our souls as a secret inner place: “It seems you do not know that we have been taught to pray in our secret closets [in clausis cubiculis], by which is meant the inmost part of the mind.”78 This feeling for the inwardness of truth and vision is very strong. God is to be sought “in the very secret places of the rational soul . . . in the inner sanctuaries of the mind [in penetralibus mentis].”79 Words for Augustine are signs which point to this inner guide resident within. Thus when someone speaks we do not understand through the truth of their words, but through the truth itself, resident in us: Discimus non verbis foris sonantibus, sed codente intus veritate.80 Outer words thus serve to remind us of what we already have: “But, referring now to all things which we understand, we consult, not the speaker who utters words, but the guardian truth within the mind itself [intus ipsi menti praesidentem], because we have perhaps been reminded by words to do so.”81 In the elaboration of this figure Augustine moves away from the sense of hearing and towards the sense of sight, visions held in the eye of the mind. These signs (signa) are images impressed on the mind, texts (documenta) which are filed away (imaginibus ablatis secum).82 Like an image, the truth these signs reveal is instantaneous rather than discursive, and what we translate of them in our stammerings is only a small part of that vision: “It is apparent that only a very small measure of what a speaker thinks is expressed in his words.”83 Outer words are discursive and temporal; the recognition of a face is instantaneous, and so in the end we will see God face to face. This tendency towards inwardness was sown in religious mysticism, cultivated in German Pietism, and culminated in High Romanticism, where genius took refuge in imagination to escape a godless world. It was, oddly, the fruit of the same tree that gave birth to the Enlightenment apotheosis of the subject. Gadamer, in the complex legacy of response to this tendency, worked tirelessly to move away from the isolated self, and so towards an appreciation of understanding as a social phenomenon, existing more in the interplay of dialogue, the work of culture, and the event of historical phenomena than in an inward thought. Thus we have one of the great ironies of Gadamer’s attraction to the doctrine of the inner word. The kind of reflexivity that I have outlined here in Augustine and Aquinas is a very personal kind of access to God that involves seeing

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inwardly. The tradition of Luther that emphasizes the role of the word in forming community finds a champion in Gadamer, who moves towards the ever-expanding solidarity that dialogue creates. Gadamer’s whole movement of thought seems to be away from the pietist-Romantic inheritance, and towards a thinking with the other, a membership in the civic community. Gadamer’s allegiance to hermeneutics is at one level his movement beyond Hegel from the seduction of the subjective, and he says as much when he critiques German and scholastic thought in the same sentence: “No more than an infinite mind can an infinite will surpass the experience of being that is proportionate to our finitude” (TM, 457/WM, 461).84 Gadamer notes that already in Dilthey there is a “transition from the structure of coherence in an individual’s experience to historical coherence, which is not experienced by any individual at all ” (TM, 224/WM, 228). The place where meaning resides is somewhere in between minds: “It is the medium of language alone that, related to the totality of beings, mediates the finite, historical nature of man to himself and to the world” (TM, 457/WM, 461). Being lives in the rich accretions of meaning out in the world, in the particular manifestations of culture and history which communities innovate. Gadamer is less about the return, less what the world reveals about the mind, and more about what the world is in and of itself. Gadamer humbles us, in a sense, by moving the emphasis from the special value of the inner life of the individual, to the shared world of community and history. Aquinas’s view of the relation of mind to world has a different valence. We cannot know God directly, but only through his works. Human knowledge is inherently a relation to the sensible world, because of its constitution as a relation between form and matter. The mind works by translating sense impressions into ideas (by some intermediate steps), and then intellect comprehends, in a way that is both entirely within itself and never completely divorced from the outside world.85 This last part of the formulation is necessarily difficult, because it is the effort by an Aristotelian (Aquinas) to use the concept of the inner word of a Neoplatonist (Augustine) to resolve the problem of participation. The point that the De natura is making about the primarily unreflexive nature of understanding is that the way a human knows is always in relation to material things. But this is a truncated explanation, and it is inaccurate if left alone. The inner word is direct only to the extent that it never loses touch

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with the world; it never exists in some kind of splendid isolation. The life of the mind, Aquinas insists, is always fed by the material of the exterior world. Gadamer establishes with historical consciousness, or hermeneutical experience, a relationship between community and tradition that is analogously equivalent to the relation between the object and the mind in Aquinas. Just as the mind cannot abstract the material object and the object is dependent on the work of the mind to know its essence, so persons must acknowledge culture, history, and tradition as the partner in a dialogue which constitutes us: [T]radition is not simply a process that experience teaches us to know and govern; it is language — that is, it expresses itself like a Thou. A Thou is not an object; it relates itself to us. It would be wrong to think that this means that what is experienced in tradition is to be taken as the opinion of another person, a Thou. Rather, I maintain that the understanding of tradition does not take the traditionary text as an expression of another person’s life, but as meaning that is detached from the person who means it, from an I or a Thou. . . . [T]radition is a genuine partner in dialogue, and we belong to it, as does the I with a Thou. (TM, 358/WM, 353 ‒ 354) Gadamer is not using “partner” and “Thou” for “tradition” stylistically or metaphorically. Tradition “is not an object but is in relationship with us” (TM, 358/WM, 354). He is intent on removing the privilege attendant on the subjective self enshrined in Western thought, and he does this by seeing the reciprocal implication of person and tradition as a unity, in the same way that intellection and material object require each other ontologically. And in fact at this precise point in his argument Gadamer references the language of reflection: “A person who reflects himself out of a living relationship to tradition destroys the true meaning of this tradition” (TM, 360/WM, 366). Gadamer builds a description of hermeneutic understanding in tandem with personal understanding, but ultimately he affirms his belief that hermeneutic understanding is the greater (TM, 361/WM, 367). This parallel between Thomist intellection and historical consciousness means that there is a deep accord between Aquinas and Gadamer that is not apparent on the surface. The inherent reflexivity that exists by

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virtue of the mind’s engagement with the world in Thomism is analogous to the history that is the engagement of subjectivity with tradition and the indeterminate future in hermeneutics. This strict parallel is the commitment that both Aquinas and Gadamer make to Aristotle at the level of epistemology. But the accord is more than this. As we have seen with Aquinas’s notion of conformity to God, the very act of human intellection, in a sense, magnifies the Lord. The more we understand, the closer we bring the universe to God’s perfection, and the more we express the love which is the cause of our being. Human finitude creates the same dynamic for Gadamer. The finite language that we have to understand what is means that there are always new perspectives that open up before us and always something that remains to be said, the positive side of our finitude.86 What is important for Gadamer is that the word is not reflective because it is not a rebounding back upon itself or the speaker, but rather is an emanation into the world that works to constitute that world. It does not come back to the sender like the sound waves off a flat surface, but with additions, in the response of another, and as such it is not a reflection, but an increase, in the way that God’s love is magnified or the seed grows. The temporal world is not a weak image of the divine intellect, since history is an increase, like the building of coral reefs, and the world, the real world, is always becoming richer than itself and anything else. Having said this, the difference between Aquinas and Gadamer also finds its proper register. Among the great animating and preserving forces of the Christian faith through its history 87 is its fundamental faith in a personal God, and a personal relationship with God.88 In its extraordinary scope and design, Thomism places a “realist” epistemology in the service of personal relationship to the divine.89 Intellect, which is the form of human being, is ordered to God, who is perfect intellect, perfect understanding. Gadamer reverses this priority. The self is taught humility by its lack of control of experience and the world (TM, 352/WM, 358). A person of experience is someone “who knows that he is master neither of time nor the future” (TM, 357/WM, 363). But for this reason, understanding elevates the dignity of experience over and above our willing. The Lutheran abasement has its counterpart not in salvific love but in what lies fatefully in store for us. The priority of the question,90 the independence of play,91 and our fundamental openness to experience, means that our fundamen-

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tal being is one of finitude, and our fundamental relationship is to history as at least an equal partner. The self is demoted in Gadamer, and the relation to the world is no longer simply the necessary means of understanding by which we know God. Our consciousness is caught up in and serves the unfolding of being in a co-implication that does not ultimately privilege our separated souls. Put another way, the mind is an organ of speech, of the priority of the question, rather than of vision, of being in the sight of God.

chapter 5



The Pattern of Hegel’s Trinity The Legacy of Christian Immanence in German Thought

So they loved as love in twain Had the essence but in one, Two distinct, division none:

For love is a distinguishing of two, who nevertheless are absolutely not distinguished for each other.

Number there in love was slain . . . Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together, To themselves yet either neither, Simple were so well compounded. — Shakespeare, “The Phoenix and the Turtle”

It is established that the two distinguished moments are the same, that this distinction is sublated insofar as it is precisely what posits itself as no distinction at all; hence the one remains present to itself in the other. —Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3:276.

Dispersed throughout Gadamer’s writings are testimonies to the importance of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity for hermeneutics. Trinity is linked in Gadamer’s mind with Plato’s effort to solve “the great dialectical puzzle of the one and the many.”1 In his 1977 essay “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” Gadamer connects Hegel’s claim that philosophy’s task “comprehends and gathers up into itself the totality of truth as it has been unfolded in its historical development” to the truth of the trinitarian doctrine, and Gadamer then adds: “I personally believe that this doctrine has constantly stimulated the course of thought in the West 162

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as a challenge and invitation to try and think that which continually transcends the limits of human understanding” (5). Gadamer cites the prodigious mystery of the Trinity as the major impediment to a reconciliation between revelation and reason in the time of the Enlightenment, a barrier that only Hegel would overcome.2 And of course in Gadamer’s section on the verbum interius in Truth and Method the mystery of the Trinity is brought into the closest proximity with the nature of human linguisticality.3 What is the claim of this doctrine on hermeneutic philosophy? The mystery at the heart of Christian teaching is an enigma that sustained the identity of the Christian church, and it was based on a logical contradiction, the presence at one and the same time of identity in difference: “Father and Son and Holy Spirit in the inseparable equality of one substance present a divine unity; and therefore there are not three gods but one God; although indeed the Father has begotten the Son, and therefore he who is the Father is not the Son; and the Son is begotten by the Father, and therefore he who is the Son is not the Father.”4 This is true both in terms of the internal relation of the persons of the Trinity and also in terms of the worldly incarnation of God in the Word.5 With the extension of the trinitarian enigma into the economy of history, the utterance of the Father is expressed through the life of the church, and the belongingrelation between identity and difference becomes the texture of worldly history. The reciprocity of transcendent and immanent reality at the heart of this “double” Trinity expresses the complex ontological role of the word as the crossing point between the mundane and the eternal, a theme that theology shares with philosophy.6 Between Gadamer and dogmatic Christianity, however, lies Hegel, who brought philosophy and the doctrine of the Trinity into the closest proximity. Hegel himself “more than once described his thought as the translation of the content of classical Christianity into the form of the speculative concept.”7 No effort to come to grips with Hegel can safely avoid his encounter with Trinity, since, as Samuel Powell notes, “the philosophical deciphering of the doctrine is, Hegel believed, the key to solving every philosophical perplexity” (108). When Hegel describes the true in the Phenomenology as “the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal,” he is recapitulating a pattern of thought that developed out of centuries of struggle with the enigma

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of the divine processions (10). This philosophy is an appropriation of the emanationist circuit of self-othering that theology described for its own purposes. History as the necessary expression of God’s love becomes for Hegel “Spirit emptied out into Time.”8 The profound trinitarian abuse of logic is reinforced and amplified in his dialectic, which is itself a provocation to Enlightenment reason. Hegel’s philosophical innovation is a borrowing. By thinking Aristotle’s nohvs iı nohvsewı within the cosmic narrative of death and resurrection, philosophy manifests the existential pathos of the Christian narrative. In the last line of the Phenomenology, Hegel expresses the self-movement of Spirit between inward beatitude (contemplation) and outward suffering (history, Calvary) with Schiller’s words “aus dem Kelche dieses Geisterreiches/schäumt ihm seine Unendlichkeit” (531) [from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth from Him his own infinitude]. Augustine’s formula for the economic procession in the narrative of human history—“God utters himself ”—summarizes the trinitarian argument that allows Hegel to reintroduce pathos and ethos into the logos of speculative metaphysics. No doubt Hegel was interested in trinitarian theology on its own terms. It was Hegel who, after Augustine, made the most extraordinary effort to reconcile the transcendent and economic procession of the Trinity. But for Hegel religion and philosophy speak in the same language, and it is this reconciliation that makes possible the idea of a primordial Sprachlichkeit, a logos that binds substance and subject. The result is that when Gadamer takes incarnation as the model for linguistic belonging in the third part of Truth and Method, he is not just offering an analogy. It is a model for his understanding of the relatedness of being and word.9 The “truth of Hegel’s thought” about the Trinity is his working out of the enigmatic relation of divine immanence and transcendence. In the history of Christian theology through the centuries before Hegel, the doctrine of the Trinity had nearly foundered on the illogic of the relation between God’s self-subsisting perfection and an imperfect world that is somehow to be involved in the procession. Hegel, in his remarkable confidence, never thinks of this division as an insuperable problem. For him, immanence and transcendence exist in self-supporting relation, and the transcendent Trinity is only a “moment” in the eternal procession. Finitude is the necessary other of the infinite [Der Geist . . . muß die Bestimmung der Endlich-

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keit an sich selbst haben].10 The idea of perfection is born out of the indeterminate and contingent. This positive relation echoes through Gadamer’s explication of the inseparability of finitude and infinity, the intimate unity of thought and speech, and his famous Wirkungsgeschichte (historically effected consciousness). Hermeneutics is primarily interested to assert the interrelation as an interaction of language and being, which it takes to be a practical advance beyond Hegel’s still too idealist dialectic of knowledge and being. But in its dynamic structure, as opposed to its absolute endpoint, it requires little innovation that is not already in Hegel’s phenomenology. Gadamer renounces Hegel twice resoundingly in the third part of Truth and Method. In the first instance Gadamer links Hegel’s idealism explicitly to the “splendid self-forgetfulness” of Greek metaphysics that regards thought (nous) as a “fulfilled potential” of the infinite presence of being (TM, 457). Gadamer links this illusory fulfillment to the scholastic species as well: “A word is not simply the perfection of the ‘species’ [Lat.], as medieval thought held. When a being is represented in the thinking mind, this is not the reflection of a pregiven order of being, the true nature of which is apparent to an infinite mind (that of the Creator)” (ibid.). The second instance is after Gadamer has developed Hegel’s speculative dialectic as far as he can for the purpose of an ontology of language: “This is the point at which the proximity of our own inquiry to the speculative dialectic of Plato and Hegel meets a fundamental barrier” (TM, 468). Hegel’s commitment to “the totality of known knowledge, to the self-consciousness of the concept,” has a kinship with the pretence of logic to capture truth in the statement (469). Against this Gadamer sets “the finitude of our historical experience,” which is the ground of hermeneutical experience (457). But what is essential to Gadamer’s project at its heart is the marriage of dialectic and language, so Hegel lives at the heart of Gadamer’s project. The mutually constitutive relation of language and being in hermeneutics is tricky, because, as we have seen, it exists as a kind of double loop, cycling through the human capacity to reflect, which is both a capacity that language confers and creative of the reality by which it continues to evolve.11 Such reflection arises out of the distance that language gives to consciousness from itself and from the objects of its attention, which is to say, a distance from what is its own. This internal reciprocity

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of distance and proximity is more than a simple contrast, but rather a selfeffectuating mechanism that works by leaving traces of itself, permanent reflections, and thus in a sense supersedes consciousness. Living language thus is at the center of an ontological circle, a sort of passageway between the mind and the world and all that has transpired between them and all that opens out before them, except that the passageway is inseparable with the identity of that mind and world. It turns out that this circularity is a kind of repetition of the trinitarian structure, and not by accident. Hegel anticipated this when he developed the dialectic of the concrete absolute, although he had not understood his dialectic as a function of language but of idea. The doctrine of the inner word was ahead of him in a sense by understanding this structure in terms of language. Nevertheless, it is Hegel who draws on the larger historical structure of trinitarian procession to eclipse the subjectivism that had trapped mentalist models of understanding.12 My effort here is to see Hegel’s philosophical encounter with the Trinity as an aid to understanding hermeneutics. To do this we must explicate Hegel’s train of thought when he explicates theTrinity as the supreme manifestation of dialectic. The 1827 iteration of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, even more than the Phenomenology, provide the clearest and fullest exposition of Hegel’s thinking on this subject.

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1827 13 The subject of the lectures, revised and delivered four times (1821, 1824, 1827, 1831),14 is the concept of religion, which is the knowledge “that God is the absolute truth” (PR, 1:366).15 This formulation of Hegel’s subject matter is conceived already dialectically, since the inquiry is not about God or the nature of God, but about the knowledge of God (religion), which includes in itself the speculative actualization of God through history. This dialectic is here presented to mirror the Trinitarian relation. That is, the structure of knowledge is a reciprocal relation between knower and known just as the reciprocity of immanence and transcendence is the selfmovement of the Trinity. This is played out in the very structure of the lecture course itself—just as it should—given the dialectical relation between knowledge and inquiry. Thus the exposition moves in its three

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major sections from the universal (Allgemeinheit) [awareness of God in faith] to the particular (Besonderheit) [the awareness of difference between God and self] to the individual (Einzelheit) [incarnation]. Hegel’s performative approach to his subject is a profound legacy for hermeneutics. Heidegger16 and those he influenced in France were actually more faithful practitioners than Gadamer of this kind of performativity in the way that they enacted their thinking through their thought experiments, but Gadamer at least theorizes performance through the central concept of the hermeneutic circle. The point of his appropriation of Heidegger’s formula,“interpretation doesn’t occur as an activity in the course of life, but is the form of human life” is that there is not a life over there and a subject reflecting on it over here.17 Understanding constructs the life in progress, and is in turn part of that construction. Not only the form of Hegel’s lectures, but the transformative process his thinking undergoes, enacts the very procession he claims thought to be involved in. Although the different versions of the lectures expressed the schema of the concept of religion in slightly different ways each time, the movement of the dialectic was the same: The moment of universality is the undifferentiated awareness of God through faith; the most basic human intuition of the presence of God. The moment of particularity is the progressive historical development of the “determinate” religions, which he understood to be all religions leading up to Christianity. The moment of the individual is the consummate religion, Protestant Christianity, which unifies the two previous moments. Each of these moments has its own tripartite structure that moves thinking to the next stage. For instance, in the first moment, the development of subjective consciousness of God from immediate and simple intuition to speculative awareness is propelled dialectically: The immanent truth of God is intuited in us as a unity without distinction—for instance, in the pietist inner feeling of the holy—and this is the first moment. The second moment, distinction, is the realization that this holiness is in us, but that we are not God; so that we gain a consciousness of self and other (PR 1:381). Reason starts with this capacity to understand difference, to see that we are looking at something that is not ourselves, “the feeling of a content and the feeling of oneself—both at once” (390). The gap this introduces between what we see and that we see is the space of reason’s actuation. The third moment is the unification of self and spirit through reflection, the knowledge that we have of our

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unity with God in creation. And so on. The entire argument of the lectures is built out of these embedded and ascending triads, culminating in an exposition of thought as the logical articulation and enactment of Christian truth at its apex. Hegel introduces his lecture subject by asking how he is to begin, acknowledging the difficulty of a beginning for this greatest of all knowledge. In Hegel’s view, religion does not constitute a different subject from philosophy itself: “Philosophy is only explicating itself when it explicates religion” (PR, 1:152 ‒ 153). The science of religion is simply the final, most encompassing science, and “God is the absolute truth” (366).18 By taking philosophy as the preeminent activity of thinking, the pursuit of truth, and God as the ultimate object of thought, the truth itself, we then have thought thinking itself. This poses a unique problem for the manner of his lectures, since the subject therefore is, so to speak, self-exceeding.19 It will constantly be overrun by itself, since the object of the inquiry is inquiry itself. How does one surprise and get hold of what one is doing, what is at the beginning and ending of all inquiry? One must dispense with determinate premises, since there are no claims antecedent to an absolute beginning. Conversely, as the final truth, the subject presupposes all other knowledge, which would seem to postpone any beginning. Hegel’s starting point for the beginning of the philosophy of religion engages at once his great struggle with the question of the beginning of any knowledge at all. Gadamer of course applies this same issue of the self-exceeding to linguistic understanding: “In understanding we are drawn into an event of truth and arrive, as it were, too late, if we want to know what we are supposed to believe” (TM, 490). Hegel’s initial answer to the dilemma of a beginning is that thinker and subject matter are never separate as “free-standing, independent, fixed sides that are mutually opposed” (PR, 1:151 ‒‒ 152). We are already in the circle, since as existing beings, we live in the truth. He relates this crossing of epistemology and ontology to the Christian notion of intuition or insight implanted in the soul: “[T]he highest or religious content discloses itself to the human being in the spirit itself, that spirit manifests itself in spirit, in this my own spirit, that faith has its root in the inner self or in what is most my own, that my inmost core is inseparable from it” (160). This existential starting point is no real starting point, since each individual is always already in the truth of the spirit. Hegel’s circularity relies on an “appeal to the general consciousness” of religion itself,

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its “initial content” in our own intuition (366). He turns to the Pietist background of the problem not as an ultimate solution, but as a surety that reason is on the right track. Reason will discover what it has known all along: “The original content, the foundation of the philosophy of religion, is a result, namely a lemma or subsidiary proposition to the effect that the content with which we begin is genuine content” (366). It can do this because the act of inquiry itself, as the constitutive nature of our being, enacts the truth which it is seeking: “[T]he truth will become evident in the progression itself ” (366). What he calls here “subjective consciousness” is the objectification of that involvement in the enactment of truth: “For us who have religion, what God is, is something well-known, a content that can be presupposed in subjective consciousness” (367). Thus we can place in mirror relation the comprehension of faith and the circular path of philosophy. To find the end in the beginning is the key to both. Here is the religious statement of the case: “The proposition, ‘God is the absolutely true,’ means just as much that God is not the result, but rather that, inasmuch as it is the last thing, what is absolutely true is just as much the first” (PR, 1:367 ‒ 68). Here is the philosophical statement of the case: “The One is the result of philosophy. We make our beginning straightaway from this result of philosophy” (367). The intuition of faith is of the unity of one and many, finite and infinite. In the end, this is what is achieved in God’s wholeness and perfection. However feeble human understanding, faith grants each individual an incipient awareness of this relation: “[T]he beginning of the content is to be grasped in such a way that, in all the further developments of the content, inasmuch as the universal itself will show itself to be something absolutely concrete, rich, and full of content, we never step outside this universality” (PR, 1:368).20 Even the first intuition points to the fullness of the dialectical interplay of one and many. Hegel puts it this way in reference to the creation of the world: All through the development God does not step outside his unity with himself. In God’s creating of the world, as tradition has it, no new principle makes an appearance, nor is something evil established, something other that would be autonomous or independent. God remains only this One; the one true actuality, the one principle, abides throughout all particularity.21 (PR, 1:371)

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This is indeed an enigma, one that defies positive logic, and it was just such a schematism that could make Aristotle’s reciprocal determination of particular and universal the engine of historical development. Hegel’s grasping of the structure of the Trinity is simultaneously a description of the structure of thought and being. There is no true cleavage between an immanent and transcendent God, just as there is no beginning to thought that does not anticipate its end. Readers familiar with the third part of Truth and Method recognize the deep accord between Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Hegel’s circular epistemology. In the same way that Hegel’s subject is self-exceeding, so language for Gadamer captivates us “before we can come to ourselves,” as an event of truth at which we “arrive, as it were, too late” (TM, 490). How can language be the subject of inquiry when we cannot think outside of language?22 The relationship between the manifold of existence and the unity of the concept in Hegel is the parallel to Gadamer’s assertion that “the word of language . . . is always one word” (457). The problem for hermeneutics, as Heidegger said, was how to get into the circle, which is a repetition of Hegel’s problem. For both Hegel and Gadamer, the problem of a beginning is inherently the relationship between the beginning and the end, since a beginning presupposes its end. Gadamer’s understanding of linguisticality [Sprachlichkeit] is essentially a recovery of this sense of Hegel’s Geist and its expression as incarnation, an ontological unity which it is the aim of Hegel’s lecture to explicate. Hegel demonstrates how the principle of the dialectic articulates the trinitarian relation as world history. In doing this, he provides Gadamer with the conceptual pattern for a Sprachlichkeit that speaks one word as many. As Gadamer says, “The mystery of the Trinity is mirrored in the miracle of language” (421). The Hegelian lesson that outlasts the irrelevancies of his system is his insight into the performative structure of understanding, which occurs in what Gadamer calls a Wechselwirkung, a reciprocal interaction between what we are given and what we invent—we are creating in the very process of catching up, so that we can never stand outside of knowledge. Hegel and Gadamer emphasize the positive side of this interanimation, relishing the constitutive nature of our practice. In Gadamer, this is expressed in terms of the principle of the hermeneutic circle: “The anticipation of meaning in which the whole is envisaged becomes actual un-

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derstanding when the parts that are determined by the whole themselves also determine this whole” (TM, 291). When translated into the terms of understanding in life, this means that we cannot prescind from our situated condition when we attempt to know what is true. The paradigm for this is when we find ourselves in a difficult situation, where it becomes most necessary to try to understand: “The very idea of a situation means that we are not standing outside it and hence are unable to have any objective knowledge of it” (301). But this is not just a special case of knowledge, since we “always find ourselves within a situation, and throwing light on it is a task that is never entirely finished” (301). The reason the task is never entirely finished is precisely the circular action of situation on understanding and understanding on situation, each of which act in the way that Hegel’s thesis and antithesis act toward each other in moving thought continually forward. Philosophical hermeneutics transforms Hegel’s dialectic into an inexhaustible development of its own facticity: “Its task is to retrace the path of Hegel’s phenomenology of mind until we discover in all that is subjective the substantiality that determines it” (302). There is no steady state, no absolute notion in hermeneutics. But it is this very outstripping of the telos that becomes a question for philosophical hermeneutics. How can Hegel’s dialectic be appropriated to a historicist belief in a teleology without a telos? Let us trace the argument of the lectures.

Part I of the Lectures

The first moment and its first element. Part I of the lectures considers the moment of universality (Allgemeinheit). True to Hegel’s speculative idea, the full complexity of the dialectical relation is contained in nuce in the very first moment, which means that its perfect simplicity bears within itself the seed of differentiation that will lead eventually to full reflective awareness. Thus the simple knowledge of God can be parsed into three movements or aspects, from the awareness of the comprehensive unity of God, to an awareness of the believer’s difference from God, and finally to the resultant concretion of this knowledge in human culture. In the first aspect of this moment, the awareness of God, there is no conscious differentiation between knower and known, between the

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thought and its object. It is merely the complete potency to thought of religious feeling. The image of God presupposes all the rest, in the way that the first moment, the idea in its unity, bears the seed of the whole: “Our starting point (namely, that what we generally call ‘God,’ or God in an indeterminate sense, is the truth of all things) is the result of the whole of philosophy” (PR, 1:367). Just as God is the cause and the telos of creation, so Hegel can begin with the idea of religion, speak of its immediate intuition as the first moment in the progression of knowledge, and still be at the end and fulfillment of his subject, “that from which everything proceeds and into which everything returns” (368).23 Aristotle’s reciprocal relation of potency and act receives a sur-charge in its Christian and Hegelian appropriation before it is passed on to Heidegger. We hear something more than just the relation of the seed to the oak in Gadamer’s invocation of Aquinas: “While it is being conceived by the intellect, the subject matter is at the same time ordered toward being uttered” (TM, 422). The inner word exists strangely between temporal and timeless worlds. What bounds the movement from God to community in the first moment within a simple unity? It is that it is circumscribed within an intuition, “generally of God, of consciousness of God and connection with God, of our human knowledge of the divine spirit within ourselves and of ourselves within the divine spirit” (PR, 2:515). It is the immediate, unreflective awareness of the presence of God to which consciousness may appeal as a first truth: “[H]owever full one’s heart may be with this representation, the beginning remains scientifically abstract” (PR, 1:368).24 Nevertheless, it would be wrong to mistake this first moment as an intuition of the transcendent Trinity, since Hegel speaks from the beginning of the relation of humankind to God. Sounding very much like Augustine in his effort to articulate this inherent relationality, he asserts that we know God through the full existential capacity of human being: We express this beginning thus, as a content within us, an object for us. We have this object, and so the immediate question is: Who then are “we” who have the content within us? When we say “we,”“I,” or “spirit,” that is itself something very concrete, something manifold: I am intuiting, I see, I hear, etc. I am all of that—the feeling, intuition, sight, and hearing. Therefore the more exact meaning of our question is: Under

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which of those determinations is this content for our awareness? Is it representation, will, phantasy, or feeling? What is the place in which this content or this object is at home? What is the soil for this content? If we recall the usual answers, then [they are that] God is within us as believing, feeling, representing, and knowing beings. (PR, 1:372) Hegel finds the whole being of human feeling and understanding to give evidence of the relation. Now, Hegel will take a step back in the sense that he removes himself somewhat from the existential pathos of Augustine, and others will have to retrieve this, but Hegel makes progress in coming to terms with the human engagement of mind and world, because he works out and gives salience to the concreteness of this passage from transcendence to immanence. When Augustine explains how the word grows in us, he cautions that we are not some fixed subjectivity that spawns a manifold world: “The Word itself, after all, doesn’t grow, but it’s we who grow in him, we who make progress in him, we who increase in him, until we no longer find voices necessary” (Sermon 293a). But it is Hegel who turns this principle to account in a philosophical framework, as the engine of perception and judgment, practical and theoretical. The enigma of the trinitarian relation is most potent precisely in this first moment, because it constitutes the relation of God to the world in creation, but consists at the very same time of the simple unity of God as a perfection always already completed: “All through the development God does not step outside his unity with himself. In God’s creating of the world as tradition has it, no new principle makes an appearance. . . . God remains only this One; the one true actuality, the one principle, abides throughout all particularity” (PR, 1:371). The audacity of this thought goes well beyond the idea of a natural potency of a being for its end, and it is to this enigmatic contradiction that Hegel gives his mind, and to which the explanation of the lectures unfolds. This radicalization of Aristotle is fundamental to the ontological shift of the third part of Truth and Method as well. The Christian appropriation of the relation of whole and part is at the root of Gadamer’s explication of the linguisticality, but only after it passes through Hegel’s interpretation. This is made explicit in a famous passage in Truth and Method where Gadamer claims that “the great dialectical puzzle of the one and the many” is given “its true and fundamental ground” (457). Although Plato

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and Augustine had made great advances in solving the puzzle, Gadamer reserves for Hegel the fullest achievement of the dialectic, in which “every word breaks forth as if from a center and is related to a whole” (458). In the speculative movement of language, every particular word “carries with it the unsaid,” bringing “a totality of meaning into play” (458). The mark of Hegel is unmistakable in Gadamer’s resolution of the puzzle of the one and the many: “All human speaking is finite in such a way that there is laid up within it an infinity of meaning to be explicated and laid out” (458).25 The second moment. If the first moment in the simple awareness of God intuits the relation of God to oneself, the second moment understands, conversely, the distinction of self as the other of the intuition of the One. This knowledge of unity and difference is a dialectical movement. Because the principle of difference provides that any single truth stands in need of its other, any partial recognition of God serves as the force towards fuller recognition. Thus the initial, indeterminate moment of relation between God and human encompasses every other level in potency. In Part I, the dialectical negation and subsumption of difference confines itself to the institution of religion in a kind of snapshot, seeing the generic structures of relation before uncovering the temporal-historical progression. (This division, like the segmentation of a cell for analysis, is a convenience of explanation necessitated by discursive thought.) We see in the very structure of the dialectic how Hegel attempts to surpass the dilemma of immanent and economic Trinity. His dialectical approach to the God-world relationship is from the beginning and always relational, so that the immanent truth implies the economic truth as its other. Its first moment is the general, abstract awareness that God is the truth of all things. This is an indeterminate concept that subsumes knower and known in the perfect unity of the relation. The second moment is the knowledge of God, which is in Hegel’s schema the moment of distinction, or consciousness. We must be careful here because, although God is distinguished from self at this stage, God is so completely the object of awareness that the self is forgotten in its absorption with its object: “I am immersed in my object and know nothing of myself. . . . there is only one object with which I am filled, I know nothing myself ” (PR, 1:442). It is only in the third stage that the complex reflexivity of self and other is achieved: “I have not only to know the object, to be filled,

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but to know myself as filled by this object, to know it as within me and likewise myself as within this object that is the truth — and so to know myself in the truth” (PR, 1:442). Self-knowledge has the full complexity of speculative reflection, traversing the circuit of self, other, and the selfother relation. This absorption in the object is a consistent theme of Gadamer’s Sprachlichkeit: “[T]he word is a word only because of what comes into language in it. Its own physical being exists only in order to disappear into what is said” (TM, 475). Likewise an interpretation is not a separate thing over against a text, but an extension of the meaning of the text (TM, 398, 400). This is not a loss, but rather a magnification of truth, and a manifestation of the integral bond of word and thought. It is not easy to hold onto this claim in Gadamer, since it seems intuitively to run counter to his effort to bring out the linguisticality of the Sache. He marshals the idea of disappearance in service of the non-instrumental character of language, so that it is clear the word is not a separate thing. But why should it then entirely “disappear”? The answer to this difficulty lies in relating language back to incarnation, the exemplar of this logical hyperbole. The mortality of Christ, the finitude of creation, are expressions of their opposite. Just as the worldly procession “disappears in the immediacy of divine omniscience” (424), language “is that in which knowledge is consummate” (426). When we see a color, the light that makes the color visible is both lost to our attention and the very ground of its possibility. Similarly, an interpretation “disappears” when it is right (298), in the sense that it becomes a part of the text itself. In the logic of incarnation God assumes death in order to conquer death. It is the rebuke of the incarnation to logic that we hear in Hegel, and then in Gadamer. Disappearance is not a nullity, but a negation or subsumption. In the differentiation of moments, Hegel is never just explicating the alternation between unity and difference in the progress of understanding, but seeing, rather, every aspect implicated in the other, in the same way that likeness and difference is present in the trinitarian procession, “internal distinction within itself ” (PR, 1:381). Thus, if the first moment is an indeterminate universality without distinction, it is not “an inert, abstract universal, however, but rather the absolute womb or the infinite fountainhead out of which everything merges, into which everything returns, and in which it is eternally maintained” (374). The second moment

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follows necessarily as distinction, with God on the one side and consciousness on the other. But this consciousness of God is an othering of self-creation, since the creation of the world and the spirit present in the world is God’s self-manifestation. Thus the subjective consciousness of God is his own creation, and it bears witness to an other that is itself: “[W]hat God creates God himself is” (381). The standpoint of consciousness as difference manifests unity in the very moment that it is annulled, testifying to the belonging of the subject to its object. Hegel puts this in a phrase —Differentiation serves identity, since it is only a matter of “the distinction of these determinations of unity” (380; emphasis added). Hegel thus reasserts a Neoplatonic principle that underlies the trinitarian theory of the communicatio Dei: “God loses nothing when he communicates himself ” (383). Gadamer says the same thing about the creation of the word, since in that process “the memory is not plundered and does not lose anything” (TM, 425). The infinite potential of language to discover its subject matter is an addition without loss. Like the multiplication of the loaves, like God’s love (his generatio), linguistic innovation is not bounded by Newtonian principles of space and measure. There is no zero sum, no equivalence of matter and energy. But more than this, what is created exists, is being. This has two sides. First, what comes into being does not emerge out of nothing. Hegel is quite explicit on the ground for this principle in Jewish faith (PR, 2:673). The second aspect is that what is new is not other or different from its creator: “[W]hat God creates God himself is” (PR, 1:381). In hermeneutic terms, what humans in society construct out of their deliberations and decisions is who they are. Gadamer draws on Aristotle’s ethics to make this point, since character is what we do habitually, but we must not ascribe the source of this commitment to Aristotle exclusively. One of the signal principles of philosophical hermeneutics is the infinite potential of language, which is Aristotle’s ejnergeiva passing through ˙ Aquinas, Hegel, Humboldt, and Heidegger. The trinitarian idea that God loses nothing when he communicates himself is first in respect to the Son, who is both God’s generatio and God himself, and then also the Word in history. Theologians used the metaphor of speech to explain this enigma, and Gadamer reversed the figure and ground. It is difficult to imagine this move unless we factor in the daring of Hegel’s logic. By replacing the Enlightenment commitment to measurable, non-contradictory identity with

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the structure of Trinity, Hegel allows hermeneutics to think language as a provocation to logic. The determinations of the second element of the first moment. Our consciousness, our recognition of God is, by definition, a moment of differentiation between ourselves and him. Hegel thinks of this process of differentiation as a movement from indeterminacy to determinacy, from abstract to concrete, creation being the progressive concretion of the abstract principle. This is a rudimentary awareness of difference that does not expand yet into the complexity of the speculative relation. It is bounded by the immediacy of the simple conviction of its truth, God. Subjective consciousness, specifically, discovers God in a series of specific determinations — through immediate knowledge, feeling, representation, and thought. These modes of knowledge stand in contrast to the Enlightenment tendency to isolate cognition as the valid access to truth, and they can be traced back to Aristotle’s more catholic view of science. It will be useful to summarize these determinations briefly, since the “knowledge” they describe is analogous to what Gadamer would call understanding. Each of the four determinations has a tripartite structure. Immediate knowledge of God in the certainty of faith is a subjective awareness of the finite and particular individual, that God is, that he is distinct from myself, and that there is a relation in this negation. This is not a reflective relation, but the simple immediate certainty of God’s otherness and reality. The ground of this certainty is faith, an unreflective intuition grounded in authority and the witness of spirit (PR, 1:389). The subjective and objective aspects of feeling, similarly, exist in mirror relation, not in self-conscious reflection, but intuitively: “It is the feeling of a content and the feeling of oneself — both at once” (PR, 3:138). Feeling is not a strictly separate determination from immediate knowledge, but lives in cooperation with it in the service of faith, supporting the truth of what is asserted. “Warmth of feeling” is what produces conviction, which is “not only that one knows the principles but also that they are in one’s heart” (PR, 1:391). Hegel traverses some Aristotelian ground at this point. Logos and pathos, if you will, are inextricably tied up with ethos, since conviction is the disposition “to act in accordance with what one is” (ibid.). Later in the lectures Hegel will make reason and ethics correlative. Freedom “is rationality or, more precisely, ethical life”

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(PR, 2:643). The dependence of these relations on each other has a polemical aspect, since feeling is not ancillary but integral to the conviction “of one’s inmost being” (PR, 1:391). We do not simply consult our feelings to achieve certainty of God’s existence. The determinations of knowledge and feeling call upon each other, as a seed draws nourishment from the ground. Immediate knowledge and feeling stand in need of a further determination, and this is where religion finds its proper medium, the objective determinacy of symbols, images, and accounts that make faith concrete. These representations are the objective “places” where feeling and knowledge emerge into consciousness. Thus we have an image of Jesus in our minds, a story of his deliverance, a ritual life that recalls us to him, and a canon of faith. But then this objectivity before us “comes under consideration” in thought (PR, 1:403), which has at this stage the limited manifestation of conviction. Thought ties together the previous determinations by understanding their relation. The thought of the separateness of self and God is strictly the distance traveled between subject and object, the empirical knowledge of God’s representations. The third element of the first moment. The capacity of thought to distance itself from the immediate is a critical moment in the progress of spirit. The capacity for reflective mediation, the “passing over” from the immediate to the mediate, is a transcendence, an elevation [Erhebung] that connects the finite to the infinite (PR, 1:162). Gadamer too speaks of the capacity of hermeneutic consciousness to “rise above that of which it is conscious” (TM, 341). In Hegel this passing over enacts the trinity that is most characteristic of human reason, a mediation [Vermittlung] between “I” and God that is itself a third thing, a tie that overcomes distinction: “[T]his identity itself is distinct from their distinct being; it is something different from both of them because otherwise they would not be distinct. The mediation accordingly is in a third [term] over against these two distinct sides, and is itself a third that brings them together and in which they are mediated and are identical” (PR, 1:163 ‒ 164). Speculative reflection26 is indeed at its core the trinitarian enigma, holding together distinction and unity as each other’s other—“Two distincts, division none.” And here Hegel provides the rationale for the relation of finite and infinite that Gadamer is always talking about:

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Genuine transition does not consist in change, in perennial alteration [as Heraclitus said]. Instead the genuine other of the finite is the infinite, and this is not bare negation of the finite but is affirmative, is being. That is the quite simple consideration involved here. This affirmative process is the process of our spirit; it brings itself about unconsciously within our spirit; but philosophy is having the consciousness of it. (PR, 1:423) Gadamer speaks of linguisticality in almost the same way. Just as with the incarnation, “the act of becoming is not the kind of becoming in which something turns into something else” (TM, 420). And elsewhere he says: “It is always one word that we say to one another and that is said to us” (TM, 457 ‒ 458). For Gadamer, it is not philosophy that unites the “aggregate of endlessly many contingent phenomena” (Hegel, PR, 2:421), but language.27 In fact, if we replace “concept” with “language,” we can use Hegel’s description of the ontological proof of God’s existence to describe Gadamer’s resolution of the problem of the many and the one: “The concept is what is alive. . . . it is immediately this universal that determines and particularizes itself—it is this activity of dividing, of particularizing and determining itself, of positing a finitude, negating this its own finitude and being identical with itself through the negation of this finitude” (PR, 1:436). It is at precisely this point that Hegel repeats the trinitarian formula as a summary of the process: “God creates the world and he produces his Son, posits an other to himself and in this other has himself, is identical with himself ” (437). World and Son in this formulation are part of the same procession in the immanent and transcendent movement of spirit. Intellect is the event horizon of this procession, the point of transformation between subjectivity and objectivity: “All the action in the world is a sublating of the subjective and a positing of the objective, and so is the production of the unity of both” (439). Intellect is a consummation/consuming of world in the act of understanding, except that its increasing knowledge is its history: “Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance.”28 Here concept has for Hegel something very much like the role of intellectus in Aquinas. Both concept and intellect serve as the infinite mediation of mind and world, in the former as the actualization of being, in the latter as the perfecting of God’s order.

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For Hegel, the activity of the concept is what God is; for Gadamer, creation is what language does—the self-particularizing of the world by historical thought: “It is always one word that we say to one another and that is said to us (theologically, ‘the’ Word of God)—but the unity of this word, as we saw, always unfolds step by step in articulated discourse.”29 Of course Hegel’s attribution of ultimate agency to Begriff is something very strange to the ear, but this is no mere trick of expression: “First we must cease thinking of the concept as such as something that we only have or form within ourselves. The concept is the purpose of an object, the soul of the living thing” (PR, 1:438). The idealist habit of shifting agency from subject to substance, a habit Kierkegaard found maddening, rooted itself deeply in German thought thereafter, as Gadamer recounts. For Dilthey, truth does not exist “in an intention locked in the impotence of subjective particularity” (TM, 489). This was Hegel’s legacy. The power of the individual is “related to what exists beyond and prior to him: objective spirit” (PR, 2:538), and objective spirit “comprises language, customs, every form of life, as well as the family, civil society, state, and law” (540). For Gadamer himself this shift of agency is particularly important for language. Meaning in the text “pertains not to the speaker but to what is spoken” (489). The Thou of the tradition and the text is the true dialogic partner of hermeneutic understanding.

Part II of the Lectures The history of religion in the world, in Hegel’s narrative, is the record of immanent procession, the historical face of incarnation. Hegel divides this immanence in two, because the consummate religion is qualitatively different from the others, even though it emerges out of the same historical progression. Hegel prefaces the exposition of nature religions with a remarkable note on the customary view of “the original condition” of humanity before the fall. “Most religions,” he tells us, “begin with a sojourn in paradise, and hence with an original state of human innocence” (PR, 2:523). It is wholly misguided, pace Rousseau, to think of this momentary condition as an Edenic, blissful condition not yet corrupted by evil: “As a state of existence, that initial natural oneness is in actuality not a state of

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innocence but the state of savagery” (527). For Hegel, the fall is the necessary event that constitutes humanity and spiritual awareness. Before that, “nothing is good and nothing is evil,” and Paradise is only a zoological garden (526). Without the accountability that the choice of good and evil places on us, we exist in a “stupor” that deprives us of freedom (529). Thus the primordial starting point of humanity is not the state of innocence, but reflective distance, the capacity to see ourselves as having a choice between good and evil (527). Inasmuch as “reflection, or the rupture of consciousness, is contained in this knowledge of good and evil,” the unreflective immersion in nature, proximity without distance, cannot will the good (528). Freedom is freedom to choose, and thus requires the initial rupture with the good in order to know it, “severing oneself from nature and only reconciling oneself with nature the first time through this severance and on the basis of it” (526). Thus Hegel places reflective distance at the constituting moment of human being in the primordial myth of good and evil. We can also hear in the necessity of rupture a recapitulation of the trinitarian relation of the Father and the Son. The Father achieves oneness only through the procession, which is the constituting differentiation of persons. One can say of the divine procession just as of the human knowledge of good that unity exists only through severance and on the basis of it. Gadamer likewise points to the dialectic of distance and proximity as the constitutive characteristic of linguisticality: “That a thing behaves in various ways permits one to recognize its independent otherness, which presupposes a real distance between the speaker and the thing. That something can foreground itself as a genuine matter of fact and become the content of an assertion that others can understand depends on this distance” (TM, 445). With this principle Gadamer is correcting Hegel, but a Hegel who is schooled in the enigma of Trinity. Hegel, like Augustine, finds trinities everywhere, and the Christian Trinity dominates the second part of the lectures by its present absence. The determinate religions are, in one way or another, incomplete versions of the trinitarian relation, and Hegel’s descriptions are a progressive series of adjustments in the approach to the perfect interrelation of immanence and transcendence. Thus Hegel’s method of understanding the historical progression of religion, although dialectical in structure, is trinitarian in content. The movement from one moment to another,

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one stage to another, is expressed dialectically, but the character of each determinate religion progressively approximates the trinitarian relation. Let us briefly sketch the structure of the second part from the standpoint of these two aspects. In its dialectical aspect, the progress of religions is expressed as two separate movements. The determinate religions move in three dialectical stages. The vast number of religions of world culture express the first stage of immediate unity in which nature and spirit are commingled unreflectively, or rather, in only an incipient relation to reason. The second stage, corresponding to the elevation of the spiritual above the natural in a movement of differentiation, is expressed in Jewish and Greek religion, respectively, as either abstract thought or as concrete individual. The third stage, an absolute moment of purposiveness, is expressed in Roman religion, but its purpose is purely external, an empire of the profane. Christianity is not just a final stage in the graduated progress from lesser to greater revelation, but an altogether new category. It will be the principle under which all other religions are finite instances and partial realizations.30 Hegel thus establishes a binary of world religions as, on the one hand, the determinate, particular, and finite moment of knowledge, and on the other hand, Christianity, their goal, as the general, universal, and infinite consummation of knowledge. That is the dialectical structure. Non-Christian religions also anticipate, imperfectly, the trinitarian relation. The first stage of natural religion is an unreflective unity, an historical analogy to the indeterminate intuition of the whole that characterizes the initial concept of religion as a generative seed of understanding. Here the “mingling of the spiritual with the natural” (PR, 2:519) exists in the most primal awareness of the sacred in the prehistoric religions of magic. Hegel actually places Buddhism and Taoism within this first category of generality, regarding them as expressing an undifferentiated unity of inwardness of self and spirit. Hinduism is a development within this first stage, as spirit moves to an external totality as the multiplicity of powers. This externalization is not only in the polytheistic enumeration of deities, such as moon, sun, rivers, and mountains, but in a triune divinity, Brahman, Vishnu, and Shiva. However this trinity “is only a unity,” and distinction “has no right” against it (587). Substance, change, and incarnation are distinct, and do not express the reciprocity of natures or the true unity of subject and substance. The various incarnations of divinity that constitute the universe “are

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posited as something transitory. Although the particular powers return into the substantial unity, it does not become concrete; rather it remains an abstractly substantial unity; and although these determinacies emerge out of it, the unity does not become concrete even on that account, for they are outside it, they are phenomena posited with the characteristic of independence” (604). The so-called religions of transition such as Parseeism (Zoroastrianism) accomplish the truer unity of substance and subject through the particularization of the One as an inward self-determining. But this reciprocity of self and other is perfect only in the transcendent identity of the godhead. The relation to the empirical world of determinations is only one of creation. Dualism results from the fact that “the infinite and the finite stand opposed to one another, so that the infinite has no part in the finite and the latter cannot cross over to the infinite” (613). The Egyptian religion is Hegel’s example of the transition to the next higher stage, in which the self-differentiation of the divinity is portrayed in terms of death and resurrection, thus reflecting a human bridge from the divine procession. The cycles of nature are the outward signification of the inner self-renewal of the God, and although the two are distinct from one another, they do not exist in contradiction, and so banish the dualism of finite and infinite. In the moment of differentiation, nature and spirit must become distinct from each other, and Hegel chooses to see this negation in Judaism and Greek mythology. The gods of the Greek religion had a concrete individuality that served as a reflection of human understanding. At the center of this religion is the fate of the individual human being, tossed here and there by a chance that manifests itself in portents of fate, of “the rustling of the trees at Dodona” (PR, 2:656) or “the blowing of the wind” (668). Humans read the world as the battle of reason and chaos that determines their fate, and the pure appearance of the religion of beauty suffers from this weakness that “it falls asunder into its particular [shapes]” (ibid.). On the other hand, the Jewish God is so completely transcendent and other as to render a worldly relation secondary. God is absolute subject, absolutely first, “the initiator of creation, not the result” (673). Unlike the beauty of the Greeks, the prosaic appearance of the subject in nature is utterly profane and inferior. Although the Roman state religion lacked a spiritual unity in its extreme secularism, it demonstrated a “relative

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totality” (688). Its purpose is comprehensive, as the will to empire, yet that unity is confined to the sphere of the state. The Greek notion of embodiment, as Gadamer reminds us, is not the radical idea of incarnation. We are being prepared for the extraordinary conception of Christian Trinity, which is the fulfillment of the identification of the particular and the universal. In summary, one could say that the lectures on the determinate religions explicate the trinitarian relation dialectically, or the dialectical relation as the approach of the Trinity in understanding. Before concluding this overview of the second part of the lectures, we should note how many of the key themes of philosophical hermeneutics are echoes of Hegel’s history of religion. His explication of the symbol, in the sections on Egyptian and Jewish religion, anticipates a signal feature of Gadamer’s thinking on the word. Somewhat perversely, Hegel reverses the conventional relation of sign and signified. The symbol “is the ruling element, something inner and on its own account that has an outward mode of determinate being” (PR, 2:631). This formulation echoes Augustine’s definition of the inner word, which is embodied in the historical languages of peoples as accident to essence. The inner word or symbol for both Augustine and Hegel is “the significance, the representation on its own account, as against the sensible mode of determinate being” (632).31 The inner word, by a dialectical inversion, what Heidegger will call a counter-turning, is indissociable from its representing function: “The outward mode is a sign of the inner, and this inner is completely recognized in the shape of its externality” (678). Hegel’s understanding of the effect of this reversal becomes a standard topos of philosophical hermeneutics, the disappearance of language in the Sache. Hegel expresses this quality of language in relation to Judaism, the sublimity of which “simultaneously annihilates the matter or the material in which the sublime appears” (678). A reconciliation between meaning and its sensible expression is accomplished in the way that “the inadequacy is directly posited in the shape” (678). We can also recognize in Hegel’s explication of the religion of sublimity (Judaism) Gadamer’s vision of the finite human community. Its characteristics include its essential positivity—“Goodness consists in the fact that the world is” (PR, 2:675); its constitution out of social relation— “The way in which one human being is related to another—that is just what is human, that is human nature itself” (674); its wholeness is simply

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the sum of its imperfections —“the totality of finitude” (675); and its historicity—“The world ought to be, and likewise it ought to transform itself and pass away” (678). Hegel asserts in an uncompromising way here what would become a guiding motif of hermeneutics, the identification of human being with community: “The way in which one human being is related to another — that is just what is human, that is human nature itself ” (674). The key idea of beauty as truth’s appearance in the last sections of Truth and Method is indebted not only to Heidegger and the Greeks, but to Hegel’s notion of the “self-externalization” of the infinite: “Sublimity emerges as the appearance or relation of this infinite subject to the world. The world is grasped as a manifestation of this subject” (677).32 These are only a few indications of the many resonances between the two texts.

Part III of the Lectures The third part of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion regards Protestant Christianity as the maturation of the speculative progression of religion. There is again a coincidence between subject matter and inquiry, since the theme of consummate knowledge provides the means to understand the speculative structure of truth, and arrives along with it. Just as God “is himself consciousness, differentiating himself within himself ” (PR, 3:251), so Christianity “is an object to itself, is for itself, becomes objective to itself, is related to itself ” (249). Similarly, the pursuit of “scientific knowledge,” in this case regarding religion, returns to itself by becoming the object of its gaze: “[A]t the end science itself grasps its concept” (ibid.). This is the performative circularity of Hegel’s science, that the knower and the known should coincide in act. The structure of his description of the consummate religion reflects this mirror relation. The three modes of human discovery of God from our own standpoint (“it is we who have made this distinction, this trichotomy, we have arrived at it more or less empirically”) are reciprocally related to the three modalities of God’s own transcendent and worldly procession. (“These three realms . . . as our definition . . . are not to be regarded . . . as externally subsisting modes vis-à-vis God.”) Humanity rises to God in the passage from thought (the capacity of the mind to

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conceive of God abstractly), to nature (the recognition of our own alienation from God), to sensibility (our mending of this breach in the spiritual inwardness of piety). Corresponding to our own abstract understanding of God in thought is God’s own eternal existence “outside” creation. Corresponding to our own sense of alienation from God is the separation God posits by the creation of a world. And corresponding to our reconciliation to God in piety is the drama of incarnation. Thus we have repeated in the consummate religion the same relational structure of subject and object that is worked out in the idea of religion in Part I, but now as the universal particular—the alienation from, reconciliation with, and community of Christ. The revelatory religion is, indeed, speculative, i.e., the third moment of the dialectic, what becomes objective to itself. What this means is that religion is no longer something external to the consciousness of the subject that knows it, nor wholly differentiated in its particularity from the subject, but existing in a mirror relation to the subject, showing the subject to itself as itself, and vice versa. This is the function of incarnation, who is both God and man, the nexus of the Verkehre between subject and substance. The consummate revelation is given to humanity in the idea of the Son, “that God has given himself for humans to know what he is” (PR, 3:252). The incarnate God is the positive (sensible, empirical, external, immediate) evidence of the relation. The contingent, historical nature of the Son, both in his biography and in his continued witness through the Church, is only the consummation of the event-like process of revelation through signs, witness, and testimonies that constitutes the unfolding of God in history (254). Part III, The Consummate Religion, therefore, is, so to speak, the speculative realization of the dialectical movement that informed the idea of religion in Part I.33 Here the movement from the universal moment of God’s knowledge, to the awareness of the self ’s rupture from spirit, to the coidentity of consciousness and spirit, is recounted in the terms of Christian revelation, as the subsumption of all particular world historical religions under the concept, the ultimate fulfillment of the dialectic. It recapitulates the historical progression of religion from the perspective of Church history. By tracing the moments of this progression in Hegel’s description, we can see how he works out the interplay of transcendence and immanence, and thus is able to think of the human community as a trinity.

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The first element of consummation. The first element of consummation provides an opportunity to see how what has been regarded in the Western tradition as an enigma proper becomes logical for Hegel. The first moment in this triad is the transcendent God outside of time and history, “prior to and apart from the creation of the world, so to speak” (PR, 3:275). Hegel describes the relation of the persons of the Trinity in the terms of love, and we have here a description that not only harmonizes the Hegelian philosophy of speculative truth with traditional dogma, but finds a common note with the signal attempts in Western thought to resolve the enigma of unity and division in the idea of love. The structure of perfect love is one of double consciousness (Verdoppelung), a complete and utter dependency that has the odd effect one finds in giving oneself entirely: For love is a distinguishing of two, who nevertheless are absolutely not distinguished for each other. The consciousness or feeling of the identity of the two— to be outside of myself and in the other— this is love. I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other—and I am only because I have peace with myself. (PR, 3:276) As the outlandish rejoinder to the logical assertion that “two things cannot be in one and the same place” (PR, 3:290), love has always been brought forth in service of a “distinguishing which at the same time is no distinction” (280). Plato noted this structural relation of love to knowledge in the Alcibiades, when he invokes the metaphor of the mirror: Socrates. And have you observed that the face of the person who looks into another’s eye is shown in the optic confronting him, as in a mirror, and we call this the pupil, for in a sort it is an image of the person looking? Alcibiades. That is true. Socrates. Then an eye viewing another eye, and looking at the most perfect part of it, the thing wherewith it sees, will thus see itself. And in the Phaedrus, Socrates expresses this as a relation of love. The “lover is as it were a mirror in which he beholds himself” (255b–e). Hegel

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says almost the same thing: “[T]he one remains present to itself in the other” (PR, 3:276). But then he takes this reciprocation and passes it through the ascending movement of the dialectic: Ethical life, love, means precisely the giving up of particularity, of particular personality, and its extension to universality — so, too, with friendship. In friendship and love I give up my abstract personality and thereby win it back as concrete. The truth of personality is found precisely in winning it back through this immersion, this being immersed in the other. (PR, 3:285 ‒ 286) With Plato too there is an elevation, an increase that results from the passage through the reflection, but Hegel adds two elements. He adds selfsacrifice—giving up and winning back—which is the lesson of the Gospels (Matt. 10:39). And he echoes the procession of the Trinity insofar as, in the elevation to the concrete universal, nothing is added or used up. The elevation is a recapitulation of the drama of salvation. The speculative movement translates the dogmatic formula into reason. Hegel ruminates on the challenge this conception presents to conventional logic, the conditions of its possibility. It must mean that “in the region of the idea,” the sensible notions of distinction and succession do not operate as they do in the sensible world. But since the speculative idea is part of who we are, “life itself is a contradiction” (PR, 3:282). Hegel concludes that in terms of understanding,“This is inconceivable” (ibid.). But it is precisely this assault to that other logic that spurs the movement of speculative truth. The second element of consummation. It is in the analysis of the second moment of the Trinity that incarnation receives its proper treatment. What is most important for theology in the incarnation is also important for speculative thought. It is necessary for the salvation of the world that God should give his Son, that is to say, that the Son should become fully human. The perfect sacrifice, the perfect act of love, requires this giving over entirely to what is other, “the e}teron, the determinate, what is distinct, limited, negative” (PR, 3:293). The speculative dialectic requires this otherness as well, “in order that there may be difference” (292). The perfect self-subsistence of God requires that determination exists, and this could only be if God’s other were a determinate being,

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free and independent of Him: “It is only for the being that is free that freedom is; it is only for the free human being that an other has freedom too” (ibid.). In this sense Christ as Man is metonymy for the world as such, as the freedom to be determined in the particularity that is the negative to God: “This other, released as something free and independent, is the world as such” (ibid.). Christ, however, it needs to be stated immediately, is not simply representative of humanity in general, because his otherness to the Father requires that he be single and individual, “in the determinacy of singularity and particularity. . . . as a singular human being set apart” (313). But here is where the enigma of incarnation asserts itself most strenuously, because this independence from the Father in the certainty of its particular form is what proffers the unity of divine and human nature. The universal exists in counterpoint to the singular, so that the birth of the world in Christ is the necessary negative to the absolute. But this otherness exists in relation to its other. Christ is not particular and human so as to be utterly divorced from God, but so as to be that other in his particularity: “The substantial unity [of God and humanity] is what humanity implicitly is” (PR, 3:313). The theology of the catechism is thus reconciled to the speculative dialectic. Hegel defends the improbable logic of this account by means of the temporal imperfection of our understanding. We conceive the creation of the world, its loss and salvation in time, whereas these moments exist in God’s being without time. The anguish of the cleavage from God’s oneness is what creates the need for reconciliation, a reconciliation that is acted out in the drama of salvation. The movement of history is spurred by this lack of perfection: “Spirit presses toward its truth because it has an infinite cleavage and anguish within itself” (PR, 3:296). But the lack exists only for us. Our reconciliation to him is eternally his: “This reconciliation, expressed as a state of affairs, is the kingdom of God, an actuality. . . . This kingdom of God, the new religion, thus contains implicitly the characteristic of negating the present world” (318). Even human understanding is not utterly captive to its temporal limitations, and we somehow share in that perfect knowledge. The grace of God is that we should know by our anguish that we are incomplete. Our anguish is proof of his love and our eventual end. The Christian lives, in a sense, in a simultaneous present, the present-at-hand of our distance

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from God, and the eternal presence of the future reconciliation. Incarnation, a reconciliation “inherent in the moment of the Son” (PR, 3:293), is the embodiment of this understanding, a symbolon of the entire process in the instant, the promissory note of our destiny: “The second element is, therefore, the process of the world in love by which it passes over from fall and separation into reconciliation” (ibid.). Christ is, as the “utterly concrete universal,” humanity fulfilled in God (279). Do we see here an anticipation of Heidegger’s revolutionary insight into temporality? We can say at least that the Christian notion of time worked out in the relation of immanence and transcendence, together with the Greek idea of anamnesis, laid the groundwork for this insight. We can see this explicitly in Gadamer when he speaks of the distance and proximity that language creates. In the terms of scholasticism, it is the inner word that negotiates the two temporal orders. The world as it is created out of our discursive activity fills the gap between our lack and our desire. Love, the anguish that is the testimony to our lack, impels us forward to erase that distance. The word functions in this scheme as the means by which we overcome our distance to God. The distance between the inner and outer word, the language that holds the promise for a complete expression, and the speech that is only ever on the way to expressing what we mean to say, holds in that nexus the promise of reconciliation. This is why the word is not just a surplus of meaning in the potency of language, but the symbolon of our being on the way. Hegel’s whole effort was to navigate this distance between the ideal and the real. In the temporal translation of procession, the ideal becomes regulative, the possibility that guides us, and the potential in the instant that promises that ideal. The third element of consummation. In this final consummation of the final science, Hegel sets out to explain how church dogma is to be brought together with free spirit. How is the work of the Church as an institution, which is the ultimate expression of the community of the Spirit on earth, to be made convertible with thought, the promised harmony of religion and philosophy? What do the sacramental rituals and doctrine of the Church have to do with free reason? How do history, institution, and thought conspire to be one? It is in Hegel’s solution to this structural problem that we have something like a forerunner to Gadamer’s Wirkungsgeschichte. Hegel calls the third element, very simply, community. True to the speculative nature of the mirror relation, knower and known are no

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longer separate: “Thus the community itself is the existing Spirit, the Spirit in its existence [Existenz], God existing as community” (PR, 3:331). This as is the actualization of consciousness through the institutional teachings, sacraments, and ritual practices of the church. The event of incarnation, of the reconciliation of the finite and the infinite, is translated from biography to world history by institutionalizing salvation. The sacramental church turns the salvation of each unique individual into the ongoing process of communion. The community of the Church is literally a communion with God, the sublation of difference, a perpetual reconciliation that heals the rupture of finitude: “The spiritual is the truth of the worldly realm in the more proximate sense that the subject, as an object of divine grace and as one who is reconciled with God, already has infinite value in virtue of its vocation; and this is made effective in the community” (340). This means that reconciliation is a continual and unending process (a vocation). Our infinity is born out of our finitude as a turning toward God in our wretchedness. The third moment is a transformation through the teachings of the Church into the blessedness of a faith community: “[T]he subject, as an object of divine grace and as one who is reconciled with God, already has infinite value in virtue of its vocation; and this is made effective in the community” (ibid.). How then does Hegel make the leap from this sacramental process to philosophy? He simply needs to refer back to the dialectical movement of opposites, of community and individual, faith and thought. The community can only be realized if each individual heart is reconciled to God: “[T]he subject traverses this process in itself ” (PR, 3:329). Reconciliation must be known by the self or subject in the worldly realm through rationality: “What is required, therefore, is that this reconciliation should also be accomplished in the worldly realm” (340). Here is where the cooperation of tradition and the individual is worked out. Doctrine is the “presupposition” into which individuals are born: “Human beings are already born into this doctrine; they have their beginnings in this context of valid truth, already present, and in the consciousness of it. . . . Since individuals are born into the church, they are destined straightaway, while they are still unconscious” (334 ‒ 335). All truth “comes to people initially in the form of authority . . . That is how it comes to me” (335). From here the individual takes over, and “what is found within the individual is developed so that one knows it as the truth in which one abides” (336). In bringing to fruition this process of reconciliation, rationality becomes

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“the ultimate pinnacle of the formal culture of our time,” spirit actualized through reason as the capacity to know (344). I will state rather than belabor an obvious point. The relationship between the individual on the one hand, and tradition, authority, and culture on the other has the same structure for Gadamer. Where the Enlightenment sought to banish tradition as a distorting prejudice, philosophical hermeneutics recognizes it, as does Hegel, as integral to the circular structure of understanding: “Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather, we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves” (TM, 293/WM, 298). This tie to tradition is more than just a structure of understanding, for both Hegel and Gadamer. It is the basis of the solidarity of community. Gadamer’s translation of the speculative movement into Sprachlichkeit preserves the ideal of community that is at the apex of Hegel’s system. This makes Gadamer’s perspective on language so different from conventional philosophies of language or linguistic theories. Often for Gadamer this is a linguistic community (TM, 436/WM, 439), but this linguistic bond is shot through with communitarian value, since “The word first raises communality into words, as it were.”34 The belonging of the sensus communis relates most often to the Aristotelian and humanist ideal of a civic community that is bound by ties of fellow-feeling: “Once again we discover that the person who is understanding does not know and judge as one who stands apart and unaffected but rather he thinks along with the other from the perspective of a specific bond of belonging, as if he too were affected” (TM, 323/WM, 328). But at key moments it surpasses this heritage and moves within the realm of spirit. In dialogue we become “bound to one another in a new community,” and are “transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were” (TM, 379/WM, 384).

Gadamer and the Hegelian System By way of conclusion, I would like to point to the relation between Hegel’s fundamental impulse toward system, the structural logic that articulates itself with dogged persistence, and the contrasting openness of Gadamer’s

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Sprachlichkeit. I want to point out not the obvious difference, but a certain similarity. The great difficulty for Gadamer is finding a connection between the fundamental openness of language (its lack of a telos) and the tendency towards order, beauty, or goodness to which he commits himself. Kant and then German historicism expressed this relation as a teleology without a telos. But one can also perhaps detect an answer to this dilemma in Hegel, in spite of his allegiance to the absolute idea. If you look at the way in which the full movement of the dialectic is anticipated in its beginning and at every stage along the way, what you see is that what makes this possible is the principle of the dialectic itself, which is to say, the counterturning of negation and reconciliation. One analogy in Gadamer is the generative force of metaphor in concept formation (TM, 428 ‒ 429/WM, 432 ‒ 433). This principle of movement drives the system, and is in fact wholly applicable to any and every subject that Hegel confronts. Although the absolute idea requires this principle, the principle does not require the absolute idea. Perhaps what Gadamer is demanding de minimis is something like such a principle, something that does not guarantee a specific outcome, but that enacts a logic of order. The pre-Socratic contest between chaos and order is given direction. Mutatis mutandis, something like this would be Gadamer’s formative logic. The dogmatic reconciliation of immanence and transcendence, the work of centuries of thought, is a legacy that feeds the thought of German idealism, and through German idealism, philosophical hermeneutics. Its enigmatic nature is never entirely lost, and is in fact amplified as the struggle to dispense with a telos animates the inventional energies of that scholarly conversation.

chapter 6



Heidegger On the Way to the Verbum

Thought includes all the effects to be produced by language. —Aristotle, Poetics, 1456b2‒‒7

Scientists theorize that an evolutionary leap took place at a certain point in certain mammals who developed a rudimentary reflective capacity. Experiments have worked out the dimensions of this evolutionary achievement by looking at the ability of the orangutan, the Asian elephant, and the bottlenose dolphin to recognize themselves in a mirror image.1 But then what prodigious complication of this confluence of world and consciousness must have occurred to move beyond that leap to human awareness? It is not only that perception is turned upon itself, but that it has the flexibility to out-leap the dimensions of space and time that anchor it in its immediate locale. We may never uncover the history of this development, the pre-history of humankind, but we continue to have a better sense of the structure of its operation. The irritant, the grain of sand that gives the evolutionary development of reflective consciousness traction, says hermeneutics, is language—logos —not simply a tool of communication, but the granting of a life beyond present awareness.2 We have to characterize this “beyond” more precisely to indicate the enormity of the hermeneutic advance. What is significant in the hermeneutic innovation has to do with the location of the reflexive movement. Lingual reflexivity is not simply the conscious act of self-reflection, but a capacity prior to and potentiating of any such intentional act, the being 194

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constituted out of the distancing that language allows in the first place. This being beyond the present is not merely a capacity of the reflective mind, but a relational potential of culture and history. The power resident in our connection to language survives both consciousness and generations, shifting the axis of being that we have claimed so long to be in ourselves, over to the living word. It is fair to say from this point of view, borrowing the language of faith traditions, that we live in the word. The sea change in the conceptualization of reflective consciousness since Descartes is tied to the recognition of its great dependence on language. What is by now a centuries-long “linguistic turn” is a re-turn to an essential modesty about the role of human agency in the phenomenal world. Hermeneutics recasts the framework in which theory and practice operate as a humanist paideia under the impetus of Heidegger’s insistence that Aristotle’s logos meant Sprache and not Logik. This was Heidegger’s way of locating the discovery of the correct axis of being as an undeveloped tradition of the West. In Truth and Method, Gadamer introduces the concept of the inner word as a way to speak of this same shift, but now as a shadow tradition that was never quite lost. He saw Heidegger’s insight as a momentous contribution to a living conversation that had not ceased.

Heidegger, Augustine, Aquinas The marriage of the classical profane with the Christian sacred carries in hermeneutics a unique advance in the understanding of linguistic being. The “innermost nexus of our existence” shifts from the sanctity of the private soul to the shared spirit of linguistic culture.3 Although, as we have seen, the Judaeo-Christian tradition has the dispersal of agency all along, this did not translate over entirely into the speculative tradition. The emphasis on the inner world of the soul by Augustine combined with Greek metaphysics leads eventually to the sovereignty of the rational mind in Descartes. The later Heidegger upsets the apple cart by deposing human agency in the ontological structure of Saying: “But—does language itself speak? How is it supposed to perform such a feat when obviously it is not equipped with organs of speech? Yet language speaks. Language first of all and inherently obeys the essential nature of speaking: it says.”4 The question I pose is whether this dispersion of agency does not upset the

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valence of inherent reflexivity. The issue certainly is responsible for Gadamer’s equivocation on the question of consciousness, and so we must get to the bottom of it in Heidegger. In the end, I do not think we will escape a tension, and this tension will be an appropriate introduction to Gadamer’s verbum. Let us recall briefly the ontological circularity of the mind as it is understood in scholasticism. According to Augustine, the human mind is the linchpin of the discourse between the material and the spiritual because its inward and outward looking are the same act, subjoining the eternal and the finite by understanding: “[T]he nature of the intellectual mind has been so established by the disposition of its creator that it is subjoined to intelligible things in the order of nature, and so it sees such truths in a kind of non-bodily light that is sui generis, just as our eyes of flesh see all things that lie around us in this bodily light, a light they were created to be receptive of and to match.”5 The mental act is an actualization of the truth of the world, because by seeing the world as intelligible it completes the circuit of God’s emanation. The mind is in a sense the intelligibility of the universe, in that it is its actualization. It “gives” consciousness to the material universe so that that universe is more like God. The important thing to grasp about this process is that it is not linear. Reflection on the world or through the world is always simultaneously self-reflection, so by the act of thought we “imitate” the self-returning procession of the divine mind, a necessary step in the path of consciousness of the universe back to its origin: “If we ask what kind of mirror this might be, the thought occurs to us that the only thing ever seen in a mirror is an image. So what we have been trying to do is somehow to see him by whom we were made by means of this image which we ourselves are, as through a mirror.”6 Aquinas adds that this is a becoming: “But in that cognition by which the mind knows God the mind itself becomes conformed to God.”7 And we can see that by extension it is historicized. The progression of world history is also progressively a conformation to God’s mind. God creates the world as a good which we seek to understand, and in understanding it we learn of his goodness. But it is in our understanding that we manifest the good which he intends of us. The two goods are two sides of the same coin, because they are the same act — what we understand and that we understand. This is not second-order reflection, but the pivot which is

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being enacted in intellection, comprehending self and other correlatively. In Aquinas we can see what may be the origin of Heidegger’s idea of turning as he expresses it in the Contributions. In describing Thomist emanation, Blanchette describes what we might call a fold in the universe, the intellect of the human creature as “pivotal in this emanation and return of being in the universe, from the Principle to the effect and back from the effect to the Principle, that is, in function of the intellectual creature whose role it is to collect (colligare) all things through its knowledge and lead them back to the Creator. Indeed, the very notion of return is closely related to the idea of universe, since verti in Latin means to turn.”8 The very same convenientia is strongly present in Heidegger, although he does not call it that. In the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics he says that “from the very beginning, there occurs a holding together: man’s holding himself together with something in such a way that he can come into agreement with whatever he is holding himself together with . . . . Only something which is referred to as such in the utterance can be held together, something with which, in uniting it, this holding together agrees.”9 In this construction, the holding together is first expressed in the impersonal (“es gibt”), and then human agency is caught up in the reflexive or middle-voiced convenientia with this more original belonging. How does thought grasp this structure that transcends intention and agency? Thinking that exists in and by the attributes of becoming must find a way into the being from which by definition it is foreclosed by its very identity. Heidegger breaks into the circle by realizing that his ontological position is not really ever outside it, and that he must somehow subvert the normally available epistemic means of approach, that is, the mechanisms of conscious, processive logic that place him on the outside of what he wishes to understand before he even begins. This would be a fool’s game unless he can find a way around the procedure that works by the normal act of reflection, from subject to object. Moving along the familiar Hegelian path, he somehow has to get back behind himself and his conscious reflection, to surprise himself in the act by another act, an act of indirection that includes itself and its object at the same time. Heidegger finds this reflexive “holding together” of self and world in language. Language becomes the center of the hold, rather than the mind or its intentionality. Language is doing more than he himself in the conscious act of address, pushing him as if from behind. His very act of

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thinking is an involvement that has only a partial view of its proceeding.10 If this is true, then his logical proceeding will be interrupted by the discovery that the language he thought he was using has actually been working him: “To experience something means to attain it along the way, by going on a way. To undergo an experience with something means that this something, which we reach along the way in order to attain it, itself pertains to us, meets and makes its appeal to us, in that it transforms us into itself.”11 The philosopher’s effort is an attempt to catch herself in the act, to grasp her own tail, and she nearly does, but only as a kind of trick, like Perseus’s shield. Being is inaccessible in any real sense, but if we accept that language is already taking place, our listening is a participation in something far greater than we. The evidence we have of this is the very fact that we must listen before we speak, that is, we have first the capacity to receive before we can express anything: “[T]o think is before all else to listen, to let ourselves be told something and not to ask questions . . . . Language must, in its own way, avow to us itself—its nature. Language persists as this avowal.”12 Thus for Heidegger language is a kind of testimony. To what does it testify then? Heidegger’s configuration of language and thinking is possible because of a deeper configuration; the relation between language and being. For Heidegger, the ancient concept of logos “speaks simultaneously as the name for Being and for Saying.”13 Here we see why the temporal circle in which language always anticipates thinking exists. Language is a gift beyond subjectivity, of the immediate presence of the subject, but it is of the same substance as the subject. We have been taught to think of language as a tool, consequently as something categorially inferior to, i.e., in the service of, the human being. But in fact our own dependence on language as that which brings understanding to us, who are nothing without it, places us in a position of subservience. We are creatures of the moment, held captive by the present, and it is language that liberates us, giving us access to the past and the future. At this point Heidegger starts to exploit the structural capacities of language, what he calls the design of being. We would be without a relation to the past or the future without the capacity of language to salvage and bring the past to presence, and to anticipate the future in all its contingent possibility. In the first sense language has an institutional role, in the second sense, an inventive role. Language “institutes” by the way that it abides as a textual trace, as a linguistic form, as a cultural pattern: “About the ‘word’ we also said that it

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not only stands in a relation to the thing, but that the word is what first brings that given thing, as the being that is, into this ‘is’; that the word is what holds the thing there and relates it and so to speak provides its maintenance with which to be a thing.”14 In the second case, its capacity to outstrip the past and present, its ex-stasis, is a capacity to imagine, to be further ahead looking back: “To turn back to where we are (in reality) already staying.”15 Its capacity to do this, to cope with the indeterminacy of the future, is that it itself is the form of that indeterminacy. Gadamer thinks about this in terms of language’s metaphorical instability. Heidegger expresses it in terms of the figure of the clearing. Language cuts out the open space, the region or clearing within which thinking transpires. Its structuration is a formal indication, a potent suggestion for the direction of thought (Richtungssinn). In other words, it does not master the future, but simply makes the future available to thought, for conjecture and revision. This is why language stands above subjectivity, because it holds the past and the future that is concealed from our being in the present. The structure of the ontological circle emerges from our finitude, which is both temporal and spatial — a truncated relation to time and a limitation of horizon. What is never fully available, because it is always withdrawing into indistinctness, into forgetfulness and indeterminacy, and beyond the periphery of our vision. But human thinking for Heidegger, just as for Augustine, has some purchase on the whole, a spectral and absent presence. The very fact of being underway implies its not-yet. When thinking turns to the past it is really addressing the future, negotiating its presence by a free invention out of the repositories of what abides: “And ways of thinking hold within them that mysterious quality that we can walk them forward and backward, and that indeed only the way back will lead us forward.”16 This negotiation is the interaction of the Vor-, between its not-yet and its already: “‘Fore’—into that nearest nearness which we constantly rush ahead of, and which strikes us as strange each time anew when we catch sight of it.”17 This is why we are always going back into what is beginning, and meeting the origin in the future. Heidegger finds that it is language that grants this negotiating ability in its ability to name: “To assign the naming word is, after all, what constitutes finding.”18 The word holds meaning in the way that the presence of our consciousness cannot. It carries the wealth of history and culture in its folds, and it has the unique capacity, indeed it operates by virtue of

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turning this grant always into something new and strange. It is never entirely different, but it is always different. When at a later point Heidegger justifies his early recourse to the term “hermeneutics,” he points to the central place of language in the circular ontology of human being. “What prevails in and bears up the relation of human nature to the two-fold is language. Language defines the hermeneutic relation.”19 The ontological difference between beings and Being is precisely what language negotiates. The “Being of beings,” which he describes as a “two-fold,” bears within its very structure the folding over of finite presence and the reflection of everything that is absent in it. When he says that “hermeneutics means not just the interpretation but, even before it, the bearing of message and tidings,” he is pointing out that the message from the gods works at two levels, as the specific meaning carried down in the message and the fact that this message grants us a relation to the fullness of meaning itself.20 We are changed by the constant process of interpretation because we are taking part in the modification of our presence. Most significantly for this study, Heidegger describes this folding over between message, language, and finitude in trinitarian terms: What mattered then, and still does, is to bring out the Being of beings— though no longer in the manner of metaphysics, but such that Being itself will shine out, Being itself—that is to say: the presence of present beings, the two-fold of the two in virtue of their simple oneness. This is what makes its claim on man, calling him to its essential being.21 He asserts the oneness of being (presence) in the face of the ontological difference. This is in no way to negate the finitude of human presence, but rather to affirm the enigma of its relation to its other. The structure of the negotiation that I have described is analogous to the indirect reflection of God in human intellection, a folding over or mediation that is explained in terms of ontological circularity, and depicted in terms of the trinitarian enigma—two distinct, division none.

Language Moves to the Center What I have been describing up to this point is the fold in temporal being that language makes possible for humans. Meaning that is displaced

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from its metaphysical center in the I does not lose the chiasmatic structure of the hermeneutic circle. We see this in many descriptions after the turn. The grounding leap of beings occurs in such a way that “der Werfer des Entwurfs als geworfener sich erfährt” [the thrower of the projecting-open experiences itself as thrown].22 Understanding is both “staying within the openness” but also “projecting-open what is open”:23 “Aus Seinsverstehen, in diesem sich halten, d. h. aber, da Verstehen Entwurf des Offenen, in der Offenheit stehen.”24 A reciprocity exists between the participation of Dasein in being and the gift of Saying that being grants to thinking. However Heidegger centers the cosmic fold no longer in the presence of the human subjectum, but in an in-between that cannot be expressed simply from the perspective of consciousness.25 The question about the likeness of this structure to the duplex actio of Aquinas or Hegel’s Verdoppelung is whether true reflexivity exists any more in the passage to the middle voice. Is the turning “back to where we are (in reality) already staying” still reflection, when the Er-eignis is stretched out between mind and language?”26 Heidegger and Gadamer move away from the centeredness of experience in subjective consciousness by establishing language as a holding place in the passage of experience removed from the ideality of meaning and the now-character of human awareness. What does reflection really mean in this new construction? The question is how reflexivity per se is meaningful outside of the consciousness of self as the locus of understanding. Thought “moves away from the relation to man and reveals itself as the ‘between’ [zwischen] that is unfolded by be-ing itself.”27 Even if Dasein is involved, the center of actualization is in the in-between of Be-ing, and this split would seem to dissolve the essence of what reflection is, which by its very nature is a doubling over on itself. Because the structure of understanding now is situated in the space of the ontological difference, it takes place in between the two poles, between thinking beings and everything that is to be thought. The new dignity conferred on the being of the Sache displaces the point of intersection to the between, and we have left the long tradition that Augustine epitomized when he talked about the chamber of the soul, the idea that the mind is its own place. The weakness in this objection is that it conceives the diminished integrity of Dasein in the uncovering of truth by means of a spatial metaphor, as if der Mitte were a spot between beings and being. It is agency

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that is displaced and relocated. Heidegger learned this by the aid of Christian teaching, the pathos of Augustine and Luther’s schooling in humility. Michael Aune noted that the “‘de-centering’ of the human subject is ‘old news’ from both Classical and Christian perspectives,”28 and the discovery of Heidegger’s roots in Pauline theology only makes this more clear. Truth comes to us, interrupts and confronts us. We do not invent the truth, but rather respond to it in the way that we can. It is very much like the Christian concept of grace as something that humans do not deserve but that God grants. At the same time, being as enowning comes “fully into play” only through “man,” who, as the guardian of truth “is enowned in an outstanding and unique way.”29 It is only by virtue of Dasein’s encounter “that be-ing as enowning itself builds the midpoint of all thinking” [daß Seyn als Ereignis selbst die Mitte alles Denkens bildet].30 The midpoint (Zwischen) is the there (Da), the struggle between earth and world, and it is located, if one must speak in spatial terms, at the point of the Dasein: “Selfhood is the enquivering of the counter-turning of the strife in the cleavage, an enquivering which is gotten hold of from within enownment and sustains it.”31 Dasein is the in-between point, the pivot, “the point of turn in the turning of enowning.”32 Structure and agency are not the same. “Man is used for hearing the message” [Er ist dahin gebraucht, sie zu hören.]33 So, ironically, it is human being that is instrumental rather than language, and agency is reversed. Heidegger draws from the kerygma the odd double truth of human dignity and abasement. In Christian terms, we are merely the instrument of God’s plan, yet each one of us is loved by him as unique in all the world and infinitely precious. In hermeneutic terms, the subject is no longer sovereign, but our being in the world is the possibility of truth’s witness. But now if this is right, if agency exists in the Saying and human being is still at the juncture of this Saying, how to describe how and what happens? What function does the reflexive or middle-voiced structure of consciousness serve? In the 1951 ‒‒ 52 lectures Was Heisst Denken, Heidegger returns to the two disparate meanings of legein in early Greek usage, emphasizing their seeming incompatibility: “It can easily be confirmed that levgein means both telling [sagen] and laying [legen]. The two meanings are so far apart

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that they do not interfere with each other.”34 But this is a rhetorical strategy, and the occasion for insight into a synthesis: “To the Greeks, telling is laying.”35 Heidegger dismisses concern about the two different meanings of levgein as idle and useless, and asks instead, “What is it that takes place when levgein means both ‘to lay’ and ‘to tell’?”: “Is it only by accident that these meanings come together under the common roof of the same wordsound?” (205). His answer is that both relate to the more basic meaning of relationality: When man finds himself among what so lies before him should he not respond to it in all purity by letting it lie before him just as it lies? And this letting-lie, would it not be that laying which is the stage for all the other laying that man performs? Thus laying would now suddenly emerge as relatedness that pervades man’s stay on this earth from the ground up . . . . (206)36 Levgein here seems to be that which interposes itself between human being and the Sache, or rather, that which allows the distance and nearness of a relation. And the human response (entsprechen) to what is offered is to recognize it for what it is, becoming, as it were, the channel for that difference. The seeming passiveness of this response — letting lie before — is deceptive. Entsprechen is both the language of correspondence, agreement, proportion, and accord, but also of speech. Just as musical instruments sound by the physical sympathy of the string or the metal to the vibration, so speech is the “agreement” with the order that is gathered. The correspondence is not a passive, mute agreement, but the signal that constitutes agreement. And at this point we come, again, in proximity to the verbum. When something “comes to language” (zur Sprache kommt) it is a relation to the entire overtone series, all that is within and beyond human hearing: What language tells, what it speaks and what it keeps silent, is and remains always and everywhere what is, what can be, what has been, and what is about to come—most directly and abundantly where the terms “is” and “be” are not specifically given voice. For whatever is put into language in any real sense is essentially richer than what is captured in audible and visible phonetic conformations and as such falls

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silent again when it is put in writing. But even so, every statement remains in a mysterious manner related to all that can be called up by a “There is . . .” (206)37 The contrast with writing makes evident the “active” attribute of speech. Writing, in effect, stops the sympathetic resonance that living speech sounds. Even what is audible in the speaking is only the enharmonic range of the drum of the ear, and what is sounded remains necessarily related to all possible soundings. The relationality of language is not the inert relation of numbers that the mathematician detects, as if nature were dead atoms which the mind could parse, but rather a concordance that vibrates in the resonance chamber of human understanding and speech. Relation is always the act of relating. The analysis of levgein as both telling and laying sets up an exchange between what is said and the response to what is said. Humans “find” something lying before them, and this discovery is itself an action, a letting-lie. In fact, Heidegger converts the “passive” letting-lie to an active laying (“And this letting-lie, would it not be that laying . . . ?” [“Und sollte dieses Vorliegenlassen dann nicht dasjenige Legen sein. . . ?”]),38 so that the human witness is an active response. The laying is something that “man performs” (der Mensch betreibt) (206/171). Heidegger’s manner of speaking is obscure, but the role of human being in the work of Saying is very clear. It is a response that engages what is said and builds a life, a culture, through this performative response. Whereas human beings are primarily witnesses and responders, they are at the middle of the action. So now we have to figure out how we figure into this relating that we receive, manifest, or perform. In the discussion of logos in the first of the two lectures of 1957 published as Identität und Differenz, Heidegger speaks of “relationship” as a fundamental conception linking Beings and being. What in the tradition is designated nexus and connexio (29) he here translates as der Bezug der Entsprechung (relation of agreement) or Zusammengehören (belonging together). As distinct from the tradition, he regards such relation not as remaining apart from the perceiver, who is swallowed up in the relation: “Man is essentially this relationship of responding to Being, and he is only this” [Der Mensch ist eigentlich dieser Bezug der Entsprechung].39 Heidegger is thinking through the Parmenidean conception of belonging

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together as a foil to the modern principle of identity (A = A), and his intent is polemical. Although he does not say so explicitly, it is clear that he is searching out the meaning of Zusammengehören as a richer alternative to the impoverished notion of logical identity, which is to say, as an implicit critique. Of course it is no secret that he wants to reorient his own thought by a fuller appreciation of what modernity now regards as primitive, and for him the judgment is exactly the reverse: It is the modern conception of coordination which has become anemic. When he poses the question “Who, or what, is man?”, and “What does Being mean?”, he stipulates that his answer is to be constrained by the vocabulary of Parmenides. But even though this is expressed as a disclaimer, at the same time we feel he is no hurry to move far beyond such a constraint: Everybody can see easily that without a sufficient answer to these questions we lack the foundation for determining anything reliable about the belonging together of man and Being. But as long as we ask our questions in this way, we are confined within the attempt to represent the “together” of man and Being as a coordination [Zuordnung], and to establish and explain this coordination either in terms of man or in terms of Being. In this procedure, the traditional concepts of man and Being constitute the toe-hold for the coordination of the two.40 There is no attempt to relate this concept of “coordination” to its bare modern sense of arrangement, and so there remains about it the penumbra of ancient beliefs in the harmony of the cosmos. The belonging together of man and Being as a coordination is not as of a number series on an x-y axis, but rather somehow related to the ancient intuition of universal symmetries. The important point about this schema is that it places “man” (der Mensch) in an extraordinary position of privilege vis-à-vis the manifestation of Being in the cosmos. Man is coordinate with Being; man is somehow in counterbalance to Being. What is distinctive about man, as opposed to stone or tree or eagle, is “that he, as the being who thinks, is open to Being, face to face with Being.”41 The sentence is a kind of Summa: “Aber das Auszeichnende des Menschen beruht darin, daß er als das denkende Wesen, offen dem Sein, vor dieses gestellt ist, auf das Sein bezogen bleibt und ihm so entspricht.”42 Man is set before, stands in regard, or is

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relative to Being and so corresponds, or speaks to Being. Heidegger creates a triple chiasm out of the linguistic overlaps of gestellen, bezogen, and entsprechen. As both answer and correspondence, entsprechen itself intimates Heidegger’s entire schema, the resonance of Being and beings that discourse mediates. This relation is the apex of Heidegger’s interpretation of human belonging together, the place of language. The particular nature of the appropriation of Man and Being is the correspondence that language allows. The leap away from the categorial thinking that prevents our seeing this equiprimordial correspondence lands us directly into belonging together with Being, and once in more direct contact with that belonging do we experience the nature of this mutual appropriation: “The spring is the abrupt entry into the realm from which man and Being have already reached each other in their active nature (Wesen/fuvs iı), since both are mutually appropriated, extended as a gift, one to the other.”43 How does this leap happen where we see our relation to each other? Through language: To think of appropriating as the event of appropriation means to contribute to this self-vibrating realm. Thinking receives the tools for this self-suspended structure from language. For language is the most delicate and thus the most susceptible vibration holding everything within the suspended structure of the appropriation. We dwell in the appropriation inasmuch as our active nature is given over to language. (38) What makes the coordination or counterbalance between Man and Being possible is the gift of language, the entry point into the circle of relatedness that constitutes our coordination, our belonging together with Being. Heidegger has transformed the x-y axis of coordinate space into the reflexive circularity of linguistic belonging. So, relation stands behind, or rather at the root of, reason, language, and thing. But even this is not the end of the matter, because the coimplication of what is includes not only reason, language, and thing, but ourselves: “Perhaps we can never experience anything concerning things and make out anything about them except as we remain in the reality in which they encounter us. Meanwhile, we cannot get loose from the question whether or not we approach the things themselves, at least within this realm, whether in it we aren’t always already with them.”44 The prob-

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lem that this question raises is one Kant “constantly tried to grasp anew.” How is it possible “to have objects standing against us as they themselves, even though the letting encounter (das Begegnen-lassen) happens through us” (242)? Heidegger answers that we are caught in the movement back and forth “between man and thing,” and in this movement, relation is temporalized, that “this between is not like a rope stretching from the thing to man, but that this between as an anticipation (Vorgriff ) reaches beyond the thing and similarly back behind us. Reaching-before (Vorgriff ) means thrown back (Rück-wurf )” (243). The picture that is emerging of a world not separate from its understanding is a moving image, a circular movement: “[T]he nature of experience, is not a thing present-at-hand, to which we return and upon which we then simply stand. Experience is in itself a circular happening through which what lies within the circle becomes exposed (eröffnet). This open (Offene), however, is nothing other than the between (Zwischen)— between us and the thing” (242). The temporalization of the relation of world and understanding also means that there is no fixed determination of categories. Since what is emerges not only in the shuttling between self and thing, but also in a ceaseless interplay of anticipation and recollection, the movement of understanding undercuts not only the subject-object dichotomy but the metaphysics of presence. The structure, the existential constitution of human being is its activation of the correspondence of being and beings.45 The 1959 lecture Der Weg zur Sprache is a statement on language moved as much as anything by the spirit of Humboldt, and it deepens and complicates the themes which Heidegger has been developing about language up to this point. He is concerned first and foremost with the peculiarity that our thinking about language always occurs within language. This is not a trivial point for Heidegger, as it illustrates in an exemplary fashion the circularity of understanding. In this context he speaks of language as “a web of relations (ein Geflecht von Beziehungen)46 in which we ourselves are included.”47 Relation here is something like the shape of a Möbius strip that is always circling back on itself and never able to be either inside or out. Its perpetually self-canceling, self-developing difference includes the intimacy of language, thought, and thing, which are each other’s other, recto and verso. Language is something that “we reach along the way in order to attain it, itself pertains to us, meets and makes its appeal to us,

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in that it transforms us into itself” [wohin wir unterwegs gelangen, um es zu erlangen, uns selber belangt, uns trifft und beansprucht, insofern es uns zu sich verwandelt] (73 ‒‒ 74/177).

The Structure of the Logos Heidegger works at finding the place of human being in the circle of language rather than the reverse, without dissolving the tension between them, and the direction he points this to brings us right up to Gadamer’s verbum. It will turn out that the Möbius metaphor is inadequate—The relationality of humans, world, and language is saturated with the frailty and possibility of human finitude, and so constructed out of a generativedestructive dynamic the continual loop does not have, simultaneously withdrawing into abysms and accreting by revelation. Heidegger traced much of what he thought about language to the logos of Parmenides and Heraclitus in the “beginning” (der Anfang).48 But he marries their logos to the Husserlian insight about intentionality (that consciousness is always consciousness of something) to language, an insight which Heidegger credits Plato to have perceived first: “[E]very logos is as such logos tinos” (a logos of something).49 This sort of incorrigible relationality is a rather poignant fact about being human. We can only ever understand something “as,” which means that any understanding is limited to an orientation, a perspective, an interpretation, which suggests that anything is always going to be more than its interpretation, or even the sum of its interpretations. Heidegger is at pains to point out that this more than is in a sense always already inherent in the possibilities of language, since we could never avail ourselves of language if it did not already have the signifying power that we found there: “Some being must be antecedently given as unveiled in order to serve as the possible about-which of an assertion” (208). This is the kernel of Heidegger’s insistence on the inexhaustibility of the logos: “So far as it exists, the Dasein is always already dwelling with some being or other, which is uncovered in some way or other and in some degree or other” (208). Thus any assertion, any particular expression of logos, is Janus-faced: On the one hand it emerges from and is linked to the whole vast web of significations that allowed it to be expressed in the first place, and at the same time, it articulates a situated,

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historical aspect of the matter it addresses. With respect to its Zusammenhänge, Heidegger means that there is no need for some external engine or external ideal because language is a self-renewing, self-generating matrix of emergent meaning. Logos “speaks itself out. . . . from out of its own self ” (208 ‒‒ 209). With respect to its historicity, the connection between language and the phenomenological “as” reveals the connection between the logos and the manifold dimensions of human finitude—temporality, processiveness, contingency, dialogue, etc. The logos is both inexhaustibly deep and inescapably limited. Heidegger also finds a Hegelian moment in the apophantic “as” of the logos insofar as the spoken word functions as a power of exclusion or negation: “The ‘representing’ [Vorstellen] of the eij˜doı is a selecting and thus a giving notice (lovgoı). . . . it regulates, and it does this by excluding.”50 Indicating something as something is an elimination of possibilities. However from a Hegelian perspective these possibilities are alternatives that continue to resonate in the denial: “But why is there this contrariness of positive and negative in lovgoı? Because the essence of lovgoı is notification, and because this giving notice to something is necessarily a giving of something as something. But why necessarily? Because all giving is a response to a receptive not having” (123). In the logos tradition that stretches from the pre-Socratics through Christian theology to Humboldt and Herder, the denial has not failed to summon the world of possibilities present before the listener, what Gadamer will call the “resonance chamber” of language. Heidegger explicitly links the denial’s indirect reference to these possibilities with the Christian understanding of lovgoı: “We can only allude to the not infrequent use of lovgoı in which the meaning of the word resonates out of the gospel of St. John and the Oriental gnostic teachings on wisdom, and which utterly transforms the original Greek content of the word” (126). Heidegger characterizes this subterranean link between assertion and negation as “openness,” an openness diametrically opposed to “the ideas of a professor who appeals to a logic textbook for support” (126). Now, the openness of the logos connects back to the displacement of agency in language. Logos is what separates human being from animal being by the distance it creates from one’s immediate environment.51 Because one always has one foot in a closed environment, the distance traversed becomes the measure or space of openness. Openness is, for

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this reason, both possibility and indeterminacy, and it has this duplicity across several dimensions. It provides stability 52 over generations and subjectivities, and introduces alienation and instability to culture and value. It provides the fluid space in which positions can be reconciled, and the ambiguity that undermines agreement. It provides the abstractive unity that relates disparate particulars, and the variation that defeats generalization. This dimensional structure of the logos as a self-subsisting, tensive field of play, articulating the difference between being and beings, makes of it something of an entirely different order from the conventional instrumentality of language. Heidegger provides a description of this contrast in the “Conversation on a Country Path” (“Gelassenheit”): “Because a word does not and never can re-present anything; but signifies something, that is, shows something as abiding into the range of its expressibility” [Weil das Wort nicht und nie etwas vorstellt, sondern etwas bedeutet, d.h. etwas so zeigend, in die Weite seines Sagbaren verweilt.] (69/46). In this definition, Heidegger travels the path Gadamer will later repeat when he moves from the Cratylus to the verbum in sections III, 2, A and B of Truth and Method. That the word “shows something as abiding into the range of its expressibility” suggests that it carries itself into a field of play where its meaning emerges. In representation, the word looks to be adequate to the thing it describes. The inexhaustibility of the word which is the hallmark of both Heidegger’s logos and Gadamer’s verbum exists in the capacity language has to build a space to be meaningful, which makes of language simultaneously something both more and less than its representational account. More, because in hermeneutics the thing, or subject matter, does not exist outside the word. Less, because the spoken word would never be adequate to what it is on the way to saying. Even the temporal enigma of human discourse is captured in this conception, since the processive (“in die Weite”) commingles with the durative (“etwas es zeigend . . . verweilt”).53 This temporal peculiarity of linguistic being is central to Gadamer’s verbum, and it is indebted to Heidegger’s advances in understanding the structure of temporality. Language manifests the ontological structure that Heidegger most famously expresses as the formale Anzeige, or formal indication. The formale Anzeige is Heidegger’s name for the speech phenomenon that replaces the form/matter or style/substance distinction.

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Unlike conventional notions of form, formal indications as utterances “are not subsequently pasted on: they are not mere extrinsic accompaniments of the modes of possession. On the contrary, it is in these forms that we possess the object itself as such; it is in them that we claim the object.”54 The formal indication is the means by which a being broken by time repairs itself. It is an anticipatory claim to its own fullness, made necessary by the fact that time will not cooperate with its intention but will always outrun its achievement. What it fashions then is a kind of improvised response, a simultaneous and not wholly “legitimate” occupation of time at both ends, an expectation for what may be, and a pliant response to what in fact emerges. From one side, the expectation is a “pre-possession,” a “claiming the object in speech” (16). From the other side, the response is not something that happens at the end, but is underway from the beginning: “In every mode of possession as such, the object is, in one way or another, under discussion” (16). The most original part of this idea is the simultaneity: Heidegger speaks of a determination of the object “in a way . . . that grasps the object out of the basic experience that is to be acquired” (16). The “experience” of the thing somehow precedes the thing. This peculiar way of talking about the formal indication comes from adapting syntax that expresses temporal relations for a phenomenon that does not operate in that modality. It works just to the side of normal chronology, like an offset or shadow, because it cannot quite subvert it. Heidegger’s theory of discursivity repeats this structure. Discourse, Rede, emerges out of the contact between, on the one hand, the structural resources of language bequeathed by cultural usage, its embedded history, and on the other hand its own living, innovative, improvisatory engagement with the world. The special quality of our linguisticality (Saying-speaking) is the human capacity to be in touch with, call upon, point to, and stay within both dimensions at once. It is a point of contact with the dimensions of, in Heidegger’s terms, the concealed/withdrawing and the revealed/emerging. Saying-speaking is, if you will, the event horizon of Being. Discourse is not a fixed system or structure which is applied to a contingent world after the fact, but a shifting transitory structure bodying forth the very particulars it is conventionally thought to order. He cites Humboldt on this paradox: “Properly conceived of, language is something persistent and in every instant transitory.”55

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As we imagine how this persistence and transience interacts we come upon another aspect of the formal indication. In the first section of Gelassenheit Heidegger has established that the question of language is complicated by the fact that we must make use of language to understand language, so that understanding is an open circling structure, made of the same material it is designed to create. In the second section of the lecture, he turns this structure on its side and finds that its curious open-ended circling has a third, a depth-dimension. There is a necessary connection between what is said and all that is unsaid, both what has been deposited in memory or remains possible of expression. In the normal sense of structural boundedness, what is said would seem to separate itself off from what is not said, as what is living from what is dead or not in play. But what Heidegger finds instead is that this relation, this belonging together of said to unsaid is a part of the intertwining structure: “[T]hat which is spoken in various ways begins to appear as if it were cut off from speaking and the speakers, and did not belong to them, while in fact it alone offers to speaking and to the speakers whatever it is they attend to, no matter in what way they stay within what is spoken of the unspoken.”56 The relation or belonging together of unsaid to said is of a similarly circular structure as that between language to speaker. What is said depends on what is not said both in the repertoire of customary saying and the openness of language to innovation. What is created in the saying is dependent on the possibilities of language to change and remain open, and this difference from the said of memory enriches the deposits of language, thus changing the structure of that store. There is then a continuous feedback loop in the basic structure of language, never fixed. Following Plato,57 Heidegger develops an agricultural metaphor to explain this dimension of the structural openness of language, the metaphor of cultivation,58 and of the furrow:59 “But we make a design (Aufriß) also when we cut a furrow into the soil to open it to seed and growth. The design is the whole of the traits of that drawing which structures and prevails throughout the open, unlocked freedom of language.”60 The image suggests the way in which the structure of language is not preformed: Wherever the furrows are cut, there thinking may grow. These are not a priori categories which language finds. It is language that creates the space for thought. One has the sense here of language improvising a structure of coherence which could have moved in this direction or that, and the thought that is made possible is simply where language happens

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to lay down these furrows. The foundation for thought is prepared as we go. Moreover, the event of truth that language makes possible is a sprouting forth that bears witness to the vast dark earth beneath the surface, but also deposits new wealth in the alluvial strata of earth that build up over time, or deplete the ground of its nutrients. This takes us to the deepest point of the formal indication, a point well illustrated in a statement Heidegger makes about translation: It is said that “translating” is the transposing of one language into another, of the foreign language into the mother tongue or vice versa. What we fail to recognize, however, is that we are also already constantly translating our own language, our native tongue, into its genuine word [in ihr eigenes Wort]. To speak and to say is in itself a translation, the essence of which can by no means be divided without remainder into those situations where the translating and translated words belong to different languages.61 (emphasis added) That something is both purposeful and open-ended is contradictory unless we understand the subversion of temporal understanding at play. The idea of a teleology without a telos (a phrase of the German historicists that describes aptly the openness of language) flips our conventional understanding of the temporal direction of development: We are coming to the present from out of the future.62 We do not know what the genuine word is until we have gotten there, and yet we were always bound to it, and know when we have arrived that it is what we have always intended. An artist once spoke this way about a film he had produced when asked how the work had changed over the many years of its production: We had to allow the story to come out, and really let the story speak to us, and know what it was that we were trying to say with the film. And it really is all of our experiences put into this film. . . . There have been so many different cuts that it’s hard to really know exactly how it changed through the years. But it’s definitely exactly what we all knew it would be. (emphasis added)63 This illustration is a concrete instance of Heidegger’s paradoxical process that he describes as “the maturation of an original fulfillment of what was indicated. . . . the actualized in-forming [Ein-bildung] of the full

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phenomenon.”64 Heidegger gives his most precise formulation of a process that is constituted by an absence at both ends: There resides in the formal indication a very definite bond: this bond says that I stand in a quite definite direction of approach, and it points out the only way of arriving at what is proper, namely, by exhausting and fulfilling what is improperly indicated by following the indication. An exhausting, a drawing out: precisely not such a one that the more it grasps, the less it leaves behind (by way of removal) to be acquired, but the reverse: the more radical and formal is the understanding of what is empty, the richer it becomes, because it leads to the concrete.65 What he calls a bond is more a dependency, in the sense that the idea needs its concretion and the reverse, and the way this plays out in temporal invention is discursive.  Initially we saw that the meaning-structure Heidegger saw in the logos is similar to what Augustine and Aquinas saw as the structure of reflection. Even the decentering of agency from mind to word that was discovered gradually in German philosophy from the nineteenth century as a counterclaim to Enlightenment reason has seeds in the theology of the Word. Heidegger sounds not unlike the German mystic when he privileges the basic comportment of listening over speaking: But if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless . . . . Before he speaks man must first let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say. Only thus will the preciousness of its essence be once more bestowed upon the word . . . .66 The “nameless” is very close to the Augustinian verbum interius, a truth that precedes and follows, anticipates and perfects the spoken word, which is a human approximation bound by the laws of time and contingency. The nameless is not so much what cannot be named as what is never fully named. The full humanity or personhood of understanding is not its

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agency, but its being what Heidegger will later call the jointure, the awareness of relation that a fully embodied understanding holds. Like the gathering of the fold in a drapery, human understanding is capable of holding together the reflection or glimmering of the source of meaning (the totality of history) in the particularity and contingency of the unique event. In the later Heidegger the human being who steers between the particular and the universal, negotiating the ontological difference,“walks the boundary of the boundless.”67 This privilege of place is nevertheless receptive. The human being is the listening one, and language is “the voice that determines and tunes his nature” (41). The complexity of the structure of being-between in Heidegger’s thought, as I have tried to show in this chapter, will be carried over into Gadamer’s understanding of verbum, and explains in part the density of his text on the subject. One of the purposes of my study of the verbum is to show that the inner word does not simply correspond to some Romantic notion of ineffable experience, as is sometimes implied, but serves as a formal indication of the almost infathomable structure of lingual being. Heidegger taught Gadamer how to remain in the tension between human being and the spirit of language, and Gadamer colored this tensive relationality by a shift from the ontological Mitsein to the communal Miteinander. The “word,” in Gadamer’s view, “has a communal meaning and implies a social relation.”68 Gadamer’s exploration of the medieval sources of hermeneutics marks in more than one way his debt and his distance from his mentor. In taking over what Heidegger had taught him about the pre-Socratic logos, Gadamer will explore his ties to the scholastic verbum that Heidegger had eschewed in a return to the “beginning.”



Part II

Exegesis, Truth and Method, Part III, 2, B

chapter 7



The Verbum and Augustine’s Inner Word

Truth and Method is famously divided into three major sections which treat, respectively, the themes of art, history, and language. The unity of the book and the relation of these parts have been the subject of much discussion, but the basic theme, providing an alternative vision to the modern, essentialist model of knowledge production, is consistently developed in different ways over the three sections. Against the picture of a determining subject observing and controlling a determinate object-world, Truth and Method depicts an emergent world arising out of the ceaseless play of culture, language, history. Agency is a shared or dispersed power, subjectivity is a secondary, co-dependent phenomenon, and both world and reflective consciousness grow out of their manifold interactions. The first part of Truth and Method focuses on the theme of play, the playing of a game or the performance of a play, which exhibits the interactive structure (Gebilde) of a world not captive to the fixed binary of subject and object. The second part of Truth and Method shows this structure at work on the scale of history, that is, the contact of consciousness with its own history exhibiting the same emergent, reciprocating structure developed in part one. The third part of Truth and Method reveals how Sprachlichkeit, linguality or living speech, is the fundamental idiom of this interaction. Clearly this is a Heideggerian theme, repeated now in a new key. The reciprocal relation of player and played, of history and consciousness, is anchored in the ontological unity of thought and speech. The word is the bodying forth of history and thought together, a unity that the Western tradition has forgotten. Indeed, Western intellectual tradition may 219

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be read as the history of the separation of thought and word, and consequently as the instrumentalization of culture. How did this forgetfulness happen? Gadamer offers a brief intellectual history in section 2 of the third part, the middle chapter of which contains the verbum section. His history begins with the fatal mistake of Plato in the Cratylus where language is attributed the bare function of signing. This is right because Plato was always for Gadamer the ambiguous pivot of Western thought, holding the seeds of its fateful detour and the keys to its hidden return. Instead of detailing the long career of the West’s historical mistake, Gadamer develops the counter- or shadow-history that lives along or underneath that dominant narrative, the history of the word that begins with the Greek logos and culminates with Heidegger’s Sprachlichkeit. Although the medieval concept of the verbum does not yet in every respect fully achieve the structure of hermeneutic understanding, elements that are developed in the final parts of Truth and Method, it served as a constant source of inspiration for Gadamer to get at the mystery of human Sprachlichkeit. He remarked in 1974 that “the deepest mystery of Christian doctrine, the mystery of the Trinity . . . constantly stimulated the course of thought in the West as a challenge and invitation to try and think that which continually transcends the limits of human understanding.”1 Gadamer looks at the verbum in this way. Just as the Trinity defies the categorical boundaries of person and word, process and end, spirit and body, singular and multiple, so the verbum never resolves language into a phenomenon that human understanding comprehends. The eighty-page prospectus of Truth and Method that Gadamer penned in 1956 devotes roughly three long sheets to the theme of the inner word, covering all the major themes that will be developed in greater detail in the finished work, including the later development of complicatio in Cusanus.2 It is not the case that Aquinas is left out of this draft, as Grondin states, although this is not obvious. Both the De differentia verbi divini et humani (“per modum egredientis”) and the De natura verbi intellectus (“verbum proprie dicitur personaliter tantum”) are quoted directly, although without citing authorship. The De natura quotation actually introduces the theme of verbum in the manuscript.3 Gadamer also discusses Aquinas’s division of verbum into definitio and ennuntiatio, and the complex structure of the Thomist species. Gadamer used the left-facing page

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in the manuscript to make notes to himself, and two other Thomist texts are referenced in this fashion on manuscript page 134, one to the fourth book of the De veritate that includes an extensive note on the analogy of trinitarian procession to human thought. What is even clearer in this manuscript than in the published version is the extent to which Gadamer read Augustine and Aquinas together as co-producers of the analogy of the inner word. He jumps back and forth between them here, whereas in the published version Aquinas takes over after the sixth paragraph. He seems to read Augustine and Aquinas together in much the same way that he read Plato and Aristotle together as companion thinkers.4 The notoriously compressed argument of III, 2, B of Truth and Method, Language and Verbum, unfolds in five distinct phases: the first six paragraphs on the Christian doctrine of the Word per se; a brief section on Augustine’s analogy of the “inner word”; an extensive commentary on Aquinas’s version of this idea, which is in turn divided into two subsections: the foundation of the idea in Neoplatonist emanation theory, and a close analysis of the analogy itself; and a summary that, characteristically, opens up new areas of thought relating to the inner word. The Christian Idea of the Word (pars. 1‒‒ 6) s. 1, S. 422 Es gibt aber einen Gedanken, der kein griechischer Gedanke ist und der dem Sein der Sprache besser gerecht wird, so daß die Sprachvergessenheit des abendländischen Denkens keine vollständige werden kann. Es ist der christliche Gedanke der Inkarnation. Inkarnation ist offenbar nicht Einkörperung. Weder die Seelenvorstellung noch die Gottesvorstellung, die mit solcher Einkörperung verknüpft sind, entsprechen dem christlichen Begriff der Inkarnation.

par. 1, p. 4185 There is, however, a thought that is not Greek, and which treats more justly the being of language, so that the West’s forgetfullnessof-language is not complete. It is the Christian idea of incarnation. Incarnation is plainly not embodiment. The soul-concept and god-concept entailed in such embodiment do not correspond to the Christian concept of incarnation.

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The first thing to note about the subsection III, 2, B is the title itself. It is not, for instance, “The Doctrine of the Verbum Interius,” but rather “Sprache und verbum” (“Language and verbum”) in parallel to the previous subsection title “Sprache und Logos.” It is true that Augustine sometimes referred to the inner word as simply verbum (along with a host of other designations), but it is clear that Gadamer is grounding his discussion of the verbum interius in the more fundamental tradition that designates the incarnate Son of God as Word. A great deal depends on the fact that the verbum interius is neither merely a metaphor nor an analogy, both for the theologians and Gadamer. The opening paragraph characterizes the doctrine of the Word as different from the Greek idea of language as embodiment. At this point Gadamer is not concerned to observe the continuity of the secular and religious themes, and he does not even address the massive complexity of translating the Greek word logos with the Latin verbum. He will concentrate on the single point that theology provided a remarkable way for the imagination to surpass Plato’s “epoch-making decision” to treat the word as a sign (semeion) (TM, 414/WM, 418). Gadamer’s polemical purpose in Truth and Method to mark the epochmaking consequence of Plato’s language theory suppresses in great part the profound respect he had for the Greek idea of o{loı. Hermeneutics was deeply indebted to the Greek conception of the word as active principle living in the world that forms and guides it. Heidegger never stopped thinking about “all that is said in the Greek word lovgoı.”6 The Latin translation was in a sense a devaluation. Lovgoı carries with it the combined sense of the Latin relatio and ratio, the belonging-together of being, and the bringing to light or showing how something, as Heidegger says, “regards us.”7 The Cratylus thesis expresses one explicit option in Plato that became subsequently decisive.8 s. 2, S. 422 Das Verhältnis von Seele und Leib, wie es in diesen Theorien, so in der platonisch-pythagoreischen Philosophie, gedacht wird und der religiösen Vorstellung der

par. 2, p. 418 How the relationship of soul and body is considered in theories such as platonic-pythagorian philosophy, and how it corresponds to the religious representation of the soul in

The Verbum and Augustine’s Inner Word Seelenwanderung entspricht, setzt vielmehr die vollständige Andersheit der Seele gegenüber dem Leib. Sie behält in allen Einkörperungen ihr Fürsichsein, und die Lösung vom Leib gilt als Reinigung, d.h. als Wiederherstellung ihres wahren und eigentlichen Seins. Auch die Erscheinung des Göttlichen in menschlicher Gestalt, die die griechische Religion so menschlich macht, hat nichts mit Inkarnation zu tun. Gott wird da nicht Mensch, sondern zeigt sich den Menschen in menschlicher Gestalt, indem er zugleich seine übermenschliche Gestalt ganz und gar behält. Demgegenüber schließt die Menschwerdung Gottes, wie sie die christliche Religion lehrt, das Opfer, das der Gekreuzigte als der Menschensohn auf sich nimmt, d.h. aber ein geheimnisvoll anderes Verhältnis ein, dessen theologische Ausdeutung in der Lehre von der Trinität geschieht.

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migration, relates much more to the absolute otherness of the soul to the body. It retains its beingfor-itself in all embodiments, and the dissolution of the body has to do with a cleansing purification, i.e., as a restoration of its true and actual being. Even the appearance of the divine in human form that makes Greek religion so human has nothing to do with incarnation. God does not become man here, but rather shows himself to men in a human guise while entirely preserving his superhuman character.9 By contrast, the assumption of the flesh that Christianity teaches implies the sacrifice to himself in the crucifixion that Christ endures as the son of man, i.e., a mysteriously different relation that is encountered in the theological interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity.

(par. 2) “ein geheimnisvoll anderes Verhältnis” [a mysteriously different relation] The Cratylus anticipated the intellectual divorce of thought and speech, and within the space of this severance the distortions of subjectivism and empiricism played out through the centuries. As a counter-thrust, the appropriation of John’s elevation of the Word in the gospel prologue to the status of doctrine preserved and fostered the Isocratean belief in the intimate unity of thought and speech.

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What does Gadamer mean by saying that incarnation is a mysteriously different relation from the Greek idea of embodiment? He does not answer this question right away or directly, but the statement goes straight to the heart of the enigma he is explicating. It suffices to say at this point that in this substitution of “Word” for “Son” the notion of representation is radically transformed, to an extent to which we have not yet come to terms.10 Of particular interest for a theory of language here is the way in which the act of redemption introduces to thought a different sense of cosmic history, one of progressive unfolding and turning points. Because the Word is now a vehicle for this interruption of cyclical time, hermeneutics speaks in terms of the word as pure event.11 The first perplexing question that arises in this terse summation therefore is what precisely is the relation between the Christian doctrine of the Word and the hermeneutic understanding of language as event. In the first case there is no alteration in the superhuman character of the divine by the assumption of flesh. The difficulty of stating the second case (of Christ) is that this is also true. It is on this fact that the whole enigma rests. God is not harmed by the sacrifice or made less, and yet it is a true sacrifice and the Christ who suffers is no mere sign of God. We already have a hint of the philosophical implications for the analogy with language. The materiality, facticity, and particularity of discourse is not a diminution of an abstract “language,” since what language becomes in suffering this experience is what it is. Incarnation is a furtherance of an always already involved relation. By way of anticipation of the fuller analogy, Gadamer’s 1966 statement about the event of language will serve: “There is always a world already interpreted, already organized in its basic relations, into which experience steps as something new, upsetting what has led our expectations and undergoing reorganization itself in the upheaval. . . . Only the support of familiar and common understanding makes possible the venture into the alien, the lifting up of something out of the alien, and thus the broadening and enrichment of our own experience of the world.”12 s. 3, S. 423

par. 3, p. 418 ‒‒419

An dieses Hauptstück des christlichen Denkens dürfen wir uns um mehr halten, als die Inkarnation

All the more reason to hold onto this cardinal point of Christian thought, since the incarnation is so

The Verbum and Augustine’s Inner Word auch für das christliche Denken mit dem Problem des Wortes aufs engste zusammenhängt. Die Ausdeutung des Geheimnisses der Trinität, wohl die wichtigste Aufgabe, die dem Denken des christlichen Mittelalters gestellt war, lehnt sich schon bei den Vätern und schließlich in systematischer Durchbildung des Augustinismus in der Hochscholastik an das menschliche Verhältnis von Sprechen und Denken an. Die Dogmatik folgt damit vor allem dem Prolog des Johannes-Evangeliums, und so sehr es griechische Denkmittel sind, mit denen sie ihre eigene theologische Aufgabe zu lösen sucht, so gewinnt doch das philosophische Denken durch sie eine dem griechischen Denken verschlossene Dimension. Wenn das Wort Fleisch wird und erst in dieser Inkarnation die Wirklichkeit des Geistes sich vollendet, so wird damit der Logos aus seiner Spiritualität, die zugleich seine kosmische Potentialität bedeutet, befreit. Die Einmaligkeit des Erlösungsgeschehens führt den Einzug des geschichtlichen Wesens in das abendländische Denken herauf und läßt auch das Phänomen der Sprache aus seiner Versenkung in die Idealität des Sinnes heraustreten und sich dem philosophischen Nachdenken darbieten. Denn im Unterschied zum griechischen Logos gilt: das Wort ist reines Geschehen (verbum proprie dicitur personaliter tantum).

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most closely connected to Christian thinking on the problem of the word. The interpretation of the mystery of the Trinity, the most important task of thinking for the Christian Middle Ages, rests originally with the Fathers, and then ultimately in the systematic perfecting of Augustinianism in the High Scholastic period with the human relationship of thinking and speaking. In this matter, dogmatics follows above all the prologue of John the Evangelist, and so, whereas dogmatics attempts to resolve its questions so often with Greek modes of thought, indeed philosophy won through John a dimension closed off from Greek thinking. If the word becomes flesh and the actuality of the spirit fulfills itself only in the incarnation, so likewise the Logos is released from its spirituality, which signifies equally its cosmic potential. Hereupon the uniqueness of the redemptive event introduces historical being into Western thought, allows the phenomenon of language to escape from its submersion in the ideality of meaning, and offers itself to philosophical consideration. For as distinct from the Greek logos, the word is pure event (verbum proprie dicitur personaliter tantum).

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We must note carefully Gadamer’s transition here between the theology of the incarnation in paragraph 2 and its relation to the problem of the word in paragraph 3, because it is here that he references the doctrine of the Trinity. Catholic theological speculation on the Trinity for much of its history concentrated on the relation of the Father and the Son, and the Protestant Reformation marked a notable shift in emphasis to the third Person of the Trinity. This emphasis has deeply characterized the Protestant view of the historical movement of the Holy Spirit through the community of believers. Spirit obviously dominates Hegel’s mediation of philosophy and religion, for instance.13 The mystery of the Trinity in Gadamer’s text, by contrast, even when he speaks of proclamation and preaching in paragraph 22, is a reference to the second procession. This is understandable given Gadamer’s specific theme, but given his larger theme of hermeneutic understanding as the manifestation of human solidarity and community, is there something substantive to be drawn from this emphasis? It should be remembered of course that the Nicene creed also paid very little attention to the nature of the third Person, and its specific relation became a salient issue only later. It is in this paragraph that Gadamer announces in broad terms the nature of his claim for the momentous patristic decision to use John 1:1 to interpret the trinitarian mystery, in itself a true event of language. In the second to last sentence, he offers in quick succession three epochal reasons why this choice is significant for intellectual history. (par. 3, cont.) “. . . wird damit der Logos aus seiner Spiritualität . . . befreit. Die Einmaligkeit des Erlösungsgeschehens führt den Einzug des geschichtlichen Wesens in das abendländische Denken herauf.” [. . . the Logos is delivered from its spirituality, which means, at the same time, its cosmic potentiality. Hereupon the uniqueness of the redemptive event introduces historical being into Western thought.] In this quote, the last phrase of the first sentence, and the first phrase of the following sentence draw a direct and pointed comparison between theology and language philosophy. The phrase “delivered from its spirituality” is more or less a theological equivalent of the philosophical phrase that occurs in the next sentence, “escape from its submersion in the ideality of meaning,” which itself echoes the phrase “ideality of meaning

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[Idealität des Sinnes]” in the Cratylus section. Ideality of meaning is the unfortunate Greek idea that thought does not need language, and can operate in a sphere of pure mathematical rationality. Gadamer seems about to say what is common between “the Christian idea of incarnation” (par. 1) and “the problem of the word” (par. 3). Since incarnation is not embodiment, that is, that soul and body are not essentially separate, we expect that he will make the same point about language, and say how thought and word are inseparable. But in a way that is characteristic of him, he doesn’t clarify the analogy so much as extend the claim to its broader significance, and we are left to fill in the missing steps. To say that “Logos is released from its spirituality” is a turning away from nous, the Greek conception that “thought is so independent of the being of words” that it does not need them (TM, 414). One would think that the spiritual would be happy to be independent of the material, but the taking on of human flesh is characterized here oddly as a freedom. One would normally think, as Augustine did, that to tie the soul to a material body is an enslavement, but Gadamer wants to reverse this. God sacrificed himself in order that we may be free. So God’s gift, the ultimate sacrifice (doing what God did not allow Abraham to do), is in the economy of salvation the opposite of itself, freedom rather than enslavement. But even more strange is the way Gadamer phrases the consequence of this freedom. It would be easy to see how the freedom from spirituality brings historicity into Western thought, but instead he adds a middle term, the uniqueness of the redemptive event: “. . . the Logos is released from its spirituality. . . . Hereupon the uniqueness of the redemptive event introduces historical being into Western thought.” We must try to understand the logic of these connections. Logos is freed from its spirituality by its becoming flesh in a single person. What is the relationship between the uniqueness of the redemptive event and the escape from abstraction? This passage is a prime example of the extreme compression of thought that characterizes the verbum section, and so we must try to puzzle this out. We know that uniqueness in this particular context means individual in a fully biographical sense. God became human by becoming Jesus of Nazareth, the son of a carpenter, to signify that every mortal, no matter how insignificant, is a son of God. Salvation is brought about by an identification—the son of God with the sons of man. It is the announcement of the relation between the transcendent and the immanent.

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Pure spirituality here has the negative connotation of pure abstraction, something that, for an Aristotelian, does not actually exist. To put this in terms of Christian doctrine, the economic procession is foreordained. The concretion of the Son in mortal form fulfills the abstract potential (erst in dieser Inkarnation die Wirklichkeit des Geistes sich vollendet). What Gadamer is doing here is inserting Hegel’s reading of the incarnation, which is to say, a philosophical conflation of Aristotle with Trinitarian doctrine. In Hegel’s terms, in order to redeem the world, God, who is already self-differentiation eternally superseding itself,“is transplanted into the world of time,” in order to repair the division of worlds by mediating the eternal and the finite. Because, according to Hegel, the objective totality of the divine man “is the implicit presupposition for the finite immediacy of the single subject. . . . he is also the movement to throw off his immediacy.”14 It is a commonplace that Christianity introduced progressive history into Western thought by establishing a single trajectory between the first and second coming. History is embodied by a singular event with the narrative force of its concrete material circumstance. This transforms reality. Something that happens here and now is unique, never to be repeated in the same way. Thus history is not a cycle but a progression. Eventfulness (as history) means that something new happens. That is what makes an event an event. We mark events by celebrating them, because they represent the introduction of something new. Analogously, language is not the ritualized repetition of formulas and rites, but an ongoing process of concept formation fertilized by the concrete and situated. Something new is always being created as we find words to come to terms with the world. At this point we may return to the topic of the paragraph, “the relationship of thinking and speaking.” Scholasticism found this relation in John’s prologue, where he reinterprets the Greek logos in an entirely new manner. Gadamer’s argument, seen now in this context, is that thought is equivalent to spirituality (abstraction) and language to uniqueness (the concrete event). Thus “the most important task of thinking for the Christian Middle Ages,” which was to know the relationship of thought and speech, is resolved by understanding language as the fulfillment of thought in the concreteness that it needs, in the same way that the Son’s taking on of human flesh is a necessity of history. Thought and language belong together in the same way that the Son enters into human history, as a

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necessary fulfillment. Abstract thought is incomplete until it is fulfilled in its concrete expression, and that expression is not merely a signifier for a meaning but something that gives meaning. God had literally to sacrifice, to give away something meaningful (the most meaningful, to express the fullness of his love). Language is not just an appearance, but what gives meaning, and it does this by creating something new, by the very fact of its humble concretion. (par. 3, cont.) “verbum proprie dicitur personaliter tantum” What we have just discussed is not by any means the most strange or difficult point Gadamer makes here. In the very last sentence, Gadamer quotes the De natura to support the theme of eventfulness, but the quotation he provides seems at first strangely incongruous. What is the relation of the personal nature of God’s sacrifice with the historicity of the Logos? The explanation, as it turns out, is rather involved. The obvious reference is to the fact that the Word is the Son, the nature rather than an accident of the soul, and this is different from the human word. In Aquinas’s De differentia we read: “Now in our soul, to understand is not the same as the nature of the soul,” whereas “in God, to understand and to be are the same.”15 But each human word, as an event of understanding, is a dim echo and reminder of that epochal event. The relationship of language to the being of the Son is worked out in section 277 of the De natura: [T]he Word in the Godhead does not utter itself by begetting and expressing, but it speaks itself already born and expressed. Thus again it is clear why the word is properly so called with relation to the person. For our word is always in continual becoming, because its complete existence is always in its becoming. Now this is not an imperfection, the word’s not existing all at once, as is the case with other things that are in becoming, which are imperfect. Nay, rather the word in its own origin is perfect, since the conception is there perfectly formed, and its perfected existence is preserved in the same manner as its birth. For the formation of the word does not pass away when it (i.e., the word) itself is formed, but when it is being actively understood the word is in continual formation, since it is always in a state of becoming and emerging from something else, namely from the speaker. This is in

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fact in agreement with the processions of the persons. In truth, thinking when it happens in silence is still in fact speaking, just as it is in the divine, where to speak of the word is to speak regarding the person. This explanation, although an extreme compression in thought, provides the gist of the Thomist teaching. The characteristic of personhood here has to do with the filial relation, and about resolving the paradox of something that is perfect even though it is in a continual state of formation. This is not the Aristotelian movement from potency to act, but the Thomist derivation of it. When someone is speaking, we understand them only because we have a sense of the whole of what they are saying by virtue of a hermeneutic anticipation. Aquinas glosses Aristotle on the hermeneutic relation in the Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics: For if the intellect understands a man and an animal as they are in themselves, as two distinct things, it understands them successively by two simple concepts without forming an affirmation or a negation from them. But when it combines or separates them, it understands them both as one thing, i.e., according as one thing is constituted from them; just as the intellect also understands the parts of a whole as one thing by understanding the whole itself. For the intellect does not understand a house by understanding first the foundation and then the walls and then the roof, but it understands all of these together insofar as one thing is constituted from them.16 Aristotle is speaking of distinctions between genus and class as a function of the mind rather than of the things themselves, “since the combination and the separation are in thought and not in the things” (Met. 6.3.1027b1), and in this context he refers to the way in which “we think things together and apart” (Met. 6.3.1027b1). Parenthetically, because this is not the object of his concern at the moment, Aristotle notes that when we categorize in this way “there is no succession in the thoughts but they become a unity” (Met. 6.3.1027b1). Aquinas derives from this instruction the topos of the part and the whole, a topos that is not explicitly present in the source text.17 His reading is based exclusively on Aristotle’s brief but extraordinary remark on succession. We could not make sense of individual words, Aquinas says, outside of the projection of the whole of

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meaning. Thus “the formation of the word does not pass away when it (i.e., the word) itself is formed, but when it is actually understood the word is in continual formation, since it is always in a state of becoming and emerging from something else, namely from the speaker.” (DN, sect. 277). Here is where the idea of the person comes in. No one thinks of a baby or a child as a half person, as a potential person. Each is fully human. With this aspect of the comparison, the analogical direction has flipped: It is easier to understand the concept of the person’s wholeness than the same characteristic in language, and the analogy aids understanding in this direction. The birth itself, the event of giving birth, the act of handing over, is the nature of the thing, which is therefore not an object but an act. When we conceive of the whole of what someone is saying, that whole is not expressed merely in the words that are being spoken, but to everything out of which those words emerge and with reference to which those words point. One gets a sense of the extraordinary character of the De natura in its explication of this difficult point. The human word is like the child who is father of the man: “So the first thing it is necessary to know is that the word in its essential character is in more perfect agreement with the thing being expressed by the word than with the person expressing it, even granting that it exists in the mind of the speaker as in the thing itself.”18 At the same time, the uniqueness of what is being said with the word is contained in that particular expression, just as each child is a unique soul. The birth of the Christ-child is a unique event, and yet is signifies the birth of hope. The particular historical conditions of the birth repeats the uniqueness of each individual Christian life in its historical concreteness. The Christ event thus sets up a reciprocity of the particular and the universal in a way that had not before been conceived. The particularity and finitude of the event is what gives it universal significance. From the De natura: “[I]ts perfected existence is preserved in the same manner as its birth.”19 Finally, this entire analogic relation is related back to the inner word: “In truth, thinking when it happens in silence is still in fact speaking, just as it is in the divine, where to speak of the word is to speak regarding the person.” This means, when thinking takes place within ourselves (personally), it is like the birth of the Son from the Father, a birth that manifests its perfection in the act and does not wait for its completion. The perfection is the giving birth, the event of personal sacrifice.

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Something similar emerges from the equivalent passage in the De differentia: In God however, to understand and to be are the same, and the word that the divine intellect forms is not an accident, but pertains to its very nature. Thus it must be that it is subsisting, because whatever is the nature of God is God. Thus said Damascene: “The word of God is subsistent, and exists in a hypostasis. The other kind of word (that is to say, ours), “are qualities of the mind.” From these premises therefore it follows that properly speaking the word is always said personally in the divine, because it is not brought forth except as an expression of the one understanding.20 The divine word is “coessential and consubstantial with the Father, because it subsists in his nature.” The analogy is about this sense of proximity and identity. Generatio here means that the issuance is by nature connected to the person who is its progenitor—“perfect and expressive of the whole being of the Father”— in the sense that it bears the nature of the person in it.21 The human word is fully expressive of the humanity that gives it birth. We know this from the tradition of rhetoric, especially in its Ciceronian and Renaissance expressions. The word is not disembodied reason, but the witness to the ethos, pathos, and logos of the person who speaks. In Christian terms we would simply say “witness.” Christ is witness to the love of the Father, and this act of witnessing is born out by a personal sacrifice. Thus the word is personal in the sense that it is not only a fragment, but maintains an unbroken tie to the fullness of the being from which it is generated, and we must not treat it otherwise. We denigrate the word by treating it as something less than the full witness to an affirmation. When a person testifies as to a belief, it is not the same as a conclusion drawn from premises; it has the conviction of the person. To give another example, the point of a promise is that it will endure regardless of whether the conditions under which it was given have changed. It has this attribute because it has the person standing behind it. We can begin to see the significance of the analogy of incarnation, pace Figal, for a philosophy of language. Emery insists that the word is not a metaphor, and that it “est dit per prius de Dieu et per posterius des créatures.”22 Gerhard Ebeling expresses something like this in his insistence that the human word is neither metaphor nor analogy:

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[W]hen John 1.14 says that the Word became flesh, that surely means (interpreted of course in very abbreviated terms) that here word became event in a sense so complete that being word and being man became one. But that does not allow of any analogical transference to the relation of two kinds of word — let us say for the moment, in order to lay bare the metaphysical misunderstanding it contains, of heavenly word and earthly word. When the Bible speaks of God’s Word, then it means here unreservedly word as word—word that as far as its wordcharacter is concerned is completely normal, let us not hesitate to say: natural, oral word taking place between man and man.23 To say “being word and being man become one” is another way of explicating personaliter. Word in Ebeling’s understanding is the means of achieving participation with God, a communicatio Dei. Word is an exchange between God and man, but not as an instrument of either. Just as God is on his side already Word, so human being “is to exist as response” (327). Verbum proprie dicitur personaliter tantum is codified in Christian humanism particularly in the figure of Melanchthon. His insistence on the integrity of ethos, pathos, and logos as the structure of rhetorical knowledge derives from this christological root: He reflects out of the Renaissance, as Aune notes, “a changed conception of what it means to ‘know’ something.”24 Wingren explains it this way: [T]he Verbum is understood as a word which is spoken by God. The spoken word is never inactive or in equipoise between speaker and hearer. Simply because it is a word, it issues from someone and it is received by someone: Christ joins God and humanity together because He is the Word which God addresses to man. . . . The Verbum is God’s and is divine, but it comes to man through being spoken by Jesus Himself and being heard as every other human word is heard. A man moves among his fellow-beings, speaks to them, and has dealings with them. In the case of the divine Word—the Verbum—there is no progression to a certain point at which it assumes human substance and then communicates the divine to mankind. Rather, the concept of the Word shatters the concept of substance, and a function or dialectic movement between God and men appears in place of the two static natures, and it is the spoken and heard Word which unites man to God. God is

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in His Word, His Son, and the Word, that is the divine Word, is operative in His divinity because it is heard, i.e. because it is human, material, and corporeal.25 Ebeling puts the matter in such a way that we can see the connection between the doctrine of the Word and the humanist recovery of the rhetorical community: “. . . to the essence of the Word belongs its oral character, i.e. its character of an event in personal relationship.”26 Word is never to be reduced to a mere instrument of communication because it is always indissolubly connected with the wholeness of human experience and being, as testament, as surety, as living presence. Verbum proprie dicitur personaliter tantum. s. 4, S. 423 Gewiß ist dabei die menschliche Sprache nur indirekt zum Gegenstand der Besinnung erhoben. Es soll ja nur am Gegenbild des menschlichen Wortes das theologische Problem des Wortes, des verbum dei, nämlich die Einheit von Gottvater und Gottsohn heraustreten. Aber gerade das ist für uns das entscheidend Wichtige, daß das Mysterium dieser Einheit am Phänomen der Sprache seine Spiegelung hat.

par. 4, p. 419 Certainly with this [the scholastic appropriation of John], human language is only indirectly raised to an object of reflection. The human word is used only as an analogy to the theological problem of the Word, of the verbum dei, namely the unity of God the Father and God the Son. But it is precisely this likeness that is of defining importance for us, that the mystery of this unity has its reflection in the phenomenon of language.

This paragraph works as a pivot for Gadamer to reverse the focus of the problem of the word. For theology, the linguistic similitude supports faith, but for Gadamer, theology discovers the truth of language. Gadamer notes this inversion twice more in the subsection, in paragraph 8 where he underlines the function of the inner word as a helpful analogue to the Trinitarian mystery, and in paragraph 10, where he simply marks the passage from his treatment of theological discourse to language theory.

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We must follow carefully the consequences of this inversion. It is no doubt true that Augustine welcomed the surplus of his own thought when it provided insight into language, memory, time, etc., but is there any distortion of Augustine’s idea by extracting his primary motive from the concept? Gadamer insists on his secular purpose. Elsewhere he glosses: “I am not defending Christian claims, but identifying their categorial significance.”27 In this regard Gadamer consistently distances himself from Heidegger’s motives, which he asserted to be always at base religious, a search for God. Having said this, Gadamer’s voice is so resonant with tradition, really more Renaissance than secular, more Protestant than agnostic, and his affinity for religion, theology and theologians undeniable. s. 5, S. 423

par. 5, p. 419

Schon die Weise, wie in der Patristik die theologische Spekulation über das Mysterium der Inkarnation an das hellenistische Denken anschließt, ist für die neue Dimension, auf die sie zielt, bezeichnend. So versucht man anfangs, von dem stoischen Begriff des inneren und des äußeren Logos (logos endiathetos-prophorikos) Gebrauch zu machen. Diese Unterscheidung sollte ursprünglich das stoischen Weltprinzip des Logos von der Äußerlichkeit des bloßen Nachsprechens abheben. Für den christlichen Offenbahrungsglauben wird nun sogleich die umgekehrte Richtung von positiver Bedeutung. Die Analogie von innerem und äußerem Wort, das Lautwerden des Wortes in der vox, gewinnt jetzt einen exemplarischen Wert.

Already the manner in which Patristic theological speculation on the mystery of incarnation connects with Hellenistic thought points to a new dimension of the problem. From the beginning the Fathers attempt to make use of the Stoic concept of the inner and outer Logos (logos endiathetosprophorikos). This distinction was originally intended as the contrast between the Stoic worldprinciple of the Logos and speech as mere outward repetition. Now the revealed faith of Christianity goes in precisely the opposite direction for something of positive significance. The analogy of the inner and outer word, the becoming-sound of the word in the voice, achieves an exemplary value.

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Gadamer here refers in a footnote to Sextus Empiricus, who reports that the Stoics conceive the spoken word as an outward sign that “is itself of such a nature as to indicate and disclose the non-evident . . . But it does not possess a nature capable of indicating non-evident things, since, , it ought to indicate non-evident things to all men equally. Therefore it depends upon the state of our memory what view we take about the real nature of things.”28 It is for this reason that the Stoics conclude that such an outer word (logos prophorikos) does not differ from that of animals without reason (ajlovgoi zwvoi). In other words, the outer word is mere sign, a parroting. We should note that even with the negative appraisal of Sextus there is a remarkable hermeneutic possibility in this conception. Since “the state of our memory” changes the meaning of the sign, the sign understood by different people will produce the “view we take about the real nature of things.” A slight reorientation of these relations could yield something very much like hermeneutic understanding, although this was not the path taken. Gadamer’s point, however, is that this conception of language reduces the outer word to a mere cipher. (We must remember, pace Gadamer, that Sextus Empiricus was not a friend of the Stoics, and this is his interpretation of the lekton.) In the first chapter we saw how congenial the Stoic lekton is to the mediation of mental and material realms. In any case, the “something of positive significance” in Christian theology is to be found in Theophilus: To externalize the word in the heart is not to lose the word that has been spoken: For the divine scripture itself teaches us that Adam said that he “heard the voice”. . . . What is the “voice” but . . . the Logos, always innate in the heart of God? For before anything came into existence he had this as his Counsellor, his own Mind and Intelligence. When God wished to make what he had planned to make, he generated this Logos, making him external, as the firstborn of all creation. He did not deprive himself of the Logos but generated the Logos and constantly converses with his Logos. (63) Justin teaches the same lesson: “[W]hen we speak any word, we beget that word; but not by separating it from us, so as to diminish the word that is in us, by our speaking it.”29

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Lonergan says the following about Augustine’s appropriation: “Church tradition, perhaps, precluded any appeal to the Stoic distinction between verbum prolatum and verbum insitum. In any case [Augustine] cut between these Stoic terms to discover a third verbum that was neither the verbum prolatum of human speech nor the verbum insitum of man’s native rationality but an intermediate verbum intus prolatum.”30 This is more attention than Gadamer pays to the logos endiathetos in Truth and Method, where he references the Stoic doctrine merely in passing, as an inspiration for the patristic development. But in other works he shows that, as I have indicated in chapter 1, the verbum is indebted to Stoic conceptions for a good deal more.31 The Stoics refused to understand the rational order of the universe as something separate from the lekta. Logos is pervasive and common between the mind, world, and language, and the lekta are the internal connections of all of this. This inseparability is crucial to establishing the intimate unity of thought and speech. The Stoic conception of lekton, particularly in its relation to the logos spermatikos, is in some ways closer to the intimate unity of thought and speech than Augustine’s inner word, which Graeser refers to dismissively as an antevocem position that represents a regression from the advances in language theory since Aristotle.32 Why did Gadamer bypass the Hellenistic development in this case in favor of what seems on the surface a much less congenial idea? Heidegger may be relevant here. When Heidegger finds language in silence, in the acknowledgment of withdrawal and concealment, he is very close to the surplus of meaning which is never fully expressed by the logos prophorikos, the Stoic precedent to the verbum. In Heidegger’s words, what is “essentially richer than” any statement “remains in a mysterious manner related to” all. He says that what comes to be through language is “completely unmediated and abundant” (am unmittelbarsten und reichsten).33 It is unmediated because language is not a translation of a prior meaning, but a showing or a shining. It is partial because human speech (Rede) is logos dispersed and refracting.34 (par. 5, cont.) “Für den christlichen Offenbahrungsglauben wird nun sogleich die umgekehrte Richtung von positiver Bedeutung. Die Analogie von innerem und äußerem Wort, das Lautwerden des Wortes in der vox, gewinnt jetzt einen exemplarischen Wert.”

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[Now the revealed faith of Christianity goes in precisely the opposite direction for something of positive significance. The analogy of the inner and outer word, the becoming-sound of the word in the voice, achieves an exemplary value.] Gadamer is perhaps thinking in broader terms of the reduction of the word to a tool function in the rationalist West, and the extraordinary counter-tradition in faith traditions. Christians took what was already an extraordinary idea in the Hebrew scriptures and transformed it. The agency of the word in the Old Testament had this extraordinary fluidity, that it was sent by God but then found its expression in the voice of the prophets, in the text of the scriptures, and the worship of the faithful: “Doth not wisdom cry aloud, and prudence put forth her voice? Standing in the top of the highest places by the way, in the midst of the paths, beside the gates of the city, in the very doors she speaketh, saying: O ye men, to you I call, and my voice is to the sons of men. . . . I wisdom dwell in counsel, and am present in learned thoughts. . . . The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made any thing from the beginning” (Prov. 8). The prophets expressed the circular relation of the word’s journey: “[S]o shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it” (Isa. 55:11). The Christian Word operates with the same efficacy, operating through the faithful and through the Church: “[T]he Lord thus has redeemed us through His own blood, giving His soul for our souls, and His flesh for our flesh, and has also poured out the Spirit of the Father for the union and communion of God and man, imparting indeed God to men by means of the Spirit, and, on the other hand, attaching man to God by His own incarnation, and bestowing upon us at His coming immortality durably and truly, by means of communion with God.”35

s. 6, S. 423 ‒‒424 Einmal geschieht ja die Schöpfung durch das Wort Gottes. So haben schon die frühen Väter, um den

par. 6, pp. 419 ‒‒420 The creation took place at once through the word of God. So already the early Fathers made

The Verbum and Augustine’s Inner Word ungriechischen Gedanken der Schöpfung denkbar zu machen, von dem Wunder der Sprache Gebrauch gemacht. Vor allem aber wird die eigentliche Heilstat, die Entsendung des Sohnes, das Mysterium der Inkarnation, im Johannes-Prolog selber vom Wort her beschrieben. Die Exegese interpretiert das Lautwerden des Wortes ebenso als Wunder wie das Fleischwerden Gottes. Das Werden, um das es sich in Beidem handelt, ist kein Werden, in dem aus etwas etwas anderes wird. Weder handelt es sich um eine Abscheidung des einen vom anderen (kat’ apokope¯n), noch um eine Minderung des inneren Wortes durch sein Hervorgehen in die Äußerlichkeit, noch überhaupt um ein Anderswerden, so daß das innere Wort verbraucht würde. Schon in den frühesten Anlehnungen an das griechische Denken ist vielmehr die neue Richtung auf die geheimnisvolle Einheit von Vater und Sohn, von Geist und Wort, zu erkennen. Und wenn die direkte Bezugnahme auf die Äußerung, das Lautwerden des Wortes, am Ende in der christlichen Dogmatik—in der Verwerfund des Subordinationismus— mitverworfen wird, so wird es doch gerade auf Grund dieser Entscheidung nötig, das Mysterium der Sprache und ihren Zusammenhang mit dem Denken philosophisch neu zu durchleuchten. Das größere

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use of the marvel of language in order to make thinkable the unGreek idea of creation. Above all, however, the actual redemption, the sending of the Son, the mystery of incarnation, is described in the Johannine Prologue as the word. Exegesis interprets the coming-tolanguage of the word as wondrous as the becoming-flesh of God. The becoming in both instances is not a becoming in which something becomes something else. Neither has it to do with a separation of one thing from the other (kat’ apokope¯n), nor with the diminishing of the inner word by its externalization, nor with a becomingother, so that the inner word would be spent. Already in the earliest borrowings of Greek thought there is to be discerned a new view of the mysterious unity of Father and Son, of spirit and word. And if the direct reference to externality, the sounding of the word out loud, is in the end rejected by Christian dogmatics (in the rejection of subordinationism), so it becomes necessary to investigate anew the basis of this difference, the mystery of language and its connection with philosophical thought. The greater marvel of language is not that the word becomes flesh and emerges into an external existence, but rather that what so emerges and is externalized is always already a word. That the word

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Wunder der Sprache liegt nicht darin, daß das Wort Fleisch wird und im äußeren Sein heraustritt, sondern daß das, was so heraustritt und sich in der Äußerung äußert, immer schon Wort ist. Daß das Wort bei Gott ist, und zwar von Ewigkeit her, das ist die in der Abwehr des Subordinationismus siegreiche Lehre der Kirche, die auch das Problem der Sprache ganz in das Innere des Denkens einkehren läßt.

is with God, and with Him from eternity, that is the triumphant teaching of the Church in its resistance of subordinationism, a position which also situates the problem of language entirely in the inwardness of thought.

(par. 6) “Das Werden, um das es sich in Beidem handelt, ist kein Werden, in dem aus etwas etwas anderes wird. Weder handelt es sich um eine Abscheidung des einen vom anderen (kat’ apokope¯n), noch um eine Minderung des inneren Wortes durch sein Hervorgehen in die Äußerlichkeit, noch überhaupt um ein Anderswerden, so daß das innere Wort verbraucht würde.” [The becoming in both instances is not a becoming in which something becomes something else. Neither has it to do with a separation of one thing from the other (kat’ apokope¯n), nor with the diminishing of the inner word by its externalization, nor with a becoming-other, so that the inner word would be spent.] The radical nature of Gadamer’s appropriation of the inner word begins to be apparent in the insistence on the strict similitude between the incarnation and language. It is precisely that the birth of the Son, that is to say, of God himself, contradicts the common sense that what is born is new. Justin Martyr is actually closer to the spirit of Gadamer’s intention than Augustine when he offers the verbum as an analogy for the procession of God, because, contrary to Augustine, he uses it to deny any loss or diminution in the outer word. The procession of the Son is Just like what we see done in ourselves: for when we speak any word, we beget that word; but not by separating it from us, so as to diminish the

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word that is in us, by our speaking it. Just as we see also that one fire is lighted from another without diminishing that which it is lighted from, that still continuing to be the same; and that which is lighted does really exist, but does not diminish that from which it was lighted.36 Just as with fire, the word spoken into the air is the life of the thought as it passes outward, and its function as speech is to grow as a gift rather than to diminish. Nevertheless it is not a separate thing severed from its source, but is precisely what is offered. Plotinus expresses this idea in relation to the soul, which gives “a kind of outflow from it to what is below, or rather an activity, by which that intelligible part is not itself lessened.”37 Earlier in Truth and Method, Gadamer glosses this idea in relation to the inexhaustible meaning of art: “Essential to an emanation is that what emanates is 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. For if the original One is not diminished by the outflow of the many from it, this means that being increases” (Zuwachs an Sein) (TM, 140/WM, 145). The Church Fathers appropriated this conception to their own purposes, and thus Hilary speaks of the scriptural language of trinitarian birth: “There was not an imperfect separation but a perfect begetting, for the birth does not lead to any loss on the part of the begetter, while it includes a gain for the one who is born.”38 And Athanasius makes the point in terms of familial procreation: “A son is a father’s increase, not acquisition.”39 Trinitarian theology sought language that permitted the passage of differing predications through a subject which shared their root meaning in what became known as a communicatio idiomatum.40 The Son was begotten rather than created, because he was of the same substance (homoousios) with the Father (74). Thus when God becomes man, he loses nothing of his divine nature, but yet takes on a fully human nature in order that his sacrifice might be a true salvation. The paradox of Trinity and incarnation is in fact the deepest paradox of metaphor itself, and these doctrinal distinctions represent a paradigm of thought which was to prove serviceable far beyond their institutional functions in uniting a fractured Church. Hegel, who was intent on conceiving the principles of universal generation and order without resort to divine intervention was unable to

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do without this special communication between predicate and subject: “All through the development [of Christian history] God does not step outside his unity with himself. In God’s creating of the world, as tradition has it, no new principle makes an appearance, nor is something evil established, something other that would be autonomous or independent. God remains only this One; the one true actuality, the one principle, abides throughout all particularity.”41 In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel relates this idea explicitly to the communicatio idiomatum: “Among the Athenians the death penalty was exacted if one did not allow another person to light his lamp from one’s own, for one lost nothing by doing so. In the same way God loses nothing when he communicates himself.”42 The attraction of the hermeneutic theory of language to this Logos doctrine is patent, and the reverse polarity of the analogy of the verbum begins to pay dividends precisely here. Heidegger’s belief in the primordiality of language for thought is founded in the rejection of pure thought before language, a thesis that did service against not only the Enlightenment ideal of uncontaminated intellect, but against a prevalent belief in the divine origin of language as a gift offered to human nature as an afterthought. As Herder puts it, “the attempt has been made to think of man’s reason as a new and totally detached power that was put into his soul and given to him before all animals as a special additional gift and which, like the fourth step of a ladder with three steps below, must be considered by itself.”43 Herder remonstrated in the face of this orthodoxy with an equivocal assertion: “While still an animal, man already has language” (87). For Herder the questions, What is reflection? What is language? and What is it to be human? are really only one question. Human nature, according to Herder, is distinguished from the beginning from non-human animal nature by virtue of its constitutional capacity for reflection, which is the capacity for isolating an image as a distinguishing mark free of “the vast hovering dream of images which pass by” (115). Language occurs, human nature occurs, because the human animal “can collect himself into a moment of wakefulness” (116). Thus separated out, a single impression is a clear concept, “a first judgment of the soul” (116). The soul breaks away from the mass of sensation and holds one particular impression by marking it. This act of marking is what allows the inter-

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ruption of the ceaseless flow, and this marking is nothing other than an inner word: The inner sense is at work. . . . It has recognized it humanly when it recognized and named it clearly, that is, with a distinguishing mark. More darkly? . . . Distinctly and directly but without a distinguishing mark? In that way no sensuous being can perceive outside itself, for there are forever other feelings which it must repress, annihilate as it were, in order to recognize, as it forever must, the difference between one and another through a third. Thus through a distinguishing mark? And what was that other than a distinguishing word within? . . . This was a conceived sign through which the soul clearly remembered an idea—and what is that other than a word? (117, emphasis added) But this is not an explanation of the arbitrary conventions of signs, because for Herder, just as for Gadamer, ratio et oratio are inseparable (119). When a human being “conceived the first clear thought, language was already present in his soul” (121). Human nature, Herder seems to be saying, evolved in concert with all of nature as a kind of sounding board: “Nature did not merely ring out the characteristic mark, it rang it in, deep into the soul. There was a sound, the soul grasped for it, and there it had a ringing word” (129, emphasis added). Call this entire disposition of man’s forces rationality, reason, reflection, call it what you will. . . . What it is, is the total arrangement of all human forces, the total economy of his sensuous and cognitive, of his cognitive and volitional nature . . . . a totally distinct orientation and evolution of all powers. (109 ‒‒ 110) The capacity is instinct with, or rather simply commensurate with humanness, and it exists “in the first thought of the child,” the capacity always already there (112). Heidegger’s use of the idea comes full force in The Origin of the Work of Art, a pivotal text for Gadamer: “[T]he sculptor uses stone just as the mason uses it, in his own way. But he does not use it up” (172). This increase from store works itself out most fully in the example of the peasant shoe: “The peasant woman wears her shoes in the field. Only here

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are they what they are. They are all the more genuinely so, the less the peasant woman thinks about the shoes while she is at work, or looks at them at all, or is even aware of them” (162). Heidegger’s description of the shoes in their equipmental relation to the woman and to her world is a rich and beautiful phenomenology which concretizes the organic relation of each aspect to every other in a kind of web of meaningful connection: “In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoe there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge. . . . On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. . . . In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain” (163). What is most significant for Gadamer is the attachment of this idea to the poetic word. The poet, according to Heidegger, “uses the word—not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word” (172). Heidegger’s application of the conception to language here comes very close to the doctrine of the verbum: The self-seclusion of earth, however, is not a uniform, inflexible staying under cover, but unfolds itself in an inexhaustible variety of simple modes and shapes. To be sure, the sculptor uses stone just as the mason uses it, in his own way. But he does not use it up. That happens in a certain way only where the work miscarries. To be sure, the painter also uses pigment, but in such a way that color is not used up but rather only now comes to shine forth. To be sure, the poet also uses the word—not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word. (172) This must all be behind Gadamer’s attraction to the verbum interius, which exemplifies a begetting in which nothing is “spent” (par. 6), and through which “the memory is not in any way plundered and loses nothing” (par. 18). In a late essay on the word he identifies language with methexis, and suddenly we see how the metaphysics of participation can be made concrete: “The German word for ‘communication’ is Mitteilung which means literally ‘sharing with.’ What a beautiful word! It involves the idea that we share something with one another that does not become less as a result, and perhaps even becomes more.”44 The idea comes

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up in Gadamer’s reflections on theoria, which means “to have been given away to something that in virtue of its overwhelming presence is accessible to all in common and that is distinguished in such a way that in contrast to all other goods it is not diminished by being shared and so is not an object of dispute like all other goods but actually gains through participation.”45 Throughout Gadamer’s work this Neoplatonist idea of overflow without loss46 describes the work of language, and this is an essential part of what he draws from Augustine’s ruminations on the inner word: There are two essentially very different kinds of goods. The first are those that we try to acquire in order to use them or have them in our possession so that it is possible to use them. It is part of the nature of these goods that what one person possesses and puts to use another person cannot have. These are the goods that are to be distributed, and the efforts of modern government are directed toward distributing them justly. And then there are goods of another kind, whose belonging to one person does not prevent their belonging to others. These actually belong to nobody, and for just that reason they are something in which each individual has a full share. To distinguish the two ways of “having” a good, Augustine used the opposition of uti and frui, of making use of something and using it up, by contrast to dealing with something in a way that bears its own fruit.47 Gadamer’s reference to a kind of becoming, an inner word, which is never “spent” is like the emanation of the fountain which is never “deprived or depleted” (par. 15). The idea of never being used up is, of course, a commonplace in all ancient mythologies, but it is appropriated to philosophy with peculiar intensity in Neoplatonism, where it is typically described by analogy to a fountain in developing the theory of emanation. Because Gadamer develops the fountain metaphor at greater length in paragraph 15, we will explicate its relation to emanationism there. Here I want to focus specifically on the trope of begetting as an example of something that is not “spent.” This is used frequently, of course, in the writings of the Church Fathers who found it indispensable to describe the gift of the Son. For Hilary it is the reason for the scriptural use of the language of divine procreation: “There was not an imperfect

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separation but a perfect begetting, for the birth does not lead to any loss on the part of the begetter, while it includes a gain for the one who is born.”48 Athanasius uses it for the same purpose: “[T]he Son is of the nature of the Father, for nature and nothing short of nature is implied in the idea of sonship, generation, or derivation. A son is a father’s increase, not acquisition.”49 For Theophilus, the Father “is the result of a distribution (merismovı) but not of a separation (ajpokophv). For that which is separated is cut off from its original source, but that which is distributed implies an instantaneous disposition (oijkonomiva), and does not cause any deficiency in that from which it is derived.”50 Justin then takes this commonplace and extends it to earthly things: “This Power has been begotten from the Father by his power and will, but not by amputation (ajpotomhv), as if the essence (oujs iva) of the Father had been divided (ajpomerizomevnh) in the same way that other things, when they are divided and cut, are no longer the same as they were before they were cut.”51 Then, remarkably, Justin applies the principle to human language: “When we ourselves utter a word, the word which we bring forth is not an amputation which diminishes the amount of logos within us. . . . Similarly we see that form one fire another is produced without diminishing the fire at which the second is lit; but the new fire which is lit both leaves it unchanged and is itself manifestly a real fire, even though the fire at which it was lit is in no way diminished.”52 (par. 6, cont.) “Schon in den frühesten Anlehnungen an das griechische Denken ist vielmehr die neue Richtung auf die geheimnisvolle Einheit von Vater und Sohn, von Geist und Wort, zu erkennen. Und wenn die direkte Bezugnahme auf die Äußerung, das Lautwerden des Wortes, am Ende in der christlichen Dogmatik—in der Verwerfund des Subordinationismus—mitverworfen wird, so wird es doch gerade auf Grund dieser Entscheidung nötig, das Mysterium der Sprache und ihren Zusammenhang mit dem Denken philosophisch neu zu durchleuchten.” [Already in the earliest borrowings of Greek thought there is to be discerned a new view of the mysterious unity of Father and Son, of spirit and word. And if the direct reference to externality, the sounding of the word out loud, is in the end rejected by Christian dogmatics (in the rejection of subordinationism), so it becomes necessary to investigate anew the basis of this difference, the mystery of language and its connection with philosophical thought.]

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There is a subtle and undeveloped chiasm in this passage. The first sentence suggests that Greek speculation on the logos that influences Church doctrine, which presumably refers to the teachings on the logos spermatikos, endiathetos, and prophorikos. But then the second sentence points out that dogmatics rejects the distinction between the logos endiathetos and prophorikos—Irenaeus, for instance, is categorical on this point— which leads to the conclusion that we must “investigate anew the basis of this difference.” So there is first an influence and then a rejection. What sense are we to make of this? Is Gadamer suggesting that Church doctrine improvised on the available speculative thought so as to transform it past recognition, or that there was a productive tension that generated a powerful new conception? The interjection “in the end” (am Ende) seems to decide the issue in favor of the latter. If we think of the doctrinal solution in terms of the Greek idioms, then there is something like a reconciliation of the logos spermatikos with the verbum prolatus. The Logos that pervades the universe somehow must bind together the inner and outer word, and this is something that only Christian theology was able to conceive. (par. 6, cont.) “Das größere Wunder der Sprache liegt nicht darin, daß das Wort Fleisch wird und im äußeren Sein heraustritt, sondern daß das, was so heraustritt und sich in der Äußerung äußert, immer schon Wort ist.” [The greater marvel of language is not that the word becomes flesh and steps out into an external existence, but rather that what so emerges and is externalized is always already a word.] Irenaeus states this matter with great force in opposition to heretical theories that treat the mind and the word of God as separable emanations: “God is completely intellect (mens) and completely word (logos); what he conceives he speaks, and what he speaks he conceives, because his thought (cogitatio) is his word and his word is his intellect, and the intellect that contains everything is nothing other than the Father himself.”53 This enigmatic position is characteristic of the doctrine that won the hegemony of the official Church, but considered in relation to the philosophies that were influenced by it, it has a radicality that continues to reverberate. To make of the Word an emission proceeding from the Godhead “ignores the grandeur of the Father, and establishes a profound separation between the Word and Him” (2.28.5).

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(par. 6, cont.) “Daß das Wort bei Gott ist, und zwar von Ewigkeit her, das ist die in der Abwehr des Subordinationismus siegreiche Lehre der Kirche, die auch das Problem der Sprache ganz in das Innere des Denkens einkehren läßt.” [That the word is with God, and with Him from eternity, that is the triumphant teaching of the Church in its resistance of subordinationism, a position which also situates the problem of language entirely in the inwardness of thought.] In the last sentence of the paragraph, Gadamer takes this point of doctrine in a specific direction. The fact that there is no change in the Word in its externalization means that there is an absolute continuity of the transcendent and economic procession. To say that this “situates the problem of language entirely in the inwardness of thought” is not therefore strictly accurate. What happens is that Augustine and Aquinas simply chose to reflect on the enigma of the divine Word by analogy with the inwardness of thought. The opposite route might also have been taken, and has been taken in other contexts, by conceiving of the externalization of God’s word in the history of the church community as proclamation, evangelism, and prayer. But Gadamer here is intent on following the theological speculation that supports his interest in the intimate unity of thought and speech, and this lies in the efforts to combat “the profound separation of the Father and his Word.”54 Thomist metaphysics, not just hermeneutics, can claim to have it both ways, since the causal circularity of the universe in imitating God is an ongoing differentiation and externalization that is actually a return, a finding of what is ever deeper within God’s mystery. Rosemann comments: In addition to not constituting an alienation, the reversio of creation to God is also more properly described as a journey inwards rather than a movement outwards or an exteriorizing process. For Aquinas believes that God, to whom creation desires to assimilate itself, is not outside but at the very centre of each created substance. . . . One could paradoxically say that God’s transcendence consists in the fact that he is out of the reach of creation, not as something infinitely distant from it—for “nihil est distans ab [Deo]”—but as something existing too deeply, too profoundly within each created substance to be within its grasp. In the final analysis, the meaning of reversio is introversio.55

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Augustine’s Verbum Cordis (pars. 7 ‒‒ 10)56 s. 7, S. 424

par. 7, p. 420

Das äußere Wort, und damit das ganze Problem der Vielheit der Sprachen, wird schon von Augustin—er es immerhin noch erörtert—ausdrücklich entwertet. Das äußere Wort ebenso wie das nur innerlich reproduzierte äußere Wort ist an eine bestimmte Zunge gebunden (lingua). Die Tatsache, daß das verbum in jeder Sprache anders gesagt wird, bedeutet jedoch nur, daß es sich menschlicher Zunge nicht in seinem wahren Sein zu zeigen vermag. Augustinus sagt in ganz platonischer Abwertung der sinnlichen Erscheinung: non dicitur, sicuti est, sed sicut potest videri audivire per corpus. Das “wahre” Wort, das verbum cordis, ist von solcher Erscheinung ganz unabhängig. Es ist weder prolativum noch cogitativum in similitudine soni. So ist dieses innere Wort der Spiegel und das Bild des göttlichen Wortes. Wenn Augustinus und die Scholastik das Problem des verbum behandeln, um für das Geheimnis der Trinität die begrifflichen Mittel zu gewinnen, so ist es ausschließlich dies innere Wort, das Wort des Herzens und dessen Verhältnis zur intelligentia, das sie zum Thema machen.

The outer word, and with it the entire problem of the multiplicity of languages, is already expressly depreciated with Augustine, who discusses it nevertheless. The outer word, as merely the inner word outwardly reproduced, is tied to particular tongues (lingua). The fact that the verbum is said differently in each language signifies only that it is not capable of manifesting itself in a human tongue in its true being. Augustine says in an entirely platonic devaluation of sensible appearance: non dicitur, sicuti est, sed sicut potest videri audivire per corpus. The “true” word, the verbum cordis, is entirely independent of such an appearance. It is neither prolativum nor cogitativum in similtudine soni. Thus this inner word is a mirror and image of the divine word. When Augustine and the scholastics address the problem of the verbum in order to gain a conceptual purchase on the mystery of the Trinity, it is thus exclusively the inner word, the word of the heart and of its relation to intelligentia, which they make their theme.

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(par. 7) “Das ‘wahre’ Wort, das verbum cordis” [The “true” word, the verbum cordis] As has been noted, this seventh paragraph is the beginning of the explication of the verbum interius, a particular outgrowth of the Christian conception of the word. Here introduced as the verbum cordis, one of the many designations Augustine uses for the inner word, the word of the heart has the specific purpose of helping solve “the problem of the verbum,” that is, of the broader designation for the immanent procession. We can see here the care Gadamer takes to avoid speaking of the inner word as a mere analogy or metaphor.57 Because it “is the mirror and the image of the divine Word,” its similitude is not analogical in the figurative sense, but instead what is sometimes called a literal analogy. A figural analogy is one that compares two relations with no term in common, and the comparison refers to the relation rather than the terms. A literal analogy has a term in common, and so the similitude has a substantive connection. The comparison is between both the relation and the parts, or to put is another way, there is a true participation. (par. 7, cont.) “. . . ist von solcher Erscheinung ganz unabhängig” [. . . is completely independent of such an appearance] This part of Augustine’s theory is anathema to hermeneutics, the basis of which is the intimate belonging of thought and speech. The appropriation of Augustine is filled with these kinds of ironic differences, but this is the biggest one. What Augustine says precisely is that when the word is uttered inwardly, it is uttered “just exactly as it is. When it is uttered vocally or by some bodily sign, it is not uttered just exactly as it is, but as it can be seen or heard through the body.”58 As Lonergan has pointed out, we do not know exactly what Augustine means by this.59 As I have shown in the Augustine chapter, it is not strictly true that “Augustine and the Scholastics . . . are concerned exclusively with the inner word” (par. 7). There is a bleeding over from inner word to words in his complex ruminations on the analogy with language. Indeed, the analogy with incarnation leads Augustine into a careful consideration of the relation of words to the inner word. But the spirit of the statement is not inaccurate. Augustine pitied the weakness of human invention, and probably never resolved his ambivalence over rhetoric.

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(par. 7, cont.) “So ist dieses innere Wort der Spiegel und das Bild des göttlichen Wortes.” [Thus this inner word is a mirror and image of the divine word.] This is the first mention of the mirror metaphor in the verbum section. It is a pivotal metaphor, much misunderstood, but here it has more of the conventional meaning often attributed to it. In bypassing the changes that occur to the word in human speech, the inner word reflects an image of the divine word, just as a mirror has the ability to reflect accurately. But as Gadamer begins to tease out the implications of the metaphor in the next paragraph, it begins to be clear that the reflection at issue could never be a simple one. s. 8, S. 425

par. 8, pp. 420 ‒‒421

Es ist also eine ganz bestimmte Seite am Wesen der Sprache, die damit ans Licht tritt. Das Geheimnis der Trinität findet im Wunder der Sprache insofern seinen Spiegel, als das Wort, das wahr ist, weil es sagt, wie die Sache ist, nichts für sich ist und nichts für sich sein will: nihil de suo habens, sed totum de illa scientia de qua nascitur. Es hat sein Sein in seinem Offenbarmachen. Genau das gilt vom Mysterium der Trinität. Auch hier kommt es nicht auf die irdische Erscheinung des Erlösers als solche an, sondern vielmehr auf seine vollständige Göttlichkeit, seine Wesensgleichheit mit Gott. In dieser Wesensgleichheit dennoch dies selbständige personale Existenz Christi zu denken, ist die theologische Aufgabe. Hierzu wird das menschliche Verhältnis aufgeboten, das am Wort des

It is thus a very specific side of the nature of language that is here brought to light. The mystery of the Trinity in this respect finds a reflection in the wonder of language, because the word that is true is nothing by itself and wants to be nothing for itself, but says rather what the thing is: nihil de suo habens, sed totum de illa scientia de qua nascitur. It has its being in its coming to appearance. This is exactly what is at issue in the mystery of the Trinity. This as well has to do not with the earthly appearance of the Saviour as such, but rather much more with his full divinity, his identity in nature with God. The theological task is to understand this perfect coincidence of being with the independent personal existence of Christ. A human analogy is enlisted for this task; the word

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Geistes, dem verbum intellectus, sichtbar wird. Es handelt sich um mehr als um ein bloßes Bild, denn das menschliche Verhältnis von Denken und Sprechen entspricht in aller Unvollkommenheit doch dem göttlichen Verhältnis der Trinität. Das innere Wort des Geistes ist mit dem Denken genauso wesensgleich, wie Gottessohn mit Gottvater.

of the mind, the verbum intellectus. This is more than a mere similarity, because the human relation of thinking and speaking corresponds,60 in all its imperfections, to the divine relation of the Trinity. The inner word of the mind is consubstantial with thought just as is God the Son to God the Father.

The Latin Gadamer quotes in this paragraph is from the De Trinitate, 15.22, the climactic verbum passage in which Augustine describes how the intellect scrubs perception through memory and construes its reality in imagination: All these things then that the human consciousness knows by perceiving them through itself or through the senses of its 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 like the thing known, and most its image, because the seeing which is thought springs direct from the seeing which is knowledge [de visione scientiae visio cogitationis exoritur], 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.61 Note how the eidos is the result of a process rather than an a priori. True, it matches the divine image that is outside of time, but that kind of Christian atemporality is not a before. The eidos or verbum is something humanly achieved. We have arrived at a marked departure from Platonism. Augustine’s reason for insisting on the non-contribution of language to its truth is quite different from Gadamer’s. For Augustine, the languages of the world that clothe the thought are no essential part of it, and even diminish it. The original inwardness of the word is what protects it from this decay. For Gadamer, language itself is lost to thought in the

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contemplation of the issue at hand (die Sache), even though the particularity of the language is what constitutes its particular meaning. This is a very different point. Gadamer is quite clear about Augustine’s intent, but at the same time claims that the two views are related (“a very specific side of the nature of language that is here brought to light” [emphasis added]). This is a clear example of the parallel tracks Gadamer is laying in this exposition, and of his peculiar “hinged” style of indicating two arguments simultaneously. Whether or not Gadamer is right to conflate the two will depend on what exactly the processive nature of the inner word actually is. (par. 8, cont.) “Es hat sein Sein in seinem Offenbarmachen.” [It has its being in its coming to appearance.] It is initially confusing to hear Gadamer give such power to language as constitutive, and then to hear his insistence here and elsewhere that language is nothing by itself, and disappears in the gaze at the issue at hand. This theme comes mainly from his teacher Heidegger, for whom the world which is ours does not normally come into question despite its massive presence. That language “has its being in its coming to appearance” is quintessential hermeneutics. But here Gadamer is following the thought of Aquinas, who says the same thing (nihil de suo habens, sed totum de illa scientia de qua nascitur), so that we have a clear instance of the double interpretation that is going on in the verbum section. That language disappears is the obverse side of the fact that language and Sache cannot be separated in their intimate belonging. Hermeneutics starts from the assertion that there is no thing-in-itself without language, so this too is a kind of disappearance. But the emphasis on the disappearance of language-in-itself is necessary because of the prevalent view of language as a tool. The rubric that expresses both sides of this disappearance in a positive way is that the word “has its being in its coming to appearance.” Let us first briefly recall what this means for Heidegger, and then ask the significance of its hermeneutic recovery from Aquinas. Truth and Method emphasizes the Heideggerian theme of revealment more than its corollary, concealment, and Gadamer will correct this later, but it is impossible to understand the one without the other. Attached to the attribute of presence, opposed as it is to our preoccupation of what is present-to-hand, is the notion “that all attempts of human beings to

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understand themselves from themselves and from the world that they have at their disposal are ill-fated.”62 This central Heideggerian theme certainly draws upon the Christian schooling in the weakness of the human perspective, cognitive as well as moral. We are inclined to think that what is before us is true, and are hardly aware of the fact that what is before us is only ever part, and the substitution of the part for the whole blinds us. The Christian notion of revelation kept the dialectic of revealment and concealment from the oblivion of the Western march towards transparency, and it is what taught Heidegger to look past the logic of progress which he believed started with a Greek misconception. Standing over against the paltry capacities of human attention is the massiveness of truth, the great oceans of truth building quietly against our little lakes and dams. The eventfulness of being is precisely the occasion of emergence from out of the darkness of what we have failed to remember, what we cannot keep before us. This is the particular pathos of human nature, that it is too frail for any real constancy, and yet it is somehow chosen to renew this fitful awareness, to keep this tie. The way this happens is that, in the midst of our forgetfulness, we are reminded. Perhaps even through this forgetfulness we gain the capacity to see. Self-understanding is a kind of Pascalian recognition of our doubleness, both too weak to see and capable of seeing. Consequently we see eventfully, both partially and beyond our own best intentions. The eventfulness of being testifies to our double role as unwitting witness: “Anyone who has achieved true self-understanding has had something and is having something happen to him.”63 Language is the battleground of revealment and concealment, where what is meaningful is dispersed through particularity: “Is not language always the language of the homeland and the process of becoming-athome in the world? And does this fact not mean that language knows no restrictions and never breaks down, because it holds infinite possibilities of utterance in readiness?” (78). Gadamer understands Heidegger’s dialectic of revelation-concealment to relate to another dialectic, that of infinity and finitude, the incapacity of discourse ever to be definitive, but always to be fruitful. “The human word is essentially incomplete.” So for instance the question of justice applied to concrete acts interpreted through a tradition of laws. This theme of incompletion is augmented later by adopting Heidegger’s dialectic of emergence and withdrawal:

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There is clearly a tension between the emergence and the sheltering that constitute the Being of the work itself. It is the power of this tension that constitutes the form-niveau of a work of art and produces the brilliance by which it outshines everything else. Its truth is not constituted simply by its laying bare its meaning, but rather by the unfathomableness and depth of its meaning. (107) The same may be said of the word. Commentators often make the mistake of attributing to this descriptive language of unfathomableness and depth of meaning in both Gadamer and Heidegger a reference to some kind of secret source or foundation in truth, but all Gadamer and Heidegger are really saying is that paltry human finitude will never encompass a matter that belongs to history. (par. 8, cont.) “Es handelt sich um mehr als um ein bloßes Bild.” [This is more than a mere similarity.] It is actually easier to understand what Gadamer is saying in this paragraph, which is a preçis of the entire subsection, by reversing the direction of the analogy! We can understand better the mystery of language by contemplating the doctrine of the Trinity. The danger is for us to think of this humble man Jesus as less than God, and so as distinct from God. But his appearance as a man is utterly tied to his salvific purpose, and so he is never merely a man, but the enactment of God’s sacrifice, and that is that he should be a man. His personhood is virtually equivalent to his symbolic role as Savior. This inseparability is what carries over to language. A word is never just an object or sound, but the meaning incarnate. It is always related to the thought and gets its being from the thought. Perhaps we have a case here of a true similitude, in which the mysteries are really the same mystery, and we can think from both directions to our benefit. In fact it is here that Gadamer gives the strongest warning that, as I have asserted in chapter 3, hermeneutics does not use the verbum as merely a helpful model. Instead, there is a true correspondence: “Here a human analogue—the mental word, the verbum intellectus—is helpful. 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.” This leads Gadamer directly to the conundrum he expresses next.

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par. 9, p. 421

Nun wird man sich fragen, ob hier nicht Unverständliches durch Unverständlichkeit erklärt wird. Was soll das für ein Wort sein, das inneres Gespräch des Denkens bleibt und keine Lautgestalt gewinnt? Gibt es das überhaupt? Zieht nicht all unser Denken immer schon in den Bahnen einer bestimmten Sprache, und wissen wir nicht zu gut, daß man in einer Sprache denken muß, wenn man sie wirklich sprechen will? Auch wenn wir uns der Freiheit erinnern, die sich unsere Vernunft angesichts der Sprachgebundenheit unseres Denkens bewahrt, sei es dadurch, daß sie künstliche Zeichensprachen erfindet und gebraucht, sei es daß sie aus der einen Sprache in die andere zu übersetzen weiß, ein Beginnen, das ja ebenso eine Erhebung über die Sprachgebundenheit zu dem gemeinten Sinn hin voraussetzt, so ist doch jede solche Erhebung selbst wieder, wie wir sahen, eine sprachliche. Die “Sprache der Vernunft” ist keine Sprache für sich. Was soll es also für einen Sinn haben, angesichts der Unaufhebbarkeit unserer Sprachgebundenheit von einem “inneren Wort” zu sprechen, das gleichsam in der reinen Vernunftsprache gesprochen wird? Worin erweist sich das Wort der Vernunft (wenn wir mit Vernunft hier intellectus wiedergeben) als ein wirkliches “Wort,”

Now one may ask if we are not here explaining the unintelligible with the incomprehensible. What kind of a word is it supposed to be that remains an inner speaking of thought that does not achieve sound? Is there really such a thing? Is not our thinking always carried along the channel of a particular language, and do we not know so well that one must think in language if one wants truly to speak? Even if we recall the freedom our reason preserves in confronting the bond of thinking to language — it would be thus that it invents and uses artificial signing, thus that it knows how to translate from one language into another, an undertaking that indeed presumes eclipsing this bondage to the intended meaning — yet every such eclipsing is itself again, as we have seen, linguistic. The “language of reason” is not a language per se. What then does it mean to talk of an inner word that is spoken — so to say — in the pure language of reason, if our dependence on language cannot be abrogated? What is the warrant for a “word of pure reason” (if we render intellectus as “reason” here), if it is not in fact a sounding word, or not

The Verbum and Augustine’s Inner Word wenn es doch kein wirklich ertönendes Wort sein soll, auch nicht das Phantasma eines solchen, sondern das von diesem mit einem Zeichen Bezeichnete, d.h. aber das Gemeinte und Gedachte selbst?

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even the “phantasm” of one, but rather a signaling of it with a sign, i.e., simply the meaning and the thought itself ?

Gadamer acknowledges the misalignment expressed in the previous paragraph in an indirect question that is often quoted—“Now one may ask if we are not here explaining the unintelligible with the incomprehensible.” But he is not making an apology for obscurity here. This paragraph is really nothing but a series of rhetorical questions that position the hermeneutic view that is being developed here in relation to the theology of the word. We have seen already points of divergence, and with this stream of questions about the inner word he is really marking out the territory in dispute. Hermeneutics is, after all, a critique of the idea that “the pure language of reason” exists, since reason is inextricably bound to the language we use (Sprachgebundenheit). His critical interrogation becomes sharper and sharper as the paragraph develops, until at the end, the last question asks whether the doctrine of the inner word is not simply another version of the dualism of the Cratylus. But the question itself is posed in such a way that we are asked to look more carefully at the specific mechanism of the inner word in order to test the inference. Is Augustine’s word in fact not a word that sounds or the image of such a word? Does Augustine truly separate them, as Western culture has done? (par. 9, cont.) “ein Beginnen, das ja ebenso eine Erhebung über die Sprachgebundenheit zu dem gemeinten Sinn hin voraussetzt” [an undertaking that indeed presumes eclipsing this bondage to the intended meaning—yet every such eclipsing is itself again, as we have seen, linguistic.] Translation is a recurring topos for hermeneutics as a counter-example or challenge to its insistence on the intimate unity of thought and speech. There is an unbridgeable distance between text and translator because of the difference of languages, something irreducibly alien. There is always

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something that will never be translated. The compromises the translator makes are negotiations between two language worlds. What results is something that Gadamer describes as “proportionate to the original,” an analogy between two worlds (TM, 387). The translation cannot capture “the overtones that vibrate in the original,” and if something beautiful is created in the translation, it is something new (386). The rising above the constraint of language is therefore not a victory, but simply a compromise. And when all is said and done, the process never escapes language. The Erhebung is the movement to another, an additional language with “a common diction and a common dictum” (387). The freedom of reason is therefore not a freedom from language, but a freedom that language enables. (par. 9, cont.) “Worin erweist sich das Wort der Vernunft (wenn wir mit Vernunft hier intellectus wiedergeben) als ein wirkliches “Wort,” wenn es doch kein wirklich ertönendes Wort sein soll, auch nicht das Phantasma eines solchen, sondern das von diesem mit einem Zeichen Bezeichnete, d.h. aber das Gemeinte und Gedachte selbst?” [What is the warrant for a “word of pure reason” (if we render intellectus as “reason” here), if it is not in fact a sounding word, or not even the “phantasm” of one, but rather a signaling of it with a sign, i.e., simply the meaning and the thought itself ?] Phantasm in Aquinas is the “image” of the material thing in the mind.64 Drawing from Aristotle, Aquinas elaborates a double structure of intellect, one side of which (intellectus possibilis) is “to provide room for thoughts,” the other side of which (intellectus agens) is “to create objects of thought.”65 The passageway of the mind involves the variable retention of ideas, the movement to abstraction from raw sense, the relation between encoded experience and disposition, and between images and words. The operation of the mind is a kind of laundering activity in which the contingencies of the material world are sorted out and placed in the light of their real being. Aquinas works out the intermediary stages in some detail so as to connect the timeless, spiritual world with the contingent, material world through the mind. Gadamer is making explicit in this sentence the difficulty for a modern of translating medieval terms. It is difficult for contemporary thought, schooled in the Leibnizian and Carte-

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sian language of pure reason, to hear the word intellectus 66 or verbum without these accretions. But in spite of the clumsy anachronisms, the Thomist conception is superior in its union of substance and subject to the mechanistic reduction of the physicists. Hermeneutics is the living spirit of this older tradition. In hermeneutics, the word testifies to itself by its own saying, that is, is its own testimony. The word carries its truth by its connection to the person and the life and culture in the voice. But within the framework of rationalism, a word that is merely a sign falls into the infinite regress of warranted proofs. Since the word is attached to the thing only by convention, we are truly lost in a world of mirrors. One should not leave this paragraph without noticing its consummate rhetorical force. A series of ascending questions climaxing in a single sustained claim in the middle, then returning to the insistent rhythm of rhetorical questions. Gadamer was self-deprecating about his writing ability, but he was a humanist through and through, marrying the rhythms of the Ciceronian period to the intentional prevarications of his own thought. What is breaking out here is his own hermeneutic misgivings about the proximity of the inner word to its scientific progeny. There is no question that Augustine and the Schoolmen with all this talk of an inner word laid the ground for the language of pure reason, as Heidegger would have been quick to note. The frustration of the first sentence in the paragraph can be explained by this worry, and this rhetorical peroration is Gadamer’s caution about his own reading. Hermeneutics at this point almost breaks the bounds of its own interpretive charity, and serves as a caution. At the same time, Gadamer manages to bolster his case by the implied claim. The living word is its own warrant, and the technique of the rhetorical question allows Gadamer to do both.

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s. 10, S. 425 ‒‒426

par. 10, pp. 421 ‒‒422

Weil die Lehre vom inneren Wort die theologische Ausdeutung der Trinität durch ihre Analogie tragen soll, kann uns die theologische Frage als solche hier nicht weiterhelfen. Wir müssen vielmehr die Sache befragen, was dieses “innere Wort” sein soll. Es kann nicht einfach der griechische Logos, das Gespräch, das die Seele mit sich selbst führt, sein. Vielmehr ist die bloße Tatsache, daß “logos” sowohl durch “ratio” als durch “verbum” wiedergegeben wird, ein Hinweis darauf, daß sich die Phänomenen der Sprache in der scholastischen Verarbeitung der griechischen Metaphysik stärker zur Geltung bringen wird, als bei den Griechen selbst der Fall war.

Because the doctrine of the inner word is intended to support the theological exegesis of the Trinity by analogy, the theological question as such can help us no further here. We need to ask rather what this “inner word” could be. It cannot be simply the Greek logos, the conversation of the soul with itself. It has rather to do with the simple fact that “logos” is rendered both as “ratio” and as “verbum,” an indication that the phenomenon of language in the scholastic interpretation is brought more firmly into line with Greek metaphysics than by the Greeks themselves.

That “the theological question as such can help us no further here” is a puzzling statement, not the least because Gadamer continues to return to the theology as an aid to comprehension in the remainder of the section, he has not been constrained up to this point from focusing on the ques260

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tion of language, and finally, he has already begun close consideration of the meaning of the inner word itself. But what he does do differently from this point is to broaden the discussion to take in and compare the Platonic, Stoic, and Neoplatonic theories of language in relation to the Christian concept. Gadamer is saying that he now has to get to the bottom of the relation between the inner word and thought itself in order to answer the questions he has just raised (par. 9). For this, he cannot invert Augustine’s analogy, but must see how the inner word stands up on its own. Aquinas is much more specific and systematic about the actual functioning of the inner word in the mind, which may be a reason Gadamer turns to him for closer analysis.1 And so I think he is not abandoning the depth of the mystery of language that is implied by its connection to the Trinity, but only the demonstrative force of the inverted analogy. And the truth of the matter is that Gadamer does not cease thinking of the similitude (see for example par. 16). It is central to his purpose. (par. 10, cont.) “. . . ‘logos’ sowohl durch ‘ratio’ als durch ‘verbum’ wiedergegeben wird” [“logos” is rendered both as “ratio” and as “verbum”] The transition in this paragraph from Augustine to Aquinas is almost imperceptible, marked only by the reference to scholasticism rather than the Fathers in the last sentence. Just as Gadamer sees Plato and Aristotle cooperating in the same project and building one on the other, so he seems to regard Augustine and Aquinas. Although he notes differences, he sees a close continuity. In any case, there is hardly a transition. The issue is the cultural translation of logos from the pagan Greek to the theological Latin, and this translation is thematized, appropriately, in a gloss of Augustine by Aquinas in the Commentary on the Gospel of St. John. Aquinas has four questions about John’s decision to use Word in place of Son in the prologue, and the third of the four questions “is raised by Augustine in his book Eighty-three Questions; and it is this. In Greek, where we have ‘Word,’ they have ‘Logos’; now since ‘Logos’ signifies in Latin both ‘notion’ and ‘word’ [i.e., ratio et verbum], why did the translators render it as ‘word’ and not ‘notion,’ since a notion is something interior just as a word is?” (35).2 Aquinas answers that “word” contains both meanings, inner and outer: “I answer that ‘notion’ [ratio], properly speaking, names a conception of the mind precisely as in the mind, even if

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through it nothing exterior comes to be; but ‘word’ signifies a reference to something exterior” (35). An inner word, in this sense, remains within, but points to something without: And so because the Evangelist, when he said “Logos,” intended to signify not only a reference to the Son’s existence in the Father, but also the operative power of the Son, by which, through him, all things were made, our predecessors preferred to translate it “Word,” which implies a reference to something exterior, rather than “notion,” which implies merely a concept of the mind. (35) The “operative power” of the word refers to the immanent procession of the Trinity into and through the world, its action in the transformation of people’s lives. The distinction to keep in mind here is that in the Thomist scheme of things the world enters into the mind where it is transformed into a conversation with God. The link is never severed with the world, but the center of action is inward. The world in a sense figures the drama of the return to God’s love, but the event of return actually happens in the soul of the believer. Gadamer reflects this complexity, and does not contribute to its clarification. In paragraph 5 he speaks of the Augustinian-Thomist analogy in terms of the spoken word: “The analogy between the inner and the outer word, speaking the word aloud in the ‘vox,’ now acquires an exemplary value” (419). But in paragraph 12, he will insist that the analogy for Aquinas is not from the inner word to the outer word: “To be sure, the word is not the full achievement of communication, an irrevocable delivering up of one’s own thinking to another, nevertheless the character of the word’s being is in any case still an event” (par. 12). As it turns out, the characteristic of externalization or manifestation in the word is not its only or even primary relevance in the analogy for Aquinas. More important than manifestation is the peculiar character of relation (relatio) that distinguishes verbum from ratio.3 Relation is the term of equivocation between the two terms, because it is a characteristic shared by both, and yet it has a different sense in each. The clarification is to be found in the Quaestiones. There the relation of the word is a relation of dependency rather than accident, a “real relation” (relatio realiter) in the manner of the dependency of human beings on God:

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Whenever two things are related to each other in such a way that one depends upon the other but the other does not depend upon it, there is a real relation in the dependent member, but in the independent member the relation is merely one of reason — simply because one thing cannot be understood as being related to another without that other being understood as being related to it. The motion of such a relation becomes clear if we consider knowledge, which depends on what is known, although the latter does not depend on it. / Consequently, since all creatures depend on God but He does not depend on them, there are real relations in creatures, referring them to God. The opposite relations in God to creatures, however, are merely conceptual relations.4 This is almost like the semantic distinction between a mathematical relation and a blood relation. But the essential point is that the relation of the word is one of ontological necessity: “From the very fact of His being the Son, the Son perfectly represents the Father in that which is intrinsic to the Father” (q. 4, a. 5). The word bears an intrinsic relation to that which it names. The relation to the thing is given life by the person uttering, by its connection to the person. The “word is related to the one who utters it and to that which is uttered by the word” and is, like the Son to the Father, “a knot intrinsicate.” Thus, the word is related “to a thing to which the character of being uttered belongs” [ad rem cui convenit ratio dicti] (q. 4 a. 5, reply). As it says in the Summa, the person is spoken by the word (I, q. 34). This is an extraordinary development in the theory of language. The bond of thought-word-thing is an ontological bond. It is emanation. (par. 10, cont.) “. . . sich die Phänomenen der Sprache in der scholastischen Verarbeitung der griechischen Metaphysik stärker zur Geltung bringen wird, als bei den Griechen selbst der Fall war.” [. . . the phenomenon of language in the scholastic interpretation is brought more firmly into line with Greek metaphysics than by the Greeks themselves.] With this claim we have a concise example of Gadamer’s counterturning argument, a way of expressing the gradual progress of tradition in coming to terms with an issue which is at the same time not progressing

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past the original insight. Gadamer attributes to the Greeks a kind of wisdom that foreshadowed and perhaps superseded everything that was to follow, but a wisdom that they had not fully come to terms with. This is Heidegger again, who even more went back to the Greeks as the profoundest point of origin of Western culture, as if Greek understanding was a kind of formale Anzeige or verbum in itself. Greek metaphysics understood how the manifestation or shining of truth in appearance is not separate from the truth itself, but simply had not applied this to language. s. 11, S. 426

par. 11, p. 422

Die besondere Schwierigkeit, das scholastische Denken für unsere Fragestellung fruchtbar zu machen, besteht darin, daß das christliche Wortverständnis, wie wir es bei den Vätern teils in Anlehnung, teils in Umbildung spätantiker Gedanken finden, mit der Rezeption der aristotelischen Philosophie durch die Hochscholastik dem Logos-Begriff der klassischen griechischen Philosophie wieder angenähert worden ist. So hat Thomas die aus dem Prolog des Johannes-Evangeliums entwickelte christliche Lehre mit Aristoteles systematisch vermittelt. Bei ihm ist bezeichnenderweise von der Vielheit der Sprachen kaum noch die Rede, die Augustin immerhin noch erörtert, wenngleich zugunsten des “inneren Wortes” ausschaltet. Die Lehre vom “inneren Wort” ist für ihn die selbstverständliche Voraussetzung, unter der er den Zusammenhang von forma und verbum untersucht.

The difficulty in making scholastic thought productive for our inquiry is that the Christian understanding of the word as we find it in the fathers, who partly support and partly transform the thought of late antiquity, had with the high scholastic reception of Aristotle once again come closer to the logos-concept of classical Greek philosophy. Thus did Thomas bring together systematically the Christian doctrine developed out of the prologue of John the Evangelist with Aristotelian philosophy. For Thomas, notably, there is hardly any discussion of the multiplicity of languages, which Augustine at least addressed before he discarded it in favor of the inner word. For Thomas the doctrine of the “inner word” is the self-evident starting point for inquiring into the connection of forma and verbum.

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Paragraph 11 is in part an extended disclaimer. Aquinas may have even taken a small step back from Augustine, who at least mentioned the variousness of the spoken tongue. The paradox of these thinkers is that all the while they are developing the processive nature of thought, they lay the ground ever more exquisitely for Western subjectivism. Gadamer only glances on this paradox, essentially using it to pivot toward the positive contribution of the scholastics. He will make a more forceful correction in the closing sections of Truth and Method. The circuity and compaction of Gadamer’s thought is evident here. He intimates this disclaimer or concession in the first half of the first sentence of the paragraph, but in the second half of the sentence he is already turning to the advance Aquinas could make over Augustine in realizing the full potential of the Logos doctrine. Only Thucydides’ periods are this overloaded and overlapping!5 In any case, what was this advance? Patristic theology drew from Philo, Plotinus, Chrysippus, etc. (“spätantiker Gedanken”) to interpret John’s prologue, whereas Aquinas drew primarily on the classical Greek tradition of Aristotle. Augustine, it will be remembered, drew inspiration from the contrast between the logos endiathetos and logos prophorikos, and his conception of the word is developed out of Neoplatonist and Stoic language theory. Aquinas saw the verbum interius in relation to the metaphysical questions of form, substance, act, idea, etc.6 This vocabulary allowed Aquinas, in Gadamer’s view, to advance further into the understanding of the processiveness of human thought than Augustine. We are here beginning to find out why Gadamer chose Aquinas over Augustine in his final draft of Truth and Method when he had to develop the exegesis on the inner word. (par. 11, cont.) “Die Lehre vom ‘inneren Wort’ ist für ihn die selbstverständliche Voraussetzung, unter der er den Zusammenhang von forma und verbum untersucht.” [For Thomas the doctrine of the “inner word” is the self-evident starting point for inquiring into the connection of forma and verbum.] If the Aristotelian solution to Platonic dualism was an immense achievement for metaphysics, the difficulty for Aquinas was even greater, since Aristotle had only to assert the immanence of the divine as form to matter. How to explain a personal God, not existing in a separate universe,

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but in perfect self-sufficiency, responsible for the creation of the universe? If understanding is different in a temporal and eternal context, how can the two not be of two worlds? As it worked itself out in Aquinas, the universe is a creation of God, as effect to cause, so God is related to the world in a particular way; as a cause is in all things which it effects. The common term in this relationship, the thing which bridges God and universe, is act. God is pure act, and the universe which he created, is an effect. It bears a likeness to its creator as an effect has some essential connection to its cause. But it is better to say that it seeks its principle, since its being “is ordered to” God as a capacity to its purpose. The movement of matter to form, potency to act, is the movement toward principle which instructs the actualization of the world. Form stands in relation to matter as this instruction: God is the first exemplary cause of all things. . . . Now it is manifest that things made by nature receive determinate forms. This determination of forms must be reduced to the divine wisdom as its first principle, for divine wisdom devised the order of the universe, which order consists in the variety of things. And therefore we must say that in the divine wisdom are the types of all things, which types we have called ideas—that is, exemplary forms existing in the divine mind.7 Where in this scheme of things does the inner word fit? It is for Aquinas precisely what is the essential working of the mind, the achievement of human intellect that marks the passage between the temporal and transcendent. In intellection the word is an achievement that follows discursive reasoning, but once it is achieved, it resembles what divine intelligence (both God and angels) knew all along, so the process mimics that atemporal realization; a poor imitation, but an imitation nonetheless. It is important to see here the coming together of Platonic and Aristotelian aspects of form. Aristotle denies the presence of a separate world of Forms by constructing reality as something which requires cognition, as potency (matter) to form (intellect). Reality is the continual interplay of abstract category and material instance. Aquinas accepts this vision of the world, but he says that this is a further expression of God’s actuality rather than a by-product. This allows him to describe what appear to be two different realms operating on different principles. But what he has in mind is a single reality divided by orders of understanding, more and

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less perfect. He can do this if he finds a middle term that can modulate between temporal and eternal orders, and this middle term is verbum, a term which, with far fewer linguistic resources, bears even more weight than the Greek logos. We hear in Aquinas’s formulation of the verbum the echo of the Stoic understanding of logos as an informing principle, except that matter for him has no share in this impulse, and its potency is simply its susceptibility. A world of matter-becoming-form is not just a feeble shadow, but an intended effect of God’s grace, so that its kinship has a greater dignity: “Thus, then, all creatures are nothing but a kind of real expression and representation of those things which are comprehended in the conception of the divine Word.”8 Verbum becomes the middle term in this formula because it is both word and Word, modulating two different forms of understanding: There especially seems to be, furthermore, a kind of kinship of the Word for human nature. For man gets his proper species from being rational. But the Word is kin to the reason. Hence, among the Greeks “word” and “reason” are called logos. Most appropriately, then, was the Word united to the reasonable nature, for by reason of the kinship mentioned the divine Scripture attributes the name “image” to the Word and to man . . .9 So now we have a sense of the importance of the inner word in the grand scheme of the Thomist universe. It is, insofar as it represents the event horizon of the temporal universe, its exact center. What passes through the verbum’s center is not only the synchronic structure of the divine image but the diachronic structure of its historical enactment. The way in which speech operates makes this performative structure powerfully self-evident. The first question Aquinas asks in the De natura is what a word is, and his answer is that “the word in its essential character is in more perfect agreement with the thing being expressed by the word than with the person expressing it, even granting that the word exists in the mind of the speaker as in the thing itself ” (270). True enough, this language about “agreement of the word with the thing” shares much with the mainstream linguistic theory that Gadamer so much opposes. But what Aquinas has done here beyond this formula is to unite the Aristotelian idea of form with the Johannine idea of word. The intrinsic

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connection of forma and verbum juxtaposes the playing out of the potency of form with the theological idea of procession. From the Aristotelian side, Aquinas describes God teleologically as having the idea of the universe in his mind from the moment of its creation (so to speak),10 and from the Johannine side, he expresses the playing out of this form through the word in history.11 The word is the form, excepting that the exchange allows the potentiation of form to be expressed in terms of articulation rather than simply enmattering. The transposition from the purely physical to the social has another advantage, since the dualism that Aristotle wishes to distance himself from that so easily attaches to the pairing of form-matter or formcontent is interrupted by the concept of linguistic expression. The word is only more or less expressed in its articulation, and needs therefore ongoing articulation until it is fully expressed, which is itself a relative or local perfection at best. The fact that Latin has two words for the logos of the Greeks, ratio and verbum, allows the fathers, according to Gadamer, to come closer to the processive, historical nature of human thought/language than even the Greeks. He cautions that the distance Augustine and Aquinas travel is still limited, since their notion of the inner word is still not a theory of language expressed in its cultural diversity. Nevertheless, the inner word contains attributes of becoming and difference that will come to rupture the static ontology of linguistic adequation. He will elaborate this point now. s. 12, S. 426

par. 12, p. 422

Gleichwohl besteht auch bei Thomas keine vollständige Deckung von Logos und Verbum. Zwar ist das Wort nicht das Geschehen des Aussprechens, diese unwiderrufbare Überantwortung des eigenen Denkens an einen anderen, aber der Seinscharakter des Wortes ist gleichwohl ein Geschehen. Das innere Wort bleibt auf seine mögliche Äußerung bezogen. Der Sachgehalt, wie er vom Intellekt

All the same, for Thomas as well there is not a perfect overlap between logos and verbum. To be sure, the word is not the full achievement of communication, an irrevocable delivering up of one’s own thinking to another, nevertheless the character of the word’s being is in any case still an event. The inner word remains related to its potential for being made manifest. The matter at hand as it is conceived by the

The Aquinas Section aufgefaßt wird, ist zugleich auf die Verlautbarung hin geordnet (similitudo rei concepta in intellectu et ordinata ad manifestationem vel ad se vel ad alterum). Das innere Wort ist also gewiß nicht auf eine bestimmte Sprache bezogen, und es hat überhaupt nicht den Charakter eines Vorschwebens von Worten, die aus dem Gedächtnis hervorkommen, sondern es ist der bis zu Ende gedachte Sachverhalt (forma excogitata). Insofern es sich um ein Zuendedenken handelt, ist auch in ihm ein prozessuales Moment anzuerkennen. Es verhält sich per modum egredientis. Es ist zwar nicht Äußerung, sondern Denken, aber es ist die Perfektion des Denkens, die in diesem Sich-Sagen erreicht wird. Das innere Wort, indem es das Denken ausdrückt, bildet also gleichsam die Endlichkeit unseres diskursiven Verstandes ab. Weil unser Verstand das, was er weiß, nicht in Einem denkenden Blick umfaßt, muß er jeweils das, was er denkt, erst aus sich herausführen und wie in einer inneren Selbstaussprache vor sich selber hinstellen. In diesem Sinne ist alles Denken ein Sichsagen.

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intellect is at the same time ordered toward its articulation (similitudo rei concepta in intellectu et ordinata ad manifestationem vel ad se vel ad alterum). The inner word is thus certainly not drawn from a particular language, nor does it have the character of words held in mind that are drawn from memory, but rather it is the matter thought to the end (forma excogitata). And in as much as it has to do with thinking to the end, there is a processual moment recognizable in it. It acts per modum egredientis. It is certainly not externalized, but rather thinking that is the perfection of thought reached in its self-saying. The inner word, while it expresses thought, represents as much the finitude of our discursive understanding. Because our understanding does not grasp what it knows in one instant of thought, it must first draw out from itself what it thinks, and place that before itself in an inner self-expression. In this sense all thinking is a self-saying.

Paragraphs 12 through 16 are thematically united in tracing the similarity between human discursiveness and trinitarian procession. The subsequent paragraphs (17 ‒ 23) address the differences between the two. Both sides of this relation go to the heart of Gadamer’s purpose, and his writing here reflects the complexity and depth of the subject. He is attempting here to address the difference and identity of temporal succession and

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divine procession. With paragraph 12, Gadamer returns to the question he asked at the end of the ninth paragraph. How does the conception of the inner word make progress toward understanding language beyond the theory of the sign, even though it stops short of the constitutive sociality of Gadamer’s Sprachlichkeit ? (par. 12, cont.) “Gleichwohl besteht auch bei Thomas keine vollständige Deckung von Logos und Verbum.” [All the same, for Thomas as well there is not a perfect overlap between logos and verbum.] Because of the nuance of this paragraph, it is important to fix its topic as an orientation point in order to navigate the developing argument. Gadamer has just spoken of the inner word as the connection between Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian theology, and now he has qualified it. To say that “there is not a perfect overlap between logos and verbum” makes clear in retrospect “the self-evident starting point” of Aquinas; i.e., that logos serves as a common term, that which is translated into verbum, mediating the two traditions. The qualification then is that there is an equivocation in the translation itself, and that the passage from logos to verbum sets up a disequilibrium between the two traditions. We can guess that this disequilibrium, as a kind of Hegelian difference, will be generative for the hermeneutic understanding of language. (par. 12, cont.) “Zwar ist das Wort nicht das Geschehen des Aussprechens, diese unwiderrufbare Überantwortung des eigenen Denkens an einen anderen, aber der Seinscharakter des Wortes ist gleichwohl ein Geschehen.” [To be sure, the word is not the full achievement of communication, an irrevocable delivering up of one’s own thinking to another, the character of the word’s being is in any case still an event.] This is confirmed by the next sentence, which points ahead to the hermeneutic position by qualifying the progress of the verbum toward it. The “irrevocable delivering up of one’s own thinking to another” is the nub of the hermeneutic phenomenon, the power of language to create a common understanding that is no longer subjective but shared. The hermeneutic word is an event in that conception because it marks

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the passing out from the presence of the subjective to a realm that is no longer captive to that presence. It is irrevocable in the sense that one is no longer master of the thought which has been made public, and must now enter into the conversation of everyone. It is a delivering up because one offers it in this way with all the risk attendant on a social act. The Thomist verbum is still an event in that it requires a discursive development that issues in a fulfilled idea. Because the word in this conception cannot be fully present, and will exist in its fullness only in its unfolding, it exhibits “the finitude of our discursive understanding.” Even within the mind of the thinker, the inner word is a dialogue. Moreover, Gadamer forgets that the De natura (and this must explain in part his attraction to that document) does address the sociality of language — “the word spoken by diverse speakers concerning the very same thing” (sect. 270), etc. (par. 12, cont.) “es ist der bis zu Ende gedachte Sachverhalt)” [it is the matter thought to the end] Forma refers to the Aristotelian nexus between form and matter that subverts dualist idealism: “The central problem of the Metaphysics is whether substance is to be identified with form or with the inseparable composite of form and matter.”12 Forma is the Latin word that stands as a placemarker for the idea resident in all three Greek words logos, telos, and eidos that there is something for which the formless strives. It is the unresolved tension between these ends and their potency in the material world that creates the need to conceive a mediation between human discursiveness and divine intuition, tried again and again, but with a particular felicity in the Christian tradition when it thought of forma as verbum. So, in spite of the fact that Aquinas is not mainly concerned with the essential linguisticality of human understanding in the sense Humboldt would later propose, the tradition gains much by comprehending the inextricable bond of process and result in understanding. Our ideas and judgments are formed in contact with a world of particulars to which those ideas are bound. Mind and thought are not subject and object, but the processive constitution of a world with which we come-to-terms.

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(par. 12, cont.) “forma excogitata” The difficult idea of the forma excogitata is not immediately evident in Gadamer’s text, but unfolds gradually in the explication. The first clarifying tip comes with his invocation of a phrase that is common to Augustine and Aquinas—the inner word as a forma excogitata —loosely, the matter at hand thought through completely.13 The processive nature of human thought does not mean that the object of our thinking is essentially temporal, but only that we cannot get at it any other way. Aquinas thought of the verbum as a kind of achievement, in the way that a judgment is in the end a result of long deliberation. The judgment cannot stand apart from the struggle of thought that gave birth to it, and represents that struggle. In its decisiveness, its necessary isolation, it “represents as much the finiteness of our discursive understanding” (422). Its achievement is “the perfection of thought,” but that perfection is a testimony to its other, the discursive struggle that underlies it: “Because our understanding does not grasp what it knows in one instant of thought, it must first draw out from itself what it thinks” (422). There are several sources for the concept of the forma excogitata which illustrate a complex genealogy. The idea is beautifully anticipated in Plotinus, in a passage where he speaks of a “silent word”! It comes up in his argument about the relation of the practical to the contemplative life, where he describes the capacity of the soul to internalize experience for reflection. Imagine someone wishing to achieve greatly. Plotinus says that that achievement would not be complete simply in the act, but would only be fulfilled as it was understood, and that a person would then need to get to the heart of the achievement in order for it to be fully realized: Action, then, is for the sake of contemplation and vision, so that for men of action, too, contemplation is the goal, and what they cannot get by going straight to it, so to speak, they seek to obtain by going round about. For, again, when they reach what they want, the thing which they wished to exist, not so that they should not know it but so that they should know it and see it present in their soul, it is, obviously, an object set there for contemplation. This is so, too, because they act for the sake of a good; but this means, not that the good arising from their action should be outside them, or that they should not have it, but that

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they should have it. But where do they have it? In their soul. So action bends back again to contemplation, for what someone receives in his soul, which is a logos form [ejn yuch/˜ . . . lovgw/ ou[sh/] what can it be other than a logos not spoken [lovgoı siwpw ˜ n]? And more so, the more it is within the soul. . . . And, in proportion as the confidence is clearly, the contemplation is quieter, in that it unifies more, and what knows, in so far as it knows—we must be serious now—comes into unity with what is known. . . . The soul, then, when it has become akin to and disposed according to the rational principle, still, all the same, utters and propounds it—for it did not possess it primarily—and learns it thoroughly and by its proposition becomes other than it, and looks at it, considering it, like one thing looking at another; and yet soul, too, was a rational principle and a sort of intellect, but an intellect seeing something else. For it is not full, but has something wanting in relation to what comes before it; yet it itself sees also quietly what it utters. For it does not go on uttering what it has uttered well already, but what it utters, it utters because of its deficiency, with a view to examining it, trying to learn thoroughly what it possesses.14 In a way, Plotinus anticipates and combines every element of the forma excogitata that is expressed after him. What a thing is comes to us only gradually in a ripening of understanding. But then we have it, finally. This is an example of something that is ours that we do not have until we know it well and deeply, when it is thought through to the end. We have here an example of the paradox of something that is both circular and processive. We have it before we know it, but only when we know it do we have it. In defining reflection, Plotinus’s description of how even “men of action” revolve an idea in their minds before it is fully formed and ready to be spoken is a clear precedent to the idea of the inner word. He describes here so richly the process whereby an inchoate idea nevertheless has a sense of direction so that, by revolving a thing in our minds, it can be fleshed out to become more fully itself, like the painter’s search for the proverbial final touch. Action is discursive, intuition is immediate, but although the mind possesses an idea in its perfection first, it does not have it until it is acted out—either through discussion or creation—so that, in a sense, the silent logos is both perfect and imperfect. As we will see, Augustine and Aquinas preserve the paradox but emphasize different aspects of it.

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Here is the passage from the De Trinitate where Augustine speaks of the same pattern and principle as Plotinus. It occurs now in the heart of Augustine’s ruminations on the inner word: [O]nly God can be understood to have an everlasting Word co-eternal with himself. Unless perhaps you could say that the very possibility of thought, given that what is known can be truly thought about even when it is not being thought about, is a word as continuous as the knowledge itself is continuous. But how can that be a word which has not yet been formed in the sight which is actual thought? How will it be like the knowledge it is born from it if does not have its form? Is it already to be called a word because it can have this form? That amounts to saying that it should already be called a word because it can be a word. But in that case, what is it that can be a word and therefore already deserves the name of word? What, I ask, is this formable not-yet-formed thing, but something of our mind which we cast about hither and thither with a kind of chopping and changing motion as we think about now this and now that just as it occurs to us or comes our way? And the time you get a true word is when this thing that I have said we cast around with a chopping and changing motion [volubili motione] falls onto [iactare ad] something we know and is formed from it and takes on [capiens] its exact likeness, so that the thing is thought about exactly as it is known, that is to say is uttered in the heart without either voice or thought of voice which would ipso facto belong to some language. And thus even if we concede, to avoid thrashing around in an argument about words, that something of our mind [quiddam illud mentis nostrae] which can be formed from our knowledge should already be called a word even before it has been formed, because it is already, so to say, formable; still, who could fail to see what a vast dissimilarity there is here to the Word of God which is in the form of God without first being formable and afterward formed, and which could never ever be formless, but is simple form and simply equal to him from whom it is and with whom it is wonderfully coeternal?15 The human word displays something of the perfection of God’s word and the utter dispersion of the linguistic utterance. What Augustine asks for he concedes from the outside to be illogical, and after he offers up

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the best possibility to hand he knows how short he has fallen. Is there any sense in saying the something can “already be called a word because it can be a word”? This framing of the question seems to construct failure into the answer. And how do we avoid thinking about this in Aristotelian terms of a potency ordered towards its form? We have to approach what he is getting at in the inner word with these issues in mind, because the conception lives, so to speak, in the reservations. Augustine echoes Plotinus’s reference to the soul in his formula “the mind is so constructed . . .” Just as Plotinus affirms the convenientia of the soul to the thing that needs uttering, so Augustine affirms that “the something of our mind” in a sense preconceives the thing that needs to be expressed, because it is an expression, an actualization, of it (the mind). The agreement or harmony in the universe (convenientia) that allows minds to find the truth of anything, which is to say, to find what is of the mind in it and it in the mind (adaequatio), means that the mind brings what it has to bear on what there is to be seen. It offers something, it finds something. The fact that there is anything to be offered or found depends on a prior susceptibility. The mind is so constructed; it has evolved and advances in a productive relation to the world. Let us think in terms of one of the richest examples, something that could have been before Augustine’s mind, and was certainly in his background, as he thought about this. A civic leader faces a practical question, a contingent matter that fits no predetermined rule or law, without arts or systems to guide. It is the typical situation of the Roman orator-politician. What does the wise leader bring to this circumstance? The answer that the rhetorical tradition would give, phronesis, prudentia, is close to what Augustine must have in mind, a kind of seasoned wisdom, a repository of experience ready to be applied to the specific circumstance. This judgment-notyet-formed is not a mind that is undeveloped, but a wisdom that is not yet applied. The word, the judgment, is not some distant possibility, some creation out of whole cloth, but the dialectic of application and invention that lies behind the notion of practical reason. The experienced mind has this kind of ripeness, it is “that something of our mind which can be formed from our knowledge . . . because it is already, so to say, formable.” So, without the elaborated Aristotelian framework of potency and act, Augustine moves towards a conception that is not at all discordant with its later Aristotelian interpretation. This is why the Augustinian vocabulary — formable but not yet formed — is retained right through

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Aquinas to Gadamer. It does not, however, refer to a prior perfection; that is Aquinas only. Aquinas’s appropriation of the idea states the matter so as to bring it into the closest proximity to the trinitarian mystery. Gadamer’s explication is an accurate paraphrase of section 277 of the De natura, and the paradoxical language Gadamer uses is a fair rendering of the Thomist text: “In truth, thinking when it happens in silence is still in fact speaking, just as it is in the divine, where to speak of the word is to speak regarding the person.” Thus the inner dialogue with oneself is closer to the procession of the Father to the Son, which is neither an externalization nor a diminution. The actual phrase forma excogitata appears in neither of the two treatises on the verbum, nor in the relevant sections in the Summa, but rather in the Questions. In question three of the Quaestiones disputatae, Aquinas employs for an example of the forma excogitata a piece of architecture in the mind of the architect. The original insight of the builder is, in a manner of speaking, a word, and the articulation of the house in the subsequent drawings and plans and then the actual building is a working out of what had already been in sight, so to speak: A form can exist in the intellect in two ways. First, it can exist there so as to be a principle [principium] of the act of understanding, as is the form had by a knower in so far as he understands. This is the likeness of what is understood, existing in him. Second, the form can exist in the intellect so as to be the end-term of the act of understanding [terminus actus intelligendi]. For example, by understanding an architect thinks out the form of a house [excogitat formam domus]; and since that form has been thought out [forma sit excogitata] by means of an act of understanding and is, as it were, effected by [quasi per actum effecta] that act, it cannot be a principle of the act of understanding and thus the first means by which the understanding takes place. It is, instead, the understood, by which the knower makes something. Nevertheless, it is the second means by which understanding takes place, because it is by means of the excogitated form [per formam excogitatam] that the architect understands what he is to make. Similarly, with respect to the speculative intellect, we see that the species by which the intellect is informed so that it can actually understand is the first means

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by which understanding takes place; and because the intellect is brought into act by means of this form, it can now operate and form quiddities of things, as well as compose and divide. Consequently, the quiddities formed in the intellect, or even the affirmative and negative propositions, are, in a sense, products of the intellect, but products of such a kind that through them the intellect arrives at the knowledge of an exterior thing.16 The first kind of species would be a first principle that required no ratiocination, but rather simply intuition. The second form is a product of cogitation, and therefore occurs at the end of a process. Gadamer’s point is that this second constructed form is analogous to the discursivity of speech, which is never just one word, but many words. With the distinction of the two forms, Aquinas would seem to have drained the concept of Augustine’s paradox, but that would be only if the treatises on the verbum preserved the lucid simplicity of the Quaestiones. The verbum appears to be something in between, or a combination of, the first and second forms Aquinas describes here. According to the De differentia, it forms “in act,” “when understanding,” and, as Gadamer notes, “per modum egredientis” (sect. 288). The mind must think towards the completed form before it achieves it, and that processive activity of thinking is prior to the idea. It “preconceives” (praeconcipiens) the form, and is, therefore, counterintuitively, before the idea. The discursivity of human intellect, Aquinas is saying, destroys the simple binary of expression and meaning. The distance between the initial idea and its perfection is the processive space of the mind’s action. In a way that helps us understand Gadamer’s receptivity to Aquinas’s conception, Humboldt describes the difference between word and words in a way that characterizes the idea of the peculiar perfection of language: Naturally this does not mean that one is to think of language as a given that is complete and finished. . . . It necessarily grows out of an individual, gradually growing up with him, but in such a way that its organization does not lie, like an inert mass, in the dark of a man’s soul till it is brought forth, but instead that its laws condition the functions of thought. Thus the very first word gives the hint of and presupposes the whole rest of the language.17

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In other words, language is neither just synchronic nor diachronic, but both dialectically. Note that the implication of wholeness in the word— that is to say, in the use of language—is also caught in Aquinas’s notion of perfection, except that Aquinas sees this relation even more decisively as an ontological structure: “For our word is always in continual becoming, because its complete existence is always in its becoming” [Verbum enim nostrum semper est in continuo fieri, quia semper perfectum esse sum est in fieri] (DN, sect. 277). For purposes of comparison, Heidegger’s explanation of what he called the formale Anzeige, a phenomenological “definition,” is significantly different, because it occurs at the level of actual human discourse, but it preserves the complex relation between process and completion: In every mode of possession as such, the object is, in one way or another, “under discussion.” The appropriate genuine possession can then in itself require an explicit discussion: the task can become that of bringing the discussion around to, and of speaking explicitly about, the “what” of the object in the “how” of its being possessed. This task is itself such that in each case it arises out of and in a situation of possessing objects, in a situation of factical experience and existence. . . . The philosophical definition occasions a pre-“turning” to the object, such that I do indeed not “turn” to the content. The definition is “formally” indicative — the “way,” the “approach.” What is pre-given is a bond that is indeterminate as to content but determinate as to the way of actualization.18 Gadamer notes that Aquinas’s inner word may be complete and perfect, but short of being expressed, so that procession, a kind of imperfection, is built into it: It is, to paraphrase and reverse Heidegger, determinate as to content but indeterminate as to actualization. The inner word is thought through to the end but conceived before the expression, and this expression will take more than one word. What all of these conceptions have in common is a defeat of simple linear causality. The initial idea has in some way an anticipation of what follows, and the end product somehow completes the initial idea. There is a lack on both ends that drives the process. Human temporality is a pale mirror of the eternal. To say that the inner word is ordered toward its being uttered means that it is complete and incomplete at the same time.

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s. 13, S. 426 ‒‒427

par. 13, 422 ‒‒423

Nun hat das gewiß auch die griechische Logos-Philosophie gewußt. Plato beschreibt das Denken als ein inneres Gespräch der Seele mit sich selber, und die Unendlichkeit der dialektischen Bemühung, die er von dem Philosophen fordert, ist der Ausdruck der Diskursivität unseres endlichen Verstandes. Auch hat Plato im Grunde, so sehr er das “reine Denken” forderte, stets anerkannt, daß das Medium von Onoma und Logos für das Denken der Sache unentbehrlich bleibt. Wenn aber mit der Lehre vom inneren Wort nichts weiter gemeint ist als die Diskursivität des menschlichen Denkens und Sprechens, wie soll das “Wort” dann zu dem Prozeß der göttlichen Personen, von dem die Trinitätslehre spricht, eine Analogie bilden? Ist nicht gerade der Gegensatz von Intuition und Diskursivität dann im Wege? Wo ist das Gemeinsame zwischen diesem und jenem “Prozeß”?

Now Greek logos philosophy certainly knew this. Plato described thinking as an inward speaking of the soul with itself. The unending dialectical struggle which he demanded of philosophy is the expression of the discursivity of our finite understanding. Plato also never ceased to recognize at bottom, in spite of his demand for pure thought, that the medium of onoma and logos for thinking about any subject matter remained inescapable. But if the doctrine of the inner word means nothing more than the discursivity of human thinking and speaking,19 how then can the “word” be invoked as an analogy to the procession of the divine persons in trinitarian doctrine? At that point is not the contrast between intuition and discursivity actually an obstacle? Where is the commonality between the latter and the former “process”?

(par. 13) “Nun hat das gewiß auch die griechische Logos-Philosophie gewußt.” [Now Greek logos philosophy certainly knew this.] If the exegetical lengths towards which I have gone in the previous section need some justification, it is given here. The mere recognition of “the inward speaking of the soul with itself ” is not enough to explain the importance to Gadamer of the verbum interius. Plato’s famous phrase occurs in the Sophist: “Well, thinking and discourse are the same thing, except that what we call thinking is, precisely, the inward dialogue carried

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on by the mind with itself without spoken sound” (263e). Gadamer had explained earlier in Truth and Method why this conception had come up short: “The pure thought of ideas, dianoia, is silent, for it is a dialogue of the soul with itself (aneu phones). . . . Plato undoubtedly did not consider the fact that the process of thought, if conceived as a dialogue of soul, itself involves a connection with language” (TM, 407/WM, 411). What Gadamer means by “language” has to do with its sociality, as Humboldt had taught him: No one when he uses a word has in mind exactly the same thing that another has, and the difference, however tiny, sends its tremors throughout language, if one may compare language with the most volatile element. With each thought, each feeling, this difference returns, thanks to the element of unvarying identity in individuality, and finally forms a mass of elements which singly went unnoticed. All understanding, therefore, is always at the same time a misunderstanding—this being a truth which it is most useful to know in practical life—and all agreement of feelings and thoughts is at the same time a means for growing apart.20 But as usual Gadamer’s reservation needs to be qualified, and the advance of the verbum constrained. For Gadamer, the dialogues themselves demonstrate the incompleteness of human understanding, and the necessity to continue questioning in the way that they so often end in indecision or aporia. In the 1931 Plato essay, Gadamer says that Plato’s philosophy is a dialectic because “it knows man as a creature that is thus ‘on the way’ and ‘between.’”21 The incompleteness of discursive thought is not a reason to despair, but simply the finite means humans have to seek wisdom: “We shall be better, braver, and more active men if we believe it right to look for what we don’t know than if we believe there is no point in looking because what we don’t know we can never discover.”22 Both the obligation always to ask the next question, and the hopefulness that lies behind the effort to keep asking, characterize both Platonic dialogue and the discursive movement of the mind searching for the word. (par. 13, cont.) “Wenn aber mit der Lehre vom inneren Wort nichts weiter gemeint ist als die Diskursivität des menschlichen Denkens

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und Sprechens, wie soll das “Wort” dann zu dem Prozeß der göttlichen Personen, von dem die Trinitätslehre spricht, eine Analogie bilden? Ist nicht gerade der Gegensatz von Intuition und Diskursivität dann im Wege?” [But if the doctrine of the inner word means nothing more than the discursivity of human thinking and speaking, how then can the “word” be invoked as an analogy to the procession of the divine persons in trinitarian doctrine? At that point is not the contrast between intuition and discursivity actually an obstacle?] The three questions that Gadamer poses at the end of paragraph 13 turn away from Plato’s contribution however, and toward the scholastic innovation. Gadamer adopts an elenchic technique against the conception of the verbum interius to frame his exegesis. Where the antithesis between intuition and discursivity in Plato had at least been clear, it would seem that the scholastic effort to conflate them in the idea of procession is problematic. Nevertheless, the questions themselves imply rhetorically that there is something deeply significant in the analogy of procession which needs to be worked out. Gadamer puts his finger on the most important substantive issue in the second question; the relationship between insight (nous, intuitus) and the human necessity for reasoning things through (dianoia, discursus).23 The reference is to the De natura, where intuition and discursivity are contrasted: “Since God sees all things with a single act of perception, he utters all things with one word; we however have many words on account of the frailty of our intellect in understanding” (sect. 286). The relationship between intuition and discursivity, a relationship which troubles the history of Western philosophy straight through, goes to the heart of the issue of understanding. We need briefly to outline the parameters of this theme in the tradition to understand the question Gadamer has posed, since the tension between intuitive and discursive understanding resonates in these central paragraphs, only to become the explicit theme of Truth and Method III, 2, C, “Language and Concept Formation.” For Plato, intuition is a kind of mystical access to knowledge against which discursive reasoning represented by comparison a frail human approximation. True wisdom is the soul’s ascent “into the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless, and being of a kindred

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nature, when it is once independent and free from interference, consorts with it always and strays no longer, but remains, in that realm of the absolute, constant and invariable, through contact with beings of a similar nature.”24 By contrast, “when it inclines to that region which is mingled with darkness, the world of becoming and passing away, it opines only and its edge is blunted, and it shifts its opinions hither and thither, and again seems as if it lacked reason.”25 Even within the privacy of the mind, human thought is bound by the discursive process: “We have found thinking to be a dialogue of the mind with itself, and judgment to be the conclusion of thinking, and what we mean by ‘it appears’ a blend of perception and judgment.”26 In Aristotle, the division is different, since intuition is reserved for first principles in a scheme of reasoning. On the one hand, the knowledge of “ultimates” and “primary definitions” are apprehended by intelligence (nou˜ ı), and on the other hand, judgments come about through reasoning (lovgoı).27 Intelligence uses intuition to discern first principles (NE 6.11.1143a35 ‒‒ 36). This still allows Aristotle to follow Plato’s larger point: Deliberation concerns things liable to change, whereas intuition regards only changeless principles (6.10.1143a4 ‒‒ 6). Aristotle still acknowledges that there is “something divine present in” human intellect which is this capacity to know universal truth in an unchanging way (10.7.1177b34). The capacity to know truth is the thing most proximate to the divine in humans, and intuition that which most resembles divine understanding. The timelessness of this knowledge follows from the nature of the principles which it sees, since by Aristotle’s teaching the mind and the object of thought are in some manner the same. In certain places Aquinas seems to believe that the mind does not have innate knowledge but rather innate capacity. God implants his own illumination in the mind of the human being by creating an agent intellect: “Within every human being there is a source of knowledge, the light of agent intellect, through which the universal principles of all knowledge are naturally cognized right from the start.”28 This is not, as Pasnau makes clear, an argument for innate knowledge: “Aquinas wants that insight to be given all at once, from the start—bottled up within agent intellect, as we might think of it. . . . Aquinas conceives of the illumination as a deep well within us.”29 This is different from an earlier teaching in the Summa: “[M]an’s act of reasoning, since it is a kind of movement, proceeds from

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the understanding of certain things—namely, those which are naturally known without any investigation on the part of reason, as from an immovable principle” (q. 79, a. 12). These first principles are closer to “intuition” in the subsequent tradition, maxims immediately available to understanding without reasoning. Aquinas is, from a hermeneutic perspective however, superior to the subsequent history of the relation between intuition and reasoning, because for him, the word is part and parcel of this relation. Judgment is a “word,” following the example of divine understanding. By contrast, from Leibniz to Hegel, the legacy of Plato’s “pure thought” comes to fruition, and intuition is opposed to concept as the product of reason, rather than word. Gadamer’s rhetorical question,“At that point isn’t the contrast between intuition and discursivity actually an obstacle?” is a rebuke to the Thomist idea of intuitus, a first form, but both Heidegger and Gadamer put something in its place rather than simply dismiss it; what Heidegger will call a formale Anzeige, and what Gadamer will call a Richtungsinn. These both indicate a sense of direction that guides an indeterminate discourse, and are formed themselves in the circular structure of understanding. Neither of these, however, negates the function of the inner word, which in a sense already bears their stamp. (par. 13, cont.) “Wo ist das Gemeinsame zwischen diesem und jenem ‘Prozeß’?” [Where is the commonality between the latter and the former “process”?] With the third question we are on track to Gadamer’s primary thesis. If German thought gradually corrected the view of discursive reasoning as a stand-in for godlike intuition, the view which Plato had taught and Aquinas had reinforced, this emendation was not wholly alien to scholastic thought in the analogy to procession. Just as the Son is not different in nature from the Father, the multiplicity of words is only accident and not essence: “Our word is imperfect . . . since we are not able to express in one word all the things that are in our soul” (De differentia, sect. 4). This is what Gadamer is referring to in the last half of paragraph 13. Theology offers something more than simply discursiveness. Procession holds together intuition and discursivity in one embrace. This is the implication of the first of the three questions, and the second and third question

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simply lay out the difficulty for maintaining the seemingly contradictory implications of this notion. It is the burden of paragraphs 14 through 16 to work out this difficulty. Gadamer will do this through the emanationist theory underlying the analogy to trinitarian procession: It is obvious that when anything in nature that proceeds from something has its likeness and its nature, it is called an offspring; and this is the case with the word, because the Son is spoken in the Father, and his production is called a generation. (De differentia, sect. 5)

chapter 9



The Neoplatonist Section

s. 14, S. 427

par. 14, p. 423

Es ist wahr, daß dem Verhältnis der göttlichen Personen zueinander keine Zeitlichkeit zukommen soll. Indessen ist das Nacheinander, das für die Diskursivität des menschlichen Denkens bezeichnend ist, im Grunde auch kein zeitliches Verhältnis. Wenn das menschliche Denken vom einen zum anderen übergeht, d.h. dies und dann1 jenes denkt, so wird es gleichwohl nicht vom einen zum anderen mitgenommen. Es denkt nicht in der bloßen Abfolge des Nacheinander erst eines und dann das andere,—was ja hieße, daß es sich selber damit ständig veränderte. Wenn es das eine und das andere denkt, so heißt das vielmehr, daß es weiß, was es damit tut, und das bedeutet, daß es das eine mit dem anderen zu verbinden weiß. Insofern liegt hier also kein zeitliches Verhältnis vor, sondern es handelt sich um einen geistigen Vorgang, eine emanatio intellectualis.

It is true that temporality in no way enters into the relation of the divine persons to one another. However, the successiveness which characterizes the discursivity of human thinking is not essentially a temporal relation either. When human thought moves from one thing to another, that is, thinks now this now that, it is not simply moving from the one thought to the other. It does not think merely in successiveness, one thing first and then the next— which would mean that it would be constantly changing itself. If it thinks now this now that, this means rather that it knows what it is doing in the process, and this signifies that it has the knowledge to connect the one thing with the other. In this respect no temporal relation obtains, but rather it is a question of a mental process, an emanatio intellectualis. 285

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Gadamer’s assertion that human discursivity is not essentially temporal seems illogical, but becomes clear if we see it through Augustine’s reflection on time and understanding. In a way different from and less perfect than the eternal nature of divine understanding, human thought gathers past and future into a kind of eternal present. The mind “awaits and dwells on [adtendit] and recollects, so that that which it awaits passes through that which it attends upon into what it remembers.”2 The relation between Word and word is not merely an analogy, since the one is the imitation of the other. Now, Augustine is clear that the difference has to do with the relation of the temporal to the eternal: “You call us to understand the Word, God, who is you, the Word which is spoken eternally, and all things in it everlastingly. For that Word in its speaking is not concluded and then another follows, as our words are spoken, but it is spoken all at once and forever.”3 The frail human ability to harness temporality through the anticipation and recollection still only mimics divine understanding.4 Augustine confesses the distance from eternal perfection on this very point: “But I have been broken apart in times, the order of which I fail to comprehend, and my thoughts are torn to bits in tumultuous varieties.”5 But the feeling of insufficiency is itself evidence of the imperfect similitude. The evidence that our grasp of time is an approximation of eternal understanding is precisely that, in spite of its weakness, thought knows to connect one thing to another, how what is being worked out in the discursive process is not separate from the realization, but is of a piece with the finished thought. This is straightforward enough, and the paragraph seems in the main to speak to this point. But there is some tricky language that shows that something more is going on just below the Augustinian surface. I am referring to a clause in the fourth sentence—“was ja hieße, daß es sich selber damit ständig veränderte.” If the mind simply followed one idea after another, that would mean that it itself, literally, has no continuity. We are not simply speaking anymore of the temporal and the eternal, but of the meaning of trinitarian procession. (par. 14, cont.) “Wenn das menschliche Denken vom einen zum anderen übergeht, d.h. dies und dann jenes denkt, so wird es gleichwohl nicht vom einen zum anderen mitgenommen. Es denkt nicht in der bloßen Abfolge des Nacheinander erst eines und dann das andere,—was ja hieße, daß es sich selber damit ständigveränderte.”

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[When human thought moves from one thing to another, that is, thinks now this now that, it is not simply moving from the one thought to the other. It does not think merely in successiveness, one thing first and then the next—which would mean that it would be constantly changing itself.] What does Gadamer mean by saying that thinking itself would change in the process? Does he mean only that one thought would have no connection with the next, as we see in certain cases of brain disease? That is certainly part of it, but not only this. Gadamer is still talking about the opposition between intuition and discursivity introduced in paragraph 13. The mental process, which is to say, the mind, cannot be reduced to either the organ (as an object) or the thoughts the mind entertains. The mind is one, the actualization all of a piece, and it has the conception in some way in hand while it unravels it discursively. This is what is behind the seemingly contradictory language of paragraph 12 —“Because our understanding does not grasp what it knows in one instant of thought, it must first draw out from itself what it thinks, and place that before itself in an inner self-expression” (par. 12). The doctrine of the inner word depends on regarding the mind, not as an object, but as an actualization of the world. To say, as Aquinas constantly repeats Aristotle, that the mind is in a sense all things, is to say that in its work of understanding, the mind imitates the divine mind, which is thought thinking itself, except that in the case of the human mind, this full identity is thought thinking the world. So when Gadamer says that the mind does not itself constantly change in the process, he means exactly this. The mind in reflecting the changing world thinks in a process that does not deprive it of its fundamental unity. Its temporal unfolding is only accident. Both it and the world are, like the Father and Son, one. The confirmation of this reading is in the last line of the paragraph: “In this respect no temporal relation obtains, but rather it is a question of a mental process, an emanatio intellectualis.” The force of emanation theory lies in its ability to conceive the process of unfolding understanding as remaining a part of a single source. Just as the root remains connected to the branch, or the outpouring to its source, so the cogitation is not severed from the word. (par. 14, cont.) “Wenn es das eine und das andere denkt, so heißt das vielmehr, daß es weiß, was es damit tut, und das bedeutet, daß es das

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eine mit dem anderen zu verbinden weiß.” [If it thinks now this now that, this means rather that it knows what it is doing in the process, and this signifies that it has the knowledge to connect the one thing with the other.] The contrast between discursivity and succession relates to the circular nature of human understanding. In ordinary usage “successiveness” certainly is temporal, by Aristotle’s own definition (Physics 5.3.226b.34 ff.). But in the theology of the early Church Fathers, the procession of the Son from the Father is eternal and not temporal, and so the elaborate arguments about divine procession developed around this enigma. Augustine had recourse to the analogy of the inner word, which provided some hint of divine procession in human experience. We have some idea of the whole of what we wish to say before we say it. We anticipate what someone is about to say as they speak. If we did not have this sense, we would not be able to utter or make sense of discourse. So when Gadamer suggests that discourse works not only through a temporal unfolding but “knows what it is doing in the process, and has the knowledge to connect the one thing with the other,” he is alluding to a sense of the whole that may be likened to an intuition, the intuition Augustine refers to in his description of the circle of understanding: Suppose I am about to recite a Psalm which I know. Before I begin, my expectation (or “looking forward”) is extended over the whole psalm. But once I have began, whatever I pluck off from it and let fall into the past enters the province of my memory (or “looking back at”). So the life of this action of mine is extended in two directions—toward my memory, as regards what I have recited, and toward my expectation, as regards what I am about to recite.6 Of course Gadamer has in mind here as well not only the mental preconception, but the prior disposition of partners in a dialogue, or the social norms of communities in praxis. The medieval anticipation of the hermeneutic Vorgriff remains confined within the individual mind. The De natura verbi intellectus takes the analogy of procession even further than Augustine, using language that makes of the inner word a procession as enigmatic as Trinity: “For our word is always in continual becoming, because its perfect existence is always in its becoming” (sect. 277).

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This is a transformation of the part-whole relationship that goes beyond Neoplatonism. Here the part (the becoming-word) is already perfect!7 In the De natura the claim that a word’s perfect existence “is always in its becoming” seems to have a similar meaning. The very fact that a word is on the way implies the perfection towards which it aims: For our word is always in continual becoming, because its complete existence is always in its becoming. Now this is not an imperfection, the word’s not existing all at once, as is the case with other things that are in becoming, which are imperfect. Nay, rather the word in its own origin is perfect, since the conception is there perfectly formed, and its perfected existence is preserved in the same manner as its birth. (sect. 277) Gadamer’s full explication of this theme is in paragraph 12, so what is important to notice here is the repeated identification of coherence not just with the meaning that unfolds, but the connection with the thinking process itself. To say that the mind does not change in the process of thinking one thing and then another is to say that the mind is in possession of itself in no way separate from the thought. Here the rich legacy of Aristotle’s philosophy of mind begins to count.8 Intellect for Aristotle does not really exist in itself, certainly not as an object, and is rather only the capacity to comprehend.9 Just as thought “is in its essential nature activity,” so mind “can have no nature of its own, other than that of having a certain capacity.”10 Neither thought nor mind are real without each other, and we must constantly resist the temptation to reify and separate them. Mind is “a kind of actuality or notion [ouj˜ n ejntel evceiav tivı ejsti kai; lovgoı] which has the capacity of having a soul” (De Anima 2.2.414a28) and thought “has no actual existence until it thinks” (3.4.429a.21 ‒ 22).11 (par. 14, cont.) “Insofern liegt hier also kein zeitliches Verhältnis vor, sondern es handelt sich um einen geistigen Vorgang, eine emanatio intellectualis.” [In this respect no temporal relation obtains, but rather it is a question of a mental process, an emanatio intellectualis.] When finally, in the last sentence of paragraph 14, Gadamer links the mental procession to the “emanatio intellectualis,” he is making the first explicit linkage between the Christian conception of the inner word and Neoplatonism. Aristotelianism passed to the Latin West through Arabic

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sources heavily infused with Neoplatonic elements,12 and this was something of which Thomism took full advantage. Aristotelian metaphysics could not support the far deeper structures of participation demanded by theology, and Neoplatonism, in its own attempt to address the problem of immanence and transcendence, had provided a plausible framework for the communicatio Dei.13 It is hard to overstate the potent presence of Neoplatonism, and of Plotinus in particular, not only in Augustine and Aquinas, but in Gadamer’s interpretation of the verbum. A brief summary of emanation theory as it relates to our topic will clarify this point. The basis of a non-temporal procession is already established in the theory of emanation, since, in the first place, time is not the absolute other of eternity, but its weak reflection. In Plotinus, time “mimics” (mimei˜tai) the true eternity.14 Thus, the equivocal nature of priority in Aristotle as having both a temporal and causal dimension is appropriated by Plotinus to intellectual emanation, which is caught up in an eternal cycle of return (5.2.2).15 The phrase emanatio intellectualis does not occur as such in either the De natura or the De differentia, although the idea certainly underlies both. Perhaps Gadamer has in mind a passage in the Summa theologiae which mentions the emanatio intelligibilis in a discussion of Trinitarian procession (I, q. 27, a. 1). Aquinas is contrasting the ordinary sense of procession, which means a going outwards, with the “inward procession” of the Trinity. He suggests an analogy for this counterintuitive notion, “the word in the heart,” a concept proceeding from the awareness which the spoken word only signifies — something that issues forth but remains within at the same time (procedit aliquid intra ipsum). Procession needs to be taken in this sense, not as a movement outwards, but as “an issuing in the mind” (emanationem intelligibilem). Gadamer is particularly interested in the way the emanating overflow maintains an unbroken link to its source, as root to branch.16 Human time exemplifies this relationality precisely by the way it imitates eternity. Time is, in the Neoplatonist framework, a demotion from, rather than an abrogation of eternity: “Soul, making the world of sense in imitation of that other world, moving with a motion which is not that which exists There, but like it, and intending to be an image of it, first of all put itself into time, which it made instead of eternity.”17 According to Plotinus, this imitation is a near equivalence, since there exists “instead of a complete unbounded whole, a continuous unbounded succession, and instead of a

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whole all together a whole which is, and always will be, going to come into being part by part” (2.7.11). But although Plotinus goes very far in advancing the understanding of time from the Timaeus and the Physics, and provides Augustine with the vocabulary to elaborate its existential basis,18 it was Augustine who went the extra step to conceive the manner in which the mind creates temporal continuity. Augustine saw that understanding does not and cannot work through the present alone, as if logic moved in a series of now points, but operates out of a sense of anticipation and recollection, a sense of the whole. By this means that even the human mind approximates an eternal present, and as such, as Gadamer puts it,“the successiveness which characterizes the discursivity of human thinking is not essentially a temporal relation either” (par. 14). Thus I translate Gadamer’s reference, which is just as much Plotinus and Augustine as Aquinas: “If it thinks now this now that, this means rather that it knows what it is doing in the process, and this signifies that it has the knowledge to connect the one thing with the other.”19 What happens in the De natura is that this demotion of temporality is applied in an extraordinary way to the generation of the word. Emanation has a non-temporal modality, so to speak, in the sense that what is unfolding is subject to the laws of time per accidens. There is in the medieval text an indication that the sense of the whole is not so much an insight of the person as a realization lying in wait, anticipated as much in the object (what is formable) as in the mind (what forms): Furthermore, it is not necessary to form a word before understanding, for when the intellect has understood, it forms a word of itself; and thus when it understands itself, the understanding precedes this formation essentially rather than temporally. For it is not the case, when it is understanding itself, that intellect creates the whole object, but rather something concerning the object: For it clothes itself, as it were, and this is its word, the achievement of self-understanding. (sect. 284) Here we have the Neoplatonist view of temporal imitation, the Aristotelian unification of intellect and object as well as the recognition of the “priority” of ends, and the Augustinian appropriation of entelechy to the word as form.

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par. 15, pp. 423 ‒‒424

Mit diesem neuplatonischen Begriff sucht Thomas den Prozeßcharakter des inneren Wortes so gut wie den Prozeß der Trinität zu beschreiben. Dadurch kommt etwas zur Geltung, was in der Logos-Philosophie Platos tatsächlich nicht enthalten was. Der Begriff der Emanation enthält im Neuplatonismus immer schon mehr, als was das physische Phänomen des Ausfließens als Bewegungsvorgang ist. Es ist das Bild der Quelle, das sich vor allem einstellt. Im Prozeß der Emanation wird das, aus dem etwas ausfließt, das Eine, dadurch nicht beraubt oder weniger. Das gilt nun ebenso für die Geburt des Sohnes aus dem Vater, der damit nicht etwas von sich verbraucht, sondern etwas zu sich hinzunimmt. Es gilt aber auch von dem geistigen Hervorgehen, das sich im Vorgang des Denkens, des Sichsagens, vollzieht. Solches Hervorgehen ist zugleich ein gänzliches Insichbleiben. Wenn das göttliche Verhältnis von Wort und Intellekt so beschrieben werden kann, daß das Wort nicht teilhaft, sondern ganz und gar (totaliter) vom Intellekt seinen Ursprung hat, so gilt auch bei uns, daß da ein Wort aus dem anderen totaliter entsteht, d.h. aber: seinen Ursprung im Geiste hat, wie das Folgen des Schlusses aus den Prämissen (ut conclusio ex principiis).

Aquinas seeks to describe the processive character of the inner word as well as of the Trinity with this Neoplatonic concept. With this, something of value begins to emerge that in fact did not exist in Plato’s logos-philosophy. The concept of emanation in Neoplatonism has always meant more than the physical phenomenon of overflow in the process of movement. The image of a fountain is most often invoked. In the process of emanation, the “One” which overflows is neither depleted nor made less. This holds now as well for the birth of the Son from the Father, who does not in the process use up something of Himself, but rather adds.20 This also holds for the intellectual manifestation that is actualized in the process of thinking, of speaking to oneself. Such a procession nevertheless remains entirely within oneself. If the divine relation of word and intellect can be described in such a way that the word does not have its origin partly, but rather wholly and completely (totaliter) from the intellect, so it is for us as well that one word originates totaliter from another; that is to say, its origin is within the intellect, just as a conclusion follows from its premises (ut conclusio ex principiis). The process and result of thinking is in this

The Neoplatonist Section Der Vorgang und Hervorgang des Denkens ist insofern kein Veränderungsvorgang (motus), also kein Übergang von Potenz in Akt, sondern ein Hervorgehen ut actus ex actu: das Wort wird nicht erst gebildet, nachdem die Erkenntnis vollendet ist, scholastisch gesprochen, nachdem die Information des Intellektes durch die species abgeschlossen ist, sondern es ist der Vollzug der Erkenntnis selbst. Insofern ist das Wort mit dieser Bildung (formatio) des Intellektes zugleich.

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respect neither a process of change (motus), nor a passage from potency to act, but rather an issuance ut actus ex actu: The word is not formed only after the completion of the thought; or in scholastic language, when the in-formation of the intellect is arrived at through the species; rather, it is the actualization of the thought itself. Thus the word occurs along with the formation (formatio) of the intellect.

In the way Gadamer asserts the relevance of Neoplatonist emanation theory to Augustine and Aquinas in this paragraph, many buried strata of real consequence to the idea of the inner word are activated, and it will take some work to excavate all of this. Gadamer says that both the procession of the word and of the Trinity have the character of Neoplatonic emanation in common. But what exactly is held in common between these three? The thrust of the answer, in the paragraph as whole, is that emanation as an overflow is not the generation of something different from its creator. Since both procession and emanation mean precisely a moving out, and generation the birth of something new, the doctrine of Trinity threatens logical incoherence. Aquinas himself makes note of the problem, and in response he reverts, following Augustine, to the analogy of the inner word (ST, I, q. 27, a. 1). Gadamer does not take this course, and instead takes an excursion through Plotinus and the simile of the fountain.21 Since this figure is neither in the De natura nor the De differentia, at this point Gadamer is working out his own connections between Neoplatonism and scholasticism. The movement of his thought here is hard to follow, but the connections he is making are fundamental. In order that we can judge this meaning, we need to outline and explain systematically its five main features: inexhaustible outflow, the cycle of return, the absence of potency, the unity of process and product, and simultaneity.

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Inexhaustible Outflow (par. 15, cont.) “Der Begriff der Emanation enthält im Neuplatonismus immer schon mehr, als was das physische Phänomen des Ausfließens als Bewegungsvorgang ist.” [The concept of emanation in Neoplatonism has always meant more than the physical phenomenon of overflow in the process of movement.] Gadamer’s disclaimer that emanation contains more than the sense of physical outflow is meant to warn against only the most superficial feature of the image. He is asking us, in other words, to consider the cause or source of the flowing motion. Superabundant bounty, “a kind of gracious gift,” as Plotinus puts it, explains the flowing out of self, and so the essential continuity of creation and creator.22 The perpetual effulgence answers one of the hardest questions—why a transcendent and perfect being without need would effect an imperfect offspring. Whereas Avicenna believed that this overflow was a necessary effect of the superabundance of the divine, Aquinas regarded it as a bounteous act of will. The figure of the fountain would seem to represent the capacity of a source to give of itself and not be used up, like the milk pitcher of the gods given as a gift to Baucis and Philemon. Gadamer asserts this sense in an appendix linked to the passage by a footnote, describing the natural fountain as “the springing up of pure and fresh water from invisible depths” (TM, 520). There is something inexhaustible in the source, in the same way that a classical text continues to provide new insights. The idea of inexhaustibility is expressed in the De natura in regards to what is called “the first procession” of the word, that is to say, the movement from the memory to the agent intellect. The mind in this case “receives from memory that which is offered to it by memory, not plundering it, leaving nothing in it as it were, but taking up the likeness of what is held in memory” (sect. 273). The idea of non-depletion was useful to theology when it had to explain how trinitarian procession did not create a substantive difference in the single nature of the persons. In geometry, if you take a part from the whole, the whole is diminished precisely by that much. To move away from this kind of part-whole relation, theology could appeal to the biblical language of birth or begetting, since a son is a part of the father, flesh of his flesh, but does not take anything away from the father.

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Plotinus expresses a similar relation in his description of the soul, which gives “a kind of outflow from it to what is below, or rather an activity, by which that intelligible part is not itself lessened.”23 The Plotinian influence on this characteristic of increasing abundance can hardly be exaggerated. Increase without loss is at the root of his metaphysics, and a notable innovation in the tradition of the metaphysics of light. It is a consequence of his belief in a radical and pervasive interpenetration of nous throughout the universe. Each form “has everything in itself and sees all things in every other, so that all are everywhere and each and every one is all.”24 This is not a passive participation, since everything actually “sees” itself in every other thing (5.8.4). There is no dichotomy of subject and object, since vision is cooperative: “everything and all things are clear to the inmost part to everything” (5.8.4). The resulting worldview means that participation is an increase of being: Plotinian optics makes each particular object of vision something of intrinsic value. It does not derive its worthy simply as a function of my perspective on the universe. Nor is it ever absorbed into or plundered of its unity and identity by other things. Its relationship is to a whole of which the percipient himself is a sentient part rather than an objective or alien observer.”25 Hegel will return this ontology of increase to the comparison of Trinity and dialectic. He first provides a negative example with the filial bond between mortal parent and child as one in which emanation is disequilibriated, and the source is in fact depleted: The devotion between parents and children is affected by just this one emotion [of having] the consciousness of its actuality in the other, and of seeing being-for-self arising in the other without holding it back 26 [ohne es züruck zu erhalten]; but the actuality of the other remains something foreign. Conversely, the devotion of the children to their parents is affected by the emotion [of having] their genesis or [being] in-itself in another who is disappearing, and of achieving their beingfor-self and their own self-consciousness only through the separation from their source: a separation in which the source dries up [worin dieser versiegt].27

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In the filial relation of Trinity the equilibrium is restored: “Father and son are simply modifications of the same life, not opposite essences, not a plurality of absolute substantialities.”28 It is only in the divine emanation and return of the trinitarian economy that fulfillment is realized, and the source is not dried up: The culmination of faith, the return to the Godhead whence man is born, closes the circle of man’s development. Everything lives in the Godhead, every living thing is its child, but the child carries the unity, the connection, the concord with the entire harmony, undisturbed though undeveloped, in itself. . . . The more variegated the manifold in which life is alive, the more the places in which it can be reunified; the more the places in which it can sense itself, the deeper does love become. (Ibid., 273, 279) This principle of inexhaustibility passes straight through to hermeneutics, but of course is reattached to language. Heidegger’s statement of the principle of non-depletion, mutatis mutandis, is very close to the scholastic version: “To be sure, the painter also uses pigment, but in such a way that color is not used up but rather only now comes to shine forth. To be sure, the poet also uses the word — not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who have to use them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and remains truly a word.”29 The theme of non-depletion is echoed, not only in this exegesis of scholasticism, but all through Gadamer’s work as a signal characteristic of language.30 But if we add to this inexhaustibility the fact of self-containment — “Such a result nevertheless remains entirely within oneself ”—we have a puzzle; the movement of emanation is, so to speak, counter-indicated to itself.31 How does this outflowing ingress or inflowing egress relate to the fountain image? The Trevi fountain circulates its water supply in imitation of the natural spring which feeds rivers, since the water will eventually find its way back to the depths of the earth in the cycle of nature. The procession of the Son and Holy Spirit does not generate new gods; rather, it magnifies itself. The maintenance of identity through transformation is exemplified by the intimate unity of language and thought: Hence it is clear that it is not the word that follows understanding immediately after the ratiocination of the intellect. For in this case

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the word would precede the actualization of intellect that is understanding. In point of fact, the word exists in the sequence of actual understanding through an idea, from which the word proceeds as act from act, and not as act from potency. Hence the word follows the act of understanding on the part of the intellect; and thus the word follows in relation to understanding not vis-à-vis itself, but vis-à-vis its source, as has been said. (DN, sect. 283) The holism of the intellectual act, which includes the word as a moment in intellection, is understanding itself. Since there is no actual separation of object, process, means, or product, the mundane discursive act that results in a word is roughly analogous to the divine intuition.

Emanation as Return (par. 15, cont.) “Es gilt aber auch von dem geistigen Hervorgehen, das sich im Vorgang des Denkens, des Sichsagens, vollzieht.” [This also holds for the intellectual manifestation that is actualized in the process of thinking, of speaking to oneself.] Gadamer wants to correct any impression that emanation is a flowing out from one substance to another. Its motion is a motion of identity by which the thing constitutes itself in the very movement, in the way that a circle constitutes itself by returning to itself. The sun in its outpouring is not a thing separate from the light it sheds, but creates and nourishes the world out of its very identity. The Father gives life to the Son, who returns the love and extends the patrimony. Language is always tied to and revealing more of its origins from its inexhaustible store of meaning. By remaining “entirely within oneself ” Gadamer does not mean to refer to the introversion or inwardness of pietism, but rather to a self-sustaining cycle, like the cyclical precipitation, flow, and evaporation of moisture in an ecosystem. This allowed Neoplatonic emanation theory to explain the inclination of the human intellect towards the divine.32 That which flows from the One seeks its origin as the perfection towards which it is ordered. This is why Gadamer says emanation is not just a flowing out. This idea has an obvious kinship with the Aristotelian principle that a thing is ordered to, and seeks its end. By establishing that which is most

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perfect as the origin and principle, de facto it is the telos as well. This idea becomes a fundamental building block in the logic of Aquinas’s system, and it has specific relevance to the doctrine of the inner word with respect to the place of human intellect in the order of things.33 Aquinas goes well beyond Aristotle in elaborating the pivotal place of that intellect which participates in both material and spiritual realms,34 in particular by harvesting the implications of the quodammodo omnia, the potentiality of mind for all things. This Aristotelian principle in combination with its emanationist entailments serves as the medieval linchpin for the graduated structure of cosmic perfection, in which human intellect serves as the pivot. This argument is built up in several steps. If you start from the idea that the overflow of God’s goodness is of his very nature, then there will be in the temporal universe traces of his nature: From love of his own goodness proceeds that which his goodness wills to diffuse and communicate to others, according as it is possible, namely, through similitude, and because his goodness would not remain in himself, but flow out to others.35 And because his nature is intellect in act, that which most resembles him in nature is that which possesses the intellectual capacity: “Hence, the consummate perfection of the universe required the existence of some creatures which return to God not only as regards likeness of nature, but also by their action.”36 Therefore for Aquinas, even more than for Aristotle, human being occupies a special place in the order of the universe: “the intellectual soul is said to be on the horizon and confines of things corporeal and incorporeal.”37 Here is where the conception of Aristotelian physics as a relation of form and matter shows its special value when applied to the nature of intellection, the function of which is to complete nature by its understanding, according to Thomas: “We must assign on the part of the intellect some power to make things actually intelligible.”38 Intellection is the form of matter, and this locates human being in a special place, at ground zero, so to speak, in the order of the universe, because human nature is the coming together (convenientiam) of the material and spiritual in the universe, the existence of which is possible “only if there is something which is such

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that it agrees with every being.”39 It is because the mind is capable of being quodammodo omnia in its intellectual mediation that it stands at the exact center of cosmic order, “since man is constituted of a spiritual and of a bodily nature, and stands, so to say, on the boundary of each nature.”40 It is not only that the mind is in a sense all things, but that the purpose of the mind is to be all things: “In this way it is possible for the perfection of the entire universe to exist in one thing. The ultimate perfection which the soul can attain, therefore, is, according to the philosophers, to have delineated in it the entire order and causes of the universe.”41 Emanation thus explains not only the unified connection of nature with the divine blessedness, but also the manner in which human nature continues that emanation in the cycle of return: An effect is most perfect when it returns to its source; thus the circle is the most perfect of all figures, and circular motion the most perfect of all motions, because in their case a return is made to the starting point. It is therefore necessary that creatures return to their principle in order that the universe of creatures may attain its ultimate perfection. Now, each and every creature returns to its source, according to its being and its nature . . .42 This explanation makes of human intellect a necessary and central component of creation: And such a return to God cannot be made except by the act of the intellect and will, because God Himself has no other operation in His own regard than these. The greatest perfection of the universe therefore demanded the existence of some intellectual creatures. (2.46.3) And so with this schematization of intellect as a necessary link in the cycle of return, there is no dualist break between immanent and transcendent realms, and the whole of creation in its unified motion imitates the procession of the Trinity. This central position of intellect in the hierarchy is further refined through the doctrine of the inner word. The order that flows from the divine mind to the material world is not broken, and so there is need of a transition point, what one might call an event horizon, where the passage

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between eternal and temporal may take place. In specific terms, the human mind functions in this intermediate role by a kind of translation, an operation that involves going back and forth between the material and the spiritual in a kind of relay, and the verbum is at the exact center of this exchange. The mind must somehow negotiate the difference between the temporal and the eternal. We must now see how this mechanism works.

The Absence of Potency The point about inwardness is not simply that the forming of the word takes place in the mind before it is expressed outwardly, but that the word itself when formed is not a product severed from its production. The Son proceeds from the Father in the same way that one word derives from another and a conclusion derives from its premises. We want to reverse this and say that one word comes from another and a conclusion derives from its premises in the same way that the Son proceeds from the Father. In either case we are at the heart of the enigma of Trinity. God utters himself. Procession cannot be a movement from something to something else, since the Son is one in nature with the Father. In striving to give some rational sense to this teaching, Augustine struck upon the analogy of the inner word. In spite of the discursivity of the human intellect, many thoughts revolve in the mind to form — to get at —one idea. Gadamer somewhere uses the example of the person who says “Let me have a word with you,” and there are common idioms in every language that use the same trope. The movement of the mind is thus not from various conceptions to another new conception, but out of the need to find the single conception the mind intended. In adopting Augustine’s inner word to an Aristotelian framework, Aquinas elaborated the analogy of procession in the terms of Aristotelian psychology. Everything in mundane reality is explained in terms of the relation of potency and act, but there is one exception in the intellect, which is a trace of the divine. There, a movement occurs not from potency to act, but from act to act. There are two different types of species in the process of intellection that lead to the inner word. The term species covers a range of meanings that depend on context. It can mean, for instance, sense impression, perception, image, idea, conception, word. The first species is the

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process of intellection in the mere sense perception of the material object as it strikes the mind, a more or less undefined impression. It is not fully formed, because it lacks as yet the determination of the intellect. Nevertheless it is already “inside” the mind and involved as a stage in the process, or procession, that leads to the word. We are no longer talking about matter (potency) but about something already intellectual, already partly form. There is a second stage in this process that involves the discursive reasoning of the intellect. The object is categorized or defined or judged to be this or that, and in this process it loses all its accidental properties and becomes essentially what it is. This is an abstracting process, but an Aristotelian one, insofar as it doesn’t lose touch with the material object which inspires the thought. The inner word emerges from this cogitation, and it is sometimes spoken of as a second “species,” the idea or conception resulting from the mind’s engagement with the material object. Let me offer a simple example. Einstein is trying to get a handle on the relationship between “space” and “time.” These aren’t very adequate concepts to begin with, and so he has only some vaguely intuitive and inchoate ideas floating around in his head about “space” and “time” which have gathered there and are trying to break to the surface. So far nothing concrete or clear, but he is thinking. Suddenly it dawns on him. E = mc2! He has a clear concept in his mind, and for the moment, it makes perfect sense to him. He has a definition, a verbum, which is very much alive to him as an understanding. Now the point that the De natura is trying to make in the above passage is that this whole process was going on in the mind, that it was already involved in a physical matter in the real world, and so the solution itself had already entered into the realm of intellect and had its life there. The importance of this example to theology is that it must be similar to the perfect procession of the Son from the Father, since there is no matter or potency in that generation, but a procession of persons in the same act of being. The importance of the example to hermeneutics is that the first species is analogous to the language that one is born into; concepts are already full of the life of a culture, and the work that we put them to is informed already by that previous life. Well, is that not also then the exact center of hermeneutics? For Aquinas the process of understanding is not one whereby we fit predetermined categories onto the objective world, but a living process of realization. The inner word is the pivot in this procession, and even though it is an achievement, it is

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never a dead letter, because as an inner word it is actively the switchpoint on the circuit between matter and form.

The Unity of Process and Product (par. 15, cont.) “das Wort . . . ist der Vollzug der Erkenntnis selbst.” [The word . . . is the actualization of the thought itself.] Although the word, in good Aristotelian fashion, is in some wise always related, however indirectly, to the worldly object, the word completes the reality of the thing. Aristotelian psychology says something like what Yeats said: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”43 The thing, the object, the matter under consideration, is not completely itself until it has found its word. The physical world without our understanding is not the truth of reality, because material things “ne réalisent pas la plénitude commune de leur essence. . . . [L]eur existence est beaucoup moins que leur nature.”44 The essence of the thing is not its physical nature, but what our mind is equipped to understand it as, and so in this sense, “nous la construisons” (8). Understanding the world involves a spiritual transformation which the mind effects. Lonergan relates this to the inner word, which “supplies the object of thought. What is abstract, what is true or false, is not, as such, either a real thing or a mere copy of a real thing. It is a product of the mind.”45 This is anything but obvious to the scientific objectivism against which Gadamer was opposed, and he sees it as an insight in support of his theory of the intimate unity of world, thought, and language. It also takes us, by analogy, to the heart of the enigma of Trinity. The De natura works out the principle that the word completes the thing; that is, that the world needs the word as much as the word does the world: For, on the one hand, the intellect is informed first by an idea, which is required for intellection, and this informing of the intellect is prior to the creation of the word. And so the act of intellection, by its very nature, is prior to the word, and the word is the terminus of the intellect’s action. But, on the other hand, because the object is not grasped until it has found a word, as has been said, and the object is prior to

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any action that finds its terminus in it, the word stands before understanding. And all this can occur because the action of the intellect does not terminate in an external object from which it acquires an idea all by itself. For if an idea naturally led the intellect to a thing in itself, as the idea of color leads to color, understanding would stand before the word in all respects. (DN, sect. 283) The idea that the word completes the thing is incipient in Aristotle’s notion of thought as the form of matter. This idea only needs the association of language with thought to bring us to the scholastic principle. The generation of the living word is the actualization of the mind. This idea is expressed in section 275 of the De natura: “Just as at the start of an action the intellect and the idea are not two, but the intellect itself and the illuminated idea are one, so at the end there remains one thing, namely, the perfect likeness generated and expressed by the intellect.” Therefore it is in a certain way artificial to separate word, mind, and thing.46 Now, this is not the simple equation of word and mind, nor understanding and mind, and Gadamer is not guilty of this overstatement. The Thomist formula is: “the act of understanding is to the intellect as being [esse] is to essence [essentia].”47 This means that, on the one hand,“God’s understanding is His intellect,” but on the other hand, human intellect is not the same as human understanding. This does not mean that mind is a thing, but simply that intellect as form must be joined to matter as potency in “one act of being” (SCG, 2.68). Thus, intellect is not act, but always only ever part of that act, since it must always be in relation to the potency of matter. This is what Aquinas calls participated being, and he explains the term this way: “Since the human soul is, after a manner, in potency, which appears from the fact that sometimes a man is potentially understanding, it seems that the human soul must participate of primary matter as a part of itself.”48 Intellect, therefore, has its essence by participation in being.49 And so, the forming of the intellect in understanding is never a finished project. The word is thus not simply a product of the mind, but is constitutive of the activity of the mind: “That is properly called an interior word which the one understanding forms when understanding” [Illud igitur proprie dicitur verbum interius, quod intelligens intelligendo format.] (De differentia, sect. 2). It is not separable from the mind as the button

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from the button factory. The word lives in and manifests the life of the mind. Just as the Father “takes something to himself ” in giving birth to the Son, so intellect forms itself in giving birth to ideas. A knowing being “becomes still something other than itself. . . . to know is to be in a new and richer way than before.”50 The mental word is the evidence of the mind in act. The word is simultaneously two things: “a notion [ratio] and likeness [similitudo] of the thing understood,” and “a notion and likeness of the mind from which it proceeds” (De differentia, sect. 3). The word is both the completed substance and the activity (“est suppositum completum cuius est agere”) (DN, sect. 274). Ratio has the sense both of a process of thinking out (a reckoning), or the outcome for consideration, something one has in mind (a reckoning). The principle or notion (ratio) of a thing, he notes, is found through an accounting (ratiocinando), and once understanding is achieved, there is a true equivalence. Ratio rei and ratio verbi are two sides of the same coin. This notion is what leads in the De natura to the metaphor of the mirror: “The word expressed is both the whole of the thing said, and the whole in which the matter is expressed. And this is the principal thing understood, because a thing is understood only in it. For it is as a mirror in which a thing is perceived, one that does not go beyond what is perceived in it. For it is brought about by an operation of nature that something is perceived in it, and nature does nothing superfluous, and that is why the mirror does not go beyond that, namely, what is seen in it” (DN, sect. 275). The word is like a surface that simultaneously images both the world and the mind.51 The unity of thought and word is picked up with a vengeance in German philosophy of language, and the theme creates an unbroken line from Humboldt to Gadamer. Humboldt52 recasts the idea in the language of subject and object: Subjective activity fashions an object in thought. For no class of ideas can be regarded as a purely receptive contemplation of a thing already present. The activity of the senses must combine synthetically with the inner action of the mind, and from this combination the idea is ejected, becomes an object vis-à-vis the subjective power, and, perceived anew as such, returns back into the latter. But language is indispensable for this. For in that the mental striving breaks out through the lips in language, the product of that striving returns back to the

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speaker’s ear. Thus the idea becomes transformed into real objectivity, without being deprived of subjectivity on that account. Only language can do this; and without this transformation, occurring constantly with the help of language even in silence, into an objectivity that returns to the subject, the act of concept-formation, and with it all true thinking, is impossible.53 The idea is restated in Heidegger’s later writing on language: “While language names being for the first time, such naming brings being to the word and to appearance. This naming nominates being to its being from it.”54 The word completes the thing: “Only where the word for the thing has been found is the thing a thing. Only thus is it. . . . The word alone gives being to the thing.”55 In the extreme compression of paragraph 15, Gadamer combines the attribution of the word’s completion of the thing with a temporal element. Thus he does not say simply that the word “is the actualization of the thought itself,” but attaches this unity to a temporal relation.

Simultaneity (par. 15, cont.) “Insofern ist das Wort mit dieser Bildung (formatio) des Intellektes zugleich.” [Thus the word occurs along with the formation (formatio) of the intellect.] I have said in an earlier section that the mind must somehow negotiate the difference between the temporal and the eternal. The way that the De natura gets at this, and this is one of the trickiest parts of the formulation, is to relate two different senses of sequor and prior to the verbum (sect. 282). Sequor can mean either that which follows in time or in order of importance. Prior can mean either that which precedes in time or in priority. This is standard Aristotelianism. Aristotle made the point in relation to what is primary (to; prw ˜ ton): “Now there are several senses in which a thing is said to be primary; in substance, in formula, in order of knowledge, in time.”56 Aquinas applies the principle to actuality: “Though a being that is sometime in potency and sometime in act is in time in potency before being in act, absolutely speaking act is prior to potency.”57

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Something can be first in time, in importance, in origin, or in essence, and the temporal sense is generally the least important. Lonergan puts the relation in the most generic terms: “[T]he end, which is first in intention, is last in execution, whereas what is first in execution is last to be arrived at in the order of thought.”58 In the discursive human realm, the word as the completion of the act of understanding is the terminal point or result, and so is temporally last. But that same word is ordered toward its telos, and only waits upon our catching up to it.59 Thus,“this being informed is by its very nature, but not temporally, related to understanding” (DN, sect. 282). Informari means here literally the en-forming, the coming to perfect form, which human understanding gives to worldly nature by its cognition. With this we begin to understand what Gadamer means when he says that “the word is not formed only after the completion of the thought. . . . [T]he word occurs along with the development (formatio) of the intellect.” This unity of word and mind shows us the proximity of Thomism to hermeneutics. Gadamer’s constant theme of the intimate unity of thought and speech is clearly drawn to this aspect of the doctrine. The great German language theorists went about explaining this unity in a different way, attempting to fix its constitutive evolutionary origin. Humboldt connects thought and speech in the medium of physical sound: “The inseparable bonding of thought, vocal apparatus and hearing to language is unalterably rooted in the original constitution of human nature, which cannot be further explained.”60 Herder tries hardest of all to imagine this link: While still an animal, man already has language. . . . Even the most delicate chords of animal feeling—I must use this image because I know none better for the mechanics of sentient bodies—even the chords whose sound and strain do not arise from choice and slow deliberation, whose very nature the probing of reason has not as yet been able to fathom, even they — though there be no awareness of sympathy from outside—are aligned in their entire performance for a going out toward other creatures. The plucked chord performs its natural duty: it sounds! It calls for an echo from one that feels alike . . .61 Heidegger does not attempt a physiological grounding at all, but simply speaks of the unity as the “kinship [Beziehung] of Showing [Zeichen] with

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what it shows”:62 “We hear Saying only because we belong within it.”63 And so we return to something closer to the medieval conception.  Gadamer began paragraph 15 by saying that, with the wedding of emanation to the analogy of the word, “something begins to emerge that in fact did not exist in Plato’s logos-philosophy.” What is this something? The complexity of the paragraph flows from the complexity of the answer, since it involves a medieval blending of Aristotle, Neoplatonism, and dogma. What “begins to emerge” is a sense for the ordering of the beginning toward the telos or principium of thought. The end is the beginning. It is a doctrine that confounds the ordinary role of time, of cause and effect, of succession or movement. Perhaps the ultimate value of the analogy of the verbum interius, and the particular clarity that Aquinas’s reading provides it, is right here. Freud believed in “the most universal endeavour of all living substance—namely to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world.”64 The verbum models a different end, one that is informed by the struggle that achieves it. Our temporal interpretation of and approximation to God’s Aktualität sees the achievement in the effort. s. 16, S. 428 So läßt es sich verstehen, daß die Erzeugung des Wortes als ein echtes Abbild der Trinität verstanden wurde. Es handelt sich um wirkliche generatio, und wirkliche Geburt, wenngleich er hier natürlich keinen empfangenden Teil neben einem zeugenden gibt. Gerade dieser intellektuale Charakter der Erzeugung des Wortes ist jedoch für seine theologische Modellfunktion entscheidend. Es gibt wirklich etwas Gemeinsames zwischen dem Prozeß der göttlichen Personen und dem Prozeß des Denkens.

par. 16, p. 424 So one can understand how the generation of the word would be understood as a genuine likeness of the Trinity. It is a true generatio, a true birth, although of course there is no receptive part for an engendering part. The purely intellectual character of the generation of the word, however, is important for the function of theological model. There is truly something in common between the procession of the divine persons and the thinking process.

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The relation of the word to a begetting and receiving part refers to the Thomist schema of intellection. The phantasia and memory are storehouses of particular images (phantasms and intentions) derived from sensations which are then available to intellect, that draws upon and actualizes these images as needed.65 There are therefore separate sending and receiving functions or moments in thought, even though intellect is one process. The analogy to the Trinity is therefore fragile: With respect to the divine persons, the Father, who corresponds to memory as regards order or origin, begets perfectly. That is because the Father does not merely hold onto what he has, as memory does in our case. The relation is completely given over in its being actualized. Thus does the Father beget the Son. For in that begetting, it is not that some one thing being received from the Father is presupposed and some other distinct thing is received. This is the way, in our case, that the intellect receives from memory, the one presupposed for the generation of the other. In the divine case, however, the Son is truly begotten by the Father—It is as though, in our terms, it would not be merely the likeness of that which is received, but our whole intellect from our memory. (DN, sect. 274) What happens in this passage through the intellect is that an idea is born; not an abstract universal, but a universal particular,66 the actual object of thought perceived in its essence shorn of accident. The mind creates something, or perfects something, that could not exist without it. A true generatio. The phrase “true generatio” may also have reference to the passage from the De differentia that makes use of the analogy of progeniture for the Trinitarian procession: “Since it is the case that in every nature where the thing which proceeds forth which has its likeness and nature from that which it proceeds is called an offspring or son, and since this pertains to the word, which in God is called Son, its production is also called a generation” (sect. 5). The passage of a father’s identity to the son in procreation provides an analogy to the trinitarian procession insofar as there is a comparably profound identity in difference, “flesh of my flesh.” But why does Gadamer point this out as a “true generatio”? The mind generates a “word,” a judgment, an insight, a conclusion. The conception

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at the end of the process of intellection is an actualization of the quiddity (the answer to the question of what a thing is—quid est? ). When a solution crystallizes in the mind, when the proper word is found, or when the mystery is solved, we say that an idea is born. But this is not what is at stake here. Theology had to walk the line between monotheism and the distinction of persons in accordance with the biblical language of birth. An inner word is indeed an act of generation, the actualization of the intellect, and not a product which the mind deposits: “Clearly there is not something beyond intellect in which, by itself, a thing else may be expressed; nor something other than that by which understanding is expressed; there is not another word which expresses beyond just as, in God, there is not, on the one hand, the Father expressing and, on the other hand, another being in whom the expression is received” (DN, sect. 271). The bond of father and son is profound because the identity passes beyond all superficial likeness. There is a deep connection which is not even understood in the normal conscious relations of father and son, but is powerfully felt. When the mind produces an inner word, that profound relation of identity exists as well. For that reason it is a true generatio. In other words, Gadamer is still explaining the significance of the emanatio intellectualis. (par. 16, cont.) “Gerade dieser intellektuale Charakter der Erzeugung des Wortes ist jedoch für seine theologische Modellfunktion entscheidend.” [The purely intellectual character of the generation of the word, however, is important for the function of the theological model.] When Gadamer says that it is the intellectual nature of the generation that is important, the syntax is misleading. What makes sense, and what the context suggests, is that the occurrence of something like a generation without reception is what is important. Now, the conception of the ut actus ex actu exists always in a mode of contradiction to the human condition which is by definition a relation of form to matter and act to potency. But the human intellect is something like an exception, because there within that “space” where material objects do not penetrate, where the mechanism of mind translates the external world into the immaterial activities of impressions, ideas, and judgments, an analog to divine self-expression occurs:

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Now, the object is not present to the soul that is informed by an idea, since the object in its own nature is external to the soul; however, the activity of the soul is not from outside itself, because understanding is a motion toward the soul, both in virtue of the nature of the idea that leads to such a thing, and in virtue of the nature of the intellect, whose action is not external. Now, the intellect’s first action is the formation of its object (a word) through the idea. Once this is formed, it understands. These are not movements from potentiality toward actuality, because the intellect has already been made actual through the idea; rather, it is a complete procession from actuality to actuality, where no idea of motion is required. (DN, sect. 275) So, even in the lowest form67 of (i.e., human) intellect, “there is not one thing which expresses and another thing in which it is expressed” (DN, sect. 271). This says explicitly that the mind itself is the thinking and the thought. The reason Gadamer stresses the absorption of the mind in the word is to underline the Thomist idea that while the soul contemplates the world, there are not two separate things, but interanimated parts of a whole; the cooperative movement of form-matter which is the human equivalent of divine understanding. This is a temporary relation (existential rather than essential), and always connected to its imperfection, but with regard to that part of the circuit where understanding acts with only an indirect relation to matter, it resembles God.68

chapter 10



The Three Differences

s. 17, S. 428

par. 17, pp. 424 ‒‒425

Indessen muß es uns noch mehr als auf diese Übereinstimmung auf die Unterschiede ankommen, die zwischen dem göttlichen und dem menschlichen Wort bestehen. Das ist theologisch auch ganz in Ordnung. Das Mysterium der Trinität, das durch die Analogie mit dem inneren Wort aufgehellt werden soll, muß vom menschlichen Denken her am Ende doch unverständlich bleiben. Wenn im göttlichen Wort das Ganze des göttlichen Geistes ausgesprochen ist, dann bedeutet das prozessuale Moment an diesem Wort etwas, wofür uns im Grunde jede Analogie im Stich läßt. Sofern der göttliche Geist, indem er sich selbst erkennt, zugleich alles Seiende erkennt, ist das Wort Gottes das Wort des alles in einem Anschauen (intuitus) schauenden und schaffenden Geistes. Der Hervorgang verschwindet in der Aktualität der göttlichen Allweisheit. Auch die

And yet we ourselves want to pay attention more to the differences than the similarities between the divine and human word. This is perfectly legitimate theologically— The mystery of the Trinity, which the analogy of the inner word is meant to illuminate, must remain in the end incomprehensible to human thought. If the whole of the divine mind is expressed in this divine word, then the processual moment signifies something about this word concerning which we must, in the end, abandon any analogy. Insofar as the divine mind, while it knows itself, knows all beings, the word of God is the word of an all beholding and creating spirit in one vision (intuitus). The “process” disappears in the actuality of divine omniscience.1 The creation would also really not be a procession, but would rather only interpret the structure of the world order in 311

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Schöpfung sei kein wirklicher Prozeß, sondern lege nur das Ordnungsgefüge des Weltganzen im zeitlichen Schema aus. Wenn wir das prozessuale Moment am Wort genauer erfassen wollen, das uns für unsere Frage nach dem Zusammenhang von Sprachlichkeit und Verstehen das wichtige ist, werden wir bei der Übereinstimmung mit dem theologischen Problem nicht stehenbleiben dürfen, sondern werden bei der Unvollkommenheit des menschlichen Geistes und dem Unterschiede zum Göttlichen zu verweilen haben. Auch dabei dürfen wir Thomas folgen, der drei Unterschiede hervorhebt.

a temporal schema. If we wish to grasp more precisely the processual element in the word, which is important for our inquiry into the connectedness of language and understanding, we may not stop with our points of agreement with the theological problem, but instead will have to dwell on the imperfection of the human mind, and its difference with the divine understanding. We may still follow Thomas for this purpose, who underlines three differences.

Paragraph 17 begins the third and last major section of III, 2, B. In its recourse to the analogy of the inner word with incarnation, Thomism taught the corresponding differences between the human and divine word, and here Gadamer finds ample commonality with the hermeneutic theme of human finitude. To draw this out, he explicates Aquinas’s De differentia verbi divini et humani, which is itself a commentary on this theme, the first part of a lecture on John’s prologue.2 The beginning of Aquinas’s commentary is an exhaustive analysis of the phrase “In the beginning was the Word.” Aquinas looks at each of the three parts of the phrase in turn (subject, prepositional clause, and predicate), starting first with the noun “Word.” Following Augustine, Aquinas takes word to mean in its fundamental sense not the vocal sounds caused by the vibration of the air through the larynx, but the conception in our mind (conceptui animae) of which those vocalizations are a sign. This interior word (verbum interius) is something that is formed out of the mind’s coming to terms with the world. For Aquinas there are two such primary mental actions, analytic (definitionem) and

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synthetic (enuntiationem), sometimes translated as definition and judgment.3 The former is the marking and fixing of the boundaries of an issue, and the latter is the pronunciation on a matter under consideration. Regardless of such a division, the important point for the inner word here is that a matter has been brought to a point of settlement (terminatur). Gadamer speaks of an idea being “thought through” or “thought to the end.”4 The inner word is a crystallization of thought in a moment of conclusion. Thus Aquinas can say that “it is of the very nature of understanding that the intellect in understanding should form something.” This is where Gadamer finds the recovery of an understanding of language from the forgetfulness of Western thought, because Aquinas’s inner word is an issuance that only exists in the act of understanding as a kind of virtual embodiment of the act. It is something that is formed when one is understanding. Aquinas makes the key distinction that Gadamer is so intent on emphasizing throughout Truth and Method, that language is not a tool but a medium. The inner word is “not that by which (quo) the intellect understands, but that in which (in quo) it understands, since in that which is expressed and formed it sees the nature of the intelligible thing,” videt naturam rei intellectae (De differentia, sect. 2). The all-important second half of this sentence means that the judgment that the word holds is not held separately from the word in the mind, but is intrinsic to the word, so that the mind needs the word to understand the judgment. The intimate unity of thought and speech is that the mind cannot understand without language, that in a sense language completes the mind. (par. 17, cont.) “Wenn im göttlichen Wort das Ganze des göttlichen Geistes ausgesprochen ist, dann bedeutet das prozessuale Moment an diesem Wort etwas, wofür uns im Grunde jede Analogie im Stich läßt.” [If the whole of the divine mind is expressed in this divine word, then the processual element signifies something about this word concerning which we must, in the end, abandon any analogy.] Since the theme of III, 2, B is the analogy of the inner word, one might well ask what it is that Gadamer is suddenly referring to in this disclaimer.

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He offers two points of clarification. His first point is the distinction between intuitus and discursus: “Insofar as the divine mind, while it knows itself, knows all beings, the word of God is the word of an all beholding and creating spirit in one vision (intuitus).” This statement refers to a passage near the very end of the De natura: “Since God sees all things with a single act of perception, he utters all things with one word” (sect. 286). The power of the word in this formulation is ultimate—“the word of an all beholding and creating spirit in one vision.” Not only does God utter himself, but understands and creates by the same act (intuitus). The conception of speech as simultaneous understanding and creation reaches back to archaic beliefs in the power of naming, forward to the social construction of reality, and beyond any of this to the most comprehensive sense of being in act. It places speech at the very center of Thomistic metaphysics. And it imagines a power that surpasses our comprehension. The second point is the distinction between procession and succession: “The creation would also really not be a procession, but would rather only interpret the structure of the world order in a temporal schema.” Here we have clear evidence of Gadamer’s understanding of the word “procession,” and this reinforces my interpretation of the confusing vocabulary of paragraph 14. Procession is not basically temporal; it is in fact succession less the temporal element. The distinction between procession and succession is analogous to the Aristotelian distinction between energeia and kinesis. God is immovable, impassive, and unalterable and at the same time always in act.5 In the hermeneutic scheme, human intuition is only a formal indication, a sense of what must be revised, enlarged, completed. Whereas God needs only intuitus, humans have a weakened form of intuitus that is caught up in the circle of discursus. This human and divine distribution of the capacity for intuitus means that our temporal process is in fact a shadow: “The creation would also really not be a procession.” Here we must hear Gadamer’s admission of the unintelligibility of procession as also a distancing, since for him discursus is just as real as or more real than intuitus. As a subtext, we must also hear therefore Gadamer’s sensitivity to this subject in his Kantian rejection of the mystical tendencies of the counter-Enlightenment.6 The inability to conceive a word that does not go outside the mind and that expresses everything brings the meaning of divine procession

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to the breaking point. It is impossible to see how intuitus and discursus 7 can be brought together in the divine understanding, precisely because “there is no receptive part for an engendering part” (par. 16). And it is for this reason that at this point Gadamer backs off from the theological purpose—“we may not stop with our points of agreement with the theological problem”—allowing it to stand as a true aporia, “incomprehensible to human thought.” Gadamer’s whole interest is on the side of reception, and the dialogue that flows from the uniqueness of every receptive act. (par. 17, cont.) “Wenn wir das prozessuale Moment am Wort genauer erfassen wollen, das uns für unsere Frage nach dem Zusammenhang von Sprachlichkeit und Verstehen das wichtige ist, werden wir bei der Übereinstimmung mit dem theologischen Problem nicht stehenbleiben dürfen . . .” [If we wish to grasp more precisely the processual element in the word, which is important for our inquiry into the connectedness of language and understanding, we may not stop with our points of agreement with the theological problem . . . .] The last sentence of paragraph 17 is an introduction to the three differences. It is another truncation of thought that sounds like an obvious contradiction. However, this difficulty is only stylistic. The point is that theology fastened on the inner word as an analogy to divine expression, whereas hermeneutics is interested in the inner word as an insight into human language. Scholasticism saw the weak imitation of the human intellect as an imperfect version of what is real: “The creation would also really not be a procession, but would rather only interpret the structure of the world order in a temporal schema.” Gadamerian hermeneutics flips this around. Not only is the imperfection of the mind real, but it is its special glory. When Gadamer turns to Aquinas as guide, it is because, in spite of the difference in perspectives, Aquinas provides an unsurpassed account of discursivity. In spite of this common accord, Gadamer’s paraphrase here feels slightly off-register, because for Aquinas, the differences between the human and divine word demonstrate the weakness of the analogy, whereas Gadamer finds in the differences hermeneutics’ true element.

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The First Difference s. 18, S. 428 ‒‒429

par. 18, pp. 424 ‒‒425

1. Zunächst gilt, daß das menschliche Wort potentiell ist, bevor es aktualisiert wird. Es ist formierbar, aber nicht formiert. Der Vorgang des Denkens setzt ja damit ein, daß uns etwas aus unserem Gedächtnis in den Sinn kommt. Auch dies ist schon eine Emanation, sofern ja da Gedächtnis nicht etwa geplündert wird und etwas einbüßt. Aber was uns so in den Sinn kommt, ist noch nicht das Vollendete und Zu-EndeGedachte. Vielmehr setzt jetzt erst die eigentliche denkende Bewegung ein, in der der Geist von einem zum anderen eilt, sich hin- und herwälzt, dieses und jenes erwägt und so in der Weise der Untersuchung (inquisitio) und Überlegung (cogitatio) den vollendeten Ausdruck seiner Gedanken erst sucht. Das vollendete Wort wird also erst im Denken gebildet, insofern wie ein Werkzeug, aber wenn es als die volle Perfektion des Gedankens da ist, wird mit ihm nichts mehr hergestellt. Vielmehr ist in ihm alsdann die Sache präsent. Es ist also kein eigenliches Werkzeug. Thomas hat dafür ein glänzendes Bild gefunden. Das Wort ist wie ein Spiegel, in dem die Sache gesehen wird. Das Besondere dieses Spiegels aber ist, daß er nirgends über das Bild der Sache hinausgeht. In ihm spiegelt

1. What comes first to the fore is that the human word is potential before it is actualized. It is formable, but not formed. The process of thinking begins with the fact that something comes to our attention from our memory. Even this is already an emanation, insofar as the memory is not in any way plundered and loses nothing. Now, what is brought to mind is not yet completed and thought out to the end. But now here is where the true thinking process really gets engaged: The mind hastens from one thing to another, flits here and there, weighs this thought and that, and so in this manner both through analysis (inquisitio) and consideration (cogitatio) first searches for the perfected expression of its thinking. The perfected word will be thus at first formed in thought, almost like an instrument or agent, but when it exists there as the full perfection of the thought, nothing more is produced with it—Rather, the matter at hand is then present in it. It is thus not an actual instrument. Thomas found a splendid image for it. The word is like a mirror in which the thing is seen: The special thing about this mirror, however, is that it nowhere goes beyond the vision

The Three Differences sich nichts als nur diese eine Sache, so daß er als Ganzes, das er ist, nur ihr Bild (similitudo) wiedergibt. Das Großartige dieses Bildes ist, daß das Wort hier ganz als die perfekte Spiegelung der Sache, also der Ausdruck der Sache erfaßt ist und den Weg des Denkens hinter sich gelassen hat, dem es doch allein seinde Existenz verdankt. Dergleichen gibt es im göttlichen Geist nicht.

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of what is under consideration. It mirrors nothing other than this one thing, so that it reflects back only the form (similitudo) of what it is. The wonder of this image is that the word, as the perfect mirroring of the thing, is the expression of the matter captured, and it has left the trail of thinking to which it owes its entire existence. There is nothing of the kind in the divine mind.

Gadamer’s description of the first difference, in spite of its close paraphrase, is noticeably different in tone from Aquinas. In the De differentia, the word of God is always already perfect, whereas we humans must, so to speak,“tack up” to our judgments by a discursive process: “When I wish to conceive the essence [ratio] of a stone, it is necessary to reason towards that which is its word” (sect. 26). Ratiocination precedes the achievement of judgment, a discursus inquisitionis, and only then do we have the thing—et tunc primo habet rationem verbi (sect. 291). In Gadamer’s paraphrase, the comparison to the divine word, next to which the human word comes up short, is absent, and Gadamer delights in the description of the potency of the word not yet formed. We all know the pleasure of finding just the right word, and the gradual progress of our powers to achieve this felicity of expression. He is actually much closer in spirit to Augustine, whom Aquinas has quoted indirectly: “What, I say, is this thing that is formable, but not yet formed, except a something in our mind, which we toss to and fro by revolving it this way or that, while we think of first one thing and then another, according as they are found by or occur to us? And the true word then comes into being” (Augustine, DT, 15.15). (par. 18, cont.) “das menschliche Wort potentiell ist, bevor es aktualisiert wird” [the human word is potential before it is actualized] The first sentence of paragraph 18 is confusing, because the attribution of potency and act to word is what the De natura has expressly denied

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(ista non sunt motus de potentia ad actum), and this denial has been carefully pointed out in par. 15, III, 2, B, with the explication of the phrase ut actus ex actu. In fact, though, Gadamer is merely repeating the language Aquinas uses in the lecture (“So our word is first in potency before it is in act”). So, in the De differentia, cogitation is to word as potency is to act. The discursivity of human reasoning 8 is the word that is forming but not yet formed, and as such it is not yet the perfection of pure act. This becoming-structure loses the distinction between temporal and essential priority worked out so painstakingly in the De natura as a way to find an analogy to the being-in-act of divinity. Since we can say that the human term in the analogy will be a weak image, the discrepancy between potency-act and the ut actus ex actu could be resolved, but the text does not do this, and Gadamer does not explain the discrepancy. In the ensuing description, he almost seems to be smoothing out the difference by describing the ways in which the formation of the word is always already in act, either in the first stage of emanation from memory, or in the cogitation that follows. The rest of the commentary in paragraph 18 leaves the De differentia, and jumps to the parallel description of “the first difference” in the De natura (sect. 275). It is clear that Gadamer’s reading is a collation of the two texts, and this gets him into a bit of trouble. Again there is a confusion of terminology which accounts for the obscurity of Gadamer’s language in the following passage: “The perfected word will be thus at first formed in thought, almost like an instrument or agent, but when it exists there as the full perfection of the thought, nothing more is produced with it —Rather, the matter at hand is then present in it. It is thus not an actual instrument.” It is a hermeneutic commonplace that language is not just a tool, but how does this relate to an inner word’s perfection or imperfection? Aquinas makes the clear distinction between cogitation, the discursive process and an inner word, the result, so the confusion is not with him. One way to address the tool/non-tool distinction is by reference to the species, since species have multiple functions in the formation of the inner word. The impressions (species) or ideas (species) which combine to form a word (species), are in the first two instances tools, and in the latter not. I will suggest an additional clarification of the tool/non-tool distinction shortly, but for now this distinction will help us understand the difficult simile of the mirror which follows.

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(par. 18, cont.) “der Geist von einem zum anderen eilt, sich hinund herwälzt, dieses und jenes erwägt und so in der Weise der Untersuchung (inquisitio) und Überlegung (cogitatio) den vollendeten Ausdruck seiner Gedanken erst sucht.” [The mind hastens from one thing to another, flits here and there, weighs this thought and that, and so in this manner both through analysis (inquisitio) and consideration (cogitatio) first searches for the perfected expression of its thinking.] This description of discursivity corresponds to a single sentence in the De differentia: “While therefore the intellect discourses in reasoning out, being thrown this way and that, the word is not fully formed until it conceives the perfect nature of the thing” (sect. 4).9 The discursive nature of reason is a commonplace of the tradition, but more often as a deficiency of human intellection. Aquinas sometimes describes ratiocination with more favor. Humans reason “with such dignity of spirit that they have an intellect, mutatis mutandis, almost equal to angels. For the cogitative of reasoning ends in the simple intelligence of truth, just as it begins from the simple intelligence of truth in first principles. Moreover, in the process of reasoning there is a coiling (convolutio) like a circle, while reasoning, beginning from one, proceeds through many and ends in one.”10 Gadamer expands upon his description of discursiveness with more feeling, and once again the difference in his commitments becomes evident: “Vielmehr setzt ertst die eigentliche denkende Bewegung ein, in der der Geist von einem zum anderen eilt, sich hin- und herwälzt, dieses und jenes erwägt und so in der Weise der Untersuchung (inquisitio) und Überlegung (cogitatio) den vollendeten Ausdruck seiner Gedanken erst sucht.” The movement of the language is itself processive rather than objectivizing. (par. 18, cont.) “Das vollendete Wort wird also erst im Denken gebildet, insofern wie ein werkzeug, aber wenn es als die volle Perfektion des Gedankens da ist, wird mit ihm nichts mehr hergestellt.” [The perfected word will be thus at first formed in thought, almost like an instrument or agent, but when it exists there as the full perfection of the thought, nothing more is produced with it—Rather, the matter at hand is then present in it. It is thus not an actual instrument.]

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Gadamer’s “voluntary recall” of the tool simile has to do with one of the more important understandings of language that hermeneutics carries through from Thomism. In Thomist psychology the agent intellect apprehends the universal in the concrete object itself. The mind is not looking at a word, but through the word at the thing. The word is only what makes the thing intelligible. The word is a tool in the sense it is that by which something is understood, but it is not a tool in the sense that the word completes the thing. We must give the word its proper dignity as fully correspondent with the thing itself. (par. 18, cont.) “Thomas hat dafür ein glänzendes Bild gefunden. Das Wort ist wie ein Spiegel, in dem die Sache gesehen wird.” [Thomas found a splendid image for it: The word is like a mirror in which the thing is seen.] We must now see how the mirror simile expresses this equivocal relation of word to tool. I have devoted an entire chapter to working out some of the deepest implications of the mirror simile,11 so in this exegesis I want to stay close to Gadamer’s use of the scholastic texts. The simile occurs in the section in the De natura about the first difference (sect. 275).12 There are two attributes of the word which rise to a culminating statement in this passage. The first is that word and object complete each other. Any particular object in the world is necessarily less than what it truly is in its essence given its contingent being. It is the word which comprehends the essential nature of the thing by abstracting from it all accidental elements. This essentializing is saved from its own Platonic tendencies by the fact that the essence exists only in the cooperation of the accidental object and its word. The word is the manifestation of the intellect in act, and in human intellect that act is always an exchange between matter and mind. This idea is expressed nicely in the phrase “illuminated idea” (species illustrata). The light of illumination is the spark of divine light which the human mind has, a light which illuminates the essence of the object. It is illumined only so long as intellect is in contact with it, that is to say, with its species, animated like the soul animates the body in life. The second attribute is the perfection of the word’s manifestation. The language is actually quite beautiful here, with first a balanced parallel (“the intellect and the idea are not two, but intellect and illuminated idea are one”), then what ancient rhetoric calls a ploce (“This complete expression is a word, and it is the whole expressibility of the thing spo-

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ken, and the whole in which the thing is expressed”), and finally an epanodos (“and this is intellect principally, since a thing is not understood unless in it”).13 The description is meant to convey the convertibility of the mind and the illuminated object, the one being only so much as and not more than the other in this moment of exchange—the absorption of the mind in the object, represented by the conception of the word, and the absorption of the object in the mind, in the only way that it will be perfected, by understanding. Such an absorption is a kind of likeness to the moving image of eternity,14 the actualization of understanding in contemplation is self-sufficient and perfect. To use a more accessible example, when we find the right word that has been sought, for a moment, in its thought and expression, in that moment of illumination, we discover exactly what it is we were looking for, and we are captivated in the fulfillment of that momentary discovery. Gadamer often speaks of the mind’s absorption in the subject matter, another proof on behalf of the effort to distance understanding from the tyranny of the subject. Language and mind necessarily disappear from our consciousness in the preoccupation with whatever is at issue.15 Gadamer regards Aristotle’s assertion that the mind becomes what it perceives as the same point in different language. Aquinas’s mirror metaphor has the same purpose as well, which is ironic, since the language of reflection is so closely tied to subjective idealism. But in scholasticism this figure is not problematic given the proximity to the term species, which means not only impression, idea, or form, but also image or reflection. The various species in the mind work in concert to produce judgments about the exterior world, receiving, retaining, and transforming the matter of the material world for intellectual consumption. They are, so to speak, relay points in the processing of sense impressions.16 The species is not one kind of mechanism, but the various manifestations of enformed matter proceeding through the intellect—perception, impression, image, memory, conception, word. In one sense a species is a reflecting surface, but from the material world to the immaterial world of the mind. As the immaterial intellect cannot directly handle material objects, species stand in their place as ghost images of the exterior world. Brennan states Gadamer’s point about the absorption of the object in simpler terms: “Intellect, in its act of understanding, is perfectly identified with the thing that it understands. . . . This does not mean, however, that the essence of the intellect becomes the thing understood or the image of the thing understood;

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but simply that, in the moment that it actually understands, it is completely informed by the species of the thing understood.”17 One part of what Gadamer is getting at in this distinction between the word and the tool, and the use of the mirror image that disappears in what it reflects, is part of a theory of language that will be articulated fully in his later work. The notion of the “self-forgetfulness” of language is an appropriation of Heidegger’s later reflections on the word. For Gadamer, language is the medium of our solidarity. As such, it does not have an existence apart from us, just as no individual has no existence apart from it or others. This idea will receive its fullest treatment in paragraph 21. Gadamer is enchanted by the mirror simile because it expresses the similarity of the human and divine intellect. When the mind conceives the inner word, there is not, to paraphrase him, mind here and word there. Just as the word and the thing are inseparable, so the mind and the word. Heidegger would say that the appearance is not a mere seeming, but a manifestation of what is. The mirror is not a tool here, but is caught up in the seeing. We have passed outside the boundaries of subject and object. Word and mind are coextensive with truth.18 When Gadamer then says at the close of the paragraph that the inner word “has left behind it the path of the thought to which alone, however, it owes its existence,” he is both acknowledging and bracketing the first difference. He is having both thoughts at the same time. My summary of the mirror metaphor is only a bare introduction. When Gadamer speaks of the mirror simile he is very conscious of its resonances in the tradition. This is clear for instance when he brings up the metaphor in the first part of Truth and Method: The essence of the copy lies in its having no other function than to resemble the original.19 The measure of its adequacy is that one recognizes the original from the copy. This means that it is its purpose to sublate20 its own being-for-itself and to serve only to be a mediator for what is copied. The ideal copy would be a mirror image. Its being is in fact to disappear. It exists only for the one who looks into the mirror, and is nothing more than its pure appearing. In truth it is not even an image or a copy, since it has no being for itself. The mirror throws the image back; that is, the mirror makes visible whatever it reflects only so long as one looks in the mirror and perceives one’s own image, or whatever else is reflected in it. (TM, 138/WM, 143)

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Here the lesson from Aquinas is clearly being stated prospectively, but also we are being reminded of the Alcibiades and the Phaedo, of Plotinus, Hegel, and Schelling. The Theaetetus, for instance, anticipates the De natura with a mirror metaphor as beautiful and opaque, to express, of all things, the intimate unity of thought and speech: “Speech is that which makes one’s own thought evident through sound with words and phrases, just as if it were into a mirror or water one was striking off one’s opinion into the stream through one’s mouth” (206d). Because Aquinas uses the mirror metaphor often, and because it is a standard trope in the tradition which he read, it is odd that Gadamer should speak of it as if Aquinas had happened upon something original. It is perhaps more the use to which he puts the figure, and the depth of its ramifications in the simile. In any case, behind Gadamer’s attention to the mirror is the concentrated force of his thought about human understanding. (par. 18, cont.) “Das Besondere dieses Spiegels aber ist, daß er nirgends über das Bild der Sache hinausgeht. In ihm spiegelt sich nichts als nur diese eine Sache, so daß er als Ganzes, das er ist, nur ihr Bild (similitudo) wiedergibt.” [The special thing about this mirror, however, is that it nowhere goes beyond the vision of what is under consideration. It mirrors nothing other than this one thing, so that it reflects back only the form (similitudo) of what it is.] What Gadamer is referring to in this last distinction between human and divine intellect is the mind’s capacity to hold in memory the “words” that have been generated in thought. This is at the same time a weakness and strength of human intellect, since, on the one hand, these words are, so to speak, asleep, separated from the act of intellect which illuminated them, but, on the other hand, they allow the mind to build on what it has achieved, reanimating and building from prior thought by drawing on memory. The word has two aspects; it represents essentially the actualization of understanding in the moment of its achievement, “la Pensée vivante.”21 It is also the understanding achieved, “la connaissance possédée.”22 This is hardly more than an aside in the De natura, but one can imagine its importance for Gadamer, who understands the structure of hermeneutic understanding to follow in part from the availability of the resources of language and accumulated achievements of thought.

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The Second Difference s. 19, S. 429

par. 19, p. 425

2. Im Unterschied zum göttlichen Wort ist das menschliche Wort wesensmäßig unvollkommen. Kein menschliches Wort kann in vollkommener Weise unseren Geist ausdrücken. Aber wie das Bild des Spiegels schon sagte, ist das nicht eigentlich die Unvollkommenheit des Wortes selber. Das Wort gibt ja vollständig wieder, was der Geist meint. Vielmehr ist es die Unvollkommenheit des menschlichen Geistes, daß er nie die vollständige Selbstgegenwart besitzt, sondern ins Meinen von Diesem oder Jenem zerstreut ist. Aus dieser seiner wesensmäßigen Unvollkommenheit folgt, daß das menschliche Wort nicht wie das göttliche Wort ein einziges ist, sondern notwendigerweise viele Worte sein muß. Die Vielheit der Worte bedeutet also keineswegs, daß an dem einzelnen Wort ein Mangel wäre, den man beheben könnte, sofern es nicht vollkommen ausspräche, was der Geist meint, sondern weil unser Intellekt unvollkommen ist, d.h. sich nicht vollkommen in dem, was er weiß, gegenwärtig ist, bedarf es der Vielheit der Worte. Er weiß gar nicht wirklich, was er weiß.

2. As distinct from the divine Word, the human word is essentially imperfect. No human word can express our mind in a complete way. But as the image in the mirror already indicated, this is not actually the imperfection of the word itself. The word gives access fully to what the mind intends. The imperfection of the human mind is rather that it never stands perfectly present to itself, but is dispersed into meaning this or that. From this essential imperfection it follows that the human word is not single as the divine word is, but must necessarily be many words. The multiplicity of words thus in no way signifies that there is a lack in the individual word which could be overcome inasmuch as what the mind means is not fully expressed in it, but rather that because our intellect is imperfect, that is, is not completely present to what it knows, it stands in need of many words. It hardly knows what it knows.

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The second difference has to do with the fact that God’s word is truly just one word, and Aquinas cites Job as the proof text:“God speaketh once” (33:14).23 All that we know, by contrast, is the subject of many thoughts and words. The distinction here is not about the temporal succession of discursive reasoning, but rather simply number. Our frailty is that many imperfect words are needed to reflect the myriad aspects of truth. Gadamer uses an apt word to describe this attribute: Human language is “dispersed.” The passage in the De differentia reads: The second difference is that our word is imperfect, but the divine Word is most perfect. For since we cannot express all our conceptions in one word, we must form many imperfect words through which we separately express all that is in our knowledge. But it is not that way with God. For since he understands both himself and everything else through his essence, by one act, the single divine Word is expressive of all that is in God, not only of the Persons but also of creatures. (sect. 4) [Secunda differentia est verbi nostri ad verbum divinum quod verbum nostrum est imperfectum sed verbum Dei est perfectissimum, quia nos non possumus omnia quae sunt in anima nostra exprimere uno verbo; ideo opertet quod sint plura verba imperfecta, per quae divisim exprimamus omnia quae in anima nostra sunt.] Here is the equivalent passage in the De natura: Since God sees all things with a single act of perception, he utters all things with one word; we however have many words on account of the frailty of our intellect in understanding.24 And of these some arise from others, just as conclusion from premises; and some not, as in things which do not have a mutual connection, as is evident with “stone” and “wood”; some things lend themselves immediately to the one understanding, other things not; some things involve longer reasoning, others less. Therefore our words involve sometimes more, sometimes less cognition, and some are formed more quickly and others more slowly, just as to arrive at one conclusion may be more slow and difficult, and another easier and quicker. (sect. 286)

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Our thinking is more or less discursive, the more so the more we fall away from the divine. This is Aquinas’s point, and it seems straightforward. Gadamer’s exegesis, however, pushes the statement until it reads like Heidegger, including the language of concealment and revealment25 and the forecompletion of understanding: “[B]ecause our intellect is imperfect, that is, is not completely present to what it knows, it stands in need of many words. It hardly knows what it knows.” It is possible to see the interplay of presence and absence in Aquinas’s “all that is in our knowledge,” since the analogy of God’s word is “all that is in God, not only of the persons but also of creatures.” Aquinas says explicitly, “we cannot express all our conceptions in one word,” and so this clearly has to do with more than rationization or discursivity, since what would correspond with God’s complete knowledge is all the words that would ever speak our historical existence. What is also in Gadamer’s description is the claim that the intellect somehow does have a complete knowledge, in spite of its inability to express everything at once. This sounds almost mystical, but as we now know, this is instead a reference to the unbroken connection the language that we use has on the whole of tradition. Although the Thomist text could not be referring to this, it could be referring to the seed of logos that contains every possibility. At the very least, Gadamer’s ambitious interpretation challenges us to think what it must mean to think of the one Word that “is expressive of all that God is.”26 (par. 19, cont.) “Aber wie das Bild des Spiegels schon sagte, ist das nicht eigentlich die Unvollkommenheit des Wortes selber. Das Wort gibt ja vollständig wieder, was der Geist meint.” [But as the image in the mirror already indicated, this is not actually the imperfection of the word itself. The word gives access fully to what the mind intends.] In the German, Gadamer is faithful to the Thomist text, translating perfectum as Vollkommen. In English, the linguistic roots of perfection (per-facio) are dead to the ear, but certainly still audible in Aquinas, and roughly parallel to the German vollkommen (that which has come to fullness). This is what allows the smooth modulation to Vollständigkeit, literally standing in fullness, a semantic and linguistic proximity that is less present in the English.

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There is nothing in the De differentia on this paradoxical point of the perfection of the inner word. It is a good example of Gadamer’s blending of the two proof texts, because the reference to the mirror metaphor is from the De natura, which is filled with considerations of the point. The word is what is given when “the idea is the completed nature of the thing” (sect. 270). The inner word “is both the whole of the thing said, and the whole in which the matter is expressed” (sect. 275). We should be careful about this claim, because it does not mean that there is no procession in the word. Here we come to one of the hardest points to comprehend. In a Thomist world perfection can exist in becoming, in the sense that the word is an act, not a thing, and its perfection is in its being born: “For our word is always in continual becoming, because its complete existence is always in its becoming. Now this is not an imperfection . . . .” (sect. 277). (par. 19, cont.) “unser Intellekt unvollkommen ist, d.h. sich nicht vollkommen in dem, was er weiß, gegenwärtig ist” [our intellect is imperfect, that is, is not completely present to what it knows] There is a precedent to this medieval rumination in Plotinus, when he is trying to understand the relationship between time and eternity. For him, of course, the temporal world is a faint image of its perfect archetype, and so the question becomes how temporality mimics the eternal. It does this in a way very similar to Heideggerian resoluteness, by aspiring in its constancy to that wholeness: And instead of a complete unbounded whole, a continuous unbounded succession, and instead of a whole all together a whole which is, and always will be, going to come into being part by part. For this is the way in which it will imitate that which is already a whole, already all together and unbounded, by intending to be always making an increase in its being, for this is how its being will intimate the being of the intelligible world. (Enneads, 3.7.11) And Plotinus then relates this effort of continuity to the nature of temporal being:27 “We must understand, too, from this that this nature is time, the extent of life of this kind which goes forward in even and uniform progression quietly, and which possesses continuity of activity” (3.7.12).

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The same relation of completeness and incompleteness is pivotal in Heidegger, a theme on which he brooded over the last decades, and out of which Gadamer’s hermeneutics is fashioned. Our understanding is never wholly present to itself, compounded out of past and future at many different levels. According to the De natura memory corresponds to the Father, and the first procession or birth of the word is a bringing from the treasury house of memory. The intellect does not simply plunder this treasury, but rather actualizes a living relation with it, so that the word in its presence is not some separate thing, but a connection to the whole (sects. 272 ‒‒ 274). So in Aquinas the relation between unvollkommen and vollkommen is already quite complicated. It is important to underscore the history this complex relation will have in hermeneutics if we are to understand what Gadamer sees in the De natura. At the beginning of Part II of Being and Time, Heidegger opens by asking whether an entity such as a human being “can ever become accessible in its Being-a-whole” (BT, 279). He asks this in the context of a Dasein in which “there is always something still outstanding” (279). In spite of his continued affirmation that there is “a constant lack of totality” in Dasein by definition, since it is an entity “to whose kind of Being becoming belongs” (287), he nevertheless speaks eventually of a kind of totality when he introduces temporality into the structure of care. Our anxious anticipation presumes a whole which we never achieve, but which is the basis for our understanding in the first place. So, totality is not a predetermined perfection, but a project: “[A]s long as any Dasein is, it too is already its ‘not-yet’ ” (288). Dasein is “fatefully whole” in the moment of vision that “is held in that future which is in the process of having-been” (463). The dialectic of part and whole as it relates to language is the lesson that guides the explication of the verbum doctrine, but it is not until a later section of Truth and Method (III, 3, B) that this relation receives its explicit statement, in a passage that asserts the improvement of hermeneutic thought over the Augustinian insight into human discursivity: Every word breaks forth as if from a center and is related to a whole, through which alone it is a word. Every word causes the whole of the language to which it belongs to resonate and the whole world-

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view that underlies it to appear. Thus every word, as the event of a moment, carries with it the unsaid, to which it is related by responding and summoning. The occasionality of human speech is not a casual imperfection of its expressive power; it is, rather, the logical expression of the living virtuality of speech that brings a totality of meaning into play, without being able to express it totally. All human speaking is finite in such a way that there is laid up within it an infinity of meaning to be explicated and laid out. That is why the hermeneutical phenomenon also can be illuminated only in light of the fundamental finitude of being, which is wholly verbal in character. (458) On the face of it this is pure Humboldt, but the idea that “human speaking is finite in such a way that there is laid up within it an infinity of meaning to be explicated and laid out” is original to the tension between the divine and human word, and the long history of the word is the precedent for that German linguistic theory.28 Behind Gadamer’s invocation of wholeness (totaliter) resounds the encounter with Heidegger, whose ruminations on the whole of being turn from the earlier preoccupation with Dasein to the wholeness resident within language: “The peculiar property of language, which is determined by Appropriation, is even less knowable than the particularity of language, if to know means to have seen something in the wholeness of its nature, seen it in the round. We are not capable of seeing that nature of language in the round because we, who can only say something by saying it after Saying, belong ourselves within Saying” (Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 133 ‒ 134). The theme of wholeness and our relationship to it is a constant animating thought of hermeneutics, “what is spoken and what of it is unspoken in all that is given in the speaking” (121), and we hear the resonance of this theme again and again in III, 2, B.29 Gadamer himself glosses the theme in a 1987 lecture: “To say that a ‘word’ can have truth does not mean to assert that the individual word as such, a single word alongside other words, can be true. Rather, ‘the word’ [das Wort] always already refers to a greater and more multiple unity, a unity well known in the tradition in the concept of the verbum interius [inner word]” (Gadamer,“Thinking and Poetizing in Heidegger and Hölderlin’s ‘Anderken,’” 146). What is it that hermeneutics sees in speech that is always impelling it toward a vision of wholeness? In the ordinary course of conversation,

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I don’t think most people are led to think of the vast underlying language and culture that supports them. But Gadamer and Heidegger are constantly saying that it is so: “Thanks to the gravitational force of every single word, something other, something different, is always there with it” (Gadamer,“Thinking and Poetizing,” 154). The answer works on many levels. At one level is the abiding obligation to Humboldt, for whom it is the core theme, although for him it is always explicitly the cultural whole that a language expresses. At a deeper level is the ocean of Hegel, and his almost insensible influence on any subsequent German thought about the totality of what is.30 The Hegelian influence is clearly related to the religious impulse and the Christian teaching, as we have seen. On the other hand, Gadamer’s totality is clearly inflected by Socrates’ ignorance, the traditions of civic humanism, and the rhetorical understanding of open indeterminacies. The interpretation of hermeneutic totality is still being battled out.31 (par. 19, cont.) “Aus dieser seiner wesensmäßigen Unvollkommenheit folgt, daß das menschliche Wort nicht wie das göttliche Wort ein einziges ist, sondern notwendigerweise viele Worte sein muß.” [From this essential imperfection it follows that the human word is not single as the divine word is, but must necessarily be many words.] In a later statement Gadamer is more explicit: “‘Word’ refers not only to the individual word, the singular of ‘words’ or of the words that together form a discourse, rather it more importantly relates to a use of language, where ‘word’ has a collective meaning and implies a social relation” (“On the Truth of the Word,” 135). This explanation opens out onto the Protestant sense of the word of God descending through history as a binding source of tradition and testimony that unites communities. As Lawrence Schmidt and Monika Reuss explain, German encourages this plasticity: “Das Wort has two declensions in German that are distinguished in the plural. Die Wörter refers to the smallest independent parts of speech, the many individual words as in a dictionary (Wörterbuch); Die Wörter is used in all other cases and may refer to the collective sense of word as expression, sentence, or one’s thought” (“On the Truth of Word,” trans. note, 258).

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The Third Difference s. 20, S. 429 ‒‒430

par. 20, 425 ‒‒426

3. Damit aber hängt der dritte Unterschied zusammen. Während Gott im Wort seine Natur und Substanz in reiner Aktualität vollkommen ausspricht, ist jeder Gedanke, den wir denken, und damit auch jedes Wort, in dem dieses Denken sich vollendet, ein bloßes Akzidens des Geistes. Das Wort des menschlichen Denkens zielt zwar auf die Sache, aber kann sie nicht als ein Ganzes in sich enthalten. So geht das Denken den Weg zu immer neuen Konzeptionen fort und ist im Grunde in keiner ganz vollendbar. Seine Unvollendbarkeit hat als Kehrseite, daß sie positiv die wahre Unendlichkeit des Geistes ausmacht, der in immer neuem geistigem Prozeß über sich hinausgeht und eben darin auch die Freiheit zu immer neuen Entwürfen findet.

3. The third difference is related to the second. Whereas God expresses his nature and substance in the word in pure actuality, each thought that we think, and with it also every word in which the thought is completed, is a mere accident of the mind. The word of human thinking indeed aims for the substance at hand, but it cannot comprise it in its entirety. Thus the thought moves on always to new conceptions and is basically never entirely complete. Its incompleteness has a reverse side, that it constitutes positively the true infinity of the mind, which exceeds itself in an ever new thought process and in so doing as well finds freedom for ever new projects.

In the De differentia, the third difference “is that our word is not of the same nature as we” (verbum nostrum non est eiusdem naturae nobiscum), but in God, “to understand and to be are the same” (sect. 28). Aquinas quotes Damascene that “God is a substantial Word, and a hypostasis, but our words are concepts in our mind” (sect. 28), and characterizes the human word as accident rather than essence. This is all that the De differentia says on the human word, and Gadamer’s explication moves in a direction away from the source text. Aquinas takes the distinction between essence and accident as the occasion to expound on the personal nature of the Word. The consequence he draws from this is the relation of the expression to the person speaking, rather than the incompleteness of the

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word to express the thought. We have already reflected on the highly significant meaning of this attribute in the explication of paragraph 3 of III, 2, B, because Gadamer quotes the source text at that point directly. Gadamer’s point about the incompleteness of the human word, it should be no surprise, comes from the De natura, in which the personal nature of the divine Word is indeed connected to the characteristic incompleteness of the human word. This point is implicit in the De differentia in a subclause in which it is noted that the divine Word “is perfect and expressive of the whole being of the Father,” although the negative of this is not stated. Gadamer’s decision to read both texts simultaneously glosses over the important differences between them, and this is one of the most important. Here is the passage from the De natura: For our word is always in continual becoming, because its complete existence is always in its becoming. Now this is not an imperfection, the word’s not existing all at once, as is the case with other things that are in becoming, which are imperfect. Nay, rather the word in its own origin is perfect, since the conception is there perfectly formed, and its perfected existence is preserved in the same manner as its birth. For the formation of the word does not pass away when it (i.e., the word) itself is formed, but when it is being actively understood the word is in continual formation, since it is always in a state of becoming and emerging from something else, namely from the speaker. (sect. 277) The link between the completion of the thought and the personhood of the Word is not immediately obvious, and yet it will bear the weight of the thought as the exegesis unfolds. Although the differences are fully engaged, they are explained in such a way that we feel actually less of the difference. Here we see a good example of how the De natura acts to deconstruct the De differentia by turning the differences to positive account. The conceptual nature of the human word is understood as a complex translation of the hypostasis rather than as simply a falling off. The De natura relates a difference as a preface to ameliorating the difference, and it does this systematically. For instance, the inner word is not merely a sign of some thought: “Clearly there is not something beyond intellect in which, by itself, a thing else may be expressed; nor something other than that by which understanding is expressed; there is not another word

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which expresses beyond just as, in God, there is not, on the one hand, the Father expressing and, on the other hand, another being in whom the expression is received” (sect. 271). The light of the mind, as ultimately an emanation from God, is diffused from the idea into and through the word, holding all together, so that in the end, in spite of the separation, even the human word relates to the intellect as “the uttering of itself !” (sect. 276). The peculiarity of the De natura is that the difference of the human word can even be an advantage. Memory is an example. The inner word exists in a latent or hibernating state in the memory where it is not “in act.” But instead of regarding this as an imperfection—as the disunity of the word—the De natura conceives of this in positive terms: “For what is understood can be in the intellect and remain in the intellect while not actively understood” (sect. 276).32 (par. 20, cont.) “Seine Unvollendbarkeit hat als Kehrseite” [Its incompleteness has a reverse side] From this point in paragraph 20, Gadamer departs from exegesis and moves toward Hegel and Kierkegaard (the true infinity of the mind), and Heidegger (freedom for new projects). For the doctrine of the inner word, human language always stands in subordination to the simple unity of the divine. It is true that Aquinas allows that the principle of diversity works towards the second perfection of the universe, and the proper dignity of human being includes a creative power that works with a certain domain of freedom. But this freedom is also circumscribed by the ultimate tendency towards order and perfection, and schooled by the principle of convenientia, of what is appropriate. Gadamer must break from this profile of difference, and this is why he has recourse, in the subsequent section (III, 2, C) to the later theology of Nicholas of Cusa, for whom the principle of complicatio gives a positive sense to the diversity of human finitude: “Accordingly, the multiplicity in which the human mind unfolds itself is not a mere fall from true unity and not a loss of its home” (TM, 435). This, as Gadamer repeatedly emphasizes, is a new idea. But apparently Gadamer is so anxious to reveal this aspect of the word that the positivity of linguistic diversity arrives early, in his departure from exegesis in the verbum section.

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Here the production of thought works, in a sense, backwards, or at least as the reverse of our normal expectation. Our encounter with the world, an encounter that is always various and new, continually enriches the language that is coming to terms with it. Because it is the particular encounter that makes the conceptual abstraction come alive and have meaning, it is the particular word of the occasion that begins to uncover what is meaningful in the language. “Speaking the word aloud in the vox” is “first” (prius), i.e., the occasion of meaning in the world, its animation, its interanimation.33

chapter 11



Gadamer’s Summation and Prospectus (pars. 21‒‒ 22)

s. 21, S. 429

par. 21, p. 426

Fassen wir zusammen, was aus der Theologie des Verbum für uns zu gewinnen ist, so ist als erstes ein Gesichtspunkt festzuhalten, der in der vorangegangenen Analyse kaum ausdrücklich wurde und im scholastischen Denken auch selbst kaum ausdrücklich wird und der doch insbesondere für das hermeneutische Phänomen, auf das es uns ankommt, von entscheidender Wichtigkeit ist. Die innere Einheit von Denken und Sichsagen, die dem trinitarischen Mysterium der Inkarnation entspricht, schließt in sich, daß das innere Wort des Geistes nicht durch einen reflexiven Akt gebildet wird. Wer etwas denkt, d.h. sich sagt, meint damit das, was er denkt, die Sache. Er ist also auf sein eigenes Denken zurückgerichtet, wenn er das Wort bildet. Das Wort ist wohl das Produkt der Arbeit seines Geistes. Er bildet es in sich fort, sofern er den Gedanken aus und zu Ende denkt. Im Unterschied

Summarizing what we have gotten from the theology of the verbum, we should keep hold of a point that was not sufficiently emphasized in the previous analysis, and that is hardly expressed in scholastic thinking, but that is nevertheless of decisive importance for the hermeneutic phenomenon that is our concern. The inner unity of thinking and speaking to oneself that corresponds to the trinitarian mystery of incarnation suggests that the inner word of the mind is not formed in a reflexive act. Whoever thinks something, i.e., says it to himself, means the very thing that he thinks. He is thus turned back toward his own thinking whenever he forms a word. The word is indeed the product of the work of his mind. He perfects it in itself, inasmuch as he thinks the thought through to the end. As distinct from other products it remains entirely in the mind. Thus it appears as if it concerns itself and as if the 335

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zu sonstigen Produkten verbleibt es aber ganz im Geistigen. So entsteht der Anschein, als handelte es sich um ein Verhalten zu sich selbst und als wäre das Sich-Sagen eine Reflexion. In Wahrheit ist es das nicht, wohl aber liegt in dieser Struktur des Denkens begründet, warum sich das Denken auf sich selber reflexiv zu richten und sich so gegenständlich zu werden vermag. Die Innerlichkeit des Wortes, die die innige Einheit von Denken und Sprechen ausmacht, ist die Ursache dafür, daß der direkte, unreflektierte Charakter des “Wortes” leicht verkannt wird. Wer denkt, schreitet nicht vom Einen zum Anderen, vom Denken zum Sichsagen fort. Das Wort entsteht nicht in einem vom Denken noch freien Bereich des Geistes (in aliquo sui nudo) Daher rührt der Anschein, daß das Bilden des Wortes einem Sich-auf-sich-selbst-Richten des Geistes entstammt. In Wahrheit ist bei der Bildung des Wortes keine Reflexion tätig. Denn das Wort drückt gar nicht den Geist, sondern die gemeinte Sache aus. Ausgangspunkt der Bildung des Wortes ist der Sachgehalt selbst (die species), der den Geist erfüllt. Das Denken, das seinen Ausdruck sucht, ist nicht auf den Geist, sondern auf die Sache bezogen. So ist das Wort nicht Ausdruck des Geistes, sondern geht auf die similitudo rei. Der gedachte Sachverhalt (die species) und das

self-saying is a reflection. In truth it is not this, but the fact that it is grounded in this structure of thinking explains why thinking is able to direct itself to itself reflexively and thus becomes objective to itself. The inwardness of the word that determines the inner unity of thought and speech explains why the direct, unreflective character of the “word” is misapprehended. Whoever thinks, does not progress from the one to another, from the thinking to the saying-to-oneself. The word does not form in a region of the mind that is free of thought (in aliquo sui nudo). It appears as if the forming of the word emerges in the self-to-self orientation of the mind. In fact there is no reflection active in the formation of the word. The word does not express the mind but rather the issue about which the mind thinks. The starting point of the formation of the word is the content of the matter itself (the species) that fills the mind. The thought that seeks its expression is not related to the mind but to the issue at hand. Thus the word is not an expression of the mind but has to do with the similitudo rei. The issue in view (the species) and the word belong together in the closest proximity. They are so unified that the word does not take second place to the species in the mind, but is that in which knowledge fulfills

Gadamer’s Summation and Prospectus (pars. 21‒‒22) Wort sind es, die auf das engste zusammengehören. Ihre Einheit ist so eng, daß das Wort nicht neben der species als ein zweites im Geiste Platz greift, sondern das ist, worin die Erkenntnis sich vollendet, d.h. worin die species ganz gedacht wird. Thomas verweist darauf, daß das Wort darin wie das Licht ist, in dem die Farbe erst sichtbar ist.

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itself, i.e., in which the species is completely thought. Thomas referred to this by saying that the word is like light, that makes color visible.

There is first a slight but important emendation of the second revised edition’s translation of the paragraph’s opening sentence. The summary point Gadamer wishes to make about the inner word is something that was scarcely expressed in medieval scholasticism, but it is there nevertheless. The published translation omits the second kaum: “nor was it expressed in Scholastic thought” (426). Gadamer wishes to counter any misconception that Thomism advances the notion that “the mind is its own place.”1 Aquinas’s psychology involves a complex circular reflection that connects world, mind, and God. Thus the use of the term “reflection” given the subsequent history of reflective philosophy from the time of Descartes, can be misleading here. The issue is actually rather thorny, because Augustine’s emphasis on inwardness was read a certain way in the intellectual tradition of the West, and Gadamer is swimming against a massive current in countering this reading. Because of the complexity and importance of the issue, I have devoted an entire chapter to the meaning of reflexivity. But we can say here that even in Augustine the doctrine of the word is not about the hermetic space of reason. When he says that “That Son of God, then is not called the Thought of God, but the Word of God” (TT, 15.16), his subject is the communicatio Dei, and it involves the mind as a passageway between worlds. In the De doctrina christiana Augustine tells us that “words were not devised by human industry, but were poured forth from the divine mind both wisely and eloquently, not in such a way that wisdom was directed toward eloquence, but in such a way that eloquence did not abandon wisdom.”2

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Gadamer’s particular way of reading this communicatio is to focus on the Sache, the issue at hand that becomes manifest in the word: “The thought seeking expression refers not to the mind but to the thing.” His effort throughout his work is to get us away from the focus on the sovereign Subject, and consequently a preoccupation with the reflecting mind would be a regressive step. Nor is Gadamer interested primarily in the idea of the text, as his commitment to the idea of hermeneutics might suggest. Instead he wants to shift the focus to the living culture that is being born wherever communication takes place, and this is not the product of isolated minds but what comes into being wherever we are engaged in the world.3 This refocusing on the Sache is also at the heart of the analysis of play in the first part of Truth and Method. There the game is what is at issue, not the players. Of course, Gadamer will not be satisfied to restrict the shift in focus to the mental apparatus, and to Aquinas’s preoccupation with the inner workings of the mind, so in his second summary point (par. 22), Gadamer pushes scholastic teaching as far he can towards a social phenomenology of the word. The point Gadamer is making is obviously extremely important to him, since he is for the first time actually redundant, literally exhausting the point with repetition. His sensitivity here stems from something we have already noticed, that the idea of the inner word contributed unfortunately to the tradition of dualism that mars the unhermeneutic career of Western thought. The very first sentence of Truth and Method addresses itself to the implications of Cartesian subjectivism for the humanities: “The logical self-reflection that accompanied the development of the human sciences in the nineteenth century is wholly governed by the model of the natural sciences” (3). If this is understood, then the point Gadamer makes in the next paragraph, which he introduces as “a second thing Scholasticism teaches us,” is in fact his correction to that tendency, and so the connection between the two paragraphs is much closer than it seems on the surface. s. 22, S. 430 ‒‒431

par. 22, p. 426 ‒‒427

Es ist aber noch ein zweites, was uns dieses scholastische Denken zu lehren hat. Der Unterschied zwischen

But there is thus a second thing that we have to learn from scholastic thought. The difference between the

Gadamer’s Summation and Prospectus (pars. 21‒‒22) der Einheit des göttlichen Wortes und der Vielheit der menschlichen Worte schöpft die Sachlage nicht aus. Vielmehr haben Einheit und Vielheit ein von Grund auf dialektisches Verhältnis. Die Dialektik dieses Verhältnisses beherrscht das ganze Wesen des Wortes. Auch vom göttlichen Wort ist der Vielheit nicht ganz fernzuhalten. Das göttliche Wort ist zwar wirklich nur ein einziges Wort, das in der Gestalt des Erlösers in die Welt gekommen ist, aber sofern es doch Geschehen bleibt—und das ist trotz aller Ablehnung der Subordination, wie wir sahen, der Fall—, so besteht damit eine wesenhafte Beziehung zwischen der Einheit des göttlichen Wortes und seiner Erscheinung in der Kirche. Die Verkündigung des Heils, der Inhalt der christlichen Botschaft, ist selbst ein eigenes Geschehen in Sakrament und Predigt und bringt doch nur das zur Aussage, was in der Erlösungstat Christi geschehen ist. Insofern ist es ein einziges Wort, von dem doch immer wieder in der Predigt gekündet wird. Offenbar liegt in seinem Charakter als Botschaft bereits der Verweis auf die Vielfalt seiner Verkündigung. Der Sinn des Wortes ist vom Geschehen der Verkündigung nicht ablösbar. Der Geschehenscharakter gehört vielmehr zum Sinne selbst. Es ist so wie bei einem Fluch, der offenbar auch nicht davon ablösbar ist, daß er von jemanden und

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unity of the divine word and the multiplicity of human words does not fully get at what is at issue, because the unity and multiplicity have a dialectical relationship. The dialectic of this relation governs the entire essence of the word. In fact, the divine word itself is not entirely divorced from multiplicity. It is indeed truly only a single word that came into the world in the form of the redeemer, but insofar as it is still event—and this is the case despite the rejection of subordination, as we said—, so there exists in this an essential relation between the unity of the divine word and its embodiment in the church. The proclamation of salvation, the content of the Christian message, is itself a unified event in sacrament and preaching, and only brings to expression what happens in Christ’s redeeming act. It is yet a single word out of which proclamation continually goes forth. Obviously there lies in its character as message already a reference to the manifoldness of its proclamation. The meaning of the word is not extractable from the event of proclamation. The event character belongs rather to the meaning itself. It is just as with a curse, which obviously is also not extractable from what is spoken from someone to someone. What can be understood with regard to it is not logically extractable from the utterance, but rather is enmeshed with

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über jemanden gesprochen wird. Was an ihm verstanden werden kann, ist nicht ein abstrahierbarer logischer Sinn der Aussage, sondern die Verflechtung, die in ihm geschieht. Das gleiche gilt für die Einheit und Vielheit des Wortes, das durch die Kirche verkündet wird. Christi Kreuzestod und Auferstehung ist der Inhalt der Heilsverkündigung, der in jeder Predigt gepredigt wird. Der auferstandene und der gepredigte Christus sind ein und derselbe. Insbesondere die moderne protestantische Theologie hat den eschatologischen Charakter des Glaubens herausgearbeitet, der auf diesem dialektischen Verhältnis beruht.

the speech-act itself. It is the same for the unity and multiplicity of the word that is proclaimed through the church. The risen and sermonic Christ are one and the same. Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection is the content of holy teaching that is preached in each sermon. Modern protestant theology in particular has worked out the eschatological character of faith that rests on this dialectical relation.

This “second thing” that scholasticism teaches us is the dialectical relationship of the unity and multiplicity of the word. Gadamer’s treatment of this theme here can easily be misleading. First, he is manifestly correct in his description of the relationship, but he has gone far beyond the scholastic doctrine, as he admits at the end of the paragraph. In fact, the depth of his insight into the unity of the kerygma seems to be aided as much as anything by an Hegelian sense of dialectic. Second, since the analysis of Augustine and Aquinas up to this point has mostly devalued the external expression of speech, it is confusing to hear suddenly about the word as proclamation, the preaching of the church, and so necessarily of the spoken word. Third, he is immensely suggestive about the relation of the Christ narrative and its recapitulation in the redemption of souls through the Word, so that one must bring in the patristic themes we have developed in the early chapters of this book to understand his point. Finally, it is clear with his example of the curse that he is again thinking past the doctrine of the Word to the concreteness of living speech generally, in which again theology becomes the model for linguistics rather than the reverse.

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It is true, the multiplicity to which Gadamer refers in the preaching of the gospel is not the multiplicity of languages, but rather the historical recapitulation of the message. The structure of this repetition is the reenactment of the crucifixion and resurrection in the life of each individual Christian through history. Nevertheless, the multiplicity of the human word for Augustine and Aquinas up to this point has meant ratiocination, the discursivity of the mental act of judgment. There is a leap here to an entirely different order of multiplication in the passage of the word down through the generations. So we must understand “a second thing that Scholastic thinking teaches us” as a kind of expository anacoluthon in which Gadamer has returned to the broader subject of the Word of John’s prologue. The confusion I note is not exaggerated, because in the very next paragraph, Gadamer turns his theme of linguistic multiplicity to “the process of concept formation,” and so to generative potency of language itself. The common thread that links all of this is the idea of the eventfulness of language. This theme is consistent throughout the verbum section, and it makes possible these abrupt modulations. What Gadamer wants to do here is to connect the idea of event with the dialectic of unity and multiplicity. At its root, this connection is indeed the pivotal issue behind every aspect of the word. Event means the happening of something new, something that establishes historical precedent, but that is nevertheless embedded in a context from which it draws its sustenance. The connection with the dialectic of unity and multiplicity is that the word introduced into human history must maintain its unity while at the same time expressing itself through diversity. We can see this basic idea running through every aspect of the doctrine of the word and hermeneutic understanding: in the enigma of immanent procession, in discursivity of reason, in the reenactment of the gospel truth, in the metontology of being, and in the sedimentation of linguistic culture. (par. 22, cont.) “Die Verkündigung des Heils, der Inhalt der christlichen Botschaft, ist selbst ein eigenes Geschehen in Sakrament und Predigt und bringt doch nur das zur Aussage, was in der Erlösungstat Christi geschehen ist.” [The proclamation of salvation, the content of the Christian message, is itself a unified event in sacrament and preaching, and only brings to expression what happens in Christ’s redeeming act.]

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The continuity, which is to say, the connection in kind, between the Christ event and the Church as proclamation of the gospel ongoing, is given conceptual grounding in Augustine’s De Trinitate. This arises in the context of a discussion about theophanies, and the controversies surrounding how God manifests himself in history, “whether the Son and Holy Spirit were also sent in the Old Testament; and if so, what difference there is between that sending and the one we read of in the gospel” (3.4). The crux of the issue is that the Christ event as manifestation is of an entirely different order from signs such as miracles, since Christ not only bears witness but is himself God. In spite of the distinction, Augustine is concerned here to preserve the continuity in these forms of intervention, and he does this by the conception of agency. Angels, for instance, are often intermediaries of God’s message, and they have a certain freedom in the manner of their communication, although they do not create so much as make use of what God creates as a seminal force (DT, 3.13). Notably, Augustine speaks of this relation between primary and secondary cause with the figure of inner and outer form: “This is the very way in which the apostle distinguishes between God creating and forming from within and created agents working from without, and he takes his example from agriculture: I planted, he says, and Apollos watered, but it was God who made things grow (1 Cor. 3:6)” (3.14). Almost in passing, Augustine transfers this distinction between seminal material and secondary agency to the preaching of the gospel: “So, as in our Christian life it is only God who can give the right shape to our spirits by justifying us, while men can preach the gospel outwardly, and bad men too under false pretenses, as well as good men in all sincerity (Phil. 1:13); in the same way it is only God who inwardly effects the creation of all visible things” (3.14). Thus Augustine links the distinction between direct and indirect intervention in the scriptures to the Aristotelian-Stoic teleological conception of a ratio seminales: Observe for example a tiny cutting; it is a kind of seed, since if it is properly planted out in the ground it produces a tree. But this cutting has a finer seed in the seed of its kind properly so-called, the grain of seed which is also visible to our eyes. But though our eyes cannot see any further seed of this grain of seed, we can reasonably infer its existence . . . . (3.13)

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It is easy to see how Augustine attaches to this teleological conception the language of inwardness and outwardness, since the underlying and invisible seed is the cause of its external manifestation. But this inwardoutward opposition is also a fundamental mode of Augustine’s thought, and it leads, later, to the topos of the verbum interius. So it is crucial to note at this point that the conceit is attached to the continuity of God’s manifestation in all its forms: It is one thing, after all, to establish and administer creation from the inmost and supreme pivot of all causes, and the one who does that is God the sole creator; it is another matter to apply activity from outside, in virtue of power and capacities distributed by him, so that the thing being created turns out like this or like that. All these things around us have been seminally and primordially created in the very fabric, as it were, or texture of the elements. (3.16) It is then a short step from the ratio seminales to the logos seminales: “In a similar fashion, when men convey the message, they sometimes speak the words of God in their own persons, as when they begin with “The Lord said,” or “Thus says the Lord,” or some equivalent; sometimes without any such introduction they play God’s part and represent God’s own person” (3.19). This transference now has its conceptual grounding in Christian doctrine. The abruptness of the shift from the operation of the inner word to the operation of the word in history can be explained in part by the fact that Gadamer has been thinking at this second level all the while. It is only a step from the processive nature of the inner word to the progression of the word through history. And if it is indeed true that the inner word is not merely an analogy but at the nexus of the continuum between transcendent and economic processions, we can justify the shift ourselves, although we have to fill in the missing steps. In addressing the kerygma as the recapitulation, expression, and fulfillment of the divine word, Gadamer stands upon a tradition that had blossomed in German Protestant scholarship of his time. Under the impetus of Luther’s focus on the authority of scripture in the life of the Christian, twentieth-century theologians absorbed the existential and hermeneutic currents of philosophical thought into a robust new intellectual

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engagement with the very idea of the Word in history in all its aspects, including even its trinitarian meanings.4 It is the exciting work of Barth, Fuchs, Bultmann, Eberling and others that lies behind Gadamer’s brief incursion into the eventfulness of proclamation and personal redemption. To touch on this tradition with brevity, I will note three historical points along its trajectory that will indicate something of its outline. Even before Luther, German mysticism searched the deep inner connection between the eventfulness of Christ’s life and its recapitulation in the life of the Christian soul. For Eckhart the Word is begotten in time “without ceasing in eternity.” But Eckhart gives this birth a double function, not only as the historical Christ but as the Word that is perpetually born in every soul: “Because the same One, who is begotten and born of God the Father, without ceasing in eternity, is born today, within time, in human nature, we make a holiday to celebrate it.” The doctrinal achievement of Christianity was to fuse the historical birth of the Christ figure with the birth of awareness in every human being through history of their role in God’s plan. Eckhart enlists his principle authority on this point: “St. Augustine says that this birth is always happening.” Augustine’s expression contains the core of the doctrine, an embrace of the paradox of incarnation; i.e., that God’s redemptive sacrifice entails the ongoing reenactment of the incursion of the eternal into the temporal. Eckhart’s sermon is about how this birth takes place in the human soul, which takes him directly to Augustine’s doctrine of the inner word. The assertion that “it is in a good soul that God the Father is speaking his eternal word” immediately reinforces the role of language as the mediator of this incursion. The perpetual present in this formulation expresses the resolution of the original paradox: Eternity is married to temporality by repetition. Christ is made human not once, but each time a good soul hears the truth. The occurrence, moreover, is not simply the unity of nows in the Aristotelian sense of time present, but an increase, a growth towards perfection: “We intend to discuss . . . how it does occur in us, or how it is made perfect in a good soul.” God’s intervention in history begins with the historical figure of Christ, but is brought to gradual fruition through the response of Christians in the course of history. The revelation, expressed not only in what we hear but how we respond, is always on the way: “A blessing is not a creature nor is it perfection, for perfection is the consequence of the perfecting of life” (Eckhart, 98).

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Luther also focused on the salvation of individual souls united through the word: “It must be firmly maintained that God gives no one his Spirit or his grace except through or with the outward word which precedes it, and this is our defense against the enthusiasts, that is, the spirits which boast that they have the Spirit without and before the word, and judge, interpret and expound thereby the scripture and the spoken word as it pleases them. . . . Thus we must firmly maintain that God desires to do nothing with us men except through his outward word and sacrament. But everything which boasts that it is of the Spirit, without the word and the sacrament, is the Devil” (Ebeling, Luther, 109). Luther quotes the pivotal text of Isaiah that images the path of the word in its cycle of redemption: “And as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return no more thither, but soak the earth, and water it, and make it to spring, and give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be, which shall go forth from my mouth: it shall not return to me void, but it shall do whatsoever I please, and shall prosper in the things for which I sent it” (Isa. 55:10 ‒‒ 11).5 (par. 22, returning to top) “Der Unterschied zwischen der Einheit des göttlichen Wortes und der Vielheit der menschlichen Worte schöpft die Sachlage nicht aus. Vielmehr haben Einheit und Vielheit ein von Grund auf dialektisches Verhältnis. Die Dialektik dieses Verhältnisses beherrscht das ganze Wesen des Wortes. Auch vom göttlichen Wort ist der Vielheit nicht ganz fernzuhalten.” [The difference between the unity of the divine word and the multiplicity of human words does not fully get at what is at issue, because the unity and multiplicity have a dialectical relationship. A dialectic of this relation governs the entire essence of the word. In fact, the divine word itself is not entirely divorced from multiplicity.] It is in the context of this discussion in Protestant theology of Gadamer’s time, especially with Bultmann, that we can now understand better what Gadamer means at the beginning of the paragraph when he refers to “a second thing” about scholastic teaching, and so I have come back to the opening words of the paragraph here. Paragraphs 17 through 21 have explicated the three differences between the divine and human word, which Gadamer is saying here do not exhaust the thematic of the

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word in theology. We have seen this ourselves already in the analysis of the De natura, which complicates the differences of the De differentia almost as a countertext. But Gadamer wants to draw attention to another manifestation of the dialectic in the idea of church history. So we do not really have a new idea here, since the dialectic of unity and multiplicity in the word has already been deeply sounded. But by introducing the theme of recapitulation in the baptism in faith, Gadamer is providing an opening for himself to extend the thematic of the word to the historical enactment of discursivity as it is recast in hermeneutics. (par. 22, cont.) “Der Sinn des Wortes ist vom Geschehen der Verkündigung nicht ablösbar. Der Geschehenscharakter gehört vielmehr zum Sinne selbst. Es ist so wie bei einem Fluch, der offenbar auch nicht davon ablösbar ist, daß er von jemanden und über jemanden gesprochen wird. Was an ihm verstanden werden kann, ist nicht ein abstrahierbarer logischer Sinn der Aussage, sondern die Verflechtung, die in ihm geschieht.” [The meaning of the word is not extractable from the event of proclamation. The event character belongs rather to the meaning itself. It is just as with a curse, which obviously is also not extractable from what is spoken from someone to someone. What can be understood with regard to it is not logically extractable from the utterance, but rather is enmeshed with the speech-act itself.] I have made reference to this passage more than once as an indication of Gadamer’s sense of what is now called rhetorical understanding, the constituitive role of discourse in every dimension of knowledge. It impinges on his train of thought here in regards to the dialectical relation of the one and many as a linguistic phenomenon. The dialectic here is between the concrete and the universal, and Gadamer again connects the Christian idea of personal salvation to the rhetorical negotiation of the rule and the case. Rhetoric refused to see any human issue as an abstract intellectual problem, but rather as fully inscribed in a particular situation and responding to the individual involvement in that situation. That is why invention matches the wholeness and humanity of the speaker in thought, feeling, and character to the wholeness and humanity of the immediate audience affected by the situation. The Christian narrative is simply the most extreme example of this relation.

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The interesting thing about Gadamer’s exposition here is how he blends all these diverse elements together so tightly and unselfconsciously — Hegel’s dialectic, the historical procession of the Word, and rhetorical humanism. The kerygma is being appropriated into his developing sense of a civic humanism that is at once rhetorical, dialectical, and hermeneutic.

s. 23, S. 431

par. 23, pp. 427 ‒‒428

Umgekehrt zeigt sich im menschlichen Wort der dialektische Bezug der Vielheit der Worte auf die Einheit des Wortes in seinem neuen Licht. Daß das menschliche Wort den Charakter der Rede hat, d.h. durch die Zusammenordnung einer Vielheit von Wörtern die Einheit einer Meinung zum Ausdruck bringt, hatte Plato erkannt und diese Struktur des Logos auf dialektische Weise entfaltet. Aristoteles zeigte dann die logischen Strukturen auf, die den Satz bzw. das Urteil oder den Satzzusammenhang bzw. den Schluß ausmachen. Aber die Sachlage ist damit noch nicht erschöpft. Die Einheit des Wortes, die sich in der Vielheit der Wörter auslegt, läßt darüber hinaus etwas sichtbar werden, was im Wesensgefüge der Logik nicht aufgeht und den Geschehenscharakter der Sprache zur Geltung bringt: den Prozeß der Begriffsbildung. Indem das scholastische Denken die Verbumlehre ausbildet, bleibt es nicht dabei stehen, die Begriffsbildung als Abbildung der Wesensordnung zu denken.

Conversely the human word sheds a new light on the dialectical relation between the unity of the word and the multiplicity of words. Plato had understood that the human word has the character of discourse, i.e., brings to expression the unity of a meaning through the orchestration of a multiplicity of words, and he had developed this structure of the Logos in a dialectical fashion. Aristotle then showed the logical structure that determines the proposition from induction, or the conclusion from deduction. But the issue with this development is not yet exhausted. Beyond this the unity of the word that is construed in the multiplicity of words permits something to become clear that does not come out in the essentializing disposition of logic, and brings to light the eventful character of language: the process of concept building. The scholastic development of the doctrine of the word did not simply conceive concept formation as copying the order of things.

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The last paragraph of III, 2, B points toward the theme of the following section “Sprache und Begriffsbildung” [Language and Concept Formation], which continues the history of a hermeneutic understanding of language. In spite of the importance of the verbum interius for Gadamer, it is not sufficient to establish a hermeneutic understanding of language. The third part of Truth and Method really has two turning points. The first is the claim that language is ontological, and this is accomplished through the model of incarnation. The second is the relinquishing of the absolute that ties language to a metaphysics of presence. Prominent hermeneutic scholars have said that Gadamer cannot have both, and that the model of incarnation precludes an abandonment of the absolute. But when Gadamer says in this last paragraph that there is a dialectical relation between the unity of the word and the multiplicity of words, he has named the note that runs through the entire exegesis of the Verbumlehre, from the meaning of incarnation in language, to the analogy of trinitarian procession, to the unfolding of the Word in history. This same theme is also one of the principle grounds of hermeneutics, one that runs through Gadamer’s appropriation of the Platonist and pre-Socratic problem of the one and the many, Aristotle’s mediation of the universal and the particular, Hegel’s dialectic of the concept, and Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity. What the analogy of the inner word does differently from all these other sources is put language on an ontological footing that undermines the most taken-for-granted reflexes of a positivist culture. By linking the eventfulness of language established in the verbum section to the theme of concept formation, a notion that lies at the heart of modern epistemology, Gadamer is subverting scientific culture in a way that we have hardly come to terms with. The ontological footing of this subsection is not a stopping point or a barrier to the hermeneutic openness that marks Gadamer’s best legacy, but a depth dimension that challenges us to understand the full radicality of hermeneutic understanding.



Part III

Conclusion

chapter 12



Gadamer and the Verbum Interius

nor can I myself comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself: so where could that be which cannot contain itself? Is it without itself and not within? —Augustine, Confessions, 10.8

Twice explicitly Gadamer spells out the limitations of the doctrine of the word for hermeneutics in the later sections of Truth and Method.1 Hermeneutics itself as an idea and practice emerging in the wake of Reformation and Enlightenment grew out of innovative studies in philology, jurisprudence, theology, and history to cope with a world that had grown increasingly distant from the perspective of the medieval mind. The scholastic worldview was predicated on an order of perfection, coordinated and harmonized by a moral telos. Philosophical hermeneutics struggles to salvage the ideal under a different principle. The concluding sections of Truth and Method after III, 2, B are a sustained attempt to describe the dimensions of a world shaped by the limits and possibilities of its own Sprachlichkeit. From a Gadamerian perspective, the translation of dynamis and energeia suffered a reduction in the Latin translation to potentia and forma, because the practical wisdom of the Greeks did not depend on its metaphysics. Platonic-Aristotelian actualization is not so much without an end as open-ended. The two ends of its middle, the concrete particular and the abstract universal, are conveniences of thought. Hope is built on a sense of direction that comes from a precedent rather than an origin. As Socrates taught, the world bodies forth under the sign of abstractions that disappear at the touch. They flow, as 351

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we have seen, from the thinking of language that never ceases to discover and invent itself. Gadamer’s first hermeneutic critique of a teleological order is in reference to the linguistic perspective of the German philologist Wilhelm von Humboldt. Whereas the word in scholasticism is “only a prismatic refraction in which there shines the one truth,” Humboldt believes in a “relative perfection” that emerges in each language and culture (TM, 440, 438/ WM, 443, 442): “A word is not simply the perfection of the ‘species,’ as medieval thought held. When a being is represented in the thinking mind, this is not the reflection of a pregiven order of being” (457/461). Gadamer’s own hermeneutics is nourished by this model of thought, one “that is no longer guided by the knowledge of salvation” (461/465). Despite this distancing, Gadamer also asserts that insight into the puzzle of the one and the many “received a mysterious affirmation in medieval speculation on the Trinity” (TM, 457/WM, 461). We have seen that, for him, the teleology of the divine order and the model of trinitarian procession are not inextricably dependent on one another. He is grounded first in the rhetoricality of the social order: “The language that things have — whatever kind of things they may be — is not the logos ousias, and it is not fulfilled in the self-contemplation of an infinite intellect. It is the language that our finite, historical nature apprehends when we learn to speak” (476/480). The modesty of Gadamer’s humanism precludes a strong tie to a teleological perspective. What then is the bequest of trinitarianism for philosophical hermeneutics? I will attempt in this conclusion to indicate how Gadamer’s appropriation of the theological concept of the verbum interius informs his conception of hermeneutic experience. Jean Grondin has transcribed a conversation he had with Gadamer late in the philosopher’s life, a kind of retrospective and summary discussion, in which the importance of the verbum interius comes up. In response to a question about his interest in the Trinity, Gadamer engages in a long disquisition on what he regards as the critical alternative to Cartesianism: “The entire destiny of Western civilization announces itself here in this nominalist turning toward the universalist argument, insofar as one no longer strives to lead a conversation, but rather wants to demonstrate compelling proofs.”2 Somehow in his mind there remains an indissoluble bond between speculative theology and classical rhetorical praxis. The kind of thinking that

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approaches the unknowability of the Trinity is intimately connected to the legacy of rhetoric, and in his extended response to Grondin he catalogues its affinities. Socrates’ famous “Wissen des Nicht-Wissens” (knowing that he does not know), Plato’s poetic philosophy, Aristotle’s phronesis, the ethical nature of knowledge, the priority of rhetoric over logic, the experience of art, the voice of poetry and hermeneutic understanding are all constituents of a picture of the eventfulness of our linguistic becoming (290 ff.). This picture somehow bears a strong relationship to the church fathers’ effort to mend the breach between divine immanence and transcendence. Partly the connection has to do with the role of language as medium (Mitte) in a way that hermeneutics redefined away from its conventional instrumental aspect. The facticity of language is like the fly caught in the spider’s web that vibrates the whole. The event of speech sets the web vibrating at every point of anticipation and recollection, and in every possibility, even that which cannot yet be expressed. This is the uncanny capacity of language to extend the birthright of everything that is within human experience: When you point your hand in a direction for a dog, he does not run in that direction, but springs up to your hand. . . . It is obviously this common sense that house-pets lack, since they do not have language, and can so easily misunderstand human signs. Why? What is the universal that they cannot grasp? Obviously they lack the ability to understand symbols, that is, that one recognizes in something what one had not originally found there, something it would always be capable of being, and what fits in retrospect, just as the tessara hospitalis with which one identifies oneself to an old friend of the family as a member of the next generation.3 The unbroken thread of language and culture has a complex relationship to consciousness. The example of the tessara hospitalis shows that the most important relations are not governed by awareness, and in fact the capacity for historical relation stems from our being creatures of forgetfulness, distance, and withdrawal—“the sliding into ruination as the tendency of everyday existence.”4 The best that individual consciousness can do is to become aware of its working relation to the panorama of history.5

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As deeply as secular classical humanism penetrates to the antirationalist grounding of Sprachwerden, it does not carry language as far as the Christian word. John’s appropriation of the logos sets it on a collision course with the very underpinnings of Western rationalism. The abuse of categories in the trinitarian idea contradicts substance ontology. The agency of the sovereign subject is displaced. Subject becomes medium as the human mind becomes the point of transformation, and the medium becomes subject as the word becomes the agent of transformation. What is analogous to the birth of Christ is that language “is not a becoming in which something becomes something else” (TM, 420/WM, 424) because what is spoken is somehow not different from the mind that conceives it. For Gadamer linguistic incarnation means that being is not diminished in speech, that what had been thought to be sovereign in the Subject is dispersed through “nature and art, customs, actions and works, and everything that communicates itself and, in being shared, belongs to everyone.”6 It is easy to diminish this recasting of the Hegelian idea of spirit and the Judaeo-Christian idea of the Word. Gadamer works tirelessly to warn us from doing so. The glorious victory of church doctrine in asserting the unity of immanence and transcendence supports the hermeneutic program in resisting ontological dualism and asserting the materiality of the idea. This is true at every level of categorical distinction, from the relation of particular to general,7 temporal to timeless, and matter to form. The entire weight of hermeneutic understanding is balanced on this point, the interacting performance of intellect, word, and world. Truth bodies forth, not as an object but as an existential expression caught up in an always open circle, an increase of being. But hermeneutics is more than the ancient law of undiminished return. The link between the narrative of the passion and the temporality of being introduces a wholly new dimension to the circle of understanding. Although Gadamer is adamant about the positivity of finitude, his debt to Heidegger’s Christianity includes an appreciation of fragility and loss in the economy of being. The enfleshment of truth means its devastation and withdrawal. The finitude of perspectives introduces the note of tragedy into human understanding. The theology of incarnation as it developed through conceptions such as recapitulation, kenosis, kerygma, etc., allowed no clear and distinct division between the symbol as an in-

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strument of thought and the understanding of lived experience. The uniqueness and particularity of the event of salvation gave an existential concreteness and pathos to the symbol, and its theology secured an inescapable nexus between meaning and expression. No disembodied reason, the linguistic medium of thought is simply a different side of the narrative history of human beings who suffer, destroy, create, live, and die. As such, the circle of understanding courses with human blood, and breathes out of the same generative and degenerative pool of common humanity. After the publication of Truth and Method Gadamer had to correct a misreading of his appropriation of the inner word: “Thus it was not understood that when I make use of Augustine’s trinitarian speculations, (the theme of “verbum”), I am not defending Christian claims, but identifying their categorial significance.”8 What Gadamer does is to reject the timeless absolute by saying that it is a convenience of thought to imagine static and opposed extremes of what is actually taking place, the constant fruition of life that is neither completely a world of the temporal mundane nor the eternal absolute. Hermeneutics learns from Aristotle and then Hegel how to see the idea of an absolute and its negative, formless matter, as only virtual extremes, as place markers for thought. Thus in its shuttling capacity it is not so much a translator as a generator of a mediated world. Second, the work of mediation has been displaced from the sovereignty of subjective consciousness to the field of meaning and culture in which the mind occupies a prominent place, but only in a strict reciprocity. The conception of the word native to Jewish prophecy as an historical agency that flows out and down through time and culture is married to the theological model of incarnate procession, and the result is a model of human being-in-the-world that surpasses the sovereign subject and the metaphysics of presence that has become our modern inheritance. Although a great effort would be required to pry thought loose from this inheritance, the elements of this effort lay dormant in the tradition of the Christian humanism that had been overtaken by the rationalist enterprise. What distinguishes incarnation from embodiment is the refusal of the dualism that underlies predicatory reason, and this refusal means that rationality must traffic in a reductive and impoverished linearity.9 Late in his career Gadamer helpfully specified the precise point of divergence from the Western rationalist enterprise in a gentle correction of Aristotle:

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Aristotle once said the human is a double essence. We would say for this: he [the human being] is nature and spirit. But this differentiation has a false abstractness. What it depends upon, and what lies in this doubling, appears to me to be rather the interlacing of together-with and with-one-another. That is the true form of the human essence, the special worth of behavioral research. This is already prepared for by Aristotle when he defines the soul as the entelechy of the body. With this he retains the corporeality of the Greek feeling for life. Accordingly, following Aristotle, nous, what we could perhaps call “spirit,” comes inside, so to speak, through the door from outside, and that is not really a behavior of humans, but is described as the “entering” of brightness.10 In a characteristic habit, Gadamer has distanced himself from Aristotle by agreeing with him. We have seen that a certain tradition of speculative thought has understood the doubling of human nature as a Janusstructure that has a fundamental unity,“like the convex and concave sides of a curve,”11 as opposed to the cruder dualism that is typically read off from this tradition. Gadamer simply transposes the non-dualist doubling from its “false abstractness,” so lethal for its broader reception, to the sociality of the political body. It is thus transferred from its location in the subjectum to the middle place of human culture, the word that is always between its own presence and absence in an inspir(al)ing journey. As we have seen, the original model for this diffuse agency is theological, which, when coupled with the rhetorical tradition, yielded a different placement for Aristotle’s’ spirit: “It is certain that the Spirit of God . . . does not denote reason . . . but the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, sent into the hearts of the faithful and moving them through the voice of the Gospel to the knowledge of God and to actions conforming to His law.”12 Here we have the full circuit of the Word, the spiritus filioque, followed along its path of return. And it is, like Gadamer’s “spirit” (Geist) located not in the subject but along the history of its circuit. The marvel of the doctrine of the word is that it should unite the Hebraic and Greek conceptions; the word as the bearer of history and culture with the word as the product of judgment in the mind. Although the word passes down through the ages as the message and messenger of salvation, its birth is recapitulated, produced, and delivered in the process

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of intellection. The peculiar force of this unification is that the two aspects are not allowed to be distinct. The intellectual process is the interface of divine understanding on the one side and finite understanding on the other. The mind’s lowly work is central to the enordering of the universe, and it works by bringing together eternal truth with the contingent and particular. How does it do this? It is useful to recall Oliva Blanchette’s summary of the intellect in the Thomist system, as “pivotal in this emanation and return of being in the universe, from the Principle to the effect and back from the effect to the Principle, that is, in function of the intellectual creature whose role it is to collect (colligare) all things through its knowledge and lead them back to the Creator.”13 She says almost parenthetically that indeed “the very notion of return is closely related to the idea of universe, since verti in Latin means to turn,” and we have seen that that turning is the same turning that occurs in the reflection (reflectitur) of the intellect (298). The human mind imitates the mind of God in its intellection, and in spite of all the differences, brings the world closer to its perfection, back to its home, through that work. For Gadamer in his secular vision, the home of the return is the dialogue of times. The wealth of the past, not only what is remembered but what is most remote and inaccessible, speaks to the future of possibilities through the word, out of which a massing present forms and unfolds. This unfurling canopy of secrets and promises, rites and judgments, works and worlds, is the social fabric that constitutes the bond of our word. Its content is a “true infinity . . . which constantly surpasses itself . . . and in doing so also finds the freedom for constantly new projects” (TM, 426/ WM, 429 ‒‒430). Is there a returning in Gadamer’s word? He says emphatically and repeatedly not (“there is no reflection when the word is formed”), but he only means that it is not the reflection of the moderns. It is an axiom of philosophical hermeneutics that “all understanding is self-understanding,” and in this statement we see embedded the complete cycle of emanation and return, since it implies that comprehension of the world in each finite act of coming-to-terms is an interpretation. Through the accumulation, exchange, and conflict of interpretations, something like culture comes into being, as long as we understand by culture something infinitely formable and not yet formed, like an infinitely pliant and formable neural network.

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Ultimately we have to remember that Gadamer substitutes in place of the mens of the medieval conception the entire cultus in a way more drastic even than Hegel. Under the influence of Heidegger, the agency of the word resides diffusely and ephemerally in the ongoing conversation of history as a performance rather than in the seat of intelligence. But here is where the conception of the word is most valuable, because it anticipates this dispersion of agency right from the beginning: “And as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return no more thither, but soak the earth, and water it, and make it to spring, and give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be, which shall go forth from my mouth: it shall not return to me void, but it shall do whatsoever I please, and shall prosper in the things for which I sent it” (Isa. 55:10 ‒ 11). And so when Gadamer recalls the ongoing recapitulation of the event of salvation in the kerygma, he allies himself with the most powerful model for hermeneutic “understanding,” an understanding that is social and enacted through history (TM, 427/WM, 431). In spite of the move from mens to cultus in Gadamer, he still preserves something of the structure of the duplex actio in his hermeneutic circle. The relation of the part to the whole is stretched between the two in defiance of temporality, and the recursive movement is always held in its possibility: “Let us think of this structure in a dynamic way; the effective unity of the anticipated meaning comes out as the comprehension is enlarged and renovated by concentric circles.”14 More pragmatically than Heidegger, Gadamer refuses to discard the language of comprehension and consciousness, even though he accepts Heidegger’s movement from the subject. His position then is expressed with greater ambiguity, because he does not work very hard at separating off the structures of intentionality from the structures of history. The ambiguity itself is perhaps what he is after. Gadamer’s underlying theme throughout the verbum section is the intimate unity of thought and speech. This is what dominates his interest in the appropriation. It would be a rather thin reed on which to hang the whole of this long inquiry if this meant only that I cannot separate my thoughts from the words that express them. But as we have seen, the idea is more an entry way into the mystery of language. The fullest sense of the teaching is the doctrinal belief: “For the formation of the word does not pass away when it is formed, but when it is actually under-

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stood the word is in continual formation. . . . This is in fact in agreement with the processions of the persons. In truth, thinking when it happens in silence is truly speaking, just as He is called a Word with respect to His person.”15 Likewise, by a connection of the two words, the person of Christ is present in the word that is passed down. However finite, incomplete, and contingent, it is directly in touch with the full beatitude of God’s love. How much of this assertion remains in Gadamer’s appropriation? In the ongoing negotiation of possibility and contingency that constitutes our discursive world, there is a constant exchange between what we know and who we are, or rather, an increase of both in the process. And understanding is a kind of manifestation that enlivens the person in the thing. The thing, the Sache, is informed by the understanding just as much as the reverse when it is expressed. Hermeneutics thinks about this in terms of the claim of understanding, the experience of the person, against knowledge, the product of science: “Understanding is no longer alongside of knowledge, but knowledge becomes a derivative of understanding.”16 As Schleiermacher puts it, “True science is complete vision.”17 The point Gadamer takes from the verbum interius is not that something is expressed inwardly, but that its expression in thought carries the whole language along with it, and so the community of persons that speak through that language, their achievements, discoveries, and failures. And here we see how his reflections on the verbum turn back and feed into his commitment to humanist paideia. The dispersal of agency to and through the cultural textum is a denial of the sovereignty of the transcendent subject, not of personhood. Gadamer is a humanist precisely because for him the word is the expression of the whole experience of the person, and more than this, of the community standing behind the person, and of its history stretching backward and forward into the oblivion of time and infinite possibility. This corresponds to the rhetorical understanding of speech as an address to the whole person, from the whole person, as Erasmus points out: “[L]ocated as it is more truly in the disposition of the mind than in syllogisms, life means more than debate, inspiration is preferable to erudition, transformation is a more important matter than intellectual comprehension.”18 In rhetoric, logic on its own is not necessarily persuasive, because it is to human beings that we address our concerns, and to elicit

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genuine agreement we need to reach the person in their very fiber. From the other direction, the word does not come to us disembodied, but as the witness to what a person stands behind. By virtue of its being expressed it is a surety of the person. The speech is in itself the speaker’s claim upon our good will, and we do not separate the speaker from the word. As Heidegger says, it is what comes to be through language “completely unmediated and abundant” (am unmittelbarsten und reichsten).19 It is unmediated because language is not a translation of a prior meaning, nor an instrument of communication, but a manifestation of what is to be believed. The truth is substantial and embodied as a word. To say that we are a conversation, as Gadamer says, does not diminish human beings to the status of ciphers, but rather elevates language to the status of spirit. Just as rhetoric speaks to the whole person, the whole person speaks in language, and the entire circuit of communication is in a sense without mediation, because what is being spoken is never a reduction, but rather an increase of being. And the whole person is someone who, by birthright, in their uniqueness and ruinance, is connected to the whole of the human project. The distanced work of reflection that allows the Thomist mind to transgress the boundary of the temporal and the eternal becomes the free distance of language that allows humans to imagine a community. The reflecting mirror is in one case the mind, in the other case, language and culture. But insofar as the verbum is convertible with mind, and Sprache is convertible with community, the word is the common term of the tradition. The passage of the word down through human history is now to be understood in a far more radical way, not simply as reenactment through ritual or prayer, but as a procession, an increase of being arising out of the very finitude of our contingent being. Gadamer’s reception of humanist culture and Christian teaching is, nevertheless, a balancing act. This is because there is a decisive break between the Greek sense of order and the Christian sense of history. Werner Marx is adamant that for Aristotle, “only because everything stands in necessary, ordered relationships can man in various ways bring these order-structures to the light of day,” which excludes the possibility of the new.20 Emmanuel Mounier describes the rupture between the conception of a world of unity and balance and the Christian world conceived as manifestation of the superabundance of love:

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We can hardly comprehend today what a complete scandal this was to the thought and sensibility of the Greeks. Whilst for them, multiplicity was an evil inadmissible to the spirit, Christianity made it into an absolute, by affirming the creation ex nihilo, and the eternal destiny, of each and every person. The supreme Being which through love brings them into existence no longer makes the world a unity through the abstraction of the idea, but by an infinite capacity for the indefinite multiplication of these separate acts of love. Far from being an imperfection, this multiplicity, proceeding from superabundance, bears that superabundance in itself as an illimitable interchange of love.21 Transposed into the language of philosophy, this idea of surplus leads to Husserl’s “consciousness of a single perceptual thing appearing with ever-increasing completeness, from endlessly new points of view, and with ever-richer determinations.”22 In Gadamer it is the freedom of play, the openness of meaning, and the infinite possibilities of the word. After the verbum section, Gadamer transposes the mental action of the Thomist verbum to the social stage: “Judgment is not so much a faculty as a demand that has to be made of all” (TM, 32/WM, 37). But as we have seen, this socialization of the word is already anticipated in the doctrine of the word as it comes down from Judaeo-Christian evangelism. The superabundance of love of the Christian vision breaks out of the Thomist system and opens out into a hermeneutics of charity. The world is infinite, manifold, variegated, and open. It is a world ripe for hermeneutic understanding. What Mounier says about Christian love can be just as well said about the solidarity that arises from the social dialogue that is constitutive of the hermeneutic phenomenon: “Far from being an imperfection, this multiplicity, proceeding from superabundance, bears that superabundance in itself as an illimitable interchange of love.” Gadamer speaks more of solidarity than of love, but there is no question that his thoughts are always turned toward filiva, that for him filiva is implicit in lovgoı, and that verbum and caritas are as integral to each other as the persons of the Trinity.23



Appendix Source Texts

Es ist immer ein Wort, das wir miteinander sagen, und das uns gesagt wird. —H.G. Gadamer

De natura verbi intellectus

st. thomas aquinas (probably spurious)

De differentia verbi divini et humani

st. thomas aquinas (possibly spurious)

A Note on the Translations The Thomist understanding of the mind’s working is both strange and difficult. Those unfamiliar with its conception and terms of description may nevertheless glean from it the power of the idea of the inner word. The basic idea is that the mind is the site of mediation between the material and spiritural world, and that it works according to the Aristotelian principle that form and matter are necessary parts of that process of mediation. Intellection involves both the process of remotion from matter and the active comprehension of intelligible reality, a world elaborated as much by the action of the mind as the material of sense. The mechanism of intellect involves at its center the untranslatable species, the psychological medium of knowledge of the real. Different kinds of species exist in differing manifestations in the progression of the intellect toward understanding. The taking in of perceptions forms 362

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a species that abstracts and illumines the real nature of the objective world. This species becomes the tool of the mind’s operation as it comes to terms with the world’s meaning. As the object of the mind’s eye becomes informed with this intellectual light, understanding reaches a consummation in the perfection of intelligibility, and the species is now the point at which world and reality are one. The verbum itself is therefore a kind of species, i.e., the articulated world of the mind’s eye. That Aquinas should have thought of the perfected understanding as a word — as an intellectual articulation — explains Gadamer’s interest. No longer simply a sign of the real, it is the active medium of reality which includes the living understanding. Ultimately Aquinas’s somewhat cumbersome conceptual apparatus yields a vision of the world in which not only thought and word are inextricable, but human understanding coming to terms with the world is its progressive incarnation. There are a couple of nagging translation problems. The term species has a range of meanings that require a variety of English equivalents. The English equivalents only reflect an aspect of the conception, which often carries all these elements in it simultaneously. A species is an idea, exemplary or intelligible form, image, conception, pattern, type, appearance, and/or reflection. It is a phantasm, but only if ghosts were a truer reflection of the embodied reality that they represent. The species does not exist without the sensual object, but the translation it effects is not a pale version. It is rather a true understanding. The action of the intellect through the species completes the meaning of the thing. There simply is no modern equivalent for this conception, and no single word that makes sense in all contexts. The Latin similitudo, a metaphysical concordance or intentional likeness, is also more than any English equivalent, and I offer an explanation in chapter 4. Similarly, the word ratio is untranslatable. It has some correspondence to the English words ground, measure, reason, rationale, form, essence, or nature as intelligible, but it often straddles these meanings. It has a range similar to the Greek logos but is not equivalent. The highly technical mode of thinking common to both texts is so embedded in the language that the syntax of a literal translation can only be a weak approximation. Both texts are regarded as possibly or probably spurious, although Gadamer thought them both to be genuine. The De natura may have been written a year or two after Aquinas’s death. The De differentia is an excerpt, with slight differences, of Aquinas’s commentary on the Gospel of John, itself a scribe’s reportatio of a lecture. Lethielleux (1949) published the text of the excerpt from

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the Vatican codex. For purposes of comparison, readers may consult three principle sources of Aquinas’s thought on the verbum interius: The Summa theologiae, I, question 34; the Disputed Questions on Truth, question 4; and the Summa contra Gentiles, book 4, chapter 11. For ease of reference, language from the following texts that Gadamer quotes explicitly in his exegesis have been underlined.

De natura verbi intellectus

On the Nature of the Intellectual Word

Proemium.

Preface.

269. – Quoniam circa naturam verbi intellectus, sine quo imago Trinitatis non invenitur in homine expressa, multiplex difficultas et prolixitas nimia animum involvit; idea summatim eius naturam tradere intendimus, insuper et difficultates ipsum tangentes simul manifestare.

269. – Regarding the nature of the word of the mind, without which the image of the Trinity is not found expressed in the human being, manifold difficulty and extraordinary complexity confronts thought; therefore we intend to treat its nature summarily, and to reveal the difficulties that touch upon it at the same time.1

Caput 1. Quid Sit Verbum.

Chapter 1. What a Word Is.

270. – Sciendum est igitur primo, quod verbum cum re dicta per verbum convenientiam habet maiorem in natura sua quam cum dicente, licet in dicente sit ut in subiecto. Unumquodque enim ab illo naturam sortitur a quo speciem accipit et nomen

270.2 – So the first thing it is necessary to know is that the word in its essential character is in more perfect agreement with the thing being expressed by the word than with the person expressing it, even granting that the word is as much in the mind of the speaker as in the thing itself.

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sortitur, cum species sit tota natura rei. Verbum autem speciem accipit a re dicta, et non a dicente, nisi forte quando dicit se; sicut verbum lapidis differt specie a verbo asini; verbum etiam dictum a diversis de eadem re, idem specie est. Et huius ratio est, quia effectus quilibet magis convenit cum principio quo agens agit, quam cum agente, cui solum assimilatur ratione ipsius principii: hoc enim est quod communicatur effectui per actionem agentis.

For the means by which a thing gets its idea and its name is indeed how it gets its nature, since the idea is the completed nature of the thing. To be sure, a word receives its idea from the thing that is spoken of, not the one saying it, excepting, of course, when it utters itself. Thus the word “stone” differs in its form from the word “donkey.” Also, a word spoken by diverse speakers concerning the very same thing means precisely the same. And the reason for this is that any effect is in greater agreement with the principle3 from which the agent acts, than with the agent, to whom it is assimilated only by reason of the principle itself: for this principle is what is communicated to the effect through the action of the agent.

271. – Similitudo autem rei dictae est principium quo verbum rei efficitur, quae etiam in verbo reperitur a dicente sibi communicata: et ideo ipsum verbum quandoque dicitur similitudo rei, quandoque vero verbum rei, ubicumque illa similitudo ex primitur, sive in parte imaginativa, sicut phantasma Chartaginis est verbum Chartaginis, secundum Augustinum; sive in intellectu nostro, ubi perfecta ratio verbi invenitur quod, ad imaginem pertinet.

271. – Now, a similitude4 of the thing spoken of is the principle out of which the word of the thing is created, which the speaker discovers in the word when it is spoken inwardly. And so sometimes the word is itself called a similitude of the thing, but sometimes the word of the thing, regardless of where that similitude is expressed, whether in the imaginative part of our soul (as the phantasm Carthage is a word of Carthage, as Augustine says), or in our intellect, where the perfect nature of the word that accords with that idea is found.

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In verbis enim quae in imaginativa fiunt, non est ratio verbi expressa. Aliud namque est in ea unde similitudo exprimitur, et aliud in quo terminatur. Exprimitur enim a sensu, et terminatur in ipsa phantasia cum phantasia sit motus factus a sensu secundum actum, secundum Philosophum in tertio De anima. Sed supra intellectum nihil est in quo ab ipso aliquid exprimatur; et ideo non est aliud quod exprimit ab eo in quo exprimitur, sicut nec in Deo aliud est Pater exprimens, et aliud in quo recipitur expressum.

For with the words that are created in the imagination, the fully articulated meaning of the word is not expressed.5 For there is one aspect of it by which a similitude is expressed, and another in which it is fulfilled. For it is expressed from sense, and completed in imagination, since the imagination is a movement from sense in conformity with act, as Aristotle says in the third book of the De Anima. Clearly there is not something beyond intellect in which, by itself, a thing may be expressed; nor something other than that by which understanding is expressed; just as, in God, there is not, on the one hand, the Father expressing and, on the other hand, another being in whom the expression is received.6

272. – Sed adhuc in intellectu nostro est defectus, quia aliud est quod exprimit, aliud ipsum verbum expressum; quod in Deo non invenitur: et ideo verbum Dei est Deus, intellectus autem noster verbum suum non est, neque etiam est suum dicere, quod est proxima causa verbi.

272. – In this analogy there is a defect in our intellect, since there is (a.) one thing which expresses, and (b.) another which is the word itself expressed, whereas in God this is not the case. So, the word of God is God, whereas our intellect (a.) is not its own word (b.), nor even its speaking, which is the proximate cause of the word.7

Nascitur enim verbum nostrum ex notitia alicuius habiti apud memoriam nostram, quae nihil aliud est in hoc loco quam ipsa receptibilitas animae nostrae, in qua etiam tenet se, secundum Augustinum, etiam

Our word is born from knowledge of a thing held in our memory, which is nothing else in this respect than the receptivity of our soul in which the word is treasured up, as Augustine says, even though it does not yet

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cum se non discernit, sed alia quae ab extra acquirit.

discern itself, but only other things which it acquires from the outside.

273. – Primus ergo processus in gignitione verbi est cum intellectus accipit a memoria quod ab ea sibi offertur, non eam spolians quasi in ea nihil relinquens, sed similitudinem habiti in se assumens; et hoc est simile illi quod in memoria habetur, et ideo vocatur aliquando illud quod ab intellectu accipitur “verbum memoriae”; sed adhuc non habet perfectam rationem verbi; haberet tamen, si intellectus solum reciperet a memoria exprimente. Sed cum memoria non habeat actum aliquem, sed in loco actus solum tenet libere quasi parata capienti a se, intellectus vero in lumine suo capit ea; adhuc perfectam rationem verbi non habet.

273. – Thus the first procession8 in the begetting of a word is when the intellect receives from memory that which is offered to it by memory, not plundering it, leaving nothing in it as it were, but taking up the likeness of what is held in memory.9 This is like that similitude which is held in memory, and therefore what is received by the intellect is sometimes called “the word of memory”; yet it still does not have the complete nature of a word. It would have, if the intellect passively received from a memory what was drawn from there. But because memory does not have an active intellect, but in place of act merely retains freely, as if standing ready for that which takes from it, while the intellect takes these things in its own light, it does not yet have the complete nature of a word.

274. – In divinis vero Pater, cui respondet memoria in ratione ordinis, vel originis, complete generat, quia Pater id quod habet, non solum tenet ut memoria apud nos, sed quia est suppositum completum cuius est agere, ideo generat Filium. Non enim in generatione ista praesupponitur aliquid quasi a Patre accipiens, et aliud quasi acceptum: sic apud nos intellectus accipit a

274. – With respect to the divine persons, the Father, who corresponds to memory as regards order or origin, begets perfectly. That is because the Father does not merely hold onto what he has, as memory does in our case. The relation is completely given over in its being actualized. Thus does the Father beget the Son. For in that begetting, it is not that some one thing being received from the Father

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memoria, et praesupponitur generationi; ibi vero Filius generatur a Patre, sicut si totus intellectus noster esset a nostra memoria, et non similitudo ista vel illa.

is presupposed and some other distinct thing is received. This is the way, in our case, that the intellect receives from memory, the one presupposed for the generation of the other. In the divine case, however, the Son is truly begotten by the Father—It is as though, in our terms, it would not be merely the likeness of that which is received, but our whole intellect from our memory.

275. – Cum ergo intellectus informatus specie natus sit agere; terminus autem cuiuslibet actionis est eius obiectum, nititur agere circa obiectum; obiectum autem suum est quidditas aliqua cuius specie informatur, quae non est principium operationis vel actionis nisi ex propria ratione illius cuius est species. Obiectum autem non adest ipsi animae illa specie informatae, cum obiectum sit extra in sua natura; actio autem animae non est ab extra, quia intelligere est motus ad animam, tum ex natura speciei quae in talem quidditatem ducit, tum ex natura intellectus, cuius actio non est ad extra. Prima autem actio eius per speciem est formatio sui obiecti, quo formato intelligit; simul tamen tempore ipse format, et formatum est, et simul intelligit, quia ista non sunt motus de potentia ad actum, quia iam factus est intellectus in actu per speciem, sed est processus

275. – Therefore, since the intellect informed by an idea is naturally suited to act, and the end of any action is its object, the intellect endeavors to act concerning its object. However, its object is a thing by whose idea it is informed, an idea that is a principle of operation or action only in virtue of the proper nature of the thing to which it belongs. Now, the object is not present to the soul that is informed by an idea, since the object in its own nature is external to the soul; however, the activity of the soul is not from outside itself, because understanding is a motion toward the soul, both in virtue of the nature of the idea that leads to such a thing, and in virtue of the nature of the intellect, whose action is not external. Now, the intellect’s first action is the formation of its object (a word) through the idea. Once this is formed, it understands. These are not movements

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perfectus de actu in actum, ubi non requiritur aliqua species motus.

from potentiality toward actuality, because the intellect has already been made actual through the idea; rather, it is a complete procession from actuality to actuality, where no idea of motion is required.

Et quia, ut dictum est, huiusmodi obiectum in ipsa anima formatur, et non extra, ideo erit in anima ut in subiecto; est enim similitudo rei extra. Quod autem est in anima ut in subiecto, efficitur in ea ut habitus. De perfecta autem ratione habitus est, quando actui coniungitur: in hoc enim natura perficitur. Perficitur autem per lumen naturale intellectus, involvens speciem intelligibilem in quo et sub quo intelligatur.

And because, as has been said, this sort of object is formed in the soul and not outside, it will be in the soul as its subject, for it is a likeness of the external thing. But what is in the soul as its subject is effectuated in it as a habit. Now, a habit is in the nature of a perfect reasoning when it is conjoined to act; for in this conjoining its nature is perfected. But it is perfected by the natural light of the intellect, involving the intelligible idea in which and under which it is understood.

Idem enim lumen quod intellectus recipit cum specie ab agente, per actionem intellectus possibilis informati tali specie diffunditur, cum obiectum formatur, et manet cum obiecto formato; et hoc habet plenam rationem verbi, cum in eo quidditas rei intelligatur. Sicut in principio actionis intellectus et species non sunt duo, sed unum est ipse intellectus et species illustrata; ita unum in fine relinquitur, similitudo scilicet perfecta, genita et expressa ab intellectu: et hoc totum expressum est verbum, et est totum

For the same light that the intellect receives with an idea from an agent is diffused through the action of the possible intellect informed by such an idea; when the intellectual object is formed, it remains with the formed object, and then this has the full nature of a word, since in it the essence of the thing is understood. Just as at the start of an action the intellect and the idea are not two, but the intellect itself and the illuminated idea are one, so at the end there remains one thing, namely, the perfect likeness generated and

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rei dictae expressivum, et totum in quo res exprimitur; et hoc est intellectum principale, quia res non intelligitur nisi in eo. Est enim tanquam speculum in quo res cernitur, sed non excedens id quod in eo cernitur. Efficitur enim opere naturae ut in eo aliquid cernatur: natura autem non agit aliquid superflue, et ideo non excedit speculum hoc, idest id quod in eo videtur.

expressed by the intellect. And this whole that is expressed is the word: The word expressed is both the whole of the thing said, and the whole in which the matter is expressed. And this is the principal thing understood, because a thing is understood only in it. For it is as a mirror in which a thing is perceived, one that does not go beyond what is perceived in it. For it is brought about by an operation of nature that something is perceived in it, and nature does nothing superfluous, and that is why the mirror does not go beyond that, namely, what is seen in it.

276. – Verbum igitur cordis est ultimum quod potest intellectus in se operari. Ad ipsum enim, ut est in quo quidditas rei recipitur, immo quia ipsemet est quidditatis similitudo, terminatur intelligere. Sic enim habet rationem obiecti intellectus. Ut vero est per intellectum expressum, ei coniungitur dicere; et sic ipsum idem verbum est effectus actus intellectus, qui est formativus obiecti, et ipsius dicere.

276. – Therefore, the word of the heart is the last thing that the intellect can make in itself. For understanding comes to an end with it, as it is that in which the essence of a thing is received, or more precisely, because it is itself the likeness of the essence. For in this way the intellect has the nature of an object. But insofar as it is expressed through the intellect, the act of saying is conjoined to it; hence the selfsame word is the effect of the act of understanding that is formative of the object, and the uttering of itself.

Sed in hoc reperitur differentia quaedam: quod enim intelligitur, potest esse in intellectu et manere

But we find a difference here; for what is understood can be in the intellect and remain in the intellect

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in intellectu non intellectum actu; quod autem dicitur, potest esse dictum, sed non potest manere dictum, nisi cum actu dicitur: unde in intellectu potest manere species obiecti in habitu. Illud enim dico quod formatum est, sed non manet id in quo formatum est sine lumine in quo actu aliquid intelligitur. Inde est quod verbum non est sine intelligere in actu, licet ipsum intellectum nudum in habitu manere possit. Habitus hic dicitur non ipsa potentia memorativa tantum, quae praecedit intellectum: immo ipse intellectus est natus retinere suum obiectu, propter tamen naturam memoriae, quae prior est. Unumquodque enim prius salvatur in suo posteriori; et ideo ipsa perfectio obiecti habetur in ipso habitu intellectus, ut dictum est; et ibi posita est perfectio verbi superius.

while not actively understood, while what is said can be said but cannot remain said unless it is actually being said. So, the idea of the object can remain in the intellect habitually. For I speak that which is formed, but that in which it is formed does not persist without the light in which something is actually understood. It follows from this that a word does not exist without one’s actually understanding, even though the mere understanding itself can persist habitually. Here, “habit” does not mean just the memorative power that precedes understanding; rather, the intellect itself naturally retains its object, though this is due to the nature of memory, which is prior. For whatever is prior is preserved in what is posterior, and so the very perfection of the object is found in the very habit of the intellect, as has been said. And there the perfection of a higher word is located.

277. – Ex his manifestum est qualiter apud nos deficit a repraesentatione Filii in divinis; quia scilicet ipsa intelligentia nostra non est educta de memoria nostra, a qua tamen principium et rationem agendi habet. Quae, si esset de memoria totaliter educta, ipsa esset verbum memoriae suae: unde non diceret se, nec exprimeret nisi dictatum et expressum a memoria sua,

277. – From these remarks it is evident in what way our word falls short of the representation of the Son in God; namely, that our understanding is not drawn from our memory, from which, however, it has its origin and its basis of operation. If understanding were totally drawn from memory, it would be the word of its memory; accordingly, it would neither utter nor

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quia aliter falso diceret et exprimeret se: sicut verbum in divinis non dicit seipsum gignendo et exprimendo, sed dicit seipsum genitum et expressum.

express itself unless it were dictated and expressed by its memory, because otherwise it would utter and express itself falsely, just as the Word in the Godhead does not utter itself by begetting and expressing, but it speaks itself already born and expressed.

Rursum manifestum est quare verbum proprie dicitur personaliter tantum. Verbum enim nostrum semper est in continuo fieri, quia semper perfectum esse suum est in fieri; sed hoc non est imperfectum, quasi totum simul non existens, sicut est de aliis quae sunt in fieri, quae etiam semper sunt imperfecta; immo verbum in principio sui est perfectum, quia conceptio perfecte formata est, et nihilominus esse eius perfectum servatur eodem modo quo gignebatur. Non enim transit formatio verbi ipso formato, sed cum actu intelligitur continue formatur verbum, quia semper est ut in fieri et ut in egrediendo ab aliquo, scilicet a dicente. Et hoc cum personarum processionibus convenit. Intelligere vero, ut in quiete accipitur, et essentiale est in divinis, dicere vero, sicut et verbum, personaliter dicitur.

Thus again it is clear why the word is properly so called with relation to the person. For our word is always in continual becoming, because its complete existence is always in its becoming. Now this is not an imperfection, the word’s not existing all at once, as is the case with other things that are in becoming, which are imperfect. Nay, rather the word in its own origin is perfect, since the conception is there perfectly formed, and its perfected existence is preserved in the same manner as its birth. For the formation of the word does not pass away when it (i.e., the word) itself is formed, but when it is being actively understood the word is in continual formation, since it is always in a state of becoming and emerging from something else, namely from the speaker. This is in fact in agreement with the processions of the persons. In truth, thinking when it happens in silence is still in fact speaking, just as it is in the divine, where to speak of the word is to speak regarding the person.

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Caput 2. Quomodo Generetur Verbum.

Chapter 2. How the Word is Begotten

278. – Nunc restat videre, utrum verbum gignatur per reflexionem actus intellectus vel per actum rectum. Ad cuius evidentiam considerandum est quod verbum quod est expressivum rei quae intelligitur, non est reflexum; nec actio qua formatur verbum, quod est expressum quidditatis rei quae concipitur, non est reflexa; alioquin omne intelligere esset reflexum, quia semper cum actu intelligitur aliquid, verbum formatur. Unde manifestum est quod intellectus infra se ipsum actionem rectam exercere potest, et haec semper est actio sua propria quae terminatur ad obiectum factum in se et a se.

278. – Now it remains to see whether the word is begotten through the reflection of an intellectual act or through a direct act. In this regard we must consider the evidence that the word expressing the thing which is understood is not reflexive. Certainly the activity which forms a word that is the expression of the essence of the thing conceived is not reflexive; otherwise every act of understanding would be reflexive, since, whenever something is actively understood, a word is formed. What follows from this is that the intellect can exercise a direct action within itself, and this is always an act of its own, which is terminated with an object made in itself and by itself.

Unum enim constituitur ex intellectu et specie, quae est principium actionis suae, et huius est agere; unde species haec est prima qua agitur, non autem ad quam: non enim intellectus noster inspiciens hanc speciem tanquam exemplar sibi simile, aliquid facit quasi verbum eius. Sic enim non fieret unum ex intellectu et specie, cum intellectus non intelligat nisi factus unum aliquid cum specie, sed in ipsa specie formatus agi

For one thing alone is constituted out of intellect and idea, i.e., the principle of its action, and its principle is to act; therefore this idea is fundamental in respect to means, but not in respect to end: for our intellect as it looks upon an idea is not so much a pattern or model of itself, as intellect makes something which is a kind of word of that reflection. For thus would it not become one thing outside of intellect and form, since intellect would not understand unless it had become one with form.

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tanquam aliquo sui, ipsam tamen non excedens.

But in fact it is formed in its idea to be acted upon as it were, by a part of itself, not exceeding itself.

Species autem sic accepta semper ducit in obiectum primum. Unde manifestum est quod ipsum verbum intellectus perficitur per actum rectum; tamen quia non mittit ad aliquid aliud conceptiones suas, sicut facit sensus, hinc est quod potest super actus suos reflecti cum vult, quod non potest sensus: non enim utitur medio corpore cuius non est percipere quod in eo fit.

So an idea thus received always leads to the object primarily. Hence it is clear that the word of the intellect is perfected through a direct action; nevertheless, since the word does not direct its conceptions towards anything else, as sense does, it has this capacity to reflect on its own activity when it wishes, which sense is not able to do: for the word does not use as (its) means (of reflection) a body, of which it is not possible to perceive what is inside it.

Sed cum sit unum agens, cum quo et species ipsa efficitur unum spiritualiter in participando vitam eius, percipit actum suum cum vult, complete, quod non potest sensus. Non enim indiget anima, ad hoc quod a se intelligatur, specie illa, sed ad hoc ut intelligat: de se namque habet ut intelligatur, sed non quod intelligat. Intelligit enim se sicut alia, secundum Philosophum: hoc autem est per speciem, quia alia sic intelliguntur. Sensus autem indiget organo ad hoc ut agat; organum autem non redit supra se, unde non est reflexio in sensu.

But since there is only one activity with which the idea itself produces something in spirit in sharing its life, it perceives its own act when it wishes—completely—which is something sense is not able to do. For the soul does not stand in need of that reflection so that it itself should be understood, but simply so that it should understand: Indeed, it has the capacity for understanding itself, but not as that which understands. For it understands itself just as other things, according to the Philosopher: However this is understood through an idea, just as other things are understood. On the other hand, sense is in need of an organ in order to do this, but since the organ does not return back upon itself, reflection is not in the senses.

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279. – Considerandum tamen est, quod generatio verbi videtur propinquissima cognitioni reflexae: unde multi putaverunt eam reflexam. Cum enim anima informata specie format verbum in se, non format ipsum in aliquo sui non informato specie, quasi aliquid sui extendat a se non informatum specie prima, ut in eo verbum primum formetur, et ipsum esset informatum verbo in eo formato: sic enim videretur extendi quasi in rectum, et sic per actum rectum formaretur verbum; sed in se specie prima formata, eo quod formata est, actu gignitur verbum, et non in aliquo sui nudo. Unde videtur haec gignitio simillima reflexae.

279. – It is necessary, nevertheless, to consider further that the generation of the word seems very close to an act of reflection, as indeed many have thought. For when the soul informed by an idea forms a word in itself, it does not do so in some part of the soul uninformed by the idea, as if being produced without coming from the first idea (in which case a first word would be formed in it, and it would be informed by the word formed in it!). For in that case it would appear to come forth as though directly, and thus the word would be formed through a direct act. But thanks to the idea first formed in it, the word is generated in the very act, and not in some object. That is why this generation is very like a reflection.

280. – Sed sciendum est, quod cum reflexio fiat redeundo super idem, hic autem non sit reditio super speciem, nece super intellectum formatum specie, quia non percipiuntur quando verbum formatur; gignitio verbi non est reflexa.

280. – To be sure, it is important to realize that reflection takes place by a return to the same thing. In this case however there is no return to an idea, nor to the intellect formed by an idea, since these are not perceived when the word is being formed. Hence, the generation of the word is not reflexive.

Non enim generatur verbum ipsum per actum intellectus, nec eius similitudo, nec etiam similitudo illius speciei qua intellectus informatur, quasi verbum esset eius expressivum, sed similitudo rei. Illius enim

For the word itself is not generated through an act of understanding, nor is its likeness generated, nor even the likeness of an idea by which intellect is informed, as if the word were an expression of it; no, a

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similitudo generatur quod in sua similitudine cognoscitur. Est tamen ipsum verbum similitudo illius speciei tamquam eius quo factum est et est sibi simillimum. Similitudo vero rei est ut ad quod formatur, et tanquam ad eius exemplar.

likeness of the thing is generated. For it is the likeness of that which is cognized that is generated. Nevertheless, the word itself is a likeness of that idea to the degree that it is a likeness of that by which it is made, and is very like it. But it is a likeness of the thing from which it is formed, just as if it were an exemplar of it.

Nec propter hoc oportet ipsum formantem prius rem intueri, et post ad eam verbum seu imaginem ipsam in se formare: quia habere speciem rei apud se, est sibi loco aspectus exemplaris. Artifices namque, intuentes sua exemplaria, nihil aliud acquirunt nisi ipsas species exemplarium. Haec autem species quam habet intellectus, advenit sibi a re quam ipse non est intuitus, sed sensus. Et quia est rei similitudo, est principium generationis huius. Unde in intellectu potest esse generatio per rectum, cum nihil eius generetur.

Nor for this reason is it necessary that the object in this process of formation be intuited, and afterwards the soul form the word or image separately in relation to the object; for holding onto the idea of the thing takes place where the exemplar would be seen. Thus craftsmen who ponder their exemplars acquire just the idea of the exemplars. Now, this idea, which the intellect has, comes to it from a thing that sense, not intellect itself, has observed. And because it is a likeness of the thing, it is a principle of this generation. That is why there can be direct generation in the intellect, since nothing of it is actually generated.10

Directe igitur a specie ipsa itur in ipsum verbum, cum non percipitur eius subiectum, sed res cuius est prima similitudo. Huic etiam similitudini tanto intimius est verbum, quanto perfectius genitum est. Ideo verbum intelligentis intimum est principio intellecto, ex quo et specie

The view goes therefore directly from the idea to the word, since the subject of it is not perceived, but the thing of which it is the preeminent likeness. Moreover, the more perfectly it is begotten, the nearer the word is to this likeness. Therefore, the word of the one understanding

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fit unum nec tamen informatur subiectum simul diversis accidentibus eiusdem speciei, quia impossibile est eamdem superficiem simul duabus albedinibus informari: hoc enim est impossibile, quando utrumque accidens est in ratione eius quo aliquid fieri habet.

is proximate to the understood origin from which indeed it emerges as one with the idea.11 This is so even though the subject is not informed at the same time with diverse accidents of the same idea (after all, it is impossible that the same surface should be informed at the same time with two white colors); for this is impossible, when each accident is in the nature of that by which something has its coming to be.

281. – Verbum autem est in quo aliquid intelligitur, sicut lux in qua videtur aliquid; species autem est qua perficitur cognitio, sicut species coloris in visu exteriori; et foret simillimum si lux ex specie coloris generaretur, sicut ibi fit verbum ex specie: exteriora enim deficiunt a repraesentatione interiorum.

281. – However the word is that by which something is understood, just as light is that in which something is seen; furthermore, the idea is that by which knowledge (of something) is perfected, as is the case with the idea of color in external vision. It would be exactly similar if light were generated from out of the idea of the color, just as in the other case the word comes from the idea: for exterior things fall short of their representation of inward things

Et propter hoc licet utrumque sit accidens, species scilicet et verbum ex specie genitum, quia utrumque est in anima ut in subiecto; verbum tamen magis transit in similitudinem substantiae quam species ipsa. Quia enim intellectus nititur in quidditatem rei venire, ideo in specie praedicta est virtus quidditatis substantialis spiritualiter per

And on account of this, each is an accident, that is, an idea and the word born from it, since each is in the soul as in its subject [i.e., object]. Nevertheless, the word is transformed into the likeness of the substance [i.e., the object] more than the idea.12 For intellect tries to arrive at the essence of the thing. Therefore the quality of the objective essence

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quam quidditas spiritualiter intus formatur, sicut in calore est virtus formae ignis per quam attingitur in generatione ad formam substantialem ignis, ad quam accidens per se non attingeret: unde verbum, quod est ultimum quod potest fieri intra per speciem, magis accedit ad ipsam rem repraesentandam quam nuda species rei.

exists in the aforementioned idea immaterially, a quality through which the essence is formed (immaterially) within, just as in heat, a quality of the form of fire through the substantial form of fire is reached in its generation, which an accident by itself would not reach. Hence a word, which is the utmost that is able to be generated inwardly through an idea, approaches the thing itself that is to be represented more than the bare idea of the thing.

282. – Quia igitur res intelligibilis eo ipso intelligitur quo intellectus formatur sua specie actu; prius natura est informari quam intelligere, sed non tempore: ideo videtur verbum, quod sequitur speciem rei, similiter sequi intelligere eius. Hoc autem non esset, si per speciem rei tenderet intellectus in ipsam rem ut in se, sicut visus videt colorem extra se existentem, et tunc formaret verbum in se de re prius intellecta. Sed quia intellectus accipiens speciem a re per sensus, non ducitur per ipsam in rem ut est in sui natura, sed ut in se est, quia ipse facit in se obiectum quod est in eo intellectum; obiectum autem naturaliter prius est actione potentiae circa obiectum: ideo verbum quod est intra ipsum intellectum, prius est ipso intelligere ad ipsum terminato. Aliud enim est hoc a quo accipitur

282. – Since therefore an intelligible thing (an object perfected by the light of reason) is understood by the same activity that forms an understanding from an idea in act; this being informed is by its very nature, but not temporally, related to understanding; therefore it appears that the word, which follows an idea of the thing, follows the understanding of it in a similar way. This would not be the case if, through an idea of the thing, understanding were directed toward the thing itself as it is in itself (the way sight sees color existing outside it) and then formed a word concerning the thing already understood. But since the intellect, receiving an idea from the thing through the senses, is not led by it to the thing as it is in its natural state, but rather as it is in the intellect, it constructs in itself the object that is understood in it. Now, the

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species, scilicet res ipsa, et aliud ad quod terminatur actio intellectus, scilicet similitudo rei formata ab intellectu.

object is in its nature prior to the activation of the potentiality of the intellectual object. Hence the word that is within the intellect itself exists prior to the understanding that ends in the word. For that from which an idea is taken—the thing itself— is one thing, and that at which the intellect’s action terminates— the thing’s likeness formed by the intellect—is another.

283. – Ex dictis manifestum est quomodo attenditur prioritas unius eorum ad alterum. Prius13 enim natura est intellectus informatus specie quae est primum sufficiens intelligendi, quam gignatur verbum: et ideo intelligere in radice prius est verbo, et verbum est terminus actionis intellectus. Sed quia obiectum non habetur nisi in verbo, ut dictum est; obiectum autem prius est quam quaelibet actio ad eum terminata. ideo verbum prius est quam intelligere. Et hoc totum ideo contingit, quia non terminatur actio intellectus ad rem extra, a qua acquirit speciem ut in se est. Si enim species nata esset ducere intellectum ad rem ut in se est, ut species coloris ducit in colorem, omnibus modis praecederet intelligere verbum.

283. – From this explanation it is clear in what way one of these stands before the other. For, on the one hand, the intellect is informed first by an idea, which is required for intellection, and this informing of the intellect is prior to the creation of the word. And so the act of intellection, by its very nature, is prior to the word, and the word is the terminus of the intellect’s action. But, on the other hand, because the object is not grasped until it has found a word, as has been said, and the object is prior to any action that finds its terminus in it, the word stands before understanding. And all this can occur because the action of the intellect does not terminate in an external object from which it acquires an idea all by itself. For if an idea naturally led the intellect to a thing in itself, as the idea of color leads to color, understanding would stand before the word in all respects.

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Unde manifestum est quod verbum non est quod sequitur14 intellectum immediate post rationem intellectus: sic enim simpliciter praecederet verbum actum intellectus, qui est intelligere; sed verbum sequitur immediate intellectum in actu per speciem, a qua procedit verbum ut actus ex actu, et non ut actus ex potentia. Unde verbum posterius est actu intelligendi a parte intellectus; et sic verbum sequitur ad intelligere non in se, sed in sua radice, ut dictum est. Si vero intellectus a verbo acciperet speciem prius quam intelligeret ipsum verbum, et rem in verbo, impossibile foret per illud intelligere, vel verbum formare per eius principium, sicut impossibile est intellectum facere rem extra, a qua speciem trahit.

Hence it is clear that it is not the word that follows understanding immediately after the ratiocination of the intellect. For in this case the word would precede the actualization of intellect that is understanding. In point of fact, the word exists in the sequence of actual understanding through an idea, from which the word proceeds as act from act, and not as act from potency. Hence the word follows the act of understanding on the part of the intellect; and thus the word follows in relation to understanding not vis-à-vis itself, but vis-à-vis its source, as has been said. To be sure, if the intellect were to receive an idea from a word before it understood the word itself, and the thing in the word, it would be impossible to understand through it, or to form a word through its principle, just as it is impossible that the mind would create an external object from which it then would draw an idea.

284. – Ex dictis facile est scire quare intellectus non dicit se, quando format verbum secundum rem. Anima enim quasi transformata est in rem per speciem, qua agit quidquid agit; unde cum ea informatus est actu, verbum producit, in quo rem illam dicit cuius speciem habet, et non se. Cum vero nititur se apprehendere, quia non est

284. – From what has been said it is easy to see why the intellect does not utter itself when it forms a word with reference to a thing. For the soul is, as it were, transformed into the thing through an idea, by which it actualizes what is at issue. That is why the intellect, when informed by an idea, produces a word, in which it utters not itself but

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cognoscibilis, nisi sicut alia per speciem aliorum, quia non indiget specie ut intelligat (hoc enim potest de se), non habet in se, ut intelligens est, speciem qua formetur verbum sui, sed accipit a se intelligibilem speciem non sui, sed rei qua necessario informatur ut intelligatur, ut dictum est. Cum igitur illa specie informatur, statim se intelligit; et hoc est per reflexionem, quia haec species prius est accepta a re quam a se informata et intellecta.

that thing whose idea it has before it. On the other hand, when the intellect strives to grasp itself, it is cognizable not through the kind of idea by which other things are understood. It does not need such an idea to understand, but can do so all by itself. In other words, it does not possess that kind of idea by which a word is formed, but by the thing [the idea of the mind itself], by which of necessity it is informed in order to understand, as was said. Therefore, when it is informed by that mental idea, the intellect understands without mediation—and this occurs through the process of reflection, whereas that other idea is received from the thing before the intellect is informed and understood by itself.15

Nec oportet prius formare verbum quam intelligere; sed cum intellexerit, format verbum sui; et ideo intelligere non tempore, sed natura praecedere necesse est, cum se ipsum intelligit. Non enim cum se intelligit, facit totum obiectum, sed aliquid circa ipsum: induit enim se, et hoc est verbum sui, cum se intelligit; non enim est aliud a quo accipitur species, ab eo ad quod terminatur, sed idem.

Furthermore, it is not necessary to form a word before understanding, for when the intellect has understood, it forms a word of itself; thus when it understands itself, the understanding precedes this formation essentially rather than temporally. For it is not the case, when it is understanding itself, that intellect creates the whole object, but rather something concerning the object: For it clothes itself, as it were, and this is its word, the achievement of self-understanding. For the origin of an idea is not separable from the end result.16

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285. – Sed quia ista est species rei, et non genita de essentia nuda, formatum verbum de anima per speciem rei non est purum verbum animae, sed rei dictae. Si vero nudatam ab omni re se apprehenderet, et similitudinem sui in se gigneret, hoc eius verbum esset purum, nihil extraneum habens admixtum. Tale est verbum Dei, quod idem est in natura cum Patre dicente ipsum verbum. Verbum tamen animae tali modo se dicentis foret accidens, et pro tanto diversae naturae foret ab anima, cum accidens sui foret, et a se et de se factum: ipsa enim substantiam facere non potest. Deus autem nihil diversitatis in sua natura habet; ideo verum suum Deus, virtus et substantia vera est.

285. – Now, since this is an idea of a thing, and not begot from [the soul’s] bare essence, a word formed from the soul through an idea of a thing is not a pure word of the soul, but rather of the thing uttered. However, if it were to apprehend itself denuded of everything, and were to beget a likeness of itself in itself, this would be its pure word, having extraneously nothing mixed in. Such is the Word of God, which is the same in its nature with the Father uttering the Word itself. So the word of the soul speaking itself in such a manner would be an accident, and to that degree it would be of a nature different from the soul, since it would be an accident of it, and produced by it and from it: for it cannot create a substance. God, however has no diversity in his nature; therefore God is his own truth, power and true substance.

286. – Deus autem quia omnia unico intuitu videt, uno verbo omnia dicit; nos vero multa verba habemus propter impotentiam intellectus nostri in intelligendo. Et horum quaedam oriuntur ex aliis, sicut verbum conclusionis ex principiis; quaedam vero non, sicut in rebus quae non habent connexionem ad invicem, ut patet de lapide et ligno; quaedam statim offeruntur intelligenti, quaedam non; quaedam etiam

286. – Since God sees all things with a single act of perception, he utters all things with one word; we however have many words on account of the frailty of our intellect in understanding.17 And of these some arise from others, just as a conclusion from premises; and some not, as in things which do not have a mutual connection, as is evident with “stone” and “wood”; some things lend themselves immediately to the

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cum maiori, quaedam cum breviori discursu. Ideo verba nostra quaedam plus, quaedam minus habent de cognitione, et quaedam citius et quaedam tardius formantur, sicut scire quarumdam conclusionem tardius et difficilius, quarumdam vero facilius et citius acquiritur. Et haec de verbo dicta sufficant.

one understanding, other things not; some things involve longer reasoning, others less. Therefore our words involve sometimes more, sometimes less cognition, and some are formed more quickly and others more slowly, just as to arrive at one conclusion may be more slow and difficult, and another easier and quicker. And may these remarks concerning the word be sufficient.

De differentia

On the Differences

1. Videndum est quid sit hoc quod dicitur verbum. Ad cujus intellectum sciendum est, secundum Philosophum, quod ea quae sunt in voce sunt signa earum quae sunt in anima passionum. Consuetum est autem in Scripturis quod res significatae sortiuntur vocabula signorum et e converso sicut illud; Petra autem erat Christus. De necessitate igitur sequitur quod illud intrinsecum animae nostrae, quod significatur exteriori voce cum verbo nostro, verbum vocetur. Utrum autem prius conveniat nomen verbi rei exteriori voce prolatae, vel ipsi conceptui animae intrinseco, nihil refert ad praesense. Planum tamen est quod illud quod significatur interius in anima existens prius est quam ipsum verbum exteriori voce prolatum, utpote

1. It is necessary to inquire what sort of thing a word is. We must know about the intellect, according to the philosopher, that those things that are in the voice are signs of movement in the soul. It is conventional in Scriptures, however, that things signified acquire the designations of signs, and out of a turning [of meaning], as in the following: “Christ was a rock.”18 It follows of necessity therefore that what is within our soul that is signified in the outward voice with our word is called a word. It is for another time to ask whether the name “word” agrees with either the external thing expressed in the spoken voice, or of the concept within the soul.19 Nevertheless it is plain that what is signified prior to inwardly in the soul is that word exteriorized in the voice, inasmuch as it

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causa ejus existens. Si igitur volumus scire quid est interius verbum in anima nostra, videamus quid significet verbum quod exteriori voce profertur.

is its cause. If therefore we wish to know what sort of thing that interior word in our soul is, let us look at what the word signifies that is expressed outwardly in the voice.

2. In intellectu autem tria sunt, scilicet: ipsa potentia intellectus; species rei intellectae, quae est forma ejus, se habens ad intellectum sicut species coloris ad pupillam; tertium est intelligere, scilicet operatio intellectus. Nullum enim istorum significatur verbo exteriori voce prolato; nam hoc nomen “lapis” non significat substantiam intellectus quia hoc non intendit dicere nominans, nec significat speciem quae est quo intellectus intelligit cum etiam non sit intentio nominantis, nec etiam significat ipsum intelligere cum intelligere non sit actio progrediens ab intelligente sed in ipso manens. Verbum autem interius conceptum per modum egredientis se habet, quod testatur verbum exterius vocale, quod est ejus signum; istud enim egreditur a dicente vocaliter extra. Illud igitur proprie dicitur verbum interius, quod intelligens intelligendo format. Intellectus autem duo format secundum duas ejus operationes: nam secundum operationem suam quae dicitur indivisibilium intelligentia, format difinitionem; secundum vero operationem qua componit et dividit, format enuntiationem vel aliquid hujusmodi; et

2. In the intellect there are three things: first, the intellectual power; second, the species of the object of intellection (its form)—just as is the species of color to the eye); and third, understanding, which is to say, the operation of the intellect itself. None of these three are signified by the exterior word that is expressed vocally. For the outer word “stone” does not signify the substance of the intellect, since this is not what the one naming intends to say, nor does it specify the species by which the intellect understands, since the species does not yet have the intent to name, nor yet does it signify understanding, since intellection is not an act that progresses out from the one understanding, but remains within itself. However, the inner word grasps a concept by a kind of outward movement, to which the outer word gives vocal testimony as its sign, for the inner word is externalized by the one speaking in outward expression. This then is properly said to be the inner word, which the one understanding forms in understanding. However, the intellect forms two words according to its two operations. For on the basis of its operation which is called

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ideo illud, sic formatum et expressum per operationem intellectus vel definientis vel enuntiantis, exteriori voce significatur. Unde dicit Philosophus IV Metaph.: “Ratio quam significat nomen est definitio.” Istud igitur sic formatum et expressum in anima dicitur verbum interius; et ideo comparatur ad intellectum, non sicut quo intellectus intelligit, sed sicut in quo intelligit, quia in isto expresso et formato videt naturam rei intellectae.

the understanding of indivisibles it forms a definition. But according to the operation by which it synthesizes and divides, it forms a proposition, or something of the kind. And on that account that word that is thus formed and expressed by the operation of the intellect, either of a definition or a proposition, is signified by the external voice. Thus says the philosopher in Metaphysics, book IV: “The ratio that the name signifies is a definition.” Therefore this thing that is formed and expressed in the soul is called the verbum interius; and on that account it is compared to the intellect, not as that by which the intellect understands, but as that in which it understands, since in its expression and formation it sees the nature of the thing understood.

3. Ex his quae dicta sunt possumus duo de verbo accipere, scilicet quod verbum est semper aliquid procedens ab intellectu et in intellectu existens secundo quod verbum est ratio et similitudo rei intellectae. Et si quidem eadem res sit intelligens et intellecta, tunc verbum est ratio et similitudo intellectus a quo procedit. Si autem aliud sit intelligens et intellectum, tunc verbum non est ratio rei intelligentis sed intellectae, sicut conceptio quam habet aliquis de lapide est similitudo lapidis tantum. Sed quando intellectus intelligit se,

3. From these things we are able to derive two conclusions about the word: it is actually always something proceeding from the intellect and existing in the intellect, and after which it is the reason and likeness of the object of intellection. And if the one understanding and what is understood are the same, then the word is the ratio and the similitude of what is understood, as the conception that someone has of a stone is only a likeness of the stone. But when the intellect understands itself, then in this respect the word is the

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tunc hujusmodi verbum est ratio et similitudo intellectus. Et ideo Augustinus ponit similitudinem Trinitatis in anima secundum quod mens intelligit se ipsam, non autem secundum quod intelligit alia.

reason and likeness of the intellect. And on that account Augustine finds the likeness of the Trinity in the soul when the mind understands itself rather than other things.

Patet igitur quod in qualibet re intellectuali cui competit intelligere, necesse est ponere verbum; de ratione enim intelligendi est quod intellectus intelligendo aliquid formet: hujusmodi autem formatio dicitur verbum. Natura enim intellectualis est natura humana, angelica et divina. Et ideo verbum est humanum, [secundum] Psalm: Dicit insipiens in corde suo: Non est Deus. Est etiam verbum Angeli cum sic dicitur in Zach. 1: Dixit Angelus etc. Est etiam verbum divinum, unde Genes, I: Dixit Deus etc.; de quo dicit Evangelista: In principio erat Verbum.” Constat autem quodnon dicit hoc de verbo humano nec angelico, quia utrumque istorum factum est, cum verbum non praecedat dicentem; hoc autem verbum de quo Joannes loquitur non est factum, sed omnia per ipsum facta sunt. Necesse est igitur quod hoc de verbo divino intelligatur.

It is therefore obvious somehow or other with respect to intellectual matters to which understanding applies that it is necessary to posit a word. For it is concerning the reason of the one understanding that the intellect of the one understanding forms something, and this forming is called a word. For the nature of what is intellectual is both human, angelic and divine. Therefore, the word is human according to the Psalm: “The fool says in his heart: ‘There is no God.’” It is also the word of the angel as it is said in Zacharius: “And the Angel said . . .” And it is also the word of the divine, as it says in Genesis: “God said . . .” regarding which the Evangelist comments: “In the beginning was the Word.” However this is not either human or angelic word, since both of these words are created, and do not precede the saying, whereas the word about which John speaks is not created, and all things are created through it. It is necessary therefore that this latter is understood to be a divine word.

4. Est etiam sciendum quod verbum Dei, de quo loquitur Joannes

4. It must also be known that the word of God about which John

Appendix tres habet differentias ad verbum nostrum. Prima est, secundum Augustinum, quia verbum nostrum est “prius formabile quam formatum”; nam cum volo concipere rationem lapidis, oportet quod ad ipsum verbum ratiocinando perveniam, et sic est in omnibus aliis quae a nobis intelliguntur, nisi forte in primis principiis quae, cum sint naturaliter nota, absque discursu rationis statim cognoscuntur. Quamdiu igitur intellectus ratiocinando discurrit, huc illucque jactatur, nec adhuc formatio perfecta est nisi quando ipsam rationem rei perfecte conceperit, et tunc primo habet rationem verbi. Et inde est quod in anima nostra est etiam cogitatio, per quam significatur ipse discursus inquisitionis, et verbum quod est jam formatum secundum perfectam contemplationem veritatis. Sic igitur verbum nostrum prius est in potentia quam in actu; sed verbum Dei semper est in actu, et ideo nomen cogitationis verbo Dei proprie non convenit. Dicit enim Augustinus III de Trinitate: “Ita dicitur illud verbum Dei, ut cogitatum non dicatur, ne quid quasi volubile in Deo credatur.” Et illud quod Anselmus dicit, scilicet quod “dicere summo Patri nihil aliud est quam cogitando intueri,” improprie dictum est.

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speaks is different from our word in three respects. The first is, according to Augustine, that our word is “formable before being formed.” For when I want to conceive the essence of the stone, it is necessary that I come to its word by a process of reasoning, as thus it is the case in all other things that are understood by us, excepting perhaps first principles, which, since they are naturally known, are cognized immediately without discursive reasoning. Therefore so long as the intellect runs about discursively in this process of reasoning, thrown here and there, the formation [of the word] is not complete until the essence of the thing is conceived completely, and only at that time does the intellect hold the essence of the word. And there is also in our soul a cogitation by which discursivity itself of the inquiry is signified, and only then is the word which is then formed out of the completed contemplation of the truth. Thus our word is in potency before in act, but the word of God is always in act, and so the word of God is not appropriately called cogitation. For Augustine says in the Trinity: “Thus it is said of the word of God that it should not be called cogitation, lest something changeable is believed to be in God.” And to say, as Anselm says, that “For the highest Father to speak is nothing other than to contemplate in cogitating.” is improperly said.

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Secunda differentia est verbi nostri ad verbum divinum quod verbum nostrum est imperfectum sed verbum Dei est perfectissimum, quia nos non possumus omnia quae sunt in anima nostra exprimere uno verbo; ideo oportet quod sint plura verba imperfecta, per quae divisim exprimamus omnia quae in anima nostra sunt. In Deo autem non est sic: cum enim intelligat et seipsum et quidquid intelligit per essentiam suam uno actu, unicum verbum divinum expressivum est totius quod in Deo est, non solum Patris, sed etiam creaturarum; alias esset imperfectum. Unde dicit Augustinus: “Si, inquit, aliquid minus esset in verbo quam in scientia continetur dicentis, esset verbum imperfectum.” Sed constat quod est perfectissimum. Ergo est tantum unum, Job XXXIII: Semel loquitur Deus.

The second difference is that our word is imperfect, but God’s word is most perfect, since we are not able to express in one word all the things that are in our soul. On account of this we require many imperfect words through which we express separately all that is in our mind. In God however it is not this way: For since he understands both himself and anything he thinks through his own essence in one act, a single word of divine expression is all that is in God—a word not of the Father alone, but also of creatures; it would otherwise be imperfect. Thus Augustine says: “If something less were to be in the word than is contained in the knowledge of the one speaking, the word would be incomplete.” But in fact it is perfect. Therefore it is only one, as it says in Job XXXIII: “God speaks once.”

5. Tertia differentia est quod verbum nostrum non est ejusdem naturae nobiscum; sed verbum divinum est ejusdem naturae cum Deo, et subsistens in natura divina. Nam ratio intellectiva quam intellectus noster de aliqua re format, habet esse in anima intelligibili tantum; intelligere autem animae non est idem cum esse naturali animae, quia anima non est sua operatio: et ideo verbum quod format intellectus noster, non est de essentia animae,

5. The third difference is that our word is not of our very nature, but the divine word is of a nature as God, and subsists in the divine nature. For the intellectual idea that our intellect forms about something exists only in the mind. However the understanding of the mind is not the same as the nature of the mind, since the mind is not its own operation. Hence the word that our intellect forms is not the essence of the mind, but its accident. In God

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sed est accidens ei. In Deo autem idem est intelligere et esse; et ideo verbum quodformat intellectus divinus, non est aliquid accidens, sed pertinens ad naturam ejus: unde oportet quod sit subsistens, quia quidquid est natura Dei est Deus: unde dicit Damascenus quod “Dei verbum subsistens est, et in hypostasi ens; reliqua vero verba,” nostra scilicet, “virtutes sunt animae.”

however, to understand and to be are the same, and the word that the divine intellect forms is not an accident, but pertains to its very nature. Thus it must be that it is subsisting, because whatever is the nature of God is God. Thus said Damascene: “The word of God is subsistent, and exists in a hypostasis. The other kind of words” (that is to say, ours), “are qualities of the mind.”

Ex praemissis ergo tenendum est quod proprie loquendo verbum semper dicitur personaliter in divinis, cum non importet nisi quid expressum ab intelligente. Patet etiam quod verbum in divinis est similitudo ejus a quo procedit, et quod est coaeternum ei a quo procedit, cum non fuerit prius formabile quam formatum, sed semper in actu; et quod sit aequale Patri, cum sit perfectum, et totius esse Patris expressivum; et quod sit coessentiale et consubstantiale Patri, cum ist subsistens in natura ejus. Patet etiam quod cum in qualibet natura id quod procedit habens similitudinem et naturam ejus a quo procedit, vocetur filius; et hoc fit in verbo, quod in Deo dicatur Filius, et productio ejus dicitur generatio.

From these premises therefore it follows that properly speaking the word is always said personally in the divine, because it is not brought forth except as an expression of the one understanding. Yet it is plain that the word in the divine is a similitude of that from which it proceeds, and that it is coeternal with that from which it proceeds, because it was not formable before being formed, and was always in act. And it is plain that it is equal to the Father, because it is perfect, and totally expresses the being of the Father, and that it is coessential and consubstantial with the Father, because it subsists in his nature. It is obvious that when anything in nature that proceeds from something has its likeness and its nature, it is called an offspring; and this is the case with the word, because the Son is spoken in the Father, and his production is called a generation.



Notes

Preface 1. Cicero, De Oratore 3.xvi.60 ‒‒ 61. 2. Bible quotations taken from the Douay Rheims unless otherwise indicated. 3. The metaphor I have developed here is suggested by Gadamer in a later writing on language (GW, 8:355). 4. Gadamer, GW, 8:358. 5. The Protestant theology of the word was manifestly a silent partner in the writing of section III, 2, B, “Sprache und verbum”—in its language we hear the debates of Barth, Bultmann, Fuchs, and Ebeling. How do we listen to the word that calls us? How are we guided by its spirit? Should philosophy attend to the theological debates on the nature of language? These are Gadamer’s implicit questions to us. 6. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, 31. 7. Heidegger notes Augustine’s Platonism in this respect: “Augustine ascertained the absolute reality of internal experience. . . . The veritates aeternae [eternal truths] are the ideas in the absolute consciousness of God” (Phenomenology of Religious Life, 118). Gadamer acknowledges this aspect, but devotes his energy to finding the relation of the inner and outer life in the AugustinianThomist verbum. 8. In The Phenomenology of Religious Life, Heidegger spoke directly to Augustine’s place at the balancing point between a reflective-existential unity and the dualist fate of the West, and argued that it was Descartes and not Augustine who tipped the scales: “One has to appropriate the facies cordis [face of the heart] (inwardness) for oneself,” but “To interpret this as subjectivism is misplaced” (220, 219): “Descartes blurred [verwässert] Augustine’s thoughts. Self-certainty and the self-possession in the sense of Augustine’s thoughts. Self-

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certainty and the self-possession in the sense of Augustine are entirely different from the Cartesian evidence of the ‘cogito’ ” (226). Understanding, in Augustine, “forms itself within myself from out of the relation in which I experience the world” (226). Likewise, the face of the heart, a kind of inter-face, faces in the opposite direction toward God’s infinity at the same time: “God will be present in the inward human being when we will have understood what breadth, length, height, depth . . . mean, and therewith, the sense of the infinity of God for the thought of the heart” (220). 9. The distinguished hermeneutic scholar Günter Figal pinpoints this section of Truth and Method as the turning point for Gadamer’s work, since the inner word serves as a model for Gadamer’s ontology of language. Figal, “The Doing of the Thing Itself,” 113 ‒‒ 123. 10. MacIntyre, “On Not Having the Last Word,” 157. 11. Stephen H. Watson remarked recently that generalizations about philosophical hermeneutics are abundant, and that more fine-grained analyses of Gadamer’s texts are what is needed at this point (41st Annual Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy Conference, October 11, 2002, Chicago).

Introduction 1. Gadamer in Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, xiii–xiv. Grondin relates that this conversation took place around 1988 in a Heidelberg pub. 2. Jean Grondin built the larger part of his interpretation of Gadamer and hermeneutics on its relation to the verbum, and he has been challenged on this from a number of quarters. See his “L’Universalité de l’herméneutique et de la rhétorique: Ses sources dans le passage de Platon à Augustin dans Vérité et méthode”; “Unterwegs zur Rhetorik: Gadamers Schritt von Platon zu Augustin in ‘Wahrheit und Methode’”; “L’Universalité de l’herméneutique et les limites du langage: Contribution à une phénoménologie de l’inapparent”; Gadamer Lesebuch (editor); Sources of Hermeneutics; and Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. Dominic Kaegi provides a critique of Grondin’s interpretation in “Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man philosophische Hermeneutik?” For other scholarship on Gadamer and the verbum see Wiercin´ski, “The Hermeneutic Retrieval of a Theological Insight: Verbum Interius,” in Wiercin´ski, ed., Between the Human and the Divine, 1 ‒ 23; Springer, Die antiken Grundlagen der neuzleitlichen Hermeneutik, 338 ‒ 343; Figal, “The Doing of the Thing Itself”; Carpenter, “Emanation, Incarnation, and the Truth-Event in Gadamer’s Truth and Method.”

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3. Hamann, Hamann’s Schriften, 7:151 ‒‒ 152. 4. This position is very much in line with the theology of the Word: “C’est par un langage propre, et non pas seulement par métaphore, que l’on peut parler d’un Verbe en Dieu. S’il y a métaphore, seule la similitude de la ‘parole vocale’ (verbum vocis) est en cause. Mais l’attribution d’un Verbe en Dieu se fait de manière propre lorsqu’elle a lieu sur la base de cette similitude qu’est la ‘parole du coeur’ (verbum cordis). Dans ce cas, le Verbe, quant à la réalité désignée par ce nom, est dit per prius de Dieu et per posterius des créatures, remplissant les conditions requises pour qu’un nom soit attribué proprement à Dieu.” Emery, La Trinité Créatrice, 415. 5. For instance, Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 77; GW, 2:192, 336; GW, 8:359; GW, 10:135 ‒‒ 136. 6. A sign of increased interest in the hermeneutic appropriation of the verbum was the First International Congress on Hermeneutics held in 2002, the proceedings of which are published in Wiercin´ski, Between the Human and the Divine: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics. It was the subject of the keynote, and Richard Palmer provides a preçis of the topic, but most interesting of all was Donatella di Cesare’s claim that hermeneutic understanding is a kind of transcendence. For her, understanding is as an existential imperative at the root of a Christian life: “He who would understand will be asked to sacrifice, to renounce himself, to let go of all his original fundamental understanding, even his original fundamental understanding of himself.” Di Cesare, “Hermeneutics and the Transcendence of Understanding,” 560. This divestment is an enactment of the Christian discipleship transposed to the call of language. But that original sacrifice of the disciples is itself a repetition of the more original sacrifice, and so understanding may be described in terms of incarnation: “I constantly sacrifice myself in order to open myself to You and to receive You, to understand [in order to] make myself understood” (560). Understanding thus mimics, or, rather, extends, the greatest and most perfect act of love. Each such act of renunciation and openness at the same time “touches, overwhelms, involves and transforms, in the depth of his existence, him who understands, no less than him who is understood” (560). 7. Gadamer, “Die Philosophie und die Religion des Judentums,” GW, 4:68 ‒‒ 77. 8. Melanchthon, A Melanchthon Reader, 283. 9. Gadamer, “Towards a Phenomenology of Ritual and Language,” 45. 10. Heidegger relates his appropriation of the term “hermeneutics” to a time in his student days when he “was particularly agitated over the question of the relation between the Word of Holy Scripture and theological-speculative thinking.” On the Way to Language, 9 ‒‒ 10. He acknowledges that “without this theological background I should never have come upon the path of thinking” for which he is so well known (10).

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11. The elements of the verbum are everywhere in Heidegger in his thoughts on logos. In the Principle of Reason, for instance, he quotes Novalis’s statement about “a principle that allows absolutely no peace, that always attracts and repels, that always anew would become unintelligible as soon as one had understood it? That ceaselessly stirs up our activity — without ever exhausting it, without ever becoming familiar?” (13). 12. The lecture courses and course notes on religion of the 1920 ‒‒ 21 semesters are collected and translated in Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Heidegger speaks of the “vox interioris hominis,” which is not in Augustine, but is referring in all likelihood in the context to the homo interior (131). 13. See Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 245, 250. The word “Vollzug” occurs throughout this text. It refers to the performative emergence of knowledge in life, a knowledge that is anchored in that life and not to be divorced from it. 14. As James C. Risser has said, Gadamer’s defense of tradition has to do with “hearing the extinguished voices of the past.” Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other, 73. 15. This second conversation between Grondin and Gadamer took place in 1996. Grondin was a close, life-long friend to Gadamer, as well as his biographer. See Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography. 16. Gadamer in Grondin, Gadamer Lesebuch, 286, my translation. 17. Gadamer sees this question as the primary one: “In the end it was the great theme of the concretization of the universal that I learned to think of as the basic experience of hermeneutics.” Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, 49. 18. “Nun erst gewinnt das große dialektische Rätsel des Einen und Vielen, das Plato als das Widerfahrnis des Logos in Atem hielt und das in der mittelalterlichen Trinitätsspekulation eine geheimnisvolle Bewahrheitung erfuhr, seinen wahren Grund und Boden. Es war nur ein erster Schritt, den Plato vollzog, als er erkannte, daß das Wort der Sprache eines und vieles zugleich ist. Es ist immer ein Wort, das wir einander sagen und das uns gesagt wird (theologisch: >das< Wort Gottes)—aber die Einheit dieses Wortes legt sich, wie wir sahen, je und je auseinander in artikulierte Rede” (WM, 461 ‒‒462). 19. The complexity of his vision, however, is in all likelihood truer to his subject matter. The palimpsest of the Augustinian reception of Greek antiquity is a case in point, as Heidegger explained in 1921: “The historical context in question here is the most inappropriate ground for the problem ‘Greek antiquity and Christianity,’ once this problem has been admitted. Firstly, because the Christianity into which Augustine grows is already entirely permeated by what is Greek, and secondly, because what is Greek in Neo-Platonism has already been subjected to a ‘Hellenization’ and orientalization, if not also, as seems very likely to me, to a Christianization” (Phenomenology of Religious Life, 123).

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20. Gadamer points to these interpretive filters himself: “Whoever wants to learn from the Greeks always has to learn from Hegel first” (TM, 460). 21. Hegel derives this from Aristotle: “Clearly no universal exists apart from the individuals” (Met. 7.15.1040b). 22. Gadamer, “From Word to Concept,” 1. 23. Gadamer, “Jusqu’à Quel Point la Langue Préforme-t-elle la Pensée,” 70. I have only quoted the first half of this sentence here, because it expresses the speculative dimension of discursivity. In the next section I will give the entire quote, which combines both the speculative and practical dimensions of discursivity. 24. Gadamer, “Jusqu’à Quel Point la Langue Préforme-t-elle la Pensée,” 70. 25. In the Confessions, Augustine prays: “Et commutantur haec omnia, tu autem incommutabilis manes super omnia” [All these things are changed, but you remain unchangeable above all things] (10.25.36). 26. Gadamer, Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History, 63. 27. Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” 16. 28. Arthos, “The Hermeneutic Version of the Rhetorical Turn.” 29. The phrase is a neologism of my colleague at Denison University, Lisbeth Lipari. 30. Gadamer, “Towards a Phenomenology of Ritual and Language,” 33. 31. Gadamer in Grondin, Gadamer Lesebuch, 287, my translation. 32. Ibid., 288. 33. Gadamer wrote Truth and Method from the starting point of his own teaching, which was in fact a practice of textual interpretation grounded in the German hermeneutic tradition. But Gadamer was a classical scholar primarily, and his hermeneutic training was always mixed up with his understanding of Greek and Latin thought, as the early essays on Plato clearly show. Whereas Heidegger’s titanic encounter with the Greeks seems ultimately to be overshadowed by his effort to get back behind them, the ancients for Gadamer still and always lead the conversation forward. 34. Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 68 ‒‒ 71. 35. “Die Scheidewand aber, wodurch diese Trennung für die Bildung, wovon hier die Rede ist, bewerkstelligt wird, ist die Welt und Sprache der Alten; aber sie, die uns von uns trennt, enthält zugleich alle Anfangspunkte und Fäden der Rückkehr zu sich selbst, der Befreudung mit ihr und des Wiederfindens seiner selbst.” Hegel, Werke, 4:321 ‒ 322. This quotation occurs in a lecture entitled “On Classical Studies,” given Sept. 29, 1809. I have used Weinsheimer and Marshall’s translation as it appears in TM, 14. 36. Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, 7.1:30. 37. “The humanists were contrasting a general and practical culture to the professional and academic activities and attitutdes which, in their interpretation, were symbolized by scholasticism.” Gray, “Renaissance Humanism,” 203.

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38. This is a phrase common to both Quintilian and Erasmus. 39. Bouwsma, “Changing Assumptions,” 423. 40. This is really the question that lies behind Figal’s critique of Gadamer’s turn to the model of incarnation. Figal, “The Doing of the Thing Itself,” 113 ‒‒ 114. 41. Gadamer in Grondin, Gadamer Lesebuch, 286. 42. Rosemann traces this circularity from Proclus to Aquinas in Omne Agens Agit Sibi Simile. 43. Heidegger often nominalizes the preposition zwischen (between) to give a name to his own particular brand of relationality as a way of undermining subject-object dualism. It is important not to mistake this between as a third thing, as simply a connector. The phenomenon is a relationality that denies the separation in the first place: “Dasein is the being of this ‘between’ ” (BT, 170/SZ, 132). 44. Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 181. 45. It is at once a Pascalian sense of the thin reed, and an Hegelian sense of the sublime totality to which the lack gives access. Gadamer wants both. 46. I.e., verbum interius. Augustine uses several locutions for his idea. chapter 1

The Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian Word

1. Gadamer here is speaking of the doctrine of the Trinity, but with specific reference to its legacy for the philosophy of language. The Relevance of the Beautiful, 5. 2. Gadamer’s essay “Die Philosophie und die Religion des Judentums” (GW, 4:68 ‒ 77) acknowledges Judaism in the history of hermeneutics, but does not integrate its traditions sufficiently into the weave of hermeneutic theory. Gerald Bruns begins to assign its importance more correctly (Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern), but this is only a beginning. 3. Robinson, Essential Judaism, 313. 4. This respect for orality and suspicion of textuality is a central thread in philosophical hermeneutics. 5. “By the time of the tannaim, the rabbinical authorities of the period of Juda Ha-Nasi (approximately 170 ‒‒ 220 C.E.), the sheer volume of oral rulings had become so unwieldy that the rabbis reluctantly assented to their recording. The resulting text is the Mishnah, the first compilation of the Oral Law, compiled by Judah Ha-Nasi, Judah the Prince.” Robinson, Essential Judaism, 226. 6. Déaut, The Message of the New Testament and the Aramaic Bible, 2. 7. Bloch,“Midrash,” 1270. [Isaîe renvoie à Amos; Jérémie manifeste l’influence d’Osée, puis d’Isaîe; Ézéchiel, outre ses rapports avec le Code de sainteté, reprend Amos, Osée, Isaîe et surtout Jérémie.]

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8. Gadamer, TM, 309. 9. Bloch, “Midrash,” 1266. [Il s’agit toujours d’une Parole vivante adressée personnellement au peuple de Dieu et à chacun de ses membres, d’une Parole qui manifeste des volontés, des exigences divines, et qui appelle une réponse, nullement théorique, un engagement, la fidélité du peuple et de ses membres aux exigences manifestées par elle.] 10. Déaut, The Message of the New Testament and the Aramaic Bible, 17. 11. “[I]n Palestine . . . the Jewish worshippers could not resist listening to beautiful haggadic commentaries, just as for many believers, until recently, there could be no real Christmas in France without the hymn Minuit chrétiens.” Ibid., 7. 12. A modern example may help this point. Jazz improvisation, which not coincidentally has been marginalized at times as a cultural practice, respects the genius of the “original,” but not as a fixed text; in fact the “standard” lives primarily in ever new embodiments, which are themselves innovative, constitutive of tradition, and ephemeral. 13. Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, 110. 14. Bultmann, “The Concept of the Word of God in the New Testament,” Faith and Understanding, vol. 1, 296. Bultmann believes that the specific doctrinal idea of incarnation is an innovation from the influence of mystery religions, mythology, and Greek dualism. He wants to understand the Christian word as an extension of the Hebrew understanding: “For the Old Testament, God is present to men specifically in the word and only in the word” (297). Bultmann reads the eventfulness of Jesus not as hypostasis but as a further stage in the direct address of God to humans. Winslow probably has the most reasonable viewpoint about John’s innovation: “It is impossible to determine with any accuracy the extent to which John’s use of ‘Logos’ was a conscious inheritance from Hebrew scriptures or a conscious (or unconscious) derivation from Hellenic philosophy” (545). 15. For a careful discussion of the history of scholarship on this issue, see Hayward, Divine Name and Presence, 1 ‒‒ 14. 16. Walton observed that, as demonstrated in the later Wisdom literature, “the tendency to personify Divine agencies was steadily growing in Hebrew thought” (Development of the Logos-doctrine, 56). In spite of the intimate relation Yahweh established with his people through covenant, the distance which was manifest in the suffering and all too human frailty of the children of Israel had to be explained: “Israel’s sages had become aware of the chasm between the world and God, between human wisdom and the wisdom of God. But their reflection also led them toward the understanding that the gulf is spanned from God’s side through the agency of the divine wisdom that dwells in the world of human experience” (Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament, 603).

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17. Bultmann, “The Concept of the Word of God in the New Testament,” Faith and Understanding, vol. 1, 289. 18. George Mendenhall writes about the eventfulness of covenant in Law and Covenant in Israel and the Ancient Near East, 5, 37. 19. This will later become a signal element of philosophical hermeneutics as the finitude of human linguisticality. 20. This sense of covenant as promise is a repeated and important theme in twentieth-century hermeneutics, which contributes very little that is innovative to the original idea. See, for instance, Gadamer, “On the Truth of the Word,” in The Specter of Relativism, 140 ‒‒ 141; “Von der Wahrheit des Wortes,” GW, 8:37 ‒‒ 57. 21. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 106. 22. The following list is my summary of Detienne’s argument in The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece. 23. Detienne emphasizes the extent to which speech itself creates the reality: “Apollo realizes through his speech . . . a hymn of praise is something that makes human beings grow and expand in stature. . . . Oracular speech does not reflect an event that has already occurred; it is part of its realization. . . . speech is indistinguishable from action.” The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, 71, 72, 73, 74. 24. Ibid., 43 ff. 25. See Schindler, “The Community of the One and the Many,” who explicates Heraclitus’s notion of the logos as the cosmic force par excellence. 26. See discussion in Windelband, A History of Philosophy, 1:36. 27. Attributed to Heraclitus by Hippolytus in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 192. 28. This is a major theme in hermeneutics. See, for instance, Gadamer, TM, 414, or Heidegger, BT, 48. 29. TM, 418. 30. Westcott, Introduction to the Study of the Gospels, 267. 31. Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, 5.34.3. 32. Irenaeus quoted in Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 2:229. 33. Gregory of Nazianzus, Faith Gives Fullness, 275 ‒‒ 276. 34. Cyril, Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, 216. 35. Westcott, Introduction to the Study of the Gospels, 267. 36. TM, 419/WM, 423. 37. Bultmann, “The Concept of the Word of God in the New Testament,” Faith and Understanding, vol. 1, 296. 38. TM, 418/WM, 422. 39. Ebeling, Word and Faith, 324. 40. See, for instance, Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics, 41. 41. Philo in von Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, 2:802.

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42. Of course this is in danger of simplifying Aristotle, as Gadamer points out: “I learned from Heidegger, to my great astonishment, that what Aristotle meant by the term “rational animal”— or man, the being that has reason — was that man had language!” Gadamer, Gadamer in Conversation, 90. 43. Windelband, A History of Philosophy, 1:179. 44. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 2, 7.88. 45. Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 273. 46. Similarly, Cicero has his Stoic character Balbus describe it: “So the world must be wise, and that element which holds all things together in its embrace must be perfectly and outstandingly rational. Therefore the world must be god, and all the power of the world must be sustained by a divine element.” In Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 47. 47. Zeno according to Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 2, 7.87. 48. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 2, 7.87. 49. Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament, 577. 50. Epictetus, “Arrian’s Discourses of Epictetus,” 1.14. 51. Windelband, A History of Philosophy, 1:179. 52. Seneca, Epistulae Morales, vol. 2, letter 66. 53. Attributed to Chrysippus by Aulus Gellius 7.2.1 ‒ 14 (von Arnim, 2:1000). 54. “Mens agitate molem, et magno se corpore miscet.” Virgil, Aeneid 6.726 ‒‒ 727. 55. This quote is attributed to Chrysippus in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 2, 7.88. Whereas Aristotle used the idea of coherence (sunecevia) as a more strictly mathematical-spatial concept for relating unbroken succession and continuity, the Stoics reverted back to a Parmenidian usage of suneceia as a pervasive feature of nature and the physical world, which helped them articulate a stronger sense of coherence as an animating principle. 56. Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics, 9. 57. This is the paraphrase of Sextus Empiricus, Against the Physicists, 1.79 ‒‒ 85. 58. Chrysippus in Nemesius, in von Arnim, 2:442. 59. Ibid., 3:451. 60. Chrysippus according to Plutarch, in von Arnim, 3:69. 61. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 2, 7.54. 62. Watson, The Stoic Theory of Knowledge, 24. 63. Plutarch, Oeuvres Morales, vol. 12, 900 C2, 3. 64. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 2, 7.51. 65. Ibid., 7.49. 66. Watson, The Stoic Theory of Knowledge, 42. Graeser agrees with this description of the relational nature of the lekton: “[T]he lekton is neither the word

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nor, of course, the subjective thought, but is meant as some connection that we express through language” (88). Graeser’s expansion on this thesis is worthy of study: “[I]f the Stoic account of the Platonist notion of idea does in fact derive from the premise that Plato failed to distinguish between the sense of a sign and its associated idea, it would seem fair to infer that what the Stoics took the idea to be in the first place was some hybrid, a cross between what they considered to be a linguistic entity and a mental entity respectively. . . . The meaning signified belongs to the sound signifying it. In other words, it is not some external object referred to by name that ‘gets’ a meaning but the sound uttered” (85). 67. Von Arnim, 2:135. 68. Ibid., 2:298. This is often referenced to in the Latin, Adversus Mathematicos (books 7 and 8), in Greek, Pros Logikou`ı, and in English, Against the Physicists. It should be noted that “logician” is a poor translation of logikovı, which is a much broader term which derives from logos (word, reason) and legein (to speak). To speak of logikoiv in this context (for the Stoics) was to speak of human beings, i.e., beings who have reason. 69. Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, 82. 70. Wolfson, Philo, 88 ‒‒ 90. 71. Ibid., 12. 72. “Although faint echoes of Philo’s teachings may be found in several rabbinic dicta, his name appears nowhere in the vast rabbinic corpus. This is hardly surprising, since the rabbis had evinced little interest in philosophical speculation and did not even refer to the well-known Jewish historian Josephus. Were it not for the extraordinary interest of the Church Fathers in Philo Judaeus, his writings would surely have perished and his richly textured reconstruction of Biblical thought in the Greek philosophical mode would have perished along with them.” Winston, Logos and Mystical Theology in Philo of Alexandria, 9. 73. Runia’s Philo in Early Christian Literature has an extensive discussion of Philo’s influence. 74. Runia, Philo of Alexandria and the “Timaeus” of Plato, 156. 75. Plato translation is from Collected Dialogues, ed. Hamilton and Cairns. 76. Philo, Philo, vol. 1, “De Opificio Mundi,” 4.18. 77. Armstrong concludes that the first unequivocal placement of the ideas in the mind of God is Antiochus of Ascalon in the first century BC. Plotinian and Christian Studies, 401 ‒‒404. 78. Dillon, The Great Tradition, 120; Wolfson, Philo, 230. 79. Philo, Philo, vol. 1, “De Opificio Mundi,” 6.25. 80. Some scholars treat the heterogeneity of Philo’s Logos as a concept that responds by adaptation to contextual need: “When the Logos is regarded as the ‘embodiment’ of God’s thought focused on the cosmos (i.e. place of the)

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or as the ‘embodiment’ of God’s creational activity (i.e. foremost of the powers), the difference between God and his Logos appears to be kept to a minimum, perhaps a matter of aspect rather than level. But when the immanent presence of the Logos is stressed, Philo envisages a direct contact with and permeation through the cosmos which it holds together. The Logos is [and], even God’s archangel. The Logos has to all appearances become a hypostasis, a level of God’s being given real existence outside God himself. When the Logos acts as God’s instrument it moves between the two levels indicated, organizing and imparting to matter as best it can the form of the noetic cosmos. The conclusion must be, therefore, that the Logos, seen in relation to the Timaeus, functions at the levels of both the demiurge (and model) and the cosmic soul” (Runia, Philo of Alexandria and the “Timaeus” of Plato, 450 ‒‒451). Sometimes Logos is clearly instrumental, carrying out God’s will in creation: “Elsewhere, but not in Opif., Philo entrusts the actual execution of the creative activity to the Logos as instrument of creation, direct contact between God and matter being regarded as out of the question. . . . Although Philo does not say in explicit terms how God’s thinking is related to his providential activity of continuous creation, one might surmise that God, by continuously thinking the noetic cosmos in the Logos, enables the Logos continuously to effectuate that the visible cosmos corresponds katav duvnamiı to its intelligible model” (Runia, ibid., 440 ‒‒441). G. Reydams-Schils sees in the ambiguity of Philo’s Logos the result of a convergence; the Stoic logos seminales and Timaeus’ divine reason guided by the Genesis formula “God said”: “The manner in which Philo describes the divine Logos once again betrays an oscillation. On the one hand the Logos seems to have acquired some independent, intermediary status, of an hypostasis, which is most clearly expressed by the notion of the Logos as God’s instrument and which emphasizes the Logos’ immanent character. But in other contexts the Logos appears to be an aspect of God himself, of whom Philo wants to safeguard the transcendence. Hence the One god can be present in His entire creation, without an essential loss of transcendence” (Reydams-Schils,“The Stoicized Readings of Plato’s Timaeus,” 91 ‒ 92). What is indisputable is that Logos in Philo is raised to the highest level of importance both in the workings of the universe and in the mediation of immanent and transcendent realms, displacing in many instances the role of nous in the Greek tradition. Because of its variegated roles, both as pattern and as mediation, it serves as an important example to Christian theology of a conception that straddles the categories of mind, thought, and expression. 81. Philo, Philo, vol. 1, “De Opificio Mundi,” 5.20. 82. Aristotle, De Anima 3.4.429a27 ‒‒ 28; 3.8.432a1. 83. Runia, Philo of Alexandria and the “Timaeus” of Plato, 448 ‒‒449. 84. Wolfson’s gloss on the Stoic contribution is a strenuous delimitation: “[T]he Stoics never use the term Logos in the sense of an incorporeal being

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and as the totality of the ideas; they use it only in the sense of immanent principle in the world, like a soul or mind.” Wolfson, Philo, 253. 85. Philo, Philo, vol. 4, “Heres,” 27.140. 86. Wolfson, Philo, 226 ‒‒ 227. 87. Philo, Philo, vol. 1, “De Opificio Mundi,” 4.19.16. 88. Aristotle, De Anima 3.8.432a2. 89. See note 18 of the appendix to Philo’s “De Sobrietate,” in Philo, vol. 3, p. 510. 90. Philo, Philo, vol. 4, “De Migratione Abrahami,” 12.70 ‒‒ 71, modified. 91. “God had it in His mind that He had made men upon the earth and he bethought Him” (Genesis 6:6). 92. Philo, Philo, vol. 3, “Quod Deus Immutabilis sit,” 7.34. 93. Philo, Philo, vol. 6, “De Vita Moses,” 2.25.127. 94. Of course, this effort to avoid dualism runs into problems immediately. Philo’s discussion of the Word of God as a monad, and its human expression as a dyad illustrates the problem for the ancients after Plato in finessing this difficulty. And it is precisely the vocal utterance of the inner word that creates a mixture of form and matter. Philo, Philo, vol. 3, “Quod Deus Immutabilitis sit,” 18.82 ‒‒ 85. 95. Ibid., 6.32. 96. Ibid., 6.35 ‒‒ 36. 97. Philo, Philo, vol. 1, “De Opificio Mundi,” sect. 23. 98. “Whatever slight similarities there are between Philo’s logos and Plotinus’ are almost certainly accidental. There is a good deal of Stoicism in Plotinus’ conception; there are even echoes, via this Stoicism, of the logos of the world in Heraclitus, but in the main we shall be on safe ground if, until further evidence comes to light, we interpret Plotinus’ logos out of Plotinus’ text.” Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality, 101. Rist provides a useful comparison of Philo and Plotinus in the use of the logos endiathetos and prophorikos (100). 99. My authority for this claim is Armstrong, Hellenic and Christian Studies, 81 ‒‒ 82. 100. Armstrong, Aristotle, Plotinus, and St. Thomas, 11. 101. Plotinus, Enneads, 5.1.6.45, 5.1.7.43 ‒‒44. 102. Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality, 85 ‒‒ 86. 103. Plotinus, Enneads, 5.1.6.45 ‒‒46. 104. Ibid. 105. Armstrong, Architecture of the Intelligible Universe, 63. Armstrong writes extensively about the confusion of Plotinus’s theory of emanation (52 ‒‒ 64). 106. Schroeder, Form and Transformation, 8. 107. Plotinus, Enneads, 7.6.7.21 ‒‒ 24. 108. Ibid., 6.7.7.30 ‒‒ 31.

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Notes to Pages 63‒‒72

109. TM, 362/WM, 368. 110. Plotinus, Enneads, 5.3.14.8 ‒‒ 19. I have used Schroeder’s translation of this passage (68 ‒‒ 69). He translates ejnqousiw ˜ nteı as “those who have become inspired” (Form and Transformation, 5), instead of Armstrong’s “those who have a god within them” (Architecture of the Intelligible Universe, 120 ‒‒ 121). 111. Plotinus, Enneads, 3.8.6.20 ‒‒ 30. 112. Ibid., 3.8.6.36 ‒‒40. 113. Ibid., 6.7.23.1 ‒‒ 5; 6.7.7.158 ‒‒ 161. 114. Augustine, Confessions, 11.4. Schroeder, Form and Transformation, 73. 115. P. Christopher Smith, “The I-Thou Encounter,” 519 ‒‒ 523. 116. Luther, Commentary on the Psalms, 158. 117. Ebeling, Introduction to a Theological Theory of Language, 17. 118. Luther, Commentary on the Psalms, 130. 119. Luther, Table Talk, #44. 120. Luther, Complete Sermons, 237 ‒‒ 238. 121. P. Christopher Smith, “The I-Thou Encounter,” 522, 519. Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey,” 527. chapter 2

Immanence and Transcendence in the Trinity

1. Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, 61. 2. “[T]he dialectic is an abstraction from the formal structure of the traditional Christian Trinitarian god.” Wall, “Hegel: The Theological Roots of His Dialectic,” 736. 3. “In modern usage, ‘person’ means ‘human being.’ This is clearly not the meaning of ‘person’ in the doctrine of the Trinity. A second modern meaning of ‘person’ is ‘self ’ or ‘center of consciousness.’ While these senses are permitted by the ancient usage, they are not the primary meaning of the term. The tritheistic conception of the Trinity, which is implied by using ‘persons’ to mean ‘centers of consciousness,’ is not demanded by the original meanings of the words ‘persona,’ ‘prosopon,’ or ‘hypostasis,’ but it is not ruled out either. . . . ‘Persona’ and ‘prosopon’ originally were names for the masks worn by actors in dramas. By transference they came to refer to the role or character to be played. In this usage they also meant ‘distinguishing characteristic.’ But they also had a second meaning, ‘real individual beings.’” Urban, A Short History of Christian Thought, 61 ‒‒ 62. 4. Bruns, “On the Weakness of Language in the Human Sciences,” 248. 5. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 14. 6. Placher, A History of Christian Theology, 40 ‒‒41. 7. Armstrong, Hellenic and Christian Studies, 74.

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8. Gregory of Nazianzus is typical of this appropriation of the speculative habit: “But reason took us up in our desire for God, in our refusal to travel without guide or helmsman. Reason looked on the visible world, lighted on things primeval yet did not make us stop at these. . . . Thus God-derived reason, bound up, connected, with the whole of nature, man’s most ancient law, has led us up from things of sight to God.” Faith Gives Fullness, 233. 9. William Hill, The Three-Personed God, 30. 10. Gregory of Nazianzus, Faith Gives Fullness, 217. 11. One can also read its presence back into Hebrew scriptures: “Where is he that put in the midst of them the spirit of his Holy One? . . . As a beast that goeth down in the field, the spirit of the Lord was their leader” (Isa. 63:11, 14). 12. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 1:217 ‒‒ 218. 13. Ibid., 2:191. 14. Pelikan’s translation, The Christian Tradition, 1:201. 15. Ibid., 1:203. Soteriology regards the function of salvation. 16. Athanasius, “Against Arianism,” 24.227, in Select Treatises, 360. 17. See Placher, A History of Christian Theology, 59. 18. Quoted in Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 253. 19. Athanasius, “Epistle of Athanasius in Defence of the Nicene Definition of the Homousion,” 7.41, in Select Treatises, 50 ‒‒ 51. 20. Athanasius, “Epistle of Athanasius Concerning the Arian Bi-partite Council Held at Ariminum and at Seleucia,” 6.54, in Select Treatises, 143 ‒‒ 144. 21. William Hill, The Three-Personed God, 47; Placher, A History of Christian Theology, 76 ‒‒ 78. To attribute a solution to the Cappadocians oversimplifies somewhat. See Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 1:200 ‒‒ 225. 22. Gregory Nazianzus developed the distinction in the unity by drawing a relational rather than substantive difference: “ ‘Father’ designates neither the substance nor the activity, but the relationship, the manner of being, which holds good between the Father and the Son. Just as with us these names indicate kindred and affinity, so here too they designate the sameness of stock, of parent and offspring.” Faith Gives Fullness, 255. 23. Placher has represented these opposing tendencies topologically, with Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Syria pulling in opposite directions (A History of Christian Theology, 80), but the truth may be more complex. See Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 1:175 ‒‒ 210; Daniélou, A History of Early Christian Doctrine, 2:354 ‒‒ 386. 24. Pope Leo in Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 1:263 ‒‒ 264. 25. “In Palestine, Syria, Armenia, Egypt, and other countries, many monks and ecclesiastics refused to accept the definition of Chalcedon, and Monophysites are found there to this day.” Schaefer, “Council of Chalcedon.” 26. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 5.

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Notes to Pages 78‒‒85

27. Gadamer, TM, 252. 28. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 1:223. The last sentence of the verbum section in Truth and Method concludes: “In developing the doctrine of the verbum, Scholastic thought is not content with viewing concept formation as simply the reflection of the order of things,” and Gadamer consequently attaches concept formation to “the fundamental metaphoricity of language,” a move that is prepared for him by Christian thought. TM, 431, 434 ‒‒438. 29. Cyril, “Catechetical Lectures,” 12.16. 30. Hilary, The Trinity, 9.6. 31. Theodore Mopsuestius, Homélies Catéchétiques, homily 7, sect. 4, my translation. 32. Quoted in Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 1:233. 33. Nestorius, The Sermons of Nestorius, 36. The reference is to the proof text John 2:19 for the doctrine of the indwelling Logos: “Jesus answered, and said to them: Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 34. Theodore Mopsuestius, Homélies Catéchétiques, homily 8, sect. 5. 35. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 1:254. 36. Leo the Great, The Letters and Sermons, sermon 54. 37. Theodore Mopsuestius, Homélies Catéchétiques, homily 7, sect. 4, my translation. 38. Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation, 2:271. 39. Leo the Great, The Letters and Sermons, letter 28, sect. 3. 40. Ibid., letter 28, sect. 4. 41. Ibid., sermon 63. 42. Ibid., sermon 74. 43. Ibid., sermon 54. 44. Ibid., sermon 67. 45. Ibid., sermon 63. 46. Ibid., letter 28. 47. Hilary, The Trinity, 10.17. 48. Pelikan provides a piece of information about the problems around the terminological distinction that is rich with hermeneutic implications. Syriac theology had less trouble with the theological point, because it possessed a word, kyânâ, which could mean either nature or person in its appropriate context. The Christian Tradition, 1:249. 49. Daniélou, A History of Early Christian Doctrine, 2:172 ‒‒ 173. 50. In Cyril the seal and its impress are distinguished as, respectively, tuvpoı and ajntivtupon. Catechetical Lectures, lecture 21, sect. 1. 51. Exod. 35 ‒‒40, Ezek. 40 ‒‒43. 52. I depend heavily for this explication of typology on Lampe and Woollcombe.

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53. Lampe and Woollcombe, Essays on Typology, 42 ‒‒43. 54. Leo the Great, Letters and Sermons, sermon 63, sect. 1. 55. Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, 3.22.3. 56. Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, 88. 57. Cyril, Catechetical Lectures, 18.7. 58. Philosophical reflection on the general and the particular is appropriated by Basil to describe the distinction between hypostasis and ousia: “Those who are described by the same definition of essence or substance are of the same essence or substance when the inquirer has learned what is common, and turns his attention to the differentiating properties whereby one is distinguished from another, the definition by which each is known will no longer tally in all particulars with the definition of another, even though in some points it be found to agree.” Letters and Selected Works, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 8, letter 38, sect. 2. 59. Cyril, “Catechetical Lectures,” 21.2. 60. Daniélou, A History of Early Christian Doctrine, 2:158. 61. Augustine, TT, 4.30. 62. Edmund Hill, The Mystery of Trinity, 117. 63. Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, 4.20.5. 64. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, 1:190. 65. Pelikan cites this usage in Tertullian, Cyprian, Novatian, Ignatius, and Jerome. The Christian Tradition, 1:187. 66. Athanasius, “Contra Gentes,” 43, in Selected Writings and Letters (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers 4), 26 ‒‒ 27. 67. Leo the Great, Letters and Sermons, sermon 61, sect. 7; sermon 72, sect. 1; sermon 61, sect. 7. 68. Augustine, TT, 4.2. 69. Cyril, “Catechetical Lectures,” 21.2. 70. Gregory of Nyssa, From Glory to Glory, 122. 71. Augustine, TT, 4.2. 72. TT, 4.2. 73. TT, 4.2. 74. “So he applied to us the similarity of his humanity to take away the dissimilarity of our iniquity, and becoming a partaker of our morality he made us partakers of his divinity . . . his single matching our double.” TT, 4.4. 75. TT, 4.4. 76. TT, 4.4. 77. TT, 4.5. 78. TT, 4.4. 79. Goethe, Maxims und Reflections, nos. 314, 1112, 1113. In a description reminiscent of the verbum, Goethe says that the symbol “changes the phenomenon

406

Notes to Pages 95‒‒100

into the idea, the idea into the image, in such a way that the idea remains always infinitely active and unapproachable in the image, and will remain inexpressible even though expressed in all languages.” 80. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, 46. 81. Coleridge, Inquiring Spirit: A Coleridge Reader, 104. 82. This quote is taken from Kant’s Der Streit der Fakultäten. Ouevres Philosophiques, 841. 83. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 378. 84. Cyril, “Catechetical Lectures,” 10.5. chapter 3

Hermeneutic Anticipations

1. Gadamer, “Towards a Phenomenology of Ritual and Language,” 33 ‒‒ 34. 2. Lonergan sees a fundamental separation in Augustine between what one is and what one knows: “Now the Platonism of this position is palpable, for its ultimate answer is not something that we are but something that we see” (Verbum, 73). 3. See the discussion in Gadamer, Gadamer Lesebuch, 286 ‒‒ 288. 4. Grondin is largely responsible for bringing the importance of the verbum interius to hermeneutics to our attention, but he does not exhaust its full implications. See his Sources of Hermeneutics and Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. Figal examines the centrality of trinitarian thought in Gadamer in his “The Doing of the Thing Itself.” 5. Subordinationism is the belief that the Son and the Holy Spirit are subordinate to the Father in status and identity. Modalism is the belief that God is one person having three different modes or aspects. 6. The proof text for Paul is Genesis: “Let us make man to our image and likeness” (Gen. 1:26); “We see now through a glass in a dark manner, but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12); “But we all beholding the glory of the Lord with open face, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18); “Dearly beloved, we are now the sons of God; and it hath not yet appeared what we shall be. We know, that, when he shall appear, we shall be like to him; because we shall see him as he is ” (1 John 3:2). 7. Augustine, TT, 9.2. 8. TT, 9.17. 9. Gadamer, TM, 426/WM, 490. 10. Gadamer always credits the idea of the hermeneutic circle to the ancient rhetorical principle of part and whole, and he certainly points to Plato’s use of the relation for its provenance, but it seems to me that it is in Augustine that this idea congeals into its genuine hermeneutic identity.

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11. Heidegger, BT, 186. 12. Grondin, Sources of Hermeneutics, 101 ‒‒ 106; Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 32 ‒‒ 39. 13. “I was a young man when I began these books on the Trinity which the one true God is, and I am now an old man as I publish them.” Augustine, TT, prefatory letter. 14. “Ipsa enim phantasia eius in memoria mea verbum eius.” Augustine, DT, 8.9. 15. “quadam conspiratione naturali” (DT, 8.9). 16. Gadamer, TM, 140, 151, 153, 154, 156. 17. “ita cum deum novimus, quamvis meliores efficiamur quam eramus antequam nossemus maximeque cum eadem notitia etiam placita digneque amata verbum est fitque aliqua dei similtudo illa notitia.” Augustine, DT, 9.16. 18. Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader, 220. 19. Augustine, TT, 6.11. 20. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 3. 21. Gadamer, TM, 423. 22. Augustine, TT, 7.4. 23. Edmund Hill in Augustine, TT, 242. Augustine warns his readers about this in his introductory remarks to the book. 24. Augustine, TT, 8.3. 25. Plato, Parmenides 132d–133a, Phaedo 100d. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Hamilton and Cairns. 26. Augustine, TT, 8.2. 27. Heidegger, BT, 193/SZ, 151. 28. See, for instance, van Buren, “Martin Heidegger, Martin Luther,” 159 ‒‒ 174. 29. Augustine, TT, 8.7. 30. Gadamer, TM, 291. 31. Augustine, TT, 10.2. 32. Heidegger, Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 61 ‒‒ 62. 33. Augustine, TT, 10.5. 34. In Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader, 220. 35. Heidegger, Basic Writings, 170. 36. Augustine, TT, 9.16. 37. This is a cardinal principle of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, that we would not speak unless we wished to be understood. See Gadamer, Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, 55. 38. “This then is the lovely and useful form which the soul discerns and knows and loves.” Augustine, TT, 10.2. 39. TT, 10.2.

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Notes to Pages 122‒‒136

40. Socrates: “And have you observed that the face of the person who looks into another’s eye is shown in the optic confronting him, as in a mirror, and we call this the pupil, for in a sort it is an image of the person looking?” Alcibiades: “That is true.” Socrates: “Then an eye viewing another eye, and looking at the most perfect part of it, the thing wherewith it sees, will thus see itself.” Alcibiades: “Apparently.” . . . Socrates: “Then if an eye is to see itself, it must look at an eye, and at the region of the eye in which the virtue of an eye is found to occur; and this, I presume, is sight.” Plato, Alcibiades 133a (Lamb edition). 41. Gadamer, TM, 443 ‒‒447. 42. “Quid enim tam in mente quam mens est? Sed quia in his est quae cum amore cogitat, sensibilibus autem, id est corporalibus, cum amore assuefacta est, non valet sine imaginibus eorum esse in semetipsa. Hinc ei oboritur erroris dedecus dum rerum sensarum imagines secernere a se non potest ut se solam videat; cohaeserunt enim mirabiliter glutino amoris. . . . Cum ergo sit mens interior, quodam modo exit a semetipsa cum in haec quasi vestigia multarum intentionum exerit amoris affectum. . . . sed aliud secum amando cum eo se confudit et concreuit quodam modo, atque ita dum sicut unum diversa complectitur, unum putauit esse quae diversa sunt.” Augustine, DT, 10.8. 43. Unlike the word, Augustine believes that the image of a sense object in the mind is an exact copy, “because the two coincide so exactly that there is no overlap to tell them apart by” (TT, 11.3). We know now this is untrue, but the point is taken. The generativity of language is altogether more radical. 44. A similar process that Gadamer calls “concept formation” is pivotal in his explication of the scholastic doctrine of the inner word (TM, 428 ‒‒438). 45. Gadamer and Ricoeur both point to an analogous metaphor in the Confessions to explain the hermeneutic structure of understanding. The best example of this borrowing is Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1:19 ‒‒ 22. 46. “[I]t is with reference to its capacity to use reason” (Augustine, TT, 14.6). 47. TT, 15.20. 48. “Et tunc fit verum verbum quando illud quod nos dixi volubili motione iactare ad id quod scimus pervenit atque inde formatur eius omnimodam similitudinem capiens ut quomodo res quaeque scitur sic etiam cogitetur, id est sine voce, sine cogitatione vocis quae profecto alicuius linguae est sic in corde dicatur.” Augustine, DT, 15.25. chapter 4

“The Word Is Not Reflexive”

1. Gadamer, TM, 426/WM, 430. 2. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 64; “Mensch und Sprache,” in GW, 2:150.

Notes to Pages 136‒‒143

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3. TM, 449/WM, 453: “die Unmittelbarkeit unseres Anschauens der Welt und unserer selbst, bei der wir beharren, in ihr verwahrt und verwandelt wird, weil wir endliche Wesen stets von weither kommen und weithin reichen.” 4. Martin Luther, Martin Luther’s Complete Commentary on the First Twenty-Two Psalms, 144. 5. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 492. 6. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 3. 7. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 36. 8. Hegel, Science of Logic, 45. 9. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 7. 10. De differentia, sect. 588. 11. De natura, sect. 272. 12. Summa theologiae, I, q. 34, a. 2. 13. In Aristotle we are not utterly deprived of thought thinking itself, since even the life of the sensible universe “is like the best which we temporarily enjoy”: “And thought thinks itself through participation in the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought by the act of apprehension and thinking, so that thought and the object of thought are the same” (Aristotle, Met. 12.7.1072b20 ‒‒ 22). Here the necessity of objects of thought does not alienate us from self-reflection, but rather provides a kind of mimicry of that selfreflection. 14. Lonergan, Verbum, 73. 15. Heidegger discovers this phenomenon from an explication of memoria in Augustine’s Confessions: “What does searching really mean? What am I really ‘searching’ for? More precisely: what, while searching, is still at my disposal? (That I have it, how I have it.) At what am I directing my effort, and what escapes me? (In anticipation [im Vorgriff ]: God as vita vitae [the life of life]. But this does not have to have the formed-out, concrete, traditional sense, but really has an existential sense of movement.) Or as whom do I experience myself, who has forgotten what and how [. . .]? That is, in my search of God, something in me does not only reach ‘expression,’ but makes up my facticity and my concern for it. (According to what do I recognize and grasp something as God? What gives the fulfillment of meaning: ‘sat est ’ [it suffices]? Vita [Life]. That means, in searching for this something as God, I myself assume a completely different role. I am not only the one from whose place the search proceeds and who moves toward some place, or the one in whom the search takes place; but the enactment of the search itself is something of the self. What does it mean that I ‘am’? (The self gains an ‘idea’ of itself, what kind of idea I have of myself. Kierkegaard.)” Phenomenology of Religious Life, 140 ‒ 141. 16. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, 56 ‒‒ 57.

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Notes to Pages 143‒‒149

17. In Paul the image is not static. In beholding the Lord we “are being transformed into the same image” (2 Cor. 3:18). 18. Augustine, TT, 15.17. 19. TT, 15.9. 20. TT, 15.7. 21. TT, 14.8. 22. “Proinde restat ut aliquid pertinens ad eius naturam sit conspectus eius, et in eam quando se cogitat non quasi per loci spatium sed incorporea conuersione reuocetur” (DT, 14.8). 23. TT, 14.8. 24. TT, 14.8. 25. TT, 14.8. 26. TT, 8.4. 27. TT, 14.11. 28. TT, 14.15. 29. TT, 15.11. 30. TT, 12.24. “Sed potius credendum est mentis intellectualis ita conditam esse naturam ut rebus intellegibilibus naturali ordine disponente conditore subiuncta sic ista uidea quae in hac corporea luce circumadiacent, cuius lusic capax eique congruens est creatus” (DT ). 31. TT, 15.14. 32. TT, 9.9. 33. TT, 14.18. 34. See Fetz, Ontologie der Innerlichkeit, 144 ‒ 145: “Die Annahme liegt dann auf der Hand, daß sich im Erkenntnisakt nicht nur das Formale der Erkenntnisform, sondern auch der menschliche Geist selbst auswirkt, was dann eben heißt, daß im Erkennen des (äußerlichen) Gegenstandes auch der Geist selbst miterkannt wird.” 35. See Aquinas, De veritate/Truth, vols. 1 and 2, q. 10, a. 6.; q. 15, a. 1; q. 3, a. 3. 36. De veritate/Truth, vol. 2, q. 10, a. 7. 37. Merriell traces the different forms of likeness, from vestigia to imago. See his To the Image of the Trinity, 41 ‒‒ 51. 38. Aquinas, De veritate/Truth, vol. 2, q. 10, a. 7. 39. “In the acts by which man catches hold of God in knowledge and love, man becomes a representation of God” (Merriell, To the Image of the Trinity, 70). 40. For a full discussion of this distinction, see Merriell, ibid., 137 ‒‒ 139. 41. Aquinas, In librum Boetii de hebdomadibus expositio, lec. 2, n. 24. 42. Te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas, 93. 43. ST, I, q. 6, a.1.

Notes to Pages 149‒‒152

411

44. Rosemann provides an extended explication of the profound relation between Aquinas’s doctrine of causal similiarity and the ancient metaphysics of circularity in Omne Agens Agit Sibi Simile, especially chapters 2 and 9. 45. See Fetz, Ontologie der Innerlichkeit. 162: “ ‘Rückkehr’ ist darum bei Thomas in diesem Zusammenhang die sachgerechte Erschließung des ureignensten Bezirks des Menschen, seines Selbst, von dem der Mensch schon immer Besitz ergriffen hat, wenn er ‘Ich’ sagt, und keineswegs die Gewinnung bisher unbekannten Neulandes.” 46. Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, 8. 47. Merleau-Ponty constantly rehearses what Pickstock speaks of as Aquinas’s “delicate balance between the objective and the subjective” (Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, 11). “There is a thought traveling a circle where the condition and the conditioned, the reflection and the unreflected, are in a reciprocal, if not symmetrical, relationship” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 35). Merleau-Ponty describes the communicatio boni in relation to similitude in the causal sense we have found in Aquinas: “[T]he idios kosmos opens by virtue of vision upon a koinos kosmos; in short, that the same thing is both out there in the world and here in the heart of vision—the same or, if one prefers, a similar thing, but according to an efficacious similarity which is the parent, the genesis, the metamorphosis of Being in his vision” (MerleauPonty, The Primacy of Perception, 166). And for Merleau-Ponty, there exists the same quasi-metaphysical-ontological relationship of language and world: “The word has inhabited the thing from all eternity” and “it is language which propels us toward the things it signifies” (Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 6 and 10). 48. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 308. 49. See Blanchette, The Perfection of the Universe according to Aquinas, 269. 50. Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, 9. 51. See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 32: “The world can present itself to this knowing which I am only by offering it a meaning, only in the form of a thought of the world.” 52. Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, 5. 53. SCG, 4.11.48 (Leonine ed.). 54. ST, I, q. 14, a. 2. 55. Te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas, 272. 56. Blanchette, The Perfection of the Universe according to Aquinas, 280. 57. SCG, 4.55.24. 58. “Thomas still availed himself of this idea of the rational soul as containing nature, and as being at the horizon of eternity and time. . . . [H]e characterized the place of the human soul in the order of the universe as a kind of border between the corporeal and the incorporeal” (Blanchette, Perfection,

412

Notes to Pages 152‒‒157

268). For Aquinas, see SCG, 2.68; In librum de causis expositio, lec. 2, n. 61; lec. 14, n. 296 and n. 220. 59. Blanchette, Perfection, 298. 60. See, for instance, Figal, who regards the instantaneous image in the mirror as a reference to the complete transparency of being, that is, essentialism. “The Doing of the Thing Itself,” 102 ‒‒ 125. 61. Merriell, To the Image of the Trinity, 70. 62. Ibid., 133. 63. Aquinas, De veritate/Truth, vol. 2, q. 10, a. 7. 64. See Aquinas, SCG, 3.25.103. 65. SCG, 3.47.161. 66. Ibid., emphasis added. 67. Merriell, To the Image of the Trinity, 12. 68. SCG, 3.20.77. 69. SCG, 3.19.75. 70. ST, I, q. 85, a. 2. 71. Te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas, 93. 72. Ibid., 115 ‒‒ 116. 73. ST, I, q. 12, a. 2. 74. Robert Pasnau locates the problem of “reflection, not introspection” with precision, placing Aquinas midway between the introspectionists like Peter John Olivi, John Ruane, and Ambroise Gardeil, who believe the mind has direct experiential access to itself, and the behaviorists like Gilbert Ryle and Robert Brandom, who deny utterly the presence of inward states or conscious awareness. Pasnau, however, does not try to explain Aquinas’s paradoxical middle ground, and is satisfied to say that “I know many things that I have never thought about.” Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 347. 75. Rosemann traces the notion that “living is a kind of knowledge” to its roots in Aristotle (Omne Agens Agit Sibi Simile, 50 ‒‒ 51). 76. “The visible about us seems to rest in itself. It is as though our vision were formed in the heart of the visible, or as though there were between it and us an intimacy as close as between the sea and the strand. And yet it is not possible that we blend into it, nor that it passes into us, for then the vision would vanish at the moment of formation, by disappearance of the seer or of the visible” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 130 ‒‒ 131). 77. See Plato, Sophist 263e. 78. Augustine, Concerning the Teacher, 4 ‒‒ 5/De magistro, 158. 79. Ibid., 5/159. 80. Ibid., 46/195. 81. Ibid., 47/195 ‒‒ 196. 82. Ibid., 49/197.

Notes to Pages 157‒‒163

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83. Ibid., 56/207. 84. At the same time, of course, this movement beyond the personal toward the whole is fundamentally Hegelian. 85. With minute attention Fetz explicates the indirection through otherness of human knowing in the second part of Ontologie der Innerlichkeit. 86. Rosemann claims for Aquinas the same openness in his systematic synthesis of knowledge, an openness that is characteristic of what Rosemann calls transcendence within immanence: “When two historical positions are ‘repeated’ without a priori trying to reduce them to one another or to some common denominator, the transcendence of the media via arises literally between them, in the gap opened up by their difference. As this gap sheds light back on the respective historical positions, it becomes possible to discern a ‘more profound truth’ (profundior intentio, veritas occulta) arising from within each of them. Of course, there is nothing to prevent the veritas occulta from being reinterpreted in the future, when the constellation of historical authorities will have changed. The Thomistic system is thus fundamentally ‘open’: its circle never closes” (Omne Agens Agit Sibi Simile, 30). 87. See Windelband, A History of Philosophy, 1:238: “[T]he development of Christian thought in the Church preserved its impressive energy by holding fast to the conception of God as spiritual personality.” 88. See Copleston, A History of Philosophy, 2.2:150: “[T]he individual stands in a personal relation to God, and however much one may stress the corporate aspect of Christianity, it remains true that each human person is ultimately of more value than the whole material universe, which exists for the sake of man.” 89. See ST, I-II, q. 3, a. 7; I, q. 76, a. 2. 90. “[T]he openness essential to experience is precisely the openness of being either this or that. It has the structure of a question” (TM, 362/WM, 368). 91. “The ‘subject’ of the experience of art, that which remains and endures, is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work itself. . . . For play has its own essence, independent of the consciousness of those who play” (TM, 102/WM, 108). chapter 5

The Pattern of Hegel’s Trinity

1. Gadamer, TM, 457. 2. Gadamer, “Die Philosophie und die Religion des Judentums,” 69 ‒‒ 73. 3. Gadamer, TM, 418 ‒‒419/WM, 422 ‒‒423. 4. Augustine, TT, 69. Theology found several ways to convey this identity in difference. Athanasius develops it through the metaphor of light: “For the brightness itself is also light; it does not come after the sun, nor is it another

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Notes to Pages 163‒‒166

light, nor does it become light by participating in the sun’s light, but it is, in the fullest sense, the sun’s offspring. Where light, in this way, gives birth to light, there is, of necessity, only one light, and it cannot be said that the sun and its brightness are two different lights” (in Lonergan, The Way to Nicaea, 100 ‒ 101). 5. As the Body of Christ, the Church continues the incarnation. 6. I use Emil Fackenheim’s phrase “double Trinity” in this chapter as a shorthand for the immanent and transcendent word (The Religious Dimension in Hegel’s Thought, 149 ‒‒ 154). The term is somewhat controversial in Fackenheim’s use, and I only mean it generically to refer to the procession in its fullest actualization. 7. John Smith, “Hegel’s Reinterpretation of the Doctrine of Spirit and the Religious Community,” 157. 8. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 492/Phänomenologie des Geistes, 529. 9. To be clear, I am not saying that Gadamer is doing theology under cover of philosophy. Although Hegel understood religion and philosophy as subsumable one within the other, Gadamer is speaking of a manner of thinking rather than a religious commitment. 10. And Hegel adds, “das kann blasphemisch aussehen” (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, 3:189), but he assures us it is not. 11. Kathleen Wright regards this phenomenon of doubling in Hegel as something more than reflexivity: “If we take the phrase ‘that which is alive senses that which is alive’ as reflexive, it means that that which is alive encounters itself as that which is alive in and through another which is alive for it. For Hegel, however, more than reflexivity is involved in the relation between lover and beloved. There is also symmetry in the sense that both lover and beloved simultaneously discover themselves as alive in and through the other. Thus difference must be taken as Verdoppelung, that is, as a duplication of the same. To be lover is to be at the same time beloved and to be beloved is to be at the same time lover” (“The Role of Reflection in the Formation of Hegel’s Concept of Speculation,” 20). 12. Gadamer quietly bypasses the monumental anachronism of Hegel’s painstakingly developed “system” in order to “preserve the truth of Hegel’s thought,” and he makes little mention of Hegel’s devotion to religion, the trinitarian structure of his philosophy, or his profound role in revivifying trinitarian doctrine for Christianity. Nevertheless, Gadamer’s complex interweaving of the themes of speculative reflection, incarnation, and the mirror metaphor in the last third of Truth and Method are really a further extension of Hegel’s application of trinitarian teaching to philosophy. 13. I am mainly using the 1827 lectures because, of the four versions, this one gives the closest attention to trinitarian doctrine and its relation to logic. See Hodgson (trans.) in Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1 vol. ed., 22 (hereafter, PR for both English and German). It is to be noted that the texts

Notes to Pages 166‒‒172

415

of the Lectures are composed of Hegel’s handwritten lecture notes (there is a complete manuscript for the 1821 course), and student transcripts, which are thought to be very accurate: “Hegel’s slow and repetitious style of delivery made it possible to take virtually verbatim notes. Frequently students worked together, combining their notes into a carefully rewritten fair copy” (ibid., 7 ‒ 9). 14. The 1827 lecture course is, of the four, the most expansive on the subject of the Trinity. 15. Page numbers are from the English language three-volume edition, which is based on original manuscripts of the lectures. 16. “Thinking itself is a way. We respond to the way only by remaining underway. To be underway on the way in order to clear the way” (Heidegger, WCT, 168 ‒‒ 169). 17. Gadamer in Ricoeur, A Ricoeur Reader, 220. 18. A good deal of Hegel commentary behaves as if one could ignore the obvious centrality of religion to the system. This makes understanding Hegel much more difficult. 19. This is, of course, a perennial problem for Hegel not only here. He meets the issue head on in the beginning of the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. It is also the question Heidegger poses hermeneutically when he asks, “How does one enter the circle?” 20. This anticipation of the whole is, mutatis mutandis, the structure of hermeneutic understanding as Gadamer describes it. As we begin reading a line of poetry, we project the full period in order to make sense of each word. Hermeneutics corrects Hegel by noting that we revise our expectations as we go along, but form is in the same way caught up in the dialectic of eventful understanding. 21. Note the parallel in Gadamer: “Exegesis interprets the speaking of the word to be as miraculous as the incarnation of God. In both cases the act of becoming is not the kind of becoming in which something turns into something else” (TM, 419 ‒‒420). 22. See also Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 75 et passim. 23. This circle is described again in the tripartite structure of the whole work. The first part, the concept of religion, describes the knowledge of God in its wholeness and unity, as an intuitive anticipation of the whole in every particular. Part II of the lectures describes “determinate religion,” the historical development of religions leading up to the consummate religion. Part III of the lectures describes “the consummate religion,” Protestant Christianity, in which the whole is achieved and comprehended in its concrete universality. The tripartite structure bears no superficial resemblance to Trinity, but exhibits the movement from “universal” to “particular” to “individual” which it is explaining. Hegel thus performs the claim he has made that we cannot get behind inquiry as a subject, but must approach it through itself.

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Notes to Pages 172‒‒195

24. The particularization of religious truth begins only in Part II of the lectures with the second moment as religious consciousness takes on determinate form in the progress of history. The encompassing movement of the lectures is an historical movement from the earliest premonitions of God in the nature religions to the mature achievement of Protestantism in the third part of the lectures. 25. Gadamer has indeed been accused of being too Hegelian in this assertion of wholeness, and we can only understand this controversy by locating the nature of the debt, on the side of an essential totality, a metaphysics of presence, etc. This issue requires its own treatment, and here I can just say that Gadamer finds in the speculation an openness that works without a telos. 26. See Wright, “The Role of Reflection in the Formation of Hegel’s Concept of Speculation,” 42 ‒‒48. 27. Gadamer locates the earliest transformation of Hegel’s spirit into language in Dilthey, who “differs from Hegel ultimately on one thing only, that according to Hegel the homecoming of the spirit takes place in the philosophical concept whereas, for Dilthey, the philosophical concept is significant not as knowledge but as expression” (TM, 229). 28. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 492. 29. Gadamer, TM, 457 ‒‒458. 30. In a certain respect, hermeneutics aborts the Hegelian project at just this stage, since its dialectic involves only the progressive realization of the indefinite in its concrete stage, and Christianity is only a further (if critical) development in the conversation that is truth. Indeed, for hermeneutics, just as for Hegel’s Judaism, “The world is grasped as a manifestation of the subject” (PR 2, 677/365), as long as we specify that for hermeneutics the subject is not separate from that manifestation, and that that manifestation can only ever be partial. 31. And so with Egyptian art, an impulsion which “involves the struggle of meaning with material, with external shape generally; it is only the attempt or the striving to place the stamp of inner spirit on outer configuration” (PR 2, 637/325). 32. Gadamer, TM, 477 ‒‒479. 33. On the difference between speculative and dialectical, see TM, 468 ‒ 474. 34. Gadamer, Praise of Theory, 7. chapter 6 1. 2. 3. 4.

Heidegger

Gallup, Jr., Anderson, and Shillito, “The Mirror Test.” Gadamer, TM, 443/WM, 447. Heidegger, On the Way to Languages, 57/Unterwegs zur Sprache, 159. Ibid., 124/254.

Notes to Pages 196‒‒203

417

5. Augustine, TT, 12.24. 6. TT, 15.14. 7. Aquinas, De veritate/Truth, vol. 2, q. 10, a. 7. 8. Blanchette, The Perfection of the Universe according to Aquinas, 298. 9. Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, 308. 10. “We speak and speak about language. What we speak of, language, is always ahead of us. Our speaking merely follows language constantly. Thus we are continually lagging behind what we first ought to have overtaken and taken up in order to speak about it.” Heidegger, On the Way, 75/Unterwegs, 179. 11. Ibid., 74/177. 12. Ibid., 76/180. 13. Ibid., 80/185. 14. Ibid., 82/187 ‒‒ 188. 15. Heidegger, On the Way, 85. 16. Heidegger, On the Way, 12/Unterwegs, 190. 17. Ibid., 12/190. 18. Ibid., 20/105. 19. Ibid., 30/116. 20. Ibid., 29/115. 21. Ibid., 30/116. 22. Heidegger, GA, 65:239/CP, 169. 23. Heidegger, CP, 213. 24. Heidegger, GA, 65:303. 25. “What is decisive, however, is . . . to recognize and to know . . . that this between is not like a rope stretching from the thing to man, but that this between as an anticipation (Vorgriff ) reaches beyond the thing and similarly back behind us.” Heidegger, What Is A Thing? 243. 26. Heidegger, On the Way, 85/Unterwegs, 190. 27. Heidegger, CP, 211. 28. Aune, To Move the Heart, 75. 29. Heidegger, CP, 211. 30. Heidegger, CP, 211/GA, 65:299. 31. Heidegger, CP, 226. 32. Vallega-Neu’s translation in Companion to Heidegger’s “Contributions to Philosophy,” 73. Heidegger, Beiträge, sections 190 ‒‒ 191/GA, 65:310 ‒‒ 311. 33. Heidegger, On the Way, 40/Unterwegs, 128. 34. Heidegger, WCT, 204/WHD, 170. 35. Heidegger, WCT, 205. 36. “Sollte nun der Mensch, wenn er sich im so Vorliegenden vorfindet, dem Vorliegenden nicht dadurch rein entsprechen, daß er das Vorliegende so vorliegen läßt, wie es liegt: Und sollte dieses Vorliegen-lassen dann nicht dasjenige

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Notes to Pages 204‒‒210

Legen sein, in dessen Spielraum sich alles übrige Legen, das der Mensch betreibt, abspielt: So würde denn das Legen jetzt plötzlich als ein Bezug sichtbar, der den Aufenthalt des Menschen auf dieser Erde von Grund aus durchwaltet.” WHD, 171. 37. “Ihr Gesagtes, das, was sie spricht und was sie schweigt, bleibt immer und überall das, was ist, sein kann, gewesen und im Ankommen ist: und all dies am unmittelbarsten und reichsten dort, wo die Wörter ‘ist’ und ‘sein’ gar nicht eigens in die Verlautbarung gelangen. Denn das, was im eigentlichen Sinne jeweils zur Sprache kommt, ist wesentlich reicher als das, was in die hörbaren und sichtbaren Gestalten der Verlautbarung eingeht und als solches dann im Geschriebenen der Schrift wieder verstummt. Gleichwohl bleibt alles Sagen verborgener Weise auf Jenes bezogen, das nennbar bleibt durch ein ‘Es ist.’” WHD, 171 ‒‒ 172. 38. Heidegger, WCT, 206/WHD, 171. 39. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, 31/Identität und Differenz, 94. 40. Ibid., 30/93 ‒‒ 94. 41. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, 31. 42. Ibid., 94. 43. Ibid., 33. 44. Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 32. 45. In Heidegger’s early thinking the dispersal of agency had been carried through to the being of culture: “Through its world and with it, life is relucent in itself, i.e., relucent of itself as a life of caring . . . from the relucent world life makes its claims and measures itself. Life begins to build out from this world and for it. . . . The result is cultural life as the prestructively organized proclivity of the worldly relucence of the life of care.” Heidegger, PIA, 89. Gadamer will pick up here. 46. Geflecht means net, as in the close weave of wickerwork, latticework, or even tissue. 47. Heidegger, On the Way, 112/Unterwegs, 242. 48. “Chronologically, 2,500 years have elapsed since the outset [Beginn] of Western thought. But the passing of the years and centuries has never affected what was thought in the thinking of these two thinkers. . . . We call what thus precedes and determines all history the beginning [das Anfängliche]. Because it does not reside back in a past but lies in advance of what is to come.” Heidegger, Parmenides, 1/GA, 54:2. 49. Plato, Sophist 244d; Collected Dialogues, 988. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 208. 50. Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Q 1‒‒3, 123. 51. See also Gadamer, TM, 443. 52. “About the ‘word’ we also said that it not only stands in a relation to the thing, but that the word is what first brings that given thing, as the being

Notes to Pages 210‒‒221

419

that is, into this ‘is’; that the word is what holds the thing there and relates it and so to speak provides its maintenance with which to be a thing.” Heidegger, Gelassenheit, 82. 53. See also Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 88 ‒‒ 90. 54. Heidegger, PIA, 16. 55. Humboldt quoted in Heidegger, On the Way, 116. 56. Heidegger, On the Way, 120/Unterwegs, 251. 57. Plato, Phaedrus 277a; Collected Dialogues, 522. 58. As both Heidegger and Gadamer point out in other places, the Roman word for culture derives from this metaphor. Gadamer, Praise of Theory, 9. 59. Gadamer picks up this metaphor for language: “This mode of thinking follows the furrows that it makes in language. Language, however, is like a field from which a variety of seeds can come forth” (Heidegger’s Ways, 135). Gadamer offers a more prosaic formulation of logos as gathering: Language is meant “to gather thinking into the word and to gather us in the word around something commonly thought” (136). 60. Heidegger, On the Way, 121. “Der Auf-Riß ist das Ganze der Züge derjenigen Zeichnung, die das Aufgeschlossene, Freie der Sprache durchfügt.” Unterwegs, 251. 61. Heidegger, Parmenides, 12/GA, 54:17. 62. “Der Anfang ist das, was in der wesenhaften Geschichte zuletzt kommt” [In essential history the beginning comes last]. For Heidegger, the future is the origin. Heidegger, Parmenides, 1/GA, 54:2. 63. Adrien Grenier, interview on The Treatment, produced by KCRW-FM radio, June 20, 2007. 64. Heidegger, PIA, 27. 65. Ibid., 26. 66. Heidegger, Basic Writings, 199. 67. Heidegger, On the Way, 41. 68. Gadamer, A Century of Philosophy, 23; Gadamer, “On the Truth of the Word,” 135. chapter 7

The Verbum and Augustine’s Inner Word

1. Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, 5. 2. Grondin has an important philological study of the early draft outline of Truth and Method in his Sources of Hermeneutics, 83 ‒‒ 98. 3. Manuscript page 131. 4. This is characteristic Gadamer, in contrast to Heidegger, who emphasizes the division between Augustine and Aquinas: “Medieval theology is based on Augustine. The medieval reception of Aristotle was able to assert itself—if at

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Notes to Pages 221‒‒226

all—only in a sharp confrontation with Augustinian directions of thought. . . . Augustinianism has a twofold meaning: philosophically, it means a Christian Platonism turned against Aristotle” (Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 115). What Heidegger characterizes as controversia (Auseinandersetzung), Gadamer characterizes as conversation (Miteinandersprechen). 5. The paragraph-by-paragraph facing English is my translation of III, 2, B, as are the quotations from the Thomist texts, De natura and De differentia. These last two texts are included whole in the appendix. There is currently no other English translation of the De natura. 6. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 106. 7. Ibid., 107. 8. In “The Doing of the Thing Itself,” Figal shows how even the Cratylus provides different possibilities for understanding Plato’s understanding of language (117). Figal argues that Gadamer was wrong in his interpretation of Plato, but Gadamer’s own vast scholarship on Plato’s appreciation for the lovgoı before and after Truth and Method makes clear that he was only entertaining the career of this particular thesis of the dialogue. Gadamer makes no particular effort to make this clear in the text. 9. Here Gadamer plays significantly on the double meaning of the German word Gestalt. 10. We can begin to address this enigma by following Aquinas in his description of what he will call “real expression”: “The Word also has a kind of essential kinship not only with the rational nature, but also universally with the whole of creation, since the Word contains the essences of all things created by God, just as man the artist in the conception of his intellect comprehends the essences of all the products of art. Thus, then, all creatures are nothing but a kind of real expression and representation of those things which are comprehended in the conception of the divine Word; wherefore all things are said (John 1:3) to be made by the Word. Therefore, suitably was the Word united to the creature, namely, to human nature” (SCG, 4.42). 11. Gadamer, TM, 419. 12. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 15. 13. “It is a fact well known to students of Christian theology that, despite the powerful influence exercised by the Trinitarian conception of God and the doctrine of the three Persons, the Third Person or Holy Spirit was curiously neglected throughout the long development of thought from the early Greek and Latin Fathers to the end of the Middle Ages. It is not possible here to argue the case on historical grounds, but two factors may be mentioned as major reasons for the neglect. First, in the main, Roman Catholic theology interpreted the Church as the Body of Christ and thus as an extension of the Incarnation or Second Person, without special emphasis on the idea that was later to be made

Notes to Pages 228‒‒242

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so central by the Reformers, namely, that the Church is the community of believers in whom the Spirit lives and works” (John E. Smith, “Hegel’s Reinterpretation,” 159). 14. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, 300 ‒‒ 301. 15. Sect. 28. 16. Book 6, lesson 4, §1229. 17. I will continue to refer to Aquinas as author of De natura. Gadamer believed this was a genuine Aquinas text in the face of the authorship controversy. 18. Sect. 270. 19. Sect. 277. 20. Sect. 5. 21. I have quoted here the beautiful translation of the De differentia by Weisheipl and Larcher, Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, 34. 22. Emery, La Trinité Créatrice, 415. 23. Ebeling, Word and Faith, 325. 24. Aune, To Move the Heart, 20. 25. Wingren, Man and the Incarnation, 88 ‒‒ 89. 26. Ebeling, Word and Faith, 313 note. 27. Gadamer, Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History, 69. 28. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Physicists, 2.270. 29. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, 124. 30. Lonergan, Verbum, x. 31. Daniélou asserts that the term pair endiathetos and prophorikos “serve to unpack the two meanings of logos, corresponding to the Latin ratio and sermo, the interior thought and the uttered word” (A History of Early Christian Doctrine, 2:353). 32. Graeser, “The Stoic Theory of Meaning,” 88. 33. Heidegger, WCT, 206/WHD, 171. 34. Here is also a difference between Gadamer and Heidegger. Heidegger sides with Augustine in emphasizing that human speech is a dissipation of the truth of the Word, whereas Gadamer sides with Hegel that history enriches logos. 35. Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, 5.1.1. 36. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, 134, emphasis added. 37. Plotinus, Enneads, 3.3. 38. Hilary, The Trinity, 234. 39. Athanasius, “Epistle of Athanasius in Defense of the Nicene Definition of the Homousion,” 3.16, in Select Treatises, 25. 40. This became a defining concept in the development of christological orthodoxy at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Placher, A History of Christian Theology, 83. 41. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1 vol. ed., 119.

422

Notes to Pages 242‒‒252

42. Ibid., 130 ‒‒ 131. 43. Herder, “Essay on the Origin of Language,” 110. 44. Gadamer, Praise of Theory, 6. 45. Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, 77. 46. It should be noted that Gadamer’s formula derives originally from Aristotle, even though Aristotle’s point is considerably more prosaic. He is speaking of the work, which, like the creation of Leonardo’s final touch, has a selfevident perfection: “[I]t is usually said of a successful piece of work that it is impossible to detract from it or to add to it” (NE 2.6.1106b10). 47. Gadamer, Praise of Theory, 32. 48. Hilary, The Trinity, 7.11. 49. Athanasius, “Epistle of Athanasius in Defence of the Nicene Definition of the Homousion,” 3.16, in Select Treatises, 25. 50. Theophilus in Daniélou, A History of Early Christian Doctrine, 2:356. 51. Justin Martyr in Daniélou, A History of Early Christian Doctrine, 2 :355. 52. Ibid., 355. 53. Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, 2.28.5. 54. Ibid. 55. Rosemann, Omne Agens Agit Sibi Simile, 274. 56. There is an overlapping structure to Gadamer’s argument which does not neatly divide between Augustine and Thomas. In paragraphs 1 ‒ 9 Gadamer reflects on the implications of trinitiarian theology for language, and in paragraphs 10 ‒‒ 13 Gadamer turns his focus to the nature of human language in its own right. To reflect this overlap in the argument, I have held paragraph 10 over to chapter 8, despite the fact that the Aquinas section does not begin until paragraph 11. 57. “C’est par un langage propre, et non pas seulement par métaphore, que l’on peut parler d’un Verbe en Dieu” (Emery, La Trinité Créatrice, 415). Emanation provides the rationale for the unbroken connection: “Cette émanation est absolument requise pour que l’on parle de verbe au sens propre et non seulement en un sens métaphorique. Le verbe comporte d’autre part une fonction de manifestation, et d’abord une manifestation de soi-même à soi-même” (416). 58. Augustine, TT, 15.20. 59. “Many more passages might be cited and they would reveal him saying different things or the same things in a different manner. But sooner or later it would be necessary to advance from the simpler question of what he said to the more difficult question of what he meant” (Lonergan, Verbum, xi). 60. The German verb entsprechen (to answer, to correspond to) comes from the root sprechen, to speak, a semantic basis that Heidegger, who is also deeply committed to the consubstantiality of thought and speech sounds in all it stops.

Notes to Pages 252‒‒262

423

61. Augustine, TT, 15.22. 62. Gadamer, Heidegger’s Ways, 37. 63. Ibid., 38. 64. Thomistic psychology is a subject of considerable debate: “It seems implausible to suggest that whenever we see a horse we have at the same time a mental image of a horse. Perhaps the theory is that if we see accurately our phantasm of a horse is a sense-impression; if we are mistaken about what we see, and there is no horse there at all, then our phantasm is a mental image. This theory seems to be confused in several ways, but it is hard to be sure whether St. Thomas held it or not” (Kenny, Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays, 294). 65. Ibid., 43. 66. “. . . intelligere covers both latent understanding and current conscious thought. . . . What is the relationship between the intellect and the mind? Do we have here two words for the same thing?” (ibid., 41 ‒‒42). chapter 8

The Aquinas Section

1. Aquinas is only mentioned in a footnote in the handwritten first draft of Truth and Method. 2. Ratio for Aquinas does contain many of the key attributes of the verbum. It is wholly in the mind and yet discursive. It has a logical movement, in the way that we arrive at a conclusion through a series of premises: “For the discursive movement of the mind comes from one thing being known through another” (ST, I, q. 58, a. 3), and indeed Aquinas’s exemplar in this regard is the syllogism. We hear this signification in our own word ratiocination. Aquinas regards this discursivity as evidence of human frailty: “But human souls which acquire knowledge of truth by the discursive method are called rational; and this comes of the feebleness of their intellectual light.” (ST, I, q. 58, a. 3). This is because divine understanding understands all at once, and therefore there is no necessity to proceed bit by bit: “So, likewise, the lower, namely, the human, intellects obtain their perfection in the knowledge of truth by a kind of movement and discursive intellectual operation; that is to say, as they advance from one known thing to another. But, if from the knowledge of a known principle they were straightway to perceive as known all its consequent conclusions, then discourse would have no place in them” (ST, I, q. 58, a. 3). 3. “Now, the Word, by its very name, adds the notion of making manifest. But there can be no manifestation other than that in which the Father is manifested through creatures—a manifestation, as it were, to the exterior. Therefore, the Word implies a relation to creatures” (De veritate/Truth, vol. 1, q. 4, a. 5).

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4. Aquinas, De veritate/Truth, vol. 1, q. 4, a. 5. 5. It is a good specimen of Gadamer’s style, which can be, depending on the reader, either exhilarating or exhausting. The single statement operates on two levels, making two arguments simultaneously, somewhat like the carrier signal in broadcasting that contains different kinds of information in various parts of the waveform (sound, image, color, control track, etc.). 6. For Aristotle everything constituted by nature (phusis) “has within itself a principle of motion and of stationariness,” and it “has in itself the source of its own production” (Physics 1.8.192b). To this attribute Aristotle applies the term subject (uJpokeivmenon). A thing’s nature is that which is inherent, the difference between what exists in potential and in a fully realized state being the difference between imperfection and perfection: “the perfect is that which lacks nothing” (Physics 3.6.207a). A thing’s nature is what it points toward as a fulfillment of itself, its “complete reality” (Met. 9.8.1050a) and in fact the realized or end state of a thing is not whatever it ends up being but “that which is best,” that for the sake of which it exists (Met. 12.7.1072b). Matter and form together are the constituent conceptual aspects of what is one, and so the process by which something comes into its own perfection does not mean that it is essentially different or many along the way. In his understanding of this temporal relationship, bridging what is manifold with what is complete, Aristotle can be heard to still be speaking to the churchmen, to Kant and his successors, to Husserl and Heidegger and Gadamer: Since of the actions which have a limit none is an end but all are relative to the end . . . We are seeing and have seen, are understanding and have understood, are thinking and have thought (while it is not true that at the same time we are learning and have learnt, or are being cured and have been cured). At the same time we are living well and have lived well, and are happy and have been happy. If not, the process would have had sometime to cease, as the process of making thin ceases: but, as things are, it does not cease. (Met. 9.6.1048b) There is one thing which has no limit, the mind, since “it is what it is by virtue of becoming all things” (De Anima 3.5.430a.14 ‒‒ 15). 7. ST, I, q. 4, a. 3. 8. SCG, 4.42. 9. SCG, 4.42. 10. “[I]f the order itself of the universe was created by Him immediately, and intended by Him, He must have the idea of the order of the universe” (ST, I, q. 15, a. 3). 11. SCG, 4.42. 12. Eugene Garver, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 141.

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13. Augustine speaks in the De Trinitate of the “verbum excogitatum” (9.13). 14. Plotinus, Enneads, 3.8.6.379 ‒‒ 381, modified. 15. Augustine, TT/DT, 15.25. “[S]olus deus intellegatur habere verbum sempiternum sibique coaeternum. Nisi forte dicendum est ipsam possibilitatem cogitationis, quoniam id quod scitur etiam quando non cogitatur potest tamen veraciter cogitari, verbum esse tam perpetuum quam scientia ipsa perpetua est. Sed quomodo est verbum quod nondum in cogitationis visione formatum est? Quomodo erit simile scientiae de qua nascitur si eius non habet formam et ideo iam vocatur verbum quia potest habere? Tale est enim ac si dicatur ideo iam vocandum esse verbum quia potest esse verbum. / Sed quid est quod potest esse verbum et ideo iam dignum est verbi nomine? Quid est, inquam, hoc formabile nondumque formatum nisi quiddam mentis nostrae quod hac atque hac volubili quadam motione iactamus cum a nobis nunc hoc, nunc illud sicut inuentum fuerit vel occurrerit cogitatur? Et tunc fit verum verbum quando illud quod nos dixi volubili motione iactare ad id quod scimus pervenit atque inde formatur eius omnimodam similitudinem capiens ut quomodo res quaeque scitur sic etiam cogitetur, id est sine voce, sine cogitatione vocis quae profecto alicuius linguae est sic in corde dicatur. Ac per hoc etiam si concedamus, ne de controversia vocabuli laborare videamur, iam vocandum esse verbum quiddam illud mentis nostrae quod de nostra scientia formari potest etiam priusquam formatum sit quia iam ut ita dicam formabile est, quis non videat quanta hic sit dissimilitudo ab illo dei verbo quod in forma dei sic est ut non ante fuerit formabile postque formatum, nec aliquando esse possit informe, sed sit forma simplex et simplicter aequalis ei de quo est et cui mirabiliter coaeterna est?” 16. “Forma enim in intellectu dupliciter esse potest. Uno modo ita quod sit principium actus intelligendi, sicut forma quae est intelligentis in quantum est intelligens, et haec est similitudo intellecti in ipso; alio modo ita quod sit terminus actus intelligendi, sicut artifex intelligendo excogitat formam domus, et cum illa forma sit excogitata per actum intelligendi et quasi per actum effecta, non potest esse principium actus intelligendi ut sit primum quo intelligatur sed magis se habet ut intellectum quo intelligens aliquid operatur, nihilominus tamen est forma praedicta secundum quo intelligitur quia per formam excogitatam artifex intelligit quid operandum sit; sicut etiam in intellectu speculativo videmus quod species qua intellectus informatur ut intelligat actu est primum quo intelligitur, ex hoc autem quod est effectus in actu per talem formam operari iam potest formando quiditates rerum et componendo et dividendo, unde ipsa quiditas formata in intellectu vel etiam compositio et divisio est quoddam operatum ipsius, per quod tamen intellectus venit in cognitionem rei exterioris et sic est quasi secundum quo intelligitur.” De veritate/Truth, vol. 1, q. 3, a. 2.

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17. Humboldt, Humanist Without Portfolio, 240/Gesammelte Schriften, 4.14 ff. 18. Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, 16 ‒‒ 17. 19. Does Gadamer imply that Plato’s view was so limited? It is hard to avoid answering affirmatively with a close reading, although this is an easy charge to refute. Socrates tells Theaetetus that he is pregnant with knowledge even as Theaetetus believes he knows nothing, and then encourages him to venture a definition as more than a basis for conversation, but as really something like a formal indication, an opinion destined to be revised: Theaetetus. But I cannot persuade myself that I can give any satisfactory solution or that anyone has ever stated in my hearing the sort of answer you require. And yet I cannot get the question out of my mind. Socrates. My dear Theaetetus, that is because your mind is not empty or barren. You are suffering the pains of travail.” (Theaetetus 148e) The dialectic of intuitus and discursus is certainly present in Plato. 20. Humboldt, Humanist Without Portfolio, 235/Gesammelte Schriften, 5.396. 21. Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, 4 ‒‒ 5. 22. Plato, Meno 86b–c. 23. The intuition that exists (dialectically) in the verbum is described well by Rabeau: “Lorsque nous sommes mis en présence d’une situation complexe, et obligés en même temps d’agir et de parler, nous comprenons parfaitement l’ensemble de la situation, et nous savons notre intention, bien que notre parole extérieure et intérieure (imaginative) dise tout autre chose” (Species. Verbum, 66). 24. Phaedo 79d. 25. Republic 508f. 26. Sophist 264a–b. 27. NE 6.11. 28. ST, I, q. 117, a. 1. This is Pasnau’s translation, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 307. 29. Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 306. chapter 9

The Neoplatonist Section

1. This is an odd locution, “this and then,” as if, in English, one were to combine “this and that” with “now and then.” 2. Augustine, Confessions, 9.28 (my trans.). In context adtendit means consider or think here, but literally it is a stretching out toward. In describing thought’s relation to past, present, and future, Augustine uses vocabulary that

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has the root meaning of stretching out and extending, because he is getting at the capacity of the mind to conceive the whole as a continuum. He is suggesting that the separation of the temporal procession of thought into distinct moments of past, present, and future is an arbitrary convention which thinking itself does not observe. Ricoeur has written the definitive study on this theme. Temps et Récit, 1:19 ‒‒ 54/Time and Narrative, 1:5 ‒‒ 30). 3. Augustine, Confessions, 11.7 (my trans.). 4. Thus Gadamer, pace Figal, does not mean to suggest that the procession of human understanding is or will ever be a perfect and transparent understanding. 5. Augustine, Confessions, 11.29 (my trans.). 6. Ibid., 11.28 (Warner trans.). 7. Or this may be a distinction without a difference: “Thinking, which sees the intelligible and turns towards it and is, in a way, being perfected by it” (Plotinus, Enneads, 5.4.2). 8. Aided by the Pauline figure of the inner and outer man, the strongly dualist character of Augustine’s perspective suggests to him a division of desire between inquisitiveness (appetitus inveniendi) and studiousness (amor studentium), the former of worldly objects, the latter of spiritual things. The senses of the flesh are external distractions from the rational effort of the mind to look for itself. Now, this is not perfectly true for Augustine. In spite of his dualism, he concedes the principle of general participation: “Is there anything, after all, that does not bear a likeness to God after its own kind and fashion, seeing that God made all things very good” (TT, 11.8). This is where the analysis of the inner word of the Platonist Augustine and the Aristotelian Aquinas will part company, and ultimately why Gadamer followed Aquinas’s verbum mentis, since all the world, in the Thomist view, is the revelation of divine perfection. What would later be simply the form of human understanding is for Augustine its particular weakness. The mind’s attention is focused not only on itself, but “the things it thinks about with love, and it has got used to loving sensible, that is bodily things; so it is unable to be in itself without their images. Hence arises its shameful mistake, that it cannot make itself out among the images of the things it has perceived with the senses and see itself alone; they are all stuck astonishingly fast together with the glue of love” (TT, 10.10). So, while Augustine has eloquently anticipated phenomenology (see especially 10.7, 11), he discards it in favor of a form of subject-object dualism. Self-knowledge is for Augustine a form of retreat, and self-reflection is, from a hermeneutic perspective, somewhat impoverished. Ironically, this is ameliorated by Augustine’s fierce concentration on an inner world that betrays its imaginative ties to the outer world that he rejects. 9. Aristotle, De Anima 3.4.429a21 ‒‒ 22. 10. Ibid.

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11. To the extent that the word “is distinct from understanding,” as Lonergan says, it is less like God. It imitates God in the extent to which understanding and word coincide. 12. “I momenti in cui la metafisica tomistica lascia trasparire con più evidenze la trama mistica sono infatti quelli dove l’influenze neoplatonica ha il sopravvento su quella aristotelica. Motivo per cui una lettura attentata alle istanze mistiche della metafisica di S. Tommaso riconduce puntualmente lo storico alle fonti neoplatoniche.” De Angelis, L’Influenza del Pensiero Neoplatonico Sulla Metafisica di S. Tommaso d’Aquino, 16. 13. “In its nature or essence what is the Incarnation? It is a movement of Divine compassion and sympathy towards man. . . . Love—self-surrender— this is the link or point of connection between Deity and manhood, the Divine ever enlarging its self-communication according to the measure of human receptivity.” Ottley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation, 3, 226. 14. Plotinus, Enneads, 5.1.23. 15. Armstrong attempts to locate the contiguity and difference between the emanationism of Plotinus and the theologians. In the first place, Plotinus’s emanation is “a real metaphysical advance”: “Plotinus did arrive at something very like the Christian conception of Divine Simplicity and unbounded Plenitude (he brings the two together at the end of 6.7.37). This is apparent above all in chapters 37 ‒‒ 39 of the Seventh Treatise of the Sixth Ennead. Plotinus is explaining his most important and to Christian ears most startling negations, that the One does not think and does not even exist. He makes it quite clear that he means that it does not think only in the sense that there is in it no actualization of potency, no real distinction of thought and object of thought” (Aristotle, Plotinus, and St. Thomas, 6 ‒‒ 7). However, Armstrong distinguishes between “the Jewish-Christian doctrine of free creation instead of the necessary emanation or procession of the eternal universe. This is the decisive difference between the Christian and Plotinian conceptions of God” (8). 16. “Nothing is separated or cut off from that which is before it. . . . So it goes from the beginning to the last and lowest, each remaining behind in its own place, and that which is generated taking another, lower, rank; and yet each becomes the same as that upon which it follows, as long as it does continue to follow upon it” (Enneads, 6.2.1). 17. Ibid., 3.7.11. 18. Plotinus speaks, for instance, of the “I” as the measure of time, which “runs along with it and stretches out with it” (ibid.). 19. Gadamer can only be speaking loosely when he says that successiveness is not basically temporal. Successiveness is by definition temporal. That is in fact what he means in the same paragraph by “simple succession,” with which he contrasts the process which grasps the whole, i.e., procession.

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20. The German phrase “etwas zu sich hinzunimmt” involves the notion of addition, which is not theologically sound. The Weinsheimer/Marshall translation reads “takes something to himself,” which is theologically correct. The Father does not ever add anything to himself, and such an attribution would confuse immanent and transcendent procession. In the latter case, nothing is added or subtracted, since God is perfect, and the three aspects, moments or persons of the triune God are eternally present to each other. In the former case, there is a continual increase or becoming in salvation history, and incarnation brings something new to human experience. What hermeneutics appropriates to its understanding of language is in fact the economic procession, “la transformation immanente par quoi la pensée humaine s’enrichit sans rien perdre” (Rabeau, Species. Verbum, 9). With incarnation something is introduced which alters the course of history, and so with language, the event of understanding means that “understanding is always understanding-differently” (Gadamer, Dialogue and Deconstruction, 96). 21. Philo’s adoption of a Stoic emanationist figure: “. . . one resembling a spring, the other its outflow; logos in the understanding resembles a spring and is called reason, while utterance by mouth and tongue is like its outflow and is called speech” (Philo, vol. 4, “De Migratione Abrahami,” 13.71). 22. Plotinus, Enneads, 4.8.6. 23. Ibid., 3.4.3. 24. Ibid., 5.8.4. 25. Schroeder, Form and Transformation, 23. 26. Miller translates das Fürsichsein . . . ohne es zurück zu erhalten as “an independent existence which they are unable to take back again” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 273). 27. Hegel, Spirit: Chapter Six of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, par. 19, 456/Phänomenologie des Geistes, par. 246. 28. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity, in Early Theological Writings, 260. 29. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 172/“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 34. “Zwar gebraucht auch der Maler den Farbstoff, jedoch so, daß die Farbe nicht verbraucht auch der Dichter das Wort, aber nicht so, wie die gewöhnlich Redenden und Schreibenden die Worte verbrauchen müssen, sondern so, daß das Wort erst wahrhaft ein Wort wird und bleibt.” 30. E.g., “All human speaking is finite in such a way that there is laid up within it an infinity of meaning to be explicated and laid out” (TM, 458). 31. Gadamer emphasizes this helpful delimitation of the inward procession, insofar as the movement from impression to species to judgment or definition is a wholly intellectual operation. This boundedness must not be confused with self-sufficiency, as the whole drift of the doctrine is to maintain the indissociable connection of word, thought, and thing:

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Moreover the object is not present to the soul which is informed by its image, since the object is external in its nature; however the activity of the soul is not from outside itself, since understanding is a movement toward the soul, on the one hand from the nature of the image which derives from such a quiddity, on the other hand out of the nature of intellect, the activity of which is not external. . . . an intelligible object is formed in the soul, and not outside. (sect. 275) Gadamer is simply extending the analogy of the divine procession of the word with human discursivity. Even though the mind uses many words, cogitation is an internal process in which concepts are compared, refined, combined, and even produced. In section III, 2, C, Gadamer will introduce the metaphorical nature of concept formation, which is an important example of how one word originates from another. In this passage the reference is to the example of the syllogism in the De natura: “And of these [words] some arise from others, just as a word of conclusion from premises” (sect. 286). 32. “The culmination of faith, the return to the Godhead whence man is born, closes the circle of man’s development. Everything lives in the Godhead, every living thing is its child, but the child carries the unity, the connection, the concord with the entire harmony, undisturbed though undeveloped, in itself.” Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity, in Early Theological Writings, 273. 33. For a thorough discussion of the place of humans in the Thomist order of the universe see Blanchette. 34. In the Thomist scheme, angels are an intellectual substance intermediate between God and humans, and are relatively less or more perfect. 35. Aquinas, In librum beati Dionysii de divinis nominibus expositio, 4.410. 36. Aquinas, SCG 2.46.3. 37. Ibid., 2.68.6. 38. Aquinas, ST, I, q. 79, a. 3. 39. Aquinas, De veritate/Truth, vol. 1, q. 1, a. 1. 40. Aquinas, SCG, 4.55.5. 41. Aquinas, De veritate/Truth, vol. 1, q. 2, a. 2. 42. Aquinas, SCG, 2.46.2. One of the ways Gadamer undoubtedly hears this medieval appropriation of emanation to the inner word is in the register of language theory. Humboldt uses emanationist language to describe the reciprocity between the contribution of language to what a human being is able to think, and the changes wrought on language by individual use. On the one hand, language exerts the effect of the history of a people in its use: “Yet it is always language in which every individual feels most vividly that he is nothing but an outflow of the whole of mankind. For while each reacts individually and incessantly upon it, every generation nevertheless produces a change in it, which only too often escapes notice” (Humboldt, On Language, 63). On the

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other hand, the individual use is a contribution to that outflow: “Nobody means by a word precisely and exactly what his neighbour does, and the difference, be it ever so small, vibrates, like a ripple in water, throughout the entire language” (ibid.). As this description shows, it is not just the idea of outflow that animates Humboldt’s appropriation of emanationist theory, but the Neoplatonist idea of return. In the ancient theory, whatever flows from the source seeks its origin in a movement of eternal return. Humboldt finds this same movement in language, which, like the circulation of water in a fountain, is never wasted. Language exerts “its effect in two directions at once, in that it first proceeds outwards to the utterance, but then also back again to the powers that engender it” (ibid., 91). Humboldt expresses this often as a retroactive or reverse effect—Rückwirkung. (Über die Verschiedenheit des Menschlichen Sprachbaues, 221, 361). 43. William Butler Yeats, “Among Schoolchildren,” stanza 8. 44. Rabeau, Species. Verbum, 251. 45. Lonergan, Verbum, 5. 46. “[T]he object of thought exists, intentionally, in the intellect; its existence is the actualization, the life, of the intellect. . . . The actuality of the power of the object of thought is the same thing as the actuality of the power of thinking. That is to say, on the one hand the intellect just is the capacity for intellectual thought, the locus of thought; the intellect has no structure or matter; it is just the capacity for thought. On the other hand, the object of intellectual thought, a universal as such, is something which has no existence outside thought.” Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, 107. 47. Aquinas, SCG, 1.45. 48. ST, I, q. 75, a. 5. 49. Aquinas, SCG, 1.22. 50. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, 224. 51. See commentary, par. 18. 52. Gadamer’s use of the simile may have been inspired by Humboldt, who wrote like an emanationist, and it was Humboldt rather than Plotinus who developed the fountain image so single-mindedly. In him, the word as mediator of concept and sound is characterized by the capacity for movement as a flowing forth, literally the movement of a fountain (hervorquellen) (Gadamer, Praise of Theory, 92). Humboldt develops the figure not in a superficial way, but with a feeling for the coalescing and abiding natural phenomenon of a spring-fed source, which gathers within the bowels of the earth and converges from its hidden reservoir as a wonder of nature: The mental power that intrudes, for its inner depth and fullness, into the course of world events, is the truly creative principle in the hidden, and as it were, secret evolution of mankind. . . . It is the outstanding peculiarity of

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the spirit, enlarging the concept of human intellectuality, and emerging in a manner unexpected, and, in the ultimate depths of its appearance, inexplicable. (Humboldt, On Language, 29) The constant outflow is caused by an overabundance and inexhaustibility of the source, which is a perfect image for Humboldt’s and Gadamer’s understanding of language. Language is never “deprived or depleted” (par. 15), it is not “used up” (par. 6). This is the feature that Gadamer elaborates in his appendix to the fountain reference. The study of classical sources “is so rewarding precisely because they always have something more to yield than has yet been taken from them” (TM, 502). 53. Humboldt, On Language, 56. 54. Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 185/“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 61. 55. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 62/Unterwegs zur Sprache, 164 .“Erst wo das Wort gefunden ist für das Ding, ist das Ding ein Ding. So erst ist es. Demnach müssen wir betonen: Kein Ding ist, wo das Wort, d.h. der Name fehlt. Das Wort verschafft dem Ding erst das Sein.” 56. Aristotle, Met. 7.1.1028a31 ‒‒ 32. 57. Aquinas, SCG, 1.16. 58. Lonergan, Verbum, 5. 59. This is not such a remarkable conception given the metaphysical presuppositions of Christianity. It is a remarkable and challenging idea when you remove the telos, which Gadamer does. 60. Humboldt, On Language, 55. 61. Herder, “Essay on the Origin of Language,” 87. 62. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 115/Unterwegs zur Sprache, 245. 63. Ibid., 124/255. 64. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 76. 65. For a recent discussion of the particulars of Thomist intellection, see Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 267 ‒‒ 329. 66. On the difference between Aristotle’s “immanent realism” or Hegel’s concrete universal and what Copleston calls Aquinas’s “direct universal” (A History of Philosophy, 2.2:111), Pasnau explains that Aquinas “does not defend what is known as immanent realism, the view that universals exist within material particular objets. Universal natures, for Aquinas, exist only within intellect. Outside of intellect, there are no natures that exist in more than one individual. . . . So although universal natures exist only in intellect, still those natures do exist in particulars, where they are individuated by the distinctive characteristics of the object to which they are attached” (Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 301).

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67. Recall that Aquinas believed angelic intellect to be intermediate between the intellect of man and God. 68. See De natura, sect. 275: “The activity of the soul is not from outside, since understanding is a movement toward the soul, on the one hand from the nature of the species which derives from such a quiddity, on the other hand out of the nature of intellect, the activity of which is not external.” chapter 10

The Three Differences

1. Hervorgang is an issuance, that which has emerged, and Aktualität is, in the medieval sense, that which is real, and so necessarily in act. It is without movement from potency to act, but pure actuality. Gadamer is simply repeating the enigma of divine procession. 2. Although there are several extant variants of this text, it is possible to tell the variant Gadamer explicated by referencing the direct quotes he provides. 3. See Lonergan, Verbum, 47 ‒‒ 66 et passim. Although this agrees with Aquinas’s statement in the De differentia, Pasnau explains that Aquinas has, more comprehensively, and more plausibly, three forms of cognition: “Aquinas distinguishes between three operations performed by intellect: (1) the grasp of indivisible, noncomplex ideas; (2) composition and division; and (3) rational inference” (Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 322). 4. “Zu-Ende-Gedachte,” par. 18. See also commentary, par. 12. 5. Aristotle, Met. 12.7.1072b7 ‒‒ 9. 6. I mean Kant’s antipathy toward the mystico-religious intuitionism and the cult of genius by the “Schwärmerei,” Herder, Hamann, and the Sturm und Drang (Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, 5 ‒‒ 63). 7. See commentary, par. 13. 8. See commentary, pars. 12 and 13. 9. See also ST, I, q. 58, a. 3; q. 79, a. 4 and a. 8. 10. Aquinas, In librum beati dionysii de divinis nominibus expositio, sect. 713. 11. There I treat among other things the common misconception that the mirror metaphor describes a kind of reflection that leads to the “reflective philosophy” that is anathema to Gadamer. Aquinas is quite explicit that this is not what he means: “But the mind brings itself to bear upon an object in two ways; directly and immediately, or indirectly and through something else, as when someone sees a man’s reflection in a mirror, and is thereby said to direct his attention on the man himself. . . . But it is an image, not because the mind is bearing directly on itself, but because through this act it can proceed further to bear on God” (ST, I, q. 93, a. 8).

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12. It is not called the “first” difference in the De natura. That is the schematism of the De differentia which Gadamer adopts. The De natura introduces differences and similitudes between the divine and human word throughout in no particular order. 13. “Ploce is the repetition of the same word under different forms or with different meanings in the same sentence . . . . Epanodos is the repetition of a word anywhere within the sentence, either in the same sense or in a different sense” (De Mille, The Elements of Rhetoric, 178). 14. Timaeus 37d. 15. TM, 400. 16. Pickstock refers to this as “a relay system of signification” (Milbank and Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas, 14). 17. Brennan, Thomistic Psychology, 172. 18. This idea is developed at length in chapter 7. 19. The German aids the sense here because copy and original are cognates of Bild —Abbild and Urbild. Thus the two appear as halves of a whole, as, to use Gadamer’s example, the reflection of a castle in a lake. 20. Gadamer is being overtly Hegelian here, and I have preserved the awkward Hegelianisms so as not to lose this point. Aufheben means both cancel and preserve, and there is no good translation for it. 21. Rabeau, Species. Verbum, 24. 22. Ibid., 13. 23. This does not seem to me to be the correct biblical reference for support, as the passage from Job clearly means that Yahweh in his authority does not repeat himself. The idea is really from Genesis, in the beginning was the Word. 24. In another place Gadamer writes, having taken the message from theology: “Es ist immer ein Wort, das wir einander sagen und das uns gesagt wird.” 25. Here again Figal is off. At the heart of the verbum section Gadamer proves to be promoting the essential hiddenness of being. 26. I should add that Gadamer could have found the ontological difference in Aquinas, or enough of it to make a sound connection with Heidegger. Here, for instance, is Aquinas on the problem of the many and the one: But there is this difference, that the form of the natural thing is a form individualized by matter, and therefore the inclination following it is determined to one, but the form intellectually grasped is universal, under which many can be comprehended. Hence since acts are concerned with singulars, among which there is none that is equal to the potentiality of the universal, the inclination of the will remains indeterminately related to many. For example, if an architect conceives the form of a house universally, under which houses of different shapes are comprised, his will can be inclined to build a house that is square or circular or of some other shape. (On Evil, 257 ‒ 258)

Notes to Pages 327‒‒338

435

27. “Now what does the word phusis say? It says what emerges from itself (for example, the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in appearance in such unfolding, and handling itself and persisting in appearance—in short, the emerging-abiding sway” (Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 15). 28. “For there are some things which with their full implications are not understood or are hardly understood, no matter how eloquently they are spoken, or how often, or how plainly” (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 133). 29. See, for instance, par. 19. 30. “In the relation of inner and outer, the essential moment of this emerges, namely, that its determinations are posited as being in negative unity in such a manner that each immediately is not only its there but also the totality of the whole” (Hegel, Science of Logic, 526). “[E]ach of the differences of form, the inner and outer, is posited within itself as the totality of itself and its other. For it is precisely through its other that each is what it is in itself, the totality of the relation” (528). 31. See, for instance, Figal, “The Doing of the Thing Itself.” 32. In Heidegger this unused portion of knowing becomes transformed into the great theme of withdrawal and forgetting that stands in the shadow of presence, “that gathering which beforehand has in its keeping and keeps hidden all that remains to be thought” (WCT, 150). 33. This positivity is expressed in terms of the productive ambiguity of language in Gadamer’s Plato studies. In the Parmenides, “that multiplicity was not a burdensome ambiguity to be eliminated but an entirety of interrelated aspects of meaning which articulate a field of knowing. The multiple valences of meaning which separate from one another in speaking about things contain a productive ambiguity. . . . The productivity of this dialectic is the positive side of the ineradicable weakness from which the procedure of conceptual determination suffers” (Dialogue and Dialectic, 111). chapter 11

Gadamer’s Summation and Prospectus (pars. 21‒‒ 22)

1. John Milton, Paradise Lost, I, 254. 2. Aquinas, On Christian Doctrine, 132. “Sed bonum auditorem non tam, si diligenter discutiatur, instruit, quam si ardenter pronuntietur, accendit. Neque enim haec humana industria composita, sed divina mente sunt fusa et sapienter et eloquenter non intenta in eloquentiam sapientia, sed a sapientia non recedente eloquentia” (De doctrina christiana, 4.7.21). 3. Gadamer says at a later point: “Language has no independent life apart from the world that comes to language within it. Not only is the world world

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only insofar as it comes into language, but language, too, has its real being only in the fact that the world is presented in it” (TM, 443). 4. This has its equivalent in what is known generically as process theology in the United States and elsewhere. 5. When P. Christopher Smith (“The I-Thou Encounter [Begegnung]”) refers to the “tacit Lutheran German semantic field” in which Gadamer’s notions of phronesis operate, Gadamer agrees but offers a note of caution about Smith’s statement: “[Smith] demonstrates how the voice of Luther, and thus the soulful voice of Christian biblical language, resounds on the semantic level, that is, in the vocabulary and the conceptual world within which my own thinking moved. This is made obvious without any false proximity assumed, and yet precisely because of it. How could someone who experienced his own formation to a large extent with German poetry not expect to have heard, among other things, the voice of Luther?” (“Reply to P. Christopher Smith,” 527). chapter 12

Gadamer and the Verbum Interius

1. Gadamer, TM, 457, 461. 2. Gadamer,“Dialogische Rückblick auf das Gesammelte Werke,” in Gadamer Lesebuch, 290, my translation. 3. Ibid., 289, 291, my translation. 4. Gadamer, Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History, 67. 5. Even in Truth and Method the play of language “proposes and withdraws,” arriving, “as it were, too late” (TM, 490/WM, 494). 6. Gadamer, Praise of Theory, 9. 7. “The universal under which the particular is subsumed continues to determine itself through the particular” (TM, 557). 8. Gadamer, Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History, 69. 9. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 37; Gadamer, Hegel’s Dialectic, 18. 10. Gadamer, “Towards a Phenomenology of Ritual and Language,” 27 ‒ 28. 11. Aristotle, NE 1.13.10.1102b. 12. Melanchthon, Opera quae supersunt omnia, vol. 23, 279. 13. Blanchette, The Perfection of the Universe according to Aquinas, 298. 14. Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” 127. 15. Aquinas, DN, sect. 277. 16. Dockhorn, “Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” 171. 17. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 39. 18. Erasmus, Christian Humanism and the Reformation, 100. 19. Heidegger, WCT, 206/WHD, 171. 20. Marx, Heidegger and the Tradition, 75.

Notes to Page 361

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21. Mounier, Personalism, xx–xxi. 22. Husserl, Ideas, 122. 23. A retrenchment has occurred in recent years around certain discussions of Gadamer’s verbum. A note of caution was sounded first in Kaegi’s critique of Jean Grondin’s wholesale identification of the verbum with Gadamer’s hermeneutics. And then Günter Figal published a scathing critique of the ontology of language implicit in Gadamer’s appropriation. Grondin himself notes an Akzentverschiebung (slight shift of emphasis) in Gadamer’s later thinking on linguisticality that restrains, in Grondin’s view, his identification with the verbum. What Grondin describes as a tonal shift in Gadamer’s later thought is perhaps a growing awareness in Gadamer over the decades of his exposure to world critique of the enormity of the distance to the community that the idea of linguisticality would seem to promise: The new accent on the boundary of language refers for its part not to something beyond linguisticality that would make understanding accessible as such. What lies beyond what is said remains always something to be said, and can only be discovered as such. However, the later Gadamer stresses here how seldom we succeed in this, since the very thing that we are actually able to formulate linguistically is extraordinarily uncommon. An insufficiency clings always to what is said. No word captures the inner word entirely. This inner word is that very thing that we are always trying to stammer out. We lapse mostly into popular and cliché-ridden patterns of comprehension that are very often quite superficial . . . . The inner word that is neither on this side or the other side of language, but rather lies in it, is equally the language which language constantly seeks and of which it is a trace. (Grondin, Von Heidegger zu Gadamer, 104; my translation) But this emphasis on finitude rather than universality leads Grondin to conclude that Gadamer’s linguisticality is no longer ontological: “Gadamer’s claim thus is not an ontological thesis concerning being, i.e., being in itself (that would be created from the outset linguistically), but rather a thesis concerning our understanding, namely, that human understanding in a necessary and enabling sense relies on linguisticality.” [Gadamers Ausspruch stellt also nicht eine ‘ontologische’ These über das Sein bzw. das Sein an sich (das von Hause aus sprachlich verfasst wäre), sondern eine These über unser Verstehen auf, nämlich die, dass das menschliche Verstehen in einem notwendigen und ermöglichenden Sinne auf Sprachlichkeit angewiesen ist] (103). I am less inclined to go so far. Even more assertively, Figal maintains that Gadamer “revokes” the earlier ontology of the word (“The Doing of the Thing Itself,” 122), and for support he points to a passage in a 1984 essay of Gadamer: “In this regard it is of

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decisive importance that ‘Being’ does not unfold totally in its self-manifestation, but rather withholds itself and withdraws with the same primordiality with which it manifests itself ” (Dialogue and Deconstruction, 25). Gadamer’s later shift is certainly the greater recognition of withdrawal — this is a genuine shift—but again there is no evidence for a revocation, and in fact in the very same essay Gadamer returns to the epochal discovery of the verbum (27). Gadamer’s greater embrace of finitude in his last years remains within his own dialectic. It is in turns more un-Hegelian and un-Heideggerian, because more singularly reliant on human community as the arbiter of philosophical standards. But all the more reason that this does not diminish his vision of the infinity that this humility, by contrast, reveals.

Appendix: Source Texts 1. Rather remarkably, the entire theme of this treatise is how the operation of the intellect serves as an analogy for the trinitarian procession. 2. At least through sect. 275, the author of the text is working at describing the phases through which understanding passes in relation to the inner word. 3. In medieval theology, a principium is “that from which something in some way proceeds; the starting point of being, or change, or knowledge, or discussion” (Wuellner, Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy, 97). 4. Gadamer highlights the Latin similitudo, which is much stronger than likeness or impression. Although summarizing the later scholastic history of the term, Meier-Oeser gives a fair sense of what is at issue with similitudo, which is “neither an icon nor an index in its Peircean sense. It is rather to be characterized as naturalis similtudo obiectiva only because it is a natural form representing on its own account (per se) the object. And this in turn is based on a particular nature of its being, which is produced by an intellect informed by a species. Similitude according to this interpretation, is not a two-term relation but rather (at least) a triadic relation: a concept is the similitudo obiectiva of x because it has been produced by an intellect that itself is affected by x in a certain way” (Meier-Oeser, “Mental Language and Mental Representation in Late Scholastic Logic,” 258). 5. The sense here seems to be that a similitudo that appears in the imagination, which is sometimes called a verbum, is not perfected in its articulation, but remains more of an adumbration or an image, and so the noun “ratio” is used descriptively to refer to the power of language to give a rational clarity to a meaning. In sect. 276 the phrase “perfected reasoning” (de ratione perfecta) is used in a similar way.

Notes to Pages 366‒‒380

439

6. This rather recondite discussion of medieval psychology has a close relation to an important issue of language and thought that is close to Gadamer’s heart. The ability to use language well is not the skill of ornament, but rather the ability to comprehend. Felicitous language is the direct product of the grasp of an issue, not a facility of style. 7. Here Aquinas marks a distinction between the human and divine word. The human word speaks of the world, that is, what is exterior to the person, whereas God utters Himself, which is to say, the Word of God is God. The fact that Aquinas considers the human word’s procession a defect highlights the fact that whatever language essentially is, it is that essentially in God. In other words, it is not a metaphor. 8. With the denomination “first procession” we see an indication of a system. The first point to make is that this first procession is already one stage in, i.e., after an impression from sense has already been taken up. The word exists imperfectly in imagination, memory, and speech (for different reasons), and perfectly in intellect, where it is in act. It remains vague and imagistic in the imagination, unactivated in memory, and plural in speech. 9. This image, taken from Plotinus, becomes pivotal for Gadamer all through Truth and Method. Language is that which is not exhausted by use, but rather replenished and augmented. 10. This difficult passage bears the heart of the distinction between direct and reflexive. It follows out the links in what Pinckett calls Aquinas’s “relay system of signification.” Even though and words are abstracted from external objects, they are nevertheless indebted to them, they must not be untrue to them. The word squares the mind with the world; trues the mind to the world. The owes its power to its fidelity. 11. The claim is the lynchpin for the argument in this section. 12. Aquinas’s psychology posits two distinctly different kinds of that relate to each other at different stages of the intellectual process. 13. This section seems to play on the double signification of prius and posterius as both a temporal and a hierarchical designation. 14. This passage seems to contrast two different senses of sequor: in the contrary-to-fact case the word is formed after the mind has done all its work and is still; in the actual case, the word is formed once the mind is engaged, and so it is formed after the mind has begun its work but not after it has finished. One must assume this is because the word is animated by the relay back and forth to the material object. The mind is already in act (not in potency) when the word is formed, since it is in the process of translating object to impression. The further step of translating impression to word is engaging in a project already underway. If I am trying to find the right word to describe an impression, I am already fully engaged in thought, and when I come upon the word, that

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word holds or contains the map of my intellectual journey, and I travel back along those paths to the thing I was trying to get hold of to feel the satisfaction of my achievement. 15. The logic here must depend on one of the doctrines that distinguishes different species, the active and receptive species, or practical and speculative species, and so in this one instance it was necessary to translate species to distinguish this usage from the usage up to this point. 16. I have moved away from a literal translation in this sentence to get at what I think is the meaning. The sense of “non enim est aliud a quo accipitur species, ab eo ad quod terminatur, sed idem” seems to be that the whole relation or process is defining. 17. In another place Gadamer writes, having taken the message from theology: “Es ist immer ein Wort, das wir einander sagen und das uns gesagt wird.” 18. 1 Cor. 10:4. 19. This pairing of the idea of metaphorical conversion and the phrase “rei exteriori voce prolatae” (literally, the thing exteriorized in the articulating voice) is tantalizingly more complex than the conventional sign theory. It would appear to be suggesting that the conversion that takes place in the scriptural practice actually results in something more than in the soul. We are suddenly in the territory of Gadamerian hermeneutics.



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Index

agency, 129, 195, 197 ‒‒ 98, 201 ‒‒4, 342, 356 ambiguity, 95, 105 assimilation, 148 ‒‒49, 154 Athanasius, 75, 77, 241, 246, 293 Avicenna, 294 Bildung, 18 ‒‒ 19 Bultmann, Rudolph Karl, 43 ‒‒45, 396n.14 Cicero, ix–x, xi, 21 communicatio Dei, 47, 79, 176, 191, 196, 233, 290, 337 communicatio idiomatum, 82, 241 ‒‒42 concept (Begriff ), 180 concrete universal, 190 confirmatio, 149 ‒‒ 51 Constantine, 76 convenientia, 21, 275, 298, 333 Council of Ephesus, 81 covenant theory, 38 Cusa, Nicholas of, 333 Cyril of Alexandria, 42, 96 ‒‒ 97 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 158 docta ignorantia, 26

458

Ebeling, Gerhard, 45, 232 ‒‒ 34 Eckhart, Meister, 344 emanation, 155, 160, 196 ‒‒ 97, 245, 284 ‒‒ 310 Epictetus, 47 ‒‒48 Erfahrung, 26 exchange, doctrine of, 81 ‒‒ 83, 92 form (forma), 115, 265 ‒‒ 68, 271 ‒‒ 78 formal indication (formale Anzeige), 210 ‒‒ 11, 213 ‒‒ 14, 278 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 95, 405n.79 Gregory Nazianzus, 42, 73, 77 Hamann, Johann Georg, 2, 392n.3 Hegel, G.W.F. and becoming, 106 and incarnation, 242 and the inner and outer, 435n.30 and totality, 228, 242 and Trinity, 295 Heidegger, Martin and Augustine, 419n.4 and becoming, 435n.27 and hermeneutics, 392n.10 and inner word, 393n.12

Index and language, 296, 305, 329 and memory, 409n.15 and Mitsein, 23 and showing/appearing, 306 ‒‒ 7 and temporality, 105 and totality (being-a-whole), 150, 328 and Vollzug, 5, 393n.13 and withdrawal, 326, 435n.32 Heraclitus, 40 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 242 ‒‒43 hermeneutics and Heidegger, 392n.10 and Jewish exegesis, 32 ‒‒ 36 Hilary of Poitiers, 83, 241, 245 ‒‒46 historicity, 23 ‒‒ 25 homoousios, 76, 77, 91, 241 humanism, 14, 21 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 277, 280, 330, 352, 430n.42, 431n.52 Husserl, Edmund, 361 imitation, 155 immanence/transcendence, 47, 75, 83, 88, 98, 106 ‒‒ 7, 113, 129, 132, 164, 166 ‒‒ 69, 174, 181, 186, 227, 299 increase of being (Zuwachs an Sein), 116, 120, 241, 295 Irenaeus, 42, 84 ‒‒ 85, 88, 247 Justin Martyr, 236, 240 ‒‒41, 246 lekton, 45, 51, 236 ‒‒ 37 Leo I, Pope (Leo the Great), 78, 81 ‒‒ 83, 86 living word, the, 11 ‒‒ 13, 21, 31 ‒‒ 33, 36 ‒‒ 39, 41 logos, 39 logos prophorikos/endiathetos, 45, 52 ‒‒ 59, 235 ‒‒ 37, 247

459

logos seminales, 79 ‒‒ 80, 93, 342 ‒‒43 orthos logos, 49 Luther, Martin, 66 ‒‒ 69, 137, 343 ‒‒45 Melanchthon, Philipp, 3 ‒‒4, 233, 392n.8 memory, 333 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 411nn.47, 51 microcosm/macrocosm, 46 ‒‒47, 49 ‒‒ 50, 59 Nicene Creed, 75 Parmenides, 204 ‒‒ 5 part/whole doctrine, 56, 57, 99 ‒‒ 100, 118, 123, 173, 230, 328 participation (methexis), 56, 108 ‒‒ 9, 119, 149, 198, 244 ‒‒45, 303 particular/general (one and many), 7, 10, 95, 111, 133, 142, 148, 162, 167, 184, 186 ‒‒ 89, 308, 346, 405n.58 person, 402n.3 Philo, 55 ‒‒ 62, 399nn.72, 73, 80 phronesis, 18, 26 Plato, 12 ‒‒ 13, 220, 222, 226 ‒‒ 27, 279 ‒‒ 80, 281 ‒‒ 82, 420n.8 Plotinus, 62 ‒‒ 65, 241, 272 ‒‒ 73, 327, 428nn.15, 16, 18 prolepseis, 51 proportion, 92 ‒‒ 95 reason (ratio), 49 recapitulation, doctrine of, 84, 188 reflection (Besinnung), 122 ‒‒ 23, 127, 180, 196 Richtungssinn, 26, 116. See also formal indication (formale Anzeige)

460

Index

similitude (similitudo), 153, 155 ‒‒ 56, 363, 438nn.4, 5 sociality, 7, 23 ‒‒ 24 species, 362 ‒‒ 63 Stoicism, 45 ‒‒ 52, 236 ‒‒ 37 subject, subjectivity, 99, 166, 175 ‒‒ 77, 186, 198, 354, 259 subjectivism, 338 substance, 77, 148, 119 symbol, 95, 184, 190



Theodore of Mopsuestia, 80 ‒‒ 81 Theophilus, 236, 246 transitivity, 102 typology, 84 ‒‒ 85 universal. See particular/general (one and many) Wirkungsgeschichte, 190

John Arthos is associate professor of communication at Denison University.