Beginning with the Word (Cultural Exegesis)

Modern Literature and the Question of Belief

Lundin, Roger

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441244840
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

In this addition to the critically acclaimed Cultural Exegesis series, a nationally recognized scholar and award-winning author offers a sophisticated theological engagement with the nature of language and literature. Roger Lundin conducts a sustained theological dialogue with imaginative literature and with modern literary and cultural theory, utilizing works of poetry and fiction throughout to prompt the discussion and focus his reflections. The book is marked by a commitment to bring the history of Christian thought, modern theology in particular, into dialogue with literature and modern culture. It is theologically rigorous, widely interdisciplinary in scope, lucidly written, and ecumenical in tone and approach.

1
Beginning with the Word

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. . . . And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

—John 1:1–5, 14

’Tis but thy name that is my enemy.

Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.

What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,

Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part

Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called,

Retain that dear perfection which he owes

Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name;

And for thy name, which is no part of thee,

Take all myself.

—William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

A Word dropped careless on a Page

May consecrate an Eye

When folded in perpetual seam

The Wrinkled Author lie

Infection in the sentence breeds

We may inhale Despair

At distances of Centuries

From the Malaria—

—Emily Dickinson, #1268

We begin with words. Without them, there would be no literature. We would have no poems or plays, no lyrics or stories, no memories or dreams, not even any names. With words, we pledge our love to one another, we rail against wrongs in our homes and injustices across the seas, we chart the course of the past, we map the contours of the future, and we remember what—and whom—we have lost.

But what are these things we know as words? What strength do they possess? What is the source of their power to “breed Infection” and make us “inhale Despair” centuries after they have been written or printed? What weaknesses might words reveal? What do they have to do with the gritty realities of our lives or the glittering visions we imagine for the future?

That words have power of some sort, virtually everyone would agree, including St. John, William Shakespeare, and Emily Dickinson. But beyond that point, out in the vast universe of language usage, the disputes begin and the battles are fought over the nature and meaning of words.

According to the Gospel of John, the Triune God provides the secret to the source and power of words. “In the beginning was the Word,” John announces, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” For John, the Word is personal and powerful beyond imagining. From the nucleus of the smallest cell to the edge of the farthest galaxy, at the heights of joy and in the depths of sorrow, the Word abides. Before “heaven and earth were created, there was the Word of God, already existing in closest association with God and partaking of the essence of God.”1

To describe the Incarnation and “its connection to all the past and all the future,” John used the Greek word Logos. This term can only be “faintly and partially imaged by ‘the Word,’” argues the eminent Victorian biblical scholar Brooke Foss Westcott, for “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.” In addition to pointing to a given revelation, the concept of the Logos also speaks of a redemptive purpose that has been revealed in human history and that was present “in the depths of the Divine Being before creation.” Yet until the Gospel of John was written, “no one had dared to form such a sentence as that which . . . declares the central fact of Redemption, in connection with time and eternity, with action and with being: ‘The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.’”2

From the beginning of the Christian era, the theologians of the church found in the Logos crucial resources for describing how God relates to creation and what the beautiful order of this world may reveal to us about him. “God is good,” St. Athanasius wrote in the fourth century, and “because he does not begrudge being to anything, he made all things from non-being through his own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ.” From among all the things he created, God chose to be “especially merciful toward the human race.” Since by the logic of our origin, we lack the power to live forever, God “granted [us] a further gift” to distinguish us from the rest of creation. In an act of charity, he created us “according to his own Image, and shared” with us “the power of his own Word, so that having a kind of reflection of the Word,” we might “be enabled to remain in blessedness and live the true life of the saints in paradise.”3

The Word secures the blessedness of the saints, and through its power God also binds, strengthens, and supports the structures of creation and imparts to human life the purposeful dignity it requires if it is to prosper and flourish. Through the power of the Word, we are made, sustained, and reconciled to God, and through the agency of words, we hear of God’s faithfulness in the past, God’s power in the present, and God’s promises for the future. “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation,” Colossians says of Christ, “for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (1:15–17). Astonishingly, according to John’s Gospel, the One through whom all things came into being was not content to leave the world he had made to its own devices. So, “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).4

All this is to say that the Scriptures, creeds, and early church councils bore witness to the intimate bond between the power and personality of God, as they are embodied and revealed in the Logos, the Word made flesh. Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar notes that from the beginning, Christianity challenged paganism to recognize all that the “personal God-Logos” had accomplished through his incarnate life, sacrificial death, and miraculous resurrection. All “the ancient world’s unifying principles” have been redeemed by the God who “has drawn close to the world” through the history of Israel and the Incarnation of the Word. “The world was created in this Logos, the true ‘place of the ideas,’ and can therefore be understood only in the light of this Logos.”5 In the words of an eminent twentieth-century historian, “history in terms of the embodied logos means history in terms of personality.”6

Yet unlike God’s Word, our own words cannot create something out of nothing and do not have the power to live forever. Indeed, as Shakespeare’s Juliet realizes, it is hard for us to pin down just what it is that our words can do. Consider the case of the two lovers. With the force of nature and the pulse of passion running through them, who or what can stand against them? No one. Nothing. Nothing, that is, but their names. She is a Capulet, he a Montague, and for generations a deadly feud has poisoned the relationship between their families.

Knowing that her family’s history of hatreds imperils her future as well as that of Romeo, Juliet asks a simple question. What does the name Montague have to do with the man she loves? After all, this name “is nor hand, nor foot, / Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part / Belonging to a man.” To Juliet a name may point to something—or someone—of incomparable value, but the name itself is of little worth. “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet” (II.ii., 40–44).

Or would it? A part of what it means to smell a rose has to do with everything we carry within us as we draw near to it. Equipped with language and animated by memories, we stoop to a rose with myriad associations already in mind. As we see and smell it, our experience slips into a continuum of contrasts and discriminations, and this enables us to know and name the thing for what it is. We recognize that it is a flower, a living thing, and not an inert object like a stone; in its usual state, it is sweet and not pungent, soft rather than abrasive, and it is red, white, or yellow rather than dark violet or black. We can situate the rose within a field of understanding because we have words to name our experiences, and when we find ourselves at a loss for words, we may turn to metaphor to open new worlds before us.

Still, Juliet’s question remains: “What’s in a name?” Before we can venture an answer, we need to stand back and take a wider view of the historical, theoretical, and theological dimensions of the question. For although that answer bears on literature, it has broad implications as well, and one of our ongoing concerns in this book will be to explore the myriad ways in which language, literature, and Christian thought mingle and mix in the life of the spirit and the culture of today.

What’s in a Name?

As she ponders the meaning of names, Juliet Capulet in many ways sounds like a dutiful graduate student wending her way through the labyrinthine paths of contemporary theories of language and interpretation. To her, a name is an arbitrary sign. It may point to a real person or an actual state of affairs, but it should never be accepted as a sufficient substitute for the real thing. Knowing that names carry with them a history of power and prejudice, Juliet is suspicious of the associations that cling to them, and she regrets how readily names can become markers in conflicts that have nothing to do with those who bear them. In turn, she believes it to be within her rights to rebel against those who might seek to define and limit her through the power of naming.

That is to say, Juliet is a lot like us; for when she asks, “What’s in a name?” Shakespeare is raising through her character in the late sixteenth century a concern about language that was to grow ever more pressing in the centuries to come. In simple terms, it is the question as to whether words somehow belong to reality and embody truths about God and the world or whether they are primarily signs employed by the powerful to order the world according to their purposes. We come upon debates about this matter in ancient Greek philosophy, we find them renewed in a provocative form with the rise of nominalism in late medieval thought, and in the past century, those arguments—driven by a new variant of nominalism—have resurfaced in powerful ways within the theory of language and the culture at large.

In speaking of nominalism, I am referring to a philosophical theory whose roots reach back to thirteenth- and fourteenth-century arguments about the laws of nature, the workings of the mind, and the power of God. At the heart of these arguments was a dramatic contrast between the laws of nature seen as something imposed upon the universe and those laws being seen as immanent within the structure of reality itself. The latter view was anchored in Stoic thought and the theory of the Logos. It held, in the words of Alfred North Whitehead, “that the order of nature expresses the characters of the real things which jointly compose the existences to be found in nature.” When we understand those things in their essences, we also are enabled to see them in their mutual relations to one another.7 This understanding of natural law, which took the world to be “impregnated with reason,” dominated the Aristotelian science that was promoted by the early medieval church and its centers of learning.8

What came to be known as nominalism first surfaced in the late thirteenth century and became fully developed in the thought of William of Ockham. As historian Francis Oakley explains, Ockham grounded natural law solely on the arbitrary, unobliged will of God; as a result, that law ceased to be a “dictate of reason” built into the creation and became instead “a divine command” addressed to it. By grounding natural law and ethics in the divine will, Ockham and other nominalists believed they were vindicating and preserving the “freedom and omnipotence of God.” Yet the price to be paid was steep, for their defense of the divine will came “at the expense of the ultimate intelligibility of the world.” Order could no longer be discerned as being immanent within the structures and relationships of creation; instead, it was assumed to have been imposed upon creation as a result of “the peremptory mandate of an autonomous divine will.”9

The nominalists considered “all real being” to be individual and particular (as Juliet does when she dwells on the “dear perfection” of Romeo). They took universals to be fictions because “words did not point to real universal entities but were merely signs useful for human understanding. Creation was radically particular and thus not teleological.”10 This meant that the ends of human life—the goals, virtues, and visions to which men and women aspire—are not embedded within the creation and its interlocking relationships. Instead, they have been imparted to the world by a transcendent God whose will remains mystifyingly obscure.

To see the link between this medieval philosophical movement and contemporary theories of language, we can turn to a provocative essay by philosopher Richard Rorty. Titled “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” this work opens with a bold declaration: “In the last [nineteenth] century there were philosophers who argued that nothing exists but ideas. In our [twentieth] century there are people who write as if there were nothing but texts.” 11 According to Rorty, the idealists believed that all of life and human experience were embedded within a realm of transcendental ideals; the textualists assume that same experience to be entangled in an infinite web of words, beyond wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Beginning with the Word
• 2. The Sign in Our Time
• 3. Picturing the Truth
• 4. From Signs to Stories
• 5. Modern Times
• 6. “I Will Restore It All”
• 7. Defending a Great Hope
• 8. Dwelling in Possibility
• 9. A Good Man Is Hard to Find
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover