Homo loquens coram Deo [1]

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Gen1.1-5
Immediately there is an issue of how we understand the relaionship between the first 'God created' in relation to 'Let there be light'. To me, having theological a prioris with the creation out of nothing position, I would say that "Let there be light" is to be understood as an act bringing about the formlessness and void which was then ordered. So we have an act of performative language bringing about what is spoken. Then we have acts of naming of what has been brought about.

And there are questions that occur to me as a linguist about all of this. Now I don't read Genesis 1 as literal history, but it is interesting to work interpretively within the framework of the story. So I find myself wondering: what 'said' can mean without mouth to speak; what medium the signal is supposed to be carried through; what linguistic community is envisaged?

Now, there is a level at which these questions are clearly 'wrong' in that they are asking things that are beyond the purview of the story, particularly if it is not a literal story. (Of course, if it were a literal story, then these questions would be legitimate and the difficulty in coming up with sensible answers would tell against treating the story as being of a literal kind of genre). However, these are the kind of thing that occurs to a linguist to wonder about and I'm interested in seeing where they might go and whether it might be useful to go there.

"Said" seems to entail 'imagining' God -for the purposes of the narrative- as having a vocal tract and to be functioning within a medium capable of carrying sound. In other words the picture is literally contradictory to the rest of the narrative by envisaging it taking place in the world that is still to be created. So what are we to make of this? Well, it does play into the later stories which see God walking around and in anthropomorphic terms. It could be seen as connected to creating humans in God's image later in the same story. But if we leave aside the anthropomorphisms or rather, if we seek to find in them pointers to non-literal meanings or ideas about God (as all religious language must do, it's just that this is 'cruder' than we usually play with), then what could we say; how could it help us to understand God and the world better?

Performative language is different from 'informative' language. By that I mean that performative language does what it says rather than giving information. It's the 'hereby' stuff: "I hereby name this ship ...", "I take you to be my wife..." the naming is accompliched by the act of speaking, the wedding is accomplshed by the saying of appropriate words. It' a rough and ready definition, but hopefully it will do for now. God's "Let theree be light" is performative and as such doesn't need a hearer or a speech community; it is in itself an act of creation or shaping. It only needs the formless void to respond by giving up energy as light, or whatever.

The question is why it is presented as a speech-act and not, say, as a feat of engineering, or manual labour. Maybe because light is 'ethereal', though that would not hold for the subsequent acts of speeched shaping. I'm going to suggest that perhaps the important thing about it is that speech, words, hint at mind in a way that other kinds of actions do not. Speech is used among humans mostly for 'mind reading', so speaking is more closely associated with 'what's on your mind'. There's a closer relationship between intention and expression; less room for recalcitrance on the part of what is being 'performed upon'. For many people ther is a close relationship between language and thought because there is a lot of thought that is mediated and processed via language (not all, though, contrary to some post-modernist assertions).

Therefore, this "Let there be..." is both relatively effortless and hints at a very close connection to the mind of God. Here we do not have the effortful and violent myths of other cultures' creation stories with a god[de] or goddes having to make do with something that is being recycled from the body of an opponent, for example. Rather we have a clear expression of God's mind which can truly be called "good".

Next HLCD post.
Crosswalk.com - Genesis 1:
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