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.Gen1.4-5
Here we have God portrayed as naming "day" and "night". Again, I don't think that it is very useful to ask what language. It happens here to be in English translated from Hebrew -which is the original language of the text. However, it would seem that the hebrews picked up what we know as 'Hebrew' from the Canaanites, having presumably spoken Aramaic in patriarchal times. So the point is the act of naming not the phonemes. In any case, we are surely not really entertaining the notion that God formed a vocal tract in order to speak the world into being and to name some of its parts, are we?
It does seem to me that portraying God as naming tells us that God affirms language. I say that because I am aware that there are those who, aware of the limitations of language which hermeneutics rubs our noses in, move from that awareness to viewing language as necessarily imperfect and therefore as a condition of fallen human existence to be overcome and removed in the Age to come. I see in this part of the passage a hint that language is part of God's purposes and is not necessarily allied with the fall. Of course it must partake of the fall, but hermeneutics is not a science that must disappear in the new heavens and the new earth. (If you fancy following that up, you could do worse than read The Fall of Interpretation, there's a synopsis here.)
The fact of God naming gives a legitimacy grounded in Ultimacy to the endeavour of language. The tasks of recognising similarities and differences and creating or refining semantic fields, of creating symbols to carry ideas, concepts and emotions between minds is a god-imaging task. In this passage we see God recognising reality and representing it in some way symbolically. To be sure it is tied to finiteness, createdness. But it is not thereby ungodly.
But it should be noted that the finitude is part of the point of language. It selects or highlights certain things about what we are aware of and leaves so many other things unlabelled, unsaid because they are not the focus. We can either assume others know them already or that they are not sufficiently important to name at that point for the purposes of communication then and there. God creates something finite, bounded and immediately it is capable of being symbolised. Yes, God knows with total immediacy every quark, molecule, energetic trajectory, cell, planet and galaxy, but to recognise boundaries, differences and similarities, is to do something more than 'merely' be aware of all and each. Recognition opens up into seeing finite things in themselves and in relationship, and that in turn opens into the possibility of representation in symbol.
I'm not convinced by those who write and speak about language as being in some way power over things. To me it seems that it is more akin to God seeing that what is is good; it is about recognising the way things are, understanding them to some degree, seeing them in relationship, affirming them. It is first an act of contemplation, even of thanksgiving-in-embryo and then it is a calling to focus for others. Far from being a sign of fallenness, language is other oriented of necessity in two dimensions: the signified is other and the receiver is other. Language represents an attempt to transcend the self; it is grounded in an agapic movement.
next articlette.
Filed in: Genesis God linguistics language
2 comments:
Andii
Your remarks about naming and power over things is interesting on two different horizons.
The first horizon concerns those who read the Bible as sacred text and intuit that as God named things it shows his power over them; then by extension "ah ha! Look in Genesis 2 the Adam names the animals and then names the female". The inference then drawn as part of a wider argument is that Adam as male has authority and power over the woman, and that pre-Fall their is a creation-based hierarchy where female is subordinated to the male.
Leaving aside here the entire subordination discourse, a point from Genesis that goes back to your observation about naming and power is found in Hagar's experiences of abuse at the hands of Sarai and Abram. In her story of desolation and exile she encounters the Lord (Genesis 16). As she is consoled her response: "so she named the Lord who spoke to her, 'you are El-roi'; for she said, have I really seen god and remained alive after seeing him?" (16:13) This is the only instance in the Bible where somebody confers a name on God, all other occasions God discloses his name to individuals or people groups. And what is also juicy is that here a female names God. If we inferred that naming gives power over things, then if Adam has power over the female, then it follows Hagar has power over God!
The second and different horizon is the hermeneutic of suspicion that language is used in power-plays to discriminate and exclude and disempower the "alien other" by those who control a given social setting, state etc. It would be interesting then to approach the hermeneutic of suspicion from the "subversive" angle that Genesis (a la the Hagar episode) could be understood in our context as over-throwing word-power games; because in the Hagar narrative the utterly marginalised and disempowered woman takes the bold privilege of conferring a name on the Creator of the cosmos, and in that narrative we likewise find the God who shows mercy with the disempowered over against those who manipulate and abuse relationships.
You're anticipating a bit Phil, but helpfully. I'm aware of the perspective you mention on Hagar. I'm still thinking about it and hope to tackle it in due course. These Homo Loquens posts are really a kind of thinking aloud, so I'm still assimilating my 'discovery' that I really wasn't convinced by the 'power over' thing and that it actually could be seen in a very different way.
I'm rambling a bit here, but grateful for the interaction; I'll be musing over it for a while. It may well turn up when [or if] I get as far as that in my series...
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