Homo Loquens Coram Deo [5] Adam names the animals

out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field;

Genesis 2:19-20a

I hope you will excuse me commenting on God's declaration of the non-goodness of Adam's aloneness, for the moment. Perhaps I'll come back to it. For the moment, I will simply say that it seems interesting that the 'non goodness' seems to relate to the previous posting on this topic about the imagination, 'not' and the potential for ill.

It is this naming by Adam that seems to be the most fascinating. And again, it doesn't seem to me to be about taking power over. It seems, once again, to be more of a contemplative act. Perhaps more than contemplative: an act of understanding, of taxonomy; and act of seeing in connection with other things and in differentiation. In actual fact, in doing this we seem to have a parallel to what we have seen of God's naming in chapter one.

Of course, the difficulty we have with that is that it is almost certain that chapter one has a different origin to that of chapter two. However, we may want to ask further questions of potential intertextual histories, but I don't want to hang around that issue here; merely note that I think that perhaps this theological similarity may indicate that there is one, in God's providence.

I'm very interested in how this naming is presented. It is not something that Adam snatches at while God isn't looking, it is not an act of fallen humanity [though it is intriguingly bracketted by things that later contribute to the fall, perhaps more of that later]. Rather it is an act which God engineers by bringing before Adam what is to be named. And althought it is in the passive, there is more than a hint of Divine endorsement in "that was its name". It is as if God is giving Adam -that is humankind- the freedom to make connections and discoveries, taxonomies and poetries. In short, it seems to me, it is implied in this little scene that God opens up a space for human culture to evolve with some degree of freedom from God. God is not creating a Divinely-sanctioned Borg collective where individuality is effectively erased and cultural development is only permitted along certain very tightly constrained lines. No, Adam can make names, give names and those names stand. Humans can contemplate the world, explore its nature, its components and its 'inter-ousiality' and assign signs and codes to think further and together about it and that sign-empowered marshalling of thinking understanding and celebrating is allowed to stand; it is accepted by God. God seems to want to see what we will make of the Creation, how we will understand it and wonder at it and how we will speak of it. And when I write 'speak', I mean to include the languages of the arts as well as the more 'scientific' or formal linguistic registers.

What I'm not yet sure I have a reflection on is the matter of whether plants and other non-animal things not being named is significant for these purposes ...

Last posting in this series ...

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