So whatever fruit Scripture bears it is going to bear
through its vines, its medium: language. Like any book, Scripture comes to us
in tongues. If the New Testament, or any Scripture, invokes, it invokes through
language; if it imagines, it imagines through words; if it encourages empathy,
it does so through the world occasioned by the text. How, exactly, does it do
so? What is it that words actually do?
These question, though a fascination of modernity and
postmodernity, are not novel; we have explored Augustine’s notion of signa and res in some depth. But our contemporary innovation has been, for
the most part, to emphasize two things: on one hand, that the link between sign
and signified is neither fixed nor essential, and on the other, that we change signa and res alike by referring through to and through them. We have
acknowledged , in short, that we are quite a bit more involved in language than
we once wanted to be.
This realization, that we are bound to the languages in
which we are also immersed, once occasioned a considerable amount of cultural
anxiety. And it has subsequently occasioned an even greater amount of complex
philosophical, psychological, and theoretical work. Naturally, such varied and
sophisticated work has proven to be of varying degrees of usefulness to
Christians reading Scripture.
But, for our purposes, the work of three scholars who
suggest, despite their differences, that language is tensive or unstable as a
result of a surplus or saturation of meaning may be most helpful. If they are
correct, then the linguistic form of
Scripture coincides with the wise content
of Scripture to describe humans and their psyches in a complex, tensive, and
holistic manner.
And if they are correct, words properly do serve as empathic, holistic
connection to others, and the interpretation of words remains essential to
healing transformation. Christians will not only have community because of a book. Christians will have, though
the guidance of the Holy Spirit, something like communion with a book.
So Christians who read the Bible would be fortunate if
our understanding through language was not itself accidental, if language had
not just happened to be a primary way in which humans engage the world and one
another. Indeed, if God has had any hand in it, either within its structures or
by its very nature, language would seek and foster human understanding.
Far from betraying our objectivity, if words actually
tied us to one another, if other people were the res toward which all our prolixity signaed, language would be boon rather than bane. If this were so, Sausuure’s
famed split between signifier and signified would address not the inherent
failure of language to mean what we have always thought it meant, but would refer
instead to the search for communication, connection, and understanding that we
share for simply being human. Empathy would find is very voice in language.
A number of theorists interested in psychology and
language alike have gestured profoundly in this direction. The Freudian
feminist Julia Kristeva has suggested that “our souls have been flattened and
emptied by the rhythms and images of our culture.” She has
written of the pragmatic break between affect and cognition, emotional drive
and cerebral signification that the theoretical breach between sign and
signifier symptomizes.
Naming cognitive understanding as the symbolic, and
physical drive or yearning as the semiotic, Kristeva recommends their
reconciliation through therapy. Such healing will look less like fusion and
more like tensive balance as the flattened self of modernity uses words
intentionally to articulate its desires and satisfactions in healthy, holistic
relation.
So it is certainly fascinating, to we who have read
Augustine, that Kristeva would articulate the moment of individuation as the
“thetic” break. This refers to the alienation between the self and the other
when the self realizes that it does not have what it desires and is different
from it.
Surely, if we are going to find an empathy that moves
in more than one direction, we will not find it here. Indeed, in some ways the
Kristevan interpreter is still more alone than the Augustinian one, for there
is no mimesis here, no imitation of the other, only self-expression in healthy
or pathological ways. Language in Kristeva’s scheme always reaches for the
other, but seeks mostly to ensure that the self is fully understood.
While we would certainly applaud such holism of
identity, language in this sense does not seem empathic as much as the yearning
for empathy. Christians who seek to love their neighbors as themselves,
especially as they read, explain, and hear proclaimed the Christians
scriptures, would rightly feel a disjoint here. Kristeva, it might seem, has
only gone halfway to the neighbor, or to love.
