There is an idea in Western thought which in Gadamer's opinion gave a totally new and deeper dimension to the being of language, preventing, as it were, the forgetfulness of language from being complete1. Firstly do we ask: what does he mean by this forgetfulness of language? This forgetfulness came through Greek philosophy understanding the word as a mere name which has nothing to do with the true being of a thing it is representing, but is only substituting it. There has to be a natural union between the word and the thing. It is not only a matter of pure ideas as Plato saw it nor the pure forms as seen by Aristotle. The word is not an empty tool without any real substance to it.
This new idea which came to rescue the true meaning
of language was the Christian idea of Incarnation. This new
dimension, feature of language as
being will
be the subject of this essay. I am going to have a closer look at
the inner
word
which has been the subject of many philosophers from Plato, Thomas
Aquinas to Gadamer himself. I will try to open up the true richness
of its meaning, the whole world of its own through metaphors and
writings of these great thinkers.
Before we
investigate more deeply into the mystery of Incarnation, let us
unlock the concept of language as a
being,
which has much more empirical approach to it than a pure abstract
conceptualism or speculation could ever have. Language as a being
refers to something which has life in itself, which is living,
breathing, changing like an organism, not just a combination of some
lifeless letters written on a sheet of paper or engraved on a
tombstone. This reminds us of living legends, myths or ancient songs
passed over from father to the son. This is a living tradition, not
science invented as a mere convention by the wise men behind the
closed doors. No, it is a free and independent child of nature.
We
as human beings are also children of the nature. But what is so
special about us is that we are in a different way in this world than
other living beings? We are rational beings, we have a free will and
we are able to understand. "In every being which understands
there must be a word."2
And this word we are talking about is not primarily dependent on its
outer form, its expression, but it is firstly and essentially inner.
Thus we come to the notion of inner word as already understood by
Plato. And this inner word, the basis of all languages and
communication, is not a tiny fragment or seed of something greater –
it constitutes our whole being. We are in this world through being in
language.
So
how is our very being connected with language? Language is something
much broader and all-embracing than just a system of signs, grammar
or speech we are used to understand it. If we read the beginning of
the Gospel of John, "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God,"3
our mind broadens far across the universe and yet we see that this
universe can be hidden from the physical eyes in a tiny little human
heart, which cannot be so tiny after all if we consider things in the
light of invisible, which surely in the words of the Little Prince is
much more important than the visible appearance: "Here is my
secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see
rightly; What is essential is invisible to the eye."4
We
read in the Gospel of John that "in
the beginning was the Word" and
"the Word was God". Thus it is not just the universe which
is in our hearts and minds, but the inner word is somehow mystically
connected with something which has no limits, is beyond the universe
itself and our understanding, being the cause of everything, being
the very Being itself. So we ask: how can the language be a mere
tool, some empty words said without care? Even for Plato, who had
never read the Gospel of John nor heard about Incarnation, the
"dianoia,
the pure thought of ideas is silent, for it is a dialogue of the soul
with itself".5
This word of the heart, logos, is close to the spiritual aspect of
verbum, the scholastic interpretation of word, but it lacks the
substance and "flesh" which doesn't let it float far away
into the spheres of pure thinking. This Plato's promised land of
ideas conceals the true nature of language, creating a gap between
the original and the copy, the things and the words.
So in our endeavor we try to rebuild this natural
union, to make a bridge over the gap between the word and its initial
source, its origin, through the concept of Incarnation. Why? Because
the historical event of the birth of Jesus Christ, the Word made
flesh, was the very reason for the world to know about the inner life
of Trinity, which became the basis of the new understanding of
language. Augustine and the scholastics used Greek ideas to explain
the Gospel of John, giving a totally new dimension to language and
liberating the Greek thought of its pure abstraction.
"If the Word became flesh and if it is only in the incarnation
that spirit is fully realized, then the logos is freed from its
spirituality, which means, at the same time, from its cosmic
potentiality."6
Thus the spirit and the flesh must not only be united, but the spirit
attains its full perfection only in becoming real, in becoming a
living reality and must never be opposed to flesh as was considered
by the manicheanistic concept.
The other effect which the "redemptive event"
of Incarnation brought into Western thought was the essence of
history. It brings the attention from the ideality of meaning, from
the immutable ideas and concepts, into this world with its course
through time, to the human existence, elevated hence to a higher
level through the decision of divinity to become human, whence the
need for the human perfection. In a word, it is not enough only to
meditate, to contemplate the pure ideas and form conceptions.
Philosophy has to be active, it has to become Socratean again, it has
to preach on the streets and marketplaces as a living example of
wisdom. It has to ask questions again, it has to wake up from its
self-admiration and pride pretending to have ready answers for
everything. It has to realize its limits and finitude by confronting
itself with the Infinite and Limitless. It has to act, because God
acted. It has to open up, because God opened up his immensity. And in
spite of philosophy's humble self-recognition it has to realize
itself and not lie comfortably on a stove like Ivan the Fool, whose
main concern was to avoid all activity and effort, even though his
meditativeness proved to bear much more fruit than the simple fooling
around of his older brothers. The inner word has always the
potentiality to be uttered, to be active, to be visible and to have
consequences. "Word is pure event".7
So the early Christian Fathers used the Stoic
antithesis of the inner and the outer logos to explain the mystery of
Incarnation. But the real importance of this new concept is that in
being uttered the inner word is not changed, it doesn't lose anything
in becoming exterior, because it is linguistic from the very
beginning. "The greater miracle of language lies not in the fact
that the Word becomes flesh and emerges in external being, but that
that which emerges and externalizes itself in utterance is always
already a word."
And through this miracle of language the mystery of Trinity, the
intellectual generation of the second person in God is explained.
Now we must ask: what exactly is meant by this word?
How do we define it? "It
is fitting that what is within our soul, and which is signified by
our external word, be called a “word.”"8
The external word is only signifier of the signified, of the meaning
of things reflected innerly and hence the inner word is in a way much
more truely a word than the exterior one, which is only the form of
the essence attaining visibility. The inner word is already perfect,
it really doesn't have to be uttered to be perfect, because it is a
consequence of understanding. It is formed by the one who understands
through the act of understanding. And as understanding is always an
action which proceeds from the intellect and because the word is
always likeness and notion of the thing understood, then in
understanding itself the word is a likeness and notion of the
intellect itself. In this way the human mind's understanding of
itself has a similarity with God's understanding of itself, which as
a process generates a second person in the likeness of its generator.
By calling this generation of a new divine person the Word, the
Gospel of John stresses the intellectual meaning of this generation,
which is different from a physical one. We must not forget that God
is a spiritual being and his intellectual birth was prior to his
physical birth as a man.
So there is a similarity in God's becoming
exteriorized through becoming flesh by becoming a man and the man's
utterance of the inner word, whence it becomes exteriorized. Although
the divine incarnation was perfect in the sense that God became man
only once and perfectly, we know that human mind needs many words
even to express just one simple thought. "The fact that the
verbum is spoken differently in different languages, however, means
only that it cannot reveal itself through the human tongue in its
true being." The human word remains always imperfect and finite.
God understands in an instant the whole universe and
itself in one single perfect thought, the Word, which contains his
whole intellect. "If the whole of the divine mind is expressed
in the divine Word, then the processual element in this word
signifies something for which we basically have no analogy." We
can never put our whole mind in words, least into one single word.
And this is not all to it. We cannot create anything with our
thoughts or words. Our inner word doesn't produce anything visible
outside itself and yet God made everything, the invisible and the
visible, out of nothing in one single Word. "Insofar as, in
knowing itself, the divine mind likewise knows all beings, the word
of God is the word of the Spirit that knows and creates everything in
one intuition."9
Thus we see that the divine intellect and the human
intellect, the divine Word and the human word differ immensely, even
if they have many things in common. Firstly we will look with Thomas
at the differences of these two sources of thinking and
understanding. The first difference is in potency. Human word is
already potential before it is uttered, it is capable of being
formed. If we start to think, there starts a whole process of
thinking from memorizing something, something is coming to our mind,
but it is not yet finished, "thought out to its conclusion".
The human mind acts rather like a young calf first time on a spring
field. "He
maketh them also to skip like a calf; Lebanon and Sirion like a young
unicorn."10
The mind hurries from one thing to the other, stops at this and that,
looking for a perfect concept, expression of its thoughts through
inquiry and thoughtfulness. And once the word is ready, it creates
nothing new, it has its existence in being an image, presence of the
thing it is reflecting like a reflection in the mirror. "The
word is
like a mirror in which the thing is seen."11
And in this mirror we do not see the path through which the mind came
to the conclusion, the perfect reflection of the thing. We do not see
the green valleys or the flowery fields on which the calf has
skipped. But it's different with the divine mind.
Second difference comes from the incompleteness of
the human word. Although the word in itself as a perfect reflection
is complete, it doesn't express the mind completely. The mind is
never completely present to itself, i.e. it can never imagine or
behold itself in front of its spiritual eyes as a perfect form. The
mind's object is primarily the
other,
something or someone, and it can reflect this other completely. Thus
as there are many things and many beings in this world, there
necessarily have to be many words to reflect them, not of course at
the same time, but one by one, randomly, accidentally. There is a
certain unpredictability to the human mind as we saw with the
metaphor of the young calf. Thus the variety of words, this mind's
"fooling around", does not mean that the words are in any
way deficient. This multiplicity of words makes up for the
imperfectness of the human mind which really doesn't know what it
knows. The human intellect is always a much deeper and richer ark
than it can grasp at one single look. This keeps it humble.
Thirdly we come to
the randomness or the accidental character of the human mind.
"Whereas God completely
expresses his nature and substance in the Word in pure immediacy,
every thought that we think (and therefore every word in which the
thought expresses itself) is a mere accident of the mind."12
The thought cannot wholly realize itself in any of its constantly
formed conceptions. This is perhaps due to the fact that human mind
is captivated by the time, but divinity is free from any chains of
time and space. Divine intellect is in eternity, but we are temporal.
But in this incapacity for completeness, in this constant struggle to
overcome the difficulties in understanding, in expressing oneself,
the human mind reveals its infinity and has its freedom for
constantly new endeavors, adventures, conquests and victories over
oneself. The infinitude of finitude becomes infinite.
So we come to the conclusion that in human mind "the
inner mental word is not formed by a reflective act"13
It is always directed forward, towards the thing it is reflecting and
not back towards his own thinking. Even though the word remains
within itself, it isn't a relationship with itself, but with the
other, the thing it is reflecting. Human thinking is not primarily
self-reflecting as in the divine mind, which has all the information
needed for forming the one single Word within itself. The word in
human mind is not expressing itself but the thing intended. Thomas
gives it a beautiful metaphor: "The word resembles light, which
is what makes color visible"14
The word isn't the color itself, but draws the essence, the meaning
out of the thing by reflecting it, by shedding light upon it and
making it thus visible to the mind. It is like a magic unity which
works only in light, not in the darkness. If there is no sun, the
colors turn into nothingness. Light makes things alive and visible.
The things become visible in our mind through understanding.
As for the divine mind, Thomas gives another
metaphor which sets us as if into a beautiful garden of paradise,
where there is a constant light without shadows or change. The Sun of
this garden is the Beatific Vision in the form of a fountain. As the
inner word and divine Word have a similar processual character, this
emanation, from which something flows is not diminishing the amount
of the water flowing from the mind as from the fountain. This
processual image of a fountain, where the water never ends and is
constantly circulating, is applicable to both, but the divine
fountain is more than just a flow of thoughts. It is the living
water, Life itself. "With
you is the fountain of life."15
What does this image of a fountain as a source of
living water mean? This means that it is the source of all creation,
giving life to all living beings and existence to all inanimated
things. But this ability to give existence, to create, is life
itself, because it is a vital force behind everything, governing
everything and keeping everything in its existence. This fountain
"has an unfailing flow and a causality for producing things
continually without undergoing any change, being a living fountain
which is not diminished in spite of its continuous outflow; whereas
collected water, that is not living water, is diminished when it
flows out, and is used up"16
So the human mind is in a constant flow producing the ideas it is
thinking and is thus sharing in the infinitude of the divine mind. It
was made in the image of God after all.
But besides the similarity which human mind has with
the divine mind, there is also a similarity of the incarnated Word
with the infinitude of human words. The Gospel, being the Word of
God, is preached by different preachers at different times through
history. The Word becomes historical. It needs a constant repetition
to be alive, a constant interpretation to be understood by all the
ages and peoples, which have their beginning with this living water
of a fountain called Life. This Word is becoming daily and constantly
flesh and blood on the altars behind the visible signs of the
sacrament. "Jesus
said to them, "Very truely I tell you, unless you eat the flesh
of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
Whoever
eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, has eternal life. For my flesh is
food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.""17
Surely he did not mean that we should eat his real flesh and drink
his real blood, but that we should have through the sacramental
communion a spiritual share in him, in this living water called Word,
to grow in perfection and to raise our minds to the divine, as the
divine mind descended to the human mind. We share in God's spirit as
he shares in our flesh. This is a perfect union.
Now
we come to the other aspect of human existence as a rational being,
his will. As we saw with the human intellect's capacity to understand
things through thinking, the will is connected with its capacity to
love. There is the same pattern here. The human love is primarily
directed not to itself, as it is with the divine mind, but to the
other, as we saw with the understanding. Because human mind is
imperfect, it needs the other to be perfect. It seeks this otherness
in the divine things and in the divine book, his creation. It wants
to understand something outside of itself, because it is imperfect
and in need of perfection. Being the image of Perfection it will
always have this longing for perfection. The same longing it has in
his will. As the human being is imperfect, it wills, it needs
the otherness to make him perfect. He reaches out for the divine
perfectness in all its manifestations – be it the nature, wisdom or
its fellow creatures.
According
to Thomas, "As complete understanding not only grasps essence
and in essence all properties but also affirms existence and value,
so also from understanding's self-expression in judgment of value
there is an intelligible procession of love in the will"18.
Thus the basis of true love is a judgment made by the intellect about
something which is valued to be good. Firstly there has to be the
understanding and then the act of will to love. Thomas bases the
whole concept of the Holy Spirit on this construction.
It
is not enough to merely understand. There has to be an evaluation, a
moral certitude by which something is considered to be good, wise or
beautiful. Without this evaluation the understanding would have no
sense. There would be no reason for this complex apparatus of a human
mind, made in the image of God, just to register and aknowledge the
colors of a burning sunset or the enchanting smell of a blossoming
jasmine, if it did not have an ability to find pleasure in the
qualities of these phenomenons and so to enjoy thus the gifts of the
nature, the book of divinity itself. Whenever our hearts are filled
with wonder, we instinctively rise our hearts up and express a silent
gratitude to the unknown or not so unknown author of these miracles
we experience in our life.
Thus
Thomas postulates, that "in everyone who understands there must
also be a will" and "the basic act, to which all other acts
of will are to be reduced, is love"19.
Firstly, we have the intellect, which is the attribute of God the
Father. Then we have the word, the product of understanding, which is
the attribute of God the Son. And then we have the will, which is the
attribute of God the Holy Ghost. Thus we see that human mind is truly
an image, a reflection of the inner life of Trinity and hence is of
greatest help in explaining these mysteries we would otherwise not be
able to approach. On the other hand these mysteries broaden our
understanding of language, human understanding and love. Are not
these three notions in need of a deeper dimension, having a totally
alienated meaning in modern thinking which seems to be in
forgetfulness of certain aspects of them?
In
developing his concept of the Holy Spirit, Thomas points out the
"difference between the presence of the beloved in the intellect
and its presence in the will of the lover"20
The beloved is present in the mind per
similitudinem speciei,
in the similarity of species. For example, the mind acknowledges the
similarity of the eyes of its beloved to the stars blinking in the
darkness of night, the likeness of its lips to the freshly picked-up
red strawberries or the likeness of his voice to the burble of a
brook filled with a chrystal-clear water. "Thy cheeks are
beautiful as the turtledove's, thy neck as jewels... My beloved is
like a roe, or a young hart... Who is she that goeth up by the
desert, as a pillar of smoke of aromatical spices, of myrrh, and
frankincense, and of all the powders of the perfumer? "21
In
the will the beloved is present dynamically,
not through similarity as in the intellect. The beloved is in the
will of the lover "as the term of a movement in the movement's
proportionate principle"22.
How are the to understand this dynamic presence? How can the term of
a movement be in the movement's proportionate principle? This is
explained by final causality: the end determines the agent, the
object is projected into the way through which it is reached. By this
final causality, the presence of the beloved in the lover is the
amari,
the
loved one, which becomes a beloved not in itself, but in the lover.
But this is not all to it. "The
amari of
the beloved in the lover is one and the same act as the amare
of
the lover for the beloved."23
The amari
and the amare
become
united in the lover's will.
How are we to
understand this? The mythical concept of the Amor might be helpful
here. In the mythical thinking, Amor sends his arrow into the human
heart, becoming thus "infected" by the love towards of an
object which he finds beautiful or worthy in his mind. The object of
his affections becomes part of his inner life through its dynamical
presence by the constant will towards it. The act of love and the
presence of the beloved melt into the same entity and become
inseparable. Without the will and its ability to love there cannot be
the presence of the beloved in his mind. Without the presence of the
beloved in his mind there cannot be the act of love in his will. Thus
Thomas determines the very nature of love.
Why does he need to
determine the nature of love? He needs it in order to show the
difference between the generation of the Word in God and the
procession of love as the third divine person in the mystery of
Trinity. This procession of love in the will is not a reproduction
per
similitudinem speciei,
as it is with God the Father pouring out all of his being into one
single Word, his Son. Love is not in the will per
similitudinem speciei.
It is in the will "as a goal is in tendency to the goal"24
Since God understands, He must have a will and this will cannot be
distinct from the divine substance or the divine intellect. It must
necessarily be in act, not just in potency as in human being, because
in God there is no potency. Since the basic act of will is love, God
must be actually
loving.
We see the difference here between divine and human love, the human
one very often being only in a state of potency, of possible
realization. It cannot be so with God. God's love is always active,
because loving is his very essence. God is Love itself in the similar
way that he is Wisdom and Goodness and Life and Beauty itself.
Thus as the divine
Word is the result of a self-reflection, so it is with the divine
love. The very object of his love is the infinitude of his own
perfection. "The proper object of divine love is the divine
goodness which is identical with God."25
But as love is a dynamic presence, the love of God for God involves
the dynamic presence of God in God. The object of His love, the
beloved in this case, is God himself and so the divine amari
must
be present
in
God as the lover. Since divine love, divine will and divine being are
one and the same entity, it follows that the dynamic presence in God
is not mere dynamic presence but God himself. In the similar way that
the Word of God is not mere word or thought but God himself, thus the
love of God is not mere accidental act, as it is with human beings,
but God himself. Thomas develops his concept of the Holy Ghost in the
mystery of Trinity as a procession of the third person as love.
And this love
doesn't proceed only from one divine person, but from both of them.
"There cannot be the dynamic presence of the beloved in the
lover's will, unless there first is intellectual conception."26
And its not the concept but the conceived, the Word, which is loved.
The divine love is between the divine Word and the one from which it
proceeds. As the
act of love is partially caused by the will and partially by the
object presented to the intellect, as we previously saw, it follows
that if the object is necessary sine
quo non to
the act of love, then the Word is necessary sin
equo non to
the procession of the Holy Spirit. The consubstantiality, the union
between the three divine persons is essential and necessary.
But this procession
which becomes the third person in God can never be said to happen in
the human being. The other human will never creates through the act
of love another person in his mind. We can only metaphorically say
that love as Amor has an active role in the process of one becoming a
lover and the other as a loved one. But nevertheless the concept of
the procession of love in the divine will gives us a deeper
understanding of the very nature of love. As the human mind is
imperfect and accidental in its thinking, so the human will is
imperfect and accidental in its loving too. For God, being perfect
and infinite, cannot in his thinking and loving be imperfect or
accidental. Human heart has the same multitude of loves as it has the
words, because there are so many things to be thought of and loved.
There is a vast ocean of created beings and things to be loved - all
kinds of birds and animals, beautiful moments to be treasured, good
souls to be met. But in one thing the human being has analogy with
the divine – in loving the special one, weather it is its kindred
spirit or the divinity itself who is totally ruling its its heart.
This imperfectness
which yearns to become perfect through dialogue with the other,
weather through a silent conversation between two hearts or
understanding through unuttered inner words, is so characteristic to
human existence, that it creates a language of its own. The language
is essentially a dialogue, weather with oneself or with the other.
There has to be a question and the response.
"Children and lovers likewise have "their" language,
by which they communicate with each other
in a world that belongs to them alone."27
This may be a language of signs, looks, gestures, symbols, whose
meaning is only known to those involved. This is never a mere
convention or agreement. It has grown naturally between them,
becoming part of their world through the course of time. Language is
a way of being, not a form or idea. It has a soul and a heart, it has
its flesh and potentiality to be uttered. The Incarnation gave it a
necessity to be actively uttered, as it gave the necessity to love
actually and
truly, because the uttered words and visible signs of love are the
images of God's perfect thinking and loving, which did not restrict
itself with its inner well-being, but sacrificed itself in the
redemptive act of, firstly, becoming flesh and, secondly, offering it
as the satisfaction for the imperfection of human thinking and love.
1Gadamer,
Truth and Method, p. 417.
2Thomas
Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St. John.
Part
I: Chapters 1, Lecture 1. Translated
by James A. Weisheipl, O.P. Magi Books, Inc., Albany, N.Y.
3Gospel
of John 1:1.
4
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The
Little Prince.
5Gadamer,
Truth and Method, p. 4O8.
6Ibid,
p. 418.
7Ibid,
p. 418.
8Thomas
Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St.
John.
Part
I: Chapters 1, Lecture 1, 25.
9Gadamer,
Truth and Method, p. 423.
10Psalms
29:6.
11Gadamer,
Truth and Method, p. 424.
12Ibid.
13Ibid,
p. 425.
14Ibid.
15Psalm
35:10.
16Thomas
Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St.
John.
Part
I: Chapters 1, Lecture 1, 94.
17John
6:53-55.
18Bernard
J.F. Lonergan, The Concept of Verbum in the Writings of St.
Thomas Aquinas. Amor procedens, p. 376.
19Ibid.
20Ibid.
21Solomon's
Canticle of Canticles, 1:9, 2:9, 3:6.
22Bernard
J.F. Lonergan, The Concept of Verbum in the Writings of St.
Thomas Aquinas. Amor procedens, p. 377.
23Ibid.
24Thomas
Aquinas, Contra Gentiles, IV
Of God in His Revelation, 19 § 4, 9.
25Bernard
J.F. Lonergan, The Concept of Verbum in the Writings of St.
Thomas Aquinas. Amor procedens, p. 377.
26Ibid,
p. 378.
27Gadamer,
Truth and Method, p. 407.
