Friday, October 20, 2006
(4:46 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Literal Truth
Today I finished my crash course in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and so when someone commented asking if the "two natures in one person" doctrine of the Incarnation was "a literal truth," I have to admit that I didn't even know what that means. The same with "metaphorical," which seems to be very much in vogue in religious discourse these days, particularly among the liberal crowd. "Literal" seems to designate a truthier type of truth, whereas "metaphor" is a smarter, more nuanced type of truth. Take your pick!Neither of them makes sense to me, though I'm more annoyed with "literal" simply because I hear about it more. "Literally true" -- the words correspond perfectly to the reality. What would that even mean? What does it even mean for a scientific study to be "literally true"? Why is "literally" considered a stronger modifier for "true" than, say, "really" or "actually"? Perhaps it's that "literal" is understood to exclude all other options. There can be many interpretations of a text, but only one "literal" meaning (assuming, of course, that there is one established text of the text in question).
That's the appeal of fundamentalism: it removes the options. In actual fact, fundamentalism isn't a literal reading -- a point that far too many secular people concede in advance. What fundamentalism does is make the rhetorical claim that it's the literal truth. Because there can by definition be only one literal reading, everything else looks insecure, floating off into the ether. Fundamentalism is only possible in modernity, though, only possible once the printing press has made exact reproduction of a text possible. It doesn't do much good for God to mechanically dictate to the original author when human error will introduce mistakes afterward. The earlier fundamentalists were clever -- they claimed that the King James Version of the Bible was "re-inspired," thus rebooting the process of textual transmission and establishing it on firm mechanical foundations. This fit in well with the univocal, mechanical universe of scientism.
Fundamentalism is not bad because it goes against empiricism. Fundamentalism is the bastard son of empiricism. Fundamentalism is the Christian religion as reimagined by vulgar empiricists. It is the straw man that one day came to life -- a real-live version of Christianity that's all based on true or false propositions, relying on the premise of a univocal, mechanical universe that science itself has abandoned, except for when it comes time to debate with the dumb "Christians" (fundamentalists). Then all of a sudden it's Isaac Newton, back from the dead!
Pseudo-Dionysius would have had no patience for "literalism." None of our words are able to circumscribe God, not even those in Scripture. In fact, some of the words of Scripture are simply false, and are put there as a provocation: "Indeed the sheer crassness of the signs is a goad so that even the materially inclined cannot accept that it should be permitted or true that the celestial and divine sights could be conveyed by such shameful things" (Celestial Hierarchy II.3). Thus provoked, our minds rise above the words toward the divine reality that is above words. Some words of course -- such as "Good," "Beauty," "Cause," "Being," etc. -- are better than others, but all words, even the dogmatic definitions, are inadequate.
Even though he's a made-up person whose writings apparently fell out of the sky, Pseudo-Dionysius is far from alone in this. In fact, all the worst heretics were literalists. Marcion rejected the Old Testament due to his literal reading of the stories of God's capriciousness. Arianism, which prompted the first ecumenical council, was based on the most obvious reading of most of the controverted passages. Allegorical interpretation of scripture goes hand-in-hand with negative theology -- not letting any words, even the words of scripture themselves, get in the way of God. Some words are more adequate, as I mentioned, and some words such as the dogmatic definitions are necessary in order to keep the vision of God from being blocked altogether, but none of them are equal to the divine reality.
The dogmatic definitions are ultimately a mode of negative theology, even though their primary purpose is to exclude other, less adequate definitions -- definitions that are dangerous precisely because they allow the "literal," whether that be the obvious reading of Scripture or ordinary common sensical logic or the previously accepted meanings of terms used in dogmatic definitions, to impose themselves on the truth of what God has done in Jesus Christ. The dogmatic definitions become guardrails, then, instead of simply empirical propositions.
Metaphor? I don't know: is this what people mean when they say "metaphor"? Has it been this "negative theology" thing all along, or is it just a knee-jerk reaction against the literal -- as if the two options were either "one single truth" or "absolute total free-for-all"? Classical Christian theology seems to me to break with this binary option. It's not the only mode of thought that does, but it also does.
