Dear Advocatus Diaboli,
I shudder to think what Faust would say if he knew to what his hospitality has given rise. But let us press forward boldly.
Being the learned sort, and notwithstanding your rather dim view of things historical, you will no doubt recall the scholastic method known as disputatio. In its Thomistic form, the method entailed a statement of one’s opponent’s view on an issue, followed by a systematic presentation of one’s own view, followed by a reply to opposing arguments. In the opening salvo of our exchange, I hope you will not mind my drawing selectively from this method.
Following your lead, I postpone questions of biblical authenticity, canonicity, and theological oppression, and concentrate presently on what you perceive to be a/the central problem of “my” orthodoxy, viz., the problem of the author. As you define the problem, an author’s “situatedness in his own cultural, historical, linguistic, and personal milieu implies that you cannot access what he meant, what he intended to communicate; you can only access what you yourself at this moment experience as a result of reading his words.”
If I may be so bold, the problem is in fact much more acute than you have stated. A reader/hearer of a text is confronted not only with the problem of how to fuse the “two horizons” of his/her situation and that of the text (author); but also with such philosophical problems as (a) whether the text “contains” or corresponds to any metaphysical reality, (b) if so, whether that reality is independent of the reader/hearer or “constructed” by the reader/hearer, (c) if the latter, whether any metaphysical reality (within or without a text) exists independent of the human mind, (d) whether the human mind and/or its “situation” is/are sufficiently stable to admit of analysis or interpretation (is the “human mind” itself a construct of some sort?), and (d) what, if any, ethical issues are implicated in how one “interprets” or “constructs” meaning/reality. (My debt to Vanhoozer at this point will be obvious.)
To express part of this another way, the problem of the author as it arises in connection with text is one manifestation of a much larger problem: that of reality itself. Does reality exist “out there,” independent of the knower? If so, is there any correlation between that reality and the knowing faculties of the knower? Or if not, is all reality simply a projection of a knower’s own consciousness? The literary problem is, mirabile dictu, a philosophical one. I might add, a very old philosophical one. Dating even from the Enlightenment. Berkeley comes to mind.
What, then, saith orthodoxy? Two things. First, by way of counterstroke, it is profoundly ironic that you will raise such “problems” yet certifiably fail to carry them through while reading this text. You will read my words as if they have meaning, however much you may think him a Luddite who wrote them. And, I doubt not, you would quickly protest if I treated your post as having no meaning whatsoever beyond what I impose upon it.
(Parenthetically, I realize your original question had to do with texts, attributed to St. Paul, which are centuries old. However, the problem of the author does not become a problem simply when the author lived in the first century; it is basic to verbal communication between any two people, even those quite similarly “situated.”)
Let me press the point. You assume the existence of meaning in order to speak about it. If meaning is purely a reader-construct, your “speech” simply floats out into a universe of sounds, which must then be strung together into something definite by whomever happens to find those sounds interesting. You have not “spoken” any more than the person who burps after dinner. You vanish the moment your words are emitted, and they lie like an amorphous blob of sound, waiting to be resurrected and shaped by another. This is the death of communication; it is the reduction of language to sound, and nobody with a brain could take it seriously. Which is no offense to you, because, as I said, you don’t take it seriously. You assume meaning exists. Our correspondence is proof positive of that.
Second, by way of further counterstroke, I wonder how you justify this assumption. George Steiner said in Real Presences, “Any coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs . . . any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence.” That is precisely the assumption of orthodoxy; but as it is one you don’t share, I wonder how you defend your belief in (a) your own metaphysical existence, (b) my metaphysical existence, (c) the meaningfulness of language, and (d) a correlation between us that makes communication possible, one that goes beyond shared language to a shared metaphysical and/or epistemological structure. You may, of course, deny that you hold these beliefs, but to do so is to render this whole exercise between us nonsensical in the extreme; and I remind you who wrote first.
To sum up, thus spake orthodoxy: “Great question! Now defend it.”
Sincerely,
Promotor Fidei
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