In David Bentley Hart's book, the Beauty of the Infinite, he has a chapter where he claims Creation may be grasped by theology as language.
The following are excerpts from the chapter :
God is, so to speak, infinite discourse, full of the perfect utterance of his Word and the limitless variety of the Spirit's "reply:' Here, in the most elementary terms, is Christian metaphysics: God speaks God, and creation occurs within that speaking, as a rhetorical embellishment, a needless ornament.
Nor are the logoi of things simply anonymous "universals": all beings, in their particularity, subsist within the creative ratio of the divine language as "eternal" locutions.
Christian theology the world is "spoken"; that there is no reality or truth prior to language; that there is no species of intelligibility that wholly escapes the logic of poetic analogy, metaphor, and deferral; that all is utterance; and that, to borrow a phrase, il n'y a pas de hors-texte.
...one may as well also grant that to say that creation is spoken is also to say that it is written - a texture of semeiotic deferral. Lest it be suspected that my hidden motive for speaking of creation as language is a desire to argue for a metaphysical hierarchy of correspondences, a symbolic economy between the world's "outer" and "inner" texts, I should say that, for biblical reasons, the world can be imagined as a realm of divine semeia only in a principally "rhetorical" sense: the liber naturae is a text of majestic lucidity, whose exquisite and terrible intricacies are stylistic, not hermetic; the world is not a vast system of auguries and "symbols;' merely pointing away from itself to a realm of rational or magical essences. Scripture attests to God speaking his glory in creation, not his arcana; the invisible things of him are clearly seen.
It is as a kind of poetry that the discourse of being is revelatory, as endless sequences of beautiful turns of phrase, and the proper response to this language - the reply that properly grasps, interprets, and corresponds to the truth of creation - is doxology. The Word comprehends all words transcendently, not as a great silence destitute of speech, but as the fullness of utterance, a "sounding silence" of utter plenitude, the Father's entire depth expressed in the agile radiance of the Spirit. As all talk of "substance" is most properly deferred to God, and then as the "effect" of the infinite discourse that God is, creation should be seen as a kind of miraculous wordplay, a brilliant persiflage within the "logic" of the Trinity, demonstrating the inexhaustible richness of God's Word in the endless diversity of its combinations.
To speak of the book of nature is not even to invite speculation regarding the possibility of a natural theology, or of a rational deduction of divine truth or first principles from the evidences of nature. Theology has always affirmed the reality of a natural order and natural law, certainly, while also acknowledging that sin both obscures that order and weakens our grasp of it; but in a world fashioned within the splendor of divine glory, no law or proportion or way of nature is discernible apart from a prior education of sensibility and comportment, or from a training in subtle appreciation, dignified enthusiasm, and robust oratio obliqua. Even the passage from Romans I so often invoked in defense of natural law theory is concerned principally with the immediacy of God's glory, the manifest declaration of his Godhead in creation; what is deplored in those who fail to glorify God is, so to speak, an inadequate aesthetic response, a failure to appreciate the magnitude and ubiquity of the divine address, a deficiency of taste and gratitude.
We need not agonize over banal postmodern denunciations of Christianity's supposed negation of all signifiers in a "transcendental signified;' or of theology's alleged fear of "difference" and its mythology of an aboriginal fall from the purity of silent immediacy.
The effect of sin, for Christian thought, is not that deferral and dissemination have displaced an immediate voice and presence, a more than Edenic intimacy with God, but only that this interminable dissemination cannot be received as the always differing presence - the analogy - of God. The gift of creation, its expression of divine love, is not immediacy, but an inexhaustible thematism of the mediate; the gift lies in just this "impurity;' this deferred presence, the ceremonious delay of a rhetorical gesture, which enjoins a rhetorical response: a sacrifice of praise.
When I speak of creation as expression, however, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of the one and the many as such; the coincidence in Christian thought of the doctrines of the Trinity and of creation ex nihilo renders that question a matter of indifference (for both the unity and the multiplicity of finite reality are contingent, and participate in an act in which unity and multiplicity are the same). While it is certainly desirable to say that in creation no hard division can be drawn between essence and exposition, and even that within the trinitarian perichoresis God is never an indeterminate ground of pure divinity, prior to or apart from the utterance of his Word and breathing forth of his Spirit, still God and world do not constitute between them a single order of content and explication, and so one can properly speak only of "analogical expression:'
....what is first expressive in creation is the analogical interval between God and the creature, inasmuch as its rhetorical surfeit expresses the delight and freedom that God is.
Creation's words are analogous to God's eternal utterance of himself because in their restless dynamism of essence and exposition, or content and expression, they reflect under the form of a finite and complex synthesis the perfect and simple convertibility in God of essence and expression, ousia and perichoresis.
That is, I am expressed in words and deeds, not as a hidden substance that my words merely signify, but as the event and mutable constancy of the ceaseless supplementation and deferral whereby I am at once disclosed, discovered, and invented; and even here there are analogical intervals, moments of delay or suspense, between what has been expressed and what will supplement it, between my words and the "self" to which my words refer, between one word and the next, and I in a sense am all these intervals - these analogical disjunctions within continuity - taken together.
But God expresses himself entirely as God, in the infinitely accomplished act of triune love. Precisely because God does not come to or discover or achieve himself in and through creation but simply declares his glory therein, we find God in and through creation as the generous source and end whose goodness shines upon the surface of every sign.
True expression, though, even when no real or absolute distinction is drawn between it and the content it discloses, is possible only if there is that movement that allows it to differ, to be at once a new word and an act of disclosure.
There must be an original difference that precedes each finite utterance, that frees each word from every "ground"; becoming is set in motion by its ontological differentiation from the transcendent actuality in which it participates, beings differ from moment to moment and from other beings because they first differ infinitely from being, and finite expression is set free by its difference from the transcendent act of God's utterance. This is the difference that allows every sign to be simply what it is, with no secret inner fold, and yet to speak in and with all other signs. The irreducible synthesis of the sign - the tension within it between the self-manifestation of transcendent truth in which it participates and the insufficiency of its own finite essence - is what causes each sign to "seek" its supplement, to become what it is (its meaning), to surrender its own ground to another sign so that in language's differing the ever greater difference of the divine utterance can show itself.
To see creation thus, as an expressive surface reflecting God, endlessly folding and unfolding, implicating and explicating, is perhaps to replace the Kantian caesura between the phenomenal and the noumenal with the dynamic traversal of God's distance, but it is not to discern a continuity without analogical interval between God's knowledge of himself and his "reprise" of that knowledge in what he creates.
God is the supreme rhetorician. As opposed to the mechanistic monism of Spinozan expression, Christian thought makes room for the thought of expression as deferral, as writing, transcription, mediation, and dissemination; it is the divine distance from (this transcendent presence to) creation that makes the world an inflection of the eternal Torah, the writing that the Logos comprises as difference.
If creation's language does not consist simply in a direct correspondence between this sign and that meaning, but in its ever various enunciation of glory, then its character as divine address is revealed in (for want of a better term) its style. Erich Auerbach and others have noted that the originality of Augustine's prose lies in its departure from the immobile architectonic intricacy and monumental hypotaxis of classical rhetoric to the fluid, motile, and supple transitions of parataxis (simple sentences joined by the most elementary copula.of all, the word "and"); I find it tempting to take this as a metaphor for the transition from a pagan to a Christian view of being, for that revolution in sensibility that, at the speculative level, prompted the church, in its development of trinitarian theology, to reject the intricate hierarchies of metaphysical mediations between the world and its ultimate principle, offered by various late antique Platonisms, in favor of a discourse of true transcendence, of God as wholly present in each moment of created reality, as the very energy of its being.
Creation, for all its natural and supernatural hierarchies of transcendental truth, is not a static integration of superordinate and subordinate parts in a structure that, as a whole, achieves metaphysical completion, with God at its highest pinnacle; nor is the language of creation governed by an ideal meaning that consigns whatever is "inessential" in its locutions to the realm of the simulacral or adiaphoral; creation obeys the grammar not of the total but of the infinite (or, so to put it, the "bad" infinite that God calls good).
To speak of the book of nature is not even to invite speculation regarding the possibility of a natural theology, or of a rational deduction of divine truth or first principles from the evidences of nature. Theology has always affirmed the reality of a natural order and natural law, certainly, while also acknowledging that sin both obscures that order and weakens our grasp of it; but in a world fashioned within the splendor of divine glory, no law or proportion or way of nature is discernible apart from a prior education of sensibility and comportment, or from a training in subtle appreciation, dignified enthusiasm, and robust oratio obliqua. Even the passage from Romans I so often invoked in defense of natural law theory is concerned principally with the immediacy of God's glory, the manifest declaration of his Godhead in creation; what is deplored in those who fail to glorify God is, so to speak, an inadequate aesthetic response, a failure to appreciate the magnitude and ubiquity of the divine address, a deficiency of taste and gratitude.
We need not agonize over banal postmodern denunciations of Christianity's supposed negation of all signifiers in a "transcendental signified;' or of theology's alleged fear of "difference" and its mythology of an aboriginal fall from the purity of silent immediacy.
The effect of sin, for Christian thought, is not that deferral and dissemination have displaced an immediate voice and presence, a more than Edenic intimacy with God, but only that this interminable dissemination cannot be received as the always differing presence - the analogy - of God. The gift of creation, its expression of divine love, is not immediacy, but an inexhaustible thematism of the mediate; the gift lies in just this "impurity;' this deferred presence, the ceremonious delay of a rhetorical gesture, which enjoins a rhetorical response: a sacrifice of praise.
When I speak of creation as expression, however, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of the one and the many as such; the coincidence in Christian thought of the doctrines of the Trinity and of creation ex nihilo renders that question a matter of indifference (for both the unity and the multiplicity of finite reality are contingent, and participate in an act in which unity and multiplicity are the same). While it is certainly desirable to say that in creation no hard division can be drawn between essence and exposition, and even that within the trinitarian perichoresis God is never an indeterminate ground of pure divinity, prior to or apart from the utterance of his Word and breathing forth of his Spirit, still God and world do not constitute between them a single order of content and explication, and so one can properly speak only of "analogical expression:'
....what is first expressive in creation is the analogical interval between God and the creature, inasmuch as its rhetorical surfeit expresses the delight and freedom that God is.
Creation's words are analogous to God's eternal utterance of himself because in their restless dynamism of essence and exposition, or content and expression, they reflect under the form of a finite and complex synthesis the perfect and simple convertibility in God of essence and expression, ousia and perichoresis.
That is, I am expressed in words and deeds, not as a hidden substance that my words merely signify, but as the event and mutable constancy of the ceaseless supplementation and deferral whereby I am at once disclosed, discovered, and invented; and even here there are analogical intervals, moments of delay or suspense, between what has been expressed and what will supplement it, between my words and the "self" to which my words refer, between one word and the next, and I in a sense am all these intervals - these analogical disjunctions within continuity - taken together.
But God expresses himself entirely as God, in the infinitely accomplished act of triune love. Precisely because God does not come to or discover or achieve himself in and through creation but simply declares his glory therein, we find God in and through creation as the generous source and end whose goodness shines upon the surface of every sign.
True expression, though, even when no real or absolute distinction is drawn between it and the content it discloses, is possible only if there is that movement that allows it to differ, to be at once a new word and an act of disclosure.
There must be an original difference that precedes each finite utterance, that frees each word from every "ground"; becoming is set in motion by its ontological differentiation from the transcendent actuality in which it participates, beings differ from moment to moment and from other beings because they first differ infinitely from being, and finite expression is set free by its difference from the transcendent act of God's utterance. This is the difference that allows every sign to be simply what it is, with no secret inner fold, and yet to speak in and with all other signs. The irreducible synthesis of the sign - the tension within it between the self-manifestation of transcendent truth in which it participates and the insufficiency of its own finite essence - is what causes each sign to "seek" its supplement, to become what it is (its meaning), to surrender its own ground to another sign so that in language's differing the ever greater difference of the divine utterance can show itself.
To see creation thus, as an expressive surface reflecting God, endlessly folding and unfolding, implicating and explicating, is perhaps to replace the Kantian caesura between the phenomenal and the noumenal with the dynamic traversal of God's distance, but it is not to discern a continuity without analogical interval between God's knowledge of himself and his "reprise" of that knowledge in what he creates.
God is the supreme rhetorician. As opposed to the mechanistic monism of Spinozan expression, Christian thought makes room for the thought of expression as deferral, as writing, transcription, mediation, and dissemination; it is the divine distance from (this transcendent presence to) creation that makes the world an inflection of the eternal Torah, the writing that the Logos comprises as difference.
If creation's language does not consist simply in a direct correspondence between this sign and that meaning, but in its ever various enunciation of glory, then its character as divine address is revealed in (for want of a better term) its style. Erich Auerbach and others have noted that the originality of Augustine's prose lies in its departure from the immobile architectonic intricacy and monumental hypotaxis of classical rhetoric to the fluid, motile, and supple transitions of parataxis (simple sentences joined by the most elementary copula.of all, the word "and"); I find it tempting to take this as a metaphor for the transition from a pagan to a Christian view of being, for that revolution in sensibility that, at the speculative level, prompted the church, in its development of trinitarian theology, to reject the intricate hierarchies of metaphysical mediations between the world and its ultimate principle, offered by various late antique Platonisms, in favor of a discourse of true transcendence, of God as wholly present in each moment of created reality, as the very energy of its being.
Creation, for all its natural and supernatural hierarchies of transcendental truth, is not a static integration of superordinate and subordinate parts in a structure that, as a whole, achieves metaphysical completion, with God at its highest pinnacle; nor is the language of creation governed by an ideal meaning that consigns whatever is "inessential" in its locutions to the realm of the simulacral or adiaphoral; creation obeys the grammar not of the total but of the infinite (or, so to put it, the "bad" infinite that God calls good).
Nothing that truly is, is an "inessential" or accidental locution: each instance of difference tells of God's glory, differently, as another rhetorical embellishment. Divine love extends itself as a boundless display of gifts; and as creation is the expressive analogy of this love rather than a direct emanative exposition, the mind does not attain to the "truth" of things through an ascensus toward the true voice prior to creation's rhetoric, but through an apprehension of divine glory now, already, in the material "differend;' in the moment, in the reflection and echo of the divine declaration of creation's goodness and God's love. One "remembers" by hearing more, perceiving creation's beauty in the ever more eminent eloquence toward which all created signs stretch out, and to fail to hear leaves one without excuse. The language of creation leads nowhere but onward into the infinite distance that gives creation: the Spirit who brings all things into conformity with the divine Word is not the Spirit who sublates, but a pillar of fire or of cloud, illumination or darkness, the nomadic nomos who leads always on into the bounty of creation, to a beauty revealed by grace as the grammar of all things, the destination of infinitely many wanderings.
The Logos is not - like the Nous of Plotinus - the prism of the one, the moon in whose opaline pallor the light of the sun acquires shades and nuances; as the eternal utterance of the Father, the Son contains not just the abstract, anonymous essences of things, but the whole rhetoric, the entire display, of infinitely many differences. He contains them, moreover, as the perfect rhetoric of love, which dissimulates nothing, knows no violence or alienation from its source, and expresses all things; he comprises a limitless "economy;' a dissemination of signs without reserve, declaring love, proclaiming peace and glory.
Which is to say that God's utterance of himself, articulated anew in creation, is present to creation always as deferred referral, the fullness of the infinite that can be "spoken" by creation only in the ceaseless parataxis of things, the epektasis of one sign to the next, the "slippage" of meaning.
Such is the nature of God's infinity that immediacy and mediation are the same in him.
John does not desire an end to writing, but simply a better text; he laments the fact that the text of the self is not written in accord with the love of the Spirit, that there is a separation of "interiority" from the exteriority of God's gift of created freedom and the law of charity, that the text must be recovered from our sinful desire to write our- selves, to be perfectly present and sufficient to ourselves. Far from giving voice to a pathetic yearning for the unwritten, John cries out for a more radical textuality, converting mind and flesh into the book of the Spirit: would that Christ were the most deeply inscribed text in us, that the grammar governing our articulations of ourselves and making us "present" were of another style.
"Writing" is not sin; but sin takes away a style, a creative play of intervals; it loses a theme, it transforms text into "my" substance. God, though, creates a "rhetorical" world, its "substance" entirely "exposed;' at the surface. Creation is "excess;' an analogy of the "exceedingness" of the Father's gift of his being to the Son and Spirit.
God's speech in creation does not, then, invite a speculative nisus toward silence - the silence of pure knowing or of absolute saying - but doxology, an overabundance of words, hymnody, prayer, and then, within this discipline of gratitude and liturgy, a speculative discourse obedient to the gratuity of existence and the transcendence of its source, or a contemplative silence whose secret is not poverty but plenitude.
God's address may even be given as law, as command and prohibition, but always to establish thereby a grammar of adoring response. God's is a language of love, it never expresses itself in hierarchies of abstract "meaning" or becomes "taxonomic" (except, perhaps, in the way the voice from the whirlwind names God's wonders before the stricken Job, or in the way the Song of Songs praises every aspect of the beloved).
This is why theology must find itself on the side of "rhetoric" over against that of "dialectic," crudely defined, or at least recognize their inseparability. One should not separate in God's Verbum the traits of sermo and of ratio; one should, though, insist that the two meanings inhere in one another for Christian thought in a way that pagan philosophy could not imagine (for even if Middle Platonism recog- nized in the divine logos both the rational structure of reality and the self- manifestation of the divine in a derivative principle, it could not understand the supreme "logic" unifying these concepts: God as self-outpouring love).
Human language, which is a further implication within the linguisticality of creation, a particularly responsive and vagrant intensity thereof, can never achieve its truth by abstraction from the free play of supplementation, of doxological excess, the power to bless and curse, name and lie, respond in love or demur in anger.
Dialectic and "analysis" are sterile illusions apart from a prior aesthetic education of desire that prepares the soul to make of its words offerings to the Word (in the highest form, offerings of divine names).
Indeed, the very idea of an "analytic" philosophy is a hopeless one: in attempting to reduce every "synthetic" proposition to one or more analytic truths, self-evidently and even tautologously correct, one makes the mistake of imagining that truth for finite beings is ever anything but synthetic: just as being is granted to beings by an act that transcends the conditions of finitude, so truth inhabits words that in themselves can never be adequate to the fullness of what they express; thus all real philosophy must include the motion of conjecture toward that transcendent horizon that shows itself yet hides itself in beings, and the animating logic of such conjecture must be one of contemplation and praise.
I am not arguing for mere jubilant irrationalism here, and one certainly can insist upon the doxological rationality of theological discourse without succumbing to the postmodern mysticism of the aleatory: because creation is indeed divine ad- dress, and because every intonation of its discourse can be reconciled with the theme that God imparts in creating, the world is not simply a Dionysian festival of endlessly many signifiers, opaque to one another, spilling over one another in wasteful and extravagant play; its significations are infinitely susceptible of analogy, they are transparent before one another, they can be arranged into rational orderings of desire and delight that "correspond" to the rational ordination of divine love that gives them, before which their transparency is transformed into sheer incandescence. As opposed to the boring univocities of Dionysus, the monotonous beat of his dithyrambs, and the chaotic romp of uniform and punctiliar instances of difference, the prosody of creation is fluid, varied, inventive, and always able to unfold into glorious complexities of living verse. Prior to every rhetoric of power, every coercive discourse, every dissimu- lation and violent persuasion, is a rhetoric that is peace.
Prior to the Saying that obliges there is the infinite of the said, a determinate word of peace, which loves: there is a gift of light that may be given, one to another, because it corresponds to and participates in and is nourished by the infinite rhetoric of God's trinitarian discourse of love.
The other arises in the very excess of being's rhetoric, and has the shape of a rhetorical appeal: not the violence of a reduction, an interrogative excavation of the other out of the infinite, but a certain kind of generous style that, participating in the theme of di- vine love that gives both one and one's other, makes room for analogous and creative responses; a certain rhetorical form, a gesture, that by its gratuity, excess, and beauty displaces every phenomenology or ontology that cannot venture beyond the conditions of the transcendental ego.
The other is known as other not in the silence of immediacy or identity, nor in the darkness of infinite alterity, but in the free and boundlessly beautiful rhetoric of a shared infinite. The rhetoric of the other evokes my representations, which- so long as they are governed by charity - can take the form of peaceful replies. The rhetorical display that is given across the divine distance, in which the other figures as a unique "turn of phrase" (as does the I), means that there is always, in every moment of difference, a mediating rhetoric of love that offers infinite scope for reconciliation, return, gestures of peace.
One need only attune one's words to the Word who speaks all things, and who is himself spoken from all eternity.
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