The Inner Word in Gadamer's Hermeneutics

The Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian Word

chap ter 1  The Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian Word 31 And as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return no more thither, but soak the earth, and water it, and make it to spring, and give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be, which shall go forth from my mouth: it shall not return to me void, but it shall do whatsoever I please, and shall prosper in the things for which I sent it. —Isaiah 55:10‒ ‒11 The Spirit of the Lord has filled the world, and that which holds all things together has knowledge of speech. —Wisdom 1:7 A profusion of meanings attached to the idea of the Word in ancient Western history. To the Hebrews it meant the breath of God, the commandments,or the scripture.To the early Christians it meant the person of Christ and the profession of the faithful, the Gospels and the sacrament of the Eucharist. To the Greek and Roman theologians it meant as well the principle or pattern of the universe,the underlying reason of matter and the fulfillment of humanity. But the“Word”accrued these various meanings without contradiction, referring to the whole body of received tradition, achieving a figural elasticity and potency that came to typify its use. The audacity of the thought contained in John’s predication—“And the Word was God”—was a crystallizing moment in this expansionist history, and Christian theology in its long gestation was victorious in 32 The Verbum in the History of Ideas maintaining the identity of person and Word. The doctrinal insistence on this identity had enormous consequences for thought in the West beyond religion. Gadamer noted:“I personally believe that this doctrine has constantly stimulated the course of thought in the West as a challenge and invitation to try and think that which continually transcends the limits of human understanding.”1 What hermeneutics says in its appropriation of the theology of the word is that what takes place in language, in the life of a promise, in the uncertainty that opens up before a question, in the world that emerges from a story, is who we are. Our meaningfulness, our love, our coherence, our ability to relate to anything and everything, arises out of this central and primal being-in-the-middle-of language.At its source, human being is with language. The meaning of things is intrinsic to logos, that in which humans understand. This view is alien to a rationalist culture that sees language as merely instrumental, as a tool, or as a container for information . We think now that we use language to name truth, but it is rather in language that we have any truth, for all its ambiguity, its rootedness in culture and particularity, and its origin in the human voice. Gadamer ’s understanding of Sprachlichkeit draws on this conception of language that grew out of a stream of thought that was fed by the Talmud and the New Testament, the Stoics and the Church Fathers, medieval scholasticism and German mysticism, Lutheranism and the counterEnlightenment . Talmud and Targum Gadamer spoke tangentially about Judaism’s role at the origins of hermeneutics , and this was not enough.2 Hermeneutics needs not just a belated acknowledgment, but an openness to the continued vital role of the midrashic tradition as a guide to hermeneutic understanding. Whereas Christology may express the extreme limit of the idea of linguistic embodiment , the understanding of tradition as a living voice in Christian practice is still deeply dependent on that original mediation of divine utterance and human interpretation. Jewish scriptural tradition provides, from a Western rationalist point of view, a radical understanding of the living word. The rabbinical prac- tice of biblical exegesis is a response to the words of scripture carried on over the millennia as a conversation, originally and primarily an oral conversation . Thus the Word existed for the larger community in the living voice of the exegete in dialogue with the congregation, and the law was transmitted as both text and commentary. But the great interpretive traditions were in their earliest histories oral not only because of illiteracy among the faithful or scarcity of texts, but also because “the Oral Law (rightly) was seen as subject to further change, a malleable thing,” and “to write it down would be to freeze it, to institutionalize it.”3...