Silence, the Word and the Sacred

The Word as Symbol in Sacred Experience

Chapter 5 THE WORD AS SYMBOL IN SACRED EXPERIENCE Stanley Hopper Helen: If you break the mirror, will what is reflected in it cease to exist? Hector: That is the whole question. — Giraudoux: Tiger at the Gates (1955, 32) I have cited this passage once before, when attempting to identify the setting of the contemporary hermeneutical problem (1967, x). The breaking up of the conceptual mirror in which the Western mind has been seeing itself has been going on apace, and I know of nothing that capsulates and situates our problem as neatly as this passage from Giraudoux. With the breaking up of the classical conceptual mirror, the question of whether what was reflected in it will cease to exist has become increasingly radical. In the essay (1967), I took the view that interpretation was moving into what Auerbach called "figural interpretation" in which "history," "event," the "Word," and the like, were "permitted to function symbolically, thus retaining within their figural complex the meanings which their propositional formulations had lost." Since then the problems of language have become more probing and insistent, reaching over (via Structuralism, Deconstructionism, and the like) into Biblical Studies, Theology, Philosophy, and Literary Criticism. I continue to adhere nevertheless to that point of view, while conceding that the contextual environment within which one perceives symbolic functioning has been undergoing drastic revision. For example, "with the whole trend of twentieth-century philosophy of language... a correction is coming from M. Foucault, Les Mots et les choses\ and J. Derrida, De la 83 84 Silence, The Word and the Sacred grammatologie... (who) return to the doctrine of signs as signatures of things..." (N.O. Brown, 1973, 98). Terms such as those in my title have become questionable. They no longer function with the charismatic power that they once had—as though they had suffered a slow erosion or leakage of meaning over the centuries. Our key words appear to have suffered a logological phthisis (to appropriate a metaphor from Athanasius, De Incarnatione Verbi) or wasting away, like a branch cut off from the vine, in which the sap continues to run for a period, only to dry up, become brittle, and be cast aside. Thus, as the poet (Eliot) says, we inherit today "a heap of broken images" or "bricolage," to employ a metaphor preferred today by anthropologists, psychologists, and literary critics (e.g., Levi Strauss, James Hillman, Jacques Derrida, etc.). Even more emphatic is the line of Wallace Stevens (1954,183): Throw away the lights,thedefinitions, And say of what you see in the dark That it is this or that it is that, But do not use the rotted names. In a letter to Hi Simons, Stevens remarked about these verses (from "The Man With the Blue Guitar," xxxii), "The point of the poem is, not that this can be done, but that, if done, it is the key to poetry, to the closed garden... of the fountain of youth and life and renewal" (1954: [183], 864). This key is big with implication: too big, in fact, for a brief essay; but it points to a problem in whichwe are all unavoidablyinvolved. When the general topic of "Silence, the Word, and the Sacred" was first broached, I wrote the following paragraph, mainly to set the parameters of my own thinking on the subject: Revisionary thinking today is radical in virtually all fields. The words "silence," "word," and "sacred" describe a zone of "paradigm shift" where most of these fields overlap. The term "silence" resumes the Gnostic Sige, the Zen nihil, and the mystics' modes of apprehension beyond discursive thinking; the "Word" presents and unveils the paradox of language (that language conceals what it reveals) and instates the basis of language as metaphor; while the term "sacred" becomes a mode of seeing (as distinct from "profane" and privileging,perhaps, a dualistic mode of thinking), at pnce evoking the numinous yet remaining itself a symbolic form. Where the three overlap the vision of the world as "utterance" appears —itself a holographic metaphor invoking both a psycho-poetics of depth and an Eckhartian God beyond "God." Word as Symbol in Sacred Experience 85 This paragraph, impromptu as it is,will perhaps serve to provide a provisional profile of my present biases. To explicate the same, however, in a brief essay, is not a simple matter. I shall therefore exploit the problematics of what Harold Bloom has described...