The Inner Word in Gadamer's Hermeneutics

Introduction: From Logos to Verbum to Sprache

 Introduction From Logos to Verbum to Sprache The greater miracle of language lies not in the fact that the Word becomes flesh and emerges in external being, but that that which emerges and externalizes itself in utterance is always already a word. —Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, III, 2, B Hans-Georg Gadamer taught that interpretation underlies human experience through and through. Jean Grondin, a student of Gadamer, once asked him to explain this universality, and his answer was surprising: In a formulaic and unsophisticated way, I asked him to explain more exactly what the universal aspect of hermeneutics consisted in. After everything that I had read, I was prepared for a long and rather vague answer. He thought the matter over and answered, concisely and conclusively , thus: “In the verbum interius.”1 This reference to the theological idea that Gadamer used to understand the mystery of language has been cited often of late but is still not well understood, even though a great deal hangs on the extent of Gadamer’s allegiance to the Augustinian idea.2 What might otherwise be a comparatively uncomplicated assertion about interpretive understanding takes on a deeper complexion here, reflecting one of the profoundest revisions of knowledge theory in Western cultural history. In this opening chapter I would like to sketch out in a preliminary way what is at stake. 1 For Gadamer, Christian incarnation “is strangely different from” the manifestations of pagan gods in human form (TM, 418/WM, 422). In Christology, the spirit made flesh is “not the kind of becoming in which something turns into something else” (TM, 420/WM, 424). This strong enigma places the credal faith apart, and upends the normal relation of the spiritual and the material. The indivisible bond between the word and the person is a fuller ontological relation than simply the unity of the spiritual and material. The relation between word and person is no bloodless, conceptual abstraction. The constancy of the person in the word represents a concentration or fullness of meaning and an increase of being. We can see this, for instance, in the idea of a promise, in which a person stands behind the word that is given, since it is they as much as the word that is at stake, and the fulfillment of the promise strengthens the person who made it and the community it forms. The innovation of the doctrine of the word is to reverse the trend set in motion with the Greeks that the reasoning faculty distills the mind’s work from the accidents of the flesh. Logos is rather the fully embodied medium of human community. The Judaeo-Christian habit of concentrating history, being, and action into the single locution“word”reverberated as an idiom of thought that fed back into the humanist tradition of the West and had a fruitful and consequential life thereafter.We can see a result of this,for instance,in the Renaissance revival of rhetoric, where the classical union of eloquence and wisdom is intensified by the ontological background of Christian Neoplatonism. It resonated deeply in German mysticism and Protestantism , explaining in part the depth of the German philosophy of language: “If I were as eloquent as Demosthenes I would yet have to do nothing more than repeat a single word three times: reason is language, logos. I gnaw at this marrow-bone and will gnaw myself to death over it. There still remains a darkness, always, over this depth for me; I am still waiting for an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss.”3 The verbum interius, Gadamer tells us, “is more than a mere metaphor ” (TM, 421).4 The link between human language and the theological doctrine of incarnation, if taken seriously, cannot be a convenience of explanation for language theory. Gadamer did not approach the theme from a religious perspective, but he did not link language to incarnation as merely an example. Augustine’s analogy of the verbum interius feeds on the epochal achievement of the church to conceive of itself and its 2 The Inner Word in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics kerygmatic mission as an extension of God’s utterance, and of world history as a figural and narrative enactment that bespeaks the person of the Word. Gadamer’s reappropriation of the link between incarnation and Sprache (language or speech), worked out in ten or eleven dense pages of text in his...