III
Let us now list some cases the discussion of which might most directly help us inquire, by comparison and contrast, into words about the divine, the supernatural (theology), and words about words (logology), including words for the divine and supernatural, whether or not there be such a realm, which theologies have words for.
Since theology in our tradition is so clearly grounded in the relation between the Old Testament and the New, let's begin logologically from there. The formula of the Christian theologians was stated thus: Novum Testamentum in Vetere latet, Vetus in Novo patet. How translate it exactly? "The New Testament was latent in the Old Testament. The Old
In any case, the Christian theology, with regard to the relation between Old Testament and New Testament, would see in the Old Testament many stories about characters that were conceived as what they were only insofar as they were "types of Christ." Indeed, the Jewish tribe itself, in its Exodus from Egypt, was but a type of Christ. Thus its Jewish identity was, in effect (in principle), being viewed not as that of a tribe in its own right, but as an emergent stage of the Christian future.
Exactly, then, what does logology, as a purely secular cult of the Logos, do with that particular localization of dialectical resources? Obviously, the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac (telling of how the father, in obedience to God's Law, would consent to sacrifice even his most beloved person, hisson) can be conceived of asincipiently, prophetically a type of the New Testament story of an all-powerful Father, the very soul of justice, who actually does fulfill the pattern, in completing the sacrifice of his most precious person, his only begotten Son. And logology looks upon both stories as variations on the theme of sacrifice.
In my early scattered readings among mediaeval texts, I found a sentence that fascinated me. It was probably a rule of some monastic order, I don't know which. And though I have lost track of the original, I still incline to go on repeating my translation, which is as resonant as I could make it: "If any one have any thing of which he is especially fond, let it be taken from him." There is even the ironic possibility that I got the Latin somewhere from Remy de Gourmont, a nonbeliever if there ever was one; and he taught me to appreciate, in a kind of twisted nostalgia, the forlorn fragmentary beauty of such accents. The fantastically "materialistic" George Santayana's gallant Realm of Spirit is also in that groove.
But the main consideration, from the standpoint of logology, is the fact that, however variously theologians may treat of the relation between the Old Testament and the New Testament, they have in common the theological stress upon the principle of sacrifice. As viewed from the standpoint of logology, even the most primitive offering of animals on
As viewed logologically, the theological story of the Creation and the Fall (in the opening chapter of Genesis) would be summed up thus:
The story of Creation, in representing the principle of Order, necessarily introduced a principle of Division, classifying some things as distinct from other things. In this purely technical sense, Creation itself was a kind of "Fall," inasmuch as it divided the principle of Unity into parts, each of which has a nature of its own, regardless of how they might in principle be "unified." (As seen from this point of view, even a project for "unification" implies a grammatical gerundive, a "to-be-unified.") Thus, viewed from the other side, the orderly principle of Division isseen to contain implicitly the possibility of Divisiveness.
The possibility of Divisiveness calls for a Law against Divisiveness. (In a world set up by the creative word, how keep Division from becoming Divisive except by a word, a Law, that says, "Don’t do whatever would disrupt the Order"?) So the story includes a "don't" that, stories of that sort being what they are, stands for the sheer principle of Law, as the negative aspect of Order. But implicit in the idea of "Don't" there is the possibility of Disobedience. One says, "Do" or "Don't" only to such kinds of entities as can be able to respond (that is, can have the responsibility) by in effect saying, "Yes" or "No" (that is, being obedient or disobedient).
But Saint Paul's theology was quite in keeping with logology when he said that the Law made sin, as Bentham was to say that the Law makes crime. However, note that, in introducing, via Law, the possibility of Disobedience, one has by implication introduced the principle of Temptation (the incentive, however originating, to fall afoul of the Law). Where, then, locate the "origin" of that Temptation, as befits the nature of narrative (story, myth)?
At this point, the implications of terms for Law and Order surface by translation into terms of role. These are two kinds of "priority." There is logical priority in the sense of first premise, second premise, conclusion. Or in the sense that the name for a class of particulars is "prior" to any particular included under that head, quite as the term "table" already "anticipates" the inclusion of countless particular objects that don't even yet exist. Or there is temporal priority in the sequence yesterday-today-tomorrow.
As a result of this doubling, one can state matters of principle (that is, firsts or beginnings) in terms of either logical or temporal priority. (Hence in my Rhetoric of Religion I put major emphasis upon the etymological fact that both the Greek and Latin words for "principle" [arché and principium] refer to priority in both the logical and temporal senses of the term.) I said somewhere (I think in my Grammar of Motives, but I can't locate it) that a Spinozistic translation of the first words in the Vulgate Bible, "In principio Deus creavit," would be not "in the beginning God created," but "in principle God created" For his basic equation, Deus sive Natura, amounts exactly to that, since he would never associate the words "God" and " nature" in terms of a temporal priority whereby God "came first" in time. Though such equating of God and nature was pantheistic, hence anathema, in its sheer design it resembled the thinking of those Orthodox Christians who attacked Arianism by insisting that the "priority" of Father to Son was not in any sense temporal. We here confront a purely logological kind of "priority," as we might well say that the number 1 is "prior" to any other number, but only "in principle"; for no number in time is "prior" to any other, since an internal relationship among numbers is nontemporal. "Before numbers were," 3 was less than 4 and more than 2, though we can "go from" one such to another. And logologically we confront an analogous situation with regard to the narrative or "mythic" translation of "nontemporal" implications among terms into terms of story, as with the narrative ways of stating the principles of Order in the first three chapters of Genesis, under "primal" conditions involving an audience for whom the poetic ways of story came first; however, such expressions were later to be sophisticated by the "traumatic" step from poetry and mythology to criticism and critically mature theology.
The Old Testament begins in its way quite as the New Testament Gospel of John begins in its, with pronouncements that overlap upon these two kinds of priority. Genesis "tells the story" of the divine word's informative power. John tells the story of the Logos, a Hellenistic stress upon the word that a "Judaizing" sect among the emergent Christian doctrinarians had unsuccessfully attempted to exclude from the canon. Hence, though the term in English seems to have begun by reference to the Logos in the Gospel of John (a usage that is ambiguously implicit in these present shuttlings between theology and logology), both the Book of Genesis and the Gospel of John present their cases in terms of story. And we now take on from there.
Logologically, we confront the fact that, given the fluid relation between
The principle of the Law, implicit in the principle of Order, is identical with an astounding seiendes Unding that human language has added to nature, the negative (a purely linguistic invention unknown to the world of sheer wordless motion, which can be but what it positively is). Thus, implicit in the legal negative, the "thou shalt not" of the Law (which, the story of Beginnings tell us, was born with the creation of worldly order) is the possibility that its negativity can be extended to the negating of negativity. There is thus the "responsibility" of being able to say no to a thou-shalt-not.
But the tactics of narrative personalizing (in effect a kind of substitution that represents a principle in terms of a prince) raise a problem local to that particular mode of representation itself. If this kind of "first" is to represent the possibility of disobedience that is implicit in the decreeing of a Law, where did the "temptation" to disobedience "come from"? Up to this point, we have been trying to show that a logological analysis of the case would coincide with a theological presentation, in that theology has said implicitly what logology says explicitly; namely, the conditions of the Fall were inherent in the conditions of the Creation, since the Divisiveness of Order was reinforced by the divisive possibility of saying either Yes or No to the primal Law of that Order.
However, the sheer psychology of personality is such that an act of disobedience is but the culminating stage of an inclination to disobey, a guilty disobedient attitude. And where did that prior step, the emergent temptation to disobey, originate? Here theology's concern with the sources of such an attitude introduces a causal chain that turns out to involve a quite different provenance.
Eve was the immediate temptress. But she had been tempted by the serpent. But the serpent was not "entelechially perfect" enough to be the starting place for so comprehensive, so universal (so "catholic") a theological summation. The principle of substitution gets "perfect" embodiment here in that the serpent becomes in turn the surrogate for Satan, the supernatural tempter beyond which no further personal source of temptation need be imagined, since his personality and his role as ultimate