A COMMA DISJOINS the two parts of the title. It is clearly a patch: for lack of a better term, it is an approximate solution. There could have been a colon or a dash; however, it would have not been possible to replace the comma with a sive, a “that is.” Somehow—and I do not think that it is just a deconstructive chattering—this is the real topic of the following remarks.
The comma is not a neutral joint, as a simple conjunction might have been, bringing near the two terms so as to announce, more simply, an analysis of their relation. The preference for a comma here—or a colon, or a dash—underscores that it is not a question of analyzing two themes, which are anyway defined in their own terms, in order to establish the relations or differences between them. The theme arises properly out of the recognition that it is possible for us today, if not obligatory, to move from one term to the other. One does so by following a type of relation that cannot be easily recognized as a simple identity—seu, sive, that is—or as a difference between two autonomous thought-contents, which would disclose their proximity or distance. What I mean to suggest with this title is the need to thematize the point of departure where we find ourselves—no matter how problematic that “we” may be—that is to say, the pre-understanding in which we are placed, and of which we become aware when we problematize our pre-understanding. Our point of departure is that the relation between these two terms is closer, and yet more vague or opaque, than would have been suggested by a relationship of identity or by a simple parataxis.1
I do not mean to say that the history of salvation is the history of interpretation, or that there are significant relations between the two terms (notions, events) that would be worthy of inquiry with the right kind of research. Rather, I mean to echo a “crossing,” the rustle of a slippage from one term to the other, a slippage of which we are all aware. Our pre-understanding of this slippage constitutes our common, historical belonging to the world (epoch, history, culture) of the religions of the Book. If we replaced the comma with an is, we would have to make an effort to hear it as a transitive verb: the history of salvation lets be the history of interpretation, or the history of salvation occurs, gives itself, as the history of interpretation.
It seems to me that it is justified to insist on what might appear a marginal question of punctuation. In fact, a more appropriate tone for this discourse is not that of a “scientific” investigation (or only apparently scientific, as it can be in disciplines like philosophy), but that of a meditation seeking to grasp a relationship, which seems to impose itself with a certain undeniability and which is nevertheless a fleeting relationship.
Interpretation—primarily of sacred texts—has always dealt with the issue of salvation in the Judeo-Christian tradition. (Note that there is already a meaningful difference between a discourse on interpretation and salvation, and a discourse on the history of the one or the other. I shall not dwell on this, as it may become clearer later on; yet this difference resonates and echoes in the title as well as in its immediate illustrations.) From its beginning, modern hermeneutics has reflected on salvation, as in Schleiermacher, whose work in its most immediate sense has to do with preaching and with pastoral explication of sacred texts to the faithful (subtilitas intelligendi, subtilitas explicandi, in the hermeneutical terminology of the time). Salvation requires understanding the Word of God in Scripture and its correct application to our condition and situation (subtilitas applicandi). Furthermore, it is necessary to interpret Scripture without contradicting reason, making use of our faculties to respect thoroughly the Word of God and avoiding the attribution of aberrant meanings to Scripture (even Spinoza, after all, is motivated by this essentially pious purpose; however, during the Enlightenment, it was on this terrain that criticism arose).
In another sense, however, salvation and interpretation are joint in the Christian tradition, linking Jesus to the prophets, as heard in New Testament expressions like: “You heard it was said …, but I say. …” Here interpretation is no longer only a tool (of the faithful) for understanding what God reveals and expects; the event of salvation (Jesus’ coming) is itself, deep down, a hermeneutical occurrence. But it can be called hermeneutical only to a point: it is true that Jesus is the living interpretation of the meaning of the law and the prophets (here another meaning of the Logos that becomes flesh: the incarnation of the Logos, of meaning, of the Jewish Scriptures), but somehow, he is also its fulfillment. Thus Jesus seems to be announced as the definitive deciphering of sense—as if after him there were no longer any space or necessity for interpretation. Yet (it would suffice to reflect on the interpretations of the so-called consequent eschatology) although salvation is essentially “fulfilled” in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus, it awaits a further fulfillment. Thus the Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth bestowed upon the faithful at Pentecost, has been assigned the task of assisting them in this further hermeneutical project. We should not forget that the Spirit (the one who gives life to the text, the true sense of the “letter”), namely the more exquisitely hermeneutical person of the Trinity, is also the one through whom the Son becomes human in the bosom of Mary. The Trinity is a hermeneutical structure par excellence, for the Son is the Logos of the Father and the Spirit is their relation, the hypostatizing of their love-understanding. If we follow through these elementary subjects of the Christian teaching in a spirit of loyalty to the catechism, the relationship between interpretation and salvation becomes more complex: it introduces overwhelmingly the feature of history into the main picture. It is more and more difficult to attribute the pure sense of a subjective genitive to “the history of interpretation,” according to which interpretation has a history but is basically something that takes place in the immediate relation between reader and sacred text, the latter being posited once and for all with its definitive sense, which the believer must only decipher and apply.
If interpretation continues after the resurrection of Jesus (indeed by virtue of the resurrection, as its continuation and authentication), this means that interpretation and salvation, too, have a history that is not only an accidental occurrence crossing above or near their supposedly stable kernels. Rather, this history affects them deeply, in a sense that can only be explained by emphasizing the “objective” genitive in the two expressions. Salvation takes shape, takes place, gives itself, and constitutes itself through its history, and thus the history of interpretation, too—through a series of connections that can be only with difficulty frozen into a scheme. It is true that the announcement of salvation is given once and for all—in Jesus and the prophets—but it is equally true that, having given itself, it needs interpretations that receive it, actualize it, and enrich it. The history of salvation that continues in the age of the Spirit, after the descent of the Paraclete at Pentecost, is not simply driven by the biological fact of the presence of ever new human generations that must be evangelized. Rather, it is history, just as the Old Testament narrative up to the Messiah’s coming was history. This history has a meaning and a direction, and the interpretation of Scripture that takes place in it is its constitutive dimension. It is not only a tale of errors, or conversely of close or literal understanding of meaning given once and for all in Scripture (which would be as inessential in itself as the errors). The history of salvation continues as the history of interpretation in the strong sense in which Jesus himself was the living, incarnate interpretation of Scripture.
But, even assuming that we have given an accurate—albeit cursory—representation of this event, is it not in the end only the business of theologians, of historians of religions? In other words, the interpretation of which we speak in the title, whose history stands in a deep and complex relationship with the history of salvation, seems to be finally only the interpretation of Scriptures. Would it not be better to add this qualification in the title in order to avoid inappropriate generalizations, or confusion and equivocation?
The fact is that it seems difficult to bring the issue to closure within such restricted and precise (disciplinary) boundaries. Is ours a “religion of the Book,” which we will leave eventually behind through the irresistible process of secularization? Or, more important, do we belong to a culture or civilization of the Book that still affects us deeply, even when we think, or might think, that we no longer have anything in common with the religion of the Book? Does this culture or civilization of the Book not have any relation—at the same time both vague and deep—with the religion of the Book, so much so that it becomes difficult to confine our “history of interpretation” to the history of the interpretation of Scripture?
Of course, one can rightfully argue that the relationship of modern European civilization with sacred Scripture is only a particular instance of the civilization of the Book, which has deeper and more distant origins. In this civilization of the Book, or of writing (in lower case), interpretation is a general phenomenon that is not based and does not depend on the interpretive model of Scripture. This can be granted. Indeed, the Greeks used Hesiod and Homer as the foundational texts in their education, and conceived of their culture as interpretation of these texts—at least to some extent.
Thus the formation of modern Europe has revolved around not only the interpretation of sacred Scripture but also around the interpretation of the Justinian Code and the reading and rereading of the canon of classic literary texts—a textual corpus that is not directly related to the sacred Scripture (although this could be debated, too). But the idea of the productive act of interpretation could not have originated in the interpretation of legal codes or in the interpretation of literary and poetic classics, even though it is obvious—as Gadamer illustrates in Truth and Method—that the notion of application makes juridical hermeneutics more sensitive to this idea. By contrast, consider the classicist tradition that runs through the whole history of European art and literature, wherein one can read of an ever-returning negation of the productiveness of interpretation on behalf of a literal loyalty to models (a loyalty that is always conceptualized rigidly even when one becomes nostalgically aware of its impossibility, as in Romanticism).
What I want to suggest is that the idea of the productiveness of interpretation could only originate as an “effect” of the Judeo-Christian (or specifically Christian) concept of the history of revelation and salvation. By the productiveness of interpretation, I mean that interpretation is not only an attempt to grasp the original meaning of the text (for example, the authorial intention) and to reproduce it as literally as possible but also to add something essential to the text (to understand it better than its author, the adage resonating in eighteenth-century hermeneutics). This effect is itself an occurrence of interpretation and salvation—and here we find again one of those vertiginous circles, albeit not vicious ones, that unfold when we speak of hermeneutics: in other words, the fact that the European culture of late modernity “discovered” the productiveness of interpretation or—which is the same—the nonepiphenomenality, instrumentality, or secondariness of the commentary. I take this fact, to the extent that it has taken place, as an effect of the interpretation that this culture has given of the Christian message. It is an inseparable effect, or undoubtedly the effect, of the Christian event.
But has such a hermeneutical event—an effect of interpretation as well as a way of construing interpretation—really taken place? As I pointed out at the outset, even the argument that such an event has taken place cannot be submitted as an objective or literal description of a state of affairs, but only as an interpretation of the situation in which we are always already thrown.
I take this hermeneutical event to coincide with the phenomenon that in Heideggerian language is called the end of metaphysics in the world of techno-science. Briefly, let me remark that Heidegger calls modern techno-science the end of metaphysics, because science “consumes” definitively the idea that Being is what is indubitably given as simple presence. The ascertained and indubitable presence of the “thing” becomes explicitly an effect of representation in experimental science and in the universal (at least tendentially, in principle) technological manipulation of the world that it has made possible. In other words, the certainty of the object is a pure effect of the process of verification carried out by the subject. When one reaches this stage by consistently developing the premises already implicit in classical metaphysics, it becomes impossible to identify Being with simple presence.
Although Heidegger did not go very far beyond this simple negation, that is, beyond the recognition of the unfolding of the radical difference between Being and beings, it is easy to see how and why precisely this ontology provides support (in his own work and in that of those who appeal to him) for the broad direction of thought called hermeneutics, which has become a sort of koine, a commonplace of contemporary culture. However, one can assign a nonderivative, noninstrumental, or accidental sense to interpretation only through the denial of the identification of Being-true with what is completely and indubitably present.
But is Heidegger’s ontology—and the hermeneutics that depends on it—at all connected with the history of Christian revelation? Is this, after all, only a question of hermeneutics unfolding within European culture initially and primarily in relation to the problem of reading and interpreting the sacred Scripture, as can be easily seen by tracing the history of interpretation theory? This fact conceals a larger issue that can be articulated in the following terms: if an ontology of Heidegger’s type, which does not want to contradict its own conclusions, “denies” the identity of Being with the objectively present, it cannot announce itself as the description of an “objective structure,” that is, present, given, of Being. Rather, it must argue necessarily on the basis of an “interpretation,” as a response to a message, a reading of texts, a sending that comes from tradition. (As is well known, terms like sending and tradition are central to the philosophy of the so-called second Heidegger). Now, it can be argued, even diverging from the Heideggerian texts on this topic—which are very obscure, if not reticent and inconclusive (at least, so it seems to me)—that the sending to which postmetaphysical philosophy, ontology, or hermeneutics corresponds is the tradition of Western Christian civilization.
The thesis thus enunciated seems both too rigid and too generic. Instead, it should be taken mainly as a project of inquiry, which is still largely unfinished (even in Heidegger himself). Only if the interpretive and non-metaphysically descriptive status of ontological hermeneutics is radically acknowledged—a recognition not explicitly made by Heidegger or by his first and most authoritative hermeneutical interpreters, such as Gadamer—can it be both possible and necessary to clarify the link between postmetaphysical ontology and the Western tradition, that is, the fact that ontological hermeneutics is nothing but the theory of Christian modernity.
The basic continuity of Western civilization with the message of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures is generally acknowledged. Here, however, the issue is radicalizing the implications of this recognition. First of all—and this can only be a parenthetical remark—this must be done by exploring in depth Christianity’s constitutive role and positive constitution in the birth of modern Western civilization. This is the direction explored by Weber with his analysis of capitalism and the Protestant ethic, although one must move far beyond this specific feature. The point is that the various processes of secularization occurring throughout modernity need not be seen as a leave-taking from the religious source—as is argued by Hans Blumenberg, for example, and by much historiography inspired by the Enlightenment, and also by Catholicism (the Italian Augusto Del Noce). Rather, these can be seen as processes of secularization, application, enrichment, and specification of that source.
One of these “positive” processes of secularization of the Christian message is precisely what Heidegger calls the advent of the end of metaphysics in modern techno-science, and the unfolding of the ontological difference between Being and particular beings—the same process leading up to the discovery that interpretation is productive. It is not easy—though possible—to show, precisely by retracing the paths explored by Weber, the extent to which the Christian message contributed to the development of modern science, out of which, finally, comes the end of the metaphysics of presence. However, we can easily recall along Weberian lines the significance of monotheism for the development of the scientific vision of the world as well as the conception of the human task of mastering the earth, which God, according to Scripture, assigned to humanity. What can be more easily illustrated is that the outcome of the process—the dissolution of the metaphysics of presence and the reduction of the object to the power of the subject—has come to signify the paving of the way for a sort of global recognition that the truth, including the truth of the hard, experimental sciences, constitutes itself as announcement and interpretation.
The increasingly acute awareness of the historicity of scientific paradigms enables contemporary epistemology to acknowledge that even the natural sciences are connected to the history of interpretation and the history of salvation: there is no truth outside of a horizon disclosed by an announcement, by a word handed over. The transmitted word cannot be set in opposition to the truth of objects that are given as objectively present (the classic distinction between the natural sciences and the sciences of the spirit, between explanation and understanding), since even this self-giving is always made possible by an opening, which is language, and therefore by the word handed over and transmitted—provenance.
Those outlined so far are only the incipient steps on the way toward listening to the sense of the comma linking the two parts of the title. Ontological hermeneutics, which explicitly thematizes the productiveness of interpretation, and the end of the metaphysics of presence as the outcome of modern techno-science spring from the action of the Christian message throughout the history of Western civilization. They are interpretations that “secularize” this message in the constructive, positive sense of the term. It should be added here that secularization is not a term in contrast with the essence of the message, but rather is constitutive of it. Jesus’ incarnation (the kenosis, the self-lowering of God), as an event both salvific and hermeneutical, is already indeed an archetypical occurrence of secularization.
If the relation between the history of salvation and the history of interpretation is understood in this way, will not salvation and interpretation be configured just as processes of drifting, in which there seem to be no limits, no criteria of validity, no risk of defeat, and finally, no space for freedom and responsibility, just as in the relation of productive interpretation with the text? In fact, it is all too obvious that once metaphysics has been liquidated, a good, valid interpretation will no longer be configured absolutely as that which is literally or objectively faithful to the text.
What does a productive interpretation generate? It generates Being, new senses of experience, new ways for the world to announce itself, which are not only other than the ones announced “before.” Rather, they join the latter in a sort of discursus whose logic (also in the sense of Logos) consists precisely in the continuity. Such a continuity—briefly stated—does not have any objective status; it is reduced (but is it indeed reduction?) to rhetorical persuasion, ad homines. But not every secularization is good and positive, and neither is every interpretation valid; it must be valid for a community of interpreters.
With a more explicitly spiritual language, one could say that the only limit of secularization is love, that is, the possibility of communicating with a community of interpreters. It is not paradoxical to assert that the history of modern hermeneutics, in which the Protestant Reformation has played such an important role, is also a long journey of rediscovery of the Church. It is not without significance for the Church, at least as I intend it here, that this recognition springs from the end of the metaphysics of presence and from the advent of ontological hermeneutics. But this way of conceiving of and experiencing the Church as a community of reference for the validity and continuity of the history of interpretation is continuously exposed to the resurgence of metaphysical temptations, which tend to fall back on the horizon of presence. For instance, the authoritarianism of the Catholic Church lies in the claim to return to a text given once and for all, bringing to closure the process of interpretation not in the name of the continuity of discourse and reception of the community’s voice, but in the name of an overwhelming “foundational truth.” The latter is assumed to be present somewhere (for example, in the dogmatic definition, or at worst—as one hears more often in the discussions of bioethical issues—in “nature” and its immutable laws).
Thus the reference to a community as the “criterion” for the validity of interpretation cannot be set apart from the recognition that such a criterion is legitimated only by the dissolution of the metaphysics of presence, and as such cannot be invoked outside of the horizon of such a dissolution. Ontological hermeneutics replaces the metaphysics of presence with a concept of Being that is essentially constituted by the feature of dissolution. Being gives itself not once and for all as a simple presence; rather, it occurs as announcement and grows into the interpretations that listen and correspond (to Being). Being is also oriented toward spiritualization and lightening, or, which is the same, toward kenosis. It is quite probable that ontological hermeneutics, which is generated from the dissolution of the metaphysics of presence, is not only a rediscovery of the Church but also, and mainly, the retrieval of Joachim of Fiore’s dream.
