John Panteleimon Manoussakis
The original hermeneutics was theological, that is, theology was the origin of hermeneutics. The original hermeneutical discipline, and every hermeneutics even today, be it the hermeneutics of philosophy, of art, of law, of science, and so on, has retained something of its theological origin. Generally, this claim holds true for both ancient hermeneutics, being originally the interpretation of the ambiguous divine sign given within a prophetic context (e.g., dream, oracle, etc.), and for modern hermeneutics, which was developed through the practice and methodology of scriptural exegesis. Yet, such a statement, if it is to be properly understood, needs to be taken as something more than a mere historical claim. It rather invites us to examine in greater depth the relationship between theology and hermeneutics so as to demonstrate how the origin of hermeneutics and thereby its character, regardless of its object, could not have been anything but theological. This can only be done if the remarks that follow fulfill this double imperative by being as much an exposition on theology as on hermeneutics.
Broadly understood, the recourse to some type of hermeneutics is occasioned by the need for interpretation—that is, hermeneutics is fundamentally a call for explication and explanation. Philosophy has for a long time now liberated us from the illusion of mere facts, that is, of assuming an objective reality of which we could have an unmediated experience—spotless, as it were, from the taint of any interpretation.1 Every “seeing,” in general, is always already a “seeing-as”—that is, every perception is already an interpretation.2 Such a position immediately implies, among other things, that no truth is self-constituted, for its meaning is bestowed upon it by another, namely, by that interlocutor to whom such a meaning is indeed meaningful.
Things, however, become a little more complicated when the truth in question concerns God or is given (i.e., revealed) by God. The fundamental disparity between the divine Logos and the human logic makes the need of interpretation all the more crucial. Yet, who is capable of undertaking such a tremendous task of deciphering the divine utterance, of translating God’s language into the categories of our experience? Indeed, it would seem that hermeneutics is destined to fail even before it comes into existence—for all human interpretation of God’s revelation can aspire to be nothing more than this: interpretation, an approximation at best, ventured with no authority and even less certitude that it corresponds to the revelation that it purports to interpret.
It was precisely for this unbridgeable difference between the world of God (or gods) and the world of mortals that the function of ερμνηνεεειν was conceived as the metaxu, the in-between that transfers (hence the original meaning of translation) something from the one world to the other, thereby establishing a communication, if not a communion, between the two orders; this metaxological function was thought of as particularly suitable for a daemon—that is, for a being who, on account of being a demigod, partakes of both realms: the human and the divine. Diotima gives us a memorable account in Plato’s Symposium:
They are messengers who shuttle back and forth between the two, conveying prayer and sacrifice from men to gods, while to men they bring commands from the gods and gifts in return for sacrifices. Being in the middle of the two, they round out the whole and bind fast the all to all. Through them all divination passes, through them the art of priests in sacrifice and ritual, in enchantment, prophecy, and sorcery. Gods do not mix with men; they mingle and converse with us through spirits instead, whether we are awake or asleep.
(Symposium, 203a, p. 486)
Interestingly, for Plato the daemonic force best suited for this mission was Eros—an Eros who, as Plato through Diotima describes him in the lines that follow, found its closest resemblance in the person of a philosopher, and indeed the philosopher par excellence, Socrates. We will leave aside for now this moment where philosophy, hermeneutics, and erotics converge together into a single point, as it deserves its own proper treatment. Instead, we will follow Diotima’s axiom as cited earlier: “Gods do not mix with men.” For the excursion to the idyllic landscapes of Greek philosophy has confirmed in the most explicit way the problematic of the absolute disparity between God and humans, and thus, by implication, it has opened for us the question of theology’s impossibility. For if theology is merely our discourse about God and nothing more, then it cannot make any pretenses to know its object—such “theology” has rightly been called an anthropomorphism3 and a conceptual (self-) idolatry.4 If, on the other hand, theology is our discourse about God on the basis of and in response to God’s always prior address to humanity, an address that was initiated by God’s self-revelation, one which unfolds as an invitation to a dialogical conversation, then the human logos about the divine Logos (theo-logy) cannot be anything else than the logos of the Logos: in other words, it is of paramount importance that the Fourth Gospel calls God’s self-revelation “the Logos” (the Word) who was “in the beginning” and who was eternally “with God” and who “was God” (John 1:1); for only as logos, as word, as discourse—a discourse that proceeds from God and is God—can God’s self-revelation ground theology, now properly understood. Theology as the logos of the Logos points to a hermeneutical uniqueness of a truth—indeed, the Truth, “I am the truth” (John 14:6)—that offers itself as interpretation and, moreover, as a self-interpretation.5 A truth that is hermeneutical through and through.
To repeat, then, this last point before we go on to analyze it: that God’s revelation is called Logos indicates a communication (a word) that, even though it is about God, is nevertheless comprehensible because it offers itself as an explanation—for what this Logos communicates is a logos about itself—thus, a self-explication and twice so: firstly, because before even asking what it says the Word “words”—that is, it speaks—and so the act of speaking is first and foremost about itself as the spoken and speaking Word; second, insofar as what it says is a revelation of God and this Word is God, it is also a self-revelation. I hope to show that what might sound like an unnecessarily complicated redundancy is of the utmost importance for a proper understanding of the hermeneutic character of all theology (all theology as the logos of the Logos cannot but be hermeneutical), which in turn gives rise to theological hermeneutics (all hermeneutics, in some sense, falls under this theological tautology).
“Gods do not mix with men”: this was the Platonic axiom which called for a hermeneutics of translation between “men and gods” by the spiritual intermediary that was neither god nor man. However, such hermeneutics of translation is metaphorical in every sense of the word. It inhabits a world of resemblances, and thus lives in the anxiety which permeates Greek metaphysics, the anxiety of deception, of being deceived (by the sensible world, by one’s senses); hence, the need for establishing those criteria that would distinguish between what is real and what is only apparent, between the original and its image, between the truth and its many counterfeits. As a result, Platonic philosophy (and its much stricter Eleatic predecessor) pronounces that the world in which we live is an image qualitatively inferior to its archetype. This judgment, with all its philosophical and ethical ramifications, is not unrelated to the metaphorical hermeneutics of neither/nor.
Against this classical worldview, the Fourth Gospel offers a radical alternative: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). In no better way can we glance over the intellectual abyss that separated antiquity from Christianity than in these two statements. The novelty that the incarnation of the Word introduced was reflected in a new kind of theological hermeneutics: the gap between God and humanity was not to be populated any more by the spirits of antiquity, neither men nor gods, for it was united by the flesh of the incarnate Word, both perfect man and perfect God. As human, he spoke to humans (logos), but as God, he spoke of God (Logos). Thus, he is at once the message (logos) and the messenger (Logos); the revealer and the revelation; the truth and its interpretation. Indeed, John writes: “No one has ever seen God, the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has exposited him [ἐξηγήσατο/enarravit]” (John 1:18). The Greek term “exegesato” employed by John is telling: Christ is God’s exegete as much as his exegesis. If he and he alone is able to offer the only possible theological exegesis, this is because he is “the only-begotten Son” who “is in the bosom of the Father”—that is to say, only God can explain God and, therefore, his self-explanation is, as one may expect, divine; it (or rather he) is God.
When God wished to communicate himself, he did so the only way that such communication could have been possible without being falsified, that is, without being partial or “metaphorical,” as it would have to been, had he revealed himself by any means other than himself. No such revelation could have been truly theo-logical (i.e., a revelation of God) for, whatever the means, it would have added something (at the very least itself) to this revelation, and by adding to God’s revelation, it would have made it less of a revelation. Moreover, it would not have been, strictly speaking, God’s revelation, that is, his self-revelation, but only someone else’s “revelation of God.” In Christ, we do not have a synthesis between the divine and the human orders, because Christ is not some third that allows the two poles to come to a dialectical relationship; rather, we have God’s manifestation not only to men but also in a man. Christological hermeneutics are thus permeated with the paradox of affirming both continuity and discontinuity, both communion and difference.
The Word’s condensation to flesh [πάχυνσις τοũ λóγου, verbum incrassatum] is tantamount with the articulation of the incarnational event to word (i.e., the Gospel’s kerygma which offers its witness but also a continuation to the Christic explication—more on this later) and furthermore with the scriptural thickening of the word to text. The isomorphism between condensation and articulation, whether verbal or textual, is further established by inscribing the incarnational circle of world-flesh-word within the hermeneutical circle of meaning-signification-meaning, even though it is the former that grounds and makes possible the latter.
The late revelation of the Logos in the fullness of times harkens back to the creation of every being’s logos “in the image” (Gen. 1:27) of the Logos through whom “all things were made and without him was made nothing that was made” (John 1:3). Although the implied participatory metaphysics of creation could justifiably bring to mind the metaphoric hermeneutics of Plato and Neoplatonism, nevertheless any similarity between the two worldviews becomes untenable for the relation that the image bears to its origin and original for the Christian exegete. Christological hermeneutics forbids us to think of this relation in any subordinationist terms (Origen), such as the classical ideas of participation and reflection might suggest, and it insists not only on the equality of the two, but it dares to go further than any other theory of signification and affirm their consubstantiality. If it is the hierarchy of the sensuous to the suprasensible or of the sign to the meaning that sums up Platonism in describing the relation of the inferior copy to its original (that is, to its “truth”), then Christological hermeneutics cannot be seen as anything less than a radical paradigm shift. The incarnation does not merely invert the Platonic scheme by placing the sensuous higher than the suprasensible (as Nietzsche sought to do) or by abolishing altogether the suprasensible for the sake of this sensible world (as many a theories have claimed to have done in the name of immanetism), but goes further still. When Paul asserts Christ is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), he does not wish to reiterate the Platonic model of a visible image reflecting its invisible original. Rather, what Paul says is far more radical—he declares that without image there can be no original, without interpretation there can be no truth, as without the Son there is no Father. Only Christological hermeneutics can claim interpretation not only as equal to the truth, but also as indispensable for the truth. There is no meaning anterior to reading, as something that waits to be discovered, but it is co-constituted with interpretation. The logic of Christological interpretation is at once analogical and katalogical:6 it entangles [Verflechtung7] the signified in the signifier in accordance with the Chalcedonian dialectic of “without division” and “without confusion.” This entanglement is properly a chiasmus between flesh and word, sign and meaning.8
What safeguards and confirms Christ as the authentic and unsurpassed theo-logical statement is this affirmation of both communion and difference that is its unique characteristic: namely, the difference and identity between the exposition and the expositor. If there were only difference, then the exposition would stand in need of confirmation; if there were only identity, then there would have been no exposition—nothing would have been communicated, because nothing could. This simultaneous affirmation of identity and difference could not have been possible except by the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which upholds the unity of the one God (identity), while distinguishing the three Persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (difference).
The ontological status of difference, in its vexing problematic for classical metaphysics, finds here a surprising justification. We recall that one of the manifestations of this problem was precisely in connection with hermeneutics as the play of differences, indeed, with hermeneutics as made possible and organized by the difference between the saying and the said, between the written sign and its reference, and so on. Hence, for example, the hermeneutical problematic that occupies the Platonic Phaedrus, whether it is a question of the authenticity of speech or of the nature of writing.9 The root of the problem lies with the priority that the one, in its absolute unity and simplicity, enjoins in Greek metaphysics. For such a system of thought that begins with the principle of the one’s self-identity and the one’s self-sufficiency, difference and its opening to polysemy cannot but remain an unaccountable inferiority which the philosopher, aided by this very metaphysics, seeks to escape. On the other hand, the Christian God as the communion of three cosubstantial yet distinct persons inscribes difference at the very heart of God’s existence. For God exists only as this ek-sistence, that is, the eternal coming forth of the Son and the Holy Spirit from the Father. The persons of the Trinity are distinguished from each other by a difference (in theological language a hypostatic difference) that is expressed in each person’s reciprocal deferring to each other (perichoresis/circumincessio), a deferring which begets temporalization—the very possibility of time, and therefore, difference as it is known in this regione dissimilitudinis of history (Confessions, VII.10.8) and in the diachrony of interpretation (cf., Derrida’s différance). In fact, what we call history is the imperfect explication (unfolding)—imperfect insofar as it strives toward its eschatological completion—of the difference that we have just described in its complicated (folded) state within the Trinity. From this standpoint, Christ as God’s self-explication in history is not an afterthought or simply a remedy devised by a betrayed God. Nor is history itself the unintended ramification of humanity’s disobedience. Becoming is ultimately grounded in God as much as being is.
Indeed, taking our hint from St. Augustine, we could recognize a vestigium trinitatis in the triadological structure of signified/Father-signifier/Son-signification/Holy Spirit, with the proviso that we do not project the arbitrariness of the relation between signifier and signified, as it holds sway in our fragmented language, back to the intra-trinitarian life. Ultimately, an absolutely singular God could not offer a self-revelation; such a God would have been like a mute sign without signification, the Lacanian das Ding that lies beyond or rather beneath the imaginary and the symbolic.
If, within God’s identity, there is an Other, who at the same time is the image of the Father and thus the archetype of all that can be created; if, within this identity, there is a Spirit, who is the free, superabundant love of the “One” and of the “Other,” then both the otherness of creation, which is modeled on the archetypal otherness within God, and its sheer existence, which it owes to the intradivine liberality, are brought into a positive relationship to God. Such a relationship is beyond the imagination of any non-Christian religion (including Judaism and Islam), for wherever God (even in the person of Yahweh or Allah) can only be the One, it remains impossible to discover any satisfactory explanation of the Other. In these circumstances, philosophical reflection (which never occurred in Judaism and Islam) inevitably conceives the world, in its otherness and multiplicity, as a fall from the One, whose blessedness is only in itself (von Balthasar, 180–181).
The Trinitarian affirmation of history assumes a particular significance as soon as we turn to the hermeneutical site par excellence, namely, the Eucharist. By Eucharist, we understand the sacramental chiasm of Christ’s real presence in and through the bread and the wine, but no less Eucharistic is the text of the Gospels and their exposition (the kerygma, the homily), both of which are integral parts of the Eucharistic rite. In fact, it was Merleau-Ponty who first suggested a correspondence between the Eucharistic transubstantiation and the entanglement between the visible and invisible in sensation:
This is just as the sacrament does not merely symbolize, in a sensible way, an operation of Grace, but is the real presence of God and makes this presence occupy a fragment of space and to communicate it to those who eat the bread, given that they are inwardly prepared. In the same way, the sensible does not merely have a motor and vital signification, but is rather nothing other than a certain manner of being in the world that is proposed to us from a point in space, that our body takes up and adopts if it is capable, and sensation is, literally, a communion.
(Merleau-Ponty 2012, 246)
Indeed, the Eucharist unfolds through a triptych of incarnations: (a) the original incarnation of the Word made flesh; (b) the scriptural incarnation of the Word made text; and (c) the incarnation of the Word into the elements of bread and wine. About the first we have spoken sufficiently in the section on Christological hermeneutics. There we had an opportunity to hint at the second incarnation of the Word to text which thinkers like Eriugena (Periphyseon V, 1005B) saw as an event that imitated and followed as consequence of the historical incarnation. To this we only need to add the following gloss from Stephen Moore’s reinterpretation of the Last Supper:
And as they were writing he took papyrus, and blessed, and tore it, and gave it to them, and said “Take, this is my body.” And he took ink, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they drank of it. And he said, “This is the blood of the New Testament, which is poured out for many.”(84)
In fact, the textual rendition of the Eucharist presented here is nothing more than an elaboration of an idea first presented by the scriptures themselves: St. John of Patmos, in his apocalyptic vision in which one can easily recognize the main structures of the Eucharist, he is given to eat, in lieu of the Eucharistic host, a scroll (Rev. 10:9).
The journey to Emmaus as recounted in the last chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke gathers together these three levels of incarnation. For the two disciples are joined by Jesus, who, in preparation for the Eucharistic breaking of the bread that will reveal his identity to them (24:30), offers them nothing less than an exegesis of the scriptures: “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (24:27). The Greek verb employed by Luke is the proper technical term for hermeneutics: διερμήνευσεν (in alternative manuscript readings simply ἑρμηνεεειν). Here too, as in other passages (e.g., Lk. 4:16–21), Christ appears first and foremost as an exegete of the scriptures, one who teaches “as one who had authority” (Mk. 1:22), for since “all the Scriptures” are “concerning himself,” Christ’s hermeneutics is a self-interpretation as much as self-revelation; an explicatio sui that takes two forms: a) only he can explain himself or that which is “concerning himself” (as discussed in our earlier section titled “Christological Hermeneutics”) and b) because of this, any scriptural hermeneutics requires an imitatio Christi—for whether one is aware of it or not, in expounding the scriptures inevitably one comes to occupy Christ’s place as the archetypical exegete. (It should not escape our notice that this present text falls under the same rule!)
Thus, the Lukan passage of the road to Emmaus generates an endless self-reflecting mise-en-scène: the risen Lord’s appearance to the disciples consists precisely in these two acts that the church has repeated since that first Eastertide, namely, the exposition of the scriptures and the celebration of the Eucharist. When this passage is read in the context of the liturgy—that is, in its proper setting—it becomes acutely self-referential; the faithful gathered in the church hear something that describes their present moment. It describes them. By virtue of their participation in the celebration of the Eucharist, they too are in the presence of the divine “stranger” whom they fail to recognize for “their eyes are restrained” (24:16), and who will offer for them an interpretation of the scriptures “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets” that will lead to the moment where “taking bread, he will give thanks, and breaking it, he will begin to give it to them” (cf., 24:30). In this endless repetition, the diachronic axis of interpretation crisscrosses that of the moment’s synchrony: for, on the one hand, the distance accrued by the passing of two thousand years is overcome so much so that the difference between the “second-hand follower” and the eyewitness becomes irrelevant (Kierkegaard), while, on the other hand, the community gathered by the Eucharist are reminded that they are continuously inscribed within this line constituted by an unbroken interpretation, that is, by a hermeneutics of continuity.
The Greek term martyrion signifies witness, testimony, and also martyrdom. The polysemy of the term allows us to read St. Paul’s expression “the testimony [μαρτεριον] of our conscience” (2 Cor. 1:12) not only as signifying the approbation of one’s own conscience but also, in Patristic exegesis dating back to Origen, a hidden “martyrdom”—an experience of suffering and death that is open to the life on interiority and perhaps makes such an interiority possible.
Writing during the persecution of Maximinus, Origen already recognizes two forms of martyrdom, one visible, the other hidden (Exhortation to Martyrdom, XXI). The latter is identified with the martyrdom that conscience undergoes not once but every day, alluding to the Psalmist’s verse 43:23 [44:22] “Yet for your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” In what does this “martyrdom” of the conscience consist? According to Origen, it takes the form of a judgment (crisis). In reading the well-known passage from the Letter to the Hebrews:
For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
(4:12)
Origen sees in that judgment of “the thought and attitudes of the heart” a self-judgment that takes its final and fullest form at the last judgment (XXXVII). The last judgment, therefore, will take place in the form of a self-examination and self-condemnation within each one of us, inasmuch as each one of us will bear witness against the evil in ourselves. Here the two senses of the word martyrion, that is the bearing of witness and martyrdom, coincide inasmuch as he who bears witness and he against whom the witness is borne, and therefore he who undergoes a certain suffering, is one and the same person. Thus, Origen refers to a division that is followed by a separation (X, 32) and even a bifurcation (XXXVII, 27) of oneself from oneself. This idea found in Origen receives a more systematic treatment in the “Eight Letter” of Pavel Florensky’s The Pillar and the Ground of the Truth. It is the letter that bears the title “Gehenna” and discusses the last judgment which for Florensky “is a separation, a cutting off, an isolating” (161). Here we find again a terminology very similar to that of Origen’s. Florensky elaborates further as to what such a separation means: “It is therefore clear” he writes, “that salvation postulates a separation between person and character. … a person’s evil will, manifested in the lusts and pride of the character, is separate from the person himself” (156). Florensky reads all the eschatological passages of the Gospel in this sense, that is, as describing “how the selfhood of the condemned man perceives the judgment, of his subjective experience of this judgment” (175). For Florensky too, what is to receive a final form at the end of times begins already “in this life.” “Such (though voluntary) cutting off, or uprooting, of the sinful part from the empirical person is necessary even in this life …” (174).
Our aim is to examine how these two meanings, namely, of “being a witness” and of “bearing witness to” a truth or an event, connect with each other and with the concept of conscience: the term witness, etymologically, originates from the verb wit, that is, to know, in particular in the sense of sense perception, to see (from videre). Witnessing presupposes knowing and, indeed, a theoretical knowledge, a certain form of seeing; therefore, a witness is always a witness of what is seen and of what has shown itself, that is, of a phenomenon. More specifically, witnessing is to wit (i.e., to say) the phenomena, that is, a phenomenology.
By allowing witness to be understood as phenomenology, that is as an articulation, a logos, of the phenomena, of what manifests and reveals itself, we have arrived at the second term that is taken as synonymous to witness, namely, that of testimony. To bear witness is to testify, but there can be no testimony that is not, at the same time, a testimonial: a narrative and a story that opens witness to interpretation and therefore to hermeneutics. The concept of a Testament collects together all these nuances. The New Testament, for example, is a testimonial (a narrative) that testifies, that is, bears witness, to God’s self-revelation (the phenomenon par excellence). That there should be a plurality of stories in such witnessing (e.g., the four Gospels) is only necessary, if witness is to be understood as offering an interpretation. The testimonial character of testimony implies and necessitates an Other and even a Third, inscribing, therefore, the act of hermeneutics within a witnessing community that is, in turn, founded upon such testimonies.