For this post, I want to
meditate on the idea that Anselm, in his Proslogion, is providing a definition of God, namely “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” I
do not which to focus on the content of his definition and argument, but rather
on the overall format of his exercise, for one way to worship God (a very
important way) is to struggle with the task of articulating what and who He
is. From this blog post, hopefully I may
get a better understanding of how Christianity sees the Word and the act of
articulation as divine. Hopefully, I may
also find joy in my exercise, as Anselm does in his.
It is far easier to hold
a belief than it is to precisely articulate it to someone else and explain why you
hold that belief. Ideas that are not
articulated remain in the nonverbal subconscious, and it is in this murky realm
that ideas become easily distorted, fluid, and even dangerous.[1]
Bringing ideas into the verbal world of light
is imperative so that we may reject bad ideas, refine incomplete ideas, and
confirm good ideas. This might be why there are four different articulations
of the Creed – the church really wanted to make sure that they got the words
right.
Likewise, it is easy to
simply call oneself a Christian and hold a vague notion of what God is, but it
is much harder to spend countless hours thinking and reflecting on God in order
to articulate His nature so that He
may be more clearly understood. This is precisely Anselm’s project in his
Proslogion. This exercise is fundamentally
a definitional exercise: it answers the question, “What is God?” Once we have
established proper definitions, we may then perhaps tackle questions like
“Where is God?” or “What does his face look like?”
Given my previous
depiction of the cognitive landscape as divided into two realms, verbal and
nonverbal, it might be helpful to imagine Anselm as embarking on a difficult
journey between these realms. Anselm is venturing out into the nonverbal world essentially
blind[2],
and searching for words to bring back home to the light. This endeavor requires great courage, for Anselm
is attempting to describe the most complex, grand being in the cognitive
universe, by definition. Showing how
easy it is to get lost along the way, Anselm asks of God, “help me to
understand what I am saying” (Anselm 251).
Anselm has two guiding
principles to keep him on the right track as he is searching for the right
words to say. Through reason, he becomes closer to finding
the kernel of his belief, or that “one single argument, needing no other proof
than itself, to prove that God really exists” (Anselm 238), and he uses
syllogisms to confidently walk forward, closer to God. There is something reassuring about
transitivity. If A implies B, and B
implies C, then Anselm can have confidence as he claims A implies C. However, reason is not Anselm’s only guiding
principle. His conviction of God also grows through the joy he feels from this attempted articulation of God. The love that Anselm feels when he sees a
slimmer of light helps to convince him that he is on the path towards even more
brightness, that he may even find a realm so bright that he can see the face of
God. Guided by both reason and emotion, Anselm
reminds us that God is not simply an object of contemplation, he is also someone
to love, and someone by whom to feel loved. Overall, theology and devotion are
mutually-reinforcing for Anselm, bringing him ever-closer to God.
I want to concentrate on
why it was important that Anselm wrote
out his understanding of God, rather than painted it, danced it, or
expressed it in some other form. What is
so special about words? Here’s what I
think: 1) language is the best tool that humans have developed to discover
truth, and 2) the truth is unbelievably
good! Hallelujah!
It is useful to note the
several instances in which Anselm associates God with truth. Anselm calls God
the “God of truth” (Anselm 267), and praises him accordingly, “you are in very
truth, life wisdom and truth” (Anselm 259).
Being true is so essential to the definition of God that not even He can
make false what is true (Anselm 248). With some imagination, one can even understand
the very visual aspect of Christianity and the desire to see God as a form of thirsting
for the truth, since Christianity establishes a deep connection between light/vision
and truth.
It is also important to
recognize that the truth is good. In
Genesis, it is God who, in the dark, speaks light into existence, sees that it
is good, and then speaks the whole world into existence.[3] When Christians worship Jesus as the Word,
they are worshiping the divinity of true speech. This is God as the Logos. They
are worshiping mysterious occurrence that speech, true speech, has the power to
make life better. As Anselm puts it, “this
good is your word” (Anselm 262).
When we speak our true
beliefs, when we articulate our ideas boldly and honestly, as clumsily as it
may turn out or as wrong as it may be, we are attempting to imitate Christ the
Word. The first time you articulate an
idea, it might go disastrously. Maybe
you fumble your words, and maybe your logic is incoherent, but here’s the
beautiful thing: next time you can do better.
Once your ideas are out in the open for critique and refinement, you can
learn how to more clearly articulate difficult ideas, how to traverse the boundary between the nonverbal world
and the verbal world. Anselm is
clearly practiced in this skill. Christ is
and was always perfect at it. Each time
we get better at clearly speaking our truth, we become closer and closer to imitating
Christ, and it is precisely the joy we feel from this successive approximation
to Truth that keeps us aiming towards God.
With this understanding
of the Word in mind, it comes as no surprise that monastic culture so greatly
emphasized literacy. It makes sense why
after God made light (truth), he saw that it was good, and it makes sense why
the very core ideas of Christianity are transmitted through the Bible – that is
through words, and not song, nor image, nor movement.
Imagine a world in which
everyone always spoke the truth – maybe this is what New Jerusalem would look
like…
Source Cited:
Anselm of Canterbury, The Prayers and Meditations, with the
Proslogion, trans. Sister Benedicta Ward (London: Penguin Classics, 1979)
[1] This in fact highlights the importance of freedom
of speech. Sunlight is the best
disinfectant for bad ideas.
[2]
though God’s light is ubiquitous, it is
blinding like the sun (Anselm 257). Anselm cannot see fully see it and longs to
see God’s face (Anselm 239). That this
realm in which Anselm is writing is both blindingly bright and perceived as
dark by Anselm is part of the mystery of God.
Lovely meditation on the exercise of faith seeking understanding through articulated speech! Very nice attention to the mode in which Anselm conducts his search and the affect that it induces—understanding brings joy! Also nicely grounded in a sense of what it means to say Jesus is the Word through whom God speaks creation into being. I am intrigued by the distinction you make between writing or painting or dancing this understanding. Christians SING—Anselm spent his life singing the Divine Office, which is a very embodied form of speech, as is writing, but in a different way. How would his singing fit in your argument? NB how psalm-like the "Proslogion" is! RLFB
ReplyDeleteA well written meditation. I am still left with some questions though. How do we define truth? Saying truth is good and anything good is true is using the word in its own definition--logically consistent maybe but ultimately unsatisfying for me. Many people examine texts allegorically when they want to determine the truth of it separate from the reality. As we saw in class today, that's not always what everyone's after (e.g. figura is very similar to allegory except that it accepts the historical truth of figures + events). Furthermore, how do we know that "Christ is and was always perfect at it"? The gospels all tell similar stories, right? I can get on board with them all being inspired by the Holy Spirit, but how do we account for a difference of phrasing? As we're seeing in Hugh and Anselm and as I've seen in medieval poetry, the phrasing matters. But maybe phrasing doesn't affect the truth (?). It's something less tangible presumably.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that Anselm and Hugh etc.'s position of finding joy in it and thus it must be from some being that can create joy is appropriate for everyone. Is satisfaction at getting an answer the same thing as joy? What about all the frustration that can go with it? Why is language the best tool? Because Jesus was the Word? What about the emotions that people can't articulate, so they cry, or listen to instrumental music, or do any number of other things that aren't lingual. There seems to be a pre-language truth, if I'm understanding the use of truth in this blog post (though, like I said, there are many definitions of this). It's why so many people say things like "a picture's worth a thousand words" or why Tennyson claims grief leaves him with "no language but a cry." Language is cultural. Shouldn't the truth of divinity, God's goodness, etc. not be? Anyone regardless of language should be able to understand the truth. But, that's not how it seems to work. But the language we use can even affect what we think of as being reality, as being, maybe, "true" (see Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). How can we account for that? I've been told that some sects of Christianity used to or possible still worship other energies or beings besides God, because they took the whole "thou shalt not have any other gods before me" thing to be that subordinate entities are fine. That's a language issue that possibly obscures the truth. I'd be interested to hear more thoughts on language and truth, since it's very close to home for me as someone who studies literature. After all, there can be an underlying truth in fiction even if everything is "made up" by the author.
Hi LAJ, thank you for the very thoughtful response. Let me preface my response with an admission that this might not be clear, and I apologize for not being able to fully articulate my incomplete ideas. I also don’t think I can answer all of your questions, but I will do my best to respond to what I can.
ReplyDeleteI think you’re right in pointing out my loose use of the word “truth.” I remember in one of the first classes, in discussing what myth is, the question of defining truth came up. Rather than using a modern, positive, and objective definition of truth (i.e. describing what the world is), I think that I was using “truth” more as descriptor for a normative, proper mode of being in the world (i.e. describing how one should act in the world). I was using truth in a moral sense. Something is true if you can act it out, and as a result, the world becomes a better place. Truth is what you should act out, truth is what you should speak. Christ is the God of truth because it is he who conducted himself in the world most perfectly and without error. Christ’s mode of being in the world (a truthful mode of being) is that to which Christians strive (What would Jesus DO). In this definition of “truth” (a way of acting that makes the world a better place), saying that the truth is good is merely a restatement of the definition.
To be clear, it is not always easy to live a truthful life – there are terrible, terrible things in this world which dissuade us from wanting to make it a better place. Faith in Christ is a belief that there is a ultimate moral good, an ultimate, perfect way of being. Even if we will never come close to acting as Christ did, faith in him helps us to aim at him as a goal. Without faith that there exists a true mode of being that sits atop a hierarchy of morality, it is very easy to slip into a sort of moral relativism – to have nowhere to aim. I have personally experienced this, for I was a militant atheist (I was obsessed with Sam Harris, Chris Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, etc.) for all of high school and the first half of college, but I slowly realized that I had no proper way of orienting myself at something true, something worthwhile, and I sank into a sort of nihilism. For me, truth is and was the remedy to my nihilism.
In response to your comment on joy, I understand that learning about anything can be an extremely difficult and painful process. When I describe Anselm as experiencing joy, I do not mean he simply experiences pleasure. The joy that one may derive from the painful exercise of trying to articulate the ineffable is more a deep, meaningful sense of fulfillment – maybe like eudaimonia.
Apologies, my response was too many characters to comment in one post. Here is the second part:
ReplyDeleteIn response to your point on language, I do realize that there are limits on the extent to which language can properly express our being. I for one am keenly aware of this since I am a dancer (I have done hip hop since I was seven years old, and I picked up contemporary in high school. I currently direct UChicago’s contemporary dance crew, and dance is my absolute passion). There are things that I experience, things that I express through my body and through music that I can not even begin to articulate with words. I really love your claim that there is a “pre-language truth,” and I think this makes a lot of sense to me.
As to why truth is something that is most properly conveyed using language (i.e. why Christians are so insistent on the Word): I think this has something to do with community and connection to other humans. While it is true that a beautiful painting or a dance performance can make someone experience something inarticulable, the same painting or dance may invoke a completely different response in another person. How are we to know that the way we experienced that piece of art was the same? Language, though imperfect, is the best tool that we have to communicate an idea to someone else, and (here is the crucial part) know with some level of certainty that we are thinking of the same thing. This is the spirit of dialogue. Our ability to go back and forth clarifying, restating, and challenging (much like we are doing on this blog) makes language unique in its high level of precision and connectivity. Sometimes, I have the fear that I am truly alone in this world, that language is futile and I have not been able to find anyone else who truly understands the world as I do (“what if we say the same words but mean different things?”). The only thing that gets me out of that isolated place is a faith that the meaning of what I am saying is understood and shared by others when we talk, and that I am able to truly understand what other people mean when they speak. This is why definitions are so important in the first place! Anselm wants to make sure that when he says “God,” he knows that other people mean the same thing that he does! Christians (and people in general) require a community in which to be a part in order to live a healthy lifestyle. Isolation depresses and kills. It is exactly this beautiful quality of language, its ability to help humans connect on a spiritual and semantic (?) level, that guards us against the looming threat of isolation.
Also, I do intend to respond to Fencing Bear's original comment – I just need a bit more time to think about it.