Moving from Milk to Meat

Reflecting on Rememberance Day

2006-11-11T09:17:00.000-08:00

The truth in its full meaning lies in what was said thousands of years ago (in the law accepted among us as the Law of God) in four words: Thou shalt not kill. The truth is that man may not and should not in any circumstances or under any pretext kill his fellow man.

The truth is so evident, so binding, and so generally acknowledged, that it is only necessary to put it clearly before men for the evil called war to become quite impossible.

-Leo Tolstoy, (Stockholm, 1909.)

Thom Yorke

2006-10-29T22:01:00.000-08:00

Ellul on Writing

2006-10-22T14:18:00.000-07:00

"Language is reduced by being written down. It ceases being multicentered and flowing, evocative and mythological."

"We all know that [poetry] acquires impact and meaning only when recited. Then it becomes a living text because it is no longer a text; the speaker takes it up and can read it only to the precise degree that he makes it his own. He must become in turn the creator of language, with the help of the text he has been given."

Likewise, "religious writing is filled with life only when it serves as a support and starting point for a word that is spoken, announced, or proclaimed. In this way the word becomes current and living, having left the book’s pages and flown toward the listener."

"Only the word conveys the truth of a religious message. What the written word needs is not to be considered the source of a mere code, law, or formula, or of an indefinitely repeated prayer. It must be taken at its source and given rebirth, not by repetition, but by an inspiration that reopens it. That way the whisper can be perceived and received again. Then the word can start the listener off anew in his quest for truth."

Read on for another taste of Jacques Ellul's take on language and truth.

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The word when written becomes a means of abstract, solemn discussion. A University based on writing is not the same thing as an Academy’s halls. Writing changes hearing into sight, and transforms the understanding of a person, with his words’ halo of mystery and echoes, into the understanding of a text. This approach involves grammatical and logical analysis, decomposition of structures, and understanding of truth through the dull seriousness of exact methods. Deciphering words and phrases leads us to reconstruct a message that has lost its life and immediacy. It becomes the result of a process, of a coming and going from the text to my knowledge and from my knowledge to the text, with an increasingly precise method.

We must not forget that writing also affects language. Images and our practice of reading and writing cause us to conceive of discourse as linear, with only one meaning, and consecutive. Writing is of necessity linear and consecutive, even when we try to sever its univocal quality through a sort of written polyphony. Efforts of this nature, such as Henri Pichette’s Epiphanies (Henri Pichette, Les Epiphanies[mystere profane] (Paris: Gallimard, 1969)) or Raymond Queneau’s poems, are just stylistic exercises that cannot outweigh the unrelenting mass of texts that engulf us.

Language is thus reduced by being written down. It ceases being multicentered and flowing, evocative and mythological. In this sense, and therefore quite indirectly, McLuhan is right when he speaks of a return to a world of myth through television -- but not for the reasons he gives. Television, to the degree that it eliminates part of writing, causes writing to lose its rigor, or the implacable quality it gives to the development of thought. All this is lost when the written word is replaced by speech. Spoken language is then able to have multiple meanings again. These include the play on variations of a theme and the myriad directions in which the human spirit can move when listening. But this can happen only if the deluge of televised images has not done away with language altogether. In that case television will not produce any flowering; instead, the result will be the dismal disintegration of the very possibility of thought.

We all know that writing strips language of its certainty and even of its meaning, which then can be restored only after a certain thought process. We show that we sense this when we feel the need to go in the opposite direction and switch from the text to speech. This happens often, especially when we are dealing with the most creative, evocative, and truth-filled texts, such as poetry or religious writings. It is impossible simply to read them. Poetry needs to be spoken. We all know that it acquires impact and meaning only when recited. Then it becomes a living text because it is no longer a text; the speaker takes it up and can read it only to the precise degree that he makes it his own. He must become in turn the creator of language, with the help of the text he has been given.

The same process applies to religious writing. It is filled with life only when it serves as a support and starting point for a word that is spoken, announced, or proclaimed. In this way the word becomes current and living, having left the book’s pages and flown toward the listener. What a tremendous error people commit when they consider the verba volent to be critical and the scripta manent to be something positive. Precisely because written words subsist, and persist, they are nothing but an anonymous trace. Because they fly, spoken words are living and filled with meaning. The expressions above form a useful formula for a judge who needs proof of something that is past and surpassed -- a finished and closed matter. But they are a fatal formula for something living.

The written word is just a mummy whose wrappings must be removed someday -- not to discover a few bones, but to breathe life into it again. Only the word conveys the truth of a religious message. What the written word needs is not to be considered the source of a mere code, law, or formula, or of an indefinitely repeated prayer. It must be taken at its source and given rebirth, not by repetition, but by an inspiration that reopens it. Written language has closed the mind. Like a fist grasping a diamond, it has closed its grammatical and structural trap over a vanishing whisper that it tries to translate through enclosing and containment. But instead, writing snuffs it out, and we must open the straitjacket of writing so that it becomes a freshly spoken word. That way the whisper can be perceived and received again. Then the word can start the listener off anew in his quest for truth.

Ellul on the Nature of Truth

2006-10-22T13:44:00.000-07:00

"How could we live if our senses advised us that the reality in which we live does not really exist in the final analysis, that it is only a tangle of whirlwinds and illusions?"

"What would become of us if we could grasp truth with unvarying precision and express it without the slightest imperfection or without any uncertainty?"

"Such a situation would be dreadful and completely unlivable... my certainty is false as far as exact reality is concerned, but this certainty allows me to live."

"One person’s word against another’s is the only possible fragile pointer to truth, like a compass quivering in its case... we need truth to be expressed by the most fragile agent, so that the listener remains free. The uneasiness which enables us to keep going involves knowing that we will never be able to grasp truth in its entirety, or be able to bring our adventure to a close by identifying our life with truth."

These are just some of the issues Jacques Ellul tackles in "The Humiliation of the Word." The following is just a teaser, including some provocative questions that move beyond the realm of abstract philosophy or theology into practical existence - affecting every aspect of our daily lives.

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The reality around us changes and flows constantly. Everything flows: panta rhei. The river I see is never the same. This water I am looking at races away and will never return. At every level, reality is unstable and fleeting. Consider politics or economics: every moment changes their framework. Every moment presents some loss or accident that rules out planning ahead with a view to efficient organization. History does not repeat itself; no two situations will ever be truly comparable.

Time is not alone in making reality unstable. What is the nature of reality? Bernard d’Espagnat’s fine book (Bernard d’Espagnat, A la recherche du Réel: Le Regard d’un physicien (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1981). questions and upsets us. I am aware that this rock I am looking at is essentially a vacuum with atoms whirling around it. But the more physicists progress, the less able we are to grasp reality. In the last analysis, only mathematics can assure us that reality exists. We finally arrive at such refined analysis and a knowledge so subtle that reality becomes a gradually disappearing object that leaves us bedazzled.

Reality is present and yet nothing is there. What I think I grasp is not only transitory and changing, but imperceptible in its "substance" (if one can still use this word in the light of the vacuum and emptiness revealed to us by theoretical physics). We have tools for measuring, but beyond that.... Is everything then an illusion produced by our senses? This old question needs to be brought up again, because it leads us to an astonishing contradiction. I perceive the reality around me (such as this table I am looking at, and on which I am writing) through my sight and sense of touch. That is, I grasp it by means of my most reliable and indisputable senses. We do not need to return to this idea: I cannot doubt what I see. Yet we know for a certainty that what I see is not what I see. But what difference does this make? My sight gives me certainty concerning reality, and I need nothing more.

Here is the other side of the coin: in Measure for Measure, Shakespeare says "Truth is truth to th’end of reck’ning." And Shakespeare is right. Truth remains truth in relation to and in spite of everything. It is firm, stable, hard, and irrefutable. We must not relativize it just because science has changed. We must not say that yesterday’s truth becomes today’s error (and vice versa). We must not become so extremely liberal that we say everything is relative, so that one person can be just as right as the person who says the opposite. If truth is truth even beyond the limits of our grasp and our approximations, it exists. And that settles it. It remains true to itself, of necessity. In observing vanishing reality, Heraclitus says something that does not vanish, and his statement falls within the scope of truth.

Truth is the absolute or eternal. We are not able even to approach its outskirts. We do not construct truth out of bits and pieces added to one another, so as to enable us to remove them and dismantle the construction. By means of language we transmit and understand this truth that is as tightly closed and solid as a dot, reliable as a map, translucent as a crystal, but hard as a diamond. We transmit it and even discern it only through language. Truth is connected to the word and communicated by it. That is, truth is communicated by the most uncertain means, the one most prone to variations and doubt, as we have seen -- by the word, that fragile thing that does not last, evaporating as soon as it has been said. Thus what we are surest of is connected with the most uncertain thing in existence; our most changeable means has to do with what is most certain.

Now here is the amazing thing: this is a godsend for us. How could we live if our senses advised us that the reality in which we live does not really exist in the final analysis, that it is only a tangle of whirlwinds and illusions? How could I walk if my senses showed me nothing but emptiness in front of me? How could I eat if my senses showed me the utter unreality of what I am eating? Not that everything can be reduced to the impressions of my senses. That is not what I mean. My point is that sight and touch, the senses of certainty, give me the guarantee indispensable for living, concerning a milieu that is strange and foreign to me. My certainty is false as far as exact reality is concerned, but this certainty allows me to live.

Physics or mathematics can teach me many things about reality, but they cannot contradict the unimpeachable evidence of my senses. What do I care about the fact that chemistry can give me the exact formula for the wine I am drinking? That has no effect on the great pleasure I derive from it. (Moreover, when chemists claim to be able to reproduce wine, vanilla, orange extract, etc., on the basis of their exact formulas, the result is always horrible -- at least for those with a sense of taste.) In order for me to live, my senses must be right in spite of the scientific analysis of reality. (This is part of d’Espagnat’s rigorous analysis.)

The opposite is just as true. What would become of us if we could grasp truth with unvarying precision and express it without the slightest imperfection or without any uncertainty? What would happen if the means were perfectly adequate for expressing truth? Such a situation would be dreadful and completely unlivable. We would be pinned down once and for all in a butterfly museum. We would be there in all our splendor, unable to move any more, because everything would be said, closed up, and finished: perfect. We have seen the horror that has resulted in the course of our history every time a person or group has claimed to express truth in its entirety, believing their word to be identical with the truth, or that truth could not be "elsewhere" or "other." This attitude has given legitimacy to all dictatorships, oppressions, falsehoods, and massacres. One person’s word against another’s is the only possible fragile pointer to truth, like a compass quivering in its case. And quite apart from human pretension to have a proud, exclusive corner on truth, even if we could seize truth as it is and transmit it without wasting any of it and without confusion, truth would crush us of its own weight and prevent us from living. In order to live, we need truth to be expressed by the most fragile agent, so that the listener remains free. The uneasiness which enables us to keep going involves knowing that we will never be able to grasp truth in its entirety, or be able to bring our adventure to a close by identifying our life with truth.

Some people, including Christians (I think particularly of my Protestant friends), have the profound conviction that truth is "there." They say, for instance, that "the word of God is expressed in the Bible." Even so, I must be prudent enough to say that this word is conveyed through human language: witnesses who pass it on to other witnesses. And when I hear it, I understand it with my words, my verbal images, and I speak it with my language -- and I am not God, fortunately. If this were not so, human life would be closed. By these statements, I do not reduce the value of revealed truth in the slightest; on the contrary, in this way I respect it and recognize its special dimension and the depth and permanence that make it truth. If I claim to grasp and express it in its entirety, then it is no longer truth.

The connection between Word and Truth is of such a nature that nothing can be known of truth apart from language. This truth establishes itself over the duration of generations (Hebrew toledoth), in the ebb and flow of words, through our fellowship and our misunderstandings. This is where this marvelously human life is located. The most reliable thing speaks to the most uncertain world; my most flexible means expresses what is irrefutable.